Under Pen’s long red coat I can see the hems of her pinstripe pajamas and her wool slippers. She grins at me. “Have a fun tryst?” she asks.
“What are you doing out without your shoes?” I say. I think back on what she said about killing Judas if anything ever happened to me, and I wonder if she followed me.
She looks over her shoulder and nods at the silver branches, lanterns, and charms that decorate the train platform. “Thinking about this year’s request,” she says.
I sit beside her. “It’s strange to see Internment so afraid, especially this time of year,” I say.
“It’s important that the festival of stars goes on, no matter what happens,” Pen says. “The fear will pass eventually, as unhappy things always do.” She smiles at the sky, but offers a little nod toward me. “Do you remember how excited we used to get when we were little, and we would try to sneak away with whatever treats your mother was baking for the festival?”
“She knew what we were up to, and she let us get away with our pockets full of mini pastries anyway,” I say.
Pen sighs wistfully.
“I still do love the city this time of year,” I say. “I love the way it looks, the way it feels. I just don’t get excited about the requests anymore.”
“The requesting part is more fun when you’re a child anyway,” Pen says. “Children ask for simple things.”
When I was young I asked for a flutterling farm in a jar, and the next year, for my brother to be nicer to me. Lex struck the match for me both times, never knowing what I’d asked for, and together we watched our papers fly up into a sky of burning stars. My mother bought me the farm, but my brother’s patience with me grows thinner every year. From that festival on, I began to suspect that by being born I disturbed something in his fragile world. I gave him someone to worry about, and he would never forgive me for it.
“The god of the sky has never answered my most important requests,” I say. “Do you suppose it’s because I was never very good at slantscript?”
“No,” Pen says. “I’m rather good at slantscript, and my requests go unanswered lately, too.”
“Maybe this year I’ll offer up a request on Judas’s behalf.”
Pen shakes her head. “Don’t waste your request. There isn’t much that can be done for him now.”
“Do you think Daphne’s essay is right?” I ask.
“All that whatnot about the gods being a myth that we dreamed up to add meaning to our lives?” she says. “It goes against everything we’ve been taught. We’re living on a big rock floating in the sky. How many explanations can there be for that?”
“Maybe there’s a science to it,” I say.
“Medicine is a science,” she says. “Electricity, colors, mapmaking. Those are things that can be crafted. What kind of science could explain how we got here or even why we exist? Of course there are gods.”
“Daphne said the gods are a theory,” I say. “Theories can’t be proven.”
“Daphne is dead, may I remind you,” she says. “You need to get your head back up in the sky with the rest of us. You’re always so fixated on what’s beyond the city. Whatever there is, it isn’t for us. We’ve been interned.”
She’s impassioned by her faith, yet another reason Instructor Newlan adores her. Her next breath moves the hair from her brow. “We didn’t make ourselves,” she says. “We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that. We have too many faults.”
“I didn’t mean to get you so riled,” I say.
“I’m not riled, Morgan. Not at all. I’m just concerned that one of these days your daydreaming will go entirely too far.” She fidgets with the hem of her glove.
“I was just discussing.”
She talks of staying in the sky. Yet sometimes she is her own floating city, drifting farther away from me.
“You should think more about the things you choose to discuss aloud,” she says. “Maybe the specialist will leave you alone then.” She was subjected to one of the king’s specialists in third year, when her mother’s tonic addiction prevented her mother from working. That was the year Pen learned to set her own curls.
“I haven’t talked to the specialist about it,” I say. “I don’t like her. She makes me uneasy.”
Pen hugs her arms. “Just lie like the rest of us,” she says as the train approaches. The train’s roar nearly swallows her voice when she says, “And if you must escape, escape here in the city. There are so many places for it.”
The train door opens with a mechanical whine. No one disembarks. The shops are all closed and there’s hardly anyone out at this hour on a weeknight unless they work for the hospital or the king’s patrol. And still, the trains run, keeping vigil over those who dream of leaving the safe world within the tracks.
“I don’t need to escape,” I say.
She leans back on her elbows and looks at the stars. “That’s good,” she says, starting to smile. “See that? You are an apt liar after all.”
The train pulls away from us.
I frown and put my hand over hers. “Please don’t be angry,” I say. I don’t understand her when she gets like this, and it frightens me.
She shakes her head. “I’m not. Really.”
“Were you waiting for me?” I say.
“You aren’t the only one who can sneak off into the night to meet mysterious men,” she says, raising her chin. “It just so happens that I am having a starlit picnic tonight.”
The clock tower strikes its first chime of the tenth hour, and I see a figure in the distance. The figure removes its bowler hat and spins it on its finger. I recognize the sharp click of those shoes on the cobblestones. Thomas moves into the light of a street lantern. This shocks me more than a mysterious man would have.
“Hello,” he says, nodding to the both of us. “I didn’t realize I’d be graced with both of your companies tonight.”
“Morgan’s leaving,” Pen says, squeezing my hand before rising.
“I thought you were having a picnic,” I say. “You didn’t pack any food?”
Thomas smiles in his theatrical way. “Tonight, we’re feasting on the words of dead poets,” he says.
Pen narrows her eyes. “Must you be so cloying?”
But she descends the platform steps with him, though not letting him wrap his arm around her shoulders when he reaches out.
“Good night, Morgan,” she tells me. She picks the lint from her coat sleeve and tosses it away, blithely unaware of the way Thomas looks at her—as though he has no purpose at all but to love her.
16
Death is the end of some things. Not everything.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
IN THE MORNING ON THE WAY TO THE academy, Pen can’t seem to stay awake. Not that she’s trying. She has her head on my shoulder and her eyes are closed.
The crowded train car forced Thomas and Basil to take seats elsewhere.
“Out late with Thomas?” I ask.
“You don’t have to sound so hopeful about it,” she says.
“It’s just nice to see the two of you getting along,” I say.
“I suppose I should get used to him,” she says, and sighs. “But we weren’t out very late. I was working on my coloring for the festival after I came home. The art instructor was furious when she realized I’d crumbled my portrait of the glasslands.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I say.
She sits up, blinking lazily. “Artistic license.” She yawns. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Not a talentless commoner like me,” I say.
She pats my cheek. “We all have our own skills,” she says. “I can color still life and scrub tonic stains out of the furniture. And you are a professional diplomat.”
“Am I?” I say.
“To a fault,” she says. “For example, you’re always kind to your brother, even though he’s been picking on you since day one. Most little si
blings are brats. I’m so relieved my parents never entered the queue after I was born.”
The train slows to stop. “If I’m such a diplomat, why aren’t I at all popular?”
“To everyone who matters, you are,” she says.
While she’s adjusting her satchel over her shoulder and standing, the light catches her face and I see the cosmetic powder around her eyes. She never wears cosmetics unless she’s trying to hide something, like that she’s been crying. It would do no good to ask; she would only take her own advice and lie.
“You didn’t need a sibling, anyway,” I say. “You’ve always had me.”
“Yes.” She hooks her arm around mine and leads me down the aisle. “After so many years, we’re rather stuck with each other now. We’re like a double birth.”
A double birth is when two children are born from the same womb at one time, and sometimes they’re even identical. There’s a story in the history book about one such pair. Their names were Odette and Olive. But while they wore the same face, they couldn’t have been more different. Odette was content with her life, while Olive was restless and ever unhappy. She seduced Odette’s betrothed by pretending to be her; Olive fell so in love with being her sister that she drowned Odette and assumed her identity. Years went on, and Olive, pretending to be Odette, married her sister’s betrothed and bore numerous children, all of which were born dead. Convinced that she was being punished by the god in the sky, and driven mad by grief, Olive confessed what she had done.
Double births were banned after that. If two were to be born of the same womb, the first was allowed to live, while the second was drowned before it finished its first cry. It was believed that the second child was Olive, always Olive, trying to be reborn once again as someone new.
Within the last hundred years, medicine has progressed enough that double births never need to happen.
It would frighten me to share a face with someone else, but that’s one of Pen’s favorite chapters in the history book. She says it’s poetic that one soul could bear so much sadness that it tries again and again to come into the world as someone else.
Lex and Alice aren’t speaking. Alice swore to me she wasn’t angry, but she’s slamming the cabinets as she puts things away. Down the hall, my brother is talking to his transcriber and he has just knocked something over. When he’s flustered, he forgets where things are placed.
I don’t know what this is about. Basil and I missed the worst of it. My mother has just sent us upstairs with dinner, but dinner doesn’t seem to be in the immediate future here.
Alice wants to leave, I can tell. She wants to put on a pretty dress and go for a walk. Men who are unaccompanied by their betrotheds would wink at her, tip their hats, and smile the way they always do, and she’d tug on her earrings and look away. A little flirting is harmless, she’s told me. But she could never be the sort to commit an irrational act out of lust or greed. Such things have had people declared irrational, ruined their family’s reputations, and affected their chances of entering the queue. But Alice’s loyalty to my brother isn’t rooted in fear. She always hurries straight home from work to be with him, and she won’t go as far as the market unless I’m nearby to check on him. She loves him completely and without complaint.
“I’m sorry, Morgan,” she tells me, taking the plate from my hands and bringing it to the cold box. “Now isn’t a good time. Tell your mother we say thank you.”
“Is everything okay?” I say. Basil touches my arm and guides me toward the door.
“As much as things will ever be,” she sighs, and closes the door behind us.
I hear her high heels pacing about the kitchen, disappearing down the hall.
I frown. “I wonder what Lex has done this time.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” Basil says. “They argue all the time. They argued on their wedding day. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I say, and force a rather unconvincing laugh.
“What’s the matter?” Basil says.
Everyone seems to be falling to pieces around me. Alice and Lex are struggling in the aftermath of Lex’s incident with the edge, even all these years later. I don’t know what is the matter with Pen—destroying her art and hoarding her secrets; and I cannot stop thinking about Judas Hensley and his dead betrothed.
But none of these things are mine to share, not even with Basil. So I say, “It’s nothing.” No need to burden him with the burden of others. Perhaps Pen is right, and I am diplomatic to a fault.
“Come on,” Basil says, hooking his elbow around mine. “We can go for a walk.”
He’s trying to distract me so I don’t go sullen on him. Boys get nervous when girls are sullen.
“Not to the lake,” I say, too quickly. It’s after dark now and Judas might be lurking; Amy said he’s been drifting through the labor sections, where there will be nobody but the food animals at night, but there’s no telling with him. I swear I feel his eyes on me in the afternoons sometimes.
Basil raises an eyebrow as he holds the stairwell door open for me. “No?”
“I’m still hungry,” I amend. “Maybe we could try the tea shop near the theater. They have desserts.”
“You know it’s near where the flower shop burned down,” he says. “We’ll have to pass by it.”
“I know.” Maybe if I keep seeing it, it won’t be so scary.
There are no patrolmen to hold open the lobby doors for us tonight. Security seems to be lessening, and I wonder if it’s to perpetuate the illusion of safety or so that there will be more men secretly looking for Judas.
I have my answer before we make it to the shuttle station. A crowd has gathered, and patrolmen are pacing with their arms out, saying “Get back, get back” while nobody seems to be listening.
A flutter of a white bow gets my attention, resting atop a short blond ponytail. Amy. I break free of Basil’s arm and run toward her.
“Morgan, wait!” Basil says.
“Amy!” People are moving around her like the angry waves the god of the earth cast to drown his people in the history book.
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t even turn her head. As I get closer I see that a boy is holding on to her hand, the pair of them like statues. Why won’t they move?
I muscle my way through the crowd, and when I reach her I can see that she’s trembling. Her face has gone pale and her eyes are rimmed with red. The boy at her side is staring too.
“Amy?”
A whimper.
Basil catches up to me. He’s got his arm around my waist and he’s trying to tug me away, but I’m resisting. “Come on,” he says. “Don’t look.”
“What?” I say. And even though he has told me not to, I can’t help following Amy’s gaze.
The crowd has gathered here to see something.
I don’t understand at first. Through the crowd I can see a boy who has fallen on the cobbles. Some other part of me knows what’s happening, though, because I’m already frozen still when I see the university crest on the rich purple vest, and I realize that he hasn’t simply fallen down.
His eyes are like the eyes of the trout my mother buys at the market on weekends. Peel back the paper and there are those eyes, bloodshot, glassy, and lifeless.
His dark skin is glistening wet, clothes plastered to his shape like a body emerging from water for air. But air means nothing to him now; he isn’t going to breathe.
The crowd has parted to make room for the medical vehicle, which has arrived too late.
Basil tugs my arm, and once again I hear the patrolmen shouting for us to get back. Someone crashes into me. “Amy,” I gasp, and finally she looks at me. There’s still that defiance in her eyes, but there’s fear too, because she’s a child and her parents don’t notice her absence and she needs someone. She needs somewhere to go. I grab her hand and she follows me as I follow Basil, and the boy holding on to Amy’s other hand follows too.
In the lobby of my apartment building, nobody know
s what has happened yet. It’s a different world in here. We file into the stairwell and up the stairs. One step and then the next, I move, incapable of focusing on anything more. Breaths are hard to come by.
“The flower shop,” Amy blurts, stepping hard. “And Daphne.” Step. “And now Quince.”
“Stop,” the boy says. Amy breaks away from me and sits on a step and buries her forehead in her knees.
We all stop to look at her.
The boy sits beside her and asks if she needs her pill. She shakes her head.
“I need off,” she whispers, to no one in particular. “I need to get off this place.”
“You have to take one,” the boy says. He fumbles through her satchel until he finds the pharmacy bag of yellow pills. “You’ll have a fit.”
“Get Alice,” I whisper to Basil.
I sit next to Amy, and in resisting the pill the boy holds out, she looks at me. “One at a time,” she says. “He’s going to kill every last one of us. We’re all going to die and I’m one of the people to blame.”
She looks so breakable.
The boy grabs her chin, forces the pill into her mouth. She flails and struggles, but the pill goes down. She touches her throat and growls at him.
“You know I had to,” he says.
“It was a mistake bringing you anywhere with me,” she says. “You’re just like them. I can’t believe I’ll have to marry you; this year my request is going to be that Internment drops out of the sky before that day comes.”
“Go on then,” he says. “The way things are going, it may come true.” He hardly seems wounded. He’s done what the doctor has advised him to do. Jumpers need their medication.
Lex told me to stay away from Amy. Was he right? Does she have something to do with what I just saw? Does Judas? I hid him in the lake. I saved him from arrest. Am I involved in whatever this is?
One story up, the door bursts open and footsteps are pounding. Alice has taken off her heels and she runs barefooted down the steps. “Come on,” she’s saying, in that urgent way she uses when Lex crashes to the ground overcome with sudden pain. “Come on, it’s going to be okay. Let’s get you kids upstairs.”
Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1) Page 14
