Burning Kingdoms Read online

  Alice and Lex come immediately to mind, the injustice of having to lose their own child simply because it wasn’t planned. I force myself to push the thought away.

  “You couldn’t make that up if you tried,” Pen says.

  “Father tells people that Mother’s in the country caring for her ailing mother. When he’s all tied up in knots about something, he’ll say I look just like her, like he’s accusing me. He’s paranoid that I’ll turn out the same way.”

  “Will you?” Pen asks.

  “Maybe,” she says. “I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to see the world. And I have no interest in typewriters or childbearing, which is all that’s expected of me here.”

  “Typewriters and childbearing are miserable options,” Pen says.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with them,” I say.

  “Morgan’s a good girl,” Pen says, by way of explanation.

  “I wish you’d stop saying that,” I say. I lean around her to look at Birdie. “I think you should be able to do whatever you want. All I meant is that you don’t have to be like one parent or the other.”

  “I’ve never had friends like the two of you,” Birdie says. Her smile is an indication of a slow awakening. She is a woman slowly being realized. Her father is afraid of that, and I’d like to tell her so, but I don’t know how to say the words in a way that would make sense. I don’t know how to explain that we have more power than we know. We are young and bright and waiting to see what we are capable of.

  The ocean’s mist has caused our hair to frizz around our faces, and I wish that I could hold this moment still, because it is perfect.

  The ferry reaches the city. I’m finding that the vertigo I experienced in the transition from the water to the ground has lessened. I’m becoming used to this place.

  Birdie walks ahead of us, and she begins to say something, but she hears someone call her name and she spins around. “Nim?” she says, unbelieving. “Riles?” Her brothers are stepping off the ferry. “Were you both there the whole time?”

  “Of course we were,” Riles says. “We didn’t swim.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Birdie says. She groans. “Don’t tell me Father sent you after me.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Nim says. “We didn’t see you until a second ago. There’s a brass concert in the center that Riles wants to see.” He regards Pen and me. “Our father doesn’t allow brass in the house.”

  “Devil’s music,” Riles adds cheerfully. “He thinks it’ll hypnotize me.”

  “We don’t have brass on Internment, but I can’t see why it would be banned,” I say.

  “We only ban talk of the ground,” Pen says. “Music should be fine as long as it entices people to stay.”

  “Internment is weird,” Riles says, and tugs on Nimble’s sleeve. “We’re going to be late.”

  Birdie nudges Riles’s backside with her shoe. “Get outta here, kid. You bug me.”

  “That’s because you’re bug-eyed,” he says.

  “Come over here and say that.” She stoops to his height and they wave their fists at each other in a mock fight until she pulls him into a headlock and he tries in vain to free himself, but he’s laughing.

  I tell myself it does no good to be envious, that my brother and I still communicate in our own peculiar way, but I find myself missing the years before he jumped, when he was full of life like this.

  “You’re crushing my larynx,” he croaks.

  “Fine, you big baby.” She lets him go. “Enjoy your concert.”

  Nimble tips his hat to us. “See you at breakfast, ladies.”

  Birdie waves. We watch them disappear into the crowd.

  “A lot of people tonight,” Pen says.

  “This week is the spring festival,” Birdie says. “Everyone in Havalais flocks to the city, it seems. Most of it will begin tomorrow, but a few concerts and carts will be set up tonight.”

  “I don’t know anything about war,” Pen says. “But isn’t it a bit of a mockery to have a festival?”

  “In a way, that’s what King Ingram wants,” Birdie says. “We have to seem unaffected. From what I understand, Havalais is doing much better than Dastor right now.”

  She hasn’t even finished with the words when I hear it. That faraway whistling in the air. My body understands before my mind can catch up. My blood is cold and I’m grabbing Birdie and Pen by the arms, pulling them against me. If they know what I know, they don’t get a chance to say it. We can only stand frozen as the whistling turns into a crash, and the ground shakes under us, and the city turns to smoke and flame.

  Screams are everywhere. How they have the energy to scream, I don’t understand. Sound is caught in my throat. My feet are stuck here. My breaths are shallow and loud.

  Birdie, wound around my arm, begins to shake. It’s slight at first, and then it overtakes her, and she screams too.

  She tries to run, not away from the flames and toward the harbor like everyone else, but into the heart of it. Pen and I hold her back, but she is no longer the mild-mannered girl who apologizes for rolling her stockings or daring to speak of her mother at the dinner table. She is wild, stronger than both of us. She’s screaming for her brothers.

  “You can’t!” Pen says.

  But Birdie is beyond logic. And I can’t fault her for that, but I also can’t let her kill herself.

  “They’re together,” I tell her. “Nimble will get Riles out safely.”

  I’ve got her wrist, and she digs her nails into my skin, trying to free herself. She’s slipping away. She isn’t going to hear any of my logic, and if she runs into this frenzy, we’ll never get her back.

  “I’ll go with you!” I lock my fingers in hers. If I can’t stop her, at least I can try to keep her safe. “Okay? We’ll find them.”

  “Excuse me?” Pen’s voice is shrill.

  “Go back and wait for us at the harbor,” I tell her.

  She mutters curses and takes my hand. “You know I won’t leave you.”

  We run against a stampede of humans who have become animals; they have no faces; they are round mouths and round eyes and horrible noises. And then, as the smoke thickens, the bodies are lying on the ground, crawling, gaping. I don’t know where the bomb hit, but we’re surely getting closer to it.

  The smoke makes water flood my eyes, but Birdie’s tears are real. I can hear her sobbing, gasping, unrelenting. She tries to call for her brothers, but a cough fills her mouth instead. It’s impossible to see anything, understand anything. Pen tugs me, and I tug Birdie. She tries to resist, but she’s out of oxygen, out of fight.

  My knees are buckling, and Pen has moved between Birdie and me, and she’s the one holding both of us up. She pulls our collars over our mouths, but it does no good.

  I don’t realize we’ve reached the harbor until I see the ocean for myself. It’s unrecognizable here, shrouded in ash that’s overtaking Havalais like a disease.

  We’ve arrived just in time to see the ferry departing.

  Birdie falls to her knees, and I spill after her, gagging.

  “It’s coming back, right?” Pen says, kneeling in front of us. “It has to come back.”

  Through her coughs, Birdie nods.

  There are hundreds here. Perhaps thousands, all in the same state as us—if they’re lucky. I can hardly see anything but gray and black and smears of red. Pen’s sleeve is gone, her arm raw and bloody. I can’t get the breath to ask her if she’s in pain. She is as stoic as stone. She wipes at Birdie’s watery eyes.

  “They’re gone,” Birdie moans.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Pen says. “Maybe they got on the ferry.”

  “Nim wouldn’t leave me,” she says. “I know he wouldn’t. And they wouldn’t have made it back to the harbor in time. They were all the way at the center.” Birdie turns onto her back, stares into the city that is a gradient of black and deeper black.

  “Okay,” Pen says. “So where is the center?”
/>   “Gone,” Birdie says. She closes her eyes, shudders with what may be a cough or a sob.

  I flinch and realize I closed my eyes. I force them open. I can’t imagine what overtook me that I should be tired at a time like this.

  Pen turns me to face the water. “Watch for the ferry,” she says. “It’s got to be coming back soon.”

  Birdie shakes her head. “My god,” she says. I have never heard her call upon her god before. She has never needed one so much as she does now. “My god, my god.” Her voice is creaky. I can’t stand to see her so broken.

  The screams have all faded to whimpers and groans; Birdie is one sobbing girl among hundreds.

  “Look,” Pen says. “The moon is full.”

  But I am in no state to be taunted by the sky and its wonders. I am beyond my nightmares, and I want to go home.

  Birdie sits up. She coughs before she’s able to call out, “Nim? Nim!”

  I try to follow her gaze, but I can’t see anything but ashy air.

  “There’s no one there,” Pen tells her.

  “I see him,” Birdie says. “He’s got Riles—something is wrong. Nim!”

  She stumbles to her feet, and I start to say, “Birdie, no,” but she’s already gone, running over and between bodies that may be living or dead, toward something that I can’t see.

  “We have to go after her,” I say.

  Pen winds her arm around me, and even with that red wound, she is strong. “Don’t you dare.”

  She’s just said the words, and then the ground shakes again, and the city is overtaken anew by flames.

  16

  The ferry doesn’t come back.

  Pen keeps saying, “Morgan, Morgan, Morgan,” and the words turn to birds. Lovely blue ones that soar up and up until they are black lines. I want to tell her to look at the sky. The flames have burnt through the troposphere, and there is Internment through a scorched hole in the sky. It’s so close, I’d touch it if only I had the strength to reach. There are the roots of trees I used to climb, and soft white clouds.

  Look, Pen, look; you’re missing it.

  I wish she’d stop calling my name, for the urgency in her voice is making clouds appear, and it’s getting harder to see the city.

  She hits me across the face, and I open my eyes to realize I was dreaming. There is no Internment to be seen—only smoke. Pen is knelt over me, trembling. Or maybe the ground is trembling—I don’t know. The city burns behind her.

  “Don’t leave me now,” she says.

  I struggle to sit up, but I can’t, and I don’t understand why my leg is burning.

  “Is anyone coming?” I say.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Birdie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she find her brothers?”

  She places my head in her lap. “I don’t know.”

  She was right. She was right about everything. King Ingram and King Erasmus are cheerfully ripping each other’s kingdoms apart, and they’ll bring this ugliness to Internment. There will be no peaceful alliance; Celeste’s mother won’t recover; things can only get worse and worse.

  I close my eyes to ward off the tears, but Pen says, “Hey,” and shakes me. She will grant me no rest. But she might not be so eager for my company if she knew what I’d done. And I’d like to tell her now, if for no reason but to clear my conscience. But these may well be our last moments, and at the very least she should spend them thinking that the city she has loved all her life is safe. That it will be hovering in the sky long after these fools who run the ground have destroyed their own kingdoms.

  Pen plays with the beads around my neck. They are a part of another world, a thousand miles and an hour behind us.

  I feel for the strip of fabric tied around my wrist, a memory that I belonged somewhere once. Annette asked me about it one evening at dinner, calling it a strange bracelet, and I didn’t want to tell her. It would feel too strange to bring my parents’ names into this bizarre world that astonishes at one turn and destroys at another. I don’t believe my mother would have been strong enough to know suffering like the kind that happens here, and my father would have driven himself mad trying to fix it.

  “The first bomb was just to get everyone to the harbor,” Pen says now. “All the survivors would come here and be like caged animals.”

  There are such horrible things in her head, and what’s worse is that she’s right. She almost always is.

  A voice shouts our names, and I’m not sure if I’m imagining things. A shadow in the smog is running for us. “We’re here!” Pen says.

  Nimble is still wearing his lenses. That’s my first thought when I see him. I don’t know how many things these bombs have destroyed—buildings, bones—but two tiny circles of glass on one boy’s face are still intact. It makes me laugh, and the laugh turns into a cough.

  “She’s hurt,” Pen says. “I think I’ve stopped the bleeding.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Where’s Birdie?”

  He doesn’t answer. His left arm is dead weight at his side. “Where’s Riles?” I ask.

  “My father is coming for us,” he says. “Stay right here so I’ll be able to find you.”

  “Wait,” Pen says, but he’s already gone.

  “He’s probably got Riles and Birdie someplace safe,” I say.

  “There is no ‘someplace safe,’ Morgan,” she says.

  “Yes, there is,” I say. “And I’ve destroyed it.”

  If she heard me, she doesn’t acknowledge it. “Do you suppose Jack Piper will be able to get to us through the melee?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Pen?”

  “Mm?”

  “What story from The History of Internment would you compare this to?” I think it would comfort me to hear a story from our home.

  She runs her fingers over the beads around her neck. “There isn’t one,” she says. “There is nothing like this in our history.”

  It feels like ages, but cars come. The smoke begins to settle. I don’t see Jack Piper, but there’s a man who kneels before Pen and me, and he asks if we’re the ones who have been staying with the Pipers, and he gives us a ride in his ambulance, which is like Nimble’s car, but just a bit longer, and I’m carried to it rather than allowed to walk.

  And somewhere on the way to the hospital, I see the red mess that my leg has become, wound with the remains of Pen’s sweater, which really belongs to Mrs. Piper. And all I can think to say is, “Lex is going to murder me.”

  Pen gives a small laugh. “Thomas is going to murder me,” she says.

  “Nobody in this car is going to die today,” the driver says. It’s a nice thought, and one that many people in Havalais can no longer have.

  There are rules, so many rules the hospital has. I’ve heard Judas and Amy complain about sometimes being turned away when they try to visit the professor. But it’s immediately clear that rules do not apply in a time of mass crisis. Pen and I are herded to a room where she’s treated for her arm and I’m treated for my leg. And now, under the unnaturally bright lights, wearing a white gown so thin it lets in a chill, breathing in the smell of abrasive chemicals, I begin to feel the pain in my leg. I smell the soot in my hair. I see Birdie running into the cloud of screams and I’m unable to stop her. Over and over she runs, and a moment before the air explodes, the moment begins again.

  But it isn’t until Basil appears in the doorway, out of breath, that I break into tears.

  Thomas is right behind him, and he runs to Pen as Basil runs to me. The nurse is too busy to pay any mind, and she leaves us. Outside the door I hear a mess of noise and desperation.

  “How did you find us?” Pen asks.

  “We’ve been running from room to room,” Thomas says.

  Basil is dabbing at my runny nose and eyes, but I wrap my arms around him. All I want in the world is for him to hold me steady. The ground is forever shaking. I am seeing this moment and also the moments in the city
between the bombs.

  “Basil,” I whimper.

  “I’m here,” he says. Kisses my shoulder. Smoothes my hair. “I’m here. I won’t leave you.”

  “I don’t know where Birdie is.” I grab his shirt in my fists. “Or Riles and Nim.”

  I want him to tell me that they’re okay, but he can’t.

  “How did you know we’d be at the hospital?” Pen asks. And her tone turns worried. “Did something happen at the hotel?”

  “Everyone there is safe,” Thomas says. “We were woken by news of the attack, and when your beds were empty, the princess said she’d overheard you talking about going to the cinema, and Nimble had told her he would be taking Riles to some concert.”

  Basil eases me against the mattress. “Your eyes are dilated,” he says.

  “She probably has a concussion,” Pen says. “She took a piece of shrapnel to the head after the second explosion.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say.

  “No, I don’t suppose you would. You were too busy muttering about tree roots in the sky and trying to get me to look at them.”

  Basil frowns and brushes his thumb across my brow. “I’ve been so worried about you,” he says.

  “Is Nim here?” I ask.

  “Somewhere, yes.”

  “Good,” I say. He’ll be looking for his brother and sister, and he’ll find them, the way Basil and Thomas found us. We’ll go back to the hotel, and we’ll endure a lecture for our actions, but we’ll be okay.

  Despite persistent evidence to the contrary, there is something in me that believes we’ll be okay.

  “I have something for you,” Thomas tells Pen.

  He holds her betrothal band up to the light before he places it on her finger. “Annette found it while she and Riles were cleaning the yacht yesterday.”

  Pen stares at it for a long while, as though she is trying to remember the girl she was just hours before, who would have thought a betrothal band to be among the most important things in her world.