Lauren DeStefano - Perfect Ruin

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.”

“Maybe Morgan and I should clean her up first,” Pen says. I don’t realize she’s even descended the ladder until she’s beside me. She nods to the stain that’s formed on the skirt of Amy’s uniform.

Judas looks away, cheeks flushed. “I’ll go find something else for her to wear.”

“A bucket of water and some cloths would be ideal, too,” Pen says. “And don’t let anyone come in here until we’re done. The poor girl’s having a bad enough day as it is without becoming a scene.”

I stroke Amy’s forehead, which is flushed and warm. She leans into my touch, helpless and utterly at my mercy. I’m ashamed of myself for having envied her, for thinking she was able to brave the edge without consequence.

“Oh, stop looking so serious,” Pen says. “Really, I’ve cleaned my share of messes, and I’ve seen some worse things, let me tell you.”

She’s trying to make me feel better, and I’m grateful. It makes the task more bearable.

By the time we’ve finished dabbing Amy with warm soapy cloths and gotten her into an oversize shirt, she’s beginning to stir. She mumbles something about the smell of burning hair.

“There are no fires,” I assure her.

She opens her eyes, as vacant as a doll’s, and stares at me. “You’re not her,” she says. Then she’s gone again.

“You stay with her,” Pen says, gathering the wadded uniform. “I’ll go wash these.”

I’m not sure what else to do, so I hold Amy’s head in my lap and run my fingers through her hair. I can’t be certain where this delirium has taken her, but maybe she can sense that someone is caring for her, the way that I could after I’d been poisoned.

“Soon,” I tell her, “after you’ve awoken, this bird will fly us away. The people of the ground will throw us a party bigger than Internment itself. Everyone will love us. It’s going to be wonderful.”

A strange thing, words. Once they’re said, it’s hard to imagine they’re untrue.

The bird is moving unsteadily through the dirt. Judas argued with the professor that Amy needed to recover, and the professor told him that his grandchildren weren’t made of glass, and anyway we didn’t have the time to waste. He added, “Coddling the living sister won’t bring back the dead sister,” which I thought was especially harsh.

Now Judas and I are standing in the doorway to Amy’s bunk room. It’s been more than an hour since her episode, and Judas looks as exhausted as if he’d been the one experiencing it.

“Poor kid,” he says. “All she’s got now is me.”

“What about her parents?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “They would have had her and Daphne both declared irrational if they’d known about the bird. They wanted perfect daughters and nothing to do with scandal.”

It’s happened before that parents have had their children declared irrational. The sentence can usually be dropped after the child has agreed to give up the rebellious behavior, such as falling in love with someone else’s betrothed or admitting attraction to the same sex. I’ve heard of it happening, but I still have trouble believing it’s done.

“I can’t imagine my parents ever declaring me irrational,” I say. “Even after Lex jumped, they would never have done that to either of us.”

“Lucky you, then,” Judas says.

He sees the hurt in my eyes and adds, “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

Now, after more than an hour of still sleep, Amy’s limbs begin to move under the blanket. When she opens her eyes, they’re glassy and gray.

“Hey,” Judas says, back to her side in an instant. “Hey, you. Welcome back.”

She rolls her head to the side, realizes that I’m watching her, and groans with embarrassment.

“The turbulence got you,” Judas says. “We said it might. Remember that?”

His soothing tone is for her, though he seems to be more in need of comforting than she does. She’s the only thing like family he has left.

“I was listening for Daphne,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “Listening for her ghost. But they cut her throat. They took her voice away.”

Her eyes fill with tears, and Judas is quick to dab at them with his sleeve. “No they haven’t,” he says. “I hear her all the time.”

“You do?” she says.

“Of course I do, silly girl. She’s in this bird. She’s holding all of the bolts in place and she’s begging for us to sail across the sky.”

Amy squeezes her eyes shut, closing herself away from us living things.

“Those are only echoes,” she says. “People die, and everything they’ve ever said just echoes around and around. There’s nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.”

I fear she’s right.

… or a not-so-glorious dream …

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

IPACE ABOUT THE BIRD FOR A LONG WHILE, pressing my hands to the wall when it lurches. I’ve seen what the edge did to my brother, and I’ve just seen what it did to a little girl. Whatever it is that keeps us here, whether it’s a god or a ghost or something atmospheric, it doesn’t discriminate. What will it do to a metal bird that tries to leave? Will the bolts come loose? Will the floors splinter while the walls crumple in on us?

“How certain are you that we won’t die?” I ask.

Professor Leander is inspecting the window at his control panel; there’s nothing to see but dirt on the other side. “Remarkable stuff, this sort of glass. Nearly unbreakable. Several decades ago, long before our times, they tried to build a dome around this city. Thought it would discourage the jumpers. And this beautiful glass was made to withstand the wind pressure. To test it, pieces were flung from the edge, and they shot back into the city, unscratched.”

I heard about this, not in my history book, but from my father when I asked why more wasn’t being done to deter jumpers.