The Broken World

by Lindsey Klingele

  “I just cannot understand,” Kat had said back at the castle, her expression one of immense disappointment, “how you can put the word of one crazy old crone over the needs of our realm.”

  “I am thinking about our realm,” Cedric had shot back.

  They’d been alone in the parlor next to Cedric’s bedchamber, pacing and arguing.

  “No, you are not,” Kat had replied. Her eyes were as still and hard as ice, and it killed Cedric that this look had come to be specially reserved for him. “You have been looking for any excuse to go back to Los Angeles for weeks—”

  “That is not true. You know that I have been here, trying my hardest to be a good king.”

  “You let yourself be distracted.”

  Cedric whirled on Kat, his anger matching hers. “Worrying about Merek wasn’t a distraction. Wanting to find Malquin, the man who killed my father, and bring him to justice—that was not a distraction, either. Those were legitimate concerns, Kat, and yet I still put them aside to do what was right. But this—this I cannot ignore.”

  Kat had shaken her head. “You believe this crazy woman because it is what you want to believe. Because it is easier to run back there than it is to face your duties here. Look outside, Cedric.” Kat motioned out a window at the townspeople below. “Look at the people who need you now. They are what’s important.”

  “But . . . the trees!” Cedric had yelled, throwing his hands in the air. Not exactly his best argument, but Kat’s accusations were more piercing than he wanted to admit. He did want a legitimate reason to go back to Los Angeles, and they both knew it.

  In the end, she couldn’t stop him, so she agreed to cover for him in the castle until he returned, which he promised to do soon. An uneasy solution, but at least Cedric was here.

  Now, Cedric got onto the back of the “moped” contraption behind Liv, holding on to her tightly as she drove down streets that looked radically different from when he had seen them last. But he could barely focus on the changed world as wind whipped past his face. As they got nearer and nearer to the Malibu house, Cedric knew he was facing another difficult interaction. With Merek.

  The trouble was, Cedric had no idea what to say, or how to even begin to make things right. Liv assured him that Merek’s injuries had all but healed and he’d been fine and even battle-ready for weeks, but every time he thought of how he would apologize to Merek—for not believing him, for never trusting him, for slamming his injured head into the ground—he could only imagine the last time he’d seen him. Then, Merek had been unconscious in a hospital bed, his face wrapped in bandages, his jaw swollen.

  How could Cedric apologize for that?

  In what felt like hardly any time at all, they were pulling up to the house, a dark silhouette against the ocean and the orange sky beyond.

  “They might all be sleeping,” Liv said as she made her way to the front door. “Unless they stayed up to curse my name.”

  She put her hand on the door handle, and Cedric reached out to touch her wrist.

  “Wait,” he whispered. “Just one moment more.”

  She took her hand from the handle and slipped it into his, looking up at him in the orange-y dark. After a brief pause, he nodded.

  Liv sighed heavily. “It’s grovel time.”

  She opened the front door of the house to the glow of very dim lights. In the living room, everyone was awake and sitting around a few flickering candles that were burning down to the dregs. They looked up as Cedric and Liv entered. Merek’s eyes fell on Cedric immediately, and Cedric had to force himself not to look away.

  “Look who I found!” Liv said, her voice unnaturally bright against the glumness of the room.

  For a few seconds, everyone just stared at Cedric with wide, disbelieving eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “Hello.”

  There was a brief moment of stunned silence before Liv broke from Cedric and rushed toward Shannon, apologizing so fast he could not understand half her words.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “No! I mean, I know! I’m sorry, too—” Shannon said back.

  “You don’t have to be sorry! I do want you here, of course I do—”

  “But I never meant to call you a bitch. You’re not a bitch, you’re the opposite of a bitch, why can’t I stop saying bitch?”

  And then they were laughing and hugging, as Joe and Peter looked on with wide eyes.

  Cedric looked to Merek, knowing his own round of apologies likely wouldn’t take place in quite the same way. Which was probably for the best—if Merek ever hugged him, Cedric would know for sure the blow to his head had caused serious damage.

  Merek didn’t even stand as Cedric came forward. Before he could say anything, Joe intercepted him.

  “Cedric! Not that it’s not good to see you, but why . . . ?”

  “I had to come back,” Cedric said, glad for the interruption. “I learned about something that affects both of our worlds.”

  “If it’s about the sky boiling up, we already got that memo,” Shannon said.

  “There’s more,” Liv put in.

  Cedric went on to explain—again—everything he’d learned from Mathilde.

  Joe responded first. “Well. That is bad news.”

  “So you want to close the portals entirely?” Peter asked, leaning forward.

  There was a heavy pause. Cedric didn’t look at Liv. Even when they had caught each other up by the riverbed, they had talked quickly past this point, about the necessity of closing the portals. Because once the portals were closed for good, the two of them would be in opposite worlds. Again. Forever.

  “That’s assuming we even can close them,” Joe put in.

  “Mathilde seemed to think it was possible,” Cedric said. “Even if she didn’t know how.”

  “We have to keep looking for the Knight the professor told me about—Martin. Maybe he knows how we can close the portals.” Liv’s eyes opened wide, as if a thought was occurring to her. “Maybe that’s why Malquin is killing the Knights—because he wants to keep someone like Martin from keeping our worlds apart for good?”

  Joe shook his head. “Maybe. But it’s still just a guess. We don’t actually know John is behind those deaths. And if he was, why would he want to keep the portals open anyway? He already lost in Caelum, so there’s no point in him going back.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know, sure,” Liv said. “But that’s why we have to find Martin. He might be the only one with answers.”

  “Aside from John himself,” Joe said. He bit his lip, and put one hand to his beard. His eyes were on the ground, as if he were working out a problem. “If I could only talk to him, reason with him—”

  “Malquin does not understand reason,” Cedric said, his voice cutting through the room. “He is a murderer. He killed my father.”

  Even saying the words out loud was hard. Cedric felt the rage and helplessness of that night, and he had to force himself to stand straight, to keep his voice firm.

  Joe took a moment before replying. “I’m truly sorry, Cedric. I’m not defending John, but if there’s anyone in the world who might be able to reach him, it could be me. If I could just find him—”

  “If we found him, it would be to kill him,” Cedric heard himself saying. It took effort to control the anger in his voice. “That is Caelum’s punishment for murder.”

  Everyone was quiet.

  “Speaking like a true king already,” Merek finally said, not so much breaking as adding to the tension.

  “Merek,” Cedric said carefully. “Could I speak with you for a moment? Alone?”

  “Is that a command?”

  “A request.”

  Merek didn’t say yes or nod, but he did stand. And he did follow Cedric (very slowly) out through the back door of the house. They stood a good distance apart from each other, both facing the ocean.

  Cedric cleared his throat. “I know ‘sorry’ will never be enough . . .” He trailed off,
hoping that Merek would at least look at him.

  “Is that it?” Merek scoffed. “That is your whole apology?”

  “No, of course not,” Cedric replied, trying not to get frustrated by how Merek had to make everything difficult.

  “I should not have so easily believed you would betray us,” Cedric continued. “I should not have hurt you the way I did. There is no excuse for it.”

  Merek crossed his arms, staring over the water, stretching the moment to the edge of what was bearable, and then staying there for a few more seconds.

  “Fine. Forgiven,” he finally said. “So long as I do not have to refer to you as ‘Your Majesty.’”

  Cedric saw him smirk—for the briefest of seconds—but it was enough to know that things between them would be okay.

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” Cedric replied.

  “So we can just move on, then.”

  “Agreed.”

  After an awkward pause, Merek looked to Cedric. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

  Cedric swallowed past a small lump in his throat. “Thank you. In truth, being a king is not what I expected it to be. I thought I would have . . . more time. To prepare. I am not sure I will ever be as good as my father was.”

  Merek looked shocked, perhaps at Cedric’s honesty, and Cedric was a bit surprised at himself, too. He hadn’t spoken those words aloud since the moment the crown was put on his head.

  Merek finally gave a light snort. “That was possibly the least arrogant thing you have ever said. Maybe this place has changed you.”

  “Me?” Cedric couldn’t help responding. “Look at you. I expected that as soon as your recovery was complete, you would come through a portal after us. But here you still are, well and fine—and seemingly content.”

  “I am not sure ‘content’ is the word I would use.”

  “All right,” Cedric said, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. “But why did you stay?”

  Merek shrugged lightly. “As it turns out, I wasn’t really up for joining a revolution, fighting a wrath army, taking back the castle, all of that business. Seemed a lot of work.”

  Cedric shook his head, not buying it. “You are a lot of things, Merek. Challenging, sarcastic, irritating—”

  “Can I take back my forgiveness now?”

  “But despite all that,” Cedric continued, “you’ve never been one to back down from a fight. Not ever.”

  Merek glanced once at the door to the house before shifting his eyes back to the ocean. “Maybe I found something else to fight for,” he said, with a small shrug.

  Cedric looked through the door, to where Shannon was sitting, and wondered how much she factored into Merek’s sudden commitment to fight for this world. But he knew better than to ask about that. Instead, he followed Merek’s gaze to the ocean.

  “There is something about this place,” he said.

  “Do you know how enormous it is?” Merek asked, his eyes still on the distant waves. “Much larger than Caelum. Full of new things and opportunity. No overshadowing older brother, no disapproving father, no dreary destiny of almost-dukedom. Here, it is as if I were almost . . . free.”

  Cedric wanted badly to speak, but he didn’t want to risk ruining this moment. How could it be he and Merek felt so similarly? Had things always been like this, with the both of them weighed down by similar burdens of a set future, so concentrated on their own problems they couldn’t even see that their problems were the same?

  “I suppose you couldn’t understand that,” Merek said, after a minute passed without Cedric responding.

  “On the contrary, I do. More than you know.”

  After that, they fell into another silence, this one more comfortable. Then Merek asked after his parents and Rafe, and Cedric gave him a longer account of everything that had taken place in Caelum. When they went back inside, the others were preparing to go to bed.

  As they made their way down the corridor toward the bedrooms, Liv and Cedric trailed just a bit behind the others. She reached a doorway and stopped before it. Without thinking, Cedric stopped, too.

  From a few feet away, Cedric heard a cough. He looked up to see Joe watching them.

  “You can sleep over here, Cedric.”

  Cedric nodded quickly. “Yes. Of course.”

  Liv bit back her smile and disappeared into her room. Cedric moved away from her door, half relieved, half disappointed. Part of him dreaded talking to Liv about closing the portals permanently and was anxious to put that conversation off for another day.

  But another part of him hated to walk away from her, even for a few hours. Because if they did figure out how to close the portals forever, then a few numbered hours were all they had.

  THE DARK KNIGHT

  Teaching Cedric to drive a moped turned out to be much easier than teaching him to drive a car. The trickiest part was navigating where he would put his sword. This time, Liv knew better than to ask him to leave it behind. Getting pulled over and arrested by the police or an evacuation crew was possible, of course, but then again, having to use the sword to defend themselves was also a possibility.

  That morning, Joe had consulted the list of leads he had left and divided the group into teams. Shannon and Merek were taking her van north to a doctor’s office in Thousand Oaks. It was a slim lead—the doctor’s office had been scribbled on a piece of paper left behind in a Knight’s abandoned house, and might just as easily be the man’s actual doctor as a clue to tracking down more Knights. Liv and Cedric were on their way to a home in Orange County that may or may not have been rented by a Knight at one point in the early 2000s, according to some old tax papers Joe had found in a former Knight’s filing cabinet.

  Joe’s leads were definitely dwindling, and Liv had never felt farther from finding Martin.

  Still, her spirits weren’t exactly low as she motored south along an empty highway, Cedric at her side. It was still hard to believe he was actually back, and she had to look over at him every few moments just to confirm he was still there.

  Cedric caught Liv looking at her and smiled. He yelled something out, but his voice was swallowed by the wind.

  “What?” Liv called.

  Cedric shouted again, but again, she couldn’t hear. But she could tell from the excitement on his face that he liked riding the moped. He was taking to it much better than Merek, who scowled every time he had to approach the bike’s thin seat.

  As they neared Orange County, the orange-ish color in the sky started to thin out, looking first yellow, then fading into a more normal blue. The lead they were chasing was firmly out of Apocalypse Zone, and the OC hadn’t felt many of the effects of the earthquakes. Still, the city roads were much emptier on a weekday afternoon than normal.

  Unlike Los Angeles, with its twisty-crowded streets and buildings spanning from 1970s bungalows to modern skyscrapers to actual glass houses, Orange County was almost entirely uniform in its design. Its streets were wide and clean, and its neighborhoods were orderly. The buildings in the strip malls were all painted the same shades of white and tan, and they all had the same red tile roofs. Even the KFC looked classy.

  “Weird,” Liv murmured to herself, looking around. Orange County seemed as different a world from LA as Caelum had.

  Liv motioned with her head for Cedric to follow her, then pulled over into a giant parking lot surrounded by well-manicured shrubs and palm trees. Cedric pulled his moped over next to her.

  “These are so much better than horses,” he said, grinning.

  Liv couldn’t help but smile back. “Thought you might like it. We should be pretty close to the house from here. Snack?”

  She motioned to the pack on her moped, but Cedric shook his head. “No, but a moment’s rest would be good. I feel as though my legs are vibrating.”

  They both straddled their mopeds, only a couple feet apart from each other. It would be nothing for him to lean over and close the gap between them, nothing at all . . .

  Instead, Cedric
leaned back a fraction. “Liv.”

  She tensed and looked away, not sure she was ready to hear what he was going to say. Emotional reunion make-outs aside, he was still a king in another world, and she was committed to staying in this one. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, but the second they started that conversation again, she knew where it would lead. Whenever they were honest with each other, it seemed to close doors rather than open them.

  And she wasn’t ready for that yet. Not so soon after she’d gotten him back.

  So she pretended she didn’t hear him, instead looking quickly away to check the map in her pack. Without the use of GPS, she’d had to pull over every twenty minutes or so to make sure they were still heading in the right direction.

  “Looks like the house is just on the next street up,” she said, pointing to the starred location on the map.

  He looked a bit startled, but then nodded. And when she started her moped up again, he did the same, following just a few feet behind. Liv led him down a wide and perfectly manicured side street, where white stucco houses lined the road like a row of sturdy wedding cakes. She tried to get her mind back to the task at hand as she stopped in front of their destination, noting its functioning sprinkler system and the Lexus in the driveway.

  “That’s strange.”

  “Water spraying from the ground?” Cedric asked, eyeing the sprinklers with suspicion. “Definitely strange.”

  “Yeah. I mean, no, sprinklers are normal. But every other lead we’ve chased down has led to abandoned properties or . . . worse. It looks like someone’s actually home here.”

  “Is that not a good thing?”

  “Maybe. One way to find out, I guess.”

  She hopped off her moped and made her way up the front walk. What would she say if someone answered the door? In all their searching over the past two months, she hadn’t yet encountered a living person, one who might actually know something helpful.