Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1)

by DeStefano, Lauren

  I think I’ve made him angry with me, and that he’s going to shut me out, tell me to go back to bed, and then tomorrow carry on as though none of this ever happened.

  What he says is, “So?”

  “So,” I say, feeling a little bolder now, “is that why you went to the edge?”

  When he doesn’t answer right away, I open my eyes and see his cheek in a patch of moonlight. We have the same round face. Right up until his incident, he looked young. Now he’s so much older, like a man who somehow exceeded his dispatch date. I understand why my mother has such trouble looking at him; it’s impossible not to search for traces of that youth.

  “You’re full of questions tonight,” he says, pulling at a loose thread coming from his sleeve. He’s forever tugging at his shirts, winding threads around his fingers. I’ve heard Alice complain about all the mending she’s left to do.

  “I don’t mean to be,” I say. “I mean to stay out of everyone’s way, but sometimes I can’t stop … asking. I never seem to run out of things I want to know.”

  “It’s your way,” he says. “When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes.”

  “Your tone makes it sound like a bad thing,” I say.

  “This floating city is all you’ll ever have,” he says. “It’s enough for some, but not for people like you and me. It saddens me that you’ll have to learn that, just like I had to.”

  All this time I’ve been unnerved by my fascination with the ground; I’ve wondered and worried and thought about the same things over and over, and just like the train that speeds past us now, my wonder has taken me to no new destination. I know he’s right, but I haven’t given up my search for something more, even if that something is within the train tracks.

  “I’ve always been like you in that sense, haven’t I?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “No way. You’ve always been you.”

  “Lex?”

  I don’t know if it’s the moonlight or the stillness as everyone else in our family sleeps. Or it could be that my own restlessness is driving me mad, but I want to tell him about the specialist, and about Judas and Amy. I want to tell him the things I can’t stand to admit to myself—that I miss the way it was before, and that when things are at their worst, I think it’s his fault that our mother sleeps all day and our father is never home. He doesn’t need them anymore, but I do. And I have to pretend that I don’t, because of what he did.

  Lex leans back against the wall and I realize he’s not waiting for me to speak. He knows I’m not going to. He reaches out in the darkness and bumps my knee with his fist. “Get some sleep, Little Sister. I’ve got more terrible things to brood about.”

  In the morning, there’s a knock at my bedroom door.

  “Come in,” I say.

  I’m still trying to wake myself up when Pen peeks into the room. “You’re not sleeping naked, are you?” she says.

  I push myself upright, blinking away the drowsiness. “I had a dream about you,” I say. “We were climbing a ladder into the clouds.”

  She sits on the end of my bed and folds her legs. “Was I on top or on the bottom?”

  “Next to me. It was a peculiarly wide ladder.”

  She looks thoughtful.

  “You were mad at me the whole way up,” I say.

  “About that,” she says, dropping her hands into her lap. “Morgan, I’m sorry. I was being a child. I shouldn’t have been so vicious.”

  “I shouldn’t have left without telling you,” I say.

  “No, I understand. You didn’t want the competition when you met up with your secret Prince Wonderful.”

  I throw my pillow at her and we burst into giggles.

  Pen glances at my opened door, as though to be certain my mother isn’t nearby listening. Very quietly, she says, “What’s he like? Judas.”

  “He’s …” I fall back against the mattress, considering. “Untrusting. And he seems sad.”

  “Can’t imagine what about,” she says, caustic.

  “I don’t believe he killed her,” I say. “I just don’t.”

  “Well, you were alone with him in the cavern and you didn’t return hacked into bits, so there’s something to that,” Pen says. “Does Basil know?”

  “Of course not. He’d never allow it.”

  At the mention of my betrothed, I feel guilty. He proved trustworthy with my secrets the other day, and it’s wrong to keep things from him. I know this. But Judas isn’t my secret to keep. Telling Basil could hurt Judas more than it would hurt me.

  “Maybe I’ll tell Basil once it’s safe,” I say. “When Judas is proven innocent.”

  Pen laughs. “When will that be? According to what we’re supposed to know, he’s locked up in the courthouse right now while the jury selection begins. The king obviously has men searching for him. He’s going to be found and then he’s going to be found guilty.”

  “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe the real murderer will be caught.”

  Pen crawls onto the bed and lies beside me, knocking her head gently against mine.

  “Just be safe. You’re the only friend I’ve got.”

  “You could make replacement friends,” I say. “Lots of people like you.”

  “Awful beasts, the whole lot of them.” She wraps her arm around mine and squeezes.

  “I’ll have to be careful, then,” I say.

  “If anything happens to you,” she says, “I’ll kill him.”

  I’m struck by the edge in her tone.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I’m glad we’re not angry with each other anymore. In lieu of a festival of stars present, Thomas just wants to drag me around the city today. I was hoping you’d share in my misery. We can wear shell hats like the princess.” The king’s daughter is known for her sense of fashion.

  “If we’re playing princess, we have to act as though we’re better than everyone,” I say.

  “We are better than everyone,” she says. “Unlike the princess.” She shoulders me toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, get dressed. I’ll help you pick out an outfit. How you dress is a reflection on me.”

  I end up borrowing her purple shell hat with synthetic fibers pinned to one side that are meant to mimic bird plumage. Basil stares at them while we’re pressed together on the train.

  “You don’t like it?” I say.

  “It’s just, I didn’t know birds could have pink feathers.”

  “Birds are white, silly,” Pen says. “It’s just a decoration.”

  “The birds we’ve seen through the scope are white,” Thomas says. “But I’ve read stories in which there were all sorts of species. Maybe there are pink birds in a different region. The ground has all sorts of climates.”

  Pen huffs a pale blond curl away from her face. The train stops with a jolt and she breezes ahead of him, tugging me along. “Such an insufferable know-it-all,” she mutters. But I swear there’s a hint of a smile to go with the words.

  The boys catch up to us and take our arms in tandem. Thomas kisses Pen’s cheek as she pertly raises her chin to accept. “It’s your day,” she tells him. “Where are we going?”

  “The library first,” he says. “They’re having a sale.”

  Most books on Internment aren’t for sale; we can borrow them from the library, and as the years go on and the spines begin to crack and the pages yellow, new editions are printed and the old ones are sold. When I was little, I was the first to borrow a newly printed library book and I hid it under my mattress. I wanted to know what it was like to own a new book for myself. One that hadn’t been worn down by someone else’s hands, with pages that hadn’t absorbed someone else’s spills.

  After a week, guilt made me return it. I never borrowed that book again; I couldn’t bear to see it the victim of a stranger’s hands.

  As we walk, Thomas and Pen gradually move a few paces ahead of Basil and me. Thomas whispers something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs. The shadows of clouds pass over them,
and whatever Thomas was going to say to her next has been forgotten as he watches her. She’s a revelation in the sun, dazzling everywhere the light touches her. And not just today. Even when she’s sad, even when she sings off-key.

  Basil touches one of the feathers. “Careful,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

  “I didn’t think so. It’s not very you.”

  I try to smile, but I’m still thinking about last night. I’m still thinking about the ground and if there are different kinds of birds. If things down there are mostly good or mostly bad. If they ever wonder about us.

  Basil steals a kiss to my jaw, and I smile at my feet.

  “There you are,” he says.

  “I don’t mean to be distant,” I say, hooking my arm around his.

  He stops our walking, and I realize that Pen and Thomas have stopped too. We’ve just passed the theater, and at the end of the block we can see what used to be the flower shop. It’s gray and splintered. The roof has caved in, and there’s a makeshift wire fence surrounding it now, with signs cautioning us not to approach.

  Other passersby are staring at it, too.

  “It’s depressing,” Basil says.

  “Alice used to bring me here on the weekends when I was little,” I say. “It was one of her favorite places.”

  Things aren’t the same. The patrolmen and this ruined building are proof of that.

  After a few seconds, Thomas and Pen start walking again and we follow them. We go to the library and then to a tea shop. The day is full of light breezes and sweet aromas, but I cannot rid my hair of the smell of ash.

  15

  Each of us has a betrothed so that we won’t have to spend our lives alone. It leads me to wonder to whom the gods are married. The elements, perhaps. Or do they know something that we don’t about solitude?

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  AFTER CLASSES ON MONDAY, BASIL AND I spend time trying to skip stones on the lake. We don’t talk much; somehow that has stopped feeling so necessary.

  As we sit on the grass, I watch the sunlight catch bits of gold in his hair and I think that he’s more handsome than the prince. The prince, like his sister, is always at the height of fashion. He’s always polished and there are rumors that he wears cosmetics in his images. But there’s nothing more real than sunlight on skin.

  Feeling brave, I push forward and kiss him. He pulls me on top of him, and, laughing, we fall into the grass.

  I rest my forehead on his, trying to line up our noses and mouths so we’re at a perfect parallel. He slides his hands up my sleeves and I have the distant sense that Judas is watching us. I wonder if he and Daphne were ever like this.

  I try to dismiss the thought, but too late I’m thinking of her body on the train tracks and how awful her final moments must have been.

  “Kiss me?” I say, and he does. It’s so easy now. It roots me to this place, makes me feel at home.

  I rest my arms on his chest and draw back so I can look at him. He pushes my hair behind my ears and says, “You look worried.”

  “I’m only thinking about what sort of person I am,” I say.

  “What sort of person?” he says.

  “It’s something my brother said. He told me that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t think Internment is enough.” It sounds crazy now that I’ve said it aloud, but I trust Basil now with the things that make me sound unhinged.

  “He’s right. Internment isn’t enough for you,” Basil says, surprising me. “Neither is the ground. Neither is the sky.”

  I smile. “Being betrothed to me has made you lose your mind,” I say.

  He looks around us to be certain we’re alone, and then he says, “With all that’s happened lately, I’m beginning to understand why you’d fantasize about the ground.”

  I roll over so that I’m lying beside him. “Maybe I wouldn’t even like the ground. Maybe it would be cruel or ugly. Maybe it would be exactly like here. I just want to know.”

  “It wouldn’t be like here,” Basil says. “Think of how much land there must be.”

  “That’s just it. I can’t even imagine it.” I hold my arms over my head, watching the way the sunlight fills the spaces between my fingers. “All my life, the more I’ve been told not to think about it, the more I can’t resist. It’s like … like …”

  “Like being in love,” Basil suggests.

  I turn my head to look at him. “I think you may be right.”

  He looks back at me.

  “I can stop talking about it so much,” I say. “The ground, I mean. If it bothers you.”

  “I do think we should be careful what we say, and where,” Basil says. “There’s too much fear right now, and I worry.”

  He turns his face skyward and shields his eyes from the sun, but I think he’s just trying to hide from my stare.

  “Worry about what?”

  “About what will happen to you,” he says. “Even when we were children, I thought that something like what happened to Daphne could happen to you. One day you’d say something that upset the wrong person, and—We’re supposed to keep each other safe. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “Basil.” I move his hand away from his eyes. I want to tell him there’s nothing to be afraid of, but after the honesty he has just given me, I can only give him the same. “We have each other, and we always will, whatever happens. And if someone does murder me, you needn’t worry, because I’ll come haunt you.”

  He smirks. “Rattling the windows and tipping glasses and things?”

  “I’d say nice things while you slept so you’d have good dreams,” I say. “Or maybe mean things if I get jealous.” I shove his shoulder.

  “But we aren’t ghosts,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “Not for a long time.”

  “Sixty years,” he says.

  “A thousand,” I counter, and tug him by the collar until he’s kissing me, and anything we believe is true, and everything in the world is ours.

  The short season takes more light from each day. Judas is scarce. I haven’t seen him at all this week, but Amy will still meet me in the cavern. She says he’s hiding in the farm and mining section. She says he has a plan. When I ask her what this plan could be, she tells me that he won’t tell her. It’s too important and she’s too unpredictable.

  And one night, I find her sitting out in the starlight at the mouth of the cavern. She’s toying with the strips of cloth tied around her wrists.

  “Amy?” I say.

  She doesn’t answer, and when I kneel in front of her I see the sheen of tears on her cheeks.

  “Suppose it was painful,” she whispers. “All that broken skin.”

  She has been so steely that I could almost forget she’s in mourning. She’s never talked about what happened to her sister. Barely mentioned Daphne at all.

  “She was going to do something important.” Her voice cracks. “She wasn’t there yet, but it was happening. The things she wrote and the thoughts she had. She was going to prove things are wrong on Internment, and someone didn’t want that, and that’s why she was killed.” She uses the cloth to dab at her eyes. “And now she’s gone, and no one will ever get to hear what she had to say.”

  Gently, I ask, “Is that why you were putting up her essay?”

  She nods. “It was a draft she didn’t turn in. Instead, our parents made her write about the ecosystem and turn that in. But I had to give her a voice. My parents blamed Judas for her thoughts and the things she said. Before her death, my parents went to the king asking for Daphne and Judas’s betrothal to be undone. They would have preferred that she be alone—rather than tied to him.”

  “I didn’t think undoing a betrothal was possible,” I say.

  “It isn’t.” She swipes the heel of her hand against her nose, sniffling. “That’s probably why they blame him so much. They were practically the first in line to have him arrested once she was killed. But it doesn’t matter anymore.” />
  “Why doesn’t it matter?” I say.

  She looks at me, eyes glistening in the moonlight. I see a girl who has been to the edge, and who has nothing left to fear. “Because I’m going to finish what my sister helped start. I’m going to find a way off of this place.”

  I can’t help the pitying expression that surely comes over me. She raises her chin in defiance. “I can’t tell you everything,” she says. “But you’ll hear about it, and when you do, I’ll already be gone.”

  She doesn’t have anything to say to me after that. She gets up and busies herself trying to climb one of the trees.

  “You like to climb?” I say.

  “I’m not allowed,” she says. “I can get away with it only when Judas isn’t around.”

  I can’t imagine why he would worry about Amy climbing trees. She appears to be quite good at it.

  “When I was little,” I say, “I used to climb trees, too. It took me months before I could reach the top of the highest tree I could find here in the woods. And once I’d climbed it I realized there was nowhere else to go.”

  Amy’s expression is thoughtful. “Did you ever think about what it would be like to climb in the opposite direction? Instead of going above Internment, to go beneath it?”

  “Like a tunnel,” I say. “Yes, I think so, now that you mention it. I could burrow along the roots that go all the way to the bottom of the city, and then I’d be dangling high above the ground.”

  “You’re kind of strange,” Amy says, swinging from a low branch.

  “You are, too,” I say.

  Before she hoists herself up to the next branch, she smiles at me. “Go away now,” she says. “I have important things to consider.”

  I leave her to her ascent for the stars.

  Somewhere around the block, I hear a sweeper. They always come sometime after dinner. Men driving machines propelled by giant round brushes, gathering all the debris from the street so that it can be recycled.

  I pass my apartment, not ready to go home, and keep walking until I reach the border of my city: the train tracks.

  And I’m not alone. There is a patrolman at the far end of the platform where the doors will open when the train arrives. And Pen, sitting on the steps of the platform in the light of a street lantern. Paper lanterns hang from the lantern’s post, decorated with slantscript requests.