Aerie

  “What’s Zal done with my sister? Where is she?”

  “Your sister?”

  “Eli,” I manage. “Someone took her. It has to be Zal. Who else would it be?” Something occurs to me. “That’s why you were down there, isn’t it? That’s why her friends saw you. You were sent for Eli?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “It’s you. I came . . . they came . . . for you. I changed my mind and deflected. No one was sent for Eli.”

  I choke on that, and then swallow and keep myself together. I have to stay together. I can’t lose it. I have to be strong enough, even if—

  Even if anything.

  This is what chosen really means.

  People choose you. People tell you, this is your job forever. You have no choice. You have no say. Running, hiding is useless.

  Heyward just looks at me, weirdly patient.

  “I don’t know anything about Eli being taken. Zal Quel was in prison until a few days ago. Dai was released a few months ago, I don’t know why or how. Those black things, Nightingales, they call them. They’re some kind of new weapon. And they’re deadly.”

  These other birds, these Nightingales, are the things Caru saw on the edge of the sky, on my birthday. The visions he sent showed me that.

  The Nightingales are singing Magonian song. I play it back in my head. No, not just Magonian, more precise than that. They’re singing Caru’s song, but twisted somehow.

  How is that possible? Each heartbird’s song is different. None more so than Caru’s.

  How are they singing my heartbird’s song?

  Zal didn’t get what she wanted. I broke her plans for drowning the earth. What does she want now?

  “She wants you,” says Heyward. “Why do you think she took your bird? Just for fun? She can’t sing with Caru. She wants Caru because you want Caru. She’s drawing you out. Otherwise, she’d kill him.”

  On the screen, lightning flashing, dark clouds full of stormsharks. Dai’s face, covered in rain, and then Zal’s face, wet with both rain and blood. Not her own blood.

  “How do you have this? How am I seeing it?”

  “They have airborne spy cameras up there,” Heyward says. “They, as in the people in charge of this ship.”

  Where is Eli? Where is she?

  “Audio,” says Heyward. The screens go dark and something crackles on in the cell. Zal’s voice. I’d know it anywhere. She’s speaking to a crowd.

  “Magonians,” she says. “Your leaders are liars. Your slaves have rebelled. Your children starve, and your songs shrivel. The food you take from the drowners is poisoned, and their crops kill your families. We must take Maganwetar, and once they can no longer oppose us, we must destroy the drowners.”

  I hear the Nightingales screaming a tormented, twisted Caru song. I hear the shrieks that call for flood, for death, for the sky raining rocks. I hear a cheering crowd speaking Magonian.

  My stomach twists as I listen. I ran back to my family on earth, and I left Zal and Dai alive. Maybe if I’d stayed in Magonia—

  “ZAL QUEL! HAIL!”

  Heyward grabs my face and turns it so I look at her.

  “Old stories are tempting to a starving sky,” she says. “She’s whipping them up, preying on their honor and hunger, to get them to war against the ground. There are singers up there in her service, and weather she has control over.”

  I lurch back so she’s not touching me.

  “Did she send you to kill me?” I sputter.

  Heyward looks at me. “No. I told you the truth. I left Magonia. I thought I could just—”

  “What?”

  “Change my life,” she says, and her face is rueful. “What was I thinking? Now Zal Quel is loose. There is no more home.”

  A shiver racks my exhausted body. “Someone has to sing her into silence,” I say. “I don’t think I can do it alone.”

  Heyward nods. “We need to find the Flock.”

  Frustration level to ten. “The Flock. Again. What is it?!”

  “All I know is that it’s strong enough to kill her. They’ve been watching Zal a long time. The Flock is the only thing she fears. I thought you’d know more.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about, and it makes me angry. The camera above me makes me angry. And in my rage I have a tiny capacity for song. I force sounds out and shriek a high and damaging note, things starting to twist in the air around us.

  I feel the cell starting to bend to my tones, but Heyward gives me a look.

  It’s a look that says wait.

  I blink.

  Then she’s leaping toward me, flipping backward, her leg up in the air and kicking. She hits me in the throat, and I’m gagging, choking, bent over double, trying to scream, and no one’s coming to help me, no one’s opening the cell. There are soldiers outside watching her as she grabs my arms and twists them, as she puts her hands around my neck.

  I wait for her to break it like a bird’s throat, but instead I find—

  The thing they’ve done to my voice—it’s broken instead. Heyward’s mouth is just over my ear and she whispers, “We’re getting out of here. I don’t work for them. I work for myself.”

  I feel Heyward’s hands around my throat, prying at something, and I feel my song opening up again, more and more, until I know I have the whole thing, my voice back. She unlatches something I can’t see from around my neck, and I’m free.

  “NOW!” Heyward shouts.

  And I sing.

  I sing the walls of the cell into shattering, like that, sand from glass, sand to water. The floor of the prison is suddenly covered with ice. I sing a haywire song, something that isn’t anything I know, all the elements at once, no Caru, but I can sing it anyway.

  The corners of the prison light up, and the guards each find themselves surrounded by fire. I sing softness into the walls, mire into the floors, and they’re up to their ankles, their boots caught as they shout for help. Heyward is with me as we jump the barrier that used to be a cell wall, and we run as I sing other cells into collapse.

  My song is full of grief and rage. I don’t know what I’m doing.

  My song is Jason’s betrayal and Eli’s absence and Caru, trapped. My song is the nightmare of being my mother’s daughter.

  An empty center to my heart, and the song echoes inside it.

  The notes course through my bloodstream, like the cold of an IV when it’s just inserted, when all of a sudden your blood turns to ice and saline. Soldier-sailors run through the prison, wearing body armor and flotation gear, trying to cover their ears.

  I sing the glass of the cells into oblivion. I sing a prison break, because even though I don’t know what these prisoners did, I can’t leave them to be tortured.

  The ship is all monsters now, running, flying, leaping, and I sprint with Heyward up the stairs. She’s yelling at me, telling me which way to go, and I’m still singing. We burst out into the open air, onto the upper deck.

  I see the winged monster take off into the sky, feathers rotating and turning, the creature inside them sleek and smooth as a fish. Gone, shooting across the blue.

  The leopard made of smoke arcs backward and flips above the deck, a plume of burning air. The smoke hurts my eyes. I turn my head away from it as fast as I can, only to see the man with the lava in his hands start throwing molten rock at soldiers, none of whom know what to do.

  “DOWN!” Heyward yells.

  A movement over my head, and I drop to the deck. Close to me. A sound. A hum like a hive of bees. Something dark flashes past, close enough to touch my hair.

  One of the soldiers turns to look at me and I see his expression, like the faces of kids I used to see in the hospital, the ones who weren’t gonna make it and knew it.

  The song gets louder and louder. It’s coming from outside me, from the air. The soldiers are still running and they’re all tearing at their armor and dropping their weapons.

  I see soldiers starting to fall, unable to breathe, and I remember so
mething, a thing about what sound can do. It can collapse your lungs, if it’s the right tone.

  I’m Magonian. That’s something I can do, if I sing the right way, but this isn’t me. This is coming out of the sky.

  The birdsong is higher still, and louder, amplified, and they’re humming. The sounds they make aren’t from the natural world. They’re recorded and altered. They’re . . . mechanized.

  It’s the song I’d sing with Caru, made poisonous. Electrified, turned into something nonliving and made of spikes.

  KILL, the song sings, from a hundred birds at once. Die. Break now. Deathsong, killsong, screamsong.

  The soldiers are all leaping off the ship.

  Heyward grabs me and yanks me out of the way, just as a cloud of smoke covers the deck where I was. She lets go of me and leaps out, running. Do I follow her? My semi-sister, the lost child.

  She almost killed Jason. She almost killed me.

  But the sky is attacking us both.

  There’s a huge lurch and waves higher than they were a second ago explode over the deck. Small detonations, fire dropping through the decks, and this ship has got to be powered by something. Fuel tanks? Where are they?

  Shitshitshit.

  I sing a path, shifting parts of the wet on deck—seawater and, oh god, blood—to stone, to steps, to a place for us to run. There’s violence everywhere. Confusion. People are screaming, dying.

  A red dot appears in the shine of Heyward’s black hair. I throw myself at her knees, knocking her out of the range of whatever’s aiming at her.

  And then, a gift from nowhere: I see the Magonian launch that sat in a lab earlier, being experimented on. It was far enough from me that I thought I’d never see it again, but I melted all the walls. The launch is still here, floating above the deck.

  I grab the edge of the little wooden boat and heave myself up into it, reaching out my hand to get Heyward too. I wonder what I’m doing, but then it’s done.

  This is a Magonian vessel. It wants the clouds. It rises. I stand up and SING.

  We sway, but it’s okay. The song is supporting us. I’ve braided the hull of the boat to the wind. I know some things, and others are coming back to me. I learned them all on my mother’s ship and now I need them.

  Heyward is beside me, and we’re rising up.

  The last thing I see as I look out from this launch is the team of soldiers screaming at me from a hundred feet down. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.

  I sing us faster, move us harder across the sky, away from those things on the ship, away from whatever Zal sent to attack us. To seize us? Faster. Faster. As far away as I can get us. I sing so hard my lungs feel broken, until I’m panting, gasping. I look down again.

  Blue earth, blue water, blue sky.

  I spin, searching. It’s a Magonian boat. That means there are Magonian materials on it. That’s all I need. Something sharp. Finally, I find a small nail made of Magonian metal, jabbed halfway into a plank and pointed enough for my purposes.

  I take off my flight suit, and put the tip of the nail to my arm.

  I’m not supposed to do this, my mind’s screaming at me, but we’re all in bodies that are dying, from the moment we open our eyes.

  I cut.

  It hurts, but it doesn’t take much to shed a Magonian skin, once you start. It’s like a zipper. The kind of zipper every part of you is programmed not to open.

  This body, this body that’s been kissed and held and danced with on earth, this body that’s been mine for a year? It was never mine. Just like the last body, the one everyone called Aza Ray, was never mine. Both things were fake.

  Was everything fake?

  I wasn’t faking.

  I reveal an entire blue arm. I’m used to brown skin now, not this flesh tattooed with constellations, not this gleaming Magonian skin, this utterly not-human skin.

  Let go of the body you loved him with.

  Let go of the skin he touched. Let go of the fingers that touched him. Let go of the mouth he kissed. Let go of the body that slept beside his, the body that curled into his arms in the middle of the night when he was the only one who could comfort you after you lost your home in the sky.

  Let go of love.

  Let go of who you were when he was lying to you.

  Let go of all of it, earth and the world below.

  You’re Magonian, Aza Ray. Quit denying it. This is who you are.

  You need this body, this strength, this fight. You need to be all the way again. You need to be exactly, entirely what you are.

  It’s time to grow up. It’s time to go back.

  I tug Beth Marchon over my head, and roll her off my body, feeling the skin surrender, the bond that attached everything to everything ebbing. Feeling my Magonian hair unfurling, my skin taking in the high air, even alongside the grief of losing yet another human self, another chance at happiness.

  I loved him.

  Loved? Oh god, do I past tense it now?

  Does my heart live inside my chest, broken? Does it just stay there? Do you die of this feeling?

  I’m naked for a moment and then I put my flight suit back on. Carpe omnia. ELI. That’s why I’m doing this. My sister. My heart.

  I stretch my Magonian arms, feel my Magonian song, the vocal cords unbinding from their human covering.

  In a movie version of my life, I’d be whole now. I’d feel complete. As we rise to the country I came from, I’d heal the crack in the center of my heart as easily as I shed the skin.

  But I don’t.

  {I—}

  {&,&,&}

  I can’t crack now.

  There’s a clock some people made that’s supposed to keep perfect time for ten thousand years, a system of weights and pulleys, of gears and hope, and ten thousand years from now, it will still be telling us what time it is, so we can keep track of the seconds we have with the people we love.

  I didn’t know I’d have so few of them with Jason. I thought we’d be forever. Nothing could take us away from each other besides dying, yet here I am, alive, and there he is, alive—

  I’m sailing as fast as I can back to the country I came from.

  I let myself cry for what I’ve lost. I don’t even care that Heyward’s watching.

  I can’t stop.

  I cry over the edge of the launch, my tears mixing with the rain.

  CHAPTER 14

  {JASON}

  No pictures, no phone. No internet. Unplugged.

  Long hallways, locked doors, and each room full of prisoners. People who fell apart. People whose nearest and dearest took one look at them and went, “Nope, you’re done.”

  I’m sent to group therapy and I say, “I never tried to kill myself,” and everyone looks at me like yeah right, and I shift my weight and try to look exactly like someone who really never tried to kill himself, which is exactly the person I am, but I can tell I look wrong anyway.

  How can I not?

  Aza Aza Aza

  I’m broken.

  A doctor informs me that I really am broken. She tells me that I had a psychotic break, except I swear I didn’t. But maybe that’s how everyone feels when something in their brain goes haywire. No, no, I’m fine, really. Except that you’re wearing your shoes on your hands.

  The brain is running the show. If the brain’s got it wrong, everything else goes wrong too.

  “I never tried to kill myself,” says someone in the group, and then explains that instead, he swallowed three pairs of scissors, which were not to kill himself, but to kill the spirits of the dead that had possessed him.

  I look at this person and feel very sad for him. Whatever happened, it happened in a major way, and now here he is, swallowing sharp things in an attempt to barter with the fates. Which I don’t think I’m doing.

  But . . .

  You.

  Never.

  Know.

  I’m in a locked ward full of people who are fucked up. We are all fucked up together.

  I can’
t help but think of the place Aza’s in. This isn’t all that different. She’s there, I’m here, and there’s no normal. Maybe not for anyone.

  “I hear you believe in aliens,” says a kid.

  And I say, because I’m momentarily foolish, “No, I believe in one alien.”

  “I hear you tried to blow up your high school,” says another kid, and after the millionth time that comes up, I say, “Fine, sure.”

  “I heard you said you were a spy,” and I say, “No, I never said that. I never said any of that,” and I take my pills and sip my water, keep breathing despite the fact that every inhale is a struggle, knowing that if she never speaks to me again, I will deserve it.

  Everything has a little border of yellow, of weird shine. I don’t know what drugs I’m even taking. And honestly, I don’t care.

  Who am I to say what’s true? Maybe everything is. Maybe falling apart is a normal response to the way the world looks, weirder and warmer every day, people starving and being consumed by cracks in the earth, by tidal waves, by drought and plague. All that sounds very biblical, but it’s also very actual.

  Very Magonian.

  I watch the weather like I’m in charge of it. In group I say, conscientiously, “I know I’m not responsible for every horrible thing that has ever happened and will ever happen in the universe.”

  (In truth, I might be.)

  “I know I have to forgive myself for my best friend dying.”

  (No, I don’t, not for her dying the first time, not for her being taken prisoner now. I don’t have to forgive myself.)

  “Do you believe in people in the sky, Jason?” asks the group leader.

  “No,” I say.

  “Ships that sail in the clouds?” she asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Do you believe your friend is still alive? Do you believe in aliens?”

  “No, yes, no, YES,” I say. “YES! YES, I DO. CAN WE STOP FUCKING TALKING ABOUT IT?”

  If I hadn’t lost it already, I’d be losing it now. I think I’m losing more of it. Whatever “it” is.

  Single bed. No Magonia. No contact from SWAB, who are probably happy I’m here, stuck. Imprisoned. Out of their way now that they have no use for me. It’s not like me talking about SWAB is a risk for them. I’m here, binned, and they’re out there doing whatever they’re doing.