Like me.
“I don’t want trouble,” Jik says. “I want justice. You’ve heard Caru screaming as long as I have.”
“Caru is a ghost,” Wedda says, her tone tense.
“We all know he is not,” Jik retorts. “The captain says he is, and we follow her orders and call him dead, but that bird lives in torment.”
Jik turns to me again.
“You can help the captain. Or you can help us. You’re stronger than she ever was—”
Wedda grabs her by the wing and hisses into her ear.
“Enough! Leave her. Leave now.”
Jik spins and goes.
When she is sure Jik is gone, Wedda looks at me. “Do not,” she says. “Whatever you’re considering, nestling. It won’t end well for you, nor will it end well for that bird. The captain’s canwr isn’t sane.”
“But it isn’t dead either,” I say. I’m completely dressed— prepared, for what reason I’m not totally willing to consider, to go out into the cold.
I march past her, and Wedda reaches out. She clenches my hair into her fingers.
“You can’t stop me, I—”
I realize she’s not trying to hurt me. She’s knotting my hair in a way that feels unfamiliar.
“What’s that you’re doing?” I ask. “It’s not the captain’s knot?”
“No. It is your own,” she says.
When I look in the mirror, my hair is twisted up into tight plaits, close to my skull, twirling and swooping nautilus shells.
“This belongs to you,” she says softly. “Just as your mind, and your will belong to you.”
I stare at my reflection, and Wedda behind me. I hear what she’s telling me. I start to give her my thanks, but she cuts me off before I can even begin.
“If anyone asks, you chose this yourself, nestling. I’m a steward, not a revolutionary.”
And so I go hunting a ghost.
I sidle my way down the ladder and into the galley, where I steal a piece of bread and a small piece of salted meat left from the pig.
I listen hard for the sound of Milekt’s tone. The cote up there has only bitter things to say.
Some of them are hatchlings, as yet untrained to sing with their Magonian hosts, and thus far unbonded to them. Milekt and Svilken are teaching them. The little birds resist. They strain against their chains. When Magonians die, the canwr that are bonded to them die as well, but not automatically. They’re killed. They can’t link with another Magonian. Once the bond is made, it’s permanent.
Oh god, like a wife burned with her husband’s body.
Restraint, trills Milekt. I hear him say it to the hatchlings, training them. He’s a drill sergeant. The same way he trains me. I hear Zal on deck, too, giving orders to the ship’s crew.
I wonder, at times, if she ever sleeps.
I hear a quiet whirring from Zal’s quarters. Knowing Zal’s above, I don’t even hesitate. No one would dare come in here without permission. No one but me.
I push on Zal’s door. Inside, a large bed with red-and-gold bedcovers, an ancient, worn-smooth wooden desk, and rolled-up maps on parchment. There are tons of maps. But they’re not what I’m here for.
In the corner is a screen, and behind it is a cage covered with a dark cloth. Inside it I can feel Caru moving, spinning, stretching his wings out.
I’ve never been in here before.
This is why.
This canwr is contraband. He should be dead.
Aza, the bird says. I jump at my name.
Kill me, he says, voice quieter than it was. He’s talking only to me, to himself.
No, I say. Feed, I tell him, in the Magonian I can manage.
Feed, Caru repeats. There’s a darkness in that voice, a rawness. I take off the cage cover, gently, quietly.
I meet his dark, shining eye. He’s a falcon.
Gleaming black on the top, each shining feather flecked with gold. His breast is creamy with dark markings all over it, and the undersides of his wings are fire red. Enormous. His body is as long as my arm.
I see him, and he’s what I’ve been searching for since I came aboard.
I’m not sure what you want, I say, no longer in Magonian, but in my own language. Eat, I say.
I put my hand through the bars. Caru shuffles forward. I don’t let myself recoil, even though I can feel the despair and longing that are driving him insane. Even though it all makes my heart hurt. He takes the bread from my fingers. He tears loose a bite of meat.
His sleek head turns to me, and he stares at my chest, making a low and dangerous noise, but Milekt’s not with me. The falcon rocks on his perch, his eyes wild and nervous.
I look around. The key is there, hanging on the wall (just in sight of the bird, what a torture). So I open the cage. I hold out my arm, bare, trusting him.
He steps onto my forearm. Talons touching. They dig into my flesh, but don’t break my skin. They feel as though they sink into me, fit me. I feel his weight.
Broken string, Caru sings, looking at me. Heart battered home burned. Bound, broken, knots undone. Ocean, island, talons, feathers, nests. Fall, fall from the stars.
Caru’s wings spread slowly, and then he beats them and starts to rise into the air, just enough to scare me. I step back.
He looks at my heart, like he wants to tear it out of my chest. But when he stares, I stare back. I watch his eyes widen, clear bright gold, and totally insane.
Aza, the falcon whirrs, quietly.
His voice is different now, less scared, less rageful.
Sing, he whirrs, the sharpness of his beak close enough to savage me. He ruffles up his feathers and shakes himself. His talons are as long as my fingers.
Sky, Caru says. Take me.
He moves his head forward and uses his beak to pluck something from his ankle.
I look at it. It’s a ring. A gold ring, similar to the rings I’ve seen on the Rostrae, but this one is without any chains.
Caru drops it into my hand, and then looks at me. I don’t know what to do. I could throw it off the ship. Would that release him?
Sky, says Caru again.
I keep my arm extended. I take a roll of charts from the desk and push them into my belt.
Caru looks at me. I put my cloak over his head, and wrap him in it. I hold him in my arms, and we go up in the dark. Caru croons into my ear—
A terrifying soft song and the song sounds like mine. It hurts my head, bruises my eardrums. I shake my head to clear it, and Caru moves against my chest.
Sky, he sings in the smallest voice.
I walk to the launches pretending I’m not doing what I’m about to do. I see Jik lingering on deck, and then walking toward Dai with purpose. He looks barely awake, and she’s distracting him.
I’m casual. Slow. I consider one of the launches, big enough to be stable in high wind, big enough to not capsize if something comes up beneath us.
The batsail looks down at me and makes a soft sound, high and quiet. A squallwhale passes close to me singing a delicate light rain.
Caru is still in my arms, but I can feel his heart pounding; it shakes his entire body. I step into the launch, and put Caru down inside it. He’s not chained to anything, not captive.
I unspool the rope that holds us to the ship. I unknot the knots. I don’t even remotely know what I’m doing. Stealing the captain’s canwr? The captain I swore an oath to?
An oath. Aza, who are you? What life is this in which you’re swearing blood oaths?
And who are you swearing them to?
I look up at the sails, and at the ship, at the night all around us. The batsail flexes its wings, pushing Amina Pennarum away from us, and with Caru in my boat, I push off from the side, and into the sky.
I start to row.
After a moment, Caru shudders beneath my cloak, and shakes it off his head, an elegant pool of fabric slipping from his shining feathers.
He makes a low ruffling noise, deep in his chest, a hum. I push us out
from the ship, out, out.
I look out at the scip steorra, and aim myself toward it. I can hardly see the navigation lights of Amina Pennarum now. We just need to get far enough away that they won’t see him take flight.
Caru tilts his head and rattles out a little cry.
“What?” I ask.
Prison, Caru says. Torn from rain and sky.
Who took you? I ask. I notice that I’m singing, suddenly, notice that I’m not speaking any language but the one I share with Caru.
Magonia, says the falcon. Thieves! Home, he sings, more quietly now. Home.
The pitch of the bird’s voice goes into my heart, and my heartbeat aligns to it. A beat, and the bird cries out, another, and the bird cries out again, a metronome.
Slavebirds. Songbirds. Songgirl.
Caru stares into my eyes and his head weaves.
He stops singing, and stares at the sky, opens his wings wide, and then folds them again.
A breeze, and I realize my cheeks are wet. Tears are streaming down my face. Caru yearns for home. For [({ })].
Maybe he, at least, can have it.
It’s quiet out here. There’s no one, no other ship, no Milekt. All I have is the roll of maps I took from Zal’s cabin, and this huge, mad bird, who could kill me and everything around me, simply by screaming an alarm. I think about Zal’s plans, the ones she’s told me about. I’m only supposed to steal the plants. She swore it.
Do I trust her? I just watched her break her word.
How can I trust her?
Caru’s talons and my arm are one now, and I row. Caru’s wings open, and together we push into the night.
Caru sings a string of jangling syllables. In front of us, stars begin to blaze brighter, one by one. A trail. Very carefully, hesitantly, I add my voice to Caru’s and I start seeing before us a gleaming silver path, straight into the night. A mist rises up around us, a storm of soft sand, and hides us from the moonlight. We move forward in darkness.
But I look down, off the boat, toward the world, and for a moment, I lose myself. I imagine Jason seeing my rowboat making its way across a dark and highly trafficked sky. I imagine how much he’d love it. Part of me is drawn to the earth’s surface, while another part reaches through the night for Dai. I ache a little more with each push of my boat. Partner.
My chest is hollow without Milekt, but the song of Caru has made its way inside me too. I feel something rattling in my heart, not a living being, but a want. To sing with Caru. To meld my voice to his. His voice is so strong—
But no.
He gets a choice.
“Go,” I tell him. “You’re free. Go. Fly!”
Caru rises from my arm.
Go, I sing. You’re not mine. You belong to yourself.
Caru looks down at me, eyes wild, wings wide, the red undersides visible. There’s nothing keeping him here. He hangs in the air for a moment, above my boat, and then he arcs up.
He flies, a black-and-red flash of movement and silence, covering stars as he departs.
I hear him sing a bright white note. And then he’s gone. My eyes are full of tears, but I put my oars out and start to turn my launch boat back to my ship. Back to . . . I don’t know what. I aim toward the distant lights of Amina Pennarum, grit my teeth, and start rowing against the wind.
There’s a strange sound. My head jerks up. The slap of ropes on wood, and then a rush of bodies rappelling expertly down, the impact of boots in the bottom of my launch.
Six of them, all in black, all wearing helmets, all silent. They’re standing in my boat. Too many of them to fight off, if I even knew how to fight them off.
Oh my god. Oh my god, oh my god. There’s only one thing this could be. Breath.
OH NO. Aza, Aza, Aza, you have made a serious mistake.
I tilt myself toward the edge of the boat. One of them looks at me and slowly, slowly, shakes its head. Black suits. I can’t see their faces. Huge and muscled. A silent, terrifying, totally covered group of monsters.
This is what everyone has been talking about since I came onboard. Bulbous, reflective eyes, faces a mass of tubes and tissue, all covered in dark, almost invisible against the sky. Monsters, insects with human bodies, nothing I’ve seen, nothing I’ve imagined.
shitshitshit
There’s a voice in my ear, jumbled and garbled, rough, right against my face.
“Aza Ray Quel,” says the voice, gurgling, a broken ocean, someone speaking from deep inside whitenoise.
One of the Breath has my arms, and another has my legs, as though I’m strong enough to really fight them. Maybe I am. I don’t know how strong I am. I don’t know what I’m fighting.
“Aza Ray,” says the voice again, a voice that reminds me of something, but they’re all over my little boat, these black-garbed things, pinning my arms and grabbing me. I scream as they push a gag into my mouth. Someone yanks a hood over my head, and I can’t see anything after that.
I’m a prisoner. Of the Breath.
I’m hauled out from my launch, hooked to ropes. I swing out across space.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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I’m not on Amina Pennarum. I can feel, by lack of sway, the tremendous space this ship is taking up in the sky. The smell’s different, too, cold metal rather than feathers and twigs.
My heart’s burning and so are my nostrils and lungs. My bones are sticks. It’s like I’m back on earth. Maybe it’s the gag. I test, inhaling. No. I take a tight breath.
My chest is an empty hold in the center of a ship. No Milekt, and no Caru either. I can feel the cold metal of Caru’s ring on my thumb, though I’m not sure how it got there. I don’t remember putting it on.
Breath are walking around me, boots, circling, circling.
One of the monsters rips off my hood, yanking my neck back, tearing out my hair. I wince, but the gag’s still in my mouth.
I’m seeing through tears a hold with metal, rounded walls. It’s bright in here. Bright and dark at once, the way fluorescent lights are. I haven’t seen any for a long time. And looking up, I realize I’m not actually seeing them now. There’s a weird cold, gray lightning cracking along the ceiling, trapped against the walls, but it moves the same way lightning does, a tendril of fire, and then dark again.
A submarine. That’s how this feels. A metal room full of Breath. I inhale, and choke, my lungs tight, my throat closing. They’re going to kill me. I know it. I know it like I’ve never known anything.
One of the Breath takes off its helmet and I realize that it’s a diving helmet, a kind of diving helmet. I brace myself for what I see underneath—
And—
And—
She looks at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.
Long twisted black hair. Smooth pale skin. Needle-bright eyes, pale blue, not indigo. Skinny body, but less skinny than mine. She’s made of muscle.
Aza Ray.
Is standing.
In front of me.
She’s me. Oh my god, she’s me. The me I was. The me I’m not anymore.
I throw myself, hard, backward in the chair I’m tied to and someone catches it, forcing me back into place. I can’t speak. There’s a gag still in my mouth, but I’m biting it.
I can’t understand what I’m looking at. Is this Magonian magic? Is it a mind game? Is she some kind of . . . mirror?
Then, I realize. No, I know what she is. I know exactly what she is.
I know WHO she is.
This is Heyward Boyle. The baby who was taken from my parents by the Breath. This is the girl whose life I was dropped into. This is the girl whose life I lived for fifteen years.
Oh god.
She’s got a tattoo on her wrist, a stylized whirlwind, and I’ve seen it somewhere before. Not all whirlwinds are bad. Some of them bring new seeds to fertile ground. Some of them move ships across the sky. The Breath are the ki
nd of whirlwinds that kill you.
It all unfolds now, in a rush of revelations, the things I’ve heard whispered. The Breath are assassins and special agents. The Breath are mercenaries.
The Breath are humans raised in Magonia.
“Aza Ray Quel,” she says, her voice no longer muffled by oxygen equipment. She stretches her arms and flexes them, and takes a step toward me. I jerk in my chair. Other Breath are taking off their helmets, and they’re dead-eyed, the same way the stormsharks are. Rippling with muscle, and tense as springs.
They are human, but they look wrong. They look evil to me now. I feel small and Magonian. I feel like—
I look down at my blue skin, my indigo body, feel my twisting hair.
I haven’t felt this way since I was on earth.
Alien. I feel like an alien.
Heyward assesses me.
“The renegade. Where were you off to?” she hisses.
A redheaded man is in front of me suddenly, and I know him. Oh god, I definitely know him. The medic who took me in the ambulance, the guy who cut me open. He was Breath. He’s the one Zal sent.
He’s scarier without his helmet, his suit unzipped to the waist. I can see a tattoo on his chest, a hurricane wind, flattening a tree into the ocean. It’s as though Breath wear extra insignia on their skin.
“Commander,” he says, and Heyward turns to him.
She’s the commander?
“Confirmation,” she says. “This girl is the one you harvested from amongst the drowners, and brought onto Captain Quel’s ship?”
“One and the same. I delivered her to Captain Quel aboard Amina Pennarum. It is my assessment that Quel intends to use her daughter’s song in direct opposition to Magonian command.” He turns and glares at me. They all do.
My gag gets ripped out, nearly taking my lips with it, and I sputter, spitting and choking, still unable to breathe.
Heyward picks me up from the chair with no effort at all, and shakes me hard enough that my bones rattle. She’s unbelievably strong. I’m tiny compared to her.
“What is this?” I manage to choke out.
Her suit is covered in embroidered rank badges. I may have stolen her life, but she has a new one. My head swims, and my hands shake.