Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

A Paperback Original 2016

Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2016

Cover design Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (girl in scene); Shutterstock.com (birds).

Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007541287

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007541270

Version: 2016-02-19

Epigraph

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T. S. Eliot

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Lauren DeStefano

About the Publisher

1

“The city is falling out of the sky,” Professor Leander said. They were his last words. The medicine of the ground was not enough to cure an old man of the sun disease. He refused most of the efforts anyway. He told me that he’d already accomplished what no one else had been able to do. He’d gotten us to the ground. He was quite curious, he said, to know if his spirit would be taken to the tributary, or if he’d go to whatever afterlife the ground believed in, or if there was nothing at all.

Amy was with him when he died, and she called it a peaceful death. A fitting death.

Down a labyrinthine set of hallways in the same hospital, Gertrude Piper opened her eyes after a month of sleep. It was as though the two gods had made an even trade—the life of a man from the sky in exchange for the life of a girl on the ground.

Before that, we all thought that Birdie Piper would die. After I landed in Havalais at the dawn of winter, she was the most vibrant thing in her strange world. She offered her friendship to Pen and me without question; she snuck us through our bedroom window and showed us the wonders of Havalais. The mermaids in the sea. The glittering lights cast upon the water at night. The spinning metal rides in her family’s amusement park.

And then the cold war between Havalais and its neighboring kingdom of Dastor advanced on us all at once, in the middle of the spring festival. I watched as an explosion 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 from the king’s jet, descending from Internment for its monthly fuel delivery.

At the start of each month, the king’s jet returns to Havalais to deliver more phosane that it has mined from Internment’s soil. A refinery was built in Havalais to process that soil into fuel. In the mornings when I step outside, I can see the plumes of black smoke billowing out into the air, and sometimes I can smell it, too—like compost and metal.

But in six months, King Ingram has yet to return with his men, and after the delivery is made, the jet flies back to Internment for more. It’s a wonder there is any city left up there at all.

The warring kingdom of Dastor has seen the jet’s comings and goings. Nimble tells us that the war has moved to the home front. Boys even younger than he is are being recruited to fight. If Dastor means to have Internment and its fuel source, it will have to take ownership of Havalais itself.

“It won’t happen,” he’s told us. “Havalais is bigger, more advanced.”

I’m not so certain. I see nothing of the war from the confines of this sheltered world where Jack Piper raised his children, but sometimes when the air is still, I think I hear gunfire.

Pen puts her hand over mine, and I realize that I’ve been holding my breath. I know she’s trying to keep me calm. She has heard me tossing and turning in my bed at night as I worry what news this king will bring when he returns from Internment. Only, I don’t feel worry now. I don’t feel anything, not even the dread that King Ingram usually ignites in me.

“We should go back and tell the others,” I say.

Pen gnaws her lip, and even as she sits up, her face is still angled skyward. “It’s probably just another delivery,” she says, and she is likely right. Five times before this, the jet has returned, and five times we have all waited in silence for word of the king’s arrival, and it never comes.

I pull Pen to her feet, and we make our way back to the hotel, both of us looking over our shoulders as the jet moves at an angle. Like a bird. Like a city falling from the sky.

Basil and Thomas arrive at the front steps moments before Pen and I do. Back on Internment, Pen’s and my friendship was the only bond between them, but since coming here they’ve forged something like an independent friendship of their own, perhaps because if nothing else they have home in common.

They wouldn’t have been able to go very far. Jack Piper has forbidden us to leave the grounds, for our own protection, all on the king’s orders that we are to be kept away from anyone who may have sinister intentions for us now that it’s revealed that we come from the magical floating island above this world. Though, the people of Havalais have more cause to distrust their king than to harm us.

Truth be told, I don’t mind the restriction half the time. It makes me feel safe. Reminds me of the train tracks that surrounded me back home.

Other times, my wanderer’s spirit comes out for a visit and I wonder at when this will all be over.

“We were walking back from the theme park when we saw the jet,” Thomas says. “Did you see it?”

“Yes,” I say.

Princess Celeste became a pawn when King Ingram needed access to Internment. King Furlow up in his sky has only two weaknesses, and those weaknesses are his children. He would allow King Ingram to have anything he asked for in exchange for Celeste’s safe return.

I have worried for her in silence. Pen would be angry if I so much as brought her name up. But I do hope that she’s well, and that her decision making abilities have improved.

Basil’s standing close. His eyes are on me, and whether or not he knows it, he still sets my stomach fluttering.

Another gust of wind comes, and even the fearless Pen hugs her arms across her stomach and shivers.

Thomas frowns at her. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Not all over, clearly, or you’d have found me,” she says.

He stands at a pace’s distance from her, and I can see the worry in his eyes. I can see that he is trying to get a whiff of tonic on her breath. When he can’t find one, he looks to me, and while Pen isn’t watching I give a slight shake of my head. She’s sober.

The jet has quit rumbling in the sky; presumably it has landed.

“Come on,” I say to Pen, and hold the door open. “Let’s see if we can find something in the kitchen you’re willing to eat.”

She follows me into the house, past the smallest Piper children, who are playing a war game in the living room. Annie is a soldier whose legs were blown off in an explosion, and Marjorie is a nurse applying a tourniquet. I have seen them play this game a dozen times, and it is anyone’s guess whether Annie will survive her wounds. Last time, an explosion hit their pretend medical tent and all the nurses and soldiers were killed.

I hate this game, but I think it makes them feel closer to Riles.

Up at the top of the stairs, Amy watches them from between the bars of the railing, not quite ready for human interaction. She has been quiet since her grandfather’s death, and she’s added another cloth around her wrist beside the one meant to symbolize her sister.

“Let’s say I lost my arm too,” Annie says.

“Which one?” Marjorie asks.

“The left.”

“Would you girls like to help me in the garden?” Alice calls down from the top of the stairs. She cannot bear this game of theirs.

Annie sits up from her deathbed on the hearth. “Why do you tend to the garden? We have a gardener.”

“It just makes me happy, I suppose,” Alice says. She reaches the bottom step and holds her hands out to them, and they forget their game and happily follow her outside.

In the kitchen, Pen and I sit at the small table reserved for the maids, and Pen bites into a raw carrot from the cold box.

“I wish you’d stop looking so worried,” she says.

“I can’t play it as cool as you, I suppose.”

She stares at me for a long moment, and then she says, “You’re not the only one who has nightmares about what’s happening back home. Just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

“I know that you care. That’s what’s so frustrating,” I say. “We’ve hardly spoken in months.”

“What are you going on about ‘we’ve hardly spoken’? We share a room. We speak every day. We’re speaking right now.”

“You know what I mean.”

She takes another bite of the carrot, with a crunch I swear is meant to be pointed. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you with my secrets these days.”

I know just what she means. It has been a source of contention that’s never fully gone away these past several months. She discovered that Internment’s soil contains the very fuel source King Ingram wants for his kingdom, and she confided this secret to me. But after she nearly drowned, I told the princess everything, hoping an alliance could be forged between Internment and Havalais, giving us all a chance to return home.

Instead, King Ingram used the princess as a hostage and has been depleting Internment of its soil as he pleases.

I don’t know the enormity of what’s already happened and what’s to come, but even so I wouldn’t take back what I did. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to return Pen home to her family, to the city that she loves so much that she’s been going to pieces without it.

So I say nothing, and Pen can see that she’s wounded me. “Nim says Birdie has had her last surgery, and can come home soon,” she says to change the subject. “She’ll still be confined to her wheelchair, but I doubt that will last for long.”

I push my chair away from the table. “I’m going to make some tea for Lex.”

“Oh, Morgan, don’t be cross. I didn’t mean it. I’m just on edge because of that bloody jet.”

“I know,” I say softly.

I hope that this time the king has returned, and the princess as well, alive and safe. Whatever news they bring will surely be better than all this wondering and fear.

I don’t know what sort of mood Lex will be in when I reach the top of the stairs, but he’s been especially sour lately. He’s running low on paper for his transcriber, and soon he will no longer be able to spend his days hiding in his fictional worlds.

I knock when I reach his door.

“Alice?” he says.

“No, it’s me.” Back home he always knew when I was the one approaching him, but something about this house and its noises disorients him. “I’ve brought some tea.”

“Oh,” he says, rather unenthusiastically. “Come in.”

He’s sitting in a wing chair near the open window, and the worry on his face mirrors my own from earlier. He doesn’t care for the wind; perhaps it reminds him too much of the edge. “The weather down here takes some getting used to,” I say. I press the teacup into his hand, not letting go until I’m sure he’s got a grip on it.

“I have a bad feeling,” he says.

“Me too.”

I hesitate, standing before him, debating with myself whether to tell him what I saw in the sky.

But in the end I’m not given a choice. Even without his sight, Lex is clever at sensing when anything is wrong. “What is it, Little Sister? What’s happened?”

I wring my skirt in my hands. “We saw the jet about an hour ago. Pen, Basil, Thomas, and I. We’ve been waiting for someone to come home and tell us what it means.”

Lex is silent for a long moment. “I heard.” He takes a sip of his tea and then with minimal fumbling he sets it on the window ledge. “So it begins,” he says.

“There’s no need to be so theatrical,” I say. “It may be good news.”

“A greedy king in a wasteland of wealth holds a princess hostage so that he may invade a tiny floating city, and you still think he may return with good news. My sister the optimist.”

I am tired of being called an optimist as though it were a bad thing. Pen has used this word against me as well. “I’m merely trying not to panic, Lex.” I hold myself back from saying anything too combative. I don’t want to fight, and it has taken me so long to stop hating my brother for lying to me about our father being dead. I would like for us to be reasonable with each other.

“Where is Alice?” he asks. Maybe he wants to avoid an argument too.

“She’s in the garden.”

“And she knows about the jet?”

“I told her when we came back inside. We’re all waiting now. Drink your tea, all right? Alice will be up to check on you in a bit.”

As I cross the threshold, he says, “Morgan?”

I turn.

“Be careful.”

“I’m only going downstairs.”

“I never know what mad and wild adventures you’ll get off to on a whim.”

I can’t help but smile at the thought. Mad and wild adventures. It’s not something he ever would have accused me of back home, when I was tucked safely in our little floating world.

2

They never exhale, the trees. It was the same on Internment; on a very windy day, the trees rustle and inhale, and then the leaves and the branches all tremble as though something were trying to strangle the life from them. The dark sky watches on, filled with anticipation, wondering if this will be a great night, or a horrible night, or the last night of the world.

“Morgan.” Basil’s voice pulls me out of my trance. He joins me at the window, and when his arm brushes mine, my skin swells with tiny bumps. “You’ve been standing here for an hour.”

My body releases some of its tension and I lean my head toward his. “I have a bad feeling. Lex does too. Like something big is about to happen.”

“Suppose something is about to happen,” he says. “Then what?”

I shake my head. “I’m tired of being driven mad by the ‘what if’ game. I just want to know. I want King Ingram to come back and tell us what’s happening. Good or bad. So all the wondering can stop.”

Basil is quiet for a few seconds, and then with some difficulty he says, “I’ve been playing that same game, wondering about my parents and Leland.”

I look at him.

“I think they must be okay,” he says, and nods straight ahead at the sky, where our floating city is hiding somewhere in that darkness beyond our sullen reflections. “They would follow the king’s orders. They’ve always been smart about that.”

“Which king’s orders?” I say.

“Whichever king is in charge these days,” he says.

“Maybe King Ingram and King Furlow really are forming some sort of alliance,” I say. “Maybe there will be good news.”

He glances sidelong at me, and a smile comes to his lips. “I’ve always loved your optimistic side.”

“You’re the only one. Everyone else seems to think I’m foolish for harboring it.”

He puts his arm around my back, and the last of the tension in me dies. I rest my temple against his shoulder. “I’m tired, Basil. And so worried that the decisions I’ve made were the wrong ones.”

“The wrong decisions have been made by these kings,” he says. “And for what it’s worth, I would have done the same thing you did. If I’d known about the phosane, I would have told.”

“Really?”

“If what’s happening to Pen had been happening to you, if I’d thought this world were killing you, yes. I’d do anything it took to bring you back home.”

“You’ve always understood me, Basil.”

His arm tightens around me and I close my eyes. The anxiety feels so distant when he’s around. Farther away and smaller in the sky than our long-lost floating city.

Then I hear the front door open, and my stomach drops.

The younger Pipers have long since gone to bed, and everyone else has been in the lobby for hours, waiting for word. All eyes are at the front door when Nimble steps inside, his shoulders dropped, his eyes weary. He is always the first to run to the tarmac when the jet returns, hoping for word about Celeste. And he is always heartsick when no word comes.

We all wait in silence. Nim raises his head and looks at each of us, settling on me. “King Ingram has returned. My father is with him now. I don’t know what any of this means yet. I’m sorry.”

He moves toward his bedroom, and by the heaviness of his steps I can suspect what the answer will be. But still I have to ask, “Was Celeste with him?”

He pauses, his back to me. “No,” he says. “My father told me only that the king has brought a special visitor, but it isn’t her.” He takes a deep breath, and his voice is so tight, I think he may be fighting tears. “I doubt my father will be back tonight. You might as well all go to bed.”

He can’t get away from us fast enough.

Pen is standing by the couch, Thomas at her side. She’s staring worriedly after Nimble, though, and she doesn’t hear Thomas until the third or fourth time he’s said her name. “Pen.” She flinches, startled.

“We’ll know more tomorrow, surely,” Basil says.

The hotel falls into its nightly silence. I soak in the tub long after everyone else has gone to bed. The mornings in this place can be so noisy, with the Piper children running about, shrieking with laughter as they play their games, most of which involve explosions. And footsteps going this way and that, and voices, and silverware on plates.

But the nights are still. I can feel everyone’s silence just as surely as I can hear their voices during the day.

Someone knocks at the door. “Morgan?” Pen’s voice. “Are you all right? You’ve been in there forever.”

“I thought you were in bed,” I say.

“I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t drowned.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.” The water’s gone cold anyway. I wring out my wet hair, dry off, and slip into my nightgown.

When I open the door, Pen is waiting in the hallway, holding a lantern. Its orange glow picks up the bags under her eyes, and I can see all at once how troubled she’s been, despite her best efforts to conceal it.

“I’m not tired,” she whispers. “Are you?”

“No,” I say, although it’s a lie. I will stay awake all night if there’s a chance she’ll finally be honest with me. She is much more likely to reveal her secrets at night, when the sleeping world will be undisturbed by her whispering voice.

She smiles. “Do you want to go for a midnight walk?”

We don’t bother with our shoes. We tiptoe barefoot down the steps and through the front door.

Unlike earlier, the night’s wind is mellow and warm. The moon outshines our lantern, nearly full and bright white.

As soon as we’ve stepped into the grass, I can feel the cool earth under my feet, astoundingly like the ground back home. Pen moves forward, and when I don’t follow, she turns to face me. “Aren’t you coming?”

I wriggle my bare toes in the grass and stare down at it. I have never seen the heaps of soil being flown down from Internment. I’ve only heard about it from Nim. I imagine Internment filled with craters so wide that you could look through them and see the ground below.

“I was just thinking about home,” I say. “About what King Ingram is going to tell us, if he plans to tell us anything at all.”

Pen takes my hand, leads me away from the hotel. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

She leads me to the amusement park, and I climb the fence after her without question, happy to see whatever it is she wants to show me. Maybe it will be something other than tonic this time. Maybe it will give me some insight into this distance she’s built between herself and everyone else in this world.

I expect her to lead me to the telescopes. That’s where I find her sometimes. But instead she leads me to the giant teacups, sitting inanimate in the moonlight. She is still clutching the lantern when she kneels beside one of the saucers—chipped but still bright green—and reaches beneath it, somewhere in the mechanism that would cause it to spin.

Eventually she finds what she was looking for: several pieces of paper folded together. Whatever is on those pages must be important, if she would keep them all the way out here.

Is this because I discovered her request paper all those months ago? Does she think I’ll go rifling through her things when she’s not in our room? I haven’t. I would never. But sometimes, when I hear her tossing and turning, muttering through her nightmares about the harbor, I would do anything to know what is happening in her mind.

“Here.” She hands me the lantern, and then she swings one leg over the teacup’s rim, then the other. She takes the lantern back so I can climb in after her.

Inside the teacup is a metal wraparound bench, and she sits so close to me that my wet hair dampens her shoulder.

She spreads the papers open on the small table before us—the one that we would twist if we wanted the teacup to spin. “Now that the king is back, we have to find a way to stop him,” she says. Her eyes are on the pages. “If we don’t, I think we’re in real trouble.”

I stare at the pages, lit up by the moon and the lantern, and as always, I don’t understand. I see Pen’s steadily drawn lines. I see a circle and a small floating silhouette that could be Internment. I see numbers drifting around it like birds.

Pen shuffles through the pages like a madman. “I’ve been reading up on the sunsets. The sun goes down about a minute earlier every day, except about once a week or so when it goes down two minutes earlier.”

She looks at me to be sure I’m following along. “Okay,” I say. I’ve never paid too much attention to the sunset, but I know that we’re at the time of year when we lose a bit of light each day. “So?”

“So,” she says. “For the past few months, I’ve been keeping a grid of where Internment sits in the sky, and where the sun should be. Every day I look through the same telescope at the same angle.”

She points to Internment’s shape on each of the pages before us, as though I should know what we’re looking at.

“I don’t understand.”

She looks at me, and I can see how tired her face is, how worried. But her eyes are bright, the way they always are when she’s onto something important. “Internment is sinking. Not very much, but a bit each month. Enough that it’s bound to be a problem if this keeps up.”

I can only stare at the pages as these words sink in. In her ever steady hand Pen has drawn the outline of the clock tower, protruding above the mass of apartment buildings. Scraggly roots jut from the torn underbelly of the floating city. The sun, a perfect circle, is at a distance, held in the pure white sky by tiny equations I can’t decipher.

There are two versions of Pen. There is the silly, spontaneous, and brutally blunt girl I know, and then there is the side of her that can ingeniously solve these mysteries. It is frightening what she is capable of.

“Can you be sure?” I say.

“The professor helped me with the algorithm.” She gnaws on her lower lip guiltily. “I’d been visiting him before he died.”

I suppose she expects me to feel betrayed. And I do, in a way, but I am also relieved. I knew she was off somewhere; I’m only grateful it wasn’t with a bottle.

“It must be all the mining,” I say. “We don’t know how much soil King Ingram’s men bring back on each shipment.”

“It would have to be a lot of soil to affect Internment’s weight,” Pen says. “More soil than could possibly be fitting into those jets. Internment is thousands of times their size. I don’t think it’s that.”

“What, then?”

Pen shuffles through the papers until she finds a full-page drawing of Internment. The accuracy and scale is stunning, as though she’d sat in the sky and sketched its likeness. She has drawn a bubble around the city in rough overlapping lines.

“When your brother went to the edge, it was the wind that threw him back. The wind was moving sideways, like a current around the city. Have you ever noticed the way clouds that get too close to Internment seem to zip past us?”

“Those clouds get caught up in the wind that surrounds the city,” I say. “And you think that wind is part of what’s keeping Internment afloat?”

“I have several theories about what keeps Internment afloat, but I do think the wind is a big factor,” Pen says. “When we left the city in the metal bird, we went under the city, through the dirt. But King Ingram’s jet lands and departs from the surface.”

“It flies through the wind,” I say, understanding.

She nods eagerly. “And disrupts it. Maybe even weakens it. It’s a slight change for now, but over the course of years, it could knock Internment from the sky completely.”

Her voice is excited, the way it always is when she is explaining things. But in the silence that follows, she remembers the magnitude of what she’s said, and I feel it too. Internment is not only being ravaged by this world’s greedy king; it could be knocked right out of the sky.

“King Ingram wouldn’t care if he knew,” I say.

“No. Why should he? He’ll have what he wants. Even if Internment crashed right into Havalais, he’d stand clear and let people die like he did at the harbor.”

I look at Pen. “How do we stop it?”

She shrugs. “I say we kill King Ingram.”

“Be serious.”

“I am, rather.”

“Yes, okay,” I say. “We’ll just walk right up to his castle, and we’ll knock on the door, and then we’ll stab him with the knife you keep under your pillow. I can’t find any fault in that. But suppose we come up with a backup plan.”

“There’s only one person I trust who has access to the king,” Pen says. “And I’d trust him with a secret, too. After all, he’s lived his entire life never letting anyone know he’s third in line to the throne.”

“Nimble?” I say. One night after too much drinking, Birdie confided in us that her father was the king’s secret bastard, and that she and her siblings were princes and princesses. Later when she was comatose after the bombings, Nim confirmed it.

“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.

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 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.”

“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.”

I don’t know that there’s much left on Internment for me either. I tell myself that my father is still alive up there, and that I’ll be reunited with him. But when that happens, will he want to leave Internment behind? He risked his life trying to do just that.

After Alice and I have finished with the dishes, I slip outside unnoticed, and I walk to the ocean’s edge, where the boats bob along lengths of rope. This place is asleep, like all of Havalais, lying in wait for a solution to this war. I lie in the sand for what feels like hours, fixated on that dark shadow of earth in the sky.

Long after the sun has set, Nim still hasn’t returned. The smallest Pipers are asleep.

I lie in bed while Pen reads one of Birdie’s catalogs by candlelight. She’s got a drawing pad resting on her knee, and she keeps returning to a sketch she started earlier this evening of Ehco, a divinity that lives in the sea and contains all the world’s sadness. It’s Birdie’s favorite story from The Text, and I suppose the drawing will be a gift for Birdie when she returns home.

“Pen?”

I can hear the rapid strokes of the pencil on the page. “Mm? Sorry, am I keeping you awake?”

“No.” I turn onto my side so I’m facing her. “It’s just that you’ve been so guarded with your secrets lately. Why did you tell me your theory about Internment sinking?”

She goes on sketching. “It wasn’t the right time before now. No sense making you panic until King Ingram was back and we could do something about it.”

“It’s just … After I told Celeste about the phosane, and she went to the king, I thought you hadn’t forgiven me. I thought I’d been locked out of your head.”

The pencil stills in her hand. She stares down at the page as she speaks, with difficulty. “I thought about everything,” she says in a soft voice. “I thought about what it would have done to me to pull you out of the water, with you the one not breathing. I …” She draws a line on the page, feebly. “I saw it all very clearly, and I understood why you did it. I can’t say I’d have done something different if the tables had been turned.”

She clears her throat. “And besides, you could strike a match and set Internment on fire. You could lose your wits and destroy it all. I’d still be here. There’s nothing in the worlds that I couldn’t forgive you for.”

The words are so sincere and candid that I’d like to get up and embrace her. But I don’t move for fear of breaking this fragile moment between us. I have known Pen since before we were old enough to speak, and perhaps that is why so much of our friendship is built on what goes unsaid. But it feels so good to hear her say those words.

“I could never turn my back on you, either,” I tell her.

“I know what I’m like, Morgan. I know it’s not easy.”

“So it’s not easy,” I say. “What is?”

She smiles briefly, and then allows herself to be distracted anew by her drawing.

I close my eyes, and eventually I feel myself fading into sleep, soothed by the sound of pencil on paper and catalog pages turning.

But it isn’t a very sound sleep, because when there’s a knock on the door, I’m startled awake.

“You girls awake?” Nim whispers through the door.

Pen is still sitting up by the candle. “Come in,” she says.

I comb my fingers through my hair and wipe away the drool in the corner of my mouth, hastily trying to make myself presentable.

Nim opens the door and peeks his head in. “I didn’t see the king. Or my father. I wasn’t permitted into any of the meetings. My father isn’t exactly happy with me these days.”

“But you were gone all day,” Pen says. “What were you doing?”

Nim smirks. “I was speaking with a few of the king’s men. You remember how I said they were unhappy with things since the harbor? One of the men is assigned to guard King Ingram’s special guest, come down from Internment. My contact is escorting the guest to a meeting spot for us, but we have to go right now.”

“Him?” I say, trying to keep myself from hoping that the guest from home could possibly be my father. The disappointment would be unbearable if I were wrong.

“I think you’ll love this,” Nim says. “Hurry on and get dressed. I’ll meet you outside.”

I’m on my feet as soon as he’s closed the door. I’m finished changing before Pen. “I have to get Basil,” I say. “He’ll want to come.”

Pen sighs theatrically. “Must you?”

I stare at her flatly. “He’s my betrothed.”

“So?”

“You said you were fine with my telling him about all this. He’s coming.”

“Fine. But if you wake Thomas, I’ll strangle you.”

“Noted.”

I turn the knob to the boys’ room very slowly, wincing as I push the door away from the frame. I tread lightly past Judas’s and Thomas’s beds.

“Basil,” I whisper, as quiet as breathing.

He murmurs something, tries to embrace me when I lean in. It’s my breathy laugh that wakes him. “Morgan?”

I put my finger to his lips, nod my head at the door in gesture.

He climbs out of bed and follows me out to the hallway. In whispers I tell him that Nim is taking us to see King Ingram’s guest from Internment.

“‘Hostage’ may be more accurate,” Basil whispers.

“Perhaps, yes.” There are many people on Internment who secretly dream of life beyond the edge of the city, but most would be too terrified to ever leave. Especially now that King Ingram and his men have likely taken over the city.

We meet on the front steps, and Pen shivers excitedly. She has been carrying this information about Internment sinking in her head for months, and now finally she will be able to put her knowledge to use.

“Are you going to tell us who this mystery guest is?” she asks as we start walking.

“I don’t think you’d believe me if I did,” Nim says. “I’m not sure I’ll believe it myself until I see him.”

“How trustworthy are the men at the castle you’ve been speaking with?” Basil asks, the most practical of us all.

“Extremely. I’ve grown up in and out of the castle walls. I know which men are good and which are bad news.”

“How can you tell which are good and which are bad?” Basil asks.

“The bad ones are friends of my father’s.”

Despite the grim sentiment, Nim is the most upbeat he’s been in months. After the bombings and after Celeste’s departure, he became despondent. I’ve been worried about him, but Pen’s theory and the hope it brings has put light back into his eyes.

We can’t fail. I run the words in my head over and over as we walk through the darkness and into the woods. We can’t fail.

We walk for miles in fields and wooded areas off the main road. We must be near the city, because I can taste the burnt metallic quality to the air and I’m sure it’s from one of the fuel refineries. Whatever King Ingram is doing with that phosane, it can’t be right. I have never been inside the glasslands, but I have been near them, and there was never any smoke, never any horrid fumes.

Pen’s father works in the glasslands. He’s one of their top engineers. But Pen has not brought him up since our fight several months ago, when I found her request paper and she reluctantly confessed that he had hurt her in some way she wouldn’t share with me. I have wondered in silence since then, hoping for and dreading her confidence in the matter. But Pen cannot be pushed. She cannot even be coaxed. I know this.

I walk between her and Basil, and for the next several paces it almost feels as though we’re still back home, returning late from a play at the theater. We’re just ordinary schoolchildren and our world is intact.

I have yet to see the outside of Havalais. Annette and Marjorie go into Birdie’s room sometimes, and one afternoon they found a shoebox under her bed filled with all the postcards their mother had sent from the farthest reaches of this world. Watercolor paintings of sprawling cities and barren deserts and long slender boats coasting over still waters. There is still so much to see, and confined as we are by King Ingram and his rules, I wonder at whether I’ll ever have the chance.

Nimble leads us into the thick of some woods. We move guided only by the moonlight through the trees, and I can’t help asking, “How do you know where we are?”

“Birds and I used to play here,” he says. “The castle is less than a mile away. In the summer our father would send us outside so he could convene with the king. I know all the trees and roots by heart.”

“Morgan and I used to have a spot in the woods,” Pen says. “There was a cavern.”

“It’s still there,” I say.

“Maybe.”

“It is,” I say. It is important to me that she believes this. That she believes there is still a safe place for us in our own world, hidden from all the warfare.

A whistle pierces the air. Something rustles in the brambles ahead of us, and Basil advances protectively at my side.

Nim is unconcerned. “This way,” he says, and leads us toward the sound.

The trees are very tall here, blocking out most of the moonlight. But I can make out the dark silhouettes of two men standing side by side. I know it’s unlikely. Unrealistic. But I hope that one of those men is my father. In this darkness they could be anyone.

“You’re on time, but we won’t have long,” one of the men says. “The king is an insomniac since his return. He got up several times last night to wander the halls. No telling if he’ll want to check in on our guest.”

This guest, whoever he may be, doesn’t say a word, leaving me to agonize.

“Is this him?” Nimble says.

“I’m standing right here,” the other man says. “You could just ask me yourself.”

My blood goes cold. Pen is in a dead silence beside me. I think she’s stopped breathing. We know that voice, and it doesn’t belong to my father.

Nimble reaches into his pocket for his matchbook, and then he strikes a match and brings the flame to a lantern the first man is carrying. And I see the face of King Ingram’s guest. Prince Azure.

“May I present our honored guest,” the man says, rather unenthusiastically, as though he must appease some imaginary court, “Prince Azure of the magical floating city.”

“Internment,” Prince Azure corrects. “There’s nothing magical about it. We aren’t a bedtime story.”

“Prince Azure of Internment, then,” the man corrects.

Nimble is frozen in place for a moment. Here in the lantern light, Azure bears a striking resemblance to his sister. He has the same clear, sparkling eyes, the rounded cheeks, the gold hair.

Nim snaps out of it after a few seconds and falls into a bow. “Your Highness,” he says. “I’m—”

“Yes, I know who you are,” the prince says with impatience. He grabs the lantern from the man beside him and holds it to Pen, Basil, and me.

He is wearing a pin-striped suit with a ruffled lace ascot that I recognize from his appearances back home. He stands tall and regal, nothing at all like the dying boy he was when I left him.

“I hope you’re not expecting us to curtsy,” Pen says.

“Pen!” I whisper.

Prince Azure chuckles, but even with that cocky grin he’s wearing, I can see how tired he seems, how frightened. I am sure he wasn’t brought here of his own will. King Furlow would not have happily relinquished another of his children to this place.

“Don’t curtsy, don’t bow,” he says. “I think we’re well past formalities now.” He turns to Nim. “Don’t let these girls fool you, what with their dresses and this one’s curls. They tried to kill me.”

“You were holding us hostage,” Pen says through gritted teeth. “Your insane sister kidnapped my betrothed, held a knife to his throat—”

The prince puts his fingers to her lips. “Shh.”

Pen’s face goes red with rage and I can hear the crack of her knuckles. I put my hand over her fist, a silent plea for her to be calm. She can hit him with another rock some other time. There are more pressing matters to attend to now.

I am trying not to stare at Prince Azure, but I’m so taken aback by the sight of him. When I saw him last, he was limp and lifeless, bleeding from the head and being carried up the stairs by medics. And before that he had been a maniacal, childish young prince scheming with his sister to pry out of Pen and me information about the metal bird that would bring us to the ground.

But like his sister, he has grown since then. “Your Highness,” I begin cautiously. “You’ve surely noticed by now that Internment is in trouble, and we’d like to do what we can to help.”

Prince Azure looks to Basil. “It’s unfair to be male, isn’t it? We’re betrothed to these unreasonable things, and for what? Just for being born.”

Basil swallows whatever unkind response he’d like to give to that, and instead he says, “Morgan and Pen have some information about Internment that I think you’d be interested in. Perhaps you should ask them what it is.”

“They have information about Internment?” Prince Azure says, sneering. “From all the way down here? That’s a laugh. I’m the one who’s been made to watch as foreigners fly up onto my kingdom in a metal beast of a machine, terrorizing everyone, stealing our soil. I haven’t been down here very long”—he looks up at the sky and then sharply back at us—“but the view from down here hardly seems accurate.”

Pen is steeling herself beside me, and I fear what she may say next, so I speak first. “Be that as it may, Your Highness”—the honorific is sour on my tongue—“from down here we’ve been able to see that Internment is sinking.”

At that, the prince regards me as though I may be of some use to him after all. “How?” he says. “How can you see that?”

“It was Pen who made the calculations. She was able to compare its location in the sky against the sun. It began sinking bit by bit when the jet started to make its comings and goings.”

I don’t think I am doing the explanation any justice. I lack Pen’s finesse. But the prince seems to believe me. He advances on Pen and says, “How much has it sunk?”

“Not terribly much,” she says with surprising civility. “Equal to about an arm’s length, which isn’t enough to disrupt things. But if the jet keeps passing through the wind surrounding the city, I believe it will weaken the current that helps hold Internment in place. It may continue to sink bit by bit over time, or it may come crashing down all at once. I don’t know.”

I always thought the prince to be a fool, but he’s smart enough to be troubled by all this. He paces with the lantern in his hands. His shadow dances in the fragile light.

“We have to stop the jet,” he says. “I already knew that. King Ingram’s arrival has brought nothing but chaos to Internment, but if what you say is true, we will have to stop him soon.”

Pen looks startled by this. “You believe me?” she says.

The prince stops pacing and looks at her. “By the time I woke up, after you’d hit me, you were long gone. My sister had disappeared, too, and I knew that she had found her way to that contraption of yours that was headed for the ground. I was alone, bedridden, with nothing but free time. I wanted to know everything I could about the girls who’d tried to kill me. The girls my sister had followed to the ground.” He waves his hand at me. “You were boring, Stockhour. Yes, your brother was a jumper, but you were as dull as dirt. A nobody.”

I know it isn’t meant to be a compliment, but somehow I am flattered that my attempts to blend in and hide my daydreams convinced someone up there.

The prince turns on Pen. “But you, Atmus. The daughter of the top engineer at the glasslands. A perfect student. You have the lights on up in your head, don’t you? You’re just like your father. A budding engineer.”

“I’m not like him,” she says feebly. “Having a brain in my head doesn’t make me like him.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “But you know things. You figure them out. Who else in this bloody world down here would have thought to calculate Internment’s position in the sky? Nobody but you.”

Pen has nothing to say to this. People who figure things out on Internment are likely to end up dead for treason. If her father knows as much as she does, he’s not foolish enough to say it aloud while he’s in the city.

The other man clears his throat. “Your Highness, we should be getting back before King Ingram notices that you’re gone.”

“We want to go back to Internment,” I say. “The three of us. We want King Ingram to send us under the pretense of helping his cause, and then we want to help your father overthrow King Ingram’s men however we can.”

The prince gives a sad smile. “You want to help my father? Our world is being drilled apart, bled dry, and my father has been reduced to nothing. He cannot save us.”

“So who can save us, then?” I say. “You?”

“No,” he says softly. “Not me.”

He allows the other man to lead him back toward the castle. Down here, he is not a prince, but a prisoner.

“Wait!” Nim calls after him. “Your sister, Celeste, is she all right? Is she alive?”

The prince stops but doesn’t turn to face us. “Celeste is a silly princess with silly ideas that she can think the way a king thinks. She fancies herself the political sort. But she only ever makes things worse. You would be wise to forget about her.”

Nim’s shoulders sag with what may be despair or relief, or both. The prince spoke of Celeste as though she were still alive and well, and that’s something.

“I can’t stand that little nit,” Pen mutters.

“But he listened,” I remind her.

Nim is staring off into the darkness. The lantern has been blown out, and the prince and his escort have disappeared from view. Even in the frail bits of moonlight, I can see the pain in Nim’s eyes.

“Are they twins?” he asks. “Celeste and her brother.”

“No,” Pen says. “But they are equally annoying.”

“Stop,” I whisper to her.

She softens. “Don’t let what he said get to you,” Pen says to Nim. “You’ll see her again. You can try to come back to Internment with us.”

Nim shakes his head. “I can’t leave Havalais. Someone will have to keep an eye on things here once you’ve gone. I don’t trust my father, or the king.”

Two kings who can’t be trusted. What a fabulous predicament we’re all in now.

We walk back to the hotel, all of us silent, knowing there are no words that could reassure any of us.

5

It’s a week before Jack Piper returns home. Nimble plays a contrite role that is painful to watch, but it pays off. He convinces his father that we could be of some help to the king.

Jack Piper, whether it is arrogance or exhaustion, mistakes our scheme for gratitude for Havalais’s hospitality. Over dinner he tells us that he’s arranged a meeting with King Ingram in the morning.

I stare at my plate, trying to ignore Judas’s and Amy’s stares. True to my promise to Pen, I have not told anyone about our encounter with the prince. Not even Alice or my brother.

If things go as I hope, I’ll tell Lex that I’m leaving. He may wish to stop me, but he won’t be able to. He knows that he owes me that much, after letting me think our father was dead. I have to try to find my father as well.

Thomas clears his throat. “Pen?” he says. “Can I speak with you privately?” His calm tone is a mirage.

“It’d be rude to leave the table before dinner is over,” Pen says, mirroring his tone.

Basil and I exchange worried glances but say nothing.

When the Pipers begin clearing the dinner plates, I have never been so relieved in my life as I leave that dinner table. Pen, poised and cool, follows Thomas outside. Basil and I go upstairs.

Once we’re in my room, I close the door behind us and drop onto the edge of my bed.

Basil sits beside me. “That’s going to be an ugly fight the two of them have.”

“I wish she had just told him,” I say. “He would have been happy. He wants her to go home. He begged me to find a way to get her back to Internment.”

“Unless she means to go without him,” Basil says.

“I believe that’s it,” I say. “She’s forever evading him. It’s been that way since we were children.”

“They’ll work it out eventually,” Basil says. “They always do.”

I think of Pen’s drawing, the ugly word she wrote over and over on that scrap of request paper, and I wonder if I will ever fully understand her. I wonder if she would want anyone to.

And am I any better than she is? I’ve got secrets of my own. Even now, the words are on my tongue: Basil, I kissed Judas.

I almost say it. I let it replay in my head over and over as this loaded silence exists between us.

But I don’t. Selfishly I rest my head on his shoulder and I think about the jet breaking through Internment’s atmosphere. I think about what will await us when we arrive, if we arrive, and I wonder if any of it can be undone.

Pen is gone for most of the evening, and she returns just as I’m turning down the covers. I’m only going through the motions; I know I’ll be too nervous to sleep.

“Well, that was brutal,” she says, and falls onto her bed.

“What happened?”

“He was upset that I didn’t clue him in to what’s going on. It’s just that he worries about me, and I feel how much he worries about me.” She squirms against the mattress. “All his doting can make me so itchy.”

“Did he go along with it?” I say.

“Ultimately, yes. He hates this world. Maybe he’s foolishly hoping that we can go back to Internment and it will be as we left it. I don’t know.” She wriggles under the blanket. “He’s going to try to come with us if the king will allow a fourth. I suppose I owe him at least that much.”

“Mind if I turn out the lights?”

She shakes her head, closes her eyes.

It’s only after I’ve gotten into my bed and we’ve settled into the darkness that I’m brave enough to say what’s on my mind.

“Do you think I’m a detestable person for kissing Judas?”

“From what I saw, he was the one who kissed you.”

“Even so.”

I hear the sheets rustling as she moves. “You’re not a detestable person, Morgan. I mean, if you were—what does that make me? I’m sure if we kept a tally of our sins, I would be in the lead.”

“It’s not the quantity of sins in this instance, but the magnitude.”

“I don’t think it was right,” she admits. “But I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have done something like that at home. It’s this mad world that’s made us all feverish.”

I think of the night I saved Judas from the patrolmen who were coming for him. I pushed him into the lake to hide him, and after that he tried to scare me off. I still remember the fresh grief in his eyes, the severe angles of his face. He was nothing at all like Basil, and yet he stood so close to me that I could feel his breath. I was terrified with intrigue.

But Pen is right. I wouldn’t have kissed him, because back home I did all I could to follow the rules, to be what was expected of me.

“I spent my life thinking all those little things mattered back home. Those rules. But five minutes in this world and it all came undone.”

“Stop punishing yourself,” Pen says. “Everything I ever loved about you is still intact. I’m sure Basil feels the same way.”

We don’t speak after that, and eventually her breathing changes, and somehow she has found a way to sleep.

I’m still lying awake when the sun begins to lighten the sky. Nimble knocks on the door and says, “Ten minutes.”

It’s still early enough that the rest of the house is sleeping. The night’s insects are still singing.

Nimble is waiting for us at the door, weaving the car keys between his fingers anxiously. He watches as Pen, Basil, Thomas, and I convene before him. His eyes are sympathetic. “Sorry, kiddos. The king sent word this morning that he’d like to speak with only you and you.” He nods to Basil and me.

“What?” Pen says. “But I thought—”

“Prince Azure’s request,” Nim says. “We should be grateful that he convinced King Ingram to meet with you at all.”

Pen looks from Thomas to me, fury in her eyes. “That royal terror is trying to ruin everything.”

“He must have a plan,” I say, trying to calm her. “Let Basil and me go. We’ll see what it’s all about, and I’ll tell you everything once I return.”

Her teeth are gritted, but she knows no good would come from arguing and she gives in.

Nimble is our driver, and as usual, Jack Piper is nowhere. “I visited with Birds yesterday,” Nim says, trying to sound cheerful to lighten the mood. He glances at us in the rearview mirror. “Father finally got around to visiting her, and wouldn’t you know, they spent the whole time arguing.”

“Why?” Basil asks.

“She’s got scars,” Nim says. “In particular, this deep continuous gash that runs down the side of her face and her arm. Father says it ruins her. He says no man will ever marry her and that he’d like to send her overseas to this surgeon in the north who can fix it. Only, she doesn’t want it fixed. She wants to keep it. She says it’s a part of her now.”

“She should keep it, then,” I say.

“Father hates the reminder. I dare even to say that he feels guilty for what’s happened to her. Maybe he has a conscience in there after all.”

Like burials, this is another custom I don’t understand. We wear our scars where I come from.

I meet his eyes in the mirror for an instant before he looks back to the road. “If that’s what it’s about, don’t let him send her off to that surgeon,” I say. “If her scars remind him of what he did, he should have to look at them every day. Maybe it will change his mind the next time he goes along with the king’s warfare.”

“It’s a nice thought, but nothing can change his mind once he’s made it up. Especially not when he’s working for the king.” He glances at me in the mirror again. “What’s your king like?”

“Celeste didn’t talk about him?”

“She did,” Nim says. “But with a sort of hopefulness. I got the sense that she was idealizing things when she said he could be reasoned with.”

The king’s castle has begun to emerge from the distance, and I’m getting a queasy feeling in my stomach.

“Whatever you do,” Nim says, “don’t let on to the king that you know anything about the phosane. He doesn’t think much of broads anyway, so all you have to do is act dense. You don’t know anything. You just want to help.”

That shouldn’t be hard. King Ingram makes me so uneasy that it’s hard to speak around him anyway. Maybe it’s a good thing Pen isn’t here; she isn’t intimidated by anyone.

It’s a perfectly sunny day, but when we reach the castle, it doesn’t glimmer as much as it has in the past. A shadow seems to loom over it.

Nimble brings the car to a stop. He turns in his seat and looks between Basil and me. “Say as little as you can,” he says. “Be dumb. If the king realizes you know more than he does about the city sinking, you’ll never get what you want. You’ll be trapped here working for him.”

Two of the king’s guards have been waiting for us, and they open the car doors so we can step out.

“King Ingram and his guest are expecting the three of you,” a guard says. “Right this way.”

I have come to hate this castle. The waste of it. How many bricks were laid, and how much money went into this sprawling palace filled with empty rooms? On Internment, children dream about whether castles exist. I used to dream as well. But in my grandest dreams, the castle was not half the size of this one, and every room was filled with parties and food and dancing girls in sweeping dresses, not a gleaming stone gone to waste.

I’m grateful that Basil is here beside me. When I begin to feel that I’ll drown in this world and its strange luxuries, he makes me remember who I am, where we come from.

“You’re here, you’re here!” King Ingram is clapping as he greets us in the hallway. He walks straight to me and takes my hand in both of his and kisses my knuckles with enthusiasm. “Now I’ve seen your brilliant little kingdom for myself. It’s magnificent!”

“Thank you,” I manage, startled by his energy.

“And your friend the princess was kind enough to give me the grand tour. Your people were so happy for her return that there were parties daily. Parades. A marvelous festival.”

The only celebration we have on Internment is the Festival of Stars in December, and it both worries and intrigues me to think of the celebration he’s describing. King Furlow must have been frightened if he was willing to expend the city’s resources to throw such an affair.

But when I realize that King Ingram is waiting for me to speak, what I say is, “And how is Princess Celeste?”

Nimble stands beside me now, and I see his face come alive at the mention of her name, but he quickly hides within himself before the king might notice.

“The poor thing has taken ill. The festivities were a bit much for her. But she is back at home in her charming clock tower castle getting the rest she needs. The journey back to Havalais would have been too much for her, but she sends her love. And I’ve brought a surprise for all of you, sent from your King Furlow himself.”

King Ingram leads us to his parlor, saying “Come, come!” as he goes, like a child excited to receive a gift rather than a king about to give one.

He throws open the heavy wooden doors, and Prince Azure rises up from the wing chair. He is dressed in the fashions of this world: a plaid sport jacket with a silk handkerchief in his pocket, and gray pants with sharp creases. But even in the foreign fashion, something about his posture makes me think of home.

“May I present to you Prince Azure of Internment,” King Ingram says.

Basil and I feign surprise. He nods into a bow, I into a curtsy.

“Your Highness,” Nim says. “Welcome to Havalais.”

“Such formality!” King Ingram says. “It’s nice to see young people with a regard for custom. Refreshing. But please sit. Sit!”

I sit on the same couch cushion as I did the very first time I met the king, Basil at one side and Nimble at the other.

It has been mere hours since I saw Prince Azure, but he looks the worse for wear. Or perhaps it’s only that the lantern light concealed his true condition. He is pale, with light purple bags under his eyes that have been dabbed over with cosmetics. He seems smaller in the daylight, regal but still frail. His hair has grown a bit longer, and a lock of it is doing little to conceal a series of pink scars at his right temple.

He meets my eyes but offers neither a smile nor a frown. A politician’s neutral gaze, so much like his father. “I’ve heard quite a bit about this world, and I’m glad for the opportunity to see it myself,” he says.

“Yes, yes, we have quite the itinerary planned,” King Ingram says. “Tomorrow afternoon, we’ll be presenting our Prince Azure to the rest of the kingdom. My staff is already at work organizing the festivities. There will be radio announcements broadcast today at the top of every hour.”

“Plans?” Nimble says.

The king looks to Basil and me. “Well, yes, of course. Our Havalais has fallen on some dark times, I think you’d agree. Warfare, bombings, deaths, and devastation. Of course the phosane mining will fix that, and soon enough peace will be restored. That’s all well and good, isn’t it? But all of that is a lot to take in, and the people will need a bit of a morale boost, yes? Someone to cheer for.”

“Morgan and Basil have expressed a willingness to help, of course,” Nim says. “Father said he spoke with you about that.”

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