unwise to scream, either of you,” he says. “It’s an old building. Voices carry. We’re the nicest people you’re likely to encounter. Maybe you were clever enough to get your hands in front of you, but you’re no match for the people a scream will summon.”
Pen jerks away when he tries to touch her hair. Her lips are pursed and I think she’s going to scream just because she was told not to, but she doesn’t. As he drags her toward the door, she looks back at me and mouths, “I’ll be fine.”
The door closes. My heart pounds. Breathing gets harder. The princess stands at an arm’s length, twisting her hips, her skirt swishing over her knees.
“He took her to the water room,” she says. “The only danger she’s in would come from the filth of that place. It’s positively archaic. It used to all be holdings for prisoners down here.”
“It still is,” I say.
She smirks. “True, isn’t it?” she says.
I don’t understand why she’s trying to make conversation. The king’s children are isolated from society and have never set foot in the academy unless it was to make a political appearance with their father, but is she so lonely as to try to make friends with me?
“We haven’t decided what to do with you yet,” she says. “But …”
She hesitates. After a moment, she removes the bowl of grapes and kneels on the tray like it’s a seat. She doesn’t want to sully her clothes.
“Our father warned us about your family,” she says. “Your brother is a jumper.”
“There are plenty of families with jumpers,” I say.
“Not families that know the way to the ground.”
“There is no way to the ground,” I say.
“Liar,” she says. “There’s a machine that can do it. My father is going to find it, you know. He’s going to destroy it, because that’s what the god of the sky would have him do. And he’ll destroy your brother and everyone else involved with it, too, for treason.”
“Then what do you need me for?” I say, not hiding my anger. “Why kill anyone if he’s just going to destroy the machine?”
“So you admit it.” She’s smiling, her teeth perfect and white. “There really is a machine that could bring us to the ground safely.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“There is. You’ve seen it. You know.”
Her eyes brighten, but there’s nothing maniacal or cruel in them. Worse, there’s hope.
25
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
PEN RETURNS WITH COMPLAINTS THAT THE prince was trying to spy on her while she used the water room, but she’s otherwise unscathed.
“If that isn’t the silliest thing I’ve heard today,” the princess says, helping me to my feet. “If it were a
“Leste!” he cries.
“You’re more interested in my betrothed than I am,” she says. “His cheekbones—Honestly.” She takes the lantern from her brother and pushes me toward the door. For the first time, I’m able to see the stairwell that brought me here, but it’s all I’m able to see on the way to and from the water room, which isn’t even a fitting name because it has no running water and is little more than a hole in the ground.
But I’m still thinking about the prince being attracted to his sister’s betrothed. Could the decision makers have done something wrong? Is his own betrothed not appealing to him? Is he irrational? The prince isn’t the first to be attracted to his own gender; although it isn’t talked about, I remember my brother denouncing the serum and the surgery purported to treat this kind of attraction. Even before Alice’s forced termination procedure, there were elements of medicine that he despised.
“Oh, your wrists are so red,” the princess says as she’s guiding me back to my prison. “The twine will do that, I suppose.”
I say nothing. I can hear footfalls above me, and doors closing and opening. People going about their business, believing I’m dead because of tainted pharmaceuticals. Unaware of the king’s sour practices, the corruption in his reign, and the absurdity of his children.
All of it leaves an ache in my chest. I consider running. The princess doesn’t appear to be armed. But my hands are still tied, and I can’t leave Pen besides.
My only hope is that Judas saw us being taken. And even if he doesn’t care enough to pursue us himself, he’ll tell Basil. Basil will come for me. The alternative would be living the rest of his life alone. I would try to save him if it were the other way around.
Though I’d be sour that he left me while I was sleeping, without so much as a note of explanation, which is what I did to him.
I wasn’t thinking rationally when I left him. Looking back, it’s all a haze of grief that overtook me. It made the craziest ideas seem possible. It made logic as far away as a beige patch of the ground.
The princess stops us walking. She holds the lantern up between us, and she looks at me with the eyes of all the princesses and queens in the history book. Eyes as old as Judas the Hero and Micah’s boat of stars. She is ancient and profound, and she has Internment fascinated, copying her hair and her clothing in an attempt to understand.
She looks at me now the way the whole floating city looks at her—hoping for some sort of answer she’ll never have.
“You can tell me,” she whispers. “What does the machine look like? Smell like?”
“Smell?” I say.
“I want a full sensory experience,” she says. “I imagine it smells like freshly printed paper and old coins.”
It smells like mold, though old coins isn’t inaccurate. But I don’t tell her this.
“There is no machine,” I say.
“Last night when you were talking to your friend, you said ‘I wasn’t even supposed to come out.’ Why would you have said that if you hadn’t been hiding in the machine?”
“I was being general,” I say. “It wasn’t safe for me to be outside, and clearly we can both see why.”
She truly doesn’t understand. She spends her life hidden away in this tower with her private instructors and her plum uniform and her braided crown. Her mother and father are alive. I hate her for that. I hate her in a way no princess in a tower can ever understand.
“There is no machine,” I repeat. She can rot here.
The hope hasn’t left her face. I don’t know what it will take to kill it, but if I’m going to be trapped here, I’ll have time to think up ways.
The door opens and the prince says, “What is taking so long?” He’s still angry about his sister’s jab.
I slump back to the ground beside Pen, hoping our captors hear the rumble in our stomachs. We don’t touch the grapes.
If we refuse to eat, maybe it’ll make them nervous and they’ll consider letting us go so we don’t starve to death. Though, given their oblivion, it isn’t likely they’ll notice.
The clock begins its set of ten chimes. “We should just kill the blond one,” the prince says, perhaps thinking we won’t hear him over the noise.
“Don’t be a dolt,” the princess says. “She might know something, too.”
