Broken Crowns

Basil is quiet for a few seconds, and then with some difficulty he says, “I’ve been playing that same game, wondering about my parents and Leland.”

I look at him.

“I think they must be okay,” he says, and nods straight ahead at the sky, where our floating city is hiding somewhere in that darkness beyond our sullen reflections. “They would follow the king’s orders. They’ve always been smart about that.”

“Which king’s orders?” I say.

“Whichever king is in charge these days,” he says.

“Maybe King Ingram and King Furlow really are forming some sort of alliance,” I say. “Maybe there will be good news.”

He glances sidelong at me, and a smile comes to his lips. “I’ve always loved your optimistic side.”

“You’re the only one. Everyone else seems to think I’m foolish for harboring it.”

He puts his arm around my back, and the last of the tension in me dies. I rest my temple against his shoulder. “I’m tired, Basil. And so worried that the decisions I’ve made were the wrong ones.”

“The wrong decisions have been made by these kings,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, I would have done the same thing you did. If I’d known about the phosane, I would have told.”

“Really?”

“If what’s happening to Pen had been happening to you, if I’d thought this world were killing you, yes. I’d do anything it took to bring you back home.”

“You’ve always understood me, Basil.”

His arm tightens around me and I close my eyes. The anxiety feels so distant when he’s around. Farther away and smaller in the sky than our long-lost floating city.

Then I hear the front door open, and my stomach drops.

The younger Pipers have long since gone to bed, and everyone else has been in the lobby for hours, waiting for word. All eyes are at the front door when Nimble steps inside, his shoulders dropped, his eyes weary. He is always the first to run to the tarmac when the jet returns, hoping for word about Celeste. And he is always heartsick when no word comes.

We all wait in silence. Nim raises his head and looks at each of us, settling on me. “King Ingram has returned. My father is with him now. I don’t know what any of this means yet. I’m sorry.”

He moves toward his bedroom, and by the heaviness of his steps I can suspect what the answer will be. But still I have to ask, “Was Celeste with him?”

He pauses, his back to me. “No,” he says. “My father told me only that the king has brought a special visitor, but it isn’t her.” He takes a deep breath, and his voice is so tight, I think he may be fighting tears. “I doubt my father will be back tonight. You might as well all go to bed.”

He can’t get away from us fast enough.

Pen is standing by the couch, Thomas at her side. She’s staring worriedly after Nimble, though, and she doesn’t hear Thomas until the third or fourth time he’s said her name. “Pen.” She flinches, startled.

“We’ll know more tomorrow, surely,” Basil says.

The hotel falls into its nightly silence. I soak in the tub long after everyone else has gone to bed. The mornings in this place can be so noisy, with the Piper children running about, shrieking with laughter as they play their games, most of which involve explosions. And footsteps going this way and that, and voices, and silverware on plates.

But the nights are still. I can feel everyone’s silence just as surely as I can hear their voices during the day.

Someone knocks at the door. “Morgan?” Pen’s voice. “Are you all right? You’ve been in there forever.”

“I thought you were in bed,” I say.

“I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t drowned.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.” The water’s gone cold anyway. I wring out my wet hair, dry off, and slip into my nightgown.

When I open the door, Pen is waiting in the hallway, holding a lantern. Its orange glow picks up the bags under her eyes, and I can see all at once how troubled she’s been, despite her best efforts to conceal it.

“I’m not tired,” she whispers. “Are you?”

“No,” I say, although it’s a lie. I will stay awake all night if there’s a chance she’ll finally be honest with me. She is much more likely to reveal her secrets at night, when the sleeping world will be undisturbed by her whispering voice.

She smiles. “Do you want to go for a midnight walk?”

We don’t bother with our shoes. We tiptoe barefoot down the steps and through the front door.

Unlike earlier, the night’s wind is mellow and warm. The moon outshines our lantern, nearly full and bright white.

As soon as we’ve stepped into the grass, I can feel the cool earth under my feet, astoundingly like the ground back home. Pen moves forward, and when I don’t follow, she turns to face me. “Aren’t you coming?”

I wriggle my bare toes in the grass and stare down at it. I have never seen the heaps of soil being flown down from Internment. I’ve only heard about it from Nim. I imagine Internment filled with craters so wide that you could look through them and see the ground below.

“I was just thinking about home,” I say. “About what King Ingram is going to tell us, if he plans to tell us anything at all.”

Pen takes my hand, leads me away from the hotel. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

She leads me to the amusement park, and I climb the fence after her without question, happy to see whatever it is she wants to show me. Maybe it will be something other than tonic this time. Maybe it will give me some insight into this distance she’s built between herself and everyone else in this world.

I expect her to lead me to the telescopes. That’s where I find her sometimes. But instead she leads me to the giant teacups, sitting inanimate in the moonlight. She is still clutching the lantern when she kneels beside one of the saucers—chipped but still bright green—and reaches beneath it, somewhere in the mechanism that would cause it to spin.

Eventually she finds what she was looking for: several pieces of paper folded together. Whatever is on those pages must be important, if she would keep them all the way out here.

Is this because I discovered her request paper all those months ago? Does she think I’ll go rifling through her things when she’s not in our room? I haven’t. I would never. But sometimes, when I hear her tossing and turning, muttering through her nightmares about the harbor, I would do anything to know what is happening in her mind.

“Here.” She hands me the lantern, and then she swings one leg over the teacup’s rim, then the other. She takes the lantern back so I can climb in after her.

Inside the teacup is a metal wraparound bench, and she sits so close to me that my wet hair dampens her shoulder.

She spreads the papers open on the small table before us—the one that we would twist if we wanted the teacup to spin. “Now that the king is back, we have to find a way to stop him,” she says. Her eyes are on the pages. “If we don’t, I think we’re in real trouble.”

I stare at the pages, lit up by the moon and the lantern, and as always, I don’t understand. I see Pen’s steadily drawn lines. I see a circle and a small floating silhouette that could be Internment. I see numbers drifting around it like birds.

Pen shuffles through the pages like a madman. “I’ve been reading up on the sunsets. The sun goes down about a minute earlier every day, except about once a week or so when it goes down two minutes earlier.”

She looks at me to be sure I’m following along. “Okay,” I say. I’ve never paid too much attention to the sunset, but I know that we’re at the time of year when we lose a bit of light each day. “So?”

“So,” she says. “For the past few months, I’ve been keeping a grid of where Internment sits in the sky, and where the sun should be. Every day I look through the same telescope at the same angle.”

She points to Internment’s shape on each of the pages before us, as though I should know what we’re looking at.

“I don’t understand.”

She looks at me, and I can see how tired her face is, how worried. But her eyes are bright, the way they always are when she’s onto something important. “Internment is sinking. Not very much, but a bit each month. Enough that it’s bound to be a problem if this keeps up.”

I can only stare at the pages as these words sink in. In her ever steady hand Pen has drawn the outline of the clock tower, protruding above the mass of apartment buildings. Scraggly roots jut from the torn underbelly of the floating city. The sun, a perfect circle, is at a distance, held in the pure white sky by tiny equations I can’t decipher.

There are two versions of Pen. There is the silly, spontaneous, and brutally blunt girl I know, and then there is the side of her that can ingeniously solve these mysteries. It is frightening what she is capable of.

“Can you be sure?” I say.

“The professor helped me with the algorithm.” She gnaws on her lower lip guiltily. “I’d been visiting him before he died.”

I suppose she expects me to feel betrayed. And I do, in a way, but I am also relieved. I knew she was off somewhere; I’m only grateful it wasn’t with a bottle.

“It must be all the mining,” I say. “We don’t know how much soil King Ingram’s men bring back on each shipment.”

“It would have to be a lot of soil to affect Internment’s weight,” Pen says. “More soil than could possibly be fitting into those jets. Internment is thousands of times their size. I don’t think it’s that.”

“What, then?”

Pen shuffles through the papers until she finds a full-page drawing of Internment. The accuracy and scale is stunning, as though she’d sat in the sky and sketched its likeness. She has drawn a bubble around the city in rough overlapping lines.

“When your brother went to the edge, it was the wind that threw him back. The wind was moving sideways, like a current around the city. Have you ever noticed the way clouds that get too close to Internment seem to zip past us?”

“Those clouds get caught up in the wind that surrounds the city,” I say. “And you think that wind is part of what’s keeping Internment afloat?”

“I have several theories about what keeps Internment afloat, but I do think the wind is a big factor,” Pen says. “When we left the city in the metal bird, we went under the city, through the dirt. But King Ingram’s jet lands and departs from the surface.”

“It flies through the wind,” I say, understanding.

She nods eagerly. “And disrupts it. Maybe even weakens it. It’s a slight change for now, but over the course of years, it could knock Internment from the sky completely.”

Her voice is excited, the way it always is when she is explaining things. But in the silence that follows, she remembers the magnitude of what she’s said, and I feel it too. Internment is not only being ravaged by this world’s greedy king; it could be knocked right out of the sky.

“King Ingram wouldn’t care if he knew,” I say.

“No. Why should he? He’ll have what he wants. Even if Internment crashed right into Havalais, he’d stand clear and let people die like he did at the harbor.”

I look at Pen. “How do we stop it?”

She shrugs. “I say we kill King Ingram.”

“Be serious.”

“I am, rather.”

“Yes, okay,” I say. “We’ll just walk right up to his castle, and we’ll knock on the door, and then we’ll stab him with the knife you keep under your pillow. I can’t find any fault in that. But suppose we come up with a backup plan.”

“There’s only one person I trust who has access to the king,” Pen says. “And I’d trust him with a secret, too. After all, he’s lived his entire life never letting anyone know he’s third in line to the throne.”

“Nimble?” I say. One night after too much drinking, Birdie confided in us that her father was the king’s secret bastard, and that she and her siblings were princes and princesses. Later when she was comatose after the bombings, Nim confirmed it.

“He hates King Ingram as much as I do,” Pen says. “The king is the reason his brother is dead. The king is the reason the princess was taken away from him. He has no reason to care about Internment, but he cares about her, and she’s up there. He’ll want to help us.”

A light breeze coasts along the ground, bringing the salt of the endless ocean, rustling the grass and causing some rusted metal thing within the park to squeak.

The papers rattle, and Pen organizes them with affection and folds them along their crease.

“Should we talk to him tomorrow?” I say.

“We won’t have to wait until then.” Pen nods up at the telescope at a distance. In the moonlight I can just see a dark outline clutching one of the telescopes aimed at Internment. “He comes here every night and drops coin after coin into that thing so he can stare up at the city. He would never be able to see her, though. At best those lenses make a blurry faraway view bigger and blurrier.”

I feel a pain in my chest, watching him. He lives in this vast world that goes on forever until it wraps around to where it started again. There are trains and biplanes and ferries and elegors that can take him anywhere. But he cannot reach the girl he loves up in her kingdom in the sky.

“I hear him sneaking out sometimes at night,” Pen says. “The poor fool.” She heaves a deep breath then blows out the lantern.

We climb one after the other from the teacup, through the man-made labyrinth of gears and metal pieces until we reach the stairway to the telescopes.

It is here that we hesitate. As pressing as the matter is, neither of us wants to interrupt this intimate sadness.

But we don’t have to. He heard us approach, and after a few seconds, when the telescope must have expired, he comes to the top of the staircase and looks down at us.

“Bit late for a stroll, isn’t it, girls?” he says in his breezy Havalais accent.

Pen is clutching the papers to her chest. “We have something to tell you,” she says.

We sit on the wooden planks beside the telescopes, Pen’s drawings spread out between the three of us like a deck of morbid cards.

Throughout Pen’s explanation, Nimble said nothing and asked no questions. He only stared with that pensive expression he gives when his father is discussing politics. Now he reaches forward to touch Internment’s outline on one of the sketches. “So much detail,” he says. “There must be an atlas in your head. It must be so exhausting.”

He looks up at us, smiling grimly. “Celeste and I predicted something like this happening. Not exactly this, per se, but that King Ingram’s greed about the phosane would make him reckless. We knew Internment was in jeopardy.”

“We already have the riddle, then,” I say. “What’s the answer?”

“You girls aren’t the only ones unhappy with King Ingram,” Nim says. “It isn’t just the people of Internment who have cause to hate him. There’s been a lot of unrest down here since the bombing at the harbor. I have a boy who works as one of the king’s guards who has been feeding me intelligence. His niece was killed in the bombing.”

“That’s awful,” I say.

“What kind of intelligence?” Pen says.

“So far it’s all just been a lot of angry chatter,” Nim says. “The refinery has caused some people in the heart of the city to become sick. Water comes out of the pipes smelling like sulfur. After the bombings, this phosane was supposed to make everything better, and it has only caused more problems. King Ingram has the phosane, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s a politician, not a scientist. The scientist who initially discovered its usefulness is dead now, and there’s speculation that Dastor would know a thing or two about refining it, but as for our kingdom, Havalais has yet to see this miracle fuel in action and they’re beginning to doubt it exists.”

“It exists,” Pen says. “Down here you call it phosane, but up on Internment we call it sunstone, and it’s a powerful fuel source if it’s refined properly.” She sits up straight, stricken with a new thought. “What if the engineers on Internment are refusing to help them refine it? Or what if they’re giving faulty instructions?” She looks between Nim and me, giddy and proud. “What if they’re up there fighting?”

I struggle to suppress my smile. It’s bad luck to hope for such a thing, but I could believe it. I do believe it. “If that’s true,” I say, “King Ingram needs Internment. He can’t just take all he pleases and then dispose of its people. It took decades for our engineers to perfect the glasslands and harness our fuel. Your king may have all the riches to build and employ a refinery, and all the raw materials, but if he doesn’t know how to use them, it’s all for nothing.”

“Clever little city,” Nim says, looking up. He does not share in our joy, though. “If that’s true, it’s surely an ugly scene up there right now. Think torture. Think homes being burnt down. Your people can be as stubborn as you please, but no one down here can hear them scream from up there.”

Pen shakes her head wildly. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see? Being tortured, deprived—it’s the lesser evil. Our people would withstand anything to keep the city afloat.”

“She’s right,” I say. “Down here, if you don’t like where you live, you can pick up and leave. If you don’t like the weather, or your children—you can just go. But on Internment, our home is all we have.”

The people of Internment are resilient if we have to be. We don’t value property or money the way they do down here; often our secrets are the only things of worth to us. I think of, but don’t say aloud, the time the prince and princess held us hostage in their clock tower’s dungeon. All they wanted was a way to the metal bird, and proof that it existed, but I would have died before I’d have let them have it.

“Your king underestimated Internment,” I say. “But that’s good. Isn’t it? We can work with that. We can—I don’t know.”

I look at Pen, hoping she’ll blurt out a solution. But she foolishly expects the solution to come from me. “Go on,” she says.

“We can try to get sent to Internment, and then we’ll know for sure what’s happening up there. If they’re not telling King Ingram how to refine the phosane, maybe there’s a rebellion being organized.”

“If that’s true, there’s plenty of intelligence here on the ground that would be of use to them,” Nimble says. “There are men in King Ingram’s court who are disgruntled enough to help. It’s just a matter of finding who to trust, and I know those boys. You could leave that to me.”

“How would we get ourselves sent back to Internment, though?” Pen says.

“We could go to King Ingram and pretend we’d like to help him,” I say. “We can make him think that he can use us the way he used Celeste. As leverage or a sort of hostage. And he’ll send us back home.” I look at Nim. “Do you think he would do that?”

Pen laughs and grabs my face in her hands and kisses my temple. “Brilliant,” she says.

“Really?”

“Really,” Nim says. “That might work.” The hope in his eyes is too much to take. I don’t tell him that if the people of Internment are as stubborn as we’re hoping, King Ingram may have gotten desperate and gone for the jugular. And there are only two things on Internment that could be taken from King Furlow that are of any value: his children. Prince Azure, and Princess Celeste. They may already be dead.

3

Pen is not ready to divulge her findings to Thomas or the others, but she understands when I insist on telling Basil. If I’m going to attempt to return to Internment, he deserves to know.

In the morning I meet him in his room as everyone else is going to breakfast. I close the door behind me. We sit on his bed and I tell him everything in a hushed tone. Through it all, he doesn’t say a word, listening patiently to my eager, harried rambling.

When I get to the end, it takes all my willpower not to look away from him when I say, “And Pen and I want to convince King Ingram to send us back. If we make him think we’re on his side, and that we want to try to talk the engineers back home into helping him, we’re hoping he’ll go along with it.”

He is the first to break our gaze. He looks down at my hand as he covers it with his own and then he looks back at me. “When we were back home, your mind wandered toward the ground. But now that we’re on the ground, your mind wanders back home. Sometimes I think what you want is to be away from wherever it is you’re standing.”

“Maybe there’s some truth to that,” I admit.

“I think about home, too.” He speaks with great caution. “Not just my parents and Leland, but the life I had there. The sounds. The future I might have had.” He shakes his head. “It was enough for me, staying there. I didn’t mind it. But for as long as I can remember, there has been this current leading me away. You,” he says.

“I tried, Basil. I tried to stay within the train tracks, to do what was expected of me.”

“I know you did. I was there with you.”

I stare down at our hands. “I didn’t want to be the current pulling you away from all the things that you loved.”

“Morgan,” he says, in that practical way of his. “You were the thing I loved.”

The words feel both wonderful and painful at the same time. “The truth is that I had to pull you along with me,” I say. “I couldn’t untangle myself from you if I tried. We’ve always just sort’ve gone together. It’s as though someone mixed us up until we were a secondary color, and there’s no way to tell which one of us started out which color.”

I am terrible with words. My brother’s the writer. I’m only clumsily trying to come up with words for things I’ll never have the skill to say.

Basil laughs, but he isn’t making fun of me. I know he understands.

“I am going to live my life worrying about you,” he says. “But I do think you’re right that there is unrest on Internment. It’s a peaceful city. It has nothing to protect itself against a kingdom like Havalais, much less the ground itself. If nothing is done, and Pen’s calculations are correct, Internment will crash-land on the ground before King Ingram ever has a way to refine his phosane.”

“A lose-lose,” I say.

“If you were to go back home, you would need something that would give Internment a fighting chance against King Ingram. Do you have anything like that?”

“Nim thinks he can get us some allies on the ground. A lot of King Ingram’s men are disgruntled after the bombing. And on Internment we’ll have an ally in Princess Celeste. If she’s still alive.”

“She’ll be alive,” Basil assures me. “If King Ingram wants something from Internment, he won’t go killing King Furlow’s children before he has it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“What if I go with you?” Basil says. “No matter what information or power you may be able to gather, the fact remains that both Havalais and Internment are patriarchies.”

Pen would hate him for saying it, but I know that he’s right. Kings are more reasonable with men than they are with girls. King Ingram is more likely to believe that Basil could influence the engineers.

“But is that what you want?” I say.

“I could never sit idly by while you disappear into the clouds, leaving me to wonder if you’re alive each day,” he says, and despite everything, I can’t help but indulge in that beautiful thing he’s just said to me. He goes on, “I also don’t want Internment to come crashing down on our heads, killing us all and my family too.”

“Nim is hoping to get an audience with the king this afternoon,” I say. “Let’s hope he can come through. Oh, and, Basil, about all this. Pen doesn’t want Thomas to know about it.”

He frowns. “It isn’t our business to get involved, then. But I do wish she’d be more forthright about things. It would be healthier for her.”

“You and me both,” I say. “But for now I think it’s best we keep this to ourselves until we know more.”

“Agreed,” he says.

Nim is gone after lunchtime, off to King Ingram’s castle to play the good son to Jack Piper for once, in an attempt to stay in his graces.