“They’re waiting outside,” he says. “Morgan.” He takes my hands. “Whatever you decide, I want you to know that I’ll stand behind it. I said I’d follow you off the edge, and I meant it. I’d jump into the sky with you. Wherever you go, you won’t have to go alone. Even if you want to go back.”
The words are wonderful, but I’m not sure what he’s trying to tell me. I know that I’m about to find out.
“It’s going to be a long story,” he says. “Are you up to hearing it yet?”
“Yes,” I say. I won’t want to hear what the others have to say, but I have to. I stretch my legs off the makeshift mattress. There’s no time left for resting, and no room for dreams. It’s time to wake up.
I ignore the dizziness as I rise to my feet. There’s a low ceiling; Basil can just about stand at full height. The floor is made of wooden planks that are crudely finished, full of knots and nicks; they shudder and creak under my steps. Basil opens the door; its green color is chipped, the wood splintered and aged. The entire room seems to be made of pieces of different buildings. Beyond it, there’s a narrow hallway. I hear voices murmuring from a room at the end of it, where lantern light is flickering through an open door.
The murmurs cease when Basil and I enter the room. There are tattered couches and cushions arranged in a half circle on the floor. Lex is of course on the floor, with Alice beside him.
Judas’s and Amy’s eyes are on me immediately. I tug the sleeves of my red sweater over my hands. My necktie is missing, but I’m still in my academy uniform. It feels more like a game of make-believe to wear it now. One look around this room, and I’m sure my days of being a schoolgirl are done.
Amy is looking at me like we have loss in common. Or maybe I’m imagining that.
“Sit down,” Lex says.
Basil and I share a paisley green cushion that once belonged to what I’m sure was a hideous couch.
“I’m sitting,” I tell him. “Maybe you’d like to tell me what sort of place I’m sitting in.”
“It’s a machine,” he says. “Or, if you prefer, we’re in the chest of a giant metal bird.”
What a thing to say. I wonder if our parents’ deaths have driven him mad.
Madder still is that, with all that has happened, it isn’t the hardest thing I’m made to believe today.
“It’s far more extraordinary than a bird,” says an older man, likely near his dispatch age; as though to keep track of his remaining time, there’s a copper clock on a chain clipped to his pocket. He’s short and round with tufts of hair that at one glance seem white, but at the next a sort of yellow. “It doesn’t simply fly; it can also burrow like a dirt warren.”
I try to reconcile this. Dirt warrens are small black creatures that burrow in the ground and eat worms and things. Birds, from what I understand, are known only for flying. “How can it be both?” I ask.
The clock man opens his mouth to speak, but my brother interrupts. “First,” he says, “you should know the reason you’re here.”
21
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
WHEN MY BROTHER JUMPED FROM THE edge of Internment, my father said it was because he had a lot of demons. But long before my brother was a jumper, when he and I were children, my father began collecting demons of his own.
As a patrolman, he fitted anklets on people who had turned irrational. He took part in the quiet dispatches of those who had committed crimes, their deaths later made to seem accidental. He was made to participate and even choreograph ugly things on the promise that these things would keep us all safe. And in the evening he would come home to his happy children and his loving wife and try to reconcile his role as one of the king’s elite.
Lex isn’t sure when our father began to tell my mother of the things that were happening behind the peoples’ backs, but my parents began to talk of changing things. There were other patrolmen and wives who felt the same way, and they began to meet in secret. At first they wondered whether they could persuade the king to change his methods. But this is a king who has ways of killing those who disrupt the order of his city. And the talk soon turned to rebellion. When they met Professor Finnian Leander, who taught technology courses at the university, he introduced the idea that they could leave Internment. Fly away on the wings of a metal bird.
Finnian Leander turned his blueprints and ideas into stories for his granddaughters—Amy and Daphne. “I could never take credit for their imaginations,” Professor Leander interrupts, smoothing his fingers over the face of his clock. “Their minds stretched farther than Internment long before my silly stories.”
“So Daphne became a part of it,” I say. I look to Lex. “What about you? When did Mom and Dad tell you all of this?”
“It was after I jumped,” he says. “At first Dad would whisper about it in the hospital, when he thought I was too far gone to hear him. My eyes were taped shut. He would apologize and say he should have realized the things I’d been seeing as a pharmacist. He should have told me everything sooner. He blamed himself.”
My brother speaks so coolly about it, as though he’s talking of people he’s never met, but I see the way his fingers are fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. This is all hard for him to say.
I finish for him, “And you became a part of it, too.”
He nods. “But I had suspected something like it for a long time,” he says. “I didn’t realize they’d actually built the bird, but I wasn’t surprised.”
He never got to see this place, I realize. Dad told him about it after the incident that blinded him.
“And that’s why they’re dead?” I say. “Because the king found out about it? And Daphne, and the university student?”
“Quince,” Amy says softly.
“Others, too,” Lex says. “There are plenty of deaths that nobody thinks twice about. The king can do away with anyone and make the cause appear to be anything he pleases.”
“Then why was Daphne’s death so public?” I say. I try not to think of the brutality of her demise. It was more than doing away with a nuisance—it was too violent and cruel to be anything but personal. Did the king do it himself, or did he have someone do the dirty work? Was it the prince, with his firm jaw and sparkling eyes?
“The king is trying to make a point now,” Professor Leander says. “He doesn’t know about the bird for certain, but he knows that there is unrest. He knows about the plans to leave the city. We have our suspicions about who may have betrayed our secret. It may have been done under duress. And now not only does the king want to stop us, but he wants to frighten everyone else into thinking that leaving the city is an act of evil. He wants them to think that we’re deranged and violent, so that they’ll fear us and seek his protection.”
Basil presses the back of his hand to my forehead and frowns. I lean into his touch before he draws his hand away. I’m glad he’s here, still by my side after all the trouble I’ve caused him.
“So all of you had this secret,” I say to Lex, an edge to my tone, “and nobody thought it’d be a good idea to tell me?”
“You weren’t burdened by it,” he says. “You didn’t carry the things that we did, and we didn’t want that for you.”
“So—what, you were all going to fly off Internment in a metal bird and just leave me home with a note saying that dinner was in the stove and you wouldn’t be coming back?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “There was no sense putting you at risk before anything was certain. We never would have left you behind.”
I think of the night my father came to my room after Daphne’s murder.
I realize I’m shaking. The metal walls are caving in, and all these eyes are on me and it’s getting hard to breathe.
“I need air,” I say.
“You can’t leave,” Alice says, sympathetic. “It isn’t safe for you. The king will have men looking for
