Broken Crowns. Lauren DeStefano
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