Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1)

by DeStefano, Lauren

  I think of what my mother said that one afternoon about dreaming of living among the roots of a giant tree. That may have been her way of trying to tell me about this place; but she stopped herself, because she thought ignorance would keep me safe.

  I become distantly aware of my own grief, and I realize how easily I’m able to force it away. It will come back, to be sure, but for now I’m in control, and when Judas leads me to a ladder, I climb up after him.

  “Didn’t you have a dream like this?” Pen says, climbing the rungs beneath me.

  “Yes, but we were side by side,” I say.

  “Still. How eerie.”

  Judas grabs my hand and helps me onto the upper level. Then he stoops down to help Pen, but she ignores him, preferring to stumble on all fours before coming upright. “Did you know our Morgan is something of a clairvoyant?” she says.

  Judas is looking at me when he says, “She’s something.”

  How unusual for me to smile at such an innocuous thing. Basil climbs up beside me, bringing me back to my senses. I stoop to gather the lantern Judas set on the floor.

  We find Professor Leander in the control room, sitting before a wall of windows, each different in size and shape. He must have been hoarding pieces for decades in order for this bird to exist as it does.

  There’s an alcove off to one side, surrounded entirely by dirt-darkened windows, containing levers that seem to move on their own without needing any human force.

  “Do those control the claws?” Basil asks.

  “Sure do,” Judas says.

  Amy is hanging over her grandfather’s chair, pointing to the levers and asking questions, but she spins around when she hears our approach. “I knew you’d be back,” she says cheerily. “The others said you were dead.”

  “Nobody said that,” Judas says.

  “You did.”

  He scratches the back of his neck. I decide to forgive him. If he thought I was dead after my capture, it was with good reason. All his friends who have crossed the king are either in this bird or dead. I heard Alice and Lex murmuring that if the other jumpers haven’t found their way to the bird by now, it’s time to leave them behind.

  “We’re quite alive,” Pen says. “What can we do to help?” Her voice is bright, though she exudes weariness. Well after midnight, I heard her enter Basil’s and my bunk room. I guess her loneliness made sleeping on a cushion on our floor more appealing than the couch in the common room.

  “There is a gear that’s giving me trouble,” Professor Leander says. “Sticking. There’s some grease in a yellow can.”

  “I’ll go,” I say. “Where is it, exactly?”

  “I’ll show you,” Amy says. As she brushes past me, she grabs my hand, and the gesture is so nonchalant that I wonder if she’s aware of it. It makes me feel honored. Trusted.

  Behind us, Professor Leander has already begun assigning tasks to the others.

  “You must tell me all about the clock tower,” Amy whispers when we get to the ladder. “I’m infinitely jealous that you met the princess.”

  I blink. “Are you an admirer?” Princess Celeste is a popular role model for the girls of this city, but Amy doesn’t seem the sort to buy into that, especially with the king’s role in Daphne’s death.

  “I just wonder what it’s like to be her, is all.” Her eyes are wide. “My sister told me that the princess shoots deer for fun and nobody is bold enough to stop her.”

  “She collects antlers and mounts them to her wall,” I say, beginning to climb down.

  “Ghastly,” Amy says. I can hear her grin. She reminds me a bit of Pen when we were younger—fascinated with the macabre, excited at any small scrap of adventure to be found. I wonder if Daphne was the same way. I’m sorry we never spoke, though surely we passed each other nearly every day at the academy. She wasn’t among the faces to judge and shun me after Lex’s incident. With a sister that had done the same thing, maybe she even sympathized. I have a feeling we could have been friends.

  The bird lurches to the left with a chorus of metal whines. Amy loses her grip and topples backward. We’re close enough to the bottom now that I can catch her as I set one foot on the floor. Miraculously, I don’t drop the lantern. But she’s dead weight when she hits me. The bird goes still, and I realize that she’s quaking in my arms. Her eyes are all white, lashes aflutter, limbs and torso shuddering as though some creature is trying to burst out of her.

  Alarmed, I lay her on the floorboards.

  “Judas,” I cry. My voice is shrill. “Judas!”

  In a blur, he’s leapt to the bottom of the ladder and is crouching at her side.

  “She just—I caught her when she fell, and …”

  “It’s okay,” Judas says. “It wasn’t anything you did. Stand back.”

  He looks up to where Pen and Basil are perched at the top of the ladder. “Tell the professor to stop tinkering with the bird. She’s going to need stillness until she comes out of it.” His voice is calm, but his eyes are sharp with worry.

  “I’ll get Lex,” I say. “He can help.”

  “No,” he says. “It’ll run its course.”

  This is how the edge ruined her. Her arms thrash. Her ankles pound at the floor. A low, hiccupping cry comes out of her.

  I just want it to stop. I’d do anything to make it stop.

  I think of the yellow pill her betrothed forced down her throat after we found the murdered university student. “Doesn’t she have a pharmacy bag?” I say. “Something.”

  “Doubt she brought it here,” he says. “A lot of good those things will do, anyway.”

  “This—this happens often?” I say.

  “Now and again.”

  Mercifully, she goes still. For a moment I wonder if she’s dead, but then I hear her moan. Judas sighs with relief. “We should get her to bed.”

  “Maybe Morgan and I should clean her up first,” Pen says. I don’t realize she’s even descended the ladder until she’s beside me. She nods to the stain that’s formed on the skirt of Amy’s uniform.

  Judas looks away, cheeks flushed. “I’ll go find something else for her to wear.”

  “A bucket of water and some cloths would be ideal, too,” Pen says. “And don’t let anyone come in here until we’re done. The poor girl’s having a bad enough day as it is without becoming a scene.”

  I stroke Amy’s forehead, which is flushed and warm. She leans into my touch, helpless and utterly at my mercy. I’m ashamed of myself for having envied her, for thinking she was able to brave the edge without consequence.

  “Oh, stop looking so serious,” Pen says. “Really, I’ve cleaned my share of messes, and I’ve seen some worse things, let me tell you.”

  She’s trying to make me feel better, and I’m grateful. It makes the task more bearable.

  By the time we’ve finished dabbing Amy with warm soapy cloths and gotten her into an oversize shirt, she’s beginning to stir. She mumbles something about the smell of burning hair.

  “There are no fires,” I assure her.

  She opens her eyes, as vacant as a doll’s, and stares at me. “You’re not her,” she says. Then she’s gone again.

  “You stay with her,” Pen says, gathering the wadded uniform. “I’ll go wash these.”

  I’m not sure what else to do, so I hold Amy’s head in my lap and run my fingers through her hair. I can’t be certain where this delirium has taken her, but maybe she can sense that someone is caring for her, the way that I could after I’d been poisoned.

  “Soon,” I tell her, “after you’ve awoken, this bird will fly us away. The people of the ground will throw us a party bigger than Internment itself. Everyone will love us. It’s going to be wonderful.”

  A strange thing, words. Once they’re said, it’s hard to imagine they’re untrue.

  The bird is moving unsteadily through the dirt. Judas argued with the professor that Amy needed to recover, and the professor told him that his grandchildren weren’t made of glas
s, and anyway we didn’t have the time to waste. He added, “Coddling the living sister won’t bring back the dead sister,” which I thought was especially harsh.

  Now Judas and I are standing in the doorway to Amy’s bunk room. It’s been more than an hour since her episode, and Judas looks as exhausted as if he’d been the one experiencing it.

  “Poor kid,” he says. “All she’s got now is me.”

  “What about her parents?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “They would have had her and Daphne both declared irrational if they’d known about the bird. They wanted perfect daughters and nothing to do with scandal.”

  It’s happened before that parents have had their children declared irrational. The sentence can usually be dropped after the child has agreed to give up the rebellious behavior, such as falling in love with someone else’s betrothed or admitting attraction to the same sex. I’ve heard of it happening, but I still have trouble believing it’s done.

  “I can’t imagine my parents ever declaring me irrational,” I say. “Even after Lex jumped, they would never have done that to either of us.”

  “Lucky you, then,” Judas says.

  He sees the hurt in my eyes and adds, “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

  Now, after more than an hour of still sleep, Amy’s limbs begin to move under the blanket. When she opens her eyes, they’re glassy and gray.

  “Hey,” Judas says, back to her side in an instant. “Hey, you. Welcome back.”

  She rolls her head to the side, realizes that I’m watching her, and groans with embarrassment.

  “The turbulence got you,” Judas says. “We said it might. Remember that?”

  His soothing tone is for her, though he seems to be more in need of comforting than she does. She’s the only thing like family he has left.

  “I was listening for Daphne,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “Listening for her ghost. But they cut her throat. They took her voice away.”

  Her eyes fill with tears, and Judas is quick to dab at them with his sleeve. “No they haven’t,” he says. “I hear her all the time.”

  “You do?” she says.

  “Of course I do, silly girl. She’s in this bird. She’s holding all of the bolts in place and she’s begging for us to sail across the sky.”

  Amy squeezes her eyes shut, closing herself away from us living things.

  “Those are only echoes,” she says. “People die, and everything they’ve ever said just echoes around and around. There’s nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.”

  I fear she’s right.

  29

  … or a not-so-glorious dream …

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  I PACE ABOUT THE BIRD FOR A LONG WHILE, pressing my hands to the wall when it lurches. I’ve seen what the edge did to my brother, and I’ve just seen what it did to a little girl. Whatever it is that keeps us here, whether it’s a god or a ghost or something atmospheric, it doesn’t discriminate. What will it do to a metal bird that tries to leave? Will the bolts come loose? Will the floors splinter while the walls crumple in on us?

  “How certain are you that we won’t die?” I ask.

  Professor Leander is inspecting the window at his control panel; there’s nothing to see but dirt on the other side. “Remarkable stuff, this sort of glass. Nearly unbreakable. Several decades ago, long before our times, they tried to build a dome around this city. Thought it would discourage the jumpers. And this beautiful glass was made to withstand the wind pressure. To test it, pieces were flung from the edge, and they shot back into the city, unscratched.”

  I heard about this, not in my history book, but from my father when I asked why more wasn’t being done to deter jumpers.

  “But despite all the clever engineering of the dome and this glass, the sun’s glare through it would have caused us to burst into flame.”

  “How did you come across it?” I ask. “The glass.”

  “It was buried by my great-grandfather, one of the dome’s engineers. He willed the map of the burial site to my father, and my father to me. Now, after generations, it’s finally time to put it to use. So I can’t assure you, child, that we won’t die, but I can assure you that this bird has been building for longer than you or I have been alive. The time has come and there’s to be no backing down.”

  This does little to reassure me. I feel that familiar wave of claustrophobia coming up in my stomach, and I force it down.

  “When?” I ask.

  “Maybe this evening,” he says. “Or tomorrow. We’ve already moved several hundred paces from the flower shop. I expect that soon we’ll have reached the swallows.”

  My heart is in my ears. “The swallows?” I say. “Why would we want to be there?”

  “The pressure of the sinking dirt will be enough force to get us to the bottom of the city. We’ll be thrust into the sky. Think of it as a birth.”

  “What if we’re crushed?” I gasp. “What if we cause a gap in the bottom of the city and all the dirt leaks out to the sky, and—”

  The professor is chuckling. “What if we stay here?” he says. I assume he’s being rhetorical, but he spins his chair around to face me and waits for an answer.

  “We’d run out of food,” I say, feeling as scrutinized as when I’m caught daydreaming during one of Instructor Newlan’s lessons. “And now that we’ve moved, we would have difficulty tapping another water supply.”

  “And without food and water, we would …” He holds his arm out toward me, a line on a page waiting for a sentence.

  “Die,” I say.

  “We would die,” he agrees, turning back to his controls. “That is a fact. So we can face a certain death, or I can try to make this girl fly.”

  Well, it’s hard to argue with that.

  “How is my granddaughter?” he asks. “I haven’t had time to check in on her. I hear she had a fit.”

  “She’s resting,” I say. “But she’s better. She was talking for a bit earlier.”

  He nods. “My granddaughters are always strong,” he says, and then he begins muttering to his controls. I take that as my cue to leave.

  The lantern casts a dim glow on the metal hallway; there are windows in the ceiling, but they’re dark because of the earth on the other side of them. This tiny upper platform has been deemed the Nucleus: bird’s head, Judas told me. I like it here. The voices of the others are small and tinny, and it seems like a great place to think, if only my thoughts didn’t all turn a dark corner right now.

  I find Pen and Basil in the kitchen, huddled over a rumpled piece of paper.

  Basil looks up, forehead creasing when he sees my troubled face. “Amy’s not doing any better?”

  “It isn’t that,” I say, shaking my head. I don’t want to tell him about my fear of being crushed. “Never mind. It’s been a long day. What are you doing?”

  “Mapmaking,” Pen says. “We’re trying to guess where the bird is now. If we’re going around the lake and not under it, of course, then we’ve probably passed under our apartments by now.”

  She’s working with a pen stone that’s been crudely sharpened, and her hands are ashy. Normally the pen stone would be cut and rolled into a wooden pencil, but down here she’s had to make due with raw materials. It’s easy enough to find pen stone in the dirt. The old piece of paper, she must have found lying around.

  Basil pulls out a chair for me and I sit between them. Even though it’s a rough sketch, Pen has a talented hand. The lines are clean and carefully scaled, and the shaded squares of buildings are evenly spaced apart. For the lake, she even doodled some trout with Xs for eyes.

  “So we started here,” she says, tracing her finger around the square labeled flower shop. “And if we’ve been moving toward the swallows, that’s west, which puts us about here, or maybe not quite that far yet.” She points to the academy. The map doesn’t say anything for the students inside it, learning in our absence.

 
; “You knew about the swallows?” I say.

  “I asked what his plan was,” she answers. “I like to know where I am and where I’m going at all times.”

  “Does anyone else know you’ve been working on this?” I say. “It would be a big help to the professor, I’m sure.”

  She smiles at the page. “You think?”

  “It’s quite good,” Basil agrees.

  She wrinkles her nose. “I just wish I had some proper colors,” she says. “Do you think they have decent coloring materials on the ground? They must, right?”

  “Of course,” I say. “The people who run the scopes have reported that the buildings down there are all sorts of colors. They must like to decorate the way that we do.”

  Pen seems satisfied with this. She blows on the tip of her pen stone and draws the princess falling from the clock tower.

  Tentatively, I peer into my brother’s bunk room.

  Alice has gone to the helm to try to help with the efforts, and Lex is sitting alone on the mattress, his fingers tracing the raised letters on a roll of paper from his transcriber.

  His lips stop moving when he hears me.

  “Are you through being angry with me?” I ask.

  “Are you through making foolish decisions that could get you killed?” he says.

  “We’re in a metal bird that’s set to be hurtling toward the ground soon.” There’s a laugh in my voice. “What could be more foolish than that?”

  He makes a small tear in the page to mark his place, and then he rolls the paper and sets it down.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you when I snuck off, Lex, truly.”

  He grunts, but the raised corner of his mouth is more of a smile than he gives me on good days.

  “I’ve brought you something,” I say. I sit next to him and begin tying the scrap of white cloth around his wrist. “I’m wearing one, too,” I say as I finish the knot.

  He runs his fingers over the frayed edges of the fabric. “For Mom and Dad, then,” he says.

  Traditionally, family members and exceptionally close friends would cut a strip of fabric from the deceased’s clothing and wear it in remembrance. “I know we’re supposed to make these after the ashes have been thrown to the tributary,” I say, “but we aren’t going to have that.”