Magonia (32 page)

I open the door in my chest again, and I place Caru’s ring inside my lung.

I hear Milekt scream a horrible scream. He shudders and tumbles to the deck at my feet. I merge with Caru.

Heartbird.

I sing.

Separate but connected. By choice, his own and mine.
We choose each other.

There’s a huge quake a change in everything. Caru looks at me and I look at him.

We are stronger together, I know, than anything else. Fiercer than everything else. He’s both things, earth and Magonia and so am I.

Caru jerks in the air, those huge yellow eyes, his wings wide. He lifts up, and hangs on the wind above me, his wings out. His beak opens and he shrieks something that shifts the sky around us. I open my mouth and fling my voice out with his, and our notes wrap around each other.

I feel the whole sky respond. This isn’t the way it is with Milekt, or even Dai. Caru and I—the two of us are one thing. Caru’s voice comes out of my mouth, and mine out of his.

Caru and I sing waves of certainty. Stars blaze in the sky at our sound and fall in arcs on both sides. My voice is growing and so is Caru’s. High-pitched sonar, singing out, singing out, singing out.

The world’s flooding. I did it for Zal. I undo it for me.

It’s overflowing, water against the vault, and Caru sings with my voice, changing it back, forcing me back to myself, making me able to sing my own song.

We un-sing the flood. Caru and I push the water back into shape, transform it back into rock.

“Up! Pull this ship up!” Zal’s screaming commands at our Rostrae, but they’re ignoring her.

I see Jik, her bright blue wings visible, her face half human. She’s at a height where she can be in between. She’s shrieking along with our song and, as I watch, the chains around her talons and ankles shatter. She’s doing it herself. It’s her own song, magnified, breaking whatever spell has been on the crew, destroying something.
Working from the inside.

I see Wedda beside her. Wedda, who’s always been loyal to Zal, perched on a mast. She spreads her wings too. I watch her chains dismantle themselves and fall to the deck, a glittering collapse.

I look at the batsail and see its wings folded in solidarity. It will not take Zal up. It will not save her.

We bend the sky to our will, Caru and me. We put the earth back together. We sing to it,
Heal
.

Moments ago Spitsbergen was water. It shudders as if with shame, and is stone all over again. The waves splash up and freeze into earth shapes, the water goes opaque, the island goes hard.

The hook with the epiphytes is only a few feet below the surface now. What if I gave Zal the plants? It would right an ancient wrong between earth and Magonia.

But my song with Caru isn’t controlled. The earth is sealing up, and even as I think about it, it closes over the plants, locking them in the rock—the airplants, and the last few yards of line from
Amina Pennarum
.

The rope attached to our pulley is suddenly jutting up from the ground of Svalbard. The urgent whirring wheels aren’t pulling the crops up anymore. They’re yanking the ship down toward the earth’s surface.

We list hard. The crew screams and stumbles. Dai’s frantic voice stops as he slips across the deck. The ship veers and jostles and drops, and the crew are trying to cut the rope but it’s too late, we’ve lost control. I’m clinging on but I’m not afraid.

Our song is strong enough that Caru and I can fly if we need to, but I don’t have to try it. I know it’s true.

Now I do what some part of me knew I should have always done. This is not a slave ship, not anymore. The Rostrae are free. They freed themselves, but the batsail is still trapped.

I use my song with Caru to cut the threads that bind
Amina Pennarum
’s batsail to the ship. I set it free. It sings a high note at me,
firefly
, and then it’s gone, wings stretching out into the wind.

I watch the crew of Rostrae transform entirely, the sky suddenly filled with feathers. Wedda, an owl again, her wingspan tremendous. Jik, bright blue, rising up. Hummingbirds. The eagle.

Now I cut the enslaved canwr cote free, and the sky is flecked with gold, all of Milekt’s siblings and students swooping out from the ship like motes of sun.

Fly
, they trill.

Magonians fall out of the sky into the sea. There’s gasping, and shuddering and the water takes some of the crew.

We lurch downward, and at last, with a screaming splash and a shock akin to earthquake,
Amina Pennarum
drops into the ocean. The real ocean, not the sky we’ve been sailing in. We beach on the shore of Spitsbergen.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

It takes me a second to get my bearings after the impact. I’m
surrounded by cracking wood. Magonians are gasping and screaming, choking and whimpering in the heavy air of earth. I don’t even look. I move fast.

I have to get to Jason.

I haul myself over the railing and drop a few feet onto the rock. I gasp air from my bottle.

Zal leaps over the rail behind me. Then she’s in front of me on the ice, this raging woman, my screaming mother, this warrior, my captain. But down here she’s not as strong as I am. I’m used to earth. I know how to walk here. I know how to survive on less than I need here.

The stakes have changed. I’m not the daughter who serves. I’m not the girl who came aboard
Amina Pennarum
, scared and delicate.

Zal reaches for my face, trying to grab my bottle for herself. I push her, and she falls backward.

Milekt flies at me and flutters around screaming ragesongs as Breath rappel down onto
Amina Pennarum
from Maganwetar, and seize Zal.

Zal screams and fights, but she has no power over them. She has no song. She’s struggling to breathe but she battles hard. I sing her weapons into paralysis.

I wait for them to try to grab me too. I won’t let them.

I sing a tiny note of warning, and Caru echoes it.

The Breath before me holds up a hand. Not Heyward. This is a Breath I’ve never seen before. He stares at me for a moment, and then turns back to Zal. They’re not taking me. I don’t know why, but they’re not.

The note I sang with Caru echoes in the air, and all around me there’s stillness. Protection. Strength.

Then he’s gone, hauling Zal up into the Magonian command ship. Zal shakes in the air, upended, flipped like a whale, choking on air. As, one by one, is her crew.

“Betrayer
,” Zal screams as she goes.

Dai is pulled up after her, unconscious from the fall. My heart clenches and my eyes fill, watching him hauled up. We’re still attached; our bond isn’t gone. Not gone at all. Though we didn’t choose each other, we’re supposed to sing together, no matter what.

I don’t think this is the end of Dai and me.

I don’t think I’m that lucky.

I see Milekt land on him as he rises, a dart of gold on his shoulder, abandoned by me. Dai has two birds now, one on each shoulder, one for each lung. Milekt shrills maddened bird loathing at me as he ascends.

Cut string
, he screams. I feel a hideous racking inside me, guilt. I broke our bond. I had to.

Forget it, Aza. None of it matters. Because Jason.

I sprint across the snow, the tilting landscape.

I push into the repository entrance with Caru behind me, and it’s dark, and still no one. Where is he? Gone? How can he be?

No, I hear footsteps. He runs into something and grunts. “Ow.”

The simplest sound and it causes me to come to my senses.

I’m not ready for this. I can never be ready. I’m not the Aza he knew. I look—

I look like—

I feel my stomach drop. My legs go numb, my tongue trips in my mouth, my whole body crashes
and burns with this insane feeling of falling from something so high there’s no end. I feel everything tumble—comet meteor parachute wingless—into him.

“Aza,” he says. He’s coming toward me. “I know you’re here.”

I’m Magonian. He’s human. There’s no version of this that’s okay. I can’t be on earth. I can’t let him see me. Not this way.

“Get off this island,” I warn him, even though I feel my heart splintering. “Get away from here.”

“Aza Ray. Do you know how hard it was to get into this place? I’m breaking laws in maybe five countries. You almost killed me.
They
almost killed me. And the Norwegians think I’m a curious and slightly stupid schoolboy on a trip to Longyearbyen.”

I’m smiling inside my zipped-up hood because this is vintage Jason. He’s alive. He’s real. But I’m not Aza anymore. I have no idea who I am.

“And in order to get to Longyearbyen, I basically had to bribe God.”

There’s a silence.

“The airport’s less than a mile away,” he says. “If your clothes are warm enough you can walk. And wait. I had a tent with me, but some people took me in. I think my tent sank. Where the water, you know. Was.”

I say nothing.

“Come out, and come home with me,” he whispers. “It’s freezing. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t have to do it alone.”

Caru sings in our voice, this terrifying screamsong voice, this nothing-is-inside-my-heart voice, and we turn the floor to water for a moment, because we’re scared, I admit it, I admit it. Jason’s eyes get huge, and he stumbles, splashes, sinks, recovers.

I can’t be with him I can’t be with him.
Caru sings a high awful pitch, a shrill of despair, and agony, and Jason covers his ears in pain. Caru keeps singing with my mouth.

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.