“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 hom
e, 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.
Pen and Thomas are playing a board game. They’re leaning toward each other on opposing sides of the coffee table, the crowns of their blond heads almost touching.
It’s a beautiful day, and Alice has taken Amy and the youngest Pipers outside. Through an open window I can hear them laughing in the garden. This Havalais air has had a positive effect on Amy; she hasn’t had one of her fits in months.
Basil is trying to engage me in a game of cards. The decks they use on the ground are similar to our own, and with a bit of compromise we can duplicate most of the games we played back home. But I am having the hardest time sitting still. My leg shakes anxiously. My mind is spinning out dozens of scenarios about Nim’s efforts at the castle.
Should I tell Judas and Amy any of this?
The thought of Judas brings a rush of heat to my cheeks. We’ve barely spoken in weeks, and I don’t see him anywhere now, but somehow I feel his presence hiding nearby, as always, just out of frame. We have scarcely spoken since our kiss, save for a few benign polite exchanges—good morning; yes, please; thank you—but time has done nothing to extinguish my curiosity about him. Time has not assuaged my guilt, and the sight of him still confuses me. I do not know what it will take to rid myself of that kiss, but I would pay any price to undo it. I would pay any price to stop wanting another.
Basil lays his stack of cards on the table and then gently takes the cards from my hands too. I blink dumbly at him.
“Would a walk help take your mind off it?” he says.
I shake my head. “I don’t want to be gone when Nim gets back.”
“We won’t go far,” he says. “Come on. The air will do you some good.”
He’s right. As soon as we’ve stepped outside, I feel less anxious. There’s some comfort in hearing the living things in the grass and in the sky. A blue bird shoots from one tree to the next, and I wish I could capture a perfect image of him to take back home. There are no birds on Internment, only speculation as to what they must be like.
Basil and I walk a lap around the hotel, past the charred altar where Nim burnt his beloved car in offering so that his sister might live. Whether or not it was an answered prayer, Birdie did pull through. It makes me wonder if their god is real. It makes me wonder if any god is real, or if it’s only easier to believe in that than in the arbitrary series of events that make up all our lives.
“What do you think it’s like back home?” I say, to break the silence.
Basil is not one to lie about the way of things. “Ugly. I wonder what King Furlow is doing to reassure everyone. If he’s able to do anything at all.”
“I never realized how small Internment was until we came here,” I say. “From down here it just looks like a big clot of dirt in the sky. If I had lived down here all my life, I would never have suspected there was any life up there. I would think it a mistake of nature, something small enough to fit into my palm if only I could reach out and take it.”
How strange that I’ve lived so much of my life on a clump of dirt in an infinite sky. After all these months, I can feel myself starting to forget how alive it was up there, how bright and cheerful.
We’ve stopped walking, and as I shield my eyes and stare up at Internment, I can feel Basil watching me. My heart is fluttering in my chest, anxious and frightened and strangely thrilled. It is an act of bravery for me to look at him when he makes me feel this way.
“I was wrong, all those times I said your eyes might be the same color as the sea down here,” he says.
“No?”
“No,” he says. “They’re still the brightest blue I’ve ever seen.”
I look at the ground, flustered, smiling. Without looking at him, I can feel his victorious smirk.
“You’re being too kind,” I say.
“Ridiculous accusation. When have you ever known me to be kind?”
“It’s true; you’re a real beast most days. Flat-out tyrannical.”
He laughs. Somehow my arm ends up around his back, and his around my shoulders, squeezing me close. The sun burns the crown of my hair, and despite the warmth, my blood is running chills up and down my spine.
I want to tell him everything. About Judas kissing me in the grass, and the way he still haunts my thoughts even though he is surely using me to quell his loneliness. I want to tell Basil that I’m sorry, that I’ve made a mess of everything, that I’m scared.
But here beside him, insects hopping around our feet, all the worlds have gone still. This planet has stopped rotating around its sun. Everything is calm. We’re safe here. We’ll be okay.
4
After dinner, I help Alice with the dishes. For security purposes, Jack Piper has dismissed most of the hotel’s staff, and chores like these are supposed to fall to his children, but Alice always gets to them first. Years of being married to my brother have left her restless and with an endless desire to make things clean.
She hands me a clean white plate, and I go over it with the dishrag. “Do you want to go back home?” I say.
She shakes her head. “I couldn’t leave your brother, and he’s told me he won’t return. Not after what the king did to your parents, and especially to you.”
“I didn’t ask you what Lex wants. I asked what you want.”
She smiles. It is a kind, wistful smile. “Should there be any difference?”
“What a thing to say. Of course there’s a difference.”
She hands me another dish. “After your brother jumped, one afternoon while he was still in the hospital, I came home to tend to the plants, and there was a letter waiting for me at the door, from my parents. I was welcome to return home if I estranged myself from Lex. But if not, they felt it best for me not to associate with them anymore.”
I suspected as much. Alice’s parents stopped coming around, and jumpers carry a stigma. With the exception of Pen and Basil, I lost virtually all my friends. Still, to hear it said out loud disgusts me. There is no one kinder than Alice, and no one who deserves kindness more.
“That’s the thing about marriage, love. You hope you won’t ever have to choose, but if there’s a choice to be made, it’s the one whose blood is in your ring. It doesn’t matter how many worlds there are; our place is with each other.”
“Lex doesn’t deserve you,” I say. “Truly.”
She smiles. “But there is nothing left for me up there,” she adds. “Since you asked. Everything I need is here.”