Lauren DeStefano - Perfect Ruin

“But despite all the clever engineering of the dome and this glass, the sun’s glare through it would have caused us to burst into flame.”

“How did you come across it?” I ask. “The glass.”

“It was buried by my great-grandfather, one of the dome’s engineers. He willed the map of the burial site to my father, and my father to me. Now, after generations, it’s finally time to put it to use. So I can’t assure you, child, that we won’t die, but I can assure you that this bird has been building for longer than you or I have been alive. The time has come and there’s to be no backing down.”

This does little to reassure me. I feel that familiar wave of claustrophobia coming up in my stomach, and I force it down.

“When?” I ask.

“Maybe this evening,” he says. “Or tomorrow. We’ve already moved several hundred paces from the flower shop. I expect that soon we’ll have reached the swallows.”

My heart is in my ears. “The swallows?” I say. “Why would we want to be there?”

“The pressure of the sinking dirt will be enough force to get us to the bottom of the city. We’ll be thrust into the sky. Think of it as a birth.”

“What if we’re crushed?” I gasp. “What if we cause a gap in the bottom of the city and all the dirt leaks out to the sky, and—”

The professor is chuckling. “What if we stay here?” he says. I assume he’s being rhetorical, but he spins his chair around to face me and waits for an answer.

“We’d run out of food,” I say, feeling as scrutinized as when I’m caught daydreaming during one of Instructor Newlan’s lessons. “And now that we’ve moved, we would have difficulty tapping another water supply.”

“And without food and water, we would …” He holds his arm out toward me, a line on a page waiting for a sentence.

“Die,” I say.

“We would die,” he agrees, turning back to his controls. “That is a fact. So we can face a certain death, or I can try to make this girl fly.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that.

“How is my granddaughter?” he asks. “I haven’t had time to check in on her. I hear she had a fit.”

“She’s resting,” I say. “But she’s better. She was talking for a bit earlier.”

He nods. “My granddaughters are always strong,” he says, and then he begins muttering to his controls. I take that as my cue to leave.

The lantern casts a dim glow on the metal hallway; there are windows in the ceiling, but they’re dark because of the earth on the other side of them. This tiny upper platform has been deemed the Nucleus: bird’s head, Judas told me. I like it here. The voices of the others are small and tinny, and it seems like a great place to think, if only my thoughts didn’t all turn a dark corner right now.

I find Pen and Basil in the kitchen, huddled over a rumpled piece of paper.

Basil looks up, forehead creasing when he sees my troubled face. “Amy’s not doing any better?”

“It isn’t that,” I say, shaking my head. I don’t want to tell him about my fear of being crushed. “Never mind. It’s been a long day. What are you doing?”

“Mapmaking,” Pen says. “We’re trying to guess where the bird is now. If we’re going around the lake and not under it, of course, then we’ve probably passed under our apartments by now.”

She’s working with a pen stone that’s been crudely sharpened, and her hands are ashy. Normally the pen stone would be cut and rolled into a wooden pencil, but down here she’s had to make due with raw materials. It’s easy enough to find pen stone in the dirt. The old piece of paper, she must have found lying around.

Basil pulls out a chair for me and I sit between them. Even though it’s a rough sketch, Pen has a talented hand. The lines are clean and carefully scaled, and the shaded squares of buildings are evenly spaced apart. For the lake, she even doodled some trout with X s for eyes.

“So we started here,” she says, tracing her finger around the square labeled flower shop . “And if we’ve been moving toward the swallows, that’s west, which puts us about here, or maybe not quite that far yet.” She points to the academy. The map doesn’t say anything for the students inside it, learning in our absence.

“You knew about the swallows?” I say.

“I asked what his plan was,” she answers. “I like to know where I am and where I’m going at all times.”

“Does anyone else know you’ve been working on this?” I say. “It would be a big help to the professor, I’m sure.”

She smiles at the page. “You think?”

“It’s quite good,” Basil agrees.

She wrinkles her nose. “I just wish I had some proper colors,” she says. “Do you think they have decent coloring materials on the ground? They must, right?”

“Of course,” I say. “The people who run the scopes have reported that the buildings down there are all sorts of colors. They must like to decorate the way that we do.”

Pen seems satisfied with this. She blows on the tip of her pen stone and draws the princess falling from the clock tower.

Tentatively, I peer into my brother’s bunk room.

Alice has gone to the helm to try to help with the efforts, and Lex is sitting alone on the mattress, his fingers tracing the raised letters on a roll of paper from his transcriber.

His lips stop moving when he hears me.

“Are you through being angry with me?” I ask.

“Are you through making foolish decisions that could get you killed?” he says.

“We’re in a metal bird that’s set to be hurtling toward the ground soon.” There’s a laugh in my voice. “What could be more foolish than that?”

He makes a small tear in the page to mark his place, and then he rolls the paper and sets it down.

“I’m sorry if I scared you when I snuck off, Lex, truly.”

He grunts, but the raised corner of his mouth is more of a smile than he gives me on good days.

“I’ve brought you something,” I say. I sit next to him and begin tying the scrap of white cloth around his wrist. “I’m wearing one, too,” I say as I finish the knot.

He runs his fingers over the frayed edges of the fabric. “For Mom and Dad, then,” he says.

Traditionally, family members and exceptionally close friends would cut a strip of fabric from the deceased’s clothing and wear it in remembrance. “I know we’re supposed to make these after the ashes have been thrown to the tributary,” I say, “but we aren’t going to have that.”

“What did you use?” Lex asks.

“The shirtsleeve from my uniform.” Another piece of my life I’m grieving.

Lex is still for a while, and I begin to wonder if I’ve done the wrong thing in tying the fabric around his wrist. Maybe I’ve forced my grief on him, and he doesn’t want to share it with me. He does seem adamant about moving on.

But then he puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes me close.

Neither of us have words for this loss. We expected to say good-bye to our parents the way our world dictates, years from now when we were prepared. But our world turned out not to be what was promised to us. There will be no ashes thrown to the tributary. There will be no festival of stars with our paper desires burning in the sky.

Our parents are gone now. Our home, where we teased each other and squabbled as we grew, is out of reach. It is only Lex and me, escaping the city that wants us dead.

I stare at the fabric that’s around my wrist. “I never properly thanked you for saving me after I was poisoned.”

“No thanks necessary,” he says. “Just repay me by staying alive, if it isn’t too much to ask.”

I’m about to tell him that he has a deal, but I don’t get the chance. The bird jolts sharply in one direction, then the other, and I careen into the wall with Lex still holding on to my shoulder. The lantern is swinging dangerously overhead. The next jolt extinguishes it.