Perfect Ruin

13

THE FIRST KISS LINGERS. IT TRAVELS AWAY from the lips once it’s over, and it breaks apart and settles in strange places. The stomach. Fingertips. Knees. It follows us along the cobbles and onto the train.

The train’s rumbling rattles my ribs. It’s late enough now that the train is crowded with workers on their evening commute, and the noise is like bugs that have gotten trapped inside the car, vaguely thrumming. I feel as though a layer of my skin has been peeled away, leaving me chilled, my senses heightened.

Basil keeps me fastened to his side, as though to protect me from the crowd. He kisses my temple, and I close my eyes, reveling in the sensation of it. Now that we’ve had that first kiss, the tension is severed. He can kiss me a thousand times. Ten thousand.

Then, too soon, the train rolls to a stop and his arm around me tenses to keep us steady for the final jolt. I stand with the feeling that I’m being awoken.

Alice told me that the first kiss would leave a girl feeling strange. I wasn’t prepared for how right she was.

We take our time walking back to the apartment building. I watch a cloud swirl over the atmosphere. On very overcast days when the sky goes entirely white, it’s like Internment is an inking on a piece of paper, and the rest has yet to be drawn.

“Do you have to see the specialist again?”

“Every day, until I hear otherwise,” I say.

I see in his face that he’s unhappy, but it isn’t because of anything I’ve done; he’s being protective. I’m glad I told him. I’d want him to tell me, if it were the other way around. “I’m not going to bother my parents with it,” I say. “They’ll worry. They’ll think they’ve done wrong by us. First Lex and now me.”

He stops me a few paces before the door to my building, takes my hands. “If you feel like going to the edge, come and find me,” he says.

It takes me a moment to work up the courage to look at him. “What if you can’t stop me?” I say. “What if I go mad and I jump?”

He squeezes my hands. “I won’t let you go alone.”

It may be the greatest thing anyone has ever said to me, and my smile is too small to express my gratitude.

“Shall we go inside?” Basil says.

“Not yet,” I say, looking to the clouds again. This afternoon has been one long moment that I haven’t wanted to end. I want Basil beside me a little longer. I want this warmth in my cheeks to stay.

He puts his hand on the small of my back, and I feel the current of my blood flowing under his touch. “You could walk with me to the playground,” he says. “I’m supposed to find my brother before dinner.”

“All right,” I say.

The playground isn’t far from the park, which means we’re undoing our train ride by going there, but Basil doesn’t seem to mind. Time is passing too quickly, though I keep willing for it to hold still.

There’s only one child left on the playground, hanging by his knees from the dome of metal bars.

“Leland,” Basil calls, and the boy topples clumsily to his feet.

“He’s gotten better,” I notice. “Last time he was falling on his head.”

“He practices on the furniture,” Basil says, and sighs.

“Is it dinnertime already?” Leland asks, dusting his knees as he ambles toward us. The necklace that holds his betrothal band has fallen against his collar so that the band is behind his neck. Basil stoops to fix it.

“Almost,” Basil says. “Where’s your tie?”

“I lost it.”

“Lost it where?”

He shrugs. Leland has never been a child who can hold on to things; he’s careless even by the standards set by other seven-year-olds. He does his best to seem contrite for Basil’s sake, an effort that’s less than valiant. He scratches the bridge of his nose. “Hi, Morgan.”

“Hi, kid,” I say. I try not to laugh at Basil’s fretful expression. “The tie will turn up somewhere,” I say.

“It’s the third one you’ve lost this year, Little Brother,” Basil says.

“Or maybe it’s been the same tie being found and reissued to me all along,” Leland says, walking ahead. “We’ve never seen more than one at a time.”

“Interesting theory,” I say.

He beams. “Are you coming for dinner?”

“Another night,” I say. Basil and I quicken our pace to keep up with him. Leland is all skips and twirls, always in motion. I think he’ll become something theatrical, or at the very least some kind of athlete.

Or an explorer. The thought comes to me now and again, though I know it isn’t logical. Explorers are for stories about the people of the ground. Explorers are for those who weren’t born in a city that has been interned in the sky.

“There wasn’t even a patrolman watching the playground,” Basil says, quiet enough that his brother won’t hear.

“There never used to be,” I say. “When we were little, sometimes it was dark out by the time we went home for dinner.”

“That was then,” Basil says. Too late, he realizes the worried expression on his face and tries to smile for my sake.

I catch his arm and stop him from walking. “Nobody is going to hurt Leland,” I say.

He locks his arms around the small of my back and draws me to his chest. I feel like a jar filled with lightbugs that have burst suddenly into flight. How can our little world be unsafe? How can it be anything but perfect?

Several paces ahead, Leland has made a game of leaping among the biggest cobblestones. He won’t end up like Daphne; of course he won’t. He is brimming with so much energy and life, not even death would be able to catch him as he skips toward the melting sun.

I wonder if the people of the ground ever feel that their children are too big for their world, too.

After dinner, my mother settles on the couch with her sampler. I sit on the floor with my homework spread out in front of me, but sometimes my gaze wanders to the underside of the fabric. I watch as the arches become stitched full with color. Whatever the colors mean, it has my mother in a good mood. She’s humming.

But it doesn’t take long, of course, for the headache elixir to exhaust her. She stoops down to kiss me before she goes to bed.

I finish up my equations sheet and wait for the soft snoring that means my mother is asleep, before I take my unfinished leftovers from the cold box and wrap them in a few sheets of water-soluble cloth. That way the evidence can be tossed into the lake. I don’t know if I’m trying to protect Judas, or myself.

When I open the door, a slip of paper flutters from the doorjamb. I unfold it, revealing Pen’s swirling, flawless handwriting:

M—

I know where you’re going.

Don’t leave without me.

—P

My natural inclination is to include her, the way I’ve always included her. But Judas barely trusts me, and Amy is starting to—I can see it. Bringing Pen along would scare the both of them off. Amy is the one, after all, who answered Pen’s question to indicate that we were dealing with a murderer.

For all the secrets Pen keeps for herself, surely she can allow me this one.

The cavern is empty when I arrive. Maybe Judas and Amy have decided not to trust me after all.

I leave the food anyway.

There are no further broadcasts, but news travels anyway. On the train the next morning, the word has spread that the jury selection for Judas Hensley has begun. Everyone is murmuring.

Pen isn’t paying attention. She breathes onto the window and writes her name in the fog.

“Such a clear day,” Thomas says. “We can almost see the ground.”

I look over Pen’s shoulder, and “almost” is the best way to describe any notion of seeing the ground. All I see is the wooden fence that borders the train, and then the sky and Internment’s uninhabited outskirts. If I were standing on the edge, then maybe I would see the patchwork of land that is captured by the scopes.

The thought of the edge has caused me to clench my fists. Basil touches my wrist.

Pen is someplace far away. With a flourish and a sigh, she rests her head against my shoulder and watches her name fill up with daylight in the window and then disappear.

Ms. Harlan pours us each a second cup of tea toward the end of our session.

I would love to believe that she’s trying to help me, but her presence only serves to make me anxious. She asks how I’m sleeping and how frequently my mother takes her elixirs. She asks about my brother and even about Alice. Stoic Alice who never flinches even when things are at their worst. Even when she was on the verge of becoming a loner forever.

“I understand your sister-in-law underwent a termination procedure,” Ms. Harlan says.

I stare at the bell that’s near the ceiling, willing it to ring.

“Yes,” I say. “Three years ago.”

“Was she ill afterward?” Ms. Harlan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was too young to have paid much attention.” This is a lie. I remember everything about the weeks to follow. I remember wondering how it was that Alice could be physically healthy, while it seemed so very possible the grief alone could kill her.

“I understand that you were young. Thirteen, was it?” Ms. Harlan says. “But do you remember anything at all about her or your brother being angry with the king? Questioning the rules that keep Internment functioning?”

“No.” Also a lie. I had never seen Lex so angry in my life.

“It’s all right. They aren’t going to be in any trouble,” Ms. Harlan says. “Questions are normal after procedures like that.”

“I really wouldn’t know,” I say.

Procedures. Like “incident,” this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things. There is the termination procedure. The dispatch procedure. The dusting procedure that reduces bodies to ash. The mercy procedure that dispatches the infants who are born unwell. Lex wrestled with these things constantly as a pharmacist. I would never hope to know the things he has seen.

Mercifully, the bell rings. I’m gone even before the tea has had a chance to cool.

Basil is waiting for me outside the headmaster’s office, and immediately I go under his waiting arm, and he steers me away from Ms. Harlan and her questions. It’s Friday, but the thought that I’ll have two days free of questioning does little to settle me.

“What did she say?” Basil asks.

“She knows,” I say softly. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something about my family.”

After class, Pen and I walk to Brass Beans Trinket Shop. It’s a little toy store modeled after a storybook castle, complete with a balcony atop a tower. We don’t actually have castles—they’re too large and impractical—but the notion of them has existed for as long as Internment has been above the ground, like a secret we were never meant to have. Or maybe the stories of castles on the ground are untrue, and we dreamed them up for ourselves. Even the princess has said she longs to live in one; our centuries-old clock tower is as close as she’ll come to that.

Pen and I fell in love with the trinket shop when we were toddlers and never quite outgrew it. We have an annual tradition of picking out our festival of stars gifts here and exchanging them early.

Though the people of Internment don’t exchange gifts for birthdays, Pen’s and my festival gifts also double as late birthday presents, because it marks the anniversary of our friendship. Her birthday is only a handful of days after mine; in fact, that’s how our mothers met and how we came to be friends. She was part of an October batch of due dates, while I was to be part of a November group, right along with Basil. But in late October, my mother was rushed to a hospital room with early labor pains, just as Pen’s mother was being dismissed from it with false labor. We were both eventually born that week—I too eager, and Pen too hesitant.

“Do you suppose we’ll come here even when we’re in dodder housing?” I ask.

“I intend to die young,” Pen says, tapping at each in a row of tiny wooden princes and princesses. “Tragically, I hope. You’re immortalized if that’s how you go.”

“Be serious,” I say.

“This is no place for that,” she says. She hoists a small metal insect in the palm of her hand. She squints at its tail, reading the tiny label affixed to it. It’s modeled after a quartet flutterling, if the four wings and long tail are any indication. I see them by the water, mostly.

Pen tugs at a tiny thread on its back, and with a mechanical whine it takes flight, spiraling busily around our heads. She squeaks with delight.

She intends to die young, she says. I think she’d make a brilliant old woman, though, surrounded by toys and tonics, saying crude things and flinging water balls at the young lovers holding hands.

The quartet flutterling lands on her shoulder. “I want this,” she says. “Think how much more fun it’ll be when we’re drunk off tonic.” It has happened only a handful of times, and mostly in the year following Lex’s incident. Pen would bring a bottle of her mother’s spirits to our cavern and tell me it would take the sting out. For a couple of hours it did, I suppose, but my life was still waiting for me in the morning, and I’d have to face it with a headache.

“I want you to have a gift you can enjoy while you’re sober,” I say.

She hugs the flutterling protectively to her shoulder. “I will. Do you see anything you’d like?”

I stare at a row of bound journals. Like all other books on Internment, the blank pages in those journals are recycled. They’ll be mostly white, but there will be shadowy flecks, bits of someone else’s handwriting, fragments of old images. Pure white pages are expensive and rare; my brother has the scrolls for his transcriber only because they’re considered necessary for the blind, and the words are printed with indents so he can feel them, which is why the paper must be unblemished.

I saw him rip apart a manuscript in a fit of frustration one afternoon, and I wanted to scream.

“Not yet,” I say.

“We could try upstairs,” Pen says, petting her new toy. “Do you need to get something for Lex?”

“No,” I say. “He says the best gift I can give him any year is peace and quiet. He says I snore and it disturbs his writing.”

“You don’t snore,” Pen assures. “He just loves to tease you.”

“You’re lucky you’re an only child,” I say.

We move up the creaky wooden steps, through a tunneling stairwell that’s lit by flame lanterns on the wall.

For no logical reason at all, I think of Judas, all angles in the moonlight, and of Basil, who kissed me when I told him I feared going crazy. I’m only just beginning to feel for him the way that Alice feels for Lex, the way my mother feels for my father. It’s an injustice that Judas’s betrothed is dead at any age, but especially at this one.

Did they ever kiss? Were they in love, or will Judas spend the rest of his life never getting to know what that feels like?

“You’re being quiet,” Pen pouts. We reach the top of the staircase and she tugs the thread, setting the flutterling in the air again.

“Basil kissed me,” I say.

The flutterling lands in her palm.

“At last,” she says. “I was beginning to wonder about his sexuality. You’ve no idea how close I was to grabbing a brochure from the infirmary about those natural attraction classes.”

I feel my face go warm. “You were not.”

“How was it?” she says.

I’m looking at my shoes, and I don’t have to say anything, because my smile tells her everything she needs to know.

She wraps her arm around my shoulders, leading me toward shelves of water balls, dirt candies, and other assorted pranks. “Let’s find you something childish, quick, before you grow up completely.”

The food is gone when I check the cavern again.

If Judas is lurking nearby, Amy won’t be with him. The jumper group meets tonight.

“I’m leaving this here,” I say to the trees as I set another package in the same spot as before. “It’s apple cinnamon bread. It’s my favorite. My mother bakes it because she says it reminds her of when I was little and it was the only thing I’d ask to eat.”

After a while, a voice above me answers, “Your mother’s an excellent cook.” The branches rustle overhead as a shadow jumps from them to land before me. “All mine ever makes is soup, and it isn’t very good soup at that.”

I cant my head. “Is that where you were hiding last night?” I ask.

“If I told you, I wouldn’t be a very good hider,” Judas says, ducking into the cavern.

I follow after him, and then set my pocket light between us as we sit on the dirt. It doesn’t have much of a glow, but at least he can see the food package.

He eats, and I try not to bother him. I don’t want to scare him away, but I’m brimming with questions and confessions. I want to tell him about the talk on the train of jurors, and the specialist questioning me about my family. I want to ask him about Daphne—what he knows about her death, if he misses her, if he loved her.

He looks at me and stops chewing, mouth full, and says, “What?”

I realize I’m staring and look at my lap. “How is Amy so …” I try to find the right word. “Together?”

“Together?” He takes another bite.

“It’s just that my brother is a jumper, too, and I’ve seen enough of them to know that it leaves scars. But she seems fine.”

He watches me a moment, considering whether or not I’m one to trust. Or maybe he thinks me too stupid to understand the enormity. “She’s a strange girl,” he says. “Always has been, always will be. She somehow made it to the edge all by herself when she was seven. Wandered off during outdoor recreation at the academy.”

Seven?

“She was unconscious when the patrolman found her. It’s been a matter of debate whether or not she knew what she was doing. Her parents will say that she just wandered off, and that she didn’t understand and wasn’t paying attention. She liked bugs. Flutterlings and bramble flies—anything with wings, she’d chase. They said she must have gone after something and lost track of where she’d wandered.”

“But you think otherwise?” I ask.

“I do,” he says. “But she doesn’t remember why she did it. That’s the thing. When she woke up, she didn’t seem injured, but her mind wasn’t quite right. She forgets things. She has fits where her eyes go back and no amount of calling will get her to hear you, and she senses things. Says she knows when someone is being dispatched and can hear their thoughts floating away on the wind. Her grandmother died of the sun disease, and Amy dreams about her all the time. Says she’s being haunted by her ghost. Her parents took her to a specialist for a while.”

I don’t say that I’m meeting with a specialist myself. “Did it help?” I ask.

“Sure,” Judas says. “It taught her to be a better liar.”

Amy’s mind hasn’t been quite right.

Judas’s words stay with me on the walk home. Maybe that’s why she’s so trusting of Judas. Maybe he did murder Daphne.

If something is wrong with her, then it’s wrong with me as well, because I don’t believe Judas had anything to do with Daphne’s death.

Pen is perched on the stairwell when I get home. She’s wearing a flannel nightgown and her hair is plaited to set her curls when she sleeps. “You left without me,” she says.

She looks exhausted, or just sad.

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to scare him off. Give me some time and then I’ll introduce you.”

She shakes her head. She’s looking at the floor. “No you won’t,” she says. “You’re keeping him for yourself. I’ll only get in your way.”

I don’t know which hurts more—that she thinks this of me, or that I realize there may be some truth to that.

“Pen …”

“Don’t.” She stands and is already climbing the stairs as she says, “I’m going to bed.”

I start after her, and when we reach the door to her landing, she turns to face me. Her eyes are dull. I hate to think I’m the cause.

“Wait,” I say.

“Why?” she says, shouldering her way through the small opening in the doorway. “You wouldn’t wait for me.”