Perfect Ruin

by Lauren DeStefano

Page 12

  He drops to the grass and huddles forward, and his shape protrudes through his wet shirt, the muscles moving as he takes in oxygen. Like some sort of machine. Like there are gears under his skin. He seems too exquisitely crafted to be all human.

  Cautiously, I kneel beside him. “I’ve seen you,” I say.

  “On the king’s broadcast?” he says bitterly.

  “At the academy. ” There are four academies and universities on Internment. “We’re in the same year. ”

  “We were,” he amends. “There’s not much of an education on my horizon now. ” His jaw is trembling, and I wish that I had something to offer him for warmth.

  I don’t see something deranged, like how the killer who went mad from tainted pharmaceuticals when my parents were children must have looked. I don’t see Daphne Leander’s murderer. Just a ragged shirt and water dripping from all the angles of his collarbone, moonlight darkening the notches of his throat. Just a boy.

  “Your father is a patrolman,” he says. “Stockhour? Am I right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I say, feeling oddly brave. It’s strange that he would know this about my father; if anything, most of my classmates know me for having a brother who’s a jumper. “Your hands are bleeding. ”

  He stares at his open palms, marred with bloody lines, and then he rubs them in the dirt. I wince.

  “Why did you help me?” he says. “Don’t you know who I am? I could have killed you. ”

  “How? By wringing your wet hair out on me?” I say. “You need to get someplace warm before you catch a chill. ”

  “Don’t have that luxury,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. He has already begun to walk away when I start after him.

  “Where are you going?” I say. He can’t be thinking of hiding. “There are patrolmen on almost every corner. At the doors of every building, for certain. ”

  He doesn’t answer, pushing through the shrubs and crossing into the small woods that encompass the park. The trees are mostly insubstantial, skinny things only as thick as arms.

  Basil would never go for this—me chasing after an accused murderer in the darkness. He says there’s nothing wrong with me, but it’s entirely possible he hasn’t been paying enough attention.

  “You aren’t thinking of jumping over the edge, are you?” I say, ducking a low branch as I keep several paces behind him. “That isn’t the answer, you know. It’s worse than suicide. My brother tried. ”

  For a while there’s only the sound of twigs cracking under our feet, and then Judas asks, “Does he regret it?”

  “He went blind,” I say.

  “But does he regret it? Has he said he wishes he could undo it?”

  I stop walking. He moves a few steps ahead before he notices and turns to face me. I can see only his hair and one side of his face.

  “No,” I say. “He wouldn’t tell me something like that. He doesn’t talk to me like he used to. It’s implied, though. ” I’m not oblivious to the uncertainty in my voice, and Judas isn’t either. I can just make out his sad grin before he turns away and stomps onward. It’s amazing how little noise he makes for one with such angry footfalls.

  I follow. I know where we are. When we were kids, Pen and I found a shallow cavern here made up of rocks and we turned it into our secret house. I ruined the game when I told Basil and he brought Thomas into it. It was a full day before she forgave me. The boys have forgotten about it, but Pen and I still go there sometimes.

  “If you keep following me, I really will have to kill you,” Judas says.

  “My father is a patrolman,” I say. “You were right about that. But if you kill me, it’ll be a week before he notices. ” It’s been about that long since I’ve seen him.

  The frail moonlight blurs and in the next instant a tree trunk is pressing into my spine and I can taste the blood and the dirt from Judas’s hand against my mouth.

  He begins with the word, “Listen. ”

  I do. Listen to a heartbeat throbbing in my ears. The slight wind moving leaves gone silver all around. His heavy, grieving, shaking breaths that go toward and then around me like clouds to our atmosphere.

  “Go back,” he says. “Go back home to your safe apartment high above the city, and forget that you saw me here. ”

  When he moves his hand away from my mouth, I’m not breathing. My arms are wrapped around the tree behind me and that’s the only reason I don’t fall forward when he moves away. There’s a sense that I am weightless, that if I let go, I’ll be carried on the wind of his strides and I’ll go wherever he goes. Something keeps me here, my eyes straining to see what I can of him as he leaves. But the image isn’t perfect. My memory of Judas Hensley will always be dark. It will always be moving away from me.

  9

  Novelists weave tales of ghosts and villains and what the ground must be like. This is accepted so long as these things are presented as fiction.

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  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. ”