Perfect Ruin

16

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 siblings 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 knows 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.”

She has to tug Amy up from under the arms and nudge her before she begins to move.

By the time I’ve made it to my brother’s and Alice’s apartment, something is happening to me. My mind is beginning to remember details, like the boy’s eyes that were staring at the stars, not blinking as patrolmen stepped over him. The flash of medic lights animating his shadow.

My knees are shaking and I sit in a kitchen chair before I fall instead. Basil stands behind me, holding my shoulders.

Alice leans on the table before me, tilts my chin so that our eyes meet. “Did you see the body?” she asks.

I nod.

“Oh. Oh, Morgan.”

I’m not ready for sympathy. I’m not ready to understand what I just saw, but the images persist.

Down the hall, Lex is calling for Alice because he’s heard footsteps and voices, and he doesn’t like people in his home unannounced. He won’t leave the safety of his office while they’re here.

Amy raises her head at the sound of his voice, but she doesn’t speak. “Look at me,” the boy says. “Do you feel dizzy? Does it feel like a fit is coming on?”

He touches her forehead, and she slaps him away. “I’m not an irrational, Wesley.”

Lex is calling for me now. “Sister,” he’s saying, hissing the way he would when I was young and I’d made him angry. “Morgan, get over here.”

I rise to my feet, pretending the floor isn’t tilting. I move methodically until I’m down the hall, in the doorway to Lex’s office.

Alice follows me and turns on the light for once; it’s strange to see all of my brother’s shadowy things colored orange by the glow. He’s standing with his clock in his hands. For a moment I envy his blindness. I want to curl up in that darkness and have the city disappear around me. I want to be in a place where awful things are never seen and never known, and there’s only the whirr of the transcriber as the paper fills with fiction.

“What did you see?” he asks.

“A body,” I say. “Dripping wet, although we weren’t near the lake. Patrolmen were holding us back.”

“What did it look like?” he insists. Alice touches his arm to calm him down. I can’t understand why it should matter to him. If it’s someone he knows, it wouldn’t be by the sight of them.

“A university student in uniform. A boy,” I say. I remember the dark skin and the open eyes, and the name that Amy said in the stairwell. Quince. My voice is unsteady when I get to the end of the sentence.

Lex moves closer. I foolishly think he’s going to hug me, but instead he leans close and says, “Go downstairs. Pretend that none of this ever happened. Get into bed.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, Morgan. Dad will be hurrying home to check on you. You can’t let him know what you saw. You have to pretend you’ve been asleep.”

I look to Alice for reason, but she only gives me a sympathetic nod of assent.

“But Basil and the others,” I say.

“Take Basil with you. He’s been in your room doing homework. Neither of you have any idea what’s going on outside. I’ll take care of the others. Go. Don’t screw it up.”

He reaches for my hands, but hesitates and pushes me for the door instead.

In my bed, I close my eyes and try to be still while Basil pretends to study by the light of the lantern that swings over my desk. My bedroom has an overhead light, a luxury, as many of the less updated apartment buildings have electrical fixtures only in the main living areas. But I prefer the soft glow of the flame lantern anyway.

Basil turns a page.

“I keep seeing the body and then it becomes you, or Pen, or my family,” I say.

“I see it, too,” he says. “It could have been any of us.”

I open one eye and watch his shoulders move as he slouches over the textbook. Maybe he really is trying to study.

“Basil,” I say. “Internment isn’t very big. The person who did this could be anywhere. Could live in this building.”

“One person did this,” he says, “but there are dozens of patrolmen. The good outweighs the bad.” Still, he doesn’t sound so certain. He’s trying to be brave for my sake, but he’s scared too.

“Can you lie down with me for a little while?” I ask.

“Of course.”

I open the blanket to him, and when he gets beside me, I rest my head in the curve of his neck and I try to imagine a life without a betrothed. Try to imagine Judas breathing Daphne’s ashes as they’re released into the tributary.

Basil squeezes his arm around me.

“Do you really believe the good outweighs the bad?” I say.

“It has to.” He sees how little this consoles me, and he nudges my forehead with his chin. “I’ll always be here to make sure you’re safe.”

He’s strong; one of the most promising athletes in the academy. I’ve seen him lift weights half as heavy as I am, and he can climb a rope in record time. But what is all of that worth, really? Can it protect against something that steals you away and leaves your dead eyes gaping at the moon?

“I’ll always be here to make sure you’re safe, too,” I say. “Even if you are the one who’s stronger.”

“You’re strong,” he says. “Believe me about that.”

His fingers weave between mine, and if I were bolder, I’d bring his hand to my heart so that he could feel what he’s doing to it.

He kisses my temple and I feel his breath on my forehead and I nearly feel safe.

Nearly, though not nearly enough.

“Sometimes,” I say, “I want the world that was promised to us when we were small. Uncomplicated and nonviolent.”

He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t be happy with that.”

“I’m not happy with the way things are now,” I say. “I don’t want to be scared that every time I leave my apartment I’ll find a dead body or see a building catch fire.”

“I’m not certain what’s to become of the city,” he says. “But I know we’ll be able to face it.”

“I wish I had your courage,” I say.

“I’m drawing it from you,” he says. He bumps my shoulder. I don’t know how he’s able to make me feel better in the darkest moments.

“I have a thought,” I say. “The two of us running into the sky and disappearing.”

He closes his eyes to see it too.

Outside my bedroom, I hear my father’s patrolman shoes on the kitchen floor. The entire apartment shudders with the authority of them. Basil takes his place at my desk, and my body goes cold where he was holding me. My door creaks open and I close my eyes. As Lex promised, my father is here to check on me. And as promised, I pretend to be asleep. Basil kisses my forehead and whispers “Good night” before he leaves.

I stay very still as the university student dies a thousand deaths behind my eyelids.