Broken Crowns

by Lauren DeStefano

“You know what I mean.”

  She takes another bite of the carrot, with a crunch I swear is meant to be pointed. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you with my secrets these days.”

  I know just what she means. It has been a source of contention that’s never fully gone away these past several months. She discovered that Internment’s soil contains the very fuel source King Ingram wants for his kingdom, and she confided this secret to me. But after she nearly drowned, I told the princess everything, hoping an alliance could be forged between Internment and Havalais, giving us all a chance to return home.

  Instead, King Ingram used the princess as a hostage and has been depleting Internment of its soil as he pleases.

  I don’t know the enormity of what’s already happened and what’s to come, but even so I wouldn’t take back what I did. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to return Pen home to her family, to the city that she loves so much that she’s been going to pieces without it.

  So I say nothing, and Pen can see that she’s wounded me. “Nim says Birdie has had her last surgery, and can come home soon,” she says to change the subject. “She’ll still be confined to her wheelchair, but I doubt that will last for long.”

  I push my chair away from the table. “I’m going to make some tea for Lex.”

  “Oh, Morgan, don’t be cross. I didn’t mean it. I’m just on edge because of that bloody jet.”

  “I know,” I say softly.

  I hope that this time the king has returned, and the princess as well, alive and safe. Whatever news they bring will surely be better than all this wondering and fear.

  I don’t know what sort of mood Lex will be in when I reach the top of the stairs, but he’s been especially sour lately. He’s running low on paper for his transcriber, and soon he will no longer be able to spend his days hiding in his fictional worlds.

  I knock when I reach his door.

  “Alice?” he says.

  “No, it’s me.” Back home he always knew when I was the one approaching him, but something about this house and its noises disorients him. “I’ve brought some tea.”

  “Oh,” he says, rather unenthusiastically. “Come in.”

  He’s sitting in a wing chair near the open window, and the worry on his face mirrors my own from earlier. He doesn’t care for the wind; perhaps it reminds him too much of the edge. “The weather down here takes some getting used to,” I say. I press the teacup into his hand, not letting go until I’m sure he’s got a grip on it.

  “I have a bad feeling,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  I hesitate, standing before him, debating with myself whether to tell him what I saw in the sky.

  But in the end I’m not given a choice. Even without his sight, Lex is clever at sensing when anything is wrong. “What is it, Little Sister? What’s happened?”

  I wring my skirt in my hands. “We saw the jet about an hour ago. Pen, Basil, Thomas, and I. We’ve been waiting for someone to come home and tell us what it means.”

  Lex is silent for a long moment. “I heard.” He takes a sip of his tea and then with minimal fumbling he sets it on the window ledge. “So it begins,” he says.

  “There’s no need to be so theatrical,” I say. “It may be good news.”

  “A greedy king in a wasteland of wealth holds a princess hostage so that he may invade a tiny floating city, and you still think he may return with good news. My sister the optimist.”

  I am tired of being called an optimist as though it were a bad thing. Pen has used this word against me as well. “I’m merely trying not to panic, Lex.” I hold myself back from saying anything too combative. I don’t want to fight, and it has taken me so long to stop hating my brother for lying to me about our father being dead. I would like for us to be reasonable with each other.

  “Where is Alice?” he asks. Maybe he wants to avoid an argument too.

  “She’s in the garden.”

  “And she knows about the jet?”

  “I told her when we came back inside. We’re all waiting now. Drink your tea, all right? Alice will be up to check on you in a bit.”

  As I cross the threshold, he says, “Morgan?”

  I turn.

  “Be careful.”

  “I’m only going downstairs.”

  “I never know what mad and wild adventures you’ll get off to on a whim.”

  I can’t help but smile at the thought. Mad and wild adventures. It’s not something he ever would have accused me of back home, when I was tucked safely in our little floating world.

  2

  They never exhale, the trees. It was the same on Internment; on a very windy day, the trees rustle and inhale, and then the leaves and the branches all tremble as though something were trying to strangle the life from them. The dark sky watches on, filled with anticipation, wondering if this will be a great night, or a horrible night, or the last night of the world.

  “Morgan.” Basil’s voice pulls me out of my trance. He joins me at the window, and when his arm brushes mine, my skin swells with tiny bumps. “You’ve been standing here for an hour.”

  My body releases some of its tension and I lean my head toward his. “I have a bad feeling. Lex does too. Like something big is about to happen.”

  “Suppose something is about to happen,” he says. “Then what?”

  I shake my head. “I’m tired of being driven mad by the ‘what if’ game. I just want to know. I want King Ingram to come back and tell us what’s happening. Good or bad. So all the wondering can stop.”

  Basil is quiet for a few seconds, and then with some difficulty he says, “I’ve been playing that same game, wondering about my parents and Leland.”

  I look at him.

  “I think they must be okay,” he says, and nods straight ahead at the sky, where our floating city is hiding somewhere in that darkness beyond our sullen reflections. “They would follow the king’s orders. They’ve always been smart about that.”

  “Which king’s orders?” I say.

  “Whichever king is in charge these days,” he says.

  “Maybe King Ingram and King Furlow really are forming some sort of alliance,” I say. “Maybe there will be good news.”

  He glances sidelong at me, and a smile comes to his lips. “I’ve always loved your optimistic side.”

  “You’re the only one. Everyone else seems to think I’m foolish for harboring it.”

  He puts his arm around my back, and the last of the tension in me dies. I rest my temple against his shoulder. “I’m tired, Basil. And so worried that the decisions I’ve made were the wrong ones.”

  “The wrong decisions have been made by these kings,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, I would have done the same thing you did. If I’d known about the phosane, I would have told.”

  “Really?”

  “If what’s happening to Pen had been happening to you, if I’d thought this world were killing you, yes. I’d do anything it took to bring you back home.”

  “You’ve always understood me, Basil.”

  His arm tightens around me and I close my eyes. The anxiety feels so distant when he’s around. Farther away and smaller in the sky than our long-lost floating city.

  Then I hear the front door open, and my stomach drops.

  The younger Pipers have long since gone to bed, and everyone else has been in the lobby for hours, waiting for word. All eyes are at the front door when Nimble steps inside, his shoulders dropped, his eyes weary. He is always the first to run to the tarmac when the jet returns, hoping for word about Celeste. And he is always heartsick when no word comes.

  We all wait in silence. Nim raises his head and looks at each of us, settling on me. “King Ingram has returned. My father is with him now. I don’t know what any of this means yet. I’m sorry.”

  He moves toward his bedroom, and by the heaviness of his steps I can suspect what the answer will be. But still I have to ask, “Was Celeste with him?”
<
br />   He pauses, his back to me. “No,” he says. “My father told me only that the king has brought a special visitor, but it isn’t her.” He takes a deep breath, and his voice is so tight, I think he may be fighting tears. “I doubt my father will be back tonight. You might as well all go to bed.”

  He can’t get away from us fast enough.

  Pen is standing by the couch, Thomas at her side. She’s staring worriedly after Nimble, though, and she doesn’t hear Thomas until the third or fourth time he’s said her name. “Pen.” She flinches, startled.

  “We’ll know more tomorrow, surely,” Basil says.

  The hotel falls into its nightly silence. I soak in the tub long after everyone else has gone to bed. The mornings in this place can be so noisy, with the Piper children running about, shrieking with laughter as they play their games, most of which involve explosions. And footsteps going this way and that, and voices, and silverware on plates.

  But the nights are still. I can feel everyone’s silence just as surely as I can hear their voices during the day.

  Someone knocks at the door. “Morgan?” Pen’s voice. “Are you all right? You’ve been in there forever.”

  “I thought you were in bed,” I say.

  “I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t drowned.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.” The water’s gone cold anyway. I wring out my wet hair, dry off, and slip into my nightgown.

  When I open the door, Pen is waiting in the hallway, holding a lantern. Its orange glow picks up the bags under her eyes, and I can see all at once how troubled she’s been, despite her best efforts to conceal it.

  “I’m not tired,” she whispers. “Are you?”

  “No,” I say, although it’s a lie. I will stay awake all night if there’s a chance she’ll finally be honest with me. She is much more likely to reveal her secrets at night, when the sleeping world will be undisturbed by her whispering voice.

  She smiles. “Do you want to go for a midnight walk?”

  We don’t bother with our shoes. We tiptoe barefoot down the steps and through the front door.

  Unlike earlier, the night’s wind is mellow and warm. The moon outshines our lantern, nearly full and bright white.

  As soon as we’ve stepped into the grass, I can feel the cool earth under my feet, astoundingly like the ground back home. Pen moves forward, and when I don’t follow, she turns to face me. “Aren’t you coming?”

  I wriggle my bare toes in the grass and stare down at it. I have never seen the heaps of soil being flown down from Internment. I’ve only heard about it from Nim. I imagine Internment filled with craters so wide that you could look through them and see the ground below.

  “I was just thinking about home,” I say. “About what King Ingram is going to tell us, if he plans to tell us anything at all.”

  Pen takes my hand, leads me away from the hotel. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

  She leads me to the amusement park, and I climb the fence after her without question, happy to see whatever it is she wants to show me. Maybe it will be something other than tonic this time. Maybe it will give me some insight into this distance she’s built between herself and everyone else in this world.

  I expect her to lead me to the telescopes. That’s where I find her sometimes. But instead she leads me to the giant teacups, sitting inanimate in the moonlight. She is still clutching the lantern when she kneels beside one of the saucers—chipped but still bright green—and reaches beneath it, somewhere in the mechanism that would cause it to spin.

  Eventually she finds what she was looking for: several pieces of paper folded together. Whatever is on those pages must be important, if she would keep them all the way out here.

  Is this because I discovered her request paper all those months ago? Does she think I’ll go rifling through her things when she’s not in our room? I haven’t. I would never. But sometimes, when I hear her tossing and turning, muttering through her nightmares about the harbor, I would do anything to know what is happening in her mind.

  “Here.” She hands me the lantern, and then she swings one leg over the teacup’s rim, then the other. She takes the lantern back so I can climb in after her.

  Inside the teacup is a metal wraparound bench, and she sits so close to me that my wet hair dampens her shoulder.

  She spreads the papers open on the small table before us—the one that we would twist if we wanted the teacup to spin. “Now that the king is back, we have to find a way to stop him,” she says. Her eyes are on the pages. “If we don’t, I think we’re in real trouble.”

  I stare at the pages, lit up by the moon and the lantern, and as always, I don’t understand. I see Pen’s steadily drawn lines. I see a circle and a small floating silhouette that could be Internment. I see numbers drifting around it like birds.

  Pen shuffles through the pages like a madman. “I’ve been reading up on the sunsets. The sun goes down about a minute earlier every day, except about once a week or so when it goes down two minutes earlier.”

  She looks at me to be sure I’m following along. “Okay,” I say. I’ve never paid too much attention to the sunset, but I know that we’re at the time of year when we lose a bit of light each day. “So?”

  “So,” she says. “For the past few months, I’ve been keeping a grid of where Internment sits in the sky, and where the sun should be. Every day I look through the same telescope at the same angle.”

  She points to Internment’s shape on each of the pages before us, as though I should know what we’re looking at.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She looks at me, and I can see how tired her face is, how worried. But her eyes are bright, the way they always are when she’s onto something important. “Internment is sinking. Not very much, but a bit each month. Enough that it’s bound to be a problem if this keeps up.”

  I can only stare at the pages as these words sink in. In her ever steady hand Pen has drawn the outline of the clock tower, protruding above the mass of apartment buildings. Scraggly roots jut from the torn underbelly of the floating city. The sun, a perfect circle, is at a distance, held in the pure white sky by tiny equations I can’t decipher.

  There are two versions of Pen. There is the silly, spontaneous, and brutally blunt girl I know, and then there is the side of her that can ingeniously solve these mysteries. It is frightening what she is capable of.

  “Can you be sure?” I say.

  “The professor helped me with the algorithm.” She gnaws on her lower lip guiltily. “I’d been visiting him before he died.”

  I suppose she expects me to feel betrayed. And I do, in a way, but I am also relieved. I knew she was off somewhere; I’m only grateful it wasn’t with a bottle.

  “It must be all the mining,” I say. “We don’t know how much soil King Ingram’s men bring back on each shipment.”

  “It would have to be a lot of soil to affect Internment’s weight,” Pen says. “More soil than could possibly be fitting into those jets. Internment is thousands of times their size. I don’t think it’s that.”

  “What, then?”

  Pen shuffles through the papers until she finds a full-page drawing of Internment. The accuracy and scale is stunning, as though she’d sat in the sky and sketched its likeness. She has drawn a bubble around the city in rough overlapping lines.

  “When your brother went to the edge, it was the wind that threw him back. The wind was moving sideways, like a current around the city. Have you ever noticed the way clouds that get too close to Internment seem to zip past us?”

  “Those clouds get caught up in the wind that surrounds the city,” I say. “And you think that wind is part of what’s keeping Internment afloat?”

  “I have several theories about what keeps Internment afloat, but I do think the wind is a big factor,” Pen says. “When we left the city in the metal bird, we went under the city, through the dirt. But King Ingram’s jet lands and departs fr
om the surface.”

  “It flies through the wind,” I say, understanding.

  She nods eagerly. “And disrupts it. Maybe even weakens it. It’s a slight change for now, but over the course of years, it could knock Internment from the sky completely.”

  Her voice is excited, the way it always is when she is explaining things. But in the silence that follows, she remembers the magnitude of what she’s said, and I feel it too. Internment is not only being ravaged by this world’s greedy king; it could be knocked right out of the sky.

  “King Ingram wouldn’t care if he knew,” I say.

  “No. Why should he? He’ll have what he wants. Even if Internment crashed right into Havalais, he’d stand clear and let people die like he did at the harbor.”

  I look at Pen. “How do we stop it?”

  She shrugs. “I say we kill King Ingram.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am, rather.”

  “Yes, okay,” I say. “We’ll just walk right up to his castle, and we’ll knock on the door, and then we’ll stab him with the knife you keep under your pillow. I can’t find any fault in that. But suppose we come up with a backup plan.”

  “There’s only one person I trust who has access to the king,” Pen says. “And I’d trust him with a secret, too. After all, he’s lived his entire life never letting anyone know he’s third in line to the throne.”

  “Nimble?” I say. One night after too much drinking, Birdie confided in us that her father was the king’s secret bastard, and that she and her siblings were princes and princesses. Later when she was comatose after the bombings, Nim confirmed it.

  “He hates King Ingram as much as I do,” Pen says. “The king is the reason his brother is dead. The king is the reason the princess was taken away from him. He has no reason to care about Internment, but he cares about her, and she’s up there. He’ll want to help us.”

  A light breeze coasts along the ground, bringing the salt of the endless ocean, rustling the grass and causing some rusted metal thing within the park to squeak.

  The papers rattle, and Pen organizes them with affection and folds them along their crease.