Burning Kingdoms (32 page)

He has also taken away the transistor radio that the cooks kept in the kitchen. We aren’t allowed to go far from the hotel. The ferry and elegor rentals have stopped. The city has finally gone to sleep, and we aren’t made to know anything about what’s happening, or what’s going to happen.

The clock is always ticking, louder than ever.

Pen sits up with a gasp. “Morgan—” Still in her dream she reaches for me, but then she sees where she is and collapses back against the pillow.

“Bad dream?” I say.

“I heard a bomb falling,” she says. “I didn’t want you to get killed.” She yawns. “I’m losing my mind. I still hear it.”

I sit up. “I think I hear something, too,” I say, but she has fallen back to sleep, if she was ever awake at all.

I go to the bedroom window, but there’s nothing but a placid spring night. The sound is coming from the other side of the building.

Pen doesn’t stir as I walk past her bed and turn the doorknob. She’s able to recover more quickly from her nightmares about the harbor.

The sound is louder once I’ve descended the stairs. Nothing at all like the bombs at the harbor, but more of an engine’s rumbling.

I step outside, crossing my arms against the chilly night air, and I make it around the corner of the hotel just in time to see Nimble back his car into the fire altar. The tires dig into the earth and there’s a grating sound as the back of the car is forced onto the stone platform.

Even from where I’m standing, I can smell the fuel, as though the car has been coated in it. Nimble climbs out of the driver’s side, and a moment before he does it, I realize what’s happening. He draws a match from the breast pocket of his pin-striped pajamas and strikes it, and in an instant the car is burning.

He stands as close as he dares, arms folded.

Head bowed, his lips move to form what can only be a prayer of offering.

“Oh, Nim,” I whisper, even though I’m too far for him to hear me. He loved that car. This hotel is his floating city, his father his oppressive king. That car was his only freedom in this world.

I approach slowly, in the tracks the tires burnt into the grass. My eyes are watering from the stench of the rubber and the smoke.

When he’s finished with his prayer, he turns toward me.

“When Birds and I were kids, we used to look up at the floating island and hold our breath when a big cloud passed under it,” he says. “It was a game we had. She could always hold her breath for longer than I could. I feel like that’s what she’s doing now, holding her breath until a dark cloud has passed over us.”

Something pops in the flames and I flinch, but he is as stoic as the altar under all that fire.

“Do you think what Pen said is true? About my prayers being able to reach my sister.”

Thick black smoke disappears into the darkness of night, blotting out patches of stars. Somewhere up there, higher than his world and mine, is the place where all things go when they have stopped breathing. It is a place my brother visited, and perhaps Birdie has seen it too. Up where it’s quiet and calm, and it takes something greater than voices to reach them.

“I do,” I say.

It really was an exquisite machine. The metal glistens still.

The roof collapses in on itself, and the sound is absorbed by the roaring fire. It is violent and ugly and beautiful. Nothing at all like the wreckage at the harbor.

Nim’s eyes are steely and filled anew with prayers. There is no choice for him but to believe. He has nothing left to give in offering.

A child’s shriek awakens me in the morning.

Pen groans and pulls the blankets over her head as we hear what must be Annette and Marjorie running down the stairs.

“Your car!” Annette says. “Father is going to blow a gasket.”

Nim shushes them, and the voices are too faint to hear after that.

“What about his car?” Pen asks.

“He set it on fire last night.”

She pushes the blankets away from her face. “What?”

“On the fire altar, in offering so that Birdie would get better,” I say. “He took your advice.”

She stares at the ceiling, blinking. “Wow,” she says. After a long moment she turns to face me. “I didn’t think he would take what I said to heart like that.”

“There are people who would give anything to have faith like yours,” I say. “It’s hard to come by.”

“You’re not going to get saccharine on me, are you?” She crinkles her nose. “Just because we’ve shared a few near-death experiences and personal tragedies.”

I watch her sit on the edge of the bed and carefully undo her plaits. The curls fall perfectly into place. “I should probably get out of here early,” she says. “The last thing I need is Jack Piper hearing I’m the reason his son set fire to his car. He’ll probably set fire to me.”

I sit up. “Go where?” I ask.

She shrugs out of her nightgown and studies the dresses in the closet before selecting one that’s black with large polka dots. It’s dreary on the hanger, but it becomes something elegant once Pen has wriggled into it. She looks so much more grown-up now that we’ve been here awhile, and I wonder if I do too.

“Pen? Where are you going?”

She looks over her shoulder at me. “Morgan, I adore you. Stop smothering me.”

I cannot keep trying to follow her around this world, checking her breath for tonic, looking for her in alleyways. We aren’t the children we were back home. I can’t be her guardian, only her friend.

“Promise I won’t find you floating facedown in any large bodies of water,” I say.

She shoulders the window open. She means to avoid everyone with her exit, then. “If I were to do anything extremely foolish, you wouldn’t find me at all.”

And then she’s gone.

I get dressed and tread carefully through the house. I don’t know what sort of mood Jack Piper will be in once he’s seen what happened to his son’s car. He seems the sort of man to value possessions.

If fire altars were a part of Internment’s culture, and if I’d owned something as extravagant as a car, I’d have done the same thing to save Lex when he needed it. And my parents would have joined in, because life is always worth more than things. Because their children were everything to them.

Fighting tears, I stand at the top of the staircase. I spent my life fascinated by the ground, but now that I’m here, I would give anything to undo what I’ve seen: a man who has five children and values none of them. Endless land destroyed by bombs.

I don’t belong here, and this place has changed me, made me forget pieces of who I was before I left home.

That’s why, rather than going downstairs toward the sound of breakfast chatter, I head for my brother’s door.

“Alice?” he says as I turn the knob.

“It’s me.” He always used to know when it was me.

“Oh,” he says. He’s sitting on the floor by the bed, tracing his fingers over the paper from his transcriber. “She’s supposed to bring me breakfast.”

“Why don’t you come downstairs and get it yourself?” I ask. I try not to sound angry, but I hate when he carries on like an invalid.

“Because I want nothing to do with the Pipers,” he says. “Sort of the way you want nothing to do with me.”

“If you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, I’m leaving,” I say.

His dramatic huff is his apology. “Please, come in. Stay. Talk to me.” His tone is caustic, but I believe he’s being sincere, and I sit on the floor across from him.

“I’m running low on transcriber paper,” he says, rustling the page in his hands.

“Is the story almost through?” I ask.

He smirks. “I don’t think this one is meant to have an end,” he says.

For a moment, it’s as though we’re in his office above my bedroom, and everything between us is as it was before.

His head is down. He says, “I hear the princess has gone back to Internment.”

“Yes,” I say.

He pauses. “Morgan, I need for you to understand why I didn’t tell you about Dad.”

“I hate to admit that I do understand,” I say. “But that doesn’t make it right. You wouldn’t have left Alice behind, left me behind. Why Dad?”

“It was what he wanted,” Lex says. “He didn’t risk everything just to have his children die trying to rescue him.”

I squeeze my eyes shut against the tears that come. I focus on my breathing so he won’t know that I’m starting to cry. “Maybe that’s what he wanted, but what I want is to find him,” I say. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go home again, but if there’s an opportunity, I’ll take it.”

He runs his fingers over the pages of his unfinished story. “Remember your promise to me, then. You said you’d always come back.”

I pat his knee. “I remember.”

Alice brings him a breakfast tray, and I leave to find Basil, who is surely wondering where I’ve been all morning.

We meet at the bottom of the stairs, and before he can say a word, I take his hands. “Let’s go outside,” I say. “I much like the smell of the air on days like this.”

Contrary to the claustrophobic feeling this hotel has taken on, the spring air is sweet. Almost like home, but more fragrant.

We walk the perimeter of the hotel, and when we reach Nim’s ruined car, Basil winces.

“An offering,” I say. “For Birdie.”

He stops walking, studying the charred remains. It looks like one of Pen’s sketches if she were to use a crude piece of pen stone on a dirty piece of paper.

Basil’s mouth twists like he’s trying not to frown. “I really hope it works,” he says. And because I’ve known him all my life, I know that he’s staring at Nim’s offering and he’s thinking of his own family, up in the floating city that’s a faded scar in this blue sky.

“There might still be a way for us to get back home,” I say. “Celeste said she had a plan. Granted, her plans are always terrible, but it’s all any of us have got right now.”

“I’m not sure that would be for the best,” he says.

“I’m still going to try,” I say.

“I know you are.” He starts walking, and I find myself sprinting to keep pace. “Morgan, I’ve had plenty of time to think down here. I’ve seen what Internment does to its people—how it nearly killed you—and I’ve seen what this world does.”

“More of the same, isn’t it?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “And even if a ladder were to appear one morning between this world and Internment, I would be at a loss for which world to choose.”

“The climb would kill you first,” I say, trying to make a joke. It makes me nervous to see this side of him. So serious. He’s starting to get angry in a most uncharacteristic way.

“I don’t know which world to choose,” he repeats, “but I see no sense in trying to stop you from returning home if you can. I wouldn’t be able to anyway. I was never able to tell you what to do.” He slows his pace and glances at me. “Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s who you are. I very much like who you are.”

“I like who you are, too,” I say uncertainly. Where is he going with this?

He shields his eyes and looks skyward for a moment, and then back at me.

“Internment’s rules never seemed to have suited you,” he says. “And I’ve come to realize that it’s unfair for me to hold you to our betrothal. I’m not going to invent any rules forcing you to love me if you don’t.”

I grab his arm to stop him from walking. He staggers and then faces me.

“It isn’t that I don’t love you,” I say firmly. “Don’t think that. That was never the truth. It’s just that, all my life, I’ve watched Alice and Lex, and my parents, and even Pen and Thomas sometimes. And I’ve thought—what’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I brave enough to say ‘I love you’ when it’s so easy for everyone around us?

“But I see now that we can’t have what other people have. I don’t want us to. I’ve grown up feeling my own way for you, and it’s just something that’s in me, and I’ve always known it, like the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I’d feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I’ve never felt needed to be said.”

“You’ve just said it now,” Basil says.

“I suppose I have.” I look at my shoes and then at him. “So there it is.”

He touches my cheek, and I lean against his palm. I feel the cool glass of his betrothal band against my warm skin.