Burning Kingdoms (10 page)

True to Birdie’s description, the elegor is much larger than a car. I keep imagining that if Internment had such heavy animals, it would never manage to stay in the sky; that it would hover above the water, shuddering and tilting, depending on where these things walked. Its short, squatting legs are as thick as tree trunks. There’s a folding ladder attached to the cart on its back.

I should be frightened, but any worries I have about the security of the cart are abated by the creature’s cooing murmurs as we board. One of the boys at the rental house pats the elegor’s face, and the elegor curls its large, ropelike nose in pleasure.

Judas is trying to give Amy a boost up the ladder, and she’s swatting at him, telling him she feels fine and to lay off. I don’t blame him for worrying; it takes so little to provoke one of her fits.

Pen climbs after them. “You’ve got to come up and see this,” she says, waving a red silk cushion she’s taken from one of the seats. “We’ll be set up like royalty.”

“When we ride them, my little sister Annie likes to pretend we’re princesses,” Birdie says.

“No, not princesses,” Pen says, pulling me up as I reach the top rung.

“Queens,” I agree.

“Absolutely,” Birdie says, emphasizing each syllable, looking back at us as she takes the reins. She seems so brilliantly happy when she’s outside the hotel.

Basil and Thomas are eyeing us suspiciously. They can see that they’re being left out of something. When Basil sits next to me, I pat his knee reassuringly. He has placed himself directly between Judas and me, making his opinion known. Basil hasn’t forgotten that Judas was accused of murdering his own betrothed, Daphne, and a part of Basil still believes it to be true.

The elegor starts to move with a lurch, and I tense.

“Don’t worry,” Birdie says. “The cart is fastened on about a dozen different ways. It won’t fall off.”

Basil is watching me closely. And when he can see that I’ve calmed some, he says, “What did you learn this morning?”

Much more than I was prepared for, that’s certain.

I tell them about the planes and the altitude and the phosane. I tell them everything but that the queen is dying; that part isn’t my secret to tell, and I’d like to think my promise to Celeste means something.

“Fuel?” Pen makes a face. “That’s what this war is about?”

“It isn’t just any fuel,” Birdie says. “Phosane is naturally produced by the soil in that one archipelago. It would take thousands of years for it to run out, if it ever did. It’s a real world wonder.”

Pen looks thoughtful. “What does it take for this phosane to work?”

“Heat, I think,” Birdie says. “The king’s men have been the world over, and there’s nothing like it anywhere else. You can find about a billion pictures of the stuff, but no one’s mined for it yet.”

“If so little goes so far, why can’t they just share it?” Amy asks.

Birdie tugs on the reins. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? King Ingram and King Erasmus are both afraid that if they share it, the other kingdom will use it to enhance their warfare. They both want it all to themselves to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

Even Amy, a young girl, can see why this is appalling. “They’re having a war to prevent losing a bigger war that may not even happen?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Pen has gone quiet, body jostling with the elegor’s steps as she watches the city. I nudge her with my foot, and she offers a weak, distracted smile.

“What is this King Ingram like?” Judas asks.

Birdie shrugs. “He’s a politician.”

“So, awful, then.”

Birdie laughs, but doesn’t deny it.

The conversation turns to Havalais’s capital city and what the theme park is like in the summer. Having heard not a word of this, Pen blurts, “Birdie, do you have libraries down here?”

“Of course we have libraries,” Birdie says. “Did you need to find something?”

“No,” Pen says. “Just looking for similarities between here and home.” She cants her head back against the railing and stares at the sky until the clouds move from the sun and she’s forced to look away.

She’s trying to be together about it, but I fear what will become of her without her home. I worry that all those years she’s invested in our history book will unravel, and she’ll be left holding the tangled threads she once thought made up a god.

And, strangely, I worry for the princess, whose mother will die without a doctor from that sprawling hospital. What will it do to her to know that she can never go back, that she left her kingdom for nothing?

But greater still is my fear of these things they call airplanes. Because, whether or not Internment has anything to gain, King Ingram and his army may find a way there soon enough. Even without our help.

It is the worst worry, the helpless sort.

Birdie has begun playing tour guide, and the grim conversation turns to a lighthearted geography lesson. Basil leans close and speaks at a volume only I will hear. “It doesn’t bode well, does it?”

I shake my head. “I can’t see it ending well for anyone. Internment can’t handle a war.”

He has more to lose than I do. His parents and little brother are still up there, oblivious to what is going on below their haven. And that’s what it was for us: a haven. The king was putting people to death for trying to leave, but while his actions were deplorable, I’m beginning to think that he saw this as his only way to protect the city. Keep the people safe. Keep them in the sky. Maybe he saw through the scopes what was happening on the ground.

And where does all of this leave my parents? Surely they only wanted my brother and me to be safe. Internment was our home, but its edge blinded my brother, and its government took away his and Alice’s child before it could have been born. Internment is an imperfect world that sits atop another imperfect world.

“I feel that we have nowhere to go,” I say to Basil.

“We’re here,” he says.

“For now,” I blurt.

Pen breaks free of her brooding to say, “All this moving around is making me ill.”

I’m immediately concerned. While the food has been an adjustment for all of us, uncertainty and sullenness have taken Pen’s appetite away completely. The tonic at the brass club is the most she’s consumed of anything but oxygen since we arrived. It was only a matter of time before it caught up to her.

Thomas frowns and places the back of his hand to her forehead. “Do you feel sick to your stomach? I’ve told you that you should try to eat more.”

“It isn’t my fault vegetables are hardly so much as a garnish down here. I should love something that didn’t have to die for my appetite at every single meal.” But she rests her head on his shoulder, and all he can do is fret and worry and insist that she go straight to bed.

I don’t mind that our elegor ride is cut short; after all I’ve learned this morning, I think I’d like to lie down as well.

But as soon as we return and I’ve followed Pen into the bedroom, she closes the door behind us. “You must tell me everything you learned about phosane,” she says, with all her usual verve.

“Pen! You’re feeling all right, then?”

She waves my question off. “There’s no time for that. Thomas will be up in the time it takes to boil broth and toast bread for me, and I need this to stay between the two of us. What did you learn?”

“Only what I’ve already said. It’s a substance that can be used for fuel once it’s melted.”

“What does it look like?”

“I didn’t see a picture,” I say. Her anxiety is palpable. “Why? What do you know?”

“Possibly nothing, but we’ll have to go to the library before it closes. After Thomas leaves, I’ll pretend to fall asleep and we’ll use the window.”

“We could have asked Birdie—”

“No. One. Can know.” Her words are slow and deliberate. She climbs into her bed. “I looked in one of the tourism pamphlets in the lobby, and I’m sure we’ll be able to find the library on our own.”

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“What?”

“Just be able to navigate your way through a strange city.”

She shrugs. “No matter which city you’re in, it’s all buildings with numbers. It’s easy.”

Sure enough, Thomas is soon at her side with a tray of broth and toast. I would think it dishonest of her to make him worry, but his doting on her will do them both some real good. He’s also brought drawing papers, which for Pen has always been the greatest medicine. As I’m leaving the room, I see her wield the pencil, and I know that she is going to begin a new map.

It’s nearly an hour before Thomas comes downstairs carrying a tray and a worried expression. “She isn’t running a fever,” he tells me, “but she’s sleeping. She asked me not to wake her for dinner. All of this ground business has taken its toll.”

“I agree,” I say, and that’s the truth.

“Morgan—” He hesitates, looking very uncomfortable, and I know what he’s thinking.

“She hasn’t had any tonic,” I say. “She’s only tired.”

He nods, though it doesn’t seem to put him very at ease.

By the time I’m able to steal away on the pretense of taking a nap, Pen is already wearing her coat. She can’t make it to the library fast enough. We have no money for the ferry or an elegor, so we’re forced to walk. I can’t tell one city block from the next, but Pen navigates them as though she’s lived here all her life. She has said time and again that she always needs to know where she is, and she makes it her business to be familiar with her surroundings.

“Here.” Pen hands me a folded handkerchief when she’s had enough of my sniffling. “You should really carry some on you. My nose has hardly stopped running, thanks to this cold.”

“It’s like living in a cold box,” I say. “I feel like the god of the ground is trying to preserve us like food.”

She gives me a wan smile as she opens the library door. “So you still believe in the gods, then? Or is it just a habit now?”

“I don’t know,” I confess. But then, I haven’t known that for some time. “It’s hard to believe in this one or that one when the answer is silence all the same.”

We step into the library, and Pen closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.

“Are you all right?” I say.

“Books smell the same down here,” she says.

The books are arranged around us in circular tiers accessible by ramps and ladders. The cataloging system is similar to the system in the libraries back home, and it takes Pen only moments to find what she’s looking for. Soon we’re sitting at a table before something called a world atlas and several texts about minerals, chemical substances, and fossil fuels. I can’t help being distracted by the smoothness of this paper. Perfectly white pages with bold black ink. It hasn’t been recycled and there are no ghosts of the pages’ past lives in other books. These books, filled with topics I scarcely understand, are the most beautiful things I’ve yet encountered in this world.

Pen retrieves her latest map from her coat pocket and smoothes it against the table.

“What’s it of?” I ask, as she flips through the atlas.

“This is Havalais here, and that’s Dastor, and here between them is the archipelago. Or at least, my nearest guess.” She holds the page near the open atlas, and the likeness is astoundingly similar. She points to a small land mass hovering over the ocean near Havalais. “And there’s Internment. It’s a ways off from the archipelago, but you said the archipelago’s islands are all too small and misshapen to be inhabitable, right?”

“That’s what the king said.”

“So what if this is where Internment once was, before it became a part of the sky?”

“But it’s all the way over here now, thousands and thousands of paces away.”

Pen shrugs. “Internment broke away from the ground and has spent several hundred years in the sky. Is it so hard to believe it might have drifted?”

“Maybe not,” I admit. Her eyes are bright, and it’s nice to see her interested in this world the way she was interested in Internment. It gives me hope that she’ll be able to adapt. That we both will. “What made you think of all this?”

“It’s the phosane,” Pen says, lowering her voice. “Grab one of these books. Help me scare up a picture of it.”

We both scan the glossaries and the pictures on the pages until I find what she’s looking for. “Here,” I say, laying the open book between us. There’s an image of a cavern taken at the archipelago. The image is gray and white, but the jagged clumps of phosane are clearly visible along the walls and ceiling. I had pictured a black rock, but it’s more like quartz, clear and sparkling.

Pen turns to the next page, where there is an image of a scientist who discovered a way to refine phosane for fuel. He holds a rock of phosane in his hand.

Pen’s lips move as she reads the text under the photo, and soon all her brightness fades for worry. She looks at me. “The reason I think this archipelago is left over from when Internment broke away is because it has the same sort of soil. It’s not like regular dirt. It produces this substance. Down here they call it phosane, but on Internment it’s sunstone. All it needs is heat and light to make energy.”

“We have this on Internment?” I say. “Where?”

“It can be dug up from almost anywhere,” Pen says. “But you’ve looked at it every day of your life. It’s what the glasslands are made of.”

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely. My father brings hunks of it home all the time for his work. It’s hardly a commodity before it’s refined.” She taps my betrothal band. “It’s used to make these, too. It’s nearly indestructible, far better than glass.”

“I had honestly thought our betrothal bands were made of ordinary glass.”

“Most people think that,” she says. “I suppose you’d have no reason to question it.”

She’s a genius, and here we sit, surrounded by people who have no idea what she’s found. The splendor and the horror it can unleash.

“This is why you wanted to sneak out,” I say.

“We can’t tell a soul.” She grabs my wrist, and her knuckles are white from the strain. “Morgan, no one can know about this. They’ll cause an upheaval looking for those rocks.”

I stare at Pen’s handmade map. It’s the work of a prodigy, and at the same time a homesick, wistful girl who has taken the time to draw mermaids and starfish in the water and clouds in the sky. The clouds form a protective barrier over Internment’s surface, curtaining it from what is happening below.