I hear another long call of mourning, from somewhere close.
Caru?
No. My canwr is in my lung. You get the canwr that’s assigned to you, not the one you choose. Milekt is mine. We’re bonded. It’s permanent. I think about what happens when it’s not, and I don’t want that for either of us.
Zal’s pacing the deck, her own voice humming. All the crew is lit up with it—readiness, hunger.
We’re stationing our ship above an old mine in a sandstone mountain, fitted out with everything to keep the world’s seeds safe. Its location is its security. The mountain is its protection.
This is the vault the Breath talked about.
Down there are packets and packets of seeds, hundreds of thousands, sealed against moisture, on rows and rows of shelves, almost a library. These are backups of almost all the edible plants on earth. Rice and apple seeds and broccoli and anything else you can imagine. There are walnuts in deep freeze, and down that old mine shaft, all kinds of tiny bins full of salvation.
Apparently, there are airplants here too. Or so Zal swears.
The vault is a reverse ark—plants not animals, under stone, not on the water. This isn’t a military camp. There are no guns, no soldiers. What’s there to keep the seeds safe is miles and miles of rock.
And I’m the girl who can sing the rock into water. I’m the one who can bring the plants up.
I wonder for a moment what will happen once the rock shifts. Zal promised me again that this would be simple. But what does Zal’s word mean?
I can’t think about it. I’m in charge of myself, no matter what Zal may or may not want. I’ll get the plants out, and we’ll be done.
I feel Milekt singing again, a lullaby. Loyalty.
I wonder where Jik is. I realize I haven’t seen her since we battled with the Breath. I don’t know what she wanted me to do with Caru, or if I did it properly. I wonder if she’s mad at me.
I look down again. The ice is breaking, and between the floes, something swims. A polar bear.
The spray from the Barents Sea splashes up onto our deck, and there are whitecaps on the edge of the rocks bordering Svalbard. I know there’s a tiny town close by, a tiny airport, but the way we came there’s been almost nothing below us but the sweep of ice hills. Now it’s only snow and sea.
This is the closest I’ve been to the ground in a long time. How long exactly, Aza? It feels like forever. I don’t belong down there anymore. But then, I never did.
On the earth, I was never the person in charge of anything, not even my own body. But here, I’m important. Here, I’m the only one capable of doing this—the hard thing—the thing that will save my people.
And I have to do it now. I picture the airplants in Magonian skies again, fields and fields of them. No one starving. No more dying.
We’re wheezing, all of us who aren’t Rostrae. We can’t stay this low for very long. My lungs are compacting and quivering, and inside them, everything’s both cold and tight. That part’s okay. That’s accounted for. I’m not wearing a helmet. I have to sing, but in order to sing, I need to be able to breathe. I have a bottle of high Magonian air. I can gasp from it if I have to.
The batsail sings me a song that if I were human, I wouldn’t be able to hear. There are no other bats here. It’s too cold for them. Here it’s Arctic foxes and polar bears. But the batsail isn’t fussy about work. I think about how Zal told me it was just an animal. It isn’t. It sings me comfort. It calms my soul.
The night gets a little darker, but it’s all snow and ice down there, a kind of glowing gray.
Zal is beside me, looking hard at me. “Are you uncertain?” she says.
“No,” I tell her. “I know what to do.”
On cue, Milekt makes a golden sound from inside my chest.
Ready, ready, ready, Milekt sings. His claws are in my lung, holding on, and his beak is stabbing me.
Ready, I sing with Milekt. I zip up my suit, pull up my hood, walk out onto the deck, and stand at the rail. I catch my breath and it’s not just this drowner air that makes me gasp. A tall gray shaft spikes right out of the permafrost. It’s a splinter in the hillside. This is the repository entrance.
Milekt starts to sing the first notes of the song we’ve been practicing since Ley died. An old song, something Magonians sang hundreds of years ago.
When we get these plants back, the sky will be full of fields of epiphytes. Magonia will be self-sufficient. We can leave earth crops alone. And the capital will lose its power to deprive its people.
The song is full of hope, of green, of spring.
We will harvest the clouds when we get them back. No more skysettlements will starve. And the rest of the things that are wrong here? They can be fixed. Hunger makes wars. Plenty ends them.
Green leaf, Milekt sings. Skyblooms.
I join him, light-fingered as a pickpocket at first, testing my techniques. Dai will sing, too, but right now it’s too delicate. We don’t want to overwhelm the ice.
I sing a little harder to the rock below us. The metals of the entrance and the hidden building. For long seconds nothing happens. Then there’s a low groan. Something in the earth moving.
(Maganwetar is coming, a voice in my head breaks in. We broke every law. We’re breaking more now. There’s no way they’re not going to find us.)
I drive the thought away and focus, and the air starts to shine, a shimmering frozenness. Dai’s opening his mouth—still silent, but ready, Svilken in his chest.
I reach out my hand and take his, and he squeezes my fingers. I sing a section of air into a sheet of ice.
The air is gleaming, a bright, knife-hardness, and I slam the ice, through my voice, into the ground.
I glance at Zal. Her face is lit up with excitement. Her eyes trained only on the destruction I’m causing.
I sing one high note with Milekt, a piercing sound, and there’s a scream from below, a shuddering lurch of stone. I watch the ground divide at the point into which I drove the ice. A crack in the snow, right outside the repository. Water wells out of the crevasse, melted and shifted, turned from stone into liquid.
I pant for a moment, dizzy. Dai holds me tighter. Milekt buzzes around in my lung, and I look over and see Jik. She’s behind the captain, staring at me. Everyone is. Her feathers are standing up all over her shoulders.
“Open the rock!” Zal cries, exultant.
I take a breath from the bottle, and then sing deeper. I feel Dai’s voice before I hear it. He joins his quiet note into my song, and things shift below us.
The change spreads more quickly than I can account for it. The snow on the hillside shudders into liquid and the great shaft of rock above the repository isn’t stone now, no, it’s a column of siltless, clear new water. We hold it with our voices.
Zal maneuvers the ship directly above it; I can see through hundreds of feet of what was, a moment ago, a mountain. It’s now a deep wide well, the rock receeding deeper, and then deeper still until the stone at the bottom suddenly ends. The water wants to spill.
Yes, the water wants to flood, but I stop it, holding it in place with song. I feel Dai tense with the effort of keeping a world in motion motionless.
Through the swirling depths, we glimpse a room.
Shelves and shelves and shelves, lockers full of seeds. The vault.
The water wants to plunge. It wants to gush right into the corridors we’ve reached, but I manage to hold it where it is. Dai and I sing a few more taut notes, and the sinkhole grows wider. The entire surface of the island is churning now.
The crew is gasping, staring, at the force of this power. The hill’s turning to a lake. Inside my chest, Milekt is frantic with effort, battering against me.
The water wants to fall more than I have strength to stop it, so I sing cold and turn acres of hill water into ice. Through it, we can see all the way down, clear as glass.
Room after room, chamber after chamber of cabinets, suddenly lit up. Which seeds will we get
? Which of the plants will we carry? There’re too many.
The strongest singers of the crew are starting their own notes now, and I can see cabinets bursting open, packets of seeds gusting into rooms, rising as if in high winds, each wrapped in their waterproofing. Floods have been planned for by the people who constructed this vault.
“Starboard!” Zal yells, and the ship moves, our Rostrae in the sky towing it. I look up and see Jik, her talons clasped on a rope. She’s still staring down at me, but she’s completely in bird form.
“Now, Aza,” Zal says to me.
I sing a melthole in the ice, not so different from where a seal would rise to breathe.
Amina Pennarum’s best fishers and hunters lean over the side. They tug the pulley from the back of our deck—the strong one we use for bringing up livestock—into position.
“Now!” Zal shouts, and the great weighted mass of hooks and snares plummets into the hole I’ve made. The pulley’s flywheels spin and the gripper plunges into the shaft of water and into the center of the hill. Toward the seeds.
I expect it to reach the room we can see, grab what it can, ascend again, to repeat the fishing as long as I can hold the hill. But Zal orders me, “Go deeper.”
Milekt directs our notes. He shrills, and I sing with Dai and Svilken. There are deeper rooms, beneath the main vault. I stutter a second, confused, and a big chunk of the ice flickers for a moment back to stone. I steady my song as quickly as I can.
Lights, much lower in that storage facility than there should be, rooms of hydroponic rows deep in the mountain. Testing rooms with plants struggling into existence.
I sing, controlled, precise, but I feel as though something’s wrong with me. It feels the same way it did when Dai and I accidentally sang that wave together, out of control.
I can feel him behind me, his quiet notes guiding my song, but they feel stronger than they should. My notes are tense and sharp.
At the bottom of the complex, the lowest of these clandestine levels, behind secure doors, guarded by cameras now breaking with sudden cold, are rooms full of secret seeds and plants. There’s a whole level of them. I can only just make them out.
I didn’t expect these. A chamber full of twitching root babies in pots. Mandrake roots. A vegetable lamb. Pumpkins fed by blood drips. Those, and more.
THERE. The things I’m looking for: the Magonian epiphytes. The plants from myth. They’re as real as Magonia is.
The drowners have been hiding them.
My voice falters again, but Milekt, Svilken, and Dai are there, singing to me, singing hard into me, forcing me not to stop.
The plants are drifting in the air. They float like seaweed. Their leaves are long and silver. Their roots twist. They’re rooted—in nothing.
Lost Magonian crops, still growing in midair. They’re so beautiful I can barely believe it.
The hook plunges straight through the rooms of drowner crops. The crew moves fast, swiveling the hook. It oscillates in the room of eddying airplants, snags one, two, more on its teeth.
“Bring them up,” Zal shouts.
They crank the handle of the pulley and the rope begins to ascend. It tugs the plants. They shake themselves loose of the air they’ve rooted in. They start to rise through the vault.
We only need enough to start a crop. This will change everything.
It’s almost finished. We have the epiphytes. We can take them and go. I don’t know how afraid I was, of what I don’t know, until the relief starts washing over me.
It’s done, I think. I did it. I’m still singing, but it can ebb.
I glance at Zal for permission to stop, but she’s not looking at me.
“Now,” she says to Dai. “It’s time.”
There’s a hunger and an anger in her voice that makes me feel frozen.
There’s something wrong in the air suddenly. A hum, far away, a sound. My head jerks up to look around, but I can’t see anything, only mist and clouds. Squallwhales.
What’s happening?
I can’t read Dai’s expression. He steps back from me, but I still have his heat, the comfort of him next to me. Then Dai and Svilken join their song entirely to mine, at their peak volume. Our song surges up, pouring out of me.
It’s as though I hit a trip wire. The need to sing is overwhelming. It’s the only thing.
Dai’s notes blast into me. It’s too much. More than I can handle. I have no control. I try to silence my vocal cords.
I can’t, I discover. I can’t.
Power’s pouring out of me, but I’m powerless. I’m being used as a tool in someone else’s hands.
I scream and the scream is my song, Dai’s notes are in my throat and roaring into my ears. In a moment, the song changes.
And what they’re—what we’re singing is Flood.
This isn’t the plan. The plan was the seeds. The plants. But the island starts breaking into pieces. Water rushing into and in from the sea.
Glacial ice collides and batters against the edge of the island. The repository entrance shakes hard. The ice I’ve made from the hill’s stone is shattering, turning into water, and starting to gush.
Zal stands beside me. “We will have our revenge, Aza Ray, on all who’ve wronged us, and all who’ve hurt you. Drown them. Rid the earth of them. When the floods recede, we begin again with the true Magonia.”
I blink, but I can’t stop. My mouth is open and my voice is flying from it, like I’m Caru, like I have wings on every note.
Zal wants this, I realize. She’s wanted it all along.
Below us, the rock island starts turning to ocean.
Flood, Milekt sings now, betraying me, acting against me, and Dai sings deeply with him, harmonizing, focusing the notes that Milekt sings into my whistling melody.
The corridors below are shaking and liquefying, and suddenly, from one of them, sprints a line of humans, uniformed. Soldiers running from somewhere in the building, so many ants, and Amina Pennarum’s hook is rising through the water I’ve made out of solid ground.
No. There weren’t supposed to be people here.
Uninhabited, they told me. This wasn’t supposed to happen—
The hill is shaking. The whole of Spitsbergen is trying to turn to water. I see the men running and I try to stop, but Dai’s song won’t let me.
“Keep going,” Zal shouts at him. Dai looks as terrified as I feel, but he’s still singing.
Flood, screams Milekt, this tiny demon of yellow feathers; from my own body he screams, and I scream the song with him, helpless. Drown.
Zal is using me. As Ley warned, as Jik warned. I’m as much a slave as the Rostrae. I fooled myself with the thought that I was special. I have no agency. I have no choice.
I calculate frantically, quickly. A few tons of matter is all it’ll take. An island here, a mountain there, the seas will rise, and earth will flood.
Dai’s song is right in me, moving with my own heart, my own lungs, my own body. I try to tell him no, try to appeal to him with my eyes.
I can see his fear, but he’s loyal to Zal. He warned me that he’d do anything she commanded. I didn’t know this was what he meant.
A new sound mingles with our song. First a hum but soon a deafening roar.
Rushing downward from out of the clouds, I see it. Something huge moving through the sky, something surrounded by wind. It’s so huge I can’t see the size of it. Whirlwind. Oh god. Oh my god. I see clouds and spinning, and ropes dangling from it.
Maganwetar.
Zal barks, “Bring the plants up now! Stations!” The pulley turns, and the rest of the crew starts whirling ropes and chains.
We’re surrounded, out of nowhere, by the capital city and its twisting borders. And I’m still singing with Milekt in my chest—
The epiphytes are still rising up, and—
I’m losing myself. The song is singing me. I’m drunk with it, and some part of me thinks I don’t care anymore.
I’ll drown everyone, all
of us, sing until my throat tears out, sing the sky open, sing everything into an abyss—
Another human runs out from near the repository, fighting the wind, shouting into the dark. It’s snowing and hailing and I’m looking down at this person on this little island of ice, a tiny person seen from above.
We’re maybe twenty feet up, hanging in the mist of our song, pulling up the plants, and the world is turning to water, and tears are streaming down my face, from rage and powerlessness, from grief, from desperation.
He’s waving his arms.
I can’t see him through the mist and flood. A person. A drowner.
“Finish it!” Zal bellows. “Flood them.”
I see the world Zal wants. A sea made of the earth. A flash of a ship on a great sea, and of a bird above it all, a bird like Caru. Then gone. A flash of a flood rising up and covering over the world. The sea full of bodies. Drowned.
Someone near me screams. Someone above our ship screams louder.
An anchor drops onto our deck from the massive city above us.
Arrows zing by and stick in the deck beside my feet.
The whole time, Dai’s singing “Don’t stop,” and I’m singing “FLOOD,” even as Amina Pennarum tilts.
Below, that flood is surging up for the person on the ground. He shifts and the mist moves away from him, the one person, the one drowner, his face suddenly visible, and—
A giant squid on a backlit screen.
An alligator at my birthday party.
A hoodie for the hospital.
Driving a car to fetch a hoax.
Together on my front steps.
Jason.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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I’m right below her. I can see her. I can see everything, at least every few seconds. It’s like a bad connection.
I see a ship. More than a ship. I see something so insane up there, so high in the sky, way above where the ship is. There’s a city in the clouds.
Mostly hidden, a huge ponderous thing, buildings with spire tops, wind whirling around it.
I’m alive. I didn’t think I would be. The lightning struck, leaving me three burns—one in each hand, and one in the middle of my back.