The Last Princess Read Online Free Page A

again. The sunball had died out falling to earth.
    The flarewas gone, but I couldn’t bear to take my eyes from the dark fields. I watched, waited, just in case anotherone fell from the sky. The sunballs—pieces of the sun that spun off toward Earth—had been falling out of the sky since the Seventeen Days. No one knew exactly what caused them, but getting caught in their fiery rain was fatal.
    Even after the destruction of the Seventeen Days, we had beenhopeful. There was still electricity thanks to the backup generators, which my father allotted for use in the hospitals and fire and police stations. The hum of the generators was oddly comforting—it was the sound of rebuilding, of putting the pieces back together. The water lines were destroyed, the sun was hidden behind a cloud of ash, but as long as I heard the generators, I hoped everythingwould somehow be okay.
    Except that England was utterly alone.
    My father had sent the Queen Mary , the navy’s eight-thousand-ton steel warship, to find news of the rest of the world. The earth had stilled, laying itself down among the mess like an exhausted child after a temper tantrum, but the oceans were still furious. The Queen Mary only made it a few miles offshore before the ocean swallowedher whole. There wasn’t enough fuel to send another ship, and no one had answered a single one of our radio transmissions. Maybe we were the only survivors.
    I pressed my hand against the window glass, still warm from the burst of the sunball’s flame. The cabin suddenly felt unbearably cold. I shrugged into my coat, putting my hands in the pockets, and felt the sharp corner of an envelope. I’dforgotten about Polly’s letter. I unfolded it with a smile and started to read.
    Dear Eliza,
    I am so sorry to have to tell you this. You are my best friend and if anything happened to you I would never feel whole again.
    Do you remember my uncle, the one who worked in a metal factory before the electricity stopped? Late last night he banged on our door with his wife and their baby son. They said they had been lucky enough to escape a raid on the district LS12 in Manchester, a raid led by a group calling themselves the New Guard. They had weapons, guns, and ammunition, and they were shooting everyone who resisted. My uncle’s family was able to escape through the underground to another district. They were the lucky ones.
    My uncle said the New Guard have already seized many of the districts in London. They are led by Cornelius Hollister, who wants to kill your entire family and become king.
    Please be careful, Eliza. Your life is in danger.
    Polly
    My hands trembled as I held the letter. In the dim glow of the coal lamp, I looked at my brother and sister sleeping soundly.
    It dawned on me that all summer I had not heard any news of the outside world. Usually the Carriersbrought us updates from London when they delivered letters from our father, but this year Clara had collected the mail for us. I thought of the time I walked into the kitchen and saw her with her ear pressed to the radio. She had switched it off as soon as she saw me, claiming that all she could find was static.
    I sank back into the train’s seat, staring out at the dark night. I wondered howmuch my father knew of Cornelius Hollister’s plan and how much he was trying to hide from us. Maybe that was the reason he had stayed in London all summer.
    As the light started to break through the fog, London came into view: the beautiful spires of Westminster Abbey; the sharp, glinting Steel Tower, the maximum-security prison, rising above it all; the London Eye still against theskyline, frozen,like the hands of Big Ben. When the disasters of the Seventeen Days hit London six years ago, the clock had stopped at eleven fifteen, and it was never set right again. To me the clock appeared normal, just as it had always been. But as the train charged into the city, I considered how little I understood of anything at all.

5
    WE FOLLOWED