Someone knocks at the door. Morgan? Pens voice. Are you all right? Youve been in there forever.
I thought you were in bed, I say.
I couldnt sleep, and I wanted to make sure you hadnt drowned.
Ill be out in a minute. The waters gone cold anyway. I wring out my wet hair, dry off, and slip into my nightgown.
When I open the door, Pen is waiting in the hallway, holding a lantern. Its orange glow picks up the bags under her eyes, and I can see all at once how troubled shes been, despite her best efforts to conceal it.
Im not tired, she whispers. Are you?
No, I say, although its a lie. I will stay awake all night if theres a chance shell finally be honest with me. She is much more likely to reveal her secrets at night, when the sleeping world will be undisturbed by her whispering voice.
She smiles. Do you want to go for a midnight walk?
We dont bother with our shoes. We tiptoe barefoot down the steps and through the front door.
Unlike earlier, the nights wind is mellow and warm. The moon outshines our lantern, nearly full and bright white.
As soon as weve stepped into the grass, I can feel the cool earth under my feet, astoundingly like the ground back home. Pen moves forward, and when I dont follow, she turns to face me. Arent you coming?
I wriggle my bare toes in the grass and stare down at it. I have never seen the heaps of soil being flown down from Internment. Ive only heard about it from Nim. I imagine Internment filled with craters so wide that you could look through them and see the ground below.
I was just thinking about home, I say. About what King Ingram is going to tell us, if he plans to tell us anything at all.
Pen takes my hand, leads me away from the hotel. Come on. Theres something I want to show you.
She leads me to the amusement park, and I climb the fence after her without question, happy to see whatever it is she wants to show me. Maybe it will be something other than tonic this time. Maybe it will give me some insight into this distance shes built between herself and everyone else in this world.
I expect her to lead me to the telescopes. Thats where I find her sometimes. But instead she leads me to the giant teacups, sitting inanimate in the moonlight. She is still clutching the lantern when she kneels beside one of the saucerschipped but still bright greenand reaches beneath it, somewhere in the mechanism that would cause it to spin.
Eventually she finds what she was looking for: several pieces of paper folded together. Whatever is on those pages must be important, if she would keep them all the way out here.
Is this because I discovered her request paper all those months ago? Does she think Ill go rifling through her things when shes not in our room? I havent. I would never. But sometimes, when I hear her tossing and turning, muttering through her nightmares about the harbor, I would do anything to know what is happening in her mind.
Here. She hands me the lantern, and then she swings one leg over the teacups rim, then the other. She takes the lantern back so I can climb in after her.
Inside the teacup is a metal wraparound bench, and she sits so close to me that my wet hair dampens her shoulder.
She spreads the papers open on the small table before usthe one that we would twist if we wanted the teacup to spin. Now that the king is back, we have to find a way to stop him, she says. Her eyes are on the pages. If we dont, I think were in real trouble.
I stare at the pages, lit up by the moon and the lantern, and as always, I dont understand. I see Pens steadily drawn lines. I see a circle and a small floating silhouette that could be Internment. I see numbers drifting around it like birds.
Pen shuffles through the pages like a madman. Ive been reading up on the sunsets. The sun goes down about a minute earlier every day, except about once a week or so when it goes down two minutes earlier.
She looks at me to be sure Im following along. Okay, I say. Ive never paid too much attention to the sunset, but I know that were at the time of year when we lose a bit of light each day. So?
So, she says. For the past few months, Ive been keeping a grid of where Internment sits in the sky, and where the sun should be. Every day I look through the same telescope at the same angle.
She points to Internments shape on each of the pages before us, as though I should know what were looking at.
I dont understand.
She looks at me, and I can see how tired her face is, how worried. But her eyes are bright, the way they always are when shes onto something important. Internment is sinking. Not very much, but a bit each month. Enough that its bound to be a problem if this keeps up.
I can only stare at the pages as these words sink in. In her ever steady hand Pen has drawn the outline of the clock tower, protruding above the mass of apartment buildings. Scraggly roots jut from the torn underbelly of the floating city. The sun, a perfect circle, is at a distance, held in the pure white sky by tiny equations I cant decipher.
There are two versions of Pen. There is the silly, spontaneous, and brutally blunt girl I know, and then there is the side of her that can ingeniously solve these mysteries. It is frightening what she is capable of.
Can you be sure? I say.
The professor helped me with the algorithm. She gnaws on her lower lip guiltily. Id been visiting him before he died.
I suppose she expects me to feel betrayed. And I do, in a way, but I am also relieved. I knew she was off somewhere; Im only grateful it wasnt with a bottle.
It must be all the mining, I say. We dont know how much soil King Ingrams men bring back on each shipment.
It would have to be a lot of soil to affect Internments weight, Pen says. More soil than could possibly be fitting into those jets. Internment is thousands of times their size. I dont think its that.
What, then?
Pen shuffles through the papers until she finds a full-page drawing of Internment. The accuracy and scale is stunning, as though shed sat in the sky and sketched its likeness. She has drawn a bubble around the city in rough overlapping lines.
When your brother went to the edge, it was the wind that threw him back. The wind was moving sideways, like a current around the city. Have you ever noticed the way clouds that get too close to Internment seem to zip past us?
Those clouds get caught up in the wind that surrounds the city, I say. And you think that wind is part of whats keeping Internment afloat?
I have several theories about what keeps Internment afloat, but I do think the wind is a big factor, Pen says. When we left the city in the metal bird, we went under the city, through the dirt. But King Ingrams jet lands and departs from the surface.
It flies through the wind, I say, understanding.
She nods eagerly. And disrupts it. Maybe even weakens it. Its a slight change for now, but over the course of years, it could knock Internment from the sky completely.
Her voice is excited, the way it always is when she is explaining things. But in the silence that follows, she remembers the magnitude of what shes said, and I feel it too. Internment is not only being ravaged by this worlds greedy king; it could be knocked right out of the sky.
King Ingram wouldnt care if he knew, I say.
No. Why should he? Hell have what he wants. Even if Internment crashed right into Havalais, hed stand clear and let people die like he did at the harbor.
I look at Pen. How do we stop it?
She shrugs. I say we kill King Ingram.
Be serious.
I am, rather.
Yes, okay, I say. Well just walk right up to his castle, and well knock on the door, and then well stab him with the knife you keep under your pillow. I cant find any fault in that. But suppose we come up with a backup plan.
Theres only one person I trust who has access to the king, Pen says. And Id trust him with a secret, too. After all, hes lived his entire life never letting anyone know hes third in line to the throne.
Nimble? I say. One night after too much drinking, Birdie confided in us that her father was the kings secret bastard, and that she and her siblings were princes and princesses. Later when she was comatose after the bombings, Nim confirmed it.
He hates King Ingram as much as I do, Pen says. The king is the reason his brother is dead. The king is the reason the princess was taken away from him. He has no reason to care about Internment, but he cares about her, and shes up there. Hell want to help us.
A light breeze coasts along the ground, bringing the salt of the endless ocean, rustling the grass and causing some rusted metal thing within the park to squeak.
The papers rattle, and Pen organizes them with affection and folds them along their crease.
Should we talk to him tomorrow? I say.
We wont have to wait until then. Pen nods up at the telescope at a distance. In the moonlight I can just see a dark outline clutching one of the telescopes aimed at Internment. He comes here every night and drops coin after coin into that thing so he can stare up at the city. He would never be able to see her, though. At best those lenses make a blurry faraway view bigger and blurrier.
I feel a pain in my chest, watching him. He lives in this vast world that goes on forever until it wraps around to where it started again. There are trains and biplanes and ferries and elegors that can take him anywhere. But he cannot reach the girl he loves up in her kingdom in the sky.
I hear him sneaking out sometimes at night, Pen says. The poor fool. She heaves a deep breath then blows out the lantern.
We climb one after the other from the teacup, through the man-made labyrinth of gears and metal pieces until we reach the stairway to the telescopes.
It is here that we hesitate. As pressing as the matter is, neither of us wants to interrupt this intimate sadness.
But we dont have to. He heard us approach, and after a few seconds, when the telescope must have expired, he comes to the top of the staircase and looks down at us.
Bit late for a stroll, isnt it, girls? he says in his breezy Havalais accent.
Pen is clutching the papers to her chest. We have something to tell you, she says.
We sit on the wooden planks beside the telescopes, Pens drawings spread out between the three of us like a deck of morbid cards.
Throughout Pens explanation, Nimble said nothing and asked no questions. He only stared with that pensive expression he gives when his father is discussing politics. Now he reaches forward to touch Internments outline on one of the sketches. So much detail, he says. There must be an atlas in your head. It must be so exhausting.
He looks up at us, smiling grimly. Celeste and I predicted something like this happening. Not exactly this, per se, but that King Ingrams greed about the phosane would make him reckless. We knew Internment was in jeopardy.
We already have the riddle, then, I say. Whats the answer?
You girls arent the only ones unhappy with King Ingram, Nim says. It isnt just the people of Internment who have cause to hate him. Theres been a lot of unrest down here since the bombing at the harbor. I have a boy who works as one of the kings guards who has been feeding me intelligence. His niece was killed in the bombing.
Thats awful, I say.
What kind of intelligence? Pen says.
So far its all just been a lot of angry chatter, Nim says. The refinery has caused some people in the heart of the city to become sick. Water comes out of the pipes smelling like sulfur. After the bombings, this phosane was supposed to make everything better, and it has only caused more problems. King Ingram has the phosane, but he doesnt know what to do with it. Hes a politician, not a scientist. The scientist who initially discovered its usefulness is dead now, and theres speculation that Dastor would know a thing or two about refining it, but as for our kingdom, Havalais has yet to see this miracle fuel in action and theyre beginning to doubt it exists.
It exists, Pen says. Down here you call it phosane, but up on Internment we call it sunstone, and its a powerful fuel source if its refined properly. She sits up straight, stricken with a new thought. What if the engineers on Internment are refusing to help them refine it? Or what if theyre giving faulty instructions? She looks between Nim and me, giddy and proud. What if theyre up there fighting?
I struggle to suppress my smile. Its bad luck to hope for such a thing, but I could believe it. I do believe it. If thats true, I say, King Ingram needs Internment. He cant just take all he pleases and then dispose of its people. It took decades for our engineers to perfect the glasslands and harness our fuel. Your king may have all the riches to build and employ a refinery, and all the raw materials, but if he doesnt know how to use them, its all for nothing.
Clever little city, Nim says, looking up. He does not share in our joy, though. If thats true, its surely an ugly scene up there right now. Think torture. Think homes being burnt down. Your people can be as stubborn as you please, but no one down here can hear them scream from up there.
Pen shakes her head wildly. It doesnt matter. Dont you see? Being tortured, deprivedits the lesser evil. Our people would withstand anything to keep the city afloat.
Shes right, I say. Down here, if you dont like where you live, you can pick up and leave. If you dont like the weather, or your childrenyou can just go. But on Internment, our home is all we have.
The people of Internment are resilient if we have to be. We dont value property or money the way they do down here; often our secrets are the only things of worth to us. I think of, but dont say aloud, the time the prince and princess held us hostage in their clock towers dungeon. All they wanted was a way to the metal bird, and proof that it existed, but I would have died before Id have let them have it.
Your king underestimated Internment, I say. But thats good. Isnt it? We can work with that. We canI dont know.
I look at Pen, hoping shell blurt out a solution. But she foolishly expects the solution to come from me. Go on, she says.
We can try to get sent to Internment, and then well know for sure whats happening up there. If theyre not telling King Ingram how to refine the phosane, maybe theres a rebellion being organized.
If thats true, theres plenty of intelligence here on the ground that would be of use to them, Nimble says. There are men in King Ingrams court who are disgruntled enough to help. Its just a matter of finding who to trust, and I know those boys. You could leave that to me.