Perfect Ruin

21

WHEN MY BROTHER JUMPED FROM THE edge of Internment, my father said it was because he had a lot of demons. But long before my brother was a jumper, when he and I were children, my father began collecting demons of his own.

As a patrolman, he fitted anklets on people who had turned irrational. He took part in the quiet dispatches of those who had committed crimes, their deaths later made to seem accidental. He was made to participate and even choreograph ugly things on the promise that these things would keep us all safe. And in the evening he would come home to his happy children and his loving wife and try to reconcile his role as one of the king’s elite.

Lex isn’t sure when our father began to tell my mother of the things that were happening behind the peoples’ backs, but my parents began to talk of changing things. There were other patrolmen and wives who felt the same way, and they began to meet in secret. At first they wondered whether they could persuade the king to change his methods. But this is a king who has ways of killing those who disrupt the order of his city. And the talk soon turned to rebellion. When they met Professor Finnian Leander, who taught technology courses at the university, he introduced the idea that they could leave Internment. Fly away on the wings of a metal bird.

Finnian Leander turned his blueprints and ideas into stories for his granddaughters—Amy and Daphne. “I could never take credit for their imaginations,” Professor Leander interrupts, smoothing his fingers over the face of his clock. “Their minds stretched farther than Internment long before my silly stories.”

“So Daphne became a part of it,” I say. I look to Lex. “What about you? When did Mom and Dad tell you all of this?”

“It was after I jumped,” he says. “At first Dad would whisper about it in the hospital, when he thought I was too far gone to hear him. My eyes were taped shut. He would apologize and say he should have realized the things I’d been seeing as a pharmacist. He should have told me everything sooner. He blamed himself.”

My brother speaks so coolly about it, as though he’s talking of people he’s never met, but I see the way his fingers are fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. This is all hard for him to say.

I finish for him, “And you became a part of it, too.”

He nods. “But I had suspected something like it for a long time,” he says. “I didn’t realize they’d actually built the bird, but I wasn’t surprised.”

He never got to see this place, I realize. Dad told him about it after the incident that blinded him.

“And that’s why they’re dead?” I say. “Because the king found out about it? And Daphne, and the university student?”

“Quince,” Amy says softly.

“Others, too,” Lex says. “There are plenty of deaths that nobody thinks twice about. The king can do away with anyone and make the cause appear to be anything he pleases.”

“Then why was Daphne’s death so public?” I say. I try not to think of the brutality of her demise. It was more than doing away with a nuisance—it was too violent and cruel to be anything but personal. Did the king do it himself, or did he have someone do the dirty work? Was it the prince, with his firm jaw and sparkling eyes?

“The king is trying to make a point now,” Professor Leander says. “He doesn’t know about the bird for certain, but he knows that there is unrest. He knows about the plans to leave the city. We have our suspicions about who may have betrayed our secret. It may have been done under duress. And now not only does the king want to stop us, but he wants to frighten everyone else into thinking that leaving the city is an act of evil. He wants them to think that we’re deranged and violent, so that they’ll fear us and seek his protection.”

Basil presses the back of his hand to my forehead and frowns. I lean into his touch before he draws his hand away. I’m glad he’s here, still by my side after all the trouble I’ve caused him.

“So all of you had this secret,” I say to Lex, an edge to my tone, “and nobody thought it’d be a good idea to tell me?”

“You weren’t burdened by it,” he says. “You didn’t carry the things that we did, and we didn’t want that for you.”

“So—what, you were all going to fly off Internment in a metal bird and just leave me home with a note saying that dinner was in the stove and you wouldn’t be coming back?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “There was no sense putting you at risk before anything was certain. We never would have left you behind.”

I think of the night my father came to my room after Daphne’s murder. You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is. That’s what he said. He must have come so close to telling me before he lost his nerve about it.

I realize I’m shaking. The metal walls are caving in, and all these eyes are on me and it’s getting hard to breathe.

“I need air,” I say.

“You can’t leave,” Alice says, sympathetic. “It isn’t safe for you. The king will have men looking for you.”

“Why?” I say. “None of this has anything to do with me. You all made sure of that.”

Lex laughs bitterly, and it takes all my strength not to hit him. “I guess that specialist saw something in you anyway,” he says. “There are extraordinary things in that head of yours. You don’t even realize the sorts of things you say.”

I try to recall the things I said to Ms. Harlan that might have made me stand out, but there’s nothing. I remember her accusatory stares and her suspicions, but I never betrayed a single thought. I lied each time she asked me about the ground.

I’ve been told I’m a terrible liar, though. There’s that.

Basil tries to put an arm around me, but I pull away. I rise to my feet. I wouldn’t know how to get out of this place even if I could, so when I hurry from the room, I go straight back to the tiny bunk. The green door closes behind me with a slam.

I hear Alice, as practical as ever, saying, “Let her be.”

I pull the blanket over my head and listen to the rush of blood in my ears. I have never been so aware of all my bones, and how heavy my limbs are, and how much effort it takes to breathe in and out.

A little bit of light peeks through the weave in the blanket, and it’s like the stars gleaming in a sky I might never see again.

The quiet here isn’t perfect. It’s filled with clinks and groans, as though I’ve been shrunk down and imprisoned in the engine of some machine. I suppose the truth isn’t far from that.

The doorknob turns eventually. A bit of light reaches me when a piece of the blanket is lifted just enough for Amy to stick her head under. “Hey,” she says.

I just stare at her.

“They told me to leave you alone.”

“And you thought this would be the best way to do that,” I say.

“Move over,” she says, and crawls under the blanket with me. The blanket between us is tented by our shoulders, and in the darkness her eyes are very round. I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl. When she grows older, she’ll be very nearly a perfect replica of her sister.

“You can’t be afraid,” she tells me. “You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it’s the fear that’ll freeze you in place.”

“They think you wandered to the edge accidentally,” I say. “But I think you knew what you were doing, especially when you go saying things like that.”

“Nobody knows what they’re doing at the edge,” she says. “You don’t know what you’ll find there; it’s just that you’ve had your fill of not knowing.”

“What was it like?” I say.

“Windy,” she says. “Theory is, the wind is what keeps you from going over the edge. You hear it roaring, and you can’t see anything but sky and bits of the ground through the clouds, and you think you could jump and then you’d be like the birds, sailing down and down until you land in one of those colorful patches. But when you jump, everything goes black, and when you wake up, you’re still here.”

This rivals the news of my parents’ deaths as the saddest thing I’ve heard today.

“There are a lot of dead bugs, too,” she says, her teeth showing as she smiles. She looks like a little girl for once.

“Bugs?” I say.

“Hundreds of them all around the edge, just thrown back onto the grass when they tried to fly off.”

She laughs and I laugh too. I don’t even know why. Maybe I’m in shock.

When we’re quiet again, she says, “I’m sorry your parents are dead.”

I say, “I’m sorry your sister is dead.”

“It won’t be for nothing,” she says. “I’m glad you survived. You’ll get to see what your parents and my sister were working for.”

“Even if we do make it to the ground,” I say, “who’s to say it’s any better? What if there’s another king no less corrupt than ours? Or what if the ground is just another city floating over an even bigger one, and so on?”

“Then at least we’ll be the wiser,” she says. “I’d rather be disappointed than oblivious.”

“Would you now?” I say.

Her smile is back. “But I bet the people down there will be fascinated by us. I bet they’ll feed us their delicacies and give us crowns and ask us all about our city.”

Her notions are as good as mine, I suppose.

“I’d much like for you to be right,” I say.