bunch of buildings.”
“Maybe you should color the clouds,” I say.
“It’s been done a thousand times,” she says. “Really, Morgan. I’m disappointed in you.”
“Forgive me,” I say. “We aren’t all creative geniuses.”
We make it to the doorway before she runs back to her easel and takes the slenderest of the coloring pens. She wipes the bristles on a scrap of cloth and places it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll work on it at home,” she says.
I don’t know very much about art—that has always been Pen’s area—but I do believe that it is honesty at its core. I look at the smear of color on the recycling tube, and I worry that there’s something Pen’s trying to hide.
I can’t sit in the apartment any longer. I can’t listen to my mother’s rasped breathing as she sleeps in Lex’s blanket, and Alice’s shoes upstairs. She has a pair of wooden shoes that Lex favors. They’re loud and he always knows where she is when she’s wearing them. Normally the sound doesn’t bother me, but tonight I can’t seem to concentrate on anything but those steps. Pacing this way and that.
Alice moves across the common room.
I put on a sweater and leave the apartment.
A patrolman holds open the door for me, tells me to be safe. I hear that every day. Be safe. I wonder what the patrolmen are doing to catch the supposed murderer. I wonder what they’re doing to catch the person who really killed Daphne Leander. There was some talk at the academy about a memorial service. It was held on Monday for family only. No friends were invited, if she had any friends—from what I’ve heard, she and Judas kept to themselves, a trait that gave them a reputation for being snobs. But I’ve learned not to take stock in what people say. I can only imagine what’s been said about me since Lex’s incident, and about Pen, who distances herself from all the high-ranking cliques at the cost of being my friend. “Who needs them?” she says.
The park is empty when I arrive. Little winged insects keep their chorus in the brush. I tread quietly, listening for patrolmen. Listening for Judas.
Only when I reach the cavern do I dare turn on my pocket light, angling it inside. But I find no messages written on the wall with a pebble. And I don’t find Judas.
Instead, curled under a red academy sweater, I find Amy Leander fast asleep.
12
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
THERE’S A STRIP OF FABRIC TIED AROUND her wrist, the traditional mark of grieving after a loved one has been dusted to ashes and scattered. The academy sweater she uses as a blanket must have belonged to her sister.
Under the sharp blue-white glow of my pocket light, her face is young and troubled, her eyebrows pushed together. I’ve been watching her for only a few seconds before something moves behind me and an arm hooks around my throat.
Even before he has spoken, my heart is pounding up my spine, and I know the soft, measured breaths against my ear belong to Judas Hensley.
“Back away,” he whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”
I suppose he means to be threatening, this boy who answered
“Are you having fun?” he hisses.
I focus on all the sharp angles of his face, neck, and collarbone. I can’t help it; I’ve not seen anyone like him, the way he seems sculpted from shards of broken glass. “Bringing your academy friends here to play games and write messages?”
“Why did you lie?” I say. He stares in response, and I begin to worry that my instinct is wrong, that he did kill his betrothed and that he’ll kill me, right here with no witnesses. Maybe Amy wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was dead, or dying. I try to remember if I saw her breathe.
But my instincts about people have never been wrong. Not even about Lex. The morning of his incident, he came into the room after my mother had finished coloring my cheeks with pink powder. I wasn’t quite the right age for cosmetics to be acceptable, and I was holding a wet cloth, preparing to wipe it away before academy. We looked at each other in the mirror, Lex and I, and I had a terrible feeling like he was going to do something desperate. But he only asked our mother if she’d fixed the tear in Alice’s pink dress.
“Lie?” Judas says at last. I try not to show my relief.
“My friend asked you if you were a murderer. You said yes.”
“Not that it is any of your concern, but I didn’t write that,” he says. “I have a spy handling my correspondence.”
I glance at the cavern, where Amy is asleep. “A little spy?” I ask. “Blond hair, blue eyes?”
Amy’s presence, perplexing as it is, adds to my relief. She wouldn’t be here if she thought Judas had murdered her sister.
“You should leave,” Judas says. “Now.”
And here comes the moment of decision, because I believe him. I believe that something permanent will change if I don’t turn for those trees and return to my apartment and try to study to the sound of Alice’s shoes. I don’t know what will happen if I stay, and I don’t know why I do.
When I don’t take a step, he growls. Muscles move in his throat.
His eyes look better, not so swollen. His hands are no longer bleeding.
“Why isn’t anyone looking for you?” I say. “How did you escape?”
He folds his arms, laughs in tandem with a breeze that comes through the leaves, the woods shaking around us like paper bells.
“Because no one can be smarter than a patrolman?” he says. “No one can be smarter than your father?”
This is meant to offend me, but it doesn’t. I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I’ve heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex’s bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men—only men.
“They are looking for me,” he says. “The king probably doesn’t want to announce that he was foolish enough to let a prisoner escape. Wouldn’t want people to think he’s lost control.”
“The woods is the first place they’d look,” I say.
“There’s plenty of evidence elsewhere,” he says. “And as I said, I have a spy.”
“A little girl,” I challenge. “And her parents must be looking for her.”
His next laugh comes sadder. Something stirs in the cavern and we turn our heads.
Amy Leander is small as she crawls out into the starlight and shadows. She’s wearing the red sweater now, and it falls halfway to her knees as she stands, her eyes trained warily on me.
“Your father’s a patrolman,” she says, the words something between an accusation and an observation. “Is that why you keep following me?”
“No,” I say. “Is that why you ran away from me? You thought I’d turn you in for hanging up those essays?”
She stares at me a moment longer, then looks to Judas, who tells her, “Those were a bad idea. I told you
