Broken Crowns (4 page)

“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.

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.”