Perfect Ruin

“This matter will be met with discretion,” he says. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

When I don’t answer, he says, “This is a matter more common than you might think. Many students receive counseling for a number of different reasons, and it all turns out fine.”

Fine. I mouth the word at my lap, desperate for the taste of it. What I wouldn’t give for things to turn out fine.

“All right,” I say.

He smiles, all the creases in his pudgy face curling like the wind the sky god conjures in my textbooks. “There will be no need to sneak off the premises to seek counsel from your classmates. I hope we have an understanding.”

“We do, sir.”

“Wonderful.” He scribbles an excusatory note on a piece of paper and hands it to me. “You’re dismissed. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

After classes, Pen and I linger on the outskirts of the playing field, watching the athletes chase one another within the confines of the low stone wall that marks game territory. Basil and Thomas are on opposing teams, and I could swear they’ve turned their practice into a private competition to impress us. Thomas is about as tall as Basil, quick and lean while Basil is more solid. It could be anyone’s win.

It’s an especially windy day, which is common for the short season. I bunch my fists inside the sleeves of my red academy sweater as we sit and watch them.

“Look at that,” Pen says. “If I were one of those poor, dumb, love-struck girls, I’d say there’s nothing in the sky more fetching than that, our boys with their sleeves rolled up, going at each other like beasts.”

I wonder if she knows her hand is to her chest. Her face goes flat. “Thomas doesn’t look too bad from this distance, does he? What a disappointment to know he’s not so exquisite up close.”

“He’s perfectly attractive,” I say.

“He has a nose like a broken bridge.”

“Oh, he doesn’t,” I say.

“You want him for yourself, is that it?” Pen says. “Have him. I’ll trade you your day-old compost scraps. At least then I could use them to grow something I could stomach.” She is smiling as she watches him, though. I watch the boys, too, trying to follow Basil across the field, the beads of sweat making his hair jagged when he doubles over to catch his breath.

I wrap my arms around Pen’s shoulders and lean my head against hers. “I hope we live in apartments next door to each other once we’re grown and married,” I say.

“I’ll be a mapmaker by then,” she says, “penning maps by candlelight until all hours. Maybe I’ll turn irrational. But not the bumbling, stupid irrational. The quiet sort, whispering things to glass jars as though they’ll hold my secrets. No one will ever know.”

There’s a moment of silence before she snorts and giggles. I can never tell when she’s being serious. She seems to prefer it that way.

“Hey,” she says. “I have to get something from the art room. Come with me.”

“I think Basil wanted to walk home with me.”

“We’ll be right back,” she says, and tugs me to my feet. She leads me into the academy, up the stairs, to the art room.

There’s a sort of eerie peace to an empty classroom. The easels display colorings like windows, each one a distorted view of Internment. I know which one is Pen’s even before she has marched over to it. The easel’s ledge is a mess of coloring pens, and bladder sacks haphazardly tied shut with twine, fat with colors. The bladders of small animals are the most common way of storing colors; paper wouldn’t do the job, and collapsible metal was deemed too wasteful when an inventor proposed the idea a hundred years ago. The colors themselves are made from plants.

She’s colored the glasslands the way they would look late in the afternoon, the domes and spires mirroring the orange sky and smoky clouds. She’s memorized that place. Not only does her father work there as a sun engineer, but she has a perfect view of it from her bedroom window.

She frowns at her work. “My contribution to the festival,” she says. “The instructor thinks it’s quite good. She wants me to color it in the center of the clock tower canvas, assuming we get the king’s approval.”

“Really?” I say.

She shrugs.

Every year, a large canvas is prepared by the city’s most talented artists. For the final week of December, the king allows the canvas to be wrapped around the clock tower. There’s a final week of festivities under that canvas, and even the rarely seen prince and princess come out to mingle.

“Pen, that’s a huge honor,” I say. “Why don’t you seem at all excited?”

In answer, she tears her coloring from the easel and crumples it in both hands. The colors are still wet, and oranges and grays stain her fingers. “It wasn’t right,” she says. Gritting her teeth, she pushes the balled paper together before yanking it into two pieces.

She drops the ruined project into a recycling tube, where it’s immediately sucked away, leaving a smear of color on the rim.

“How could you say that?” I say. “It looked perfect.”

“It was going to bother me all night knowing it was just sitting here all wrong,” she says. “I’ll make something better tomorrow. A portrait, maybe. You can be my model.”

“I thought the assignment was to color the city,” I say.

She shakes her head. “The assignment was to color something we love.” She gestures to the easels, full of colorings. “Clearly, everyone loves Internment. But I’ve decided you’re a more interesting part of my world than a bunch of buildings.”

“Maybe you should color the clouds,” I say.

“It’s been done a thousand times,” she says. “Really, Morgan. I’m disappointed in you.”

“Forgive me,” I say. “We aren’t all creative geniuses.”

We make it to the doorway before she runs back to her easel and takes the slenderest of the coloring pens. She wipes the bristles on a scrap of cloth and places it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll work on it at home,” she says.

I don’t know very much about art—that has always been Pen’s area—but I do believe that it is honesty at its core. I look at the smear of color on the recycling tube, and I worry that there’s something Pen’s trying to hide.

I can’t sit in the apartment any longer. I can’t listen to my mother’s rasped breathing as she sleeps in Lex’s blanket, and Alice’s shoes upstairs. She has a pair of wooden shoes that Lex favors. They’re loud and he always knows where she is when she’s wearing them. Normally the sound doesn’t bother me, but tonight I can’t seem to concentrate on anything but those steps. Pacing this way and that.

Yes. That word keeps coming back to me.

Are you a murderer?

Yes.

Yes.

Alice moves across the common room.

I put on a sweater and leave the apartment.

A patrolman holds open the door for me, tells me to be safe. I hear that every day. Be safe. I wonder what the patrolmen are doing to catch the supposed murderer. I wonder what they’re doing to catch the person who really killed Daphne Leander. There was some talk at the academy about a memorial service. It was held on Monday for family only. No friends were invited, if she had any friends—from what I’ve heard, she and Judas kept to themselves, a trait that gave them a reputation for being snobs. But I’ve learned not to take stock in what people say. I can only imagine what’s been said about me since Lex’s incident, and about Pen, who distances herself from all the high-ranking cliques at the cost of being my friend. “Who needs them?” she says.

The park is empty when I arrive. Little winged insects keep their chorus in the brush. I tread quietly, listening for patrolmen. Listening for Judas.

Only when I reach the cavern do I dare turn on my pocket light, angling it inside. But I find no messages written on the wall with a pebble. And I don’t find Judas.

Instead, curled under a red academy sweater, I find Amy Leander fast asleep.

12

Elixirs. Pills. Specialists. Are they meant to help us, or to keep us compliant? I’m studying medicine because I’ve always felt it would be my calling to help others. But I wonder about that.

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

THERE’S A STRIP OF FABRIC TIED AROUND her wrist, the traditional mark of grieving after a loved one has been dusted to ashes and scattered. The academy sweater she uses as a blanket must have belonged to her sister.

Under the sharp blue-white glow of my pocket light, her face is young and troubled, her eyebrows pushed together. I’ve been watching her for only a few seconds before something moves behind me and an arm hooks around my throat.

Even before he has spoken, my heart is pounding up my spine, and I know the soft, measured breaths against my ear belong to Judas Hensley.

“Back away,” he whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”

I suppose he means to be threatening, this boy who answered yes, but somehow I know he won’t hurt me. He’s only trying to protect the sleeping girl. I do as he instructs, until we’re both standing outside the cavern. He lets go of my neck, circles around so that he’s facing me.

“Are you having fun?” he hisses.

I focus on all the sharp angles of his face, neck, and collarbone. I can’t help it; I’ve not seen anyone like him, the way he seems sculpted from shards of broken glass. “Bringing your academy friends here to play games and write messages?”

“Why did you lie?” I say. He stares in response, and I begin to worry that my instinct is wrong, that he did kill his betrothed and that he’ll kill me, right here with no witnesses. Maybe Amy wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was dead, or dying. I try to remember if I saw her breathe.

But my instincts about people have never been wrong. Not even about Lex. The morning of his incident, he came into the room after my mother had finished coloring my cheeks with pink powder. I wasn’t quite the right age for cosmetics to be acceptable, and I was holding a wet cloth, preparing to wipe it away before academy. We looked at each other in the mirror, Lex and I, and I had a terrible feeling like he was going to do something desperate. But he only asked our mother if she’d fixed the tear in Alice’s pink dress.

“Lie?” Judas says at last. I try not to show my relief.

“My friend asked you if you were a murderer. You said yes.”

“Not that it is any of your concern, but I didn’t write that,” he says. “I have a spy handling my correspondence.”

I glance at the cavern, where Amy is asleep. “A little spy?” I ask. “Blond hair, blue eyes?”