Perfect Ruin

12

THERE’S A STRIP OF FABRIC TIED AROUND her wrist, the traditional mark of grieving after a loved one has been dusted to ashes and scattered. The academy sweater she uses as a blanket must have belonged to her sister.

Under the sharp blue-white glow of my pocket light, her face is young and troubled, her eyebrows pushed together. I’ve been watching her for only a few seconds before something moves behind me and an arm hooks around my throat.

Even before he has spoken, my heart is pounding up my spine, and I know the soft, measured breaths against my ear belong to Judas Hensley.

“Back away,” he whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”

I suppose he means to be threatening, this boy who answered yes, but somehow I know he won’t hurt me. He’s only trying to protect the sleeping girl. I do as he instructs, until we’re both standing outside the cavern. He lets go of my neck, circles around so that he’s facing me.

“Are you having fun?” he hisses.

I focus on all the sharp angles of his face, neck, and collarbone. I can’t help it; I’ve not seen anyone like him, the way he seems sculpted from shards of broken glass. “Bringing your academy friends here to play games and write messages?”

“Why did you lie?” I say. He stares in response, and I begin to worry that my instinct is wrong, that he did kill his betrothed and that he’ll kill me, right here with no witnesses. Maybe Amy wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was dead, or dying. I try to remember if I saw her breathe.

But my instincts about people have never been wrong. Not even about Lex. The morning of his incident, he came into the room after my mother had finished coloring my cheeks with pink powder. I wasn’t quite the right age for cosmetics to be acceptable, and I was holding a wet cloth, preparing to wipe it away before academy. We looked at each other in the mirror, Lex and I, and I had a terrible feeling like he was going to do something desperate. But he only asked our mother if she’d fixed the tear in Alice’s pink dress.

“Lie?” Judas says at last. I try not to show my relief.

“My friend asked you if you were a murderer. You said yes.”

“Not that it is any of your concern, but I didn’t write that,” he says. “I have a spy handling my correspondence.”

I glance at the cavern, where Amy is asleep. “A little spy?” I ask. “Blond hair, blue eyes?”

Amy’s presence, perplexing as it is, adds to my relief. She wouldn’t be here if she thought Judas had murdered her sister.

“You should leave,” Judas says. “Now.”

And here comes the moment of decision, because I believe him. I believe that something permanent will change if I don’t turn for those trees and return to my apartment and try to study to the sound of Alice’s shoes. I don’t know what will happen if I stay, and I don’t know why I do.

When I don’t take a step, he growls. Muscles move in his throat.

His eyes look better, not so swollen. His hands are no longer bleeding.

“Why isn’t anyone looking for you?” I say. “How did you escape?”

He folds his arms, laughs in tandem with a breeze that comes through the leaves, the woods shaking around us like paper bells.

“Because no one can be smarter than a patrolman?” he says. “No one can be smarter than your father?”

This is meant to offend me, but it doesn’t. I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I’ve heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex’s bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men—only men.

“They are looking for me,” he says. “The king probably doesn’t want to announce that he was foolish enough to let a prisoner escape. Wouldn’t want people to think he’s lost control.”

“The woods is the first place they’d look,” I say.

“There’s plenty of evidence elsewhere,” he says. “And as I said, I have a spy.”

“A little girl,” I challenge. “And her parents must be looking for her.”

His next laugh comes sadder. Something stirs in the cavern and we turn our heads.

Amy Leander is small as she crawls out into the starlight and shadows. She’s wearing the red sweater now, and it falls halfway to her knees as she stands, her eyes trained warily on me.

“Your father’s a patrolman,” she says, the words something between an accusation and an observation. “Is that why you keep following me?”

“No,” I say. “Is that why you ran away from me? You thought I’d turn you in for hanging up those essays?”

She stares at me a moment longer, then looks to Judas, who tells her, “Those were a bad idea. I told you they draw too much attention.” He nods to me in indication.

“My father doesn’t know I’m here,” I say. “I’m not planning to tell him.”

“What about your friend?” Amy asks. “The one with the curls.”

“Keeps secrets better than anyone else I know,” I assure.

Amy is wary; she stares at me with her dead sister’s eyes. There’s no glitter this time. It’s hard to reconcile that this girl, who can’t be older than eleven, belongs to a jumper group, that a bag from the pharmacy arrives at her front door and that she had the gall to cross the train tracks and peer over the edge.

The feeling that overtakes me as I stare back at her, I realize, is envy.

But there’s curiosity, too. She looks unscathed, but the edge always leaves its mark on those who dare to face it. She must have demons, too. She must recoil from society in agony on bad days.

“You know my brother, don’t you?” I say. “Alexander Stockhour. Lex. He’s in your group.”

Her gaze shoots to the ground. “Has he said anything about me?” she mumbles.

Only that I should stay away.

Judas huffs impatiently. “You still haven’t told us what you’re doing here.”

“I can go wherever I want,” I fire back, surprised when the words come out so steadily.

“You were looking for me,” he says.

“I—” I hesitate, because I can’t come up with a lie fast enough. It’s true, I was looking for him. I should be safe at home doing my assignments and preparing for bed, but instead I’m in the woods because—why? I’m looking for—what?

More. The answer is as confusing and as simple as that. I’m looking for more than what I know.

“I wanted to see if you were okay,” I say. “That’s standard after saving someone from imprisonment, I think.”

“I’m fantastic,” he says. “You’re free to leave now.”

“Judas,” Amy says quietly. His face softens for her. “She isn’t going to tell anyone. She would have by now.”

“I can bring food, if you like,” I say. “My mother always makes too much. She still cooks like there are four of us at home, but really it’s just me.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Will you be here?” I say. “Tomorrow night? If you’re not, I can just leave it here for you.”

“Maybe,” is all he says, before he turns and begins pacing away.

Amy stands between us, gnawing her lip, as if deciding which of us should get her attention.

“Your parents must be worried,” I tell her. “I’ll walk you home.”

“I told you, they won’t know I’m missing,” she says.

I open my mouth to tell her that she’s wrong, of course they’ll notice; how could parents who’ve lost one child not notice the absence of another? But then I remember my own apartment, my father who likely won’t be home before midnight, if at all, and my mother coasting in the haze of her headache elixirs.

“We can just ride the train for a while first,” I say. “Until we both get tired. That’s what I do when I’m not ready to go straight home.”

She’s considering it. She runs her betrothal band back and forth along its chain, her mouth twisting one way and then the other.

Judas calls her from somewhere in the shadows and she turns her head.

He calls again, and she begins moving toward him.

“You can bring food tomorrow, if you want,” she tells me, and then she breaks into a run and disappears into the darkness, after the boy accused of murdering her sister.

My father returns home long after I should be asleep. I’ve been lying in the dark, listening to the train and then the silence it leaves behind. It has gone by three times and I’m still awake.

I hear him pull out a chair, pour water for his tea. He moves down the hall, past my bedroom, and looks in on my mother. Soft words are spoken; the door closes again.

They were once wildly in love, my mother and father. Now they’re just sort of together. Glued to each other by Lex and me and the blood in their rings.

The kettle whistles and then the sound dies away. The quiet becomes too thick; even Lex has stopped pacing in his office.

I slip out of bed and ruffle my hair with my fingers to make it seem as though I’ve been sleeping; my father will worry only if he knows I’ve been awake. Or at least, he used to worry about me. Before Lex’s incident. Back when he still bothered to notice he had a daughter.

“Dad?” I say, stepping into the light of the kitchen.

He’s got a stack of papers on the table, and he turns it over, hiding the words from me. “You’re up late, heart,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I heard you coming in,” I say, wringing the hem of my flannel nightshirt.

“I didn’t mean to be loud about it,” he says.

“No,” I say, taking the seat across from his. “I’m glad. I like knowing that you’re home. It makes me feel better.”

“Do you feel unsafe when I’m gone?” he asks. “This building is safe; you know that, don’t you?”

I nod. “It’s just that I worry for you,” I say. “When you’re home, I know you’re okay. That’s all.”

He gives me a tired smile, reaches over the table and pats my hand. “Since you’re awake, would you like some tea?” he says. “There’s enough for two.”

I shake my head. “Dad? What’s going to happen to Jud—to the murderer?”

“What will happen?” my father says, shuffling his papers without turning them over. “That’ll be up to the jury. I don’t believe they’ve begun the selection process yet.”

“Why haven’t they?” I say. “Murder’s a serious charge.”

“I’m not involved with the politics of it,” he says. “The king makes all of those decisions.”

He isn’t meeting my eyes now. He gulps his tea.

“Have you met him?” I press.

“The king?”

“The murderer. Of course you’ve met the king.”

“I’ve seen him in the holding cell. I pass it when I’m turning in my reports each morning.”

“So you saw him today?” I ask.

“I suppose so, yes.”

He’s lying. He’s lying to me.

Maybe I’m lying, too, by keeping what I know from him. It doesn’t make me feel any less betrayed.

“Do you think he’s capable of murder?” I say. “I mean, a student my age?”

He clears his throat. “I’ve got a lot of work to contend with before I have any hope of sleeping tonight. And you have academy in the morning,” he says. “We can talk about this later. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I murmur.

I understand. Later will never come.

Ms. Harlan taps her pen against her clipboard and tries to smile at me.

I concentrate on not fidgeting.

She asks me about classes and about my betrothed. She notes my reactions and makes direct eye contact when she isn’t writing.

And then, when the lunch period is nearly over, she asks about my family. She wants to know if things have changed since the incident, if any of us have taken medication to cope. Something about the way she asks leads me to believe she already knows the answers and there’s no sense lying.

“We were all medicated at first,” I say. “But it interfered with my father’s work. He has to be alert when he’s called upon. And my parents didn’t like how drowsy the elixirs made me, so I stopped taking them.”

That isn’t the whole truth. I had begun pouring my elixirs down the sink before they took me off them. I didn’t like the heaviness of my limbs, the blackness of my dreams. I didn’t like how sterile they made the world around me seem; I couldn’t think beyond what was in front of me, couldn’t fathom that there was a ground below this floating city, couldn’t wonder at the shapes in the clouds.

The only thing I liked about that awful time was going to the top floor of the hospital. Sometimes I wouldn’t even visit my brother. I would just take the stairs up to the cafeteria on the top floor. That hospital is the second tallest building on Internment, and the cafeteria is made of windows. On an overcast day there’s nothing to see but whiteness. Clouds turning and parting, revealing more clouds. It mesmerized me.

Ms. Harlan takes notes. “And your mother?”

“She suffers from headaches,” I say. “She takes elixirs in the evening, so they won’t interfere with her workday.”

My answers are tidy. They are exactly what our medical records should reflect. Exactly what the king asks of families who’ve had a jumper. I may not know exactly what the king’s specialist is fishing for, but I know that I need to protect my family. It’s easy to give the right answers; all I need to do is pretend everything is as I want it to be.

“How is your relationship with your brother?” she asks.

“He lives upstairs,” I say. “I check in on him sometimes, but his wife takes care of him. She makes sure he attends his support group and takes his prescriptions.”

She smiles again, but these smiles only serve to unsettle me. There’s something artificial about them.

“Are you opposed to medications?” she asks. And before I can answer, she’s lifting a kettle from the portable sun warmer on her desk and pouring me a cup. “I’d like for you to try some of this,” she says. “There’s no medicine in it, but the herbs are said to have a soothing effect. If I can be blunt, Morgan, it sounds as though you’re under quite a bit of stress.”

I ran out to catch the train before I’d had a chance to touch my breakfast this morning, and I’m missing lunch for this meeting, which is perhaps why the spicy sweet smell of the tea seems so irresistible to me right now. She pours a cup for herself, blows into the steam and swirls the cup in her hands. I’ve taken only a sip when the bell rings.

Ms. Harlan looks as though she would like to ask another question as I grab my satchel from the floor. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to go. I’ll have only two minutes to get to class. Thank you for the tea.”

“Tomorrow then,” she says.

“Tomorrow.”

Pen finds me in the hallway. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she says, hanging on my shoulder as we walk. “It’s my fault you’re being punished. Can you ever forgive me?”

“I suppose you can carry my bag,” I say.

She eagerly takes it.

“I was kidding,” I say.

“So what happened?” she asks. “Did you have to write passages from The History of Internment a thousand times in slantscript?”

People haven’t written in slantscript on a daily basis for more than a hundred years, but it’s still taught in the middle-grade years as a form of history. The letters all curl into and around one another like ribbons; I couldn’t read it, much less write it. Most students would call it torture, but Pen has a real talent for it.

I shake my head. “What did you tell Basil?”

“You were being tutored in math. It was the most convincing excuse I could come up with. You are atrocious with graphs.”

I don’t like the idea of lying to my betrothed. I can’t imagine Lex and Alice ever lying to each other, and one day I want my marriage to be like theirs. Or, the way it used to be, at least.

But I can’t tell Basil the whole truth—about my fascination with Judas and my wonderings about the edge, because in his protectiveness he may have me declared irrational. But lying is no way to handle things, either. That’s what the edge does—it lures you away from those you care about. It ends your life even before your shoe has crumbled dirt into the atmosphere.

But how do I get rid of these thoughts? How do I become what I’m supposed to be?

I take my seat, giving Basil a smile from across the room. He does not smile back. There’s something dire about his brown eyes today. He knows something is wrong with me.

Once class lets out, I manage to disappear in the crowd without speaking to him. And again after our last class of the day, while everyone is herding for the shuttles. I know that my missing the train will do nothing but add to Basil’s suspicions, but I don’t know what to do. The thought of riding the train is making it hard for me to breathe.

I hurry past the hedges and into the woods. I don’t know if Judas will be here, or if he’ll come out to see me either way. Amy will still be in academy. That is, if she’s attending classes. Her family will be allowed another week of mourning before they’re expected to return to society.

Still, I find myself heading for the cavern, longing for the days when it was just a fun hideaway, a pretend house where Pen and I served pretend tea.

Someone touches my shoulder, and I start.

Basil turns me around to face him.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.

My heart is pounding, less from being startled and more now from the weight and effort of keeping secrets from him. He always knows when something is amiss with me. I fight to keep my voice even, but it still comes out too breathy. “It’s fine. I was just going for a walk.”

“Alone?” he says.

“You can come if you want.” I start moving away from the cavern, in the direction of the lake. It’s bad enough that Judas saw Pen as an invasion; I don’t want him to think I’m revealing his location to everyone I know.

“I didn’t see you at lunch,” Basil says. His knuckles touch mine, and somehow in the next instant we’re holding hands. I don’t think either of us initiated it—it just seems to happen. “Pen said you’re struggling with math and had to get a tutor.”

An amazing friend, Pen. Explaining one problem away with another.

I look at my shoes as I walk. I don’t want to lie to him, so I keep silent.

“Morgan,” he says. “It’s going to be a quiet sixty years if you refuse to tell me things.”

That’s how long we have left—not quite sixty years, give or take a few months. At age seventy-five, we’ll be dispatched in order to make room for new births. To live beyond our useful years would be selfish. That’s how we show our gratitude to the god in the sky. We live our lives, and then when we have no more to give but our lives, that’s what we do. We send our ashes up for the sky god to collect. The ashes become part of a current, a force, instead of just one body. It’s called the tributary—a perfect harmony of souls. Until then, we’re all living on borrowed time, on a floating city he allows in his domain with his clouds and his stars.

Long before our dispatch dates, though, we’ll live in dodder housing. The dodder grows in thin yellow wisps and is bald of any leaves. It tends to twine itself around more viable plants, unable to fully thrive on its own. In our later years, once we’ve raised our children and given our vital years to our trade, we become like the dodder plant, and it’s time for us to retire until our dispatch date.

I think about how long sixty years is. How long can Judas keep hiding? Even his confidante, Amy, will soon be old enough that her betrothed will be a priority. No more sneaking into caverns to keep Judas company.

He’ll have to be caught. Internment is only as big as the king’s fist, like Pen said. And then Judas will be executed because no jury is going to believe he’s innocent. All I ever hear at the academy are whispers about the charges against him. That they found fire-starting materials in his apartment, bloody razors, angry letters. I’ve seen no proof, only words, but words can be powerful. Words can be what puts a boy to death.

“I’ve been thinking about the murderer, and about Daphne Leander,” I admit. At least it’s part of the truth.

I take another step, and at once I’m ensconced in a ray of light. Hot and blinding. “Basil?” I say. “Do you think Internment is what it seems?”

He moves closer, until he’s in the same patch of sun. He tilts my chin, and when I raise my head to look at him, his eyes are marred with strands of gold. “I don’t think anything is what it seems,” he says.

I fall against him, wrap my arms around his neck. It feels good. It feels familiar and warm and right where I’m meant to be. Something as simple as his chin on the crown of my head makes me feel like a normal girl.

“Morgan?” he says. He feels the shudder that runs up my spine and he tightens his arms around my back. The moment couldn’t last as it was. Being safe, being normal—it’s only ever an act with me.

“I want to stay here,” I say. “I don’t want to move.”

“Why?” His fingers are under my hair, the warmth against my neck raising the skin into little bumps.

Why? Because one day I’ll be declared irrational. There’s something wrong with my brother and me. The king’s official knows it; that’s why she took such an interest in me. I wonder if it was always this way, if there’s something in our blood. When I was younger, all of my instructors had high expectations for me, being the little sister of one of their top students. But then he jumped, and as Lex became something different to everyone around him, so did I. There is no more high standard, only the worry that I’ll fail too.

“I’m not—” My voice falters, or maybe I just lose my courage.

They’ll fill me with elixirs until I’m somnambulating through the rest of my life, to numb this madness inside me that will surely progress.

“I’m not right. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“You’re shaking,” he says, easing us down into the grass until we’re facing each other. His hands move down the length of my arms and come to hold my wrists. “What have you been lying about?”

“Lex,” is the first word I think to say. “I’m turning into Lex.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” he says. “What do you mean you’re turning into him?”

“I wasn’t with a tutor at lunch,” I say. “I was with the king’s specialist. That lady who spoke with all of us after the broadcast about the murder. I don’t know what she wanted with me. I don’t know how she knew. She just kept asking all of these questions about my family, and she asked if I had thoughts about the edge. I lied, Basil. I told her that of course I didn’t think about the edge. But I do. I dream about it. I want to know what will happen if I cross the tracks. I don’t want to jump; I just want to look down. I want to see what’s down there with my own eyes, not through a scope.”

I wait for Basil to pull me to my feet and drag me straight to the clock tower’s affairs office to report all of this, but he only says, “Even if you were able to look over the edge without the winds hurting you, you wouldn’t see much. It would just be patches of land. It wouldn’t be any different from what’s captured through the scope.”

“What if I’m lured the way Lex was lured?” I say. “What if one day I can’t stop myself and I walk right over the edge?”

“You didn’t tell any of this to the specialist?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Did your parents ask her to meet with you?”

“They don’t know,” I say. “The headmaster thought it best that I don’t bother them.”

He seems angry, which reignites my nervousness. It takes so much to upset him.

“Don’t tell this specialist any of what you told me,” he says.

“I couldn’t,” I say. “I barely had the courage to tell you. I thought you’d say it was wrong.”

He leans toward me until our foreheads are touching, our eyes downcast. “You aren’t wrong, Morgan.” Waves of coldness and heat bloom in my stomach. “Not at all.”

I don’t know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I’ve lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we’ll be ashes—we’ll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we’ll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there’s quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest.

He knows that I’m not like the other girls—the normal ones—that a part of me is slipping off this floating city, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.

Maybe we’re both beyond saving.