Aerie (21 page)

It's Zal's song. Zal, and also—

The robot bird is singing a note that I last sang when Dai and I first sang together, a note that made the ocean rise beneath us and consider turning over, and another note that melted earth into water. It's mechanized and skewed, but I know my song when I hear it.

It's my song. For the death of the drowners. Sung by
something that is changing it, making it stronger, and worse.

Caru sings over that, as loudly and furiously as I've ever heard him sing, and the Flock's birds rise up to surround him. Vespers and Caladrius take off from the deck and put themselves on each side of my heartbird.

The thing chasing him is huge, as big as Caru, and it has wings tipped with blades. It's diving and spiraling in the sky.

The Flock's birds are up and around Caru and the predator is attacking them. They scream, and the Flock screams back. When he screams, his birds get stronger, singing
protection
, singing
shield
, their bodies between Caru and what I now realize is a drone. The Flock's tsunami of birds keeps the predator from Caru, but some of them are dying in the process.

TO ME, QUICKLY, I sing, HOME, sending Caru my strength.

Vespers and Caladrius sing it too, ferociously. Vespers shrills a note I can hardly hear, and the drone tilts on one wing, screaming too, its voice vibrating wrongly and twitching its entire body.

Caru dives out of the clouds and into my arms, screaming, bleeding, but he's here. I hold him tight.

I look up just in time to see the drone spinning in the air and screaming out a furious string of notes that flips all the birds in range in the wind as well.

JASON AND ELI ARE HERE. TO MAGANWETAR OR THEY DIE.

Then it flies fast as a jet plane out of range, and into the clouds, fleeing the Flock and his song.

Aza
, Caru trills, in my arms, my poor heartbird, wing in pain, beak scarred, body trembling. The Flock sings the birds out of the sky. They perch all over
Glyampus
.

“Thank you,” I whisper to the Flock. I'm shaking all over with the effort of the song, and with fear for everyone.

The Flock puts his hand on Caru's head. Caru whistles at him.

“Caru is an old friend,” he says. “I did not think to see him again.”

Broken string
, says Caru sadly, and looks at Caladrius, who tilts her head at him and sings a few beautiful notes. Caru sings with them. Of course they know each other. This was what they did with Zal, long before I was born.

My poor heartbird can't stop shaking for hours after he arrives. The Flock helps me splint his wing, which is fractured and bent. I tend his other wounds.

All the while Caru sings to me about Zal, a muddle of panicked songs about her plans, about what she's doing. He sends visions into my brain of her killing Rostrae and killing other things too. Canwr, and creatures from other parts of the sky. I see a phoenix, and I see a batsail.

Broken heart
, sings Caru.
Broken string.
But he can't explain. I twine my heart to his and we sing together, me trying to heal him.

He tucks his beak, then his head under my arm, and I feel something open up in my heart. I feel it crack, for Caru if for no one else. All the guard I've had up. All the protection. I feel it start to melt, and the song I've not been singing comes out, a little. It's quiet, but it's full of love, and strong enough to knit bones.

The Flock comes out of his cabin and watches me.

I sing the healing song, and Caru cries out in pain.

It hurts me to hurt him, but I can feel the bones mending. Caru submits. I sing his wing into calmness, sing it into wholeness, and he screals, but he lets me do it. When I'm done singing, he opens his wings and trills uncertainly. It's okay, I think. He's still weak, but no longer broken.

Caladrius comes toward me and tilts her head.

Fly
, she sings. Caru sings it back to her.

I look at the Flock. I feel stronger now, with Caru, at least, even if I haven't mastered the Flock's song. I have to go to them. If I can sing a healing song, that's something. If I can sing any song that isn't destruction, if I can do that, I have at least a little of what I need. I don't have time to wait for more.

“Will you lend me a launch?”

He stares hard at me.

“So you can sail to your death?”

“That's not my plan,” I tell him, but I can tell he hears what I'm not saying, that plans can change. That sometimes people change them for you. I try to look like I know what I'm doing. I don't want to sail to my death. But I might be about to do that anyway.

“No,” he says. “I won't allow it.”

“She has my sister,” I say. “She has—”

“Your ethologidion,” he says.

“No,” I say. “My . . . I don't know what the word is.”

“It's the same word,” the Flock says. “Maybe you have two singers. Maybe you're bonded to both of them. I have two heartbirds. Maybe you have two bonds, two who sing with you. There are different songs to sing, Aza.”

“I have to go,” I say. “They know where we are. We might be able to defend this piece of the sky against warships and
Nightingales, but against Maganwetar and Zal? No. I have to go. Otherwise I'll bring Zal here and that will be worse.”

“You're not ready. You have to be able to sing against her.”

I look at him, but he doesn't change his mind.

So I wait until the middle of the night, creep guiltily onto the deck with Caru on my shoulder, take provisions from the galley, and pack them into a sack. I slink over to the edge of
Glyampus
.

It's strange to imagine Caru and these canwr, all part of the same song, with Zal and the Flock, together and possibly . . . happy?

I imagine Zal and the Flock singing together. My biological parents. They are why I'm here. I have to be grateful they found each other, even if it ended up like this. Zal in love. The Flock young and not gray in the skin. Both singing, and canwr are all around them.

I feel a jab of loss. I don't know how to heal Zal.

I have to do this. I shift ropes, untangle lines.

I turn and the Flock is right behind me. Of course he is. The sky is silent out here, and he pays attention to every noise.

“I have to,” I say.

“I see that. Sing one note, then,” he says. “Sing the one that will make the future possible.”

I stare at him. I don't know the note. That's all I can think. I'm supposed to be the
chosen one
, but why? Who chooses someone who messes everything up?

Caru starts to sing.

And what he's singing?

It begins with the song of the mice from our kitchen at home. Then the song of the lonely whale.

I—

He sings the song of the batsail from
Amina Pennarum
.

He starts whistling. I know what he's whistling.

I don't want him to be. I don't want to remember this. It's in Silbo, the whistled Spanish from the Canary Islands, the song I sang at a talent show, it seems like a million years ago.

I sang it for Jason. It's full of words only Jason and I know, jokes only we have, all the love I couldn't figure out how to talk about. All the things I didn't know how to say. He didn't even know what I was singing. He couldn't understand me. I did that on purpose, because I was too scared to say everything, too scared to give him everything. Maybe too scared to know it myself. So I sang it in a language only a few people speak, and I made it too hard for him to translate.

But Caru knows it. Caru is the part of my heart that has to tell the truth.

Caru is singing them, all these things at once, and I feel something give way in my chest, because now he's singing my apology list, he's singing the things I was sorry for, the fact that I was going to die and leave Jason alone, the times I'd looked at him and not seen him. He's singing the things I'd never told him, and all the rest of it too. He's singing my worry at being imperfect Aza, and then Alien Aza, at being this wreck of a girl who could never heal any of Jason's pain, but only create more for him. At being someone who couldn't save the person she loves.

I feel my heart tilt, I feel my lungs full of song, my body full of song, because finally, Caru is singing the whole thing, all my love for all of my life below, all my love for my life above, all of it, and I join him.

I can't help myself. I have to.

This is everything. All of us at once, stars in dark rooms, parents singing me to sleep, hospital beeps and wind in the trees, Eli laughing, Jason whispering to me in my sleep. Squallwhales and batsails, Wedda teaching me to fight, to dress, to braid my hair, Jik telling me the truth about Rostrae. Stars shooting out across the sky, and all of it, everything, part of this existence. The sorrow and the joy, the guilt and the pride, the failures and the accomplishments.

This is the whole thing, and we sing it together, until it comes out of my mouth in one pure note.

Caru sings, and I sing my harmony back. It becomes one note, a note I don't recognize at first until I realize that Caru's singing me my parents, all four of them, my history, my heart, my future.

We're singing the sound of my heartbeat and my breath, the sound of bright blue blood running through my Magonian veins, the sound of someone trying to be everything at once, trying to save everyone at once.

I sing it with him. The truest note I can find. I'm not just someone's chosen one, it says. I'm myself.
I
have to choose now.

I watch the sky shift.

A whooshing surge of starlings, a murmuration, a cloud of them dancing in the air, their bodies swooping and twisting, folding the sky and singing with us, a note that summons a veil of wings, a black lace curtain of words and song. They fly around the ship, a soaring roar of glory, a million birds moving as one body.

The Flock looks at me. “Daughter,” he says.

Tears are running down my face. I'm shaking, and I feel like
I'm exposed. The world has just seen everything I'm scared of losing, all at once, written in shifting letters in the air.

“You will take my ship.”

“You don't have to do that.”

His smile broadens. “We all have songs to sing, Aza Ray. I didn't know I had a daughter. Now that I do, I have no wish to lose her. My ship is faster than any launch, and I'm coming with it.”

Vespers lands on one of my shoulders, and Caladrius on the other. Caru sings from the Flock's shoulder. We're a strange family, all the canwr, me, and my father together.

I fumble in the pocket of my flight suit. I bring out the compass Jason gave me.

The needle points.

I head north.

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5820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231

“Jason! Look at me!”

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“The burns on his chest are infected. I don't know how long they've been like this. Can someone help us? Please?”

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“Don't go to sleep. Jason! JASON!”

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“Do you want him to die? Is that the goal? A dead hostage? Is that what you want? He's burning up. I DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS. If you want Aza, you have to keep him alive.”

Cold hand on my forehead. Cold hand, colder than human—

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I open my eyes and someone's leaning over me. I'm at the level of his chest, looking up. There's a tattoo of Aza Ray. White lines on dark blue skin, and it moves and shows her singing.

“Jason,” Dai says. “Welcome to Maganwetar.”

This guy has already burned me half to death, and before that, he nearly obliterated Aza. He's a liar (and?), a betrayer (and?), someone who chose the wrong side and stayed on it because Zal offered him power. He is, except for a few differences, just like me.

The tattoo on Dai's chest shifts to Aza singing with him, leaning against a sail, an ocean rising below the ship they're on. She's wearing captain's insignia. So is he. They're sailing together. This is their future.

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I forget about the way my body is spinning and broken, the way I feel like I'm pea and sun, shriveling and expanding at once.

All I can hear is my own heartbeat, pounding, and then I grab Dai with both hands, and bring him closer to me.

“I met her when we were five! You don't even know her!” I yell.

I hear Eli yelling too.

“What are you doing? Jason! You're hurting yourself! Stop it!”

“
You
don't know her,” Dai says. “She died in your care. You lost her. You should have been keeping her safe.”

I lose track of everything around us and everything beneath us.

“I tried to save her!”

“She sang with me. She's been mine since she was born, and I hers,” he says. “We share one voice.”

Dai's leaning over me and his tattoos are showing me Aza's name and face and body, over and over, and his canwr's singing what can only be insults.

“You don't even know her. You don't know what she is. You don't know who she is. You don't know what she sings in her sleep,” I whisper. “You don't know how much—”

I exhale. There's a moment of stillness during which I try to make this all make sense.

“How much what?” he asks.

“You don't know how much I love her,” I manage to say, but I'm dizzy, in so much pain, and the edge of his sleeve drags across my chest, open wound, burns, broken skin, broken heart, broken, broken broken—

I'm blinded for a moment, blacked out in agony.

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I close my eyes. It's black and calm behind them, peaceful. Everything hurts. Nothing hurts. Feathers fan across the darkness.

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“This is her drowner, then?” someone says in Magonian, the Magonian I understand from sleepless nights steeping myself in sound files from SWAB. At least they've given me something.

I open my eyes and see Zal Quel looking down at me, her face like Aza's, her hair like Aza's, her voice like Aza's. Here I am with Aza's worst enemy, and with the reason Aza exists at once, and I don't have any strength to fight.

“Jason Kerwin,” she says, and bends over me. Aza's mother's face is close to mine, beautiful and strange, like a sky seen through dark glass, and her hair twists in the wind.

She raises her arms and I see what I didn't see before, through the drone camera. Her arms are strung with wires, and her throat is wrapped with them. When she opens her
mouth the Nightingales open their throats and sing for her. Her skin is laced with song circuits to compensate for the loss of her canwr.

She looks exactly like Aza Ray, and for a moment I confuse the two of them. I see Aza, and then Zal, and then Aza again, I see the girl I first met in kindergarten, clipping ships out of paper. I see her heart and bones and her face, the way she looked at me and knew I wasn't enough for her. I wasn't.

No, that's Zal looking at me.

That's Zal staring into my eyes.

“What did my daughter see in this weakling?” she asks Dai.

“I don't know,” says Dai, but I see him glance at me, and he looks uncertain. “He says he loves her.”

Zal's given herself a voice out of the stolen voices of Aza and Caru. She's twisted it with her own silenced song. This is what she's done. This is what she's made.

And it's still my fault. I'm not strong enough to change it.

“You're her drowner, then,” says Zal. “And you can save Aza. Do you wish to save Aza?”

I can't move anything, but it's okay. The sky is full of stars. There are songs rising all around me.

“I love Aza,” I say.

“Then do this for her,” she says.

“What?”

She opens her mouth. AZA AZA AZA AZA, she sings, and the Nightingales attached to her voice sing it for her. The sky vibrates with hundreds of voices in chorus singing her name.

“Give me your voice,” Aza's mother hisses. “Tell my daughter she is wanted here.”

Dai moves one of the wires from a Nightingale and presses
it to my throat. He sings a strange note, a blistering sound that welds the wire to my skin. It hurts, but everything hurts. Everything is agony.

There's a dry screaming creak, a hissing, and the sky's suddenly full of greenish smoke, crackling, lights. Shooting stars?

A meteor shower.

It's Aza coming. It must be.

For a second, I'm full of joy. I forget about every reason Aza should hate me, everything that's probably gonna be broken from here on out, and I just look up at these thousands of shooting stars falling all over the dark, like heaven's exploding, like the sky's a birthday cake topped with sparklers, like we're looking up at the sky on the Fourth of July, normal teenagers in love.

I watch a meteor come straight at me, and then another. Flaming boulders are falling all around us.

“JASON.” Someone slaps my cheek. Cold water pouring down.

“He'll last long enough to call to her,” says Zal. “She approaches.”

“He's dying,” says Dai.

“He has enough life left,” says Zal. “She won't want him. Look at how weak he is. She needs you. She can't sing without you. We know that. She only needs to remember.”

Her voice has a scathing beauty, the song of someone who's spent her life screaming orders, and screaming pain. She smiles a smile I'm unlikely to forget. A combination of rage and longing.

Aza's mother.

Aza's nightmare.

Aza's abuser.

Aza's captain, but not one she chose.

“He's hallucinating,” I hear Eli say, and Dai is over me for a moment, looking at me, his face creased with something that might be . . . worry. I look up at him.

“I love her,” I say. I hear my own whisper echo through Zal's Nightingales, way above us. “Tell her I'm sorry.”

The Nightingales shout it into the sky.

My words.

I love her. Tell her I'm sorry.
I hear them sing it, and I feel frozen and then like I'm made of glass. The air is whistling around me, and the stars have stopped falling. I start listing my apologies.

I don't ask her to come save me.

I don't ask her to come. I don't deserve that.

“Somebody help us! Please!” Eli's crying somewhere, but she's far away from me. I don't know where I am. In the sky. Aza's coming for me.

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I feel myself being picked up, lifted up from where I'm lying, carried. I feel myself floating over the deck, maybe flying. Beside me someone is holding my hand so tightly I can't move my fingers.

“Aza?”

“It's Eli.”

The air around me is filled with song, and there are clouds full of rain, and I can hear Eli talking, and yelling at someone far away from me, and birds screaming and wings in the air.

“She's COMING!” shout a million voices, all over the city, a million Magonians, a million Nightingales, a million echoes of echoes.

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And this is the end. The world is full of miracles. At least I've seen some of them.