She did not cry herself to sleep. Her eyes might have been bothered by allergies, and she might have nodded off for a nap for a moment, but she wouldn’t let a disagreeable person drive her to tears. Still, she woke up when sound began coming through the earring.
“Is it taken care of?” Lady Umber demanded.
“Yes,” Mr. Wilson replied. “The airship was shot down.”
“Shot down? It was supposed to explode. People can survive a sea landing.”
“No one will survive. They’re twenty miles from the nearest land. The girl is the only heir now, and you’re the regent.”
A feminine snort. “She’s not going to be as easy as we were told, but she’s still a child. Besides, if this island is too much trouble, we can always sink it again as a warning to the other three.”
Jes held her breath, wondering if she still napped after all. Surely, they didn’t mean—her parents, dead? Alex? They were willing to sink her island?
She remembered Aunt Anya talking to her mother late one night. A hostage is already dead. Nothing you do can make that worse. Maybe, just maybe, you can help.
Mrs. Clemens’s voice echoed in her head. Remember, in any crisis, you can always think of one good thing to do. While you’re doing it, you’ll think of another.
First, she could stop the island from sinking. Second, she could get herself away, so she couldn’t be used against her people. She’d have to warn someone—Mrs. Clemens—about what was going on. And she’d have to get word to someone she could trust.
If Gregor sent her, who can I trust?
Spare clothes went into a pack, along with some tools. She snuck down the back staircases to the kitchen. Preparations were underway for dinner, but the room was briefly empty, so she snuck through to the larder. Bread, cheese, and dried fruit went into her pack, along with a flask of ginger water.
She whirled around at a slight sound and sighed in relief at the sight of Mrs. Clemens.
“Princess Jes, what are you up to?” Title, not nickname. Mrs. Clemens looked like she was withholding judgment but suspected shenanigans.
“I overheard Lady Umber talking,” Jes confessed. “She arranged to have the airship shot down. My—” She broke off, blinked hard, then went on. “She’s willing to sink the island. I need to stop her.”
It sounded preposterous. Just for a second, Jes questioned again whether she’d dreamed it. Then Mrs. Clemens nodded slowly. “I worked too many years with blackguards not to suspect that there was something off about her. Who are you taking with you?”
“Nobody. I don’t know who might be working with her. King Gregor sent her! Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn’t, but I can’t risk it.” Jes pulled herself up as tall as she could. “This is my country now. I won’t let anyone hurt it.”
Mrs. Clemens sighed. “I’ll cover for you for as long as I can—you were up early, they just missed you, I’ll be sure to pass on a message when I see you. You … you be safe, Jes. You’ll be going below?”
Jes nodded. The tunnel system was damp, but it was her only chance to go unnoticed. It was also where she needed to go to keep her kingdom safe.
Donal’s mother, Queen Melia, had explained it to her once. Some ancient people had once used volcanic vents to raise and lower the different islands for their own purposes. It was impossible to tell if they had been used as farmland before, but it had taken years of special crops to clear the salt so the land could be fertile. Even if every single person made it off safely—impossible—the kingdom’s livelihood would be gone if their island was submerged.
Mrs. Clemens stood guard as Jes took a candle and slipped through the larder to the root cellar. A trapdoor there led her down into caverns that were natural rather than manmade. At the bottom of the stairs was an armful of torches wrapped in oilcloth to keep them dry. Jes lit a torch with the candle, then blew the candle out. Two more torches went into her pack, to light from the first.
The torch’s light flickered eerily over water droplets on the stone walls, and she could hear her own breathing. Jes set her teeth, and stepped forward towards the darkness ahead. She stopped at a sound from the earring, but it was just footsteps going by the room. Good to know it has that kind of a range.
The tunnel sloped down for a while. Jes sang for a few minutes, until she realized that she’d never hear anyone else over it if they were following her. Her feet made almost no noise in their soft boots. She could hear water dripping, reminding her that she was below the ocean here. If the tunnels flooded, she would drown.
The smoke from the torch made her nose itch, and sometimes a piece of ash would land on her hand, leaving a tiny burn. Old, dead barnacles dotted the walls, reminders from the centuries when this place had been underwater. There was some silt on the tunnel floor, some dried algae, some bones of unlucky fish. She imagined swimming through the tunnels instead of walking. It would be dark. She added a glowing light in her hand, then imagined she was a mermaid to make it all easier.
“If there were really warlocks, they could just imagine things into being,” she told the torch. The flames burned on, uninterested. “Of course, if Lady Umber was a warlock, we’d already have lost. The real way is probably better.”
She stopped after about an hour to have a drink of the ginger water and a bite of the cheese. Her only measurement of the time was the torch, and it had burned about a third of the way down. She remembered that they were supposed to last three hours each, and she hoped the two more she’d taken would be enough.
The first torch was almost gone when Jes reached the little spit of land that powered the vents. Back when her parents and the others had come to fight the pirates, it had been the only part of the island network still above water. Dark Mathis had had his pirate base on the tiny island above, using the higher caverns to hide treasure and guns and supplies. He hadn’t realized the true purpose of the caverns.
Jes lit a second torch from the first and set the last of the dying torch into a wall holder. She took a deep breath, then started up the long flight of stairs. She could tell when she got to the part that had never submerged. The walls were different, a lighter gray without the water’s touch. The mechanism was off to one side, a collection of stone and strange metal that looked like decorations. No one before Melia had guessed that it was more than that. It was the most powerful machine in the world.
Whoever planned this knows about the controls, Jes realized. Not just that there’s a way to do it but details about how they work. Otherwise, how would they know that you can sink just one of the islands?
The power it took to sink the islands took time to build, just as the power to raise them had. Uncle Phineas liked to talk about the blend of fast talk and action they had used to hold the pirates off while the vents filled to the point where Melia could open them. Chris’s parents, King Darby and Queen Lily, had used everything from smoke bombs to channeled lightning as delaying tactics, and Father had done something with soap and sheepskins that nobody would tell her about. Now she was the one delaying.
Everyone knew how steam could be used to move pistons, generating power to run things like trains. Miniaturized systems that could power things as small as her fist were much more complicated. This was wildly different—steam technology on such a huge level that whole islands could rise and fall. There was no man-made fire in the world vast enough for this. The islands used a volcano instead.
The temperatures that melted rock were so hot that humans would be vaporized, but the lava was far away under the ocean floor. The steam was contained in huge chambers there, and could be released to power the great machine in a matter of minutes when they were full. If the steam was let out, however, it would take a long time for it to build up again.
Step one. She opened the safety valve for the volcanic vents fully. Queen Melia said the only downside to leaving it open was that a fifth island was likely to form over the vent, off to the north west, after a few decades. Jes could live with that. Even if the vent was fully closed now, it would take about a day to get the power all the way back up.
Step two. Jes brought out her tools and started individually sabotaging the controls that would sink each of the islands. It could be fixed, but that also would take hours.
Step three. Jes closed her eyes and breathed for a minute, going over the idea in her mind. If someone came to this chamber, they could undo her work. Unless the chamber was underwater.
The previous level of sea water hadn’t reached the chamber, but adjusting that was easy enough. More difficult was setting up the failsafe. Jes decided that the failsafe would be anyone entering this chamber at all. Coming through, from above or below, would cause the tunnels to flood; the spit of land would still exist, but the chamber and the caverns below would be full. Since they were all below sea level anyway, that took no power—just an opening of doors.
It wasn’t as clean a plan as Father would have preferred—he preferred contingency plans to his contingency plans—but it would work.
Did you have a contingency plan to getting shot out of the sky? She hoped fervently that he had.
She headed back down the stairs to the tunnels, pausing at the bottom to think. Protecting the islands had been the first priority, but now she had to find help. She used the burned-out torch to sketch with soot on the stone floor. To the east was the mainland, and the Kingdom of Alsandia where her parents had grown up and King Gregor ruled now. There were other countries on the mainland, but too far away to be helpful. Next were the islands—her own, East Waveborn, was the closest to Alsandia, but still a long ride by ship or a few hours by airship. Her parents’ friends and Mom’s sister were the rulers of the other Waveborn islands.
Dad said that the younger Waveborn royal kids were a direct result of Alex being a cute toddler. Whatever the reason, all four of the ruling families had had a child in the same year, and they’d grown up like cousins. Amalia, who lived in North Waveborn with Aunt Anya and Uncle Phineas, was her cousin by blood, too. Chris lived with his parents, King Darby and Queen Lily, in South Waveborn. Donal lived with his mother, Queen Malia, in West Waveborn.
Any of them would, and could, help her. It was habit more than anything that made Jes turn north towards her cousin Amalia. Aunt Anya always listened, no matter how weird a story was, and Uncle Phineas kept his sense of humor no matter how dreadful things were.
Jes settled her pack onto her shoulders and took the tunnel to the north.