Perfect Ruin

“Yes,” I told him.

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

WHEN MY BROTHER THROWS THE GLASS, it hits the wall first, then shatters on a patch of floor that was clearly recycled from an old door.

“You could have been killed!” Lex says.

Alice sees me wince. “All right, enough of that now,” she says, standing behind Lex and stroking his trembling arms. “Sit,” she tells him, but he doesn’t. His jaw is quivering. His eyes stare through me, and though my brother can’t see me, he can hear me breathing, sense my weight shifting. He always knows where I stand.

I try to say I’m sorry, but the words catch in my throat. He so rarely shows emotion that it frightens me when he does.

“She isn’t hurt,” Alice tells him. She looks into my eyes. “And she won’t leave again. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I manage.

“Who knows who followed you here,” Lex says, an octave shy of bellowing. “And you dragged Pen into this!” I’ve never seen him this angry. Usually he just tells me I’m foolish and then storms off. And if I’m mad enough, I storm off, too.

But I can’t go back to how it was before.

I take a step forward and I put my hands on his shoulders. “Hey.” My voice softens. “I said I’d always come back.”

He’s still for a moment, and then he drops into a chair and turns away from me. I’m clearly being shunned.

Alice steps around him and pulls me into a hug.

She’s quick to forgive me. So little ever needs to be said between us. She put her arms around me when we stood vigil over Lex’s hospital bed, and when I came to visit after her termination procedure, and anytime I needed comfort while my mother slept and my father worked.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” I whisper. “I won’t leave again.”

There’s nothing left to leave for. Everyone in my life is either in this bird or dead.

Judas has taken Pen on a tour of the metal bird, and while Professor Leander has his doubts about whether she’s to be trusted, he revels in the opportunity to show off his invention.

Basil and I are alone at the kitchen table. He brushes his fingertips through a jar of clear salve and dabs at my wrists.

“She has to go back home,” he says. “She still belongs in the city.”

After a hesitation, I say, “She can’t. She may have killed Prince Azure.”

He stiffens. “What?”

“In order to get free, we’d planned an ambush, and she got her own idea and attacked him. I would have stopped her, but there wasn’t time. I don’t even think she realized what she’d done until she saw it all happening in front of her.”

“Morgan—”

“It’s bad. I know.”

“Very bad. What if someone followed you?”

“They didn’t. It was the perfect diversion. Every patrolman in earshot came running when Princess Celeste started screaming,” I say. “That was the scream of something that can’t be undone, right there.”

He frowns. “Poor Pen,” he says.

“She isn’t to be blamed entirely. It’s because I went to say good-bye; that’s when they caught her.”

“It’s because of the king,” he says, smoothing a lump of salve over my wound. “Don’t let yourself think anything else.”

To give him peace of mind, I mutter, “Okay.” But I know it isn’t true. It can never be as simple as that. So much of this is my fault.

“And I don’t care who is to blame,” Basil says. “I’m here because I love you.”

There’s that word again. “Love.” It’s so easy for him to say. But it makes my stomach ache, my head fill with bramble flies.

He doesn’t even wait to hear if I’ll say it back this time. He rustles my hair and leaves to return the medical kit to the supply closet.

When he returns, he coaxes me to eat something. I suppose it’s meant to be bread, but it’s so stale that it hurts to swallow.

Basil uncorks a glass bottle of orange liquid. “Professor Leander concocted it,” he says. “Supposedly it has a day’s nutrients in case we run out of food. Take slow sips.”

I try not to cringe, but it tastes like dirt and citrus fruits.

“Do you remember the story of Saffron?” I say.

“The uncorrupted?” he says. “From the history book?”

To be an uncorrupted is the highest honor in the history book. There are only six of them, and Saffron was the last. There’s only one artist’s rendering of her, and in it she’s melancholy, with a gaunt face, dark hair and eyes, holding a blond-haired baby she was in charge of raising. Back when Internment still adhered to rankings, her parents sold her to a noble family as their servant.

Her life was fraught with hardship. The family she served was cruel. The husband had his way with her, and though it was never spoken, the wife knew and she sought revenge on Saffron by giving her impossible and dangerous tasks. Repairing wind-damaged shingles with a broken ladder. Retrieving children’s toys from frail branches.

Saffron didn’t even get to rest in her dodder years. She spent them caring for the family that owned her.

“I’ve never understood why Saffron gave the sky god her absolute faith,” I say. “I thought she’d be angry with him.”

“She was rewarded for her faith,” Basil reminds me. When she died, before she could be committed to ashes, her body ascended to the sky god whole, so the story goes. “She’s one of the few who can walk along the tributary. She can hear its souls whispering to her. She can wash her hair in it like it’s a stream if she wants to. She gets to have a perfect afterlife.”

“How could she be so good all of the time?” I stare at the orange liquid set before me. “What about this life? Couldn’t she ever be angry that this life wasn’t fair?”

Basil scoots his chair closer to mine, and he works a lock of hair behind my shoulder, smoothing it down over and over again. “Maybe Saffron wasn’t angry,” he says, “but I am.”

“Me too.” I try to laugh, but it sounds more like a whimper. “No walking along the tributary for us. Guess we’ll just be lumped into it like all the lowly others.”

“It’s never comforted me much,” Basil says. “The tributary, I mean. I don’t like the idea of blending in. I imagine a giant ribbon of people all sewn together and waving about on the wind.”

This time, I do laugh. “I’ve always thought the same thing,” I say, and as he sweeps his hand through my hair again, I grab his wrist to keep it still. I like the way his fingers feel against my temple. “Daphne said in her essay that the tributary frightened her, too,” I say. “‘Who decides what is saved and what is lost from our souls?’”

“We seem to have much in common with a girl who was killed for her ideas,” he says.

I lean against his hand, granting myself a moment of melancholy.

His sad smile tells me he understands. I don’t know how he always understands me when I haven’t a clue myself.

“Take a few more sips if you can get them down,” Basil says. “Then let’s get you cleaned up so you can rest.”

Water is in small supply on the metal bird, I come to realize. There are no running faucets; Professor Leander rigged a tap somewhere in the dirt and there’s a device that filters it clean, but the pressure is very weak and he’s particular about how much we take.

Pen and I sit in our undergarments, bathing ourselves with cloths we dip into the same shallow basin. We lather our hands with soapberries. Normally the berries would be pressed into a bar and are often scented, but raw berries will work in a pinch.

“I’ll wash your hair if you wash mine,” she says. “Try not to lather too hard. It frizzes the curls.”

“You might have to get used to uncooperative hair,” I say. “There’s a lot of moisture underground.” I don’t mention what Judas said about the theory of water being absorbed from the clouds, rather than it being a gift from the sky god. I’m still angry with her, but not enough to make her question her beliefs.

I lean back on my elbows, dunking my hair into the basin while Pen cups water in her hands and massages my scalp.

For a while it’s just the sound of the water, and then Pen says, “I didn’t want him to die.”

I focus on the ceiling, trying to determine what pieces of machinery it once was. Old gears from the clock tower melted down, maybe, or parts from an old train car.

“He probably isn’t dead,” she says. “Medical technology is so advanced nowadays, and the prince would be top priority.”

She wrings water out of my hair. “Say something.”

“How long were you planning it without me?” I ask.

“I noticed the loose stone when Prince Creepy was leading me to the water room. Later when you fell asleep, I got up and made sure I could work it free. I knew you’d never go for it, so I didn’t tell you. Look. I didn’t want to really hurt him, but it was the only way out, and they had been threatening to kill us all along.”

“They weren’t going to kill us,” I say. “You heard the princess. She didn’t tell on us. There’s some reason she wanted me to lead her to this machine.”

“She shouldn’t be so greedy,” Pen says. “If I were living her life, I’d count my blessings, not ask for more of them.”

She’s right about this much. I’ll never understand the prince and princess’s reasons for kidnapping us, and I’ll never know if they were being greedy, or lonely, or just bored.

But despite my anger, I find myself talking to the god in the sky. It’s the first time I’ve done so in a long time.

I ask that Prince Azure will live.

28

I have wondered if Internment is an afterlife. I have entertained the idea that we are a glorious dream …

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

I’M EXHAUSTED, BUT I CAN’T SLEEP. EVERY time I close my eyes, I see the quartet flutterling I bought for Pen. A hand pulls the cord, and it flies around and around behind my eyelids. It won’t be still.

I open my eyes. Basil is pressed against me on the tiny mattress and is watching me. I wouldn’t let him blow out the candle in our lantern; the darkness would feel too much like my prison in the clock tower. “Can’t relax?” he says.

“It wasn’t midnight yet when I came back underground,” I say. “I didn’t get to hear the clock tower strike twelve. I just wish I could have heard the chimes once more.” I reposition myself, finding it difficult to find a soft spot amid these blankets. “Basil? Do you think they have clock towers on the ground?”