“I understand that you were young. Thirteen, was it?” Ms. Harlan says. “But do you remember anything at all about her or your brother being angry with the king? Questioning the rules that keep Internment functioning?”
“No.” Also a lie. I had never seen Lex so angry in my life.
“It’s all right. They aren’t going to be in any trouble,” Ms. Harlan says. “Questions are normal after procedures like that.”
“I really wouldn’t know,” I say.
Procedures. Like “incident,” this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things. There is the termination procedure. The dispatch procedure. The dusting procedure that reduces bodies to ash. The mercy procedure that dispatches the infants who are born unwell. Lex wrestled with these things constantly as a pharmacist. I would never hope to know the things he has seen.
Mercifully, the bell rings. I’m gone even before the tea has had a chance to cool.
Basil is waiting for me outside the headmaster’s office, and immediately I go under his waiting arm, and he steers me away from Ms. Harlan and her questions. It’s Friday, but the thought that I’ll have two days free of questioning does little to settle me.
“What did she say?” Basil asks.
“She knows,” I say softly. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something about my family.”
After class, Pen and I walk to Brass Beans Trinket Shop. It’s a little toy store modeled after a storybook castle, complete with a balcony atop a tower. We don’t actually have castles—they’re too large and impractical—but the notion of them has existed for as long as Internment has been above the ground, like a secret we were never meant to have. Or maybe the stories of castles on the ground are untrue, and we dreamed them up for ourselves. Even the princess has said she longs to live in one; our centuries-old clock tower is as close as she’ll come to that.
Pen and I fell in love with the trinket shop when we were toddlers and never quite outgrew it. We have an annual tradition of picking out our festival of stars gifts here and exchanging them early.
Though the people of Internment don’t exchange gifts for birthdays, Pen’s and my festival gifts also double as late birthday presents, because it marks the anniversary of our friendship. Her birthday is only a handful of days after mine; in fact, that’s how our mothers met and how we came to be friends. She was part of an October batch of due dates, while I was to be part of a November group, right along with Basil. But in late October, my mother was rushed to a hospital room with early labor pains, just as Pen’s mother was being dismissed from it with false labor. We were both eventually born that week—I too eager, and Pen too hesitant.
“Do you suppose we’ll come here even when we’re in dodder housing?” I ask.
“I intend to die young,” Pen says, tapping at each in a row of tiny wooden princes and princesses. “Tragically, I hope. You’re immortalized if that’s how you go.”
“Be serious,” I say.
“This is no place for that,” she says. She hoists a small metal insect in the palm of her hand. She squints at its tail, reading the tiny label affixed to it. It’s modeled after a quartet flutterling, if the four wings and long tail are any indication. I see them by the water, mostly.
Pen tugs at a tiny thread on its back, and with a mechanical whine it takes flight, spiraling busily around our heads. She squeaks with delight.
She intends to die young, she says. I think she’d make a brilliant old woman, though, surrounded by toys and tonics, saying crude things and flinging water balls at the young lovers holding hands.
The quartet flutterling lands on her shoulder. “I want this,” she says. “Think how much more fun it’ll be when we’re drunk off tonic.” It has happened only a handful of times, and mostly in the year following Lex’s incident. Pen would bring a bottle of her mother’s spirits to our cavern and tell me it would take the sting out. For a couple of hours it did, I suppose, but my life was still waiting for me in the morning, and I’d have to face it with a headache.
“I want you to have a gift you can enjoy while you’re sober,” I say.
She hugs the flutterling protectively to her shoulder. “I will. Do you see anything you’d like?”
I stare at a row of bound journals. Like all other books on Internment, the blank pages in those journals are recycled. They’ll be mostly white, but there will be shadowy flecks, bits of someone else’s handwriting, fragments of old images. Pure white pages are expensive and rare; my brother has the scrolls for his transcriber only because they’re considered necessary for the blind, and the words are printed with indents so he can feel them, which is why the paper must be unblemished.
I saw him rip apart a manuscript in a fit of frustration one afternoon, and I wanted to scream.
“Not yet,” I say.
“We could try upstairs,” Pen says, petting her new toy. “Do you need to get something for Lex?”
“No,” I say. “He says the best gift I can give him any year is peace and quiet. He says I snore and it disturbs his writing.”
“You don’t snore,” Pen assures. “He just loves to tease you.”
“You’re lucky you’re an only child,” I say.
We move up the creaky wooden steps, through a tunneling stairwell that’s lit by flame lanterns on the wall.
For no logical reason at all, I think of Judas, all angles in the moonlight, and of Basil, who kissed me when I told him I feared going crazy. I’m only just beginning to feel for him the way that Alice feels for Lex, the way my mother feels for my father. It’s an injustice that Judas’s betrothed is dead at any age, but especially at this one.
Did they ever kiss? Were they in love, or will Judas spend the rest of his life never getting to know what that feels like?