The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  “Huzzah!” roared the crowd.

  “Sergio?” the Princess said. “The detector?”

  “My clearance level …” Sergio began helplessly.

  A low, relaxed voice seemed to swing across the table.

  “Don’t look at me,” said the voice. “I’m not speaking. I’m just saying, Princess, you need to put an agent in the WSU. Take Sergio out and —”

  “Agent Ramsay,” said the Princess. “I told you not to speak.”

  Outside, it had started to rain. People huddled closer to the glass, and to one another, arms and elbows above their heads. There was a brief lull in the shouting.

  “They’re going to break the windows,” Keira observed.

  “Samuel?” Princess Ko commanded.

  Samuel said that, as requested, he had stolen a stack of original accounts of travel between the World and Cello.

  The others regarded him curiously.

  “How did you do it?”

  “As to a figtree in a waternoose,” he said with a modest shrug. “Neither do I see how they can help. The key passages are thoroughly blackened, and I have beheld them with candlelight and lamplight, and struggled and strained, and still? Nothing but black.”

  “Maybe Keira’s eyesight?” Sergio suggested, but Keira was shaking her head. “Can’t see through things,” she said.

  “Well, that’s Elliot’s problem,” the Princess said. She touched her nose, and some of them managed a chuckle. “Do better with your laughter, everybody. And, Samuel, get those archives into Elliot’s backpack before we leave here today.”

  “How?” wondered Samuel.

  “You got them out from behind bars in a library.” The Princess shrugged. “Getting them to Elliot should be — what was it you said? A figtree in a waternoose. Your turn, Elliot.”

  Elliot told them about how he and Madeleine had been messing with magnets and electricity, and how they’d jostled reality — or anyway, jostled the crack.

  “We’re working with a tiny crack,” Elliot said, “and things are happening. I’m thinking, the same thing would set a major crack wide open.”

  “Huzzah!” came a roar from outside, which was disconcerting. It seemed like they were cheering Elliot’s words.

  But it was just that the rain had stopped. People were stepping back, shaking themselves out, peeling off wet outer layers, removing their hats, and shaking these so that sprays of rainwater splattered against the glass.

  The musicians drew out their instruments and resumed playing.

  “Very well, before we leave today, I need Keira to calculate the timing for a staggered reentry of each member of my family — my father, obviously, as first priority — and to get this to both Elliot and me. Before the end of this week, I need Sergio to acquire a detector. I need Elliot to confirm the best way to get a person through a crack, and to pass on Keira’s schedule of reentry to my family. Next Saturday, we will meet at Ducale, Golden Coast, proceed to the location where my father disappeared, and bring him home. Over the following twenty-four hours, we retrieve the rest of my family. By Sunday afternoon, they will all be home, and my father will be attending the Namesaking Ceremony in Aldhibah.”

  All of this the Princess delivered with the tone and facial expressions of somebody sharing a lively anecdote.

  That part was impressive. Her plan, however, seemed a little fragile.

  “Eat and drink,” the Princess commanded. “And stop looking at me with those faces full of tragedy and doubt.”

  “There’s something else.” Elliot obediently picked up a cob of corn. “I’ve got letters from your sister, Jupiter, and your brother Tippett.”

  The Princess’s hand had been reaching toward the fruit platter. She paused.

  “Give them to me one at a time,” she said, and she allowed her hand to carry on, and pick off a bunch of grapes. Sideways to Sergio she murmured: “Can you do something distracting?”

  At once Sergio stood up and began to dance on his chair, keeping time with the music that was playing on the deck.

  Villagers noticed this, pointed it out to one another, and huzzahed.

  Samuel frowned.

  Elliot slid the email across. Ko read it fast. She grinned.

  “That sounds exactly like Jupiter,” she said. “Who knows what WTF means, but all those exclamation marks. They’re like the jewels with which she adorns her words. The next one, Elliot? Keep it up, Sergio!” She looked up and applauded.

  “The Princess is clapping again!” came a shout from outside. “The Princess likes the Olde Quainte dance!” There was enthusiastic stamping on the deck. Several villagers began to dance themselves, slapping their hands on the windows.

  “This place doesn’t seem all that Hostile,” Elliot observed.

  “Trust me,” said the Princess, waving at the dancers. “It is.” She took the envelope from Elliot, opened it in her lap, and drew out the letter.

  Sergio stepped onto the table and continued his dance amongst the platters. He beckoned to Samuel to do the same. Pleased, Samuel obliged him.

  The Princess lowered her eyes as if she was fixing a napkin on her lap. Elliot glanced over her shoulder.

  He could see large, square handwriting.

  The Princess stilled for a moment. Her careful smile froze, trembled, and froze again. Elliot could see her jaw clenching.

  She curled the letter into her palm.

  “Okay,” she said in a low, clear voice. “I want every single one of you to laugh. Keep dancing, Sergio and Samuel, but also laugh. Laugh like you’re off your face with GC teakwater. Laugh like you’re three years old and your parents are tickling you. Laugh like you can’t stand how funny it is.”

  Abruptly, she shouted and the others recoiled, then realized it was supposed to be a shout of laughter. She screamed, pounding her fists on the table.

  The others joined her. They started a little tentatively, but caught one another’s eyes, and the absurdity — of this pretended laughter, of the Princess’s list of impossible tasks — began to convert their performance into genuine mirth.

  Outside, the people hesitated. Their faces lit up. They caught ahold of the laughter themselves, and joined in.

  “I need to say something,” Keira laughed.

  “What?”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  Everybody hooted.

  “What is?”

  “Trying to communicate while the entire population of Olde Quainte watches.”

  “I agree. But we have no choice.”

  The Princess burst into another storm of laughter, tears streaming.

  “If we’re trying to get your dad back next weekend,” Keira said, “ha-ha-ha — we need — ha-ha — to be able — ha-ha — to get messages to each other this week.”

  The Princess chortled. Sergio fell off the table with his laughter.

  “I agree! But how do you propose we do that?”

  “Carrier pigeons!” said Samuel.

  “Messages baked in loaves!” Elliot shouted.

  “Hide secret notes in laundry hampers!” Sergio cackled.

  “We need a code!” panted the Princess, heaving with laughter. “Rearrange the stars! Put messages in comets!”

  “We can have holographic interface meetings!” Keira giggled.

  “No, we can’t! Too easily intercepted!”

  “We can use encryption keys!”

  “They’ll just circumvent them!”

  “Not these ones, they won’t! I have to tell you something else! Are you ready? Elliot gave me the paper-clip listening device! The one his father invented!”

  There was a fresh roar of laughter. Now Samuel tumbled from the table, crashing to Elliot’s lap and then to the floor. He rolled under the table, howling.

  The Princess caught her breath and spoke fast and low: “Are you saying that Elliot gave you the listening device I specifically instructed him not to give you?”

  There was a movement behind them.

  “S
tay where you are,” Princess Ko shot at the security agents, then she shrieked into another cascade of laughter.

  Outside, the villagers and musicians were in hysterics. There were crashes as they fell against the windows or onto the deck, overcome.

  “I’ve reconfigured the technology to make communication devices: one for each of us. They’re embedded in rings. Nobody will be able to intercept our transmissions.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “You can’t intercept transmissions that are smaller than particles of magic.”

  There was a pause. The Princess nodded.

  “Give out the rings at our farewell. We’ll have a virtual conference call, this Wednesday, eight A.M. Not that Sergio or Samuel have heard a word of this.”

  She pointed to the floor where Sergio was curled in a fit of laughter, and Samuel was clutching his stomach.

  “One more thing,” the Princess said to Keira. “New plan. When you calculate the timing of the transfers, I want my little brother, Tippett, to come first.”

  “Princess,” murmured the agents from behind her. “Your father must be —”

  But Princess Ko flung out a fresh peal of laughter.

  1.

  Elliot’s father was not home yet.

  “There’s just a glitch,” his mother said, collecting him from the 11:55 P.M. train, moonlight brushing stripes along the platform.

  He threw his backpack into the truck, and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Wednesday, they think,” she said, and their glances skittered sideways, crossed, and returned to the road ahead.

  She turned the key in the ignition, put the truck in gear. “Okay. Let me get you up-to-date. You missed an ice storm that snapped the power lines in the town square. Clock tower lost about forty-five minutes and nobody’s got around to giving them back just yet. Some guy staying at the Watermelon Inn tied his bedsheets together and let himself out his window in the middle of the night. Guess he didn’t want to pay his bill. Your Auntie Alanna was laughing fit to bust a gut, thinking how he could have just walked out the front door during breakfast and she’d never have noticed — but no, he went to all that trouble with the sheets. She was impressed with the way he’d knotted them. Not so pleased with how he broke the window latch but she forgave him that, for giving her a laugh. He hadn’t run up much of a bill, I guess. And your buddy Gabe’s had a bumper crop of beets. It’s put everyone in good spirits, thinking it’s a sign of change ahead. That’s the local news. Not bad for one weekend. Your turn now. Tell me everything. Olde Quainte, eh? I’m thinking old and quaint?”

  Elliot settled back into his seat, looked at the streetlights puddling the gutter, and told what he could about his weekend in Olde Quainte.

  * * *

  The next day, Monday, Agent Tovey called while they were eating breakfast.

  Elliot answered.

  “We’re all set for Wednesday,” Tovey said. “Listen, I know that the waiting’s a killer for you both, but if it helps, Agent Kim and I are about to watch a dolphin show in a water park here. That’s how confident we are that things are going to plan. Nothing to do but wait, so we’re going to watch dolphins pick up hoops with their noses. You and your mother should do the same.”

  “No dolphins here in Bonfire.”

  “I meant do something in the same spirit.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “I know you know.”

  Elliot smiled, hung up, passed this on to his mother, and the mood in the farmhouse lightened. They found themselves half grinning as they reached for the toothpaste, or buttoned up their jeans, widening their eyes now and again with the wonder, excitement nearly tripping them up.

  After school, Elliot found his mother mopping the floors.

  “Don’t walk on the floor!” she shouted, and he pulled off his shoes, dropped them by the front door, and took big steps toward the kitchen.

  The sink was gleaming, and two dish towels he’d never seen before were hanging briskly from the hooks. There were daisies in a vase on the kitchen table, which was laid with the red-and-white checked cloth that Elliot’s dad liked. He used to say it reminded him of birthday picnics. Elliot remembered how his dad had tried to hide the disappointment when his mother spilled coffee on that cloth once.

  The stain was almost gone now, he noticed. Maybe she’d tried some new laundry product on it.

  He and his mother spent that afternoon like a pair of pendulums, swinging between ordinary activities such as homework or paperwork, and more jittery activities like suddenly washing down the deck and setting up a row of potted plants to make it look welcoming.

  When they passed each other, they chatted about ordinary things. There was extra effort, extra words and phrases in their speech, Elliot thought. They kept adding layers, varnish to their speech, lilts and jigs like a pair of Olde-Quaintians.

  It was as if they were clinging to this happiness with both hands. It made him think of when they folded freshly laundered sheets together, each holding an end. That moment when they decided who would walk forward, take the sheet from the other, and finish off the folding. Only now they weren’t making any choices: They were standing there, holding tight to the ends, smiling at each other, waiting.

  It helped that he was going to speak to Madeleine tonight. Every now and then he checked the time, and the hours kept taking their solid steps toward the chat with Madeleine tonight, and his dad returning home on Wednesday.

  Maybe he’d hear her voice again, and this thought kept adding to those grins he kept catching in the mirrors as he passed them.

  He’d never even seen Madeleine, he remembered. That stopped him a moment. Did this even make sense, his Madeleine excitement?

  “People in the World look the same as people here, right?” he said to his mother while he fried burgers for their dinner.

  She was tearing lettuce leaves.

  She looked at him, perplexed.

  “I mean, they’re just ordinary people, right? They don’t have three eyes or an extra hand growing out of their shoulder or anything?”

  He remembered holding Madeleine’s hand. Things would be different if the hand had been extending from her stomach. There was just no way around that.

  “Well, when I was doing World Studies they never had extra eyes,” his mother grinned. She reached for a tomato, then paused. “I’ll tell you what I read once. That there was just one difference, as far as they could tell, between people from the World and people here.”

  “Which was?”

  His mother squinted, remembering. “The lemon juice test. You and I squeeze a little lemon juice onto our inner elbows, we’ll see a faint pattern of colors. Little specks of it. That’s true of every person in Cello. You can’t live here all your life, without some Colors getting underneath your skin, and they accumulate at the inner elbow.”

  “Is that a fact? I never knew.”

  “Never had cause to squeeze lemon juice on your inner elbow, I guess.”

  She grinned at him, and he smiled back, then Petra pulled on her lip. A tomato seed smeared onto her chin as she did.

  “You’re doing a lot of talking with your girl in the World these days,” she said. “Every other night, you’re at the schoolyard. I know I’m always on about this, but you’re being careful, right?”

  Elliot nodded, reaching out and wiping the tomato seed from her chin.

  “The Sheriff’s station being right across the road,” she continued. “I mean, Hector or Jimmy could look out any moment, and get to wondering what you’re up to. I’m glad you and Madeleine are making friends, and it’s a shame you guys can never meet. But it’s dangerous. It’s also not clear to me when you ever sleep, Elliot. Between Madeleine and the RYA. Well, I guess, things will change when — I mean things will settle down when —”

  She was smiling, but he could feel it in the room: the superstition rearing at her, hitting her in the throat, stopping the words: when your father gets back.
/>   He changed the subject. Told her the story of the banquet on the boat, how they’d fallen about laughing, and the villagers had laughed, how laughter echoes laughter echoes laughter. They both smiled at that, and got on with their burgers.

  * * *

  He was early to his meeting with Madeleine, and there was already a letter in the back of the TV.

  He felt himself light up to see her handwriting.

  Then he read her words.

  2.

  Dear Elliot,

  I know we’re talking tonight, but I wanted to explain this now, without the pressure of knowing you’re waiting in a schoolyard in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. Or heatwave. Or attack of Lime Green, or whatever.

  First, though, I have to say how incredibly happy I was to get your note about your dad coming back. That is FANTASTIC news. I hope it all worked out okay, and that he was there waiting for you when you got back from Olde Quainte. Maybe he even collected you from the station? I hope he’s well, and that you’re all happy catching up.

  How was your weekend with the RYA? I spent my weekend trying to do homework in one part of our flat, while Belle messed around with coloured lights, crystals, and my mother’s aura, in another part. Tricky to focus on trigonometry in those circumstances.

  It was cause Mum’s decided she wants her aura toughened up — reinforced or double-glazed or fine-tuned or something — so it won’t let her get another brain tumour. Not sure of the precise terminology for what Belle’s doing, although I’m pretty sure that she’d twist my face off if she saw the disrespectful words I’m using here. (She has a thing for twisting people’s faces off.)

  Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I like writing notes to you, and I’m happy to keep passing messages to the royal family or whatever — but I definitely don’t want to keep trying to get through the crack.

  I don’t want to play any more games with magnets or electricity or believing-falling-gravity, or with anything actually.

  I THINK you’ll understand why I’m saying this. The last couple of times were scary and weird and uncomfortable, and we still haven’t really come close to actually being in each other’s worlds. Or not for more than a second, which is no use to anybody. So maybe we could go back to the way things were? When we used to just write to each other?