Perfect Ruin

5

PEN FIXES THE HEM OF MY RED VELVET glove that’s starting to unroll from my elbow. “You look classic,” she says, and then holds up her own blue gloves with a look of disdain. “Aren’t these archaic? They’re my mother’s. She used to wear them on dates with my father. You know, back when Internment was still part of the ground.”

“I think you’re a vision,” Thomas says, coming up behind her, gripping the overhead handle as the shuttle begins to move.

She looks over her shoulder at him, and the sunlight catches the shadows of her neck and collarbone in a way that makes her seem more woman than girl. “I thought for sure you’d missed the shuttle.”

“I caught it just as the doors were closing,” he says, and looks at me. “I take it your other will be joining us shortly?”

“We’re taking the train to his section and walking from there,” I say, feeling strange about the word he has used: “other.” He likes to talk like a period actor; he’s always reading romantic classics—a woman on the cover with an elaborately floral hat, looking faint as a man in a tuxedo steadies her. Things of that nature.

When the shuttle jolts and pushes Thomas toward her, Pen swats at him, complaining that he’ll make her hat go crooked. She’s wearing a candlebox hat that has been dyed the same color as her gloves. Candles come in small, cylindrical stiff paper boxes that can be taken to a clothes maker to be recycled into a hat. They’re dyed desired colors, given a brim, and affixed to a band so that the hat will sit firmly on one side of the head.

They look ridiculous on me. Few girls are bold enough to pull them off, but Pen is the sort of girl who can wear anything.

Thomas smiles at her averted face. “I’ll have your heart yet, Margaret Atmus.”

“You already have it.” She holds up her hand, betrothal band gleaming in the light. “Not that I had any say in the matter. And you know I hate when you call me that.”

When we make it to the train, I notice that it isn’t very crowded, which is strange for the weekend. “Looks like a lot of people decided to walk today,” Thomas says.

Pen flattens her dress against her knees, indifferent to his arm around her shoulders.

“I’ve been reading a peculiar little story,” Thomas says, looking at me because he knows Pen won’t humor him with interest.

“What about?” I say.

“It’s about the people of the ground trying to reach us. They craft a sort of machine and harness it to birds.”

“Birds couldn’t lift something that heavy,” Pen says. We don’t know very much about birds—they’ve never flown so high as Internment, but we’ve seen images of them taken with the scope. Skinny white blurs traveling alone or as beads in a necklace of Vs.

“Well then, you’ve figured out the conflict,” he says. “Anyway, they don’t make it. The story was really more about their trying to reach us. Some think they are, and others say we’re nothing more to them than a giant rock in the sky. Perhaps they think we’re a dusty moon.”

“I wonder about that all the time,” I say.

“Don’t get Morgan started on the ground,” Pen says, rising as the train rolls to a stop. “She’ll be lost in thought for the rest of the day, and I need someone to whisper with if this play is no good.”

Basil spots us as we’re stepping out onto the platform. The gold trim of his jacket matches the flecks of light in his brown eyes. Pen calls it a shame that my eyes aren’t dominant, but I think it would be nice if my children look like Basil. He holds his arm to me, and I look at my velvet glove against his gray suit, imagining we’re figures in a very old image. Though I know I shouldn’t, I imagine that the steps leading down off the platform will go all the way down the sky until we reach the ground.

“How are you?” he asks, so close that his breath reaches the nape of my neck.

“I’ll feel better once they’ve caught the person responsible,” I admit. “My father came home last night with an extra bolt for our door. Every time I look at it, I see that girl’s face.”

“A lot of people in my building are installing locks, too.” He frowns. “They’ll find whoever’s behind this. Internment is only so big. There aren’t many places to hide.”

That’s what has me so afraid. I’ve always liked the smallness of Internment, always liked lying in bed at night and hearing the trains rush by, always on time. But now it’s starting to feel smaller, as though every day since Daphne Leander’s murder has crumbled the edges a bit more, and the city is closing in on me.

Even the seats in the theater feel smaller and closer together, the dim lights getting dimmer.

“Are you okay?” Pen says. “Your cheeks are bright red.”

Basil touches my forehead. “Do you feel sick?” His touch is supposed to comfort me, but all I want is to get away from him, to get away from this air that everyone else is breathing.

“I need to use the water room,” I say.

“I’ll go with you,” Pen says.

“No,” I say, too quickly. “No, you might miss the opening. I’ll be fast, I promise.”

I can see that she’s wary, but she doesn’t try to stop me as I shuffle down the aisle.

With all of the shows about to start, the lobby is empty aside from the ticket vendors, who pay no mind as I stumble toward the water rooms. But when I push the door open, I find that I’m not alone.

Though she’s not in uniform, I recognize the little girl from last night. She’s kneeling on the edge of the sink, tacking a piece of paper over the mirror. But she stops when she sees me, stumbles to her feet, and backs against the wall.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say.

There’s a piece of paper over each of the mirrors. A quick glance and I can see that they’re select passages from Daphne Leander’s essay. All of them are handwritten. Typewriters are a rare luxury afforded to those who write for a living; a past king once considered making them a household item, but decided against it. He said that if words could be easily printed and erased, we would lose our appreciation for what we wrote.

I’d like to ask her about the pages, but she runs past me and pushes her way through the door.

“Wait!” I run after her.

She’s quick, but so am I, and I catch up to her on the sidewalk outside the theater, where she has come to a stop. She doesn’t seem out of breath, and I’m trying to figure out why she stopped, but then I follow her gaze to the building at the end of the block, engulfed in flames.

She looks at me, and her eyes are full of so much pain that it astounds me. They’re the same as the murdered girl’s eyes, and yet different somehow.

“It’s only going to get worse,” she says.

That’s the jumper’s code, if Lex’s similar outlook is any indication.

A patrolman is running from the theater, shouting for us to get back inside. She doesn’t move, though, and I grab her arm and pull her along. She doesn’t resist, but she watches the flames over her shoulder. It was one of Internment’s oldest buildings, back when they were still made of wood as opposed to stone. Over the centuries it has been everything from a prison, back when those still existed, to a recycling plant. In my lifetime it has been only a flower shop. Alice has taken me there dozens of times.

It’s only a few paces back to the theater, but before we’ve reached the doors, the sky has changed. Ash is heavy on the air and it’s as though something has covered the sun. Even the patrolman has stopped to watch. Sirens begin as distant warnings, but soon they’re screaming as the emergency vehicles rush toward the flames.

The girl’s arm is still in my grip and she lets me bring her inside, but then she twists away, presses her hands to the glass doors and watches.

The lobby is crowded now, everyone rushing to windows, calling out the names of their friends. “Are you here with anyone?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be practicing my music.”

“Come on, then,” I say. “You can come with me. I’m going to find my friends and make sure they’re okay.”

“I don’t know you,” she says.

“Morgan Stockhour,” I say. “There, now you do.”

The room has gotten very loud around us. A woman screams.

The girl looks up at me, hesitating. Some pink glitter has clumped in her eyelashes.

“I’m Amy,” she says.

“Morgan!” Somewhere in the melee, Pen raises her gloved arm. She twists away from Thomas, fighting him and shouldering her way to me. She crashes into me, squeezing me so hard that my feet almost come away from the floor. “What’s happening? They stopped the play, and …”

She sees the smoke through the glass doors for the first time. Her mouth is open and breathless. She pales.

“The flower shop caught fire,” I say, though the words don’t do justice to what I just saw. I should be panicking like everyone around me. I should be frightened. But I feel the same as I did after watching the broadcast, like none of it is real.

“Your parents will be worried,” I tell Amy.

“They won’t notice I’m gone.” She seems like the type who can slip in and out of a place unnoticed, which is likely how she snuck into this theater without formal attire.

Basil wraps his arm around my waist from behind. Thomas does the same to Pen, and for once she seems grateful that he’s there to hold her. Amy stands between us, and we all watch the clouds and the sun get swallowed whole.

It feels like hours before the flames are extinguished. Patrolmen fill the lobby, escorting us from the building to the shuttle in droves. Pen lets Thomas hold on to her, and Basil hasn’t taken his arm from me since we were reunited. Amy walks a pace ahead of me, tugging at the ring on the chain around her neck.

“Where do you live?” Basil asks her as the five of us cram onto a shuttle bench meant to hold four.

“Section three,” she says.

“I’m in two,” he says. “But it’s a short walk back for me. I’ll see you home.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

“Yes, right, okay, we’re all old enough,” Pen snaps. “But in case you haven’t noticed, Internment has kind of gone into a complete state of lunacy.”

“I know that,” Amy says, and looks sharply out the window, where the smoke has turned the city into an old image.

“Are you frightened?” Thomas asks Pen.

She’s looking at her lap, but he tilts her chin and she meets his eyes.

“I won’t ever let anything happen to you, you know.”

She nods, leans her forehead against his.

For all their arguing, they have kissed. It first happened several months ago. He kept dropping hints and she decided to just be done with it. It wasn’t terrible, she told me. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible. I had a hard time believing it—she’s always evading him—but I’m starting to see that there’s a reason they were betrothed. There’s always a reason.

Basil grips my hand as the shuttle comes to a stop. “It’s going to be chaotic. Don’t let go of me even if people rush between us,” he says. With my free hand, I grab on to Pen and we rise to our feet.

An instant too late, I remember that Amy is behind me. In that instant, she dodges under Pen’s and my interlocked hands and disappears into the crowd.

“Amy!”

“Let her go,” Pen says. “Where did you find such a strange child, anyway?” She’s trying to act nonchalant but the fear is still in her eyes.

I’m scanning the crowd for Amy; with the patrolmen steering us all right onto the waiting train, there’s nowhere for her to go, and I still want to ask her about the essay.

But it’s taking all my efforts to hold on to Basil and Pen; I’ve never seen Internment in such a panic, and other worries start to invade my mind. My father is patrolling today; that means he must be out in this mess. And Alice will be out running errands; she frequents the flower shop, has a side job designing event bouquets.

And what started the fire to begin with?

Amy said it was only going to get worse. I see this panic all around me, while news of Daphne Leander’s murder is still fresh, and I cannot fathom what worse should look like.

By the time we make it to our seats on the train, Pen isn’t the only one with tears in her eyes. Other passengers have the same frightened expression.

Even Basil is looking worriedly at the city through the window. A patrolman is standing at the head of the car, instructing us not to check in on family and friends, to step off the train at our appropriate sections and go straight home. The train will stop for an extra two minutes on each platform to ensure everyone has a chance to exit the overcrowded cars in time.

“Something is happening,” Basil says, “isn’t it?”

“I’m sure it was only an accident,” Thomas says. “That building was so old that it has never been properly outfitted with electricity. Most of the rooms were lit by flame lanterns. One of them probably tipped over.”

“Do you think so?” Pen says.

“I’m almost certain.”

None of us believes it, but we don’t have the nerve to say so.

“Your mascara is running,” Pen says. “Here.” She rubs her gloved thumb under my eyelid.

“Thanks,” I say, though from the black smear on her glove I suspect she’s made it worse.

When the train stops in our section, Basil squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry I can’t walk you in,” he says.

“I’ll be fine; my building is right there,” I tell him, wishing desperately that I wasn’t about to leave him behind. “Stay safe.”

I don’t know what it is—the noise or the distant smell of the ashes or the fear—but I get the thought that I’d like to kiss him. I lean forward and press my lips against his forehead, pleasantly surprised by the softness and the warmth of his skin.

I don’t get a chance to see his reaction; Thomas is pulling Pen, and Pen is pulling me.

We can still smell the fire, though it happened several sections away and has since been extinguished. The blue of the sky is still up there, if a bit obscured, and I might have started to feel relief if only there weren’t a patrolman forcing me down the steps.

Thomas lives in the same section that Pen and I do, but his building is a block over, and at the fork in the pathway, he leans in for a kiss and Pen backs away. “Let’s not capitalize on a tragedy,” she says. “I’ll see you on Monday, provided the academy is still standing.”

He smirks, nods to us, and turns into the crowd.

She shakes her head. “Strange thing, him.”

“He’s just a little old-fashioned,” I say.

“And you!” she says. “Don’t think I didn’t see what you did as we were getting off the train. We’ll be talking about that some other time when we’re not being manhandled by patrolmen.”

“Move along, please,” the patrolman says from somewhere behind us. “Move along, toward your own buildings.”

It is wildly inappropriate that Internment is crumbling around me, but all I can think about is the warmth of Basil’s skin lingering on my lips.

Alice is frantic. When I open the door to my apartment, she’s got her arms around me before I know what’s happening. “She’s home,” she calls to Lex, who’s got an unfinished quilt draped across his lap and a spool of thread in one hand and a needle in the other. He does his best work when he’s anxious. But he drops all of these things and starts making his way to me.

Alice is holding me by the shoulders now. “Are those bruises?”

“She’s hurt?” Lex says. He rarely seems to regard me at all, much less show concern. Normally I’d appreciate it, but right now it only adds to this feeling that Internment has gone mad.

“It’s cosmetics,” I say, reaching my arm out to Lex so he can find me. “I’m perfectly fine. Where are Mom and Dad?”

“Dad has been patrolling all day,” Lex says. “Mom was at the market. We came down so someone would be here when you got back.”

“They’re making everyone go home,” I say. “The trains are running slowly. The cars are all overcrowded, so they want to make sure everyone has time to get off at their stops.” I thought I was doing better, but there’s a stone in my stomach at the thought of my mother and father out in all that chaos. And I can still smell the burnt air, though maybe it’s just clinging to my dress.

Alice sets me in a kitchen chair, moves to the sink, and returns seconds later to wipe the cosmetics and sweat from my face with a wet cloth. My tears are only from the abrasiveness of the ashes, but they still earn her sympathetic touch.

Lex, sitting across the table, still has his hand over mine. He keeps pressing his palm into my knuckles like I might vaporize into nothing if he doesn’t hold tight. Sometimes he hides in the darkness of his blindness, and other times he fears it will swallow everyone up and leave him alone.

Alice dabs the cold cloth to my forehead and then drapes it across the back of my neck, still fretting that I’m too red.

“Thomas thinks it may not be cause to panic,” I say, trying to reassure her. “He said the flower shop still uses flame lanterns and it was probably an accident.”

“There will be a broadcast tonight for sure,” she says. “Thank goodness you’re safe. We heard the fire was near the theater and we’ve just been all over the place about it.”

Lex is squeezing my hand. I close my eyes, trying to pretend that I’m blind, trying to understand what it means to be in this world without seeing any of it, not knowing where anyone is, if they’re safe.

I can see the red of my eyelids, but it’s still horrifying. It isn’t simply that I was missing in that chaos—without the sound of my voice, to him I’d disappeared into that darkness entirely. I could have fallen over the edge of Internment.

“I’m sorry I made you worry,” I say. I lean over the table so that I’m closer. “I’ll never disappear. I promise that every time I leave, I’ll always come back.”

“Not coming back wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he says. “For any of us.”

“None of that talk,” Alice says. “You’re going to scare her.”

“She should be scared,” Lex says.

“I’m not,” I say, but I am.

“Everything is going to be fine,” Alice says. “We’ll know more when the broadcast goes up. And if there is no broadcast, then it can’t be too serious, now, can it?” She’s handing me a cup of tea, ushering Lex and me to the couch.

Soon, I feel myself falling asleep under the unfinished blanket, as Lex works skillfully at its edges. Some distant part of me understands that there’s cause to worry and that I’m frightened, but it’s safe and warm inside, and Alice is moving about the kitchen, cooking up the smell of something sugary sweet. She asks me a question, something about my hair, and though I don’t hear her I nod assent, and in the next moment she’s peeling off my velvet gloves and gently unclasping the wooden barrettes in my hair.

When I was small, my brother would let me follow him on the train for entire afternoons without a destination. We would ride until we were hungry or had to find a water room. The train would always be crowded and I’d stay so close to him that I could hear his murmurs as he wrote on scraps of paper. He never spoke to me, always writing or looking at the city passing by. But it didn’t matter. I knew the honor of having been invited. We were two parts of the same set then, our skin as pale as the sunlight that washed over us through the glass, both of us silent and blue-eyed in the bustling crowd. On these trips I began to feel we were the same. I would catch our reflection in the window and fancy myself a perfect miniature version of him.

The train that circles Internment couldn’t carry him far enough, though. My brother, the peripatetic, the sage, was too restless to stay in one place, but one place is all we’re given. The only one who could quell this restlessness was Alice, always Alice, who swears she was born already in love with him. When she wasn’t allowed to have their child, something fell apart and they lost themselves for a while.

The train speeds past the apartment, rattling the walls, and I dream that I’m riding it in my theater dress. I’m on my way to meet my betrothed waiting for me on the platform. I dream about the other passengers, and I wonder who’s waiting for them. I wonder what keeps the conductor conscious as he navigates through the night. I dream about the murderer, out there somewhere, and wonder where he is when the train passes him by.