Sing Down the Stars (The Celestine Series Book 1)

by L. J. Hatton

  CHAPTER 33

  I was so relieved to be leaving the Aerie alive that I didn’t notice Greyor wasn’t taking me to my room. Our destination didn’t fully register until I saw the jungle’s worth of plants on the other side of the door.

  This was Birch’s room.

  He jumped off the couch.

  “I can give you ten minutes,” Greyor said, pushing me farther into the room, while he stayed outside. “You need a friend right now, not a flying toy cat in an empty room.”

  I ran to Birch. After Warden Nye rewrote my history and nearly took my future, I needed to know someone cared what happened to me. Xerxes would have made me feel better, but it wasn’t the same as having a pair of human arms wrapped around me as if they would shield me from the world.

  Birch was so surprised when I grabbed him that he rocked back, but he held on.

  “I was going to wait in your room, but the warden forbade it,” he said.

  He was warm and solid, and I breathed him in with every sob against his neck. No residue of exploding powder like with Jermay, but a rustic scent of bitter leaves mixed with flowers and berries still on the vine. In my time at the Center, the wardens had very nearly succeeded in making me feel less than a real person; Greyor’s detour gave me a chance to remind myself they were wrong.

  “He collared you, didn’t he?” Birch asked.

  I’d never been comfortable around any boy besides Jermay, but it seemed impossible that I hadn’t known Birch just as long. I grasped him harder.

  “I crumpled,” I said. “The second he took it off, I crumpled.”

  “Everyone does.”

  Birch tightened his arms, and I let him. He spoke into my skin, turning each word into a stolen kiss.

  “I thought he was going to kill me. He said he’d rather see me dead than under Arcineaux’s command.”

  “Arsenic’s taking command?” The comfort in his voice turned to pure panic.

  “They haven’t decided yet . . . Birch, what did he do to you?”

  “Nothing you’ll ever hear me explain,” he said. “No need to spread the nightmares around.”

  Something happened each time his mood shifted. Every plant bloomed when Greyor first opened the door. When Birch was apologetic, they wilted in sympathy. But at the mention of Arcineaux, and the possibility that he would become master of the Center in the sky, thorns as thick as railroad spikes burst out. The comforting jungle became a dragon with too many teeth.

  “How did you do that without triggering these?” I asked and raised my wrist.

  Birch shot a look at the door to make sure it was shut. We were still near the couch, so it was easy to maneuver back to it. He blew a puff of air toward the ceiling, and one of the plants unfurled a new leaf, covering the red light.

  “They hardly ever watch me anymore, but if someone notices, I’ll tell them I was trying to impress you and got carried away.”

  He grinned as he snapped off one of the giant thorns and held it out.

  “Stab me,” Birch said.

  “What?”

  “You want to learn? Stab me.”

  I recognized the confidence in his voice, so I wrapped my hand around the thorn and jabbed it into his thigh. He winced in pain, swallowing the yelp.

  “I’m sorry! I thought you’d stop me.”

  “And I thought you’d go for my hand.” He batted away my best attempts at triage.

  “Your leg was a bigger target. Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “And that’s the point. None of us can use our abilities to protect ourselves; it’s how the restriction protocol is designed. That’s why they think they have the upper hand.”

  “You could have just told me that! Are you okay?”

  He laughed at me.

  “You’re adorable when you’re worried,” he said, and all my concern drained away.

  “I still have the thorn, Root-rot.”

  “I surrender,” he said, teasing. “I’m better than most. For some, the protocols stay in place even if the bands are removed. Arsenic found a way to embed them permanently.”

  “On the girls?” I asked.

  “On my friends.” Birch rubbed the back of his neck. A cluster of thorny spikes fell from the ceiling, sticking fast in the floor, and a new crop of short, white flowers appeared along the rug. They looked suspiciously like hemlock.

  Now it made sense why Winnie hadn’t saved herself from Tuck and Bull—she couldn’t. All she could do was tell them to walk away, and that wouldn’t even work on Tuck because of his bad ear.

  “Try again.” Birch changed the subject, laying his palm against the table. “You won’t be able to, I promise.”

  Reluctantly, I slashed the thorn toward Birch’s palm. Halfway there, it morphed, and wrapped around my wrist as a delicate flowered chain.

  “What—”

  “I can’t stop you from stabbing me, but I can decide to make you a bracelet from a thorn,” he said, very pleased with himself. “These”—he raised his wrists—“register emotion. Control what they can see, and they’re not much of a deterrent without the collar.” Birch laid his hand over my wrist, turning the bracelet back into a thorn, which he threw aside. He waved his hand and the leaf curled away from the surveillance light in his ceiling. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on the restriction bands. I’ve tried.”

  “But there are other ways,” I insisted. “Fill the engines with chrysanthemums, and you could bring this whole place down.”

  “And then what?” Birch got off the couch and started collecting the wilted leaves and thorns that had formed and fallen during his lesson, dumping them in his wastebasket. “Everyone dies—including us. What good is that?”

  “Then do something less drastic: Fill their clothes with poison oak. Run pollen through the vents and leave them sneezing. Anything to prove you’re a real person, and not some robot that can only do what he’s told!”

  “I can only do what they tell me.” I saw that raw spark in him, again, but it faded quickly. “I’m afraid not to. I’m afraid of the pain, Penelope.”

  This time, I was the one following him. It was a circular game of chase that never ended as we moved around the room.

  “Please don’t hate me,” he said sadly. “I can’t stand it.”

  “I don’t hate you, Birch, but I can’t sit here pretending this is okay—it’s not. Nothing you do or say can change that.”

  “What if it could?”

  “Birch—”

  He shushed me, biting his lip as he glanced around the room. He placed his face beside my ear, so close I thought that he might really kiss me this time, and whispered: “I know where they’re keeping your brother.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Greyor’s promised ten minutes ended too soon, and he refused to spare me even a second longer. I had no chance to explain to Birch that my brother was dead.

  “If Nye checks, you have to be in your room,” Greyor said. “Another show of defiance would be a disaster.”

  So the good little prisoner returned to her cell, and Birch promised to come and get me when it was safe, despite Greyor’s warning that we shouldn’t be prowling around when he wasn’t on shift. Hopefully Birch didn’t mean some point in the distant future when Arcineaux was no longer underfoot.

  Greyor escorted me to my own room, but the empty hall was too easy to fill with unpleasant scenarios of what could go wrong. I had to speak to distract myself.

  “Was Nye lying about who put Evie in that cell?”

  “People like your sisters could end droughts and stop floods. They could clean the air around factories, or raise new farmland, but people like Warden Files only see them for their destructive potential. Fear of fire is primal; he wants to wield that.” He kept his eyes forward. It was a peculiar habit of people in the Center. They neve
r looked at anyone when they spoke.

  My poor Evie.

  The gift that had brought squeals of delight to countless children who loved watching Samson jump and play would now be a curse drawing screams of agony.

  “Warden Files was the bald fellow at the table,” Greyor said. “I didn’t know she’d been assigned to him.”

  My heart was breaking into smaller pieces each time some new horror smashed against it. If not for the stays inside my dress, my heart would have crumbled like powdered glass and landed at my feet. If I’d never known how close Evie was, losing her again wouldn’t have hurt so much.

  “What about Winnie?” I asked. “Will Arcineaux take her with him?”

  “He’ll try.”

  What I knew of Arcineaux made me just as certain, but there was a new determination in Greyor’s face I hadn’t seen before.

  Life was so much simpler when the Commission was a single, massive monster, but on the inside, it was full of parasites chewing away at the whole.

  Back in my cell, a lifetime passed for every minute I had to wait before Birch came. I tried distracting myself by helping Xerxes train, using random objects in the room for targets, but I couldn’t concentrate well enough to keep them in the air. After I dropped the third book on his head, he stomped to his basket in a huff.

  “Sorry,” I offered, but he snapped his wings closed over his back and shut me out, stubborn as my father.

  I was back to worrying that Birch might regret saying what he had, and that he’d lose his nerve or run confessing to Warden Nye. Could I trust him to keep his word when he said he wouldn’t hurt me?

  I clutched at my throat, imagining the collar back in place.

  It was after midnight before Birch finally appeared. The guard who had replaced Greyor for the night tromped along behind us, not daring to say I wasn’t allowed out of my room.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.” Birch was like a kid in a strange school, doing something reckless to impress a new friend.

  We took the path through the glassed walls of the wheel. The night was clear and bright, with the moon framed by the window. It had whittled down to a barely there sliver. Stars gathered, twinkling around it, and in the distance a tiny streak flared and died. I made a wish; Evie needed all the help she could get.

  “You’re prettier than your pictures,” Birch said.

  He’d stopped with me, while I gazed out the window into the endless blank of a sky with no upper limit, and no ground to be seen below. The moon’s light made our skin glow. It caught his hair where red specks turned to gold near the ends and turned his eyes to the sort of glittering emeralds stolen from idols in adventure movies—every bit as green as Jermay’s were blue. The golden flecks of lace that covered my hands and underpinned my gown glittered beneath the blue.

  Illusion was becoming more real than reality.

  “It’s the dress mixed with lack of sleep,” I told him. “Lime trousers and pinstripes don’t flatter anyone.”

  I shook my head, took a deep breath, and started walking again. Penn wasn’t beautiful; she looked like a boy. She was uncomfortable in dresses and blushed when Jermay said she looked pretty.

  Penn hated Penelope.

  “Keep moving, Root-rot,” I said.

  When we reached the greenhouse, the guard stayed outside. My reputation had grown since supper, and no one was certain of the protection afforded them by the restriction bands. The doors closed behind us, and Birch finally relaxed, letting out a breath.

  “I was afraid he might try and come in,” he said. “We’d have been sunk.”

  “What are we doing here? You said—”

  Birch held a finger up, then pointed it sideways. One of the trees bent toward us; he stepped onto the closest branch and held out a hand for me.

  “Private lift,” he said with a grin.

  “I’ve been on this ride before,” I said. “It didn’t end well.”

  “Would you believe that was a malfunction?”

  “No.”

  “I think you proved there’s no point in stranding you.”

  “Then what—”

  “There are many reasons I love this room,” he said. I let him pull me up beside him, and the tree began to move, shrinking down in a spiral until we were beside the catwalk of a lower level. “And you’re the only one who knows them. They guard the elevators; no one cares about trees.”

  The floor we came out on was metal, like the others, but this one had a bluish tint to it, as though it had been exposed to high heat, or a chemical wash.

  Birch ducked back against the wall before we crossed into a connecting hall, barely missing the pair of guards on patrol.

  “Security’s higher down here,” he whispered when they’d passed. “Watch your step.”

  They’d created a paradox for him. The rules had to be obeyed, but the real Birch was fighting his way out of his own subservience.

  “Birch . . .” I said cautiously. “Do you know your twin’s name?”

  “What’s it matter? I’ll never see her.” His voice turned hard. “The warden told me they don’t keep birth pairs together. It’s too dangerous.”

  An oddly compassionate lie, kind of like giving a sad little boy a supposed letter from his parents.

  “I never knew my brother’s name, either. He died when I was born.”

  Birch stopped with a confused scowl on his face.

  “He’s dead? I must have misunderstood.”

  He plucked one of the clips out of my hair and laid it against the wall. Its teeth sprouted vines and leaves, snaking up the bare wall toward the ventilation shaft at the top.

  “I heard them speaking about a Level-Five from the circus. I assumed they meant your brother.”

  A large trumpet blossom opened on the vines between us, and Birch pressed it toward my ear. Voices came through, grainy and distant like a degraded recording.

  “That’s Arcineaux!” I clapped a hand over my mouth and whispered, “Is that really him?”

  “He must be in Warden Nye’s private rooms. I listen in on him all the time,” Birch preened. “No one knows it, of course.”

  The voices through the trumpet started again; I set my ear closer.

  “Nye’s been wrapped up in Roma’s world for years! I don’t believe he never noticed there was something off about that girl! He’s up to something, and we’ll all be worse off for it.”

  Arcineaux was furious.

  “Let our host wager his life on his temperamental prize,” a female voice added. I was pretty sure she was the woman who had sat beneath the leak when I lost my temper. “In the end, she’ll cost him more than his position. The other assets on the table are far more stable.”

  “Agreed.” That was the voice of the silver-haired man who had been so antagonistic. “I’d say lady’s choice, but—”

  “Not necessary,” the woman cut in. “I’ve already secured the hydrokinetic. That leaves two. Any preferences, or does it come down to Rock, Paper, Scissors?”

  They were handing out my sisters like cigars after drinks, and the mystery woman had taken Nim. I choked on a sob. Birch tried to take the trumpet from me, but I curled over it to keep it from him.

  “Do you recognize the voices?” I asked softly, but he shook his head.

  “Wardens don’t bother to introduce themselves to me.”

  I needed Greyor. If the wardens left before I escaped, names would be the only way to find them.

  “While it seems an odd idea to bring filth into one’s home,” the female warden continued, “I’ve seen terrakinetics find veins of precious metal in dead mountains—or level them. And the wind-walker? I’ve had men offer three months’ pay for a look at mine.”

  “I want the Singh girl. She’s a menace, but she’s mine, and she was
with the prisoners when they were captured; my man saw her. He was preparing to have her transferred into my custody when Nye hid her away. She was in active study; I want her back!”

  “Take what’s offered, Arcineaux,” the silver-haired man warned him.

  “Fine,” Arcineaux spat. “I’ll settle for the dust mite, and the next time Nye sets foot on solid ground it will be my pleasure to watch her bury him.”

  “Make it stop,” I cried. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  The trumpet and its vine dissolved, leaving me with a clip of withered leaves.

  “Arcineaux’s taking Anise, but I don’t know the other two. I’ll never find them, Birch.”

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to help, and now I’ve made it worse.”

  With my worry over Anise and the others, I’d nearly forgotten Birch’s mistake.

  “Can we still get to him?” I asked.

  Whoever he found wasn’t my brother, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t someone worth finding. If Birch really heard the warden mention another Level-Five, that made whoever he found an asset.

  “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?” he asked.

  “If we’re lucky.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Birch truly had no idea how remarkable he was, and once he figured it out, I wouldn’t be the one the wardens had to fear. The boy Arcineaux delighted in intimidating could move at will through the Center’s securest areas by lifting himself into the ceiling vents. He did it too quickly and too easily—no way was this the first time.

  We crossed a heavily secured floor inside the air system, watching through a grate as a trio of men hovered around a body with a view screen for a voice box.

  “Birch! You’re brilliant!” I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I kissed him on the cheek.

  “You know him?”

  “Klok’s part of The Show.” And definitely an asset.

  He was in much the same state Evie had been, only clusters of hornet-shaped hummers stuck out of his body. I was quickly losing hope for Jermay and Birdie.