Sing Down the Stars (The Celestine Series Book 1)

by L. J. Hatton

  “Weapons don’t have memories. I have to live with it.”

  “Good—keep living. You survived, Penn. That’s it. And the truth is that I can’t stand watching you flounder around like this because you think you were wrong to do it. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re a monster because the truth is—you’re not. And the person I grew up with knows that. That person, this girl”—he leaned over and tugged my lace sleeve—“knows what she has to do.”

  He stood and offered me his arm.

  “On with the show, yeah?”

  “On with the show.”

  Too bad The Show was gone.

  Soon enough, I was smushed onto a bench between Jermay and the outer arm. My shirt was too small, but the feeling was so much like the bindings that turned me from Penelope to Penn that I welcomed the pressure. The ornate tails tucked under my legs reminded me of my performance coat.

  Birdie and Winnie lingered near the door, folded into the company of local students. Klok stood behind the back row, nearly indistinguishable from the people on either side of him.

  At the priest’s signal, we all stood—though he required assistance from two others. He raised his hands and spoke a long series of things from memory; at each pause, the people around us answered back in the same manner. I moved my mouth, but I didn’t know the words.

  The comfort I’d found in the silent emptiness of the building was gone; even the highest balconies had people in them now. I couldn’t find the sense of peace that had come with watching smoke paint the ceiling. There were too many faces looking down, obscuring my view. Any one of them could have been searching for me. I reached for Jermay’s hand and held it tight. He tapped his foot against my boot.

  “Almost there,” he whispered.

  I tried to convince myself he was right, but “almost” had never seemed so far away. I held his hand tighter, until the benches were dismissed.

  Winnie and Birdie slipped out first, with the group headed to the schoolrooms in the back of the church. Once they made it outside, they’d sneak away.

  Klok would go last. Sister Mary Alban said it was customary for the workmen in attendance to stay and help with renovations in lieu of putting money in the offering box. Klok would remain with them, and find his way to the road alone as soon as the rest of us were safely gone. He’d carry Xerxes and Bijou, since the golems’ weight wouldn’t slow him down like it would the rest of us.

  That left me and Jermay.

  I took my father’s coat from the arm of the bench and put it on, snapping the clasps. Suddenly, the sleeves shrunk in, so the cuffs rested against the back of my hands; the bottom hem rose to my ankles. Around my waist, the whole thing cinched tight, as though wrapped with iron bands; each clasp fused shut.

  Sister Mary Alban had said my father made the coat, but it didn’t click that she meant it was a machine, or a thing as wondrous as any he had created. It had never moved like this when my father wore it.

  “What did you do?” Jermay asked.

  “I only fastened it.” The entire contraption hummed against my skin, and I couldn’t find a way to take it off. “Did anyone see?”

  “I don’t think so, but let’s get out of here before we find out different.”

  Jermay and I stepped into the exit line, and the crowd surged, pushing us along until we hit a bottleneck at the door.

  “It won’t come off,” I whispered. The clasps had flattened out; I couldn’t get a fingernail under any of them. “I think the river water shorted it.”

  “If you keep fidgeting, someone’s going to notice us.”

  I dropped my hands and waited for the crowd to dissipate, but we were still stuck near the doors with the people who were chatting and shaking hands. We moved forward by tiny steps, slipping into gaps as they opened.

  “What’s that sound?” Jermay asked.

  “Wind?” I guessed. The trees I could glimpse through the doors were definitely blowing hard. “Maybe a storm’s coming in.”

  That was the last thing we needed.

  “That’s rotor force,” an older man behind us said. “Been a while since I’ve seen a chopper holding over town. She must be an airlift from emergency services.”

  “Emergencies are painted orange and white,” said someone ahead of us. “And this one’s got no call letters for a hospital. She’s solid black with silver runners.”

  I stood on my toes to find a clear view of the black helicopter overhead. “It’s a sky-eye.”

  The man behind us chuckled and shook his head, probably thinking I was a silly teenager who’d heard too many ghost stories. Sky-eyes were no more real than unnoticeables . . .

  “We’ve rich folks up this way,” he said. “It’s probably an executive. If there was trouble brewing, you’d see uniforms on every corner. That’s how it was when they were overhead.”

  “We can’t.” I stepped out of line.

  “If we don’t leave now, we’re stuck,” Jermay said, but he followed me. I returned to the alcove full of candles I’d lit for my family. Fear convinced me that leaving them for all to see was the same as exposing the ones I wanted to protect.

  As I reached for the thin gold candle snuffer, Jermay licked his thumb and forefinger, then made the quick-pass hand motion his father used to put out table lights during their act; half the stand went dark.

  “They’re out. Now let’s go.” Jermay tugged on my arm. “We can get out the back way, near the charity bins. There’ll be a crowd.”

  “Wait. Listen.”

  In the near-empty sanctuary, it was easy to hear the sound of an opening door. Jermay shuffled us into the alcove’s farthest corner.

  “Who is it?” I asked. “Can you see?”

  “It’s someone headed for the confession closet.”

  I heard the clink of the bell, and allowed myself a breath.

  Another door opened from the direction of the rectory, and more footsteps came.

  “Hello, Sister.” The warden, and I didn’t believe he’d come inside to speak to the priest. “Oh. You aren’t the one I spoke to before,” he said.

  “Services are over, please go—unless you’d like to unburden your soul, in which case, God be with you.”

  It was Beryl, wearing clothes like Sister Mary Alban’s, and a new face that was fine-featured beneath a spray of blonde bangs. She tried to leave, but he stopped her by the arm.

  “I can understand your friend wanting to help a group of children being chased by armed men, but she should ask herself if such measures would be necessary if they were what they appeared to be. So should you. They’ve no place with decent folk.”

  “Then they sound like half the people who come through these doors seeking help. If you think another sister has secrets hidden away, then you’ll have to ask her how to find them, and let me get back to my own concerns.” There was no fear in her voice. “I’ve got hungry children who need herding, and a wandering pair of layabouts who need to be found and set to task. I don’t have time to talk.” She left him where he stood, sweeping out of the room.

  “What do we do?” I asked. I tried counting heartbeats to gauge the time we spent waiting, but mine kept leaping about inside my chest.

  “I’ll distract him. You run,” Jermay whispered.

  “Forget it. He’d leave you to chase me, anyway.”

  “Not if he’s got an eyeful of hot wax.” Jermay nodded toward the candles. “I said I’d distract him, not let him catch me.”

  “Maybe he’s gone.”

  “Trying to escape, are you?” The warden’s voice filled the alcove just before his body appeared at the entrance.

  Jermay’s arm tightened around my waist, while I put one foot behind me, ready to bolt.

  “Something tells me this particular sister isn’t so easily put off.” He stepped closer. “Whatever punishment g
ot you assigned to this place, I think worse might be waiting if you get caught hiding in here.”

  “Then maybe we should turn ourselves in,” Jermay said.

  “It would probably be easier,” the warden agreed. Every word he spoke felt like it had two meanings.

  One of the candles leapt back to life. It caught another, and another, until the entire row that I’d wanted extinguished was lit again. The light wasn’t bright, but its meaning was clear enough—I wasn’t alone. Somehow, Evie was with me.

  “You two haven’t seen anything strange, have you?” The warden startled, shifting focus to the candles as though deciding whether or not the flames had been lit the whole time.

  “I saw someone wearing a green dress with blue shoes—that’s strange, isn’t it?” I asked, mimicking the bubbly voice of a woman I’d heard in the crowd.

  “I guess it is.” The warden chuckled. “Off you go.”

  “Yessir,” Jermay said, his words nervously slurred and thick.

  We walked in slow motion until we’d reached the door to the hall behind the sanctuary and were on the other side. With the door shut tight behind us, it felt safe enough to risk breathing again.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Is he gone?”

  The pale blonde version of Beryl was waiting for us in the hall.

  “He didn’t know us,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “He’s only ever seen us in costumes and makeup. Dressed like this, he didn’t know us.”

  Before, I’d hoped our escape would work, but now I believed it.

  “I’m not so sure,” Jermay said. “There’s something strange about that man.”

  “Only the fact that he’s a warden,” I insisted.

  “Come on,” Beryl said. “Out the back, and let them think you’re a pair of spoiled kids who didn’t want to get their hands dirty.”

  If Winnie and Birdie had gotten away without trouble, and Klok stayed on schedule, we’d make it home to the Hollow in a day. Then we could disappear someplace Penn would never exist again. I could be Penelope proper—maybe even Penelope with Jermay.

  We made our way down the hall to the outer door, pushing it open into the sun. Long lines of people waiting for food and clothing stretched to the churchyard fence from a row of tables. We headed for a table at the front where other teens were handing out bags of provisions, and took places at one of the soup stations. Things were going smoothly until a boy beside me sloshed his ladle and splashed the boy next to him. The second boy took a swing at the first.

  The sisters who had been supervising hurried over to separate them, but didn’t get there fast enough to stop them from turning over the entire pot in their scuffle. Seeing it go over, the younger children began to cry.

  “Go,” Beryl whispered. “While they’re occupied.”

  She wasn’t the only one with that idea. The girl who had been assigned the end spot at the clothing table slipped off, unseen by the supervisors. An impatient few from the line rushed the bins, tearing through them, which made others do the same for fear they’d be left out. They were happy to fill the spaces that Jermay and I vacated.

  “Hurry,” I said. “If this gets any worse, the police will come.”

  “What about Klok?”

  Jermay nodded across the courtyard to Klok and a handful of others who were carrying large wooden seats and erecting some sort of stand, while doing their best not to hear what was going on behind them. Trouble was usually better ignored than stopped. Those who got too observant were often expected to name names.

  “Klok,” I said, under my breath. Klok inclined his head, still walking backward with his half of the load. “Follow us.”

  He finished what he was doing, then headed for our satchels, which he’d hung from a tree to collect on his way out. He crossed the bags over his chest and went to help with the next load. Once that one was in place, he’d be able to walk away behind us, without it looking like we’d left together.

  As Jermay and I neared the gates, the rumble of chaos got louder. Looking back to see what had happened wasn’t even a choice; it was a reflex.

  The altercation started between those two boys had turned into a full-scale riot. Men and women pushed their way to the front of one line; children darted between their legs to snatch whatever they could carry. The sisters ran from side to side, in an attempt to contain everything.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Sister Mary Alban said.

  No one heard her. Even if they’d been listening, they couldn’t have heard. They didn’t even hear the cracking of boards that said the staging area that Klok and the others were shoring up had taken too many hits from jostled bodies. The stops fell away, causing the piers to sway, and when the structure took one blow beyond its strength, it gave out altogether. A beam, taller than the men trying to catch it, dropped like a felled tree, racing its own shadow across the yard toward the tables.

  And then it stopped.

  Hundreds of pounds of oak, and the metal braces attached to it, ground to a flat and nearly horizontal stop two feet from Sister Mary Alban and the people who were huddled under the tables to escape the violence.

  The shouts ended, and the fighting ceased. Jermay and I quit running. Everyone’s attention shifted to the beam resting firmly in Klok’s grip on the end of his telescopic arm. He wasn’t wired to let someone be crushed; his job with The Show was to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening.

  Klok set the beam down, carefully and slowly. He knew something hadn’t gone the way he intended, but looked confused about the details. As his arm retracted, his speech screen activated, flashing blue through the scarf tied around his neck. The readout beeped. While there was no way to read it, I was certain it was an apology.

  I was just as certain that it didn’t matter.

  “He’s not human!” Dorcas shouted into the silence.

  “Dorcas . . .” Sister Mary Alban protested. “That young man just saved many lives. The nature of his body is beside the point.”

  Run, Beryl pushed into my head. Don’t stand there and stare—run!

  The crowd was buzzing with suspicion and fear, but unlike my tour, I had no control here. There were no curtains to draw or script to follow.

  “Nature!” Dorcas spat. Every tiny motion on her face registered as a separate mental image, like a movie flipping frame by frame. Each was another shredded piece of hope. Dorcas kept backing up, scrambling past the tables without turning around. “There’s nothing natural about that . . . thing. It’s alien. It has to be.”

  Alien was the worst word she could have used; it jump-started the panic a second time. She, and most of the people in the yard, ran shrieking for the church doors.

  RUN! Beryl ordered.

  “Hurry now.” Sister Mary Alban ran toward us, shooing Klok along. “We’ll have to risk the side way and get you into the alley.”

  She herded us around the courtyard to a small and dingy door that led to what had to be the oldest parts of the structure. We ran through a crumbling breezeway with crumbling walls that she warned us not to touch, stopping at a rusted gate. I heard Klok’s display rat-tat another message.

  “No need to apologize, dear,” the sister said. “I’m certainly not going to complain that I don’t have a piece of oak stuck in my skull.” She turned the lock on the gate, lifting the lever to open it. “Penn, you have the medallion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep it close.”

  Jermay and Klok slipped out. Sister Mary Alban reached over and hugged me tight.

  “Good luck, Chey-chey,” she whispered, then shoved me through.

  The church’s gate crashed off its hinges. I kept moving, trying not to trip over the lace and satin I’d coveted for so long. I twisted mid-stride to look back. The stone walls and high buildings were enough to block the signal t
hat the unnoticeables used, but the riot had given the authorities an excuse to send people into the yard. One of them grabbed Sister Mary Alban and spun her to the wall, as if they were going to arrest her.

  “Run,” she shouted, with startling calm. She pressed her palm flat to the damp stone, and suddenly it was alive with blue current that burst off in a swarm of electric bees. They spread across the alley into a barrier to guard our retreat.

  “Stop!” shouted the men caught in her electric field, and I picked up my pace, sprinting after Jermay as fast as I could. My horrendous hat slid forward so the silver ribbons fell into my eye. I ripped it off and threw it behind me, wishing it would explode like Zavel’s whirling top hat.

  Klok dropped back. His hands shot out, pulling down railings and overturning rubbish bins to create a gauntlet for those behind us.

  “It’s not enough,” Jermay said. He broke Mary Alban’s order and looked back, too. “They’ll circle around and cut us off. We have to risk Dad’s rabbit holes while we’ve got the chance to do it.”

  Rabbit holes were what Zavel called “short-range come-and-go gadgets.” My father called them quantum headaches. He didn’t like transportational technologies, as they were all based on schematics he said no human mind could have developed, but Zavel talked him into making a few small disks to use in his act. They didn’t cover much ground, but they could move just about anything up to a mile. Using one was as easy as thinking of a destination, but only when they hadn’t been submerged in river water and soaked through.

  Klok dug into one of the satchels and pulled out three black disks.

  Jermay turned his over to check for damage.

  “Cross your fingers,” he said, and threw it on the ground. It hit the pavement and began to swirl. Mine did the same right beside it.

  I pictured the next town on the map and called out: “Take me to Winnie and Birdie.” Jermay did the same. Klok beeped.

  I leapt into what felt like a strong wind. I came apart traveling through a kind of between-space one cell at a time. For a second, I felt the molecules in my body bumping against each other, settling into their rightful places, and then it all stopped, leaving me standing at the base of a hill. It wasn’t a perfect landing, but close enough.