Perfect Ruin - Lauren DeStefano

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he could finally go to sleep. He won’t tell me what the stories were about. “They were gruesome, brutal,” he’ll say. “But you didn’t understand. You’d smile and go to sleep.”

      Now I can’t hear what he’s saying to his transcriber. I knock. “Lex?”

      His murmurings stop. I hear him shuffling around, but I don’t ask if he needs help. Words like “help” have been banned from his apartment like Internment has been banned from the ground.

      The door opens, and I’m hit with the smell of burnt paper. Through the darkness I can just see, on a table in a far corner, a long strip of paper trailing from the transcription machine to the floor, curling into and around itself like hills and valleys. Wisps of smoke are rising from the exposed gears.

      “You’re supposed to use that thing for only an hour at a time,” I say, frowning. There are bags under his eyes and he’s staring through me with eyes that used to be blue like mine. But they’ve faded since his incident. They’re gray, bloodshot, and they tell a different story from the rest of his youthful face. He could be my twenty-four-year-old brother or he could be a hundred.

      “What happened?” he asks me.

      “Mom sent me up here with dinner. She’s going to send me right back up here if I don’t convince you to eat. You just have to take a bite; you know she can tell if I lie.”

      “What happened?” he asks again. He always knows when I’m uneasy.

      “Nothing,” I say. “There was a problem with the train. Come out and eat something.”

      “I was in the middle of a thought. Just leave it on the table.”

      “You’re going to break that machine,” Alice yells from the kitchen. I’ve never understood how two people who are so clearly in love can act as though they hate each other at the same time.

      Lex relents, though, closing the door behind us and feeling his way along the wall toward the kitchen. Alice has mopped up the water and flower petals. The apartment is kept sparsely furnished, which is Alice’s doing. This is her way of helping Lex in secret; she’s always a step ahead of him, quietly making sure he’s safe.

      In a rare feat of accomplishment, I’ve convinced Lex to eat some of the casserole. He has just taken his first forkful, and he’s just about to complain, when the door bursts open.

      My father is standing in the doorway, red and out of breath. Sweat stains the collar of his blue patrolman’s uniform.

      “Dad?” Lex and I say at the same time. Lex is gripping Alice’s arm. He’s always worrying she’ll disappear.

      My father needs a moment to catch his breath, but then he seems relieved. “Morgan—” he wheezes. “Your mother told me she sent you up here alone—she didn’t know about the king’s order.”

      “What order?” Alice asks, pouring him a glass of water from the tap. He shakes his head, doesn’t accept.

      “What is it, Dad?” Lex says. “You’re making everyone panic.”

      “Morgan needs to come back downstairs,” he says. “The king is ordering everyone to be in their own apartments tonight. There was a body on the train tracks.”

      Some distant part of me understands, just barely, but another part of me has to ask, “Was there an accident?”

      “No, heart,” he says. “The other patrolmen and I have been investigating. A girl was murdered.”

       3

       Up until someone I loved approached the edge, I had no reason to question the hand of any god, much less my own god’s hand. But to see that no amount of love or will on my part could make that little girl open her eyes as she lay unconscious in a sterile room—How could I not question this god that watches over us? Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn’t the fear of our mortality, but the thoughts it leads us to have.

      —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

      WE EAT DINNER IN SILENCE, MY MOTHER and I. My father is out investigating the incident and going door-to-door making sure everyone is home and accounted for.

      The word keeps replaying in my head: “murder.” It’s a dusty, cobwebbed word; there hasn’t been cause to use it on Internment in my lifetime. It’s something I’ve only read about in novels. It’s something that happens on the ground, where there are so many people and most of them are strangers to one another, where there are many places to stray and conspire, where people so often go bad. At least that’s what I imagine it’s like; nobody knows for sure what the ground is like. Not even King Furlow.

      We have engineers who study the ground from afar and educate themselves on ways to further our own technology. Internment has evolved drastically in the last several hundred years; we’ve learned to set underground wires and indoor plumbing for our sinks and water rooms. The city’s electricity is generated by the glasslands, which is a series of panels and globes that gather the sun’s energy and store it so that it can be converted into electricity. But there are ground technologies we don’t use because the king believes they would complicate our world, make it too dangerous. The king says that the ground makes people greedy and wasteful, while the people of Internment are resourceful and humble.

      I think about the murdered girl. I wonder about her final moments. I’m horrible and selfish—I must be—because all my thoughts lead to the idea that she could have been me instead.

      My mother’s dinner sits untouched on her plate. She’s weaving the fork between her fingers and staring out the window across the apartment. The sun has gone away and the train speeds past, rattling our walls for the second time since we’ve heard the news. The girl’s body has been cleaned from the track and the train is back in service. Things must go on. There would be more cause to worry if they didn’t.

      “It’s good that Basil walked you all the way home,” she says. “Maybe he should from now on.”

      “Will there be academy tomorrow?” I ask.

      “I’m sure there will,” she says, not moving her eyes from the window. The view is exactly the same as it has always been—other apartments and windows full of light. But something has changed; there’s something dangerous out there, and to look now, we’d never be able to find it.

      There was a murder when my parents were young. Two men had been fighting, and somehow they’d reached the swallows, and one pushed the other in. The fence surrounding the swallows has since been rebuilt to ensure such a thing can never happen again.

      Hundreds of years ago, the swallows were a farmland, but something changed. There have been theories about atmospheric pressure, or else the god in the sky becoming angry. The dirt began shifting, and over the decades, it began to churn into itself, swallowing the animals and the crops and anything else that touched it. I’ve seen slide images of it—a whirling darkness always in motion.

      The murderer had been driven mad by a tainted elixir that should have been discarded by the pharmacists. He was feverish and deranged when they found him, and the king had no choice but to have him dispatched.

      I clear the dishes, scraping the uneaten food into the compost tube, where it’s immediately sucked away to the processing chamber in the basement. I try to keep my mind busy with homework, and my mother doesn’t offer to double-check my answers. She’s curled in the armchair, touching the fringe of Lex’s blanket that’s wrapped around her thin shoulders. I hate when she gets this way, so uncertain.

      I go to bed two hours early, and I listen to Lex pacing upstairs. When I stand on the bed and knock on the ceiling three times, there’s a pause and then he knocks three times with his foot. I think his muffled voice is saying, “Go to sleep.”

      When

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