Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1)

by DeStefano, Lauren

  There’s a moment of silence before she snorts and giggles. I can never tell when she’s being serious. She seems to prefer it that way.

  “Hey,” she says. “I have to get something from the art room. Come with me.”

  “I think Basil wanted to walk home with me.”

  “We’ll be right back,” she says, and tugs me to my feet. She leads me into the academy, up the stairs, to the art room.

  There’s a sort of eerie peace to an empty classroom. The easels display colorings like windows, each one a distorted view of Internment. I know which one is Pen’s even before she has marched over to it. The easel’s ledge is a mess of coloring pens, and bladder sacks haphazardly tied shut with twine, fat with colors. The bladders of small animals are the most common way of storing colors; paper wouldn’t do the job, and collapsible metal was deemed too wasteful when an inventor proposed the idea a hundred years ago. The colors themselves are made from plants.

  She’s colored the glasslands the way they would look late in the afternoon, the domes and spires mirroring the orange sky and smoky clouds. She’s memorized that place. Not only does her father work there as a sun engineer, but she has a perfect view of it from her bedroom window.

  She frowns at her work. “My contribution to the festival,” she says. “The instructor thinks it’s quite good. She wants me to color it in the center of the clock tower canvas, assuming we get the king’s approval.”

  “Really?” I say.

  She shrugs.

  Every year, a large canvas is prepared by the city’s most talented artists. For the final week of December, the king allows the canvas to be wrapped around the clock tower. There’s a final week of festivities under that canvas, and even the rarely seen prince and princess come out to mingle.

  “Pen, that’s a huge honor,” I say. “Why don’t you seem at all excited?”

  In answer, she tears her coloring from the easel and crumples it in both hands. The colors are still wet, and oranges and grays stain her fingers. “It wasn’t right,” she says. Gritting her teeth, she pushes the balled paper together before yanking it into two pieces.

  She drops the ruined project into a recycling tube, where it’s immediately sucked away, leaving a smear of color on the rim.

  “How could you say that?” I say. “It looked perfect.”

  “It was going to bother me all night knowing it was just sitting here all wrong,” she says. “I’ll make something better tomorrow. A portrait, maybe. You can be my model.”

  “I thought the assignment was to color the city,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “The assignment was to color something we love.” She gestures to the easels, full of colorings. “Clearly, everyone loves Internment. But I’ve decided you’re a more interesting part of my world than a bunch of buildings.”

  “Maybe you should color the clouds,” I say.

  “It’s been done a thousand times,” she says. “Really, Morgan. I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Forgive me,” I say. “We aren’t all creative geniuses.”

  We make it to the doorway before she runs back to her easel and takes the slenderest of the coloring pens. She wipes the bristles on a scrap of cloth and places it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll work on it at home,” she says.

  I don’t know very much about art—that has always been Pen’s area—but I do believe that it is honesty at its core. I look at the smear of color on the recycling tube, and I worry that there’s something Pen’s trying to hide.

  I can’t sit in the apartment any longer. I can’t listen to my mother’s rasped breathing as she sleeps in Lex’s blanket, and Alice’s shoes upstairs. She has a pair of wooden shoes that Lex favors. They’re loud and he always knows where she is when she’s wearing them. Normally the sound doesn’t bother me, but tonight I can’t seem to concentrate on anything but those steps. Pacing this way and that.

  Yes. That word keeps coming back to me.

  Are you a murderer?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Alice moves across the common room.

  I put on a sweater and leave the apartment.

  A patrolman holds open the door for me, tells me to be safe. I hear that every day. Be safe. I wonder what the patrolmen are doing to catch the supposed murderer. I wonder what they’re doing to catch the person who really killed Daphne Leander. There was some talk at the academy about a memorial service. It was held on Monday for family only. No friends were invited, if she had any friends—from what I’ve heard, she and Judas kept to themselves, a trait that gave them a reputation for being snobs. But I’ve learned not to take stock in what people say. I can only imagine what’s been said about me since Lex’s incident, and about Pen, who distances herself from all the high-ranking cliques at the cost of being my friend. “Who needs them?” she says.

  The park is empty when I arrive. Little winged insects keep their chorus in the brush. I tread quietly, listening for patrolmen. Listening for Judas.

  Only when I reach the cavern do I dare turn on my pocket light, angling it inside. But I find no messages written on the wall with a pebble. And I don’t find Judas.

  Instead, curled under a red academy sweater, I find Amy Leander fast asleep.

  12

  Elixirs. Pills. Specialists. Are they meant to help us, or to keep us compliant? I’m studying medicine because I’ve always felt it would be my calling to help others. But I wonder about that.

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  THERE’S A STRIP OF FABRIC TIED AROUND her wrist, the traditional mark of grieving after a loved one has been dusted to ashes and scattered. The academy sweater she uses as a blanket must have belonged to her sister.

  Under the sharp blue-white glow of my pocket light, her face is young and troubled, her eyebrows pushed together. I’ve been watching her for only a few seconds before something moves behind me and an arm hooks around my throat.

  Even before he has spoken, my heart is pounding up my spine, and I know the soft, measured breaths against my ear belong to Judas Hensley.

  “Back away,” he whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”

  I suppose he means to be threatening, this boy who answered yes, but somehow I know he won’t hurt me. He’s only trying to protect the sleeping girl. I do as he instructs, until we’re both standing outside the cavern. He lets go of my neck, circles around so that he’s facing me.

  “Are you having fun?” he hisses.

  I focus on all the sharp angles of his face, neck, and collarbone. I can’t help it; I’ve not seen anyone like him, the way he seems sculpted from shards of broken glass. “Bringing your academy friends here to play games and write messages?”

  “Why did you lie?” I say. He stares in response, and I begin to worry that my instinct is wrong, that he did kill his betrothed and that he’ll kill me, right here with no witnesses. Maybe Amy wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was dead, or dying. I try to remember if I saw her breathe.

  But my instincts about people have never been wrong. Not even about Lex. The morning of his incident, he came into the room after my mother had finished coloring my cheeks with pink powder. I wasn’t quite the right age for cosmetics to be acceptable, and I was holding a wet cloth, preparing to wipe it away before academy. We looked at each other in the mirror, Lex and I, and I had a terrible feeling like he was going to do something desperate. But he only asked our mother if she’d fixed the tear in Alice’s pink dress.

  “Lie?” Judas says at last. I try not to show my relief.

  “My friend asked you if you were a murderer. You said yes.”

  “Not that it is any of your concern, but I didn’t write that,” he says. “I have a spy handling my correspondence.”

  I glance at the cavern, where Amy is asleep. “A little spy?” I ask. “Blond hair, blue eyes?”

  Amy’s presence, perplexing as it is, adds to my relief. She wouldn’t be here if she thought Judas had murdered her sister.

  “Yo
u should leave,” Judas says. “Now.”

  And here comes the moment of decision, because I believe him. I believe that something permanent will change if I don’t turn for those trees and return to my apartment and try to study to the sound of Alice’s shoes. I don’t know what will happen if I stay, and I don’t know why I do.

  When I don’t take a step, he growls. Muscles move in his throat.

  His eyes look better, not so swollen. His hands are no longer bleeding.

  “Why isn’t anyone looking for you?” I say. “How did you escape?”

  He folds his arms, laughs in tandem with a breeze that comes through the leaves, the woods shaking around us like paper bells.

  “Because no one can be smarter than a patrolman?” he says. “No one can be smarter than your father?”

  This is meant to offend me, but it doesn’t. I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I’ve heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex’s bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men—only men.

  “They are looking for me,” he says. “The king probably doesn’t want to announce that he was foolish enough to let a prisoner escape. Wouldn’t want people to think he’s lost control.”

  “The woods is the first place they’d look,” I say.

  “There’s plenty of evidence elsewhere,” he says. “And as I said, I have a spy.”

  “A little girl,” I challenge. “And her parents must be looking for her.”

  His next laugh comes sadder. Something stirs in the cavern and we turn our heads.

  Amy Leander is small as she crawls out into the starlight and shadows. She’s wearing the red sweater now, and it falls halfway to her knees as she stands, her eyes trained warily on me.

  “Your father’s a patrolman,” she says, the words something between an accusation and an observation. “Is that why you keep following me?”

  “No,” I say. “Is that why you ran away from me? You thought I’d turn you in for hanging up those essays?”

  She stares at me a moment longer, then looks to Judas, who tells her, “Those were a bad idea. I told you they draw too much attention.” He nods to me in indication.

  “My father doesn’t know I’m here,” I say. “I’m not planning to tell him.”

  “What about your friend?” Amy asks. “The one with the curls.”

  “Keeps secrets better than anyone else I know,” I assure.

  Amy is wary; she stares at me with her dead sister’s eyes. There’s no glitter this time. It’s hard to reconcile that this girl, who can’t be older than eleven, belongs to a jumper group, that a bag from the pharmacy arrives at her front door and that she had the gall to cross the train tracks and peer over the edge.

  The feeling that overtakes me as I stare back at her, I realize, is envy.

  But there’s curiosity, too. She looks unscathed, but the edge always leaves its mark on those who dare to face it. She must have demons, too. She must recoil from society in agony on bad days.

  “You know my brother, don’t you?” I say. “Alexander Stockhour. Lex. He’s in your group.”

  Her gaze shoots to the ground. “Has he said anything about me?” she mumbles.

  Only that I should stay away.

  Judas huffs impatiently. “You still haven’t told us what you’re doing here.”

  “I can go wherever I want,” I fire back, surprised when the words come out so steadily.

  “You were looking for me,” he says.

  “I—” I hesitate, because I can’t come up with a lie fast enough. It’s true, I was looking for him. I should be safe at home doing my assignments and preparing for bed, but instead I’m in the woods because—why? I’m looking for—what?

  More. The answer is as confusing and as simple as that. I’m looking for more than what I know.

  “I wanted to see if you were okay,” I say. “That’s standard after saving someone from imprisonment, I think.”

  “I’m fantastic,” he says. “You’re free to leave now.”

  “Judas,” Amy says quietly. His face softens for her. “She isn’t going to tell anyone. She would have by now.”

  “I can bring food, if you like,” I say. “My mother always makes too much. She still cooks like there are four of us at home, but really it’s just me.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Will you be here?” I say. “Tomorrow night? If you’re not, I can just leave it here for you.”

  “Maybe,” is all he says, before he turns and begins pacing away.

  Amy stands between us, gnawing her lip, as if deciding which of us should get her attention.

  “Your parents must be worried,” I tell her. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “I told you, they won’t know I’m missing,” she says.

  I open my mouth to tell her that she’s wrong, of course they’ll notice; how could parents who’ve lost one child not notice the absence of another? But then I remember my own apartment, my father who likely won’t be home before midnight, if at all, and my mother coasting in the haze of her headache elixirs.

  “We can just ride the train for a while first,” I say. “Until we both get tired. That’s what I do when I’m not ready to go straight home.”

  She’s considering it. She runs her betrothal band back and forth along its chain, her mouth twisting one way and then the other.

  Judas calls her from somewhere in the shadows and she turns her head.

  He calls again, and she begins moving toward him.

  “You can bring food tomorrow, if you want,” she tells me, and then she breaks into a run and disappears into the darkness, after the boy accused of murdering her sister.

  My father returns home long after I should be asleep. I’ve been lying in the dark, listening to the train and then the silence it leaves behind. It has gone by three times and I’m still awake.

  I hear him pull out a chair, pour water for his tea. He moves down the hall, past my bedroom, and looks in on my mother. Soft words are spoken; the door closes again.

  They were once wildly in love, my mother and father. Now they’re just sort of together. Glued to each other by Lex and me and the blood in their rings.

  The kettle whistles and then the sound dies away. The quiet becomes too thick; even Lex has stopped pacing in his office.

  I slip out of bed and ruffle my hair with my fingers to make it seem as though I’ve been sleeping; my father will worry only if he knows I’ve been awake. Or at least, he used to worry about me. Before Lex’s incident. Back when he still bothered to notice he had a daughter.

  “Dad?” I say, stepping into the light of the kitchen.

  He’s got a stack of papers on the table, and he turns it over, hiding the words from me. “You’re up late, heart,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “I heard you coming in,” I say, wringing the hem of my flannel nightshirt.

  “I didn’t mean to be loud about it,” he says.

  “No,” I say, taking the seat across from his. “I’m glad. I like knowing that you’re home. It makes me feel better.”

  “Do you feel unsafe when I’m gone?” he asks. “This building is safe; you know that, don’t you?”

  I nod. “It’s just that I worry for you,” I say. “When you’re home, I know you’re okay. That’s all.”

  He gives me a tired smile, reaches over the table and pats my hand. “Since you’re awake, would you like some tea?” he says. “There’s enough for two.”

  I shake my head. “Dad? What’s going to happen to Jud—to the murderer?”

  “What will happen?” my father says, shuffling his papers without turning them over. “That’ll be up to the jury. I don’t believe they’ve begun the selection process yet.”

  “Why haven’t they?” I say. “Murder’s a serious charge.”

  “I’m not involved with the politics of it,” he says. “The king makes all of those decisions.”
/>   He isn’t meeting my eyes now. He gulps his tea.

  “Have you met him?” I press.

  “The king?”

  “The murderer. Of course you’ve met the king.”

  “I’ve seen him in the holding cell. I pass it when I’m turning in my reports each morning.”

  “So you saw him today?” I ask.

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  He’s lying. He’s lying to me.

  Maybe I’m lying, too, by keeping what I know from him. It doesn’t make me feel any less betrayed.

  “Do you think he’s capable of murder?” I say. “I mean, a student my age?”

  He clears his throat. “I’ve got a lot of work to contend with before I have any hope of sleeping tonight. And you have academy in the morning,” he says. “We can talk about this later. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I murmur.

  I understand. Later will never come.

  Ms. Harlan taps her pen against her clipboard and tries to smile at me.

  I concentrate on not fidgeting.

  She asks me about classes and about my betrothed. She notes my reactions and makes direct eye contact when she isn’t writing.

  And then, when the lunch period is nearly over, she asks about my family. She wants to know if things have changed since the incident, if any of us have taken medication to cope. Something about the way she asks leads me to believe she already knows the answers and there’s no sense lying.

  “We were all medicated at first,” I say. “But it interfered with my father’s work. He has to be alert when he’s called upon. And my parents didn’t like how drowsy the elixirs made me, so I stopped taking them.”

  That isn’t the whole truth. I had begun pouring my elixirs down the sink before they took me off them. I didn’t like the heaviness of my limbs, the blackness of my dreams. I didn’t like how sterile they made the world around me seem; I couldn’t think beyond what was in front of me, couldn’t fathom that there was a ground below this floating city, couldn’t wonder at the shapes in the clouds.

  The only thing I liked about that awful time was going to the top floor of the hospital. Sometimes I wouldn’t even visit my brother. I would just take the stairs up to the cafeteria on the top floor. That hospital is the second tallest building on Internment, and the cafeteria is made of windows. On an overcast day there’s nothing to see but whiteness. Clouds turning and parting, revealing more clouds. It mesmerized me.