Aerie

  “Wait,” I croak. I start struggling. “Drop me! Leave me! I have to fight him!”

  “He’s hurt,” says Eli, her voice strangely calm for the voice of someone flying. I feel like I’m far away from myself, far away from the sound of voices. “He’s delirious.”

  I’m gasping, my lungs fried, my skin feeling crisped. I feel cold and hot at once.

  I look down and see, what seems like a million miles below us, my own feet dangling in midair. Take me to a hospital. Take me to the graveyard. I’m dying.

  My future is flight, says my brain as we rise.

  I’m a hoax, a dying boy who’s grown wings.

  CHAPTER 19

  {AZA}

  We sail for days. We’re starving and freezing. There’s no food, nowhere to stop, and the boat has no provisions. We’re wet, and an empty sky stretches around us for thousands of miles.

  Neither of us has said it yet, but we’re lost. What destination did we have to begin with? Not enough of one.

  Will we die out here?

  I’m missing Jason. Missing Eli. Missing Caru. Missing everything. Missing even Heyward, who is with me, but increasingly silent, trying to conserve her breath. I’m familiar with this kind of silence. She’s blue-lipped, and every once in a while she chokes out a ragged, rasping cough. She’s barely talking, barely moving. She keeps a hand at the center of her chest, and periodically a trickle of blood drips from her nose. Altitude sickness, combined with lack of oxygen. Her head hurts.

  She doesn’t complain, but I can see it on her face. The studied blankness of Breath has been replaced by a line between her eyebrows, and a dark blue circle under each eye. She looks so much like the Aza I used to see in the mirror, the sickest version of myself, that I can hardly stand to look at her. I know how she feels. I know exactly how she feels.

  “We could stop,” I say.

  “Where?” she asks. “There’s no land, not up here, and not below us.”

  I worry. About everything, myself included. Hunger twists around my spine, and into my guts.

  The sky around us is dark and heavy, as confusing as it’s ever been, and everything is a sea of shadows, twisting parts of air wrapping around our boat. It’s much colder as we move south, which makes me think I’ve never properly understood anything about geography. Could we be heading toward Antarctica? The clouds are strange colors, marbled like the endpapers of fancy books.

  I close my eyes and try to feel Caru with Zal, on her ship, but all I can feel are the points of a thousand stars, my focus divided all over the sky, and a terror that he’s mad and panicked.

  Caru. What if he’s the way he was when I found him on Amina Pennarum, caged, trapped, damaged, terrified?

  Or dead.

  There’s that possibility too.

  The door in my lung hurts, like nothing will ever sing from there again, and my heart aches.

  My Magonian tattoos are a hurried rush of pictures, Caru all over my skin, like a flock of birds flying, but it’s the same falcon, flying across my arm in a stuttering image, calling for help, trying to find me, trying to keep ME safe.

  I look at my arms, despairing, and watch the Caru tattoo move in agony, screaming across my bicep. Worse than that, I see Jason suddenly, a tattoo of him assembling itself on my palm. Eli next, beside him. A flashing motion of my sister’s face.

  I close my fist.

  That’s just my head and heart talking. Misery appears on my skin. It’s not real. It has no prediction power. It’s only my thoughts made visible. And my thoughts are sad and stupid. What ever happened to the Aza who could imagine good things? I swear she used to exist.

  Heyward coughs again, choking at the depths of her lungs. She’s getting worse.

  “Aza,” she whispers.

  “Yeah?”

  “If I die out here—”

  “You’re very much, a hundred percent NOT going to die,” I tell her.

  “If I do,” she says.

  I relent. “If you do, what?”

  “Tell me what my life would’ve been like down below. I don’t want to be out here for no reason. I wasn’t ever a drowner. Maybe Breath was the best thing that ever happened. Maybe it was . . . better than what you had. Look at it down there. It’s not so good on the ground either, is it? It’s not what I thought it was.”

  I think about my life. I think about how my life would have been if I hadn’t been sick and Magonian. I can’t lie to her.

  “Your life would have been incredible. You have amazing parents,” I say.

  She smiles. “Really amazing, or just good at their jobs?”

  “Really . . . amazing. Mom . . . our mom can sing mouse songs,” I say. “Our dad can do a backflip on a trampoline.”

  “What’s a trampoline?”

  “It’s a . . . thing you jump up and down on?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “For fun,” I say.

  She looks at me.

  “Strange,” she says.

  “Don’t you have fun up here?” I ask her.

  “We have work,” she says. “We learn to fight. We learn to be good at it. But we don’t play.”

  Then she coughs again, and I feel like I should explain everything about why earth is beautiful, about why seeing a sunset can make you believe in happiness, and why a birthday surrounded by people who’ve known you since you were born is important. Why any of this matters. Why it should be saved.

  Why people are loving, and why it’s worth it to be loved by them—even if they hurt you.

  “You would’ve had a sister,” I say. “She’s brave and tough, and acts like everyone else should be just like her. She’s strong like you. You have that in common. And she’s the best person I’ve ever met. She’s been like that since she was tiny. She was born after you . . . left.”

  Heyward looks at me. “It might have been nice to have a sister.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Is it like this?”

  “You mean is it like being castaways together?” I say, and smile at her. “Basically, exactly the same.”

  I think about all the things I’ve read about rafts lost at sea, about stowaways dropped off ships, and ships running out of fuel in the middle of the ocean. I think about Zal and her plank.

  I think for a dark moment about worse ways to die. I’ve thought of plenty of bad ways over the years. I never imagined there were still more to think about.

  A gust of wind blows through, and water whips around us. There’s a clap of thunder. Rain starts falling from nowhere. No squallwhales overhead. In the thunder, I’m hearing song, but it’s an echoing, aching song from far away.

  The air feels strange suddenly. A prickling electricity runs through it. And then the sky starts to shake.

  I don’t even look, I just tense, and inhale, ready to sing.

  When the sound begins, it’s not what I’m expecting. There’s a high hum, and I’m instantly flat to the bottom of the boat, Heyward dropping beside me.

  She rolls hard toward me just as something zings through the air. She grabs me and yanks me out of the way, putting herself on top of me.

  “Nightingales!” she shouts. Another dart flies and she rolls, still protecting me as another dart flies past us—

  “Are you okay?”

  She doesn’t answer. She just points up.

  There’s a warship above us. Magonian. A capital ship. There are Magonian soldiers onboard, and the masts swarm with hundreds of the black bird things that flew at us before, when we were on the prison ship.

  “AZA RAY AND HEYWARD BOYLE!” the ship’s broadcast shouts. “SURRENDER ON ORDERS OF MAGANWETAR.”

  The capital. The only thing Zal despised more than drowners down on earth. The ship begins to let down lines, ropes for our capture, and I wait in the bottom of the boat, preparing my song.

  I’m weak. I don’t know if I have enough strength, but I have some, a moment, and I feel Heyward beside me. She makes a sound of pain, but then she’
s crouching too, ready to fight—

  There’s another note, not from the ship, a sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before.

  “LEAVE THESE SKIES!” something sings, a ferocious howl, and out of nowhere, the sky’s—

  FULL.

  Exploding with song. Birds, maybe a hundred thousand, spinning out of thin air, a rush of wings, and all of them are singing, singing in unison with someone, flying from everywhere. They’re like a swarm of bees, or like a veil crossing the blue, and they’re everywhere.

  We’re in the center of it, and they twist around us like a tornado, then around the Magonian warship. I watch the ship tossing in the wind, losing control of first its sails, then its steering.

  A crane is up in the air shrilling a note at the top of her pitch, and a small silver bat is up in the air too, voice high and fierce, singing rage.

  The bat sings crisp notes, each one pinging on my ears, and as she sings, I start singing with her, a sonar song, inaudible to anyone but Magonians. It throbs my lungs and twists my vocal cords, but it’s mine, a strange song that grabs at the edges of the sky and tries to fold them up. I’ve sung with bats before, back on Zal’s ship last year. I remember how to do it.

  The whole sky is glowing and screaming and slow motion. REALLY slow motion. The sky stops moving at its normal rate and drops down to a half-speed strangeness, a strangled pace. Almost out of nowhere, the warship turns on end, pushed by song like a ship hitting an iceberg. It cracks in half. Its crew leaps into the sky, falls into thin air, dying.

  I swallow hard, because the wake of that song is coming for us, I can feel it, a rushing roar of noise, a tsunami of voice and wind.

  Heyward’s pale and sweaty, her hair twisting in the wind as our boat flips in the echo of the other ship sinking. I don’t have enough breath left to do anything about it. Even if I did, it’s bigger than I am.

  We fall. We’re dropping through the atmosphere.

  I grab Heyward’s cold hand. She holds on to me, too, and it’s a small comfort, her weak fingers in mine, her body beside me as the earth speeds closer.

  This is the end of our story.

  I see Heyward’s face and it’s like I’m watching myself in a mirror. She looks at me, and I know she’s seeing the same thing, but the Magonian version, my body turning to un-body, an ashen drifting nothing, someone who’ll blow away like sea foam.

  But we smack against something, hit hard, and slide. Below us there’s still only open air, but we’ve stopped falling.

  I turn to look at Heyward.

  She’s unconscious. I bend over her, frantically, checking her breath, her heartbeat, and she has both, but they’re faint. She’s pale and hardly breathing.

  I look at her chest.

  A dart. It’s right there, and there’s a spreading ring of red around it. Oh no, no no. I put my fingers on it, but I don’t pull it out. I don’t know what to do. Eli and Jason are the ones who know first aid.

  I’m the one who was always needing it.

  The surface we’re on tilts, and we slide. I grab Heyward’s wrist, and hold on to her, clinging with my other hand. I don’t know where the edges are. At first I think it’s definitely ice, but then, I can just feel the edges of slippery planks. We’re on . . . a deck.

  I sing a panicked note that turns the air frigid, just for a moment, and I can see the outlines of—

  A ship. It could be made of glass, it’s so transparent. A ghost ship, or a piece of reflected sun. It’s prismatic. The edges blur and gleam. Its sails billow. There is a cabin on the deck. It looks like a glass house, but the walls are the color of cloud. Through the deck, I can see all the way down to earth, the sea, the outlines of land.

  I can feel my compass thrumming against my heart, the arrow spinning, and we’re nowhere and everywhere at once.

  An old man appears, coming through the door that isn’t visible, up out of a cabin that isn’t visible. He is, though.

  I’m on guard instantly, leaning over Heyward to shield her, but he’s not attacking.

  He’s small. A gray figure with twisting hair, tattooed all over in white lines like a star map. His eyes are golden. Skin, pale gray, the color of early morning storm. The old man’s chest isn’t like mine. I see one door open, over his lung, and the crane flies to him and places a ring in his chest. Not a canwr, like Milekt. A heartbird, like Caru. The door closes and together, they sing a note that makes my hair stand on end, strange and piercing, perfectly balanced. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s beautiful, but it’s the kind of sound that hurts everything, one degree away from fingernails on a chalkboard, and on the side of glory instead, but only barely.

  This is the one who was singing. The one whose song sank the warship.

  HOW did he do that?

  He looks at me, and his eyes are the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. He stares at me, then shakes his head.

  “You surely know you’re trespassing,” he says. His voice is sonorous, beautiful, and very quiet. “This is my sky.”

  “My friend is hurt,” I tell him, and my voice cracks. There’s a trickle of blood coming from Heyward’s mouth. Her heartbeat feels fainter and the dart quivers with each beat. “I think she’s dying. We need your help.”

  “You fell from the Magonian ship, did you not?”

  “No! They—they were trying to capture us.”

  “Criminals, then?”

  “Please help us,” I say. “Please. She’s not okay.”

  Heyward’s eyes are flicking behind her lids. She’s not seizing. But is she about to? I try to keep her head from falling backward.

  “That is a drowner,” the old man says. Contempt fills his voice.

  “She was Breath,” I say, and he grimaces. I lie slightly, on a hunch. He just sank a Magonian warship, after all. He’s no ally of Zal’s. “She left them. Now she’s a fugitive. That’s why we were being chased. Please. They shot her with something. She’s dying.”

  I don’t know if the dart was meant for me, or for Heyward, or just hit her at the perfect angle when it was meant only to hurt, not to kill, but this is where we are. I hold Heyward’s hand tightly.

  First I took her life on earth, and now—

  Another door opens in the old man’s chest. Another bird flies into it.

  My jaw drops.

  No. No, that’s not how it works. No one has more than one door. No one has more than one canwr—

  Not a bird, I realize. A bat. The tiny silver bat. Now they’re all singing, this old man with two canwr at once, the silver bat rendering all the notes into vibrations, the crane singing peals, and the old man chanting the bass.

  “What are you?” I ask him. “Who are you?”

  “Something extinct,” he says. “Or nearly. The last of my kind.”

  His bat shrieks something soundless. Out of nowhere, there are more birds, not just the silver bat and the crane with the orange beak, but a raven, and a white falcon—like Caru, but smaller. All these land on the old man’s arms.

  Heyward’s lungs are making the sound mine did on earth. I hold her tighter. I can feel her heart working to keep her here.

  “Please,” I say. “Help us.”

  “The world is ending,” he says. “Things are getting worse, not better. I left a sick country, and now the entire sky is infected with the same plague. You should let her die.”

  End of everything sings the old man. End of songs, and his bat joins in, then his crane. This is a griefsong and an angersong, but it’s a helpless, giving-up kind of anger. Sung by all these voices at once. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful. Nor anything so dark.

  Then, off the edge of his deck, I see a plank becoming visible. The air around us bends with his chorus.

  “Please,” I whisper. Heyward’s blood is soaking my hands. My sister, even if she isn’t. My family, even though we’re not. “She’ll die if you don’t help.”

  I don’t know what to do.

  So I—

  I do something I
don’t know how to do.

  I reach out my hand to the old man’s crane. Come, I sing. Help me.

  The bird looks at me, a black eye, voice loud and silken. She tilts her head. This isn’t allowed, to call to someone else’s canwr, but there’s no choice.

  The crane sings back to me, an eerie echo. Then we sing a note together, and though the crane isn’t mine, we sing anyway. We sing like strangers who discover they know the same songs.

  I’m running on faith. I don’t have time to decide, to think, to plan.

  I sing.

  I remember with a blast of agony the first time I sang with Caru, the first time I sang with Dai, Svilken, and Milekt—

  I sing light, change, heal. My voice feels tiny, full of the dead and of fear for Heyward. Full of loss. But his canwr is singing with me like she knows me. Like she’s mine. Like we’ve done this before. We haven’t. I’ve never seen her. But it still feels right, weirdly familiar.

  The old man stares at me, stunned.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “Singing,” I tell him.

  He looks angry at first, then astonished, then angry again.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Aza Ray Quel,” I say.

  I don’t break eye contact, no matter how panicked I am about Heyward. I can’t afford to. Heyward makes a tiny sound of pain, a little gasp, and I keep looking at him.

  “Who are YOU?” I ask him again.

  This time he tells me.

  “I am the Flock.”

  CHAPTER 20

  {JASON}

  I come to my senses, surrounded by feathers and in screaming pain. It’s not quite light in here, not quite dark. My brain spins. All around me is—

  Insanity.

  Jumbled-up combinations of humanbirds that I thought I understood. That I thought I could picture from Aza’s descriptions. I was wrong again. My brain couldn’t ever conjure the things I’m seeing. But I know what they are. I try to sit up, but someone presses me back down. I try to move, but I can’t. I’m pinned. My chest feels like—

  Like it’s been torn open.

  I’m surrounded by something out of a crazy surrealist painting. Wings and faces, not cartoonish, not like anything I had imagined before, which was admittedly half puppet. This isn’t like that at all. These Rostrae are ferocious, angelic, eerie, their arms muscled, the feathers on their shoulders and heads sharp as knives. They look like dreams.