No Intention of Dying

by Lauren DeStefano

  It had been a year since the incident, and now music filled the apartment.

  Daphne was curled on the window ledge in her bedroom, staring at her reflection superimposed over the faraway view of the glasslands.

  She tapped her pen to the edge of her notebook.

  “Are you writing?” Judas said. He sat on the floor beside the window, staring at a blank page of his own. “We’re supposed to have three pages about the two gods by tomorrow, and I was kind of counting on your genius to inspire me.”

  “Really, Judas. We go through this every year. We’ve read the material dozens of times by now. What they want is to see how our ‘own unique perspectives have changed.’”

  “They want us to regurgitate the text so that they can be sure we aren’t getting any wild ideas, you mean.”

  “Don’t be such a cynic,” Daphne said. But when she looked at her paper, the only line she had written was a direct quote from her text.

  The music stopped abruptly, and then the silence was broken by a crash of piano keys, and then another.

  “Amy?” Daphne was on her feet and out of the room in an instant. After the incident, Amy’s fits had begun and Daphne had learned all the warning signs, the first of which was silence. “Amy!”

  Daphne’s sister was lying on the floor by the piano, shuddering. Her eyes were open, all pupil, before they rolled back into white.

  Judas ran in after Daphne. “What can I do?”

  “You can heat some water and get a cloth,” Daphne said, kneeling beside her sister. “She was acting funny this morning. I thought this might be coming.”

  Amy had been seven last year when a patrolman had found her at Internment’s edge. It had been days before she’d awoken, and then longer still before she’d been able to speak. She’d worn bruises then, and a cast on her broken arm. A damaged doll of a girl.

  The bruises had faded. The arm had healed. Their parents didn’t speak of it. They wanted to believe that their youngest daughter’s mind was as unblemished as her skin.

  The convulsions stopped, mercifully, and Daphne dabbed at her sister’s cheeks with the warm damp cloth. “There,” she said. “It’s over. It wasn’t even a five on a scale of one to ten.”

  Amy’s eyes opened, cloudy but blue again, and she groaned.

  “Lie still,” Daphne said, when her sister tried to pick herself up. “You remember what the doctor said. Don’t move until your vision clears. Your eyes are still unfocused; I can see it.”

  “I couldn’t finish the song,” Amy murmured, after several seconds. She was blinking at the ceiling. “The last chord I played is trapped in my head, flying around.”

  Judas sat at the piano and attempted to finish the song from memory. What came out was a confused plinking of keys, but it made the sisters laugh.

  “I failed musical arts,” he said, and tapped at a key one final time before standing.

  “We should get you to bed,” Daphne told Amy, when there was clarity in the younger girl’s eyes again.

  “I don’t want to go to bed. I want to finish the song.” She struggled to her feet and brought herself back to the bench. The Leander sisters were known for their stubbornness. It was a reputation they wore with pride, but one that made their parents nervous. Stubbornness was not a virtue that the king appreciated.

  Music once again filled the room.

  Resigned, Daphne didn’t have the heart to tear her sister away from the keys. Instead she brought her notebook into the living room so she could keep an eye on Amy while she worked.

  She crossed off the quote that headed the page.

  The gods are cruel, she wrote.

  On a separate page, she noted the time and the magnitude of Amy’s latest fit.

  • • •

  Later in the afternoon, when her parents had returned and could keep watch over Amy, Daphne and Judas walked to the library.

  “I don’t think research will help me with this paper,” Daphne said, when they were alone in an aisle of textbooks that had been used as a point of student reference for more than a century. “The things I want to know aren’t in these books.”

  “There are at least a hundred books here, Daphne.”

  “Yes, but none of them can tell me what birds look like, or what’s happening on the ground below us. Or in the stars, even. Are there people living on the stars?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely. We never see anyone walking around up there,” Judas said, trying to make light. He lowered his voice. “You shouldn’t say these sorts of things. Especially not here.”

  “How can we write a paper on the gods when we aren’t taught everything they can do?”

  “Daphne.”

  “Every year I’ve written what I was taught, and that has served me just fine. But last year I was taught that my sister can be half-dead, and I can make all the requests to the god in the sky that I like, but there’s no answer. There’s never going to be an answer. It’s just ‘whatever may happen happens.’”

  Judas looked nervously down the aisle. They were completely alone.

  “I’ve stopped expecting my requests to get answered anyway,” Daphne said. “I’ve been reading medical texts, looking at diagrams, trying to understand what’s happened to my sister’s brain. The king’s specialist says they’re fits and that they’re a punishment. She says all jumpers suffer a punishment if they survive. But everything I’ve read suggests that they’re seizures and they can happen with head injuries.”

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “Whatever nonsense the king employs his doctors to say to jumpers. But I’ve been keeping a log of Amy’s progress, and I’m certain she gets better or worse depending on the weather and her diet that day. If only I could bring her to someone King Furlow hasn’t gotten his hooks into.”

  She pulled a book off the shelf; it had a blue spine and a gold outline of clouds on the cover. “I don’t think anyone is punished for going to the edge. I think there’s some atmospheric reason she was thrown back when she got too close, and if we could better understand that—that it’s not a moral failing—maybe she would get better care.”

  Judas took the book from her hand and gently opened it, mindful of the brittle, yellowed pages. It was decades old; students had been writing annual papers on the gods for generations, using this book as a reference point. Daphne was right; the texts never evolved. New theories were never introduced.

  “I’ve thought the same thing,” he said, in a low voice. “But it isn’t the kind of opinion you voice.”

  “She’s my sister, Judas.”

  “Yes, and you’re my betrothed. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  Frustrated, she grabbed the book and set it back on the shelf. “You worry about the wrong things sometimes.”

  He took a step closer to her and lowered his voice. “You know that people disappear when they start to question things, Daphne. The attraction camp where that girl from our class went, and then returned looking half-dead. The patrolman at your building who disappeared. You know that it happens.”

  For a moment there was a look of contrition on her face. He had gotten through to her. But even if she understood the risks, she was not going to change.

  She took his hand. “Let’s go. There’s something I want to show you.”

  It was a Sunday afternoon, which meant there was more of a crowd on the cobblestone walkways as people ran their weekend errands, but Daphne moved among and around the bustle, and Judas held on to her hand so he wouldn’t lose her. She moved with purpose, and he worried about her for all the same reasons he admired her. S
he had more passion than anyone else he’d met, and she didn’t believe in stifling it. He worried that it would draw the attention of someone who worked directly under the king.

  She led him away from the city noise, past the train platform, to where the tracks ran alongside some tall reeds and a high fence. It was here that she stopped.

  Judas knew what she was thinking. “You’ve climbed over before,” he said. “Haven’t you?”

  “I wasn’t going to jump.”

  “I know. You have more sense than that.”

  “I just wanted to know what it was that had lured her to the edge. I wanted to know if the winds really did sing.” She turned to him, sadness in her bright eyes.

  “Did they?”

  “Come on,” she said, already finding a foothold and beginning to hoist herself up. “I’ll show you.”

  She gathered her skirt as she climbed over the top of the fence with such deftness that Judas had to wonder if she’d done this more than just once.

  He followed after her. He had never been to this side of the barrier; all he’d ever seen of it had been the blur of green and sky as he’d sped past in the train. It was eerie the way the sounds of Internment dissolved in the air and gave way to silence and the impassive chirping of insects.

  He waited for some song, or a whisper, but all he heard was Daphne’s dress disturbing the tall weeds as she moved with purpose.

  “How far does it go on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I tried counting paces, and it’s about as far as the walk from my apartment to the park and back. Quite a way.”

  “You made sure nobody saw you?”

  “There’s a patrolman who comes around in the afternoon to look for jumpers—oh, about once a day, I suppose? They found Amy around one o’clock, I remember that. But nobody has seen me, I’m sure.”

  He hoped for her sake that she was right.

  They walked on for a while, and sometimes he thought he could sense Amy’s presence, as though they were walking along the path she’d taken that day. Maybe they were. Daphne would be one to figure something like that out; she could pinpoint things down to an exact science.

  It had been a year since Amy’s incident, but he remembered it vividly. He remembered sitting beside Daphne on the train, her fists wadded between her shaking knees, her eyes staring straight ahead at nothing, and then the way she’d jumped to her feet as they’d approached their stop. They’d run up the hospital steps, only to be told they had to wait outside.

  It would be wrong to say that something had changed in Daphne then. Rather, it was as though something that had always been there within her had suddenly awoken. After the incident, she would spend hours in the library reading every book about the gods cover to cover, until she had read them all. And then she’d read about brains, about head trauma. She’d read through records of every documented accident to ever happen in the city. And when she hadn’t found the answers there, she’d begun to seek them elsewhere. Of course it had led her here. Of course it had. This was the edge of their world, as far as they could go.

  “There,” she said. She stopped walking and he stood beside her.

  The edge was in sight, and now that he saw it, Judas realized that he had expected something more menacing. Smoke or red clouds, screaming. But there was none of that. The grass simply stopped, in a perfect arch.

  The ground was littered with bugs that must have ricocheted and died.

  “I’ve never gotten closer than this,” Daphne said. “If you listen, you can hear the wind. It goes around the city in a sort of protective sphere. I think that’s what throws jumpers back; they hit the wind, and it’s going so fast that it’s like hitting a wall.”

  He took her hand, and she held on tight. “This is what everyone’s so afraid of,” he said. He could see, through the clouds, bits of land far below them. He had always been curious about the ground, but there was something overwhelming about the temptation of seeing it here. The horizon had become like a colored portrait, and he felt that if he kept walking, he would step right through it and be on the other side.

  He willed his feet to stay in place. He understood why so many had been tempted. It wasn’t that they had wanted to jump. It was that they had wanted to step out and be on that other side. He had heard the warnings, but they disappeared with this view. It was only Daphne that kept him in place and reminded him where he was.

  “Wow,” he breathed.

  “There’s no vengeful god here,” Daphne said. “Only our own temptation.” She looked at him. “Isn’t it in our nature to want to know more? Of course so many end up here—even little girls—because we all want to go on learning and knowing as much as we can, but this is as far as we can ever go.”

  She sat in the grass and he followed suit. He forced himself to look away from the edge, and instead began plucking at the long blades of grass. He wanted more and he knew it.

  “Have you given any more thought to being a doctor?” he asked. “With all of the studying you’ve been doing on the subject.”

  She nodded, and then fell back against the grass, sighing. “My parents will be happy to know that’s what I intend to be,” she said. “But I don’t want to be a doctor like the ones we have here. I want to explore new theories. I want to try things that aren’t in books.”

  Judas lay beside her. How could he discourage her when she said she wanted to help people? When she wanted to better their world?

  Out here, away from the patrolmen and the city, the rules of their world faded away, and all of it seemed so small and silly—kings and laws and gods.

  “Maybe we can build a little home here,” he said. “You and me. And live here until we’re so old, our bodies just stop working.”

  Daphne smiled at that. “How long do you think a body is capable of living?”

  “A hundred years, maybe more.”

  “I like it,” she said. “We can build a house right here by the edge, and no one will come to tear us away, because they’ll all be too afraid.”

  “They’ll all think we’ve gone mad,” Judas said.

  “Maybe we will go mad,” Daphne said, laughing. “Hearing about all the things people do while they’re supposedly mad, it seems like it could be fun.”

  Judas watched a cloud slope over their heads, so close, he thought he could hold up a net and catch it.

  “Or maybe we’ll find a way to the ground,” he said.

  Daphne turned to face him, propping herself on her elbow. “Can you keep a secret?”

  He turned his eyes toward her. “I keep all your secrets.”

  She considered this, and then she said, “I think my grandfather has been planning something. The way he talks sometimes, I think he’ll get us to the ground someday.”

  “He does like to rant,” Judas said.

  “Yes, but this feels different. I asked him and he wouldn’t tell me. I think he wants to keep me safe. He talks to Amy, though, ever since her incident. He says that our city failed her. It’s failing everyone.”

  Judas sat up, and he took her hands in his. She looked at them and then at him. He said, “I know you agree with him. Daphne, so do I. But you have to be more careful about what you say out loud. There are people who disappear for that kind of talk.”

  “The king wants us to be afraid,” she said. “That’s how things stay the way he wants them. And he’ll prime his son to be the same exact kind of leader. People who aren’t afraid of kings are the reason things change.”

  “I just don’t want you to get killed,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid of that,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world, so long as something good came of it. Although I have no intention of dying, if that makes you feel any better at all.”

  They lay back in the grass and looked up to whe
re the sky went on forever, and it seemed that all the answers to their questions existed somewhere in the blue, waiting to be found.

  also

  by

  Lauren

  DeStefano

  The Internment Chronicles

  perfect ruin

  burning kingdoms

  The Chemical Garden Trilogy

  wither

  fever

  sever

  About the Author

  Lauren DeStefano is the author of The Internment Chronicles and the New York Times bestselling Chemical Garden trilogy, which includes Wither, Fever, and Sever. She earned her BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut. Visit her at LaurenDeStefano.com.

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