Burning Kingdoms (33 page)

I can’t imagine marrying somebody else. Who else could know me the way that he does? There are infinite boys down here in this world, boys who aren’t promised to anyone else. But none of them have grown up beside me. None of them know me the way that Basil and I know each other. Perhaps none of them are for me at all. Perhaps I’m meant to be alone.

“I suppose this isn’t how you imagined it would be when I told you I love you for the first time,” I say.

“I’ve never known what to expect with you,” he says, and smirks. “So in a lot of ways, it’s exactly what I imagined.”

I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead he moves his hand from my face.

“You can call what we have a betrothal, or not,” Basil says. “But I’ll still be here.”

I let out a little laugh. “Yes, well, we’re both stuck down here, aren’t we? But the same goes for me. I’m still here when you need me.” I do want that much. Need that much.

“And it suits me to keep my betrothal band,” I say. “It doesn’t have to mean what Internment’s rules meant for it to mean, but that doesn’t make it worthless. I just need—I need time.”

“Time,” Basil says, musing. He looks out to that vast expanse beyond the hotel. “This world goes on forever until it circles back to where we’re standing; it should seem that time is infinite here, but I don’t know that we’ll have much of it. I don’t know what’s in store for us at all.”

He looks back to me. “Just—whatever comes, promise you won’t do anything to get yourself killed.”

“Certainly going to try not to,” I say.

I don’t know what’s to come, but I do know that he will give me all the time he has. He would give me until the end of the world if I’d take it. I want to give him something just as important in return. I want to bring him back to his family. I want him to be happy, whether or not it’s with me.

We spend the rest of the afternoon at each other’s side, admiring the strange bright flowers and trying to skip stones in the ocean and squinting to see our home up in the sky. But something has changed between us.

At dinner, Annette wears a collander as a helmet and pretends her utensils are controls in a jet. Her father isn’t there to scold her. She likes to challenge this chaos that has ensued in her family, though it really seems to frighten her at the same time.

Pen doesn’t return. Thomas has spent the day searching for her, walking to town and back. I know he blames me, though my guess as to her whereabouts is as good as his. My worry for her increases every time she runs off by herself; on Internment there were only so many places one could go, but here it would be so easy to get lost forever. I don’t know how the people down here don’t live their lives in fear of it.

After dinner I distract myself by reading the heavy black book on Pen’s nightstand. I’ve landed on a story about the people of the ground naming their stars after their heroes. These are the same stars that shine over Internment, but with different stories behind them.

The love I have for my home hasn’t diminished but has instead hidden itself in things like this story, to make me remember in a new and more painful way each time. Even the stars on the ground cannot comfort me.

I flip through the thin pages for a new story. A scrap of paper flutters away, and when I catch it, there is another reminder of home in my fingers. It’s a piece of request paper, its texture not like any of the paper I’ve seen on the ground. It is meant to be set on fire and to fly up into the sky, bearing the one thing we get to ask of the god in the sky each year. Pen must have been carrying hers when we fell from the sky.

I don’t mean to read it. I mean to tuck it back into the page it was marking. But her drawing catches my eye, and my admiration turns fast to something that gives me chills.

Footsteps come to a stop in the doorway, and I look up.

Pen sees the paper in my hand, and all the light leaves her face. She looks from it to me.

“So there’s to be no privacy in this world, then,” she says.

“What is this?” I ask.

It isn’t a traditionally written request, but Pen has never taken to paper in a traditional way. She has written the word “die” in delicate slantscript. And all around that she has drawn flames and bones and bottles. The bottles and the plumes of smoke all contain the same word in different sizes and shades of black: die, die, die. There is a tiny city in the background, and the buildings are all made of the same word: die, die, die.

“May I have that back, please?” She holds out her hand. A hand that has scaled trees with me, and crawled into the cavern with me, and handed me that first bottle of tonic meaning to help me cope with my worries. Her hand is small and pretty and soft, and I can’t bear to give it such an ugly piece of paper.

When I do nothing, she stomps forward and reaches for it, but I back away. “Pen. Tell me who this is for.”

I hold the page over my head to keep it away from her, but she’s exactly my height and when I refuse to free the paper from my fist, she forces me to the ground. Her knees straddle my hips and the fall has knocked the air from my lungs, but something keeps me from unclenching my fingers even as she pries at them.

“Morgan!” Her voice is desperate. “You can’t have this. I’ve given you sixteen years of secrets. This one belongs to me.”

Instinct forces me to curl up my knees and kick at her until she’s off me. I try to stand, but she digs her nails into my wrist. Her face is red and there is something in her eyes that makes her all at once a stranger.

“Let me go,” I say.

“You can’t have that,” she cries.

“Tell me what it means.”

I manage to yank my arm from her grasp, and the force of her release sends me backward into the night table, taking down the transistor radio. She comes at me again, but I’m able to get to my feet. There is a throbbing pain between my shoulder blades.

“Was it Thomas?” I say. “Has he hurt you?”

“Of course not.”

“Someone did.” I back against the door. “And we’re not leaving this room until you’ve told me who.”

She doesn’t come after me. She sits down on the floor where I’ve left her, and her breaths come, shallow and hard. I think she may faint.

“Pen.”

“I needn’t answer,” she says. She’s looking at the ground, panting. She waves her arm at the paper. “You have it all right there, don’t you? You’re a clever enough girl.”

I smooth the paper in my hand. The sweat from my palm has done little to smudge it—request paper is especially resilient. I let myself travel into Pen’s brain, along the paths of lines she drew in secret. The flames and the bottles all point to the tiny city made of words. And now that I am really looking, I see that the city is familiar. It’s a city within a city. The glasslands, of which Pen has a perfect view from her bedroom window.

I remember the coloring she did of the glasslands also, and the way she crumpled it up and stuffed it into the recycling tube.

She’s staring at me when I take my eyes from the paper. She doesn’t make a move for me.

“I have made only one request for as long as I can remember,” she says. “And it has never been fulfilled.”

She grimaces, recovers.

“My father brought me there, when I was little,” she says. “He said I was a clever girl with a clever mind, and I should see how things go.”

“You never told me he took you there.” It’s exactly the sort of thing she would have wanted to tell me; most of Internment will never get to see the inside of the glasslands.

I can’t imagine why she would hate the glasslands so much. Why she would hate her father so much. She has never uttered an unkind word about him. Or any words at all, really.

“Oh, Morgan, don’t be stupid.” She staggers to her feet and rubs at her arm, which must have been hurt in our struggle. “A horrible thing happened that day. You wouldn’t have understood. You were only a little girl.”

Shame. That’s the word that comes to me when I look at her. That’s what’s so strange about her face. She isn’t angry or about to faint. She’s ashamed.

“We were both little girls then,” I say cautiously. “Anything you could have understood, I could have understood.”

“But I didn’t understand,” she whispers.

My heart is in my throat. The thought I’m trying not to have cannot be right. I don’t mean to say it aloud, to make it real, but it tumbles out. “Your father has been hurting you. And it started the day he took you to the glasslands.”

She looks sharply at me. “You aren’t in a position to talk about normal families yourself, though, are you?”

“I am waiting for you to tell me I’m wrong.”

She stares at the paper in my hand, and I stare at it, too. It’s a tiny world in which she has been trapped and from which I’ve been unable to save her.

Pen. What has he done to her? There are never any bruises. I grew up in the apartment just upstairs and never suspected a thing.

The knife under her pillow. The way she spurns Thomas’s advances. All the expensive gifts from her father that she barely acknowledges. Drowning herself in tonic.

I feel sick. “Tell me what he did to you,” I say, although it’s a feeble request, and one she won’t grant me. Whatever it was, her mother, drowned in her bottle, couldn’t stop it. All Pen had to turn to was a piece of request paper.

“I never knew, Pen. You never seemed at all afraid of him.”

“I was not afraid of him,” she says. “I was afraid of being declared irrational. You’ll understand I wasn’t in a hurry to have my reputation discredited and be fitted with an anklet so that I could never leave home until I was old enough to be married off to Thomas.”

She has pointed out one of our world’s most dangerous flaws—how it treats those who argue or question or fight. Yet she would defend Internment until her death. She loves our city the way Alice loves the child she was forced to bleed away, and the way the prince would love the freedom to find his prince, and all the other things that label us as broken.

Her expression has gone sour as she looks at the paper. I have never seen such hatred in her eyes. “Keep that if it means so much to you, then,” she says. “Perhaps it will be a cozy reminder of home.”

She pushes me away from the door. I stagger.

“Pen, please,” I say.

She leaves me there. The Pen I’ve known all my life has hurried from the room, descended the stairs, and slammed a door. A stranger is left staring back at me on the page.

22

The stars
are the only things the sky cannot devour. I’ve seen the way that even my floating city can disappear into the murky whiteness of a cloudy day and be a hostage there all winter. I’ve seen birds fly up into the blue until there’s nothing left of them. And now the sky has swallowed a jet that carries Internment’s only princess, and with her all our chances of going home.

Yet the stars remain. I wonder if they are the true gods. Either way I don’t ask anything of them. Pen has shown me that a lifetime of devotion does not mean a request will be acknowledged, much less answered. It wasn’t a god’s duty to protect her. I was the one who should have seen.

I try to imagine what terrible things she’s endured, and she disappears into something less than dust in my imagination. I suppose that’s what she’d want, to be burnt up like the request she never got to set on fire.

The door creaks open, letting in just a moment of light before it’s closed again. Then my mattress moves with the weight of her climbing in behind me.

She wraps her arm around me and rests her forehead against the back of my neck.

Her skin is chilly from the night air. I don’t know where she’s been all evening. Perhaps something about her is supposed to have changed, but she seems the same to me.

“I’m quite fed up with words tonight,” she says.

There are many things I would like to say to her, and so very many questions I’d like to ask, but I don’t know which are the right ones, if any of them are. So if she would like silence, for tonight, I will give her that, because she has been my solace when I’ve needed it.

I move my fingers between hers, and she squeezes my hand.

All my unanswered questions are in the smoke and bottles she drew, begging to be burnt away.

23