“I want to stay here,” I say. “I don’t want to move.”
“Why?” His fingers are under my hair, the warmth against my neck raising the skin into little bumps.
Why? Because one day I’ll be declared irrational. There’s something wrong with my brother and me. The king’s official knows it; that’s why she took such an interest in me. I wonder if it was always this way, if there’s something in our blood. When I was younger, all of my instructors had high expectations for me, being the little sister of one of their top students. But then he jumped, and as Lex became something different to everyone around him, so did I. There is no more high standard, only the worry that I’ll fail too.
“I’m not—” My voice falters, or maybe I just lose my courage.
They’ll fill me with elixirs until I’m somnambulating through the rest of my life, to numb this madness inside me that will surely progress.
“I’m not right. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”
“You’re shaking,” he says, easing us down into the grass until we’re facing each other. His hands move down the length of my arms and come to hold my wrists. “What have you been lying about?”
“Lex,” is the first word I think to say. “I’m turning into Lex.”
“You aren’t making any sense,” he says. “What do you mean you’re turning into him?”
“I wasn’t with a tutor at lunch,” I say. “I was with the king’s specialist. That lady who spoke with all of us after the broadcast about the murder. I don’t know what she wanted with me. I don’t know how she
I wait for Basil to pull me to my feet and drag me straight to the clock tower’s affairs office to report all of this, but he only says, “Even if you were able to look over the edge without the winds hurting you, you wouldn’t see much. It would just be patches of land. It wouldn’t be any different from what’s captured through the scope.”
“What if I’m lured the way Lex was lured?” I say. “What if one day I can’t stop myself and I walk right over the edge?”
“You didn’t tell any of this to the specialist?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Did your parents ask her to meet with you?”
“They don’t know,” I say. “The headmaster thought it best that I don’t bother them.”
He seems angry, which reignites my nervousness. It takes so much to upset him.
“Don’t tell this specialist any of what you told me,” he says.
“I couldn’t,” I say. “I barely had the courage to tell you. I thought you’d say it was wrong.”
He leans toward me until our foreheads are touching, our eyes downcast. “You aren’t wrong, Morgan.” Waves of coldness and heat bloom in my stomach. “Not at all.”
I don’t know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I’ve lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we’ll be ashes—we’ll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we’ll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there’s quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest.
He knows that I’m not like the other girls—the normal ones—that a part of me is slipping off this floating city, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.
Maybe we’re both beyond saving.
13
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
THE FIRST KISS LINGERS. IT TRAVELS AWAY from the lips once it’s over, and it breaks apart and settles in strange places. The stomach. Fingertips. Knees. It follows us along the cobbles and onto the train.
The train’s rumbling rattles my ribs. It’s late enough now that the train is crowded with workers on their evening commute, and the noise is like bugs that have gotten trapped inside the car, vaguely thrumming. I feel as though a layer of my skin has been peeled away, leaving me chilled, my senses heightened.
Basil keeps me fastened to his side, as though to protect me from the crowd. He kisses my temple, and I close my eyes, reveling in the sensation of it. Now that we’ve had that first kiss, the tension is severed. He can kiss me a thousand times. Ten thousand.
Then, too soon, the train rolls to a stop and his arm around me tenses to keep us steady for the final jolt. I stand with the feeling that I’m being awoken.
Alice told me that the first kiss would leave a girl feeling strange. I wasn’t prepared for how right she was.
We take our time walking back to the apartment building. I watch a cloud swirl over the atmosphere. On very overcast days when the sky goes entirely white, it’s like Internment is an inking on a piece of paper, and the rest has yet to be drawn.
“Do you have to see the specialist again?”
“Every day, until I hear otherwise,” I say.
I see in his face that he’s unhappy, but it isn’t because of anything I’ve done; he’s being protective. I’m glad I told him. I’d want him to tell me, if it were the other way around. “I’m not going to bother my parents with it,” I say. “They’ll worry. They’ll think they’ve done wrong by us. First Lex and now me.”
He stops me a few paces before the door to my building, takes my hands. “If you feel like going to the edge, come and find me,” he says.
It takes me a moment to work up the courage to look at him. “What if you can’t stop me?” I say. “What if I go mad and I jump?”
He squeezes my hands. “I won’t let you go alone.”
It may be the greatest thing anyone has ever said to me, and my smile is too small to express my gratitude.
“Shall we go inside?” Basil says.
“Not yet,” I say, looking to the clouds again. This afternoon has been one long moment that I haven’t wanted to end. I want Basil beside me a little longer. I want this warmth in my cheeks to stay.
He puts his hand on the small of my back, and I feel the current of my blood flowing under his touch. “You could walk with me to the playground,” he says. “I’m supposed to find my brother before dinner.”
“All right,” I say.
The playground isn’t far from the park, which means we’re undoing our train ride by going there, but Basil doesn’t seem to mind. Time is passing too quickly, though I keep willing for it to hold still.
There’s only one child left on the playground, hanging by his knees from the dome of metal bars.
“Leland,” Basil calls, and the boy topples clumsily to his feet.
“He’s gotten better,” I notice. “Last time he was falling on his head.”
“He practices on the furniture,” Basil says, and sighs.
“Is it dinnertime already?” Leland asks, dusting his knees as he ambles toward us. The necklace that holds his betrothal band has fallen against his collar so that the band is behind his neck. Basil stoops to fix it.
“Almost,” Basil says. “Where’s your tie?”
“I lost it.”
“Lost it where?”
He shrugs. Leland has never been a child who can hold on to things; he’s careless even by the standards set by other seven-year-olds. He does his best to seem contrite for Basil’s sake, an effort that’s less than valiant. He
