Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, Book 1)

by DeStefano, Lauren

  “What did you use?” Lex asks.

  “The shirtsleeve from my uniform.” Another piece of my life I’m grieving.

  Lex is still for a while, and I begin to wonder if I’ve done the wrong thing in tying the fabric around his wrist. Maybe I’ve forced my grief on him, and he doesn’t want to share it with me. He does seem adamant about moving on.

  But then he puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes me close.

  Neither of us have words for this loss. We expected to say good-bye to our parents the way our world dictates, years from now when we were prepared. But our world turned out not to be what was promised to us. There will be no ashes thrown to the tributary. There will be no festival of stars with our paper desires burning in the sky.

  Our parents are gone now. Our home, where we teased each other and squabbled as we grew, is out of reach. It is only Lex and me, escaping the city that wants us dead.

  I stare at the fabric that’s around my wrist. “I never properly thanked you for saving me after I was poisoned.”

  “No thanks necessary,” he says. “Just repay me by staying alive, if it isn’t too much to ask.”

  I’m about to tell him that he has a deal, but I don’t get the chance. The bird jolts sharply in one direction, then the other, and I careen into the wall with Lex still holding on to my shoulder. The lantern is swinging dangerously overhead. The next jolt extinguishes it.

  I do my best to stay close to the wall. “What’s happening?” I say.

  “Could be anything,” Lex says. He doesn’t sound at all worried, and I’m not sure whether he truly believes we’ll be all right, or he’s just content to die here if the alternative would be capture by the king.

  “Morgan!” Basil is shouting for me.

  “Stay wherever you are,” I call back. “It isn’t safe.”

  Beyond the doorway of the bunk room, there’s nothing but darkness and the sound of gears whining and hissing. All of the lanterns have blown out. Small metal plinking sounds make me fear the worst: that the bolts are coming undone and we’re being crushed.

  I prop my leg against the adjacent wall for traction, grateful these bunk rooms are so tiny. Why, with all of the planning that went into this bird, did no one fashion something for us to hold on to?

  Mercifully, the bird eventually goes still.

  Lex stirs in the darkness. “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “But the lanterns blew out.”

  “Don’t light them yet,” Lex says. “It might not be safe. We’re still moving.”

  He’s right. I can feel a pull. “We’re still spinning a bit, aren’t we?” I say. “And sinking.”

  “We must be in the swallows,” Lex says. “The bird hasn’t been crushed by the weight of the churning dirt yet.”

  “If you’re trying to make me feel better, I’d much prefer you stop,” I say.

  When the calm has gone on a while longer, I relight the lantern. I hear murmurs down the hall.

  “Basil?” I call. “Pen? Alice?”

  A dim glow forms in the bunk room across the hall. Alice.

  A sphere of light flickers up the stairwell as Basil and Pen find us. “I should go see if the professor needs help with the gears,” Basil says.

  “Be careful,” I say, raising my cheek to accept his kiss as he passes me.

  I turn my head in time to see Alice’s worried expression before she smiles at me.

  Pen’s hands are shaking as she smoothes her map against the wall and studies it. “I suppose I was wrong,” she says. Her voice is tight. “We’ve reached the swallows sooner than I thought.”

  “It’s almost over,” Amy says. I raise the lantern to better see her. Despite the weariness left over from her ordeal, her face is alight. “We’ll be in the sky in moments.”

  “Nobody knows how deep the swallows run,” Pen says. “It might just give us a boost before we hit more solid ground. It might still be a while.”

  “It won’t,” Amy says.

  “You don’t know that. No one knows that.”

  I note the hysteria in her voice. “Pen?”

  She chews on her trembling knuckle. There are tears in her eyes.

  “Everyone alive?” Judas calls from the bird’s head.

  “Barely,” Pen says.

  “Come on up if you all want to see something you’ll never forget,” he says.

  For as long as we may have left to live, anyway.

  Everyone on the bird gathers at the helm with the professor: my brother and Alice, Pen, Basil, Judas, Amy, and me.

  Pen is still shaking, though it’s nearly imperceptible, and with all the excitement no one else seems to notice. She has always had the cool head, and to see her coming undone makes me somewhat nauseous.

  Through the window at the helm, I can see the dirt churning furiously. There’s a story I read years ago; in it, a castle stood beside something called a waterfall. I wasn’t quite able to picture it then, but now I can see that the water must have been like this—restless.

  “What is this ‘something’ we’ll never forget?” I ask, holding up my lantern.

  “We’ve reached the bottom of the swallows,” the professor says, not turning away from his controls. He rubs at his chin, and I can hear the scrape of his white stubble. “We’ve hit some solid ground. I suspect we’re a hundred or so paces from the sky.”

  I don’t quite believe the words, and yet something within me must, because my palms are sweaty and there’s a chill at the back of my neck. Whether we’re to soar across the sky or sink through it like a rock, it’s only a matter of moments. I’m working my way through varying degrees of panic, and I want to yell for us to stop. I want to undo this journey and return home, even if it’s to an empty apartment. But I know that is only the fear and the grief talking.

  “No.” Pen has gone white beside me. “I don’t want to go,” she says.

  “There’s no turning back now,” the professor says.

  I try to touch her shoulder, but she pushes away, takes a step for the doorway. Even her curls are trembling. “Let me out of this thing. I don’t care what they do to me. I’ll go to trial for what I did to the prince. I could live the rest of my life as an irrational, I don’t care, so long as I can stay in the sky.”

  I set down the lantern and reach for her again, and this time I make fists around her hands. “Pen, listen—”

  “I can’t leave. And my mother, I—”

  I bring my forehead close to hers. “Pen, if we got out of this thing here, it wouldn’t be possible to dig our way back up to the surface. We would be buried in an instant.”

  I meant to console her, but my words cause me to feel trapped. No matter; Pen has always been my strength and this is my time to return the favor. “Here,” I say, and dab at her runny nose with my sleeve.

  “Thomas,” she says miserably. “He won’t even know what’s happened to me.”

  There’s nothing I can say to make this better. I’m not surprised that she’s letting it show how much she cares for him, after a lifetime of hiding it; there’s something about imminent death that makes all the threads weave into a picture like one of my mother’s samplers.

  “But we must be brave, remember?” I say.

  She nods, watching her tears fall onto her betrothal band.

  The next violent jolt has Basil at my side. He surprises me by putting an arm around Pen as well as me. He’s never been very familiar with her, but now we have our fear in common. We are all part of this floating city we’ll never see again. This city I love so much that I fear I’ll cease to exist once I’m off it.

  I steady the lantern between my feet to keep it from sliding. We stay huddled together as the bird struggles to burrow the rest of the way to the sky. We count the seconds until our little world is lost to us for good.

  “Have any visions about this?” Judas asks Amy over the incessant noise of the levers and the bird struggling its way through the last of the dirt.

>   “A dream,” Amy says. “And you don’t want to know.”

  “Don’t take stock in that,” I whisper to Pen, whose sobs have lost their sound. I do wish she’d be calm. I can’t bear to see her in such pain. I would hijack the helm and claw this bird up to the surface to take her home if I could.

  “It would be unwise to remain standing,” the professor says. Obligingly, we huddle on the floor.

  A pace away, Alice is holding Lex’s hands. He’s saying something into her ear while she stares worriedly at the windows. Poor Alice, still wearing a pretty dress, though its underarms and chest are darkened with sweat. Bone and bead earrings still hang from her ears. Dragged into this. All she wanted was a life with my brother. To go out sometimes. To have a child. To grow flowers in the apartment without Lex blindly clomping into them. To grow old in dodder housing, having lived a complete life. Instead she’s being forced out of her home.

  Now isn’t the time to be angry with my brother, but I suppose the anger I feel for him never goes away. I cover it with love and with patience, but it doesn’t undo what he’s taken from all of us.

  I’m angry with my parents, too. For not telling me. For dying.

  “Breathe,” Basil says, and I realize I’ve begun to hyperventilate.

  “Tell me again what you said earlier,” he says. “About the sleeping machine.”

  “Sleeping?” Pen whispers.

  “I said that we’re all inside this sleeping machine, and we’re waiting to see where it takes us when it wakes.”

  “Good,” Basil says. “You believed it, then. All you have to do is hold on to that belief a little longer. And then we’ll be in the sky.”

  “There aren’t maps of the sky,” Pen says. “We’re flying right off the page.” She looks as though she’ll be sick. But if she’s going to say anything more, she doesn’t get her chance. The bird tilts to one side and we all go sliding toward the wall. The lanterns go wild from the spill, and all but one are extinguished.

  I bite down on a mouthful of my shirt and scream into it. The professor’s cursing does nothing to console.

  “Keep that damned thing lit,” he tells Judas, who holds the dying lantern. “It’s all we’ve got.”

  But he’s wrong about that. In an instant all of the windows fill up with brightness.

  30

  Free will isn’t quite the same as freedom.

  —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

  I SEE NO BLUE SKY, AND NO CLOUDS. The brightness churns in a way not unlike the swallows.

  There’s a terrible grating sound, which I come to realize is the side of the bird scraping against the bottom of the city. The howling can only be the wind.

  The turbulence undoes a piece of metal in the ceiling, and it comes crashing to the floor with the spattering of bolts. Lex calls out for me.

  “I’m okay,” I say. I try to crawl toward him, but Basil tightens his hold on me.

  “Keep your head down,” he tells me.

  But that’s impossible with the temptations these windows hold; I keep trying to make out shapes in the brightness.

  “Is the bird strong enough to make it?” Judas asks, clinging to the professor’s chair, which is bolted in place.

  “This design is superior to the earlier models,” the professor says.

  “Earlier models?” I say. “You mean—you mean this isn’t the first time this has been attempted?”

  “Of course not! There have been half a dozen tries,” the professor says, shouting to be heard over the wind. “People have been attempting this for generations.”

  I don’t want to ask what came of those attempts. The answer is obvious anyway. The birds were destroyed, probably sent hurtling through the sky if they weren’t ripped apart by this wind. This is the wind that throws jumpers back. Escape is impossible from the surface; why should it be any more feasible from the bottom?

  Then the tumultuous bird calms. And I see what no other resident of Internment has ever seen: the bottom of the city.

  It’s jagged. From the outside I can now see a dome of wind that encapsulates the city, forcing clouds around and over and under it.

  The bird trembles, and through the windows of the helm I can see the wings burst open, and we break into a smooth glide.

  The professor punches down on a large brass button and there’s a sharp chemical smell. Judas told me the professor had been brewing his own fuel to keep us in the air. There was no promise it would work. We could be crashing to the ground right now, but we aren’t. The weight leaves my chest.

  I’m too stunned to move. Beside me, Pen’s sobs have ceased. There is nothing but the howl of air and the creaking of the gears and the popping of the metal.

  “What’s happening now?” Lex says, unaffected by the view. This snaps Alice out of her trance and she grabs his hands, brings them to her face.

  We are sinking into the sky. Our tiny city is getting smaller. Something within me is sinking, too.

  I wrap my arms around Basil because for the first time since all of this began, he looks truly pained. His parents and his brother are out of reach now. He could blame me, if he wants. I would understand. But no such words come from him now. He’s choosing me; no regrets.

  “It’s just like the maps have come alive,” Pen says, streaks of tears still on her face.

  Amy is the first among us who’s brave enough to stand. Basil is next, taking my hand and guiding me up from my shaky knees.

  The head of the bird is a sphere of windows. Light comes in from above and all around.

  Judas still clings to the lantern, and the look in his eyes is further away than Internment as it gets smaller behind us. He watches our city get left behind. A city that turned its back on him, took away the girl he loved.

  Pen slowly rises, holding on to my shirt hem like this is her first step.

  All my skin is covered in tiny bumps, and my blood has gone cold. The whirling clouds conceal Internment almost entirely. I can see the city for a moment at a time, but mostly it’s a white sphere. From the ground I suppose it wouldn’t seem much like a city at all. All they would see is the dirt that holds our city together. Maybe the people of the ground haven’t attempted to reach us because they don’t think such a place could be inhabited.

  We’ve all gone silent. The levers groan to a stop, no longer causing the claws to move as though digging through the dirt.

  Judas is first to snap out of our collective trance. He crouches in front of Amy and says, “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Really?”

  There’s a little laugh to her voice. “I promise. Just enjoy the view.”

  But a crash somewhere on the lower levels interrupts us. We look at one another, everyone in the bird accounted for.

  “Oh, the bloody—” the professor says. “Don’t tell me another chunk of the ceiling has come off.”

  The noise repeats itself, a loud thump like someone kicking a wall. A voice cries out for help, and at first I’m sure I’ve imagined it, but Judas reacts, moving toward the ladder.

  “Everyone stay here,” he says, but I follow him anyway, with Pen, Basil, and Amy at my heels.

  “Don’t,” Alice calls out, but she doesn’t come after me. She won’t leave Lex.

  We descend the ladder, and the daylight no longer reaches us. Judas uses the flame of his lantern to light another that used to hang from the ceiling.

  The kicking noise persists, and a scream, not of fear but seemingly of frustration.

  Pen and I look at each other.

  “That sounds like—”

  I shake my head. “It can’t be.”

  Judas tugs at the heavy door of a storage closet where spare clothes are kept. And, of all things, Princess Celeste is perched on the floor, having been prepared to kick at the door again.

  As if that weren’t strange enough, someone is slumped behind her in the darkness. I feel relieved to think that the prince survive
d Pen’s attack, but when Judas holds up the lantern, I see that the ruffled blond hair and sleeping face don’t belong to Prince Azure.

  “Thomas,” Pen gasps.

  He doesn’t move, and Pen balls her hands into fists. “What have you done to him, you bloody lunatic?” she cries. I hook my arm around her waist to keep her from lunging.

  “Yes, right,” the princess says. “I thought that might be your reaction.” She reaches into the collar of her dress and extracts something that’s wrapped in a cloth. Even before she has unwrapped it, I know it’s the knife I was carrying when she and her brother kidnapped me. She pulls Thomas’s limp body under her arm and holds the knife to his jugular. I can see the blue vein in his throat dangerously close to that blade. The bird is already so rocky, she might kill him even if she means only to bluff.

  Preemptively, I clasp my hand over Pen’s mouth. She screams in protest, but Thomas can’t afford any chances. The princess clearly hates Pen after what she did, and Pen is already so distraught from the journey that she could say something she’ll immediately regret.

  “I thought you might try to kick me out, even after we took to the sky,” the princess says. Her eyes are on Pen. “I planned to use the boy as leverage, but I believe I could return the favor and kill someone you love.”

  Pen bites my hand, hard, but I don’t let go.

  “What is it you want from us?” Judas says.

  “Shouldn’t it be obvious?” the princess says. “I want you to take me to the ground.”

  “Well, good news, then, because we couldn’t let you out even if we wanted to,” Judas says. “Opening a door right now would get us all killed at this altitude.”

  I pity her. She’s known for her poise, and here she is, undone. Her braided crown is frayed. Her eyes are desperate and vicious. She’s the most popular girl on Internment, but she’ll find little kindness among the lot of us. She looks at me. “Is that true?”

  Is it? I have no idea. “Yes,” I say. “Of course. Everyone knows that.”

  Princess Celeste has a steady hand on that knife, but the unpredictability of flight makes me nervous.