Magonia

  The bite mark wasn’t there the last time I saw it, because the last time I saw this piece of paper, I put it in her hand. I knew I wasn’t getting any more chances. I curled her fingers around the note so she’d have it where she was going. There are all those parentheses. All those brackets.

  My body floods with some nameless emotion.

  “Okay,” I say. I can feel the crying I didn’t do in the last four weeks rising up in me, and now that I maybe should be done crying, it rushes out of my eyes and runs down my face. “Okay, Aza,” I manage between sobs. “Okay.”

  It’s like she’s never seen anyone cry before. I try to mop myself up using my own T-shirt.

  I go into the kitchen, put my face under the cold water tap, and try to get myself under control.

  “Have you been home?” I say from underneath running water. “You have, right?”

  “Not yet,” she says. I turn quickly and she’s right behind me. I didn’t even hear her come in.

  She runs her fingers under the water, flicks it out from the sink, and laughs. Then she looks at me, tilting her head.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “You can’t tell my parents I’m here. Or yours.”

  “But, your dad,” I say. “Your mom. They think you’re dead.”

  I have my phone out of my pocket, and I’m showing her the number, but she takes it and puts it on the table, a little hard, a little bit point-making.

  “Do you trust me?” she says. “Then listen to me. I need you to tell me what you found out while you were looking for me. I need you to tell me everything. It’s important. Objects, data. Whatever you found. Did you find something, Jason Kerwin?”

  “I—”

  “Did something fall out of the sky?” she asks, and smiles sweetly at me. “On the day of my funeral? Tell me what you know,” she says.

  She leans in again. I’m backed up against the sink.

  “What if I said I was on a ship in the sky, Jason Kerwin? What would you say?”

  I’m quiet for a second.

  “I’d say Magonia,” I tell her.

  I hear a car in the driveway. My moms. I turn to look out the window, and they’re getting out with grocery bags.

  I look back, and Aza’s gone.

  No. She’s under the table. Curled into a ball. She looks up at me, her eyes huge.

  I get down on my knees beside her.

  “It’s just Eve and Carol,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “Who?”

  “My moms,” I tell her. “Who else? My moms.”

  She shakes her head violently.

  “No one will believe me but you. They can’t know I’m here.”

  I hand her my car keys. She looks at them, confused for a second, and then nods at them ferociously.

  “The Camaro,” she says. She says it carefully, and weirdly. Ka-marr-O.

  “Uh-huh. Meet me in the car, back door,” I say, and then I haul ass to the front to meet my moms. I spill a grocery sack to buy her some time.

  I walk back into the kitchen and there’s no evidence she was ever here.

  I look sideways out the window. It’s stormy still. I can see the trees leaning over, and there’s that kind of slushy rain and I look up at the clouds and see nothing in them. No ships. No lightning. Just a smooth gray layer of nothing overhead.

  And Aza slouching in the front seat of my car, fiddling with knobs. I mutter about something left at school, and the moms are pleasantly surprised to imagine that I’ve changed my ways, listened to them, and am going back without resistance.

  “I told you it would be okay,” says Eve to Carol. Eve looks at me for a moment, a questioning look.

  I let the moment pass. I grab my computer and my bag, and I’m out the door. I knock on the driver’s side, and Aza gazes blankly at me. Then, as if she’s remembered something, she waves at the passenger seat.

  Aza never drives. I’m—

  I walk around the back of the car, and open the passenger door.

  “We’re going to your parents’ house,” I say.

  “I’m not ready yet,” she says. “They can’t know anything. Unless they already do?”

  She turns and looks at me. “Do they know about Magonia, Jason? What did you tell them?”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone about Magonia since you and I watched the squid footage. They know you died,” I say. “Can we at least drive by? Just to see if they’re home.”

  She sighs. “The ship will be looking for me. They’re probably looking right now.”

  I can’t get used to the sound of nothing in her lungs.

  She starts the car and flicks on the windshield wipers. I watch her turn the wheel, not struggling at all, even though it sticks. Her biceps flex.

  She pulls out of my driveway.

  “Left,” I say, when she hesitates. She turns left.

  “Now right,” I say.

  She turns right without stopping at the stop sign, taking the corner too tight.

  “I love you, Jason.”

  I look at her. “You love me?”

  “Of course,” she says after a moment. “Don’t you love me?”

  I look at her some more.

  She’s driving faster than the speed limit, and she’s not paying any attention to the road. She’s just staring at me.

  “Left here,” I say.

  We approach Aza’s house.

  Eli’s walking out the front door. I wait for Aza to slow down, but she doesn’t. Eli sees my car, raises one hand halfway into the air and waves.

  Aza doesn’t stop, doesn’t look to the left, doesn’t do anything but drive.

  Her hair is still neat in its ponytail.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  “This left,” I say. “And now this one.”

  We pass through some fancy gates, up a long hill.

  “Here.”

  We pull into the lot at the graveyard. It’s empty of the living, because of the rain and the weekday, but it’s full of the dead. It’s out a ways from town, and on top of a pretty good cliff, looking out over the view.

  It’s one of those places made by pioneers. Closer to God, maybe, if you make it higher and more precarious. I always think about people trying to pack coffins up here in the days before cars. It must have been a horrible job. I thought about it the day we put Aza here.

  “A graveyard?” she says as she gets out. “Really? You know I’m not here. Look at me, stupid. I’m with you.”

  Maybe I flinch. Maybe I don’t.

  “I thought you might want to see where we buried you,” I say.

  “Not really,” she says. “It’s not safe for me to be exposed this way.” She looks up into the clouds. Her expression is one part expectant, one part certain.

  “I want you to see your grave,” I say. Of course I do. I need her to read the headstone.

  She’s beautiful, in profile, her head tilted up, looking at the clouds, but she’s always been beautiful.

  “I can’t,” she says slowly. “It might not end well. You need to tell me about the spyglass. And where you sent it. I know you have it. We’re running out of time.”

  We’re at her grave. There’s no grass on it yet. The stone is there, though.

  It says this:

  AZA RAY

  trust your heart

  if the seas catch fire

  (and live by love

  though the stars walk backward)

  She says nothing. The rain’s all over her. Her hair’s wet, and her T-shirt sticks to her.

  “So, E.E. Cummings,” I say. “You’re the one who taught it to me.”

  She nods slowly and rubs her forehead. Something about her cracks open for a moment. She laughs, in a kind of mortified, despairing way.

  “Do you ever wonder what your life would be if one thing hadn’t happened? If that one thing made it so that you weren’t you? What if I could remember this poem? I’d be more like you want me to be, then. Wouldn’t I?”

&nbs
p; She looks at me for a second, and then walks away, kicking at the dirt around the graves, looking up at the sky.

  I’m down on my knees in front of Aza’s grave. I’m looking up at the sky too. I’m thinking about the path of the ship, the way it’s been taking on provisions, the way it’s been traveling northeast, and I’m remembering something. An article Aza and I read together.

  I think about what Magonians have been doing for centuries, all those almanacs and stolen harvests in the books I read, in the scraps of information I’ve been digging up. Magonians are hungry. They’re looking for food. I know where they’re going.

  It was a photo essay, just a few months ago, a seed grown in India, held in the hand of a woman in a sari. Sealed in a plastic bag. Ready for transfer. Rows of fluorescent lights in a frozen place, long aisles, refrigeration cases.

  The Global Seed Vault. In Norway. An underground repository where there are seeds for every plant on earth. Nice and cold, nice and deep, nice and un-tectonic, a safe complex where they keep lychee nuts, raspberries, long almost-lost fruits and vegetables, in case a disaster or rising sea levels take everything. In case humans mess it all up.

  I’m shaking my head, muttering, considering. Looping in my revelation. Yeah. It’s right. I’m right.

  She’s behind me out of nowhere. Right behind me. I can feel her breathing. She puts her hand over my shoulder and traces her name on the gravestone.

  “Who have you been talking to? Who knows about Magonia? Who knows about this?” she asks.

  I look at the gravestone. I feel Aza’s hands on my back. I feel her bending. I feel her chin against my skull. I feel her arms, strong around my shoulders. I have a jolt of mortifying lust and a jolt of something else.

  “I’m the only one who knows anything,” I say.

  I have my hand in my backpack.

  “Give me the spyglass,” she says, and I hand it over my shoulder. I watch her do something to the lens cap, twist it in a pattern, and then take it off. She looks through it, up into the sky, and exhales.

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s useful, Jason Kerwin. What else do you have to share?”

  I feel a rough sharpness against the side of my throat.

  “Nothing,” I say. Then I launch myself into her, hard as I can. I slam backward and send her flying. The spyglass is knocked loose and I snatch it, forcing her to the ground. I pin her to the ground beside Aza’s grave and stare at her.

  “Who are you,” I say, and my voice is not my voice. “What have you done with Aza?”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  She’s stunned. But it only takes a second for her to regain herself. She stares at me, warily, her eyes bright and one of them, suddenly, the wrong color. She was wearing contacts. One of them slipped when she was looking into the rain, and now she has one pale, sky-blue eye, the color of Eli’s eyes, and one dark blue one. She’s got a knife in her hands, stretched tight. That knife was the thing I felt on my neck.

  I’m shaking with fury. I’ve been controlling it for a while.

  “Aza doesn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. When she does drive, she stops at all stop signs and all lights, because she doesn’t actually have a driver’s license. Aza doesn’t wear jeans. Aza wouldn’t drive past her house, and past Eli. Aza knows all the collected poems of E.E. Cummings.

  “And Aza Ray Boyle would never, never, not in a million years, tell me she loved me.

  “So who the hell are you?”

  I already know part of it. This is someone from up there.

  I didn’t want to believe it.

  I wanted her back.

  But now I know.

  “I didn’t do anything with her,” the fake Aza says. “Her mother’s ship picked her up.”

  Her mother’s ship.

  “Which ship? Where?”

  “There are ships everywhere, Jason Kerwin,” she says, and smiles. “There’s a sky full. I guess you can’t see them, can you? I guess you’re not one of the lucky ones. But then, almost no one from here is lucky enough to live in Magonia.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Are you going to kill me, Jason Kerwin?” she asks, tilting her head, looking at the sky at the same time. “I don’t think you are.”

  She ducks forward and gets me around the waist. I’m fighting, twisting. She’s fast and strong and tiny.

  She flips backward, lands on her feet, and stares at me from ten feet away.

  “You’re not bad,” she says, “for a drowner.”

  Drowner. I think about that for a moment. What it means to someone from the sky.

  That legend of a person drowning in thin air after he tried to climb down an anchor chain.

  “You’re a drowner,” I say.

  “How dare you,” she hisses. “I’m Breath.”

  It’s a normal word, but the tone she uses makes me shiver.

  I’m circling, trying to keep my distance, but also steering her. She doesn’t know this cemetery.

  She knows how to lie, though. She knows how to trick someone into believing in everything. Before she takes it all away again.

  Aza liked the Hawaiian traditions, death-wise. Cliff of the dead, and you would leap from it as a ghost, and go where you wanted to go. She wanted to be close to the edge, in case her ghost couldn’t walk.

  I feint, figuring out where she’ll go in response, and yes, she steps back, one final step, a bit too far. And I’m so full of hate right now, shaking with so much rage, I see the way she’s going, and I don’t stop moving.

  The grass slips out from beneath her and she staggers, gasps, and windmills her arms. I’m seeing her drop and oh god, and I’m shouting and changing my mind, reaching out.

  But time goes slow, and she smiles at me, this wide-open, devil-may-care, don’t-give-a-damn smile, a look I’ve only ever seen on one other person’s face.

  She falls backward, off the edge of the cliff—

  falls

  falls

  falls

  —and then a rope twists out of the sky. She grabs it, clings to it, and climbs. She tugs herself up, up into the clouds.

  I pick up the spyglass from the grass by the grave. Now that the lens cap is gone, I can see through it.

  After a second, I put it down so I can breathe.

  The sky is full of ships and she’s climbing up to one.

  My field of vision is all cracked and crisscrossed and busted, a film watched with a broken screen, but even askew and crazed, I can see them between the jags.

  Clouds with giant steamers in them. Sails and small boats, junks, catamarans. It’s an armada’s worth. The ship that’s inside the storm is huge and silver, the bottom of a tremendous vessel, something as big as a football field, or more. She’s still climbing to it, up onto its rails. It’s surrounded by dark shapes, by darting, shifting shadows.

  Sharks, made of lightning and cloud.

  I need to get onto Aza’s ship. I know where it’s going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I’ve really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.

  I send a quick text while I stare up, and then an email. I start booking myself out into the distance.

  There’s a crack of thunder. I look up to the ship the fake Aza got on, and as I look I see a streak of lightning. And then another. And another.

  I dodge out from beneath the tree I’m under, running to my car.

  You can survive a lightning storm that way—in a car, if the windows are up. But my car’s too far away, down the hill—

  How do you run away from the sky?

  The lightning’s all around me, strikes are raining down like spears, clots of fire hitting the damp earth, and I rack my brain—

  Metal in my hand. Get rid of it, NOW. I throw the spyglass as hard as I can, watch it bounce off the rocks with a glitter of glass and go over the cliff.

/>   I run another few steps, but there’s no shelter here, no place to hide—

  The wind whips up on one side of me. Then the other side. Then behind me. In front of me. I’m surrounded by spinning air and dust and stones.

  I look up at the big dark cloud and see lightning zing out of it.

  Oh god. Something flips through my brain, wilderness survival. Crouch into a ball so it can’t hit your head. Does that actually work?

  Shit shit shit.

  There’s a tremendous boom, and something comes down from the dark cloud, a ball of white lightning, fast, faster—

  You’re thirty times more likely to die of a lightning strike than of a shark attack. I am about to die of both.

  I drop down, crouch, put my arms over my head.

  And there’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard and the brightest white I’ve ever seen, and I’m made of it, I’m

  I’m made of light

  I’m made of heat

  And I’m flying

  Moms?

  Carol, Eve—

  Aza—

  I’m sorry

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  I wake up panicked the night after Dai and I sing the wave.

  A dream—Jason was in it. I can’t remember it at all, or not enough. The captain’s ghost bird screams horribly. Sky, he shrieks. Sea. Light. Zal. He makes a choking sound. Fall. Die. Night.

  The voice seems to be everywhere, all over the ship, all over the sky.

  “By the Breath,” I hear even the Magonians cursing, though not at full volume.

  “May the Breath take that bird and break him to feathers and bones,” whispers someone not far away from my cabin, and then I hear Wedda hush them.

  I sit up. I think about that.

  Not “ghost.” Bird.

  I think about how the captain’s voice can sometimes be heard, early in the mornings, cooing to something.

  To someone.

  The bird. She was banned from singing with it.

  Kill, Caru screams. Smashed nests, broken song, kill me.

  I curl in my cabin, listening to him, my eyes full. If that bird is alive on this ship, how is keeping him here okay? How is listening to him suffer? How is any of it?