So that’s what they’re telling everyone.
She smiles, wipes a tear from her cheek. “But you’re okay. It was a mistake. I should have known better than to listen to my mother; she has one foot in a fantasy novel at all times. What really happened? Did you have to go to the hospital to get looked at? Like when Carmilla Tilmaker swallowed a dead bramble fly in kinder year.”
What really happened?
Now it’s my turn to be somber. I am too exhausted to cry. Is that normal? To be orphaned and not grasp the magnitude of such a word, let alone expend any emotion over it? “I was ill, but I’m okay now. Lex and Alice are fine.”
She plays with a lock of my hair, waiting for me to go on.
“Pen?” I stare at her knees and mine. “What if there were a way off this city, and I told you I was going to take it? Would you file to have me declared irrational?”
She doesn’t answer. There’s no way she could already know about the mechanical bird or the conspiracy or any of those things, but she knows me. She knows that something is coming.
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “I wasn’t even supposed to come out, but I had to”—say good-bye—“see the stars again.” I can’t imagine they’ll be this pretty from the ground. On the ground, the history book says, the humans have infinite land to fill with buildings; and the scopes show us that they make their own lights, and the stars mean nothing to them. But up here, we see them, as clear as lightbugs that float in the air around our heads.
Pen and I raise our heads and look at each other. “Come out from where?” she asks.
I listen for some sign that Judas is still nearby, but though I know he’s watching me, he’s silent. It’s as though I can feel him willing me not to say another word about it.
And he needn’t worry. I won’t tell. But it isn’t to protect the metal bird or the rebellion. It’s because of what she said that night on the train platform. She told me I needed to stop thinking about the ground. She said that she didn’t want to know what was beyond Internment.
We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that.
This is her home. I can’t take it away from her. Instead, all I can do is stare at her—this lovely, lovely girl who might have been nobility in another time with that hair and those eyes. If I never see her again after this moment, I’ll have enough memories of her to carry for every day of the rest of my life. But no matter how vivid those memories, they will all end here, now, her eyes glimmering in the starlight, and the feel of the blade pressed to my hip.
I won’t even get to see her wedding, I realize. She’ll have so many years to float in the sky, and my days here are coming to an end.
“I have to leave now,” I say.
She says, “Where are you going?”
“To murder the king,” I say. I know it isn’t possible, but I just want to know how it feels to say the words out loud. They feel perfect. My blood swirls and swirls with delicious warmth at the fantasy of it. “I’m going to creep into the clock tower,” I say, “and climb every last stair until I get up to the king’s apartment. I’m going to sneak into his bedroom while he’s sleeping and cut open his throat. I think that’s how I’ll do it. I’d like that.”
Pen would laugh at the absurdity on a normal day, but she’s looking into my eyes.
“Morgan—” She grips my arm, stands, and tugs me into the shadow of heavy leaves as though to protect me from what I’ve said. “You can’t be blurting out things like that right now. It’s treason. What if someone hears?”
“Nobody is listening,” I say. “Nobody ever listens to us. We’re all milling around pretending that what we do is important, that we’re important, but the king will do away with anyone he’d like.”
There’s a bright moon tonight, split to pieces by branches. It’s an organ with veins and arteries. A non-beating heart. If there’s a god at all, he’s dead in his sky.
Pen holds my face in her hands. Her thumb brushes at my cheek over and over. “This isn’t like you at all,” she says. “What’s happened?”
I’ve said ugly things, but she doesn’t flinch.
“You asked what really happened,” I say. “My parents are dead.”
I stare at her collarbone that’s framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with the weight of her next breath. We’re fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?
Some sound escapes her lips, but I can’t comprehend it. All I know for sure is that I have to leave. I can’t face her like this. “I’ve said too much,” I say, and take a step away. I’m just about to run, when she grabs my wrist. I struggle. For the first time in my life I struggle to get away from her, but she’s too strong for it. I pull with all I’ve got, and her shoes dig into the earth, her legs don’t even move. She’s rooted, hardly a grunt for her efforts.
All the fight goes out of me. She lets go only when she’s sure I won’t run.
“They’re dead,” I say, and sink into the dirt. She kneels beside me.
When her mother became addicted to tonic, Pen was the victim of too many well wishes and sympathies. She has told me before that she’s had her fill of them for a lifetime no matter the tragedy, and that holds true. She says nothing.