Perfect Ruin

“I hope you’re able to bring that grade up,” he says, kissing my cheek. Then he’s gone, and Ms. Harlan is smiling theatrically as she holds her door open for me.

I push past her, betraying no anxiety. I think of what Lex told me after I saw the university student’s body. I saw nothing. I was in bed, getting ready for sleep.

Ms. Harlan doesn’t ask about the university student, though. Strangely, there is nothing accusatory or suspicious about the way she sits across from me and pours two cups of tea. There is also a glass bottle on her desk, filled with a molten gold liquid with flecks that catch the sunlight. Sweetgold; it was a rare treat in my home, because everyone knows that its sugars are terrible for the teeth. Ms. Harlan uncorks the bottle and spoons a bit of it into my tea, causing an oily ghost in the liquid before the sweetgold sinks to the bottom.

“I thought we’d be indulgent today,” she says, her glasses misting briefly as she takes a sip from her own cup. “These are trying times, you know? My grandmother used to keep a bottle of sweetgold in her cabinet for the hard times. Not that there were many hard times when I was a girl.”

“Times will get better,” I say, sounding sincere, because it’s only after I’ve already said the words that I realize I don’t mean them.

“Did you know that at the end of the warm season, the sweetgold is at its peak? Something about the stress of the pending cold worries the bramble flies, causes a chemical reaction.”

“I don’t know much about bramble flies,” I say. “Only that they sting when they feel threatened, and that their stings leave a nasty welt.” This isn’t everything. I also know that they feature prominently in my mother’s old sketches, and that Alice can calm them by humming; she encounters them a lot, working with plants as she does.

“The venom in the stinger is also an ingredient in many healing elixirs,” Ms. Harlan muses. “Curious things, really.”

She’s watching me, so I sip my tea. The sweetgold glides along my throat, and warms my stomach the instant it’s down.

I’m waiting for the inevitable. To be asked what I saw. Maybe she even knows, somehow, that I saw the university student myself, that I know his name is Quince, and because Amy knew him, I suspect he was a friend to my brother’s jumper group. But Ms. Harlan is not as menacing or as suspicious as usual today. She only smiles at me in a sad way and says, “Your family must love you very much.”

It wasn’t a question, but I feel oddly compelled to say, “Yes.”

“And your betrothed, Basil Cowl.”

It worries me that she has taken the time to learn his full name.

My muscles tense. I say nothing. I finish my tea.

Still glancing at me, Ms. Harlan scribbles on a piece of paper and then slides it across the desk. “You should be going back to class now,” she says.

The rest of the day is as foggy as the morning felt. I don’t eat a thing off my lunch tray. Basil thumbs patterns along my thigh under the table. Thomas coaxes Pen to nibble some of her apple. Her eyes are sunken, the lids mapped by tiny purple veins. She’s the most spirited person I know, and as vivacious as she is most days, that’s how dark she is other days. I believe her broken spirit has more to do with the pall that hangs over the city than the university student’s death alone. She loves Internment more than anyone I’ve ever met, and when it’s miserable, she’s miserable.

I should be saying something to cheer her, but I can’t bring myself to open my mouth. The entire cafeteria is quiet.

I can still taste the sweetgold, but it has gone sour on my tongue.

The boys try to strike up a conversation. Basil says there have been a lot of clouds, and Thomas says this is always the case in the short season. It has more to do with the weather patterns on the ground than with us.

I think of the white, frozen dust that falls from the clouds and covers the ground. How green and new the world must be when the sun melts it all away.

18

We accept gods that don’t speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It’s easier than accepting that there’s nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone.

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

AFTER CLASS, THOMAS HAS SOMEHOW persuaded Pen to come home with him. “I suppose I’m not much in the mood for my mother’s inebriated weeping anyway,” she sighs, letting him tug her away with him once we’ve gotten off the train.

Basil and I walk to my building, make our way past the patrolman who is there to hold open the door now that another murder has occurred, and climb the staircase leading to my apartment.

“My mother will probably be asleep,” I tell him, working my key into the doorknob. We never used to bother with locks before Daphne’s murder. “But I’m sure she left dinner if you’re hungry.”

Only, there is no dinner waiting for me in the kitchen. The stove is cold. My mother didn’t even bother with a light, and with the sun nearly set, the apartment is full of shadows.

Basil catches my frown when I see the pharmacy bag on the table. “Maybe she just isn’t feeling well,” he says.

“She’s getting worse,” I say. It’s because my father works so much. She’ll deny it, but I know that’s part of it.

I peer into her bedroom and can just make out her form. The blinds are, as always, drawn. She’s on top of the covers, curled away from me. I frown and close the door. I wonder if she went to work at all today. Workers are granted only two missed days a month before they are required to be medically evaluated.

When I return to the kitchen, without breaking stride I go straight into Basil’s arms, defeated. What a spectacular mess he’s betrothed to. But our home will never be like this. He will never leave for days at a time and I will never go back to the malaise of those elixirs. I’ll jump off the edge of this city, I’ll go mad, I’ll go blind before I let our home be like this. There will always be dinner waiting for our children and they’ll always feel safe. Whether or not safety exists. “I just had a silly thought,” I murmur against his chest. “Us sitting at a table eating dinner with our children, and outside, the city is burning down.”

“You’re warm,” Basil says, pressing his chin and then his wrist against my forehead. He draws back to look at me. “How do you feel?”

“A little light-headed,” I admit. “All I’ve had today is tea.”

His fingers brush against the tips of my ears and there’s a moment of dizziness, but that clears away when I feel a stab of pain in my stomach. All the pleasant lightness is being stolen away by this new pain that has me tasting something like blood where I tasted sweetgold earlier today.

Basil is leading me to a kitchen chair, but I don’t quite make it before my knees buckle.

“Morgan!” He catches me under my arms. He calls for my mother, but of course she doesn’t hear him, lost in her dreams under tree roots and in old colorings of children she’s never met.

I double forward onto my hands. Something is happening. Something is very wrong. The floorboards are blurring and my stomach is all knives, organs bleeding into my lungs.

“I’m taking you to the callbox,” Basil says. It’s a machine in every building that can be used to contact the hospital in an emergency.

I can barely get the breath to say, “No. Take me to Lex.” My brother could fix anything—stings and scrapes and odd afflictions were his specialty before he began sewing quilts. We always knew he’d go into medicine; as a child he was fascinated with healing.

When Basil lifts me into his arms, I cry out in pain. He has never moved so fast. I blink and we’re at my brother’s door, and Basil is kicking at it because it’s locked, and I want to tell him not to make such a commotion—what has possessed him?—but the motion has made me too dizzy to speak.

The door swings open, and Alice greets us with her hair done up high on her head, woven into and into itself like the pages from Lex’s transcriber.

They’re saying words I can’t catch as Basil hurries me through the kitchen. I see the unlit candles and the dishes laid out sparkling clean, before they’re pushed away with a chorus of awful shattering sounds, and then Basil is laying me down on the table. There’s the warm smell of something cooking, and all I can think is that on one of the rare nights when Alice has cooked dinner, I’ve ruined it. But she doesn’t care. She’s kicking the shards out of the way to get to me, and yelling for Lex.

I close my eyes, but then Basil says, “No, Morgan. Look at me,” and I do. Somehow I know that this is important.

“What’s happening to me?” I say.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, but we’ll fix it.”

Time is playing out before me like the scope slides we’re shown in class. One image, blackness, then another.

In the next slide, Lex is standing over me and his face is serious, detached. He presses his fingers against my neck to take my pulse. Alice tells him the things he cannot see. “Her skin is flushed but not sweaty. Her lips and tongue are pale. Her pupils are dilated.”

He touches my forehead. “Get the storage container that’s under the water room sink,” he tells her. “It’s full of corked vials.” His voice is short, almost angry.

She’s gone.

“Morgan?” He’s leaning over me now. There’s a little of the blue that was in his eyes before the edge faded them to gray. “Tell me where it hurts,” he says. My answer is a shuddering whimper when he kneads into my stomach.

Alice is back with the vials and she sets them on the counter and says, “Tell me what to do.” Her voice is steady. Her eyes are red.

“I need to know what I’m dealing with before anyone does anything,” he says. “Talk to me, Little Sister. I need your voice. Describe what you’re feeling.”

“I don’t know,” I manage. “It’s like my stomach is burning, and everything is spinning a little.”

“She said she didn’t eat anything today,” Basil offers.

Lex pushes into my stomach again. He’s in medic mode; he would have to be in order to touch me. Some months into his blindness, he began shirking away if my arm so much as brushed his. Alice said I was at the age when girls change overnight, and it made him feel that I was a stranger. I was no longer as he’d last seen me. I had barely noticed the differences in myself until she said it. It took a lot of insistence to reacquaint him with my hands. He didn’t know how to trust what he couldn’t see.