Perfect Ruin

29

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.”

“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.