Broken Crowns
War rages everywhere and Morgan is caught in the middle in the haunting conclusion of The Internment Chronicles, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy.The city is falling out of the sky…Morgan always thought it was just a saying. A metaphor. The words of the dying. But as they look up at the floating island that was their home, Pen and Morgan make a horrible discovery – Internment is sinking.And it’s all Morgan’s fault.Corrupted from the inside by one terrible king and assailed from the outside for precious resources by another, Internment could be destroyed because Morgan couldn’t keep a secret. As two wars become one, Morgan must find a way to bring her two worlds together to stop the kings that wage them…Or face the furthest fall yet.
Читать Broken Crowns онлайн беплатно
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
A Paperback Original 2016
Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2016
Cover design Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (girl in scene); Shutterstock.com (birds).
Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007541287
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007541270
Version: 2016-02-19
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
âT. S. Eliot
Contents
âThe city is falling out of the sky,â Professor Leander said. They were his last words. The medicine of the ground was not enough to cure an old man of the sun disease. He refused most of the efforts anyway. He told me that heâd already accomplished what no one else had been able to do. Heâd gotten us to the ground. He was quite curious, he said, to know if his spirit would be taken to the tributary, or if heâd go to whatever afterlife the ground believed in, or if there was nothing at all.
Amy was with him when he died, and she called it a peaceful death. A fitting death.
Down a labyrinthine set of hallways in the same hospital, Gertrude Piper opened her eyes after a month of sleep. It was as though the two gods had made an even tradeâthe life of a man from the sky in exchange for the life of a girl on the ground.
Before that, we all thought that Birdie Piper would die. After I landed in Havalais at the dawn of winter, she was the most vibrant thing in her strange world. She offered her friendship to Pen and me without question; she snuck us through our bedroom window and showed us the wonders of Havalais. The mermaids in the sea. The glittering lights cast upon the water at night. The spinning metal rides in her familyâs amusement park.
And then the cold war between Havalais and its neighboring kingdom of Dastor advanced on us all at once, in the middle of the spring festival. I watched as an explosion swallowed Birdie. I saw her body, broken and bleeding and burnt, being kept alive by some coppery machine. Even worse than my brother had been when heâd come too close to the edge.
But nothing is certain, not even death when itâs hovering over a girl. Not in my world, and not in this one. Birdie came back slowly. It took a month for her to open her eyes, and even longer for her to speak, serene in her delirium.
She told us about a spirit that would come into her room late at night to sing to her and to tend to the flowers on the table by the window.
When she had faded back to sleep, Nim slouched forward in his chair and rubbed his temples, anguished. âIt wasnât a spirit,â he told us. âOur motherâs been here.â
Mrs. Piper disappeared some years earlier to see the world. The same madness that brings so many to the edge of Internment haunts the people on the ground as well. One place is not ever enough for anyone, it seems.
Itâs August now, and Birdie no longer talks about her spirit. Instead she has returned to solid ground along with the rest of us. She asks her brother about the war. She wants to visit the grave of her other brother, Riles. She is getting well and she is ready to face the grimness that often comes with being awake. She doesnât wallow in her despair, and does not mind that her soft face has been forever scarred.
Pen is different. She doesnât seem ready to face anything these days. It has been months since King Ingram left for Internment, taking Princess Celeste with him, and in that time, Pen has been prone to more and more moments of distance. Jack Piperâs guards surround the premises, and we are scarcely permitted to leave unescorted. Not until King Ingram returns with his instructions for us. But every week, Pen gives Nimble a new list of books sheâd like from the library. Physics. Calculus. Philosophy. She is drowning in pages and pages of things she never shares with any of us. And thatâs when she isnât off someplace where none of us can find her, even within the confines.
