UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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I jolt awake to the sounds of a tortured song, my heart racing, tangled in my hammock. At first, I think the voice is part of a nightmare, but then I hear it again. The same voice I heard before, when I was crying.
Blood bone tear take hurt bite beast, someone screams.
A long wailing shrill, high and horrible, ear-bending. A bird of prey of some sort, the kind of call you might hear when something’s hunting, but much worse, because it has words.
Broken torn kill kill kill me, screams the bird.
Wedda comes into the cabin as I’m trying to get loose from the hammock to help . . . whatever it is.
Her presence is oddly calming.
“What is that?” I ask. “What’s happening?”
She looks at me for a moment with an unreadable expression. Sadness, I think.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “This ship is haunted with the ghost of a canwr. He is the captain’s business.”
I blink. “A ghost?”
“Dead long ago. He lives only in echo,” she says, and sighs. “By the Breath, I would that ghost were softer. He’s been rattling the ship since you came aboard. We’re all on edge about it, but there’s nothing to be done. Leave it alone.”
Yeah, except that it feels like the bird is calling to me—the same way this ship did, the first time I saw it in the clouds. Zal says this ship is mine. Does the ghost belong to me too?
“You’ll get used to him,” Wedda says.
“What’s happening to him? We need to help—”
“That’s just how the ghost sings, nestling. It will stop. Caru never sings longer than a few minutes at a time. Old sorrows. It is not your business to calm a spirit. Let’s get you washed and dressed.”
The sound hurts my ears and my heart, but after a few minutes, the bird stops. I don’t hear anyone running around the ship. No one seems upset by the cries but me. Maybe Wedda’s right. Maybe it’s better to ignore it.
Wedda pushes my arms through my jacket sleeves, tugging it into place. She washes my face for me, because apparently I’m five years old. No. I take the cloth from her.
“I’m fifteen. I can wash my own face.”
“Sixteen,” Wedda says, and I inhale. Sixteen. She’s right.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say. Then, “What if I’m a ghost?”
Wedda clucks. “Nestling, ships have their secrets. Magonia has its secrets too. You’ll learn what you need to learn soon enough. For now, your only duties are dressing, eating, and reporting for duty.”
Wedda fastens my buttons before I get a chance to do it myself. Today she yanks my hair into braids, twisting it in her finger-talons.
“No,” I protest feebly. “I can—”
She shows me myself in a mirror. I’m not used to my new looks. I don’t make eye contact with my reflection, but my hair’s an intricate, beautiful mass of braids that resemble some kind of sailor’s knot.
“Can you?” Wedda asks, laughing. “This is the captain’s knot. Do you know it, then, ground-dweller? Have you studied the styles of the sky?”
“Not so much,” I mumble. “I didn’t know the sky had styles.”
“We have no time to waste on teaching you basic Magonian grooming,” she says. “The captain’s made that clear. You’re here to serve a higher purpose. But there are procedures,” she says. “There are rules. Hair remains braided so that it is less accessible should the ship be boarded by pirates.”
I stare at her. “Pirates?”
She snorts. “Of course.”
She tugs my braids into position and whirrs in satisfaction, or at least, in some sort of pleasantry.
I pull at my uniform, straightening it.
Is this the deal with the rest of my life, then? Seafarer? Captain’s Daughter? At least no one’s lacing me into a corset, or fitting me for a tiara, or making me take elocution lessons.
I was never princess material. When I think about it, this ship, fairy tale or not, is tailor-made for the likes of Aza Ray Boyle.
Here, I look the same as everyone else, and I’m dressed the same way everyone else is, with the exception of the insignia on my uniform. I look down at it, studying. A little crest showing a bird with an open beak, singing to a storm cloud.
It matches the captain’s.
I lace my boots, and look at Wedda, like, yeah, Aza Ray can lace her own boots, Aza Ray has total skills.
Aza Ray Quel, not Boyle, I remind myself.
Wedda laughs an owl laugh, which is more cough than laugh.
“Report for duty,” Wedda tells me. “You belong to the first mate, lucky thing as you are.”
I haven’t learned to read her yet. I barely know her. But it’s not as though I don’t recognize sarcasm when I hear it. I was made of sarcasm for fifteen years.
“Belong?” I ask.
“So he’ll make you think,” she answers, and huffs. “Though you are not his property. Remember that, nestling.”
Definite sarcasm. Okay then.
I climb out onto the upper deck and see why. The first mate is Dai, the black-haired boy who sang stars for me, and officially, already, does not like me.
I feel instantly stupid. Immediately overwhelmed. This, it occurs to me, is the first time I haven’t already done the reading. I’ve never not been ahead of everyone else. I’m sitting at the bottom of the class, clueless.
Dai’s looking pressed, polished, and preemptively pissed off. For someone who can’t be much older than me, he has the attitude of a fifty-year-old general.
It’s a shame because, for a blue person, he’s hot.
I mean, maybe if I just admit it, it’ll lose its power.
There are stabby black metal earrings hanging from one of his ears. Fishhooks.
A little voice, not that of Milekt, but of my own idiot self, echoes through my head. Stop staring at him, Aza, you’re staring.
“You slept long enough,” Dai says. My cheeks flush.
The sky is pale orange and pink. The sun hasn’t even broken the horizon. “But it’s early,” I say.
“It’s been two days. Do you always sleep for years at a time? Now that you’re my charge, you’ll get used to seeing the dawn. You’ve wasted enough of our training time already.”
“Training?” I question. He doesn’t answer.
Instead, he leans in and jabs his finger into my insignia, right in the crooked place in the center of my chest, where my lung tilts over onto its side. Dai’s looking unhappy. I notice that his crest is just the basic, the ship shaped like a bird.
“Don’t think you’re special because of this, no matter what the captain says. I’m the first mate on this ship. You don’t even have status, Captain’s Daughter. You’re an ordinary skyman and you’re late.”
I look down at my chest, wincing at a sudden sharpness. The skin over my left lung is exposed by my uniform’s neckline. It’s blue and smooth one second, and in the next there are outlines of a circle, deep, in indigo, darker than my skin.
It’s almost a tattoo. Except that then the circle—it pushes out. It tilts.
And it opens.
Opens. No blood. No pain.
There is a door in my chest.
A little yellow bird trills from his perch atop the mainmast.
I know the bird already. They’ve called him Milekt. Gold wings. Black beak. Black eyes, flashing at me. He coughs, a delicate sound of feathers and hollow bones. He stretches his wings.
The bird swoops down and into the air. He hovers, trilling wordlessly before me, and then flits into the cavity exposed by the opening. The door closes behind him, painlessly, like he was never there.
I’m frozen.
I knew he was there—the bird. I’ve felt him before. But this? This is too much to—
Sing with him, says my chest, so hard that I actually choke. M
ilekt rustles around and kicks inside my lung.
“Where are we going?” I ask Dai. “This ship? Are we on a voyage?”
He looks at me in a way that says I’m very, very dumb.
“A voyage?” he says, making the word “voyage” sound idiotic. My mind flashes to Jason, who’d never look at me that way. I feel weak and lost, and then, no. No more thoughts in that category. I can’t afford them.
Dai stretches his arms for all the world like he’s a jock on the football field, showing his ease in his authority.
“By the Breath, you act as though no one ever taught you how to speak. The ship is foraging, and patrolling. Your duties are following my orders, and learning to sing, neither of which require commentary.”
I glance around looking for the captain. Zal’s standing just a few feet away with the blue jay girl, who is holding a chart out for her perusal.
The chart looks like something I’d drool over at a museum—yellowed, decaying at the edges. Half star map, half monsters in the water. In one corner, I glimpse a giant mouth with pointed teeth rising up out of the sky, and in another, a city in the clouds.
I angle my eyeballs to get a better look, but I hear Dai behind me.
“Ordinary Skyman Ray,” he says. “You take orders from me, not the captain.”
Zal looks up at me, and nods. “You’re assigned to the first mate.”
Salute her, shrieks Milekt. I salute as best I can.
Zal smiles slightly. “Daughter, you’re doing that with the wrong hand.”
I’m medium-embarrassed, but it’s not as though I grew up on a ship. I have a history of hosp—
“Where’s that?” I say, pointing at the chart. There’s a cluster of buildings. All around the city, there are whirling lines. “Are there cities here? What are those?” I point at the lines.
“That’s Maganwetar, our capital, and those are its defenses. The capital is surrounded by winds.”
The name of the city cues a memory in me. Old High German? That’s what it is. Maganwetar—the word for whirlwind.
Jason. I wince.
“Aboard Amina Pennarum, we prefer the open sky to cities,” Zal says. “The residents of Maganwetar live in buildings tethered to one another, their whirlwinds and tempestarii keeping everything but provisions out. It’s a city of sleepers and storm magicians, but the residents of Maganwetar are lazy as drowners.”
“Drowners like me?” I ask.
“No. You, Aza, were never a drowner,” says Zal. “We are in the skies to defend Magonia, even if there are those in Maganwetar who think they need no defenses, no strategies, no battle plan.”
Her lip curls.
“Things are changing, Aza Ray, and you’re part of the change. Now, I expect you to learn your duties.”
Dai tugs me away to another part of the deck.
I’m exploding with questions.
“Are we going to Maganwetar?” I ask. “Where is it?”
Dai looks grudging. “It moves. And we’re not going there. You’re not welcome in the capital, nor are you safe.”
“What do you mean, not safe?”
“You’re not an official crew member of Amina Pennarum,” says Dai, hesitating only a moment.
“How am I not official? Didn’t the captain send someone to get me? A Breath—”
Dai jerks, looking around. “Don’t mention them,” he says. He holds my eyes, deadly serious. “Trust me. They’re nothing you want to call to this ship, not without a good reason, and not without funds to hire them.”
“But what are they?”
He doesn’t answer. “You were reason enough for the captain to summon one, but I cannot think of another. If we come into proximity with an official ship, you are to disappear into the holds below and the rest of us are to deny that you’re here. These are the captain’s orders.”
I glance toward Zal, who isn’t looking at us. I watch her take the wheel, this giant thing, big spokes and handles around it, which I’m only really noticing now. It’s made in the shape of the sun, so the handles are the rays, and the ship is steered by rotating.
“But where are we going?” I ask again.
“Your duty is to watch, not talk,” Dai says, sneering a little.
For a moment, I’m not sure exactly what I am supposed to be looking at. Then one of the Magonians sings with his canwr, and operates the crane by crooning into its gears.
Another Magonian’s song lights a fire in a little bowl, and makes a meal of toasted grain. He shares it with his bird.
Let me out, howls Milekt from inside my chest. I feel his grumpy fluttering and battering around in my lung. I’m a canwr, not an ordinary. I’m not meant for this. I’m for singing, not standing around, mute.
I have no time for this complaining bird, but I wouldn’t mind lighting fires with my voice.
“Do I have to let him out?” I ask Dai, and Dai smirks.
“No. Though you might want to. He’ll scratch.”
And he does, his little-bird toes climbing inside my lung.
The thought makes me queasy, but I swallow the rising bile down. “How can there be cities in the sky?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from the scrabbles of Milekt. “What do they float on?”
Dai sighs.
“Do you know everything about the undersky, then? Why their heavens are blue, and how their rooms are lit in the dark? Do drowners know how their airplanes move through the sky? Can you tell me how they fly?”
I’m both sucked in and harrumphed by Dai’s simple questions. Yeah, I DO know those things. Maybe we have things to tell each other. I feel a duel coming on.
I’ll tell you how airplanes fly if you’ll show me what you know about this place.
I’m just opening my mouth to tell him so when he snorts and laughs at me.
“I could talk for a hundred years, Aza Ray Quel, and not tell you everything about Magonia. There was a time when we and the drowners consorted. Then even the worst of our cities, the ones where now everyone starves, were seen as heavens by the people below. And we were angels or, sometimes, gods.”
He pauses. “Have you ever swabbed a deck before?”
“There really weren’t a lot of boats around my house, since you know, no ocean. And, I was sick. So, swabbing . . . um, no.”
Dai holds out a mop and a bucket. I’m about to take them when he lets out a note, and I can hear the bird inside him join the song.
The mop levitates, then whips around, so that it actually scrubs the deck.
He stops. The mop falls to the floor, and is still.
“Sing this deck clean.”
I look into the bucket. There’s a scrubbing brush floating in soapy scum.
“Um,” I say.
“Stop wasting my time. Last night, I threw supernovas into the sky. Surely you can manipulate a mop.”
Milekt perks up and stamps his feet inside my chest. He’s ready. I’m at a loss.
“I’m not—I can’t just start singing,” I tell Dai. Why doesn’t he understand? I barely had enough air to speak before, let alone sing.
“And you’re not willing to learn, apparently,” he says. “So you can scrub the drowner way until you change your mind.”
I sigh. It’s only a matter of time before I get assigned to clean the heads. I’m probably lucky right now, dealing with decks instead of toilets, and so I roll up my uniform sleeves and get down on my knees. In my chest, Milekt shrieks.
Release me! I sing, not scrub.
“Sing then,” I tell Milekt, and it’s totally fine that I’m talking to a bird inside my chest.
I work, but it isn’t easy to clean when all around me are miracles, just casually happening.
I watch a Rostrae deckhand spread his green wings and take flight, with a net made of what seem to be very strong spiderwebs. He slings it out into the sky and brings it back full of moths, which then get fed to the hungry batsail.
I watch a Magonian crew member sing one of the other sails into an
unfurling, and the sail shakes itself as though it’s an animal, getting rid of water in its coat.
The Rostrae crew practices rope tricks, lassoing and twisting, but with a crazy kind of grace. What would they lasso up here? I wonder, but I have no idea.
It’s sunny above me, but there’s a pod of squallwhales swimming alongside the ship, making a light rain below. I watch them out of the corner of my eye as I scrub. The calves play together, butting up against the mothers. The babies sing, too, not complicated songs, but long dazzled ones, mostly made of happiness.
Sun, they sing. Sun. Bright. Drink the light.
The mother’s blowhole rainstorms, and the calves whip back and forth, swimming through the fountain like kids in a sprinkler.
They have mothers they trust, and a sky they understand.
I envy them.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Air-traffic-control research. I’m hunched over my desk, hacked into some major things. I could just be listening to controllers talking, hoping to run across something in all the sound, the way the people looked for the giant squid for years: basically, stick a mic down there and hope.
But, luckily things have gotten better, search-wise.
So, I’m using an app (not officially sanctioned, and not mine) to keyword search through everything air traffic control has said, in a variety of city and rural airports, for the past three weeks.
Carol shows up at my bedroom door and looks at me from the doorway for a full three minutes while I scroll.
They take effort, social graces, but the moms will kill me if I abandon them completely in favor of a person they think is a ghost. So I say, “Hi.”
“You have to go to school, kiddo.”
“I am going to school,” I say.
It’s not a lie. Periodically I show up and pass tests. I’m still part of a grief exemption. And I saved my sick days in case. So I have a couple of weeks’ worth for the year, before anything too truant happens. People are probably relieved not to have to see me anyway.