Perfect Ruin

“At four-oh-five this evening,” the king begins, “the coroner made his official statement that the death of a sixteen-year-old young lady was the result of murder. I warn those of you watching at home that many of the details about to be shared are graphic, and young children should not be present.”

The other tenants are huddling together. Pen and I have our arms around each other; my view of the screen is partially obstructed by the people ahead of me, but I don’t crane my neck for a better look.

Across the room, Alice chews her thumbnail and nods at something that my father has just said to her.

There’s an assortment of gasps and “Oh no” and mutterings as the murdered girl’s class image is shown. She’s got a coy smile and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. My first thought is that she’s radiant. Through the sepia, I can imagine her face alive with color.

“Oh,” Pen whispers into my ear. “I know her. We were in a romantic-literature course together.”

“Daphne Leander,” the king goes on, “a tenth-year student and aspiring medic, is estimated to have died this morning. Her parents informed our patrolmen that they last saw her boarding the shuttle for the academy.”

The details turn dark after that. She received absences from all of her instructors. No report from other morning passengers that she ever boarded the train. She was found early in the evening. Throat and wrists slashed. Everything indicates that she bled to death. As to how her body came to be on the train tracks during daylight hours—that’s still under investigation.

“Patrolmen will be stationed in every train car, at every platform, and outside the doors of every building of Internment until the criminal responsible for this vicious act is found.”

Pen’s mother stands a few paces away with her arm out, waving her daughter to come over and allow herself to be embraced, but Pen resists.

“It’s important for you to all go about your lives normally,” the king says. Daphne’s image is replaced with the sketched map of Internment. “The theater and the businesses in the shopping sections will keep their usual hours. There will be patrolmen in sight at all times; report any suspicious activity, no matter how minor it may seem at the time.”

The panic reaches through me like vines curling up from my toes to my stomach, twisting and knotting and tightening around my organs. Internment looks so small on the screen. It would take a train less than two hours to circle it entirely. Within that circuit is everyone I’ve ever loved and every place I will ever go. But it has been sullied, ugliness spreading out like the color from a steeping tea bag, until everything is covered by it. There’s someone out there capable of slashing open a young girl’s skin and leaving her to be found.

“I feel sick,” I say.

“Me too,” Pen says.

When the broadcast is over, the screen goes to static.

“Margaret,” Pen’s father calls impatiently. She grunts. He’s the only one who uses her real name; even her instructors call her Pen, despite what her forms and her student identification card say.

Numbly I watch her return to her parents, but she squeezed my hand before she went. The crowd is dwindling, but I don’t go to my father and Alice; I go to the stairwell, and once the door is closed behind me and I’m alone, I run up the four flights of stairs to my brother’s apartment. The door is locked; it’s never locked. I fight the doorknob and then I pound frantically on the door. I can hear shuffling inside and I know he’s coming to let me in, but there are footfalls in the stairwell and there could be anything around the corner, where a bulb has gone out and shadows spread into the light.

The door opens and I spill inside, pushing it shut behind me.

“Morgan?” he says. Even without his sight, Lex always knows my presence. His dark hair is bunched on one side; he pulls at it when he’s writing.

I try to speak, but my lip is quivering and my heart is in my throat and I’m out of breath from the climb.

“You watched the broadcast, didn’t you?” he says. “It’s all right. Breathe. Sit down.” He pulls out a kitchen chair for each of us.

“Pen knew her,” I blurt. “She wanted to be a medic. She was my age. And she was pretty.” I don’t even know what I’m saying. Words are blurring like the city through the train window. My lungs are aching.

“Morgan.” My brother reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine. “Every generation has its horror stories. It was only a matter of time before something awful happened in front of you. It’s an awful thing to be alive sometimes.”

“Don’t say that. It isn’t awful at all.”

There’s so much beauty out there that Daphne Leander will never see again.

Lex has such a piteous look on his face, as though I’m the one to feel sorry for.

“Why do you say things like that?” I ask.

“Because I saved lives when I was a pharmacy student,” he says. “And you can’t be the reason someone is alive without giving thought to what being alive means.”

I pull my hand away from his. “Remind me to never implore your aid if I’m dying.”

“Don’t be angry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Morgan, I’m sorry. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you never had to know such things.”

“But you write about it,” I say. “Don’t you? People dying and getting sucked up into the swallows and things.”

“Sometimes,” he admits. “You’ve read dark stories, haven’t you? People die in them?”

“But I know they aren’t real,” I say. “I put the book down and I go on with my life.”

He frowns. “Things are changing, Little Sister, and not for the better. I have a feeling about that. But I would dock Internment to the ground and take you someplace brilliant if I could.”

“Internment is brilliant,” I say. “It’s more than enough.”

More than enough. I repeat the words over and over in my head, forcing them to be true.

4

Virtuousness—how is it defined? We are taught not to approach the edge, and certainly not to jump. But is bravery not a virtue?

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

THE TRAIN RIDE TO THE ACADEMY IS SO quiet that I can hear the wheels squeaking on the tracks, and the hum of the electricity. The students, like the families in my building during the broadcast, huddle together, talking softly if at all.

Even Basil and Thomas aren’t speaking.

Pen watches the clouds blurring past us, and in the window’s reflection I think she’s watching the patrolman standing at the head of our car. As promised, there was no lack of them this morning, holding open doors for us, nodding, saying, “Good morning” as though to reassure us that our little world is safe. They cast suspicious glances at the men in particular. I don’t know that I like this. The vigilance of the patrolmen is supposed to make me feel safe, but all it does is further the knowledge that something has changed.

There are patrolmen watching us step off the train; Pen stays close to me, huffing indignantly as she tugs her skirt pleats down past her knees. “Are all these eyes really necessary?” she says.

“They’re only looking out for our safety,” Basil says. “Try to ignore them.”

She looks over her shoulder after the patrolman who opened the academy door for us; she crinkles her nose but says nothing more.

Normally we’d have at least ten minutes of free time in the lobby, but today we’re supposed to report to our first classes immediately. “I’ll see you at lunch,” I say to Basil.

He reaches for my hand, hesitates, and drops his arm back at his side. “See you at lunch.” I watch him disappear into a group of his morning classmates.

“What was that about?” Pen says after we’ve rounded the corner.

“I think he’s going to kiss me soon,” I say, suddenly feeling very awkward about what to do with my own hands. “It seemed like he wanted to yesterday when he walked me home.”

“At last, my little girl is growing up,” she says.

“I’m three days older than you,” I say.

She bumps me with her shoulder. “But I know all the things you’re too sweet to know.”

Her laugh gives me more reassurance than all the patrolmen on Internment combined.

The cafeteria at lunchtime, in contrast to the rest of the academy, is alive with chatter.

“I’ve found a few things out about Daphne Leander,” Pen says, setting her tray on the table across from Basil and me. She rifles through her satchel and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “These were tacked up in the ladies’ locker room. They’re all handwritten but they say the same thing. Look at the date—it’s from last month. It was her essay on the history of the gods. But we had to read our essays aloud, and this isn’t the one she read. If I had to guess, it was a draft she didn’t intend to have anyone find.”

As I’m unfolding the page, Basil says, “Should we be invading her privacy like this?”

“They’re all over the academy,” Pen says. “Someone wanted them seen, to be sure.”

I smooth the page flat against the table and begin to read. Intangible Gods, Daphne Leander, Year Ten.

“You look lovely today,” Thomas says, seating himself beside Pen.

She glares at her lunch tray and mumbles a dispirited, “Thank you.”

I fold the paper before Thomas notices it, and tuck it into my skirt pocket.

“How are you handling the news?” Thomas asks, glancing between Pen and me. “It must be pretty frightening for you girls.”

“Everyone’s frightened,” Pen says. “Not just the girls.”

“Of course,” Thomas says. “I only meant that you must feel more vulnerable. The fairer sex and all that.”

“How do you know it had anything to do with being a girl?” Pen says. “The patrolmen aren’t watching just the girls. They’re watching all of us. We don’t know why this murderer victimized a girl or if that even mattered, and we don’t know who could be next.”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” he says, looking between Pen and me. “Forgive me.”

I concentrate on my tray. It isn’t hard to understand why Pen is always avoiding her betrothed, even if to an outsider they’d seem like the perfect pair; he’s every bit as attractive as she is, in that pristine, bright-eyed way. And he has her same spiritedness, but they are far from compatible most days. She has confided in me that she’d cheerfully marry a dead trout in his place.