Lauren DeStefano - Perfect Ruin

“They’ve asked me to help with the murals this year,” Pen says, raising her chin in a modest show of pride. “Apparently one of the instructors recommended me to the festival committee.”

“It’s about time,” I say. “You couldn’t keep your talent a secret forever.”

She smiles. “I’m a bit nervous, if I’m going to be honest about it. All those people telling me what to draw. I’ve never been good at taking orders.”

She takes my shoulders and faces me away from her so that she can weave my straight dark hair into a braid. She says I waste my beauty, letting my hair fall over my shoulders like a mop.

Basil doesn’t comment on my appearance at all, although sometimes he says he hopes our children have my blue eyes; he says they make him think of what the water on the ground must look like. We’ve never seen it from up close, but we have the lakes here, which are sort of green.

“If they boss you around, just call it artistic license,” Basil says. “You can convince them to see it your way. You’re a good debater.”

“That is true,” Pen says cheerily. “Thanks, Basil.”

The train stops, and everyone getting off at the nearest section rises to their feet, but their haste is replaced by confusion. This isn’t the platform. Basil cranes his neck and tries to see ahead, but Pen is the one to notice the lights first. She abandons my braid, and my hair falls, undone. She jabs my ribs and says, “Look.”

Red-and-white medic lights are flashing off in the distance.

People around us are murmuring. There are medical emergencies sometimes, and despite the organization of the shuttles, accidents happen when people get too close to the moving vehicles. Once, there was an hour’s delay after one of the cattle animals broke through a fence and was struck by a train.

Pen and I start to get to our feet for a better look, but a jolt forces us back into our seats. We start moving again. But something is wrong. The scenery moves in the wrong direction.

We’re going backward.

Pen is alight with excitement. “I didn’t even know the train could go backward,” she says. “I wonder if it puts any strain on the gears.” At times her curiosity makes her brave.

I bite my lip, look out the window because no matter which direction we go, the sky looks the same. And the sky is familiar. The sky is safe.

There’s a half mile of land on the other side of the fence that lines the train track; I’ve never set foot on the other side of the tracks—we aren’t supposed to—but Lex has.

On Internment, you can be anything you dream—a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close that it’s as though you’re riding them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There’s only one rule: You don’t approach the edge. If you do, it’s already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted any delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself.

My stomach is doing flip-flops, and I can’t decide if it’s excitement or fear.

I force myself to look away from the window, and my eyes find Basil’s.

Some of the other passengers seem excited, others confused.

A man several seats down, in a black suit, has begun talking to Pen about how trains have emergency systems, and shuttles too. He says that the train has moved backward before, several years before she was born, when repair work needed to be done on the track.

“So it could be that something just needs to be fixed,” he says.

One of the pregnant women is staring past Basil and me, out our window at the sky. Her lips are moving. It takes me a few seconds to realize that she’s talking to the god in the sky, something the people of Internment do only when they’re desperate.

“All this backward motion is starting to make me dizzy,” I say.

“It’s only because you’re worried,” Basil says. “You have great equilibrium. What was that spinning game you used to play when we were in first year?”

I let out a small laugh. “It wasn’t a game, really. I just liked to count how many times in a row I could spin without falling down.”

“Yes, but you would do it everywhere you went,” he says. “Up and down stairs, and in the aisles of the train, and all along the cobbles. You never seemed to get dizzy.”

“What an odd thing to remember,” I say, but it makes me smile. I would spin around the apartment from the time I awoke in the morning, jumping around my older brother and spinning after each step as we shared the mirror in the cramped water room. It drove him mad.

One morning as he was fixing his tie, he warned me that if I kept spinning, I’d be stolen by the wind and carried off into the sky. “We’ll never get you back then,” he said. The words were meant to frighten me, but instead they filled me with romantic notions that became a part of my game. I began to imagine being carried on the wind and landing on the ground, seeing for myself what was happening below our city. I could imagine such great and impossible things there. Things I didn’t have words for.

The madness of youth made me unafraid.

Our genders are determined for us before our parents have reached their turn in the queue. How much are we leaving to the god in the sky?

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WALK ME ALL THE way to the door,” I say as Basil and I stop in front of my apartment. His building is within reasonable walking distance, but I’d hate to be the reason he isn’t home when his little brother arrives from classes.

“Are you feeling better?” he says. “Your knees have stopped shaking.”

I nod, stare down at my hand when he drags his fingertip over my knuckles, our clear rings catching the light. We had to wear them on chains around our necks until last year, when they finally fit us. When we’re married, the jeweler will open them and they’ll be filled with our blood—mine in his ring, his in mine. I don’t think about what it will be like to marry him; according to my mother, I don’t think about the things I should be thinking about now that I’m two months past my sixteenth birthday. But I do look at my ring and wonder if the blood drawing will hurt. Alice says it doesn’t.

“I can be here in the morning if you’d like,” he says. “To walk you to the shuttle for the academy.”

I feel my cheeks swell with a smile and I can’t meet his eyes. “No,” I say. “It’s out of your way, and anyway Pen will be with me. I’ll meet you there.”

He touches the sharp crease of my uniform sleeve, runs his hand down the length of my arm. Something within me stirs. “All right,” he says. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

I watch him enter the stairwell, and as he goes, I notice the flushed skin at the back of his neck.

The apartment door opens, and my mother, wearing an apron stained with flour, ushers me inside. She was listening at the door.

“You should have invited him to dinner. There’s plenty,” she says. And, “You’re late. Did you miss the train?”

“There was a problem with it,” I say, shrugging my satchel over the back of a kitchen chair.

“A problem?” She sounds only mildly concerned as she opens the oven and considers the state of the casserole.

“It stopped, and then it had to go backward.”

She closes the oven door and looks at me, eyes narrowed in concern.

“It started going the right way again eventually,” I say, unknotting my red necktie. With the anxiety I feel today, the tie is starting to have the effect of a noose.

“But you’re all right?” she says. “Nobody was hurt?”