The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  She read his notebook.

  I am ABEL GAREK BARANSKI. I come from BONFIRE, THE FARMS, KINGDOM OF CELLO. I have a wife, Petra, and a son, Elliot. My brother is Jonathan Baranski. He’s married to Alanna. They own the Watermelon Inn. They have a daughter, Corrie-Lynn. I own an electronics repair shop. I MUST NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT MYSELF.

  Here’s what happened to me.

  Mischka Tegan came to Bonfire not long back — high-school Physics teacher — she recruited Jon and me to her organization — told us it was a Loyalist Network branch — working against the extreme terrorist arms of the Wandering Hostiles — she wanted our help developing techniques for constructing cracks thru to the World — as method of resistance against Hostiles / escape route for royals under threat — we started development of a revolutionary technology for this purpose — experimented with listening devices and transponders — great success — first effort at actual crack thru to World was underway in back of a broken TV when Jon grew suspicious of Mischka — watched her closely — discovered she is in fact a Wandering Hostile herself — things turned ugly fast — other Hostiles with attack dogs — they were hunting me and Jon — truck got waylaid by a Purple — shutters failed — Purple got Jon — Mischka’s group pursued me thru the woods — chased me to edge of a ravine — fell into ravine — must have “stumbled” thru to the World thru a crack in the air —

  Note: Why did I come thru?

  Jon and I had theorized that “stumbling” occurs when acute emotional intensity is combined with powerful “absence” — but did the emotion / absence “construct” a crack in the air, or propel me thru a preexisting crack? Does it matter?

  Do intense emotions jostle reality and THEREBY open cracks? Space contracts when you move. Did the speed of my fall / adrenaline cause the universe to contract and thereby crack?

  Plan: make way to a university town. Find professors of Quantum Physics and consult on issues of crack construction. Consider replicating conditions of extreme emotion / absence. Can a missing bike wheel replicate the sudden absence of a brother?

  Note: one of attack dogs also came thru with me — shock seems to have rendered her harmless — also seems loyal/clings to me — take care tho —

  Madeleine closed the notebook.

  She looked down at Sulky-Anne.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said.

  Denny nodded. “Miss him every moment. And Petra. And Elliot. Only, I’ve been remembering them all with different names in different places in a different story. But the same. If you see what I mean.”

  Madeleine’s gaze was still on Sulky-Anne.

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t tell me this is the dog that came through with you? Please don’t tell me Sulky-Anne is a Hostile attack dog.”

  Denny shrugged. “I clipped her claws.”

  Madeleine sighed deeply.

  “And your name is Abel, not Denny? And you and your brother were working on cracks, and that’s why the TV in the schoolyard sculpture had a crack in it?”

  “Ah, just keep calling me Denny for now if you like. By the time I got to Cambridge, that’s who I’d become — my brain had translated everything.” He took back the notebook, and held it up. “Thought I must have got drunk and scribbled notes for a novel, which” — he paused, thoughtful — “struck me as odd, seeing as I’ve never shown a particularly literary bent.”

  “Did Elliot tell you about him and me? And the missing royals and everything?”

  “Kinda,” Denny said. “He was on the verge of incoherent, but I think I got the gist. And he mentioned your mirror-and-light trick. I’ve been trying to figure how that could work. Just thinking aloud here, but you know that if you shine light on certain metals, it blasts some electrons out of the metal? And mirrors are made from metal, of course, although —”

  Madeleine interrupted him.

  “I feel like it’s not so scientific as that,” she said. “I think when two people in two realities have a serious connection — reflect each other’s essences somehow — it sends a shot of energy between those realities. And that opens a crack. And maybe the mirror and light replicate that? Like a sort of literal reflection of the other person’s light. Like how you were thinking that a missing bike wheel might replicate an absence.”

  Denny raised his eyebrows. “Could be,” he said, “that your theory matches up with mine. A mirror might be an absence in a way — it’s waiting for something to reflect. And light could be like an emotion — that flow of energy.”

  “The most powerful force in the universe is human emotion,” Madeleine said, remembering what Belle had said, “especially when it’s brought on by an absence.”

  “Well,” said Denny. “Seems you’ve given this a lot of thought yourself. And I surely hope you’ll help me and Elliot figure out how to get home. We need to keep working on that crack in your parking meter.”

  “We can’t,” Madeleine remembered, and she took out the letter from Jimmy. “They’ll have taken away the sculpture by now.”

  Denny read Jimmy’s letter, then held it to one side, and stroked Sulky-Anne in long, slow, thoughtful strokes.

  Eventually he stopped. “I don’t think it’s relevant,” he said. “The TV sculpture being gone. There’ll still be a crack right there in the schoolyard that connects to the parking meter here. Whatever I did to the back of that TV must have been more or less right, but the crack formed when it got into the schoolyard. Maybe the way it was moved or positioned on the sculpture? The point is, the crack’s not literally inside the TV, the TV’s just been catching the things that come through.”

  He picked up Jimmy’s letter again, curling it into a scroll.

  “Can you do me a favour?” he said. “Can you post a letter through the parking meter right away?” He tapped his fingers on his knee, suddenly urgent. “Because who knows what she’s thinking right now?”

  “What who’s thinking?” Madeleine asked.

  But Denny was tearing a blank page from the notebook, swearing about how there was never a pen when you needed one, and running inside. He reappeared ten minutes later, holding up an envelope.

  Cody Richter said the envelope.

  “Cody Richter,” Madeleine read aloud, then: “Wait, that’s one of Elliot’s friends. The artist?”

  Denny’s face broke into a grin. “You sure do know my son,” he said. “I’m thinking this letter will just float into the schoolyard when you post it. And I’m hoping it’ll find its way to Cody. I think he’s the most reliable of Elliot’s unreliable friends. Then Cody can deliver it to her. She needs to know where we are and that we’re safe.”

  Madeleine looked at the envelope, then up at the third-floor window.

  “He’s still asleep.” Denny sat on the front step beside her again. “If you like, you can wait in my flat for him to wake? Not sure he’ll know who you are — his memories were in a slipping, spinning phase before he fell asleep. They’ll probably be all gone by the time he wakes. Reassembled into who knows what.”

  Madeleine stood up. “But you want me to post your letter first?”

  “Please,” he said. “It’s important.”

  She reached to take it, but paused, looking down at Denny.

  Not Denny.

  Abel Baranski.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said, and before he’d replied: “Were you planning to run away with that woman? The teacher? Mischka Tegan?”

  Denny began to scratch under Sulky-Anne’s chin so closely and attentively, that she thought he was not going to answer.

  “Mischka was a goddess,” he said eventually. “Sharpest mind. Beautiful smile. Jon and I were both smitten. We should’ve seen much sooner who she really was, but …”

  He continued scratching, and Sulky-Anne shifted a little, indicating she’d had enough and was just enduring it now, out of politeness.

  “But were you planning to run away with her?”

  There was a long pause.

 
“The honest answer,” he said, “is absolutely yes, and absolutely no. Both at once. I don’t think I would have, but …” and he left it there, his hands in the air.

  She looked at him: thin shoulders, inhaler half slipping from his pocket, bloodshot eyes, helpless hands.

  Then she took the envelope, got on her bike, and rode away to deliver it.

  * * *

  Now, standing in Denny’s flat, and looking down onto the street, Madeleine was thinking: absolutely yes and absolutely no.

  She turned from the window, and looked across at the kitchenette, where an upturned muffin tray sat beside a pair of coffee mugs.

  The duality, she realised, is inside us. We are all composed of absolutely yes and absolutely no, of north and south, dark and light; we are all both heroes and the opposite of heroes; we can all fly and we can fall.

  A strong wind can blow us away, or we can ride it.

  There are two sides to everyone, and two sides to everything, and then there’s the infinite space that’s in between.

  Dusk was falling fast.

  She wondered if Denny was still sitting outside on the step, waiting to be Abel Baranski again. She wondered if her mother was sewing upstairs, or watching TV, or standing at the window like Madeleine, waiting.

  You wait to find out where the truth will fall — at hope or at despair — but until it falls — even while it falls — it can be both.

  It is both, until it’s measured.

  She touched the window. It was smudged with her breathing and with fingerprints.

  There was a polite cough behind her, and she turned.

  The flat was dark now, but she could make out his figure, standing by the bed, white T-shirt and boxers that he must have borrowed from Denny, his hair sticking up in tufts that caught fragments of light.

  He took a step towards her. Now he was closer to the window, and she could see him more clearly. His eyes were bright and his expression suggested a person who is utterly baffled — but also amused by his own bafflement, and up for the challenge of sorting the whole thing out.

  “Maybe I could introduce myself,” he said, and then paused and chuckled. It was that deep, wicked chuckle she remembered from the space between. “Maybe I could introduce myself,” he repeated. “Not sure. Seems to me that I am Alexander Krol, and I —”

  “No, you’re not,” said Madeleine. “You’re Elliot Baranski, of Bonfire, the Farms.”

  Now Elliot grinned, and it was a grin that made her think it could prise you right open and let the light come rip-roaring in at you.

  “If that’s who you’d like me to be,” he said, “that’s who I’ll be. As for you, I have absolutely no idea who you are, but two things — one, you’re gorgeous, and two, I think I know you absolutely.”

  He paused. “That sounds like a line, doesn’t it? Fact is, it’s the truth.”

  He reached over, put his arms around her, pressed a kiss onto her forehead, and stepped back again, studying her.

  “Absolute magnitude,” she said, “means the intrinsic brightness of an object.”

  “Is that a fact?” The grin returned.

  The kiss was still there on her forehead. Inside the kiss was the essence of everything.

  In Taipei, Taiwan, Sasha Wilczek lies on her narrow bed and waits.

  The doctor had been fascinated by the coloured specks inside her elbow, but had nothing in particular to say about them. When she’d asked if they could indicate a tracking device, secretly implanted by a New Zealand–based gang called the Death Bears, his eyes had narrowed carefully, and his words had crept towards issues of mental health.

  She’d come home, and shut herself in her room.

  Now she looks at her watch. It is several hours since the designated meeting time. Obviously, they know her address, so she expects them any moment.

  Outside her door, her flatmates are setting up for their card game.

  She hopes, half-heartedly, that she has not put them in danger. They’re just kids, really, and it might have been more heroic for her to go to the meeting point, only she hadn’t felt like being shot down by a passing, speeding car.

  Now, though, they might storm in and put bullets between the eyes of the flatmates. She can’t bring herself to care all that much. If they played something other than gin rummy now and then, or if they’d even once made her laugh, things might be different.

  Still. Maybe they have unexpected ninja skills? She’ll completely forgive their lack of humour if they save her life.

  She falls into a fitful sleep and dreams she finds a trapdoor that leads her to a palace.

  * * *

  In Boise, Idaho, Monty and his friends pull up at the corner of West Jefferson and North Sixth Street, as instructed, and wait a full thirty seconds.

  Almost at once, another buddy of theirs walks by on the opposite side of the road, arms around a big brown paper bag.

  They all shout through the windows at once, and the buddy runs across the road, and leans in the window, saying hey. They talk and laugh at him, and he has no idea what they’re on about, or where the Kingdom of Cello is, or what it has to do with anything, but the brown paper bag’s full of booze, he says, and he’s heading to a party at another buddy’s place, and they all ought to come along.

  They tell him to jump in the car, and they speed off right away, all of them still hooting about cellos, and about this being the most elaborate party invitation ever concocted, the letters to Monty and the Prince Chyba thing and the whole mad lemon juice thing.

  The buddy has even less of a clue what any of it means but he laughs hard, thinking he’ll figure it out eventually.

  Monty, crammed in the backseat, has only a single moment in which he wonders if they might be missing the real thing — and inside that moment, there’s a sudden certainty that he is missing it, and an astonishing, terrifying plummet of loss — but then he’s outside the moment again, and shouting to the driver that he should take a right here, at which the driver’s shouting back that Monty wouldn’t know the best route if it crawled out of his shirt and sucker-punched him in the chin, and the car drives on and swings left.

  * * *

  In Berlin, Germany, Ariel Peters has been waiting on this corner for almost five hours. It’s dark but she’s still wearing her cheap sunglasses, the ones she stole from a petrol station. Her duffel bag is over her shoulder.

  She’s pacing in small circles to keep warm. There’s plenty going on. She’s on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, a very fancy corner. An upmarket corner. Too upmarket for a girl like her, whose gloves are fraying at the fingertips. They’re not cutoff gloves; they’re frayed.

  A couple walk by with wet hair. They’re fully dressed, but have towels hanging over their arms, and both are laughing, excited about something. From behind, Ariel sees a shiver run down the girl’s back.

  Ariel pushes up her sleeve, and peers at her inner elbow in the fading light. She can’t see the colours anymore. Her pacing circle is changing shape, stretching out, turning into a line that leads her home.

  She has in mind a new tattoo right there on her inner elbow. A spray of coloured specks. An imitation of the lemon juice effect. A permanent reminder of the time when, for just a few brief weeks, she got to be Princess Jupiter of the Kingdom of Cello.

  * * *

  In Bonfire, the Farms, Kingdom of Cello, Petra Baranski sits on the edge of her porch, waiting for nothing. She thinks lists of words like rows of pots.

  Raspberry. Quince. Beehive. Fertilizer. Pest.

  You can start with a random word, she’s found, and follow it along. Or get triggers from things you see or hear.

  The main thing is to keep the words coming.

  A bag of wet cement is slammed at her, now and then, and it knocks her off her feet, on account of having lost her husband and her son in a single day.

  But she’s found that, so long as she follows her rows of words, she can keep it from swinging too often.


  There’s the smooth rustle of a bicycle wheel in the driveway.

  Here comes Cody Richter, his wild head of curls, riding toward her.

  Bicycle. Axle. Spokes. Rust.

  That’s sweet of him to come, she thinks, but she sure hopes he won’t expect a cup of coffee.

  She’d have to stand up then, and the words might slip.

  White fly. Thrip. Downy mildew. Powdery mildew. Gray mold.

  Cody leans his bike against the wall of the house. He’s walking toward her. He’s got an envelope in his pocket. She can see a white square of it, sticking up.

  Square. Circle. Triangle —

  It’s slipping.

  “Hexagon,” she says aloud, relieved.

  “Octagon,” Cody counters, and he sits beside her, reaches into his pocket, and hands her the letter.

  I am enormously grateful to all those at Scholastic, and at Pan Macmillan, who have contributed such insight, energy, and artistry to this book, especially Arthur A. Levine, Emily Clement, Elizabeth B. Parisi, Sheila Marie Everett, and Lizette Serrano (in the US), and Claire Craig, Samantha Sainsbury, Cate Paterson, Julia Stiles, and Charlotte Ree (in Australia).

  For answering my questions and sharing thoughts, ideas, and expertise, thank you so much to Rupert Baker (Library Manager, the Royal Society), Mark Staples, Steve Menasse, Robert Guthrie, Rob Summers, Douglas Melrose-Rae, Robert Travers, Alistair Baillie, Tim and Julia Smith, and Andrea Nottage.

  For reading drafts and for suggestions, inspiration, and the distraction of a small child, thank you so much to my Mum and Dad, to Liane Moriarty, Kati Harrington, Fiona Ostric, Nicola Moriarty, Michael McCabe, Rachel Cohn, Corrie Stepan, Erin Shields, Jane Ecccleston, Lesley Kelly, Gaynor Armstrong, Libby Choo, Henry Choo, and Kirrily Agus.

  For being a consistently delightful small child, thank you to Charlie.

  This book is dedicated to my friends, Corrie Stepan and Rachel Cohn who, between them, took an impossible journey and reshaped it as a dream holiday.

  Jaclyn Moriarty is the author of The Year of Secret Assignments, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, and A Corner of White, Book One of The Colors of Madeleine. She grew up in Sydney, Australia, studied Law at Yale and Cambridge, and then turned to writing. Jaclyn now lives back in Sydney with her little boy, Charlie. She is very fond of chocolate, blueberries, and sleep.