But I’m 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. It’s 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 I’m safe. The murdered girl didn’t have a betrothed who protected her like Basil protects me. She didn’t have a brother upstairs and a mother in the next room and a father on the patrol force. She didn’t keep to her routine. She wasn’t like me. She couldn’t 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 doesn’t show his face, but he’s the maestro in an orchestra of elements. His winds cause the city to shake, the edges to crumble away. We’ve already been banished from the ground, and now the sky has turned on us. There’s nowhere left to go.
My father’s voice is what wakes me. He has turned on my bedside lamp, and its glow casts hard shadows on his face. “Morgan?” he whispers. He’s still in uniform; he must have just gotten in.
I push myself upright. “What’s 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 you’ve been too sheltered.”
“Sheltered?” I say. “From what? Things like this don’t usually happen.”
“You’re 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. It’s going to be an honest account. I know you’ve read about other incidents in your textbooks, but this will be more upsetting. I think you should come watch, but I’m leaving it up to you.”
I don’t 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 it’s very taxing keeping order, making sure we’re 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 girl’s parents wait in the queue to have her? Whose birth will be granted now that she’s 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.
“Won’t she want to see?” I ask. The screens are turned on so rarely.
“No,” he says, opening the door for me. “She won’t.”
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 woman’s arms, there are no children. Everyone talks in hushed tones, finding friends and relatives in the thin crowd. It’s 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 we’ll ask of the god in the sky.
I wonder what the murdered girl’s 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 wasn’t anyone in my life. It wasn’t Pen or Alice or my mother.
Across the room, my father has found Alice. Lex isn’t with her. I understand; he has known enough awful things for a lifetime. I still think of how he used to be, attentive and intense, his face magnified by the beaker he’d hold up to the light. He used to be one of the top pharmacy students, honored with tasks most others can’t take on until graduation. But after his incident, he burned all of his notes and abandoned the trade entirely. He earns money by sewing quilts now—his work is erratic but deft, and the quilts always fetch a higher price than the others, his skill and precision cause for envy among the other makers.
Pen presses close to me and says, “Look.”
A patrolman is jostling the screen, twisting its knobs and trying to make the static subside. The screen is more than a hundred years old, its bronze facing chipped down to oblivion; the wires are frayed, and a little burst of sparks makes someone in the crowd gasp.
But the image comes through, distorted at first, King Furlow trembling, warped, and green, before the patrolman hits the screen, knocking the image into reasonable clarity in time for us to see the king remove his red bowler hat and hold it to his pudgy stomach.
King Furlow’s lineage traces back to the dawn of Internment itself. His oldest ancestor is in the history book as the only man chosen to hear from the god in the sky. No one knows for certain how the god in the sky speaks with the king, but it’s Internment’s longest standing tradition, passed down from generation to royal generation. I’ve never envied him; it’s surely a terrible burden to be the voice of an entire city.
The rest of us speak to the god in the sky when we’re frightened or grateful, and we don’t expect to be answered.
Standing at either side of the king are his children: Princess Celeste, and her older brother, Prince Azure, both of whom may be trying to appear somber but instead seem bored. Though the screen is sepia and the image a bit out of focus, they both look like their mother, and their mother’s mother, and so on as far as records trace. Blond hair and clear sparkling eyes, a bit of plumpness to the face. They’re sixteen and seventeen, making them closer in age than any other siblings on Internment. The king’s children are traditionally born outside the queue. When the queen announces her pregnancies, she and the king go through the list of hopeful parents in the queue, and they hand-select the applicants they see fit to bear their children’s betrotheds. Of course the hopeful parents can refuse, but no one in Internment’s history has ever passed up the chance to have a child without the long wait.
“At four-oh-five this evening,” the king begins, “the coroner made his official statement that the death of a sixteen-year-old young lady was the result of murder. I warn those of you watching at home that many of the details about to be shared are graphic, and young children should not be present.”
The other tenants are huddling together. Pen and I have our arms around each other; my view of the screen is partially obstructed by the people ahead of me, but I don’t crane my neck for a better look.
Across the room, Alice chews her thumbnail and nods at something that my father has just said to her.
There’s an assortment of gasps and “Oh no” and mutterings as the murdered girl’s class image is shown. She’s got a coy smile and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. My first thought is that she’s radiant. Through the sepia, I can