Aerie (18 page)

I'm myself again for this moment, in a way I haven't been in a year. I'm the Jason Kerwin I'm supposed to be, the guy who learned how to do this shit when he was eleven. Hacking it out. Like not exactly a badass, but like someone who kind of knows something.

Does it redeem me?

Can anything?

I replace the panel on the bird's belly. I put its camera back in. I smooth its fake feathers into place. I instruct it via phone to wake up, and there, it does. I check it with my phone, and it's back online.

Ancient wing
, the middle ground between a dinosaur and a modern avian. And here, the one in my hand, is the middle ground between a modern bird and a full-on shiny metal robot. It's something made by men trying to play god over this kingdom in the sky.

Of course, as happens every time, the humans lost control of their creations. You only have to look at the history of the world to know the stories about that. There are plenty of them.

Now the sky is full of drones, and I think SWAB has no idea that the drones they think they're controlling are actually under Zal's sway. I'm pretty sure the song they're singing has been altered enough by Magonian magic that it can do whatever Zal wants it to do.

Mine, though, is missing its voice.

All it is now is a flyer on a mission.
My
mission.

I wake up in strange surroundings, a little room with trans
parent walls, where I'm looking at a flock of birds surrounding my bed, hovering all around me, hanging in the air: falcons, swallows, and swifts, and I'm swaying in a hammock, where a tiny bat is singing into my ear.

I'm on a ship called
Glyampus
, and my heart is pounding.

But it wasn't real. I rattle through my skull. That was a nightmare, a vision. It didn't happen.

No.

It did.

Heyward's dead.

This, for once, isn't something my brain invented. I look at my hands, but there's no blood on them. I feel like there should be something visible, something that shows everyone I'm not the hero I'm supposed to be.

I failed her.

Chosen one. Chosen by whom?

Chosen by Jason to be his best friend. Wrong choice.

Chosen by Zal to be her weapon. Wrong choice.

Chosen by my mother and father to love, chosen and kept alive by them.

They're the ones I think about now, when I think
chosen one
. When I think they thought I was worth saving.

I have to be worth saving.

The bat sings a weird little trill.

“You sound like Elvis,” I whisper to her.

“Vespers amuses herself picking up radio frequencies from the science station below us.” I jerk my head up and see the Flock walking into the room. “She likes to sing with all the other creatures that sing. Bats, whales, humans, the tiniest things on earth. Everything has a song.”

I sit up, hearing that. It reminds me of my mother and her singing mice, and that reminds me of the fact that I'm here for real, not there, and that everything below me is in danger and I've been sleeping through it.

Vespers flies off, singing all the way. I hear the bat shift her signal to talk radio, a news station.

“Flooding,” says the talk radio through Vespers. “Ten thousand dead.”

“Where?”
I ask the Flock. He shrugs.

“It's Zal,” I tell him, but I don't know for sure. It could also be everything below messing with everything up here. It could also be chemicals and catastrophe. It could be anything, any of the possible terrible things on earth or in the heavens, and I have no idea which it actually is.

I can't stay here sleeping in the middle of a lost part of the sky, no information, no one but us out here. They sent that ship after Heyward and me. We've already been attacked. Does Zal know the Flock is out here? Her old enemy?

Some enemy, this singer who has no intention of teaching me to sing. Maybe he's my enemy too.

“You have to help me,” I plead again. “Teach me how you sing the way you do. Teach me how to fight her.”

“Did Zal send you here to take me back to her? We are long done with singing, she and I.”

“But . . . you sang
with
her? You know her song? Then you can help me defeat her. Just teach me how! She didn't send me. I came here myself.”

“Don't ask me to have dealings with Zal,” he says.

I flinch at those words, but he keeps talking.

“Without the drowners' earth, there are no nests, no caves, no hives. My song depends on the things of the world as well as the sky. She would drown the world.”

The Flock looks increasingly wizened and ancient. Me, I feel increasingly dark. He won't teach me. He won't help me fight Zal. He's barely here. He wants to sit out the entire conflict from his safe perch in uninhabited sky.

“She sent that warship that caught us. It was hers, but she must have been sending it at you! She didn't know where we were,” I try, even though I have a deep suspicion I'm wrong about this. “Why else would she send a whole warship, full of Nightingales?! You're her enemy.”

“She sent it for YOU,” he replies. “Not me. She doesn't know I'm here, and I wish it to remain that way. I wish her to imagine that you dropped into the sea with your shipmate, a dead thing. If she is to cease pursuing your song, she must think you're dead. She thinks I'm dead, and that's how I wish it to stay.”

“Does she really think
you
are? Are you sure?”

He looks steadily at me.

“I am as good as dead,” he says. “I don't touch Magonia, and Magonia does not touch me.”

I won't give up.

“I'm not asking you to SEE Zal,” I say. “I only want you to show me how to sing like you do.”

“So you can kill your mother?” says the Flock. “She is your mother, is she not?”

I don't say anything. What is there to say? I want to kill her. I want revenge. Who wouldn't want that? On someone like Zal? She's a dictator. She's a murderer. Never mind how she got that way, never mind that she's my mother.

“I don't wish for you to kill her. I don't wish any of this. I never expected to live this long, to watch the sea broken, to watch the sky broken. The squallwhales are dying and the oceans beneath us are full of poisons. The ice is melting. There are gaps in the sky.”

Vespers glides through the room singing a quick song in a newscaster voice about thousands dead somewhere else, this time because of a huge storm that came out of nowhere and flattened half an island. My stomach lurches.

“You know who's doing this!” I say. “How can you just do nothing? She's calling down a flood, and she's using my heartbird's song to do it. And my song too. She has him captive, and everything about it is going to end with all of us dead. Do you
want
to be dead?”

He walks away from me.

“I can make things better!” I shout after him.

He looks over at me, his eyes gleaming and golden. “But will you choose to?” he says. “You are
her
daughter.”

“I'm myself,” I say. “I'm trying.”

Am I? My brain is full of visions of Zal, of taking Eli back, Caru back, getting vengeance for all the horrible things she's done, all the horrible things she WILL do if I let her. I have to get to her. I have to stop her.

I have to kill her. It's HAVE to. It's not a matter of what I want.

My brain is full of Jason too, of showing him that I never needed him to be strong, that I can do it alone. I'm strong enough with or without his love. My brain is full of finding Dai and showing him the same things, these boys who both lied to me, these boys who both pretended to love me.

And Heyward. Dead because of something I did. Dead because of something
all of them
did.

I want to throw myself at it, to sing a song that will tear it all apart, make it all right again. Sometimes, to find balance, you have to hurt rather than heal, isn't that true? It must be true. Use her own technique against her. If she's singing a destruction song, then my only option is to sing one that is stronger than hers. To outsing her.

The Flock stares steadily at me, then sighs.

“Sing, then,” he says. “Sing the song you have to sing to do this. Can you find it?”

“I obviously don't know how,” I say, losing every bedraggled bit of patience. “OR I WOULD BE SINGING IT RIGHT NOW.”

The Flock taps on my lung door, and it opens for Vespers. WHAT?

Oh my god. This isn't what I was planning. A bat in my chest?

Vespers flies into my lung.

A bat in my belfry. That's how this feels. It feels like I've just inhaled something that's gone down the wrong tube, but worse than any other version, much worse than Milekt down my
throat. This feels like I just choked on gasoline, or like the end of the world is showing up, inside my lung. A tiny lung-pocalypse. I feel all wrong, doomed and dimmed, and insecure that even as I hate the feeling of the bat, the bat hates the feeling of me too. Will she hang upside down? Is that what's about to happen?

“You asked to learn this song,” the Flock reminds me. “It requires more than one canwr. You'll get used to it. This canwr knows how to sing with you.”

I swallow, trying to be okay with it. I inhale, and go as Zen as I can go. Which is not the most Zen, but it's something.

And so Vespers and I sing together. Not sing exactly. Vespers vibrates a song, something I can't even hear, and I try to sing alongside it, wrapping my song into the bat's voice, a voice that is twitching my skin, from inside out. I feel like a guitar string.

The Flock was able to command thousands of birds with his song. I look out alongside the ship, watching for a flock of sparrows rising, and instead, I see one old seagull. He gives me a dark look before he moves on.

The Flock is watching.

“You have to try harder if you want this,” he says. “It's not the song you've been singing in Magonia.”

I don't have time to wait. I want a hack! I want the learn-a-little-and-do-it version, the way things usually are for me, the way I've lived my whole life. Factoid expertise in narrow slices equals the illusion of larger clarity.

“What song is it, then?”

“You are singing sky. But this song is everything,” the Flock says. “Not just the sky. The earth alongside it. You're singing only Magonian notes. And you're singing notes you learned
from Zal. It's no surprise the song will not come for you. It requires . . . purity.”

The Flock sings two notes and a thousand sparrows arc across the sky, spelling a word, in fancy calligraphy, which only makes me feel more frustrated:

Seriously?! What life is this? What kind of life, where even the birds are spouting things from greeting cards you wouldn't send to your enemies? What kind of life where there is no sarcasm, no cynicism, no reasonable suspicion of romantic gestures—

And then I think . . .
purity
?

Oh, wait. Oh, hell no.

I'm full of mortification and fury all over again. This is made of trite. This is typical. This is bullshit! I feel myself almost levitating off the deck, because this is ancient crap used to control girls since the beginning of time, since the legend of unicorns and blah blah blah, this whole notion that—

“Purity. You mean I have to be a virgin?”

The Flock looks at me, with a look that says I'm missing nine degrees of the point.

“What is
a virgin
?”

“It's a person who's never . . .”

I discover that I don't really feel like explaining my sexual history to some old man on a glass boat in the sky, thank you.

He looks at me, and the look reminds me of so many things, makes me miss so many people.

“I see,” he says. “And no. That has nothing to do with it. The
only way to sing with so many canwr is to sing peacefully. They sing your truth, and if that is fury, they show it. It will destroy you, and them. It's possible to cause an entire flock to die mid-flight. To sing with a flock successfully, you must sing joy.”

Blushing is a thing. I have no idea what color I am. And also—

Maybe the idea of
having
to sing joy pisses me off as much as the idea that I couldn't sing this song if I'm not a virgin. How can you sing joy if you have no joy? How can you sing love if you have no love?

“I know your song. I've sung it. Had I continued singing that way,” the Flock says, “my canwr would have taken me and torn me to pieces. As they will you.”

I look out at the sky, the misty miserable white, and I know he's right.

He sings another note. I do my best to echo it. We trill it out into the sky together.

The smooth wave of birds twists on itself and dives rapidly toward the sea, freaking me out. Are they—

The Flock sings a sharp note that somehow manages still to be full of the sun, and Vespers sings it too. The Flock's birds shift direction, arcing across the sky, now smooth again. Caladrius comes out of nowhere and prods my ear with her beak.

“That is what happens,” says the Flock.

Vespers unhelpfully trills a little bit of radio. Some random pop song about love and longing.

I sing a note that causes the tremendous, calm flock of birds to spread out from their murmuration, and into shooting stars of frustration. All of them shriek and drop in midair, flipping, twisting, and crashing into one another.

The Flock patiently sings another note, bringing the birds back together, calming them.

I sing again, trying my hardest to dim the problem elements of my soul, and the birds just whirl over my head like a tornado of feathers, screaming, until Caladrius and the Flock sing them into a soothing wave of lighter than air.

Vespers makes a disgruntled sound from inside my chest, but I can't help it. I'm reminded of Milekt, and of Caru. Milekt hating me, judging me, singing fury from inside my chest. And then . . . I don't even want to think about what happened to Milekt when we parted. We were bonded. There's no way Milekt is okay after that, no matter what wrongs he did to my song.

Caru, though, is the one I ought to be singing with. Caru is wild and filled with danger, but he understands how to sing with me, and I understand how to sing with him. I never had to learn it. It was just there, the moment we heard each other's voices. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?