Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1)

by DeStefano, Lauren

“What’s this from the girl who wanted to slit the king’s throat?” she says.

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly then,” I say.

  “And now the dehydration and lack of sleep have enlightened you?”

  “No,” I say, and the firmness of my tone makes her stop sawing at the twine and look at me.

  I hate the prince and princess—I hate the whole family more than I would have thought possible—but I don’t want to do to them what they’ve done to me. “I don’t want to be the reason anyone is dead, Pen, and I doubt you do, either.”

  She stares at me a moment longer before looking away, mouthing words I don’t catch.

  Then she says, “I make no promises,” but I know it’s her way of agreeing to my demand.

  She goes back to working at the twine, trying to loosen the knots around my wrists now. But it’s no use. Maybe the prince and princess have never had a hostage before, but they tie knots with precision, and the more we struggle, the tighter the restraints become. Pen finally gives up when I begin to bleed, and instead she helps me draw my knees to my chest, making me small enough to loop my arms under me until my hands are in my lap. For the first time I see the damage to my skin, swollen and red and oozing. Probably infected. Basil would be angry to see what they’ve done to me. Angry like when he found out about Ms. Harlan prodding into my head.

  He’s so careful with me, always.

  When I return to him, he’ll pull me into his arms. Sweep me up. I’ll close my eyes.

  I feel his chest against mine. Feel his breath on my neck. My skin swells with little bumps. And then the memory of him is gone. I said that I wouldn’t kill them, but I know that I would. To return to him, I would.

  By the seventh chime in the evening, Pen and I make the difficult decision to blow out the candle. We’ll hide on opposite sides of the door and we’ll use the darkness to ambush the prince and princess when they bring us a new candle.

  Pen stands by the flickering light, staring into the flame before smiling at me. “One last look before it’s lights-out,” she says. “If this goes wrong, we’ll never get a good look at each other again.”

  I narrow my eyes. “You always know what to say.”

  She winks.

  I’m standing by the door, arms out to help guide her back to me in the blackness.

  “You really are a beautiful girl,” she tells me. “I never tell you that. I’m always fussing about your hair and things. But you are.”

  I feel the blush burning across my cheeks. “You too,” I say.

  She takes a deep breath, exhales, and we’re in the dark.

  We settle on opposite sides of the door, and I press my back to the wall. My heart is pounding and I feel myself shuddering with it. This isn’t real darkness. This is unnatural, devoid of clean air and stars. The moon wouldn’t be able to find us here.

  We don’t talk for the longest time, listening, waiting, knowing it could be hours before it’s time to strike. The clock strikes eight. Then later, nine.

  I hear a strange rustling sound, like stone grinding against stone. It startles me before I realize the sound is coming from Pen, not the stairwell. “What are you doing?” I whisper.

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought I heard—”

  “Shh!” she says.

  There’s a noise from the other side of the door. Whispers. A little laugh. Faint gold threads of light appear through the wooden door. I hear the locks being unlatched, and just as Pen and I planned, I scoot away from the door so that I’ll still be in the shadows when the prince and princess step inside. The plan is to startle them and try to knock them down, then rush outside and lock them in. I’ve gone over and over it for what has surely been hours, hoping it will be as easy as it seems in my head.

  The door creaks open, and Princess Celeste and Prince Azure cease their whispering when they realize we aren’t on the floor where they left us. The prince holds the candle up, and he doesn’t see that Pen is behind him. The princess does, though, and she draws a breath to speak, and I know it’s time. I spring forward and hook my arms around her, pin her against me.

  She struggles wildly, but the twine that binds my wrists is keeping her in place. “No.” Her voice is desperate. “Please, no.”

  I’m not going to hurt her. I’m just about to tell her that, when I realize she isn’t paying me any mind—the words are for Pen, whose eyes are dangerous in the candlelight. She’s got something in her hands and she’s raising it above the prince’s head, and now I understand what that noise was. She discovered that a rather large stone had come loose in the wall.

  “Don’t!” Princess Celeste and I cry out at the same time.

  We’re silenced by the sound of the stone colliding with Prince Azure’s skull.

  He crumples, and the candle flies from his hand.

  His sister explodes into a scream, and both of our bodies shake with it. Panicked, I let her go and she drops to his side. “Azure!” she’s saying. “Az!”

  In the next instant her lacy sleeves are red with his blood. He doesn’t move. She lowers her ear to his chest, and her long, long hair wraps over her brother’s still form like a shield. Her braided crown holds firm, as if to insist that she is something great, even on the floor, even like this.

  The candle rolls along the stones, and just as Pen is reaching for it, it goes out, leaving us in darkness.

  26

  Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don’t question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  PEN PUSHES ME THROUGH THE DOOR. I CAN’T see a thing, and I rush to keep up with her. We pick a direction that I think will take us toward the water room, and we run.

  The princess is screaming and screaming. The stairwell is alive with footsteps. We stop and spin around to see the candlelight coming toward us.

  We crouch behind a crumbling slab of wall, likely the remains of an old prison cell, and force ourselves to quiet our gasping. My lungs burn. My heart is racing. I’m furious. As Pen presses herself against me, I’m remembering what she said.

  I make no promises.

  How could you?

  From where we’re perched, I can see the patrolmen rushing to the prince’s aide. I think it’s too late for him. The princess is sobbing that he needs a medic. Moments before she opened the door, she and her brother had been giggling.

  One of the patrolmen leads her to the doorway and grabs her shoulders, trying to get something coherent out of her. “Who did this?” he asks several times before she seems to hear him.

  Her arms are folded and she’s staring at Prince Azure when she swallows and says, “Men. They—they stole us from our beds and dragged us down here.”

  “Men? What did they look like?”

  “It doesn’t matter; they’ve gone.” She pushes his hands from her shoulders. “The heir to the throne is going to bleed to death if you don’t help him. Do you want that to happen on your watch?”

  Murmurs and footsteps. Some of the patrolmen rush upstairs; there are too many of them to count, and my stomach is sick when I realize that Pen planned it this way. A scream from Princess Celeste would summon every patrolman on duty. All we need to do is wait them out.

  Medics hurry down from upstairs, carrying a cushioned board for the prince’s body. And there’s someone else, too. King Furlow himself, his thin white hair disheveled, his white robe open, revealing his doughy stomach. To see him in such a state is to see Internment for the soil. He is as ordinary as the rest of us. No greatness to him at all.

  And I know Judas was right—I wouldn’t have been able to kill him.

  This is the man who had my parents murdered. But I take no satisfaction from the pain on his face when he sees his son, sees the blood all over his daughter’s white clothes as she chews her lip and trembles.

 
; “Papa,” she croaks. “Make them help him.”

  “They are, love, they are.”

  Shadows move in the candlelight. Medics are carrying the prince up the stairs on the cushioned board. I can’t tell whether he’s breathing. All I see is that much of the cushion has gone red with blood, drops of it falling out of reach from the light.

  Pen is trembling beside me. “Morgan?”

  My wrists are burning from where the princess’s struggle dug the twine into my wounds.

  “Shh.”

  It seems the entire tower has gathered here. Except for the queen. There have been rumors that she has taken ill; looking back it does seem strange that she wasn’t in any of the broadcasts.

  Maybe the king poisoned her too, I think bitterly.

  But he puts his arm around his daughter to console her, and it’s an echo of my father comforting me when we stood over Lex’s hospital bed, not knowing if he’d pull through.

  King Furlow and Princess Celeste follow the medics up the stairs. Patrolmen escort them on all sides. As they go, they take the candlelight with them.

  The clock strikes ten, drowning out the sounds they make. But I can still hear Princess Celeste’s sobs; I suspect I’ll hear them for a very long time in my dreams.

  Pen and I stay huddled in the dark after the last chime.

  “We won’t have long,” I whisper when I’m sure it’s safe. “Let’s try to find a way out.”

  “We shouldn’t take the stairs,” Pen says. I can tell by her voice that she’s fighting for calm. I don’t know how long she was planning to attack the prince, but she’s seen it played out and she’s seen the damage she caused, and it’s ugly.

  I’m the first to stand and begin walking. She clings to my shirt hem.

  “Morgan?” she whispers. “You understand that I had to, don’t you?”

  “Just hope he isn’t dead,” is all I say.

  “She didn’t tell on us. She could have. Why didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.” My arms are out in front of me, and I’m feeling along the grimy bricks, hoping for an out. My eyes are trying to adjust to the darkness, but there’s nothing.

  And then, suddenly, there is. A glimmer of moonlight breaking through a wooden door.

  I fumble for the doorknob, and it turns, but the door doesn’t budge. Pen helps me undo the series of locks. It’s taking so long, I feel we’re in a dream where air has been replaced by sweetgold.

  I pull the knob again, and the door opens with a creak that I’m sure will summon the patrolmen. But no, they don’t come. They’ll be busy with all that blood.

  If Prince Azure is dead, will his father tell Internment it was Judas Hensley? Say it was another act of treason?

  Moonlight, so familiar and beautiful when we make it outside that my chest aches at the sight of it. It’s trapped in a shimmering triangle on the ground. We’re standing before the plum court; it’s made of glass, its lines and circles waiting for players to come and follow their rules. Pen and I run across the court, which is scuffed from the prince and princess’s last game. We’re trying to get momentum though our wrists are bound, and no one is there to stop us. Pen’s plan is almost perfect. Almost.

  I push through a row of shrubs, scratching my arms, legs, and face as I do. Pen winces at the sound of fabric tearing. When I look at her, I see the lace from her dress collar is now dangling in the shrub. She tries to free it, but it won’t come loose, and she has to leave it behind.

  The clock tower is located in a wooded area, not far from where Sections One and Two meet. I know exactly where we are. My apartment is to the left in Section One, Basil’s to the right in Section Two. I allow myself a moment to stare at my building several paces away, partially hidden by its neighbors. Lights are still on in some of the apartments. It isn’t too late for people to be awake, but the streets are empty. Probably from fear that murderers are running rampant. The patrolmen surrounding the clock tower are occupied, but there will be plenty more in the city, and it probably won’t take long for word to spread that the prince has been attacked. We have to move quickly. We have to be invisible.

  Down alleyways and through the woods, we move. It’s only when we reach the charred flower shop that Pen asks, “Why are we here?”

  “It’s where the machine is kept,” I say, doing nothing to hide the bitterness in my voice. If she hadn’t hurt the prince, possibly killed him, here is where I would tell her to go home to her parents, to Thomas. But her ring catches a bit of starlight and I know she’ll never see her betrothed again. After what she’s done, she can never be safe in this city. She’d be declared irrational if she weren’t dispatched for her crime. I have to take her with me, and hope the metal bird really will fly us to the ground.

  She’s quiet and contrite, because she knows it too.

  I pry back the familiar board, granting a small passageway in through the window. Without full range of motion from my arms, I tumble forward, landing hard on my shoulder. The pain hardly registers. I catch Pen as she tumbles in on top of me.

  Even after several days, the burnt smell lingers in this place, and memories of the day at the theater rush back to me. In my nightmares, I couldn’t have imagined that the fire would destroy as much as it did. I couldn’t have imagined this feeling I get now knowing I can never go back.

  When I was little, my brother drew an image for me on the train ride home from the academy. It was a map of Internment. Only, instead of the real city, he’d drawn a castle for the clock tower. And the buildings were all different somehow. Mysterious. And right at the edge he drew a ladder that went down and disappeared into the clouds. It was the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen, and getting ready for my bath that night, I discovered that the map had fallen from a hole in my skirt pocket. I wanted to go out and look for it, but my mother told me the sweepers had already come. The paper would be collected with all the other forgotten-about things and it would be compressed and recycled into something new.

  I looked for it the next day, anyway, to no avail. I couldn’t believe such a wonderful thing could be destroyed so simply. I learned that it could. Anything could be destroyed.

  “There’s a machine in here?” Pen asks.

  “Under here.” I’m on my hands and knees now, struggling to crawl, until I find the door that will take us underground.

  This poses a new problem. There are several locks on the other side of it, and even if I manage to break through them, I’ll be faced with the pulleys and ropes of the lift; there’s no way I’ll be able to operate them while my wrists are bound.

  “We have to find something to cut the twine,” I say.

  “I can’t see anything,” Pen says. “There must be scissors, though.”

  We begin fumbling through what’s left of drawers and cabinets. “Careful,” I remind Pen. But I say this a moment too late, because there’s a creaking sound as one of the cabinets gives way and crashes to the ground. Glass and metal fall around our feet.

  “Sorry!” she says. “But there’s probably a glass shard we can use now.”

  Carefully, I crouch among the debris looking for something sharp, and I hear Pen rustling about beside me for a few moments before she stops. “Listen,” she says. “Did you hear that?”

  I stop fumbling and then I hear it, too. There are faint whining and creaking noises coming from beneath the floorboards. Someone is using the lift.

  Hurriedly I crawl for the door, scraping my knee as I do. I see light through cracks in the floorboards, and my heart is on my tongue.

  The noise stops, and next I hear the pound of shoes on the metal ladder. A voice says, “Who’s there?”

  “Judas?” I say.

  Latches being hastily unlocked. The door is pushed open, granting a square of candlelight to come through the floor. Judas sets the lantern on the ground before starting to hoist himself up. But Basil pushes past him—he’s heard my voice and now he can’t move fast enough—and in a beat I’m in his arms.

/>   I want to hold on to him like he’s holding me, but I can’t, and so I bury my face in his neck and I press my lips there. I don’t belong on Internment itself anymore, but I’ll always belong with him.

  “I see you’ve brought your friend.” Judas’s voice is dry.

  Pen stares aside into the darkness. I know she’s thinking about what she’s done, about the boy soaked in blood in the clock tower.

  “I had no choice,” I say, reluctantly drawing back when Basil notices my bound wrists. He tries to free them, but stops when I cringe.

  “We were coming for you,” he says. “We tried last night, and there were too many patrolmen. We had to come up with a plan.”

  “We were going to start a fire this time,” Judas says, sounding proud. “I figured it couldn’t hurt our reputation. Everyone already thinks we started this one.”

  Violence is the only way to achieve freedom, it seems. I wouldn’t have thought so before all of this. My escape plan was a more peaceful one, but I know now that it wouldn’t have been successful.

  Judas draws a knife from a makeshift sheath at his hip and saws through our restraints. It isn’t as much of a relief as I’d hoped for. The pain is still there, tightening around the bones like bloody phantom ropes.

  “So you’re the fugitive,” Pen says, grinning.

  “Look at that,” Judas says. “We’ve just met and already we have something in common.”

  During the rickety ride down in the lift, I press my body against Basil’s. I pretend that we’re in a shuttle on the way to the academy, not sinking down into a place where the stars won’t find us.

  Pen gasps when she sees a side of the metal bird emerging in the lantern light. “It’s really here,” she says.

  “What people have been dying for,” Judas says, easing up a fistful of rope.

  “Is everyone angry with me?” I ask Basil.

  “Yes, very,” he says. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking.”

  “I wanted to say good-bye to Pen, and to see the stars, and possibly murder the king.”

  Judas snickers.

  Basil kisses my hair, which has gone lank and stringy from my time as a prisoner. I look at him and quietly say, “I wanted to go home.”