Jason’s gasping, but he looks up again, and I see his face now. The furrow between his eyebrows is deeper than it was. He fidgets in his pockets and stuffs earplugs into his ears.
“Idiot,” he says. “Do you really think I’m leaving without you? Do you really think I’m going back to my full-on meltdown? Reciting pi for three weeks? Talking in my sleep?”
He straightens up, wet to the thighs with water that, after it falls from him, goes back to being concrete. He doesn’t seem to give a damn.
Caru arcs in his voice, Leave leave leave go go go drowner, but then Caru stops singing because I can’t stop crying.
Jason’s in front of me. Things have changed in him. Just like things have changed in me.
No no no. He’s human. I keep reminding myself that I’m not. But oh my god oh my god, my heart. My heart feels human.
“You’ll have to kill me if you want me to go,” Jason says. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
He says nothing for a minute.
“Then we’re even,” he finally says, and his voice breaks with an only slightly muffled sob.
I step out from behind the pillar. Covered completely. I’m wearing the clothes I had to wear to do Zal’s bidding. A suit zipped up all the way to keep me safe from too much oxygen. Emergency war gear. Only my eyes are visible.
No one but me could ever tell that he’s scared. No one but me has ever seen Jason Kerwin cry.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jason says. “You can keep trying to tell me to leave, but it’s not going to work. I came for you. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Aza’s gone,” I singsay.
Jason looks steadily at me. He takes a step toward me.
“Bullshit,” he says.
I take a step back.
He steps. I step.
Another.
Rock wall behind me.
But.
I’m going to leave him.
But.
He reaches out his hand, and like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t even notice it’s a thing, he puts his hand on the hood of my suit, and unzips it, taking the panel away from my face.
My hair uncoils into the freezing air. It twists and moves toward him as though its trying to bite his hands. My skin flares with electricity, storm sparks, too much oxygen.
I can’t breathe this way for long.
I’m here in front of him, Magonian.
Jason doesn’t even flinch.
I try one more time. This body, this person, this skin, this face, these red-gold eyes, the real, freaky version of the girl he knew. He’s looking at me, at my insane Medusa hair, at my too-long fingers and everything not what it was, and I must be hideous to him.
“Do you get it now? I’m not Aza,” I wheeze. “I’m not who you think I am—” and then Jason Kerwin takes one more fast step forward and—
He’s kissing me.
He’s got me in his arms. His human lips. My Magonian mouth. And it’s weather, a surging storm breaking, a vast, warm expanse of sun and of rightness coming across the sky. I’m glowing with it, his skin, my fingertips, his jaw and—
He moves back from me so that we’re not kissing for a second.
“Aza Ray,” he says. “You hold no horrors for me.”
He breathes me in, and I breathe him in, and when we breathe out the air freezes between us and falls. Snow.
I’m shaking and stupid, and for a second I think I’m not going to know what to do, but then I do.
I grab his face in my hands and kiss him until he’s the one who can’t breathe. I keep my eyes open. So does he. We’ve been not looking at each other for too long. Like, for our whole lives.
Real now.
No more parentheses. No more brackets.
I can hear new sounds out there. Engines, airplanes, helicopters. Whatever we did, people are about to know it all.
“It’s okay. I planned for something like this.”
I look at Jason, and remember how even though I know what he is, I always underestimate him. He smiles at me.
I stagger into the broken, sideways hull of Amina Pennarum, singing camouflage all the way. I know I don’t have long. They’ll never let this wreck stay.
I run as fast as I can through corridors I once knew, past tangled hammocks and twisted ropes to find the skins that Dai took from the Breath ship. It’s dark and smoky in here, and there’s a sizzle not far away, a sting outside, the smell of ozone, but I tear off my uniform and grab the closest skin.
I unzip the cover. I put my hand on the skin, warm, soft, fragile, and I touch it. I feel it touch me. It wraps around me, pressing, crushing, melding to me, melting into me, and inside my body I feel the vibration of Caru, questioning, from outside the vessel.
Okay, I sing. Calm, and I feel him sing back. Feel rather than hear.
The skin closes over me, smooth, perfect, and new, and I tug my clothes back over it and run, run, as the ship collapses around me.
I fling myself out a porthole onto the ice. I look up, but Maganwetar is gone. The ships are gone. The sky and ground are clear of everything but squallwhales and human things, planes in the distance, and cars coming across the island. People are arriving, running across the frozen landscape.
Casually, dressed in my Magonian uniform, breathing a little easier with these borrowed doll lungs, Jason and I walk away from the seed repository.
We walk away like we’re two American teenagers on a field trip who saw something they shouldn’t have seen, but only kind of saw it, officer, because we snuck away to make out.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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It takes some seriously heroic lying and bullshitting, and this is where having a little bit of money comes in handy, but in the end I get us on a plane home. Fake passport for her. I said heroic, didn’t I? Yes. Heroic.
I’m not entirely well from the lightning, and I’ve been feeling sick the whole flight. It’s weird and terrifying to be on a plane now, after all this. I don’t know if Aza thinks so. She’s so exhausted that she’s been sleeping for nine hours. I can hear a familiar, ragged edge to her breathing starting again, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.
The skin she’s wearing now is stronger, a new version of what she had before. She has some time, we hope, before things start to fail.
The skin. I think about that. It makes no sense. Aza tried to explain it to me, but finally gave up after she said it was a combination of camouflage and Aqua-Lung. I told her to stop because she wasn’t helping make any sense of this, and she said, “Fine, Jason. It’s magic. I can’t help you. I don’t get it either.”
I think back to that night when Aza and I watched the giant squid—the creature that also seemed fact and fantasy, real and imaginary. That day, we were uncomplicated. I mean, not, but relatively, compared to today. Even that’s something we’re never going to have again.
I’m not looping.
Okay, fine, I’m looping.
Looping as in: this won’t work, this can’t work, what’s coming for us?
As in maybe she isn’t who she was, maybe I’m not who I was, maybe nothing about this is right at all.
As in, maybe she’ll die again. Maybe it will be worse this time than it was last time, except that this time she’ll really be dead.
Loop. Worry. Panic attack quelled by breathing and a pill and a tiny, tiny dose of pi. Shh. Aza not awake and not noticing, and me in the bathroom of the airplane, trying not to fall apart now, after all the weeks of fervent not falling apart I’ve done.
This is completely insane. This was love at first sight. And now, she’s here with me, and I’m here with her, and the whole sky is full of angry people who want her dead.
And is she even staying down here? Can she?
But it doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine a universe in wh
ich I try to unlove her. What if one day she looks at me and says, “I want to go back up”?
What if I’m an anchor, snagged, holding her to the rocks?
This is not just Jason and Aza. It’s not me racing against death to save her anymore. It’s us racing against impossible.
I think about my moms. I think about how there was a moment in which they thought they’d never be able to be together. Their families panicked. Two women? No men? They did it anyway. My birth certificate has both of them on it, and they did I-don’t-even-know-what to make that happen.
They were brave. I can’t be less brave than they are.
But even Eve would be scared of what we saw in Svalbard. And maybe of the girl beside me.
At the beginning of the flight, I saw a formation of geese passing our plane, going the other way, and so did Aza. She pressed her face against the glass.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her hand was on the glass, too, as though she was greeting them, but also like she was getting ready to do something. The air felt gritty. After a moment, the geese passed the plane, and she relaxed.
“What just happened?”
“I wasn’t sure what they were doing,” she said, and looked at me with a kind of sheepish expression on this new face I’m still getting used to. “I thought they might be coming for us.”
“Explain,” I said.
“We’re near a Magonian ship right now,” she said. “The geese were in formation around the hull. I don’t know how we got out of there. I don’t know how they let us go.”
I look at her. I don’t know either. We’ve been over everything. Heyward. The ship in the air. This Dai, her partner.
She explained. It wasn’t a happy explanation, hearing her talk about how she was magnetized to him. We compared notes on everything that happened in the last month and a half, and we still have gaps.
There’s nothing hitting the news about what just went down at the vault. I’ve been tracking it the whole flight. About the breach of the seed repository—about the massive earthquake—nothing.
Which means that just beneath the surface, everyone’s freaking out. The military from several different countries. Norwegian. American. Brits. Bunch of others. This can only have been an international incident.
I make sure Aza’s sleeping, and then I pull out the business card I was given on the tarmac at Longyearbyen.
She was in the bathroom. Dude came up, black suit, dark glasses, two words, card, gone. I keep nearly, but not quite, telling her about the agent, who only said, “Thank you.”
Now I wonder how long the feds were following me. I keep thinking Aza doesn’t need to know. Maybe no one needs to know.
If I were them, I wouldn’t hire me. I know more than I should. I think if I were in their shoes, I’d kill me.
I look over again at Aza sleeping beside me. I listen to her breathing. We’re going home, but who knows how long we’re going to be able to stay there.
In this skin, Aza looks like a new person. She isn’t. She’s still entirely Aza. Example: when we got onto the plane, she looked at me and said:
“What’re you looking at?”
“You,” I said.
“Don’t get used to this. I think this skin’s gonna fall apart. That’ll be pretty. I’ll look all rotten corpse and then we’ll see if you want to hold my hand.”
Which is not true. She’ll turn more and more blue, and have a harder and harder time breathing, and eventually what happened before will happen again. And I will still want to hold her hand. We’re just hoping this version is better than what she had before.
She’s got braided black hair and brown skin. Her body’s the same, because the skin shrinks to fit. But other than the obvious changes, because I know she’s Aza, she looks like Aza to me.
Same wide mouth. Same amazing strange eyes. Her voice is Aza’s voice. Her words are Aza’s words.
If I handed her a piece of paper and some scissors, she’d cut out the Empire State Building in three minutes. If I asked her what she thought about anything, she’d instantly have an opinion, whether majorly wrong or not, she’d never hesitate to tell me what she thought. She’s always been this way. She still is.
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Whole flight,” I say.
“Am I still alive?”
“Of course you are.”
“Because it feels like I’m dreaming, coming back here.”
“We’re going to make this work.”
I wish I believed myself. I’ve been the King of Certainty the whole time I’ve known her, but about a lot of things I was faking. I’m faking right now. I don’t know anything. I feel broken and messed up, terrified and convinced I’m about to watch her get shot down by airport security.
Aza kisses me as we’re getting off the plane, full-on enough that I’m pretty sure everyone else in the jetway is blushing, and I’m blushing too. That doesn’t keep me from picking her up and carrying her into the airport, over the threshold that separates this country in the air from home.
Everyone’s laughing, all the people around us. They think we’re cute. Maybe they think we’re a little pukey.
People actually, amazingly, think we’re normal teenagers in love.
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I’m expecting a hole where my house was. My family gone. Everyone gone. Or it’ll be surrounded by police, or Breath, someone waiting to take me away and lock me up, in a brig or a cell, same difference. My neighborhood looks wrong. No sky around us. No snow. No ice. The ground stable.
I turn the corner toward my address, expecting retribution. Maganwetar knows where I came from. Zal knows where I’ll go. Someone’s got to be hunting me.
Except for that Breath, willfully letting me go. It must have been on someone’s orders. Whose? It makes me wonder if maybe, maybe we have some time. If Magonian officials want me down here somehow. I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.
I’m not what I should be. I’m illegal. I’m an alien. In all senses of that word. My mother is an assassin and a criminal and probably in jail in Magonia. Maybe I’m an assassin and a criminal too. I wonder about my father. Do I even have one? No one ever said. How come I never asked?
It’s quiet on my street, but not too quiet. A few birds, none of them speaking. All they do is sing.
The sky’s clear. The sun’s shining. There’s nothing up there that would suggest anyone knows I’m down here. I could almost (if I was insane) forget about Magonia.
Not even a breeze. It’s cold, but not as cold as Svalbard.
And there—my house is there. In front of me, itself. Yellow front door. Blue car in the driveway. Dented side.
It’s the dent that starts me crying. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe I’m just coming home after school, getting out of Jason’s car, probably gasping a little. Normal. Except that I have Jason beside me holding my hand, and that would never have happened before all this. There was no official version of Jason and me before.
There’s a rip in the neckline of his shirt, and he has a smudge on his face. I want to laugh, because a smudge? After everything? Only a smudge?
The world isn’t over, though, and here we are. Like humans. Some more like humans than others.
I look up at Jason. I can feel the sides of his fingers against mine. I can feel his heart beating through his thumb.
“What do you think?” he asks me, as though he doesn’t know already.
“My parents are home,” I say.
“You ready?”
“Not even.”
“Maybe we should jump off the garage,” he says.
“Maybe we should fly in,” I say, which almost makes me sob, because. Obvious reasons. There are losses to this. Big ones.
I don’t have a plan. Where else in the world would I go but here? Home. Not home. Ho
me.
I turn around and start walking in the opposite direction of my house. Nope. I can’t see my parents, not this way. Look at me. I’m not me—
“Do you know,” Jason says, his voice tense as mine, talking fast, a definite sign of barely hidden anxiety. “Do you know about the Ganzfeld Effect?”
“No,” I say. I’m listening, but I’m not stopping. He’s not going to seduce me with factoids. I walk faster.
“It’s the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for missing signals. For example, if you look at a clear blue sky without context, you start to hallucinate. Look at snow too long, and you’ll see cities.”
“That’s not what Magonia is,” I interrupt, irritated that he can even remotely say this after all he’s just seen.
“The students of Pythagoras used to go into dark caves and stay there in order to bring it on. Wisdom out of nothing. Astronauts say they see the same thing. And Arctic explorers.”
I feel his fingers lace through mine. He keeps talking without stopping. He’s not letting me get away.
“Prisoners in solitary. There’s a term for that version. Prisoners’ cinema. Colors at the edge of night, figures and forms. Some people think the cave paintings in Lascaux were done in the dark, someone painting the things they saw when there was nothing else to see. Hands out, dipping fingers in pigment and painting in pitch-black, from visions. You could only see them if you stayed there long enough, looking.”
I stare up at Jason. He’s looking at me too now.
“No one knows, really, why the brain makes these visions. It wants to see something. All these beautiful things came out of the blue,” he says. “And out of the black. The same way you did. Your country in the sky is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I believe you. I saw it. I see it now, little bits.” He points up. There’s a small sailing vessel, no threat, moving fast across the sky.
“Even people who’ve never seen a miracle can believe in miracles, Aza. Even people who’ve never seen the light, people who’ve been kept in the dark, people who’ve gone snow-blind, or sky-blind? Even those people can imagine fantastic things. I believe you. Your family’s going to believe you too.”