4

      The black clouds are visible from the hotel by the time we’ve returned to it. I see them rolling in the distance, moving the way that giant body of water moves, snuffing out the bereft gray clouds. The sun has made a wise decision to hide from us completely.

      The car jolts to a stop by the front door. “Go on inside,” Nimble says.

      “Aren’t you coming?” I ask.

      “After I park,” he says. “Aerial warfare’s bad for the paint.”

      The front door swings open and there the Piper children stand, perfectly in order, all of them with the same frightened eyes. “Nim!” Birdie calls as he speeds around the building.

      “Where’s he going?” Riles asks.

      “To park in the carriage house. Him and his love for that stupid bus,” Birdie says.

      “I’ll help,” Riles says, but Birdie catches him by the collar as he tries to run outside.

      “Don’t be a pest.” She ruffles his hair. “Leave the door open for him.”

      “What happened?” Basil says.

      Everyone is full of questions. Everyone is talking. The words bounce off my skin, never reaching me, not really. I move to the nearest window and I step behind those gold curtains to watch the smoke blend into the sky.

      “It’s like the flower shop fire times a thousand, isn’t it?” Celeste’s voice startles me. She’s standing beside me, both of us tented off from the others.

      “You wouldn’t know, would you?” I say. “Or did you see it from your clock tower window?”

      “I was out hunting with my brother that day, I’ll have you know,” she says. “True, we were some distance away, but I could smell the smoke.”

      Snapping at the princess won’t do any good. Even if her father and his henchmen did start that fire in an attempt to cease the rebellion, she had nothing to do with it. She hasn’t made her sinister side a secret, but when she held Pen and me hostage, I got a sense for how little she knew of her father’s plans. She wasn’t interested in or aware of any of them. She only wanted me to help her get to the ground. Nothing more.

      “So this is what you left your floating kingdom for,” I say, nodding ahead. “Are you glad you came?”

      She takes a deep breath, straightens her shoulders. “I understand that you’re frightened, so I’m going to let this bitterness slide,” she says. “But I’ll have you know that you’re beginning to sound like that brazen friend of yours, and I know you’re better than that. Anyway, I wasn’t looking to argue.”

      “What were you looking for, then?” I say.

      “I wanted to check on you, of course,” she says.

      I look at her from the corners of my eyes.

      “Oh, all right. I also wanted to ask what you saw out there.”

      “I heard an explosion and then I saw the smoke,” I say. “Nimble called it an aerial attack.”

      Celeste arranges her thumbs and index fingers like a frame and holds them to the glass, considering. “Do you suppose this has been going on below us the whole time?” she says.

      “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know how anyone can live in a world where this happens frequently.”

      Celeste looks at me. Her smile is toothy and bright. “Then we’ve come just in time to save them, wouldn’t you say?”

      I bring a tray of food to Alice and Lex. I can’t think of any other way to make myself useful. I tell them about the explosion, and the smoke. And I tell them about the graveyard.

      How much can the people of the ground value life when they have so much land with which to bury their dead? What’s a few more stones? But I don’t say that. “The princess thinks we can help them,” is what I say.

      Alice looks concerned. “Did she say why she came with us?”

      “No,” I say. “But she seemed pretty desperate. Enough that she interrogated Pen and me, and held Thomas at knifepoint so we wouldn’t kick her off the bird.”

      Lex’s transcriber sits on the floor near the bed, and the lack of smell that its coppery motor usually emits tells me he hasn’t used it since we arrived. We all left in a hurry the night I was poisoned. I was unconscious and dying in Basil’s arms. But Alice thought to grab the one thing that will surely keep Lex sane; she must have known there would be no turning back.

      Lex sits on the floor beside the thing, his legs folded, worrying a square metal clock in his hands. The ticking provides an anchor, reminds him that even in his persistent darkness, the seconds never cease. He doesn’t need to know the hour; he only needs to know that they’re still passing.

      “This war may just be getting started,” Alice says.

      “Basil says that the Pipers will want to collect on their kindness in taking us in,” I say. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, but I can’t imagine how we could help. It isn’t as though we have any more ties to home than they do. We can’t go back.”

      “They don’t know that,” Lex says. His head is down, and his voice is scratchy. “We’d better hope they don’t figure out how powerless we are.”

      Alice frowns into her tea. Then she kneels before Lex and replaces the clock in his hands with the cup. “Drink this,” she says. “And then we should eat something. We’re going to need our strength.”

      “Strength for what?” Lex says.

      “For living,” she says, with that persistent vivacity I’ve always loved her for. “I don’t know what’s to come, but we’d better prepare ourselves to face it.” She brings the cup to his lips, forcing