Lauren DeStefano - Burning Kingdoms

“It makes the most sense,” I say.

“It isn’t that we don’t like to burn stuff down here,” Nimble says. “Most homes have a fire altar. There’s one at the hotel, in fact. Even guests use it.”

“You burn bodies out on your lawn?” I say, my stomach beginning to turn.

“Not bodies. Offerings,” Nimble says. “If there’s something you really want to ask of our god, you burn something that’s of equal importance to you.”

At last a ritual I don’t find wasteful. It seems poetic, even. “We have something like that on Internment,” I say. “Once a year we burn our highest request and set it up on the wind to be heard.”

“Once a year.” Nim whistles. “You could burn things all day down here if you wanted. People have no shortage of things to ask for.”

“So you burn things often, then,” I say.

“I don’t, personally. Don’t take much stock in it.”

As soon as the car has stopped at the graveyard, Amy is gone, leaving the open car door behind her to fill the car with cold.

“We won’t be long,” I say apologetically. I don’t expect him to understand a girl like Amy. He can’t appreciate what the edge has done to her.

I expect some sort of judgment or another remark about how odd she is, but “I’ll keep the car warm for you,” is all he says.

The graveyard is framed by hedges, and the entrance is through a pair of elaborate iron doors ingrained with flying children holding some sort of stringed instrument.

Amy is knelt in the snow when I find her. She clears away the brambles until the words on the headstone before her are revealed. “Lila Pike. It says she died the year she was born,” Amy says.

“That’s miserable,” I say.

“I wonder what happened.”

I don’t.

I look up from the stone. It is only one among hundreds of untold stories. Names, dates, flowers in vases left to wilt under all this white.

There’s so much land on the ground that they can make a garden of all their dead. It’s no matter whether anyone ever comes to visit.

Amy looks over her shoulder at me. Her brow is raised. “What do you think happens when they bury you here, and years pass, and everyone who knew you is dead? Who comes to visit? Or do they mow this down and start over?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems like such a waste—all of it.”

“Maybe not,” Amy says. “If there were a place I could go and visit my sister, talk to her—I think I’d like that.”

“I don’t think I could visit my parents in a place like this,” I say. “There are no spirits here. Only stones.”

“There are spirits,” Amy says with certainty. “But these spirits aren’t our spirits.”

I don’t know what she means. She’s a peculiar little girl who says peculiar things, but her outlandish remarks are different from the kind that other children tell. She speaks assuredly. And when she awakens from her fits, there’s real sadness, and that sadness lingers with her for days.

And though I don’t entirely believe in the things she claims, I don’t think it’s all her imagination. A normal girl would want to imagine happy things.

A breeze disturbs the bare branches and I hug my arms when it reaches me.

I’d much like to leave now, but Amy may well miss out on much of the exploring, due to her fits and Judas’s overprotectiveness, and if this is all she wants, she should get to see it.

The wind picks up, as though it means to force us away. The rusted gate swings on its hinge, an invitation to leave.

But the squealing gate isn’t the only noise. There’s a low whistle, and then a crack so loud Amy jumps to her feet. “What was that?” she says. Another crack. Louder, so much louder, than the thunder that horrified us the other night when we heard it for the first time.

Straight ahead of us, the headstones make a path to the horizon. They offer no answers. And they have no reaction to that black billowing smoke where a building stood only seconds ago.

I think of what Nimble said. Bomb.

“Come on!” I grab her arm and run for the gate. I don’t look back. She’s gasping for breath beside me, but she manages to keep up. I have a fleeting thought that this could trigger one of her fits, but I don’t know what caused that explosion or if there will be another.

The day the flower shop caught fire, I thought it had the power to end my little world. How was I to know that there were bigger fires happening below us? I don’t know what it would take to end a world this size, if anything could. All I’ve seen are more terrifying ways to destroy, to no end at all.

Nimble is speeding away even before I’ve had a chance to close the door. The car lurches and swerves on the ice.

“Looks like you ladies arrived just in time for the fun to begin,” he says.

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

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

“Aren’t you coming?” I ask.

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

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

“Where’s he going?” Riles asks.

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

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

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

“What happened?” Basil says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look at her from the corners of my eyes.

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

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

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