Aerie (15 page)

“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.”

I come to my senses, surrounded by feathers and in scream
ing 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.

Someone's cutting at my skin—

Someone's cutting my clothes away—

I look. Talons, claws, knives—

Someone is bending over me, cutting at my chest, snipping threads, opening my shirt, clipping, slicing, and it hurts so much I scream.

I scream. I can't help it.

A talon touches me in the center of my chest, and I light on fire all over again, burn with broken skin and blister. I wonder for a crazy second if something's going to happen. If my chest is going to fly open. If there is there a canwr in there I never knew about? Am I . . . could I be Magonian?

But nothing happens. No birds sing from out of my lung.

There's no magic reason, no alien reason I'm the way I am. There's no explanation for all the years of pi. I'm just human. I'm cracked with disappointment even though I swear I already knew this. There's a part of me that hoped.

“You're badly injured, boy, but you're not dead. We've been trying to cut the fibers of your clothing away from your skin since you arrived.”

A female owl. Pale with dark speckles, a partially human face, giant feathered wings. I know this owl now, I realize. I know who this has to be.

“Wedda?” I croak.

She flicks her wings open and then shut again.

“Is Aza here?” I ask. “Did you come because of her?”

But Aza doesn't appear.

“Jik,” I say to the blue jay girl beside my bed, because now I know exactly who she is.

“Jik,” the girl who prodded my wounds confirms. “You should have come with us when we tried to get you the first time. We couldn't make ourselves visible at ground level, only
below or above, but we were there. We waited at the hospital, but you didn't come out. We had to track you to the mandrake, and that was nothing any of us wished to do.”

I think back to that car ride with the SWAB agents, I have no idea how long ago, the birds outside the window. The flock of birds surrounding me as I got out of the car at home. The birds I ignored.

The Rostrae just look at me.

“Where is she?” I ask. Last remnants of hope. “Please tell me she's here.”

“Not here,” Jik says. “You matter to her, so Zal wants you. She wants Eli too. There's been a contract out on both of you. We got to you first.”

“Wait,” I say. “Am I a hostage?”

I feel my lungs contract, and I cough, agonizingly. I have a plaster on my chest, and bandages, now. Everything hurts, but I'm in better shape than I have any right to be, all things considered.

Eli appears in my line of sight. She looks bruised, but intact. Her hair is twisted into complicated knots. She's wearing a uniform that matches those of the Rostrae.

“Jason,” she says, and her face is made of relief. “Awake, finally. I wasn't sure you were ever going to be—”

I cough some more.

“—better than you were. You didn't think about breathing up here?”

I cough. “I wasn't trying to come
here
,” I say. “I was trying to find you. Are we really . . . in Magonia?”

Eli nods. “I was about to be brokered to Zal. You arrived just in time to get added to the deal. Only one of us was ready for that possibility, though.”

Eli shows me a pill. “Always be prepared. Isn't that your motto, Kerwin? Where's your go bag full of everything you could possibly need in any situation?”

“It's full of classified documents,” I say. Miraculously, I still have my backpack. That's what they used when they picked me up. It doesn't have anything in the way of first aid in it, though, because I'm dumb. “What's this pill?”

“You're the one who's supposed to be some kind of genius,” she says, poking at me like we're sitting at her parents' kitchen island instead of
here
. “What do you think it is?”

No idea. Not unusual for me right now. I feel like the world has turned inside out and everything I thought I knew is utterly irrelevant.

“The drugs my mom developed,” she says. “The ones that helped Aza all this time. I've been carrying a supply for months, just in case. If they made a Magonian able to breathe on earth, I figured they'd make a human able to breathe in Magonia. At least, enough to get by.”

“Mouse drugs,” I realize.

“Mouse drugs,” Eli confirms, and puts one in my mouth. “Swallow.”

I choke it down. If this is how mice taste, I wouldn't be surprised.

“Stop making that face, Kerwin,” Eli says, reading my mind. “You're lucky I have them to share.”

“How long have we been here?” I manage to say.

“Four days,” she says. “I couldn't do anything about the breathing until you were conscious. You kept spitting out the pills.”

I inhale experimentally. The drugs haven't had any effect yet. I still feel like I'm on top of a mountain. I struggle with the restraints. I seem to be tied into my bed with ropes. Or . . . netted?

She looks at me. Her eyes, in spite of her attitude, are teary.

“You're not a prisoner. It's because you kept trying to tear off the bandages. You told us to let you die. And seriously, you almost did. Those burns—whatever kind of fire hit you, it was major. Dai was trying to kill you.”

“Where is he? Did he—”

“Gone,” she says. “I couldn't do anything. We got saved by Rostrae, but he's still alive. You were basically on fire when we left the ground.”

“But he'll go after Aza, he'll—”

Eli looks at me patiently.

“You're hurt. You were hallucinating. Wedda made a poultice out of something. You kept saying you deserved to be punished, that you'd betrayed Aza completely. Did you? Tell me now.”

I can't talk about it. I can't talk about this.

I stand up, feeling my skin stretching in pain, but at least I can move. No one stops me. I shuffle out onto the deck of the ship we're on. It's not quite a deck. We're on a huge raft made of branches and twigs. It looks for all the world like a nest.

I laugh bitterly. A nest. Of course. Rostrae. What else would they sail on?

The whole rest of the sky, as far as I can see, is filled with black smoke. The entire upper level of this vessel is full of Rostrae. Hundreds, maybe. And the rest of the sky immediately
surrounding the ship is full of them too. None of them in chains. None of them wearing harnesses of any kind, or tied to ships. They're free.

I look at Jik and Eli.

“These are rebel ships,” says Jik. “There was a price. Half of us are dead. Dai took command of the Nightingales, and once Zal Quel was free, she waged war in earnest, using them.”

“We left our old lives,” Wedda says. “We no longer thieve food for the Magonians, perhaps, but there is little forage here, and more danger than we needed to find. My friends are dead. Captain Zal Quel is marauding through the skies, but what she wants is Aza. Look out there—”

Wedda points with a talon, and shows me a part of the sky where black snow is falling.

“That's a ship burned by my former captain. That is another. Her Nightingales sing disaster. They attack Rostrae and other Magonians alike. Anyone who doesn't agree to serve with Zal is murdered. She kills canwr and their owners die with them. She's stilling songs, all over the sky.”

“But where is Aza?”

“All we know is that she came off a drowner prison ship and flew into the Tangle with a Breath. Since then, nothing. The entire sky seeks her. Zal to use her, the rest of us to shield her, but she's vanished. We thought you'd know more than we do,” says Jik.

Jik spins on her heel and walks away from me. Long blue feathery tails trail beneath her black coat.

I look at Eli. She looks at me, and she looks disappointed in everything. And by everything, I mean me. I AM supposed to
know more than anyone else. That's my job. That's what I've spent my whole life doing. Learning to be ahead of everyone else. Learning facts, memorizing secrets. But I've got nothing.

“You told us you did something awful,” Eli insists. “To Aza. You told us you betrayed her. What did you do?”

Pi is dancing around the edge of my brain, and I can feel things twisting like I've got an orrery in my skull spinning the planets.

I have to do something. I have to make it right.

“I worked for an agency called SWAB. A federal one. They're in charge of Magonia. I was spying for them.”

“Spying on Aza?” Eli's eyes blaze.

“In exchange for protection for her.”

“So that's who was parked outside our house for the past year. It's not like I didn't see them. There were like three cars trying to look like they were doing nothing. I figured you hired security and were keeping it to yourself.”

I wish I had. I'm an idiot. Of course she noticed it.

“I got them to take her into custody, so she wouldn't go out hunting for Heyward. I thought I was keeping Zal from getting to her, and then—”

The look on Eli's face is pained and beyond pissed off.

“Why?”

“I thought I could save her.”

“From
what
, Kerwin?”

“Her . . . destiny.”

“That's bullshit,” Eli says. “You don't believe in
destiny
. You thought you could keep her from making her own choices. The ones
you
were afraid of.”

And she's right, of course. She's exactly right.

“It wasn't that I didn't want her to have freedom. It was that I didn't want her to—”

“Leave you,” says Eli. “Which is pretty low. She's allowed to leave you. That's how love works. Have you never been a person, Jason?”

“I was scared,” I manage.

“Welcome to being alive,” says Eli. “Everyone's scared. Life is scary. Maybe you missed that memo. So?”

“What do you mean,
so
?
”

“So you're going to make it right,” she says. “It was your fault SWAB, is that their name? That's an embarrassing name, by the way. It was your fault they took Aza. But it was my fault too. I was sleeping, and I didn't wake up. I heard a noise, but I didn't get out of bed. In the morning, I saw that she was gone, her window open, tracks in the snow. And I took off, trying to get Magonia to take me too. I stood out there in my field yelling at the sky, and the mandrake grabbed me instead.”

“I messed up more than you did,” I say. “You don't know how sorry I am. I'm so, so sorry.”

“It's not a competition,” she says. “You can apologize to Aza, when we find her. For a few years, you're probably just going to have to repeat it, over and over again.”

She relents slightly, her face kinder for a moment. “You told me more while you were delirious than you've said in twelve years of basically living at my house. Including some things I wish you'd never told me. I had no interest in learning how much you . . .
like
, love my sister. Pretty much epic, the level of screaming. It was TMI. Moving on. We can't change any of the things we already did. All we can do is find her.
Now, what's
the Flock
? You kept saying it.”

“The Flock!” The words burst out of me before I even know they're there. “According to SWAB, the Flock is some kind of powerful weapon, something that can fight Zal. They were hunting for it. They wanted Aza's help. But I—I don't know what it is. I don't think she did either.”

The Rostrae rustle and confer. There is a lot of startled rattling and trilling.

Wedda turns to us, at last.

“Not what. Who. The Flock is Zal's ethologidion. Her mate. Her match. Imprinted on her the way . . .” She trails off and I can feel the thing she's not saying.
The way Dai is on Aza. The way Aza is on Dai.

“I was on
Amina Pennarum
when he still sang with Zal. Once Zal was convicted by Maganwetar, everything was broken, and the Flock fled. I thought he was dead. If he is not?”

“Aza's hunting him?”

“That would follow,” says Jik.

If I could see Aza's face, I'd know what to do, and that's all that's real to me right now in a sea of pi and bird people, on a raft made of twigs in the sky.

I think about a night months ago, when I woke up from a rare hour of sleep, with Aza in my arms, curled up so tightly into a ball that she had no edges, no elbows, nothing but her Aza-ness, the scent she's always had, this thing that never made sense until I knew what she really was.

She's always smelled like a storm.

It makes sense. She IS a storm. No one who's ever known her would think she was sunshine. She's clouds and lightning and hail, and oh my god, she's the only one I want.

I woke up feeling like I'd won the world and didn't deserve it, but that I'd take it anyway. Her spine against my chest, the peculiar Magonian bones hidden inside her skin, the sound, deep in her lungs, of a very quiet song. I could tell that Caru was out somewhere singing with her in her sleep.