The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  Madeleine said she’d look him up.

  But she was lying. She’d chosen Isaac Newton and he’d explained the world. There wasn’t room for anybody else.

  * * *

  So there was that.

  She’d tell Elliot that story.

  The bit about Isaac Newton being a useless farmer, he’d be interested in that, seeing as he was a farm boy himself.

  Although, actually, he might not like it. The point of the story was that it was a misalignment for a genius to be a farmer.

  Which might be insulting to a farmer.

  For all she knew, Elliot was a genius. He’d never provided her with copies of his academic records.

  She thought of the strength she’d seen in his shoulders.

  She looked at the parking meter. Still nothing.

  Maybe her note had not got through.

  She wrote it again:

  Hey, Elliot. You there?

  Well, then, instead of the Isaac Newton story, she’d tell him about the science lesson she’d had with Darshana Charan.

  Darshana was a bedder (which is what they call a cleaner at Cambridge) who taught them Science and Mathematics in exchange for free babysitting of her two daughters. She often incorporated the daughters into her classes, and she’d made them spin around the house being electrons. They had spilled from the couch, fallen off tables, and crashed into walls, and Jack had wondered aloud if this might be child abuse. Darshana had belted him over the head with a cushion.

  Electrons come from the stars, Madeleine would tell Elliot. They come from the Big Bang. They’re what started everything. They make reality.

  She looked at the parking meter again.

  Hey, Elliot. What’s the story?

  The parking meter looked back, unimpressed.

  She sat down on the footpath.

  It was all right. He was running late. He’d been away, right? So maybe he had homework to catch up on or something.

  She’d treat him the same as always.

  She wouldn’t be afraid.

  She wouldn’t tell him he looked like a freakin’ movie star, the kind everyone loves in a secretly convinced way that he belongs to them, because he’s weirdly normal-looking at the same time as hot, and his eyes, if they glanced your way, would see you.

  He had eyes that see the truth, that see what’s funny or ironic and what’s not, that see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s wrong, and always get it right.

  But she wouldn’t tell him that.

  Nor just how wrong she’d got him. Like she’d got Jack wrong, actually.

  The trouble was, she started off thinking everyone was a nerd.

  Be careful who you call a nerd: That was the lesson, she supposed.

  And here she was, planning to give Elliot a History class, or a Science lesson on electrons. Speaking of nerds.

  She wouldn’t say any of it.

  Hey, Elliot. WHERE ARE YOU???

  She’d talk about other things. Nothing scientific. Her words would spark and spin like spilling electrons. They’d catch his words and spin them back her way. Force fields spinning back and forth between them.

  The parking meter gazed at her blankly.

  She went home.

  * * *

  The next night she tried again.

  The night after that it was raining, so she took her umbrella.

  The following three nights she waited for half an hour.

  After that she stayed in bed.

  She stopped going to the parking meter altogether, day or night.

  But then, the next Wednesday, she received this email.

  * * *

  Hi Madeleine,

  I got your email address from this mad letter that came to me from someone who calls herself Princess Ko. (Cool name. Ko.) And she calls me Princess Jupiter. HA-HA. LOL. Anyhow, so she says I’m actually from a Kingdom called Cello and I just don’t remember it. Like, I’ve “created” my own memories or whatever. ROFLMAO. (But not sure why.)

  The actual truth is, I don’t remember much about me. That sounds mad, right? But it’s true. Who am I? I’m just, like, pieces. Like, here I am in Berlin, right, and WTF??? I don’t even speak German!!! Existential crisis coming out of my NOSTRILS!!

  I’ve sorta alwayz thought this situation of mine was cos of all the drugs I’ve done, and that’s why my memories are like rice pouring into a shopping trolley. (So, like, they’re all in little tiny pieces — like rice-size pieces — and they keep falling through the gaps in the trolley? That’s my memories all over.)

  So, you wanna tell me more of the story?

  Ariel Peters

  * * *

  Madeleine wrote a short reply, saying that she’d pass on the message to Princess Ko and get back to her.

  She printed out the email, got some notepaper, and thought for a while.

  Then she wrote:

  Elliot. This came. M.

  She sealed her note and the email into an envelope, and rode her bike to the parking meter.

  There was nobody around.

  She got the envelope out of her backpack, ready to press it into the crack.

  Then she stopped.

  There was a thin line of white in the crack.

  She pulled it out.

  Just got all your notes. Sorry. Can we talk tonight (Wednesday)?

  2.

  The headache had been strapping him down.

  It had been like something buried underground that reached up and dragged on his ankles every time he took a step. At the same time, it had wound itself around his face and blurred his vision.

  Once the agents cleared the headache away, Elliot could walk again without resistance. His vision cleared, and right in front of him was the next meeting of the Royal Youth Alliance. Here it came, hurtling toward him just three days away and he hadn’t done a sweet-darn thing about it.

  From the Watermelon Inn that morning, he ran to school. Most kids were heading into their classes, so he took a risk and went right to the sculpture. Five short notes from Madeleine came sliding out, one at a time, but she must have sent them a while back. They had that faded, crackling feel. Seemed she’d been waiting there for him one night. He couldn’t remember arranging a meeting but life was confusing and sleepy these days. He must have screwed up somehow. Ah, well.

  He looked around quickly. A couple of kids and a teacher were standing by the water fountain, but they were arguing — both kids’ arms were folded — so he wrote, Just got all your notes. Sorry. Can we talk tonight (Wednesday)?, delivered the message, and ran to class.

  At recess that day, he knocked on the staff-room door and asked to speak to Ms. Tamborlaine. He still hadn’t figured out how he’d put the question but there was no time for any more figuring.

  Isabella appeared in the doorway wiping chocolate frosting from the corner of her mouth, a leftover smile in her eyes. The smile turned to mild surprise.

  “Elliot Baranski!” Her voice was just above him, tall and slender as she was.

  “Could I ask you about something?”

  Right away, Isabella called over her shoulder to someone in the staff room, “Nobody take my cake — I’ll be back in a moment,” and there were jokes and laughter from in there that he couldn’t catch.

  “Mr. Vacarello’s birthday,” Isabella explained, stepping out of the staff room. She paused, thought a moment, then turned right. “Let’s talk in here.”

  It was impressive how smooth and brisk she was — with other teachers there’d have been blinking and puzzled frowns and “Ask me about what?” or maybe long, slow sighs as they checked their watch, and “Can you come back in ten minutes?” or even a dumb joke, “Now you’re thinking about taking Physics? Little late, isn’t it?”

  Anything! But no, here they were in an empty classroom, Isabella sitting up on the edge of a desk, her eyes on him, expectant.

  He’d sort of hoped for a little more lead time.

  “You know how I’m in that Royal Youth Alliance
?” he began, winging it.

  “I do.”

  “Well, we’ve been talking about the relations between provinces in Cello, and how we might, you know, improve them.”

  “Okay.”

  He had no idea where that had come from or where it was going.

  “So, anyway, we have to do a presentation this weekend. Give a new perspective on the issue. And I was thinking maybe I’d compare it with the historic situation of Cello’s relations with the World.”

  That’s where he’d been going.

  Huh. Weird. But not bad.

  “Okay,” Isabella said again. Her narrow green eyes almost closed in thought. “So why speak to me? Mr. Garenstein’s the World Studies teacher.”

  “He is,” Elliot agreed. “I did talk to him, and we got onto the subject of where we all came from originally.” He was impressed by his own powers of invention. “I mean, whether we were always part of two separate realities, then the cracks opened up between, or did we all start in one place and get dispersed across realities? If so, where did we come from originally? From the ether or what?”

  Isabella had been watching Elliot, smiling faintly as he talked, but when he said that word, ether, a fine line ran between her eyes, like confusion.

  Ether. That was a Madeleine word.

  He spoke faster, getting back on track: “And where did the cracks come from? Were they always there, or was it decay or erosion or something? Or did scientists create them in another dimension maybe? Mr. Garenstein said he’d heard about scientists who tried to construct artificial cracks, but he said it was quantum physics and I should ask you about that. What the idea was behind it.”

  Now her face changed again, and her eyebrows lifted.

  “I don’t know much about that,” she said, and she gazed at the ceiling, thinking. “Okay. Here’s what I do know. You remember from your World Studies classes that when people used to come and go between Cello and the World, there’d always be a displacement? Some sort of tremble in reality, like a photo in a frame would switch directions so it was facing inward? Or a cup of tea would turn itself to coffee?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I think there was a point when a bunch of scientists got the idea that maybe if you started with the displacement, you’d induce a crack.”

  Elliot nodded. “Switch the direction of the photo in the frame yourself?”

  “Not exactly. If you did it yourself, that’s not a displacement of reality, that’s you picking up a photo and switching its direction. It follows the everyday laws of physics. What you want to do is jostle things a little. So, tell me one overriding law of physics that governs your everyday reality.”

  He hadn’t meant this to turn into a Physics lesson.

  He looked at her.

  “If I pick up this pen and let it go, what happens next?” she said patiently.

  “Oh, right. It falls. So. Gravity.”

  “Exactly. Our everyday reality is drenched in it. So these people thought about the things that displace gravity — like magnets or electricity — and they thought, maybe play with those a bit and see if that might construct a crack.”

  Elliot frowned.

  “But we use electricity everywhere. If that made sense, there’d be a crack at every streetlight and along every telephone wire.”

  “We don’t just use electricity everywhere.” Isabella nodded. “It is everywhere. It’s just as fundamental as gravity, and quite similar actually. They’re both forces between objects: The difference is that gravity always pulls the objects together, but electricity sometimes pulls and sometimes pushes apart. Electricity binds reality together at the subatomic level. It’s making your brain work — it’s making you give me that half skeptical, half when-is-she-going-to-get-to-the-point look that’s on your face right now.” Isabella smiled. “It’s okay, I’m not offended. And I’m skeptical too — I’m just setting out a theory for you. It goes like this. When we grab ahold of electricity and use it to make a tractor engine work, that’s not a displacement of reality, that’s part of the reality of life on a farm. People invent new things all the time, and reality adjusts almost instantly — or you could say that new realities are forming constantly. It’s only sometimes, in that tiny, tiny fraction of time when reality first gets displaced by the new — the first time someone plays with an electrical current, say; the first time a compass needle gets magnetized — that’s when a tiny crack might form.”

  “Wouldn’t that still mean a lot more cracks around than there are?”

  “Just because we don’t hear about them doesn’t mean they’re not there. Think about it. Cracks are invisible. You can’t touch them. They’re almost always tiny, so they only let small things come through. It’s only if something is somehow marked with something of the World. Or if the crack happens to get caught by a material object and starts catching things that come through. Then we know it’s there.”

  “So there could be a lot more cracks around than we know about.”

  Isabella shrugged. “It’s just a theory, like I said.”

  “And the people who tried to experiment with jostling reality to make their own cracks — did that ever work? Did they ever try to make a small crack bigger?”

  “No idea. Not the kind of thing that anyone could put in a book if they wanted to stay out of prison.”

  Elliot thought about how to ask the next question. Ah, he’d come this far. Just jump in.

  “How exactly did they jostle reality?”

  Isabella laughed. “That’s where it gets complicated. Gravity and electromagnetism are just two of the four fundamental forces in our reality. There’s also the strong force — that holds the protons and neutrons together inside the nucleus of an atom — and the weak force, which causes radioactive decay. If you really want to jostle reality, you have to get down to the quantum level. Smash protons together, mess with the gluons, separate — I think I’ve lost you.”

  “No,” he said. “Well, yeah, but thanks. I’m not sure how any of this’ll help with a presentation on interprovince relations, but like I said, thanks.”

  Isabella laughed.

  “Well,” she said, taking a step toward the door, “we’re not supposed to talk about cracks, so you should probably leave this entire conversation out of your presentation. You know that, right?”

  He nodded.

  “I guess,” she continued, “you’re not planning to use the information to construct your own artificial crack? So I should hold off on reporting you for now?”

  They both laughed. Their laughter carried them right out of the empty classroom and into the corridor, where they faced each other, still smiling, friends.

  * * *

  Later that night, Elliot headed to the crack to talk to Madeleine. He arrived right on time, and waited for her usual opener.

  It didn’t come, so he wrote his own note:

  Hey, Madeleine, you there?

  He was sure she’d reply yep, but there was a long silence, and then:

  I am.

  He told her what Isabella had said and suggested they try it over the next couple of nights, before the RYA meeting on the weekend.

  She said she didn’t have the technology to jostle reality, and he said maybe they could just jostle the crack. Since it was already there. He didn’t understand the subatomic level, but let’s say they tried magnets on Thursday, and electricity on Friday? She said it all sounded preposterous, but whatever.

  The tone didn’t sound like Madeleine. Elliot was looking at the notes trying to figure out what was up — were her friends writing to him, pretending to be her? But this was Madeleine’s handwriting — when a new message arrived, along with a printed paper.

  This email came from “Ariel Peters” today. Princess Jupiter. Whatever. The girl in Berlin.

  This was followed immediately by:

  Going home now.

  That was another surprise. A message from a missing royal was huge! They could analyze this for hours. Or M
adeleine could, and he could throw his deftball in the empty school grounds waiting for her long, long notes. But she was going home?

  He’d been thinking she’d have more to say about quantum physics too, seeing as she liked science. And about the linguistic and cultural crossovers between Cello and the World. She’d wondered about those before, but they made sense if tiny cracks were everywhere. Papers and objects blowing back and forth would seep into the subconsciousness of both of their realities.

  Plus, he’d wanted to tell her other stuff. Once they got the technical talk over, he wanted to tell her about his night in Tek, Jagged Edge. The Turquoise Rain, and maybe the Keira thing — try to figure out, with Madeleine’s help, what that was all about, and also because it felt weirdly like a lie not to tell her.

  He’d wanted to tell how Princess Ko had threatened to take away Agents Tovey and Kim, and how it had seemed like the world caving in — plastered a headache over his existence for the last week and a half — because he had this crazy conviction that the only people in all the Kingdom who could get his dad back were those two agents.

  And a lot more. He had a lot more to tell her about.

  But they said good night, and went home.

  3.

  Hey, Madeleine, you there?

  Yeah I am, and I’ve got a whole bunch of fridge magnets that Belle loaned me plus a big horseshoe magnet that I sorta borrowed from Denny’s when he wasn’t looking, plus paper clips and needles and stuff. I guess I’ll mess around with these in the vicinity of the parking meter, and I guess you’ll do the same over there, and we will be looking like a pair of complete tossers to anybody who happens to be up above our realities looking down on us. They will be laughing their heads off at us. Because the idea that tricks with magnets might split open the universe and let us into each other’s world, is about as likely as an African Grey-Necked Rock Fowl (rare bird mentioned on a TV nature show today) strolling out the front door of that house over there and asking me to go for a cocktail. Cause if it were true, we’d have lost half the world’s schoolkids. They’d be tipping through holes into Cello all over the place, in the middle of their science classes. You guys wouldn’t be able to take a step without being hit by a falling science kid.