Книга - Burning Kingdoms

Burning Kingdoms
Lauren DeStefano


Danger descends in the second book of The Internment Chronicles, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy.After escaping the city of Internment, Morgan and her fellow fugitives land on the ground to finally learn about the world beneath their floating island home.The ground is a strange place where water falls from the sky as snow, and people watch moving pictures and visit speakeasies. A place where families can have as many children as they want, bury their dead in vast gardens of bodies, and where Internment is the feature of an amusement park.It is also a land at war.Everyone who fled Internment had their own reasons to escape their corrupt haven, but now they’re caught under the watchful eye of another ruler who wants to dominate his world. They may have made it to the ground, but have they dragged Internment with them?























Copyright


HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (falling girl); Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (ferris wheel, landscape).

Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007541232

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007541249

Version: 2014-12-29




Dedication


For

Mina

Baptista.

Here’s to

the next

twenty-seven

birthdays.


Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan


Contents

Cover (#ubce7e0ba-3419-5a19-a169-a923bef2347a)

Title Page (#u86d343c3-8fc1-546d-ba29-3a47b097c686)

Copyright (#uc1a570f3-9d21-56ad-bf5a-c93ba1955d4b)

Dedication (#uc87bea5e-fcd5-576b-9eba-3bb4a5fd2ad0)

Epigraph (#u1dc29e3a-616d-5ff1-a82d-7d0c697ed0c0)

Chapter 1 (#u133472a0-76f1-51cc-94f7-75dac45179fe)

Chapter 2 (#ub3fb8b3a-5972-5757-a8a2-c49776f3bdc2)

Chapter 3 (#u33a722e2-773e-50d8-a2fb-db8052499bf3)

Chapter 4 (#udb2b1745-e3f7-57c6-b135-5b02f8801a99)

Chapter 5 (#uc4354a87-08c1-5745-9306-f095d078ccb0)

Chapter 6 (#u0432b4d3-9e1a-544d-9687-996a53195652)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Lauren Destefano (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1


When the world was formed, the people soon followed. It has been a balancing act of life and death from that day on. It is not the place of any man to question it.

—The Text of All Things, Chapter 1

Snow. That’s the word the people of the ground have for this wonder.

“Goddamn snow,” our driver mumbles for the second time, as mechanical arms sweep the dusting from the window.

It’s like a stab to the heart hearing a god referred to so unkindly. I wonder which god he means. I’d think the god of the ground would be less forgiving than the one in the sky. Vengeful. It would make sense, the god of the ground having interned us to the sky for being too selfish.

But I don’t ask. I haven’t spoken a word since I told Pen that it would be all right.

All the whiteness is blinding, and despite the blustery cold, the inside of this vehicle is so hot that beads of sweat are forming at the back of my neck. There’s a metallic taste to this air.

I have a thought that my parents will be worried, before I remember that they’re gone. Not at home. They’re colors in the tributary now, a place that can’t be seen by the living.

I squeeze Basil’s hand. And on the other side of me, Princess Celeste has her hands to the glass as she stares through the window. A city has begun to materialize through the snow. It’s all boxy shadows at first, and then ribbons of color shoot through the sky, squares of light wink from the buildings.

My brother is in one of the surrounding vehicles. When we left the metal bird that brought us down from Internment, the men in heavy black coats split us up as they saw fit. They pushed us into the seats. They said they’d take us somewhere warm and safe. They don’t seem to realize that we were banished from this place, hundreds of years ago.

The driver raises his eyes to us in the mirror. “It was swell luck that you came down before the blizzard.”

I don’t know what that means. “Blizzard” is a new word, and it bounces on my tongue, begging to be said.

Basil is looking up into the sky as though to chart a way back home, but the whiteness that falls from the clouds is his only answer. Now would be an apt time for him to regret following me here—regret our betrothal. Maybe the decision makers were wrong to bond us to each other for the rest of our lives; we’ve always cared for each other, but he’s logical while I’m a dreamer. He’s patient while I’m careless. And now he’ll never see his parents or his little brother again because of me.

I want to say his name so that he’ll look at me, but I’m afraid of what speaking might do to this odd balance between the driver and the three of us.

Our driver’s coat appears to be some kind of uniform. He’s a patrolman perhaps—or whatever they have on the ground. Maybe they don’t keep order down here at all.

Princess Celeste elbows me. And now that she has my attention, she nods to her window. Outside, a large machine is set some distance from the buildings. It’s like a giant metal bug, its legs suspended in the air. Each leg is painted a different color, and at the tips are what appear to be clouds.

I can’t tell if the princess is attempting to smile. Her eyes still have their sparkle, but she is, for once, subdued.

Our vehicle rolls to a stop. I look out the window on Basil’s side and I see the other vehicles stopping alongside us. I want to run out and join my brother and Alice, and Pen, who was fighting tears the last time I saw her.

But I don’t move. Basil puts his other hand on my arm as though to protect me.

The driver steps out into the snow, and the cold air cuts right through my skin before he closes the door again.

The princess speaks first. “This is it? There isn’t a soul in sight out there. This is what we’ve been banished from?”

Doors open in the other vehicles. I see Alice first. A man is trying to escort her toward the building where we’ve parked, but she dodges him and reaches into the car to help Lex.

The sight of my brother, pale as the snow, causes me to abandon reason. I open the door.

“Wait,” Basil says.

“I have to let him know I’m okay,” I say.

Basil understands. He climbs out first and keeps hold of my hand. “Lex,” I call.

My brother’s head immediately rises from its weary drooping. “Morgan?” His voice is panicked and relieved. “Sister?”

“I’m here,” I say. “I’m right here.” The words are heavy on my tongue. This cold is freezing me to the bone. I try to reach for my brother, but one of the uniformed men is steering Basil and me toward that building. Even before the door has opened, I can smell the strange and unfamiliar foods cooking inside.

I bite my lip and take one last look over my shoulder before I’m guided inside. I can see Lex and Alice, and behind them, just a flicker of Pen’s blond curls for an instant, a flash, a thought I can’t catch.

I hold on to Basil’s hand as though my life depends on it. It might.

They bring us to a row of metal chairs, and we’re each given tea.

It looks strange in its cup. Weak. They probably have different herbs on the ground. A different ecosystem, too.

I don’t drink the tea. I don’t trust it. But I still appreciate its warmth against my palms. Though we’ve come in from the snow, we’re all shivering. What a sight we must be for these uniformed men: people who fell from the sky in a metal bird, sitting in a row, not a word uttered among the lot of us.

The professor is the only one of us who’s missing. I heard one of the uniformed men say that he refuses to leave the aircraft.

“Aircraft” is a new word also.

A different uniformed man is sitting behind a desk, staring at us. He glances between us and an open ledger on his desk. “None of you are going to talk, are you?” he says.

Silence.

“They always stick me with the weird ones,” he mumbles, more to his ledger than to us. “Last week, the caped vigilante, and this week, the party on an aircraft made of windows and doors.”

I suppose he’s referring to the metal bird. I got a fleeting glimpse of it as we were hustled away, for the first time seeing it in the daylight. This man’s description isn’t far from the truth.

“Is this them?” a man cries as the doors burst open. I flinch, and Basil grabs hold of my arm.

This man wears a long black coat that is dusted with snow, and yet his hair is pristinely combed and dry. He looks at us with the excitement of a child. “You are the ones who fell from the sky, yes?”

“They don’t talk,” the uniformed man says. “Don’t think they understand a word we’re saying.”

“We can understand you just fine, thank you,” the princess says. “It’s just that no one has offered us an introduction.” She daintily sets her cup on the ground, stands, and extends her hand to the man in the coat. She means for him to kiss her knuckles, but he shakes her hand instead, so roughly that her body jolts. But if the princess is surprised, she doesn’t show it, retaining the poise that has made her an icon for all the young girls of Internment.

“My apologies, then,” the man in the coat says. “I’m Jack Piper, the one and only adviser to King Ingram IV.”

Delight flashes in the princess’s eyes.

“I’m Celeste,” she says. “The one and only daughter to King Lican Furlow.” She pauses. “The first.”

Jack Piper laughs, and I can’t tell whether he finds her delusional or charming.

“You will have to tell me all about your father and his kingdom,” Jack Piper says. “But for now, I’ve arranged proper accommodations for all of you.”

The princess looks to me, her shoulders hunched with excitement.

She’s completely mad. She knows it, too. It’s her madness that made her the only one among us brave enough to speak. She means to remain a princess, no matter whose kingdom she may have fallen into.

We are whisked back into the vehicles. “Cars,” I hear someone call them. They’re all black with spare wheels fastened near the front doors. They emit dark clouds through pipes, and the seats rattle as we move. I try to find comparisons to the train cars back home, but there is no comparison. We have nothing like this. This is a different world.

“They won’t hurt us,” the princess says into my ear. “It wouldn’t be civilized.”

“I don’t know how you can be so certain,” I say.

“It’s standard diplomacy,” she says. “Papa says I have a real talent for it. He thinks I might even become a decision maker once I’m old enough. I’ll have to find something to do with my time once my brother is king.”

Decision making is one of the few professions that can’t be chosen. Decision makers are scouted and trained privately. They hold our society in their palms, deciding which queue applicants will have boys, which will have girls, and who should be betrothed to whom. And that’s only a small part of what they do. It’s as powerful a position as one could have. Next to being royalty, that is.

I shudder to think of Princess Celeste as a decision maker. We became acquainted after she and her brother shot Pen and me with tranquilizers and imprisoned us in the basement of the clock tower.

Not that any of that matters now.

The car stops before a building barely visible in the whiteness of the storm. I can see that it’s the color of sand and has curved edges, and it’s larger than any of the buildings on Internment. Again, we’re hustled from the cars and through the front doors.

Everything inside is red and gold.

Behind me, Alice is murmuring things into Lex’s ear. He can’t see any of this; I wonder if he senses the differences between the ground and home at all, aside from the ridiculous cold.

“Welcome, welcome to my humble home,” Jack Piper says. He sheds his coat, and one of the drivers is standing at the ready to collect it.

Pen and I exchange incredulous expressions. Home? This place is easily larger than our entire apartment building.

“Children,” Jack calls.

With the rumble of footsteps overhead, they emerge at the top of the steps, pushing and shoving one another and then, upon realizing their audience, straightening their clothes, smoothing their hair, and marching down the steps single file.

They assemble before us in order of height, all of them with Jack Piper’s light brown hair. The smallest is in ringlet ponytails, and the tallest is long and lean, with round lenses around his eyes. They appear to be magnifying glasses, though I can’t imagine why they’re on his face.

“This is my son,” Jack Piper says, gesturing to the boy with the lenses. “Jack Junior, though we all call him Nimble. Like the nursery rhyme. I don’t suppose you know how it goes. And this is Gertrude.” The second tallest lowers her eyes shyly. “And that’s Riles.” The third tallest, a boy, smirks at us. “And Marjorie. And that’s Annette.”

The littlest girl curtsies with all the petite grace of a dancer in a jewelry box. “A pleasure to meet you,” she says.

“Is it true you came from the floating island?” one of the children says.

“Riles, manners!” snaps another.

The boy with the lenses regards us wryly. “Welcome,” he says, “to the capital city of Havalais.”

I don’t understand that name he’s just said. Have-a-lace. He gestures theatrically to the letters etched into the wall behind him:

HAVALAIS: HOME OF THE FLOATING ISLAND




2


“Five!” Pen whispers, after she’s closed the door behind us. “I counted five children. The nerve, Morgan.”

“Shh. Someone will hear.”

“Oh, who’s to hear us? This building has more rooms than Internment has people.”

“He works for the king,” Celeste says. “He could be spying. Though it isn’t as though we have anything to hide.”

Pen narrows her eyes. “Nobody was talking to you, Your Bloody Highness.”

“I am only trying to help,” Celeste says. She sits on the bed and fans the skirt of her dress around her. “As the only one among us with any knowledge about public relations.”

“What public relations?” Pen cries. “You and your brother only ever left that clock tower to fire darts and arrows at things for sport.” She looks to me. “I’m not sharing a room with her. I won’t be able to close my eyes at night unless there is a lock between us.”

The three of us have been left alone to share a bedroom as large as the apartment I shared with my parents. Jack Piper told us that we would find clothes in the closets and “a place to wash up down the hall.” One of the children boasted about their indoor hot water both upstairs and down; it’s quite revolutionary, he said.

None of us questioned the way we were divided up and sent to the bedrooms. We’re approaching all of this with due caution.

“Pen, come here. Try to be calm,” I say, patting the space beside me as I sit on the adjacent bed.

She chews on her knuckle and paces.

“All right,” Celeste says. “I know the three of us haven’t gotten off to the friendliest start—”

“You kidnapped us and held my betrothed at knifepoint,” Pen says.

“Yes, and you tried to murder my brother. We’re quite even. And despite what you may think, I do know a thing or two about people. That sign out there says that this is the home of the floating island. That means they recognize where we’re from. They’re interested, maybe even fascinated. They know nothing about the way our city is governed, and now for the first time they have a chance to learn. Perhaps their king and my father can do business.”

“Oh, wake up, will you?” Pen turns to face us. Behind her, the white flurries are tangled in a dance within the window frame. “Their king and your father can’t do business. This was a one-way trip. We can’t go home. Not ever.”

“Nonsense,” Celeste says. “Why would the lot of you leave Internment with no way of getting back?”

Pen looks away. Her face has turned red. Her eyes are misting.

“We had no choice,” I say quietly. “We were fugitives.” I stare at the floor; it appears to be made of some kind of fabric cut out into a giant oval, and it’s so plush that I can see traces of our footprints in it. Even the floors are different. I fear what will await us when the sun melts away that blanket of snow. “What Pen said is true. We can’t ever go back.”

“You can’t, maybe,” Celeste says to me, “but I’ll have to return. Of course I will.”

Pen laughs cruelly.

Celeste raises her chin.

“We should change,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think of that should come next. We’ll find new clothes. We’ll start learning to adapt. No matter how impossible it seems.

There’s a wooden screen that divides off a portion of the room. Pen and I hide behind it and change into the dresses we’ve selected from the closet. On the hangers are the most exquisite dresses I’ve ever seen—all tiers and flowers and lace. Pen helps with the buttons at my wrists, and she straightens the lace at my collarbones. And while we’re facing each other, her mouth purses. She shields her eyes with her quaking hand. “Oh, Morgan,” she whispers.

I wrap my arms around her shoulders. “I know.” We’re both as good as orphaned now. My parents are in the tributary, but she’ll never see hers again whether they’re living or not.

“We can’t cry,” she says firmly.

“No. Strength, remember?”

She nods, draws back, and pulls my hair in front of my shoulders.

I pinch her cheek, and she smiles.

From beyond the screen, Celeste clears her throat. “What sort of woman wore these dresses, do you think?” she says.

Pen growls.

“And what do you think they call this fabric?” Celeste goes on.

“Maybe they belong to Mrs. Piper,” I say.

“He didn’t mention a wife at all, did he?” Celeste says.

I step out from behind the screen, and Pen follows. “Maybe they don’t have wives here,” Pen says. “Maybe the women just come around to lay eggs and then they leave.”

I can’t help laughing. “Be careful what you say,” Celeste says, but she’s laughing too.

“I’m quite serious,” Pen says, assessing her reflection in the oval mirror that hangs wreathed in dry flowers. “What kind of woman could birth five children? Can you imagine? It isn’t human.”

“It would be rude to ask,” I say. “We’ll have to look for a ring.”

“He had a ring,” Celeste says. “A metal one. It was the same shade of gold as the curtains downstairs. Gold is an odd choice for a wedding ring, isn’t it?”

“We can’t ask,” I repeat firmly. “If we were to offend our host, we could well be tossed out into the snow, and then what?”

Pen walks around me, dragging her finger through my hair so it rises and falls. It’s so straight that it falls immediately back into formation. “What if he killed his wife? What if we’re next?” Pen says.

“Are you always so grim?” Celeste says.

A knock at the door silences our chatter. I loop my arm around Pen’s.

“Excuse me.” It’s one of the children. A girl. “Dinner is being served downstairs.”

The thought of food nauseates me. For just a moment, I nearly forgot the magnitude of this ordeal, but that strange affectation in the child’s voice has reminded me.

“Thank you,” Celeste says sweetly.

“Should we try to eat any of it?” Pen whispers into my ear. “What if it’s poisoned?”

I’m not eager to relive the experience of the poisoned sweetgold. “We should at least pretend to,” I say.

“Let’s let Her Highness eat it and see if she survives.”

Celeste, who is fixing her braided crown, pauses to glare at us in the mirror.

Jack Piper is a man who strives for order; that much is clear. His children do all things in order of height, which includes taking their places at the largest dinner table I’ve ever seen. He gives them a nod, and they shake open their folded napkins and lay them in their laps.

“I have to compliment you on your gold curtains,” Celeste says. “We don’t see much gold fabric back home.”

Back home. What a notion.

Riles’s snorting laugh says he think we’re the strangest things alive. “You don’t have gold fabric?” he says.

“What else don’t you have?” one of the younger girls asks.

“Don’t be brats,” Nimble tells them.

“Yes, gold is popular down here,” Jack says. “It’s a precious metal.”

I’ve never thought of any one metal as being more special than the next. They all come in handy for something or other.

“Do you have ham?” the smallest one, Annette, asks. She isn’t teasing; she really wants to know. “Because that’s what’s for dinner.”

“I don’t think so,” Celeste says. She doesn’t seem to mind speaking on behalf of us all. “What is it?”

“It’s from a pig,” Annette says. She presses her nose upward with her finger and makes a snorting sound.

“We don’t have those,” Pen says, speaking before the princess can get in another word. “And we don’t eat animals very often. Only on special occasions.”

Annette looks at her like she’s never heard such a thing.

“That’s enough inquisition,” Jack says. “Our guests have come a long way and they’ve earned an evening of relaxation. There will be plenty of time for all of us to get acquainted.”

Lex and Alice are missing from the table, as are Judas and Amy. I look through the doorway, and all I see are infinite doors, and a staircase that leads to even more of them.

A fireplace is crackling. I can feel the warmth of it from the next room. It’s an effective enough way to stay warm, but most of the buildings on Internment have been outfitted with electric heat in the past decade, thanks to the sun’s energy being harnessed by the glasslands. I’d thought the ground would be much more advanced than we are, given that we borrow so many of their ideas through our scopes, but we seem to be on par, if not a bit ahead.

One thing the ground does have is space. A house practically the size of a whole section of Internment, and as many children to a family as they please. Dozens of windows and curtains, and closets fat with clothes, no matter if anyone can be bothered to come along to wear them.

The food is brought out by a young woman in a black dress that is dripping with metal buttons. She lays each plate on the mat with precision, and uncovers all the hot dishes, which are heaping with enough food to feed twice as many people as are seated.

The smallest Piper volunteers to say grace, which means we all bow our heads as she recites some sort of poem that begins with “Thank you, God” and goes on to list all the things at the table. She adds in “please” and “bless” copious times. It ends when she says, “And bless Mother, too. And tell her to please send a telegram.”

“We don’t ask for things like that,” Riles says.

“Says you.”

“I thought it was a fine prayer,” Nimble says. He winks at his littlest sister and she grins.

Everyone wields utensils and begins helping themselves. Pen, Basil, Thomas, and I take a modest portion of everything, but we aren’t brave—or perhaps stupid—enough to try eating it.

“Your accent is lovely,” Gertrude says, forcing the words out all at once as though she’s been building the courage to speak. She’s the second oldest, with soft rosy cheeks, and hair that covers one eye as it falls over her shoulder in waves.

“Accent?” I say.

“Yes. You don’t know that word? It’s the way that you speak. Everything has an upward inflection. You all sound so inquisitive. I think it’s pretty.”

“Thank you,” Celeste says brightly. “Where we’re from, everyone speaks the same way. It hadn’t occurred to me there was any other way.”

“There are lots of ways to speak,” Nimble says. “Though King Ingram prefers to war with the one nation that speaks the same language we do.” He looks at Celeste. “You come from a political family. Does that seem smart to you?”

“That’s enough,” Jack Piper says, dabbing his lips with a cloth napkin. “Your depiction of our king is unwelcome in this home, Nimble. We’ve discussed this.”

Nimble’s gaze rolls from one side of his lenses to the other. The younger children are giggling soundlessly at their plates.

“Are you at war?” Celeste asks.

“The dinner table isn’t the place to discuss politics,” Jack Piper says. “Perhaps tomorrow, once you’ve all had a chance to rest.” He leans back so that he can see under the table. “And speaking of inappropriate, what have I told you about rolling your stockings, Gertrude?”

She blushes. “Yes, of course,” she says. “Sorry, Father.”

During the meal, Jack explains to us that this building is something called a hotel during the warm seasons. It’s winter now, he says, and so it’s closed for business. There’s something called a theme park nearby, and people will travel from all across the nation in a season he calls summer to visit it and catch a glimpse of the floating island. They have scopes here on the ground, too, though Internment’s position and altitude prevent them from seeing much besides the bottom of the city.

“It’s flattering to know you’ve taken such an interest in our humble city,” Celeste says. “I—we would all love to see this park.”

“Well, then I—we—will have to show it to you,” Nimble says, and the way he’s looking at her actually makes her blush.

After dinner, Basil and I find a moment alone in the hallway that holds my bedroom. We’re standing in something called the east wing. His room is in something called the west wing. So many words for one building.

His eyes meet mine, and at the same time we both blurt out, “Are you okay?”

He puts his hand on the wall by my head, and I feel so safe, so very safe in his shadow and in the smell of him, like home and bottled redolence and sunlight.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m okay. Are you?”

“Is that the truth?” he says.

“Can’t we just pretend that it is?” I say. “What else are we supposed to do?”

“Morgan—”

I put my finger to his lips. “Don’t. Please. I can’t be pitied right now.”

“All right,” he says.

I nod to the closed door beside us. “They’re making Pen and me share a room with the princess. Pen thinks she’ll kill us in our sleep.”

“I should sleep with you,” he says.

“You know we can’t change where they placed us,” I say. “It might insult them. They were kind enough to take us in at all.”

“You’re right,” he says. “And sooner or later they’ll come to collect on that kindness.”

“What do you suppose they want from us?” I say.

“If it’s a way up to Internment, they’ll soon be disappointed, won’t they?” He makes an effort at a smile. “I’ll see you in the morning, if the princess doesn’t kill you and Pen, and Judas doesn’t kill me.”

“We must survive if only to see what poor animal the Pipers cook for breakfast.” I rise on tiptoes to kiss him. “Good night.”

As I reach for the doorknob, he grabs my wrist. “I also think we should take an opportunity to get familiar with this kingdom,” he says. “In case we have to run.”

“Run.” I try not to laugh, but it’s so absurd. “Basil, where would we go?”

He seems worried, though. “Don’t you think it’s strange that they’ve built a theme park just so they can gaze at the ‘magical floating city’ and yet when the lot of us falls down from it, the king wants to keep us a secret?”

“It is strange,” I say. “But everything about this world is strange so far.”

“All I mean is, what’s to stop him from killing us all if he pleases? No one would be the wiser.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I say, and I feel a chill. “Oh, Basil, do you think that could happen?”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “But we should keep that in mind.”

I nod. “We’ll familiarize ourselves with the city. Pen could even draw up a map, I should think.” I force myself to smile. “It will work out, Basil.”

He gives me the same sort of distracted smile. “Good night,” he says.

After I’ve washed up and changed into one of the many nightgowns hanging in the closet, I look for Alice and Lex. They’ll surely be together. When I get to the door at the end of the hallway and I knock, no one answers. There’s light coming from under the door, though. “Hello?” I say, and turn the knob. “Alice?”

“Quiet,” Judas says. “Close the door behind you.”

He’s knelt on the floor beside Amy, whose skin is red. Her hair is damp, and I recognize that dead stare in her eyes.

“I came in to check on her before everyone went to dinner, and I found her in the middle of a fit,” he says. “A bad one.”

“She’s been lying on the floor like that since dinner?” I touch her forehead, and she flinches and gasps, but there’s no real awareness about her.

“I’m afraid to move her,” he says. “Daphne would always say never to move her while her eyes are still open, to wait until she looks like she’s sleeping.”

Daphne aspired to be a medic before her murder, and I’m sure she knew how to care for her sister’s fits, but it doesn’t seem right to leave a sick child on the floor like this.

“I’ll get Lex,” I say.

“No.” He grabs my arm and pulls me back down. “She needs to be kept calm. She doesn’t like when anyone sees her like this; it makes her feel weak.”

“She’s ill, Judas. Look at her. She needs a doctor, and Lex is the closest we’ve got.”

He looks at Amy. Her lips twitch like she’s talking to one of her ghosts.

“She needs a doctor,” I repeat.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “You just don’t. If you want to help, bring a cold cloth from the water room and let’s try to break her fever.”

I do as he says and drench the green towel from the water room.

“Her parents hoped she’d grow out of this,” he says, dabbing at her cheeks and behind her neck. “It’s only gotten worse as she’s gotten older. And the pills and meetings with the specialist have caused more harm than good.” He looks at me. “Want to hear something crazy?”

“What?” I say.

“She’s got me believing in apparitions with all of this. She swears they talk to her.”

“I don’t think that’s crazy,” I say. “Our history book doesn’t account for the unexplained, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Her eyes have closed now. She’s surrendered to whatever dreams haunt that troubled mind of hers. I hope for all of this snow to be gone soon. I hope for a morning bright with sun. If she can see that the sunlight is the same whether we’re on Internment or the ground, it will surely help. It has to.

Pen catches up with me as I’m leaving the water room. “There you are,” she says. “You left me alone with Princess Fancy. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill her.” She leans closer to me. “What is it?” she says. “You look troubled.”

I tug her into the water room and close the door behind us. I tell her about Basil’s theory that Jack Piper and the king could be hiding us away in case he means to kill us.

Pen hardly seems surprised. “Yes, I’ve been thinking that as well,” she says, scrubbing her face at the sink with a cloth. “For all we know, these people have a history of killing outsiders. Or one another. Or anyone. It’s a strange thing to be in a world and not know a thing about its past.”

“So what should we do?” I ask.

“As you said, familiarize ourselves with this kingdom as best we can,” Pen says.

“Do you think you could draw a map?” I say.

“If they have a library, it likely already has a map of the kingdom. I could copy it and add my own notes,” she says.

“Jack Piper’s eldest daughter seems close to our age,” I say. “Maybe we can befriend her and gain some insight into the family.”

Pen shrugs. “We could. I doubt that she’ll be privy to her father’s politics—he seems annoyed with his children at best—but she could probably teach us a thing or two.”

She sits beside me on the edge of the tub. “I think we’d be wise to learn from her, but not to trust her,” she says. “We shouldn’t trust anyone in this world.”




3


There is sunlight come morning, but it’s not the same.

Pen stands at the curtains, parting them with her hand. Beyond the window there is nothing but white.

Celeste, still sleeping, turns away, muttering in protest at the light.

Pen nods from me to the window. “Come and see,” she whispers. “It’s like we’re inside an unfinished sketch.”

Even the water on the horizon is gray and white. It sparkles as it fades into the distance. There is no train framing this city. There is no limit. It could well go on forever, to a horizon it would take ten lifetimes to run to.

There’s a draft coming through the window frame, and my skin swells with little bumps.

“I can hardly stand to look at it,” Pen says excitedly.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. Pen looks at me, and I grin. She knows what I’m thinking. “You know we can’t,” I say. “We’ll freeze to death.”

She runs to the closet, a skip in her step, and she throws a heavy coat at me and takes one for herself. “What good is all that brave nonsense we’ve been feeding each other if we don’t act at least a little crazy?”

“What are you blathering about?” Celeste mumbles from under her blanket.

“Nothing,” Pen says. “I got lost trying to find the water room. Woman troubles.”

“Thank you for that charming announcement,” Celeste says.

We stand still until we’re sure she’s asleep, and then Pen opens the door, wincing as it creaks.

It’s still early and the hotel is silent. The soft floor helps to conceal our footfalls, but we move slowly anyway. “Would you look at these colorings?” Pen says. “The frames are taller than we are.”

I tug at the lapels of my coat, struggling to adjust to the weight on my shoulders. “Do you think they’re portraits of real people?” I say.

“Look at the colors,” Pen says. Her fingertips hover over the portrait of a woman whose shoulders are cloaked in fur, but Pen doesn’t dare to touch. “They’re so rich. If I had colors like this, I’d want a canvas this size to work with too.”

The next step creaks under my foot, startling us both, and we hurry the rest of the way to the door.

Overnight the snow has accumulated to knee height, but the cold is surprisingly bearable. Pen spreads her arms and falls forward into the white powder. When she emerges, her face is red and there are clumps of snow turning to water on her skin.

“Not as soft as you might’ve hoped,” she says, and pulls on my arm. I go toppling down beside her with a shriek.

“There’s so much of it,” I say. “When it melts, the whole world must be soggy underneath.”

“Our little clouds have been holding out on us,” Pen says. “Who knew?”

We make a game of chasing each other, bogged down by the weight around our ankles. We splash each other like it’s the water of an enchanted, glittering lake.

Pen kneels and tries to draw a floating city with her finger, but snow proves to be an unsatisfactory canvas.

I look at the sky, and all I see is more whiteness. I’ve never known the sky to be any color but blue.

And then, as though I willed it, I see a bit of blue in the sky. Moving.

“Pen!” I gasp.

“What? What is it?” It takes her a moment to see what I’m pointing to, and then she’s silent. We both stare at the thing, and turn our heads to follow as it flutters up and out of sight.

“Was that—”

“A bird.” My heart is in my throat.

“It was the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen,” Pen says.

“Do you think it will ever land?”

“Not if it has any sense.”

The moment is broken by a noise in the distance. Along the side of the building, a girl is attempting to scale a tree. We walk toward her until I can better see her wavy hair and the sharp seams in her brown gloves.

“Gertrude?” I say.

She drops from the foothold, a hand to her chest. “Goodness, you scared me half to death,” she says. She gives us a sheepish smile. “You can just call me Birdie. Everyone does.”

“Were you going to break into our bedroom?” Pen says.

Gertrude looks up. “Is that where you’re sleeping? Sorry, girls, that room has the strongest tree outside. You wouldn’t mind my traipsing through every now and again, would you? I’m kind of a night owl.”

“Well, we wouldn’t,” Pen says, “but who knows what Her Royal Stinky Highness will do from one day to the next? I wouldn’t let her catch you.”

Gertrude looks contemplatively at the window again. Her breath comes out in little clouds. She’s wearing a coat that seems too thin for this cold, though she has enough beads around her neck to constitute a scarf.

“Your princess is a wet blanket, huh?”

“That’s one way to put it,” I say.

“Once she senses a weak spot, she goes for the jugular,” Pen says. “Here’s a silly idea: Why don’t you use the door?”

“Father locks it,” she says.

“It isn’t locked now,” I say. “We’ve just opened it.”

“If you give us a heads up, we’ll make sure it’s unlocked when you want to sneak out,” Pen says. “That way you won’t have to sneak through the house or climb through our window and scare everyone senseless.”

“You’d do that?” Gertrude says.

“Back home, I used to sneak out all the time,” Pen says. “There was this little cavern in the woods. Remember, Morgan?”

Remember? How could I not? It was only last week and a lifetime ago. All I can do is nod. I suddenly feel that I’ll cry if I utter a word.

Gertrude smiles. It is a sincere, girlish smile, one that’s unaffected by her heavy eyeliner and blood-red lips. “Well, thanks,” she says. “I should get washed up before Father wakes us for breakfast. I must look like a ragamuffin.”

She’s a shy girl in a rebel’s garb. The ground is her home, but it’s still a big place, and I think she must be like Pen and me—trying to figure out this strange world as it reveals itself, bit by bit.

I think Pen was right, and that Gertrude Piper—Birdie—will have little insight into her father’s political dealings, but I would still like to get to know her.

After she’s gone inside, Pen looks at me. “What’s a night owl?” she says.

I shrug.

By the time we’re summoned for breakfast, Birdie is as fresh-faced and bright-eyed as her brothers and sisters. Not a drop of cosmetics on her face. After a night of no sleep, I’m not sure how she manages it, but no one suspects a thing, though I see Nimble elbow her as she takes her place beside him.

The plates are laid before us. Something yellow and fluffy, accompanied by little gray-brown cakes. “Eggs!” Annette says happily.

Pen can’t hide her skepticism. “The eggs of what?” she asks. We’ve never heard of eating something in egg form.

“Chickens,” Annette says.

“Chickens are birds,” Nimble says, watching to see our reaction.

I tuck my hands under the table. I was already having difficulty forcing an appetite, but now there’s no hope for this meal passing between my lips.

“We don’t eat a lot of plants,” he adds.

“Can it, Nim,” Birdie says under her breath. She clears her throat. “Where’s Father?”

“Otherwise engaged,” Nimble says. “He’s with a few of the king’s finest, trying to talk that crazy old man out of that ramshackle plane.”

“You should talk to that little girl—what’s her name?” Celeste says. “His granddaughter.”

“Amy,” Judas says. “And she hasn’t woken up yet. The trip exhausted her.”

“How exhausted could she be?” Celeste says. “We’re all recovered by now. Except for your brother, Morgan.”

At the mention of Lex, my hands turn to fists. She speaks so casually of people she doesn’t know at all. She doesn’t understand what it’s like for Amy and Lex. She doesn’t understand blindness or crippling fits or what it means to be anything but royalty.

“Is Amy all right?” Basil whispers to me.

I shake my head at my plate of strange food. I don’t know. “I’ll go and check on her,” I say.

“You have to ask to be excused first,” Annette says.

“May I be excused?”

“Yes. You may.”

When I open the door to Amy’s room, I find her standing at the window, her hair tangled from sleep.

“Here we are,” she says.

“Here we are. I went outside this morning. Didn’t realize how cold it truly was until I came back inside and the feeling started returning to my fingers.”

“It sounds wonderful,” she says. Her voice is subdued, though, and when she turns to face me, her eyes are cloudy.

“Would you like something to eat?” I say. “The food is strange, but the princess seems to like it. Pen has sort of been using her as a poison tester.”

Amy shakes her head. “My stomach is still recovering from the trip. I am getting restless, though.”

“Well, then, how would you like to go outside?” I say. “They could use your help talking the professor out of the bird.”

Her eyes brighten at that.

“And speaking of birds, I saw a real one today,” I say. “It flew straight across the sky and disappeared.”

“You didn’t,” she gasps.

“There are bound to be more. Maybe we’ll see one. Hurry and get dressed.”

“Will you come too?” she says.

“Sure, if you want.”

“And—could you tell Judas not to tag along?”

“I can talk to him, but—”

“If you want me to try and convince my grandfather to come out, those are my terms,” she says. “Let me get dressed.”

She shoos me from the room and closes the door.

“Glad you’re feeling better,” I mutter to the knob.

Judas doesn’t take kindly to being left out, but it’s enough of a relief to see Amy up and about that he concedes to her demands, though not without grabbing my arm at the door and warning that he will kill me if anything happens while she’s in my charge.

It isn’t the first time he’s threatened me in this way, but it is the first time I believe him. Now that his betrothed is dead, Amy is the only thing he has resembling family. Her frail health and stubborn bravery give him good reason to be concerned.

“I’ll guard her as if she were my own,” I say.

“If you had given birth to me when you were five,” Amy says snidely. Her way of reminding us that she isn’t a child.

“Don’t worry,” Nimble says. “I’m an old pro at driving in this weather.”

He drives slowly, glancing back at us in the mirror every now and again. “I couldn’t help noticing the tracks outside this morning,” he says.

“We’ve never seen snow before,” I say.

“Then this must be a real shock,” he says. “What do you get? Rain?”

“Rain?” I ask.

He laughs, turns the wheel against his open palms. “Oh boy.”

No matter how far we drive, we never seem to get any closer to the city in the distance. We do pass the field of strange machines I noticed when we landed, though. “What are all of those?” I say, nodding to the machines outside my window.

“Rides,” Nimble says. “That’s the theme park. Roller coasters and biplane rides to give you the sensation you’re flying higher than airplanes. For a penny you can get a look at the underside of the magical floating island through a telescope.”

“The magical floating island?” Amy says, scrunching her nose. “That’s what people call us?”

“What do you call it, then?”

Amy says “Internment” at the same time I say “Home.”

“Internment,” Nimble repeats several times, testing the word on his tongue. “As in ‘confined.’ Creepy.”

“It isn’t creepy at all,” I say.

“Maybe it is,” Amy says. “Not at first. You’d have to be there a while to see it.”

She’s quiet after that.

We pass what appears to be a sort of garden made of rocks, and Amy’s breath catches. Her chin snaps up attentively and her eyes are sharp.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you feel another fit coming on?”

She climbs onto her knees and watches through the back window as the garden gets smaller.

“That place gives me the heebie-jeebies too, kid,” Nimble says.

“What is it?” I say.

He raises his eyebrows at me in the mirror. “Where do you put your dead on Internment?”

Amy’s voice is small and fading when she says, “We burn them. Until they’re nothing and nowhere.”

I try to explain the tributary to Nimble, how we burn the bodies of our dead so that all the bad in them can fall away, while all the good becomes a mass of colors in the sky that can’t be seen by the living. I’ve believed it all my life, but now that I’m on the ground, it doesn’t make as much sense as it once did.

Down here, they bury their dead. Mark the spot with a stone, with dates and names. Leave flowers to remember.

It must be nice to have so much space to squander.

“Have you ever buried anyone?” Amy asks.

“Can’t say as I have,” Nimble says.

That must be nice, too.

“Here we are,” Nimble announces, stopping the car. The bird is several paces away, surrounded by men in coats who appear to be convening.

“Morning, boys,” Nimble says, and opens the door for Amy and me. “We all figured you wouldn’t have much luck talking him out, so I’ve brought someone to help. This here’s the old man’s granddaughter.”

After a brief discussion, Jack, who seems to be heading this unsuccessful operation, agrees to let Amy inside. “Go with her,” he tells Nimble.

“No,” Amy says. “It won’t do any good unless I go alone. He’s quite stubborn.”

The men all exchange glances. Jack hesitates. Amy nods to the red metal funnel that’s in his hands. “May I?” she says.

He’s so perplexed by her straightforwardness that he hands it to her. She holds the funnel near her mouth. “Grandpa, it’s me. Amy.” Her voice is magnified. “I’ve come to talk to you.”

She hands the funnel to Jack. “Thank you,” she says.

Nothing happens for a few seconds, and then there’s the unlatching of locks. Amy breezes past us and opens the door, disappearing into the darkness and then closing it behind her.

The men are all astonished. With a few words she’s managed to do what they’ve been trying to do all morning.

Nimble folds his arms. “She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she?”

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds apt. “She’s hard to stop …” My voice trails as I step back and look at the bird. Just as the ground looked like a patchwork quilt of land, the bird is a patchwork of metal in varying hues. It’s at least three stories high, it tilts to one side, and it stands on legs that are made of blades for burrowing through the soil. The wings are folded now, like a beetle that has fallen dead.

It doesn’t look like it would fly so much as hurtle through the sky and then destroy the ground it hit. But I am still astounded by the sight of it. Astounded that such a thing could be designed, assembled, welded, and created in secret, quite under the king’s nose. It was a refuge for us. It’s the embodiment of our rebellion, our liberation. It’s the thing my parents and Amy’s sister and countless others died for. It was nearly a lifetime in the making.

I understand why the professor won’t leave it.

In my observing, I’ve wandered away from the others, but Nimble has followed me. “I’m impressed that it flew,” he says.

“Me too,” I say. “I might not have boarded it if I’d had much of a choice.”

I shut my mouth immediately. I’ve said too much. What will Jack Piper and his family do if they realize we’re all fugitives? All of us but the princess, anyway, and Thomas, who was dragged along as her hostage.

Then again, what would it matter to anyone down here how the people carry about on that tiny floating rock so very high above them?

“Sounds as though there was some trouble in paradise,” Nimble says.

“Paradise?”

“Your perfect little island,” he says, nodding upward. I follow his gaze, hoping for a glimpse of Internment. But there’s only a sky heavy with clouds. These clouds are not like the ones I know—light airy things that soared around and over me every day. These clouds are burdened and gray, and I sense that they are grieving.

“There are no perfect places,” I say. The clouds move away from the sun just enough for the light to blind me, and I shield my eyes.

“You know that and I know that,” he says. “Try telling our king, and you’ll be run out of the kingdom. He thinks that if we plan an aerial attack over the right places, once the ashes clear, we’ll be in our own utopia.”

I don’t know the capabilities of a bomb, but surely it wouldn’t take much to destroy a small city like Internment.

“Firecrackers, bombs,” I say. “You people sure do like things that burn.”

“I imagine there aren’t many fires on Internment?” he says.

“Even a small one is cause to panic,” I say. I suppose something like the fire at the flower shop would be nothing to the people down here, but it was enough to throw all of Internment into upheaval.

I can feel his gaze on me as I look for a trace of Internment in the sky. I know what he’s thinking. That we were foolish to come here. We left our safe little island and descended straight into a kingdom at war. But while they fight with explosives down here, different battles are being waged in the sky. Silent revolutions. Equally silent murders.

“You don’t know anything,” I whisper. I’m not sure if the words are for him, or for me.

The door of the metal bird creaks open and Amy descends the ladder alone. She’s talking to Jack and his men, and by their disappointed expressions it becomes clear that her attempt to lure the professor out wasn’t a successful one.

“All right, all right. It looks like there will be another storm coming. Let’s reconvene once I’ve spoken to His Majesty. Nim, please see our guests home.”

“Can do, Father.”

Once we’re back in the car, Amy says, “My grandfather will come out in time. He’s just got an awful lot of love for that metal bird. He’s afraid they’ll destroy it if he leaves.”

“What makes you so sure he’ll come out, then?” Nimble asks.

“He’ll run out of food soon. He asked me to bring him some more just now, and I told him that if he wants to eat, he’ll have to come out.” She dusts the snow from the shoulders of her plaid coat.

“But if he’s so stubborn, what makes you sure he won’t starve to death rather than come out?” Nimble says.

“He won’t. He’s far too curious about this place. He’ll be taking a magnifying glass to the insects and collecting soil samples soon enough. You’ll see.”

The car starts to move. Overhead, the sky has begun to darken. The sun is behind the clouds like light trying to hatch from an egg. I feel as though I’m being smothered.

Amy seems better now, though. Her eyes are their usual blue and her mouth hangs open as she watches the city in the distance.

“What did you call that place where you bury your dead?” she asks.

“A graveyard,” Nimble says.

“Can anyone visit?”

“You want to visit the graveyard?” he says.

“If I can.”

“I guess it can’t hurt,” Nimble says. “It’s not much to see, though. People go to visit their loved ones, and kids go at night to spook each other, and that’s all the action these places get.”

“Do you always bury your dead?” I say, trying to hide how appalling I think the whole thing is.

“Not always,” Nimble says, his tone cheery to the point of sarcasm. “Sometimes we cremate. I’m guessing that’s what your kind does up there, with so little land.”

“It makes the most sense,” I say.

“It isn’t that we don’t like to burn stuff down here,” Nimble says. “Most homes have a fire altar. There’s one at the hotel, in fact. Even guests use it.”

“You burn bodies out on your lawn?” I say, my stomach beginning to turn.

“Not bodies. Offerings,” Nimble says. “If there’s something you really want to ask of our god, you burn something that’s of equal importance to you.”

At last a ritual I don’t find wasteful. It seems poetic, even. “We have something like that on Internment,” I say. “Once a year we burn our highest request and set it up on the wind to be heard.”

“Once a year.” Nim whistles. “You could burn things all day down here if you wanted. People have no shortage of things to ask for.”

“So you burn things often, then,” I say.

“I don’t, personally. Don’t take much stock in it.”

As soon as the car has stopped at the graveyard, Amy is gone, leaving the open car door behind her to fill the car with cold.

“We won’t be long,” I say apologetically. I don’t expect him to understand a girl like Amy. He can’t appreciate what the edge has done to her.

I expect some sort of judgment or another remark about how odd she is, but “I’ll keep the car warm for you,” is all he says.

The graveyard is framed by hedges, and the entrance is through a pair of elaborate iron doors ingrained with flying children holding some sort of stringed instrument.

Amy is knelt in the snow when I find her. She clears away the brambles until the words on the headstone before her are revealed. “Lila Pike. It says she died the year she was born,” Amy says.

“That’s miserable,” I say.

“I wonder what happened.”

I don’t.

I look up from the stone. It is only one among hundreds of untold stories. Names, dates, flowers in vases left to wilt under all this white.

There’s so much land on the ground that they can make a garden of all their dead. It’s no matter whether anyone ever comes to visit.

Amy looks over her shoulder at me. Her brow is raised. “What do you think happens when they bury you here, and years pass, and everyone who knew you is dead? Who comes to visit? Or do they mow this down and start over?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems like such a waste—all of it.”

“Maybe not,” Amy says. “If there were a place I could go and visit my sister, talk to her—I think I’d like that.”

“I don’t think I could visit my parents in a place like this,” I say. “There are no spirits here. Only stones.”

“There are spirits,” Amy says with certainty. “But these spirits aren’t our spirits.”

I don’t know what she means. She’s a peculiar little girl who says peculiar things, but her outlandish remarks are different from the kind that other children tell. She speaks assuredly. And when she awakens from her fits, there’s real sadness, and that sadness lingers with her for days.

And though I don’t entirely believe in the things she claims, I don’t think it’s all her imagination. A normal girl would want to imagine happy things.

A breeze disturbs the bare branches and I hug my arms when it reaches me.

I’d much like to leave now, but Amy may well miss out on much of the exploring, due to her fits and Judas’s overprotectiveness, and if this is all she wants, she should get to see it.

The wind picks up, as though it means to force us away. The rusted gate swings on its hinge, an invitation to leave.

But the squealing gate isn’t the only noise. There’s a low whistle, and then a crack so loud Amy jumps to her feet. “What was that?” she says. Another crack. Louder, so much louder, than the thunder that horrified us the other night when we heard it for the first time.

Straight ahead of us, the headstones make a path to the horizon. They offer no answers. And they have no reaction to that black billowing smoke where a building stood only seconds ago.

I think of what Nimble said. Bomb.

“Come on!” I grab her arm and run for the gate. I don’t look back. She’s gasping for breath beside me, but she manages to keep up. I have a fleeting thought that this could trigger one of her fits, but I don’t know what caused that explosion or if there will be another.

The day the flower shop caught fire, I thought it had the power to end my little world. How was I to know that there were bigger fires happening below us? I don’t know what it would take to end a world this size, if anything could. All I’ve seen are more terrifying ways to destroy, to no end at all.

Nimble is speeding away even before I’ve had a chance to close the door. The car lurches and swerves on the ice.

“Looks like you ladies arrived just in time for the fun to begin,” he says.




4


The black clouds are visible from the hotel by the time we’ve returned to it. I see them rolling in the distance, moving the way that giant body of water moves, snuffing out the bereft gray clouds. The sun has made a wise decision to hide from us completely.

The car jolts to a stop by the front door. “Go on inside,” Nimble says.

“Aren’t you coming?” I ask.

“After I park,” he says. “Aerial warfare’s bad for the paint.”

The front door swings open and there the Piper children stand, perfectly in order, all of them with the same frightened eyes. “Nim!” Birdie calls as he speeds around the building.

“Where’s he going?” Riles asks.

“To park in the carriage house. Him and his love for that stupid bus,” Birdie says.

“I’ll help,” Riles says, but Birdie catches him by the collar as he tries to run outside.

“Don’t be a pest.” She ruffles his hair. “Leave the door open for him.”

“What happened?” Basil says.

Everyone is full of questions. Everyone is talking. The words bounce off my skin, never reaching me, not really. I move to the nearest window and I step behind those gold curtains to watch the smoke blend into the sky.

“It’s like the flower shop fire times a thousand, isn’t it?” Celeste’s voice startles me. She’s standing beside me, both of us tented off from the others.

“You wouldn’t know, would you?” I say. “Or did you see it from your clock tower window?”

“I was out hunting with my brother that day, I’ll have you know,” she says. “True, we were some distance away, but I could smell the smoke.”

Snapping at the princess won’t do any good. Even if her father and his henchmen did start that fire in an attempt to cease the rebellion, she had nothing to do with it. She hasn’t made her sinister side a secret, but when she held Pen and me hostage, I got a sense for how little she knew of her father’s plans. She wasn’t interested in or aware of any of them. She only wanted me to help her get to the ground. Nothing more.

“So this is what you left your floating kingdom for,” I say, nodding ahead. “Are you glad you came?”

She takes a deep breath, straightens her shoulders. “I understand that you’re frightened, so I’m going to let this bitterness slide,” she says. “But I’ll have you know that you’re beginning to sound like that brazen friend of yours, and I know you’re better than that. Anyway, I wasn’t looking to argue.”

“What were you looking for, then?” I say.

“I wanted to check on you, of course,” she says.

I look at her from the corners of my eyes.

“Oh, all right. I also wanted to ask what you saw out there.”

“I heard an explosion and then I saw the smoke,” I say. “Nimble called it an aerial attack.”

Celeste arranges her thumbs and index fingers like a frame and holds them to the glass, considering. “Do you suppose this has been going on below us the whole time?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know how anyone can live in a world where this happens frequently.”

Celeste looks at me. Her smile is toothy and bright. “Then we’ve come just in time to save them, wouldn’t you say?”

I bring a tray of food to Alice and Lex. I can’t think of any other way to make myself useful. I tell them about the explosion, and the smoke. And I tell them about the graveyard.

How much can the people of the ground value life when they have so much land with which to bury their dead? What’s a few more stones? But I don’t say that. “The princess thinks we can help them,” is what I say.

Alice looks concerned. “Did she say why she came with us?”

“No,” I say. “But she seemed pretty desperate. Enough that she interrogated Pen and me, and held Thomas at knifepoint so we wouldn’t kick her off the bird.”

Lex’s transcriber sits on the floor near the bed, and the lack of smell that its coppery motor usually emits tells me he hasn’t used it since we arrived. We all left in a hurry the night I was poisoned. I was unconscious and dying in Basil’s arms. But Alice thought to grab the one thing that will surely keep Lex sane; she must have known there would be no turning back.

Lex sits on the floor beside the thing, his legs folded, worrying a square metal clock in his hands. The ticking provides an anchor, reminds him that even in his persistent darkness, the seconds never cease. He doesn’t need to know the hour; he only needs to know that they’re still passing.

“This war may just be getting started,” Alice says.

“Basil says that the Pipers will want to collect on their kindness in taking us in,” I say. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, but I can’t imagine how we could help. It isn’t as though we have any more ties to home than they do. We can’t go back.”

“They don’t know that,” Lex says. His head is down, and his voice is scratchy. “We’d better hope they don’t figure out how powerless we are.”

Alice frowns into her tea. Then she kneels before Lex and replaces the clock in his hands with the cup. “Drink this,” she says. “And then we should eat something. We’re going to need our strength.”

“Strength for what?” Lex says.

“For living,” she says, with that persistent vivacity I’ve always loved her for. “I don’t know what’s to come, but we’d better prepare ourselves to face it.” She brings the cup to his lips, forcing it on him. She kisses his forehead when he scowls at her. “Drink it.”

Hours pass and Jack Piper doesn’t return. The smaller children occupy themselves with some sort of game that involves a board of squares.

Nimble enters through the front door.

“I didn’t realize you’d gone outside,” Birdie says, looking up from her mathematics sheet.

He’s tucking a cloth into his pocket. “There was a smudge on the seat of the car that was nagging me.”

“You risked your safety going outside for that? After a bombing? Sometimes I think you value that car more than you do us.”

“Don’t be silly, Birds,” he says, and flicks her hair. “Of course I care more about the car.”

She rolls her eyes, blows at a bit of eraser dust on the page.

That car is his only haven, I realize. The Piper children live in this very large home, and yet every corner belongs to their father, and every move they make is scrutinized. That small place belongs only to Nimble, though, and it can take him anywhere he may ever wish to go.

Some phantom part of me keeps expecting a patrolman to come around and turn on the screen so there can be a broadcast with some news. But there are no patrolmen. There are no screens. There’s only something called a transistor radio, the knobs of which are arranged to make a permanently startled face. And it isn’t giving us any news right now. It’s only playing some sort of jaunty music that reminds me that this is not my home.

Celeste and Nimble sit by the fireplace, stacks of books between them. The pages are open in their laps, but they’re looking at each other. I catch bits of what they’re saying. Kings. Death. Something called a biplane. She is fascinated and excited.

Basil, Pen, Thomas, and I sit together on the lush floor. A carpet, they call it; it’s nothing at all like the tiny rugs my mother and Lex used to weave from old clothing scraps. “You know what this reminds me of?” Pen says.

“Don’t tell me you can liken a passage from our history book to this,” Thomas says.

“Of course I can.” She raises her chin. “This is like the story of the dark time. Hundreds of years ago, Phinneas Hart discovered a way to store the sun’s energy and use it as fuel. He knew it would revolutionize the way Internment worked, but his greedy brother, the banker, advised him to charge money for the new technology. The god of the sky was so displeased by this display of greed that the sky filled with clouds, and the clouds covered the sun completely. Crops wilted. Children and the elderly grew ill first, but slowly the illness began to overtake everyone.

“Phinneas recognized what was happening, and he abandoned his brother’s ideas, and he toiled for months laying the groundwork for the glasslands, and he wouldn’t take a page of money for it.”

“Yes, I’ve always found that story a bit hard to believe,” Thomas says.

“Because you’re a heathen,” Pen says. “In any case, the god of the sky returned the sunlight with a warning about charging for what should be free. If people were going to be greedy, he could take the source of that greed away. That’s why it’s against the law for any king to pass a bill that would charge for wind or solar energy.”

“Why does this remind you of the dark time?” Basil asks.

Pen stares at her betrothal band, twisting it round and round her finger. “Because,” she says. “This is what happens when there’s greed. Everything gets destroyed until there’s nothing left to take.”

Thomas puts his arm around her shoulders, and in a rare display of fondness she leans against him.

“It isn’t as bad as all that,” I tell her, though I don’t entirely believe it. “The ground is much bigger than Internment. These bombs couldn’t possibly end it all.”

“Don’t you see it?” she says. “All this space has made them cocky. Look at how big their houses are. Look at how many children they have. A cloud of smoke and a few explosions are only the start, Morgan. These people are doomed, and it doesn’t matter where we’re from. We’re along for the ride now, all of us.”

“I’m so fortunate to be betrothed to an optimist,” Thomas says.

She sighs, irritated. “Don’t take me seriously, then. You’ll see.”

“I do take you seriously, Pen. I just worry you’ll go spiraling if you talk like this.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but I say, “Let’s see if the others will let us join their game.”

For me, Pen relinquishes her side of the argument.

The board games are all simple, quick, and mindless. Birdie often forgets it’s her turn because she’s staring worriedly at the door. When it finally opens, she about jumps from her skin. She rushes to take her father’s coat.

Nimble looks up from his book. “What did you find out?”

“The banks are gone,” Jack says.

“The hospital?”

“No, though it may only be a matter of time.”

Marjorie, Riles, and Annette are wide-eyed, and Jack smiles at them. “Nothing to be alarmed about, children,” he says. “It’s all just a game that our King Ingram is playing with King Erasmus.”

“What will the winner get?” Annette asks.

“Something very precious,” Jack says. “A very important place.” He nods to Celeste, who is rising to her feet from across the room. “Princess, if I may speak with you privately,” he says.

“Certainly,” she says. She follows him from the room, Nimble at her heels. Birdie rushes after them, only to have the door closed in her face.

She scowls and presses her ear to the door, nearly stumbling when it opens and Nimble pokes his head out at her. “Father says to go on and have dinner without us.”

“But—”

The door closes again.

“Riles,” Birdie whispers. He has already read her mind. He scales the back of the couch and climbs onto her shoulders. He’s just high enough now to reach a crack in the plaster wall. He presses his ear to his drinking glass to amplify the sound, and listens. Clearly the two of them have this down to a science.

“Anything?” she asks.

“Not if you keep yapping.”

He listens a few seconds more, and Birdie arches her back uncomfortably. And just when I think she can carry his weight no longer, he climbs down.

“No one died,” Riles says. “That’s all I could get. That’s good, isn’t it?”

Birdie looks worried. “I don’t know,” she says, and then she blinks away her melancholy. “I owe you some ice cream after dinner, but don’t tell your sisters.”

“Pleasure doing business,” he says.




5


“I don’t like this one bit,” Pen says, scouring her face with a wet cloth. “Her Duplicitous Highness has been at conference with Jack Piper for hours now.”

I lie back in the drained tub, letting my legs dangle over the edge. “What do you suppose they’re talking about?” I say.

“If she’s smart, she isn’t telling him all about the way Internment is run. But she’s as dumb as a rock, and she loves to hear her own voice.” Pen begins furiously braiding her hair. “When I think of my mother and all those people up there, I just—I can’t stand it.”

“What?”

“How powerless they’d all be against something like what I saw today. One bomb, and it would all be gone. And down here they fire them off like it’s nothing.”

She drops her braid and struggles to fix it, but she can’t seem to steady her hands.

“Pen.” I reach for her. She sits on the edge of the tub, sulking. I fix her hair. “There’s no sense thinking about it. All the bombs they’ve got on the ground can’t reach Internment. Nothing can. Not even that bird we saw this morning.”

“Not even us,” Pen whispers, broken.

I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her into the tub with me. I was hoping to make her laugh, but she flops unceremoniously against me.

“Tell me another story from the history book,” I say. “What about the tree that grew endless fruit after the infestation killed the crops?”

“It wasn’t an infestation,” Pen says. “You always get that part confused. It was a drought. The lakes weren’t replenishing. The people were losing faith in the god of the sky. Fish were rotting in the sun.”

“And then?” I say.

“You know the story,” she sighs. She flails until she’s able to free herself from the tub. “I’m going to bed.”

She reaches her hand out to me, and I let her pull me to my feet. I’m not tired at all, but there isn’t anything more to do. The sooner we sleep, the sooner it will be morning. And maybe there will be some answers then.

Celeste still hasn’t returned by the time I turn out the light. Pen’s bed and mine are separated by a small table that holds a black book and an alarm clock. The ticking feels louder in the darkness, drowned only by Pen’s tosses and turns.

I don’t move. Guilt has made me fear the days to come. If experiencing this war is the price I must pay for my curiosity, then I accept. But Pen never asked for this. Nor did Basil and Thomas. And they’re all here, one way or another, because of me.

The door creaks open, letting in the faint glow of the fireplace down in the lobby.

“About bloody time, Princess,” Pen mutters. “Don’t even think about blinding us with the light.”

“It’s me,” Birdie whispers. “I’m sorry, but Father is still downstairs and I—I need that tree.”

She sounds as frightened as I feel.

I sit up. “Is it safe to be out there?”

“I don’t care about safe,” she says.

“We have something in common, then,” Pen says. “Take us with you.”

“Or you’ll tell on me?” Birdie says unhappily.

“Of course not,” Pen says. “I just think it would be the decent thing for you to invite us. We are letting you use our window and all.”

Birdie hesitates. “You won’t find anything suitable to wear in this room,” she says. “All these clothes belonged to my mother. Let me go see if I can’t scare up a couple of dresses.”

We stuff our beds with pillows. Birdie is impressed with the deftness by which Pen and I can descend the tree, even with the icy branches. “We’re all a lot of natural climbers,” Pen says, hopping to the ground. “After a while there’s nowhere to go but up and then back down again.”

“Where to now?” I say.

“We have to walk for a bit,” Birdie says apologetically. “But then we can take the ferry once we reach the harbor. Used to be it would close by nine, but since the war the king has resolved never to let the city sleep. Makes us superior to King Erasmus, he thinks.”

“Even if a bomb has just gone off?” I say.

“Especially then. The Cranlin will be open until sunup. That’s our cinema. Do you have moving pictures on Internment?”

I imagine an image, blurry and monochrome, like the school portrait of Daphne after her murder. I imagine the image moving, her stoic eye blinking, and it gives me a chill. “Sounds terrifying,” I say.

“Not at all!” Birdie laughs at Pen’s and my startled expressions. “They’re the bee’s knees.” She loops her arms over the backs of our necks as we trudge forward. “Seems I have a lot to show you, girls.”

She introduces us to the harbor, and the roaring body of water she calls an ocean. “Is that like a big lake?” Pen asks.

“Much, much bigger, and full of salt,” Birdie says. “And the sea has more creatures than lakes. Whales and sharks and mermaids—they have human hair, you know.”

“Of all things,” I breathe.

Birdie bounces on her heels, looking at the lights coasting across the water toward us. “That’s the ferry,” she says.

Pen elbows me. “Look!”

But I’m still trying to imagine what sort of fish could have human hair, and when I look at the water, every bit of light now seems like it could be filled with strands.

There’s a tea-steeped moon above us, cratered and beaming. Strange how it looks as near now as it did when we lived in the sky, even as the clouds meandered alongside the city.

The ferry pushes out into the water, leaving my stomach and lungs on dry land. How easily I forget this afternoon and all the fears that came with it. Pen and Birdie crowd me at the railing. We are looking for mermaids and fins.

Pen looks between the harbor and the city lights in the distance. I know her. She’s charting the course, memorizing the details most others would miss. She’ll be drafting maps of it for days. Even as a child she would pen maps of every place she’d been, on the back of her hand and on walls if she couldn’t find paper in time. It became a part of her, as obvious as the green of her eyes. And one day it became her name, and no one ever questioned it, it was that certain.

“There’s one!” Birdie points to where the water has become crowded with bubbles. There’s a head of hair as silver as the light on the water, and once it’s under again, there’s the flicker of a fin as long as my forearm. Pen squeaks with delight.

“They never come near land and you probably won’t see their faces, but they like to flirt.”

“Have you ever seen one up close?” I say.

“Once. I was fishing with Nim, and his hook got caught up in her hair. She let out this wail, I swear, that could be heard from the heavens. Scared him so much, he dropped the pole, which may have been what she was after. They like to collect human things. Which reminds me, mind your jewelry. I saw one jump up and snatch the beads right off a woman’s neck.” She presses her hat against her head at the memory.

Pen and I close our fists around our betrothal bands.

The ocean waves slap against the ferry, more turbulent than any of the lakes back home. It’s no wonder; the ocean is filled with so many creatures swimming about.

“There could be cities underwater,” Pen says. “A whole society with buildings made up of human things.”

“There’s more shrimp than you could ever eat,” Birdie says.

Pen makes a face. “Do those have human hair, too?”

Birdie laughs. Out here, her eyes aren’t downcast. She isn’t all “please” and “thank you” and “yes, Father” this and that. She tells us about all the sea creatures she can think of—hard little fish that look like stars and crawl like hands along the ocean floor, and whales that could swallow a village if they had a mind to.

“A fish big enough to swallow a person.” Pen is giddy. “What a hilarious way to die, in the digestive tract of a fish.”

“Whales aren’t fish,” Birdie says, which is all the more absurd a notion.

“You live in a strange world, Birdie,” Pen says.

The ferry comes to a stop, and once we’re on land again, I topple dizzily into the two of them, which sends us all into giggles. We collect a few stares from passersby, but they mean nothing. We are young and enchanted and clattering with beads. We are untouchable.

I find myself very aware of the ground under my feet. It’s unlike the cobbles back home. Rather, it’s solid and black, and its paths branch out like a flat tree, all of them leading to bright lights and music and possibility.

“Cinema’s this way,” Birdie says, tugging us by the wrists.

“It hardly seems like you’re at war,” I say.

“That’s how King Ingram prefers it,” she says.

“You’ve met him?” Pen says.

“Lots of times. Father has him over for dinner when there are matters to discuss. It’s a real honor. The king’s paranoid about poisons and he doesn’t trust a lot of people to prepare his meals.”

“Our king doesn’t come out of hiding much either,” Pen says. “He and his family live in a clock tower that’s full of dungeons.”

“How medieval. Here we are, girls!”

The cinema is a wedge-shaped building, the top of which is framed by a strip of light, and the words “ETIENNE JONES DOUBLE FEATURE.”

“What an unusual sign,” I say.

“It’s a marquee,” Birdie says. She hands silver coins to a man behind the glass and we go inside. She leads us into a dimly lit room that’s full of chairs and already crowded. “You’re going to love it,” she says.

Pen is eyeing the girls in the front row who are passing a bottle among them, taking swigs. I can smell from here that it’s some kind of tonic, which wouldn’t be allowed in public back home.

Nobody here seems to mind.

I clear my throat loudly. “What was that name on the building?”

“Etienne Jones,” Birdie says. “She’s the biggest star in the kingdom. Wait till you see her.”

I stare at the giant screen that takes up the wall before us like a giant image waiting to be developed.

Then the screen goes black and music starts to play. Pen loops her arm around mine and squeezes. The world doesn’t seem so scary now that she’s in good spirits. It’s not all warfare and doom.

The moving picture is gray and jumpy. Lips move and then the words appear for us to read. Etienne Jones has bobbed hair and ringed eyes, and when she walks down the street, she kicks her heels, and all the men watch, dropping hatboxes and getting elbowed by their wives.

But the image is merely a projection. The screen is only fabric. And though our screens on Internment are much smaller and are never used for entertainment, they are more advanced than this. I wonder how it could be that our tiny floating city could be ahead on any of the technology.

For hours, we watch the antics of the upbeat actors on the screen, our laughter a roar that blends in with everyone else’s.

By the time we make our way back to the streets, I have no idea what the hour may be.

“I heard that story you were telling earlier,” Birdie says. “About the dark times and the solar energy.”

“It’s from our history book,” Pen says.

“She knows all the stories,” I say.

“Have you seen the ginormous black book on your nightstand? That’s The Text of All Things,” Birdie says. “Father insists on leaving one for all the guests. Thinks he can save everyone’s soul. I think it’s all a lot of baloney, myself. Most of it, anyway.”

“Was it written by prophets like our history book?” Pen asks.

“Prophets, yes.”

“And the god of the ground told them what to write?”

“Well.” Birdie checks her reflection in a shop window and begins twirling a lock of hair. “We don’t say ‘the god of the ground.’ It’s just ‘The God.’”

“Just the one? For the ground and the sky and everything?” Pen asks.

“I think so,” Birdie says.

Pen looks at me like this is the stupidest thing she has ever heard, and maybe it is. I scan the city, hoping for something I can use to change the subject. Thomas is right. This is the sort of talk that can send her spiraling.

Whether or not it’s a welcome one, a distraction finds us in the form of brassy music streaming through a door that’s been left ajar. Pen stops us from walking and looks inside. There’s the smell of smoke and tonic. Giggles and clatters. Sparkling drinks floating on trays.

Pen is hypnotized. “What is this?” she says, swatting me when I try to pull her away. I follow her gaze to a woman who is gyrating on a table. Her beads swish around her throat in shimmering ovals, and she kicks her leg in an arch right over the head of some lovesick boy. Her lips are red, and I see now what Birdie has been trying to model herself after.

“It’s a brass club,” Birdie says. Her voice is almost too soft to hear.

Pen, stars in her eyes, takes a step forward, but Birdie pulls her back. “We can’t go in there,” she gasps.

Pen looks with heartbreak at the hand that’s holding her back. “Why not?”

“We just … can’t,” Birdie says.

“It must be late,” I say.

“We’re already going to have to sneak back in,” Pen says. “Why not have a little more fun?”

Birdie stutters and looks worriedly over her shoulder.

“Don’t hold out on us now,” Pen says. “I saw you come home after the stars had gone to bed.” With that, she plunges into the crowd.

“I’m so sorry, Birdie, she can be like this,” I say, and hurry after her. I can’t imagine the trouble Pen could get into in a place like this, with tonic shimmering in glasses everywhere.

Pen has already progressed through curtain after curtain of smoke. She’s made a direct beeline for the dancing woman, who is tall and so skinny, she’s concave. A man at the table holds what must be her shoes.

The dancing woman smiles at Pen, and it’s as though they have a sort of kinship somehow, for in the dancing woman’s eyes is a melancholy under all that cosmetic.

Or maybe the melancholy belongs to me. I can’t be certain.

The music doesn’t cease, but it changes. The dancing woman climbs down, and as she does, the man who holds her shoes leans in for a kiss. “Sorry, Mac,” she says, smiling with all her teeth. “The bank’s closed.”

Birdie stands beside me, both of us watching the dancing woman talk to Pen. We can’t make out her words, but she wraps her long arms around Pen’s shoulders and says something before kissing her cheek. And then she’s gone, waving her shoes above her head, to begin another dance.

Pen spins around to face us, giddy.

Birdie and I are on her at once.

“What did she say?”

“You have to tell us!”

“She said, ‘Now is our time to be queens.’” She stands a bit taller for having repeated it. “And then she told me not to take any wooden nickels.”

I don’t know what that means—any of it—but Pen is glowing. With a single hand she lifts three nearly empty glasses from the dancing woman’s table and hands one to each of us.

“Pen!” I say.

“What? It isn’t as though anyone is still drinking out of them. Come on, a toast.” She raises her glass. “To the coronation of three queens. Oh, don’t look like that. You aren’t going to make me drink alone, are you?”

Birdie raises her glass warily. I believe she’s never had a drink before, though nobody here would suspect it by the looks of her; she’s made up so confidently. I raise my glass to show her it won’t be as bad as all that.

“What’s it like?” Birdie asks.

“How should I know?” Pen laughs. It’s a beautiful, free laugh. “This is your world, not mine.”

“There now,” I say. “Bottoms up.”

The tonic of the ground has a greater burn than anything I’ve ever tasted on Internment, even from the myriad of bottles Pen and I found after we’d picked the lock in her mother’s cabinet. Birdie coughs, and Pen pats her back sympathetically. “Come on,” Pen says. “We’ll look for something yellow or pink. Nothing pink is ever menacing.”

By the fourth or fifth glass, Birdie has stopped spluttering the stuff back up before she can swallow it. “I can’t hear myself think in here,” she says.

“Isn’t that the point?” Pen says, mimicking the dance moves she’s been observing all night. They make her look deranged, like she’s trying to stomp invisible bugs.

I laugh. “What is that supposed to be?”

“I don’t think anyone knows.” She snorts, which sends us all into hysterics. “The dancing and the music and the hair and the dresses—it’s all so brilliantly tacky.”

“We really should go,” Birdie says.

“For a girl who sneaks out at night, you really are no fun,” Pen says.

“Birdie’s right,” I say.

“Morgan, you more than anyone should be glad we’re here. Isn’t this exactly what you’ve been dreaming about all your life?”

She’s right and she’s wrong all at once. I have dreamed of the ground for as long as I can remember, but the most talented imagination in human existence couldn’t have foreseen this. It’s all so bright and fast and terrifying.

“Dance with me!” Pen says, grabbing my arms. I backpedal, pulling her for the door.

“You, my friend, are ossified,” Birdie says, and giggles at Pen. I don’t know what that means, but I suspect it applies to her as well.

When we burst outside into the cold air, Pen opens her arms and throws her head back and says, “I can’t believe we could get away with that in public.”

“There aren’t any speakeasies on Internment?” Birdie asks. She slips on a patch of ice, and I catch her by the arm.

“Only bottles and locks and drawn curtains,” Pen says, trying to balance on the edge of the sidewalk, to little avail. “This cold is drawing the burn right out of my veins,” she sulks. “I think I’m already sober.”

“You aren’t,” I assure her.

“I don’t know how you’re both holding it so well,” Birdie says. “The ground is tilting.”

“Isn’t it great?” Pen says. With a shriek she topples into a pile of snow. “Morgan is a sensible drunk,” she tells Birdie as she picks herself up.

“Some sense,” I say. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“I do; everything’s jake,” Birdie says. “You’ve done this kind of thing before?”

“Now and again,” I say. “Not often.”

“Not often,” Birdie echoes, rolling my accent down her tongue.

“Only when we’re together,” Pen says. “We have a pact. Never drink to combat our sorrows and only drink when we’re together.”

“Why?” Birdie says.

“Because it’s dangerous otherwise,” I say, fighting off a chill that is not entirely brought on by the wind. Lex. I had my first sip of tonic the day we learned Lex would never see again. My parents kept vigil in his hospital room, and they sent me home to an empty apartment. But Pen was waiting for me on the steps; she took me by the hand and she led me to our secret cavern, the bottles clinking in her satchel. That day was an ocean in itself, filled with creatures that wanted to pull me to uncertain depths.

It’s as though Pen knows what I’m thinking, for she wraps her arm around my shoulders and kisses my cheek.

Pen looks to Birdie. “I should like to know more about your lonely god.”

“That part is boring,” Birdie says. “The divinities are the only parts I ever liked in my studies.”

“What are divinities?” I ask. I had hoped to keep Pen from mourning our own faraway god, but if we’re to live in this world, we should learn about its faith.

“They’re like guardians,” Birdie says. “They keep the elements safe. They’re the first creatures to have existed in the world, and everyone descends from them.”

“So the divinities are human, then,” Pen says.

Birdie shakes her head, loses her balance and giggles as she stumbles. “There’s Aresi, who doesn’t have a body. She lives on the wind and can be thousands of places at once. And there’s Terra, who makes things grow, and when living things die, it’s her job to guide their spirits up to the afterlife.”

“So it’s her fault Internment is floating in the sky, then.” I laugh.

“She must not have liked us,” Pen says.

“Maybe she thought we were dead and the whole city got stuck halfway to the afterlife,” I say. And after I’ve said the words, I realize with certainty that I’m still drunk.

“Growing up by the water, I was made to learn a lot about Ehco,” Birdie says. “When the world was created, he was the first creature of the sea, and he was as small as a worm. And he asked God why he was meant to live in that whole huge body of water, and The God told him that when he put mankind in the world, mankind would sometimes ask The God for things he wouldn’t be able to do. And mankind would grow angry with him—and they would grow sad, and that anger and sorrow needed someplace to go, and so it would be Ehco’s job to consume it and keep it in his body so that it didn’t destroy the world. He was a small thing then, but soon the ocean would be the only thing big enough to contain him. And eventually he divided himself into pieces—a bit in each ocean.”

Pen cranes her neck to get a view of the water in the distance. “Your ocean does seem to go on forever,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s big enough to contain all the anger and the sorrow in the world.”

“They’re only stories,” Birdie says. “People live their lives devoted to them. My father made us memorize passages from The Text, but even as a girl I never believed them. Except maybe for Ehco.”

“Why just Ehco?” I say.

“Because when I see anger and sadness,” Birdie says, “I can’t believe it’s for nothing. I like the idea that there’s a great monster in the sea who keeps all the bad thoughts so we can let them go.”

She has slowed a pace behind us, and Pen and I stop to take her hands as we make our way back to the hotel.

I had worried about sneaking past the princess upon our return, but her bed is empty and neatly made up. Early gray light follows us in through the window.

“She can’t still be meeting with your father,” Pen says.

Birdie opens the door and looks out into the hallway. “Nope. Fireplace is out,” she whispers. “Father is always the one to put it out before he goes to bed.” She lurches in an unfortunate and familiar way, and, hand over mouth, she staggers off for the water room. They call it a bathroom down here, but that doesn’t make much sense, as the bath is only a small part of the room’s purpose.

Pen falls facedown on her bed with a groan. “I’d say I’ll feel this in the morning, but it’s already morning, and I already do.”

I help her under the covers. “What do you suppose that princess is off doing?” she mumbles into her pillow.

I fall gratefully into my bed. “Whatever it is, we can’t let on that we knew she was gone.”

“She’s only a princess,” Pen says. “We’re queens now, remember.”

I close my eyes and see Internment cloaked in silver. Everyone has black lips and ringed eyes. The train pulls across the screen, and I’m not awake to see the last car go by.




6


“Up and at ’em!” Annette says, knocking on our door as she makes her rounds through the hotel. She’s done this every morning since we arrived. I hear the phrase echo what seems to be a thousand times as she knocks on all the doors.

Pen whimpers and pulls the blanket over her head.

Celeste stirs in the bed across from mine. She must have come in sometime after Pen and I snuck in, and though she makes no complaint, I can see by her heavy feet and her bleary eyes that she’s worse off for it.

“Morgan,” she says. “Did your father ever mention anything about the glasslands to you?”

“Why would he?” I say. I crane my neck to have a look at myself in the mirror, and what I see is enough to make me want to stay in bed.

“I just assumed that as a patrolman he might have been called there.”

“He didn’t discuss his work with me,” I say. The throbbing in my head steals my attention from the aching in my chest; she speaks so casually of my father, when her father is the reason he’s dead.

Celeste moves behind the changing screen, and moments later her nightgown has been flung upon its edge.

“Don’t suppose you’d know much about your father’s work there, Margaret,” she says.

“Never call me that,” Pen says from beneath her covers. “And what would you know about my father’s work?”

“I make it a point to know about the people of Internment,” Celeste answers pertly.

“Well, then,” Pen says. “You know I think you should take a running jump from that window there.”

“He works there, doesn’t he?” Celeste says, her condescending cheer undeterred by Pen’s tone. “Today I have an audience with the king, and I only thought, if either of you possessed knowledge His Majesty might find useful, I could invite you along. I’m a little too nervous, I admit, to go alone.”

Pen sits up. Her hair is an electrocuted blond animal atop her head. “The king? How did you manage that?”

Celeste emerges from behind the screen and reaches for the brush on her night table. “Despite your opinion of me, Pen”—she says her name pointedly—“I am the daughter of a king. And this is a war. I’m the only one to negotiate on my father’s behalf.”

Pen is all at once very sober. She throws back her blankets and stands. “You can’t really be saying you mean to involve Internment in this mess down here. You can’t think that’s what your father would want.”

Celeste laughs at the mirror. “I think I know my father much better than you. And I intend to convey his support to King Ingram. My brother, the prince, would back me up.” Her eyes linger on Pen. “But he isn’t here.”

Pen is clutching her collar, twisting the fabric in her fist. “This is not Internment’s war,” she says. “Thank goodness the people of the ground can’t reach Internment, or they’d destroy it.”

Celeste smiles. It is a daydreaming, hopeful smile. “Oh, but soon they will,” she says. “They have mechanical birds—planes, they call them—that can go nearly as high as Internment. And they’re learning more and building upon them every day. It’s only a matter of time.”

Pen looks as though she’ll be sick. She’s right. Internment would be very easy to destroy; it’s no match for the ground’s warfare.

What has my blood going cold is the thought that Celeste is right, too.

“So, Pen is clearly not interested,” Celeste says, turning to face me. “What about you, Morgan? I could use a fellow citizen from the magical floating island.” She can’t help giggling at the name they’ve given us. “And as the daughter of a patrolman, surely you know more than you give yourself credit for.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’d like to go. Thank you.”

Pen opens her mouth to speak, but then she closes it and stumbles from the room at a run. I wince at the sound of the water room’s door closing.

Celeste sets her hairbrush down. “See you at breakfast,” she says cheerily.

I find Pen sitting on the edge of the tub, red-faced and watery-eyed. I can smell that she’s just been sick. It isn’t just the tonic—she can hold that quite well—but the thought of losing her home for a second time.

“They can’t,” she whispers. “Tell me they can’t reach Internment.”

“I’ll find out all that I can,” I say, running a cloth under the cold water and then handing it to her. “Let’s not panic until I’ve seen the king.”

She stares at me, horror in her eyes.

“Pen? I’m going to find you something to wear, and we’re going to have breakfast, and we aren’t going to panic.”

She nods dazedly.

“Say it.”

“We aren’t going to panic,” she repeats.

After a deep breath, she’s ready to face the morning.

We find Basil and Thomas at the bottom of the stairs. “Morning,” I say, perhaps too brightly. I kiss Basil’s cheek.

I nudge Pen, which prompts her to give Thomas a flat, if troubled, stare. “Good morning,” she says. It puts her under his immediate scrutiny. I can see as much in his eyes.

Basil is looking at me the same way.

“Oh, all right,” I say. “Birdie showed us where the tonic was last night and we were up late in her room talking and sharing a bottle.”

I’m startled by how easily the lie comes. I’ve never lied to Basil. But while the people of the ground find magic in the floating island, they are perhaps too blind to see the magic that hides in this city, in silver screens and brass clubs and the beautiful thieves that live in the ocean, who carry stolen trinkets from the human world to depths beyond even the sunlight’s reach.

I feel an inexplicable need to protect that magic. Or to keep it for myself, buried in the blood that rushes around my beating heart.

Pen has no trouble with the lie. Secrets have always comforted her. “Don’t look at me that way,” she tells Thomas, and shows him the back of her ring hand. “I didn’t lose my virginity in a card game. I’m still your betrothed, no matter how far we both fall from the clouds.”

I’ve no idea why I find this so funny. Perhaps she said it to amuse me.

Thomas clears his throat and then looks between Pen and me. “Word is this morning that you’re going to meet King Ingram.”

“Morgan is,” Pen says. “I want nothing to do with all that whatnot. It makes me sick.”

That’s all she cares to say on the matter. She pushes between the boys and makes her way toward the dining room. That’s what they call it. So many rooms that there’s no need to eat in the kitchen, where the food is prepared.

Thomas frowns after her.

In the car, Celeste hooks her arm around mine and lets loose a squeak of excitement.

Two schoolgirls. What an audience we are for the king of more land than any one person should control.

Jack Piper drives while Nimble points out landmarks for us. He’s in high spirits, but all I see are more possibilities for bombings. There’s been minimal talk of the banks, and no talk at all of what casualties could have occurred.

“There’s our hospital,” Nimble says. “Saint Croix.”

If the hotel is the size of a city, the hospital is the size of ten. “Morgan,” Celeste says. “Your brother is a medic, isn’t he?”

I don’t like the liberties she’s taking by discussing my family this morning.

“He was,” I say. “Before he lost his sight.”

“The one who never comes out of his room?” Nimble says. “That’s your brother? Married to the redhead?”

“Yes,” I say, and then quickly, “How long has your hospital been here?”

“Went up the year Riles was born,” Nimble says. “They seem to be expanding on it every year.”

Celeste leans in to me. “I wish for us to be friends,” she says, softly so that only I’ll hear. “I’m a great judge of people and I have a sense about you.”

I haven’t forgotten the hours I spent shackled in the clock tower while she and her brother brought me grapes like I was a pet, or a game. But it seems so far away now. It happened in a place I can’t even see when I look for it, it’s so cloudy all the time. “I think it was brave of your parents to be a part of that metal bird’s creation,” she says. “I am sorry that they aren’t here. Truly.”

“Thank you,” I say, for lack of fitting words. My head aches and my mouth feels stuffed with sheep shavings. I am thinking of Pen, inebriated and dancing in the smoke and noise, trying to forget what we’ve had to leave behind. And of the blue bird that sailed over our heads, unaware of its own brilliance, indifferent to whatever silly worries the humans may have.

“I’m sorry about your brother, too,” I tell Celeste, because it seems like the right thing to say. Even if a part of me thinks he deserved what Pen did to him.

Celeste smiles mischievously. “He’ll be so jealous when I tell him about this place. We’ve always been rather competitive.”

“Have you considered the possibility that we won’t make it back?” My question just slips out.

“Not at all.” The princess doesn’t miss a beat. “Have a little faith.”

“In what?” I say.

“Well.” She draws her eyebrows together. “In the way of things, I suppose. And in me.”

I return her smile. We are all doomed.

We drive through the streets that Pen, Birdie, and I haunted the night before. We pass women in long coats that are a trove of buttons, hats that look like shells or folded paper, all of them with flowers and big white beads that Birdie calls pearls. They, too, are a treasure of the sea.





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