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 aloneshe didnt know about the kings order.
What order? Alice asks, pouring him a glass of water from the tap. He shakes his head, doesnt accept.
What is it, Dad? Lex says. Youre 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.
3
Up until someone I loved approached the edge, I had no reason to question the hand of any god, much less my own gods 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 roomHow could I not question this god that watches over us? Maybe what frightens us about the edge isnt 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. Its a dusty, cobwebbed word; there hasnt been cause to use it on Internment in my lifetime. Its something Ive only read about in novels. Its 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 thats what I imagine its like; nobody knows for sure what the ground is like. Not even King Furlow.
We have engineers who study the ground from afar and educate themselves on ways to further our own technology. Internment has evolved drastically in the last several hundred years; weve learned to set underground wires and indoor plumbing for our sinks and water rooms. The citys electricity is generated by the glasslands, which is a series of panels and globes that gather the suns energy and store it so that it can be converted into electricity. But there are ground technologies we dont use because the king believes they would complicate our world, make it too dangerous. The king says that the ground makes people greedy and wasteful, while the people of Internment are resourceful and humble.
I think about the murdered girl. I wonder about her final moments. Im horrible and selfishI must bebecause all my thoughts lead to the idea that she could have been me instead.
My mothers dinner sits untouched on her plate. Shes weaving the fork between her fingers and staring out the window across the apartment. The sun has gone away and the train speeds past, rattling our walls for the second time since weve heard the news. The girls body has been cleaned from the track and the train is back in service. Things must go on. There would be more cause to worry if they didnt.
Its good that Basil walked you all the way home, she says. Maybe he should from now on.
Will there be academy tomorrow? I ask.
Im sure there will, she says, not moving her eyes from the window. The view is exactly the same as it has always beenother apartments and windows full of light. But something has changed; theres something dangerous out there, and to look now, wed never be able to find it.
There was a murder when my parents were young. Two men had been fighting, and somehow theyd reached the swallows, and one pushed the other in. The fence surrounding the swallows has since been rebuilt to ensure such a thing can never happen again.
Hundreds of years ago, the swallows were a farmland, but something changed. There have been theories about atmospheric pressure, or else the god in the sky becoming angry. The dirt began shifting, and over the decades, it began to churn into itself, swallowing the animals and the crops and anything else that touched it. Ive seen slide images of ita whirling darkness always in motion.
The murderer had been driven mad by a tainted elixir that should have been discarded by the pharmacists. He was feverish and deranged when they found him, and the king had no choice but to have him dispatched.
I clear the dishes, scraping the uneaten food into the compost tube, where its immediately sucked away to the processing chamber in the basement. I try to keep my mind busy with homework, and my mother doesnt offer to double-check my answers. Shes curled in the armchair, touching the fringe of Lexs blanket thats wrapped around her thin shoulders. I hate when she gets this way, so uncertain.
I go to bed two hours early, and I listen to Lex pacing upstairs. When I stand on the bed and knock on the ceiling three times, theres a pause and then he knocks three times with his foot. I think his muffled voice is saying, Go to sleep.
When we were children, we shared a two-tiered bed, and he slept on the top tier. His lantern would burn late into the night, and sometimes I would lie awake watching his shadows move across the ceiling as he wrote. I would knock on the underside of the bed, and the only reply I ever got was, Go to sleep.
But Im too restless, and I wander to my bedroom window and thrust it open. If I stick my head out far enough, I can see a bit of the glasslands to the left. Its viewable from most everywhere because it sits at the heart of the city. Only the sun engineers are permitted to enter the buzzing fence that surrounds it. From afar, though, it looks like a miniature city made of glass. When I was little, I used to imagine that people lived there. Sometimes I still do. A city within a city. What could be safer than that?
I tell myself that Im safe. The murdered girl didnt have a betrothed who protected her like Basil protects me. She didnt have a brother upstairs and a mother in the next room and a father on the patrol force. She didnt keep to her routine. She wasnt like me. She couldnt have been.
I dream of an angry god in the sky, filling the atmosphere with lightning and inky swirls of wind. He has come alive from my textbook; he doesnt show his face, but hes the maestro in an orchestra of elements. His winds cause the city to shake, the edges to crumble away. Weve already been banished from the ground, and now the sky has turned on us. Theres nowhere left to go.
My fathers voice is what wakes me. He has turned on my bedside lamp, and its glow casts hard shadows on his face. Morgan? he whispers. Hes still in uniform; he must have just gotten in.
I push myself upright. Whats wrong? I say, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes. The nightmare is already dissolving as I remember the dark circumstances of the day.
Morgan, he says, sitting on the edge of my bed. I worry sometimes that youve been too sheltered.
Sheltered? I say. From what? Things like this dont usually happen.
Youre getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is.
What is it? I say.
Unpredictable. Mostly good, but awful sometimes. The screens are going to turn on in a few minutes, and King Furlow is going to talk about the incident on the train tracks. Its going to be an honest account. I know youve read about other incidents in your textbooks, but this will be more upsetting. I think you should come watch, but Im leaving it up to you.
I dont even have to deliberate. I want to go, I say, throwing back the covers, reaching for my robe hanging over the bedpost.
My father ruffles my hair as he stands. I worry for him; he rarely talks about his work as a patrolman, but I imagine its very taxing keeping order, making sure were all safe, all the while knowing these are things that cannot truly be controlled. He must take the murdered girl as a personal failure; somewhere on Internment tonight, there are parents without their daughter. How long did the murdered girls parents wait in the queue to have her? Whose birth will be granted now that shes dead? When a person dies alone before his or her dispatch date, the decision makers usually allow two children to be born so they can be betrothed.
Careful not to wake your mother, my father says as we move through the common room and kitchen.
Wont she want to see? I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.
No, he says, opening the door for me. She wont.
Downstairs, the broadcast room is filling with weary-eyed tenants, many in slippers and robes, some in patrolmen uniforms. Aside from a sleeping toddler in a womans arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. Its nearly midnight, and most of the city would be asleep by now, except for the patrolmen, and the ones like my brother who never sleep at all.
Careful not to wake your mother, my father says as we move through the common room and kitchen.
Wont she want to see? I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.
No, he says, opening the door for me. She wont.
Downstairs, the broadcast room is filling with weary-eyed tenants, many in slippers and robes, some in patrolmen uniforms. Aside from a sleeping toddler in a womans arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. Its nearly midnight, and most of the city would be asleep by now, except for the patrolmen, and the ones like my brother who never sleep at all.
The lobby has already been decorated to signify the start of the festival of stars. Paper lanterns hang from the ceiling on strings, lit by small electric bulbs and covered in slantscript to symbolize the requests well ask of the god in the sky.
I wonder what the murdered girls request would have been.
I force the thought away and look for Lex and Alice, but instead Pen and I find each other. She breaks away from her parents to run to me and grab my hands. Can you believe it? she says, her green eyes wide with excitement and fright. Does your father know who it was?
I probably know as much about it as you, 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 wasnt anyone in my life. It wasnt Pen or Alice or my mother.