I understand that panic now. For the first time, I truly understand it. I’m terrified to leave, overtaken by the finality of my decision. In five years, this city will have changed without me. Basil will be older. I’ll be older. We’ll both have learned who we are without each other.
If I stayed here, I could marry him tomorrow. In five years, without the queue we could even have a child.
I could stay. I could.
But I would never forgive myself. The things I love about Internment would turn into the things I’d resent for holding me back. And so I say, “Good-bye.” Not only to Basil, but to all I’m leaving behind.
He kisses me once, briefly. “Good-bye.”
The warmth of his lips, I’m certain, will stay with me the entire way down, just like the dull pain deep within my hips that reminds me of the night before.
Everyone else has said their good-byes and boarded the jet. I’m the last to go.
“Stop!” a voice cries out, just as Pen and Celeste are guiding me into the jet’s entrance. For one bereft, dazed instant I think that it’s Basil saying that he’ll come with me. But no, the voice does not belong to him.
Celeste’s eyes narrow and she pushes past me. “What do you want, Virgil?”
Her ex-betrothed is scrambling over the train tracks and running toward us. He doesn’t make it far. The patrolmen step into action, but it’s King Azure who grabs him and pins his arms behind his back. Virgil struggles. “I knew you would try to sneak off without me. I demand to go with you!”
Celeste rubs her palms over her eyes, exasperated. “If you want to see the ground, you’ll have your opportunity in five years. On your own.”
“You can’t go without me,” he calls out. “We’re meant to be together. I was born to be your other.”
“What’s done is done. We’re nothing to each other now. I suggest you go on and have your own future. I’m off to start mine.”
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?” he snaps. “I knew that must be it. You’ve been maddened by lust!”
Celeste stands tall. She is no longer a child who needs to run to the poppies to be free of him. “There’s always been someone else,” she says. “Me.”
She pulls the door shut with a slam, and the latches fall into place.
The engines burst to life, and I rush to the tiny oval window to catch one last glimpse of Internment before it’s gone. In seconds we’re moving, and Basil is too far away for me to see his face. He stands still to watch me go, even with the dirt and the wind in his hair.
Pen and Celeste put their arms around me, and together we watch our city become a shadow in the sky, and then nothing at all.
“Once we land, where will you go?” Pen asks me.
“Everywhere,” I say.
Lauren DeStefano is the New York Times bestselling author of the Chemical Garden Trilogy, which includes Wither, Fever, and Sever. This book is the conclusion to the Internment Chronicles. She earned a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut. Visit her at LaurenDeStefano.com.
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The Internment Chronicles
perfect ruin
burning kingdoms
no intention of dying
the heir apparent
The Chemical Garden Trilogy
wither
fever
sever
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Lauren DeStefano
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeStefano, Lauren.
Broken Crowns / Lauren DeStefano.
pages cm.—(The Internment Chronicles ; Book three)
Summary: With their floating city utopia threatened by the war on the ground and the greed of two kings, Morgan and the others from Internment must find a way to save the city from falling out of the sky or being obliterated altogether.
ISBN 978-1-4424-9637-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-9644-6 (eBook)
[1. Science fiction. 2. Utopias—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D47Br 2016
[Fic]—dc23
2014046571