and secure the board back in place. He turns to me, a finger over his lips, then cants his head in the direction of the shadows beyond the street lanterns.
I follow him. Our footsteps are more silent than I would have thought possible.
I try not to pay attention to the cobbles, or the smell of the grass, or the chill in the air that always leads me to think it must be dusting on the ground. But I can’t stop myself from thinking of how that frozen dust must look. Does it melt at the warm touch of human skin? The world must be so ethereal, all its cracked walkways and worn buildings covered by perfect white.
Judas moves expertly between the trees, and I do my best to follow in his footsteps. My brother said that some of the patrolmen were part of this secret plan to leave Internment, and now I wonder if the reason Judas hasn’t been caught is because there are patrolmen on his side.
“What do we call this?” I whisper.
“Call what?” Judas says.
“This—plan. To leave Internment. Is it treason?”
He doesn’t stop walking, all stealth, but he looks back. His lips are chapped and deep red when he smiles. “It’s a rebellion.”
I don’t understand why my heart leaps onto my tongue. It’s more than that mere word causing my skin to prickle, my cheeks to go warm. It’s the way he said it. It’s him, moving in the darkness, something pulling me to follow.
He stops walking and holds out his hand to keep me from taking another step. We’re in sight of the cavern now, and I can see a figure kneeling at its mouth, head in hands.
“There’s someone,” he whispers.
“Pen!”
He tries to keep me from going forward, but I push past him, and by the time she’s turned her head, Judas has disappeared into the shadows.
“Morgan? Morgan!” She runs and doesn’t stop until she’s crashed into me and I’m toppling backward. Her tears are smeared onto my face when her cheek brushes mine.
“Pen?” I say. She’s sobbing, gripping at the back of my shirt. “Breathe,” I say. “You’re scaring me.”
“You—” She chokes on a sob and draws back. “You’re scared? What a thing to say. You had me thinking you were dead.” She claps her hands against my cheeks, staring through the darkness, making sure it’s really me. Her eyes reach mine and she loses what little composure she mustered, and she pulls me to her chest.
I’ve never seen her this way. Wouldn’t have thought it possible.
“Don’t cry, silly girl,” I say. “I’m right here.”
I bring her to sit at the mouth of the cavern with me, and after many quivering breaths, she tells me what happened. With all the sorrow and the chaos after the university student’s death, the pharmacy was overflowing with orders for elixirs to calm the nerves. They were ill prepared for so much action, and some batches were improperly measured. At least a dozen deaths were reported from a tainted batch, my family among them. Lex, Alice, my parents—all of us.
So that’s what they’re telling everyone.
She smiles, wipes a tear from her cheek. “But you’re okay. It was a mistake. I should have known better than to listen to my mother; she has one foot in a fantasy novel at all times. What really happened? Did you have to go to the hospital to get looked at? Like when Carmilla Tilmaker swallowed a dead bramble fly in kinder year.”
Now it’s my turn to be somber. I am too exhausted to cry. Is that normal? To be orphaned and not grasp the magnitude of such a word, let alone expend any emotion over it? “I was ill, but I’m okay now. Lex and Alice are fine.”
She plays with a lock of my hair, waiting for me to go on.
“Pen?” I stare at her knees and mine. “What if there were a way off this city, and I told you I was going to take it? Would you file to have me declared irrational?”
She doesn’t answer. There’s no way she could already know about the mechanical bird or the conspiracy or any of those things, but she knows me. She knows that something is coming.
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “I wasn’t even supposed to come out, but I had to”—say good-bye—“see the stars again.” I can’t imagine they’ll be this pretty from the ground. On the ground, the history book says, the humans have infinite land to fill with buildings; and the scopes show us that they make their own lights, and the stars mean nothing to them. But up here, we see them, as clear as lightbugs that float in the air around our heads.
Pen and I raise our heads and look at each other. “Come out from where?” she asks.
I listen for some sign that Judas is still nearby, but though I know he’s watching me, he’s silent. It’s as though I can feel him willing me not to say another word about it.
And he needn’t worry. I won’t tell. But it isn’t to protect the metal bird or the rebellion. It’s because of what she said that night on the train platform. She told me I needed to stop thinking about the ground. She said that she didn’t want to know what was beyond Internment.
This is her home. I can’t take it away from her. Instead, all I can do is stare at her—this lovely, lovely girl who might have been nobility in another time with that hair and those eyes. If I never see her again after this moment, I’ll have enough memories of her to carry for every day of the rest of my life. But no matter how vivid those memories, they will all end here, now, her eyes glimmering in the starlight, and the feel of the blade pressed to my hip.
I won’t even get to see her wedding, I realize. She’ll have so many years to float in the sky, and my days here are coming to an end.
“I have to leave now,” I say.
She says, “Where are you going?”
“To murder the king,” I say. I know it isn’t possible, but I just want to know how it feels to say the words out loud. They feel perfect. My blood swirls and swirls with delicious warmth at the fantasy of it. “I’m going to creep into the clock tower,” I say, “and climb every last stair until I get up to the king’s apartment. I’m going to sneak into his bedroom while he’s sleeping and cut open his throat. I think that’s how I’ll do it. I’d like that.”
Pen would laugh at the absurdity on a normal day, but she’s looking into my eyes.
“Morgan—” She grips my arm, stands, and tugs me into the shadow of heavy leaves as though to protect me from what I’ve said. “You can’t be blurting out things like that right now. It’s treason. What if someone hears?”
“Nobody is listening,” I say. “Nobody ever listens to us. We’re all milling around pretending that what we do is important, that
There’s a bright moon tonight, split to pieces by branches. It’s an organ with veins and arteries. A non- beating heart. If there’s a god at all, he’s dead in his sky.
Pen holds my face in her hands. Her thumb brushes at my cheek over and over. “This isn’t like you at all,” she says. “What’s happened?”
I’ve said ugly things, but she doesn’t flinch.
“You asked what really happened,” I say. “My parents are dead.”
I stare at her collarbone that’s framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with the weight of her next breath. We’re fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?
Some sound escapes her lips, but I can’t comprehend it. All I know for sure is that I have to leave. I can’t face her like this. “I’ve said too much,” I say, and take a step away. I’m just about to run, when she grabs my wrist. I struggle. For the first time in my life I struggle to get away from her, but she’s too strong for it. I pull with all I’ve got, and her shoes dig into the earth, her legs don’t even move. She’s rooted, hardly a grunt for her efforts.
All the fight goes out of me. She lets go only when she’s sure I won’t run.
“They’re dead,” I say, and sink into the dirt. She kneels beside me.
When her mother became addicted to tonic, Pen was the victim of too many well wishes and sympathies.
