Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano

latch.
    “Morgan.” She blinks. “Is everything okay?”
    I try to see behind her, but whatever’s happening is in another room. I can smell something baking—apple pie, I think. “Are you having a party?” I ask.
    “We can’t get into the courthouse until the trial’s been had,” Alice says. “So Lex is having his group here this week. I’m sorry, love. I can’t let you in. I’ve been stuck in the kitchen myself. Come back later and we’ll have some desserts, if they haven’t eaten everything in the cold box.”
    She closes the door before I can get in so much as a word.
    The door opens again just as I reach the stairs. “Morgan,” Alice calls, and I spin around, hopeful. She hands me an envelope. “Would you mind dropping this in the message bin for me?”
    I don’t have to read the envelope to know what it says:
    Clock Tower
    Medicinal Affairs
    Every week she fills out a mandated report of the pharmaceuticals she and Lex pretend to be taking, and orders more to keep from arousing suspicions.
    I drop the envelope in the tall metal bin outside the apartment. In the morning a messenger on a bicycle will retrieve the envelopes and take them where they need to go. A messenger comes in the afternoon and evening too, but never this late.
    I’m too restless to go home; the thought of listening to clocks ticking until I fall asleep is unbearable. Pen won’t be able to leave; her parents don’t let her out after dark since the fire happened, even if it’s just upstairs to my apartment. She’s their only child and her mother is particularly protective. Though, as Pen says, her mother’s protectiveness is subject to her whims and sobriety.
    It isn’t late, and Basil will go for a walk with me. He might be a little unhappy to know I traveled to his section by myself, but the murderer, also suspected to be the arsonist, has been caught and there are still patrolmen at every turn.
    A patrolman opens the front door for me. “Be safe out there tonight,” he says. It’s a phrase that’s starting to lose meaning now.
    But somewhere out there, my father is saying the same thing, over and over. I wonder if he believes any of us are safe now.
    Outside, warm lantern light greets me. The sky is smeared with stars like the glitter over Daphne’s eyes in her class image. I don’t know why this makes me feel at peace. Like everything is connected in some way, that humans are just that, whether they’re on the ground or in the sky, and that we all belong to the same greater something.
    I gave a lot of thought to the gods when I thought my brother was dying. Pen says people get the most spiritual when things are at their worst. She was right about that. I wondered about the atmosphere that keeps us contained on Internment, and when my brother reached the edge, I wondered if the sky god felt betrayed. I wondered if the god of the earth had called out a temptation and set it on the wind. In the texts, we’re taught that it’s a hypnotic melody.
    If Lex were to die, I wondered what would become of our family then.
    I try not to dwell on it anymore. He lived. I don’t have the answers and it would be ungrateful of me to ask for them.
    It’s a beautiful night; a bit colder, as the short seasons tend to be, but I don’t mind. It’s a short walk to Basil’s section, and I’ll pass the lake on the way. There will be patrolmen, inevitably, but if I’m lucky, they won’t send me back home. Now that the murderer has been caught, things are starting to relax. Or so the king would like us to believe.
    There are fewer patrolmen than I expected. They stand guard outside apartment buildings and on certain corners, but then I see none for several blocks.
    The lake is serene.
    It casts a flawless reflection of the stars, as though it isn’t a lake at all, but a hole in the city itself. Lex and Alice used to take me here when I was small. They taught me how to swim in the shallows, and how to stand very still so that the