Perfect Ruin

“We are better than everyone,” she says. “Unlike the princess.” She shoulders me toward the edge of the bed. “Come on, get dressed. I’ll help you pick out an outfit. How you dress is a reflection on me.”

I end up borrowing her purple shell hat with synthetic fibers pinned to one side that are meant to mimic bird plumage. Basil stares at them while we’re pressed together on the train.

“You don’t like it?” I say.

“It’s just, I didn’t know birds could have pink feathers.”

“Birds are white, silly,” Pen says. “It’s just a decoration.”

“The birds we’ve seen through the scope are white,” Thomas says. “But I’ve read stories in which there were all sorts of species. Maybe there are pink birds in a different region. The ground has all sorts of climates.”

Pen huffs a pale blond curl away from her face. The train stops with a jolt and she breezes ahead of him, tugging me along. “Such an insufferable know-it-all,” she mutters. But I swear there’s a hint of a smile to go with the words.

The boys catch up to us and take our arms in tandem. Thomas kisses Pen’s cheek as she pertly raises her chin to accept. “It’s your day,” she tells him. “Where are we going?”

“The library first,” he says. “They’re having a sale.”

Most books on Internment aren’t for sale; we can borrow them from the library, and as the years go on and the spines begin to crack and the pages yellow, new editions are printed and the old ones are sold. When I was little, I was the first to borrow a newly printed library book and I hid it under my mattress. I wanted to know what it was like to own a new book for myself. One that hadn’t been worn down by someone else’s hands, with pages that hadn’t absorbed someone else’s spills.

After a week, guilt made me return it. I never borrowed that book again; I couldn’t bear to see it the victim of a stranger’s hands.

As we walk, Thomas and Pen gradually move a few paces ahead of Basil and me. Thomas whispers something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs. The shadows of clouds pass over them, and whatever Thomas was going to say to her next has been forgotten as he watches her. She’s a revelation in the sun, dazzling everywhere the light touches her. And not just today. Even when she’s sad, even when she sings off-key.

Basil touches one of the feathers. “Careful,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s not very you.”

I try to smile, but I’m still thinking about last night. I’m still thinking about the ground and if there are different kinds of birds. If things down there are mostly good or mostly bad. If they ever wonder about us.

Basil steals a kiss to my jaw, and I smile at my feet.

“There you are,” he says.

“I don’t mean to be distant,” I say, hooking my arm around his.

He stops our walking, and I realize that Pen and Thomas have stopped too. We’ve just passed the theater, and at the end of the block we can see what used to be the flower shop. It’s gray and splintered. The roof has caved in, and there’s a makeshift wire fence surrounding it now, with signs cautioning us not to approach.

Other passersby are staring at it, too.

“It’s depressing,” Basil says.

“Alice used to bring me here on the weekends when I was little,” I say. “It was one of her favorite places.”

Things aren’t the same. The patrolmen and this ruined building are proof of that.

After a few seconds, Thomas and Pen start walking again and we follow them. We go to the library and then to a tea shop. The day is full of light breezes and sweet aromas, but I cannot rid my hair of the smell of ash.

15

Each of us has a betrothed so that we won’t have to spend our lives alone. It leads me to wonder to whom the gods are married. The elements, perhaps. Or do they know something that we don’t about solitude?

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

AFTER CLASSES ON MONDAY, BASIL AND I spend time trying to skip stones on the lake. We don’t talk much; somehow that has stopped feeling so necessary.

As we sit on the grass, I watch the sunlight catch bits of gold in his hair and I think that he’s more handsome than the prince. The prince, like his sister, is always at the height of fashion. He’s always polished and there are rumors that he wears cosmetics in his images. But there’s nothing more real than sunlight on skin.

Feeling brave, I push forward and kiss him. He pulls me on top of him, and, laughing, we fall into the grass.

I rest my forehead on his, trying to line up our noses and mouths so we’re at a perfect parallel. He slides his hands up my sleeves and I have the distant sense that Judas is watching us. I wonder if he and Daphne were ever like this.

I try to dismiss the thought, but too late I’m thinking of her body on the train tracks and how awful her final moments must have been.

“Kiss me?” I say, and he does. It’s so easy now. It roots me to this place, makes me feel at home.

I rest my arms on his chest and draw back so I can look at him. He pushes my hair behind my ears and says, “You look worried.”

“I’m only thinking about what sort of person I am,” I say.

“What sort of person?” he says.

“It’s something my brother said. He told me that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t think Internment is enough.” It sounds crazy now that I’ve said it aloud, but I trust Basil now with the things that make me sound unhinged.

“He’s right. Internment isn’t enough for you,” Basil says, surprising me. “Neither is the ground. Neither is the sky.”

I smile. “Being betrothed to me has made you lose your mind,” I say.

He looks around us to be certain we’re alone, and then he says, “With all that’s happened lately, I’m beginning to understand why you’d fantasize about the ground.”

I roll over so that I’m lying beside him. “Maybe I wouldn’t even like the ground. Maybe it would be cruel or ugly. Maybe it would be exactly like here. I just want to know.”

“It wouldn’t be like here,” Basil says. “Think of how much land there must be.”

“That’s just it. I can’t even imagine it.” I hold my arms over my head, watching the way the sunlight fills the spaces between my fingers. “All my life, the more I’ve been told not to think about it, the more I can’t resist. It’s like … like …”

“Like being in love,” Basil suggests.

I turn my head to look at him. “I think you may be right.”

He looks back at me.

“I can stop talking about it so much,” I say. “The ground, I mean. If it bothers you.”

“I do think we should be careful what we say, and where,” Basil says. “There’s too much fear right now, and I worry.”

He turns his face skyward and shields his eyes from the sun, but I think he’s just trying to hide from my stare.

“Worry about what?”

“About what will happen to you,” he says. “Even when we were children, I thought that something like what happened to Daphne could happen to you. One day you’d say something that upset the wrong person, and—We’re supposed to keep each other safe. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Basil.” I move his hand away from his eyes. I want to tell him there’s nothing to be afraid of, but after the honesty he has just given me, I can only give him the same. “We have each other, and we always will, whatever happens. And if someone does murder me, you needn’t worry, because I’ll come haunt you.”

He smirks. “Rattling the windows and tipping glasses and things?”

“I’d say nice things while you slept so you’d have good dreams,” I say. “Or maybe mean things if I get jealous.” I shove his shoulder.

“But we aren’t ghosts,” he says.

“No,” I say. “Not for a long time.”

“Sixty years,” he says.

“A thousand,” I counter, and tug him by the collar until he’s kissing me, and anything we believe is true, and everything in the world is ours.

The short season takes more light from each day. Judas is scarce. I haven’t seen him at all this week, but Amy will still meet me in the cavern. She says he’s hiding in the farm and mining section. She says he has a plan. When I ask her what this plan could be, she tells me that he won’t tell her. It’s too important and she’s too unpredictable.

And one night, I find her sitting out in the starlight at the mouth of the cavern. She’s toying with the strips of cloth tied around her wrists.

“Amy?” I say.

She doesn’t answer, and when I kneel in front of her I see the sheen of tears on her cheeks.

“Suppose it was painful,” she whispers. “All that broken skin.”

She has been so steely that I could almost forget she’s in mourning. She’s never talked about what happened to her sister. Barely mentioned Daphne at all.

“She was going to do something important.” Her voice cracks. “She wasn’t there yet, but it was happening. The things she wrote and the thoughts she had. She was going to prove things are wrong on Internment, and someone didn’t want that, and that’s why she was killed.” She uses the cloth to dab at her eyes. “And now she’s gone, and no one will ever get to hear what she had to say.”

Gently, I ask, “Is that why you were putting up her essay?”

She nods. “It was a draft she didn’t turn in. Instead, our parents made her write about the ecosystem and turn that in. But I had to give her a voice. My parents blamed Judas for her thoughts and the things she said. Before her death, my parents went to the king asking for Daphne and Judas’s betrothal to be undone. They would have preferred that she be alone—rather than tied to him.”

“I didn’t think undoing a betrothal was possible,” I say.

“It isn’t.” She swipes the heel of her hand against her nose, sniffling. “That’s probably why they blame him so much. They were practically the first in line to have him arrested once she was killed. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” I say.

She looks at me, eyes glistening in the moonlight. I see a girl who has been to the edge, and who has nothing left to fear. “Because I’m going to finish what my sister helped start. I’m going to find a way off of this place.”