Perfect Ruin

“Look at that,” Judas says. “We’ve just met and already we have something in common.”

During the rickety ride down in the lift, I press my body against Basil’s. I pretend that we’re in a shuttle on the way to the academy, not sinking down into a place where the stars won’t find us.

Pen gasps when she sees a side of the metal bird emerging in the lantern light. “It’s really here,” she says.

“What people have been dying for,” Judas says, easing up a fistful of rope.

“Is everyone angry with me?” I ask Basil.

“Yes, very,” he says. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking.”

“I wanted to say good-bye to Pen, and to see the stars, and possibly murder the king.”

Judas snickers.

Basil kisses my hair, which has gone lank and stringy from my time as a prisoner. I look at him and quietly say, “I wanted to go home.”

He touches my nose, my lips. “I know.”

I press my ear to his heart, and the steady force of it makes strange music with the creaky lift. Last time I rode it, I was afraid. Now I dread only the moment we stop.

“Lex will have my head,” I say.

“He’ll just be glad you’re back,” Basil says. “We all thought, when you were taken to the king in the clock tower—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“The king never knew we were there,” Pen says. “It was his insane children.”

“The princess asked about the machine that would take us to the ground,” I say. “I misled her, but she knows. She was adamant.”

“Wonder why,” Judas says. “What’s the princess want with the ground? Her life here is charmed enough.”

“I think she’s just lonely,” I say, looking at Basil. His eyes are dark and worried.

“Lonely and insane,” Pen says. “They had us locked away from the sunlight for ages.”

“How did you get away?” Judas says.

No one answers him. But it’s no matter; we’ve stopped.

Pen is still in awe of the machine, though it’s hardly visible in the dim. She feels along the metal slope of it, tries to peer at what’s in the shadows. “What are those claws for, underneath?” she asks.

“You know how dirt warrens have claws for fingers?” Judas says. “That’s so they can dig through the dirt faster than we can walk it. There are claws like that on all sides of this thing so it can do just that.”

“To get us up to the surface so we can fly away?” Pen asks.

“To get us below the surface,” Judas says. “We’ll dig a tunnel and break out through the bottom and then sail down to the ground. Assuming we don’t fall to our deaths, or that the force surrounding the edge doesn’t throw us back.”

“But how will we get back up?” Pen says.

“We won’t.”

She already knew that, of course, but the confirmation has her staring at her betrothal band. Somewhere above us, Thomas is worrying for her. He hasn’t learned yet that he’ll spend his dodder years alone. He won’t ever stop searching for her, even if they tell him she’s dead. But that search will be fruitless, and Pen knows it. When she thinks I’m not watching, her lips move.

“I’m sorry,” is what they say.

27

When my betrothed asked me to marry him, the second time, I didn’t answer right away. I held the possibilities on my tongue. Carried them with me for days. I thought about choices. I imagined myself leaving Internment on the wings of a great bird or perhaps down a very strong length of twine. I tried to imagine what the ground would be like, and I couldn’t. I would try to see shapes, but all I would get is the bright light that cloaks the unknown when the human mind strives for a knowledge it can’t possess. But even then, even without the ability to imagine, every time I conjured that bright haze, I could feel him standing beside me. No god has ever felt as tangible as flesh and bone. I can love only what I have experienced.

“Yes,” I told him.

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

WHEN MY BROTHER THROWS THE GLASS, it hits the wall first, then shatters on a patch of floor that was clearly recycled from an old door.

“You could have been killed!” Lex says.

Alice sees me wince. “All right, enough of that now,” she says, standing behind Lex and stroking his trembling arms. “Sit,” she tells him, but he doesn’t. His jaw is quivering. His eyes stare through me, and though my brother can’t see me, he can hear me breathing, sense my weight shifting. He always knows where I stand.

I try to say I’m sorry, but the words catch in my throat. He so rarely shows emotion that it frightens me when he does.

“She isn’t hurt,” Alice tells him. She looks into my eyes. “And she won’t leave again. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I manage.

“Who knows who followed you here,” Lex says, an octave shy of bellowing. “And you dragged Pen into this!” I’ve never seen him this angry. Usually he just tells me I’m foolish and then storms off. And if I’m mad enough, I storm off, too.

But I can’t go back to how it was before.

I take a step forward and I put my hands on his shoulders. “Hey.” My voice softens. “I said I’d always come back.”

He’s still for a moment, and then he drops into a chair and turns away from me. I’m clearly being shunned.

Alice steps around him and pulls me into a hug.

She’s quick to forgive me. So little ever needs to be said between us. She put her arms around me when we stood vigil over Lex’s hospital bed, and when I came to visit after her termination procedure, and anytime I needed comfort while my mother slept and my father worked.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” I whisper. “I won’t leave again.”

There’s nothing left to leave for. Everyone in my life is either in this bird or dead.

Judas has taken Pen on a tour of the metal bird, and while Professor Leander has his doubts about whether she’s to be trusted, he revels in the opportunity to show off his invention.

Basil and I are alone at the kitchen table. He brushes his fingertips through a jar of clear salve and dabs at my wrists.

“She has to go back home,” he says. “She still belongs in the city.”

After a hesitation, I say, “She can’t. She may have killed Prince Azure.”

He stiffens. “What?”

“In order to get free, we’d planned an ambush, and she got her own idea and attacked him. I would have stopped her, but there wasn’t time. I don’t even think she realized what she’d done until she saw it all happening in front of her.”

“Morgan—”

“It’s bad. I know.”

“Very bad. What if someone followed you?”

“They didn’t. It was the perfect diversion. Every patrolman in earshot came running when Princess Celeste