Perfect Ruin

Page 40

“I read somewhere that the idea for the clock tower came from the ground,” he says. “A lot of the city’s designs did. Maybe things won’t be very different from Internment. Just much more room.”
“If we don’t crash and die,” I remind him.
“Yes, that too.”
I try to imagine what the ground will be like. All I see is another version of Internment.
“We probably won’t make it,” I say. “Our top engineers have been trying to get to the ground for centuries, and they’ve all failed. You know that, right? That we’ll probably all be killed?”
“I don’t know any such thing,” he says.
“Basil, really.”
“Call me irrational if you like,” he says. “But I believe we’ll make it, and I’ve no doubt the girl I’m betrothed to would believe it too.”
“When I put aside all of the ugly thoughts, it feels poetic,” I admit. “We’re inside this sleeping machine, just waiting to see where it takes us when it wakes.”
“There’s the Morgan I know.”
The Morgan he knew is dead. I don’t know who’s lying beside him now.
He seems to know what I’m thinking. “Don’t bury your sense of wonder,” he says. “It’s a rare thing, and one of the things I adore most about you.”
“Amy thinks they’ll be fascinated by us on the ground,” I say. “She thinks they’ll throw us a party.”
I look up at the hanging lantern, trying to imagine that this metal bird can be as much a home to me as my apartment was. The Morgan Stockhour that lived in that apartment would envy me. Maybe it’s silly of me to envy her now.
“Close your eyes,” Basil says. “Try to sleep.”
I close my eyes, and this time I see ashes being thrown upon the wind.
The bed lurches beneath me, and I awaken with a gasp.
“It’s okay,” Basil says before I’ve opened my eyes. The urgency in his voice is hardly reassuring.
The lantern swings over our bed, and Basil reaches up to steady it. “Professor Leander is testing the claws. That’s all.”
“We’re moving?” I say. “Actually moving?”
The shadows of his grin dance in the candlelight when there’s another jolt. This is the happiest he has looked in days. “We’re moving.”
The door to our bunk room whips open, and there’s Pen, her hair somehow pristine though the look in her eyes is a bit deranged. “My lantern nearly fell off its hook,” she says excitedly. “It’s like Internment is shaking on the wind.”
“Not Internment. Just the bird,” Judas says, coming up beside her. “Professor Leander was up all night fiddling with the gears. He says there’s no time left. Thanks in part to the two of you, and that little stunt with the prince.”
Pen gives me a flat stare. “You told?”
“I only told Basil!”
“Voices carry,” Judas says. “And you’ve put us all even more at risk, you know.”
Pen crosses her arms, indignant. And I know she isn’t angry with me for telling Basil; she’s angry with herself. “It’s sacrilege, what that professor is doing,” she says. “If we were meant to be on the ground, we’d be able to fly like birds.”
“Not much religion in hitting the prince with a rock,” Judas fires back.
She opens her mouth, but I interrupt. “I don’t hear an engine.”
“We have to generate our own electricity down here,” Judas says. “Get the gears turning, and with luck they’ll take over for us once we take to the sky. Right now it’s all brute strength.”
“Can I help?” Basil asks.
“How are you with heavy lifting?” Judas asks.
“He’s incredible,” I say. Basil would be too modest to let on how strong he is.
“It’s true,” Pen agrees. “Makes Thomas look like a weakling. Not that that would take much.” She folds her arms and scoffs, the way she would if Thomas had just claimed her cheek for a kiss.
But of course, no kiss comes, and her expression slowly falls.
“Come on, then, if you think you’d be useful,” Judas tells Basil.
We all follow Judas down the narrow hallway. Without the clock tower or daylight, I have no concept of time. I don’t know if I can get used to the sun’s absence. It makes me feel a bit like I’m trapped in a box; sometimes I struggle to breathe. I am a creature of the sky. I’ve always known that, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was forced to live in the dirt.
I think of what my mother said that one afternoon about dreaming of living among the roots of a giant tree. That may have been her way of trying to tell me about this place; but she stopped herself, because she thought ignorance would keep me safe.
I become distantly aware of my own grief, and I realize how easily I’m able to force it away. It will come back, to be sure, but for now I’m in control, and when Judas leads me to a ladder, I climb up after him.
“Didn’t you have a dream like this?” Pen says, climbing the rungs beneath me.
“Yes, but we were side by side,” I say.
“Still. How eerie.”
Judas grabs my hand and helps me onto the upper level. Then he stoops down to help Pen, but she ignores him, preferring to stumble on all fours before coming upright. “Did you know our Morgan is something of a clairvoyant?” she says.
Judas is looking at me when he says, “She’s something.”
How unusual for me to smile at such an innocuous thing. Basil climbs up beside me, bringing me back to my senses. I stoop to gather the lantern Judas set on the floor.
We find Professor Leander in the control room, sitting before a wall of windows, each different in size and shape. He must have been hoarding pieces for decades in order for this bird to exist as it does.
There’s an alcove off to one side, surrounded entirely by dirt-darkened windows, containing levers that seem to move on their own without needing any human force.
“Do those control the claws?” Basil asks.
“Sure do,” Judas says.
Amy is hanging over her grandfather’s chair, pointing to the levers and asking questions, but she spins around when she hears our approach. “I knew you’d be back,” she says cheerily. “The others said you were dead.”
“Nobody said that,” Judas says.
“You did.”
He scratches the back of his neck. I decide to forgive him. If he thought I was dead after my capture, it was with good reason. All his friends who have crossed the king are either in this bird or dead. I heard Alice and Lex murmuring that if the other jumpers haven’t found their way to the bird by now, it’s time to leave them behind.
“We’re quite alive,” Pen says. “What can we do to help?” Her voice is bright, though she exudes weariness. Well after midnight, I heard her enter Basil’s and my bunk room. I guess her loneliness made sleeping on a cushion on our floor more appealing than the couch in the common room.
“There is a gear that’s giving me trouble,” Professor Leander says. “Sticking. There’s some grease in a yellow can.”
“I’ll go,” I say. “Where is it, exactly?”
“I’ll show you,” Amy says. As she brushes past me, she grabs my hand, and the gesture is so nonchalant that I wonder if she’s aware of it. It makes me feel honored. Trusted.
Behind us, Professor Leander has already begun assigning tasks to the others.
“You must tell me all about the clock tower,” Amy whispers when we get to the ladder. “I’m infinitely jealous that you met the princess.”
I blink. “Are you an admirer?” Princess Celeste is a popular role model for the girls of this city, but Amy doesn’t seem the sort to buy into that, especially with the king’s role in Daphne’s death.
“I just wonder what it’s like to be her, is all.” Her eyes are wide. “My sister told me that the princess shoots deer for fun and nobody is bold enough to stop her.”
“She collects antlers and mounts them to her wall,” I say, beginning to climb down.
“Ghastly,” Amy says. I can hear her grin. She reminds me a bit of Pen when we were younger—fascinated with the macabre, excited at any small scrap of adventure to be found. I wonder if Daphne was the same way. I’m sorry we never spoke, though surely we passed each other nearly every day at the academy. She wasn’t among the faces to judge and shun me after Lex’s incident. With a sister that had done the same thing, maybe she even sympathized. I have a feeling we could have been friends.
The bird lurches to the left with a chorus of metal whines. Amy loses her grip and topples backward. We’re close enough to the bottom now that I can catch her as I set one foot on the floor. Miraculously, I don’t drop the lantern. But she’s dead weight when she hits me. The bird goes still, and I realize that she’s quaking in my arms. Her eyes are all white, lashes aflutter, limbs and torso shuddering as though some creature is trying to burst out of her.
Alarmed, I lay her on the floorboards.
“Judas,” I cry. My voice is shrill. “Judas!”
In a blur, he’s leapt to the bottom of the ladder and is crouching at her side.
“She just—I caught her when she fell, and …”
“It’s okay,” Judas says. “It wasn’t anything you did. Stand back.”
He looks up to where Pen and Basil are perched at the top of the ladder. “Tell the professor to stop tinkering with the bird. She’s going to need stillness until she comes out of it.” His voice is calm, but his eyes are sharp with worry.
“I’ll get Lex,” I say. “He can help.”
“No,” he says. “It’ll run its course.”
This is how the edge ruined her. Her arms thrash. Her ankles pound at the floor. A low, hiccupping cry comes out of her.
I just want it to stop. I’d do anything to make it stop.
I think of the yellow pill her betrothed forced down her throat after we found the murdered university student. “Doesn’t she have a pharmacy bag?” I say. “Something.”
“Doubt she brought it here,” he says. “A lot of good those things will do, anyway.”
“This—this happens often?” I say.
“Now and again.”
Mercifully, she goes still. For a moment I wonder if she’s dead, but then I hear her moan. Judas sighs with relief. “We should get her to bed.”