Perfect Ruin

28

I’M EXHAUSTED, BUT I CAN’T SLEEP. EVERY time I close my eyes, I see the quartet flutterling I bought for Pen. A hand pulls the cord, and it flies around and around behind my eyelids. It won’t be still.

I open my eyes. Basil is pressed against me on the tiny mattress and is watching me. I wouldn’t let him blow out the candle in our lantern; the darkness would feel too much like my prison in the clock tower. “Can’t relax?” he says.

“It wasn’t midnight yet when I came back underground,” I say. “I didn’t get to hear the clock tower strike twelve. I just wish I could have heard the chimes once more.” I reposition myself, finding it difficult to find a soft spot amid these blankets. “Basil? Do you think they have clock towers on the ground?”

“I read somewhere that the idea for the clock tower came from the ground,” he says. “A lot of the city’s designs did. Maybe things won’t be very different from Internment. Just much more room.”

“If we don’t crash and die,” I remind him.

“Yes, that too.”

I try to imagine what the ground will be like. All I see is another version of Internment.

“We probably won’t make it,” I say. “Our top engineers have been trying to get to the ground for centuries, and they’ve all failed. You know that, right? That we’ll probably all be killed?”

“I don’t know any such thing,” he says.

“Basil, really.”

“Call me irrational if you like,” he says. “But I believe we’ll make it, and I’ve no doubt the girl I’m betrothed to would believe it too.”

“When I put aside all of the ugly thoughts, it feels poetic,” I admit. “We’re inside this sleeping machine, just waiting to see where it takes us when it wakes.”

“There’s the Morgan I know.”

The Morgan he knew is dead. I don’t know who’s lying beside him now.

He seems to know what I’m thinking. “Don’t bury your sense of wonder,” he says. “It’s a rare thing, and one of the things I adore most about you.”

“Amy thinks they’ll be fascinated by us on the ground,” I say. “She thinks they’ll throw us a party.”

I look up at the hanging lantern, trying to imagine that this metal bird can be as much a home to me as my apartment was. The Morgan Stockhour that lived in that apartment would envy me. Maybe it’s silly of me to envy her now.

“Close your eyes,” Basil says. “Try to sleep.”

I close my eyes, and this time I see ashes being thrown upon the wind.

The bed lurches beneath me, and I awaken with a gasp.

“It’s okay,” Basil says before I’ve opened my eyes. The urgency in his voice is hardly reassuring.

The lantern swings over our bed, and Basil reaches up to steady it. “Professor Leander is testing the claws. That’s all.”

“We’re moving?” I say. “Actually moving?”

The shadows of his grin dance in the candlelight when there’s another jolt. This is the happiest he has looked in days. “We’re moving.”

The door to our bunk room whips open, and there’s Pen, her hair somehow pristine though the look in her eyes is a bit deranged. “My lantern nearly fell off its hook,” she says excitedly. “It’s like Internment is shaking on the wind.”

“Not Internment. Just the bird,” Judas says, coming up beside her. “Professor Leander was up all night fiddling with the gears. He says there’s no time left. Thanks in part to the two of you, and that little stunt with the prince.”

Pen gives me a flat stare. “You told?”

“I only told Basil!”

“Voices carry,” Judas says. “And you’ve put us all even more at risk, you know.”

Pen crosses her arms, indignant. And I know she isn’t angry with me for telling Basil; she’s angry with herself. “It’s sacrilege, what that professor is doing,” she says. “If we were meant to be on the ground, we’d be able to fly like birds.”

“Not much religion in hitting the prince with a rock,” Judas fires back.

She opens her mouth, but I interrupt. “I don’t hear an engine.”

“We have to generate our own electricity down here,” Judas says. “Get the gears turning, and with luck they’ll take over for us once we take to the sky. Right now it’s all brute strength.”

“Can I help?” Basil asks.

“How are you with heavy lifting?” Judas asks.

“He’s incredible,” I say. Basil would be too modest to let on how strong he is.

“It’s true,” Pen agrees. “Makes Thomas look like a weakling. Not that that would take much.” She folds her arms and scoffs, the way she would if Thomas had just claimed her cheek for a kiss.

But of course, no kiss comes, and her expression slowly falls.

“Come on, then, if you think you’d be useful,” Judas tells Basil.

We all follow Judas down the narrow hallway. Without the clock tower or daylight, I have no concept of time. I don’t know if I can get used to the sun’s absence. It makes me feel a bit like I’m trapped in a box; sometimes I struggle to breathe. I am a creature of the sky. I’ve always known that, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was forced to live in the dirt.

I think of what my mother said that one afternoon about dreaming of living among the roots of a giant tree. That may have been her way of trying to tell me about this place; but she stopped herself, because she thought ignorance would keep me safe.

I become distantly aware of my own grief, and I realize how easily I’m able to force it away. It will come back, to be sure, but for now I’m in control, and when Judas leads me to a ladder, I climb up after him.

“Didn’t you have a dream like this?” Pen says, climbing the rungs beneath me.

“Yes, but we were side by side,” I say.

“Still. How eerie.”

Judas grabs my hand and helps me onto the upper level. Then he stoops down to help Pen, but she ignores him, preferring to stumble on all fours before coming upright. “Did you know our Morgan is something of a clairvoyant?” she says.

Judas is looking at me when he says, “She’s something.”

How unusual for me to smile at such an innocuous thing. Basil climbs up beside me, bringing me back to my senses. I stoop to gather the lantern Judas set on the floor.

We find Professor Leander in the control room, sitting before a wall of windows, each different in size and shape. He must have been hoarding pieces for decades in order for this bird to exist as it does.

There’s an alcove off to one side, surrounded entirely by dirt-darkened windows, containing levers that seem to move on their own without needing any human force.

“Do those control the claws?” Basil asks.

“Sure do,” Judas says.

Amy is hanging over her grandfather’s chair, pointing to the levers and asking questions, but she spins around when she hears our approach. “I knew you’d be back,” she says cheerily. “The others said you were dead.”

“Nobody said that,” Judas says.

“You did.”

He scratches the back of his neck. I decide to forgive him. If he thought I was dead after my capture, it was with good reason. All his friends who have crossed the king are either in this bird or dead. I heard Alice and Lex murmuring that if the other jumpers haven’t found their way to the bird by now, it’s time to leave them behind.

“We’re quite alive,” Pen says. “What can we do to help?” Her voice is bright, though she exudes weariness. Well after midnight, I heard her enter Basil’s and my bunk room. I guess her loneliness made sleeping on a cushion on our floor more appealing than the couch in the common room.

“There is a gear that’s giving me trouble,” Professor Leander says. “Sticking. There’s some grease in a yellow can.”

“I’ll go,” I say. “Where is it, exactly?”

“I’ll show you,” Amy says. As she brushes past me, she grabs my hand, and the gesture is so nonchalant that I wonder if she’s aware of it. It makes me feel honored. Trusted.

Behind us, Professor Leander has already begun assigning tasks to the others.

“You must tell me all about the clock tower,” Amy whispers when we get to the ladder. “I’m infinitely jealous that you met the princess.”

I blink. “Are you an admirer?” Princess Celeste is a popular role model for the girls of this city, but Amy doesn’t seem the sort to buy into that, especially with the king’s role in Daphne’s death.

“I just wonder what it’s like to be her, is all.” Her eyes are wide. “My sister told me that the princess shoots deer for fun and nobody is bold enough to stop her.”

“She collects antlers and mounts them to her wall,” I say, beginning to climb down.

“Ghastly,” Amy says. I can hear her grin. She reminds me a bit of Pen when we were younger—fascinated with the macabre, excited at any small scrap of adventure to be found. I wonder if Daphne was the same way. I’m sorry we never spoke, though surely we passed each other nearly every day at the academy. She wasn’t among the faces to judge and shun me after Lex’s incident. With a sister that had done the same thing, maybe she even sympathized. I have a feeling we could have been friends.

The bird lurches to the left with a chorus of metal whines. Amy loses her grip and topples backward. We’re close enough to the bottom now that I can catch her as I set one foot on the floor. Miraculously, I don’t drop the lantern. But she’s dead weight when she hits me. The bird goes still, and I realize that she’s quaking in my arms. Her eyes are all white, lashes aflutter, limbs and torso shuddering as though some creature is trying to burst out of her.

Alarmed, I lay her on the floorboards.

“Judas,” I cry. My voice is shrill. “Judas!”

In a blur, he’s leapt to the bottom of the ladder and is crouching at her side.

“She just—I caught her when she fell, and …”

“It’s okay,” Judas says. “It wasn’t anything you did. Stand back.”

He looks up to where Pen and Basil are perched at the top of the ladder. “Tell the professor to stop tinkering with the bird. She’s going to need stillness until she comes out of it.” His voice is calm, but his eyes are sharp with worry.

“I’ll get Lex,” I say. “He can help.”

“No,” he says. “It’ll run its course.”

This is how the edge ruined her. Her arms thrash. Her ankles pound at the floor. A low, hiccupping cry comes out of her.

I just want it to stop. I’d do anything to make it stop.

I think of the yellow pill her betrothed forced down her throat after we found the murdered university student. “Doesn’t she have a pharmacy bag?” I say. “Something.”

“Doubt she brought it here,” he says. “A lot of good those things will do, anyway.”

“This—this happens often?” I say.

“Now and again.”

Mercifully, she goes still. For a moment I wonder if she’s dead, but then I hear her moan. Judas sighs with relief. “We should get her to bed.”

“Maybe Morgan and I should clean her up first,” Pen says. I don’t realize she’s even descended the ladder until she’s beside me. She nods to the stain that’s formed on the skirt of Amy’s uniform.

Judas looks away, cheeks flushed. “I’ll go find something else for her to wear.”

“A bucket of water and some cloths would be ideal, too,” Pen says. “And don’t let anyone come in here until we’re done. The poor girl’s having a bad enough day as it is without becoming a scene.”

I stroke Amy’s forehead, which is flushed and warm. She leans into my touch, helpless and utterly at my mercy. I’m ashamed of myself for having envied her, for thinking she was able to brave the edge without consequence.

“Oh, stop looking so serious,” Pen says. “Really, I’ve cleaned my share of messes, and I’ve seen some worse things, let me tell you.”

She’s trying to make me feel better, and I’m grateful. It makes the task more bearable.

By the time we’ve finished dabbing Amy with warm soapy cloths and gotten her into an oversize shirt, she’s beginning to stir. She mumbles something about the smell of burning hair.

“There are no fires,” I assure her.

She opens her eyes, as vacant as a doll’s, and stares at me. “You’re not her,” she says. Then she’s gone again.

“You stay with her,” Pen says, gathering the wadded uniform. “I’ll go wash these.”

I’m not sure what else to do, so I hold Amy’s head in my lap and run my fingers through her hair. I can’t be certain where this delirium has taken her, but maybe she can sense that someone is caring for her, the way that I could after I’d been poisoned.

“Soon,” I tell her, “after you’ve awoken, this bird will fly us away. The people of the ground will throw us a party bigger than Internment itself. Everyone will love us. It’s going to be wonderful.”

A strange thing, words. Once they’re said, it’s hard to imagine they’re untrue.

The bird is moving unsteadily through the dirt. Judas argued with the professor that Amy needed to recover, and the professor told him that his grandchildren weren’t made of glass, and anyway we didn’t have the time to waste. He added, “Coddling the living sister won’t bring back the dead sister,” which I thought was especially harsh.

Now Judas and I are standing in the doorway to Amy’s bunk room. It’s been more than an hour since her episode, and Judas looks as exhausted as if he’d been the one experiencing it.

“Poor kid,” he says. “All she’s got now is me.”

“What about her parents?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “They would have had her and Daphne both declared irrational if they’d known about the bird. They wanted perfect daughters and nothing to do with scandal.”

It’s happened before that parents have had their children declared irrational. The sentence can usually be dropped after the child has agreed to give up the rebellious behavior, such as falling in love with someone else’s betrothed or admitting attraction to the same sex. I’ve heard of it happening, but I still have trouble believing it’s done.

“I can’t imagine my parents ever declaring me irrational,” I say. “Even after Lex jumped, they would never have done that to either of us.”

“Lucky you, then,” Judas says.

He sees the hurt in my eyes and adds, “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

Now, after more than an hour of still sleep, Amy’s limbs begin to move under the blanket. When she opens her eyes, they’re glassy and gray.

“Hey,” Judas says, back to her side in an instant. “Hey, you. Welcome back.”

She rolls her head to the side, realizes that I’m watching her, and groans with embarrassment.

“The turbulence got you,” Judas says. “We said it might. Remember that?”

His soothing tone is for her, though he seems to be more in need of comforting than she does. She’s the only thing like family he has left.

“I was listening for Daphne,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “Listening for her ghost. But they cut her throat. They took her voice away.”

Her eyes fill with tears, and Judas is quick to dab at them with his sleeve. “No they haven’t,” he says. “I hear her all the time.”

“You do?” she says.

“Of course I do, silly girl. She’s in this bird. She’s holding all of the bolts in place and she’s begging for us to sail across the sky.”

Amy squeezes her eyes shut, closing herself away from us living things.

“Those are only echoes,” she says. “People die, and everything they’ve ever said just echoes around and around. There’s nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.”

I fear she’s right.