Sing Down the Stars (The Celestine Series Book 1)

by L. J. Hatton

  Maybe I nodded, because he started pulling the edges, trying to find a seam or a clasp.

  “Fell in the river.” I either said it, or thought it, but either way, he understood.

  “The water damaged it?”

  What did it matter? It was just a pretty coat that smelled like my father, and now it was giving me a hug because he wasn’t there to do it. It was wrapping me tight, trying to protect me from this horrible man, and soon Jermay would reappear and we’d be at the Hollow.

  I felt myself fall. Odd, since I didn’t remember getting up.

  “Take me home,” I whispered.

  The world turned to a wall of light, drawing me in, and I tumbled happily into the abyss as the warden screamed behind me.

  CHAPTER 16

  I thought I was dead.

  The rabbit hole had torn me to atoms this time, and it was impossible to breathe without lungs. My mind drifted out of the pain into a beautiful place where the train and The Show still existed. A string of paper lanterns was the last thing I saw.

  It was also the first.

  As I opened my eyes, the lanterns blurred into a smudge of vibrant dots, made of hues not possible in the real world. I was out of the warden’s reach. I could go looking for my mother the way Zavel spoke of seeing his late wife again in death—but then I heard a voice.

  “Are you magic?”

  It was a child’s voice, young and female, and dripping with the curiosity of a Show patron longing for proof that our illusions were real.

  If this was the afterlife, why was it a stranger who greeted me? Why did I hurt? My ribs clenched, aching like I’d embraced the Constrictus; pain crackled down my arms. My head was a stone soldered to my neck.

  Something had gone wrong.

  “Are you?” the child asked again. Her excitement curdled with impatience.

  “I’m Penn,” I said, sitting up from death in the middle of an empty field.

  It was dusk. My mouth was dry, as though I’d slept long hours without waking for a drink. Overhead, that line of lanterns hung bright and round.

  “You appeared out of nowhere. You have to be magic,” the girl insisted.

  Now that I could see her, she appeared to be the mix of clean and dirty that came from a mother who insisted her children wash their hands and face, no matter how stained their clothes had become. She was Birdie’s size, and she had absolutely no business being in a field alone.

  “Stop talking and start climbing,” a voice called down from a tree. “Who cares where she came from so long as she ain’t a cop? You’re not, are you?”

  Where the branches met the trunk was a boy of ten or eleven who had gotten his last pair of jeans at eight. He was trying to cut one of the lanterns down, and having no luck at all.

  “I’m no cop,” I told him, and he nodded.

  “Didn’t think so. They don’t usually show up bleeding.”

  “Bleeding?”

  “Unless that’s your brain leaking out of your skull.”

  I reached for my brow line and found a ridge of dry blood from cutting myself in the scuffle.

  The boy put his knife between his teeth and scooted out along a branch, shaking the lantern with both hands. It still refused to budge, but began to glow along with the others, inverse to the darkening sky.

  My body was tingling in the aftermath of panic, and my hands shook so badly that I had to hide them in fists. I wasn’t dead at all.

  On the ground, something caught my eye. It would have been easy to take for a stick, but bits of metal were still visible. It was one of Birdie’s burnt-out sparklers. A breeze moved through the field, lifting fallen leaves to expose other debris mixed among the mulch. The corner of a torn flier, and half an admission ticket for the Caravan of Wonder. Confetti paper, trampled and dulled by the elements.

  “Is this where The Show stopped last?” I asked, crumbling bits of confetti off my fingers. Most of it was singed from the explosion. Somehow I’d overlooked the charred swath of grass.

  “Where you been, you don’t know that?” the boy asked. “Up a tree, like me?”

  “Under a bush, actually.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah.” The boy was now trying to free the lantern by hacking away at the branches to see what held it in place. “Commission lifted the train right off the tracks, then lifted the tracks, too. Nobody bothers with paper, so they left the lanterns.”

  If they truly thought those lanterns were plain paper, they deserved to lose them.

  “Of course, the way this lot’s going, there might be no taking them down without taking the tree!” He laughed.

  “Then why not leave them?” I asked.

  “People buy Show stuff,” the girl said. “A couple of those shiny balls knocked loose in the fight; each one was worth two days’ eats. A whole string, and we’re rich!”

  “Shut it, Lizzie!” the boy hissed. “Keep spilling our business, and you can thank yourself for your empty stomach.”

  “What’d I spill?” Lizzie set her hands on her hips. “You told her my name. She can see you’re up that tree, and you sure didn’t climb it hunting squirrel meat and jay eggs.” Now she crossed her arms, looking sadly at the ground. “Don’t matter anyway. You still can’t cut none that didn’t fall.”

  No one could who wasn’t Show-born. Our lanterns were like everything else in my father’s repertoire. They responded only to those who knew the trick.

  They were such a tiny thing compared to all I’d lost, but seeing them was an omen. The Show had survived in some small capacity.

  “Let me,” I said.

  The boy looked at me like I was crazy, but he’d been at it long enough that he was willing to take a break. I whistled the sound cue for the lanterns’ release, and the branches began to move.

  “Whazzat?” the boy cried, hanging on to his perch as tight as he could.

  “I told you she was magic!” The girl clapped.

  The leaves near the boy’s head rustled, parting to allow a string to drop. A mechanical spider slid down to my eye level.

  “Pack it up,” I instructed.

  The spider zipped back into the tree and unceremoniously clipped the tie to each lantern, dropping them like overripe fruit. When the spider was done, it returned to the string, and transferred to my shoulder.

  Lizzie gathered as many lanterns as she could carry, but the boy was more cautious as he lowered himself from the tree.

  “That ain’t magic, and it ain’t human. What’s that make you?” he asked.

  “Someone who’d rather see you trade ’em for eats than some tosspot trade ’em for worse. Just mind who you sell to. Word of The Show brings trouble.”

  “Then I guess I’d best not mention you, eh?”

  “Best not.”

  “Done deal.” The boy snatched up the lanterns and ran with a hasty “Come on, Lizzie” shouted over his shoulder as he made for a pair of bicycles, one with a wagon tied to it.

  I sat beneath the tree, letting the spider crawl from the back of one hand to the other while I tried to piece together what had happened.

  One second I was at the mercy of a man who couldn’t decide if he wanted to defend or shoot me. The next, my body had followed my wandering mind. If not for the persistent ache in my chest and creeping current along my arms, I’d have thought myself unconscious, and dreaming.

  The space between The Show’s final performance and the road was miles and cities. No rabbit hole had that kind of range. Even at a full sprint, and with assistance from the river, it took hours to cross on foot. So, how had I returned in a blink and a flash?

  “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?” I asked the spider.

  It crawled up to my neck and spun a thread to hang there like a pendant.

  “Not what I was hoping for,” I grumbled.

  I patted
my coat for pockets to see if my father had stashed anything in them, but there was nothing, not even dust or grime to say I’d walked a single step. I’d gone from there to here, literally on a wish and a prayer.

  And then, like the clearing of fog with the rising sun, clarity came.

  A traveling coat, Sister Mary Alban had called it, and then explained its flaw. The rhythm was off.

  The coat’s purpose solidified as a fact I must have known my whole life, but let slip. I suddenly understood, as if the coat were explaining itself to me the same way the creeper lights had. My father had been building this coat for my mother—it was a contingency plan, a quick exit to anywhere if he couldn’t protect her anymore.

  “Take me to the Hollow!” I cried hopefully.

  I shook the coat’s hem.

  “Put me on the road with Jermay!”

  Still nothing.

  “They need my help,” I cried, but the coat refused my logic. “I need them! I need . . . I need to not panic.”

  I picked up Mary Alban’s medallion, closed it between my hands, and thought of the sanctuary with its rows of benches. The ceiling with its centuries of smoke and soot. The candles I’d lit for my family.

  In my mind, they flared to life again, the way I wished I could get a response out of the coat.

  “Help me,” I whispered. “I am the daughter of Magnus Roma, and I need your help. Please—help me.”

  A familiar tightening squeezed my chest; the coat’s pattern of circuits and wires blazed, searing into my skin. Spots and streaks replaced the branches over my head. Then the world went dark.

  CHAPTER 17

  The coat became as unforgiving as Evie’s brass corset. Breathing was only a wish and memory until the mechanism eased, leaving me bruised to my lungs. I landed on my back, arms limp, with hands too weak to reach for anything. I couldn’t turn my head, but staring at the ceiling was enough to prove my last thought had brought me to the church.

  What had been a safe haven now felt like a tomb.

  Determination became both my fuel and my distraction, allowing me to limp down the aisle to the stand that people could use to wash their hands as they entered the building. I used the cloth beneath the bowl to wet my head and clean the blood off my face.

  It was too dark, and the light through the windows was the wrong color, far past twilight. The coat didn’t just skip miles, it seemed. It skipped time, as well, and I made a mental note to ask my father if it was sewn from the same material as rabbit holes.

  If I ever found him, that is.

  I was overcome with the desire to light another candle and leave something shining here like the lanterns in that field, but the vestibule had changed, too. Candle stands and tables lay toppled. Wax had splashed the walls. Dried rivers of it ran along the floor, joining the fallen one-to-another where they’d made their final stand arm-in-arm.

  I reached for a candle. The wax sealing it to the floor snapped beneath my fingers, and a similar sensation splintered through my body, rattling veins and bone. My last scrap of control died shrieking in an inferno that gave birth to a rage stronger than any I’d ever felt. It seared through my hands until I would have sworn my fingers were shafts of light in place of skin.

  A flame appeared atop the candle’s wick, reminding me of Samson, burning bright. It was the light missing from Evie’s eyes the night we lost the train. It was the worry on Jermay’s face, and even Klok’s, when they came to save me and Winnie, and it was Birdie’s scream for fear that the warden would execute her on a lonely road. The heat notched higher, burning through my better judgment, and the candle turned to a molten lake inside my palm.

  Shaking, I brushed my hand clean and stared at it. I pried another candle from the floor, held it up, and thought of fire.

  Nothing happened.

  “Come on, burn!”

  I clenched my fist tight enough to drive the imprint of my fingernails into the soft skin, ran through every foul emotion I could muster, and imagined the warden’s horrible, smiling face, but it seemed I was only a flare—one quick flash that extinguished itself as soon as it formed. I didn’t have time to waste figuring out why.

  I tossed the candle aside, and focused all of my concentration on a destination.

  “Take me to the Hollow,” I told my coat—but I didn’t move.

  I stomped my foot and tried jumping in place. I only landed back on my feet.

  Why wouldn’t it work?

  When I’d asked for home, the coat took me to the train’s final stop; when I thought of the church candles, it took me to the sanctuary, so what—

  Of course. I had no touchstones of sight or sound to guide the mechanism inside the coat. I didn’t know what the Hollow looked like. I knew how to find the door, but there was no image on a map to mark it. I’d not been inside the actual house since I was a newborn. I couldn’t remember it.

  So where did that leave me? Alone, and confined to locations I could picture in my head?

  Most everywhere I’d been was seen from the train’s window while we were in motion. Those towns were distant and in the wrong direction. My mind drifted to places I was only allowed to visit in the company of my father or sisters—like the building with the ankh on the side that my father refused to let me enter because I was too young.

  He had left me and Vesper outside with Nim, but took Anise and Evie with him. I remember Vesper crying because Nim told us that if we were bad children, she’d shove us through the door and they’d never let us leave—this building was the place where touched children were collected and sequestered. My father said she made it up to be cruel, but when he’d emerged from that building, he was running, and so was Evie. He was carrying Anise, though she was too big.

  Anise had her hands over her ears, and her face was stricken. She was hiccuping from trying to swallow her tears; every time she did, the building’s stones cracked. One great rumble sent the ankh crashing to the sidewalk. I’d never seen metal break like glass, but the symbol ended up as a pile of pieces.

  Nim and Vesper ran after our father, but I was more curious than smart. I looked through the door.

  I saw faces with eyes that turned dark and hollow while I watched; once they faded, they never blinked. It took a long time and many overheard whispers to understand that I had seen death—the aftermath of a botched escape, maybe a rescue gone wrong. I never asked, but from that point, I was a very good child. I didn’t want to be sent back.

  That building stayed with me like Brick Street stayed with Nagendra, and for weeks, I woke screaming, rocking in bed until my father came to calm me down. I could hear monsters clanging in the halls and feel their breath on my neck. They shook my room with their giant hands, and tried to drown me in a fiery river.

  That was the image that came to me in the church. Death exploded into full view inside my head. That building came into ultraclear focus. Time and nightmares added details I wasn’t sure I ever actually saw: individual blades of grass beneath security lights, vermin sneaking through the fences to see what they could scavenge.

  My arms began to burn.

  “No!” I cried out loud when the coat clenched. “Not there. Don’t take me there!”

  I tried to hold on, grasping at the wall stones for an anchor, but it was too late; I was already on the move.

  A line of green appeared in place of the vestibule, giving me barely enough warning to close my eyes before I fell, tasting dirt.

  There’d been a point, between here and there, where everything stopped, pain included. For that brief moment, I was a creature of air, with all the substance of one of Vesper’s owls, listing through the atmosphere. But that respite was over. One by one, my nerves reattached, bounded on all sides by prickly leaves. I was at the base of a holly hedge. The coat’s effects were getting worse, pressing my already bruised ribs beyond where I thought they would break, to wh
ere I welcomed the relief of tension that would come if they did.

  I placed my hands palm down, testing my arms to make sure I hadn’t impaled them as I fell. A snout pushed through the hedge, snuffling my fingers and face with hot puffs of breath that left my cheek damp. Dark fur around the animal’s nose and mouth was visible only because of the contrast with its teeth, which I had a clear view of once it began to growl.

  It whined, pulling back to make room for tan front paws with pointed nails it used to dig a trench. The snout came back, growling again. I slid sideways under the bush, but hit the side of a building. I tightened my right hand on a rock, ready to smash the dog in the face.

  “Baxter!”

  I’d been breathing shallow, fighting the instinct to gulp air now that I was able, for fear of making noise, but at the sound of the man’s shout, I stopped breathing at all. The gravity of my predicament was worse than I’d allowed myself to think.

  I was in my childhood nightmare.

  This was an official building—if there were dogs, there had to be guards to go with them.

  “Baxter!”

  The dog ignored the call, digging deeper until enough dirt gave way beneath his feet that he could slide into the tunnel he’d created, and I found myself inches from his snarling yap.

  “Go away,” I whispered as he growled. Apparently, to Baxter this sounded like “Grab my arm and pull.” He clamped his jaws around the sleeve, near my wrist. His teeth sunk just deep enough to hit current, and he jumped back, yelping.

  “Hopper bit back this time, did she?” the guard asked in a familiar voice. “Serves you right.”

  Carefully, I leaned into the trench that Baxter had made to get a look at the person who had him by the collar. So this was what Coffee Bean did on the nights he wasn’t dosing random strangers who came looking for a meal.

  Baxter lunged against his hold.

  “No you don’t,” he said, snapping a leash on the collar and winding it around his hand. “You dig up one more bush, and I’ll catch fire for it.” C. B. dropped to his knees, so he and the dog were roughly the same height. “You’re lucky I like you, you worthless mutt,” he said, ruffling Baxter’s fur.