Magonia

  “Then what are the rules?”

  “We’re bonded to sing together. I’m your ethologidion.”

  “You know I don’t know what that word means,” I say, because he uses it with a tone meant, I swear, to drive me crazy.

  “Your partner. You have your skills and I have mine, and they’re compatible. I’ve never heard of anyone singing the way you can, except for Zal, and that was before I knew her. I was trained—she trained me—to complement your strengths.”

  I can’t decide if this is creepy or cool.

  “I don’t need a partner. Zal doesn’t sing with one,” I say.

  He snorts, like I’m completely clueless.

  “Zal can’t sing at all anymore,” he says. “But I’m here and alive only because of her. I’m loyal to her. If she breaks Maganwetar’s laws, I’ll break them with her. We’re all on the same mission. Are you?”

  “Yes,” I say, my voice wobbling for reasons I can’t quite figure out.

  “Then we have to learn how to sing together. I think we’re halfway there.” He runs his fingertip down my cheek, and I turn away. “Tell me you don’t want to sing with me, Aza Ray.”

  “What if I said no?” I ask, just to check.

  “Things aren’t disposable here the way they are undersky. There, they throw things away. Here, we keep them forever.”

  I consider him for a moment and think—

  (Forever.)

  Then—

  (I { } you more than [[[{{{ }}}]]].)

  I stare out at the sky, the way I made it hold me up yesterday. I wasn’t flying. I was floating.

  “I conquered an invading ship,” I say.

  “You did,” he says. “But were you sure you could? I wasn’t. You need to learn how to control it. I’m a focus for you. A magnifying glass in front of the sun. My song will make yours stronger.”

  “So in this analogy I’m the sun?” I say.

  He doesn’t smile.

  “Yes,” he says. He takes my chin in his fingers and looks at me. I look back.

  His eyes are long-lashed and very, very dark. He leans in and I want to laugh because it’s so ridiculous, it’s so stupid.

  (The last time I was this close to a boy’s face I—I don’t think about that. Nope. I don’t.)

  “Like this,” Dai says and sings a note into my mouth, very quietly, more of a breath than a note.

  I pause for a second, shaky, and then sing a note back. We’re both without our birds, so it’s not official, what we’re doing.

  It is, however, totally enough. I sing my note in Magonian, the note that means “rise.” Dai joins in with this low note, this undercurrent, which is part “rise” and part “more.”

  I feel my heart start pounding again, and I can see his pulse in the side of his neck, beating nearly in time with mine.

  His note gets louder, and mine does too. We increase our volume together, and as we do, I notice that my hand is on his chest, where his heart is, near where Svilken should be, but isn’t.

  I yank my hand back, feeling scalded.

  I’m blushing severely. I don’t know how that looks on Magonian skin. Dai smiles at me, and hums a different note. He puts out his fist, and knocks once on my breastbone. My chest opens for Milekt, which startles me totally. It feels intensely intimate, Dai initiating this. Milekt flies down and in.

  I rap as coolly as I can on Dai’s chest, and it, too, opens like a window. His canwr flies down from her perch, too, and into his lung.

  He’s as awkward as I am, suddenly.

  “We’re in this together,” Dai says. “Zal’s plan. There’ll be consequences if we fail.”

  “It would help if I knew the entirety of Zal’s plan,” I tell him. “So, if you feel inclined to tell me, now would be an excellent time.”

  “When you were a baby, you sang something that pulled an entire lake up from undersky, turned it into ice, and dropped it back down again,” Dai informs me. “It’s pretty legendary. Also illegal. It got a lot of attention from the drowners, and then a lot of attention from Maganwetar. If you could do that, what else could you do?”

  The deck sways beneath us. I look up into the rigging, where Jik is perched, sitting on a sail-supporting rope. The expression on her face is both curious and suspicious.

  When I make eye contact with her, she turns away.

  Dai stares at me intently, and after a moment, he puts out his hand and touches my fingertips.

  “I’ll sing a storm cloud now,” Dai says. “And then we’ll sing a raindrop.”

  He makes a high-pitched noise that flattens my ears to the sides of my head, and a miniature cloud mists into being. Svilken sings with him, and between us, in the frozen air, a raindrop appears. I open my mouth, and blow the rain away, like I’m blowing out birthday candl—

  A flash of memory, a chocolate éclair.

  “What should I wish for?” I hear myself asking Dai, and he looks at me, uncomprehending.

  My wind is still blowing, gusting between us invisibly. Without his prompting, I turn the raindrops to ice—each one a prism containing a tiny rainbow.

  “You have to learn how to do this,” he frowns. “There are songs that have been sung since the beginning of Magonia. You can’t just make up new ones.”

  Milekt agrees with Dai. He sings briefly with Svilken.

  Obedience, sing Milekt and Svilken from our chests, duty.

  I inhale, reach out, and take Dai’s other hand, and the four of us sing together.

  All of us, a single song, four voices bonded into one, and the sky around us blazes up insanely bright. My whole body shakes. Dai’s in front of me, his eyes on mine. He’s shaking too. The song is sweet, but deep in my chest, it’s hard as hell. This is a song that takes immense effort to sing.

  Something’s about to happen. I feel as though we’re holding each other up as our voices twine.

  I watch as a coil of rope on the deck rises up of its own volition, called by our song, as planks start to loosen, and the crew starts to rise even as they stand on deck, not flying, rising, because we’re singing them rising.

  I feel something starting to detach somewhere else, far below us, and I look over the deck rail to the ocean. A wave is rising up, a curve of water so huge I can’t see its edge. The water stretches toward us.

  Dai leans toward me and I lean toward him, and we sing into each other’s lungs. All over my body every cell calls out. The notes shimmer, and I feel as though we’re ascending, but not in a safe way. We’re rising toward a fall.

  I can tell he feels the same way. We’re singing a tsunami until I come to my senses and pull back, gasping.

  “Stop!” I manage, even as my whole body wants to keep going, even as I want to keep singing. If this is what singing is, I want to stay this way forever, but I can’t. He looks as ragged as I do.

  “Oh,” he says. I’ve never seen him look surprised before. “Oh.” He staggers.

  The wave folds with a distant crash back into the ocean. My heart slows.

  I think about what a tsunami can do. I think about the fact that I created that wave from nothing—from air—from breath.

  The ability everyone was talking about. My power. I know it now. And our power. I know that too.

  It feels terrifying.

  It feels amazing.

  Dai gives me half a smile, and I try to give him one back, still reeling.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  “I’m back,” Aza says. She’s standing on my doorstep. “I came home.”

  No.

  I held her hand as I rode with her to the hospital.

  I held her hand as she died.

  I held her hand until they told me I couldn’t hold her hand anymore.

  I read the coroner’s report.

  There was a body. Her body.

  I’m hyperventilating.

 
I’m passing out? I’m breathing too fast? Am I starting to scream?

  “What are you looking at?” she asks me, stopping me from all that, in a classic Aza tone.

  A mirage. I’m staggering through the Sahara. I’m a dying man looking at the bouncing of sunlight, but no, because sunlight just rang my doorbell and pounded on my front door. Sunlight is staring at me and pursing her lips.

  “Aza,” I say. That’s all I can say. I can’t even get close to letting anything else out of my mouth.

  “Jason Kerwin,” she says. “It’s nice to see you too.”

  She holds out her hands. Not blue.

  She comes in for a—

  I don’t, I—

  She presses her mouth to mine, very quickly, not the way someone who is dead would, not the way a ghost would, and before I can even tell what’s happening, she’s leaned back again and she’s looking at me.

  I might fall over or run away, or—

  Super-fast calculation of probabilities that I can’t compute, of time travel that I can’t do, of doppelgängers that I can’t imagine, of secret twin sisters, of Hitchcock movies, of Vertigo.

  Vertigo, that’s where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don’t let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don’t do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to.

  In one and a half seconds flat, I compare my in-brain Aza to the girl in front of me.

  She looks healthy. Strangely so. I can’t see any veins under the surface of her skin, the way I’ve always seen them. I’ve made a career of watching her blood running through her body, but now it’s invisible. Her mouth is not only not blue, she’s wearing lipstick. Her cheeks are pink. I’ve never seen the clothes she’s wearing. They’re new. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her hair brushed before.

  The last time I saw her, her strange ocean-depths eyes were shut. I was the one who shut them. Now, she’s—

  Aza holds out her arms in exasperation.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me at all?” she asks, and her voice is Aza’s voice, a little snarky, a little hurt. But not breathless. I can’t even process that.

  “I thought you’d be happy. I can’t believe you haven’t even hugged me yet. I kissed you.”

  My heart’s pounding so hard it should be rattling the window glass, and then I pick her up off the steps and hold her as tightly as I can, and she’s not gasping, not coughing. She’s in my arms. She’s in my—

  How can she be well? The last time I saw her, she was dead. I hold her out from me and stare.

  “Did I dream it?”

  “No,” she says. “You didn’t dream it.”

  “Am I crazy?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “Tell me what you’ve been doing the last four weeks and I’ll tell you if you’re crazy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m really here.”

  “Aza Ray Was Her,” I say. She looks at me curiously.

  “Aza Ray is me.” She smiles.

  Which, as always, takes me down. Her smile is like no one else’s. Even though it’s weird to see her normally dark-purple mouth painted pink.

  She drops out of my arms and walks past me into the house. I stand for a second looking out at my street, which seems to have become a street in heaven, and then I follow her into my living room.

  “Where are your parents?” she asks.

  “They went to the grocery store,” I say, oddly formal. I want to tell her everything. I want her to tell me everything.

  She patrols the edges of the room, looks at everything closely, then goes into the kitchen, looking at the cupboards, into the fridge. Normally she’d just get whatever she wanted.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” she says. “I ate.”

  She perches weirdly on the edge of a chair. (Not-a-Ghost verification: the chair is dented by her weight.)

  “Am I dreaming?” I ask again.

  “You’re not dreaming,” she says. “You’re part of a secret. Can you keep a secret, Jason Kerwin? I need your help.”

  Why does she keep saying my name that way?

  What happened to her? Would I be strange, too, if I died or didn’t die, if I god-knows-what-ed? Yes. Obviously, I would.

  I reach out and take her hand. Her skin’s warm. She’s never had warm skin before. There are calluses on her palm, new ones. Or at least, the last time I held her hand her skin was smooth. Now her hand feels as though she’s been doing work. Like, heavy labor, in coming back from the dead.

  And wow, I’m focusing in too much on the details. The world’s shrinking down and all the things that should matter disappear into a blur when I’m this way. I try to breathe.

  Is this shock? I think I’m in shock.

  “Where’ve you been, Az?” I ask her in a pretty calm voice. Like it’s no big deal that she died. Like I haven’t been losing my mind. Like I am not losing my mind right now.

  She’s looking around the room, her head moving oddly, tilting and then tilting again. She looks scared, the way she’s moving, but her face doesn’t show “scared,” and then it occurs to me that she’s looking for something. It’s a movement I’ve seen in birds hunting insects. She zeroes in on something, looking out the window. She smiles, and for just a second I’m scared.

  Jason Kerwin: crazy.

  I hold her hand tighter. I don’t need to be counting her freckles and comparing them to a tally in my brain.

  I’m not scared of Aza.

  I’ve only ever been scared of losing Aza.

  She looks straight at me, and again I’m hit with adrenaline. I want to bolt out of the room. Why? What the hell?

  “Where’ve you been?” I try it again.

  “What do you know?” she asks. “I’ll tell you everything, but tell me what you know first.”

  I’m about to start, but then again that movement of her head, tilting quickly, turning quickly.

  I don’t know anything.

  She moves closer, leans in, puts one of her hands on my knee, which is so unlike Aza that I’m completely at a loss. I look down at my knee, paralyzed.

  “Okay. Basic things, Az. Do you happen to be dead?”

  “Of course not,” she says. “Look at me. I’m alive.” She leans in toward me again. Her hand moves on my leg. I’m not even close to being able to deal with that. I grab her fingers and keep them from moving.

  “But you died, Az,” I say. “You did. I was there. I saw it happen.”

  I’m cursing myself even as these words are coming out of my mouth, because she’s more alive than she was when she was alive. She was always on the verge of suffocation, and now that’s not what’s happening.

  When I hugged her I felt muscles in her back and arms. She has a . . . a density she never had before. Aza’s body was always made of glass, and her brain was made of sharpened steel. Now her hair smells of salt and ozone.

  Her skin smells like the ocean, which—we’re inland. But there’s stormy weather outside. Maybe something’s blowing in from somewhere. Maybe she has new perfume.

  Aza hasn’t ever worn perfume before. She can’t wear it because it makes her choke, and no one anywhere near her can wear it either.

  I know this. She knows this. Why aren’t we talking about this?

  “Come on, Jason Kerwin. You didn’t really think I died,” she says. “You’ve been hunting for me. You’ve been tracking things in the sky, haven’t you? Weather patterns? What did you find?”

  My confusion must show on my face.

  “You promised you’d always find me,” she says. “So that’s what you’ve been doing, right?”

  I take a moment.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I heard a rumor,” she says.

  “From who? Where’ve you been that you’ve been listening to rumors? Where have you been that there were people to whisper rumors to you? And if you WERE listening to rumors, why did you let me think you were dead?”

  I guess I sound a little overwrought. br />
  Her eyes widen. She seems less sure suddenly. More lost.

  “I promise I’ll tell you everything. But we can figure it out together. I need you to help me until we understand.”

  Once, Aza Ray got bronchitis and passed out in my car. When she woke up in the hospital and learned that I’d carried her through the doors, she was mortified.

  Even in the ambulance, right before she died, when she found out that I’d given her mouth-to-mouth, I could see the horror on her face.

  We all knew how she felt about invalid blankets. I had a hospital hoodie custom-made for her, with a million pockets, zippable sleeves to let the phlebotomists in, and IV cord portals, so she wouldn’t have to be wrapped in a blanket to stay warm.

  But she’s never asked me to help her before.

  “All right then, tell me how to figure this out, Aza Ray.”

  Am I playing games now? Maybe she has some sort of brain injury. How can I even assess it?

  The coroner’s report—I have a PDF, scanned from a hard copy stolen by janitorial staff—was clear. Her body degraded quickly. The coroner was both surprised and dismayed. The report wasn’t fun reading.

  Adolescent female, aged fifteen years. And 360 days, I added, in my head, to the world.

  There was no reason for him to do a full autopsy. We knew what happened. He didn’t have the skills to do the kind of analysis someone with a disease like hers needed anyway. Same way no one here had the skills to keep her alive.

  Her lungs went to a lab dealing with rare disorders. The rest of her got cremated. I haven’t seen any of those reports yet. It’s only been four weeks. There’s probably tissue still in a freezer somewhere. I can’t really think about that.

  Aza sighs, and then stretches, arching her back, yogic, a new kind of fluidity to her movements, a new kind of grace. I’m reminded of a bird again, unfurling its wings. Aza pulls something out of her jeans pocket. She hands me a fat sheaf of folded papers, and I start shaking, because I wrote them. I attached them to the balloon I sent up on the day of her funeral.

  “I acquired your apology list. It was really long.”

  Acquired? She digs in another pocket.

  A much smaller piece of paper. She hands it to me.

  I open it. And it’s the note I gave her for her birthday. Creased and rumpled and refolded and stained. In the corner of it there’s a bite mark, and I know where it came from. Aza, nervous, fidgeting.