When I opened my eyes, the groundskeeper was bending over me and saying “Son, you been struck. Should I restart your heart?”
“I think my heart’s beating, thanks,” I said.
Then my heart stopped.
He gave me CPR.
I was in the hospital for the next week. I was pretty much unconscious for four days, with people freaking out all around me. When I finally came to my senses, my body hurt like I’d been beaten up by a gang of giants, and I had long red burns branching down my arms and legs. But I was freakishly okay. In fact, I felt better than I’ve felt ever.
Magonian lightning. I don’t know. I can see things now, no spyglass necessary.
Mr. Grimm was one of the first people who visited me, asking about the lightning, asking about how it felt, and I didn’t know what to tell him, so I described everything. He went very pale. I felt kind of bad for him.
The note un-Aza handed me, the one I’d given real-Aza, it was gone.
So I knew where she was going. And I knew where Aza was going.
Ergo, I knew where I was going.
That got me out of bed, even though I fell over when my feet touched the floor. But there was no version of my life in which I wasn’t getting my ass to Svalbard.
You don’t want to know how I got here, you don’t want to know how much it cost, you don’t want to know how gigantically in deep shit I am. I left a note for Carol and Eve. They’ll never forgive me, except they love me, so they will.
I told them I’d be back and not to worry. I’m going to be explaining for the rest of my life. But hey. Some things you don’t have time to explain in the moment.
The fact that I got here before she did is a miracle.
Forged documents. Hacked computer. Claiming of consular privileges. I have called in favors. I have accrued debts that I will be spending the rest of my life paying off. And I am officially the biggest pain in the ass in the entirety of the dark side of the internet right now, but it was worth it.
I can see her there, every few seconds, a flash of her in a wet suit and a hood, on deck.
She doesn’t look like herself, but I can hear her voice mixed with other voices. It’d be hard not to hear it. Everything else is birds.
There are screaming birds everywhere, but when I blink, I can see that they’re not birds, really, not at all. Nope.
Human bird things. Some kind of hybrids.
I’m forcing myself not to pi, because I can’t do it. I have to be here.
I can see her surrounded by people I can’t understand—“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for”—and up in the sky right above her, there’s this city, sending ropes down to her ship. She’s right there in the middle of it.
Aza, Aza, Aza . . !
I’m running from where I’ve been hiding, and out into the open space, because if she sees me, she can’t—
She can. She keeps singing, and around me things are cracking open. The whole world is breaking into pieces.
This is some kind of earthquake, some kind of natural disaster, and somehow it’s because of her singing. I feel her notes stabbing into the ice around me.
There’s water pouring out of rock where there shouldn’t be, and a hook rising up beside me, coming up through the ground and attached to her ship. It’s minus I don’t even know how many degrees. It would be ironic, my brain informs me, to freeze to death, just after I was almost fried.
I shout her name. She doesn’t respond. I shout harder, but the sky’s full of ships now, and some kind of totally insane battle starts happening.
Cannonballs, arrows.
My vision goes in and out.
Blink. Blue sky.
Blink. Ship battle.
Blink. Clouds.
Blink. Cloud city.
Blink. Skysharks and skywhales.
I wave my arms.
“AZA!” I scream and the water rises around my ankles. I look up at her and shout her name again, and I see her standing there, frozen, staring down at me, still singing.
I don’t know anything. I can’t tell anything.
Except that Aza is here, and she’s alive. I might not be for much longer, but maybe that is okay as long as—the first part.
“AZA!” and I’m crying, but my tears are freezing, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, because up in that sky is her, and down here is me, and I’m without any kind of backup.
“3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286,” I shout as though it’s magic, as though pi is enough to summon her down, as fast as I can shout the numbers, the basic numbers, waving my arms frantically, and then, suddenly, she stops.
She sees me. I feel it happen. The whole island shakes. And something comes flying fast out of the sky above her.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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NO!! I cover my mouth with my hands, clamping it shut, and Milekt screamsings inside my lung.
It’s Jason! It’s JASON.
Alive, alive alive!
Every note I sing is making the sea rise. Every second I sing is two hundred years of climate change. I stop my song,
But
I’m
Not
S
T
O
P
P
I
N
G
NO.
The sea is rising
and the song
is pouring out of me
WHY CAN’T I STOP?!
I look at Dai. He stares back at me, and he has no mercy. He and Zal are making me dissolve the world, and I won’t do it. I won’t sing the world into a flood. I won’t lose Jason again.
But I’m singing as hard as ever.
I’m looking down at Jason. I’m going to drown him. I’m going to drown everyone, and Dai is beside me magnifying my voice, and Zal is screaming at me, and Milekt is inside my chest, when everything—
Stops.
Out of the air above me, I hear a cry like only one thing I’ve heard before, a damaged opera, a sweetness so high and bright it hurts, discordant and ferocious, desolation and love twined into a song.
CARU.
He shoots down, black feathers and red wings. He doesn’t land. He hangs in the air above me, and there’s fighting all around, ships and planes, and arrows and I—
SING, Caru screams. SING.
I take a huge breath from the bottle and then rap hard on my own breastbone.
You will not! Milekt shrieks. She’s mine!
Caru screams back at Milekt. Never yours!
I open the door in my chest, open it to lay my lung bare to the cold and there’s the bright yellow thorn inside it, shrilling at me.
This is my nest! whistles Milekt, and then he tries to force me back to the flood song, but he can’t, because now I can see Caru.
Caru, who is loyal. Caru who is no one’s.
She chooses, he sings. I choose.
Caru, heartbird, chooses me.
He rises from the shadow of the ship where he’s been flying, staying quiet against his own nature.
I grab Milekt, his tiny gold body, his screaming beak.
Traitor! he shrills, and I pry him out of my lung, where he’s anchored his claws. I pull him out, and close the door. The yellow bird stares at me, his eyes glittering like jet.
TRAITOR!
But I’m not the traitor.
I hurl him out into the air, and he hangs there, shocked and enraged.
Caru’s been here all along. I’ve been hearing scraps of his song. He’s here to sing with me.
I know it now. He stayed for me.
She would drown the earth, Caru shrieks. She would kill all. Kill the world. Drown the fields and the trees.
Caru jabs his beak into my hand, and prods the ring on my finger. Zal’s grabbing for him,
but he dodges, glances off, and he screeches at her, too, and all around us, still, there are Magonians and Rostrae screaming, dying. There are Breath dropping down from above.
Svilken’s out of Dai’s chest and dive-bombing the falcon. Zal’s now aiming something at Caru, and I can see it. She’s going to shoot him with her bow and arrow.
I look at Jason, this tiny figure on the ice. I can hear him shouting still, his voice, and I know what he’s shouting. I know that number. It doesn’t end.
Like {(( ))}. It never ends.
I know myself.
I know what to do.
I open the door in my chest again, and I place Caru’s ring inside my lung.
I hear Milekt scream a horrible scream. He shudders and tumbles to the deck at my feet. I merge with Caru.
Heartbird.
I sing.
Separate but connected. By choice, his own and mine. We choose each other.
There’s a huge quake a change in everything. Caru looks at me and I look at him.
We are stronger together, I know, than anything else. Fiercer than everything else. He’s both things, earth and Magonia and so am I.
Caru jerks in the air, those huge yellow eyes, his wings wide. He lifts up, and hangs on the wind above me, his wings out. His beak opens and he shrieks something that shifts the sky around us. I open my mouth and fling my voice out with his, and our notes wrap around each other.
I feel the whole sky respond. This isn’t the way it is with Milekt, or even Dai. Caru and I—the two of us are one thing. Caru’s voice comes out of my mouth, and mine out of his.
Caru and I sing waves of certainty. Stars blaze in the sky at our sound and fall in arcs on both sides. My voice is growing and so is Caru’s. High-pitched sonar, singing out, singing out, singing out.
The world’s flooding. I did it for Zal. I undo it for me.
It’s overflowing, water against the vault, and Caru sings with my voice, changing it back, forcing me back to myself, making me able to sing my own song.
We un-sing the flood. Caru and I push the water back into shape, transform it back into rock.
“Up! Pull this ship up!” Zal’s screaming commands at our Rostrae, but they’re ignoring her.
I see Jik, her bright blue wings visible, her face half human. She’s at a height where she can be in between. She’s shrieking along with our song and, as I watch, the chains around her talons and ankles shatter. She’s doing it herself. It’s her own song, magnified, breaking whatever spell has been on the crew, destroying something. Working from the inside.
I see Wedda beside her. Wedda, who’s always been loyal to Zal, perched on a mast. She spreads her wings too. I watch her chains dismantle themselves and fall to the deck, a glittering collapse.
I look at the batsail and see its wings folded in solidarity. It will not take Zal up. It will not save her.
We bend the sky to our will, Caru and me. We put the earth back together. We sing to it, Heal.
Moments ago Spitsbergen was water. It shudders as if with shame, and is stone all over again. The waves splash up and freeze into earth shapes, the water goes opaque, the island goes hard.
The hook with the epiphytes is only a few feet below the surface now. What if I gave Zal the plants? It would right an ancient wrong between earth and Magonia.
But my song with Caru isn’t controlled. The earth is sealing up, and even as I think about it, it closes over the plants, locking them in the rock—the airplants, and the last few yards of line from Amina Pennarum.
The rope attached to our pulley is suddenly jutting up from the ground of Svalbard. The urgent whirring wheels aren’t pulling the crops up anymore. They’re yanking the ship down toward the earth’s surface.
We list hard. The crew screams and stumbles. Dai’s frantic voice stops as he slips across the deck. The ship veers and jostles and drops, and the crew are trying to cut the rope but it’s too late, we’ve lost control. I’m clinging on but I’m not afraid.
Our song is strong enough that Caru and I can fly if we need to, but I don’t have to try it. I know it’s true.
Now I do what some part of me knew I should have always done. This is not a slave ship, not anymore. The Rostrae are free. They freed themselves, but the batsail is still trapped.
I use my song with Caru to cut the threads that bind Amina Pennarum’s batsail to the ship. I set it free. It sings a high note at me, firefly, and then it’s gone, wings stretching out into the wind.
I watch the crew of Rostrae transform entirely, the sky suddenly filled with feathers. Wedda, an owl again, her wingspan tremendous. Jik, bright blue, rising up. Hummingbirds. The eagle.
Now I cut the enslaved canwr cote free, and the sky is flecked with gold, all of Milekt’s siblings and students swooping out from the ship like motes of sun.
Fly, they trill.
Magonians fall out of the sky into the sea. There’s gasping, and shuddering and the water takes some of the crew.
We lurch downward, and at last, with a screaming splash and a shock akin to earthquake, Amina Pennarum drops into the ocean. The real ocean, not the sky we’ve been sailing in. We beach on the shore of Spitsbergen.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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It takes me a second to get my bearings after the impact. I’m surrounded by cracking wood. Magonians are gasping and screaming, choking and whimpering in the heavy air of earth. I don’t even look. I move fast.
I have to get to Jason.
I haul myself over the railing and drop a few feet onto the rock. I gasp air from my bottle.
Zal leaps over the rail behind me. Then she’s in front of me on the ice, this raging woman, my screaming mother, this warrior, my captain. But down here she’s not as strong as I am. I’m used to earth. I know how to walk here. I know how to survive on less than I need here.
The stakes have changed. I’m not the daughter who serves. I’m not the girl who came aboard Amina Pennarum, scared and delicate.
Zal reaches for my face, trying to grab my bottle for herself. I push her, and she falls backward.
Milekt flies at me and flutters around screaming ragesongs as Breath rappel down onto Amina Pennarum from Maganwetar, and seize Zal.
Zal screams and fights, but she has no power over them. She has no song. She’s struggling to breathe but she battles hard. I sing her weapons into paralysis.
I wait for them to try to grab me too. I won’t let them.
I sing a tiny note of warning, and Caru echoes it.
The Breath before me holds up a hand. Not Heyward. This is a Breath I’ve never seen before. He stares at me for a moment, and then turns back to Zal. They’re not taking me. I don’t know why, but they’re not.
The note I sang with Caru echoes in the air, and all around me there’s stillness. Protection. Strength.
Then he’s gone, hauling Zal up into the Magonian command ship. Zal shakes in the air, upended, flipped like a whale, choking on air. As, one by one, is her crew.
“Betrayer,” Zal screams as she goes.
Dai is pulled up after her, unconscious from the fall. My heart clenches and my eyes fill, watching him hauled up. We’re still attached; our bond isn’t gone. Not gone at all. Though we didn’t choose each other, we’re supposed to sing together, no matter what.
I don’t think this is the end of Dai and me.
I don’t think I’m that lucky.
I see Milekt land on him as he rises, a dart of gold on his shoulder, abandoned by me. Dai has two birds now, one on each shoulder, one for each lung. Milekt shrills maddened bird loathing at me as he ascends.
Cut string, he screams. I feel a hideous racking inside me, guilt. I broke our bond. I had to.
Forget it, Aza. None of it matters. Because Jason.
I sprint across the snow, the tilting landscape.
I push into the repository entrance with C
aru behind me, and it’s dark, and still no one. Where is he? Gone? How can he be?
No, I hear footsteps. He runs into something and grunts. “Ow.”
The simplest sound and it causes me to come to my senses.
I’m not ready for this. I can never be ready. I’m not the Aza he knew. I look—
I look like—
I feel my stomach drop. My legs go numb, my tongue trips in my mouth, my whole body crashes and burns with this insane feeling of falling from something so high there’s no end. I feel everything tumble—comet meteor parachute wingless—into him.
“Aza,” he says. He’s coming toward me. “I know you’re here.”
I’m Magonian. He’s human. There’s no version of this that’s okay. I can’t be on earth. I can’t let him see me. Not this way.
“Get off this island,” I warn him, even though I feel my heart splintering. “Get away from here.”
“Aza Ray. Do you know how hard it was to get into this place? I’m breaking laws in maybe five countries. You almost killed me. They almost killed me. And the Norwegians think I’m a curious and slightly stupid schoolboy on a trip to Longyearbyen.”
I’m smiling inside my zipped-up hood because this is vintage Jason. He’s alive. He’s real. But I’m not Aza anymore. I have no idea who I am.
“And in order to get to Longyearbyen, I basically had to bribe God.”
There’s a silence.
“The airport’s less than a mile away,” he says. “If your clothes are warm enough you can walk. And wait. I had a tent with me, but some people took me in. I think my tent sank. Where the water, you know. Was.”
I say nothing.
“Come out, and come home with me,” he whispers. “It’s freezing. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t have to do it alone.”
Caru sings in our voice, this terrifying screamsong voice, this nothing-is-inside-my-heart voice, and we turn the floor to water for a moment, because we’re scared, I admit it, I admit it. Jason’s eyes get huge, and he stumbles, splashes, sinks, recovers.
I can’t be with him I can’t be with him. Caru sings a high awful pitch, a shrill of despair, and agony, and Jason covers his ears in pain. Caru keeps singing with my mouth.