Perfect Ruin. Lauren DeStefano

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СКАЧАТЬ I say, comforted by the way she coils her arm around mine. I have the horrible thought that the murdered girl could have been her, that by next week she would be nothing more than a handful of ashes cast to the wind. And then I feel selfishly relieved that the murdered girl wasn’t anyone in my life. It wasn’t Pen or Alice or my mother.

      Across the room, my father has found Alice. Lex isn’t with her. I understand; he has known enough awful things for a lifetime. I still think of how he used to be, attentive and intense, his face magnified by the beaker he’d hold up to the light. He used to be one of the top pharmacy students, honored with tasks most others can’t take on until graduation. But after his incident, he burned all of his notes and abandoned the trade entirely. He earns money by sewing quilts now—his work is erratic but deft, and the quilts always fetch a higher price than the others, his skill and precision cause for envy among the other makers.

      Pen presses close to me and says, “Look.”

      A patrolman is jostling the screen, twisting its knobs and trying to make the static subside. The screen is more than a hundred years old, its bronze facing chipped down to oblivion; the wires are frayed, and a little burst of sparks makes someone in the crowd gasp.

      But the image comes through, distorted at first, King Furlow trembling, warped, and green, before the patrolman hits the screen, knocking the image into reasonable clarity in time for us to see the king remove his red bowler hat and hold it to his pudgy stomach.

      King Furlow’s lineage traces back to the dawn of Internment itself. His oldest ancestor is in the history book as the only man chosen to hear from the god in the sky. No one knows for certain how the god in the sky speaks with the king, but it’s Internment’s longest standing tradition, passed down from generation to royal generation. I’ve never envied him; it’s surely a terrible burden to be the voice of an entire city.

      The rest of us speak to the god in the sky when we’re frightened or grateful, and we don’t expect to be answered.

      Standing at either side of the king are his children: Princess Celeste, and her older brother, Prince Azure, both of whom may be trying to appear somber but instead seem bored. Though the screen is sepia and the image a bit out of focus, they both look like their mother, and their mother’s mother, and so on as far as records trace. Blond hair and clear sparkling eyes, a bit of plumpness to the face. They’re sixteen and seventeen, making them closer in age than any other siblings on Internment. The king’s children are traditionally born outside the queue. When the queen announces her pregnancies, she and the king go through the list of hopeful parents in the queue, and they hand-select the applicants they see fit to bear their children’s betrotheds. Of course the hopeful parents can refuse, but no one in Internment’s history has ever passed up the chance to have a child without the long wait.

      “At four-oh-five this evening,” the king begins, “the coroner made his official statement that the death of a sixteen-year-old young lady was the result of murder. I warn those of you watching at home that many of the details about to be shared are graphic, and young children should not be present.”

      The other tenants are huddling together. Pen and I have our arms around each other; my view of the screen is partially obstructed by the people ahead of me, but I don’t crane my neck for a better look.

      Across the room, Alice chews her thumbnail and nods at something that my father has just said to her.

      There’s an assortment of gasps and “Oh no” and mutterings as the murdered girl’s class image is shown. She’s got a coy smile and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. My first thought is that she’s radiant. Through the sepia, I can imagine her face alive with color.

      “Oh,” Pen whispers into my ear. “I know her. We were in a romantic-literature course together.”

      “Daphne Leander,” the king goes on, “a tenth-year student and aspiring medic, is estimated to have died this morning. Her parents informed our patrolmen that they last saw her boarding the shuttle for the academy.”

      The details turn dark after that. She received absences from all of her instructors. No report from other morning passengers that she ever boarded the train. She was found early in the evening. Throat and wrists slashed. Everything indicates that she bled to death. As to how her body came to be on the train tracks during daylight hours—that’s still under investigation.

      “Patrolmen will be stationed in every train car, at every platform, and outside the doors of every building of Internment until the criminal responsible for this vicious act is found.”

      Pen’s mother stands a few paces away with her arm out, waving her daughter to come over and allow herself to be embraced, but Pen resists.

      “It’s important for you to all go about your lives normally,” the king says. Daphne’s image is replaced with the sketched map of Internment. “The theater and the businesses in the shopping sections will keep their usual hours. There will be patrolmen in sight at all times; report any suspicious activity, no matter how minor it may seem at the time.”

      The panic reaches through me like vines curling up from my toes to my stomach, twisting and knotting and tightening around my organs. Internment looks so small on the screen. It would take a train less than two hours to circle it entirely. Within that circuit is everyone I’ve ever loved and every place I will ever go. But it has been sullied, ugliness spreading out like the color from a steeping tea bag, until everything is covered by it. There’s someone out there capable of slashing open a young girl’s skin and leaving her to be found.

      “I feel sick,” I say.

      “Me too,” Pen says.

      When the broadcast is over, the screen goes to static.

      “Margaret,” Pen’s father calls impatiently. She grunts. He’s the only one who uses her real name; even her instructors call her Pen, despite what her forms and her student identification card say.

      Numbly I watch her return to her parents, but she squeezed my hand before she went. The crowd is dwindling, but I don’t go to my father and Alice; I go to the stairwell, and once the door is closed behind me and I’m alone, I run up the four flights of stairs to my brother’s apartment. The door is locked; it’s never locked. I fight the doorknob and then I pound frantically on the door. I can hear shuffling inside and I know he’s coming to let me in, but there are footfalls in the stairwell and there could be anything around the corner, where a bulb has gone out and shadows spread into the light.

      The door opens and I spill inside, pushing it shut behind me.

      “Morgan?” he says. Even without his sight, Lex always knows my presence. His dark hair is bunched on one side; he pulls at it when he’s writing.

      I try to speak, but my lip is quivering and my heart is in my throat and I’m out of breath from the climb.

      “You watched the broadcast, didn’t you?” he says. “It’s all right. Breathe. Sit down.” He pulls out a kitchen chair for each of us.

      “Pen knew her,” I blurt. “She wanted to be a medic. She was my age. And she was pretty.” I don’t even know what I’m saying. Words are blurring like the city through the train window. My lungs are aching.

      “Morgan.” My brother reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine. “Every generation has its horror stories. It was only a matter of time before something awful happened in front of you. It’s an awful thing to be alive sometimes.”

      “Don’t СКАЧАТЬ