Perfect Ruin

26

PEN PUSHES ME THROUGH THE DOOR. I CAN’T see a thing, and I rush to keep up with her. We pick a direction that I think will take us toward the water room, and we run.

The princess is screaming and screaming. The stairwell is alive with footsteps. We stop and spin around to see the candlelight coming toward us.

We crouch behind a crumbling slab of wall, likely the remains of an old prison cell, and force ourselves to quiet our gasping. My lungs burn. My heart is racing. I’m furious. As Pen presses herself against me, I’m remembering what she said.

I make no promises.

How could you?

From where we’re perched, I can see the patrolmen rushing to the prince’s aide. I think it’s too late for him. The princess is sobbing that he needs a medic. Moments before she opened the door, she and her brother had been giggling.

One of the patrolmen leads her to the doorway and grabs her shoulders, trying to get something coherent out of her. “Who did this?” he asks several times before she seems to hear him.

Her arms are folded and she’s staring at Prince Azure when she swallows and says, “Men. They—they stole us from our beds and dragged us down here.”

“Men? What did they look like?”

“It doesn’t matter; they’ve gone.” She pushes his hands from her shoulders. “The heir to the throne is going to bleed to death if you don’t help him. Do you want that to happen on your watch?”

Murmurs and footsteps. Some of the patrolmen rush upstairs; there are too many of them to count, and my stomach is sick when I realize that Pen planned it this way. A scream from Princess Celeste would summon every patrolman on duty. All we need to do is wait them out.

Medics hurry down from upstairs, carrying a cushioned board for the prince’s body. And there’s someone else, too. King Furlow himself, his thin white hair disheveled, his white robe open, revealing his doughy stomach. To see him in such a state is to see Internment for the soil. He is as ordinary as the rest of us. No greatness to him at all.

And I know Judas was right—I wouldn’t have been able to kill him.

This is the man who had my parents murdered. But I take no satisfaction from the pain on his face when he sees his son, sees the blood all over his daughter’s white clothes as she chews her lip and trembles.

“Papa,” she croaks. “Make them help him.”

“They are, love, they are.”

Shadows move in the candlelight. Medics are carrying the prince up the stairs on the cushioned board. I can’t tell whether he’s breathing. All I see is that much of the cushion has gone red with blood, drops of it falling out of reach from the light.

Pen is trembling beside me. “Morgan?”

My wrists are burning from where the princess’s struggle dug the twine into my wounds.

“Shh.”

It seems the entire tower has gathered here. Except for the queen. There have been rumors that she has taken ill; looking back it does seem strange that she wasn’t in any of the broadcasts.

Maybe the king poisoned her too, I think bitterly.

But he puts his arm around his daughter to console her, and it’s an echo of my father comforting me when we stood over Lex’s hospital bed, not knowing if he’d pull through.

King Furlow and Princess Celeste follow the medics up the stairs. Patrolmen escort them on all sides. As they go, they take the candlelight with them.

The clock strikes ten, drowning out the sounds they make. But I can still hear Princess Celeste’s sobs; I suspect I’ll hear them for a very long time in my dreams.

Pen and I stay huddled in the dark after the last chime.

“We won’t have long,” I whisper when I’m sure it’s safe. “Let’s try to find a way out.”

“We shouldn’t take the stairs,” Pen says. I can tell by her voice that she’s fighting for calm. I don’t know how long she was planning to attack the prince, but she’s seen it played out and she’s seen the damage she caused, and it’s ugly.

I’m the first to stand and begin walking. She clings to my shirt hem.

“Morgan?” she whispers. “You understand that I had to, don’t you?”

“Just hope he isn’t dead,” is all I say.

“She didn’t tell on us. She could have. Why didn’t she?”

“I don’t know.” My arms are out in front of me, and I’m feeling along the grimy bricks, hoping for an out. My eyes are trying to adjust to the darkness, but there’s nothing.

And then, suddenly, there is. A glimmer of moonlight breaking through a wooden door.

I fumble for the doorknob, and it turns, but the door doesn’t budge. Pen helps me undo the series of locks. It’s taking so long, I feel we’re in a dream where air has been replaced by sweetgold.

I pull the knob again, and the door opens with a creak that I’m sure will summon the patrolmen. But no, they don’t come. They’ll be busy with all that blood.

If Prince Azure is dead, will his father tell Internment it was Judas Hensley? Say it was another act of treason?

Moonlight, so familiar and beautiful when we make it outside that my chest aches at the sight of it. It’s trapped in a shimmering triangle on the ground. We’re standing before the plum court; it’s made of glass, its lines and circles waiting for players to come and follow their rules. Pen and I run across the court, which is scuffed from the prince and princess’s last game. We’re trying to get momentum though our wrists are bound, and no one is there to stop us. Pen’s plan is almost perfect. Almost.

I push through a row of shrubs, scratching my arms, legs, and face as I do. Pen winces at the sound of fabric tearing. When I look at her, I see the lace from her dress collar is now dangling in the shrub. She tries to free it, but it won’t come loose, and she has to leave it behind.

The clock tower is located in a wooded area, not far from where Sections One and Two meet. I know exactly where we are. My apartment is to the left in Section One, Basil’s to the right in Section Two. I allow myself a moment to stare at my building several paces away, partially hidden by its neighbors. Lights are still on in some of the apartments. It isn’t too late for people to be awake, but the streets are empty. Probably from fear that murderers are running rampant. The patrolmen surrounding the clock tower are occupied, but there will be plenty more in the city, and it probably won’t take long for word to spread that the prince has been attacked. We have to move quickly. We have to be invisible.

Down alleyways and through the woods, we move. It’s only when we reach the charred flower shop that Pen asks, “Why are we here?”

“It’s where the machine is kept,” I say, doing nothing to hide the bitterness in my voice. If she hadn’t hurt the prince, possibly killed him, here is where I would tell her to go home to her parents, to Thomas. But her ring catches a bit of starlight and I know she’ll never see her betrothed again. After what she’s done, she can never be safe in this city. She’d be declared irrational if she weren’t dispatched for her crime. I have to take her with me, and hope the metal bird really will fly us to the ground.

She’s quiet and contrite, because she knows it too.

I pry back the familiar board, granting a small passageway in through the window. Without full range of motion from my arms, I tumble forward, landing hard on my shoulder. The pain hardly registers. I catch Pen as she tumbles in on top of me.

Even after several days, the burnt smell lingers in this place, and memories of the day at the theater rush back to me. In my nightmares, I couldn’t have imagined that the fire would destroy as much as it did. I couldn’t have imagined this feeling I get now knowing I can never go back.

When I was little, my brother drew an image for me on the train ride home from the academy. It was a map of Internment. Only, instead of the real city, he’d drawn a castle for the clock tower. And the buildings were all different somehow. Mysterious. And right at the edge he drew a ladder that went down and disappeared into the clouds. It was the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen, and getting ready for my bath that night, I discovered that the map had fallen from a hole in my skirt pocket. I wanted to go out and look for it, but my mother told me the sweepers had already come. The paper would be collected with all the other forgotten-about things and it would be compressed and recycled into something new.

I looked for it the next day, anyway, to no avail. I couldn’t believe such a wonderful thing could be destroyed so simply. I learned that it could. Anything could be destroyed.

“There’s a machine in here?” Pen asks.

“Under here.” I’m on my hands and knees now, struggling to crawl, until I find the door that will take us underground.

This poses a new problem. There are several locks on the other side of it, and even if I manage to break through them, I’ll be faced with the pulleys and ropes of the lift; there’s no way I’ll be able to operate them while my wrists are bound.

“We have to find something to cut the twine,” I say.

“I can’t see anything,” Pen says. “There must be scissors, though.”

We begin fumbling through what’s left of drawers and cabinets. “Careful,” I remind Pen. But I say this a moment too late, because there’s a creaking sound as one of the cabinets gives way and crashes to the ground. Glass and metal fall around our feet.

“Sorry!” she says. “But there’s probably a glass shard we can use now.”

Carefully, I crouch among the debris looking for something sharp, and I hear Pen rustling about beside me for a few moments before she stops. “Listen,” she says. “Did you hear that?”

I stop fumbling and then I hear it, too. There are faint whining and creaking noises coming from beneath the floorboards. Someone is using the lift.

Hurriedly I crawl for the door, scraping my knee as I do. I see light through cracks in the floorboards, and my heart is on my tongue.

The noise stops, and next I hear the pound of shoes on the metal ladder. A voice says, “Who’s there?”

“Judas?” I say.

Latches being hastily unlocked. The door is pushed open, granting a square of candlelight to come through the floor. Judas sets the lantern on the ground before starting to hoist himself up. But Basil pushes past him—he’s heard my voice and now he can’t move fast enough—and in a beat I’m in his arms.

I want to hold on to him like he’s holding me, but I can’t, and so I bury my face in his neck and I press my lips there. I don’t belong on Internment itself anymore, but I’ll always belong with him.

“I see you’ve brought your friend.” Judas’s voice is dry.

Pen stares aside into the darkness. I know she’s thinking about what she’s done, about the boy soaked in blood in the clock tower.

“I had no choice,” I say, reluctantly drawing back when Basil notices my bound wrists. He tries to free them, but stops when I cringe.

“We were coming for you,” he says. “We tried last night, and there were too many patrolmen. We had to come up with a plan.”

“We were going to start a fire this time,” Judas says, sounding proud. “I figured it couldn’t hurt our reputation. Everyone already thinks we started this one.”

Violence is the only way to achieve freedom, it seems. I wouldn’t have thought so before all of this. My escape plan was a more peaceful one, but I know now that it wouldn’t have been successful.

Judas draws a knife from a makeshift sheath at his hip and saws through our restraints. It isn’t as much of a relief as I’d hoped for. The pain is still there, tightening around the bones like bloody phantom ropes.

“So you’re the fugitive,” Pen says, grinning.

“Look at that,” Judas says. “We’ve just met and already we have something in common.”

During the rickety ride down in the lift, I press my body against Basil’s. I pretend that we’re in a shuttle on the way to the academy, not sinking down into a place where the stars won’t find us.

Pen gasps when she sees a side of the metal bird emerging in the lantern light. “It’s really here,” she says.

“What people have been dying for,” Judas says, easing up a fistful of rope.

“Is everyone angry with me?” I ask Basil.

“Yes, very,” he says. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking.”

“I wanted to say good-bye to Pen, and to see the stars, and possibly murder the king.”

Judas snickers.

Basil kisses my hair, which has gone lank and stringy from my time as a prisoner. I look at him and quietly say, “I wanted to go home.”

He touches my nose, my lips. “I know.”

I press my ear to his heart, and the steady force of it makes strange music with the creaky lift. Last time I rode it, I was afraid. Now I dread only the moment we stop.

“Lex will have my head,” I say.

“He’ll just be glad you’re back,” Basil says. “We all thought, when you were taken to the king in the clock tower—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“The king never knew we were there,” Pen says. “It was his insane children.”

“The princess asked about the machine that would take us to the ground,” I say. “I misled her, but she knows. She was adamant.”

“Wonder why,” Judas says. “What’s the princess want with the ground? Her life here is charmed enough.”

“I think she’s just lonely,” I say, looking at Basil. His eyes are dark and worried.

“Lonely and insane,” Pen says. “They had us locked away from the sunlight for ages.”

“How did you get away?” Judas says.

No one answers him. But it’s no matter; we’ve stopped.

Pen is still in awe of the machine, though it’s hardly visible in the dim. She feels along the metal slope of it, tries to peer at what’s in the shadows. “What are those claws for, underneath?” she asks.

“You know how dirt warrens have claws for fingers?” Judas says. “That’s so they can dig through the dirt faster than we can walk it. There are claws like that on all sides of this thing so it can do just that.”

“To get us up to the surface so we can fly away?” Pen asks.

“To get us below the surface,” Judas says. “We’ll dig a tunnel and break out through the bottom and then sail down to the ground. Assuming we don’t fall to our deaths, or that the force surrounding the edge doesn’t throw us back.”

“But how will we get back up?” Pen says.

“We won’t.”

She already knew that, of course, but the confirmation has her staring at her betrothal band. Somewhere above us, Thomas is worrying for her. He hasn’t learned yet that he’ll spend his dodder years alone. He won’t ever stop searching for her, even if they tell him she’s dead. But that search will be fruitless, and Pen knows it. When she thinks I’m not watching, her lips move.

“I’m sorry,” is what they say.