Lauren DeStefano - Perfect Ruin

“There were medic lights up ahead, but I didn’t get a good look.” I don’t want to worry her; she’s been doing so well lately. It has been a while since she’s gone through an entire prescription. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.

She stares at me a moment longer, face unreadable, then blinks to free herself from whatever it is she’s thinking. “Here,” she says, fitting me with oven mitts and thrusting a covered dish into my hands. “Take this upstairs to your brother and Alice.”

“Mom, if you keep feeding them, Alice is going to think you have something against her cooking.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “I just worry. She knows that.” She’s already opening the door for me; she can’t have me out of her kitchen fast enough. Usually she loves my company after class; she lets me nibble on mini fruitcakes and she asks about my lessons. She used to ask about Basil, but not so much since he and I started wearing our rings; she says it’s important for betrotheds to share secrets with each other.

“And tell your brother I expect that dish to come back empty,” she calls as I’m entering the stairwell.

She has unrealistic expectations. My brother can live on ideas and water for days. His apartment is directly above ours, and his office is over my bedroom. I hear him at all hours, but especially late at night, wearing down the floorboards, and I know he’s whispering his novels into the transcription machine. If I listen closely, I might hear his indistinguishable murmurs, Alice asking him to come to bed.

My brother is frequently irritated by my visits, especially if I’m under our mother’s orders to bring him food. He says he’s too old now to be treated like a child. But when he and Alice married, they applied for an apartment in this building, so he must not mind being near our parents too much.

I knock on the apartment door, and from the other side I hear Alice cursing. When she opens the door, her hair is falling out of a cloth tie, and water and flower petals are spreading out on the kitchen floor. She’s holding shards of the unfortunate vase in a dustpan. There are always flowers in her apartment, and Lex is always knocking them over.

Meekly, I hold up the covered dish. “From my mother,” I say.

“Lex!” she calls to the closed door at the end of the hallway. She steps aside to let me in. There’s no answer and she paces to the door and knocks angrily.

The windup metal vacuum discus is repeatedly knocking into the corner, trying to find its way out. The copper is scuffed, the gears whining for their efforts.

Alice goes back to picking up the shards. “You try getting him out of there,” she says. “Maybe he’ll come out for you. He’s holed up in there so often that I’m starting to forget I have a husband.”

As she gathers the shards, I watch the red blood in her band.

I set the dish on the stove before heading down the hallway—my mother’s instincts were right; the stove hasn’t been turned on.

I stand outside the door to my brother’s office, ear pressed to the door. I never know what he’s writing. He tells me that when I was a baby, he would read his earliest manuscripts to me—he would whisper them through the bars of my crib until I stopped crying in the bedroom we shared, and 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.”

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.