Perfect Ruin

While she’s adjusting her satchel over her shoulder and standing, the light catches her face and I see the cosmetic powder around her eyes. She never wears cosmetics unless she’s trying to hide something, like that she’s been crying. It would do no good to ask; she would only take her own advice and lie.

“You didn’t need a sibling, anyway,” I say. “You’ve always had me.”

“Yes.” She hooks her arm around mine and leads me down the aisle. “After so many years, we’re rather stuck with each other now. We’re like a double birth.”

A double birth is when two children are born from the same womb at one time, and sometimes they’re even identical. There’s a story in the history book about one such pair. Their names were Odette and Olive. But while they wore the same face, they couldn’t have been more different. Odette was content with her life, while Olive was restless and ever unhappy. She seduced Odette’s betrothed by pretending to be her; Olive fell so in love with being her sister that she drowned Odette and assumed her identity. Years went on, and Olive, pretending to be Odette, married her sister’s betrothed and bore numerous children, all of which were born dead. Convinced that she was being punished by the god in the sky, and driven mad by grief, Olive confessed what she had done.

Double births were banned after that. If two were to be born of the same womb, the first was allowed to live, while the second was drowned before it finished its first cry. It was believed that the second child was Olive, always Olive, trying to be reborn once again as someone new.

Within the last hundred years, medicine has progressed enough that double births never need to happen.

It would frighten me to share a face with someone else, but that’s one of Pen’s favorite chapters in the history book. She says it’s poetic that one soul could bear so much sadness that it tries again and again to come into the world as someone else.

Lex and Alice aren’t speaking. Alice swore to me she wasn’t angry, but she’s slamming the cabinets as she puts things away. Down the hall, my brother is talking to his transcriber and he has just knocked something over. When he’s flustered, he forgets where things are placed.

I don’t know what this is about. Basil and I missed the worst of it. My mother has just sent us upstairs with dinner, but dinner doesn’t seem to be in the immediate future here.

Alice wants to leave, I can tell. She wants to put on a pretty dress and go for a walk. Men who are unaccompanied by their betrotheds would wink at her, tip their hats, and smile the way they always do, and she’d tug on her earrings and look away. A little flirting is harmless, she’s told me. But she could never be the sort to commit an irrational act out of lust or greed. Such things have had people declared irrational, ruined their family’s reputations, and affected their chances of entering the queue. But Alice’s loyalty to my brother isn’t rooted in fear. She always hurries straight home from work to be with him, and she won’t go as far as the market unless I’m nearby to check on him. She loves him completely and without complaint.

“I’m sorry, Morgan,” she tells me, taking the plate from my hands and bringing it to the cold box. “Now isn’t a good time. Tell your mother we say thank you.”

“Is everything okay?” I say. Basil touches my arm and guides me toward the door.

“As much as things will ever be,” she sighs, and closes the door behind us.

I hear her high heels pacing about the kitchen, disappearing down the hall.

I frown. “I wonder what Lex has done this time.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” Basil says. “They argue all the time. They argued on their wedding day. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” I say, and force a rather unconvincing laugh.

“What’s the matter?” Basil says.

Everyone seems to be falling to pieces around me. Alice and Lex are struggling in the aftermath of Lex’s incident with the edge, even all these years later. I don’t know what is the matter with Pen—destroying her art and hoarding her secrets; and I cannot stop thinking about Judas Hensley and his dead betrothed.

But none of these things are mine to share, not even with Basil. So I say, “It’s nothing.” No need to burden him with the burden of others. Perhaps Pen is right, and I am diplomatic to a fault.

“Come on,” Basil says, hooking his elbow around mine. “We can go for a walk.”

He’s trying to distract me so I don’t go sullen on him. Boys get nervous when girls are sullen.

“Not to the lake,” I say, too quickly. It’s after dark now and Judas might be lurking; Amy said he’s been drifting through the labor sections, where there will be nobody but the food animals at night, but there’s no telling with him. I swear I feel his eyes on me in the afternoons sometimes.

Basil raises an eyebrow as he holds the stairwell door open for me. “No?”

“I’m still hungry,” I amend. “Maybe we could try the tea shop near the theater. They have desserts.”

“You know it’s near where the flower shop burned down,” he says. “We’ll have to pass by it.”

“I know.” Maybe if I keep seeing it, it won’t be so scary.

There are no patrolmen to hold open the lobby doors for us tonight. Security seems to be lessening, and I wonder if it’s to perpetuate the illusion of safety or so that there will be more men secretly looking for Judas.

I have my answer before we make it to the shuttle station. A crowd has gathered, and patrolmen are pacing with their arms out, saying “Get back, get back” while nobody seems to be listening.

A flutter of a white bow gets my attention, resting atop a short blond ponytail. Amy. I break free of Basil’s arm and run toward her.

“Morgan, wait!” Basil says.

“Amy!” People are moving around her like the angry waves the god of the earth cast to drown his people in the history book.

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t even turn her head. As I get closer I see that a boy is holding on to her hand, the pair of them like statues. Why won’t they move?

I muscle my way through the crowd, and when I reach her I can see that she’s trembling. Her face has gone pale and her eyes are rimmed with red. The boy at her side is staring too.

“Amy?”

A whimper.

Basil catches up to me. He’s got his arm around my waist and he’s trying to tug me away, but I’m resisting. “Come on,” he says. “Don’t look.”

“What?” I say. And even though he has told me not to, I can’t help following Amy’s gaze.

The crowd has gathered here to see something.

I don’t understand at first. Through the crowd I can see a boy who has fallen on the cobbles. Some other part of me knows what’s happening, though, because I’m already frozen still when I see the university crest on the rich purple vest, and I realize that he hasn’t simply fallen down.

His eyes are like the eyes of the trout my mother buys at the market on weekends. Peel back the paper and there are those eyes, bloodshot, glassy, and lifeless.

His dark skin is glistening wet, clothes plastered to his shape like a body emerging from water for air. But air means nothing to him now; he isn’t going to breathe.

The crowd has parted to make room for the medical vehicle, which has arrived too late.

Basil tugs my arm, and once again I hear the patrolmen shouting for us to get back. Someone crashes into me. “Amy,” I gasp, and finally she looks at me. There’s still that defiance in her eyes, but there’s fear too, because she’s a child and her parents don’t notice her absence and she needs someone. She needs somewhere to go. I grab her hand and she follows me as I follow Basil, and the boy holding on to Amy’s other hand follows too.

In the lobby of my apartment building, nobody knows what has happened yet. It’s a different world in here. We file into the stairwell and up the stairs. One step and then the next, I move, incapable of focusing on anything more. Breaths are hard to come by.

“The flower shop,” Amy blurts, stepping hard. “And Daphne.” Step. “And now Quince.”

“Stop,” the boy says. Amy breaks away from me and sits on a step and buries her forehead in her knees.

We all stop to look at her.

The boy sits beside her and asks if she needs her pill. She shakes her head.

“I need off,” she whispers, to no one in particular. “I need to get off this place.”

“You have to take one,” the boy says. He fumbles through her satchel until he finds the pharmacy bag of yellow pills. “You’ll have a fit.”

“Get Alice,” I whisper to Basil.

I sit next to Amy, and in resisting the pill the boy holds out, she looks at me. “One at a time,” she says. “He’s going to kill every last one of us. We’re all going to die and I’m one of the people to blame.”

She looks so breakable.

The boy grabs her chin, forces the pill into her mouth. She flails and struggles, but the pill goes down. She touches her throat and growls at him.

“You know I had to,” he says.

“It was a mistake bringing you anywhere with me,” she says. “You’re just like them. I can’t believe I’ll have to marry you; this year my request is going to be that Internment drops out of the sky before that day comes.”

“Go on then,” he says. “The way things are going, it may come true.” He hardly seems wounded. He’s done what the doctor has advised him to do. Jumpers need their medication.

Lex told me to stay away from Amy. Was he right? Does she have something to do with what I just saw? Does Judas? I hid him in the lake. I saved him from arrest. Am I involved in whatever this is?

One story up, the door bursts open and footsteps are pounding. Alice has taken off her heels and she runs barefooted down the steps. “Come on,” she’s saying, in that urgent way she uses when Lex crashes to the ground overcome with sudden pain. “Come on, it’s going to be okay. Let’s get you kids upstairs.”

She has to tug Amy up from under the arms and nudge her before she begins to move.

By the time I’ve made it to my brother’s and Alice’s apartment, something is happening to me. My mind is beginning to remember details, like the boy’s eyes that were staring at the stars, not blinking as patrolmen stepped over him. The flash of medic lights animating his shadow.

My knees are shaking and I sit in a kitchen chair before I fall instead. Basil stands behind me, holding my shoulders.

Alice leans on the table before me, tilts my chin so that our eyes meet. “Did you see the body?” she asks.