The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  The thought that flooded her then: she had been such a fool.

  How could she ever hope to find the medicine that Sayra needed among all these thousands of shelf-dwelling jars? She didn’t even know what she was looking for, not really.

  What an idiot she had been! She had been so focused on finding this place that she had forgotten that part of the problem. She had just assumed she would somehow recognize the powder or herb or whatever it was that she needed. Fool! Fool! Fool!

  Things could not possibly get worse—but then they did.

  The room exploded into lightning-white light, and a hand took firm hold of Linny’s arm.

  The hand was very strong. Linny couldn’t shrug her way out of its hold. And while she was trying, a voice that went along with that hand shouted words at her: “intruder” and “thief” and “papers” were some of those words.

  It was the end, then. She had been caught. All those years of sneakiness had come only to this, a rough hand nabbing her, maybe only a few feet away from the medicine she had come so far to find. Sayra’s medicine! Elias was gone, and now she would be gone, too, and who was left, then, to find a way to bring Sayra home?

  Oh, she was worse than a fool. She was a failure.

  27

  ABOUT SURVEYORS

  While Linny did all that silent shouting at herself, the strange hand was shaking her arm, demanding answers. Linny looked up and saw dark hair, angry squinting lines where eyes would ordinarily be, a plain gray smock.

  “I . . . um . . . I . . .”

  She remembered to stammer a little. It was good to stammer, when you’d been caught. It gave your brain an extra second or two to think something up.

  “Well? Who are you, anyway? And what in the name of all the sciences are you wearing?”

  The man slapped his own ear, for some reason, and began to talk to somebody Linny could not see. “Hey, Five, you said they were exaggerating about all the terrorists? Well, guess what? There’s a madji intruder in the fourth storeroom. Yes. Yes! Caught in the act. Yes, I’m waiting for you calmly. Hurry, though. Got to assume it’s armed. Yes. I’ll ask again. Hurry.”

  The man gave Linny another shake. “Papers? Identity papers? Showing who you are? No, don’t move!”

  Linny had been thinking as fast as she could, under the circumstances.

  “C-can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t show you papers without moving,” she said, straightening her spine as much as she could.

  The man made an angry sound.

  “So you can talk! Well, are you here with a gang? Or just destroying things on your own?”

  “I’m not destroying anything,” said Linny, offended, and at that moment another person in gray popped through the doorway. A woman, with short dark hair.

  “You didn’t say she was a child!” she said to the man.

  “I’m twelve,” said Linny, offended all over again.

  “Let her go,” said the woman to the man. “What’s come over you? She’s just a child!”

  “Don’t you check the newsfeed ever?” said the man. “Child madji terrorist on the loose, dressed up like one of those girls with banjos. Single-handedly destroyed the waterworks, just last night. And then ran away home to the wrinkled hills. Only apparently not, on that last bit, because here it is.”

  “Lourkas, not banjos,” said Linny. “And it’s completely not true. I didn’t destroy anything.”

  “We all know the newsfeed is sometimes not as plain as it should be,” said the woman calmly. “Who are you, then?”

  That was a use of the word “plain” that Linny hadn’t heard before. And what was a newsfeed? What could news possibly have to do with food?

  The man grumbled before Linny had a chance to figure out what she wanted to say.

  “Says it has identity papers.”

  “Do you?”

  “You mean one of those cards showing a name? One of those? Yes,” said Linny.

  It wasn’t precisely a lie. And it did seem to be an emergency. She twisted around to reach into the little bag around her neck with her free hand. That made the man nervous, she could tell—his grip tightened—but she had the card out before he could protest.

  He bent his head to squint at the card she was holding.

  “Irika Pontis?” he said. “But that’s—”

  The card was out of Linny’s hand before he finished his sentence. The woman in gray could move very fast, apparently.

  She no longer looked very calm.

  “Go call the Surveyors,” she told the man. “We’ll hold her until they come. I’ve got her now.”

  He let go of Linny’s arm and went trotting from the room, while Linny tried to figure out what had changed in the woman’s face, why the grate there had suddenly plummeted down and shut everything out.

  And then she took a closer look at the woman questioning her, and her heart bobbled like a duck on a rough patch of water.

  It was the way the eyebrows angled up and down, always a little surprised.

  The eyes were the same color, too—brown with a ring of green around the pupil.

  And there were similar little patches of wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, born of laughter and worry.

  Right now, however, the eyes were angry.

  “I don’t know how you got this card,” said the woman. “But I do know you are not Irika Pontis. Irika Pontis is my sister.”

  And Linny said in a whisper, “Auntie Mina!”

  They stared at each other.

  “What have you done to Irika?” said the woman, but there was more doubt than anger in her now.

  “Nothing! How could I do anything? She’s my mother! She sent me to the Bridge House to find you, but you weren’t there—”

  “She’s alive? But the madji took her.”

  “No, they didn’t. She wandered into Lourka, somehow, hillsick as could be, and then she just stayed. You can’t get back if you leave, so she stayed. She’s my mother. I told you, she sent me to find you! Auntie Mina, she said, in the Bridge House.”

  “But you don’t look like her at all. You look like—”

  “I know,” said Linny, feeling quite tired of all of it. “I just look like an old painting. That’s what happened. My mother came looking for the Girl with the Lourka, up in the wrinkled country, and boom, here I am.”

  “‘Boom’ implies suddenness,” said Linny’s Aunt Mina. “And I haven’t seen my sister in more than twelve years. I dispute the boom.”

  And the wrinkles crinkled up a little around her eyes, so Linny saw she was almost laughing. That little bit of warmth undid Linny’s caution.

  “Oh, please. I need you to help me!” she found herself saying, all in an incoherent rush. “You can’t let the Surveyors get me. If I don’t get back home very soon, Sayra will fade away for good. I promised I would find medicines and come back to her! I promised!”

  “Who’s Sayra?” said the woman. “You’ve lost me. Oh, no!”

  She slapped her own ear lightly, the same gesture the man had made.

  “Ten! Wait! No, I’m all right. I’m fine. Wait on that call. What? Blisters!” They liked talking to invisible people, here in the Plain.

  Mina looked distressed now, as she turned back to Linny.

  “Explain very fast indeed. The Surveyors will be on their way by now. Why do you look like a painting, who is Sayra, and did you say you went to the Bridge House looking for me? And what’s your name, child, anyway? Quick.”

  “Linnet,” said Linny, and she did her best with the other questions. When she explained about the Bridge House, where she’d met the Tinkerman, the woman groaned.

  When Mina groaned, she looked a lot more like Linny’s mother.

  “Oh, that awful man! Practically stole the Bridge House from us. Married our mother very late in her life. Irika and I used to whisper to each other that he wanted to marry Mother’s research collections, not her herself. And he has some very str
ange theories about Away.”

  “He wants me to take him there, to go looking for power, he said.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mina. “Very bad idea. Quick, come along this way while we talk. The Surveyors will be on their way. He’s wrong, though. We should be trying to understand the wrinkled places, not trying to use them, abuse them, destroy them. Destroy ourselves, maybe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen. It’s a physics problem. Quite a tricky one. We have scientists here studying it as hard as they can, and they say our world, our wrinkled/Plain world, is a peculiar anomaly. In fact, it shouldn’t really even exist. ‘Soap-bubble universe,’ that’s the word. And fragile, fragile. Who knows? If that Tinkerman ever brought his great experiments and his wires to Away, all of everything might go pop like a bubble, and that would be the end of us! Through this door now, Linnet, please.”

  “What?”

  How can a world go pop like a bubble? Linny’s stomach went cold from the very thought of it. They were in another supply room now, as vast as the first, and still Linny’s Aunt Mina was hurrying them along.

  “When impossible things exist, you have to keep the opposite ends of them far away from each other,” said Linny’s Aunt Mina, as matter-of-factly as if it were an explanation for why three birds plus another three make six. “Otherwise, they can short-circuit, and then it’s all over. But never mind that. No time now. Explain fast about your friend.”

  But as Linny explained, Mina kept shaking her head.

  “A girl’s mind taken off to Away—that’s not the sort of thing we deal with, here in the Plain. Our medicines are meant to cure fevers and poxes and skin rashes, not wrinkled curses. Irika would have known that.”

  “But she was hoping,” said Linny. Meaning, secretly, that she, Linny, had been hoping. Was still hoping. Would hope as long as she possibly could.

  Mina looked at her thoughtfully.

  “There’s one thing,” she said. “But I don’t know. See, what you have to understand is, when Irika got lost in the hills, I was so sad I hardly knew what to do with myself. On the wrinkled side of the world, I guess you might say my heart broke. But it didn’t really break. I was just so lonely without her. And I thought, I have to go find her, my lost sister. But I couldn’t. We get hillsick, you know.”

  Linny nodded.

  “Mama almost died,” she said. “But I don’t seem to feel sick, no matter which side of the world I’m on.”

  “Well, some of us get it worse than others,” said Mina. “And I get it so badly that already in Bend—in Bend! Within sight of the Bridge House!—the world starts spinning and the nausea rises up in me. Irika wasn’t like me. She could go much farther afield than I ever could. Maybe that’s why she became a Surveyor.”

  “What?” said Linny. “What? Mama’s not a—”

  “Hush, we don’t have time right now. What I’m saying to you is, when she left, I decided to follow. And to follow, I needed to concoct a remedy for hillsickness. So I started that work. Twelve years ago already. And here’s the thing—”

  “The antidote to magic,” said Linny. “They say it’s almost ready. So they can go marching up into the hills and ruin things. And, by the way, Mama doesn’t ruin things. So she’s not a Surveyor.”

  Mina shook her head.

  “But that’s why she left, don’t you see? She had become a Surveyor, back when she was young, because she had a talent for maps. Such a funny thing—she always seemed to know where she was!”

  “Oh, me too!” said Linny, her heart melting a little.

  “Nothing wrong with liking maps. It’s only under this regent that Surveyors have warped into something ugly. Irika wanted to stay a good person, so she left. And I wanted to follow her so much I started working on that antidote, and that’s when my trouble started. The Tinkerman let it slip to the Surveyors, what I was working on, and the Chief Surveyor had me hauled away out here, where I’m not allowed to go beyond the back wall there. See this?”

  She showed Linny the metal ring, clamped tight around her ankle.

  “It sets off a blasted deafening alarm if I cross any of their boundaries. Cheaper than soldiers, and just as effective. They don’t want to hurt me. They want me to make that remedy, so they can, as you say, march up into the hills—”

  And ruin things, thought Linny, finishing that sentence for her.

  “The funny bit is,” said Mina, with an unreadable expression in her eyes and the corners of her clever, clever mouth, “that although I had made such huge strides in this project before they imprisoned me here, my progress since then has been very, very, very slow.”

  She guided Linny through a door. And through another door. Her words were easy and relaxed, but her movements were exceedingly awake, alert, and quick.

  “Would an antidote to magic, to hillsickness, help my friend in Away?”

  “I think it might,” said Mina. They were in another great huge room now, filled with shelves. “If only it existed. If only I had somehow managed to secret away a single dose of it, before it became clear what the Surveyors had in mind for its use.”

  She was ushering Linny down one of the aisles now. Linny opened her mouth to ask another question, but Mina shook her head in warning and put a finger to her lips: “hush hush.” Then she reached her hand up, up to one of the higher shelves.

  “Because my brain has become very fuzzy,” she said. “Since they put the shackle on my ankle. And since I heard about those plans to unwrinkle the wrinkled places. I have found chemistry very hard to focus on. It’s sad, isn’t it? After my sister, Irika, chemistry was what I used to love most in the world.”

  In her hands was a crystal-glass vial with a stopper. In it, several grains of some green powder. There was a label on that vial that said only ADD THREE DROPS WATER FROM PLAIN SEA.

  Mina took Linny’s hand and curled her fingers around the vial. Then she wrapped both her own warm hands around Linny’s, and there was such courage and affection in her hands and her voice that Linny almost couldn’t stand it.

  “They come all the time, demanding and shouting,” Mina said. “But what can I do? I work all day, and then something happens, I drop something, I spill something, so every day it is as if I must start over. They will never have their antidote, I’m quite sure. Indeed, I have a feeling that today all my remaining notes will be accidentally destroyed. And the apparatus, too. Too bad.”

  There were voices being raised in some other part of that building.

  “Apparently it’s time for you to go,” said Mina. She had already hustled the two of them over to another one of those outside doors. “I won’t see my Irika again, I guess. But I have seen her daughter, and that is a wonderful thing. You must kiss your mother for me, when you find her again. Oh, and about the Plain Sea—”

  The door was open; the wind came and sputtered in their faces.

  “We can’t even get near it. It does something odd to our brains. But you, like your mother, seem to have a knack for getting to places others can’t reach. Even so, don’t let the water touch you. Use this—”

  It was a long, curved glass dropper.

  There was more noise from the other side of the building.

  “Go, go, go,” said Linny’s Auntie Mina. “I will do my best to distract them. I haven’t done much with my life, perhaps, but I have gotten lots and lots of practice in delaying Surveyors.”

  She bent forward and kissed Linny on her wild and messy hair, and then gave her a gentle shove out the door.

  Linny looked back at her, something strong and warm bubbling up in her.

  “Auntie Mina!” she said. She was looking for the right words. She had never wanted to find the right words so badly as she did right now.

  “Time to run away very fast,” said her aunt, with a last quick smile, and she stepped back in through that door.

  “Auntie Mina, you’re, I think, you must be a—”

  The door swung shut.

  So the right
word came a little too late that time, but maybe that didn’t matter.

  The right word, by the way, was:

  “Hero.”

  28

  THE PLAIN SEA

  The Half-Cat was waiting for her behind the back wall.

  “We’ve got to hurry now, sorry,” Linny said to it.

  There was a siren blaring; she didn’t care much for that sound. It probably meant the Surveyors had found out she had been there and then gone. In another second, they would surely come spilling out of all possible doors.

  Before they could nab her, she had to get to the Plain Sea, where the water for Sayra’s antidote was waiting.

  So she ran.

  For the first fifteen minutes or so, she ran with her mind full of fretfulness about what might be happening back at the research hub, and whether her Auntie Mina could really distract and delay a bunch of Surveyors. But the world was growing quieter and quieter all around her, until even the sound of her breathing began to seem like an intrusion, and she slowed her pace to a quieter lope. On either side of her stretched a great plain of yellow grass, rippling in the breeze. She was on a path forward, through that endless yellow field, and there were no hills or trees or houses anywhere. Once or twice she had to stop and shake her head, because the sameness of everything made a person’s head a little dizzy.

  Dizzy was not the same as frightened or upset! She felt, in fact, strangely calm, for someone the Surveyors were after. But none of that mattered much, out here.

  She thought nothing would break the beautiful monotony of that yellow grass, but then something caught her eye, down the path ahead of her—a pole or a toothpick (since distances were so hard to judge) sticking out of the endless yellow. She walked toward it for fifteen minutes, watching it grow taller, and when she arrived at the thing itself, she saw it was a simple sign, stuck on a pole.

  AREA CLOSED. USE EXTREME CAUTION AT ALL TIMES.

  The Half-Cat meowed, which was a strange sound in that quiet place, and sat itself down at the foot of the sign.

  Caution, thought Linny, without tasting anything particular in the word. It went floating, simply, through her head and moved on.