Perfect Ruin

25

PEN RETURNS WITH COMPLAINTS THAT THE prince was trying to spy on her while she used the water room, but she’s otherwise unscathed.

“If that isn’t the silliest thing I’ve heard today,” the princess says, helping me to my feet. “If it were a boy in the water room, maybe he’d spy then.”

“Leste!” he cries.

“You’re more interested in my betrothed than I am,” she says. “His cheekbones—Honestly.” She takes the lantern from her brother and pushes me toward the door. For the first time, I’m able to see the stairwell that brought me here, but it’s all I’m able to see on the way to and from the water room, which isn’t even a fitting name because it has no running water and is little more than a hole in the ground.

But I’m still thinking about the prince being attracted to his sister’s betrothed. Could the decision makers have done something wrong? Is his own betrothed not appealing to him? Is he irrational? The prince isn’t the first to be attracted to his own gender; although it isn’t talked about, I remember my brother denouncing the serum and the surgery purported to treat this kind of attraction. Even before Alice’s forced termination procedure, there were elements of medicine that he despised.

“Oh, your wrists are so red,” the princess says as she’s guiding me back to my prison. “The twine will do that, I suppose.”

I say nothing. I can hear footfalls above me, and doors closing and opening. People going about their business, believing I’m dead because of tainted pharmaceuticals. Unaware of the king’s sour practices, the corruption in his reign, and the absurdity of his children.

All of it leaves an ache in my chest. I consider running. The princess doesn’t appear to be armed. But my hands are still tied, and I can’t leave Pen besides.

My only hope is that Judas saw us being taken. And even if he doesn’t care enough to pursue us himself, he’ll tell Basil. Basil will come for me. The alternative would be living the rest of his life alone. I would try to save him if it were the other way around.

Though I’d be sour that he left me while I was sleeping, without so much as a note of explanation, which is what I did to him.

I wasn’t thinking rationally when I left him. Looking back, it’s all a haze of grief that overtook me. It made the craziest ideas seem possible. It made logic as far away as a beige patch of the ground.

The princess stops us walking. She holds the lantern up between us, and she looks at me with the eyes of all the princesses and queens in the history book. Eyes as old as Judas the Hero and Micah’s boat of stars. She is ancient and profound, and she has Internment fascinated, copying her hair and her clothing in an attempt to understand.

She looks at me now the way the whole floating city looks at her—hoping for some sort of answer she’ll never have.

“You can tell me,” she whispers. “What does the machine look like? Smell like?”

“Smell?” I say.

“I want a full sensory experience,” she says. “I imagine it smells like freshly printed paper and old coins.”

It smells like mold, though old coins isn’t inaccurate. But I don’t tell her this.

“There is no machine,” I say.

“Last night when you were talking to your friend, you said ‘I wasn’t even supposed to come out.’ Why would you have said that if you hadn’t been hiding in the machine?”

“I was being general,” I say. “It wasn’t safe for me to be outside, and clearly we can both see why.”

She truly doesn’t understand. She spends her life hidden away in this tower with her private instructors and her plum uniform and her braided crown. Her mother and father are alive. I hate her for that. I hate her in a way no princess in a tower can ever understand.

“There is no machine,” I repeat. She can rot here.

The hope hasn’t left her face. I don’t know what it will take to kill it, but if I’m going to be trapped here, I’ll have time to think up ways.

The door opens and the prince says, “What is taking so long?” He’s still angry about his sister’s jab.

I slump back to the ground beside Pen, hoping our captors hear the rumble in our stomachs. We don’t touch the grapes.

If we refuse to eat, maybe it’ll make them nervous and they’ll consider letting us go so we don’t starve to death. Though, given their oblivion, it isn’t likely they’ll notice.

The clock begins its set of ten chimes. “We should just kill the blond one,” the prince says, perhaps thinking we won’t hear him over the noise.

“Don’t be a dolt,” the princess says. “She might know something, too.”

Pen leans closer to me. “If they’re going to kill me,” she whispers, “I wish they’d be quicker about it.”

“Don’t say that.”

The prince makes a gesture to his sister like slicing a throat, and though Pen’s tactic has been to appear unfazed, this is more than I can stand.

“There is a machine,” I say, just as the tenth chime is finishing.

The duo looks at me, stunned.

“I’ve seen it, that’s true. I’ve ridden in it. I’ve been to the ground and back.”

The prince is the first to break his hopeful gaze. He narrows his eyes. “Impossible.”

“More than once,” I say. “Lots of us have gone.”

“Half a dozen trips, at least,” Pen says, playing along. “I can’t believe it’s gone on under your noses and you never suspected a thing. I’d have thought you’d be more clever than that.”

“We’re clever,” the prince snaps.

“Very,” the princess agrees. “I knew the whole while, didn’t I, Az? I’ve said it plenty of times.”

“You can’t be the children of the king and be stupid, you know,” the prince says.

“Clearly,” Pen mutters through gritted teeth.

The prince and princess turn their backs to us in tandem, begin speaking quietly to each other, glancing back at us more than once.

“Where is it, then?” the princess finally asks. “The machine.”

“That is the question,” I say, looking right into her eyes. “Isn’t it?”

“We don’t disclose our secrets to kidnappers,” Pen says.

The princess opens her mouth, but a voice echoes down the stairwell. “Celeste? Azure? You aren’t playing down there, are you? You know what your mother said.”

The prince looks to his sister, panicked. “Our instructor can’t know we’re down here,” he says. “She can’t find them.” He points at us.

“We’ll go out the other way,” she assures him. “We’ll make like we were outside.” She points to me as she’s backing out of the room. “This isn’t over, you. I’ll have my answers if I have to crack your head open and take them out myself.”

She’s still pointing when she closes the door.

“She has a way with words,” Pen says, now that we’re alone. “A bit stupid, though. Does she not realize secrets aren’t actual things sitting in our heads?”

But I’m not thinking about the princess now. I’m thinking about that voice that called down the stairwell.

“That was the specialist,” I say. “The woman the prince called their instructor—that was Ms. Harlan.”

“Are you sure?” Pen says. “You’re probably dehydrated. Maybe you’re imagining things.”

“No,” I say. “You don’t forget the voice of the woman who poisoned you.”

“Yesterday you were just a sweet schoolgirl,” Pen says. “Now everyone wants you dead. I’m a little jealous of your intrigue.”

“They want you dead, too,” I remind her.

“You think?” She beams.

I see where the twine has made her skin raw, and despite her verve I know she’s as miserable as I am, and as frightened. It’s selfish of me, but I’m glad I’m not alone.

“Why did we tell them there’s a machine?” she says.

“They won’t kill us if they want our secrets. I was hoping to buy us some time.”

After a pause, she says, “Morgan?”

“Yes?”

“What are we waiting for? We can’t stay at the mercy of those two. They’re insane.”

“Basil will come for me,” I say. “Maybe Judas, too. He was hiding when we were taken. He must have seen.”

“No,” she says. “We’re on our own.”

“He’ll come,” I say, forcing myself to believe it.

“He won’t know where to find us. Morgan, look at me. Nobody is going to come. We are on our own.”

I want to argue, but I know she’s right. I think I’ve always known. Basil will try, and maybe Judas will try. But they won’t know to find us in this strange dungeon and they won’t be able to reach us. We have to free ourselves. “Then what do we do?”

“I say we knock them out,” Pen says. “Push them, maybe. Or I could get behind one of them and use this twine to strangle them.”

There are many ways this could go wrong, but is it any more dangerous than waiting? With dread, I accept that her plan makes more sense than mine.

“Nothing that violent,” I say. “We can’t just lunge blindly at them. We have to think it out. For starters, we have to make sure they don’t have any syringes or blades on them.”

“The prince might,” she admits. “He seems the paranoid sort. Then again, the princess likes to be in control of situations. She probably still has your knife.”

She sees my crestfallen expression and hooks her arms over my shoulders and brings her forehead to mine. “Let’s make a promise,” she says. “To be brave and go for it. We can plan it as best we can, and if it goes horribly wrong, we keep trying until we’re free or they stab us. Maybe even after they stab us.”

“If we can keep moving, we move,” I say.

“And not leave each other behind,” she says.

“I promise.”

“I promise, too.”

And in hushed voices we begin planning our mutiny.

It will have to be when they come to check on us next, likely tonight, we decide. We’ll ambush them and try to buy a few seconds so we can lock them in while we make our escape.

The princess mentioned a back entrance so that their instructor wouldn’t see them sneak outside. We’ll look for that first, and if we can’t find it, we’ll hope the main floor of the clock tower is empty after dark. There may be patrolmen; we’ll have to risk it. My brother and Judas made it seem as though many of the patrolmen are secretly opposing the king; it’s too much to hope that we’ll encounter some of them and they’ll let us go.

Pen continues trying to saw through the twine that binds her wrists. But even when she finds a bit of protruding brick to work with, it does no good. “Definitely good stuff for strangling,” she says. “I would say I could lure the prince over to me by flirting, but it doesn’t seem that would work, does it? Given his preference.”

“We can’t kill them,” I say.

“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.