The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  He was pretty hot, actually.

  There’s a whole world just behind everybody’s eyes, she thought. Not just behind eyes either: parking meters too.

  Maybe not all parking meters.

  Belle and Jack were back onto twisting people’s faces. Turned out they used to get into fights all the time, and they were reminiscing about ribs they’d broken and bruises they’d inflicted.

  “What were you two, bullies?” Madeleine asked.

  “We only beat up people who deserved it,” Belle explained.

  “Like dweebs and that,” Jack said. “People who wore glasses. Anyone with a stutter. A good beating can only help that kind of person.”

  That sort of humour. She’d never seen it in Jack before. His jokes used to be sort of obvious and cheerful. Now he had this dry, ironic thing, with an edge. She kept believing him for a moment, then feeling a bit stupid.

  “It was more we had to defend ourselves.” Belle closed her eyes. “People were always pissed at us. For one thing and another.”

  “It was our aura and astrology readings,” Jack explained. “Belle was always telling people their auras showed they were up themselves. Or that they had multiple STDs.”

  There was a quiet while the three of them listened to the opening chords of the next track. It was a suspenseful opening. The kind where you can’t figure out where things are going, then the drums come in, and the song settles down and finds itself.

  “Hey,” Belle pounded a fist into the couch in time with the music. “What’s up with the Kingdom of Cello? You found your way through yet?”

  Madeleine felt confused for a moment. She’d got used to watching the Jack-and-Belle show. Now it was as if they’d invited her onto the stage, and were waiting, half smiling, like performers standing back to catch their breath, spotlight swinging from their face powder to the startled audience member.

  “We’ve been sending things to each other,” she said eventually.

  “Like what things?”

  “Well, whatever you can fit in an envelope and the envelope’s still flat.”

  “So you don’t have to pay extra postage,” Jack agreed. “I get you.”

  “I’ve sent grass seeds, tea leaves, sugar crystals, and one of those flat chocolate circles with orange in it. Orange thins. And I’ve sprayed my letters with different sorts of perfumes too. To see if he can smell it.”

  “Can he?”

  “Yeah. So. There’s that.”

  “Grass seeds,” mused Jack. “Are there quarantine restrictions on the cracks?”

  “You’ll disrupt the entire delicate ecosystem of the Kingdom of Cello,” Belle said comfortably. “Nice. What’s he been sending you?”

  Madeleine looked around the room. An electric heater stood in the corner, its cord straggling across the floor until it ran into the legs of a small, plush sheep, which leaned towards an old laser printer.

  Your eyes could climb this room forever, Madeleine thought.

  “Madeleine?” Belle leaned forward.

  “Oh, sorry, forgot what we were talking about.”

  She hadn’t forgotten. She just didn’t want to tell them that Elliot had sent her: a handful of shredded coconut, a Cellian leaf, half a cinnamon cookie that he’d baked himself, and a paper cone filled with gem dust from a Purple cavern in Nature Strip.

  Or that she and Elliot had talked until almost five A.M. the night before, about their parents, their pasts, but mainly about the rules of a Cellian sport called deftball.

  She still didn’t get the game. She’d been eating the cinnamon cookie while he wrote to her about it.

  Send me more of these cookies, she’d written.

  I thought you wanted to know how deftball works.

  Now, in Belle’s living room, she closed her eyes and tried to sort out the rules.

  There were fifteen players in each team.

  The field was huge.

  It had some kind of ditches in it, the field, with raised sides. These ditches could trip you up. You had to sprint, trying to catch a falling ball while you jumped over the ditches.

  Furrows, he’d called them. Not ditches.

  Other players tried to intercept the ball, or tackle you.

  You could fall into a furrow and break a bone. In the last two years, Elliot knew of three players across Cello who’d fallen and snapped their spines.

  That’s stupid, she wrote. Sports where you can get paralysed are stupid.

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  Also she’d written: What, are you saying you throw a ball FORWARD in the air and then run forward and catch it yourself?

  Right.

  That doesn’t make any sense.

  I’m not sure how else to explain it.

  No, seriously, it’s not physically possible to run as fast as you can throw a ball. That’s like a rule of physics or something.

  Okay, I should have said — a deftball has a kind of ring around it, that slows down its path through the air.

  A deftball has a ring around it. They’d exchanged notes about this ring. Trying to figure out what he meant. She was imagining the rings of Saturn.

  The ring was soft. It felt spongy. No, it would not cut the palm of anybody’s hand.

  If you were good enough, you could get more than one deftball flying at the same time: catch one, throw it, catch another, throw that. Calculate where each was going to fall.

  Like a juggler? she wrote. Like a clown juggling?

  Nothing like a clown.

  How do you get to be a hero in deftball? she wrote. Is there one player who’s always, like, a hero?

  He’d started to explain the zones between the furrows.

  At this point, she’d lost interest. He’d written a long note about the scoring system, which she’d skimmed, her eyes blurring, then she’d asked him again for another cinnamon cookie.

  He said he had no more with him. She told him to go home and get some. Bake some. Bring them back. They redefined delicious.

  He’d ignored that and written some more about the scoring system.

  She wasn’t sure if it was that her mind always faded when people explained the rules of sports, or if it was because it was four thirty A.M.

  Are you good at it? she wrote.

  I do okay.

  Ah, he was probably rubbish. Knowing all the rules like that. He was always on the sideline, waiting for his chance to play.

  When he first started writing to her a few months ago, Madeleine had thought of him as a local Cambridge nerd who’d invented a fantasy world. Now she knew that he and his Kingdom were real, but she also sensed she’d got his character right. Not a fantasy nerd, a farmer nerd. His hands had felt fine and warm when she touched them. His wrist seemed narrow. He must have skinny arms. Could he lift bales of hay with those skinny arms? Probably a concave chest. His ears probably stuck out. He probably cried easily, but turned his face away from you, buried it in his arms even, when he did so. His nose was probably snotty.

  She liked him anyway. He was sweet and he could bake.

  * * *

  “Is it working?” Jack asked. “Sending things across? Is it stretching the crack?”

  Madeleine opened her eyes. “I don’t see how it can be. The parking meter’s a parking meter. There’s a crack in it, and it’s a crack. If you see what I mean.”

  Belle and Jack considered this. They looked at each other.

  “You have to explore the idea of the crack,” Belle said.

  “Write an essay on it,” Jack suggested.

  “Cause I’m thinking,” Belle continued, “the crack can’t just be direct from parking meter to TV. There must be something between those things.”

  “Right,” agreed Jack. “So, sort of like, what is a crack?”

  Jack and Belle were back onstage, looking intently into each other’s eyes. The music had picked up, and they were rocking in time to it. Their words stopped and started with the beat.

  “If you crack a nu
t,” Belle said, “you crack it open — with a nutcracker — so — you need a giant nutcracker. To open — the crack.”

  “It means you solve it,” Jack pointed out while he cranked up the music. He had to shout over it now. “Like — you say — let’s crack this nut — you mean, solve — this — nut. So — Madeleine — you have got to — crack — the crack.”

  “Okay,” shouted Madeleine.

  “But the crack’s already there,” Belle yelled. “So how did it get there? — It’s like — how do cracks — get places?” She narrowed her eyes, trying to concentrate. “When I get cracked lips — it’s cause of the wind.”

  “IF YOU WANT TO MAKE THE CRACK BIGGER,” Jack bellowed. “YOU NEED A HAIR DRYER!”

  He looked at Belle. They both nodded. The problem was solved.

  Jack held the button down on the remote.

  “Let us know what happens next!” he shouted, but they only saw the movement of his lips.

  Then both he and Belle were jumping from the couch, and it was like the floor was a trampoline, that’s how they danced.

  This, she could do. Madeleine was on her feet and dancing too. Belle danced with her palms facing out and there was a strange white glow to her fingertips. Burn blisters, Madeleine remembered. She lost herself in dance, and Jack and Belle turned to each other, impressed — the girl could dance — and then all three were leaping over clutter, knocking over clutter, blowing around the room.

  4.

  Elliot was flying.

  The silence up here, the break in his own footfall.

  There’d been the thud-thud-thud and the frenzy of windrush, then this: up here, his body flying, the air holding still, the air holding him, sailing him, under him, around him. His hand outstretched, fingers stretched ahead, his body holding its own shape. The spin on the deftball just above, just ahead, a perfect curve, exactly right.

  He’d almost cleared the furrow. He’d catch the ball, his feet would hit the ground, and he’d be running. Now though, right now, in this moment, up here, there was the quiet, the kindness of the sky — then a front-end loader hit him from the left.

  * * *

  Hard not to take it personally.

  Not so much the illegal tackle, the head butt in the eye, the clawing at his hand. Not even the fact that they could have just about killed him, or at least cracked some bones, hitting him right over the furrow like that. It was more the interruption of his flight. There was something so big and peaceful, so solitary about that flight. Whereas, a couple of Rangos players slamming him from out of nowhere — that felt crowded. And noisy.

  He was standing on the sideline now, an ice pack to his face, and somebody was strapping up his ankle. The game had been stopped, and the whole place was letting loose with outrage. Whistles were blowing, fists pounding the air, angry shouts intersecting.

  “No way that was an illegal tackle,” the Rangos coach was bellowing, while Jimmy, the Bonfire Antelopes coach, took a breath, ready to attack.

  Of course it was an illegal tackle.

  “Now it’s a deftball match,” said a nearby voice, grim with satisfaction.

  It was a big crowd today. The locals were out, and the Rangos had brought along a busload of supporters. So there was plenty of volume to the outrage. But something, Elliot realized, was askew about the shouting. Between the words, below the words, unease.

  He glanced up at the sky, shifting the icepack. It was a low, gray, scowling sky, full of cold and rain. To the west was a fresh batch of storm cloud, and now he saw the reason for the tension. Those clouds had the kind of twist and lean that made you think of third-level Grays. Somebody walked by with a string bag full of bottles, and heads turned swiftly at the jangle. Sounded a little like warning bells.

  Corrie-Lynn emerged from the crowd, and walked right up to him.

  She watched as he peeled the ice pack away, flinching a little, and looked at the pieces of blood and skin.

  “It’s swelling up nicely,” she informed him. “Gonna be a beautiful shiner.”

  He pressed the pack against his face again.

  “There was another article in the paper about you guys today,” Corrie-Lynn added.

  “About the Antelopes?”

  She shook her head.

  “The Royal Youth Alliance. A photo of you all just before you went to the Lake of Spells.”

  Elliot nodded.

  The guy strapping his ankle sat back on his haunches.

  “Can it take your weight?” he said.

  Elliot tested it. His ankle protested like an angry coach, then the shouting settled down to an irritable mutter.

  “I can play.”

  The guy twisted his lips into a skeptical grimace, then shrugged.

  Corrie-Lynn was still standing by his side.

  “You really went to the Lake of Spells,” she said, “and talked about educational issues across the Kingdom?” Her blue eyes studied his face. “You sat there on the edge of that lake and you said, hm, is there too much homework?”

  “We caught spells too.”

  Elliot glanced up at the scoreboard, calculating what they had to do to win.

  He looked back at Corrie-Lynn. Smart kid.

  “You use that clear-away spell I gave you yet?” he asked.

  “Saving it for special. For a real big mess.”

  The shouting had picked up in some places, quieted down in others. The cold was distracting some people. They were buttoning their coats, clapping gloved hands together. Grown-ups were chasing kids around, to warm themselves up, and the kids were in fits of excitement at the attention. Then kids were slipping in the mud and scrambling back up, shrieking outrage at the adults: “You made me fall!”

  “That girl from Jagged Edge,” Corrie-Lynn was saying.

  Elliot was looking at his hands. They were turning a violent purple from the cold, and the welts from that scratch were rising up.

  He turned back to his cousin. “Keira?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s her name. She’s super pretty.”

  “I guess.” Elliot shrugged.

  “You’re going to the next Alliance thing tomorrow, right? In Jagged Edge?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you’ll get to see her there. She’s got those gray-green eyes I like.”

  “She has?”

  “The picture in the paper was color this time. And it said she’s a Night-Dweller! What’s a Night-Dweller like? Had you met any before her? Before Keira?”

  Elliot held the ice pack away from his face again. His sweat was turning to ice drops. The cold of the ice pack was getting right into his spine. He dropped it to the grass, tested out his ankle again, this time with some stretches.

  “Yep,” he said. “And so have you. Plenty of Night-Dwellers in town.”

  “No way.”

  “Sure. Yolander who does the dawn shift at your Inn? She’s a Night-Dweller. And Cam Monterino who collects the trash?”

  Corrie-Lynn’s face shone with surprised pleasure. “Oh, yeah. I have met Night-Dwellers! I guess I knew that, but I kind of forgot. I’m usually asleep when they’re around, so …”

  “But you see some in the day too,” Elliot told her. “There are Night-Dwellers with day jobs. They switch their sleeping patterns.”

  “No way,” Corrie-Lynn said again. “They must be so cranky, whoever they are, sleeping at their not normal time. Like who? Give me an example.”

  “Well,” Elliot said, “like the high-school physics teacher. Jimmy’s girlfriend. Isabella Tamborlaine.” He touched Corrie-Lynn’s shoulder, and pointed, and she followed the line of his hand.

  Isabella was usually quiet and elegant, but now she was standing with her legs apart, her hands on her hips, and she was talking in a fast, strident, angry voice that carried right over to them. She was alongside Jimmy, lecturing one of the referees, and both Jimmy and the ref were gazing at her. Elliot could see some of his friends over that way, grins in their eyes, watching too.

  N
ot that long ago she hadn’t even known the basics of the game, Elliot remembered — she was from Jagged Edge, where it wasn’t played so much — but now the rules were flying out of her mouth, turning beautiful technical circles. She was citing rules and measurements, and the referee’s face was paling with respect, while Jimmy watched with a grin made out of pride.

  “And what’s more,” Isabella explained, “I heard the Rangos players earlier — I heard them saying, ‘Get number twelve!’ I heard it clearly: ‘Take down number twelve!’ That’s Elliot. He’s number twelve! They were planning it!”

  “Uh,” said Jimmy, and “Well,” said the referee, and they both rearranged their facial expressions, exchanging a brief glance.

  “Well, that’s okay,” Jimmy said to Isabella. “That’s sort of part of the game — you always want to take down the best player. The hero is fair game. It’s not —”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Isabella cried, and she began to throw strident rules at them again, but now she’d lost their respect. They turned to talk to each other.

  Corrie-Lynn and Elliot laughed.

  “It’s true, though,” Corrie-Lynn said. “You are the hero of this game. When you jump over the furrows like that, it’s like you’re flying.”

  Elliot was stretching his hamstrings.

  “That’s why I think you’re an Occasional Pilot,” Corrie-Lynn continued. “You should read the description from the Guidebook.” She opened her hand, revealing a folded paper. “I copied it out for you, ’cause I’m not allowed to keep carrying the book around anymore. ‘It belongs in the front room! It’s for the guests of the Watermelon Inn!’ ”

  The last part she spoke in a perfect imitation of her mother’s voice. Elliot could even see Auntie Alanna’s expressions on her little face.

  “You’ve got to at least read it,” Corrie-Lynn urged, still holding out the paper.

  A whistle was blowing again. A decision had been made. It had been an illegal tackle. There was a lift in the shouting, cheers from the locals, boos from the visitors, and then a settling down.

  “Okay, kid,” Elliot said, touching his swollen eye, and squinting around to see where his backpack was. He saw it, and pointed. “Can you put it with my stuff?”