26 DAYS. 22 HOURS. 42 MINUTES
The clock on the wall ticked six-thirty a.m. the next day, which meant I had thirty minutes to get ready for church. I rushed the rest of my breakfast, tugged down my sleeves, and left the apartment doors open as I turned left. Every Saturday, it was always left.
The streets in the dim daylight were a little better than at night, so I stepped on fewer piles of slippery moss, which had caught my balance by the toe on more than one occasion.
The two kids from the house around the corner sprinted under my feet, and I paused to let them rush by, their screeches the only sound as everyone made their way southwest. Mandy dipped her head at me as she chased her boys, her dirty blonde hair piled atop her head in crisscrossing plaits.
After a few more streets, and with few minutes to spare, the church loomed in front of me. Its spirals twirled into the church on the floor above us, the overlapping pathways shadowing much of the stone features. It was the derelict nature of the building—the moss growing up the sides, the ivy cracking the stonework, the wooden door that could barely be called a door anymore—that sank my heart upon every visit.
Dad used to say the building was beautiful once—a paragon of floor zero unity—but as more and more levels were added, fewer funds were given to the lower floors, and now the only parts of the city’s singular church building that matched the reverence people once held for it were on the upper levels.
Following the line of people into the church, I headed for my designated seat between Phyllis and Mrs. Nab, the elderly lady who lived in the basement apartment below us. Her seat used to be Dad’s. Beside that used to be Mom’s, but Mrs. Nab’s granddaughter sat there now, her high ponytail ruffling down her dress’s peach corset. This seat, however, the rickety one I knew how to sit upon without getting a numb butt, with the cushion whose left side was plumper than its right, had been mine for as long as I could remember.
A whispered silence fell over the crowd, echoing its way up the open-topped chamber. I snuck a quick glance up, and the hole where the ceiling should be made way to the levels spread out above us in all their glory, layer upon layer of them as they rounded the hollow space we occupied the bottom of. Jemeena would be sitting at the top somewhere, as obliged to attend church as I was, but I couldn’t see that far up. Floor one, however, I could see, and they sat in their usual chairs, dotted in concentric rings around the open hole in what I supposed was their floor but our ceiling.
Phyllis coughed and glared at me. “Look forward, Cinderella.”
Forward. Always forward in church—never up, never back, never down—though no one could tell me why. The custom seemed to permeate everyone’s thoughts as we all stared at the same spot in front of us.
At Minister Farro. Floor zero’s Minister of Seren.
Every floor had a different minister, but they all said the same thing at the same time, a well-rehearsed speech that differed week to week.
Minister Farro’s graying hair was hidden beneath a silver cap that stopped short before falling down the sides of his head, and the corseted vest sat neatly on his chest over a dark green shirt whose sleeves fell into frills at the end. As always, he looked impeccable. The usual silver buttons adorning his clothes, as well as silver studs in his ears and the usual silver collar around his neck, marked him as a minister of Seren—the only people in Palatina allowed to wear silver.
His eyes crinkled as he looked out at us all, determination on his face. “Welcome, children of Seren, and thank you for once again joining us for a weekly sermon.” His hands outstretched upon welcome, a genuine smile on his face. Despite church not being my favorite activity, Minister Farro was a kind, elderly gentleman who had offered much counsel after Dad passed, and I would hate to think badly of the man. He fed the young orphans out of his weekly rations provided by the church, often creating stews for the sick and the elderly who had long since passed their ability to fend for themselves. “Let Seren’s light wash over you, even when light is otherwise hard to find, and let His belief in you become your belief in yourself, even when times are hard.”
Believe in myself? That sounded just like Mags yesterday, almost as though her words echoed out of Minister Farro’s mouth.
“While faith in Seren and all that He teaches is important, faith in yourself and in others is equally so. For without faith in yourself and your community, Seren’s work and creations—being all that we are and all that we see—ceases to function,” the ministers echo.
If I listened carefully enough, I could make out floor one’s younger-sounding minister. I couldn’t see him from here, but apparently you could sneak a peek from some of the seats farther back. He had black hair with a small beard covering his chin and wire glasses that sat on his nose, if general chatter among Phyllis’s pompous friends was to be believed.
“Challenges are normal in life, set in front of us by Seren to help us grow, to help us shape the world, for He wants us to have a hand in His own creation. To help shape what He made. He provided the foundations upon which we, His creations, must build.”
By the end of the hour-long sermon, I had learned two things: that I needed to remain faithful to myself and that I needed to stop sulking. So long as I kept my head above water and continued to do my best, things would fall as they were meant to. Hopefully. With enough luck.
Dad’s scribblings were illegible in more places than not, even IoN had a hard time deciphering most of his words. We’d been sifting through the rest of his things for the three hours since church had ended, and we’d created a road map of his travels here on floor zero.
“So,” Jemeena said, “the first thing he did was purchase an old lifeclock from a black-market dealer here on floor zero and start fiddling with it.”
“I wish we still had the lifeclock he was working with; maybe I could see what his thought process was. Where did he go wrong?” I scratched at my head, befuddled as to where to start next. “Are you sure it’s not in that box, IoN?”
IoN’s crackly sigh sounded, probably frustrated with my asking again, but he went and looked nonetheless. “There is nothing but scraps and pieces scattered at the bottom. A few coils, some steam lines, and a silver cog.”
“That’s a shame,” Jemeena said. “It would have been useful.”
I snapped my head up and stared at IoN. “Wait. What did you say?”
“There are coils, some steam lines, and a cog at the bottom of the box?” he asked in question.
“No, you said a silver cog.” I jumped to my feet and rushed over to the box. “Most cogs are made of bronze and copper, and the upper levels have platinum ones, but silver cogs are found in only one device in the entire city.”
“Silver is reserved for the Ministers of Seren and other religious wares, but I don’t...” She trailed off, not understanding my meaning.
I rifled through the box, scraping cardboard with dirty and broken fingernails, my hair falling out of the curls Phyllis had insisted upon before church. “Silver cogs are only found in lifeclocks.”
IoN whizzed over, looking at the bottom of the box that I’d scraped clear. I carried it all over to where I was sitting on the floor with Jemeena. I really should get the princess a damn chair. I tumbled all the pieces from my overflowing hands onto the floor, where they jangled to a heap between us.
“You think he took it apart?” Jemeena asked.
“I think he took apart a black-market lifeclock to save himself or anyone else getting into trouble.”
IoN whizzed above our heads, a green light shining from the slot of his mouth. “No one would bother to look through a box of random parts in a steam engineer’s garage.”
Jemeena’s eyes widened as she looked at the pieces, uncertainty shining in her eyes. “Clever Preston.”
“Clever Dad.” I fiddled with the pieces, uncertain where they all went. I knew the basics, that the steam lines connected to the cogwork, and that was what kept time, eventually showing us the number of hours we had left to live on the clockface, but beyond that...we weren’t allowed to delve that far. “He must have figured out how they work, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to make any changes to his or Mom’s.”
“You don’t know how they work?” she asked.
I was deep in thought, trying to figure out what the steam lines connected to, so IoN answered for me. “It’s illegal to alter the mechanics of a lifeclock, so no. No one does. Or, no one we know.” He flew into the kitchen for a minute and came back with more peppermint tea for the princess. “Preston used to say that engineers who messed with lifeclocks were often taken by the church, never to be seen again. Rumors say they were executed.”
A huff escaped my lips at that, just catching the end of their conversation. “More than likely taken to Vine Valley Prison.”
“I promise I’ve never heard of any executions.” Something clicked, and her eyes went wide. “But there are regular passenger dirigibles that leave the city a few times a year, and not a regular transport dirigible for the wealthy, either.” She looked at the floor, red covering her ever-paler cheeks. “Father used to tell me they were lucky citizens going for an adventure around the world when I was little.”
“He probably just didn’t want to talk about dark subjects with his child,” I reassured, then looked up at her. “All fathers do that.”
“Right.” She looked skeptical as she fiddled with one of the bows on her dress.
I took her hand and squeezed gently. “Father used to tell me that we were soldiers working for the great king, having been given orders to work in the mines beneath the city. That, without us, the city couldn’t exist and we were doing Seren’s work.”
Her eyes lit up a little as they met mine in the dim light of the garage, and her confusion made my chest tighten and my hand squeeze hers a little harder.
Wait a minute . . . “The mines.”
“Huh?” My interruption seemed to only further her confusion. “What?”
“The mines. That’s where Farro’s son works.”
“El . . .” IoN warns. “I don’t think?—”
“If there’s one person who knows how lifeclocks work and who might be willing to share that information, it’s the son of floor zero’s minister.”
Jemeena’s eyes widened in understanding. “But they’re not supposed to tell anyone the secrets of Seren. It’s forbidden.”
I smiled, wicked ideas playing across my mind. “Do you want some floor zero gossip, Princess?” I jumped to my feet and brushed the dust off my dress.
She followed. “Sure.”
“Five years ago, when Minister Farro’s son was due for inscription into the Church of Seren, his mother, Farro’s wife, died. No one saw it coming—not even her son, because they never uncover their lifeclocks.”
“It’s forbidden for a minister and his family to show their lifeclocks, lest it cause civil unrest,” she recites, as though she had memorized the book it was written in.
“In a show of grief and despair, the minister’s son shunned the church, his father, and the entire institution. He doesn’t even attend church. His seat at the front remains empty. Which, for most people, would be enough to get them arrested, but everyone knows Minister Farro pays the police off, begging them to leave him be. That he’s grieving and in pain.” My eyes rolled of their own accord. “Of course, he’s just protecting his son, but still.”
“So, if anyone would know anything and be willing to share, it would be Minister Farro’s son.”
“Yup. And he works in the mines.”
There were many entrances to the mines, but the one closest to the garage was, luckily for us, a mere three streets away. As we approached the gated steps that led underground, the dirty sign saying Mine Entrance glowing a faint yellow under the artificial light above it, the air grew hotter and drier, like the moisture was being sucked out it.
The mines were what kept the city running—Dad wasn’t lying about that—but they were staffed by the lower three floors because it was the only work that kept food on the table for most. Dirty, dangerous, and unregulated places, the mines were the end for many. Dad described them as “necessary evils.” The mines produced steam power for the entire city, even the palace on floor twenty-one, by converting seawater from the ocean to the southwest to high-pressure steam, which was then forced up pipes lining every building. The pipes rotated the shafts in our electrical appliances to generate power. Sometimes, some devices did this themselves on a smaller scale, like the hovers, which you had to keep topped up with water. But in terms of powering the city? That was done manually by the good old people of floors zero, one, and two. Maybe even a few from floors three and four, if they were unlucky.
Descending the steps, I turned to the princess with a grimace. “I think you should use your scarf as a mask down here.”
She unwrapped the scarf from around her neck and turned it into a makeshift mask through which it must have been hard to breathe. Beneath the scarf was her corset, which was lined with more gold around her breasts. The gold showered down the rest of her outfit, eventually trailing into what I thought might have been something meant to mimic what little I remembered of starlight.
“It’s a beautiful dress.”
She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
Shaking my head clear, I shrugged my cloak off and handed it to her. “But it stands out like the sun.”
She wrapped herself up, doing her best to protect her identity down here. “I’ve never seen the mines before.”
I couldn’t tell if what was hidden in her voice was excitement or fear or a mixture of both, but we were going to find out because we descended the stairs into the levels below the city.
The dry air scraped across my skin the moment we descended to the first level, and for a moment I was thankful I had given my cloak to the princess. The heat required to make high-pressure steam made the temperature hotter than anywhere else in the city, but it was also a blessing during winter.
On this level, metal tubes ran through the ceiling to all the houses, and they would continue up through the levels until they reached the top, where the excess steam would be let out through ventilation shafts at the top of the buildings. So all that happened here was keeping an eye on the pressure gauges, ensuring good pipework, and management working in some offices.
To find the minister’s son, however, we had to descend farther. Specifically, down to level three where they turned the water from the floor below into steam to send up the pipes. So we descended another two sets of stairs before the heat engulfed us and we could barely breathe.
I turned to Jemeena, who was out of breath and struggling. “Maybe you should wait up top with IoN?”
“No.” She yanked the scarf from her mouth and sniffed, then replaced it. “I want to see what’s down here for myself.”
On we went, exiting the staircase onto level three where miners huddled in groups around tanks, funneling fuel into the vats below at timed intervals. The men and women were sweaty with faces blackened from coal and charred from heat caking the dust into their skin. You could always tell a miner apart from the rest of the floor because they never quite got their faces clean.
I wasn’t sure where our target was and would have to start looking systematically, but these levels went on for miles, mirroring the entire city floor, and I would soon have a fainted princess on my hands if I continued.
“Maybe we could ask for help?” she suggested and turned to the nearest pit. “Excuse me?”
“Wait, Jemeena?—”
“We’re looking for someone.”
A grumpy, pale, malnourished man turned around and huffed. “Look, Miss, I’m tryna’ work, and?—”
“I know,” Jemeena said, “and I’m sorry to disturb you, but this is really important. Do you know where we can find the minister’s son?”
The man’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “Sorry, but no.” He turned back to the sealed pit that was a raging inferno of fire a few feet below him, and swore as he wiped a bead of sweat away from his face.
“Do you not have masks?” she asked.
I laughed. He laughed. But she looked at us like we’d grown two heads, so the man explained, “You get what you bring with you.”
“There’s no protective equipment at all?”
He shook his head.
“Well then, you can tell me where the manager is after you’re done telling me where the minister’s son is. I’ll make sure that’s rectified.” He snorted in disbelief and got back to work, but Jemeena wasn’t done. She lowered her cloak to show the gold on her corset dress and lifted the sleeves to show off her bracelets. “I am not from this floor.”
He turned back around, frustration edging his features, and his eyes widened at the gold he’d probably never seen before. “Just who are you?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. Tell me what I need to know, and I’ll make sure you get masks from now on. Deal?”
“All o’ us?”
“All of you.”
He looked at me for a minute, but I just shrugged, then he looked back at the princess and held out his hand. “Deal.”
She shook it without hesitation and looked at him expectantly. “Well?”
He looked to his left, saw no one there, and then said, “The minister’s son is on the level below us. He’s usually two lefts from the staircase over there.” He pointed to a barely there door in the wall behind him. “And the manager is in office twelve on the top floor.”
We thanked him and moved on before we got him into trouble. The stairs were narrower here, less even, and they were wet, slippery, and easy to fall down, so I held her hand and told her to be careful. There was no light to see by as the stairs spiraled into darkness, and the heat of her hand engulfed mine, which felt like it was pounding along to the beat of my heart.
“You okay?” I asked as we reached the final step.
“Yes. Thank you.” She didn’t let go of my hand straight away but instead stared at me in what little light trickled through the slits between the wooden boards making up the door behind us. “You’ve been amazingly helpful, Cinderella.” I cringed at the name, and she noticed, so she corrects herself. “El. Sorry.”
“C’mon.” I yanked us through the door, where she dropped my hand and stood beside me, mouth agape in wonder. I’d been down here once or twice with Dad, but it’d been a while.
A gaping hole in the wall wider than ten men opened into the ocean, waves crashing against the rocks, a roaring thunder in my ears. The water flowed into the pool in the center of the space via a manmade trough. Men used buckets bigger than their heads on a rope and pulley system to send the buckets down into the water and then up through holes in the ceiling, where they were deposited into the large vats above the vent holes the miners filled with fuel. The buckets were then sent back down the other side into the water to be filled up again.
It was cooler down here but more dangerous. High tides and waves meant people often got swept out into the ocean, never to be seen again.
“Do you see him?” Jemeena shouted above the roar of the ocean.
Looking around, I pointed to a blond man a few feet around the corner from us, turning a crank to keep the pulley system going. “That’s him.”
“Then let’s go.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me over there, but she turned to me just before stepping into his space. “Don’t tell him who I am or what we’re doing. Please.”
“I won’t.” I stepped up to the blond man. “Carden, how are you?”
“Cinderella? Wow. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Jemeena looked at me, surprised, but continued to listen to the conversation.
“How long has it been? Five years? Damn.” A hand tugged through his hair, sadness in his eyes. “I’m still sorry that he’s gone.”
“Me too. But listen, I’m not here for that.”
“Then what are you here for?” he asked, brows furrowing. “Because I can’t help out at the garage again?—”
“It’s not that. I have a question. But it’s not...”—I looked around—“allowed.”
“Seren, Cinderella, just ask me whatever you need to know.”
“How do our lifeclocks connect to us?”
His eyes widened, scanned the area, and he yanked us around another corner and into a quiet nook. “Why the hell are you asking that?”
“Not important. Do you know or not?”
“Why would I know that?”
We were in a very small corner. The princess was pressed up against my side, and I was doing my best to place as much space between the minister’s son and myself as possible.
“Because you’re Minister Farro’s son, and you’ve been through the training. If anyone knows, it’s you.”
He dragged a rough hand down his face as he grimaced, glanced at us both, and then slumped in defeat. “Do you know how much trouble I could get in for this? You realize I could be executed, right?”
I was almost certain Jemeena could prevent that—assuming I actually managed to defy the laws of basic biology and save her life—but I couldn’t mention that. “I do.”
“You must be desperate if you’re asking.” He glanced at my lifeclock, and a sad grimace overtook his face. “How long?”
He thought it was me. “Twenty-six days.”
He met my eyes in shock, his hand clenching into a fist. “It connects to our bloodstream, where it measures various factors, and then it uses the magic of Seren to determine the date. It’s never wrong.”
My arm tightened around the princess. “So the steam lines connect to our blood supply?”
He nodded. “I don’t know any more than that. Sorry.”
I turned us both around and marched us away, but just before we could leave, he grabbed my wrist and yanked me back. “If you get caught, I’ll deny helping you.”
“I know, Carden.”
The blood? Magic of Seren? But...I didn’t understand. Did blood run through the lifeclocks somehow? And if it did, then how did it measure our time?
Before I had time to ponder this further, Jemeena had dragged me to the top mining floor and to the door with the barely visible one and the two that was dangling on its last screw.
“Wait, Jemeena, this will mean someone will know who you are.”
Her hand hesitated on the door handle, her fingers clenching into a tight fist that vibrated with what I could only assume was contained rage. “But I could help.”
I placed my palm gently over her fist and squeezed. “I know you could, and maybe you’ll get the chance to.” If people found out who she was, who knew what they’d do in exchange for a ransom from the richest family in Palatina?
“Not if I die first.” She turned to face me, her mouth still covered by the scarf, but her eyes shined in the dark underground room. “If I weren’t working so hard on fixing myself, I could help fix floor zero, but I don’t have the time to do both.” She held up her cloth-covered lifeclock and looked at it like someone looks at a dead loved one—with reverent fear and a sadness about their helplessness. “Maybe I shouldn’t be wasting time on myself. Maybe I should be helping with what little time I have. Though, I can’t really do that while my father sits on the throne.”
“Jemeena...” I exhaled deeply as I uncurled her fist from the door handle and pulled her into me. “No one on floor zero would hate you for saving yourself. Not a single one of us.”
She buried her face in my shoulder, and a few sobs leaked out before she pulled away and took a deep breath. “I’m okay. Besides, when you save me, I’m going to spend every second of my new future reforming the lower floors as payment.”
Great. Now floor zero’s future was in my hands too.
Back at the garage, Jemeena removed the cloak and scarf, folded them, and left them on the chair, but it was the person sitting next to them that had my gaze fixed in that direction.
“What do you want, Lapis?”
She folded her arms across her perfect cleavage. “That’s no way to greet your sister, is it?”
I shrugged, not caring. “Either tell me what you want or get out.”
“I need another few hours at the garage tomorrow.”
I rolled my eyes but said nothing as I grabbed a cup of toffee and sat in front of Dad’s notes again, trying to make sense of all the new information.
“Pleeease? Faryl will be here this afternoon, and he wants to meet tomorrow, but you know Mom would just die if she knew.”
“Fine. But I’ll be here working because we’re on a deadline, and you can’t go poking around our project.” I’d have to separate us from them somehow, otherwise they’d figure it out, and I was sure Jemeena wouldn’t want that.
“Deal.” She squealed in excitement. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You know,” I said as she was leaving, “one day you’ll have to tell Phyllis. Whether you like it or not.”
“Yeah, I know.” She didn’t meet my eyes as she left with much less energy than before.
“Who’s Faryl?” Jemeena asked.
“Her boyfriend. He’s from Prago City, but he’s equally poor. A scrapper.” He collected scrap pieces from both inside Prago City and out in the desert and then sold them to engineers like me. “He’s not a bad man, but Phyllis would throw a fit if Lapis didn’t at least try to get onto a higher floor.”
“So they’ve been using the garage as a secret rendezvous for...how long?”
“I think it’s been two years now.”
“Wow.”
IoN whizzed by, his mouth hole lit up in yellow. “I wish she would use somewhere else, rather than risk getting El into trouble.”
“She has nowhere else, IoN,” I reminded him, because he could be unfair sometimes. “Besides, her and Lazuli have been much nicer to me since the arrangement started. They only tease with words now. They used to make me do all kinds of horrid things, like clean their underwear and run errands for them all around the city.”
“As opposed to running you ragged, now they’re just cruel,” he said, and I knew he would have used a sarcastic voice if he could. “You’d do well to learn to stand up for yourself.”
“Yeah, well...I could also do with a decent hot meal and a new sign for the garage door, but we don’t always get what we want.”
Jemeena had been rummaging through Dad’s things while IoN and I argued the repetitive argument—old and worn, but still not used up, it would seem. Just when I was ready to retire for the day, Jemeena leaped to her feet and yelled, “Look here!” Then bent over and coughed, catching her breath. She waved the piece of paper around beside her.
I grabbed it and looked down at the ticket. “A ticket for one to Eto Valley on a carrier dirigible.”
“Maybe he went there next?” IoN asked while fetching a glass of water from the kitchen for the princess. “Maybe he was just as clueless about how this worked as you and he sought answers outside of the city.”
Jemeena had caught her breath and flopped onto the sofa with shaky hands. She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief and folded it back into her pocket. “Maybe he wanted to ask questions he couldn’t here.”
IoN pulled out a leather-bound book that looked as dusty as an old sock and handed it to me. “I didn’t think anything of this when I came across it, but it might shed some light on what he was doing in Eto Valley.”
Opening the book, I realized it was a diary. Everything Dad did in the last two months leading up to Mom’s death, and then, in his grief, it ended—he was unable to pen a single other word.
“Page twenty-five,” IoN said, then settled down on the floor next to me.
Dad, ever the organized one—clearly it skipped me—numbered every page, and so I flipped to page twenty-five. “It’s some kind of notes about a conversation with a person named Varissa, but some of it’s written in code or another language or something. IoN, can you read this?”
He hovered over my shoulder. “It talks about a specific plant rumored to be watered by Seren Himself that has the power to change certain...properties. I’m not sure what this bit is.” He runs his claw-like hand over the final paragraph.
“A plant?” Jemeena asked. Her eyes widened in surprise as her mouth fell open. “I think he’s talking about the herbilore plant.”
“The what?”
“It’s an old legend. It’s supposed to grow at the feet of Seren and offer the person who picks it a single wish.”
“A wish is not mentioned in these notes,” IoN argued before looking up at the princess.
“I know, but legends are often slices of history all mixed up in magic and stories. Maybe there’s some truth to it.”
“Maybe. But at the feet of Seren? Where is that?”
Jemeena shrugged. “No idea, but I know one person who will.” She tapped the diary. “Varissa.”