WE EAT DINNER IN SILENCE, MY MOTHER and I. My father is out investigating the incident and going door-to-door making sure everyone is home and accounted for.
The word keeps replaying in my head: “murder.” It’s a dusty, cobwebbed word; there hasn’t been cause to use it on Internment in my lifetime. It’s something I’ve only read about in novels. It’s something that happens on the ground, where there are so many people and most of them are strangers to one another, where there are many places to stray and conspire, where people so often go bad. At least that’s what I imagine it’s like; nobody knows for sure what the ground is like. Not even King Furlow.
We have engineers who study the ground from afar and educate themselves on ways to further our own technology. Internment has evolved drastically in the last several hundred years; we’ve learned to set underground wires and indoor plumbing for our sinks and water rooms. The city’s electricity is generated by the glasslands, which is a series of panels and globes that gather the sun’s energy and store it so that it can be converted into electricity. But there are ground technologies we don’t use because the king believes they would complicate our world, make it too dangerous. The king says that the ground makes people greedy and wasteful, while the people of Internment are resourceful and humble.
I think about the murdered girl. I wonder about her final moments. I’m horrible and selfish—I must be—because all my thoughts lead to the idea that she could have been me instead.
My mother’s dinner sits untouched on her plate. She’s weaving the fork between her fingers and staring out the window across the apartment. The sun has gone away and the train speeds past, rattling our walls for the second time since we’ve heard the news. The girl’s body has been cleaned from the track and the train is back in service. Things must go on. There would be more cause to worry if they didn’t.
“It’s good that Basil walked you all the way home,” she says. “Maybe he should from now on.”
“Will there be academy tomorrow?” I ask.
“I’m sure there will,” she says, not moving her eyes from the window. The view is exactly the same as it has always been—other apartments and windows full of light. But something has changed; there’s something dangerous out there, and to look now, we’d never be able to find it.
There was a murder when my parents were young. Two men had been fighting, and somehow they’d reached the swallows, and one pushed the other in. The fence surrounding the swallows has since been rebuilt to ensure such a thing can never happen again.
Hundreds of years ago, the swallows were a farmland, but something changed. There have been theories about atmospheric pressure, or else the god in the sky becoming angry. The dirt began shifting, and over the decades, it began to churn into itself, swallowing the animals and the crops and anything else that touched it. I’ve seen slide images of it—a whirling darkness always in motion.
The murderer had been driven mad by a tainted elixir that should have been discarded by the pharmacists. He was feverish and deranged when they found him, and the king had no choice but to have him dispatched.
I clear the dishes, scraping the uneaten food into the compost tube, where it’s immediately sucked away to the processing chamber in the basement. I try to keep my mind busy with homework, and my mother doesn’t offer to double-check my answers. She’s curled in the armchair, touching the fringe of Lex’s blanket that’s wrapped around her thin shoulders. I hate when she gets this way, so uncertain.
I go to bed two hours early, and I listen to Lex pacing upstairs. When I stand on the bed and knock on the ceiling three times, there’s a pause and then he knocks three times with his foot. I think his muffled voice is saying, “Go to sleep.”
When we were children, we shared a two-tiered bed, and he slept on the top tier. His lantern would burn late into the night, and sometimes I would lie awake watching his shadows move across the ceiling as he wrote. I would knock on the underside of the bed, and the only reply I ever got was, “Go to sleep.”
But I’m too restless, and I wander to my bedroom window and thrust it open. If I stick my head out far enough, I can see a bit of the glasslands to the left. It’s viewable from most everywhere because it sits at the heart of the city. Only the sun engineers are permitted to enter the buzzing fence that surrounds it. From afar, though, it looks like a miniature city made of glass. When I was little, I used to imagine that people lived there. Sometimes I still do. A city within a city. What could be safer than that?
I tell myself that I’m safe. The murdered girl didn’t have a betrothed who protected her like Basil protects me. She didn’t have a brother upstairs and a mother in the next room and a father on the patrol force. She didn’t keep to her routine. She wasn’t like me. She couldn’t have been.
I dream of an angry god in the sky, filling the atmosphere with lightning and inky swirls of wind. He has come alive from my textbook; he doesn’t show his face, but he’s the maestro in an orchestra of elements. His winds cause the city to shake, the edges to crumble away. We’ve already been banished from the ground, and now the sky has turned on us. There’s nowhere left to go.
My father’s voice is what wakes me. He has turned on my bedside lamp, and its glow casts hard shadows on his face. “Morgan?” he whispers. He’s still in uniform; he must have just gotten in.
I push myself upright. “What’s wrong?” I say, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes. The nightmare is already dissolving as I remember the dark circumstances of the day.