Perfect Ruin

3

WE EAT DINNER IN SILENCE, MY MOTHER and I. My father is out investigating the incident and going door-to-door making sure everyone is home and accounted for.

The word keeps replaying in my head: “murder.” It’s a dusty, cobwebbed word; there hasn’t been cause to use it on Internment in my lifetime. It’s something I’ve only read about in novels. It’s something that happens on the ground, where there are so many people and most of them are strangers to one another, where there are many places to stray and conspire, where people so often go bad. At least that’s what I imagine it’s like; nobody knows for sure what the ground is like. Not even King Furlow.

We have engineers who study the ground from afar and educate themselves on ways to further our own technology. Internment has evolved drastically in the last several hundred years; we’ve learned to set underground wires and indoor plumbing for our sinks and water rooms. The city’s electricity is generated by the glasslands, which is a series of panels and globes that gather the sun’s energy and store it so that it can be converted into electricity. But there are ground technologies we don’t use because the king believes they would complicate our world, make it too dangerous. The king says that the ground makes people greedy and wasteful, while the people of Internment are resourceful and humble.

I think about the murdered girl. I wonder about her final moments. I’m horrible and selfish—I must be—because all my thoughts lead to the idea that she could have been me instead.

My mother’s dinner sits untouched on her plate. She’s weaving the fork between her fingers and staring out the window across the apartment. The sun has gone away and the train speeds past, rattling our walls for the second time since we’ve heard the news. The girl’s body has been cleaned from the track and the train is back in service. Things must go on. There would be more cause to worry if they didn’t.

“It’s good that Basil walked you all the way home,” she says. “Maybe he should from now on.”

“Will there be academy tomorrow?” I ask.

“I’m sure there will,” she says, not moving her eyes from the window. The view is exactly the same as it has always been—other apartments and windows full of light. But something has changed; there’s something dangerous out there, and to look now, we’d never be able to find it.

There was a murder when my parents were young. Two men had been fighting, and somehow they’d reached the swallows, and one pushed the other in. The fence surrounding the swallows has since been rebuilt to ensure such a thing can never happen again.

Hundreds of years ago, the swallows were a farmland, but something changed. There have been theories about atmospheric pressure, or else the god in the sky becoming angry. The dirt began shifting, and over the decades, it began to churn into itself, swallowing the animals and the crops and anything else that touched it. I’ve seen slide images of it—a whirling darkness always in motion.

The murderer had been driven mad by a tainted elixir that should have been discarded by the pharmacists. He was feverish and deranged when they found him, and the king had no choice but to have him dispatched.

I clear the dishes, scraping the uneaten food into the compost tube, where it’s immediately sucked away to the processing chamber in the basement. I try to keep my mind busy with homework, and my mother doesn’t offer to double-check my answers. She’s curled in the armchair, touching the fringe of Lex’s blanket that’s wrapped around her thin shoulders. I hate when she gets this way, so uncertain.

I go to bed two hours early, and I listen to Lex pacing upstairs. When I stand on the bed and knock on the ceiling three times, there’s a pause and then he knocks three times with his foot. I think his muffled voice is saying, “Go to sleep.”

When we were children, we shared a two-tiered bed, and he slept on the top tier. His lantern would burn late into the night, and sometimes I would lie awake watching his shadows move across the ceiling as he wrote. I would knock on the underside of the bed, and the only reply I ever got was, “Go to sleep.”

But I’m too restless, and I wander to my bedroom window and thrust it open. If I stick my head out far enough, I can see a bit of the glasslands to the left. It’s viewable from most everywhere because it sits at the heart of the city. Only the sun engineers are permitted to enter the buzzing fence that surrounds it. From afar, though, it looks like a miniature city made of glass. When I was little, I used to imagine that people lived there. Sometimes I still do. A city within a city. What could be safer than that?

I tell myself that I’m safe. The murdered girl didn’t have a betrothed who protected her like Basil protects me. She didn’t have a brother upstairs and a mother in the next room and a father on the patrol force. She didn’t keep to her routine. She wasn’t like me. She couldn’t have been.

I dream of an angry god in the sky, filling the atmosphere with lightning and inky swirls of wind. He has come alive from my textbook; he doesn’t show his face, but he’s the maestro in an orchestra of elements. His winds cause the city to shake, the edges to crumble away. We’ve already been banished from the ground, and now the sky has turned on us. There’s nowhere left to go.

My father’s voice is what wakes me. He has turned on my bedside lamp, and its glow casts hard shadows on his face. “Morgan?” he whispers. He’s still in uniform; he must have just gotten in.

I push myself upright. “What’s wrong?” I say, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes. The nightmare is already dissolving as I remember the dark circumstances of the day.

“Morgan,” he says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I worry sometimes that you’ve been too sheltered.”

“Sheltered?” I say. “From what? Things like this don’t usually happen.”

“You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is.”

“What is it?” I say.

“Unpredictable. Mostly good, but awful sometimes. The screens are going to turn on in a few minutes, and King Furlow is going to talk about the incident on the train tracks. It’s going to be an honest account. I know you’ve read about other incidents in your textbooks, but this will be more upsetting. I think you should come watch, but I’m leaving it up to you.”

I don’t even have to deliberate. “I want to go,” I say, throwing back the covers, reaching for my robe hanging over the bedpost.

My father ruffles my hair as he stands. I worry for him; he rarely talks about his work as a patrolman, but I imagine it’s very taxing keeping order, making sure we’re all safe, all the while knowing these are things that cannot truly be controlled. He must take the murdered girl as a personal failure; somewhere on Internment tonight, there are parents without their daughter. How long did the murdered girl’s parents wait in the queue to have her? Whose birth will be granted now that she’s dead? When a person dies alone before his or her dispatch date, the decision makers usually allow two children to be born so they can be betrothed.

“Careful not to wake your mother,” my father says as we move through the common room and kitchen.

“Won’t she want to see?” I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.

“No,” he says, opening the door for me. “She won’t.”

Downstairs, the broadcast room is filling with weary-eyed tenants, many in slippers and robes, some in patrolmen uniforms. Aside from a sleeping toddler in a woman’s arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. It’s nearly midnight, and most of the city would be asleep by now, except for the patrolmen, and the ones like my brother who never sleep at all.

The lobby has already been decorated to signify the start of the festival of stars. Paper lanterns hang from the ceiling on strings, lit by small electric bulbs and covered in slantscript to symbolize the requests we’ll ask of the god in the sky.

I wonder what the murdered girl’s request would have been.

I force the thought away and look for Lex and Alice, but instead Pen and I find each other. She breaks away from her parents to run to me and grab my hands. “Can you believe it?” she says, her green eyes wide with excitement and fright. “Does your father know who it was?”

“I probably know as much about it as you,” I say, comforted by the way she coils her arm around mine. I have the horrible thought that the murdered girl could have been her, that by next week she would be nothing more than a handful of ashes cast to the wind. And then I feel selfishly relieved that the murdered girl wasn’t anyone in my life. It wasn’t Pen or Alice or my mother.

Across the room, my father has found Alice. Lex isn’t with her. I understand; he has known enough awful things for a lifetime. I still think of how he used to be, attentive and intense, his face magnified by the beaker he’d hold up to the light. He used to be one of the top pharmacy students, honored with tasks most others can’t take on until graduation. But after his incident, he burned all of his notes and abandoned the trade entirely. He earns money by sewing quilts now—his work is erratic but deft, and the quilts always fetch a higher price than the others, his skill and precision cause for envy among the other makers.

Pen presses close to me and says, “Look.”

A patrolman is jostling the screen, twisting its knobs and trying to make the static subside. The screen is more than a hundred years old, its bronze facing chipped down to oblivion; the wires are frayed, and a little burst of sparks makes someone in the crowd gasp.

But the image comes through, distorted at first, King Furlow trembling, warped, and green, before the patrolman hits the screen, knocking the image into reasonable clarity in time for us to see the king remove his red bowler hat and hold it to his pudgy stomach.

King Furlow’s lineage traces back to the dawn of Internment itself. His oldest ancestor is in the history book as the only man chosen to hear from the god in the sky. No one knows for certain how the god in the sky speaks with the king, but it’s Internment’s longest standing tradition, passed down from generation to royal generation. I’ve never envied him; it’s surely a terrible burden to be the voice of an entire city.

The rest of us speak to the god in the sky when we’re frightened or grateful, and we don’t expect to be answered.

Standing at either side of the king are his children: Princess Celeste, and her older brother, Prince Azure, both of whom may be trying to appear somber but instead seem bored. Though the screen is sepia and the image a bit out of focus, they both look like their mother, and their mother’s mother, and so on as far as records trace. Blond hair and clear sparkling eyes, a bit of plumpness to the face. They’re sixteen and seventeen, making them closer in age than any other siblings on Internment. The king’s children are traditionally born outside the queue. When the queen announces her pregnancies, she and the king go through the list of hopeful parents in the queue, and they hand-select the applicants they see fit to bear their children’s betrotheds. Of course the hopeful parents can refuse, but no one in Internment’s history has ever passed up the chance to have a child without the long wait.

“At four-oh-five this evening,” the king begins, “the coroner made his official statement that the death of a sixteen-year-old young lady was the result of murder. I warn those of you watching at home that many of the details about to be shared are graphic, and young children should not be present.”

The other tenants are huddling together. Pen and I have our arms around each other; my view of the screen is partially obstructed by the people ahead of me, but I don’t crane my neck for a better look.

Across the room, Alice chews her thumbnail and nods at something that my father has just said to her.

There’s an assortment of gasps and “Oh no” and mutterings as the murdered girl’s class image is shown. She’s got a coy smile and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. My first thought is that she’s radiant. Through the sepia, I can imagine her face alive with color.

“Oh,” Pen whispers into my ear. “I know her. We were in a romantic-literature course together.”

“Daphne Leander,” the king goes on, “a tenth-year student and aspiring medic, is estimated to have died this morning. Her parents informed our patrolmen that they last saw her boarding the shuttle for the academy.”

The details turn dark after that. She received absences from all of her instructors. No report from other morning passengers that she ever boarded the train. She was found early in the evening. Throat and wrists slashed. Everything indicates that she bled to death. As to how her body came to be on the train tracks during daylight hours—that’s still under investigation.

“Patrolmen will be stationed in every train car, at every platform, and outside the doors of every building of Internment until the criminal responsible for this vicious act is found.”

Pen’s mother stands a few paces away with her arm out, waving her daughter to come over and allow herself to be embraced, but Pen resists.

“It’s important for you to all go about your lives normally,” the king says. Daphne’s image is replaced with the sketched map of Internment. “The theater and the businesses in the shopping sections will keep their usual hours. There will be patrolmen in sight at all times; report any suspicious activity, no matter how minor it may seem at the time.”

The panic reaches through me like vines curling up from my toes to my stomach, twisting and knotting and tightening around my organs. Internment looks so small on the screen. It would take a train less than two hours to circle it entirely. Within that circuit is everyone I’ve ever loved and every place I will ever go. But it has been sullied, ugliness spreading out like the color from a steeping tea bag, until everything is covered by it. There’s someone out there capable of slashing open a young girl’s skin and leaving her to be found.

“I feel sick,” I say.

“Me too,” Pen says.

When the broadcast is over, the screen goes to static.

“Margaret,” Pen’s father calls impatiently. She grunts. He’s the only one who uses her real name; even her instructors call her Pen, despite what her forms and her student identification card say.

Numbly I watch her return to her parents, but she squeezed my hand before she went. The crowd is dwindling, but I don’t go to my father and Alice; I go to the stairwell, and once the door is closed behind me and I’m alone, I run up the four flights of stairs to my brother’s apartment. The door is locked; it’s never locked. I fight the doorknob and then I pound frantically on the door. I can hear shuffling inside and I know he’s coming to let me in, but there are footfalls in the stairwell and there could be anything around the corner, where a bulb has gone out and shadows spread into the light.

The door opens and I spill inside, pushing it shut behind me.

“Morgan?” he says. Even without his sight, Lex always knows my presence. His dark hair is bunched on one side; he pulls at it when he’s writing.

I try to speak, but my lip is quivering and my heart is in my throat and I’m out of breath from the climb.

“You watched the broadcast, didn’t you?” he says. “It’s all right. Breathe. Sit down.” He pulls out a kitchen chair for each of us.

“Pen knew her,” I blurt. “She wanted to be a medic. She was my age. And she was pretty.” I don’t even know what I’m saying. Words are blurring like the city through the train window. My lungs are aching.

“Morgan.” My brother reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine. “Every generation has its horror stories. It was only a matter of time before something awful happened in front of you. It’s an awful thing to be alive sometimes.”

“Don’t say that. It isn’t awful at all.”

There’s so much beauty out there that Daphne Leander will never see again.

Lex has such a piteous look on his face, as though I’m the one to feel sorry for.

“Why do you say things like that?” I ask.

“Because I saved lives when I was a pharmacy student,” he says. “And you can’t be the reason someone is alive without giving thought to what being alive means.”

I pull my hand away from his. “Remind me to never implore your aid if I’m dying.”

“Don’t be angry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Morgan, I’m sorry. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you never had to know such things.”

“But you write about it,” I say. “Don’t you? People dying and getting sucked up into the swallows and things.”

“Sometimes,” he admits. “You’ve read dark stories, haven’t you? People die in them?”

“But I know they aren’t real,” I say. “I put the book down and I go on with my life.”

He frowns. “Things are changing, Little Sister, and not for the better. I have a feeling about that. But I would dock Internment to the ground and take you someplace brilliant if I could.”

“Internment is brilliant,” I say. “It’s more than enough.”

More than enough. I repeat the words over and over in my head, forcing them to be true.