Perfect Ruin

Ms. Harlan takes notes. “And your mother?”

“She suffers from headaches,” I say. “She takes elixirs in the evening, so they won’t interfere with her workday.”

My answers are tidy. They are exactly what our medical records should reflect. Exactly what the king asks of families who’ve had a jumper. I may not know exactly what the king’s specialist is fishing for, but I know that I need to protect my family. It’s easy to give the right answers; all I need to do is pretend everything is as I want it to be.

“How is your relationship with your brother?” she asks.

“He lives upstairs,” I say. “I check in on him sometimes, but his wife takes care of him. She makes sure he attends his support group and takes his prescriptions.”

She smiles again, but these smiles only serve to unsettle me. There’s something artificial about them.

“Are you opposed to medications?” she asks. And before I can answer, she’s lifting a kettle from the portable sun warmer on her desk and pouring me a cup. “I’d like for you to try some of this,” she says. “There’s no medicine in it, but the herbs are said to have a soothing effect. If I can be blunt, Morgan, it sounds as though you’re under quite a bit of stress.”

I ran out to catch the train before I’d had a chance to touch my breakfast this morning, and I’m missing lunch for this meeting, which is perhaps why the spicy sweet smell of the tea seems so irresistible to me right now. She pours a cup for herself, blows into the steam and swirls the cup in her hands. I’ve taken only a sip when the bell rings.

Ms. Harlan looks as though she would like to ask another question as I grab my satchel from the floor. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to go. I’ll have only two minutes to get to class. Thank you for the tea.”

“Tomorrow then,” she says.

“Tomorrow.”

Pen finds me in the hallway. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she says, hanging on my shoulder as we walk. “It’s my fault you’re being punished. Can you ever forgive me?”

“I suppose you can carry my bag,” I say.

She eagerly takes it.

“I was kidding,” I say.

“So what happened?” she asks. “Did you have to write passages from The History of Internment a thousand times in slantscript?”

People haven’t written in slantscript on a daily basis for more than a hundred years, but it’s still taught in the middle-grade years as a form of history. The letters all curl into and around one another like ribbons; I couldn’t read it, much less write it. Most students would call it torture, but Pen has a real talent for it.

I shake my head. “What did you tell Basil?”

“You were being tutored in math. It was the most convincing excuse I could come up with. You are atrocious with graphs.”

I don’t like the idea of lying to my betrothed. I can’t imagine Lex and Alice ever lying to each other, and one day I want my marriage to be like theirs. Or, the way it used to be, at least.

But I can’t tell Basil the whole truth—about my fascination with Judas and my wonderings about the edge, because in his protectiveness he may have me declared irrational. But lying is no way to handle things, either. That’s what the edge does—it lures you away from those you care about. It ends your life even before your shoe has crumbled dirt into the atmosphere.

But how do I get rid of these thoughts? How do I become what I’m supposed to be?

I take my seat, giving Basil a smile from across the room. He does not smile back. There’s something dire about his brown eyes today. He knows something is wrong with me.

Once class lets out, I manage to disappear in the crowd without speaking to him. And again after our last class of the day, while everyone is herding for the shuttles. I know that my missing the train will do nothing but add to Basil’s suspicions, but I don’t know what to do. The thought of riding the train is making it hard for me to breathe.

I hurry past the hedges and into the woods. I don’t know if Judas will be here, or if he’ll come out to see me either way. Amy will still be in academy. That is, if she’s attending classes. Her family will be allowed another week of mourning before they’re expected to return to society.

Still, I find myself heading for the cavern, longing for the days when it was just a fun hideaway, a pretend house where Pen and I served pretend tea.

Someone touches my shoulder, and I start.

Basil turns me around to face him.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.

My heart is pounding, less from being startled and more now from the weight and effort of keeping secrets from him. He always knows when something is amiss with me. I fight to keep my voice even, but it still comes out too breathy. “It’s fine. I was just going for a walk.”

“Alone?” he says.

“You can come if you want.” I start moving away from the cavern, in the direction of the lake. It’s bad enough that Judas saw Pen as an invasion; I don’t want him to think I’m revealing his location to everyone I know.

“I didn’t see you at lunch,” Basil says. His knuckles touch mine, and somehow in the next instant we’re holding hands. I don’t think either of us initiated it—it just seems to happen. “Pen said you’re struggling with math and had to get a tutor.”

An amazing friend, Pen. Explaining one problem away with another.

I look at my shoes as I walk. I don’t want to lie to him, so I keep silent.

“Morgan,” he says. “It’s going to be a quiet sixty years if you refuse to tell me things.”

That’s how long we have left—not quite sixty years, give or take a few months. At age seventy-five, we’ll be dispatched in order to make room for new births. To live beyond our useful years would be selfish. That’s how we show our gratitude to the god in the sky. We live our lives, and then when we have no more to give but our lives, that’s what we do. We send our ashes up for the sky god to collect. The ashes become part of a current, a force, instead of just one body. It’s called the tributary—a perfect harmony of souls. Until then, we’re all living on borrowed time, on a floating city he allows in his domain with his clouds and his stars.

Long before our dispatch dates, though, we’ll live in dodder housing. The dodder grows in thin yellow wisps and is bald of any leaves. It tends to twine itself around more viable plants, unable to fully thrive on its own. In our later years, once we’ve raised our children and given our vital years to our trade, we become like the dodder plant, and it’s time for us to retire until our dispatch date.

I think about how long sixty years is. How long can Judas keep hiding? Even his confidante, Amy, will soon be old enough that her betrothed will be a priority. No more sneaking into caverns to keep Judas company.

He’ll have to be caught. Internment is only as big as the king’s fist, like Pen said. And then Judas will be executed because no jury is going to believe he’s innocent. All I ever hear at the academy are whispers about the charges against him. That they found fire-starting materials in his apartment, bloody razors, angry letters. I’ve seen no proof, only words, but words can be powerful. Words can be what puts a boy to death.

“I’ve been thinking about the murderer, and about Daphne Leander,” I admit. At least it’s part of the truth.

I take another step, and at once I’m ensconced in a ray of light. Hot and blinding. “Basil?” I say. “Do you think Internment is what it seems?”

He moves closer, until he’s in the same patch of sun. He tilts my chin, and when I raise my head to look at him, his eyes are marred with strands of gold. “I don’t think anything is what it seems,” he says.

I fall against him, wrap my arms around his neck. It feels good. It feels familiar and warm and right where I’m meant to be. Something as simple as his chin on the crown of my head makes me feel like a normal girl.

“Morgan?” he says. He feels the shudder that runs up my spine and he tightens his arms around my back. The moment couldn’t last as it was. Being safe, being normal—it’s only ever an act with me.

“I want to stay here,” I say. “I don’t want to move.”

“Why?” His fingers are under my hair, the warmth against my neck raising the skin into little bumps.

Why? Because one day I’ll be declared irrational. There’s something wrong with my brother and me. The king’s official knows it; that’s why she took such an interest in me. I wonder if it was always this way, if there’s something in our blood. When I was younger, all of my instructors had high expectations for me, being the little sister of one of their top students. But then he jumped, and as Lex became something different to everyone around him, so did I. There is no more high standard, only the worry that I’ll fail too.

“I’m not—” My voice falters, or maybe I just lose my courage.

They’ll fill me with elixirs until I’m somnambulating through the rest of my life, to numb this madness inside me that will surely progress.

“I’m not right. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“You’re shaking,” he says, easing us down into the grass until we’re facing each other. His hands move down the length of my arms and come to hold my wrists. “What have you been lying about?”

“Lex,” is the first word I think to say. “I’m turning into Lex.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” he says. “What do you mean you’re turning into him?”

“I wasn’t with a tutor at lunch,” I say. “I was with the king’s specialist. That lady who spoke with all of us after the broadcast about the murder. I don’t know what she wanted with me. I don’t know how she knew. She just kept asking all of these questions about my family, and she asked if I had thoughts about the edge. I lied, Basil. I told her that of course I didn’t think about the edge. But I do. I dream about it. I want to know what will happen if I cross the tracks. I don’t want to jump; I just want to look down. I want to see what’s down there with my own eyes, not through a scope.”

I wait for Basil to pull me to my feet and drag me straight to the clock tower’s affairs office to report all of this, but he only says, “Even if you were able to look over the edge without the winds hurting you, you wouldn’t see much. It would just be patches of land. It wouldn’t be any different from what’s captured through the scope.”

“What if I’m lured the way Lex was lured?” I say. “What if one day I can’t stop myself and I walk right over the edge?”