The crowd is less than jubilant, grieving their own losses at the harbor, sleepless from their own recollections of bombs and the fear of more. But they believe what they’ve been told. Their desperation has made them soft, putty in his hands, just as he planned it. And we are his demonstration, also just as he planned. He never meant to kill us or to take a bomb to our magical little island; he intends to turn it into a novelty, like one of Birdie’s snow globes. She keeps them on her window ledges in her bedroom so they’ll catch the light. On Internment, I dreamed of the endless ground, while somewhere below my stratosphere she was collecting those tiny little worlds she could watch from all sides.
Pen takes hold of my hand. It isn’t a show of weakness, but of defiance. If she’s made to stand here and be a prop in a foreign king’s speech, she’s going to choose what’s worth holding on to. Thomas takes her cue, and Basil, and even Judas, until we’re all holding on to one another. We were brought here, the lot of us, at the same time and all for different reasons, but this world of spinning teacups and sinister kings will never take from us who we are and where we’ve come from. Even when we’re frightened, even when we’re angry with one another, on Internment people are loyal to our own kind. We are dangerous dreamers, and we are strong. The desperate crowd fades to darkness beneath us. I imagine that we could step through the wall of clouds that touches the horizon, and go home.
Lauren DeStefano is the New York Times bestselling author of the Chemical Garden Trilogy, which includes Wither, Fever, and Sever. This book is the second in 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
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.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeStefano, Lauren.
Burning kingdoms / Lauren DeStefano. — 1st edition.
Summary: After Morgan Stockhour and her friends escape Internment, she discovers that life on the ground is not safer, and that, perhaps, going over the edge has led her to madness.
ISBN 978-1-4424-8064-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4424-8066-7 (ebook)
[1. Science fiction. 2. Utopias—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D47Bur 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013041618