Perfect Ruin. Lauren DeStefano

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СКАЧАТЬ questions did she ask you?”

      “She asked about my parents, mostly. Their trades, and if they told me about the murder several years ago.” He tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Then she asked about my studies.”

      “That’s it?”

      “That’s it.”

      “Me too,” I say, but I think he catches my hesitation. “My father said that everyone doesn’t have to come right home after class and work anymore,” I say. “You can come over for dinner if you want. My mother always cooks too much food during the festival month.” There are things I’d like to tell him, if not for the patrolman pacing the aisle, making sure we’re safe and that our feet and our minds lie firmly on Internment’s floating floor.

      “I’d love to,” he says. “I don’t have to be home to watch Leland. My mother is taking him to get fitted for a new uniform.”

      “Don’t tell me he managed to lose an entire uniform,” I say. Basil’s brother is famous for losing things. It’s a wonder he still has his betrothal band on a chain around his neck.

      “He didn’t lose it, exactly. He’s pretty sure it’s at the bottom of the lake. Part of it, anyway.”

      Even Pen looks up from her notes at that.

      “He was trying to use the pant legs as a net to catch fish.” Basil sighs. “These are the sorts of things that happen when I take my eyes off him for five minutes.”

      I laugh. “Poor Basil,” I say. “The great fun in being a younger sibling is getting to torture the older.”

      “You were an uncorrupted compared to Leland,” Basil says.

      “What about the time we were seven and we tried to bake a cake?” I say.

      “I don’t recall any baking,” Basil says. “I recall cracked eggs on the floor and a sack of flour that was too heavy for you to carry.”

      “That mess happened on Lex’s watch,” I remind him. “He’s the one who had to clean it up.”

      Now Basil is chuckling with his lips pressed together. He’s looking at me.

      “What?” I say.

      “I’m just remembering all the flour in your hair.”

      “It got up my nose. I couldn’t stop sneezing.”

      We’re both trying to quiet our laughter so as not to disrupt the solemn mood of the train.

      “Is this what passes for romance between you two?” Pen says.

      “Yes,” I say. “And we like it this way, don’t we, Basil?”

      “Quite,” he says.

      The evening sun catches every bolt and scrap of metal on the train, and for an instant we are suspended in an atmosphere of stars.

      My mother is of course thrilled that my betrothed is joining us for dinner. Not only does she find him charming, but she is also eager for a sense of normalcy. Though the ash from the fire at the flower shop has long since disappeared, a grayness still blankets the city. I’ve never known anything like it, but something about my mother’s despondency of late tells me she knows it well.

      My father’s absence at the table doesn’t help.

      I force myself to eat everything on the plate, despite the lingering dread in my stomach after my interview with the specialist, which I leave out of the dinner conversation.

      After we’ve cleared our plates, I say I’m feeling tired and I’m going to lie down, and I pull Basil toward my bedroom.

      “Did you take your pill this morning, love?” my mother asks.

      I feel my cheeks burning. “Yes,” I say, and I can’t meet Basil’s eyes. I’ve been taking my sterility pill since about the time my betrothal band started to fit on my finger. I know my mother doesn’t want for me to repeat Alice’s mistake, and I’ve heard it isn’t uncommon for girls my age to be intimate with their betrotheds, but the idea still embarrasses me.

      When I close my bedroom door, I sag against it with a deflating sigh.

      Basil sits on the edge of my bed and holds his arms out to me. “Come here,” he says, and when I take his hands, he pulls me down to sit beside him.

      “Today was awful,” I confess, making a little game of rolling and unrolling his red necktie. “In just a few days, I feel as though everything has changed.”

      “I keep thinking it’ll all go back to normal,” he says. “Each morning I wake up and tell myself there won’t be a patrolman at the door when I leave. They’ll have found the murderer. The fire will turn out to have been an accident.”

      We sit without speaking for a while, me staring at my lap, as the sunset makes everything orange.

      “You can tell me anything, you know,” Basil says.

      He knows something is wrong, then. He’s an excellent reader of people, and I am terrible at hiding things. Another reason we’re probably a good match—he keeps me from getting lost in myself. And I always relent, telling him the little things, like my fear of giving verbal presentations before the class, or that I don’t like his mother’s walnut cookies—which she gives me every year for my festival of stars gift—as much as I let on. But how can I tell him that I fear I’m becoming like my brother, or that I have perhaps always been like him? That for all of last night I dreamed of Internment’s edge, Amy scattering pages into the clouds, and a fire raging behind her so that she had no choice but to jump?

      I think of the specialist’s card in my pocket.

      “Basil?” I say. “You want me to be safe, don’t you?”

      He puts his hand over mine, and his tie unrolls from my fingers. “Of course,” he says.

      I can’t tell him, then. If he knew that I was this curious about the edge, he would drag me to the king’s home atop the clock tower himself. He would ask to have me declared irrational, and I’d be fitted with an anklet made of blinking lights and never be allowed to step outside again. Just like the woman who used to live downstairs. I used to pass by her door and see her sometimes, standing just inside her threshold after her husband left for work. I’d hear the whimpers of pain when she tried to follow after him.

      “What is it?” he asks.

      I’m trying to think of a way to answer without lying, but then I’m saved by a knock on my door. “A patrolman was just here.” My mother’s voice. “There’s going to be a broadcast. They’ve found that poor girl’s murderer.”

       7

       Even gods must have their secrets.

      —“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year СКАЧАТЬ