Perfect Ruin (3 page)

“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.

T
HE 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
un
attractive.”

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.”