Perfect Ruin
Perfect Ruin
Lauren DeStefano
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy: On the floating city of Internment, you can be anything you dream. Unless you approach the edge.Morgan Stockhour knows getting too close to the edge of Internment, the floating city in the clouds where she lives, can lead to madness. Even though her older brother, Lex, was a Jumper, Morgan vows never to end up like him. If she ever wonders about the ground, and why it is forbidden, she takes solace in her best friend, Pen, and in Basil, the boy she’s engaged to marry.Then a murder, the first in a generation, rocks the city. With whispers swirling and fear on the wind, Morgan can no longer stop herself from investigating, especially once she meets Judas. Betrothed to the victim, he is the boy being blamed for the murder, but Morgan is convinced of his innocence. Secrets lay at the heart of Internment, but nothing can prepare Morgan for what she will find – or whom she will lose.
FOR
MY FAMILY,
who knows
the importance
of dreaming
beyond the edge
of our world
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
—Jalāl ad-Din ar-Rūmī
The first humans were especially ungrateful. After the birth of the sun and the moon, they asked for stars. After the crops rose from the ground, they asked for beasts to fill the fields. After some time, the god of the ground, weary of their demands, thought it best to destroy them and begin again with humbler beings. So it goes that the god of the sky thought the first humans too clever to waste, and he agreed to keep them in the sky with the promise that they would never again interfere with the ground.
—The History of Internment, Chapter 1
Table of Contents
Cover (#u6a5eb801-1515-536a-9bfb-9f1ec5ab5d44)
Title Page (#u8379f7cb-aa9e-5ac5-a9b6-0039b87e7225)
Dedication (#u75a7f8c8-33ef-5286-b892-cdd1cb9743b4)
Epigraph (#u7a461211-a844-549d-9d1b-e802c440cf4a)
Chapter 1 (#u8ac023a1-f2e6-528a-b20e-8f2bfecc31b8)
Chapter 2 (#uafcf069e-1cc6-5a26-83be-93d2ec608fe1)
Chapter 3 (#u1e3d840a-0f55-5423-b8f8-eb2ee5ca5448)
Chapter 4 (#u09e8af96-78ab-5346-ac06-ab3b50456ca8)
Chapter 5 (#u99da917f-b33c-58da-965c-3322c0054a5b)
Chapter 6 (#u25ed4644-e1c9-5555-890b-9fa6ffac8619)
Chapter 7 (#u7ee52336-d37d-514e-9da1-a95e700fcd98)
Chapter 8 (#u53510f76-25b2-56d2-8d3c-1f9f1a07d935)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lauren DeStefano (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_7484d1a3-8051-57ee-a14c-cbc902d6bcbf)
You have all heard the warnings about the edge. We have been told its winds are a song that will hypnotize us, and by the time we awaken from that trance, it will be too late.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
WE LIVE ENCAPSULATED BY THE TRAINS. They go around in a perfect oval at all hours, stopping for thirty-five seconds in each section so the commuters are able to board and depart. Beyond the tracks, after the fence, there’s sky. Engineers crafted a scope so that we can see the ground below us. We can see tall buildings and other sorts of trains—some of which disappear underground or rise onto bridges. We can see patches of cities and towns that appear stitched like one of Lex’s blankets.
We’ve never been able to craft a scope advanced enough to see the people—it isn’t allowed. We’ve been banished to the sky. I’m told they can see Internment, though. I wonder, what must we look like to them? A giant oval of the earth with rocks and roots clinging to the bottom, I suppose. I’ve seen sketches of what Internment looks like as a whole, and it’s as though a giant hand came down and took a piece right out of the ground, and here we are floating in the sky.
When I was a child, I used to think about the day Internment was ripped from the ground and placed in the sky. I used to wonder if the people were frightened, or if they felt fortunate to be saved. I used to imagine that I was a part of Interment’s first generation. I’d close my eyes and feel the ground under my feet going up and up and up.
“Ms. Stockhour,” Instructor Newlan says, “you’re dreaming with your eyes open again. Page forty-six.”
I look at the textbook open before me and realize I haven’t been keeping up with the lesson since page thirty-two.
“I don’t suppose you would care to add to our discussion.” He always paces between the rows of desks as he lectures, and now he’s stopped before me.
“The festival of stars?” I say, but I’m only guessing. I have an incurably wandering mind, a fact that has given Instructor Newlan much cheerful cause to torture me. The chorus of chuckles from my classmates confirms I’m wrong.
“We’ve moved on to geography,” Pen says from beside me. She glances from me to the instructor, curls bouncing around her cheeks and creating a perfect ambiance for the look of contrition on her face; if Instructor Newlan thinks she’s sorry for speaking out of turn, he won’t give her a demerit. He likes her; she’s the only one left fully conscious after his geography lectures—she’d like to work on the maps when she’s older. He gives her a wry glance over his glasses, flips my book to the correct page, and goes on.
“I do realize that it’s December first,” Instructor Newlan says. “I know we’re all excited for the festival of stars to begin, but let us remember that there is plenty of class work to be done in the meantime.”
The festival of stars is a monthlong celebration, and in the excitement and preparations, it’s common for students and adults alike to daydream. But while the rest of Internment daydreams of normal things—gifts and requests to the god of the sky—I dream of things that are dangerous and could have me arrested or killed. I stare at the edge of my desk and imagine it’s the end of my little world.
After the class is over, I wait for Basil before I move for the door. He always insists on catching the same shuttle to the train so he can escort me home. He worries. “Where does your mind go?” he asks me.
“She was thinking about the ground again,” Pen teases, linking her elbow around mine and squeezing against me. “I swear, with all your daydreams about the ground, you could be a novelist.”
I will never be disciplined enough to write a novel, not like my brother, Lex, who says I’m too much of an optimist to have any artistic prowess.
We walk quickly. Pen is trying to avoid Thomas, her betrothed, and the way she keeps glancing behind us, she isn’t even being inconspicuous.
We make it into a shuttle with hardly a second to spare. The shuttles are electric vehicles that are much smaller than train cars and therefore are usually crowded. We stand huddled by the door. Pen deflates with a quiet sigh of relief. Thomas is just leaving the academy as we depart.
Basil grips the overhead handle, and I grab his arm as a jolt knocks me into him. The reason for our betrothals is never explained to us, but I like to think the decision makers knew Basil was going to be taller than me. It can only be an act of good planning, the way my head fits into the hollow between his neck and shoulder.
I keep hold of Pen’s wrist so she doesn’t stumble, but she has no problem keeping her balance. She’s staring out at the clouds full of evening sunlight. They meander alongside Internment, but just when I think they’ll hit us, they evade, slipping under or over our little world like we’re a stone in their waters. Internment is encased by a sphere of wind that prevents the clouds from entering our city, though they seem close enough to touch.
The shuttle stops, pushing strangers into us. We’re lucky to be so close to the door, because everyone rushes to get out at once, hoping to catch the train so they won’t have to wait for the next one.
The train is not very crowded when we board, aside from the seats at the head of the car that are occupied by a group of pregnant women, chattering with one another about the details of their birthing class. Judging by their stomachs, I’d guess they’re carrying a round of January births.
The higher grades let out an hour after most work shifts end, and the younger children have another hour yet of classes. We find an empty row of seats wide enough to fit the three of us, and I deliberately usher Basil in first so that Pen won’t be the one to sit by the window. She has spent enough time staring at the clouds.
“They’ve already started decorating for the festival of stars,” I say, nodding to the silver-colored branches that frame the ceiling of our train car. From the branches hang little metal toys and trinkets that are meant to symbolize human desire—toy trains and books and miniature couples holding hands, the brass silhouette of true love.
The festival of stars overtakes the city in the month of December. It’s a time for giving gifts to our loved ones to show our gratitude for having them in our lives. And on the very last day, we’re allowed to make one big request of the god in the sky. Each request is written on a special piece of parchment that we aren’t meant to share with anyone else. The entire city gathers together, and our pieces of parchment are set on fire and cast into the sky, like hundreds of burning stars. We cling to one another and watch as our greatest desires are carried off and eventually extinguished, to be answered or denied.
“They’ve asked me to help with the murals this year,” Pen says, raising her chin in a modest show of pride. “Apparently one of the instructors recommended me to the festival committee.”
“It’s about time,” I say. “You couldn’t keep your talent a secret forever.”
She smiles. “I’m a bit nervous, if I’m going to be honest about it. All those people telling me what to draw. I’ve never been good at taking orders.”
She takes my shoulders and faces me away from her so that she can weave my straight dark hair into a braid. She says I waste my beauty, letting my hair fall over my shoulders like a mop.
Basil doesn’t comment on my appearance at all, although sometimes he says he hopes our children have my blue eyes; he says they make him think of what the water on the ground must look like. We’ve never seen it from up close, but we have the lakes here, which are sort of green.
“If they boss you around, just call it artistic license,” Basil says. “You can convince them to see it your way. You’re a good debater.”
“That is true,” Pen says cheerily. “Thanks, Basil.”
The train stops, and everyone getting off at the nearest section rises to their feet, but their haste is replaced by confusion. This isn’t the platform. Basil cranes his neck and tries to see ahead, but Pen is the one to notice the lights first. She abandons my braid, and my hair falls, undone. She jabs my ribs and says, “Look.”
Red-and-white medic lights are flashing off in the distance.
People around us are murmuring. There are medical emergencies sometimes, and despite the organization of the shuttles, accidents happen when people get too close to the moving vehicles. Once, there was an hour’s delay after one of the cattle animals broke through a fence and was struck by a train.
Pen and I start to get to our feet for a better look, but a jolt forces us back into our seats. We start moving again. But something is wrong. The scenery moves in the wrong direction.
We’re going backward.
Pen is alight with excitement. “I didn’t even know the train could go backward,” she says. “I wonder if it puts any strain on the gears.” At times her curiosity makes her brave.
I bite my lip, look out the window because no matter which direction we go, the sky looks the same. And the sky is familiar. The sky is safe.
There’s a half mile of land on the other side of the fence that lines the train track; I’ve never set foot on the other side of the tracks—we aren’t supposed to—but Lex has.
On Internment, you can be anything you dream—a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close that it’s as though you’re riding them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There’s only one rule: You don’t approach the edge. If you do, it’s already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted any delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself.
My stomach is doing flip-flops, and I can’t decide if it’s excitement or fear.
I force myself to look away from the window, and my eyes find Basil’s.
Some of the other passengers seem excited, others confused.
A man several seats down, in a black suit, has begun talking to Pen about how trains have emergency systems, and shuttles too. He says that the train has moved backward before, several years before she was born, when repair work needed to be done on the track.
“So it could be that something just needs to be fixed,” he says.
One of the pregnant women is staring past Basil and me, out our window at the sky. Her lips are moving. It takes me a few seconds to realize that she’s talking to the god in the sky, something the people of Internment do only when they’re desperate.
“All this backward motion is starting to make me dizzy,” I say.
“It’s only because you’re worried,” Basil says. “You have great equilibrium. What was that spinning game you used to play when we were in first year?”
I let out a small laugh. “It wasn’t a game, really. I just liked to count how many times in a row I could spin without falling down.”
“Yes, but you would do it everywhere you went,” he says. “Up and down stairs, and in the aisles of the train, and all along the cobbles. You never seemed to get dizzy.”
“What an odd thing to remember,” I say, but it makes me smile. I would spin around the apartment from the time I awoke in the morning, jumping around my older brother and spinning after each step as we shared the mirror in the cramped water room. It drove him mad.
One morning as he was fixing his tie, he warned me that if I kept spinning, I’d be stolen by the wind and carried off into the sky. “We’ll never get you back then,” he said. The words were meant to frighten me, but instead they filled me with romantic notions that became a part of my game. I began to imagine being carried on the wind and landing on the ground, seeing for myself what was happening below our city. I could imagine such great and impossible things there. Things I didn’t have words for.
The madness of youth made me unafraid.
2 (#ulink_43af1ebf-e7ed-5652-a057-b332e1b49f2c)
Our genders are determined for us before our parents have reached their turn in the queue. How much are we leaving to the god in the sky?
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WALK ME ALL THE way to the door,” I say as Basil and I stop in front of my apartment. His building is within reasonable walking distance, but I’d hate to be the reason he isn’t home when his little brother arrives from classes.
“Are you feeling better?” he says. “Your knees have stopped shaking.”
I nod, stare down at my hand when he drags his fingertip over my knuckles, our clear rings catching the light. We had to wear them on chains around our necks until last year, when they finally fit us. When we’re married, the jeweler will open them and they’ll be filled with our blood—mine in his ring, his in mine. I don’t think about what it will be like to marry him; according to my mother, I don’t think about the things I should be thinking about now that I’m two months past my sixteenth birthday. But I do look at my ring and wonder if the blood drawing will hurt. Alice says it doesn’t.
“I can be here in the morning if you’d like,” he says. “To walk you to the shuttle for the academy.”
I feel my cheeks swell with a smile and I can’t meet his eyes. “No,” I say. “It’s out of your way, and anyway Pen will be with me. I’ll meet you there.”
He touches the sharp crease of my uniform sleeve, runs his hand down the length of my arm. Something within me stirs. “All right,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”
“See you.”
I watch him enter the stairwell, and as he goes, I notice the flushed skin at the back of his neck.
The apartment door opens, and my mother, wearing an apron stained with flour, ushers me inside. She was listening at the door.
“You should have invited him to dinner. There’s plenty,” she says. And, “You’re late. Did you miss the train?”
“There was a problem with it,” I say, shrugging my satchel over the back of a kitchen chair.
“A problem?” She sounds only mildly concerned as she opens the oven and considers the state of the casserole.
“It stopped, and then it had to go backward.”
She closes the oven door and looks at me, eyes narrowed in concern.
“It started going the right way again eventually,” I say, unknotting my red necktie. With the anxiety I feel today, the tie is starting to have the effect of a noose.
“But you’re all right?” she says. “Nobody was hurt?”
“There were medic lights up ahead, but I didn’t get a good look.” I don’t want to worry her; she’s been doing so well lately. It has been a while since she’s gone through an entire prescription. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.
She stares at me a moment longer, face unreadable, then blinks to free herself from whatever it is she’s thinking. “Here,” she says, fitting me with oven mitts and thrusting a covered dish into my hands. “Take this upstairs to your brother and Alice.”
“Mom, if you keep feeding them, Alice is going to think you have something against her cooking.”
“Nonsense,” she says. “I just worry. She knows that.” She’s already opening the door for me; she can’t have me out of her kitchen fast enough. Usually she loves my company after class; she lets me nibble on mini fruitcakes and she asks about my lessons. She used to ask about Basil, but not so much since he and I started wearing our rings; she says it’s important for betrotheds to share secrets with each other.
“And tell your brother I expect that dish to come back empty,” she calls as I’m entering the stairwell.
She has unrealistic expectations. My brother can live on ideas and water for days. His apartment is directly above ours, and his office is over my bedroom. I hear him at all hours, but especially late at night, wearing down the floorboards, and I know he’s whispering his novels into the transcription machine. If I listen closely, I might hear his indistinguishable murmurs, Alice asking him to come to bed.
My brother is frequently irritated by my visits, especially if I’m under our mother’s orders to bring him food. He says he’s too old now to be treated like a child. But when he and Alice married, they applied for an apartment in this building, so he must not mind being near our parents too much.
I knock on the apartment door, and from the other side I hear Alice cursing. When she opens the door, her hair is falling out of a cloth tie, and water and flower petals are spreading out on the kitchen floor. She’s holding shards of the unfortunate vase in a dustpan. There are always flowers in her apartment, and Lex is always knocking them over.
Meekly, I hold up the covered dish. “From my mother,” I say.
“Lex!” she calls to the closed door at the end of the hallway. She steps aside to let me in. There’s no answer and she paces to the door and knocks angrily.
The windup metal vacuum discus is repeatedly knocking into the corner, trying to find its way out. The copper is scuffed, the gears whining for their efforts.
Alice goes back to picking up the shards. “You try getting him out of there,” she says. “Maybe he’ll come out for you. He’s holed up in there so often that I’m starting to forget I have a husband.”
As she gathers the shards, I watch the red blood in her band.
I set the dish on the stove before heading down the hallway—my mother’s instincts were right; the stove hasn’t been turned on.
I stand outside the door to my brother’s office, ear pressed to the door. I never know what he’s writing. He tells me that when I was a baby, he would read his earliest manuscripts to me—he would whisper them through the bars of my crib until I stopped crying in the bedroom we shared, and he could finally go to sleep. He won’t tell me what the stories were about. “They were gruesome, brutal,” he’ll say. “But you didn’t understand. You’d smile and go to sleep.”
Now I can’t hear what he’s saying to his transcriber. I knock. “Lex?”
His murmurings stop. I hear him shuffling around, but I don’t ask if he needs help. Words like “help” have been banned from his apartment like Internment has been banned from the ground.
The door opens, and I’m hit with the smell of burnt paper. Through the darkness I can just see, on a table in a far corner, a long strip of paper trailing from the transcription machine to the floor, curling into and around itself like hills and valleys. Wisps of smoke are rising from the exposed gears.
“You’re supposed to use that thing for only an hour at a time,” I say, frowning. There are bags under his eyes and he’s staring through me with eyes that used to be blue like mine. But they’ve faded since his incident. They’re gray, bloodshot, and they tell a different story from the rest of his youthful face. He could be my twenty-four-year-old brother or he could be a hundred.
“What happened?” he asks me.
“Mom sent me up here with dinner. She’s going to send me right back up here if I don’t convince you to eat. You just have to take a bite; you know she can tell if I lie.”
“What happened?” he asks again. He always knows when I’m uneasy.
“Nothing,” I say. “There was a problem with the train. Come out and eat something.”
“I was in the middle of a thought. Just leave it on the table.”
“You’re going to break that machine,” Alice yells from the kitchen. I’ve never understood how two people who are so clearly in love can act as though they hate each other at the same time.
Lex relents, though, closing the door behind us and feeling his way along the wall toward the kitchen. Alice has mopped up the water and flower petals. The apartment is kept sparsely furnished, which is Alice’s doing. This is her way of helping Lex in secret; she’s always a step ahead of him, quietly making sure he’s safe.
In a rare feat of accomplishment, I’ve convinced Lex to eat some of the casserole. He has just taken his first forkful, and he’s just about to complain, when the door bursts open.
My father is standing in the doorway, red and out of breath. Sweat stains the collar of his blue patrolman’s uniform.
“Dad?” Lex and I say at the same time. Lex is gripping Alice’s arm. He’s always worrying she’ll disappear.
My father needs a moment to catch his breath, but then he seems relieved. “Morgan—” he wheezes. “Your mother told me she sent you up here alone—she didn’t know about the king’s order.”
“What order?” Alice asks, pouring him a glass of water from the tap. He shakes his head, doesn’t accept.
“What is it, Dad?” Lex says. “You’re making everyone panic.”
“Morgan needs to come back downstairs,” he says. “The king is ordering everyone to be in their own apartments tonight. There was a body on the train tracks.”
Some distant part of me understands, just barely, but another part of me has to ask, “Was there an accident?”
“No, heart,” he says. “The other patrolmen and I have been investigating. A girl was murdered.”
3 (#ulink_5cca65c8-0338-5244-95ed-cfe005602284)
Up until someone I loved approached the edge, I had no reason to question the hand of any god, much less my own god’s hand. But to see that no amount of love or will on my part could make that little girl open her eyes as she lay unconscious in a sterile room—How could I not question this god that watches over us? Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn’t the fear of our mortality, but the thoughts it leads us to have.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
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.
“Morgan,” he says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I worry sometimes that you’ve been too sheltered.”
“Sheltered?” I say. “From what? Things like this don’t usually happen.”
“You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is.”
“What is it?” I say.
“Unpredictable. Mostly good, but awful sometimes. The screens are going to turn on in a few minutes, and King Furlow is going to talk about the incident on the train tracks. It’s going to be an honest account. I know you’ve read about other incidents in your textbooks, but this will be more upsetting. I think you should come watch, but I’m leaving it up to you.”
I don’t even have to deliberate. “I want to go,” I say, throwing back the covers, reaching for my robe hanging over the bedpost.
My father ruffles my hair as he stands. I worry for him; he rarely talks about his work as a patrolman, but I imagine it’s very taxing keeping order, making sure we’re all safe, all the while knowing these are things that cannot truly be controlled. He must take the murdered girl as a personal failure; somewhere on Internment tonight, there are parents without their daughter. How long did the murdered girl’s parents wait in the queue to have her? Whose birth will be granted now that she’s dead? When a person dies alone before his or her dispatch date, the decision makers usually allow two children to be born so they can be betrothed.
“Careful not to wake your mother,” my father says as we move through the common room and kitchen.
“Won’t she want to see?” I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.
“No,” he says, opening the door for me. “She won’t.”
Downstairs, the broadcast room is filling with weary-eyed tenants, many in slippers and robes, some in patrolmen uniforms. Aside from a sleeping toddler in a woman’s arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. It’s nearly midnight, and most of the city would be asleep by now, except for the patrolmen, and the ones like my brother who never sleep at all.
The lobby has already been decorated to signify the start of the festival of stars. Paper lanterns hang from the ceiling on strings, lit by small electric bulbs and covered in slantscript to symbolize the requests we’ll ask of the god in the sky.
I wonder what the murdered girl’s request would have been.
I force the thought away and look for Lex and Alice, but instead Pen and I find each other. She breaks away from her parents to run to me and grab my hands. “Can you believe it?” she says, her green eyes wide with excitement and fright. “Does your father know who it was?”
“I probably know as much about it as you,” I say, comforted by the way she coils her arm around mine. I have the horrible thought that the murdered girl could have been her, that by next week she would be nothing more than a handful of ashes cast to the wind. And then I feel selfishly relieved that the murdered girl wasn’t anyone in my life. It wasn’t Pen or Alice or my mother.
Across the room, my father has found Alice. Lex isn’t with her. I understand; he has known enough awful things for a lifetime. I still think of how he used to be, attentive and intense, his face magnified by the beaker he’d hold up to the light. He used to be one of the top pharmacy students, honored with tasks most others can’t take on until graduation. But after his incident, he burned all of his notes and abandoned the trade entirely. He earns money by sewing quilts now—his work is erratic but deft, and the quilts always fetch a higher price than the others, his skill and precision cause for envy among the other makers.
Pen presses close to me and says, “Look.”
A patrolman is jostling the screen, twisting its knobs and trying to make the static subside. The screen is more than a hundred years old, its bronze facing chipped down to oblivion; the wires are frayed, and a little burst of sparks makes someone in the crowd gasp.
But the image comes through, distorted at first, King Furlow trembling, warped, and green, before the patrolman hits the screen, knocking the image into reasonable clarity in time for us to see the king remove his red bowler hat and hold it to his pudgy stomach.
King Furlow’s lineage traces back to the dawn of Internment itself. His oldest ancestor is in the history book as the only man chosen to hear from the god in the sky. No one knows for certain how the god in the sky speaks with the king, but it’s Internment’s longest standing tradition, passed down from generation to royal generation. I’ve never envied him; it’s surely a terrible burden to be the voice of an entire city.
The rest of us speak to the god in the sky when we’re frightened or grateful, and we don’t expect to be answered.
Standing at either side of the king are his children: Princess Celeste, and her older brother, Prince Azure, both of whom may be trying to appear somber but instead seem bored. Though the screen is sepia and the image a bit out of focus, they both look like their mother, and their mother’s mother, and so on as far as records trace. Blond hair and clear sparkling eyes, a bit of plumpness to the face. They’re sixteen and seventeen, making them closer in age than any other siblings on Internment. The king’s children are traditionally born outside the queue. When the queen announces her pregnancies, she and the king go through the list of hopeful parents in the queue, and they hand-select the applicants they see fit to bear their children’s betrotheds. Of course the hopeful parents can refuse, but no one in Internment’s history has ever passed up the chance to have a child without the long wait.
“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 (#ulink_f67b58d0-e217-5e9a-9c68-1a8b03a4796e)
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.
Thankfully, Basil is an excellent conversationalist, and he and Thomas begin talking about last week’s squares tournament and some apparent controversy about a referee’s call on a blunder.
Pen pushes her vegetables around with her fork.
“You should try to eat,” I say.
“I will if you will.”
We make a silent game of synchronizing our bites.
After lunch, we drop our utensils, trays, and uneaten food into the respective recycling and compost tubes and we move in four different directions to our next classes. The paper in my pocket feels heavy.
The evening train is less somber than the morning’s was. Basil is trying to cheer me with plans for the weekend. He thinks we should go to the theater; one of his favorite books has just been adapted into a play.
I rest my head on his shoulder. His collarbone presses into my cheek, and I breathe in the sharp linen of his uniform and something faintly spicy-sweet. Up until last year, he smelled only of soap, if anything at all.
“You don’t have to walk me to the door,” I say. His train stop is right after mine, and if he walks me inside, he’ll have to walk a section over to his apartment.
“I don’t mind,” he says as the train begins to slow.
“You’ll be safer on the train,” I say. “It’d make me feel a lot better. Please.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect her,” Pen says, tugging me to my feet after the train’s final jolt.
“Come by tomorrow afternoon,” I tell him. “We’ll see the play if you want.”
We step off the train and Pen checks her reflection in her wristwatch. “You’re lucky, you know,” she says. “You aren’t doomed to marry a complete ass.”
The patrolmen open the double doors for us, nod as we pass through.
“Maybe Thomas isn’t as bad as all that,” I say. Her being envious of Basil would defeat the purpose of arranged betrothals. “Plenty of couples argue.”
“I’ll never fancy him,” she says. “He has a face like composted broccoli.”
I laugh. “No he doesn’t.”
“He does. Which is why I intend to never enter the queue. I couldn’t inflict such awful cheekbones on future generations, even if there’s a chance our children could look like me.”
Though it’s a long way off, I’ve given some thought to the queue. I might like having children, but more than that, I think my parents would want a grandchild. Lex and Alice will never be eligible now that he’s disabled, but they applied for it six years ago when they were newlyweds.
Because of Internment’s land limitations, there can’t be a round of pregnancies until there has been a sufficient amount of deaths. It’s a long wait—years—which is why so many couples enter the queue while they’re still university students. My parents reentered the day my brother was born, and it was more than seven years before they were allowed to have me.
Alice got pregnant out of turn. It wasn’t intentional; she’d been neglectful with her pill. She pleaded with the decision makers, even writing a personal appeal to the king himself, but she was years from the front of the queue. She offered to give her child to the next eligible couple, as a last-ditch effort to let her child be born, but of course that isn’t allowed—giving away a child could lead to resentment and jealousy, which could prove dangerous. There’s a story in The History of Internment to prove that, something about a woman who decided she’d rather smother her child than allow it to belong to someone else. Pen knows it better than I do. She has the history book memorized.
After weeks of fighting for her cause, Alice was forced to have a termination procedure. She came home from the hospital with darkness under her eyes, and she retreated immediately to bed, where she stayed for days. Her skin and even her hair seemed to have lost their color.
It took her a very long time to act like Alice again. I would follow her around the apartment and on her weekend errands, coaxing her to take me shopping for new jewelry and to tea shops, throwing my arms around her without warning on shuttles and while she was cooking dinner.
Lex won’t have anything to do with pharmaceuticals now. In studying medicine, he used to help manufacture the elixirs that precede the termination procedures, among other things.
Pen is still musing about the queue. “You do have nice eyes,” she tells me. “Blue isn’t very dominant against brown, though, is it? Well, still, Basil isn’t unattractive.”
We’re standing in front of her apartment door now.
“You should come to the play with us tomorrow,” I say. “Bring Thomas.”
“Maybe,” she sighs. “If my mother is having one of her headaches, she’ll want me out of the apartment anyway. See you later.”
In my apartment, I find my mother sleeping on the couch, curled in Lex’s blanket. There’s a hot plate waiting in the stove for me, but I’m not hungry. I work on my homework for a while, but the silence feels crushing and it doesn’t take long for me to get restless enough to go upstairs.
As always, there are signs of life in Lex and Alice’s apartment. Alice is standing on the kitchen table in impractical black heels, trying to change a lightbulb.
“Morgan’s here now,” Lex says before I’ve even stepped into the apartment. “Let her help you. You’re going to fall and break your face.”
“I am not going to break my face,” she says, cursing when she burns her fingertips on the bulb.
I grab a new bulb from the package at her feet and hold it up. “You’re a peach,” she says, stooping to take it.
“We’re going out in a few minutes, you know,” Lex says. “It’s Friday. Jumper group.”
“I was hoping you’d let me tag along.”
Alice climbs down from the table and dusts her hands on her shirtfront. “I don’t see why not,” she says. “It’ll give me someone to talk to, at least. I’m always left waiting in the hallway. They don’t even offer me any of their snacks.”
“Tell Mom so she doesn’t worry,” Lex says.
“She’s sleeping. Already left a note.”
Alice runs the tap and smoothes water over some defiant strands of hair. She’s done it up in elaborate curls held in place by bronze clips that compliment her curls’ many shades of red. She’s wearing a blue dress that curls and billows around her knees and elbows as she moves through the mundane tasks of putting away the bulbs and straightening an image on the wall. Sometimes she’s unreal. Something that floated down from the sky.
Before the incident, she and Lex were seldom home. She had a dress for every color the sun illuminates and there was always cause to wear one. Even when I was a child, I admired the love they had, the way every outing, every dinner party or hike through the woods was an adventure. Now Alice dresses up only for weekend errands, and Lex’s jumper group every Friday, even though the only people to see her are the shuttle and train passengers. Her job in the gardens requires a drab uniform that I’ve always thought looked like it was trying to smother her.
I feel underdressed in my academy uniform, yet I know that I won’t have time to change. Alice, reading my mind, disappears to the bedroom and returns, pressing silver earrings into my palm; they’re shaped like stars cascading down little chains.
“Better get moving,” she says, jostling the back of Lex’s chair. “If we miss the train, we’ll have to walk.”
Outside, the sky has become a deeper blue, filling fast with stars. As we step onto the train platform, Lex crushes a daisy that’s growing between the cobbles. I wonder if he remembers what flowers are, not only what they look like, but that they exist at all. He’s knocked over plenty of Alice’s vases, and he has no idea what the shattering glass was before he ruined it. He’s told me that he can’t remember how eyelashes are shaped. He can’t conjure an image of our mother’s window boxes full of tomato plants, though he had looked at them every day of his life.
The seven thirty train isn’t crowded. There’s a group of men in suits at the far end of the car; one of them tips his hat flirtatiously to Alice, and she tugs on her earring, smirking for a moment before turning her attention to ushering Lex into his seat. There’s a mother listening patiently as her young child recites the multiplication tables. There’s a girl traveling alone, which I wouldn’t have found strange before the murder. She’s wearing the blue necktie worn by sixth-through eighth-year students. She’s young but her face is pointed up, and something about the ferocity in her eyes is vaguely familiar.
Beside me, Alice rests her head on Lex’s shoulder, and he rubs her arm, says something in her ear that makes her smile.
A patrolman paces the aisle after the train has begun to move, and the girl in the blue tie plays with the ring hanging from her neck as she watches him. I’m sure I’m imagining the snarl she gives once he has passed by. Her eyes meet mine and I look away. I watch the sky slowly turning darker blue. In the long season, the sun burns until late evening, but the short season is approaching now and the days are getting shorter.
“We’ll have two hours to burn,” Alice says. “There’s a tea shop at the end of the block we could try.”
I smile. “Okay.”
“Are you feeling okay?” she says. “You seem a little distant.”
I feel the eyes of the girl in the blue tie watching me, though I don’t look in her direction to confirm. And I feel the patrolman watching me, not just here but everywhere I go. For the first time in my life, I feel unsafe and I don’t know how to help it. The king has insisted that we go about our lives as normal, that the patrolmen will keep us safe, but who was there to keep Daphne Leander safe?
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Dad shouldn’t have let you watch the broadcast,” Lex says. “All it’s done is cause you to worry about everything.”
“I needed to see it,” I say. “I don’t need to be sheltered.”
“Says the girl who still sleeps with the light on after I tell her a harmless ghost story.”
“That was years ago,” I say. “I’m not a baby, you know.”
“I am certain it was only last season,” Lex says, and his voice deepens when he adds, “The tale of the ghost birds that flew into the city and pecked everyone to death.”
“I don’t recall leaving any lights on,” I say, and am impressed by my cool tone.
“Don’t listen to him,” Alice says.
“Do they sell sweets at the tea shop?” I say. “I skipped dinner and now I’m hungry.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Lex says something about my teeth rotting out of my head and how the only way to stop me from crying as a baby was to give me sugar water, and the conversation moves into the comfort of trivial things. But in the window, among the clouds, I see the reflection of the girl in the blue tie. I can’t shake the idea that she looks familiar, even though I can’t remember ever seeing her in the city.
The train stops and Alice and I guide Lex onto the platform, keeping him out of the way of passengers entering and exiting. I feel a tug at the back of my shirt, and when I turn around, the girl in the blue tie is holding a silver star earring in her palm. “You dropped this,” she says. Her eyelids are smeared with pink glitter, and it isn’t until after she has walked away that I realize why she looks so familiar. She’s a younger version of the murdered girl. They could be sisters. And they probably are.
The jumper group is held behind a closed door in a recreational room of the courthouse that used to be a holding cell for criminals decades ago. Even spouses, siblings, and parents aren’t allowed inside.
Alice straightens the collar of Lex’s shirt and kisses him. “Handsome,” she accuses. “I’ll be right outside when it’s time to go home.”
“I’ll be waiting, gorgeous,” he says.
“Gorgeous,” she says, exhaling a little laugh. “For all you know, I’ve colored my face green.”
“Then you’d be gorgeous and green,” he says.
She does her best not to show it, but it’s hard for her to relinquish her husband into the care of a fellow jumper, who ushers him to the circle of chairs. They’ve always shared everything, and this is something he never talks about. There’s a camaraderie among these group members that never leaves the room.
The girl in the blue tie slips past us into the room and finds a seat. She looks so small and out of place there among the others. Most of the jumpers are old enough to have grown cynical about our little world, discontent. I’ve never heard of a child jumping. The others are disfigured and disabled from their attempts, but she looks polished and thin in her pressed uniform. Her hair, the same sweetgold blond as the murdered girl’s, is held back by a white band with a bow on one side. Someone hands her a paper cup and she manages a polite if despondent smile.
“Okay,” Alice says, putting her hand on my back and guiding me toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.” We pass others who linger in the hall, waiting for their loved ones while reading or talking amongst one another. This is where Alice would have waited in her pretty dress, and when she went home she would have simply hung it in the closet again. I don’t know that I can ever forgive Lex for squandering her. And yet she has never complained about having to care for him. She could go out more if she wanted to; if he’s in the throes of a novel, he probably won’t even notice. But she mostly just leaves for work in the greenhouses.
A patrolmen opens the door for us. “Ladies.” He nods as we pass by. “Be safe out there tonight.”
The orange glow of street lanterns outlines the cobblestones with shadows. Yet in the distance, the glasslands shimmer in the moonlight.
“That little girl is part of the jumper group?” I ask, once we’re beyond the earshot of the patrolmen.
“I’ve seen her the last few times,” Alice says.
“So she’s jumped?”
“She must have …” Alice’s voice is trailing off. She takes a deep breath and says, “Look at that moon, Morgan. It’s so close. As if we could just walk right up to the edge and reach out and take it.” She closes one eye and holds up her hand, balancing the moon on her palm.
I hook my elbow around hers. I don’t like what she has said. I don’t like the thought of her crossing the tracks and chasing the moon to Internment’s edge. People go mad there. They see all of that sky and nothingness and they lose themselves.
“Is this the tea shop?” I say.
“Oh! Yes, it is. Look, the sign is shaped like an actual teacup. Isn’t that quaint?”
It would be, if not for the patrolman standing at the entrance.
5 (#ulink_2c812b95-18a1-5f4c-b679-6d9ae34c782d)
Every moment is a gift, from the frivolous to the dire. The taste of sweetgold, and the rough paper of our favorite books. I find a god in these things—which god, I cannot say, but I’m grateful to it.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
PEN FIXES THE HEM OF MY RED VELVET glove that’s starting to unroll from my elbow. “You look classic,” she says, and then holds up her own blue gloves with a look of disdain. “Aren’t these archaic? They’re my mother’s. She used to wear them on dates with my father. You know, back when Internment was still part of the ground.”
“I think you’re a vision,” Thomas says, coming up behind her, gripping the overhead handle as the shuttle begins to move.
She looks over her shoulder at him, and the sunlight catches the shadows of her neck and collarbone in a way that makes her seem more woman than girl. “I thought for sure you’d missed the shuttle.”
“I caught it just as the doors were closing,” he says, and looks at me. “I take it your other will be joining us shortly?”
“We’re taking the train to his section and walking from there,” I say, feeling strange about the word he has used: “other.” He likes to talk like a period actor; he’s always reading romantic classics—a woman on the cover with an elaborately floral hat, looking faint as a man in a tuxedo steadies her. Things of that nature.
When the shuttle jolts and pushes Thomas toward her, Pen swats at him, complaining that he’ll make her hat go crooked. She’s wearing a candlebox hat that has been dyed the same color as her gloves. Candles come in small, cylindrical stiff paper boxes that can be taken to a clothes maker to be recycled into a hat. They’re dyed desired colors, given a brim, and affixed to a band so that the hat will sit firmly on one side of the head.
They look ridiculous on me. Few girls are bold enough to pull them off, but Pen is the sort of girl who can wear anything.
Thomas smiles at her averted face. “I’ll have your heart yet, Margaret Atmus.”
“You already have it.” She holds up her hand, betrothal band gleaming in the light. “Not that I had any say in the matter. And you know I hate when you call me that.”
When we make it to the train, I notice that it isn’t very crowded, which is strange for the weekend. “Looks like a lot of people decided to walk today,” Thomas says.
Pen flattens her dress against her knees, indifferent to his arm around her shoulders.
“I’ve been reading a peculiar little story,” Thomas says, looking at me because he knows Pen won’t humor him with interest.
“What about?” I say.
“It’s about the people of the ground trying to reach us. They craft a sort of machine and harness it to birds.”
“Birds couldn’t lift something that heavy,” Pen says. We don’t know very much about birds—they’ve never flown so high as Internment, but we’ve seen images of them taken with the scope. Skinny white blurs traveling alone or as beads in a necklace of Vs.
“Well then, you’ve figured out the conflict,” he says. “Anyway, they don’t make it. The story was really more about their trying to reach us. Some think they are, and others say we’re nothing more to them than a giant rock in the sky. Perhaps they think we’re a dusty moon.”
“I wonder about that all the time,” I say.
“Don’t get Morgan started on the ground,” Pen says, rising as the train rolls to a stop. “She’ll be lost in thought for the rest of the day, and I need someone to whisper with if this play is no good.”
Basil spots us as we’re stepping out onto the platform. The gold trim of his jacket matches the flecks of light in his brown eyes. Pen calls it a shame that my eyes aren’t dominant, but I think it would be nice if my children look like Basil. He holds his arm to me, and I look at my velvet glove against his gray suit, imagining we’re figures in a very old image. Though I know I shouldn’t, I imagine that the steps leading down off the platform will go all the way down the sky until we reach the ground.
“How are you?” he asks, so close that his breath reaches the nape of my neck.
“I’ll feel better once they’ve caught the person responsible,” I admit. “My father came home last night with an extra bolt for our door. Every time I look at it, I see that girl’s face.”
“A lot of people in my building are installing locks, too.” He frowns. “They’ll find whoever’s behind this. Internment is only so big. There aren’t many places to hide.”
That’s what has me so afraid. I’ve always liked the smallness of Internment, always liked lying in bed at night and hearing the trains rush by, always on time. But now it’s starting to feel smaller, as though every day since Daphne Leander’s murder has crumbled the edges a bit more, and the city is closing in on me.
Even the seats in the theater feel smaller and closer together, the dim lights getting dimmer.
“Are you okay?” Pen says. “Your cheeks are bright red.”
Basil touches my forehead. “Do you feel sick?” His touch is supposed to comfort me, but all I want is to get away from him, to get away from this air that everyone else is breathing.
“I need to use the water room,” I say.
“I’ll go with you,” Pen says.
“No,” I say, too quickly. “No, you might miss the opening. I’ll be fast, I promise.”
I can see that she’s wary, but she doesn’t try to stop me as I shuffle down the aisle.
With all of the shows about to start, the lobby is empty aside from the ticket vendors, who pay no mind as I stumble toward the water rooms. But when I push the door open, I find that I’m not alone.
Though she’s not in uniform, I recognize the little girl from last night. She’s kneeling on the edge of the sink, tacking a piece of paper over the mirror. But she stops when she sees me, stumbles to her feet, and backs against the wall.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say.
There’s a piece of paper over each of the mirrors. A quick glance and I can see that they’re select passages from Daphne Leander’s essay. All of them are handwritten. Typewriters are a rare luxury afforded to those who write for a living; a past king once considered making them a household item, but decided against it. He said that if words could be easily printed and erased, we would lose our appreciation for what we wrote.
I’d like to ask her about the pages, but she runs past me and pushes her way through the door.
“Wait!” I run after her.
She’s quick, but so am I, and I catch up to her on the sidewalk outside the theater, where she has come to a stop. She doesn’t seem out of breath, and I’m trying to figure out why she stopped, but then I follow her gaze to the building at the end of the block, engulfed in flames.
She looks at me, and her eyes are full of so much pain that it astounds me. They’re the same as the murdered girl’s eyes, and yet different somehow.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she says.
That’s the jumper’s code, if Lex’s similar outlook is any indication.
A patrolman is running from the theater, shouting for us to get back inside. She doesn’t move, though, and I grab her arm and pull her along. She doesn’t resist, but she watches the flames over her shoulder. It was one of Internment’s oldest buildings, back when they were still made of wood as opposed to stone. Over the centuries it has been everything from a prison, back when those still existed, to a recycling plant. In my lifetime it has been only a flower shop. Alice has taken me there dozens of times.
It’s only a few paces back to the theater, but before we’ve reached the doors, the sky has changed. Ash is heavy on the air and it’s as though something has covered the sun. Even the patrolman has stopped to watch. Sirens begin as distant warnings, but soon they’re screaming as the emergency vehicles rush toward the flames.
The girl’s arm is still in my grip and she lets me bring her inside, but then she twists away, presses her hands to the glass doors and watches.
The lobby is crowded now, everyone rushing to windows, calling out the names of their friends. “Are you here with anyone?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be practicing my music.”
“Come on, then,” I say. “You can come with me. I’m going to find my friends and make sure they’re okay.”
“I don’t know you,” she says.
“Morgan Stockhour,” I say. “There, now you do.”
The room has gotten very loud around us. A woman screams.
The girl looks up at me, hesitating. Some pink glitter has clumped in her eyelashes.
“I’m Amy,” she says.
“Morgan!” Somewhere in the melee, Pen raises her gloved arm. She twists away from Thomas, fighting him and shouldering her way to me. She crashes into me, squeezing me so hard that my feet almost come away from the floor. “What’s happening? They stopped the play, and …”
She sees the smoke through the glass doors for the first time. Her mouth is open and breathless. She pales.
“The flower shop caught fire,” I say, though the words don’t do justice to what I just saw. I should be panicking like everyone around me. I should be frightened. But I feel the same as I did after watching the broadcast, like none of it is real.
“Your parents will be worried,” I tell Amy.
“They won’t notice I’m gone.” She seems like the type who can slip in and out of a place unnoticed, which is likely how she snuck into this theater without formal attire.
Basil wraps his arm around my waist from behind. Thomas does the same to Pen, and for once she seems grateful that he’s there to hold her. Amy stands between us, and we all watch the clouds and the sun get swallowed whole.
It feels like hours before the flames are extinguished. Patrolmen fill the lobby, escorting us from the building to the shuttle in droves. Pen lets Thomas hold on to her, and Basil hasn’t taken his arm from me since we were reunited. Amy walks a pace ahead of me, tugging at the ring on the chain around her neck.
“Where do you live?” Basil asks her as the five of us cram onto a shuttle bench meant to hold four.
“Section three,” she says.
“I’m in two,” he says. “But it’s a short walk back for me. I’ll see you home.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
“Yes, right, okay, we’re all old enough,” Pen snaps. “But in case you haven’t noticed, Internment has kind of gone into a complete state of lunacy.”
“I know that,” Amy says, and looks sharply out the window, where the smoke has turned the city into an old image.
“Are you frightened?” Thomas asks Pen.
She’s looking at her lap, but he tilts her chin and she meets his eyes.
“I won’t ever let anything happen to you, you know.”
She nods, leans her forehead against his.
For all their arguing, they have kissed. It first happened several months ago. He kept dropping hints and she decided to just be done with it. It wasn’t terrible, she told me. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible. I had a hard time believing it—she’s always evading him—but I’m starting to see that there’s a reason they were betrothed. There’s always a reason.
Basil grips my hand as the shuttle comes to a stop. “It’s going to be chaotic. Don’t let go of me even if people rush between us,” he says. With my free hand, I grab on to Pen and we rise to our feet.
An instant too late, I remember that Amy is behind me. In that instant, she dodges under Pen’s and my interlocked hands and disappears into the crowd.
“Amy!”
“Let her go,” Pen says. “Where did you find such a strange child, anyway?” She’s trying to act nonchalant but the fear is still in her eyes.
I’m scanning the crowd for Amy; with the patrolmen steering us all right onto the waiting train, there’s nowhere for her to go, and I still want to ask her about the essay.
But it’s taking all my efforts to hold on to Basil and Pen; I’ve never seen Internment in such a panic, and other worries start to invade my mind. My father is patrolling today; that means he must be out in this mess. And Alice will be out running errands; she frequents the flower shop, has a side job designing event bouquets.
And what started the fire to begin with?
Amy said it was only going to get worse. I see this panic all around me, while news of Daphne Leander’s murder is still fresh, and I cannot fathom what worse should look like.
By the time we make it to our seats on the train, Pen isn’t the only one with tears in her eyes. Other passengers have the same frightened expression.
Even Basil is looking worriedly at the city through the window. A patrolman is standing at the head of the car, instructing us not to check in on family and friends, to step off the train at our appropriate sections and go straight home. The train will stop for an extra two minutes on each platform to ensure everyone has a chance to exit the overcrowded cars in time.
“Something is happening,” Basil says, “isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it was only an accident,” Thomas says. “That building was so old that it has never been properly outfitted with electricity. Most of the rooms were lit by flame lanterns. One of them probably tipped over.”
“Do you think so?” Pen says.
“I’m almost certain.”
None of us believes it, but we don’t have the nerve to say so.
“Your mascara is running,” Pen says. “Here.” She rubs her gloved thumb under my eyelid.
“Thanks,” I say, though from the black smear on her glove I suspect she’s made it worse.
When the train stops in our section, Basil squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry I can’t walk you in,” he says.
“I’ll be fine; my building is right there,” I tell him, wishing desperately that I wasn’t about to leave him behind. “Stay safe.”
I don’t know what it is—the noise or the distant smell of the ashes or the fear—but I get the thought that I’d like to kiss him. I lean forward and press my lips against his forehead, pleasantly surprised by the softness and the warmth of his skin.
I don’t get a chance to see his reaction; Thomas is pulling Pen, and Pen is pulling me.
We can still smell the fire, though it happened several sections away and has since been extinguished. The blue of the sky is still up there, if a bit obscured, and I might have started to feel relief if only there weren’t a patrolman forcing me down the steps.
Thomas lives in the same section that Pen and I do, but his building is a block over, and at the fork in the pathway, he leans in for a kiss and Pen backs away. “Let’s not capitalize on a tragedy,” she says. “I’ll see you on Monday, provided the academy is still standing.”
He smirks, nods to us, and turns into the crowd.
She shakes her head. “Strange thing, him.”
“He’s just a little old-fashioned,” I say.
“And you!” she says. “Don’t think I didn’t see what you did as we were getting off the train. We’ll be talking about that some other time when we’re not being manhandled by patrolmen.”
“Move along, please,” the patrolman says from somewhere behind us. “Move along, toward your own buildings.”
It is wildly inappropriate that Internment is crumbling around me, but all I can think about is the warmth of Basil’s skin lingering on my lips.
Alice is frantic. When I open the door to my apartment, she’s got her arms around me before I know what’s happening. “She’s home,” she calls to Lex, who’s got an unfinished quilt draped across his lap and a spool of thread in one hand and a needle in the other. He does his best work when he’s anxious. But he drops all of these things and starts making his way to me.
Alice is holding me by the shoulders now. “Are those bruises?”
“She’s hurt?” Lex says. He rarely seems to regard me at all, much less show concern. Normally I’d appreciate it, but right now it only adds to this feeling that Internment has gone mad.
“It’s cosmetics,” I say, reaching my arm out to Lex so he can find me. “I’m perfectly fine. Where are Mom and Dad?”
“Dad has been patrolling all day,” Lex says. “Mom was at the market. We came down so someone would be here when you got back.”
“They’re making everyone go home,” I say. “The trains are running slowly. The cars are all overcrowded, so they want to make sure everyone has time to get off at their stops.” I thought I was doing better, but there’s a stone in my stomach at the thought of my mother and father out in all that chaos. And I can still smell the burnt air, though maybe it’s just clinging to my dress.
Alice sets me in a kitchen chair, moves to the sink, and returns seconds later to wipe the cosmetics and sweat from my face with a wet cloth. My tears are only from the abrasiveness of the ashes, but they still earn her sympathetic touch.
Lex, sitting across the table, still has his hand over mine. He keeps pressing his palm into my knuckles like I might vaporize into nothing if he doesn’t hold tight. Sometimes he hides in the darkness of his blindness, and other times he fears it will swallow everyone up and leave him alone.
Alice dabs the cold cloth to my forehead and then drapes it across the back of my neck, still fretting that I’m too red.
“Thomas thinks it may not be cause to panic,” I say, trying to reassure her. “He said the flower shop still uses flame lanterns and it was probably an accident.”
“There will be a broadcast tonight for sure,” she says. “Thank goodness you’re safe. We heard the fire was near the theater and we’ve just been all over the place about it.”
Lex is squeezing my hand. I close my eyes, trying to pretend that I’m blind, trying to understand what it means to be in this world without seeing any of it, not knowing where anyone is, if they’re safe.
I can see the red of my eyelids, but it’s still horrifying. It isn’t simply that I was missing in that chaos—without the sound of my voice, to him I’d disappeared into that darkness entirely. I could have fallen over the edge of Internment.
“I’m sorry I made you worry,” I say. I lean over the table so that I’m closer. “I’ll never disappear. I promise that every time I leave, I’ll always come back.”
“Not coming back wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he says. “For any of us.”
“None of that talk,” Alice says. “You’re going to scare her.”
“She should be scared,” Lex says.
“I’m not,” I say, but I am.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Alice says. “We’ll know more when the broadcast goes up. And if there is no broadcast, then it can’t be too serious, now, can it?” She’s handing me a cup of tea, ushering Lex and me to the couch.
Soon, I feel myself falling asleep under the unfinished blanket, as Lex works skillfully at its edges. Some distant part of me understands that there’s cause to worry and that I’m frightened, but it’s safe and warm inside, and Alice is moving about the kitchen, cooking up the smell of something sugary sweet. She asks me a question, something about my hair, and though I don’t hear her I nod assent, and in the next moment she’s peeling off my velvet gloves and gently unclasping the wooden barrettes in my hair.
When I was small, my brother would let me follow him on the train for entire afternoons without a destination. We would ride until we were hungry or had to find a water room. The train would always be crowded and I’d stay so close to him that I could hear his murmurs as he wrote on scraps of paper. He never spoke to me, always writing or looking at the city passing by. But it didn’t matter. I knew the honor of having been invited. We were two parts of the same set then, our skin as pale as the sunlight that washed over us through the glass, both of us silent and blue-eyed in the bustling crowd. On these trips I began to feel we were the same. I would catch our reflection in the window and fancy myself a perfect miniature version of him.
The train that circles Internment couldn’t carry him far enough, though. My brother, the peripatetic, the sage, was too restless to stay in one place, but one place is all we’re given. The only one who could quell this restlessness was Alice, always Alice, who swears she was born already in love with him. When she wasn’t allowed to have their child, something fell apart and they lost themselves for a while.
The train speeds past the apartment, rattling the walls, and I dream that I’m riding it in my theater dress. I’m on my way to meet my betrothed waiting for me on the platform. I dream about the other passengers, and I wonder who’s waiting for them. I wonder what keeps the conductor conscious as he navigates through the night. I dream about the murderer, out there somewhere, and wonder where he is when the train passes him by.
6 (#ulink_94d3b70c-896c-56ef-9f12-b3ed32f44d62)
Break the sky. Look up. Look down. Beyond what is familiar. If you’ve never been afraid, you haven’t had your moment of bravery just yet.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
IN THE MORNING, I AWAKEN WITH STIFF muscles and the notion that something is wrong. But it isn’t until I realize I’m still on the couch, Lex’s unfinished quilt replaced with the heavy blanket from my own bed, that I remember.
“Good morning, love,” my mother says, setting down her sampler when she sees that my eyes are open. “Would you like breakfast? I brought home some fresh strawberries.”
That’s right. She was at the market when the fire happened. “Are you okay?” I sit upright. “When did you get home?”
“There was a broadcast,” she says by way of an answer. “Your father wanted me to wake you for it, but you seemed so exhausted.” She’s sitting on the edge of the couch now, smoothing back my hair. When Lex grew too old for her affections, she lavished me with double, and to make up for his absence I’ve always welcomed them.
“What did the broadcast say?” I ask.
“The king’s investigators are looking into the cause of the fire. He just wanted to reassure us that everything will be fine.” While my father is trying to introduce me to a more honest view of the city, my mother is still trying to coddle me.
“Investigators?” I say. “I didn’t know the king had investigators.”
“He does. For incidents like this.”
I don’t like that word, “incident.” Three years ago I was pulled from my classroom and told my brother had had an incident, and I was brought to see him at the hospital, where he lay unconscious and within a sliver of his life.
I think of what Basil said yesterday on the train, and the worry clouds into panic. “Something is happening, isn’t it?”
My father has never been one to lie to me, but the same can’t be said of my mother. Now, though, perhaps because I’m old enough to wear my betrothal band, she says, “It’s possible, love. We’re all waiting to find out what’s happened. They’ve stopped the train for today; nobody is supposed to leave home. The shops will stay open late tomorrow so people can do the rest of their weekend shopping after work and class.”
I’ve always wanted for her to be honest with me. When I was little, I’d try on her dresses and fantasize about the day when they would no longer pool around me. The highest honor was when she’d sit me on her overstuffed red stool and brush colors onto my eyelids and lips and cheeks. I wanted very much for us to be equals.
Now, suddenly all I want is to put my head in her lap, for her to tell me it’s going to be okay and this feeling that I’m trapped in my own city will pass. I want the mother I had before Lex became a jumper. I want to stop pretending that I don’t need her, that I’m not a child.
Instead, I ask for strawberries. We eat breakfast and make meaningless talk about nothing important—homework and what should be for dinner.
“Your father won’t be eating at home tonight,” she says. “I do hope he doesn’t work himself too hard. He was barely able to take a nap before he was called in this morning.” She’s staring past me, through the window that overlooks the city.
She has been a bit distant these days, my mother. There has always been a little worry in her eyes. I follow her gaze to the city and I can still taste the smoke on my tongue no matter how many strawberries I’ve eaten. A girl with glittery eyes was found on the train tracks with a slashed throat. Saying nothing, I stand, go to my mother’s chair, and put my arms around her.
“What was with that strange little girl in the theater?” Pen asks. As she walks, she holds her hand over her head, watching the way her betrothal band fills with light where there will one day be blood.
“I think she’s Daphne Leander’s sister,” I say. “I caught her putting up passages of Daphne’s essay.”
“Really?” She stops walking and swirls to face me, eyes wild with excitement.
Basil looks sharply at me.
“Keep it moving, ladies, please,” the patrolman behind us says.
“Being herded into the academy like animals to slaughter,” Thomas complains, appearing from nowhere, as is his skill. “I feel like we’re in section seven with all the beasts.”
Pen makes some comment about his smell resembling that of a cow, and he artfully retorts with a compliment about her redolence-dabbed wrists. Basil leans close to me and says, “You didn’t tell me about Amy being the murdered girl’s sister.”
“There was no time,” I say. “And I’m not certain. Not yet.”
“Maybe it’s best not to get involved,” Basil says. “Copies of Daphne’s essay were in the men’s water room, too. I read it, and it’s pretty sacrilegious. With all that’s going on, that’s bound to draw unwanted attention. People are already nervous.”
He’s right, of course. But I can’t stop thinking about it.
In the lobby, Basil takes my hand and squeezes it before we’re to part ways. I think there’s something more he’d like to say, but a patrolman interrupts us. He’s standing on one of the benches and yelling for all of us to stop chattering and turn our focus to him. His voice echoes off the marble walls.
“Your classes will resume as planned in a moment,” he says. “I was asked to inform all of you that throughout the day, students will be taken individually from their courses and interviewed by a specialist employed by the king. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
I wonder if there are others who see my father the way I see this patrolman—intimidating and cold. I wonder if there’s anyone who sees this patrolman the way I see my father. Whenever there’s something I don’t like about a stranger, I try to imagine that someone out there loves them, and it puts them in a different light. Most of the time, anyway. Not now. All I can feel right now is anxiety.
The patrolman stops talking, but he has successfully extinguished our chatter. There’s not so much as a murmur as we shuffle to our classrooms. All the lessons pick up where they left off in the textbooks, but the instructors seem distracted by the absence of each student who’s called. Even our morning instructor lacks his verve as he discusses the history of section fifteen’s abundance of minerals and how they are to thank for our towering apartments.
A student returns and there’s a synchronized shuffle as we all turn in our chairs to face him. The instructor, after a pause, says, “Well?”
“They want Margaret Atmus in the headmaster’s office, sir,” he says.
Pen gives me a look that is part reassurance, part worry. She takes her time stacking her notes, tucking them into the cover of her textbook, and filing the book away in her satchel before she stands.
She’s gone for the rest of the period.
At lunch, the cafeteria is subdued. Basil rubs my arm and tells me I should try to eat.
“Pen’s still gone,” I say, twisting my fork. “Could they still be speaking to her?”
“They spoke to me this morning,” Thomas says. “It’s nothing horribly elaborate. They just want to make sure we haven’t gone mad. You haven’t gone mad, have you?”
The sharpness in his eyes frightens me. He realizes this and he softens. “It’s not anything to be concerned about,” he says.
Somehow, this doesn’t feel true. The king is looking for something by sending his specialists out here.
I don’t see Pen again until our last class of the day, which is more of Instructor Newlan’s passion for our little world. It’s torturous not being able to ask her about where she’s been, but she seems intact. She’s taking notes, at least.
Instructor Newlan is talking about section nine’s cow pastures. Or maybe it’s section seven. I can’t concentrate, though I try. I’ve never noticed how wedged together we are, each section like a thin slice of a pie in the window of the bakery. Below us, is the ground just a larger version of what we have up here? Is there a bigger train that goes in a bigger circle? Do the people on the ground also fear stepping over their edge? What if there’s a bigger ground below them? What if everything is floating in the sky?
Maybe I am going mad. Maybe I’m turning into my brother, so hypnotized by the edge that I can’t stop myself from scaling the fence, so frenzied by the idea of the ground that I forget where I belong.
Another student returns from the headmaster’s office, and this time nobody else raises their head to listen for their name. Everyone in this room but me has already been called.
“Hello, Morgan,” the specialist says. She’s tall and wiry and dressed all in gray. “My name is Ms. Harlan. May I call you Morgan?”
Ms., not Mrs. For a woman to be unmarried at her age, it can mean only that her betrothed is no longer living.
“Yes,” I say, mindful of sitting very straight. I fold my hands in my lap, which is something my mother taught me when I was a fidgety child. I’ve always fidgeted too much. I’ve always thought too much. I’m very like my brother that way.
“As you know, we’ve had a couple of tragedies. Did you know Miss Leander?”
“No,” I say. “But I was sorry to hear about what happened.”
I’ve never been in this room. I’ve seen the door in the headmaster’s office and always assumed it was a closet. It’s not much bigger than one; there are only two chairs to fill the space, and the persistent clicking of the specialist’s pen, which ceases only long enough for her to scrawl the odd note.
“It was an especially violent crime,” the specialist says. “It must have scared you to know something like this could happen in your lifetime.”
“Yes,” I say, grossly understating it.
“It must make you feel that Internment is unsafe,” she says.
“Internment is my home,” I say. “I’ve always felt safe here.”
She smiles, but there’s something unsettling about it. She leans forward, resting her arms on her crossed knees. “Morgan, I’d much like to be honest with you. You seem like a bright young lady. May I be honest?”
Uncertainly, I nod.
“I’ve read your academy file, and it shows that three years ago you suffered a pretty traumatic incident.”
My blood goes cold. I don’t like where this is heading. “I didn’t,” I say. “It was my older brother.”
“But surely that was traumatic for you also,” the specialist says. “To have someone close to you fall victim to the edge’s allure.”
“He couldn’t help it,” I say, repeating what I’ve been taught, what every student is taught in their first year of academy and reminded of every year after that. “We have the free will to stay on this side of the train tracks. If we cross over to the other side, we get too close to the edge, and it mystifies us. We see how infinite the sky is and we lose our senses. Even the people we love most disappear from our thoughts in that moment.” I am quoting a textbook exactly.
The specialist takes notes. I clench my interlocked fingers in an effort to keep still.
“What about your parents?” she asks.
“My parents?”
“Your father is a patrolman—please congratulate him for me, that’s quite an honor—and your mother works in a recycling plant in section fourteen. Has either of them ever discussed the edge with you?”
I think of my father waking me for the broadcast, the darkness of my room doing little to conceal the sadness in his eyes when he told me that life could be awful sometimes. “Only to warn me to stay away,” I say.
“Would you say they’re protective of you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And your brother, Alexander, does he talk about his experience with the edge of Internment?”
I’m starting to feel ill. This conversation has moved far from Daphne Leander. Were the others questioned so personally?
And then I make the connection. Most of the others don’t know someone who tried to jump over the edge. Daphne Leander knew someone, though. And now she’s dead.
“He doesn’t talk to me about it,” I say. “He goes to his support group every week. What happens behind the closed door is confidential.”
More notes.
“Morgan, I know that these personal questions are probably uncomfortable for you to answer,” the specialist says. “Right now, the king has asked me to speak with you and your classmates only to ensure your safety. Several years ago, we had a murder. Your parents probably told you about that. It spurred a lot of talk about Internment being unsafe, and many people became, as you put it, mystified by the edge. We had a few very close calls. I found myself standing on the platform contemplating the other side.”
I can see the platform under my feet, the black rails and the gray pebbles that fill the space between the wooden planks. The fence far on the other side, bold and stoic against the meandering clouds.
I look at the king’s specialist and I do not believe her when she says she’s contemplated the other side. I believe that she is testing me.
“If you feel tempted, please come and speak to me at any time,” she says. She’s handing me a small card, gray like her uniform, with the address for a section three apartment complex.
“Thank you,” I say, tucking the card into my skirt pocket.
“You’re free to return to your class now,” she tells me. “You were my last student of the day.”
I take great care not to stand in a hurry. Just as I’m turning the doorknob, she says, “Morgan?”
I turn.
“Have you had thoughts of going over the edge yourself? Even for a fleeting moment?”
“No,” I say. My palms are starting to sweat, which happens when I lie.
On the train home, Pen stares into the loose-leaf pages of her notes. Thomas tries to talk to her and she shushes him repeatedly, swatting him when he tries to read over her shoulder.
“How’d it go with the specialist?” Basil asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “What sorts of questions did she ask you?”
“She asked about my parents, mostly. Their trades, and if they told me about the murder several years ago.” He tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Then she asked about my studies.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Me too,” I say, but I think he catches my hesitation. “My father said that everyone doesn’t have to come right home after class and work anymore,” I say. “You can come over for dinner if you want. My mother always cooks too much food during the festival month.” There are things I’d like to tell him, if not for the patrolman pacing the aisle, making sure we’re safe and that our feet and our minds lie firmly on Internment’s floating floor.
“I’d love to,” he says. “I don’t have to be home to watch Leland. My mother is taking him to get fitted for a new uniform.”
“Don’t tell me he managed to lose an entire uniform,” I say. Basil’s brother is famous for losing things. It’s a wonder he still has his betrothal band on a chain around his neck.
“He didn’t lose it, exactly. He’s pretty sure it’s at the bottom of the lake. Part of it, anyway.”
Even Pen looks up from her notes at that.
“He was trying to use the pant legs as a net to catch fish.” Basil sighs. “These are the sorts of things that happen when I take my eyes off him for five minutes.”
I laugh. “Poor Basil,” I say. “The great fun in being a younger sibling is getting to torture the older.”
“You were an uncorrupted compared to Leland,” Basil says.
“What about the time we were seven and we tried to bake a cake?” I say.
“I don’t recall any baking,” Basil says. “I recall cracked eggs on the floor and a sack of flour that was too heavy for you to carry.”
“That mess happened on Lex’s watch,” I remind him. “He’s the one who had to clean it up.”
Now Basil is chuckling with his lips pressed together. He’s looking at me.
“What?” I say.
“I’m just remembering all the flour in your hair.”
“It got up my nose. I couldn’t stop sneezing.”
We’re both trying to quiet our laughter so as not to disrupt the solemn mood of the train.
“Is this what passes for romance between you two?” Pen says.
“Yes,” I say. “And we like it this way, don’t we, Basil?”
“Quite,” he says.
The evening sun catches every bolt and scrap of metal on the train, and for an instant we are suspended in an atmosphere of stars.
My mother is of course thrilled that my betrothed is joining us for dinner. Not only does she find him charming, but she is also eager for a sense of normalcy. Though the ash from the fire at the flower shop has long since disappeared, a grayness still blankets the city. I’ve never known anything like it, but something about my mother’s despondency of late tells me she knows it well.
My father’s absence at the table doesn’t help.
I force myself to eat everything on the plate, despite the lingering dread in my stomach after my interview with the specialist, which I leave out of the dinner conversation.
After we’ve cleared our plates, I say I’m feeling tired and I’m going to lie down, and I pull Basil toward my bedroom.
“Did you take your pill this morning, love?” my mother asks.
I feel my cheeks burning. “Yes,” I say, and I can’t meet Basil’s eyes. I’ve been taking my sterility pill since about the time my betrothal band started to fit on my finger. I know my mother doesn’t want for me to repeat Alice’s mistake, and I’ve heard it isn’t uncommon for girls my age to be intimate with their betrotheds, but the idea still embarrasses me.
When I close my bedroom door, I sag against it with a deflating sigh.
Basil sits on the edge of my bed and holds his arms out to me. “Come here,” he says, and when I take his hands, he pulls me down to sit beside him.
“Today was awful,” I confess, making a little game of rolling and unrolling his red necktie. “In just a few days, I feel as though everything has changed.”
“I keep thinking it’ll all go back to normal,” he says. “Each morning I wake up and tell myself there won’t be a patrolman at the door when I leave. They’ll have found the murderer. The fire will turn out to have been an accident.”
We sit without speaking for a while, me staring at my lap, as the sunset makes everything orange.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” Basil says.
He knows something is wrong, then. He’s an excellent reader of people, and I am terrible at hiding things. Another reason we’re probably a good match—he keeps me from getting lost in myself. And I always relent, telling him the little things, like my fear of giving verbal presentations before the class, or that I don’t like his mother’s walnut cookies—which she gives me every year for my festival of stars gift—as much as I let on. But how can I tell him that I fear I’m becoming like my brother, or that I have perhaps always been like him? That for all of last night I dreamed of Internment’s edge, Amy scattering pages into the clouds, and a fire raging behind her so that she had no choice but to jump?
I think of the specialist’s card in my pocket.
“Basil?” I say. “You want me to be safe, don’t you?”
He puts his hand over mine, and his tie unrolls from my fingers. “Of course,” he says.
I can’t tell him, then. If he knew that I was this curious about the edge, he would drag me to the king’s home atop the clock tower himself. He would ask to have me declared irrational, and I’d be fitted with an anklet made of blinking lights and never be allowed to step outside again. Just like the woman who used to live downstairs. I used to pass by her door and see her sometimes, standing just inside her threshold after her husband left for work. I’d hear the whimpers of pain when she tried to follow after him.
“What is it?” he asks.
I’m trying to think of a way to answer without lying, but then I’m saved by a knock on my door. “A patrolman was just here.” My mother’s voice. “There’s going to be a broadcast. They’ve found that poor girl’s murderer.”
7 (#ulink_5250be27-e85c-5f21-b9b3-dad90c35cf6a)
Even gods must have their secrets.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
THE BUILDING IS SHAKING, FOR ALL THE footsteps fighting to get down the stairwells at once. Our fascination is as great as our horror, as though knowing the name of the person responsible will explain what has been done. As though it will bring us peace.
I hold Basil’s hand, and when we make it downstairs, the broadcast room contains what I’m certain is everyone in the apartment complex.
Even my brother, who never comes down for these. I spot him standing along the wall with Alice. He’s most comfortable when he can be near a wall or sitting on the floor; he’s told me it’s the only way he can keep from feeling like he’s falling through the sky. In the first months, when he was still adjusting to the permanent darkness, he used to crawl.
Alice waves us over.
“They found the murderer?” Basil asks.
“That’s what we’ve heard, too,” Alice says.
Lex mumbles something I don’t catch. I touch his arm, to let him know where I am and to console him before he starts to get angry. He has never had a kind thing to say about the king, or his announcements. Especially since Alice’s ordeal. He could get us all arrested for treason.
I stand on tiptoes to reach his ear. “It’ll be okay,” I say.
“It’s already plenty not-okay, Little Sister,” he says.
Alice shushes him. A patrolman is shaking the screen, trying to get it to work. There are a few seconds of static, and then the king appears, wobbly and distorted on the screen.
Everyone in the room has gone quiet. When the roar of the static reduces itself to a faint crackling, we can finally hear what the king is saying. “—are appalled by our findings early this evening that after a thorough investigation, based on extensive evidence, there is reason to believe that Judas Hensley is responsible for the murder of Daphne Leander, his betrothed.”
My blood runs cold. Basil squeezes my hand.
“No,” Lex murmurs beside me.
Rather than an academy image, there’s live footage of the accused, his arms shackled behind him, his head down, and his face half-covered by blond hair as he’s lead up the steps of the courthouse by several patrolmen. I’m uncertain what awaits him on the other side of those heavy wooden doors. Many generations before I was born, crimes were a routine part of Internment. Jealousy and greed bred most of them, and it was determined that arranged betrothals and assigned housing would diminish many such crimes. Things will never be perfect, of course. With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgment. There are still disputes and accidents that are resolved in the courthouse. If it’s an involved case, people are selected to serve as part of a jury.
But a murderer? What sort of trial would have to take place? Where would they keep him in the meantime?
Alice has her finger to Lex’s lips now, because he just said something I didn’t hear. What could this possibly mean to him? In the last moment before the image switches back to the king, I see Judas Hensley in the courthouse lights. I’ve seen him at the academy; we’ve had classes together, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.
“Do you know him?” I ask Basil.
“I’ve seen him,” he says.
The king is still speaking, telling us there will be more updates to follow, but I’m distracted by Alice, who is pulling Lex out of the room and trying not to make a scene. I don’t understand why he’s so upset by this. What does he have to do with a murdered girl’s betrothed from the academy?
The broadcast ends, and the room reaches a crescendo of chatter. Lots of speculation, but no answers among the lot of us.
All night, my dreams are pervaded by my brother’s furious pacing overhead. I fear the floorboards will splinter and break.
The cafeteria is filled with morbid, fascinated gossip. Judas is the name of a hero in the history book. The right-hand man to the king, he penned the first page of The History of Internment. The sky god favored him, and when Judas died, Internment experienced its one and only water storm. To think a boy named after Judas could commit such a crime.
Pen pulls excitedly on my sleeve. “It’s all like a tawdry romantic horror,” she says. “Can you even believe it?”
It’s all anyone in the cafeteria is talking about. I know because I overhear pieces of conversation—“Did anyone know them?”—“always a little strange”—“pretty girl”—“stuck up, if you ask me.” But I don’t find myself among them. I’m not interested in the gossip. I’m more worried about the aftermath.
“Wonder when the trial will begin,” Basil says.
“They’ll have a difficult time finding a jury, I imagine,” Thomas says. “It’s supposed to be unbiased. Who can be unbiased about murder? It’s clearly wrong.”
“Unless he didn’t do it,” I blurt, surprising myself. Everyone’s eyes are on me. “I mean—that’s what the trial is for, isn’t it? To determine innocence?”
Pen shrugs. “Guess we’ll see. Is there a math exam this week?”
And the topic of Daphne Leander and Judas Hensley dies away.
“Lex?”
“What is it?” he says after a pause. I knocked, but he won’t open his office door to me. Lost in his brilliance, I suppose. He was always like that—going off by himself. But his blindness has intensified it.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I say.
“Talk about what?”
“Things,” I say. “That’s what sisters do. You know, because you’re my brother and I care about you?”
“You bug me,” he says. “That’s what sisters do. How do you know I’m not trying to nap?”
“You aren’t,” I press. “The ceiling is practically crumbling over my bedroom.”
He ignores me. Alice, standing at the end of the hall, frowns in apology. Lex has even begun to elude her. I worry for him, alone in all that blackness.
I sit on the floor and lean against the door.
“Who was that little girl at your jumper group?” I ask. “She had a bow in her hair.” Too late, I realize a physical description won’t do my brother any good. “She can’t be more than eleven or twelve.”
No answer.
“The day of the fire, I caught her putting up papers in the ladies’ room at the theater. I think she put them up at the academy, too. They were copies of a paper Daphne Leander wrote about the gods being a myth.”
The door opens, and I tense to keep from falling backward. Lex reaches out for me.
“Where are you?” he says.
“Down here.” I hold up my hand and he takes it, feeling his way until he’s on his knees across from me.
“That girl is none of your concern,” he says.
“Is she really a jumper?” I say.
“Yes. And you have no business talking to her.”
“She’s Daphne Leander’s sister,” I say. “Isn’t she?”
“I’m not kidding, Morgan. You stay away from her.”
He’s in a miserable mood, and there’s no sense pressing him for more, but all he’s done is pique my interest.
“Since you’re out, come on and eat something,” Alice says. “I made berry cobbler.”
Later, when Lex has retreated to his office once again, Alice is washing the dishes and I’m drying them.
“He is right,” she says. “It’s best if you stay away from that girl.”
“Who is she?” I say. Alice takes her husband’s side about most things, but she’s always had a soft spot for me.
“You were right,” she says, handing me a dripping plate. “She’s Daphne’s sister. She may be a little girl, but she’s got a lot of demons. It’s best if you let her alone.”
I’ve heard that saying used to describe my brother. “A lot of demons.” That’s what my father said while we all kept vigil at Lex’s bedside in the hospital. I didn’t know what he meant. But now I’m thinking of Amy Leander, and what it must have been like to learn her sister wouldn’t be coming home. It was the most awful thing I could imagine, watching my brother fight to breathe in that sterile room. But at least he was breathing.
Alice starts talking about frivolous things—greenhouse vegetation and silver earrings in jewelry shop windows that she thinks will make my eyes sparkle—and I play along, but she isn’t fooling me. There’s something happening to Internment. That’s as certain as Daphne Leander is dead.
8 (#ulink_1e77c21d-d559-57c8-8e62-d9693b1c745b)
Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
BASIL THROWS A STONE INTO THE LAKE, trying to make it skip.
“Like this,” I say, pitching the stone into the water at an angle. It hits the surface and promptly sinks. Basil tries not to laugh.
“Well, I was good at it when I was little, anyway.” I fall back into the grass and watch a cloud that’s sloping over the atmosphere.
“Our engineers spend so much time studying the ground,” Basil says, settling beside me. “Ever think about what’s above us?”
“The tributary,” I say. “The god of the sky.”
“But those are intangible,” Basil says. “Spiritual. What I mean is, what if there’s more land up there? What if there are people living on the stars?”
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Lauren DeStefano
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy: On the floating city of Internment, you can be anything you dream. Unless you approach the edge.Morgan Stockhour knows getting too close to the edge of Internment, the floating city in the clouds where she lives, can lead to madness. Even though her older brother, Lex, was a Jumper, Morgan vows never to end up like him. If she ever wonders about the ground, and why it is forbidden, she takes solace in her best friend, Pen, and in Basil, the boy she’s engaged to marry.Then a murder, the first in a generation, rocks the city. With whispers swirling and fear on the wind, Morgan can no longer stop herself from investigating, especially once she meets Judas. Betrothed to the victim, he is the boy being blamed for the murder, but Morgan is convinced of his innocence. Secrets lay at the heart of Internment, but nothing can prepare Morgan for what she will find – or whom she will lose.
FOR
MY FAMILY,
who knows
the importance
of dreaming
beyond the edge
of our world
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
—Jalāl ad-Din ar-Rūmī
The first humans were especially ungrateful. After the birth of the sun and the moon, they asked for stars. After the crops rose from the ground, they asked for beasts to fill the fields. After some time, the god of the ground, weary of their demands, thought it best to destroy them and begin again with humbler beings. So it goes that the god of the sky thought the first humans too clever to waste, and he agreed to keep them in the sky with the promise that they would never again interfere with the ground.
—The History of Internment, Chapter 1
Table of Contents
Cover (#u6a5eb801-1515-536a-9bfb-9f1ec5ab5d44)
Title Page (#u8379f7cb-aa9e-5ac5-a9b6-0039b87e7225)
Dedication (#u75a7f8c8-33ef-5286-b892-cdd1cb9743b4)
Epigraph (#u7a461211-a844-549d-9d1b-e802c440cf4a)
Chapter 1 (#u8ac023a1-f2e6-528a-b20e-8f2bfecc31b8)
Chapter 2 (#uafcf069e-1cc6-5a26-83be-93d2ec608fe1)
Chapter 3 (#u1e3d840a-0f55-5423-b8f8-eb2ee5ca5448)
Chapter 4 (#u09e8af96-78ab-5346-ac06-ab3b50456ca8)
Chapter 5 (#u99da917f-b33c-58da-965c-3322c0054a5b)
Chapter 6 (#u25ed4644-e1c9-5555-890b-9fa6ffac8619)
Chapter 7 (#u7ee52336-d37d-514e-9da1-a95e700fcd98)
Chapter 8 (#u53510f76-25b2-56d2-8d3c-1f9f1a07d935)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lauren DeStefano (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_7484d1a3-8051-57ee-a14c-cbc902d6bcbf)
You have all heard the warnings about the edge. We have been told its winds are a song that will hypnotize us, and by the time we awaken from that trance, it will be too late.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
WE LIVE ENCAPSULATED BY THE TRAINS. They go around in a perfect oval at all hours, stopping for thirty-five seconds in each section so the commuters are able to board and depart. Beyond the tracks, after the fence, there’s sky. Engineers crafted a scope so that we can see the ground below us. We can see tall buildings and other sorts of trains—some of which disappear underground or rise onto bridges. We can see patches of cities and towns that appear stitched like one of Lex’s blankets.
We’ve never been able to craft a scope advanced enough to see the people—it isn’t allowed. We’ve been banished to the sky. I’m told they can see Internment, though. I wonder, what must we look like to them? A giant oval of the earth with rocks and roots clinging to the bottom, I suppose. I’ve seen sketches of what Internment looks like as a whole, and it’s as though a giant hand came down and took a piece right out of the ground, and here we are floating in the sky.
When I was a child, I used to think about the day Internment was ripped from the ground and placed in the sky. I used to wonder if the people were frightened, or if they felt fortunate to be saved. I used to imagine that I was a part of Interment’s first generation. I’d close my eyes and feel the ground under my feet going up and up and up.
“Ms. Stockhour,” Instructor Newlan says, “you’re dreaming with your eyes open again. Page forty-six.”
I look at the textbook open before me and realize I haven’t been keeping up with the lesson since page thirty-two.
“I don’t suppose you would care to add to our discussion.” He always paces between the rows of desks as he lectures, and now he’s stopped before me.
“The festival of stars?” I say, but I’m only guessing. I have an incurably wandering mind, a fact that has given Instructor Newlan much cheerful cause to torture me. The chorus of chuckles from my classmates confirms I’m wrong.
“We’ve moved on to geography,” Pen says from beside me. She glances from me to the instructor, curls bouncing around her cheeks and creating a perfect ambiance for the look of contrition on her face; if Instructor Newlan thinks she’s sorry for speaking out of turn, he won’t give her a demerit. He likes her; she’s the only one left fully conscious after his geography lectures—she’d like to work on the maps when she’s older. He gives her a wry glance over his glasses, flips my book to the correct page, and goes on.
“I do realize that it’s December first,” Instructor Newlan says. “I know we’re all excited for the festival of stars to begin, but let us remember that there is plenty of class work to be done in the meantime.”
The festival of stars is a monthlong celebration, and in the excitement and preparations, it’s common for students and adults alike to daydream. But while the rest of Internment daydreams of normal things—gifts and requests to the god of the sky—I dream of things that are dangerous and could have me arrested or killed. I stare at the edge of my desk and imagine it’s the end of my little world.
After the class is over, I wait for Basil before I move for the door. He always insists on catching the same shuttle to the train so he can escort me home. He worries. “Where does your mind go?” he asks me.
“She was thinking about the ground again,” Pen teases, linking her elbow around mine and squeezing against me. “I swear, with all your daydreams about the ground, you could be a novelist.”
I will never be disciplined enough to write a novel, not like my brother, Lex, who says I’m too much of an optimist to have any artistic prowess.
We walk quickly. Pen is trying to avoid Thomas, her betrothed, and the way she keeps glancing behind us, she isn’t even being inconspicuous.
We make it into a shuttle with hardly a second to spare. The shuttles are electric vehicles that are much smaller than train cars and therefore are usually crowded. We stand huddled by the door. Pen deflates with a quiet sigh of relief. Thomas is just leaving the academy as we depart.
Basil grips the overhead handle, and I grab his arm as a jolt knocks me into him. The reason for our betrothals is never explained to us, but I like to think the decision makers knew Basil was going to be taller than me. It can only be an act of good planning, the way my head fits into the hollow between his neck and shoulder.
I keep hold of Pen’s wrist so she doesn’t stumble, but she has no problem keeping her balance. She’s staring out at the clouds full of evening sunlight. They meander alongside Internment, but just when I think they’ll hit us, they evade, slipping under or over our little world like we’re a stone in their waters. Internment is encased by a sphere of wind that prevents the clouds from entering our city, though they seem close enough to touch.
The shuttle stops, pushing strangers into us. We’re lucky to be so close to the door, because everyone rushes to get out at once, hoping to catch the train so they won’t have to wait for the next one.
The train is not very crowded when we board, aside from the seats at the head of the car that are occupied by a group of pregnant women, chattering with one another about the details of their birthing class. Judging by their stomachs, I’d guess they’re carrying a round of January births.
The higher grades let out an hour after most work shifts end, and the younger children have another hour yet of classes. We find an empty row of seats wide enough to fit the three of us, and I deliberately usher Basil in first so that Pen won’t be the one to sit by the window. She has spent enough time staring at the clouds.
“They’ve already started decorating for the festival of stars,” I say, nodding to the silver-colored branches that frame the ceiling of our train car. From the branches hang little metal toys and trinkets that are meant to symbolize human desire—toy trains and books and miniature couples holding hands, the brass silhouette of true love.
The festival of stars overtakes the city in the month of December. It’s a time for giving gifts to our loved ones to show our gratitude for having them in our lives. And on the very last day, we’re allowed to make one big request of the god in the sky. Each request is written on a special piece of parchment that we aren’t meant to share with anyone else. The entire city gathers together, and our pieces of parchment are set on fire and cast into the sky, like hundreds of burning stars. We cling to one another and watch as our greatest desires are carried off and eventually extinguished, to be answered or denied.
“They’ve asked me to help with the murals this year,” Pen says, raising her chin in a modest show of pride. “Apparently one of the instructors recommended me to the festival committee.”
“It’s about time,” I say. “You couldn’t keep your talent a secret forever.”
She smiles. “I’m a bit nervous, if I’m going to be honest about it. All those people telling me what to draw. I’ve never been good at taking orders.”
She takes my shoulders and faces me away from her so that she can weave my straight dark hair into a braid. She says I waste my beauty, letting my hair fall over my shoulders like a mop.
Basil doesn’t comment on my appearance at all, although sometimes he says he hopes our children have my blue eyes; he says they make him think of what the water on the ground must look like. We’ve never seen it from up close, but we have the lakes here, which are sort of green.
“If they boss you around, just call it artistic license,” Basil says. “You can convince them to see it your way. You’re a good debater.”
“That is true,” Pen says cheerily. “Thanks, Basil.”
The train stops, and everyone getting off at the nearest section rises to their feet, but their haste is replaced by confusion. This isn’t the platform. Basil cranes his neck and tries to see ahead, but Pen is the one to notice the lights first. She abandons my braid, and my hair falls, undone. She jabs my ribs and says, “Look.”
Red-and-white medic lights are flashing off in the distance.
People around us are murmuring. There are medical emergencies sometimes, and despite the organization of the shuttles, accidents happen when people get too close to the moving vehicles. Once, there was an hour’s delay after one of the cattle animals broke through a fence and was struck by a train.
Pen and I start to get to our feet for a better look, but a jolt forces us back into our seats. We start moving again. But something is wrong. The scenery moves in the wrong direction.
We’re going backward.
Pen is alight with excitement. “I didn’t even know the train could go backward,” she says. “I wonder if it puts any strain on the gears.” At times her curiosity makes her brave.
I bite my lip, look out the window because no matter which direction we go, the sky looks the same. And the sky is familiar. The sky is safe.
There’s a half mile of land on the other side of the fence that lines the train track; I’ve never set foot on the other side of the tracks—we aren’t supposed to—but Lex has.
On Internment, you can be anything you dream—a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close that it’s as though you’re riding them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There’s only one rule: You don’t approach the edge. If you do, it’s already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted any delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself.
My stomach is doing flip-flops, and I can’t decide if it’s excitement or fear.
I force myself to look away from the window, and my eyes find Basil’s.
Some of the other passengers seem excited, others confused.
A man several seats down, in a black suit, has begun talking to Pen about how trains have emergency systems, and shuttles too. He says that the train has moved backward before, several years before she was born, when repair work needed to be done on the track.
“So it could be that something just needs to be fixed,” he says.
One of the pregnant women is staring past Basil and me, out our window at the sky. Her lips are moving. It takes me a few seconds to realize that she’s talking to the god in the sky, something the people of Internment do only when they’re desperate.
“All this backward motion is starting to make me dizzy,” I say.
“It’s only because you’re worried,” Basil says. “You have great equilibrium. What was that spinning game you used to play when we were in first year?”
I let out a small laugh. “It wasn’t a game, really. I just liked to count how many times in a row I could spin without falling down.”
“Yes, but you would do it everywhere you went,” he says. “Up and down stairs, and in the aisles of the train, and all along the cobbles. You never seemed to get dizzy.”
“What an odd thing to remember,” I say, but it makes me smile. I would spin around the apartment from the time I awoke in the morning, jumping around my older brother and spinning after each step as we shared the mirror in the cramped water room. It drove him mad.
One morning as he was fixing his tie, he warned me that if I kept spinning, I’d be stolen by the wind and carried off into the sky. “We’ll never get you back then,” he said. The words were meant to frighten me, but instead they filled me with romantic notions that became a part of my game. I began to imagine being carried on the wind and landing on the ground, seeing for myself what was happening below our city. I could imagine such great and impossible things there. Things I didn’t have words for.
The madness of youth made me unafraid.
2 (#ulink_43af1ebf-e7ed-5652-a057-b332e1b49f2c)
Our genders are determined for us before our parents have reached their turn in the queue. How much are we leaving to the god in the sky?
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WALK ME ALL THE way to the door,” I say as Basil and I stop in front of my apartment. His building is within reasonable walking distance, but I’d hate to be the reason he isn’t home when his little brother arrives from classes.
“Are you feeling better?” he says. “Your knees have stopped shaking.”
I nod, stare down at my hand when he drags his fingertip over my knuckles, our clear rings catching the light. We had to wear them on chains around our necks until last year, when they finally fit us. When we’re married, the jeweler will open them and they’ll be filled with our blood—mine in his ring, his in mine. I don’t think about what it will be like to marry him; according to my mother, I don’t think about the things I should be thinking about now that I’m two months past my sixteenth birthday. But I do look at my ring and wonder if the blood drawing will hurt. Alice says it doesn’t.
“I can be here in the morning if you’d like,” he says. “To walk you to the shuttle for the academy.”
I feel my cheeks swell with a smile and I can’t meet his eyes. “No,” I say. “It’s out of your way, and anyway Pen will be with me. I’ll meet you there.”
He touches the sharp crease of my uniform sleeve, runs his hand down the length of my arm. Something within me stirs. “All right,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”
“See you.”
I watch him enter the stairwell, and as he goes, I notice the flushed skin at the back of his neck.
The apartment door opens, and my mother, wearing an apron stained with flour, ushers me inside. She was listening at the door.
“You should have invited him to dinner. There’s plenty,” she says. And, “You’re late. Did you miss the train?”
“There was a problem with it,” I say, shrugging my satchel over the back of a kitchen chair.
“A problem?” She sounds only mildly concerned as she opens the oven and considers the state of the casserole.
“It stopped, and then it had to go backward.”
She closes the oven door and looks at me, eyes narrowed in concern.
“It started going the right way again eventually,” I say, unknotting my red necktie. With the anxiety I feel today, the tie is starting to have the effect of a noose.
“But you’re all right?” she says. “Nobody was hurt?”
“There were medic lights up ahead, but I didn’t get a good look.” I don’t want to worry her; she’s been doing so well lately. It has been a while since she’s gone through an entire prescription. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.
She stares at me a moment longer, face unreadable, then blinks to free herself from whatever it is she’s thinking. “Here,” she says, fitting me with oven mitts and thrusting a covered dish into my hands. “Take this upstairs to your brother and Alice.”
“Mom, if you keep feeding them, Alice is going to think you have something against her cooking.”
“Nonsense,” she says. “I just worry. She knows that.” She’s already opening the door for me; she can’t have me out of her kitchen fast enough. Usually she loves my company after class; she lets me nibble on mini fruitcakes and she asks about my lessons. She used to ask about Basil, but not so much since he and I started wearing our rings; she says it’s important for betrotheds to share secrets with each other.
“And tell your brother I expect that dish to come back empty,” she calls as I’m entering the stairwell.
She has unrealistic expectations. My brother can live on ideas and water for days. His apartment is directly above ours, and his office is over my bedroom. I hear him at all hours, but especially late at night, wearing down the floorboards, and I know he’s whispering his novels into the transcription machine. If I listen closely, I might hear his indistinguishable murmurs, Alice asking him to come to bed.
My brother is frequently irritated by my visits, especially if I’m under our mother’s orders to bring him food. He says he’s too old now to be treated like a child. But when he and Alice married, they applied for an apartment in this building, so he must not mind being near our parents too much.
I knock on the apartment door, and from the other side I hear Alice cursing. When she opens the door, her hair is falling out of a cloth tie, and water and flower petals are spreading out on the kitchen floor. She’s holding shards of the unfortunate vase in a dustpan. There are always flowers in her apartment, and Lex is always knocking them over.
Meekly, I hold up the covered dish. “From my mother,” I say.
“Lex!” she calls to the closed door at the end of the hallway. She steps aside to let me in. There’s no answer and she paces to the door and knocks angrily.
The windup metal vacuum discus is repeatedly knocking into the corner, trying to find its way out. The copper is scuffed, the gears whining for their efforts.
Alice goes back to picking up the shards. “You try getting him out of there,” she says. “Maybe he’ll come out for you. He’s holed up in there so often that I’m starting to forget I have a husband.”
As she gathers the shards, I watch the red blood in her band.
I set the dish on the stove before heading down the hallway—my mother’s instincts were right; the stove hasn’t been turned on.
I stand outside the door to my brother’s office, ear pressed to the door. I never know what he’s writing. He tells me that when I was a baby, he would read his earliest manuscripts to me—he would whisper them through the bars of my crib until I stopped crying in the bedroom we shared, and he could finally go to sleep. He won’t tell me what the stories were about. “They were gruesome, brutal,” he’ll say. “But you didn’t understand. You’d smile and go to sleep.”
Now I can’t hear what he’s saying to his transcriber. I knock. “Lex?”
His murmurings stop. I hear him shuffling around, but I don’t ask if he needs help. Words like “help” have been banned from his apartment like Internment has been banned from the ground.
The door opens, and I’m hit with the smell of burnt paper. Through the darkness I can just see, on a table in a far corner, a long strip of paper trailing from the transcription machine to the floor, curling into and around itself like hills and valleys. Wisps of smoke are rising from the exposed gears.
“You’re supposed to use that thing for only an hour at a time,” I say, frowning. There are bags under his eyes and he’s staring through me with eyes that used to be blue like mine. But they’ve faded since his incident. They’re gray, bloodshot, and they tell a different story from the rest of his youthful face. He could be my twenty-four-year-old brother or he could be a hundred.
“What happened?” he asks me.
“Mom sent me up here with dinner. She’s going to send me right back up here if I don’t convince you to eat. You just have to take a bite; you know she can tell if I lie.”
“What happened?” he asks again. He always knows when I’m uneasy.
“Nothing,” I say. “There was a problem with the train. Come out and eat something.”
“I was in the middle of a thought. Just leave it on the table.”
“You’re going to break that machine,” Alice yells from the kitchen. I’ve never understood how two people who are so clearly in love can act as though they hate each other at the same time.
Lex relents, though, closing the door behind us and feeling his way along the wall toward the kitchen. Alice has mopped up the water and flower petals. The apartment is kept sparsely furnished, which is Alice’s doing. This is her way of helping Lex in secret; she’s always a step ahead of him, quietly making sure he’s safe.
In a rare feat of accomplishment, I’ve convinced Lex to eat some of the casserole. He has just taken his first forkful, and he’s just about to complain, when the door bursts open.
My father is standing in the doorway, red and out of breath. Sweat stains the collar of his blue patrolman’s uniform.
“Dad?” Lex and I say at the same time. Lex is gripping Alice’s arm. He’s always worrying she’ll disappear.
My father needs a moment to catch his breath, but then he seems relieved. “Morgan—” he wheezes. “Your mother told me she sent you up here alone—she didn’t know about the king’s order.”
“What order?” Alice asks, pouring him a glass of water from the tap. He shakes his head, doesn’t accept.
“What is it, Dad?” Lex says. “You’re making everyone panic.”
“Morgan needs to come back downstairs,” he says. “The king is ordering everyone to be in their own apartments tonight. There was a body on the train tracks.”
Some distant part of me understands, just barely, but another part of me has to ask, “Was there an accident?”
“No, heart,” he says. “The other patrolmen and I have been investigating. A girl was murdered.”
3 (#ulink_5cca65c8-0338-5244-95ed-cfe005602284)
Up until someone I loved approached the edge, I had no reason to question the hand of any god, much less my own god’s hand. But to see that no amount of love or will on my part could make that little girl open her eyes as she lay unconscious in a sterile room—How could I not question this god that watches over us? Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn’t the fear of our mortality, but the thoughts it leads us to have.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
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.
“Morgan,” he says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I worry sometimes that you’ve been too sheltered.”
“Sheltered?” I say. “From what? Things like this don’t usually happen.”
“You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is.”
“What is it?” I say.
“Unpredictable. Mostly good, but awful sometimes. The screens are going to turn on in a few minutes, and King Furlow is going to talk about the incident on the train tracks. It’s going to be an honest account. I know you’ve read about other incidents in your textbooks, but this will be more upsetting. I think you should come watch, but I’m leaving it up to you.”
I don’t even have to deliberate. “I want to go,” I say, throwing back the covers, reaching for my robe hanging over the bedpost.
My father ruffles my hair as he stands. I worry for him; he rarely talks about his work as a patrolman, but I imagine it’s very taxing keeping order, making sure we’re all safe, all the while knowing these are things that cannot truly be controlled. He must take the murdered girl as a personal failure; somewhere on Internment tonight, there are parents without their daughter. How long did the murdered girl’s parents wait in the queue to have her? Whose birth will be granted now that she’s dead? When a person dies alone before his or her dispatch date, the decision makers usually allow two children to be born so they can be betrothed.
“Careful not to wake your mother,” my father says as we move through the common room and kitchen.
“Won’t she want to see?” I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.
“No,” he says, opening the door for me. “She won’t.”
Downstairs, the broadcast room is filling with weary-eyed tenants, many in slippers and robes, some in patrolmen uniforms. Aside from a sleeping toddler in a woman’s arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. It’s nearly midnight, and most of the city would be asleep by now, except for the patrolmen, and the ones like my brother who never sleep at all.
The lobby has already been decorated to signify the start of the festival of stars. Paper lanterns hang from the ceiling on strings, lit by small electric bulbs and covered in slantscript to symbolize the requests we’ll ask of the god in the sky.
I wonder what the murdered girl’s request would have been.
I force the thought away and look for Lex and Alice, but instead Pen and I find each other. She breaks away from her parents to run to me and grab my hands. “Can you believe it?” she says, her green eyes wide with excitement and fright. “Does your father know who it was?”
“I probably know as much about it as you,” I say, comforted by the way she coils her arm around mine. I have the horrible thought that the murdered girl could have been her, that by next week she would be nothing more than a handful of ashes cast to the wind. And then I feel selfishly relieved that the murdered girl wasn’t anyone in my life. It wasn’t Pen or Alice or my mother.
Across the room, my father has found Alice. Lex isn’t with her. I understand; he has known enough awful things for a lifetime. I still think of how he used to be, attentive and intense, his face magnified by the beaker he’d hold up to the light. He used to be one of the top pharmacy students, honored with tasks most others can’t take on until graduation. But after his incident, he burned all of his notes and abandoned the trade entirely. He earns money by sewing quilts now—his work is erratic but deft, and the quilts always fetch a higher price than the others, his skill and precision cause for envy among the other makers.
Pen presses close to me and says, “Look.”
A patrolman is jostling the screen, twisting its knobs and trying to make the static subside. The screen is more than a hundred years old, its bronze facing chipped down to oblivion; the wires are frayed, and a little burst of sparks makes someone in the crowd gasp.
But the image comes through, distorted at first, King Furlow trembling, warped, and green, before the patrolman hits the screen, knocking the image into reasonable clarity in time for us to see the king remove his red bowler hat and hold it to his pudgy stomach.
King Furlow’s lineage traces back to the dawn of Internment itself. His oldest ancestor is in the history book as the only man chosen to hear from the god in the sky. No one knows for certain how the god in the sky speaks with the king, but it’s Internment’s longest standing tradition, passed down from generation to royal generation. I’ve never envied him; it’s surely a terrible burden to be the voice of an entire city.
The rest of us speak to the god in the sky when we’re frightened or grateful, and we don’t expect to be answered.
Standing at either side of the king are his children: Princess Celeste, and her older brother, Prince Azure, both of whom may be trying to appear somber but instead seem bored. Though the screen is sepia and the image a bit out of focus, they both look like their mother, and their mother’s mother, and so on as far as records trace. Blond hair and clear sparkling eyes, a bit of plumpness to the face. They’re sixteen and seventeen, making them closer in age than any other siblings on Internment. The king’s children are traditionally born outside the queue. When the queen announces her pregnancies, she and the king go through the list of hopeful parents in the queue, and they hand-select the applicants they see fit to bear their children’s betrotheds. Of course the hopeful parents can refuse, but no one in Internment’s history has ever passed up the chance to have a child without the long wait.
“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 (#ulink_f67b58d0-e217-5e9a-9c68-1a8b03a4796e)
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.
Thankfully, Basil is an excellent conversationalist, and he and Thomas begin talking about last week’s squares tournament and some apparent controversy about a referee’s call on a blunder.
Pen pushes her vegetables around with her fork.
“You should try to eat,” I say.
“I will if you will.”
We make a silent game of synchronizing our bites.
After lunch, we drop our utensils, trays, and uneaten food into the respective recycling and compost tubes and we move in four different directions to our next classes. The paper in my pocket feels heavy.
The evening train is less somber than the morning’s was. Basil is trying to cheer me with plans for the weekend. He thinks we should go to the theater; one of his favorite books has just been adapted into a play.
I rest my head on his shoulder. His collarbone presses into my cheek, and I breathe in the sharp linen of his uniform and something faintly spicy-sweet. Up until last year, he smelled only of soap, if anything at all.
“You don’t have to walk me to the door,” I say. His train stop is right after mine, and if he walks me inside, he’ll have to walk a section over to his apartment.
“I don’t mind,” he says as the train begins to slow.
“You’ll be safer on the train,” I say. “It’d make me feel a lot better. Please.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect her,” Pen says, tugging me to my feet after the train’s final jolt.
“Come by tomorrow afternoon,” I tell him. “We’ll see the play if you want.”
We step off the train and Pen checks her reflection in her wristwatch. “You’re lucky, you know,” she says. “You aren’t doomed to marry a complete ass.”
The patrolmen open the double doors for us, nod as we pass through.
“Maybe Thomas isn’t as bad as all that,” I say. Her being envious of Basil would defeat the purpose of arranged betrothals. “Plenty of couples argue.”
“I’ll never fancy him,” she says. “He has a face like composted broccoli.”
I laugh. “No he doesn’t.”
“He does. Which is why I intend to never enter the queue. I couldn’t inflict such awful cheekbones on future generations, even if there’s a chance our children could look like me.”
Though it’s a long way off, I’ve given some thought to the queue. I might like having children, but more than that, I think my parents would want a grandchild. Lex and Alice will never be eligible now that he’s disabled, but they applied for it six years ago when they were newlyweds.
Because of Internment’s land limitations, there can’t be a round of pregnancies until there has been a sufficient amount of deaths. It’s a long wait—years—which is why so many couples enter the queue while they’re still university students. My parents reentered the day my brother was born, and it was more than seven years before they were allowed to have me.
Alice got pregnant out of turn. It wasn’t intentional; she’d been neglectful with her pill. She pleaded with the decision makers, even writing a personal appeal to the king himself, but she was years from the front of the queue. She offered to give her child to the next eligible couple, as a last-ditch effort to let her child be born, but of course that isn’t allowed—giving away a child could lead to resentment and jealousy, which could prove dangerous. There’s a story in The History of Internment to prove that, something about a woman who decided she’d rather smother her child than allow it to belong to someone else. Pen knows it better than I do. She has the history book memorized.
After weeks of fighting for her cause, Alice was forced to have a termination procedure. She came home from the hospital with darkness under her eyes, and she retreated immediately to bed, where she stayed for days. Her skin and even her hair seemed to have lost their color.
It took her a very long time to act like Alice again. I would follow her around the apartment and on her weekend errands, coaxing her to take me shopping for new jewelry and to tea shops, throwing my arms around her without warning on shuttles and while she was cooking dinner.
Lex won’t have anything to do with pharmaceuticals now. In studying medicine, he used to help manufacture the elixirs that precede the termination procedures, among other things.
Pen is still musing about the queue. “You do have nice eyes,” she tells me. “Blue isn’t very dominant against brown, though, is it? Well, still, Basil isn’t unattractive.”
We’re standing in front of her apartment door now.
“You should come to the play with us tomorrow,” I say. “Bring Thomas.”
“Maybe,” she sighs. “If my mother is having one of her headaches, she’ll want me out of the apartment anyway. See you later.”
In my apartment, I find my mother sleeping on the couch, curled in Lex’s blanket. There’s a hot plate waiting in the stove for me, but I’m not hungry. I work on my homework for a while, but the silence feels crushing and it doesn’t take long for me to get restless enough to go upstairs.
As always, there are signs of life in Lex and Alice’s apartment. Alice is standing on the kitchen table in impractical black heels, trying to change a lightbulb.
“Morgan’s here now,” Lex says before I’ve even stepped into the apartment. “Let her help you. You’re going to fall and break your face.”
“I am not going to break my face,” she says, cursing when she burns her fingertips on the bulb.
I grab a new bulb from the package at her feet and hold it up. “You’re a peach,” she says, stooping to take it.
“We’re going out in a few minutes, you know,” Lex says. “It’s Friday. Jumper group.”
“I was hoping you’d let me tag along.”
Alice climbs down from the table and dusts her hands on her shirtfront. “I don’t see why not,” she says. “It’ll give me someone to talk to, at least. I’m always left waiting in the hallway. They don’t even offer me any of their snacks.”
“Tell Mom so she doesn’t worry,” Lex says.
“She’s sleeping. Already left a note.”
Alice runs the tap and smoothes water over some defiant strands of hair. She’s done it up in elaborate curls held in place by bronze clips that compliment her curls’ many shades of red. She’s wearing a blue dress that curls and billows around her knees and elbows as she moves through the mundane tasks of putting away the bulbs and straightening an image on the wall. Sometimes she’s unreal. Something that floated down from the sky.
Before the incident, she and Lex were seldom home. She had a dress for every color the sun illuminates and there was always cause to wear one. Even when I was a child, I admired the love they had, the way every outing, every dinner party or hike through the woods was an adventure. Now Alice dresses up only for weekend errands, and Lex’s jumper group every Friday, even though the only people to see her are the shuttle and train passengers. Her job in the gardens requires a drab uniform that I’ve always thought looked like it was trying to smother her.
I feel underdressed in my academy uniform, yet I know that I won’t have time to change. Alice, reading my mind, disappears to the bedroom and returns, pressing silver earrings into my palm; they’re shaped like stars cascading down little chains.
“Better get moving,” she says, jostling the back of Lex’s chair. “If we miss the train, we’ll have to walk.”
Outside, the sky has become a deeper blue, filling fast with stars. As we step onto the train platform, Lex crushes a daisy that’s growing between the cobbles. I wonder if he remembers what flowers are, not only what they look like, but that they exist at all. He’s knocked over plenty of Alice’s vases, and he has no idea what the shattering glass was before he ruined it. He’s told me that he can’t remember how eyelashes are shaped. He can’t conjure an image of our mother’s window boxes full of tomato plants, though he had looked at them every day of his life.
The seven thirty train isn’t crowded. There’s a group of men in suits at the far end of the car; one of them tips his hat flirtatiously to Alice, and she tugs on her earring, smirking for a moment before turning her attention to ushering Lex into his seat. There’s a mother listening patiently as her young child recites the multiplication tables. There’s a girl traveling alone, which I wouldn’t have found strange before the murder. She’s wearing the blue necktie worn by sixth-through eighth-year students. She’s young but her face is pointed up, and something about the ferocity in her eyes is vaguely familiar.
Beside me, Alice rests her head on Lex’s shoulder, and he rubs her arm, says something in her ear that makes her smile.
A patrolman paces the aisle after the train has begun to move, and the girl in the blue tie plays with the ring hanging from her neck as she watches him. I’m sure I’m imagining the snarl she gives once he has passed by. Her eyes meet mine and I look away. I watch the sky slowly turning darker blue. In the long season, the sun burns until late evening, but the short season is approaching now and the days are getting shorter.
“We’ll have two hours to burn,” Alice says. “There’s a tea shop at the end of the block we could try.”
I smile. “Okay.”
“Are you feeling okay?” she says. “You seem a little distant.”
I feel the eyes of the girl in the blue tie watching me, though I don’t look in her direction to confirm. And I feel the patrolman watching me, not just here but everywhere I go. For the first time in my life, I feel unsafe and I don’t know how to help it. The king has insisted that we go about our lives as normal, that the patrolmen will keep us safe, but who was there to keep Daphne Leander safe?
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Dad shouldn’t have let you watch the broadcast,” Lex says. “All it’s done is cause you to worry about everything.”
“I needed to see it,” I say. “I don’t need to be sheltered.”
“Says the girl who still sleeps with the light on after I tell her a harmless ghost story.”
“That was years ago,” I say. “I’m not a baby, you know.”
“I am certain it was only last season,” Lex says, and his voice deepens when he adds, “The tale of the ghost birds that flew into the city and pecked everyone to death.”
“I don’t recall leaving any lights on,” I say, and am impressed by my cool tone.
“Don’t listen to him,” Alice says.
“Do they sell sweets at the tea shop?” I say. “I skipped dinner and now I’m hungry.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Lex says something about my teeth rotting out of my head and how the only way to stop me from crying as a baby was to give me sugar water, and the conversation moves into the comfort of trivial things. But in the window, among the clouds, I see the reflection of the girl in the blue tie. I can’t shake the idea that she looks familiar, even though I can’t remember ever seeing her in the city.
The train stops and Alice and I guide Lex onto the platform, keeping him out of the way of passengers entering and exiting. I feel a tug at the back of my shirt, and when I turn around, the girl in the blue tie is holding a silver star earring in her palm. “You dropped this,” she says. Her eyelids are smeared with pink glitter, and it isn’t until after she has walked away that I realize why she looks so familiar. She’s a younger version of the murdered girl. They could be sisters. And they probably are.
The jumper group is held behind a closed door in a recreational room of the courthouse that used to be a holding cell for criminals decades ago. Even spouses, siblings, and parents aren’t allowed inside.
Alice straightens the collar of Lex’s shirt and kisses him. “Handsome,” she accuses. “I’ll be right outside when it’s time to go home.”
“I’ll be waiting, gorgeous,” he says.
“Gorgeous,” she says, exhaling a little laugh. “For all you know, I’ve colored my face green.”
“Then you’d be gorgeous and green,” he says.
She does her best not to show it, but it’s hard for her to relinquish her husband into the care of a fellow jumper, who ushers him to the circle of chairs. They’ve always shared everything, and this is something he never talks about. There’s a camaraderie among these group members that never leaves the room.
The girl in the blue tie slips past us into the room and finds a seat. She looks so small and out of place there among the others. Most of the jumpers are old enough to have grown cynical about our little world, discontent. I’ve never heard of a child jumping. The others are disfigured and disabled from their attempts, but she looks polished and thin in her pressed uniform. Her hair, the same sweetgold blond as the murdered girl’s, is held back by a white band with a bow on one side. Someone hands her a paper cup and she manages a polite if despondent smile.
“Okay,” Alice says, putting her hand on my back and guiding me toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.” We pass others who linger in the hall, waiting for their loved ones while reading or talking amongst one another. This is where Alice would have waited in her pretty dress, and when she went home she would have simply hung it in the closet again. I don’t know that I can ever forgive Lex for squandering her. And yet she has never complained about having to care for him. She could go out more if she wanted to; if he’s in the throes of a novel, he probably won’t even notice. But she mostly just leaves for work in the greenhouses.
A patrolmen opens the door for us. “Ladies.” He nods as we pass by. “Be safe out there tonight.”
The orange glow of street lanterns outlines the cobblestones with shadows. Yet in the distance, the glasslands shimmer in the moonlight.
“That little girl is part of the jumper group?” I ask, once we’re beyond the earshot of the patrolmen.
“I’ve seen her the last few times,” Alice says.
“So she’s jumped?”
“She must have …” Alice’s voice is trailing off. She takes a deep breath and says, “Look at that moon, Morgan. It’s so close. As if we could just walk right up to the edge and reach out and take it.” She closes one eye and holds up her hand, balancing the moon on her palm.
I hook my elbow around hers. I don’t like what she has said. I don’t like the thought of her crossing the tracks and chasing the moon to Internment’s edge. People go mad there. They see all of that sky and nothingness and they lose themselves.
“Is this the tea shop?” I say.
“Oh! Yes, it is. Look, the sign is shaped like an actual teacup. Isn’t that quaint?”
It would be, if not for the patrolman standing at the entrance.
5 (#ulink_2c812b95-18a1-5f4c-b679-6d9ae34c782d)
Every moment is a gift, from the frivolous to the dire. The taste of sweetgold, and the rough paper of our favorite books. I find a god in these things—which god, I cannot say, but I’m grateful to it.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
PEN FIXES THE HEM OF MY RED VELVET glove that’s starting to unroll from my elbow. “You look classic,” she says, and then holds up her own blue gloves with a look of disdain. “Aren’t these archaic? They’re my mother’s. She used to wear them on dates with my father. You know, back when Internment was still part of the ground.”
“I think you’re a vision,” Thomas says, coming up behind her, gripping the overhead handle as the shuttle begins to move.
She looks over her shoulder at him, and the sunlight catches the shadows of her neck and collarbone in a way that makes her seem more woman than girl. “I thought for sure you’d missed the shuttle.”
“I caught it just as the doors were closing,” he says, and looks at me. “I take it your other will be joining us shortly?”
“We’re taking the train to his section and walking from there,” I say, feeling strange about the word he has used: “other.” He likes to talk like a period actor; he’s always reading romantic classics—a woman on the cover with an elaborately floral hat, looking faint as a man in a tuxedo steadies her. Things of that nature.
When the shuttle jolts and pushes Thomas toward her, Pen swats at him, complaining that he’ll make her hat go crooked. She’s wearing a candlebox hat that has been dyed the same color as her gloves. Candles come in small, cylindrical stiff paper boxes that can be taken to a clothes maker to be recycled into a hat. They’re dyed desired colors, given a brim, and affixed to a band so that the hat will sit firmly on one side of the head.
They look ridiculous on me. Few girls are bold enough to pull them off, but Pen is the sort of girl who can wear anything.
Thomas smiles at her averted face. “I’ll have your heart yet, Margaret Atmus.”
“You already have it.” She holds up her hand, betrothal band gleaming in the light. “Not that I had any say in the matter. And you know I hate when you call me that.”
When we make it to the train, I notice that it isn’t very crowded, which is strange for the weekend. “Looks like a lot of people decided to walk today,” Thomas says.
Pen flattens her dress against her knees, indifferent to his arm around her shoulders.
“I’ve been reading a peculiar little story,” Thomas says, looking at me because he knows Pen won’t humor him with interest.
“What about?” I say.
“It’s about the people of the ground trying to reach us. They craft a sort of machine and harness it to birds.”
“Birds couldn’t lift something that heavy,” Pen says. We don’t know very much about birds—they’ve never flown so high as Internment, but we’ve seen images of them taken with the scope. Skinny white blurs traveling alone or as beads in a necklace of Vs.
“Well then, you’ve figured out the conflict,” he says. “Anyway, they don’t make it. The story was really more about their trying to reach us. Some think they are, and others say we’re nothing more to them than a giant rock in the sky. Perhaps they think we’re a dusty moon.”
“I wonder about that all the time,” I say.
“Don’t get Morgan started on the ground,” Pen says, rising as the train rolls to a stop. “She’ll be lost in thought for the rest of the day, and I need someone to whisper with if this play is no good.”
Basil spots us as we’re stepping out onto the platform. The gold trim of his jacket matches the flecks of light in his brown eyes. Pen calls it a shame that my eyes aren’t dominant, but I think it would be nice if my children look like Basil. He holds his arm to me, and I look at my velvet glove against his gray suit, imagining we’re figures in a very old image. Though I know I shouldn’t, I imagine that the steps leading down off the platform will go all the way down the sky until we reach the ground.
“How are you?” he asks, so close that his breath reaches the nape of my neck.
“I’ll feel better once they’ve caught the person responsible,” I admit. “My father came home last night with an extra bolt for our door. Every time I look at it, I see that girl’s face.”
“A lot of people in my building are installing locks, too.” He frowns. “They’ll find whoever’s behind this. Internment is only so big. There aren’t many places to hide.”
That’s what has me so afraid. I’ve always liked the smallness of Internment, always liked lying in bed at night and hearing the trains rush by, always on time. But now it’s starting to feel smaller, as though every day since Daphne Leander’s murder has crumbled the edges a bit more, and the city is closing in on me.
Even the seats in the theater feel smaller and closer together, the dim lights getting dimmer.
“Are you okay?” Pen says. “Your cheeks are bright red.”
Basil touches my forehead. “Do you feel sick?” His touch is supposed to comfort me, but all I want is to get away from him, to get away from this air that everyone else is breathing.
“I need to use the water room,” I say.
“I’ll go with you,” Pen says.
“No,” I say, too quickly. “No, you might miss the opening. I’ll be fast, I promise.”
I can see that she’s wary, but she doesn’t try to stop me as I shuffle down the aisle.
With all of the shows about to start, the lobby is empty aside from the ticket vendors, who pay no mind as I stumble toward the water rooms. But when I push the door open, I find that I’m not alone.
Though she’s not in uniform, I recognize the little girl from last night. She’s kneeling on the edge of the sink, tacking a piece of paper over the mirror. But she stops when she sees me, stumbles to her feet, and backs against the wall.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say.
There’s a piece of paper over each of the mirrors. A quick glance and I can see that they’re select passages from Daphne Leander’s essay. All of them are handwritten. Typewriters are a rare luxury afforded to those who write for a living; a past king once considered making them a household item, but decided against it. He said that if words could be easily printed and erased, we would lose our appreciation for what we wrote.
I’d like to ask her about the pages, but she runs past me and pushes her way through the door.
“Wait!” I run after her.
She’s quick, but so am I, and I catch up to her on the sidewalk outside the theater, where she has come to a stop. She doesn’t seem out of breath, and I’m trying to figure out why she stopped, but then I follow her gaze to the building at the end of the block, engulfed in flames.
She looks at me, and her eyes are full of so much pain that it astounds me. They’re the same as the murdered girl’s eyes, and yet different somehow.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she says.
That’s the jumper’s code, if Lex’s similar outlook is any indication.
A patrolman is running from the theater, shouting for us to get back inside. She doesn’t move, though, and I grab her arm and pull her along. She doesn’t resist, but she watches the flames over her shoulder. It was one of Internment’s oldest buildings, back when they were still made of wood as opposed to stone. Over the centuries it has been everything from a prison, back when those still existed, to a recycling plant. In my lifetime it has been only a flower shop. Alice has taken me there dozens of times.
It’s only a few paces back to the theater, but before we’ve reached the doors, the sky has changed. Ash is heavy on the air and it’s as though something has covered the sun. Even the patrolman has stopped to watch. Sirens begin as distant warnings, but soon they’re screaming as the emergency vehicles rush toward the flames.
The girl’s arm is still in my grip and she lets me bring her inside, but then she twists away, presses her hands to the glass doors and watches.
The lobby is crowded now, everyone rushing to windows, calling out the names of their friends. “Are you here with anyone?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be practicing my music.”
“Come on, then,” I say. “You can come with me. I’m going to find my friends and make sure they’re okay.”
“I don’t know you,” she says.
“Morgan Stockhour,” I say. “There, now you do.”
The room has gotten very loud around us. A woman screams.
The girl looks up at me, hesitating. Some pink glitter has clumped in her eyelashes.
“I’m Amy,” she says.
“Morgan!” Somewhere in the melee, Pen raises her gloved arm. She twists away from Thomas, fighting him and shouldering her way to me. She crashes into me, squeezing me so hard that my feet almost come away from the floor. “What’s happening? They stopped the play, and …”
She sees the smoke through the glass doors for the first time. Her mouth is open and breathless. She pales.
“The flower shop caught fire,” I say, though the words don’t do justice to what I just saw. I should be panicking like everyone around me. I should be frightened. But I feel the same as I did after watching the broadcast, like none of it is real.
“Your parents will be worried,” I tell Amy.
“They won’t notice I’m gone.” She seems like the type who can slip in and out of a place unnoticed, which is likely how she snuck into this theater without formal attire.
Basil wraps his arm around my waist from behind. Thomas does the same to Pen, and for once she seems grateful that he’s there to hold her. Amy stands between us, and we all watch the clouds and the sun get swallowed whole.
It feels like hours before the flames are extinguished. Patrolmen fill the lobby, escorting us from the building to the shuttle in droves. Pen lets Thomas hold on to her, and Basil hasn’t taken his arm from me since we were reunited. Amy walks a pace ahead of me, tugging at the ring on the chain around her neck.
“Where do you live?” Basil asks her as the five of us cram onto a shuttle bench meant to hold four.
“Section three,” she says.
“I’m in two,” he says. “But it’s a short walk back for me. I’ll see you home.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
“Yes, right, okay, we’re all old enough,” Pen snaps. “But in case you haven’t noticed, Internment has kind of gone into a complete state of lunacy.”
“I know that,” Amy says, and looks sharply out the window, where the smoke has turned the city into an old image.
“Are you frightened?” Thomas asks Pen.
She’s looking at her lap, but he tilts her chin and she meets his eyes.
“I won’t ever let anything happen to you, you know.”
She nods, leans her forehead against his.
For all their arguing, they have kissed. It first happened several months ago. He kept dropping hints and she decided to just be done with it. It wasn’t terrible, she told me. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible. I had a hard time believing it—she’s always evading him—but I’m starting to see that there’s a reason they were betrothed. There’s always a reason.
Basil grips my hand as the shuttle comes to a stop. “It’s going to be chaotic. Don’t let go of me even if people rush between us,” he says. With my free hand, I grab on to Pen and we rise to our feet.
An instant too late, I remember that Amy is behind me. In that instant, she dodges under Pen’s and my interlocked hands and disappears into the crowd.
“Amy!”
“Let her go,” Pen says. “Where did you find such a strange child, anyway?” She’s trying to act nonchalant but the fear is still in her eyes.
I’m scanning the crowd for Amy; with the patrolmen steering us all right onto the waiting train, there’s nowhere for her to go, and I still want to ask her about the essay.
But it’s taking all my efforts to hold on to Basil and Pen; I’ve never seen Internment in such a panic, and other worries start to invade my mind. My father is patrolling today; that means he must be out in this mess. And Alice will be out running errands; she frequents the flower shop, has a side job designing event bouquets.
And what started the fire to begin with?
Amy said it was only going to get worse. I see this panic all around me, while news of Daphne Leander’s murder is still fresh, and I cannot fathom what worse should look like.
By the time we make it to our seats on the train, Pen isn’t the only one with tears in her eyes. Other passengers have the same frightened expression.
Even Basil is looking worriedly at the city through the window. A patrolman is standing at the head of the car, instructing us not to check in on family and friends, to step off the train at our appropriate sections and go straight home. The train will stop for an extra two minutes on each platform to ensure everyone has a chance to exit the overcrowded cars in time.
“Something is happening,” Basil says, “isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it was only an accident,” Thomas says. “That building was so old that it has never been properly outfitted with electricity. Most of the rooms were lit by flame lanterns. One of them probably tipped over.”
“Do you think so?” Pen says.
“I’m almost certain.”
None of us believes it, but we don’t have the nerve to say so.
“Your mascara is running,” Pen says. “Here.” She rubs her gloved thumb under my eyelid.
“Thanks,” I say, though from the black smear on her glove I suspect she’s made it worse.
When the train stops in our section, Basil squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry I can’t walk you in,” he says.
“I’ll be fine; my building is right there,” I tell him, wishing desperately that I wasn’t about to leave him behind. “Stay safe.”
I don’t know what it is—the noise or the distant smell of the ashes or the fear—but I get the thought that I’d like to kiss him. I lean forward and press my lips against his forehead, pleasantly surprised by the softness and the warmth of his skin.
I don’t get a chance to see his reaction; Thomas is pulling Pen, and Pen is pulling me.
We can still smell the fire, though it happened several sections away and has since been extinguished. The blue of the sky is still up there, if a bit obscured, and I might have started to feel relief if only there weren’t a patrolman forcing me down the steps.
Thomas lives in the same section that Pen and I do, but his building is a block over, and at the fork in the pathway, he leans in for a kiss and Pen backs away. “Let’s not capitalize on a tragedy,” she says. “I’ll see you on Monday, provided the academy is still standing.”
He smirks, nods to us, and turns into the crowd.
She shakes her head. “Strange thing, him.”
“He’s just a little old-fashioned,” I say.
“And you!” she says. “Don’t think I didn’t see what you did as we were getting off the train. We’ll be talking about that some other time when we’re not being manhandled by patrolmen.”
“Move along, please,” the patrolman says from somewhere behind us. “Move along, toward your own buildings.”
It is wildly inappropriate that Internment is crumbling around me, but all I can think about is the warmth of Basil’s skin lingering on my lips.
Alice is frantic. When I open the door to my apartment, she’s got her arms around me before I know what’s happening. “She’s home,” she calls to Lex, who’s got an unfinished quilt draped across his lap and a spool of thread in one hand and a needle in the other. He does his best work when he’s anxious. But he drops all of these things and starts making his way to me.
Alice is holding me by the shoulders now. “Are those bruises?”
“She’s hurt?” Lex says. He rarely seems to regard me at all, much less show concern. Normally I’d appreciate it, but right now it only adds to this feeling that Internment has gone mad.
“It’s cosmetics,” I say, reaching my arm out to Lex so he can find me. “I’m perfectly fine. Where are Mom and Dad?”
“Dad has been patrolling all day,” Lex says. “Mom was at the market. We came down so someone would be here when you got back.”
“They’re making everyone go home,” I say. “The trains are running slowly. The cars are all overcrowded, so they want to make sure everyone has time to get off at their stops.” I thought I was doing better, but there’s a stone in my stomach at the thought of my mother and father out in all that chaos. And I can still smell the burnt air, though maybe it’s just clinging to my dress.
Alice sets me in a kitchen chair, moves to the sink, and returns seconds later to wipe the cosmetics and sweat from my face with a wet cloth. My tears are only from the abrasiveness of the ashes, but they still earn her sympathetic touch.
Lex, sitting across the table, still has his hand over mine. He keeps pressing his palm into my knuckles like I might vaporize into nothing if he doesn’t hold tight. Sometimes he hides in the darkness of his blindness, and other times he fears it will swallow everyone up and leave him alone.
Alice dabs the cold cloth to my forehead and then drapes it across the back of my neck, still fretting that I’m too red.
“Thomas thinks it may not be cause to panic,” I say, trying to reassure her. “He said the flower shop still uses flame lanterns and it was probably an accident.”
“There will be a broadcast tonight for sure,” she says. “Thank goodness you’re safe. We heard the fire was near the theater and we’ve just been all over the place about it.”
Lex is squeezing my hand. I close my eyes, trying to pretend that I’m blind, trying to understand what it means to be in this world without seeing any of it, not knowing where anyone is, if they’re safe.
I can see the red of my eyelids, but it’s still horrifying. It isn’t simply that I was missing in that chaos—without the sound of my voice, to him I’d disappeared into that darkness entirely. I could have fallen over the edge of Internment.
“I’m sorry I made you worry,” I say. I lean over the table so that I’m closer. “I’ll never disappear. I promise that every time I leave, I’ll always come back.”
“Not coming back wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he says. “For any of us.”
“None of that talk,” Alice says. “You’re going to scare her.”
“She should be scared,” Lex says.
“I’m not,” I say, but I am.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Alice says. “We’ll know more when the broadcast goes up. And if there is no broadcast, then it can’t be too serious, now, can it?” She’s handing me a cup of tea, ushering Lex and me to the couch.
Soon, I feel myself falling asleep under the unfinished blanket, as Lex works skillfully at its edges. Some distant part of me understands that there’s cause to worry and that I’m frightened, but it’s safe and warm inside, and Alice is moving about the kitchen, cooking up the smell of something sugary sweet. She asks me a question, something about my hair, and though I don’t hear her I nod assent, and in the next moment she’s peeling off my velvet gloves and gently unclasping the wooden barrettes in my hair.
When I was small, my brother would let me follow him on the train for entire afternoons without a destination. We would ride until we were hungry or had to find a water room. The train would always be crowded and I’d stay so close to him that I could hear his murmurs as he wrote on scraps of paper. He never spoke to me, always writing or looking at the city passing by. But it didn’t matter. I knew the honor of having been invited. We were two parts of the same set then, our skin as pale as the sunlight that washed over us through the glass, both of us silent and blue-eyed in the bustling crowd. On these trips I began to feel we were the same. I would catch our reflection in the window and fancy myself a perfect miniature version of him.
The train that circles Internment couldn’t carry him far enough, though. My brother, the peripatetic, the sage, was too restless to stay in one place, but one place is all we’re given. The only one who could quell this restlessness was Alice, always Alice, who swears she was born already in love with him. When she wasn’t allowed to have their child, something fell apart and they lost themselves for a while.
The train speeds past the apartment, rattling the walls, and I dream that I’m riding it in my theater dress. I’m on my way to meet my betrothed waiting for me on the platform. I dream about the other passengers, and I wonder who’s waiting for them. I wonder what keeps the conductor conscious as he navigates through the night. I dream about the murderer, out there somewhere, and wonder where he is when the train passes him by.
6 (#ulink_94d3b70c-896c-56ef-9f12-b3ed32f44d62)
Break the sky. Look up. Look down. Beyond what is familiar. If you’ve never been afraid, you haven’t had your moment of bravery just yet.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
IN THE MORNING, I AWAKEN WITH STIFF muscles and the notion that something is wrong. But it isn’t until I realize I’m still on the couch, Lex’s unfinished quilt replaced with the heavy blanket from my own bed, that I remember.
“Good morning, love,” my mother says, setting down her sampler when she sees that my eyes are open. “Would you like breakfast? I brought home some fresh strawberries.”
That’s right. She was at the market when the fire happened. “Are you okay?” I sit upright. “When did you get home?”
“There was a broadcast,” she says by way of an answer. “Your father wanted me to wake you for it, but you seemed so exhausted.” She’s sitting on the edge of the couch now, smoothing back my hair. When Lex grew too old for her affections, she lavished me with double, and to make up for his absence I’ve always welcomed them.
“What did the broadcast say?” I ask.
“The king’s investigators are looking into the cause of the fire. He just wanted to reassure us that everything will be fine.” While my father is trying to introduce me to a more honest view of the city, my mother is still trying to coddle me.
“Investigators?” I say. “I didn’t know the king had investigators.”
“He does. For incidents like this.”
I don’t like that word, “incident.” Three years ago I was pulled from my classroom and told my brother had had an incident, and I was brought to see him at the hospital, where he lay unconscious and within a sliver of his life.
I think of what Basil said yesterday on the train, and the worry clouds into panic. “Something is happening, isn’t it?”
My father has never been one to lie to me, but the same can’t be said of my mother. Now, though, perhaps because I’m old enough to wear my betrothal band, she says, “It’s possible, love. We’re all waiting to find out what’s happened. They’ve stopped the train for today; nobody is supposed to leave home. The shops will stay open late tomorrow so people can do the rest of their weekend shopping after work and class.”
I’ve always wanted for her to be honest with me. When I was little, I’d try on her dresses and fantasize about the day when they would no longer pool around me. The highest honor was when she’d sit me on her overstuffed red stool and brush colors onto my eyelids and lips and cheeks. I wanted very much for us to be equals.
Now, suddenly all I want is to put my head in her lap, for her to tell me it’s going to be okay and this feeling that I’m trapped in my own city will pass. I want the mother I had before Lex became a jumper. I want to stop pretending that I don’t need her, that I’m not a child.
Instead, I ask for strawberries. We eat breakfast and make meaningless talk about nothing important—homework and what should be for dinner.
“Your father won’t be eating at home tonight,” she says. “I do hope he doesn’t work himself too hard. He was barely able to take a nap before he was called in this morning.” She’s staring past me, through the window that overlooks the city.
She has been a bit distant these days, my mother. There has always been a little worry in her eyes. I follow her gaze to the city and I can still taste the smoke on my tongue no matter how many strawberries I’ve eaten. A girl with glittery eyes was found on the train tracks with a slashed throat. Saying nothing, I stand, go to my mother’s chair, and put my arms around her.
“What was with that strange little girl in the theater?” Pen asks. As she walks, she holds her hand over her head, watching the way her betrothal band fills with light where there will one day be blood.
“I think she’s Daphne Leander’s sister,” I say. “I caught her putting up passages of Daphne’s essay.”
“Really?” She stops walking and swirls to face me, eyes wild with excitement.
Basil looks sharply at me.
“Keep it moving, ladies, please,” the patrolman behind us says.
“Being herded into the academy like animals to slaughter,” Thomas complains, appearing from nowhere, as is his skill. “I feel like we’re in section seven with all the beasts.”
Pen makes some comment about his smell resembling that of a cow, and he artfully retorts with a compliment about her redolence-dabbed wrists. Basil leans close to me and says, “You didn’t tell me about Amy being the murdered girl’s sister.”
“There was no time,” I say. “And I’m not certain. Not yet.”
“Maybe it’s best not to get involved,” Basil says. “Copies of Daphne’s essay were in the men’s water room, too. I read it, and it’s pretty sacrilegious. With all that’s going on, that’s bound to draw unwanted attention. People are already nervous.”
He’s right, of course. But I can’t stop thinking about it.
In the lobby, Basil takes my hand and squeezes it before we’re to part ways. I think there’s something more he’d like to say, but a patrolman interrupts us. He’s standing on one of the benches and yelling for all of us to stop chattering and turn our focus to him. His voice echoes off the marble walls.
“Your classes will resume as planned in a moment,” he says. “I was asked to inform all of you that throughout the day, students will be taken individually from their courses and interviewed by a specialist employed by the king. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
I wonder if there are others who see my father the way I see this patrolman—intimidating and cold. I wonder if there’s anyone who sees this patrolman the way I see my father. Whenever there’s something I don’t like about a stranger, I try to imagine that someone out there loves them, and it puts them in a different light. Most of the time, anyway. Not now. All I can feel right now is anxiety.
The patrolman stops talking, but he has successfully extinguished our chatter. There’s not so much as a murmur as we shuffle to our classrooms. All the lessons pick up where they left off in the textbooks, but the instructors seem distracted by the absence of each student who’s called. Even our morning instructor lacks his verve as he discusses the history of section fifteen’s abundance of minerals and how they are to thank for our towering apartments.
A student returns and there’s a synchronized shuffle as we all turn in our chairs to face him. The instructor, after a pause, says, “Well?”
“They want Margaret Atmus in the headmaster’s office, sir,” he says.
Pen gives me a look that is part reassurance, part worry. She takes her time stacking her notes, tucking them into the cover of her textbook, and filing the book away in her satchel before she stands.
She’s gone for the rest of the period.
At lunch, the cafeteria is subdued. Basil rubs my arm and tells me I should try to eat.
“Pen’s still gone,” I say, twisting my fork. “Could they still be speaking to her?”
“They spoke to me this morning,” Thomas says. “It’s nothing horribly elaborate. They just want to make sure we haven’t gone mad. You haven’t gone mad, have you?”
The sharpness in his eyes frightens me. He realizes this and he softens. “It’s not anything to be concerned about,” he says.
Somehow, this doesn’t feel true. The king is looking for something by sending his specialists out here.
I don’t see Pen again until our last class of the day, which is more of Instructor Newlan’s passion for our little world. It’s torturous not being able to ask her about where she’s been, but she seems intact. She’s taking notes, at least.
Instructor Newlan is talking about section nine’s cow pastures. Or maybe it’s section seven. I can’t concentrate, though I try. I’ve never noticed how wedged together we are, each section like a thin slice of a pie in the window of the bakery. Below us, is the ground just a larger version of what we have up here? Is there a bigger train that goes in a bigger circle? Do the people on the ground also fear stepping over their edge? What if there’s a bigger ground below them? What if everything is floating in the sky?
Maybe I am going mad. Maybe I’m turning into my brother, so hypnotized by the edge that I can’t stop myself from scaling the fence, so frenzied by the idea of the ground that I forget where I belong.
Another student returns from the headmaster’s office, and this time nobody else raises their head to listen for their name. Everyone in this room but me has already been called.
“Hello, Morgan,” the specialist says. She’s tall and wiry and dressed all in gray. “My name is Ms. Harlan. May I call you Morgan?”
Ms., not Mrs. For a woman to be unmarried at her age, it can mean only that her betrothed is no longer living.
“Yes,” I say, mindful of sitting very straight. I fold my hands in my lap, which is something my mother taught me when I was a fidgety child. I’ve always fidgeted too much. I’ve always thought too much. I’m very like my brother that way.
“As you know, we’ve had a couple of tragedies. Did you know Miss Leander?”
“No,” I say. “But I was sorry to hear about what happened.”
I’ve never been in this room. I’ve seen the door in the headmaster’s office and always assumed it was a closet. It’s not much bigger than one; there are only two chairs to fill the space, and the persistent clicking of the specialist’s pen, which ceases only long enough for her to scrawl the odd note.
“It was an especially violent crime,” the specialist says. “It must have scared you to know something like this could happen in your lifetime.”
“Yes,” I say, grossly understating it.
“It must make you feel that Internment is unsafe,” she says.
“Internment is my home,” I say. “I’ve always felt safe here.”
She smiles, but there’s something unsettling about it. She leans forward, resting her arms on her crossed knees. “Morgan, I’d much like to be honest with you. You seem like a bright young lady. May I be honest?”
Uncertainly, I nod.
“I’ve read your academy file, and it shows that three years ago you suffered a pretty traumatic incident.”
My blood goes cold. I don’t like where this is heading. “I didn’t,” I say. “It was my older brother.”
“But surely that was traumatic for you also,” the specialist says. “To have someone close to you fall victim to the edge’s allure.”
“He couldn’t help it,” I say, repeating what I’ve been taught, what every student is taught in their first year of academy and reminded of every year after that. “We have the free will to stay on this side of the train tracks. If we cross over to the other side, we get too close to the edge, and it mystifies us. We see how infinite the sky is and we lose our senses. Even the people we love most disappear from our thoughts in that moment.” I am quoting a textbook exactly.
The specialist takes notes. I clench my interlocked fingers in an effort to keep still.
“What about your parents?” she asks.
“My parents?”
“Your father is a patrolman—please congratulate him for me, that’s quite an honor—and your mother works in a recycling plant in section fourteen. Has either of them ever discussed the edge with you?”
I think of my father waking me for the broadcast, the darkness of my room doing little to conceal the sadness in his eyes when he told me that life could be awful sometimes. “Only to warn me to stay away,” I say.
“Would you say they’re protective of you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And your brother, Alexander, does he talk about his experience with the edge of Internment?”
I’m starting to feel ill. This conversation has moved far from Daphne Leander. Were the others questioned so personally?
And then I make the connection. Most of the others don’t know someone who tried to jump over the edge. Daphne Leander knew someone, though. And now she’s dead.
“He doesn’t talk to me about it,” I say. “He goes to his support group every week. What happens behind the closed door is confidential.”
More notes.
“Morgan, I know that these personal questions are probably uncomfortable for you to answer,” the specialist says. “Right now, the king has asked me to speak with you and your classmates only to ensure your safety. Several years ago, we had a murder. Your parents probably told you about that. It spurred a lot of talk about Internment being unsafe, and many people became, as you put it, mystified by the edge. We had a few very close calls. I found myself standing on the platform contemplating the other side.”
I can see the platform under my feet, the black rails and the gray pebbles that fill the space between the wooden planks. The fence far on the other side, bold and stoic against the meandering clouds.
I look at the king’s specialist and I do not believe her when she says she’s contemplated the other side. I believe that she is testing me.
“If you feel tempted, please come and speak to me at any time,” she says. She’s handing me a small card, gray like her uniform, with the address for a section three apartment complex.
“Thank you,” I say, tucking the card into my skirt pocket.
“You’re free to return to your class now,” she tells me. “You were my last student of the day.”
I take great care not to stand in a hurry. Just as I’m turning the doorknob, she says, “Morgan?”
I turn.
“Have you had thoughts of going over the edge yourself? Even for a fleeting moment?”
“No,” I say. My palms are starting to sweat, which happens when I lie.
On the train home, Pen stares into the loose-leaf pages of her notes. Thomas tries to talk to her and she shushes him repeatedly, swatting him when he tries to read over her shoulder.
“How’d it go with the specialist?” Basil asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “What sorts of questions did she ask you?”
“She asked about my parents, mostly. Their trades, and if they told me about the murder several years ago.” He tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Then she asked about my studies.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Me too,” I say, but I think he catches my hesitation. “My father said that everyone doesn’t have to come right home after class and work anymore,” I say. “You can come over for dinner if you want. My mother always cooks too much food during the festival month.” There are things I’d like to tell him, if not for the patrolman pacing the aisle, making sure we’re safe and that our feet and our minds lie firmly on Internment’s floating floor.
“I’d love to,” he says. “I don’t have to be home to watch Leland. My mother is taking him to get fitted for a new uniform.”
“Don’t tell me he managed to lose an entire uniform,” I say. Basil’s brother is famous for losing things. It’s a wonder he still has his betrothal band on a chain around his neck.
“He didn’t lose it, exactly. He’s pretty sure it’s at the bottom of the lake. Part of it, anyway.”
Even Pen looks up from her notes at that.
“He was trying to use the pant legs as a net to catch fish.” Basil sighs. “These are the sorts of things that happen when I take my eyes off him for five minutes.”
I laugh. “Poor Basil,” I say. “The great fun in being a younger sibling is getting to torture the older.”
“You were an uncorrupted compared to Leland,” Basil says.
“What about the time we were seven and we tried to bake a cake?” I say.
“I don’t recall any baking,” Basil says. “I recall cracked eggs on the floor and a sack of flour that was too heavy for you to carry.”
“That mess happened on Lex’s watch,” I remind him. “He’s the one who had to clean it up.”
Now Basil is chuckling with his lips pressed together. He’s looking at me.
“What?” I say.
“I’m just remembering all the flour in your hair.”
“It got up my nose. I couldn’t stop sneezing.”
We’re both trying to quiet our laughter so as not to disrupt the solemn mood of the train.
“Is this what passes for romance between you two?” Pen says.
“Yes,” I say. “And we like it this way, don’t we, Basil?”
“Quite,” he says.
The evening sun catches every bolt and scrap of metal on the train, and for an instant we are suspended in an atmosphere of stars.
My mother is of course thrilled that my betrothed is joining us for dinner. Not only does she find him charming, but she is also eager for a sense of normalcy. Though the ash from the fire at the flower shop has long since disappeared, a grayness still blankets the city. I’ve never known anything like it, but something about my mother’s despondency of late tells me she knows it well.
My father’s absence at the table doesn’t help.
I force myself to eat everything on the plate, despite the lingering dread in my stomach after my interview with the specialist, which I leave out of the dinner conversation.
After we’ve cleared our plates, I say I’m feeling tired and I’m going to lie down, and I pull Basil toward my bedroom.
“Did you take your pill this morning, love?” my mother asks.
I feel my cheeks burning. “Yes,” I say, and I can’t meet Basil’s eyes. I’ve been taking my sterility pill since about the time my betrothal band started to fit on my finger. I know my mother doesn’t want for me to repeat Alice’s mistake, and I’ve heard it isn’t uncommon for girls my age to be intimate with their betrotheds, but the idea still embarrasses me.
When I close my bedroom door, I sag against it with a deflating sigh.
Basil sits on the edge of my bed and holds his arms out to me. “Come here,” he says, and when I take his hands, he pulls me down to sit beside him.
“Today was awful,” I confess, making a little game of rolling and unrolling his red necktie. “In just a few days, I feel as though everything has changed.”
“I keep thinking it’ll all go back to normal,” he says. “Each morning I wake up and tell myself there won’t be a patrolman at the door when I leave. They’ll have found the murderer. The fire will turn out to have been an accident.”
We sit without speaking for a while, me staring at my lap, as the sunset makes everything orange.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” Basil says.
He knows something is wrong, then. He’s an excellent reader of people, and I am terrible at hiding things. Another reason we’re probably a good match—he keeps me from getting lost in myself. And I always relent, telling him the little things, like my fear of giving verbal presentations before the class, or that I don’t like his mother’s walnut cookies—which she gives me every year for my festival of stars gift—as much as I let on. But how can I tell him that I fear I’m becoming like my brother, or that I have perhaps always been like him? That for all of last night I dreamed of Internment’s edge, Amy scattering pages into the clouds, and a fire raging behind her so that she had no choice but to jump?
I think of the specialist’s card in my pocket.
“Basil?” I say. “You want me to be safe, don’t you?”
He puts his hand over mine, and his tie unrolls from my fingers. “Of course,” he says.
I can’t tell him, then. If he knew that I was this curious about the edge, he would drag me to the king’s home atop the clock tower himself. He would ask to have me declared irrational, and I’d be fitted with an anklet made of blinking lights and never be allowed to step outside again. Just like the woman who used to live downstairs. I used to pass by her door and see her sometimes, standing just inside her threshold after her husband left for work. I’d hear the whimpers of pain when she tried to follow after him.
“What is it?” he asks.
I’m trying to think of a way to answer without lying, but then I’m saved by a knock on my door. “A patrolman was just here.” My mother’s voice. “There’s going to be a broadcast. They’ve found that poor girl’s murderer.”
7 (#ulink_5250be27-e85c-5f21-b9b3-dad90c35cf6a)
Even gods must have their secrets.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
THE BUILDING IS SHAKING, FOR ALL THE footsteps fighting to get down the stairwells at once. Our fascination is as great as our horror, as though knowing the name of the person responsible will explain what has been done. As though it will bring us peace.
I hold Basil’s hand, and when we make it downstairs, the broadcast room contains what I’m certain is everyone in the apartment complex.
Even my brother, who never comes down for these. I spot him standing along the wall with Alice. He’s most comfortable when he can be near a wall or sitting on the floor; he’s told me it’s the only way he can keep from feeling like he’s falling through the sky. In the first months, when he was still adjusting to the permanent darkness, he used to crawl.
Alice waves us over.
“They found the murderer?” Basil asks.
“That’s what we’ve heard, too,” Alice says.
Lex mumbles something I don’t catch. I touch his arm, to let him know where I am and to console him before he starts to get angry. He has never had a kind thing to say about the king, or his announcements. Especially since Alice’s ordeal. He could get us all arrested for treason.
I stand on tiptoes to reach his ear. “It’ll be okay,” I say.
“It’s already plenty not-okay, Little Sister,” he says.
Alice shushes him. A patrolman is shaking the screen, trying to get it to work. There are a few seconds of static, and then the king appears, wobbly and distorted on the screen.
Everyone in the room has gone quiet. When the roar of the static reduces itself to a faint crackling, we can finally hear what the king is saying. “—are appalled by our findings early this evening that after a thorough investigation, based on extensive evidence, there is reason to believe that Judas Hensley is responsible for the murder of Daphne Leander, his betrothed.”
My blood runs cold. Basil squeezes my hand.
“No,” Lex murmurs beside me.
Rather than an academy image, there’s live footage of the accused, his arms shackled behind him, his head down, and his face half-covered by blond hair as he’s lead up the steps of the courthouse by several patrolmen. I’m uncertain what awaits him on the other side of those heavy wooden doors. Many generations before I was born, crimes were a routine part of Internment. Jealousy and greed bred most of them, and it was determined that arranged betrothals and assigned housing would diminish many such crimes. Things will never be perfect, of course. With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgment. There are still disputes and accidents that are resolved in the courthouse. If it’s an involved case, people are selected to serve as part of a jury.
But a murderer? What sort of trial would have to take place? Where would they keep him in the meantime?
Alice has her finger to Lex’s lips now, because he just said something I didn’t hear. What could this possibly mean to him? In the last moment before the image switches back to the king, I see Judas Hensley in the courthouse lights. I’ve seen him at the academy; we’ve had classes together, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.
“Do you know him?” I ask Basil.
“I’ve seen him,” he says.
The king is still speaking, telling us there will be more updates to follow, but I’m distracted by Alice, who is pulling Lex out of the room and trying not to make a scene. I don’t understand why he’s so upset by this. What does he have to do with a murdered girl’s betrothed from the academy?
The broadcast ends, and the room reaches a crescendo of chatter. Lots of speculation, but no answers among the lot of us.
All night, my dreams are pervaded by my brother’s furious pacing overhead. I fear the floorboards will splinter and break.
The cafeteria is filled with morbid, fascinated gossip. Judas is the name of a hero in the history book. The right-hand man to the king, he penned the first page of The History of Internment. The sky god favored him, and when Judas died, Internment experienced its one and only water storm. To think a boy named after Judas could commit such a crime.
Pen pulls excitedly on my sleeve. “It’s all like a tawdry romantic horror,” she says. “Can you even believe it?”
It’s all anyone in the cafeteria is talking about. I know because I overhear pieces of conversation—“Did anyone know them?”—“always a little strange”—“pretty girl”—“stuck up, if you ask me.” But I don’t find myself among them. I’m not interested in the gossip. I’m more worried about the aftermath.
“Wonder when the trial will begin,” Basil says.
“They’ll have a difficult time finding a jury, I imagine,” Thomas says. “It’s supposed to be unbiased. Who can be unbiased about murder? It’s clearly wrong.”
“Unless he didn’t do it,” I blurt, surprising myself. Everyone’s eyes are on me. “I mean—that’s what the trial is for, isn’t it? To determine innocence?”
Pen shrugs. “Guess we’ll see. Is there a math exam this week?”
And the topic of Daphne Leander and Judas Hensley dies away.
“Lex?”
“What is it?” he says after a pause. I knocked, but he won’t open his office door to me. Lost in his brilliance, I suppose. He was always like that—going off by himself. But his blindness has intensified it.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I say.
“Talk about what?”
“Things,” I say. “That’s what sisters do. You know, because you’re my brother and I care about you?”
“You bug me,” he says. “That’s what sisters do. How do you know I’m not trying to nap?”
“You aren’t,” I press. “The ceiling is practically crumbling over my bedroom.”
He ignores me. Alice, standing at the end of the hall, frowns in apology. Lex has even begun to elude her. I worry for him, alone in all that blackness.
I sit on the floor and lean against the door.
“Who was that little girl at your jumper group?” I ask. “She had a bow in her hair.” Too late, I realize a physical description won’t do my brother any good. “She can’t be more than eleven or twelve.”
No answer.
“The day of the fire, I caught her putting up papers in the ladies’ room at the theater. I think she put them up at the academy, too. They were copies of a paper Daphne Leander wrote about the gods being a myth.”
The door opens, and I tense to keep from falling backward. Lex reaches out for me.
“Where are you?” he says.
“Down here.” I hold up my hand and he takes it, feeling his way until he’s on his knees across from me.
“That girl is none of your concern,” he says.
“Is she really a jumper?” I say.
“Yes. And you have no business talking to her.”
“She’s Daphne Leander’s sister,” I say. “Isn’t she?”
“I’m not kidding, Morgan. You stay away from her.”
He’s in a miserable mood, and there’s no sense pressing him for more, but all he’s done is pique my interest.
“Since you’re out, come on and eat something,” Alice says. “I made berry cobbler.”
Later, when Lex has retreated to his office once again, Alice is washing the dishes and I’m drying them.
“He is right,” she says. “It’s best if you stay away from that girl.”
“Who is she?” I say. Alice takes her husband’s side about most things, but she’s always had a soft spot for me.
“You were right,” she says, handing me a dripping plate. “She’s Daphne’s sister. She may be a little girl, but she’s got a lot of demons. It’s best if you let her alone.”
I’ve heard that saying used to describe my brother. “A lot of demons.” That’s what my father said while we all kept vigil at Lex’s bedside in the hospital. I didn’t know what he meant. But now I’m thinking of Amy Leander, and what it must have been like to learn her sister wouldn’t be coming home. It was the most awful thing I could imagine, watching my brother fight to breathe in that sterile room. But at least he was breathing.
Alice starts talking about frivolous things—greenhouse vegetation and silver earrings in jewelry shop windows that she thinks will make my eyes sparkle—and I play along, but she isn’t fooling me. There’s something happening to Internment. That’s as certain as Daphne Leander is dead.
8 (#ulink_1e77c21d-d559-57c8-8e62-d9693b1c745b)
Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
BASIL THROWS A STONE INTO THE LAKE, trying to make it skip.
“Like this,” I say, pitching the stone into the water at an angle. It hits the surface and promptly sinks. Basil tries not to laugh.
“Well, I was good at it when I was little, anyway.” I fall back into the grass and watch a cloud that’s sloping over the atmosphere.
“Our engineers spend so much time studying the ground,” Basil says, settling beside me. “Ever think about what’s above us?”
“The tributary,” I say. “The god of the sky.”
“But those are intangible,” Basil says. “Spiritual. What I mean is, what if there’s more land up there? What if there are people living on the stars?”
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Lauren DeStefano
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Историческое фэнтези
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy: On the floating city of Internment, you can be anything you dream. Unless you approach the edge.Morgan Stockhour knows getting too close to the edge of Internment, the floating city in the clouds where she lives, can lead to madness. Even though her older brother, Lex, was a Jumper, Morgan vows never to end up like him. If she ever wonders about the ground, and why it is forbidden, she takes solace in her best friend, Pen, and in Basil, the boy she’s engaged to marry.Then a murder, the first in a generation, rocks the city. With whispers swirling and fear on the wind, Morgan can no longer stop herself from investigating, especially once she meets Judas. Betrothed to the victim, he is the boy being blamed for the murder, but Morgan is convinced of his innocence. Secrets lay at the heart of Internment, but nothing can prepare Morgan for what she will find – or whom she will lose.