“I still haven’t forgiven you for not letting me punch her.”
Thomas draws a sharp breath and then hoarsely says, “Not a good idea.”
“See?” I say. “He agrees with me.”
“No he doesn’t,” Pen says. “He’s been speaking nonsense for the last several minutes.”
“I only told you I love you,” Thomas says.
“Shush. How did you end up in the hands of that lunatic princess anyway?”
Weakly, he raises his arm, reaches into his shirt pocket, and retrieves a scrap of lace. Pen looks at her dress and realizes it’s the piece that’s missing from her collar. “She told me that she had you prisoner,” he says. “She said she would kill you if I didn’t follow her.”
“We should just leave her somewhere to fend for herself when we land,” Pen says. “I hope the people on the ground are savages with an appetite for blondes.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “Did you want something?”
“Remember that frozen dust I told you about?” I say. “We’re flying in it.”
She turns her attention back to Thomas. Her fingers are trembling when she smoothes his blanket. Delirious though he may be, he notices and grabs her hand.
“Pen? Don’t you want to see it?” I say.
“No,” she says softly.
“But it’s unlike anything—”
She closes the door on me.
I know that it isn’t these icy white swirls that have Pen so scared. It’s the idea of leaving Internment and surviving it. It’s the idea that our god doesn’t care whether or not we return, and that the history book may be wrong.
Amy says the ice shavings are like lightbugs, but they remind me of the funerals I’ve attended. Of the dusted bodies released onto the wind. In the dusting process, all the bad of a person’s soul is burned away, so that only the goodness will carry on to the afterlife. It’s a cleansing.
“It’s like we’re flying through the tributary,” I say, leaning back against Basil’s chest.
“They’re flurries,” Lex says, annoyed. “Don’t turn something scientific into a cathartic experience.”
“Be nice,” Alice tells him.
I don’t offer a response. Lex is entitled to his bitterness for having to miss this sight. I wouldn’t know how anyone could describe it in a way he’d appreciate.
“I think I’ve found a landing spot,” the professor says. “Where’s Judas? Need him to help me with the wheels.” There are so many pieces to this bird, and they serve so many different purposes, that it makes my head spin. Once it’s on the ground in broad daylight, I want to inspect it. I hope they have image recorders on the ground so that I can take images.
“He’s watching the princess,” Amy says, adding a flourish to the word “princess.” “She can’t be left alone, apparently.”
“I’ll get him,” Basil says, before I can volunteer.
“I’ll go with you,” I say.
“Me too!” Amy chirps.
Judas is keeping the princess in one of the bunk rooms. We find him standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, as the princess re-braids her hair.
“We’re landing,” I tell Judas. “The professor needs you. Something about wheels?”
The princess stands, her face alight. “Landing?” she gasps. “As in, on the ground?”
“Watch her,” Judas says as he leaves the bunk room. “She’ll try to seduce you.”
“We’ll try to resist,” I say.
Princess Celeste wrings her hands. “So we’re near the ground, then?” she asks. She blinks several times when she notices Amy staring at her. “Hello,” she says. She cheerily shows a row of white teeth, and her eyes squint pleasantly when she smiles, the way she smiles in every image and at every ceremony her father hosts. She would have no way of knowing that this girl before her is the famous murdered girl’s sister. Maybe she doesn’t even know her father’s role in Daphne’s death.
“I heard you collect deer antlers,” Amy says.
“Not only the antlers,” Princess Celeste says. “The whole heads sometimes, if my father lets me. Most of the body gets sent to the food and bone factories, to make jewelry like the necklace you’re wearing there.”
Amy touches the bone-carved star hanging from her neck. I’ve never noticed it before.
“Living things make the greatest art,” the princess says.
“Dead things, you mean,” Amy says, hoisting the star up in her palm. “This is dead.”
“Once living, then,” the princess says.
From somewhere on the bird, Judas calls, “Brace yourselves!” And it’s not a moment too soon, because a jolt has us all going sideways. Basil grabs on to my waist, and I grab Amy, fearing she’ll go into another of her fits. The princess backs herself into a corner and presses her hands on either wall. I could swear she looks excited.
The turbulence persists for another minute or so, and there’s an instant of reprieve before the floor shakes beneath us, like we’ve crashed into the ground and now we’re skidding.
“Pen!” I call. “Are you guys okay?”
“Lovely!”
This is it. The moment when we reach the ground, or die trying. My nerves are jumbled and I’m starting to feel nauseous. I’ve already endured more in one day than the whole of Internment’s population would deem possible. Generations of rebels have plotted for this. Several have died in failed attempts. It’s foolish of me to think that I’d be among the ones to finally achieve it.
But fantastic things are possible. I’ve learned that.
When the bird goes still at last, Amy stumbles into the hallway, drops to her knees, and gags like she’s going to be sick.
I kneel beside her.
“My body hates this endeavor,” she says, coughing.
“At least it wasn’t another fit,” I say. “You won’t miss any of the fun.”
She smiles wearily at me.
The bird hitches, and Amy claws at the floor and closes her eyes.
I think she’s whispering to the god in the sky.
32
This was to be an essay on the history of my city. But how can I tell the story of a city in the clouds without questioning what’s above the clouds, and what’s beneath them? All my life I have felt caught between two worlds. Here’s what I know for sure: Internment is only a piece of what’s out there. I know all its sections by heart, and I’ve memorized the times at which the train will speed by my bedroom window. It isn’t enough. I want to know more.
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
PEN AND THOMAS ARE THE ONLY ONES missing from the Nucleus.
We all stand at the windows, trying to reconcile what’s before us. A ground covered with white dust. White dust that falls from the clouds. Beyond that, more water than I’ve ever seen in one place. It’s nothing like our modest lakes. The waves are like roars. The water stretches on toward the sky, making a hazy, unreachable seam.
Basil stands behind me with an arm across my collarbone, as though to protect me from danger lurking in this gray-and-white place. Pen asked if they had color on the ground, and I assured her they did, but suddenly I’m not so sure. There’s no blue even in the sky.
I wonder if we’re dead. I feel as though we have been cast beyond the reaches of the living, and we’re to remain forever here, neither alive nor dead. For all the daydreaming I’ve done about the ground, I suddenly cannot imagine that life exists beyond my floating city.
The professor shuts the engine. The metal pops and groans.
The princess is the first to speak. “This is it?”
“Of course not,” Judas says. “We’re only facing the water, that’s all.”
“See you later, then,” she says, turning for the door. “You can all stand around gaping at this monstrosity of a lake if you’d like, but I’m on a mission.”
Her footsteps clomping down the metal platform stir us all into motion. Everyone follows her for the door, except the professor, who stays behind to be sure the engine cools properly. Not that I see what it would matter; I doubt this thing has the strength or the means to return us to the sky, and even if it does, we’re all fugitives. We aren’t returning.
We parade down the hallways and the spiral staircase, through the kitchen and down the ladder that will take us to the door. Judas shoulders his way to the front. “Sorry, Princess,” he says. “Usually I’d say ‘Ladies first,’ but this could be dangerous.”
The princess folds her arms. “So chivalrous.”
I’m worried about Pen, but I know that it will do no good to call for her. She can’t be rushed. All her life she has believed in our history books, and we’ve just fallen into a world where perhaps none of what we’ve been taught will matter.
I grab Basil’s hand and peer down the ladder as Judas undoes the series of locks.
“Wait,” I say. “What if the air is different? What if it’s diseased, or those ice flurries are dangerous?”
Judas smirks at me. Then, having undone the last lock, he pushes the door open.
The cold is immediate, assaulting my skin. My hair flies away from my face. We have chilly days on Internment this time of year, but they’re nothing at all like this. Cold like this could kill a person.
Over the sound of the wind, I hear the laugh on Basil’s breath. He squeezes his arm around my shoulders. “Would you look at that,” he says.
I stare at the white ground, accumulating more whiteness from the sky, until I see a strip of red fluttering about on a post. The only thing in sight. It must be some sort of flag.
Judas sets one foot outside the bird, preparing to climb his way down the side, and a voice calls out, “Halt!”
The voice is so loud that it echoes in all the metal walls. The god of the sky, I think, my heart on my tongue. He has followed us here. He’s come to decide our fates.
Judas is too stunned to step back into the bird or to go forward.
There’s a mechanical quality to the word. Not a god. A machine that’s being shouted into. And the word is heavily affected. No one on Interment speaks quite that way.
Amy grabs Judas by the collar and tugs, which brings him to his senses, and he climbs back inside.
Vehicles appear on the horizon, smaller and more colorful versions of Internment’s emergency vehicles. A peculiar mist trails behind them. Their lights are like pairs of eyes, and the flurries glimmer in their rays.