Broken Crowns. Lauren DeStefano
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swallowed Birdie. I saw her body, broken and bleeding and burnt, being kept alive by some coppery machine. Even worse than my brother had been when he’d come too close to the edge.
But nothing is certain, not even death when it’s hovering over a girl. Not in my world, and not in this one. Birdie came back slowly. It took a month for her to open her eyes, and even longer for her to speak, serene in her delirium.
She told us about a spirit that would come into her room late at night to sing to her and to tend to the flowers on the table by the window.
When she had faded back to sleep, Nim slouched forward in his chair and rubbed his temples, anguished. “It wasn’t a spirit,” he told us. “Our mother’s been here.”
Mrs. Piper disappeared some years earlier to see the world. The same madness that brings so many to the edge of Internment haunts the people on the ground as well. One place is not ever enough for anyone, it seems.
It’s August now, and Birdie no longer talks about her spirit. Instead she has returned to solid ground along with the rest of us. She asks her brother about the war. She wants to visit the grave of her other brother, Riles. She is getting well and she is ready to face the grimness that often comes with being awake. She doesn’t wallow in her despair, and does not mind that her soft face has been forever scarred.
Pen is different. She doesn’t seem ready to face anything these days. It has been months since King Ingram left for Internment, taking Princess Celeste with him, and in that time, Pen has been prone to more and more moments of distance. Jack Piper’s guards surround the premises, and we are scarcely permitted to leave unescorted. Not until King Ingram returns with his instructions for us. But every week, Pen gives Nimble a new list of books she’d like from the library. Physics. Calculus. Philosophy. She is drowning in pages and pages of things she never shares with any of us. And that’s when she isn’t off someplace where none of us can find her, even within the confines.
The sun is starting to set, and after nearly an hour of searching, I find her at the amusement park. It would normally be thriving in August, the Pipers have told us, if not for the king’s absence and the war. Now it’s locked. But Pen and I sneak in sometimes.
“Pen?” I step onto one of the metal bars, preparing to climb over the locked fence.
She’s standing high up on the platform with the telescopes that face Internment, and she turns to me.
“What are you doing?” I say.
She shrugs. She presses a piece of paper against the telescope and writes something down, then tucks the paper into her dress. “Nothing. Don’t climb up. I was just leaving.”
She descends the staircase, the steps reverberating under her stacked leather heels that make her taller than me. A girl our age would never be permitted to wear such things back home.
She comes to the fence and grips the bars and leans close, so that her forehead is almost touching mine.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” she says.
“Looking for you. You didn’t come in for dinner.”
“Who can eat?” she says, and hands me her shoes and hoists herself up over the fence. “The food in this place is nauseating. A different animal a night. I’d rather chew on grass.” She lands on her feet with a thud, and goes about straightening her skirt. She takes the shoes but doesn’t bother putting them back on.
I hate myself for trying to smell the tonic on her breath, but it must be done. She finds ways to steal gulps of it. We’ve fallen into an unspoken understanding that I will dispose of anything she tries to hide, and it will never be mentioned.
But if she’s had anything to drink, I can’t tell. Her eyes seem bright and alert when she looks at me. “Has Thomas been trying to find me?”
“Isn’t he always?” I say.
She tugs my hand. “I don’t want to go back inside just yet. Let’s go to the water. Maybe there are mermaids.”
Birdie told us that the mermaids never come close to the shore. They prefer to stay where the water is deep, where they cannot easily be captured or get their hair ensnared on a fishing line. But I don’t mind pretending we’ll spot one. I try to keep pace with her as she runs.
With my other hand I hold my hat to my head. But eventually I let it go, and it escapes. When I’m with Pen, it seems I must always leave some small thing behind.
We are in a valley of green, with shy bright flowers poking their way through. In the wind I see dotted lines. I see red lines and blue lines. I see the maps that my best friend is always drawing as she moves, as she thinks.
“Maybe if we hold our arms out, the wind will carry us up,” she says, and I think she believes it to be true.
Eventually we stop to catch our breaths somewhere along the ocean’s shore. Pen rests her elbow on my shoulder and laughs at my wheezing. I have never been a match for her.
The wind is so loud that I can scarcely hear her laughter.
She drops onto the grass and pulls me down after her. Once I’ve caught my breath, she leans back on her elbows and looks at me. “What is it?” she says. “What’s that worried look for?”
“I don’t like all this wind,” I say, over a roar of it. “It doesn’t feel right.” This time of year is so mellow on Internment. It is surely beautiful back home, the pathways all traced with bright flowers.
“A lot of the breeze comes from the sea,” Pen says. “That’s all.”
“I know.”
“Morgan, we aren’t on Internment. Things are bound to be different. We’ve been here for months. We survived all that snow; this is just a little wind.”
“I know.” What I don’t say is that I’m afraid she’ll be swallowed whole by this whirling sky. This world already tried to kill her once, and Pen is fearless and foolish enough to let it try again.
A flock of birds flies high above us, in a uniform formation. Pen stretches her arms straight up over her head, her fingers arranged like a frame. I rest my head next to hers and try to see through that frame from her perspective.
After the birds have gone, she says, “Suppose Internment were to fall out of the sky.”
“What?” I say.
“Suppose it couldn’t stay afloat any longer and it came down all at once, hard and fast. I think it would coast at an angle, rather than straight down. I’ve been looking at the way the birds come down from the sky, and it’s sort of a sixty degree angle most times.”
“I don’t give it any thought,” I say.
She turns her head in the grass to look at me. “You’ve never thought about Internment falling from the sky before?”
“I have, I suppose.” I stare up at the graying sky, where shades of pink and gold still cling to the sparse clouds. “But more as a nightmare, not something that will happen. I don’t weigh the probability or try to picture what it would look like.”
Pen stares up at the sky again.
“I think it would fall on King Ingram’s castle,” she says. “I think it would kill him and all his men. But the impact would destroy Internment, too. The foundations for all the buildings would shift. They’d likely collapse.”
“Internment won’t fall out of the sky,” I say. I am gentle with her, but firm. I have heard Amy wonder about Internment coming down. I wondered myself, as a child. But Pen is different. She gets ideas like these in her head and they become real to her. She forgets what’s in front of her and sees only what’s in her mind, and just like that she’s lost.
A mechanical growling from somewhere high above us disturbs the tranquil gray sky, and I flinch. Not even the largest beast on Internment could make a sound like that. The sound comes