Magonia (12 page)

“This isn’t hell, but the sky,” she continues, “and I’m not hell either, but Wedda. Greetings, it’s nice to meet you too. I am no bird. I’m
Rostrae
. And of course this isn’t a costume. These are my feathers.”

Right, that explains everything.

This is some kind of meltdown. My brain floods with things I’ve read, Milton, William Blake, and
Moby-Dick
, plus Disney movies viewed unwillingly in children’s hospitals plus Christmas specials, plus New-Agey yoga moves that put your brain into some kind of cosmic release state, and I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Think.

Settle
, instructs the bird in my chest
. Nest. Feed.

“She hungers, it’s true,” Wedda says, talking casually to my rib cage. “It’s not natural to sleep so
long.”

She leans over and starts trying to feed me something with a spoon, spilling food on my face. I fail to open my mouth, but she smashes the spoon against my lips, and I finally give in and take a bite of something sort of oatmeal-esque.

I can feel wind coming in from somewhere. Like, ocean breeze. The sounds I first vaguely thought were the beeping of machines are not beeping at all. They’re birds. Birds singing and screeching and peeping.

“
Why
are you here?” I ask the owl.

“I’m your steward,” she says. “The officers aboard
Amina Pennarum
all have stewards from the feathered class. You don’t know anything, little one, and you have a lot to learn. You’ve been gone a long time.”

Disregard the words “gone a long time.”

“What ocean is this? Is this the Pacific? Are we on a cruise ship? A hospital ship?”

She laughs again. “When you came aboard, you were a nestling fallen off the mast and too young to fly. But now, I think you’re recovering. Questions and questions. Let’s get you into uniform. You’ve been in bed long enough. You’re in need of fresh air, and exercise.”

“I’m fine,” I say, uneasy and lying. “I can dress myself. I can feed myself too. I don’t need a steward.”

Wedda sighs. “By the very Breath! I don’t need a nestling to dress either, but you and I aren’t in charge of that, so I suggest you make it easier on us both and let me do it. Then we can go about our business.”

She reminds me
so much
of a nurse; matter-of-fact, and intolerant of smack. I have a pang of good memory, a nurse laughing in the middle of the night, hearing it down the hallway outside my hospital room. Oh god, where am I? What happened to me?

Wedda gives me a tight blue jacket and trousers, a shirt and underwear made of something soft. Then she tugs at me until I’m dressed. So much for being a functional person who can do everything for herself. I feel so weak that I barely understand buttons, and these buttons are more along the lines of hooks.

“But,” I say hopelessly. “What’s
Rostrae
?”

“You were taken when you were very small. You remember nothing at all, do you?”

“Taken.”

She nods, as though Taken isn’t a thing. But it
is
.

“A Rostra, little one, is what the people below would call a bird. Except that Rostrae are birds who aren’t always birds,” she says. “My kind travels in drowner skies, and up here too. Not all birds you see below are like us. Only a few.”

I think about birds: crows, magpies, sparrows. I imagine a whole flock of geese shape-shifting into creatures like Wedda, but on the surface of a lake. There are fairy tales with that sort of thing in them. And ancient myths.

I think about all the birds on my lawn that day, whenever
that day
was. It’s a firm piece of memory—all those many kinds of birds, staring at me, and ropes flying through the window—

Also
Drowner
? What’s a drowner?

She pushes my feet into boots made of gray leather. “These, for example, are made of dove skin,” she informs me. “Not Rostrae.”

Right. I feel their fluttering silenced hearts through their dead skin.

Nope. No, that is impossible. I shake my head. I do not understand any of that.

“Are you prepared, nestling?” Wedda asks, fluffing her feathers back into place.

“For what?”

“It’s time for you to meet the ship.”

“But I’m—”

“Captain!” Wedda shouts. “Aza Ray Quel is awake!”

Outside the cabin, birds screech, and with a big whoosh of weird I realize the noise I’ve been hearing is language, birds arguing about who gets to see me first.

The door bangs open, and a rush of not-people enter. Wings of all colors, and beneath the wings are faces. I take a queasy step backward, and Wedda keeps me stable.

Oh god, Aza. What’s happening?

Bright blue feathers on a girl with an indigo mohawk. Red-feathered breast on a man with a long skinny face and dark hair.

Rostrae. All in uniform.

They bow. I don’t know why.

Then there are the others, just a few of them, uniformed as well, wearing medals and insignia. These are tall, thin people who at first look human, but have dark blue lips and blue skin. Delicate bones, pale cloudy patterns on throats. If I saw them against the blue sky, I might not see them at all. They’re
like
humans, enough like humans that—

What are we talking about here, Aza? What, exactly, are we talking about?

Humans?!
LIKE
humans?!

You don’t believe in this. This is UFOs and tinfoil hats and hoax-central, Jason Kerwin-style. This is—

Beautiful
, interrupts my brain, at which point the rest of my senses notice the tall blue person standing directly in front of me. His skin is no color that exists. Bluer than mine has ever been. He has black hair and eyes so dark I can’t see the pupils. He’s staring at me so intensely that it’s not a certainty I won’t become a crumpled-up pile of knees and elbows. I make an embarrassing snorting sound, which is me choking on nothing.

The boy looks me up and down, and I feel myself blushing crazily. I glance down quickly, because I feel as though I might be naked again, but I’m totally covered. Good thing Wedda was in charge of buttons.

“Aza Ray Quel is skin and bones,” barks the boy, and looks accusingly toward Wedda. “She’s
supposed to be fit for duty. Can she even walk? Can she sing? She is half what she should be. By the Breath, I thought she was supposed to be the one.”

He puts out his hand and pokes my shoulder, hard, which mobilizes me.

“Excuse me?” I manage. “Who are you?”

Everyone’s staring at me, diagramming me, bird people and blue people alike. They’re making little sounds of displeasure. “Can someone please tell me why I’m here?”

“This can’t be right,” one of the blue people says to Wedda. “This pitiful nestling cannot be the one we’ve been hunting all this time, Aza the Kidnapped. She’s nothing.”

“She’s damaged by her time among the drowners,” someone else says.

“And by the Breath that brought her aboard. That probably damaged her too. It
carried
her,” says another, in a tone of revulsion and horror. “I heard it cut her from the skin she was in. Unspeakable.”

The room shudders.

“It’s shocking she lives at all, after that,” says the first blue person.

I feel seasick now. One of the blue people touches my chest with sharp knuckles, prodding, and I hear the bird inside my lung trilling, raspy and muffled.

“Her canwr’s nested in her lung,” Wedda says. “He’d never nest in another. That’s proof enough for the captain, and it’s proof enough for me.”

There’s a sudden jostling, a murmuring. Whispers and sounds of discomfort. Everyone seems paralyzed, and then everyone’s standing at attention.

Someone’s come in. A woman tall enough to brush the ceiling.

“Captain,” says one of my visitors. “We’ve been assessing the new addition to
Amina Pennarum
—”

The woman snarls at the rest of the people in the room. “You presume to discuss her condition without me? You presume to debate whether she is who and what I say she is?”

She’s right in front of me then, bending over me. The woman has coils of black hair twisted into complicated knots, oil-field slick eyes atop navy blue. Slanted cheekbones. Sharp nose, eyebrows like slashes of ink, arms ribboned with tattoos, spirals, feathers, and clouds made of words.

I recognize her. I know her face. I know her tattoos.

I know her. I’ve been dreaming about her for years. The two of us. A flock of birds.

The woman reaches out a trembling hand and touches my face.

“
Ah . . . zah
,” she whispers, the voice not coming from her mouth, but from her throat.

The way she says my name is almost the way Jason and I say it when we’re leaving room for the &. Nobody else says it that way. Her voice grinds. It’s not the same as the other blue-person voices in the room, which are smooth. There’s something different about it. It’s harsher, stranger, a wounded whisper.

“I’m Aza,” I squeak, in the most normal voice I can manage.

She turns to Wedda.

“She’s healthy? Her fever’s down?”

“It is,” says Wedda. “She’s regaining her strength.”

“Explanations?” I try to say, but my voice is dying in my throat. I look down at my blue hands. They are
extremely
blue. Too blue.

The woman (the captain?) touches my face again, with cold, pointed fingers. I want my family very hard. I want my mom, and I want my dad, and I want Eli and I want Jason.

“So, where’s my mother?” I say. I try to be casual about it. I do not make any of the whimper-y sounds I want to make.

“Here,” the captain says.

“No. Where’s my
mom
?” I say more urgently, in a shameful little-kid way. I want to hide my face in my mom’s sweater, and I want her hugging me.

Her voice floats to me through my memory.
You can go if you have to go, Aza—

Oh god, my poor mom thinks I’m dead. She’d be here otherwise. That’s the only way this could have happened.

Wings all around me, and faces pressing in closer, blue faces, feathered faces with beaks.

Wedda fluffs herself, a mother hen instead of an owl.

“Stand back,” she says, loud and intimidating. “Let the little nestling breathe. She has no notion of who you are, nor of what happened to her.” They shuffle back, but only slightly.

I touch my chest, looking for the comfort of the crooked center bone in my rib cage. It’s there. But it feels—suddenly—like a wishbone.

I want a stethoscope. I want my doctor. I want her knocking at my chest, hunting for intruders, because this is INTRUDER CENTRAL. This is hallucinatus maximus.

There are all these familiar things, these déjà vu things, from the planks on the wall, to the way the captain’s face moves, inches from mine. The way it looks, the way
she
looks.

She has a strange necklace, and it hangs over me as she bends, almost hitting me. A tiny little nub of something—coral or bone?—embedded in clear resin at the bottom.

The earth tilts. I feel like I’m not in my body.

“Milekt found you,” the captain says. “We reeled you up from the drowners, just in time. You were almost gone.”

She covers her mouth and pauses a moment. Her eyes are filled with emotion. “But you’re finally home.”

In my heart, in this crooked, half-crushed heart I’ve always had, there’s a dizzy, weird thing.

“I don’t even know you,” I whisper.

“Of course you don’t remember how it was before you were taken, when we were on
Amina Pennarum
together. You were so small. You were only a baby. But even then you were . . . extraordinary.”

A tear glitters down the captain’s cheek, dark as ink from an exploding fountain pen. She presses her hand against my face, in the same place my mom would, and I stay still this time, overtaken by this strange sense of:

H O M E

O     M

M     O

E M O H

“I’m Captain Zal Quel,” she says. “You’re aboard the ship
Amina Pennarum
.”

I blink. She’s still here. She’s still looking at me expectantly. I’m still here. I’m still looking at her.

“You’re the Captain’s Daughter, Aza.”

And when I continue to stare, speechless, she finishes her sentence with the words I somehow knew she was going to say.

“I am your mother. And this is Magonia.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

No.

I shove hard out the door, through feathered people, blue arms, gray uniforms, and I’m running, running, running through a corridor lined with hammocks.

“
Magonia
,” Jason said. But we were talking about fairy tales, not reality. He was talking about history and hallucinations. It was crazy! I was sick!

I push past the crowd, the bird inside my lung screaming at me.
Respect your station! Zal’s the captain! Salute her!

I slingshot myself up the ladder to the upper deck, push open the hatch, and sprint out into the light.