“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.”
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.
