I try to reconcile this. Dirt warrens are small black creatures that burrow in the ground and eat worms and things. Birds, from what I understand, are known only for flying. “How can it be both?” I ask.
The clock man opens his mouth to speak, but my brother interrupts. “First,” he says, “you should know the reason you’re here.”
21
Fear is more dangerous than blasphemy.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
WHEN MY BROTHER JUMPED FROM THE edge of Internment, my father said it was because he had a lot of demons. But long before my brother was a jumper, when he and I were children, my father began collecting demons of his own.
As a patrolman, he fitted anklets on people who had turned irrational. He took part in the quiet dispatches of those who had committed crimes, their deaths later made to seem accidental. He was made to participate and even choreograph ugly things on the promise that these things would keep us all safe. And in the evening he would come home to his happy children and his loving wife and try to reconcile his role as one of the king’s elite.
Lex isn’t sure when our father began to tell my mother of the things that were happening behind the peoples’ backs, but my parents began to talk of changing things. There were other patrolmen and wives who felt the same way, and they began to meet in secret. At first they wondered whether they could persuade the king to change his methods. But this is a king who has ways of killing those who disrupt the order of his city. And the talk soon turned to rebellion. When they met Professor Finnian Leander, who taught technology courses at the university, he introduced the idea that they could leave Internment. Fly away on the wings of a metal bird.
Finnian Leander turned his blueprints and ideas into stories for his granddaughters—Amy and Daphne. “I could never take credit for their imaginations,” Professor Leander interrupts, smoothing his fingers over the face of his clock. “Their minds stretched farther than Internment long before my silly stories.”
“So Daphne became a part of it,” I say. I look to Lex. “What about you? When did Mom and Dad tell you all of this?”
“It was after I jumped,” he says. “At first Dad would whisper about it in the hospital, when he thought I was too far gone to hear him. My eyes were taped shut. He would apologize and say he should have realized the things I’d been seeing as a pharmacist. He should have told me everything sooner. He blamed himself.”
My brother speaks so coolly about it, as though he’s talking of people he’s never met, but I see the way his fingers are fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. This is all hard for him to say.
I finish for him, “And you became a part of it, too.”
He nods. “But I had suspected something like it for a long time,” he says. “I didn’t realize they’d actually built the bird, but I wasn’t surprised.”
He never got to see this place, I realize. Dad told him about it after the incident that blinded him.
“And that’s why they’re dead?” I say. “Because the king found out about it? And Daphne, and the university student?”
“Quince,” Amy says softly.
“Others, too,” Lex says. “There are plenty of deaths that nobody thinks twice about. The king can do away with anyone and make the cause appear to be anything he pleases.”
“Then why was Daphne’s death so public?” I say. I try not to think of the brutality of her demise. It was more than doing away with a nuisance—it was too violent and cruel to be anything but personal. Did the king do it himself, or did he have someone do the dirty work? Was it the prince, with his firm jaw and sparkling eyes?
“The king is trying to make a point now,” Professor Leander says. “He doesn’t know about the bird for certain, but he knows that there is unrest. He knows about the plans to leave the city. We have our suspicions about who may have betrayed our secret. It may have been done under duress. And now not only does the king want to stop us, but he wants to frighten everyone else into thinking that leaving the city is an act of evil. He wants them to think that we’re deranged and violent, so that they’ll fear us and seek his protection.”
Basil presses the back of his hand to my forehead and frowns. I lean into his touch before he draws his hand away. I’m glad he’s here, still by my side after all the trouble I’ve caused him.
“So all of you had this secret,” I say to Lex, an edge to my tone, “and nobody thought it’d be a good idea to tell me?”
“You weren’t burdened by it,” he says. “You didn’t carry the things that we did, and we didn’t want that for you.”
“So—what, you were all going to fly off Internment in a metal bird and just leave me home with a note saying that dinner was in the stove and you wouldn’t be coming back?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “There was no sense putting you at risk before anything was certain. We never would have left you behind.”
I think of the night my father came to my room after Daphne’s murder. You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is. That’s what he said. He must have come so close to telling me before he lost his nerve about it.
I realize I’m shaking. The metal walls are caving in, and all these eyes are on me and it’s getting hard to breathe.
“I need air,” I say.
“You can’t leave,” Alice says, sympathetic. “It isn’t safe for you. The king will have men looking for you.”
“Why?” I say. “None of this has anything to do with me. You all made sure of that.”
Lex laughs bitterly, and it takes all my strength not to hit him. “I guess that specialist saw something in you anyway,” he says. “There are extraordinary things in that head of yours. You don’t even realize the sorts of things you say.”
I try to recall the things I said to Ms. Harlan that might have made me stand out, but there’s nothing. I remember her accusatory stares and her suspicions, but I never betrayed a single thought. I lied each time she asked me about the ground.