She’s gone for the rest of the period.
At lunch, the cafeteria is subdued. Basil rubs my arm and tells me I should try to eat.
“Pen’s still gone,” I say, twisting my fork. “Could they still be speaking to her?”
“They spoke to me this morning,” Thomas says. “It’s nothing horribly elaborate. They just want to make sure we haven’t gone mad. You haven’t gone mad, have you?”
The sharpness in his eyes frightens me. He realizes this and he softens. “It’s not anything to be concerned about,” he says.
Somehow, this doesn’t feel true. The king is looking for something by sending his specialists out here.
I don’t see Pen again until our last class of the day, which is more of Instructor Newlan’s passion for our little world. It’s torturous not being able to ask her about where she’s been, but she seems intact. She’s taking notes, at least.
Instructor Newlan is talking about section nine’s cow pastures. Or maybe it’s section seven. I can’t concentrate, though I try. I’ve never noticed how wedged together we are, each section like a thin slice of a pie in the window of the bakery. Below us, is the ground just a larger version of what we have up here? Is there a bigger train that goes in a bigger circle? Do the people on the ground also fear stepping over their edge? What if there’s a bigger ground below them? What if everything is floating in the sky?
Maybe I am going mad. Maybe I’m turning into my brother, so hypnotized by the edge that I can’t stop myself from scaling the fence, so frenzied by the idea of the ground that I forget where I belong.
Another student returns from the headmaster’s office, and this time nobody else raises their head to listen for their name. Everyone in this room but me has already been called.
“Hello, Morgan,” the specialist says. She’s tall and wiry and dressed all in gray. “My name is Ms. Harlan. May I call you Morgan?”
Ms., not Mrs. For a woman to be unmarried at her age, it can mean only that her betrothed is no longer living.
“Yes,” I say, mindful of sitting very straight. I fold my hands in my lap, which is something my mother taught me when I was a fidgety child. I’ve always fidgeted too much. I’ve always thought too much. I’m very like my brother that way.
“As you know, we’ve had a couple of tragedies. Did you know Miss Leander?”
“No,” I say. “But I was sorry to hear about what happened.”
I’ve never been in this room. I’ve seen the door in the headmaster’s office and always assumed it was a closet. It’s not much bigger than one; there are only two chairs to fill the space, and the persistent clicking of the specialist’s pen, which ceases only long enough for her to scrawl the odd note.
“It was an especially violent crime,” the specialist says. “It must have scared you to know something like this could happen in your lifetime.”
“Yes,” I say, grossly understating it.
“It must make you feel that Internment is unsafe,” she says.
“Internment is my home,” I say. “I’ve always felt safe here.”
She smiles, but there’s something unsettling about it. She leans forward, resting her arms on her crossed knees. “Morgan, I’d much like to be honest with you. You seem like a bright young lady. May I be honest?”
Uncertainly, I nod.
“I’ve read your academy file, and it shows that three years ago you suffered a pretty traumatic incident.”
My blood goes cold. I don’t like where this is heading. “I didn’t,” I say. “It was my older brother.”
“But surely that was traumatic for you also,” the specialist says. “To have someone close to you fall victim to the edge’s allure.”
“He couldn’t help it,” I say, repeating what I’ve been taught, what every student is taught in their first year of academy and reminded of every year after that. “We have the free will to stay on this side of the train tracks. If we cross over to the other side, we get too close to the edge, and it mystifies us. We see how infinite the sky is and we lose our senses. Even the people we love most disappear from our thoughts in that moment.” I am quoting a textbook exactly.
The specialist takes notes. I clench my interlocked fingers in an effort to keep still.
“What about your parents?” she asks.
“My parents?”
“Your father is a patrolman—please congratulate him for me, that’s quite an honor—and your mother works in a recycling plant in section fourteen. Has either of them ever discussed the edge with you?”
I think of my father waking me for the broadcast, the darkness of my room doing little to conceal the sadness in his eyes when he told me that life could be awful sometimes. “Only to warn me to stay away,” I say.
“Would you say they’re protective of you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And your brother, Alexander, does he talk about his experience with the edge of Internment?”
I’m starting to feel ill. This conversation has moved far from Daphne Leander. Were the others questioned so personally?
And then I make the connection. Most of the others don’t know someone who tried to jump over the edge. Daphne Leander knew someone, though. And now she’s dead.
“He doesn’t talk to me about it,” I say. “He goes to his support group every week. What happens behind the closed door is confidential.”