Burning Kingdoms (6 page)

“It isn’t as bad as all that,” I tell her, though I don’t entirely believe it. “The ground is much bigger than Internment. These bombs couldn’t possibly end it all.”

“Don’t you see it?” she says. “All this space has made them cocky. Look at how big their houses are. Look at how many children they have. A cloud of smoke and a few explosions are only the start, Morgan. These people are doomed, and it doesn’t matter where we’re from. We’re along for the ride now, all of us.”

“I’m so fortunate to be betrothed to an optimist,” Thomas says.

She sighs, irritated. “Don’t take me seriously, then. You’ll see.”

“I do take you seriously, Pen. I just worry you’ll go spiraling if you talk like this.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but I say, “Let’s see if the others will let us join their game.”

For me, Pen relinquishes her side of the argument.

The board games are all simple, quick, and mindless. Birdie often forgets it’s her turn because she’s staring worriedly at the door. When it finally opens, she about jumps from her skin. She rushes to take her father’s coat.

Nimble looks up from his book. “What did you find out?”

“The banks are gone,” Jack says.

“The hospital?”

“No, though it may only be a matter of time.”

Marjorie, Riles, and Annette are wide-eyed, and Jack smiles at them. “Nothing to be alarmed about, children,” he says. “It’s all just a game that our King Ingram is playing with King Erasmus.”

“What will the winner get?” Annette asks.

“Something very precious,” Jack says. “A very important place.” He nods to Celeste, who is rising to her feet from across the room. “Princess, if I may speak with you privately,” he says.

“Certainly,” she says. She follows him from the room, Nimble at her heels. Birdie rushes after them, only to have the door closed in her face.

She scowls and presses her ear to the door, nearly stumbling when it opens and Nimble pokes his head out at her. “Father says to go on and have dinner without us.”

“But—”

The door closes again.

“Riles,” Birdie whispers. He has already read her mind. He scales the back of the couch and climbs onto her shoulders. He’s just high enough now to reach a crack in the plaster wall. He presses his ear to his drinking glass to amplify the sound, and listens. Clearly the two of them have this down to a science.

“Anything?” she asks.

“Not if you keep yapping.”

He listens a few seconds more, and Birdie arches her back uncomfortably. And just when I think she can carry his weight no longer, he climbs down.

“No one died,” Riles says. “That’s all I could get. That’s good, isn’t it?”

Birdie looks worried. “I don’t know,” she says, and then she blinks away her melancholy. “I owe you some ice cream after dinner, but don’t tell your sisters.”

“Pleasure doing business,” he says.

5

“I don’t like
this one bit,” Pen says, scouring her face with a wet cloth. “Her Duplicitous Highness has been at conference with Jack Piper for hours now.”

I lie back in the drained tub, letting my legs dangle over the edge. “What do you suppose they’re talking about?” I say.

“If she’s smart, she isn’t telling him all about the way Internment is run. But she’s as dumb as a rock, and she loves to hear her own voice.” Pen begins furiously braiding her hair. “When I think of my mother and all those people up there, I just—I can’t stand it.”

“What?”

“How powerless they’d all be against something like what I saw today. One bomb, and it would all be gone. And down here they fire them off like it’s nothing.”

She drops her braid and struggles to fix it, but she can’t seem to steady her hands.

“Pen.” I reach for her. She sits on the edge of the tub, sulking. I fix her hair. “There’s no sense thinking about it. All the bombs they’ve got on the ground can’t reach Internment. Nothing can. Not even that bird we saw this morning.”

“Not even us,” Pen whispers, broken.

I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her into the tub with me. I was hoping to make her laugh, but she flops unceremoniously against me.

“Tell me another story from the history book,” I say. “What about the tree that grew endless fruit after the infestation killed the crops?”

“It wasn’t an infestation,” Pen says. “You always get that part confused. It was a drought. The lakes weren’t replenishing. The people were losing faith in the god of the sky. Fish were rotting in the sun.”

“And then?” I say.

“You know the story,” she sighs. She flails until she’s able to free herself from the tub. “I’m going to bed.”

She reaches her hand out to me, and I let her pull me to my feet. I’m not tired at all, but there isn’t anything more to do. The sooner we sleep, the sooner it will be morning. And maybe there will be some answers then.

Celeste still hasn’t returned by the time I turn out the light. Pen’s bed and mine are separated by a small table that holds a black book and an alarm clock. The ticking feels louder in the darkness, drowned only by Pen’s tosses and turns.

I don’t move. Guilt has made me fear the days to come. If experiencing this war is the price I must pay for my curiosity, then I accept. But Pen never asked for this. Nor did Basil and Thomas. And they’re all here, one way or another, because of me.

The door creaks open, letting in the faint glow of the fireplace down in the lobby.

“About bloody time, Princess,” Pen mutters. “Don’t even think about blinding us with the light.”

“It’s me,” Birdie whispers. “I’m sorry, but Father is still downstairs and I—I need that tree.”

She sounds as frightened as I feel.

I sit up. “Is it safe to be out there?”

“I don’t care about safe,” she says.

“We have something in common, then,” Pen says. “Take us with you.”

“Or you’ll tell on me?” Birdie says unhappily.

“Of course not,” Pen says. “I just think it would be the decent thing for you to invite us. We are letting you use our window and all.”

Birdie hesitates. “You won’t find anything suitable to wear in this room,” she says. “All these clothes belonged to my mother. Let me go see if I can’t scare up a couple of dresses.”

We stuff our beds with pillows. Birdie is impressed with the deftness by which Pen and I can descend the tree, even with the icy branches. “We’re all a lot of natural climbers,” Pen says, hopping to the ground. “After a while there’s nowhere to go but up and then back down again.”

“Where to now?” I say.

“We have to walk for a bit,” Birdie says apologetically. “But then we can take the ferry once we reach the harbor. Used to be it would close by nine, but since the war the king has resolved never to let the city sleep. Makes us superior to King Erasmus, he thinks.”

“Even if a bomb has just gone off?” I say.

“Especially then. The Cranlin will be open until sunup. That’s our cinema. Do you have moving pictures on Internment?”

I imagine an image, blurry and monochrome, like the school portrait of Daphne after her murder. I imagine the image moving, her stoic eye blinking, and it gives me a chill. “Sounds terrifying,” I say.

“Not at all!” Birdie laughs at Pen’s and my startled expressions. “They’re the bee’s knees.” She loops her arms over the backs of our necks as we trudge forward. “Seems I have a lot to show you, girls.”

She introduces us to the harbor, and the roaring body of water she calls an ocean. “Is that like a big lake?” Pen asks.

“Much, much bigger, and full of salt,” Birdie says. “And the sea has more creatures than lakes. Whales and sharks and mermaids—they have human hair, you know.”

“Of all things,” I breathe.

Birdie bounces on her heels, looking at the lights coasting across the water toward us. “That’s the ferry,” she says.

Pen elbows me. “Look!”

But I’m still trying to imagine what sort of fish could have human hair, and when I look at the water, every bit of light now seems like it could be filled with strands.

There’s a tea-steeped moon above us, cratered and beaming. Strange how it looks as near now as it did when we lived in the sky, even as the clouds meandered alongside the city.

The ferry pushes out into the water, leaving my stomach and lungs on dry land. How easily I forget this afternoon and all the fears that came with it. Pen and Birdie crowd me at the railing. We are looking for mermaids and fins.

Pen looks between the harbor and the city lights in the distance. I know her. She’s charting the course, memorizing the details most others would miss. She’ll be drafting maps of it for days. Even as a child she would pen maps of every place she’d been, on the back of her hand and on walls if she couldn’t find paper in time. It became a part of her, as obvious as the green of her eyes. And one day it became her name, and no one ever questioned it, it was that certain.

“There’s one!” Birdie points to where the water has become crowded with bubbles. There’s a head of hair as silver as the light on the water, and once it’s under again, there’s the flicker of a fin as long as my forearm. Pen squeaks with delight.

“They never come near land and you probably won’t see their faces, but they like to flirt.”

“Have you ever seen one up close?” I say.

“Once. I was fishing with Nim, and his hook got caught up in her hair. She let out this wail, I swear, that could be heard from the heavens. Scared him so much, he dropped the pole, which may have been what she was after. They like to collect human things. Which reminds me, mind your jewelry. I saw one jump up and snatch the beads right off a woman’s neck.” She presses her hat against her head at the memory.

Pen and I close our fists around our betrothal bands.

The ocean waves slap against the ferry, more turbulent than any of the lakes back home. It’s no wonder; the ocean is filled with so many creatures swimming about.

“There could be cities underwater,” Pen says. “A whole society with buildings made up of human things.”

“There’s more shrimp than you could ever eat,” Birdie says.

Pen makes a face. “Do those have human hair, too?”

Birdie laughs. Out here, her eyes aren’t downcast. She isn’t all “please” and “thank you” and “yes, Father” this and that. She tells us about all the sea creatures she can think of—hard little fish that look like stars and crawl like hands along the ocean floor, and whales that could swallow a village if they had a mind to.

“A fish big enough to swallow a person.” Pen is giddy. “What a hilarious way to die, in the digestive tract of a fish.”

“Whales aren’t fish,” Birdie says, which is all the more absurd a notion.

“You live in a strange world, Birdie,” Pen says.

The ferry comes to a stop, and once we’re on land again, I topple dizzily into the two of them, which sends us all into giggles. We collect a few stares from passersby, but they mean nothing. We are young and enchanted and clattering with beads. We are untouchable.

I find myself very aware of the ground under my feet. It’s unlike the cobbles back home. Rather, it’s solid and black, and its paths branch out like a flat tree, all of them leading to bright lights and music and possibility.

“Cinema’s this way,” Birdie says, tugging us by the wrists.

“It hardly seems like you’re at war,” I say.

“That’s how King Ingram prefers it,” she says.

“You’ve met him?” Pen says.

“Lots of times. Father has him over for dinner when there are matters to discuss. It’s a real honor. The king’s paranoid about poisons and he doesn’t trust a lot of people to prepare his meals.”

“Our king doesn’t come out of hiding much either,” Pen says. “He and his family live in a clock tower that’s full of dungeons.”

“How medieval. Here we are, girls!”

The cinema is a wedge-shaped building, the top of which is framed by a strip of light, and the words “ETIENNE JONES DOUBLE FEATURE.”

“What an unusual sign,” I say.

“It’s a marquee,” Birdie says. She hands silver coins to a man behind the glass and we go inside. She leads us into a dimly lit room that’s full of chairs and already crowded. “You’re going to love it,” she says.

Pen is eyeing the girls in the front row who are passing a bottle among them, taking swigs. I can smell from here that it’s some kind of tonic, which wouldn’t be allowed in public back home.

Nobody here seems to mind.

I clear my throat loudly. “What was that name on the building?”

“Etienne Jones,” Birdie says. “She’s the biggest star in the kingdom. Wait till you see her.”

I stare at the giant screen that takes up the wall before us like a giant image waiting to be developed.

Then the screen goes black and music starts to play. Pen loops her arm around mine and squeezes. The world doesn’t seem so scary now that she’s in good spirits. It’s not all warfare and doom.

The moving picture is gray and jumpy. Lips move and then the words appear for us to read. Etienne Jones has bobbed hair and ringed eyes, and when she walks down the street, she kicks her heels, and all the men watch, dropping hatboxes and getting elbowed by their wives.

But the image is merely a projection. The screen is only fabric. And though our screens on Internment are much smaller and are never used for entertainment, they are more advanced than this. I wonder how it could be that our tiny floating city could be ahead on any of the technology.