The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  There was a dash of light, and far away a fountain of color.

  Elliot stopped weeping abruptly.

  “Pretty,” he said in a clogged-up but ordinary voice.

  “Yeah.”

  They laughed, still holding each other, pieces of his tears still in their laughter.

  “What if something goes wrong?” Elliot said again, voice small but direct.

  “It won’t go wrong,” Madeleine said, and she spoke with such conviction that she felt his body easing in her arms.

  “Sorry about that,” Elliot said now, but he didn’t sound embarrassed, more surprised. “It’s just. I don’t know. I keep thinking about what Keira said.”

  “She’s the one on the Royal Youth Alliance, right? From Jagged Edge?”

  “Right. And she’s a Night-Dweller so she’s, like, a darkness junkie. Darkness is part of her ideology — she sort of embraces it, and believes in endings and letting go and that. It’s like she’s trying to tell me all the time that things will end — things will go wrong — like she wants me to recognize that. Let go of hope. It’s like she’s trying to say that giving up is good.”

  “Keira’s an idiot.”

  “Well.” Elliot smiled in the dark. “I don’t know if she’s an idiot. I might be misrepresenting her. It’s more that she believes in facing reality, I guess, and reality is sometimes dark.”

  He could feel a strength in Madeleine, a resolution he hadn’t felt before, and he shifted his hold on her in the darkness, adjusting to that change.

  “She’s an idiot,” Madeleine repeated. “And your dad is coming back.”

  There was a tilt to the way they were standing. A softening, or loosening, in the nothing that was holding them.

  “Is something —?”

  “Yeah,” Elliot said. “I can feel it too.”

  “Now I’m scared that once we’re back I’ll never see you again.”

  “We’re not seeing each other right now,” Elliot pointed out.

  “But you’re here.”

  “I know. I’m just making a dumb joke. We shouldn’t have had that whole conversation about losing each other’s worlds. Now we’ve gone and scared ourselves.”

  There was another tilt.

  “Okay, talk fast, Elliot. As fast as a farm boy can, anyway. What do you need me to do?”

  “Can you get the letters to the royal family before the weekend?”

  “If I send them by courier, I could. I’ll borrow money from Jack or Belle. They’re cashed up from their aura and horoscope readings.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. The Kingdom of Cello appreciates it.”

  “Yeah, you’re just trying to make up for treating me like your World slave before. You can do that another time. When are you seeing your royal people again?”

  “I’ve got some conference call with them tomorrow morning, so I guess I’ll tell them about mirrors and lights. Do you think it needs to happen at both ends like we just did? Or will it work if someone on one side does it — like the woman in the archive report — it seemed like she didn’t have anyone on the other side matching up with her. She just used a mirror and light.”

  Madeleine found herself swaying slowly. She tried to grip Elliot’s hands more firmly, but his grasp was swaying too.

  “I guess that makes sense.” She spoke fast. “Hold a light towards our world, eventually it will catch a mirror here and be reflected. Or face a mirror our way and you’ll catch some light.” She tried to straighten up against the swaying. “Maybe,” she said, “we’re trapped in between right now because we both did the light-mirror thing at the same time — maybe if just one of us did it, we’d have crossed over by now?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” Elliot smiled. “I think the crack is too small — I’d try again when I get back, but I might just end up here alone.”

  “I think,” began Madeleine — but her voice was being tugged away from her. She fought against the pull. “I think I’m going back now.”

  “Me too,” said Elliot, his voice fading, but he fought his way forward one more time, pressed himself toward her, and spoke into her ear in a low murmur: “Nice to meet you, Madeleine Tully —”

  Elliot was back in the Kingdom of Cello; Madeleine was back in the World.

  9.

  Madeleine woke early on Wednesday morning to the sound of sighing.

  The sighs kept repeating at quick, regular intervals, like gusts of warm wind from a rotating fan.

  As if a fan had been placed right by her head, which made no sense — who would have —

  She opened her eyes, and swore.

  Her mother was crouching on the floor, staring at her from less than a hand width away.

  “Oh,” said Holly. “Did I wake you?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Madeleine said. “Why are you breathing at my face?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Holly said, and sighed. “Just, the milk’s off, so I’ll need to go and buy more but, as you know, it’s important to me to eat breakfast in my pajamas. It’s a priority of mine.”

  Madeleine sat up. Something wonderful was happening inside her chest. Fragments of light zigging and zagging. She smiled.

  “You have a beautiful smile,” Holly said, and then sighed as if this was also something to be mourned.

  Madeleine’s smile grew.

  She had found her way through to Elliot. They had talked. They had cried in each other’s arms. They’d shared secrets. He’d held her hands.

  Holding hands. The fragments of light swerved and careened inside her, running up and down her arms and legs.

  Of course, they’d been holding hands to stop each other blowing away into a mysterious abyss of darkness. But still.

  At least he hadn’t wanted her to fly off into an abyss of darkness.

  And he could have gone back to Cello at any point! Couldn’t he?

  Well, maybe not.

  But still. He hadn’t. He’d stayed and talked to her. That was the point.

  Madeleine focused on her mother, still sighing, still crouched awkwardly by the couch. “You could get dressed, go buy milk, come home, and change back into your pajamas,” she suggested.

  Holly gazed into a wistful distance. “I could,” she agreed, “but it wouldn’t be the same,” and another sigh, so long and slow, that Madeleine burst out laughing.

  She looked at her mother and her laughter faltered a little. This close she could see how much Holly’s face had changed. Lines slunk around her eyes, her cheeks seemed high and swollen, more lines and wrinkles above her mouth, a sort of bruising under her eyes. Things were being added to her mother’s face. It reminded Madeleine of sketches Holly did sometimes — how she’d draw the outline of a simple dress and then she’d start adding to it. Swoops, curves, puffs, frills, zips, sashes, shading, lines — Stop, Madeleine would think, it was perfect as it was!

  “I’ll go and buy your milk,” Madeleine said. “You just sit at the table with your pajamas on and the cereal in the bowl and your spoon ready in your hand.”

  Her mother spent the next ten minutes detailing the scope of her gratitude — the measurements for which were just dizzying — you’d need calculus, really, she said, to properly demonstrate — while Madeleine herself got dressed and thought about Elliot.

  Just making a dumb joke, he’d said at one point. He must have been nervous! Boys like Elliot didn’t make dumb jokes unless they were. Now that she thought about it, his speech patterns had been faintly edged with nerves. He must like her.

  Of course, he might have been nervous because of the abyss and potential oblivion, etcetera. But still.

  At the shop, Madeleine pulled a milk carton from the fridge, cold against her hand, and recalled how Elliot had leaned in close, and murmured in her ear, Nice to meet you, Madeleine Tully.

  He hadn’t been nervous at that point.

  He’d been the boy he could be, the boy who looked like Elliot Baranski, the boy who knew exactly how to make a girl fee
l like some kind of carbonated sugar drink was running through her veins.

  Or maybe he was just pleased to meet her, like he said. After all their efforts and letters and so on. And her being a girl in the World.

  Still, she let the soft, warm murmur replay in her mind as she walked home.

  After breakfast, Madeleine ran downstairs to Denny’s flat to use one of his computers.

  She found the email address for the girl who thought her name was Ariel Peters.

  Ha. That seemed funny. Well, today, everything seemed funny. Also, moving. It was deeply moving that Ariel Peters had been living in Berlin all this time, totally clueless that she was Princess Jupiter of Cello.

  Not moving, funny. She laughed aloud and Denny glanced up from his workbench.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  Madeleine took out the letter Princess Ko had written to her sister. It set out the precise time and location for her “transfer” back to Cello this weekend.

  She typed it into an email. The flat was quiet except for faint wheezing and clinking from Denny, the occasional swish of Sulky-Anne’s tail against the quilt cover where she was dreaming, and Madeleine’s own giggles as she typed.

  “Whatever you’re writing there,” Denny said eventually, “read it to me when you’re done?” He paused, reached for his Ventolin, inhaled, coughed, wiped his eyes. “It sounds like a hoot.”

  Madeleine looked up.

  “Not really,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s pretty sad.” She looked back at what she’d just typed and laughed hard. “Nah, it’s funny. But I can’t read it to you, sorry; it’s someone else’s letter.”

  The mouse swerved across the screen.

  Something occurred to her.

  She added a quick P.S. to the email, and hit Send.

  As she left, Denny was talking — something about borrowing change for the laundromat — but she was only half listening. Her mind was thinking: Elliot Baranski.

  She couldn’t imagine a better name. Elliot alone, with its gentle opening El sound, how it climbed up over the double l, and slid into a playful, yet strong-willed iot, that was brilliant.

  Why would a mother name a baby boy anything other than Elliot?

  But combined with Baranski! The symmetry of syllables! The sprawl and crunch of the Baranski! It was ingenious!

  Ten minutes later, she was knocking on Jack’s door, while Elliot Baranski still flew across her mind, the letters and syllables like circus performers.

  Jack seemed distracted.

  He was eating toast and he nodded right away when she asked if she could borrow money, but he didn’t quote Byron, and he didn’t tell her what the stars had planned for today.

  “See you at Belle’s place in a bit,” Jack called as Madeleine ran down the steps.

  “Yep.” She turned to wave at him one more time, but those fragments of light inside her seemed to blur his face.

  Light, she remembered, had taken her through to Elliot Baranski.

  Which was funny because she’d read so much about Isaac Newton and colours in the last few months, and colours were just pieces of light.

  All the colours of a prism, Newton wrote, being made to converge again, and mixed, reproduce light, entirely and perfectly white.

  She dodged around two elderly men, both in academic gowns, who were walking slowly, their heads close together. “The committee has decided,” one said to the other, “not to accept your application.”

  “Ah,” the man responded, and was silent.

  Madeleine left the silence behind her, swerving through a crowd of chatting students. It was a windy morning, and it seemed as if the students were being blown against one another as they walked.

  She pushed open the door to Staples — it was a stationery store, but they also did DHL couriers, she thought — and sorted through Princess Ko’s letters.

  To King Cetus in Montreal, Canada; to Queen Lyra in Taipei, Taiwan; to Prince Chyba in Boise, Idaho; to Prince Tippett in Avoca Beach, Australia.

  The woman behind the counter had dirty Band-Aids around three of her fingers. Madeleine stared at these while she listened to the rates for overnight express delivery.

  At the last moment, she grabbed the letters back and scribbled in the P.S. that she’d added to Princess Jupiter’s email.

  Now she had ten minutes to get to Belle’s place.

  The wind had grown stronger, but the sky seemed blue enough to take it. She smiled, picking up her pace. She’d spent her morning buying milk for her mother and sending messages to the royal family of Cello and thinking about how light had taken her through to Elliot.

  Not just light, she remembered. Mirrors too.

  She remembered once writing to Elliot that the pair of them were like reflections. Like two grey cats. Like a cat and the shadow of a cat.

  Everything comes in pairs, she thought now, running faster.

  Newton’s third law of motion: All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

  Two hands, two legs, two eyes.

  The World and Cello. Madeleine and Elliot.

  Even light itself came in pairs: electricity and magnetism.

  It was all part of a giant balancing act, she decided. Light balanced dark. Inside atoms, strong forces held things together, weak forces tore them apart. Out in the universe, particle motion pushed galaxies apart; gravity drew them together.

  The balance was fragile.

  Too much particle motion and you got a Big Bang; too much gravity, a black hole.

  Light had to move at precisely the right speed or that fine balance of electricity and magnetism would be lost — and so would light.

  Too much light could blind or burn you; too much darkness meant death.

  Madeleine turned into Belle’s street and slowed.

  You never knew whether the balance would hold — on which side it might fall. It was always uncertain. Light itself was uncertain — both wave and particle — and could never be pinned down.

  From here she could see that Jack had already arrived. He was standing on the front step, his back to her. The door was open, and Belle’s mother, Olivia, was leaning against the frame, talking.

  Madeleine slowed even more. The wind blew her hair across her face, and instantly her morning changed shape.

  It wasn’t milk and royals and light.

  It was the shadows on her mother’s face. Denny’s wheezing, his bloodshot eyes. It was Jack’s expression skittering. Old men in academic gowns, crestfallen by news; women with injured fingers.

  She stopped. She’d read something about blindness just the other day. It seemed important, but what was it?

  She pushed open Belle’s front gate, and Olivia and Jack both turned.

  “Come see,” called Olivia, laughter in her voice. “It seems we have lost Belle!”

  Jack was staring at Madeleine.

  He held up the paper in his hand. “It’s a suicide note,” he said.

  Madeleine stared back, bewildered.

  She remembered now what she’d read. If you are born blind, and years later, a doctor repairs your vision, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to see. You never will. Your mind will not comprehend images: It won’t understand what it’s supposed to do with light. Too much darkness will have killed off all the light.

  10.

  The Baranski farmhouse had a ticktock feel to it.

  Elliot came downstairs around seven, and the rooms seemed wide-eyed, the air quiet with noisy hope. It had rained in the night, but now the sun shone on wet windows, which added to the sense of fresh suspense.

  He imagined telling Madeleine this — that the house had a ticktock feel, only without ticking or tocking — and he remembered the movement of her hands in his, and how he’d held her close when she cried, and how tricky it had been to sort out the reason for her tears, and to speak, with her chest pressed up against his and her breath coming warm through his T-shirt.
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br />   His mother stood in the living room, her back to him, arranging flowers. Yellow gerberas. His father’s favorite.

  She turned and smiled. She was wearing lipstick, and her hair fell loose around her shoulders. Usually she tied it back first thing, but now it was brushed straight, mostly hooked behind her ears, but she must have pulled a strand of two forward, to frame her face. Something else seemed a little odd about her, but he couldn’t figure out what that was.

  “Hey,” he said. “Not at the greenhouse yet?”

  His mother turned back to the flowers.

  “Agent Tovey called again yesterday. He said it might be anytime today. Thought I’d better stay here just in case.”

  The casual to her voice was the finest layer of ice over an ocean-deep of terror and excitement.

  Elliot went into the kitchen. He made himself toast, poured juice, ate breakfast. He looked around while he ate. The red-and-white cloth was on the table again: It looked like it had been ironed, and this time he couldn’t find the coffee stain at all. There were gerberas in a vase here too. The kitchen sink gleamed so silver it almost hurt his eyes. Also, those lime green canisters — the ones labeled “flour,” “sugar,” and so on, that were usually scattered around the kitchen with their lids missing and half full of old nails or stale almonds — were now in a neat line on the counter. Elliot stared at these awhile. Then he stood, and lifted their lids. Flour in the Flour, sugar in the Sugar, salt in the Salt.

  That seemed to be taking things too far. His whole life they’d never used those tins properly. He felt a little uneasy about this, as if it tipped him into a strange new dimension.

  He cleared his breakfast away, washed his hands at the sink, and was just shaking them when his mother came into the room. She was wearing the same bright, calm smile, but the smile twisted itself sideways and fell to the floor, as her eyes caught Elliot’s shaking hands — the water droplets hitting the linoleum.