you.”
“Why?” I say. “None of this has anything to do with me. You all made sure of that.”
Lex laughs bitterly, and it takes all my strength not to hit him. “I guess that specialist saw something in you anyway,” he says. “There are extraordinary things in that head of yours. You don’t even realize the sorts of things you say.”
I try to recall the things I said to Ms. Harlan that might have made me stand out, but there’s nothing. I remember her accusatory stares and her suspicions, but I never betrayed a single thought. I lied each time she asked me about the ground.
I’ve been told I’m a terrible liar, though. There’s that.
Basil tries to put an arm around me, but I pull away. I rise to my feet. I wouldn’t know how to get out of this place even if I could, so when I hurry from the room, I go straight back to the tiny bunk. The green door closes behind me with a slam.
I hear Alice, as practical as ever, saying, “Let her be.”
I pull the blanket over my head and listen to the rush of blood in my ears. I have never been so aware of all my bones, and how heavy my limbs are, and how much effort it takes to breathe in and out.
A little bit of light peeks through the weave in the blanket, and it’s like the stars gleaming in a sky I might never see again.
The quiet here isn’t perfect. It’s filled with clinks and groans, as though I’ve been shrunk down and imprisoned in the engine of some machine. I suppose the truth isn’t far from that.
The doorknob turns eventually. A bit of light reaches me when a piece of the blanket is lifted just enough for Amy to stick her head under. “Hey,” she says.
I just stare at her.
“They told me to leave you alone.”
“And you thought this would be the best way to do that,” I say.
“Move over,” she says, and crawls under the blanket with me. The blanket between us is tented by our shoulders, and in the darkness her eyes are very round. I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl. When she grows older, she’ll be very nearly a perfect replica of her sister.
“You can’t be afraid,” she tells me. “You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it’s the fear that’ll freeze you in place.”
“They think you wandered to the edge accidentally,” I say. “But I think you knew what you were doing, especially when you go saying things like that.”
“Nobody knows what they’re doing at the edge,” she says. “You don’t know what you’ll find there; it’s just that you’ve had your fill of
“What was it like?” I say.
“Windy,” she says. “Theory is, the wind is what keeps you from going over the edge. You hear it roaring, and you can’t see anything but sky and bits of the ground through the clouds, and you think you could jump and then you’d be like the birds, sailing down and down until you land in one of those colorful patches. But when you jump, everything goes black, and when you wake up, you’re still here.”
This rivals the news of my parents’ deaths as the saddest thing I’ve heard today.
“There are a lot of dead bugs, too,” she says, her teeth showing as she smiles. She looks like a little girl for once.
“Bugs?” I say.
“Hundreds of them all around the edge, just thrown back onto the grass when they tried to fly off.”
She laughs and I laugh too. I don’t even know why. Maybe I’m in shock.
When we’re quiet again, she says, “I’m sorry your parents are dead.”
I say, “I’m sorry your sister is dead.”
“It won’t be for nothing,” she says. “I’m glad you survived. You’ll get to see what your parents and my sister were working for.”
“Even if we do make it to the ground,” I say, “who’s to say it’s any better? What if there’s another king no less corrupt than ours? Or what if the ground is just another city floating over an even bigger one, and so on?”
“Then at least we’ll be the wiser,” she says. “I’d rather be disappointed than oblivious.”
“Would you now?” I say.
Her smile is back. “But I bet the people down there will be fascinated by us. I bet they’ll feed us their delicacies and give us crowns and ask us all about our city.”
Her notions are as good as mine, I suppose.
“I’d much like for you to be right,” I say.
22
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
I DECLINE ALL OFFERS TO PARTAKE IN A tour of the metal bird.
I realize that this is a phenomenal place, but I’m not in the right mind to appreciate it. I spend the rest of the evening reliving the memory of mother turned away from me on the bed, and the night I sat at the kitchen table with my father as he lied about Judas. He was trying to protect me. If I knew nothing, he thought I wouldn’t be a target. I see that now.
I don’t say very much. Basil worries. Lex has Alice check the dilation of my pupils and he pays close attention to my temperature, asks me to describe any stomach cramps or dizziness. I tell him that I don’t feel much of anything. He has nothing to say to that. He was never very good with emotions. It’s staggering to think he’s the only family I have left.
There are probably patrolmen in the apartment now, rifling through our drawers and looking for signs of treason to justify the murder of an entire family. When they get to my bedroom they’ll find an open textbook at the desk, and the wooden marionette Pen bought for my festival of stars gift. They’ll find blue bedsheets and a closet full of uniforms and a feather headband draped over the mirror. They’ll find pieces of a girl who followed the rules.
That girl is gone now.
There’s no daylight here. There are no clouds. I hear a rumbling that I think is the train up above us. I lie with my face in the mattress, and Basil rubs circles on my back. He says nice things and he stoops down to kiss the back of my neck. Despite this hollowness inside me, the feel of his lips raises bumps in my skin.
I hear the door open, and Alice calls my name.
When I don’t answer, Basil says, “I think she’s fallen asleep.”
Alice doesn’t believe it. When I was younger, there were nights when my parents still went out together, when they would be gone long into the starlit hours, only to return with giggles and whispers, shushing each other as they slammed doors and stumbled off to bed. While they were gone, Alice would look in on me. She would know if I was pretending to sleep, and she would tickle my feet.
She doesn’t touch me now. She only says, “We’ll sort this out, love.” She doesn’t say my name, but I know the words are for me. “You aren’t alone.”
The door closes.
“She’s been crying,” Basil says, lying down beside me.
After a few seconds, I raise my face from the mattress to look at him.
“I don’t want to talk,” I say. I feel like I can’t get the words out in time. They spin angrily in my brain but disappear on my tongue.
“Okay,” he says, and wipes at a streak of my tears with his thumb. “You don’t need to say a word.”
