Lauren DeStefano - Broken Crowns

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.”