Aerie

  That girl starts to sing a note I don’t know, but somehow . . . do. It feels like everything I’ve ever heard her say over the years. It feels like every moment we’ve ever spent together, every back room of a museum, every library shelf, every time I looked at her and felt stunned that I was standing there at all.

  All those times when you’re blinded by joy and you can’t even tell why. All that, and her too, this core that sings her own song, the song she sings when she sleeps, the song she whistles when she’s not paying attention, something with no melody, no chorus, no sense to it, but entirely Aza Ray.

  It’s stronger than I’ve ever heard her, sweeter and more ferocious at once. The note she’s singing almost hurts, and I can’t separate it from my own physical pain and the pain in my heart that I’ve never noticed how she really sounds before.

  I always heard myself too loudly, alongside her. This is her with no backup, her self in song form. This is Aza without me.

  If I die? She doesn’t need me. If she doesn’t need me, it’s okay to go.

  It’s a relief.

  All those years, all that dying, and I thought I was keeping her alive. I thought I was supporting the universe, but I was just supporting my universe. She was Aza the whole time.

  So I listen.

  I’ve got nothing but that. All I can do is hear her.

  I listen to her bend the sky. I listen to her, and I know this song will break Zal, win over anything. It has to.

  But I hear Zal shouting directions at Dai, and Dai shouting back.

  I see Milekt fly across the gap between Maganwetar and Aza’s ship.

  Aza chokes, and her song is gone, with a strangled cry.

  I don’t know what happened, because I can’t sit up. I can’t stand up. I can’t see her anymore. The light around her is gone.

  “Get her!” Zal shouts.

  There are millions of notes suddenly, Magonians singing with their canwr, and each Nightingale is singing too, a robotic approximation of Magonian song, a high-pitched razor song.

  Aza’s mother is as strong as Aza is. Stronger?

  Surreal, sky on fire, the smell of gasoline and ozone, birds screaming everywhere.

  I catch a glimpse of something, and I don’t even know what it is. A squallwhale? More than one squallwhale? I’m lost here, a sprawled human stuck too far from home, and off the edge of the deck, which is tilting, I’m seeing buildings.

  are supposed to be connected by an &, not two forms of nothing, dying on separate ships.

  This is not the plan. This is not what we’ve been working for, for all these years. And here we are anyway. Maybe that’s how it always is.

  In my hand I feel the round shape of the compass, its weight and smoothness. I feel the latch at the back, the thing I had built in, another thing I never told Aza about. I should’ve. I thought we’d have time.

  But here I am.

  “Zal!” I call, croaking it out, making a particular sound like a death rattle, a sound I once heard the girl I love more than anything make.

  Here I am right now, still here. I can do something for Aza, even if it’s the last thing I do. The SWAB archive had things in it. Some of them were tiny. Some of them could be palmed.

  Zal leans over me.

  “Is the drowner dead?” she asks.

  Tomorrow, on earth, there will be reports of weather events. Of flocks of birds falling out of the heavens. Of a superstorm. People will worry about bird flu and about catastrophe, about the heavens falling, in all the ways people always have, and should, and do.

  I squint through almost closed eyes out across the clouds, over the bloody deck and torn sails.

  I flick the compass latch open. Zal is leaning over, touching my eyelid with her fingertip, pulling it up, examining. Checking to see if I’m gone. I hold my breath. I pretend to be gone all the way, instead of just most of the way.

  I hear Eli, far away, yelling, “Don’t touch him!”

  I stab straight up into Zal’s chest, a tiny knife made of stolen Magonian metal, folded out from my compass, and that’s all I have, the only chance I’m going to get.

  I plunge the knife into her heart.

  CHAPTER 29

  {AZA}

  I can’t make a sound. There’s nothing. Milekt is in my throat, binding my song. Milekt himself. A suicide mission? An endsong? He’s taking me down with his own body? I feel like I’m choking, but there’s enough room for me to breathe, a tiny bit. Not to sing. I’m mute. Not the way I was on the prison ship. A new way. No tech. This is a living thing, inside my voice, stopping my song like a cork.

  My broken canwr. Motionless. I—

  I cough. Like a dying girl. Like Aza Ray Boyle, blue in the lips, blue in the fingers, broken in the soul, missing her family in advance.

  And below me is their house. Below me is everything I knew when I was learning about the world.

  Lightning strikes my backyard.

  Lightning sets a tree on fire. Right by the bedroom windows. Wind is coursing over the landscape, flattening it.

  Rivers rise up and I watch them begin to flow over the ground, flooding the land where I live, the places I wanted to pick flowers, but couldn’t, because I was Magonian and couldn’t breathe. The places I wanted to play, but couldn’t, because I was this, and the earth was not my home.

  Zal steps onto the deck of my ship.

  I’m on my knees.

  “There’s no deathsong for traitors, Aza Ray,” Zal says, but her voice is strange. She’s holding a spot on her chest, wincing. The same spot Heyward’s dart was.

  “Your voice was a gift I gave you, and now it returns to me. It was mine.”

  I whisper, “Why?”

  This is worse than the last time, on the prison ship. A dead canwr in my throat. MY dead canwr. I want to scream, but nothing comes out.

  “A healing song,” she says. “Sing me a healing song. Sing what you were singing before. I heard you. Sing that at me.”

  There’s no healing what’s broken in Zal.

  I can’t sing to the birds all around me, all these birds who came to die for me, and I can’t even see Eli and Jason.

  I’m sorry, I think at them. I’m so sorry you’re dying up here. Caru isn’t in my line of sight and I don’t dare turn my head to look for him.

  Come closer.

  Come closer, Zal Quel. Come closer, you captain of nowhere who birthed me. Come closer.

  I can’t hate her.

  I have to feel her pain. It’s not hard to feel it. The sky is full of it. Her throat is covered in wires and her face is a frozen thing. There are Nightingales singing out in the distance, and her throat is singing with them. She’s broken.

  I can almost feel the pain in her chest, some wound there. Her face is agonized.

  I don’t know how to heal Zal Quel. I only know how to sing to her. I open my arms to my mother, this nightmare, this broken thing who is stronger than I am.

  What happened to her to make her this? Why is she still here? I can’t believe she wants to be.

  Zal takes a step toward me, her face bewildered.

  “That song you were singing.” Her face flickers. Sadness? Fury? I can’t tell. “Where did you find it?”

  “It’s mine,” I choke, the last of my voice around Milekt.

  “Which deathsong would you have sung? What funeral would we have given you, if you’d died with honor? There would have been sunsets and clouds streaked silver. There would have been new stars. Daughter of the ruler. But you choose to die dishonored, and disowned. A traitor.”

  She’s an inch from me.

  “If I die,” she says, “the world goes with me. If I die, I’ve taught my Nightingales a song.”

  I can see them spitting all around the sky, singing weather, singing with my voice.

  I still don’t know the song that will heal her. It’s not this one.

  I look at the hand she’s holding to her chest. It’s blue with her blood.

  She takes a ste
p forward and I step backward. One more. Another. I think about how I’m going to have to take her with me. Maybe that’s the end.

  “I can’t,” I choke, Milekt there in my throat. I feel him spread his wings.

  Not dead. Not—

  Zal looks at me, her face furrowed with pain, every part of her radiating fury.

  “Then you’re no one’s daughter,” she says, and shoves.

  Milekt flies out, leaving the shipwreck. Caru screams, and catches Milekt in his talons, killing him with one clasp—

  And everything changes. The ship tilts and the sky glitters, and there is a roar of a million voices, a rush of song. Of whalesong. Of birdsong. Of everything.

  Something supports my falling body. Something wide and strong. I’m on a squallwhale’s back, feeling its body vibrate as it glides up again, beside a launch ship made of birds, all flying together, all flying hard and fast at us as though they’re one body, and standing on their wings is—

  “She is MY daughter!” sings the Flock from all around me. “MY DAUGHTER!”

  All the birds sing it. All the whales. There must be hundreds of squallwhales, here out of nowhere, here to join us.

  I turn my head, and there he is, his birds perched on his arms. He’s covered in brightness, and his lung doors are both open. Caladrius and Vespers. The entire sky is full of his birds.

  Our birds.

  Zal’s face is aghast. Her mouth is wide, her eyes blazing, staring at the Flock. Her hands shake.

  “You’re dead,” Zal says. “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.”

  “I didn’t die. I disappeared,” he says. “That is a different thing.”

  They’re silent for a moment.

  “How could you leave me?” Zal whispers.

  “You broke our song.”

  “No, you left me when they took my song.” Her expression is pleading. “But I have it back! Sing me a healing. I’m dying.”

  He looks at her.

  “We are all dying,” he says. “And your ‘song’ is the sound of murder. Your song was taken from you because you sang to kill. You always have.”

  “Not always,” she says. “I didn’t, not with you.”

  His eyes on her might as well be full of lightning. “What happened to you?”

  “The world is full of hunger,” she says. “No one helps. No one but me,” she says. She looks at him pleadingly again.

  I watch them, wary.

  They look at each other, and the look that passes between them is old. It’s the look of history on fire. It’s the look of love, regardless, love no matter what has happened, love despite betrayal. It’s the look of love that will never make sense.

  But here I am.

  And here they are.

  The Flock takes a step forward, and Zal does too, and for a moment I think he’s going to heal her, that he won’t be able to keep from it.

  Instead, the Flock blasts out a note so loud and ferocious it shakes everything.

  Then they’re both singing into each other’s lungs; Zal’s voice is all Nightingales, and his is all the birds in the sky.

  He sings with her. He’s as strong as she is. As fierce. This is a battle of equals.

  The Flock’s voice, a voice compounded of all his birds, is underneath Zal’s, pushing it to be larger, singing it into a flood. This is what happened to me. I know what this feels like.

  And it’s my song they’re pushing. My stolen song.

  “STOP!” Zal screams, managing to make it over the song, managing to be louder than her Nightingales for a moment. She chokes, then flexes her fingers, controlling the voices of the birds above her. I see her tighten her throat to sing a high pitch.

  The Flock tilts in the air, in pain. Her song, the Nightingale song, hurts him. But he keeps singing.

  Lightning bolts, flashes of twirling northern lights and comets. There’s a glow around them both, and it hurts my eyes and my head.

  He’s singing shooting stars and sunrises.

  I’m close enough to them that I can see their faces. Zal’s eyes are entirely orange, lit on fire, her face bright and her skin covered in tattoos of the things she loves and lives for.

  He’s written on her skin. And she’s written on his.

  I see the points of Zal’s teeth, the love and murder in her eyes.

  Caladrius is sagging, long crane neck wrapped around the Flock’s shoulders. He’s weakening.

  Zal’s sagging too, bleeding, holding on to his hands. Both of them are barely staying in the air.

  The two of them, even wounded, are equally strong. They are bonded, and they sing as one thing.

  They sing a note that is so ferocious that I can’t even hear it. Right into each other’s bodies, into each other’s mouths, into each other’s lungs, and as the note happens I realize I know what the Flock is singing.

  Zal’s face crumples, and she gasps, choking on the song she’s singing. The Nightingales above her are twisting, tangling, and the note the Flock is singing is horribly beautiful. It’s high and sweet and savage, and Zal is singing the other half of it.

  He’s singing Zal’s note.

  Her Nightingales twist in the air, flying out over the city below us, and Zal is singing a note she doesn’t want to sing, a note of joy instead of destruction. The Flock sings with her, shifts her song into creation instead, and for a moment—

  I see a flash of recognition on her face. A softening. She sings a trill that is her own, a trill that is full of things I’ve never heard her sing. She sounds like the recordings I’ve heard of that.

  Astroseismology.

  Her song is nothing earthbound. It’s a vibration. It’s the song of a star, a quivering warble that comes from elsewhere.

  My mother’s real song is the song of a star sending light?

  I look at her. She’s beautiful suddenly, and her skin shines. She’s glowing, trembling as she sings.

  The Flock is barely hanging in the air, and he’s singing with her so hard that I can tell he’s about to fall.

  He inhales. She inhales too. I can tell they’re both preparing for a final blast, a last note—

  And then everything goes still.

  They stare at each other.

  The Nightingales whip across the sky. Zal twists, screaming a note she must have kept inside herself for years, tugging the wires that hold the Nightingales to her.

  The note is a blinding obliteration, the opposite of the Flock’s song, a song of unbelief, of distrust, of fury and sorrow.

  I’m paralyzed, watching the father I only just found writhe in agony, his face contorted, his voice tight and broken. The echoes of her note reverberating out into the sky, into the Nightingales, across the city, shaking everything, turning all sound into catastrophe. I see Magonians clutching their chests, and in the planes orbiting us, I see pilots convulsing.

  She’s singing death for everyone, an endsong for their partnership, their love, their world, and ours too. Vespers screams and Caladrius screams with her.

  Zal’s singing the Flock’s endsong, trying to collapse his heart. And it’s coming right at me. He has to sing his own note back at her, he has to call his birds, he has to—

  The Flock looks hard at me, and sings my note instead of his own.

  He sings LOVE for me, and my name, and his belief in me, the entirety of me, the part that came from Zal and the part that came from him. The part that came from earth, being raised by my parents, loved by them, having a sister, having Jason. He sings it all. He sings certainty that I will be able to do anything I want to do.

  And that I can do it right now, without him.

  The Flock sings me not extinct.

  He grabs Zal in his arms, in the middle of the sky, the two of them equally matched, the two of them still strong, both of them mortally wounded.

  And he sings one last ferocious note with her, a note like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It balances her completely. It silences her.

  It silences him too.

>   The Flock takes Zal in his arms, and together, they leap. They’re falling, and falling, and then I see the vultures come for them.

  The whole sky stops.

  Caladrius makes a mournful call, a call that says it’s over, and Vespers sings with her. Caladrius folds her wings midair, and falls, even as I hold out my hands trying to stop her.

  I hear the vultures calling out in triumph from underneath the ship.

  Deadthings. Deadsongs. Deadsingers.

  The air is a mist of blue blood and echoing notes, and I’m sobbing, gasping, bent over on the back of my whale, but my parents are gone, both of them, and below me are a mass of black wings.

  Black wings of vultures, and of Nightingales.

  Zal’s remaining canwr rise around me, all of them singing horror. All of them singing ruin.

  Waters appear below us. Land turns to lake. Storms are crashing down upon the city, and cars float, winds tearing down trees.

  The Nightingales are singing by themselves now, agony, starvation, grief, death. I can see all of them, making their way across the sky, tiny dots of disaster.

  The captain’s Nightingales sing a song full of the wide eyes of children on the ground, the outlines of buildings about to be flattened by weather events. They sing parched ground and holes in it, and in their song are corpses, heaps of bodies, graves.

  The Nightingales sing a song of a dead ocean, gray and flat, and a dead earth, gray and flat, and a dead sky, nothing living in it.

  I swallow.

  I try to feel my own song.

  The only song I can sing to fight this.

  I try to find it.

  But it’s gone.

  CHAPTER 30

  {JASON}

  There’s a sound of screaming change, a shift in everything, and I open my eyes.

  “Oh my god,” says Eli.

  “NO!” screams Dai. “NO!”

  He’s running to the edge of Maganwetar, sprinting, and his hands are outstretched to catch anything, but there’s nothing left. Zal is gone. The Flock is gone.

  Is it over?

  Is everyone dead? Aza? Where is she?