I can’t help the pitying expression that surely comes over me. She raises her chin in defiance. “I can’t tell you everything,” she says. “But you’ll hear about it, and when you do, I’ll already be gone.”
She doesn’t have anything to say to me after that. She gets up and busies herself trying to climb one of the trees.
“You like to climb?” I say.
“I’m not allowed,” she says. “I can get away with it only when Judas isn’t around.”
I can’t imagine why he would worry about Amy climbing trees. She appears to be quite good at it.
“When I was little,” I say, “I used to climb trees, too. It took me months before I could reach the top of the highest tree I could find here in the woods. And once I’d climbed it I realized there was nowhere else to go.”
Amy’s expression is thoughtful. “Did you ever think about what it would be like to climb in the opposite direction? Instead of going above Internment, to go beneath it?”
“Like a tunnel,” I say. “Yes, I think so, now that you mention it. I could burrow along the roots that go all the way to the bottom of the city, and then I’d be dangling high above the ground.”
“You’re kind of strange,” Amy says, swinging from a low branch.
“You are, too,” I say.
Before she hoists herself up to the next branch, she smiles at me. “Go away now,” she says. “I have important things to consider.”
I leave her to her ascent for the stars.
Somewhere around the block, I hear a sweeper. They always come sometime after dinner. Men driving machines propelled by giant round brushes, gathering all the debris from the street so that it can be recycled.
I pass my apartment, not ready to go home, and keep walking until I reach the border of my city: the train tracks.
And I’m not alone. There is a patrolman at the far end of the platform where the doors will open when the train arrives. And Pen, sitting on the steps of the platform in the light of a street lantern. Paper lanterns hang from the lantern’s post, decorated with slantscript requests.
Under Pen’s long red coat I can see the hems of her pinstripe pajamas and her wool slippers. She grins at me. “Have a fun tryst?” she asks.
“What are you doing out without your shoes?” I say. I think back on what she said about killing Judas if anything ever happened to me, and I wonder if she followed me.
She looks over her shoulder and nods at the silver branches, lanterns, and charms that decorate the train platform. “Thinking about this year’s request,” she says.
I sit beside her. “It’s strange to see Internment so afraid, especially this time of year,” I say.
“It’s important that the festival of stars goes on, no matter what happens,” Pen says. “The fear will pass eventually, as unhappy things always do.” She smiles at the sky, but offers a little nod toward me. “Do you remember how excited we used to get when we were little, and we would try to sneak away with whatever treats your mother was baking for the festival?”
“She knew what we were up to, and she let us get away with our pockets full of mini pastries anyway,” I say.
Pen sighs wistfully.
“I still do love the city this time of year,” I say. “I love the way it looks, the way it feels. I just don’t get excited about the requests anymore.”
“The requesting part is more fun when you’re a child anyway,” Pen says. “Children ask for simple things.”
When I was young I asked for a flutterling farm in a jar, and the next year, for my brother to be nicer to me. Lex struck the match for me both times, never knowing what I’d asked for, and together we watched our papers fly up into a sky of burning stars. My mother bought me the farm, but my brother’s patience with me grows thinner every year. From that festival on, I began to suspect that by being born I disturbed something in his fragile world. I gave him someone to worry about, and he would never forgive me for it.
“The god of the sky has never answered my most important requests,” I say. “Do you suppose it’s because I was never very good at slantscript?”
“No,” Pen says. “I’m rather good at slantscript, and my requests go unanswered lately, too.”
“Maybe this year I’ll offer up a request on Judas’s behalf.”
Pen shakes her head. “Don’t waste your request. There isn’t much that can be done for him now.”
“Do you think Daphne’s essay is right?” I ask.
“All that whatnot about the gods being a myth that we dreamed up to add meaning to our lives?” she says. “It goes against everything we’ve been taught. We’re living on a big rock floating in the sky. How many explanations can there be for that?”
“Maybe there’s a science to it,” I say.
“Medicine is a science,” she says. “Electricity, colors, mapmaking. Those are things that can be crafted. What kind of science could explain how we got here or even why we exist? Of course there are gods.”
“Daphne said the gods are a theory,” I say. “Theories can’t be proven.”
“Daphne is dead, may I remind you,” she says. “You need to get your head back up in the sky with the rest of us. You’re always so fixated on what’s beyond the city. Whatever there is, it isn’t for us. We’ve been interned.”
She’s impassioned by her faith, yet another reason Instructor Newlan adores her. Her next breath moves the hair from her brow. “We didn’t make ourselves,” she says. “We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that. We have too many faults.”
“I didn’t mean to get you so riled,” I say.