Burning Kingdoms

by Lauren DeStefano

  Something pops in the flames and I flinch, but he is as stoic as the altar under all that fire.

  “Do you think what Pen said is true? About my prayers being able to reach my sister.”

  Thick black smoke disappears into the darkness of night, blotting out patches of stars. Somewhere up there, higher than his world and mine, is the place where all things go when they have stopped breathing. It is a place my brother visited, and perhaps Birdie has seen it too. Up where it’s quiet and calm, and it takes something greater than voices to reach them.

  “I do,” I say.

  It really was an exquisite machine. The metal glistens still.

  The roof collapses in on itself, and the sound is absorbed by the roaring fire. It is violent and ugly and beautiful. Nothing at all like the wreckage at the harbor.

  Nim’s eyes are steely and filled anew with prayers. There is no choice for him but to believe. He has nothing left to give in offering.

  A child’s shriek awakens me in the morning.

  Pen groans and pulls the blankets over her head as we hear what must be Annette and Marjorie running down the stairs.

  “Your car!” Annette says. “Father is going to blow a gasket.”

  Nim shushes them, and the voices are too faint to hear after that.

  “What about his car?” Pen asks.

  “He set it on fire last night.”

  She pushes the blankets away from her face. “What?”

  “On the fire altar, in offering so that Birdie would get better,” I say. “He took your advice.”

  She stares at the ceiling, blinking. “Wow,” she says. After a long moment she turns to face me. “I didn’t think he would take what I said to heart like that.”

  “There are people who would give anything to have faith like yours,” I say. “It’s hard to come by.”

  “You’re not going to get saccharine on me, are you?” She crinkles her nose. “Just because we’ve shared a few near-death experiences and personal tragedies.”

  I watch her sit on the edge of the bed and carefully undo her plaits. The curls fall perfectly into place. “I should probably get out of here early,” she says. “The last thing I need is Jack Piper hearing I’m the reason his son set fire to his car. He’ll probably set fire to me.”

  I sit up. “Go where?” I ask.

  She shrugs out of her nightgown and studies the dresses in the closet before selecting one that’s black with large polka dots. It’s dreary on the hanger, but it becomes something elegant once Pen has wriggled into it. She looks so much more grown-up now that we’ve been here awhile, and I wonder if I do too.

  “Pen? Where are you going?”

  She looks over her shoulder at me. “Morgan, I adore you. Stop smothering me.”

  I cannot keep trying to follow her around this world, checking her breath for tonic, looking for her in alleyways. We aren’t the children we were back home. I can’t be her guardian, only her friend.

  “Promise I won’t find you floating facedown in any large bodies of water,” I say.

  She shoulders the window open. She means to avoid everyone with her exit, then. “If I were to do anything extremely foolish, you wouldn’t find me at all.”

  And then she’s gone.

  I get dressed and tread carefully through the house. I don’t know what sort of mood Jack Piper will be in once he’s seen what happened to his son’s car. He seems the sort of man to value possessions.

  If fire altars were a part of Internment’s culture, and if I’d owned something as extravagant as a car, I’d have done the same thing to save Lex when he needed it. And my parents would have joined in, because life is always worth more than things. Because their children were everything to them.

  Fighting tears, I stand at the top of the staircase. I spent my life fascinated by the ground, but now that I’m here, I would give anything to undo what I’ve seen: a man who has five children and values none of them. Endless land destroyed by bombs.

  I don’t belong here, and this place has changed me, made me forget pieces of who I was before I left home.

  That’s why, rather than going downstairs toward the sound of breakfast chatter, I head for my brother’s door.

  “Alice?” he says as I turn the knob.

  “It’s me.” He always used to know when it was me.

  “Oh,” he says. He’s sitting on the floor by the bed, tracing his fingers over the paper from his transcriber. “She’s supposed to bring me breakfast.”

  “Why don’t you come downstairs and get it yourself?” I ask. I try not to sound angry, but I hate when he carries on like an invalid.

  “Because I want nothing to do with the Pipers,” he says. “Sort of the way you want nothing to do with me.”

  “If you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, I’m leaving,” I say.

  His dramatic huff is his apology. “Please, come in. Stay. Talk to me.” His tone is caustic, but I believe he’s being sincere, and I sit on the floor across from him.

  “I’m running low on transcriber paper,” he says, rustling the page in his hands.

  “Is the story almost through?” I ask.

  He smirks. “I don’t think this one is meant to have an end,” he says.

  For a moment, it’s as though we’re in his office above my bedroom, and everything between us is as it was before.

  His head is down. He says, “I hear the princess has gone back to Internment.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He pauses. “Morgan, I need for you to understand why I didn’t tell you about Dad.”

  “I hate to admit that I do understand,” I say. “But that doesn’t make it right. You wouldn’t have left Alice behind, left me behind. Why Dad?”

  “It was what he wanted,” Lex says. “He didn’t risk everything just to have his children die trying to rescue him.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut against the tears that come. I focus on my breathing so he won’t know that I’m starting to cry. “Maybe that’s what he wanted, but what I want is to find him,” I say. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go home again, but if there’s an opportunity, I’ll take it.”

  He runs his fingers over the pages of his unfinished story. “Remember your promise to me, then. You said you’d always come back.”

  I pat his knee. “I remember.”

  Alice brings him a breakfast tray, and I leave to find Basil, who is surely wondering where I’ve been all morning.

  We meet at the bottom of the stairs, and before he can say a word, I take his hands. “Let’s go outside,” I say. “I much like the smell of the air on days like this.”

  Contrary to the claustrophobic feeling this hotel has taken on, the spring air is sweet. Almost like home, but more fragrant.

  We walk the perimeter of the hotel, and when we reach Nim’s ruined car, Basil winces.

  “An offering,” I say. “For Birdie.”

  He stops walking, studying the charred remains. It looks like one of Pen’s sketches if she were to use a crude piece of pen stone on a dirty piece of paper.

  Basil’s mouth twists like he’s trying not to frown. “I really hope it works,” he says. And because I’ve known him all my life, I know that he’s staring at Nim’s offering and he’s thinking of his own family, up in the floating city that’s a faded scar in this blue sky.

  “There might still be a way for us to get back home,” I say. “Celeste said she had a plan. Granted, her plans are always terrible, but it’s all any of us have got right now.”

  “I’m not sure that would be for the best,” he says.

  “I’m still going to try,” I say.

  “I know you are.” He starts walking, and I find myself sprinting to keep pace. “Morgan, I’ve had plenty of time to think down here. I’ve seen what Internment does to its people—how it nearly killed you—and I’ve seen what this world does.”

  “More of the same, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “And even if a ladder were t
o appear one morning between this world and Internment, I would be at a loss for which world to choose.”

  “The climb would kill you first,” I say, trying to make a joke. It makes me nervous to see this side of him. So serious. He’s starting to get angry in a most uncharacteristic way.

  “I don’t know which world to choose,” he repeats, “but I see no sense in trying to stop you from returning home if you can. I wouldn’t be able to anyway. I was never able to tell you what to do.” He slows his pace and glances at me. “Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s who you are. I very much like who you are.”

  “I like who you are, too,” I say uncertainly. Where is he going with this?

  He shields his eyes and looks skyward for a moment, and then back at me.

  “Internment’s rules never seemed to have suited you,” he says. “And I’ve come to realize that it’s unfair for me to hold you to our betrothal. I’m not going to invent any rules forcing you to love me if you don’t.”

  I grab his arm to stop him from walking. He staggers and then faces me.

  “It isn’t that I don’t love you,” I say firmly. “Don’t think that. That was never the truth. It’s just that, all my life, I’ve watched Alice and Lex, and my parents, and even Pen and Thomas sometimes. And I’ve thought—what’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I brave enough to say ‘I love you’ when it’s so easy for everyone around us?

  “But I see now that we can’t have what other people have. I don’t want us to. I’ve grown up feeling my own way for you, and it’s just something that’s in me, and I’ve always known it, like the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I’d feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I’ve never felt needed to be said.”

  “You’ve just said it now,” Basil says.

  “I suppose I have.” I look at my shoes and then at him. “So there it is.”

  He touches my cheek, and I lean against his palm. I feel the cool glass of his betrothal band against my warm skin.

  I can’t imagine marrying somebody else. Who else could know me the way that he does? There are infinite boys down here in this world, boys who aren’t promised to anyone else. But none of them have grown up beside me. None of them know me the way that Basil and I know each other. Perhaps none of them are for me at all. Perhaps I’m meant to be alone.

  “I suppose this isn’t how you imagined it would be when I told you I love you for the first time,” I say.

  “I’ve never known what to expect with you,” he says, and smirks. “So in a lot of ways, it’s exactly what I imagined.”

  I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead he moves his hand from my face.

  “You can call what we have a betrothal, or not,” Basil says. “But I’ll still be here.”

  I let out a little laugh. “Yes, well, we’re both stuck down here, aren’t we? But the same goes for me. I’m still here when you need me.” I do want that much. Need that much.

  “And it suits me to keep my betrothal band,” I say. “It doesn’t have to mean what Internment’s rules meant for it to mean, but that doesn’t make it worthless. I just need—I need time.”

  “Time,” Basil says, musing. He looks out to that vast expanse beyond the hotel. “This world goes on forever until it circles back to where we’re standing; it should seem that time is infinite here, but I don’t know that we’ll have much of it. I don’t know what’s in store for us at all.”

  He looks back to me. “Just—whatever comes, promise you won’t do anything to get yourself killed.”

  “Certainly going to try not to,” I say.

  I don’t know what’s to come, but I do know that he will give me all the time he has. He would give me until the end of the world if I’d take it. I want to give him something just as important in return. I want to bring him back to his family. I want him to be happy, whether or not it’s with me.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon at each other’s side, admiring the strange bright flowers and trying to skip stones in the ocean and squinting to see our home up in the sky. But something has changed between us.

  At dinner, Annette wears a collander as a helmet and pretends her utensils are controls in a jet. Her father isn’t there to scold her. She likes to challenge this chaos that has ensued in her family, though it really seems to frighten her at the same time.

  Pen doesn’t return. Thomas has spent the day searching for her, walking to town and back. I know he blames me, though my guess as to her whereabouts is as good as his. My worry for her increases every time she runs off by herself; on Internment there were only so many places one could go, but here it would be so easy to get lost forever. I don’t know how the people down here don’t live their lives in fear of it.

  After dinner I distract myself by reading the heavy black book on Pen’s nightstand. I’ve landed on a story about the people of the ground naming their stars after their heroes. These are the same stars that shine over Internment, but with different stories behind them.

  The love I have for my home hasn’t diminished but has instead hidden itself in things like this story, to make me remember in a new and more painful way each time. Even the stars on the ground cannot comfort me.

  I flip through the thin pages for a new story. A scrap of paper flutters away, and when I catch it, there is another reminder of home in my fingers. It’s a piece of request paper, its texture not like any of the paper I’ve seen on the ground. It is meant to be set on fire and to fly up into the sky, bearing the one thing we get to ask of the god in the sky each year. Pen must have been carrying hers when we fell from the sky.

  I don’t mean to read it. I mean to tuck it back into the page it was marking. But her drawing catches my eye, and my admiration turns fast to something that gives me chills.

  Footsteps come to a stop in the doorway, and I look up.

  Pen sees the paper in my hand, and all the light leaves her face. She looks from it to me.

  “So there’s to be no privacy in this world, then,” she says.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  It isn’t a traditionally written request, but Pen has never taken to paper in a traditional way. She has written the word “die” in delicate slantscript. And all around that she has drawn flames and bones and bottles. The bottles and the plumes of smoke all contain the same word in different sizes and shades of black: die, die, die. There is a tiny city in the background, and the buildings are all made of the same word: die, die, die.

  “May I have that back, please?” She holds out her hand. A hand that has scaled trees with me, and crawled into the cavern with me, and handed me that first bottle of tonic meaning to help me cope with my worries. Her hand is small and pretty and soft, and I can’t bear to give it such an ugly piece of paper.

  When I do nothing, she stomps forward and reaches for it, but I back away. “Pen. Tell me who this is for.”

  I hold the page over my head to keep it away from her, but she’s exactly my height and when I refuse to free the paper from my fist, she forces me to the ground. Her knees straddle my hips and the fall has knocked the air from my lungs, but something keeps me from unclenching my fingers even as she pries at them.

  “Morgan!” Her voice is desperate. “You can’t have this. I’ve given you sixteen years of secrets. This one belongs to me.”

  Instinct forces me to curl up my knees and kick at her until she’s off me. I try to stand, but she digs her nails into my wrist. Her face is red and there is something in her eyes that makes her all at once a stranger.

  “Let me go,” I say.

  “You can’t have that,” she cries.

  “Tell me what it means.”

  I manage to yank my arm from her grasp, and the force of her release sends me backward into the night table, taking down the transistor radio. She comes at me again, but I’m able to get to my fee
t. There is a throbbing pain between my shoulder blades.

  “Was it Thomas?” I say. “Has he hurt you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Someone did.” I back against the door. “And we’re not leaving this room until you’ve told me who.”

  She doesn’t come after me. She sits down on the floor where I’ve left her, and her breaths come, shallow and hard. I think she may faint.

  “Pen.”

  “I needn’t answer,” she says. She’s looking at the ground, panting. She waves her arm at the paper. “You have it all right there, don’t you? You’re a clever enough girl.”

  I smooth the paper in my hand. The sweat from my palm has done little to smudge it—request paper is especially resilient. I let myself travel into Pen’s brain, along the paths of lines she drew in secret. The flames and the bottles all point to the tiny city made of words. And now that I am really looking, I see that the city is familiar. It’s a city within a city. The glasslands, of which Pen has a perfect view from her bedroom window.

  I remember the coloring she did of the glasslands also, and the way she crumpled it up and stuffed it into the recycling tube.

  She’s staring at me when I take my eyes from the paper. She doesn’t make a move for me.

  “I have made only one request for as long as I can remember,” she says. “And it has never been fulfilled.”

  She grimaces, recovers.

  “My father brought me there, when I was little,” she says. “He said I was a clever girl with a clever mind, and I should see how things go.”

  “You never told me he took you there.” It’s exactly the sort of thing she would have wanted to tell me; most of Internment will never get to see the inside of the glasslands.

  I can’t imagine why she would hate the glasslands so much. Why she would hate her father so much. She has never uttered an unkind word about him. Or any words at all, really.

  “Oh, Morgan, don’t be stupid.” She staggers to her feet and rubs at her arm, which must have been hurt in our struggle. “A horrible thing happened that day. You wouldn’t have understood. You were only a little girl.”