Perfect Ruin

22

I DECLINE ALL OFFERS TO PARTAKE IN A tour of the metal bird.

I realize that this is a phenomenal place, but I’m not in the right mind to appreciate it. I spend the rest of the evening reliving the memory of mother turned away from me on the bed, and the night I sat at the kitchen table with my father as he lied about Judas. He was trying to protect me. If I knew nothing, he thought I wouldn’t be a target. I see that now.

I don’t say very much. Basil worries. Lex has Alice check the dilation of my pupils and he pays close attention to my temperature, asks me to describe any stomach cramps or dizziness. I tell him that I don’t feel much of anything. He has nothing to say to that. He was never very good with emotions. It’s staggering to think he’s the only family I have left.

There are probably patrolmen in the apartment now, rifling through our drawers and looking for signs of treason to justify the murder of an entire family. When they get to my bedroom they’ll find an open textbook at the desk, and the wooden marionette Pen bought for my festival of stars gift. They’ll find blue bedsheets and a closet full of uniforms and a feather headband draped over the mirror. They’ll find pieces of a girl who followed the rules.

That girl is gone now.

There’s no daylight here. There are no clouds. I hear a rumbling that I think is the train up above us. I lie with my face in the mattress, and Basil rubs circles on my back. He says nice things and he stoops down to kiss the back of my neck. Despite this hollowness inside me, the feel of his lips raises bumps in my skin.

I hear the door open, and Alice calls my name.

When I don’t answer, Basil says, “I think she’s fallen asleep.”

Alice doesn’t believe it. When I was younger, there were nights when my parents still went out together, when they would be gone long into the starlit hours, only to return with giggles and whispers, shushing each other as they slammed doors and stumbled off to bed. While they were gone, Alice would look in on me. She would know if I was pretending to sleep, and she would tickle my feet.

She doesn’t touch me now. She only says, “We’ll sort this out, love.” She doesn’t say my name, but I know the words are for me. “You aren’t alone.”

The door closes.

“She’s been crying,” Basil says, lying down beside me.

After a few seconds, I raise my face from the mattress to look at him.

“I don’t want to talk,” I say. I feel like I can’t get the words out in time. They spin angrily in my brain but disappear on my tongue.

“Okay,” he says, and wipes at a streak of my tears with his thumb. “You don’t need to say a word.”

“Never again?” I say.

“Not if you don’t want to. I’ll just read your expressions. Everywhere we go, I’ll speak so you don’t have to.”

I know he isn’t being serious, but it’s a nice thought. Him always at my side, always knowing what I’m thinking until our dodder days are over and we’re dispatched.

Only I don’t know if we’ll be allowed in dodder housing. I don’t know what’s going to happen or where I’ll go if Internment is too dangerous for me.

I close my eyes.

“Want me to turn out the light?” he says.

I shake my head. He tucks the blanket over both of us. It’s rough and unfamiliar, so I wrap my arm around Basil. The boy I’m supposed to spend forever with. He still feels and smells like home.

“What about your parents and brother?” I say.

“They’ll be safer if I don’t try to find them now,” he says. “They had nothing to do with any politics. I can’t imagine they’d be a target.”

He doesn’t sound very sure about that. Their son is betrothed to a girl the king tried to kill, after all.

“You must want to see them,” I say.

“I can’t,” he says, and his voice falters, and I know he’s trying to be strong for my sake. “You heard what they said. It would put everyone at risk—them, you, me, everyone on this bird. My family will understand. They know that my place is with you. I was going to have to leave home eventually.”

I think of Leland running along the cobbles the day we picked him up after class. He’s disappearing in the sunlight and I can’t bring him back.

“But not like this,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to leave home like this.”

“You’ll be killed if the king finds you,” he says. “It was my worst fear that something would happen to you, and I won’t chance it again. If you’re leaving Internment, I’m leaving, too.”

“If I were nobler, I’d beg you to stay with your family,” I say.

“It wouldn’t change that we’re meant to stay together.”

“What if we get to the ground in this flying bird somehow, and there are no rules like that? What would keep us together then?”

“The same thing that’s keeping us together now,” he says.

It’s quiet after that, and I’m left to remember that beautiful, strange thing he said to me before the medicine pulled me under.

I love you.

Is this what love means? That the rules aren’t the reason you stay together?

Buried away from the clock tower’s chimes, I rely on Basil’s wristwatch to know the hour. When he falls asleep, just after midnight, I slide out from under his arm.

“Morgan?”

One foot off the mattress, I freeze. His eyes don’t open, though, and I realize he’s only talking in his sleep.

Carefully I slide the rest of the way out of bed and kneel before him to be sure he’s really asleep. “I’ll be back soon,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

I close the door behind me when I leave.

The hallway contains a few other bunk rooms like mine. I hear voices behind the closed doors. Professor Leander means for this to be a sort of house if it lands on the ground; his intentions lie in the faucets and electrical fittings that don’t work as of yet.

There’s a spiral staircase that leads me down into a kitchen. It’s mostly dark, save for a little lantern hanging from the ceiling. I walk as softly as I can to avoid creaking floorboards. If the upstairs is the chest, then I wonder what part of the bird this is; the stomach, I suppose.

The lantern lights only a small bit of the room, allowing me to see outlines of cabinets, a stove, and a cold box. There’s also a chandelier hanging over a table on the far end, but I haven’t seen any evidence of working electricity on this bird. It has all been flame lanterns.

No matter, though. I’m able to find the drawers easily enough, and it doesn’t take much rummaging for me to find a knife.

“I hope you weren’t looking to fix a midnight snack. There’s not much food.” Judas’s voice throws my heart into my throat. My shoulders go stiff. He hops onto the counter in front of me and stares at the open drawer. “The professor had big dreams of making this place a second home, but by now he’s accepted that we’ll all be lucky enough if it gets us to the ground without killing us. A one-way journey to be sure.” He eyes the knife in my hand. “May I see?”

I hold the knife out but don’t let him grab it. “There, you’ve seen,” I say, lowering it again.

“A serrated blade,” he says. “Great for slicing bread or potatoes.” He narrows his eyes. “Not so great as an assassination tool, though. You’d want a paring blade for that. Short, easy to conceal, and a pointed edge that would go right to the vital organs.”

“I can’t imagine what you’re getting at,” I say.

“You know,” he says, “if you try to take the king’s life to avenge your parents, you’re likely to get killed by his security before you’ve made it halfway up the clock tower.”

He knows what I’m up to, then. There’s no sense pretending. He reaches into the drawer and selects a paring knife, which he graciously holds out for me to grasp by the handle.

“Are you going to tell the others?” I say.

“They were your parents,” he says, “and this is your decision. I’d advise you to revisit it later with a clearer head, but it’s not my place to stop you.”

“You can come with me, you know,” I say. “The king had a hand in your betrothed’s death. You’ve just as much a right to this grudge as I do.”

“No thanks,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve wanted to. I hate that she’s dead while he’s still breathing. But that isn’t what Daphne was about.”

I wrap the blade in a cloth napkin and tuck it into the waistband of my skirt. “Suit yourself,” I say. “How do I get out of here?”

It’s too dark to be sure, but I think he’s grinning when he points to a door across from us. “There’s a ladder that’ll take you down and out of the bird. We’re pretty far underground, though. Let me go with you and show you how the pulley works.”

He grabs the lantern from the ceiling hook and leads me to the exit. We scale the ladder down a tunnel that leads to a metal door.

“The bird’s all rickety inside,” he says, “but it’s airtight. The professor says the air is thin beyond our atmosphere. He says we’d suffocate on our way down if there were so much as a crack in this thing.”

If my parents were still alive, all of this would fascinate me. I would have questions and I would be certain that I was dreaming, so spoiled would I feel at the idea of the ground being a possibility.

Now the idea of sailing to the ground in a metal bird only stirs a rivulet of blood in my stomach where there should be excitement. I can’t quite bring myself to care. The colors have all dulled around me.

I was a different girl yesterday. I also possessed more patience and sanity.

Judas opens the metal door and bows with a flourish of his arm, the lantern raised to light the way. “After you,” he says. “Watch that first step.”

Beyond the bird, there’s nothing but dirt and rocks. “How far below the surface are we?” I ask.

“Not as far down as you’d think,” he says, hopping from the bird to stand beside me. “The first time I came down here, I thought we were too deep, and that if we kept digging we’d fall right through the bottom of Internment itself.”

I used to think something like this when I was little. I would watch worms wriggle into the dirt and I would imagine that at the bottom of the city there were clumps of worms falling away with pebbles and crumbs.

Judas hands me the lantern. “Here, hold this.”

Holding up the light, I follow him to what appears to be a wooden crate and a series of ropes.

“Your betrothed carried you all the way down here in this thing, you know,” he says. “Can’t have been easy. It’s hard maintaining balance when it’s in motion.”

“He’s strong,” I say.

“It would be a shame for his efforts to go to waste,” Judas says. “It did seem like he wanted you to live.”

He’s so certain I’ll get myself killed. I say nothing as I climb into the rickety makeshift lift. Judas tugs at one of the ropes, and as he pulls, we begin to ascend the tunnel in the earth.

The light catches the freckles of sweat on his throat. “What was she about?” I say.

He tugs at the rope with both hands. “Sorry?” he says.

“You said murdering the king isn’t what Daphne was about,” I say. “What was she like, then?”

He cants his head back, smiles ruefully at the darkness. “She was mad, for starters,” he says. “Everything she stood for revolved around that.”

I envy a dead girl for the look this boy gives her memory. “She must have been something to see,” I say.

“She was going to do big things,” Judas says. He doesn’t sound at all sad about it. “I don’t have her spark, but I’ll have to do in her absence.”

“My friend Pen says Daphne’s essay was a bunch of whatnot. She says we need to keep our heads in the sky where they belong.”

“Your friend Pen is afraid,” he says.

It’s hard to reconcile Pen being afraid of anything.

Judas goes on pulling the rope. “What kind of a name is ‘Pen’ anyway?” he asks. “No way it’s on the naming list.”

There is a list of approved names that is specific about spelling. Because of that, it isn’t uncommon for people to adopt nicknames later on. There are no rules about those. “She doesn’t like her real name,” I say. “When we were in kinder year, there were three other Margarets in our class, and the instructor started calling her Pen because she always had coloring pens in her dress pockets. I suppose she preferred it after a while.”

I peer over the edge of the crate; it’s hard to see how high we are, and in the darkness I can just about see the metal slope of the bird. I can’t tell if it actually looks like a bird. “And anyway, she isn’t afraid,” I say. “She just has a lot of faith in the way things are.”

“That’s the way the king would like it, to be sure,” Judas says.

“Why? If he’s so corrupt and he kills anyone who proves to be a nuisance, why wouldn’t he just let us go soaring down to the ground and die?”

“Because he’s the most afraid,” Judas says. “He gets to play ruler over this floating rock and nobody challenges him. But if transport between Internment and the ground were easy, his ways would be challenged. He might be overthrown. You’re only proving that point. You already want him dead, and you’re just one person; imagine if everyone knew what he was doing. There’d be a riot.”

“There shouldn’t be a riot,” I say. “He should die quietly, and in pain. He should have someone he’s wronged standing in the doorway, watching to be sure he’s dead. That person should be the last thing he sees.”

“You know that his death will only mean the prince is crowned the next day,” Judas says. “I don’t believe he’ll be any better.”

“Then I’ll murder the prince, too.”

Judas makes a sound that could be a snicker, but by the time I hold the lantern to his face, his smirk is gone.

We reach the top of the tunnel and Judas goes about tying the ropes to keep the rickety crate in place. “You know I’d be a horrible person if I let you go through with this,” he says. “Not to mention it’ll be my head when everyone realizes you’re gone.”

“How do I open this?” I fumble with the wooden door overhead. Judas undoes a series of elaborate and rusty latches. With a hard shove, he throws the door up into the blackness and I’m hit with the smell of ash and something else I can’t quite place.

“After you,” he says cordially, taking the lantern from my fist.

There’s a small ladder leading up to the opening, wobbly and rustier than the latches were. Flecks of copper dirt crumble under my feet. I’m still wearing my uniform, right down to the polished black shoes.

“Careful not to slip on the mold,” Judas says, climbing up behind me. “All the moisture underground makes for unpleasantness. A lot of people think our lakes are replenished by the sky god, but spend some time underground and you’ll come to favor the theory that we absorb water from the clouds.”

Absorbing water from the clouds would make more sense than believing our lakes are a gift from the sky god. But when presented with the evidence, I see how much more terrifying it is to think we’re on our own.

I cough on the ashes and crawl onto the gritty ground. I’m back on the surface of Internment, but I don’t know where. I can’t see a thing because Judas has blown out the lantern.

“What’d you do that for?” I say.

“We can’t let anyone know we’re here,” Judas says. “It’ll look suspicious, a light escaping through the cracks.”

I’m about to ask where we are, but then I can identify that other smell beneath all the ashes. It used to fill my brother’s apartment whenever Alice was in the room. Flowers.

“We’re in the flower shop,” I gasp.

“Or what used to be the flower shop,” Judas says. “The king didn’t know exactly what we were up to, thankfully. But he knew we met here. He had the place burned down as a message to us, I’m sure.”

Amy’s face when I chased her down the street and she saw the fire takes on a whole new meaning now.

The train speeds by, and as the ground rumbles, I drop to my knees, fingertips dusting wilted petals and stems.

“This is home,” I say to them.

“Look. Morgan.” There’s a rustling noise as Judas crouches beside me. “I don’t know you very well, but based on our previous exchanges, you seem pretty … not stupid.”

“I know I can’t kill the king,” I finally admit. “Thank you for letting me have the illusion as long as you did.”

“No assassinations,” he says. “And you know that you can’t return home. So, short of that, what are you really after?”

“A message,” I say.

“A message?”

“For Pen. Just to let her know that I’m okay. I could write something in our cavern with a rock; it could be as cryptic as it needs to be—she’ll know I was there.”

Judas hesitates. “It’s dangerous.”

“She would do it for me,” I say. “She’d never leave without a good-bye. And don’t tell me it isn’t possible to sneak out there. You’ve had patrolmen looking for you for a long time and you’ve snuck around plenty.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t possible,” he says. “But it’s not safe.”

“Lead the way,” I say. “If I get caught, leave me behind.”

“You don’t believe I’ll leave you behind,” he says.

“Don’t tell me what I believe,” I say, standing. “You have no idea.”

I think I hear a laugh on his breath as he moves past me.

“We can’t use the front door,” he says. “But there’s a board that we can pry away from this window. It’s brittle, so be careful not to break it. We have to put it back exactly.”

He pries the board away from the window frame, and there’s the light of the half-moon spilling into the alleyway. “After you,” he says, whispering now. “But be quiet about it. I don’t know where the patrolmen are.”

We aren’t very far from my apartment, and I know this section very well, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling different now. I suppose I was hoping that I could get to the surface and it would all be like before. If I were to leave the alleyway and look to the right, I’d see the lights from my building and force myself not to think of my parents.

I would be a minute’s walking distance from the train that would take me there.

But I don’t look for my building. I make no movement toward the train. I watch Judas climb out beside me and secure the board back in place. He turns to me, a finger over his lips, then cants his head in the direction of the shadows beyond the street lanterns.

I follow him. Our footsteps are more silent than I would have thought possible.

I try not to pay attention to the cobbles, or the smell of the grass, or the chill in the air that always leads me to think it must be dusting on the ground. But I can’t stop myself from thinking of how that frozen dust must look. Does it melt at the warm touch of human skin? The world must be so ethereal, all its cracked walkways and worn buildings covered by perfect white.

Judas moves expertly between the trees, and I do my best to follow in his footsteps. My brother said that some of the patrolmen were part of this secret plan to leave Internment, and now I wonder if the reason Judas hasn’t been caught is because there are patrolmen on his side.

“What do we call this?” I whisper.

“Call what?” Judas says.

“This—plan. To leave Internment. Is it treason?”

He doesn’t stop walking, all stealth, but he looks back. His lips are chapped and deep red when he smiles. “It’s a rebellion.”

I don’t understand why my heart leaps onto my tongue. It’s more than that mere word causing my skin to prickle, my cheeks to go warm. It’s the way he said it. It’s him, moving in the darkness, something pulling me to follow.

He stops walking and holds out his hand to keep me from taking another step. We’re in sight of the cavern now, and I can see a figure kneeling at its mouth, head in hands.

“There’s someone,” he whispers.

“Pen!”

He tries to keep me from going forward, but I push past him, and by the time she’s turned her head, Judas has disappeared into the shadows.

“Morgan? Morgan!” She runs and doesn’t stop until she’s crashed into me and I’m toppling backward. Her tears are smeared onto my face when her cheek brushes mine.

“Pen?” I say. She’s sobbing, gripping at the back of my shirt. “Breathe,” I say. “You’re scaring me.”

“You—” She chokes on a sob and draws back. “You’re scared? What a thing to say. You had me thinking you were dead.” She claps her hands against my cheeks, staring through the darkness, making sure it’s really me. Her eyes reach mine and she loses what little composure she mustered, and she pulls me to her chest.

I’ve never seen her this way. Wouldn’t have thought it possible.

“Don’t cry, silly girl,” I say. “I’m right here.”

I bring her to sit at the mouth of the cavern with me, and after many quivering breaths, she tells me what happened. With all the sorrow and the chaos after the university student’s death, the pharmacy was overflowing with orders for elixirs to calm the nerves. They were ill prepared for so much action, and some batches were improperly measured. At least a dozen deaths were reported from a tainted batch, my family among them. Lex, Alice, my parents—all of us.

So that’s what they’re telling everyone.

She smiles, wipes a tear from her cheek. “But you’re okay. It was a mistake. I should have known better than to listen to my mother; she has one foot in a fantasy novel at all times. What really happened? Did you have to go to the hospital to get looked at? Like when Carmilla Tilmaker swallowed a dead bramble fly in kinder year.”

What really happened?

Now it’s my turn to be somber. I am too exhausted to cry. Is that normal? To be orphaned and not grasp the magnitude of such a word, let alone expend any emotion over it? “I was ill, but I’m okay now. Lex and Alice are fine.”

She plays with a lock of my hair, waiting for me to go on.

“Pen?” I stare at her knees and mine. “What if there were a way off this city, and I told you I was going to take it? Would you file to have me declared irrational?”

She doesn’t answer. There’s no way she could already know about the mechanical bird or the conspiracy or any of those things, but she knows me. She knows that something is coming.

“I can’t stay here,” I say. “I wasn’t even supposed to come out, but I had to”—say good-bye—“see the stars again.” I can’t imagine they’ll be this pretty from the ground. On the ground, the history book says, the humans have infinite land to fill with buildings; and the scopes show us that they make their own lights, and the stars mean nothing to them. But up here, we see them, as clear as lightbugs that float in the air around our heads.

Pen and I raise our heads and look at each other. “Come out from where?” she asks.

I listen for some sign that Judas is still nearby, but though I know he’s watching me, he’s silent. It’s as though I can feel him willing me not to say another word about it.

And he needn’t worry. I won’t tell. But it isn’t to protect the metal bird or the rebellion. It’s because of what she said that night on the train platform. She told me I needed to stop thinking about the ground. She said that she didn’t want to know what was beyond Internment.

We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that.

This is her home. I can’t take it away from her. Instead, all I can do is stare at her—this lovely, lovely girl who might have been nobility in another time with that hair and those eyes. If I never see her again after this moment, I’ll have enough memories of her to carry for every day of the rest of my life. But no matter how vivid those memories, they will all end here, now, her eyes glimmering in the starlight, and the feel of the blade pressed to my hip.

I won’t even get to see her wedding, I realize. She’ll have so many years to float in the sky, and my days here are coming to an end.

“I have to leave now,” I say.

She says, “Where are you going?”

“To murder the king,” I say. I know it isn’t possible, but I just want to know how it feels to say the words out loud. They feel perfect. My blood swirls and swirls with delicious warmth at the fantasy of it. “I’m going to creep into the clock tower,” I say, “and climb every last stair until I get up to the king’s apartment. I’m going to sneak into his bedroom while he’s sleeping and cut open his throat. I think that’s how I’ll do it. I’d like that.”

Pen would laugh at the absurdity on a normal day, but she’s looking into my eyes.

“Morgan—” She grips my arm, stands, and tugs me into the shadow of heavy leaves as though to protect me from what I’ve said. “You can’t be blurting out things like that right now. It’s treason. What if someone hears?”

“Nobody is listening,” I say. “Nobody ever listens to us. We’re all milling around pretending that what we do is important, that we’re important, but the king will do away with anyone he’d like.”

There’s a bright moon tonight, split to pieces by branches. It’s an organ with veins and arteries. A non-beating heart. If there’s a god at all, he’s dead in his sky.

Pen holds my face in her hands. Her thumb brushes at my cheek over and over. “This isn’t like you at all,” she says. “What’s happened?”

I’ve said ugly things, but she doesn’t flinch.

“You asked what really happened,” I say. “My parents are dead.”

I stare at her collarbone that’s framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with the weight of her next breath. We’re fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?

Some sound escapes her lips, but I can’t comprehend it. All I know for sure is that I have to leave. I can’t face her like this. “I’ve said too much,” I say, and take a step away. I’m just about to run, when she grabs my wrist. I struggle. For the first time in my life I struggle to get away from her, but she’s too strong for it. I pull with all I’ve got, and her shoes dig into the earth, her legs don’t even move. She’s rooted, hardly a grunt for her efforts.

All the fight goes out of me. She lets go only when she’s sure I won’t run.

“They’re dead,” I say, and sink into the dirt. She kneels beside me.

When her mother became addicted to tonic, Pen was the victim of too many well wishes and sympathies. She has told me before that she’s had her fill of them for a lifetime no matter the tragedy, and that holds true. She says nothing.

“I can’t tell you the rest,” I say. “I would if the whole story belonged to me, but it isn’t all mine to tell. That’s the only part that matters to me, anyway. They’re dead, and I can’t stay. This all sounds so incredible that I wouldn’t expect you to believe it.”

“I believe you,” she says.

Of course she does. She’s out of her mind, the only girl left in the academy who’d still want to have anything to do with me. We’re the same sort. We always have been.

As I’m rising to a stand, there’s a stab of pain in the side of my neck, and I can’t move a muscle. The dart that’s just hit Pen’s shoulder is the only explanation. We’ve just been attacked. Something moves in the trees, and I’m falling back into someone’s waiting arms.