Perfect Ruin

9

MY FATHER IS SITTING AT THE KITCHEN table when I return home. He’s wearing his uniform and staring into a cup of tea.

“A bit late to be out, heart,” he says without looking up.

“Is it?” The kettle water has gone cold and I set it back on the burner. “I’m sorry. I was visiting Basil.” I don’t know why I’m lying; he would have assumed that’s where I was.

“Your mother,” he says, “has she been sleeping long?”

I don’t like this monotone voice he’s using. And when I sit across from him, I don’t like the circles under his eyes.

“Since I came home from class,” I say.

“You should try to keep her company,” he says. “Your brother’s no good for that anymore. He’s gone selfish. Not you, though. You’ve always cared about others.”

Why are we talking about this when Judas Hensley has broken free? My father must have heard.

“She takes a lot of headache elixirs lately,” I say.

He nods, twisting the cup around in his fingers.

“Dad?”

“Yes, heart?”

“I know there are many things on your mind, with the murder and the fire and keeping all of us safe. I know that it’s a great burden. I just want you to know that you don’t have to worry about me.”

I won’t end up like my brother, is what I don’t add. At least my parents have one child they don’t need to worry about.

He gives something like a smile for a moment, but then it’s gone. The kettle whistles and I reach for his cup to refill it, but he stands.

“I’ve got to get back out,” he says. “Get some sleep. Lock the door.”

He rustles my hair before he leaves.

The train speeds by, shaking the walls. There’s a portrait that my mother colored hanging over the kitchen table. In it, a little girl is crouched in the tall grass, cupping something in her hands. Whatever she’s holding casts light through her fingers. A boy is beside her, staring up at little pieces of light that swim in the inky blackness. The children are luminescent, invincible, and lost. My mother says it’s a dream she used to have when she was waiting in the queue to get pregnant with me. She says she knew that I’d be a girl, even though that’s up to the decision makers. I’ve asked her what the little girl is holding, and what the lights are. She told me that they’re part of another dream, one she hasn’t had yet.

The portrait rattles and goes still. I wonder if that dream would do my mother any good. I wonder if all that blackness has ever frightened her. I always assumed the children were on Internment, but do dreams have to be confined to the same place as the dreamer?

“Mom?” I whisper.

She barely stirs as I climb onto the bed. There’s a minty smell to the darkness, from the lotion she uses to keep her hands young. She’s particular about her hands. The space under the bed and the spare closets are stuffed with things she’s made—sewing samplers and colorings and statuettes made with scraps of metal she’s salvaged from the recycling plant. She’s a craftswoman and my brother is the ever-aspiring novelist-slash-playwright. And me? Every day I rearrange my thoughts and my words so that I can be ordinary. Maybe there’s a craft to that.

“Do you have another headache?” I ask her.

“No. I’m dreaming,” she says, sighing and turning onto her back. “The ceiling is made of roots. We’re under a great tree.”

She frightens me when she’s like this. There’s no line between make-believe and what’s real.

“I saw something tonight,” I tell her, only because I know she won’t believe me. “A boy with eyes like knives. He told me to go home where it was safe.”

She reaches out her arm and gathers me to her side. “He was lying to you, then,” she says. “It isn’t safe here.”

“Yes it is,” I say. “There are patrolmen outside and I locked the door.”

The ceiling is creaking and I wonder if Lex and Alice still have people over. There’s no sense trying to listen in; footfalls carry through the ceiling, but voices don’t.

My mother rests her chin on my head and mumbles something about the roots moving. “It’s only Lex and Alice walking around,” I say.

I don’t think she heard me. Judging by her breathing, she’s asleep again, if she was ever awake to begin with.

She dreams in her bed, above boxes of art she’s abandoned. When she was my age, her work was a part of the mural for the festival of stars. And then she had Lex, and her colorings were of sweet things—children and flowers. After his incident, one by one, most of those colorings disappeared from the apartment. She began to focus on samplers with a set pattern, as if she were afraid to leave the charted path and enter her own thoughts.

She’s like Pen in that way. Sometimes Pen destroys her art, and when I see the crumpled pages enter the recycling tube, I feel that a piece of her is gone forever.

I wait for there to be a broadcast telling us that Judas Hensley has broken free, or that he’s been detained again. I wait to hear anything at all. But on Monday classes go on as usual. The trains go in the right direction. Patrolmen open doors and keep us moving in organized lines.

And all day I think of Judas Hensley disappearing into the trees. I think of his parchment that will not be burning along with the others at the festival of stars. If he asked for Daphne to return to him, his request would certainly be rejected. There are some things even a god can’t do.

In the evening, as we’re all filing into shuttles that will take us to the train, Pen grabs my arm, tearing me away from Basil. “I have to show you something,” she says. “It’ll only take a second.”

I don’t have time to apologize to my betrothed before I’m dragged back into the academy. Pen says something to a patrolman about having left her assignment at her desk. When we’re alone, she leads me into a janitor’s closet and shuts the door. She shuffles through the darkness and eventually finds the hanging cord that turns on the overhead light.

“Pen, what—”

“Finally.” She claps her hands on my shoulders. “We’re alone. I’ve been feeling that the boys have been hovering around us all day, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes, they’re betrothed to us. That’s what they’re supposed to do.”

She shushes me, and we listen as footfalls approach and then fade down the hallway.

“We’re going to miss the train,” I say.

“There’ll be another one.”

“In nearly an hour.”

“So we’ll walk home,” she says. “There are bigger things to worry about.”

“Like what?” I say.

“Like that boy I saw you with on Friday night.”

I’m suddenly aware of how small this space is, how warm the buzzing lightbulb is making it. “I don’t know—What do you mean?”

“You aren’t going to lie to me, are you?” she says. “You’re the only person who isn’t brimming over with just complete nonsense, and if I can’t rely on you, I’ll go crazy.”

One of us is going crazy, all right, but it isn’t her.

I stare at the door; I’ve never been in the academy when it’s empty. It feels wrong. “What did you see?” I ask.

“You know what I saw. You were following a boy through the woods and then he told you to go home.”

“You were in the cavern?” I say. “So late at night? What for?”

“Don’t make this about me,” she says. “The cavern is our safe house. Nothing that happens there leaves with us. Remember? The tonic we snuck from my mother’s cabinet?”

I do remember. We were both sick for a whole day after that. Our parents still think it was a stomach virus.

“We aren’t in the cavern. We’re in a closet,” I say. “And we’ve missed all the shuttles for sure.”

Pen reaches for the cord, turns out the light. “Fine,” she says, opening the door. “If that’s what it’s going to take, come on.”

As we walk down the hallway, Pen fumbles through her satchel until she’s found one of the day’s assignment sheets. She waves it at the patrolman who opens the door for us, and she giggles and says something about being absentminded.

“About an hour until the next shuttle, ladies,” he tells us. There’s always a later shuttle for the staff members who stay after hours.

“We’re walking,” Pen tells him, tugging me along by the elbow. “My mother insists. She says I need the exercise if I’m going to fit into a wedding dress someday.”

Before I turn away, I see the flustered look on the patrolman’s face. This may have less to do with Pen’s words and more to do with the wink she gives him as she goes.

She hugs her arms as she walks, as though fighting a chill, although the air is tepid. She’s got that distance in her eyes again.

“My brother used to work with the engineers that man the scopes,” I tell her. “They couldn’t tell him much—only things that would help him in developing new medicines. But they told him that this time of year, the ground is covered with white dust.”

“Dust?” she asks.

“Well, not dust exactly. More like ice shavings, I think. When the clouds send down water and it begins to freeze. It melts away in the long season.”

“The ground is an absurd place,” she says. “Imagine what their buildings must be made of to withstand all the things that fall down on them from the clouds.”

“Maybe they don’t care,” I say. “They’re probably always building new things. Why wouldn’t they? They must have infinite resources.”

“Nothing is infinite,” Pen says. She doesn’t want to hear me go on about the ground. I think she’s angry with me for keeping secrets. But she brightens when the lake is in sight.

I look for signs that Judas might still be here, but of course there are none.

“If I were to build a house,” Pen says, “it would be made of rock. In fact, maybe it would be underground.”

I laugh. “Even if worms are dripping down from the ceiling?”

“Worms don’t tell secrets,” she says.

She ducks into the cavern ahead of me. When we were children, we were just barely able to stand if we kept our heads bowed, but now we have little room to do more than sit across from each other.

“Okay,” Pen says, clasping her hands together so they form an arrow pointed at me. “Tell me everything. And I’ll know if you’re holding back.”

“You won’t believe me,” I say. My heart is pounding in my ears, the way it did that night when I was tasting the blood on Judas’s hand.

“Look at you, all red.” Her eyes are suddenly serious. “Is it someone you’re seeing behind Basil’s back? Because, Morgan, it would mean a lot of trouble—”

“No!” The tips of my ears are burning. “Don’t even joke about that. You’ll get me whisked away to an attraction camp.” I focus on a pebble on the ground. I thought I’d feel safer here than in the closet, but I keep imagining that the rocks will cave in on us.

“That boy you saw”—I take a deep breath, lower my voice—“that was Judas Hensley.”

I can feel Pen staring at me. Painful seconds go by in silence, and then she bursts into laughter.

In answer, I meet her gaze with a guilty smile.

“Oh—” Her laughter subsides. “Oh. Morgan. Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Nothing we say leaves here, right?”

She drags her finger over her heart in an X, sealing the promise, and I do the same.

I tell her everything, and as I say the words out loud, I realize how little there is to tell, how I’ve been obsessing over something that lasted for a handful of minutes. I don’t tell her about the taste of his blood or the tantalizing sense of weightlessness. I don’t tell her that in my dreams last night I followed him right to the edge of our floating city, and that the thing that called my brother to cross the tracks very well may be calling me.

“You’re sure it was him?” she says breathlessly.

“I’m certain.”

“Then—why hasn’t there been a broadcast? Why did they just let us go to the academy and walk around the city while there’s a murderer running free?”

“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I didn’t ask many questions. He said he’d kill me if I followed him.”

“He didn’t seem so big,” Pen says. “We’ll kill him first if he tries.”

“I didn’t believe him. I don’t think he killed Daphne,” I say. “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but I’d much like to think I’d know a murderer if he was standing right in front of me.”

“Well, we’d all like to think that,” she says. She leans back against the rock wall, smirking. “You had a tryst with a murderer, you wicked thing.”

“It wasn’t a tryst!” My heated cheeks only fuel her delight. “And I don’t think he did it. He was so … unassuming.”

“He had you pinned to a tree.”

“For a few seconds.”

“Maybe he’s still here,” she says excitedly. “Maybe he’s watching us.”

I know it’s absurd, but I’ve felt as though he’s been watching me since we parted ways that night. “Of course he isn’t,” I say.

Pen grabs a pebble from the ground and scrapes it against one of the larger rocks, spelling out the words: “Are you a murderer?”

“There,” she says. “When he comes back, he might answer us.” She sets the pebble in the dirt with finality.

“Assuming he returns.”

“He’ll return,” she says. “Internment is only as big as the king’s fist. If you’re going to hide, you have to circle the same places over and over again.”

I wonder what makes her such an expert on hiding.

My mother is sitting by the window when I come home. She’s wrapped in Lex’s blanket, working on her sampler.

“I was starting to worry,” she says, squinting as she pokes the needle through the fabric. “You’re home late.”

“I was helping Pen look for an assignment she lost at the academy,” I say. “We missed the shuttle and walked home instead.” The lie has me averting my eyes, but she isn’t looking at me anyway. Instead she asks me to warm the kettle and check on the bread she’s got baking in the oven. The loaf, stuffed with roasted vegetables, is enough to feed a dozen. Half of it will probably go upstairs to Alice and Lex. My mother feeds them so often that Alice hardly bothers to cook anymore.

“It gets dark earlier now,” my mother says. “Maybe it would be best if you didn’t dawdle so much.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, pouring the tea and bringing it to her. She sets down her needlework. She works from her own patterns, and this one is of a cloud, and coming from the cloud is a peculiar flash of what I presume to be light. I run my finger along the strip of yellow.

I envy her talent for inventing strange and beautiful things the rest of us can’t see. But I don’t ask her about it; I think my questions frustrate her. Or, my lack of understanding frustrates her. She has one like-minded child, and he’s on the verge of being declared irrational. Maybe he would have been by now, if Alice weren’t so patient.

“The bread looks done,” I say.

“Bring half upstairs for your brother and Alice. Tell her to be sure he eats something. He’s getting too thin.”

I don’t know how she knows this; my brother lives right upstairs, but they never visit each other. The sight of him in this state is too much for her. Instead I’m their messenger, and most of my mother’s messages are simply food.

Dutifully, I wrap half of the bread in a cloth.

My brother’s door is locked again, and when I knock, it takes a long time for Alice to answer. She’s still in her work clothes and her shoulders are drooping with exhaustion. She sees the bundle in my hands and gives a weary smile. “Come on in,” she says, “but try to be quiet. He had a rough night and today isn’t very much better.”

On the kitchen table is the bag with the hospital logo that gets delivered to my brother every third week. It’s still glued shut. He even opposes the headache elixirs our mother is so fond of, notwithstanding the fact that she began taking them after his incident.

“Again?” I frown. It’s been several weeks since he had an episode, and I hoped they were going away for good.

“I wish he’d stop being so rock-headed,” Alice says in a low voice. “I was up with him at dawn and he won’t take a thing to ease the pain.” She takes the bread from my hands and breathes deep the warm aroma as she unwraps it.

“Where is he?” I say.

“His office. The door’s open. Step lightly and enter if you dare.”

She’s already slicing the bread. I doubt she’s eaten today; when Lex is having a rough time, everything else fades away from her unless she’s reminded.

I find my brother hunched on the floor in a corner of his dark office, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.

“What are you doing here, Little Sister?”

Worrying is what I’m doing.

“Can I come in?” I say.

“If you don’t touch anything.”

The transcriber is off; its rolls of paper stream out into a cavernous world of things he has imagined each night as I’ve slept in the room below. The smell of ink and the smoke of overheated wires are still in the air.

I step over and around his latest novel and kneel in front of him. The clock at his feet has a faulty second hand that goes forward and then back, and it is always twelve fifteen. He just likes the sound it makes; he carries it all around the apartment. If it’s silent he begins to feel as though he’s disappearing.

I put my hand over his fist. His knuckles are white with strain, his skin dry and cold. He drops his forehead to his knees. “Where does it hurt?” I say.

“Deep within the bones, there’s marrow,” he says. “And it’s like the marrow has begun to expand, and my skeleton is splintering slowly from the pressure.”

I want to wrap my arms around him. I want to give him my warmth and soften the marrow and make him better.

But he would push me away, remind me that I don’t understand. I suppose it’s hard for him to believe I’ll ever be more than a child. The last time he saw me, I was thirteen years old.

All I can do is be still and not ask too many questions, not tell him how he scares me, never bring up all his years as a runner when he was so alive, and especially not talk about the medicine on the table. He’ll die before he lets another elixir or tonic pass between his lips or get shot into his veins. Not that the pharmacy knows that; it’s part of the king’s policy that jumpers take the required medication in order to be considered nonthreatening to society. Alice will eventually pour them down the drain and report back to the pharmacy that she administered them to her husband in the correct order.

“Mom was working on an interesting sampler,” I tell him. “It was”—I pause, trying to think of the right way to describe it—“color shooting out of a cloud. Sort of in a zigzag.”

He’s got his eyes squeezed shut. “A zigzag?”

I draw the shape on the back of his hand with my finger and repeat it several times. “It was strange. I wonder if she saw something in the clouds.”

“She probably just thought it up.”

“How do you do that?” I say. “How do you know something that doesn’t exist to be known?”

Alice knocks on the doorframe. The smell of baked bread and warm vegetables permeates from the plate in her hand. “You need to put something in your stomach, love,” she says. “You can argue if you like, but your sister will hold your arms if I have to force this down your throat myself.” She winks at me.

“My stomach—” he begins.

“Is a cavern of fire, or whatever other poetic nonsense. I know,” she says. “But this will help. Here.” She sits beside me and sets the plate on his knees, forcing him to hold it. She stares him down, and even though he can’t see it, he knows, and he eats nearly half the slice.

“Happy now, dearest?”

“Ecstatic. How do you feel?”

“Wretched.” But he says it with a bit of a smirk, and she wipes his lips with her sleeve.

I wonder if their marriage was always destined to be this way. I wish they could have had a happier go of things, but then, it doesn’t seem as though they’re wanting for anything more.

Except a child. But nobody talks about that.

Alice tries to coerce Lex to get into bed, or at the very least the couch, but he is immovable. She relents and brings him a pillow so that his neck won’t get stiff. And it isn’t long before he tells us to go away so that he can be with his thoughts.

Alice tells him that she’ll be back with more food later.

When Alice has left and I’ve begun to follow her, Lex says, “Forget who you are.” I pause in the doorway. “That’s the answer to your question,” he says. “Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you’ll discover things that don’t exist to be known.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“Me either, Little Sister, but there you have it.”

In the kitchen, Alice is rinsing plates at the sink, and all the muscles in her hourglass figure glide as she performs the most menial of tasks. Her burden of eyelashes flit up and down as she watches the water go down the drain. She is everything I’ve grown up wanting to be, and as the sunset steals through the curtain, it sets her hair ablaze with auburns and golds. She’s unbreakable.

I want to tell her about Judas, and Ms. Harlan’s card still stowed in my pocket. I want to ask her what I’m supposed to do about these fears I have of the edge, and how I’m supposed to be complacent within the train tracks when the world within them stops being enough. But she seems tired. My brother gives her so many reasons to worry, and I don’t want to give her more. I take a rag from the counter and dry the dishes.

“Have you given any thought to your festival of stars gift?” she asks me.

“Not very much,” I say, hoisting myself onto the counter once the last dish is dry. Alice goes about putting them into the cabinet beside me.

She puts her hand on her hip and studies me. “I still remember your sixth festival.”

“My only request that year was for my front teeth to grow in so I didn’t look like a building with broken windows.”

She pinches my knee. “If I recall correctly, you also wanted a bowl of frosting.”

My childhood is one long, muddled memory of bright blue happiness. Internment seemed bigger then, and the space on the other side of the tracks infinite.

“Maybe a necklace, then?” Alice says. “I saw one in the artisan shop that reminded me of birds in flight.”

“That sounds lovely,” I say. I stare at my lap. “Though, it feels wrong to ask for anything with all that’s happened recently. I’d just like for there to be peace again, so we could all stop being so frightened.”

Alice sits on the counter beside me. “You are getting older, aren’t you?”

I lean against her and she wraps her arms around me. “Oh, Morgan,” she sighs. “What’s to be done?”

We’ve always been alike, Alice and I. We’re fixers and messengers and helpers, and when things are greater than we can manage, we can’t rest until all is right again.

Pen is sitting on the stairwell as I’m returning to my apartment. “There you are,” she says, arranging her pleats as she stands. “I’ve been thinking about our friend the murderer.”

“Not so loud,” I hiss, tugging her toward my apartment and ushering her inside. “You’re going to get us both declared irrational.”

My mother is still curled on the window ledge with her sampler, but her head is bowed and she’s snoring quietly.

“I thought we agreed that sort of talk would stay in the cavern,” I say.

“It will,” Pen assures, repeating the cross gesture over her heart. “I didn’t say what I was thinking, just that I was thinking. We should go back there and discuss it in more detail.” She raps on the wall with her knuckle. “Walls have ears. Rocks don’t.”

“Now?” I say. “It’s dark.”

“No, no. He’d be expecting that. We have to go when he thinks nobody would catch him. Like tomorrow afternoon.”

“We’ll be in academy,” I say.

“Exactly what he’ll be thinking,” she says.

“We can’t just walk out the academy door in the middle of lessons,” I say.

She tugs the ends of my hair. “Don’t think doors,” she says. “Think windows.”