The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  A fox ran by, its eyes glowing red. Light fell down a tunnel.

  Keira jogged more slowly. “It’s about extending ourselves. Our minds, bodies, the spaces of us.” She spun in a circle on the spot, then ran on. “Cut yourself down to your essence. Party hard. Stretch. Sharpen.”

  She picked up the pace again. “Break yourself!” she shouted.

  “But why?” Elliot shouted back.

  Her voice jangled and flung at him. “To go as far as possibility, break that into pieces, and reach the impossible!”

  “But why would you want to do that?”

  “That’s a stupid question…. That’s a ridiculous question…. I can’t believe you’d even ask that question!”

  There was music and rhythm to her speech. She ran with the rhythm and he saw that her body was angles and bones, that the buildings they passed were angles and bones, and then —

  “Here,” Keira said, and stopped.

  She swiped her armband at a turnstile, led them down an alleyway, and opened another door.

  5.

  The mood, which had been flying, abruptly took a seat and put its feet up.

  This was a smaller, cobblestoned square.

  It was almost empty. Two or three people wandered past, speaking softly. One wore a necklace that dripped with Turquoise Rain. A jazz trio stood silent in the corner, the double bass leaning up against the piano.

  They were breathing hard as they stepped in, then their breathing slowed and quieted.

  The Turquoise Rain was gentling. It still fanned out but had a whisper quality, a warmth.

  “This is the Art Quarter,” Keira said. “And see that caramel colored door? That leads to a Conversation Corner. You want to go?”

  They followed her across the square. Above them empty birdcages were strung along a crisscross of wires.

  They swiped their armbands and entered an empty courtyard. A fountain played in shadows, and they could make out a few plants and trees, shaping darkly in pots, and a scattering of couches at odd angles. The electronic music played, but its pace was slower, volume lower.

  “Sit anywhere,” Keira said. “You can get coffee, chocolate, and bananas from that wall over there. Swipe your armband and touch the image you want. Then sit.”

  “Coffee, chocolate, and bananas?”

  “They’re conversation stimulants.”

  The others hesitated.

  “Night is for conversation,” Keira explained patiently. “See how dim it is in here? We can hear each other’s voices, and see the light in each other’s eyes, but that’s it.”

  There was another silence.

  “When there’s only words, and the spark behind words,” she elaborated, “that’s when conversation finds its voice. Everyone, sit down and talk.”

  * * *

  Elliot and Keira sat cross-legged on opposite ends of a couch. From across the courtyard they could hear the rise and fall of voices from the Princess, Sergio, and Samuel.

  “It’s the silence,” Keira said to Elliot. “Just night-distant winds, water, owls. You hear the shifts in nothing. It softens things.”

  “Wait,” said Elliot. “I thought the point was edges.”

  “Exactly.”

  They both laughed, and Elliot felt the couch tremble.

  “It’s both,” Keira said, a horizontal slide to her voice. “That’s the essence of night. Duality. Sharp and soft. Dark and light. By day, all you get is light.”

  “We get shadows in the daytime too.”

  “Shadows are just darker light. Listen to me.”

  “I am.”

  “You’d better be.”

  There was another silence. They were looking at each other, seeing nothing but shapes and glints. The music was doing something sweet, rising up to an exquisite point and holding, and Elliot felt it holding him suspended. Then it fell back down into the low, fast drumbeat, and he exhaled.

  Keira spoke again. “All that glare and light of day,” she said. “You need darkness for beauty.”

  “Not much point in beauty you can’t see.”

  Keira leaned closer to him. “See that?” She pointed to a pale gold paper lantern that was standing in an alcove. “It’s the glow from inside that makes it beautiful. You don’t get that by day.” Now she waved across the courtyard to where the others were leaning together. “We can’t see the scar on Sergio’s forehead, or the puffiness of Samuel’s cheeks, or the tension in Princess Ko’s neck. All we see are pieces of them. The light in their eyes. The glow. That’s their true beauty.”

  Elliot was quiet, watching the shadows of the others, hearing their murmurs.

  “Of course,” Keira added, “you’re beautiful by day as well, Elliot Baranski.”

  Elliot laughed again.

  “Pieces make me crazy,” he said. “I need the whole picture.”

  The couch trembled again with the force of Keira’s head shaking.

  “That’s wrong,” she said.

  “Is that a fact?” said Elliot, mocking.

  “It is. Details clog your mind and trap your eyes. But darkness” — she reached out and rested her sharpened nails on the surface of his skin — “and a single strand of light? That’s when you see the single detail that counts.”

  “If the strand of light happens to land in the right place,” Elliot pointed out, but he was trying to study Keira, to find the detail that counted.

  All he could see was her outline and the movement of her mouth. How it kept shaping words and sentences, how it tried to be heard, the Keira behind the words.

  Maybe that was the detail that counted. Her wanting to be heard.

  Out of nowhere he remembered Corrie-Lynn’s voice discussing Night-Dwellers: They must be cranky, whoever they are, sleeping at the wrong time like that.

  Was that all it was that gave Keira her edges? She was a Night-Dweller living in the day?

  “Daytime is too flat for you?” he said.

  “Exactly!” Her voice seemed to sing its relief through him. “Night has a depth, see? You never hear people talk about the deep of the day. But you can lose things in the depth of night. You can throw a piece of jewelry into a snowbank and never see it again.”

  “Huh,” said Elliot. He thought awhile. “There’s a piece of jewelry in a snowbank somewhere?”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s — a good thing?”

  “Right.”

  He waited, but she sighed deeply and said, “You can lose yourself in night.”

  “And that’s good how?”

  Her voice sighed away into the darkness. “Trust me. It’s good. Endings are good.”

  “Wait,” said Elliot. He was remembering standing by a window with Keira, watching the snow. “Weren’t you being sort of romantic about thaws that time? And aren’t they special because they’re a new beginning?”

  “Nope. I like thaws ’cause it means the snow is done. You Day-Dwellers are so obsessed with beginnings.” She scraped his arm gently with her nails. “When what really counts is the end.”

  Across the courtyard came the sound of Sergio’s voice raised slightly, then a low chuckle from Samuel, and a giggle from the Princess. Their voices faded again.

  There was a long quiet. Drops of water drifted from the fountain in the breeze.

  “Elliot,” Keira said, pitching her voice lower, somehow matching the odd urgency of the music. “Remember at the Lake of Spells when you had that book, and I was so angry about self-help books?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother …” she began, then stopped and started again. “Self-help books aren’t usually big here in Jagged Edge, but now and then one of them takes off. So a while back there was this one that told you how to find the love of your life. My mother read it — she’d been single all my life — and it told her she had to make room for her soulmate. Like, if she had a double parking space, she shouldn’t park in the second spot. Always leave it clear for his car. This imaginary guy’s car. And clear
space in her wardrobe and in the bathroom cabinet, ready for his things.”

  She sat back, so she was a little separate from Elliot.

  “My mother followed the book so carefully. All those empty spaces on the shelves. I remember seeing how carefully she’d lie on just one side of the bed, her body like a straight line of chalk.”

  Elliot waited.

  “Did it work?” he asked.

  “You bet. She met a cracking guy.” The edge to Keira’s voice was sharper than razors.

  “Not so cracking, then,” Elliot suggested.

  Keira was silent.

  “What happened?”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Her silence poured into the courtyard.

  Elliot thought a moment. “Has this got something to do with the jewelry in the snowbank?”

  “You’re sort of amazing, Elliot.”

  He waited again.

  “It was a necklace he gave her,” she said. “I threw it into the snowbank, and it didn’t change anything — it was too late by then — but that moment of throwing it …”

  She sighed blissfully, and shifted again so she was closer to him.

  “It’s what everyone should do. Open your hands and let things fall. Endings are what count,” she said again. “Give up. Let go. Night lets you fall into the darkness —” and her own voice seemed to fall into Elliot’s hands, so he held them out to catch it, and as he did he found that he himself was falling — falling toward her — and there she was, falling too, the smooth of her and the edges, the exquisite of her, the gauntness of her bones.

  They were holding each other, pressing together, entangling, closing their eyes. He was peeling that stupid net from her hair, and pressing his hands into the softness underneath. Those nails of hers through his shirt and under his shirt.

  Their skin ran still with raindrops of color, and now the raindrops ran together, and they were lit up by the colors, lit up by each other, by each other’s hands and mouths, and falling.

  6.

  Rooms look different by day.

  The final meeting was at seven A.M., Monday, back in Conference Room 3Q. Early sun glared through the windows, paling, graying, fraying.

  The security agents seemed taller, crisper, sterner, but the members of the Royal Youth Alliance sat silent and curling at the table. Elliot felt as if a frown was riding slowly around their circle: a carousel of frowning.

  “This will be a brief meeting.” Princess Ko’s shoulders were rounded as if she was cold. “You will then depart on your trains home. Our next meeting will take place in a fortnight. The details are in your folders. For now, I only want to clarify your assignments, and to brainstorm —”

  There was a crunch as Samuel bit into an apple.

  The Princess swung toward him, her eyes flaring.

  “Call yourself my apologies,” Samuel muttered through a wet mouthful. “But I must needs eat, and I must needs request an extension to my stay.” A piece of apple slipped from his mouth. He pushed it back in, chewed fast, and swallowed. “Indeed, and I am somewhat drawn to this city and see no harm in another day of wandering its pavements.”

  The Princess blinked hard, staring and breathing through her mouth.

  “I do not have the faintest idea,” she began.

  “It is the Turquoise Rain,” Sergio said suddenly. “He wants more.”

  They all regarded Samuel, who cried, “No!” his cheeks flaming.

  “It’ll all be gone now, won’t it?” said Elliot.

  “He’s thinking there must be puddles left,” Keira said. “But there won’t, Samuel. It disappears.”

  “Indeed, and you mistake me!” Samuel blustered. “I am longing merely to gather more memories of this fine city, this —”

  “Yeah, you don’t really strike me as a city boy.” Keira leaned forward, took an apple from the bowl, and tossed it from one hand to the other. “You need a long, cold shower and a glass of kale juice. It cleanses Turquoise Rain.” She turned to the security agents. “Can someone get kale juice in for Samuel? And fast.”

  Elliot was watching Keira. Pieces of the night before kept coming back at him, hitting sharp points in his memory. Her fingernails. Music that had seemed to wind through his body.

  Now the same music seemed stale and self-important. Last night it was a sleek black cat: Today the cat had picked up a frying pan in its paws, and was slapping the side of his head with it repeatedly. He felt like he needed a long, cold shower himself. He felt ugly.

  He couldn’t figure it out, this mood, then it came to him: He felt as if he’d cheated. That thing with Keira — fantastic, intense, sexy as hell — but it seemed like a betrayal. Which made no sense. He didn’t have a girlfriend right now.

  Samuel looked ready to protest again, then he buried his face into his arms, and began a muffled sobbing. “I, of all people,” they heard, and “Addictive! But I?” and “As to a heather-swan in turmoil!”

  Agent Nettles, meanwhile, was speaking fast into her earpiece, and then, to their surprise, was stepping to the table.

  “Princess,” she said, “before you go on, I need your permission to speak.”

  The Princess’s face seemed made out of a scowl. She sighed. “Go ahead.”

  Agent Nettles tugged at her own ear, brushing against the pearl earring.

  “I will say nothing,” she began, “about the fact that you all blatantly disregarded the schedule and set out onto the streets: alone, unaccompanied, without security, with utter disregard for your own safety and for the interests of the Kingdom, and, what is more, into the heart of a storm of Turquoise Rain.”

  That’s not exactly nothing, Elliot thought.

  “Nevertheless, while you were all out gallivanting with such breathtaking foolishness” — another shot of nothing — “during that time, we received a further communication from the King of Aldhibah, intended for your father. It explained the dress code for the Namesaking Ceremony, and queried your father’s dietary requirements.”

  The Princess contributed another deep sigh, her scowl changing shape.

  “Well, may you sigh,” Agent Nettles continued. “This, of course, we can deal with, but it reminds us that the return of your family is a matter of utmost urgency. We need your father back, Princess Ko, in less than four weeks from today.”

  “This is not remotely helpful,” said Princess Ko.

  Agent Nettles straightened her thin shoulders.

  “Which brings me to my point. As you know” — she gazed around at the sleepy, worn faces — “we agents doubted the theory that the royal family was in the World. We have now reconsidered. All our theories have dried up — paths to dead ends. It seems that — and what are the chances? — you’ve had more luck. You’ve caught a Locator Spell. Nice going. You’ve used it to confirm that they are in the World. Again, wow. Okay, you win. We accept your theory. They’re in the World.”

  The Princess raised her eyebrows. “Thank you.”

  “But now …” Agent Nettles drew her lips together. “Now it’s time for this game to wrap up. Have your showers. Drink your kale juice. Run through city streets. Whatever. But it is critical that we take over. We need the stable boy out of the WSU, and one of our guys in his place. We need to bring the family home.”

  The Princess’s scowl was slipping. It was falling into her cheeks. She looked across at Samuel, still sobbing quietly into his arms.

  “You need a break, Princess,” Agent Nettles said gently, touching Ko’s shoulder. “You need to lie in a hammock and read a book. You need to go for a ride on your favorite horse. You need a bubble bath. A massage. I don’t know, a vitamin supplement, no doubt! You’ve worked so hard, but now you need to let these kids get back to their lives, and let us get on with the real work.”

  The Princess seemed to be curling up. Everything about her was falling.

  “We’ll extend the circle of knowledge,” Agent Nettles added. “We’ve all agreed to this point that it should
be very limited. But we can’t work under those conditions. We need more resources. We’ve weighed the risks and we think a slight extension is essential.”

  You could see thoughts flying behind the Princess’s eyes. You could even see her neck muscles tensing, ready with a nod.

  “We already have five or six agents in mind. We’ll brief them on the situation, and get this mess under control.”

  Now the Princess did nod. A whimper came from Samuel.

  “Give me your list of agents,” the Princess murmured.

  “Of course. I can tell you now that it includes the two agents working on the recovery of Abel Baranski.” She jutted her thumb toward Elliot. “They happen to be two of the best in the Kingdom,” she said. “You’ve been lucky to have them on your dad’s case to this point, Elliot, but it’s time to bring them in.”

  Elliot’s hands were on the edge of the table. He actually raised it a little.

  “No,” he said.

  The Princess turned vague eyes on him.

  “I’m sure some other agents,” she began, “will be perfectly —”

  “No,” Elliot repeated. “You must —” Then, “There is not a chance in —” In a moment he’d get his words together, but now they were zipping back and forth in his head, and all he could do was watch them scramble, all of them shouting to be said.

  “Your family, Princess —” He rose so fast his chair toppled, and then he stopped and tried to speak again, and now at last his voice had gathered a soaring flame of words: “Agents Tovey and Kim are staying right where they are until they get my father back.”

  He stopped. The room vibrated with his shout. He was trembling all over.

  The Princess was staring, but a faint mocking smile played on Agent Nettles’s face.

  Elliot took a step, ready to kill Agent Nettles.

  Keira spoke. “What I don’t understand,” she said, and she clicked her sharp-edged fingernails together. “What I don’t get, Princess Ko, is why the recovery of Elliot’s father has taken this long at all. He was working with the Loyalists, right? So why did you people not know what he was working on? He was on your side. He was working on something ingenious. Revolutionary. How did you not know this until the agents tracked it down? Okay. There’s that. But now they know where he is? Why is he not back? They want to negotiate with the Hostiles? What’s that all about? Why are they not storming the compound? Arresting the people who took him?”