Burning Kingdoms
Danger descends in the second book of The Internment Chronicles, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy.After escaping the city of Internment, Morgan and her fellow fugitives land on the ground to finally learn about the world beneath their floating island home.The ground is a strange place where water falls from the sky as snow, and people watch moving pictures and visit speakeasies. A place where families can have as many children as they want, bury their dead in vast gardens of bodies, and where Internment is the feature of an amusement park.It is also a land at war.Everyone who fled Internment had their own reasons to escape their corrupt haven, but now they’re caught under the watchful eye of another ruler who wants to dominate his world. They may have made it to the ground, but have they dragged Internment with them?
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Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Lauren DeStefano 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (falling girl); Shutterstock.com (ferris wheel, landscape).
Lauren DeStefano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of 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: 9780007541232
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007541249
Version: 2014-12-29
Dedication
For
Mina Baptista. Hereâs to the next twenty-seven birthdays.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
Contents
1
When the world was formed, the people soon followed. It has been a balancing act of life and death from that day on. It is not the place of any man to question it.
âThe Text of All Things, Chapter 1
Snow. Thatâs the word the people of the ground have for this wonder.
âGoddamn snow,â our driver mumbles for the second time, as mechanical arms sweep the dusting from the window.
Itâs like a stab to the heart hearing a god referred to so unkindly. I wonder which god he means. Iâd think the god of the ground would be less forgiving than the one in the sky. Vengeful. It would make sense, the god of the ground having interned us to the sky for being too selfish.
But I donât ask. I havenât spoken a word since I told Pen that it would be all right.
All the whiteness is blinding, and despite the blustery cold, the inside of this vehicle is so hot that beads of sweat are forming at the back of my neck. Thereâs a metallic taste to this air.
I have a thought that my parents will be worried, before I remember that theyâre gone. Not at home. Theyâre colors in the tributary now, a place that canât be seen by the living.
I squeeze Basilâs hand. And on the other side of me, Princess Celeste has her hands to the glass as she stares through the window. A city has begun to materialize through the snow. Itâs all boxy shadows at first, and then ribbons of color shoot through the sky, squares of light wink from the buildings.
My brother is in one of the surrounding vehicles. When we left the metal bird that brought us down from Internment, the men in heavy black coats split us up as they saw fit. They pushed us into the seats. They said theyâd take us somewhere warm and safe. They donât seem to realize that we were banished from this place, hundreds of years ago.
The driver raises his eyes to us in the mirror. âIt was swell luck that you came down before the blizzard.â
I donât know what that means. âBlizzardâ is a new word, and it bounces on my tongue, begging to be said.
Basil is looking up into the sky as though to chart a way back home, but the whiteness that falls from the clouds is his only answer. Now would be an apt time for him to regret following me hereâregret our betrothal. Maybe the decision makers were wrong to bond us to each other for the rest of our lives; weâve always cared for each other, but heâs logical while Iâm a dreamer. Heâs patient while Iâm careless. And now heâll never see his parents or his little brother again because of me.
I want to say his name so that heâll look at me, but Iâm afraid of what speaking might do to this odd balance between the driver and the three of us.
Our driverâs coat appears to be some kind of uniform. Heâs a patrolman perhapsâor whatever they have on the ground. Maybe they donât keep order down here at all.
Princess Celeste elbows me. And now that she has my attention, she nods to her window. Outside, a large machine is set some distance from the buildings. Itâs like a giant metal bug, its legs suspended in the air. Each leg is painted a different color, and at the tips are what appear to be clouds.
