Broken Crowns

by Lauren DeStefano

  “You’re Morgan,” he says. “The girl I could never keep up with in kinder year, who was always chasing flutterlings and even bramble flies—anything with wings. You’re the girl who dove into that ocean when Pen didn’t surface. You’re the thing that calls me back when my thoughts have begun to tread into darkness.”

  I sniffle dumbly. “I am?”

  He tilts my chin so that I’m looking at him. “Yes.”

  “You always know the exact thing to say.” I blow my nose again and fold the handkerchief in my lap. “I don’t suppose Nim will want this back.”

  Basil laughs. “He probably meant for you to keep it.”

  “Shall we go, then?”

  “I’m ready if you are.”

  Basil opens the door, and I follow him out into the dark morning air. It’s chilly, although last night was quite warm. I hug my arms across my stomach. “Your weather is unpredictable,” I say to Nim.

  We begin the walk down the concrete, and to keep myself rooted in the moment, I tell Nim about the long seasons and the short back home. There is no real weather. No snow. A slight change in the leaves sometimes, a slight dip in the temperature when the days get shorter, but nothing like this.

  “I imagine all of our seasons must be a nuisance for someone like you,” he says.

  “No. I think they’re beautiful.”

  “What do you call this road?” Basil asks. “It’s strange. On one end it just stops in the grass.”

  “It’s a runway,” Nim says. “The plane will come out of that carriage house there, and pick up momentum by speeding down the runway, and then it’ll take flight.”

  I turn to him as we walk. “Do you wish you were coming with us?”

  “The idea is intriguing,” he admits. “But I have my sisters to look after.” He brightens a little. “Birds will be excited to know you’ve gone home. She’ll expect all sorts of stories when you return.” He says it with such confidence, and I cannot tell whether he believes it himself or is just a convincing liar for my sake.

  I play along. “I’m looking forward to seeing her up and about.”

  I look ahead to see that the carriage house that holds the plane is much closer. I can hear voices echoing inside its brick walls.

  “Morgan,” Nim says. “Your kindness meant a lot to Celeste. She told me that you were someone she could trust. One of the only people that she could trust, actually. I was wondering if maybe—if you could give this to her. When you see her, that is.” He has extracted a folded envelope from his breast pocket and he puts it in my hand. It’s sealed shut, and I can feel the heft of several pages inside. “It’s very important that she’s the only one who reads that.”

  I meet his eyes. “Of course,” I say.

  “And if—” He cuts himself off and then begins anew after he’s summoned some courage. “And if what the others have feared is true, and she’s no longer alive, I need you to destroy that for me.”

  I’m amazed by his bravery, saying those words and accepting them as a possibility.

  “Okay,” I say, and repeat something I’ve heard Birdie say so many times, copying her accent and emphasizing the four syllables. “Absolutely.”

  Nim smiles, punches my shoulder lightly. “Thanks, kiddo.”

  He bangs on the wooden door to the carriage house: once, pause, three times, pause, once.

  There’s a stirring and a metallic sound from within, like ropes being fed through a pulley, and then the door begins lumbering upward, arching back into the carriage house itself.

  As the door rises and I begin to get a good look at the jet in the early morning light, a painfully bright flash blinds me. Too late, we shield our eyes. “There they are, our lovely young beacons of hope!” the king says. He’s holding a heavy-looking metal device in front of his face, and he lowers it to smile at us. “That will look lovely on the front page of the paper. I’ll be sure to reserve a copy for you when you return.”

  If you don’t call upon your men to kill us, I think. That’s what my own king tried to do to me.

  As the burning dots fade from my vision, I see Prince Azure standing behind the king, outfitted on either side by two of King Ingram’s men. Hostage, I think. He is dressed in more of this world’s fashions; if he were to return home like this, it would take mere seconds for the schoolboys back home to mimic this foreign image. Internment would begin to resemble the ground. The thought frightens me more than I was prepared for.

  The prince’s weary eyes are on Nim, the boy from a strange land who stole his sister’s heart.

  Nim notices and tips his cap in greeting, but this gets no response.

  Beside the prince, the jet sits like a giant metal creature I’d expect to find in one of the oceans here. If the professor’s contraption was a bird, this is a creature of the sea. A whale with an arched back and pectoral fins spread out at either side. The metal is dark with “001” painted on the side in chipped white letters.

  I turn to Basil, who is staring at the thing with worried eyes. I’d like to console him, but it doesn’t seem wise to speak candidly in the king’s presence. And besides that, I don’t want to lie to him.

  The king positions Basil and the prince and me at the jet’s nose for photos. I’m made to stand between the two of them with my arms up around their shoulders. Through his teeth, Prince Azure says to me, “It’ll go a lot faster if you smile.” He glances at me. “Not like you’re facing execution. Like you mean it.”

  I force my best smile. The king seems pleased with the lot of us and he hands the horrid flashing device to one of his men. They call it a camera, I know, but it’s a much more crude version of the image recorders we have back home. This world has many advances compared to Internment, but Internment has much better technology. I suppose Havalais harnessing the phosane would change all that.

  “This is the part where I wish you all safe travels,” the king says. He hands Basil and me each a thick stack of papers. “I’ve prepared some notes—scripts, information, itineraries, what to say when you are asked certain questions. There will be someone waiting to receive you when you return home.”

  Home. He shouldn’t be allowed to use such an intimate word to describe the place he’s so cheerfully willing to destroy.

  His delighted grin does nothing to ease my mind. I am more sure than ever that some horrible fate awaits us back home. He has used us as symbols of hope, and now that we’re leaving, he can tell his kingdom all sorts of brilliant stories about what we’re doing up there. No need for us to be alive for that.

  One of the men opens the jet’s door. It unfolds from the body of the jet like a bit of orange peel. Our shoes make hard noises on the metal steps as we climb up to the door. Basil goes first and I follow. Just before I step into the jet’s doorway, I look back over my shoulder at Nim, who gives me a pitying smile. Beside him, the prince mouths the words “my sister.” I give the slightest of nods so that the king, giddy about his plans, won’t see it.

  As I step onto the jet, two men wheel away the ladder. Basil grips my arm as though he thinks I might fall in the open space. And then the same two men swing the door shut behind us with a jarring slam. I tense. The jet’s shudder never leaves my body, instead running up and down my bones, trapped inside me.

  It’s dim inside the jet. The only light comes from the rows of small windows on either side of the tiny chamber.

  The ceiling is low and arched. Basil can’t stand fully upright and must duck his head as we make our way to the seats. The seats are very similar to the ones on the trains back home. There are four of them, made of polished brown leather, in pairs of two that face one another beside a small oval window.

  My legs are shaking as I bend into a seat beside the window. Basil sits beside me and puts his hand on my knee.

  I notice two buckets under the seats across from us. “What do you suppose those are for?” I say, desperate for a distraction.

  “In case we need to get sick,” Basil guesses. I don’t fee
l any better. I didn’t get sick when we fell out of the sky, but now the thought has been put into my head, and I purse my lips together.

  A roar begins from seemingly within the jet’s walls. Our seats rattle and shake. I grip Basil’s hand that’s on my knee. I can feel the last breath he draws before he holds it all in. The jet lurches forward, and the darkness of the garage outside the window becomes the lightening sky. I see Nim with his hands in his pocket for less than a second before he has been ripped from view. The grass flies past us, an endless field, and then suddenly that grass is far below us. We are moving up, leaving my stomach below us.

  My hand, squeezing Basil’s, is slick with sweat. My face is hot and then cold.

  Basil exhales, and his next breaths are shallow and light. He’s staring at the tiny window.

  I take a deep breath and exhale hard. “Maybe it will distract us if we read these papers King Ingram left with us.”

  Basil shakes his head lightly. “I can’t look at words just now.”

  I don’t think I’m much in the condition for reading, either. I roll my head back against the seat and try to find my bearings.

  Several minutes of quiet pass, and as soon as I realize I won’t need the bucket under my seat, I do feel better.

  We don’t speak, either because we fear being sick, or because this week of being paraded about has exhausted us.

  An hour into the flight, my head feels as though it were being compressed in a vise. I lean against Basil, who draws patterns on my knee, pausing occasionally to rub the satin of my dress between his fingers.

  I think of the grim alternate reality Prince Azure painted for Pen. Shackled and tortured in the clock tower, prodded for information. Her mind has always been a commodity, and I think she’s always known it, because she has kept her brilliance hidden. She whispers her secrets aloud only when we’re alone. Never trusting anyone. She knew it was unsafe.

  And despite trying not to, I think of what Pen endured at her father’s hand. I think of all those mornings back home when she dabbed herself with cosmetics or struggled to stay awake on the train and carried the scent of tonic. All those times I held her hair away from her face when she was sick, wondering what this affliction was that caused her to drink as much as she did. How stupid I was, and how useless.

  “Are you all right?” Basil asks, leaning forward to see my face.

  I nod. Whether I see Pen ever again or not, this is one secret of hers that I will keep. I say, “Prince Azure pulled me aside at the party last night. He’s afraid, Basil. He’s a hostage.”

  Basil nods. “King Ingram is using him for some sort of leverage, to be sure.”

  “Do you think King Ingram will kill him if Internment goes on refusing to comply?” I say.

  “It’s possible. But if that’s the case, do you think he’s willing to die for Internment?”

  “It wouldn’t do much good,” I say. “If Internment goes on being useless to King Ingram’s plan, what’s to stop him from bombing the entire city right out of the sky?” I stare out the window at wisps of clouds. The ground is a faraway patch of green. “Prince Azure told me to speak to his sister. He didn’t have a chance to explain, but I think the two of them have something planned and they seem to think we can help.”

  “I hope they’re right,” Basil says. “Resistance is fine and well, but a tiny floating city can avoid a king’s wrath for only so long.”

  Our fingers have become intertwined, and I stare down at his betrothal band, empty of my blood. I wonder if we’ll live long enough to speak our vows. I wonder if we will still choose each other if we’re given the luxury of that time.

  “Look.” Basil nods to the window, and I follow his gaze.

  There at a distance, floating in the still blue, is a swirling sphere of clouds, a perfect dome. And below that I see the jagged earth, and I realize at once that this is home. A small cloud drifts toward it and immediately gets pulled into the current of wind, zipping into fast motion.

  “It always looks so much calmer from within the city,” I say.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Basil says.

  We’re approaching rapidly, huddled around that small window as we watch our world from the outside. These clouds are swirling in the wind that threw my brother back against the earth when he got too close. It nearly killed him. Amy too. It changed them irreparably. It killed so many others.

  We slice through that wind like through water. The jet wobbles and shakes and I think that surely we will be propelled back into the sky, away from the city, from the force of it.

  The jet holds steady, though, and the window fills up with white for a moment before I see dirt.

  We touch ground and I can hear the furious squealing of the jet’s wheels, and I begin to worry that we’ll careen into the train tracks in the distance.

  I brace myself, gripping the edge of the seat. Basil’s arm, pressed against mine, is so tense, there could be steel under his skin.

  When we finally stop, my head and stomach are still speeding off ahead of me somewhere. I can feel myself breathing, but I am not in control of my own body as it struggles to understand that I’ve stopped flying.

  It takes several seconds for me to focus, and when I do, I wish, not for the first time, that Pen were here. She would somehow know exactly where we are.

  When my vision settles enough that I can see what’s on the other side of the window, I realize that we are just outside the train tracks, on the long stretch of unused land between the tracks and the road. The grass here grows scraggly and wild, scarcely tended to.

  I have time to give Basil only a worried look before the door is opened and we’re pulled out by a group of King Furlow’s patrolmen. I hear a low growl in Basil’s throat when one of the guards pulls me down the last step. In an instant Basil is at my side, keeping pace.

  I hold nothing but contempt for these patrolmen after what they’ve done to my family. Which of them are to be trusted? But even as they’re telling us to step outside and move quickly, I hear the cadence of their voices—Birdie called it an accent—like my own, and I know that I am once again home.

  The air is perfect, warm and still. The sky is calm.

  I count five patrolmen, and they lead us over the train tracks, back to within the city’s limits. I’d never been on the wrong side of these tracks before, but I no longer fear that being too close to the edge of the city will drive me mad. I have seen madness in a king who would allow an attack on his own city for political gain. I have seen bodies cracked open like fruit fallen from a tree and left to rot in the sun. There’s no god in that wind, warning me away or calling me closer.

  Even more unnerving are the men in clothes that are not from this world. I recognize the drab gray of their coats. I saw them in the dozens after the explosion at the harbor. Soldiers from King Ingram’s army.

  I look to the workers ahead of me. I recognize some of them from my section or Basil’s. There’s a woman who worked as a seamstress and who repaired my coat sleeve when I tore it on a loose scrap of metal jutting from the train’s wall. Now she is glistening with sweat. She spears the dirt with a shovel, searching for the clumps of soil that glimmer with that invaluable mineral that can be refined.

  With all this open land, we must be in Section Seven, a broad field in which animals are bred and free to roam. Only, there are no animals here now. The land is being torn apart. Ruined. The grass has started to brown and thin, as though it would rather die than be a part of what’s being done here.

  The workers all seem to be going out of their way to avoid looking at us. They’ve been instructed not to, I think.

  I look for my father in the crowd. And then I look for his face among the patrolmen standing guard. He is nowhere.

  Basil walks in silence beside me, but I note the nearly imperceptible change in his next breath and I follow his gaze. He’s looking at a woman who is waist-high in one of the holes, brushing at the dirt with her fingers, looking for specks
that will be of use. His mother.

  At first I think she hasn’t seen us yet. But then she looks at him. Sharpness and longing in her eyes. She goes right back to her task.

  I touch Basil’s arm to bring him back to me. I fear what will happen to him if he’s caught staring, or if any of the guards realize he’s related to one of the workers. I do not know what our presence means, if we’re hated or loved.

  It’s hard to think we would be loved.

  We walk for what feels like an hour, until the workers are behind us and we eventually come to a cobblestone road. There aren’t many shuttles in this section, nor is there a train platform nearby—it would startle the livestock. There is a shuttle bus waiting for us here now, though. The patrolmen guide us inside.

  It’s just Basil and me, and a patrolman who stands by the door, watching us even as the shuttle begins to move. The man driving the shuttle is dressed in the gray of King Ingram’s soldiers.

  We are all silent, but I know Basil. I look at his face and I can see that something has changed. The sight of his mother working with the mining effort, unable to so much as speak to him, has proven to us that things are not as we left them.

  I don’t ask where we’re going. We drive on the outskirts of Section Seven, far from any buildings. I never knew Internment had so many trees. I never knew the section for livestock was so vast. We could almost be on Havalais, I think. I’ve become accustomed to the idea that a patch of land can go on forever, never stopping at all, but rather looping back around to itself.

  When I begin to recognize where we are, my skin prickles. Through the window I can see the clock tower in the distance.

  “Out,” the patrolman says after the shuttle has come to a stop.

  As I follow Basil down the aisle, my body thinks, for just a moment, that I am moving for the train that will take us to school. It is a normal day. It is all the same inside the shuttle—the metal walls, the cushioned seats, the smell of it. It is the same and not the same.