Burning Kingdoms (26 page)

I take her hand. In the novels, this is all it takes for a girl in peril to awaken from her trance. But her fingers are slack in my palm, and her skin is cold, and I don’t know where she is, only that I can’t bring her back.

“She told you, didn’t she?” Nim says. “About our family and who we are to the king.”

“Yes,” I say, but it had been during one long silly night we shared while we had too much to drink. She never mentioned it again.

“We used to joke about it,” he says. “But with all the hatred everyone has for the king right now, I don’t know what kind of danger we’d all be in if anyone found out.”

“No one will find out,” Pen says. “It’s been a secret this long, right?”

“You’re bleeding,” Nimble says.

“Oh,” Pen says. “So I am.” Her bandages are soaked through with it, probably from the adrenaline when she ran from the nurse. She presses her fingers against the stain and it comes off on her skin.

“You should go back to your room and rest,” Nimble says. “Both of you.”

“We’re okay,” Pen says. “It’s nothing very serious.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” he says. “Please. Birdie would want me to look after you. You both mean a lot to her.”

I lay her hand back on the mattress. A comatose princess in a burning kingdom. “She means a lot to us, too,” I say.

Pen grabs the handles of my chair and steers me forward. “We’re in the east wing,” she says. “Come and find us if you get lonely. We’re surely not going anywhere for a while.”

He offers something like a smile as we pass by.

We make it back to our room, and after Pen helps me into my bed, she returns the wheelchair to the hallway. Someone will need it more than I do.

After the energy Pen has put forth this afternoon, she is asleep seconds after climbing into her bed. Her breathing is uneasy; she mumbles and stirs. I hear her as I drift into a sleep of my own. I don’t know that it can even be called sleep. It is only moments I’ve already lived, bolder and more vivid now that they’ve had time to grow. The bomb wakes me over and over. Birdie runs into the haze. Nimble and Riles walk into the crowd, their lips moving as they say words that I can’t hear. The ground shakes. I wake clawing at the mattress.

“. . . His victims are crushed, they collapse.” Pen is sitting beside me, a book open across her knees. “They fall under his strength. He says to himself, ‘God has forgotten; he covers his face and never sees.’ ”

“What are you reading?” I ask.

“Verses,” she says, struggling to pronounce the peculiar name. “
The Text
breaks off into this sort of poetry.”

“Where did you get a copy of
The Text
here?”

She laughs. “They’re everywhere. It’s like they mortar the walls with them down here. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I read aloud.”

“I don’t mind.” I close my eyes. I don’t have to believe the words to take comfort in them. There’s comfort, also, in the cadence of her speech, the subtle inflections and emphases that I took for granted back home, where everyone spoke the same way.

“I’m trying to skip around to the nice parts,” she says. “But sometimes it sounds nice, and then it goes somewhere ugly.”

“They like that down here, don’t they?” I say.

“Are you from the north somewhere?” a voice says through the curtain.

“Norsup,” we say in unison, and we say no more about the differences between the sky and the ground. Pen reads, and I coast in and out of sleep. This time it is dreamless. And then, when Pen’s voice has faded so far into the distance that it is scarcely there, I relive another moment. I’m standing with Celeste, behind the gold curtain in the lobby, and we’re watching the smoke rise from where the bank was bombed. She smiles at me. “We’ve come just in time to save them,” she tells me. “Wouldn’t you say?”

I wake with a gasp.

I am sure I will never again have a night of uninterrupted sleep.

A nurse is standing in our doorway with a wheelchair. “You’re being released,” she says. “Someone has come to collect you.”

“Both of us?” Pen asks.

“Yes, doll.” The nurse is clearly in a hurry, judging by the speed with which she changes our bandages and moves me into the wheelchair. I suppose there’s no shortage of people in need of our beds.

As we head down the hallway, I wonder if Jack Piper has risked his safety to collect his only remaining son, and to see what’s become of his eldest daughter.

But his driver is the one waiting for us at the door. Nimble is already there, and he looks as though he needs this chair more than I do. The nurse touches his good arm and he flinches. He looks down the hallway, until it forks into different directions, one of which begins the labyrinth that leads to his sister, and I can see that he doesn’t want to leave her.

Outside, the smell of damp earth and the singing of crickets go on uninterrupted. The basics of nature see no cause to be still for the likes of us.

Once I’m in the car, I look back at the hospital. It is made of squares of light against a black and starless sky.

“I’ve never had a friend like you either,” I whisper to Birdie as we drive away.

17

The youngest
Pipers are uncertain what to do with themselves when there is no routine. It’s just Marjorie and Annette now. No Riles to tell them which things are too selfish to mention in their prayers, or to reach the crackers when they’re hungry after lunch. And no father telling them to sit straight, eat their boiled carrots, and don’t fidget. They sob all day; it’s one long sound that begins in the morning and never really stops as the sun changes its position in the sky. They don’t speak. Something irreparable has happened; they understand that much.

Alice reads to them, and they sit still but don’t listen.

Nimble isn’t faring any better than his little sisters. He sits in a wing chair in the lobby, saying nothing as Celeste fusses over him, bringing him food he doesn’t eat and tea he doesn’t drink. She tells him to please, please talk to her, he’s got her scared, she wants to understand what’s in his mind. But she can’t understand, and it’s that simple. She didn’t see the things we did. When he falls into a frail sleep and wakes kicking his foot like he needs to run away, she has no idea what he might have dreamed, but Pen and I do. The three of us seem to have formed an unspoken agreement to stay near one another. Touching shoulders, touching hands as we pass by, smiling wearily, speaking little if at all.

Celeste, Basil, and Thomas have formed a sort of bond as well. They are on the outside trying desperately to see through the wall that’s been built between them and the ones they love. And when they can’t console us, they console each other.

Alice reads on. Fairy tales and novels and plays. No one really pays attention, but I’m grateful to have a familiar voice filling the silence.

Amy and Judas hover on the outskirts of the room, not daring to approach any of us. It’s as if they know there’s a delicate balance, and one misstep will cause everyone in the house to collapse into a sort of chaos that can’t be undone.

Pen reads
The Text of All Things
, and she tries to draw the divinities. She sketches Ehco in many forms, but most prominently as a water monster with human fingers, and screaming mouths for scales. And I begin to think Ehco is real, and that Pen has captured him exactly.

The sun goes down. Jack Piper doesn’t return, and, uncertain what else to do, everyone goes to bed. Basil carries me up the stairs and feeds me a spoonful of that awful medicine the hospital has given me in a brown glass bottle. “Would you like me to stay until you fall asleep?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I don’t mean to sound so sharp about it, but I am too drained to bring myself to say I’m sorry.

He tucks the blankets around me. “I’ll check on you through the night,” he says.

I close my eyes, hoping that he won’t kiss me good night or say more nice things to me. I have no room in me for affection. I can’t bear to be touched by anyone right now. But my betrothed knows me well, and he leaves.

I hear footsteps in the hall moments later, and I think he’s come back already, but when I open my eyes, my brother is the one standing in the doorway.

“Lex?” I say, unbelieving. He has hardly left his room since we arrived.

“I have the right room, then,” he says. “How cluttered is the floor?”

“No clutter,” I say. “There’s a bed on the left, and two beds on the right. I’m in the farthest one. I’d guide you, but—”

“Alice told me you hurt your leg,” he says. “Is it serious?”

“No. They wrapped it in gauze and sent me home with something in a brown bottle. It’ll be fine.” I’m astounded that he’s here, making his way to me. And without Alice, at that. I have always been the one going to him.

He feels for the first bed, Pen’s, and then mine, and he sits beside me. I take his hands.

“You were right, you know,” I say. “This world is miserable and I hate it. The only things I’ve liked about this world are the things Gertrude Piper showed me.” I can’t go on telling him what’s happened to her.

“You don’t hate it,” he says. “You don’t hate anything. Not truly. You only say that you do sometimes out of anger.”

“I hate when you tell me what I’m feeling, too,” I say.

“Don’t confuse my philosophies for yours, Little Sister. I’ll go on hating everything, and you’ll go on finding the good in things that don’t deserve it. And we’ll never agree, but we’ll both be right.”

“Is that what you’ve come to tell me?” I say.

“No,” he says. “I came to yell at you for sneaking off in the middle of the night and scaring Alice out of her mind.”

“Tell Alice that I am most sorry,” I say.

“I don’t know what you’ve seen, Morgan, but I—”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” I say.

“I’ve also, maybe, come to tell you that I’m sorry that it’s come to this. When Mom and Dad and I talked about coming to the ground, we thought it best to shelter you from it, but then, you have to understand that none of us really thought we’d pull it off. We didn’t expect that Daphne Leander would be murdered or that the professor would get the bird running in our lifetime.”

“What’s done is done,” I say. “Why bring it up now?”

“Because, after the other night, waiting until dawn to hear whether you were among the casualties in the city, I began to think you might have been safer on Internment. Even with the king’s specialist trying to poison you. I knew Internment had its horrors, but they are nothing compared to this.”

“How is it that there are two worlds—one in the sky and one on the ground—and I forever feel that I have nowhere to go?” I ask.

“Internment is still your home,” he says.

“But there’s nothing left for me there,” I say. “You and everyone else are here. Mom and Dad are dead.”

“Dad isn’t dead,” he blurts. And immediately I can see that he regrets it. His skin pales and he cannot seem to comfortably place his hands anywhere. For a moment he touches the scrap of cloth around his wrist, nearly identical to mine. A sign that we’re both in mourning.

Through the haze of shock and grief and utter exhaustion that has numbed me these few days, something within me begins to stir. Something frightening. “What?” I say.

He has gone as still as a statue.

“Lex.” My voice is soft because it’s all I can manage. I pull my hands away from his. My bones are shaking. “What are you saying?”

“He’s not dead for certain, at least,” Lex says. “After Daphne’s murder, when it began to look like we’d really try to get away, Mom and Dad told me that if things went from bad to worse, I was to get you to the bird. Alice and I weren’t to go searching for them. If they didn’t make it back to us in time, I should do whatever was necessary to protect you.”

“What’s all this talk of
you
protecting
me
?” I snap. “I’ve been the one looking after you for the last four years. Who would make sure that you were eating? Who would sit with you when Alice had to run errands all day? Who carried dinner and messages up and down the stairs like a bloody mailboy day and night when Mom was too sad and Dad was too stubborn to deliver them themselves?”

“You would have tried to find him,” Lex says.

“Of course I would have tried to find him!” I say. I want to say more, but the words are a frenzy inside me and they’re moving too quickly to make sense.

“Morgan, try to understand,” he says. For once he isn’t being condescending; he sounds contrite.

He reaches for my shoulder, but I move away. “No,” I say. “You try to understand. Why should you be the one to decide that we leave him behind? Why shouldn’t I have decided for myself whether to go after him? It’s like you think you are more entitled to them just because you’re older, and you’ve seen the edge, and you were left with scars. I have scars from that day too, Lex. You didn’t take a plunge off Internment’s edge alone, you know. You took us all with you. Mom, Dad, Alice, and me. We’ve all had to watch as it took over our lives. That day you crossed the tracks, you didn’t think about what would happen to us, not at all. You didn’t need Mom and Dad anymore, but I still needed them.” My voice has gotten louder, but it cracks. “
I
needed them.”