Aerie (24 page)

There's a sound of screaming change, a shift in everything,
and I open my eyes.

“Oh my god,” says Eli.

“NO!” screams Dai. “NO!”

He's running to the edge of Maganwetar, sprinting, and his hands are outstretched to catch anything, but there's nothing left. Zal is gone. The Flock is gone.

Is it over?

Is everyone dead? Aza? Where is she?

I look across the gap between Maganwetar and Aza's ship, and I see her, looking like she's in shock, on the back of a tremendous squallwhale, pale and speckled, the size of a bus.

It's singing. The whole sky is full of singers. There are squallwhales everywhere, and the underneath is whipping with storms. Magonians are running in all directions onboard this city, and I can hear screams of the dying, fighting with Rostrae.

“What's happening?” Eli yells as drones appear all around us, all over the sky. “Jason? What's happening?”

One drone after another beeps and yelps. I can see them
fixing on targets. Who's controlling them? They're all around Aza, and all over the sky.

I hear a ticking sound, a ping, and then I see something rising up from the center of Maganwetar.

I've seen something like it. On the monitors at SWAB. It's
Argentavis magnificens
. The
magnificent silver bird
with the twenty-three-foot wingspan, extinct I don't know how long ago.

It rises.

It rises.

It spreads its wings, and it looks at her. It's like the Nightingales, but fifty times their size.

Aza's standing on the whale's back. She turns and sees it, and stops. She doesn't sing. Why doesn't she sing?

A red dot appears on Aza's chest. The drone is looking directly at her, and I can tell that it's fixing a target. What does it have? Explosives? It's the size of a small plane, not a blackbird, not anything like the small ones. This is a SWAB drone. This is why they're here, ready to deploy their weapon.

No one moves.

Aza's standing on the back of the squallwhale, and slowly, others join her. There must be fifty squallwhales now. A hundred.

But it won't matter. What does that drone have?

I look around frantically.

This was what SWAB must have been preparing. This is what they had up here, smuggled in. This is why they had the bones of the bird in the headquarters, why they had a live version in the prison. Maybe it wasn't live at all. Maybe it was a prototype.

Eli clutches my hand, suddenly beside me. Dai is here too, standing, his jaw dropped.

Aza looks up at the tremendous bird, and it looks down at her, this non-sentient thing, this monster made by some mechanics, some engineers, some metalworkers.

Somewhere inside it is a red button.

I feel Eli twitch beside me. No idea what her plan is, but I can tell it involves jumping off the edge of the city, and straight at anything attacking Aza. I catch a glimpse of Dai beside me, and I swear he's thinking the same thing.

Then something moves. A screal, a fast flying shriek, and Caru comes out of the blue, a dive-bomb of black and scarlet wings.

DEATHBIRD
shrieks Caru, folds his wings, and dives at top speed right at the silver bird. Not just Caru. Caru and a tiny silver bat. They're both diving, both flinging themselves through the air and at the drone.

The tremendous drone bird begins to sing. It raises its voice and I watch as the rivers leap from their beds, as the sky shakes, and as the water below us becomes land, and then water again. The air bends around it. It has as much Magonian magic as it has science from SWAB.

Something changes in Dai. I watch it happen.

“No more of this. No more.”

His tattoos change abruptly, becoming only birds, only canwr, and his skin shifts until every inch of it is etched.

He starts to sing, and his song changes something. Aza looks up. She focuses on him.

“AZA RAY!” he shouts.

I watch as the planes kept outside our radius by weather begin to make their way over Maganwetar—

Is SWAB trying to create an event? Something that will make
their funding certain? Something, no matter how many people it sacrifices, that will make it so their mission isn't in jeopardy? They want to destroy Maganwetar, but they want it to be the kind of destruction that makes their name in the government.

Planes begin to fly through the chains that hold manta sails to Maganwetar, killing the mantas as they do. Maganwetar tips like a ship in a major storm.

This great slab of city, this huge whirlwind of song and sound, is moving toward falling like a nuclear bomb from the sky. This is a Book of Miracles. This is an asteroid hitting earth.

We're on it.

This is everything I ever read about, everything I studied, and I don't even know who's doing it, Zal's final orders, or SWAB, or both things, with the same goal of creating a huge war between heaven and earth.

I have my phone in my hand. I hold it as close to my face as I can, trying to access the huge drone's signal, trying to find its song and stop it.

Caru flips midair, grabbing the drone's skull in his claws, beak open in a savage falcon hunting posture, but he's not strong enough. The bat is clawing at the drone's eyes, yanking at its panels, its metal feathers.

Jik and Wedda join them. I see the Rostrae take flight and land on top of the huge bird, both of them ferocious, both of them dismantling it. Jik pries at another set of panels with her talons. Wedda's beak finds the central power.

Jik tangles her talons in the explosive case, shredding power cables, twisting metal.

Caru sings a deathsong for the bird. The bat joins Caru, their voices twining.

I see Aza standing, staring up at Caru with tears streaming down her face.

Her heartbird and the bat sing joy for the bird's brief existence, for its extinction, for its fall.

They sings a song of sorrow for this bird/not bird, this thing, and then Caru twists its neck with his talons and impales its power source entirely with his beak.

It falls out of the air in a heap of feathers and wiring, broken panel, broken metal wings.

Aza gasps like someone who's been holding her breath, and finally, she's singing again.

Dai is singing with her, not against her, not in opposition. He's broadening her reach, focusing her notes. It's a new song, something I've never heard before.

It's a healing song. Even I can hear it. It's a roar, but a different kind of roar, the roar of breath being taken for the first time, of things being born, of water rushing up after being dammed. It's the sound of wind through trees and birds chirping, a song of something other than chaos, a song of order, with repeating verses, things that twist back and find earlier themes, building on them, rising in strength and volume as Aza and Dai sing together, looking hard at each other. The bat is singing too, and Caru, and Dai's canwr too, everything in a chorus of instruments.

Below us is the whole world, and I look down for a moment and see a lot of disaster. Burning wreckage. There are carcasses of things all over the place and vultures are eating them.

We're very low. I can see waves roiling, and the sky darkening. Only in a few places is the song beginning to work, beginning to roll back the waves and bring the trees up from
their flattened state, push the river back into its banks. It's not fast enough.

I hold my phone up and hit record.

Aza's shaking with the song she's singing, and she looks almost exactly like Zal, but the opposite, somehow. Her wild hair twists into the air, and her skin is covered with white lines of light.

Dai's veins are bulging, his throat tight, and his song is unmaking weather with Aza's.

Maganwetar is stabilizing, even as planes are being roped by Rostrae, twisting in their flight paths, and Nightingales are being flipped through the air.

Aza and Dai clench their fists across the gap, until they're singing into each other's lungs. This is what she meant when she told me they were bonded. They sing with one voice. They sing one blinding note of joy.

I stop recording and start moving the sound files, adding things. I move the song Aza is singing into the voices of the Nightingales, pushing it over the network and into each drone.

Aza and Dai are restoring the ground. I make the Nightingales do it too.

Now the Nightingales sing a creation song, restoring it with them. The sky fills with other creatures, and all of them are singing with her.

I look down.

In the water below us, there are whales and dolphins, rising up from the deep. I see a mass of them, dark and silver, in the waters that are close enough, nearly to touch. They surface in a riot of splashing and song, high sonar waves reaching up to drag the remaining darksinging Nightingales down into the
depths where their circuits will drown.

Another Nightingale begins to sing with Aza. And another, and another, through the system. I override their instructions. I break their orders.

At the last, a single whale rises up from the ocean, a tremendous whale with dark blue flesh, not the same as any of the others, three times their size.

I know its strange voice, amplified through the Nightingales. Like a screaming owl. It's the lonely one, the one I've been obsessed with for years, following its sound files around the ocean. It's the song I added to this mixture. It sings up to the whales of the sky, its counterparts, and now the squallwhales sing at full strength with Aza and Dai, with the lonely one below.

Aza's singing with all of them, all of them her canwr, and Dai is singing with them, restoring broken things.

Smallest creatures
, Aza sings.

Smallest creatures
, Dai sings.

I hear a song amplified through them, and it's a song I don't recognize, a high, intricate jangle, something like a small bird or a music box.

A tiny silver mouse is looking up from right beside me. Eli's holding it in her palm. She smiles at me. It's singing.

“Just in case,” she said. “It came with me for luck.”

I'm overtaken by the song I heard on earth, in Aza's kitchen, her mother's mice trilling out their music.

“There might be a few of them with me,” she says. “Mice breed fast.”

This mouse has joined in, singing songs to reverse damage. I see other mice scattering around the deck of the ship.

They launch themselves up the wires that connect
Maganwetar to the manta rays, and into the engines of SWAB airplanes. They sing themselves into the breaking of SWAB.

The sky and earth and air are singing, all at once.

The last of Zal's remaining Nightingales lurch and jolt in the air. I look and see the mice are chewing their wiring into nothingness, shorting out signals, forgotten songs of dead electronics.

That's the song it is. That's the magic it has, that of making song rather than destroying it.

Below us, our city has suffered a hurricane and water is washed up over the edges of everything, but the buildings are standing. Whales and dolphins are swimming back to their places, away from the edges.

I make sure.

Our houses are still standing. We're still there.

I lost Aza a long time ago. I'm not her singer. She's not mine. Maybe it wasn't meant to be forever, but it was real.

I can't do what Dai can, and I understand why she wants him instead. I can't grieve it now. I can't think. I can't do anything else.

All I can do is shut my eyes. We're still here. We're still living.

That's all I can ask for.

Dai and I are standing on opposite sides of a gap between a
ship and a city. We're holding hands. We've just been singing into each other's lungs.

Now we're both gasping with the effort of that, of things across the sky still changing.

“Dai,” I whisper.

“Aza,” he says, and tries to smile at me. I try to smile back at him. Neither of us has it in us.

“What happened? Milekt and you and Zal? What happened?” I ask him. Magonian isn't a good language for someone who's crying.

“Everything,” he says.

I stare at this blue tattoo of a boy. I can't hate him. I've never been able to hate him. He's part of me.

He just sang life out of death. He just sang joy out of catastrophe. He did it for me.

The ground is in bloom beneath us. It was snow and now it's green and flowers. The water is clear. The storm is passing. Our song, the one we sang together, did that. The airplanes that were coming into Maganwetar are here, not crashed, and their
crews are looking startled out from their seats. Should they be dead? Maybe.

Should we be dead?

Maybe.

Do we need to say things to each other? Yes. But not now. Not when the world is whirling around us, our song the thread that has stitched it back together. Not when I have a heartbird and a heartbat on my shoulders, and the sun is coming out above us.

“Zal was wrong,” Dai says. “I thought I knew her, but she was broken. I broke her out, and all she could say, all she WOULD say, was
drown the drowners for good
. That song, the one she sang with him? That was a healing.”

“She died,” I say. “And he did too.”

“Death isn't the worst thing,” Dai says. “She was suffering for too long. Sometimes death is the only outcome.”

“What happens when I die?” I ask him. “To you?”

“What do you think?”

I look at him. He squeezes my hands.

“You have to go to Maganwetar,” he says. “Your drowner is there. Your sister too.”

I pause. He holds out his hand and picks me up as I leap across the gap.

I say good-bye to the two of us singing together.

He is not the life I choose.

I am not the life he chooses.

But we keep living anyway. Maybe that's how it always is, wherever in the universe you are, sky, earth, in between. Maybe you come back to all those people when you die, and there you are together again, all the choices you didn't make, and those
you did. Maybe love is just that, and only that. The choice you make. And so, you choose to love. You choose to give it all up, to surrender your scared self and live in this mystery.

Jik is standing on the edge of the city, blue and shining. I can see Rostrae everywhere. An entire country's worth of nomads landing in a new home. The sails brought from rafts are being hitched to buildings, and Rostrae from all corners of the sky have come to crew the city ships.

From this angle, Maganwetar looks like a nest of buildings, ship masts and sails. Maybe it belonged to someone else before it belonged to Magonians. Maybe it was a Rostrae city. The buildings take sharp angles, and have birds in statue form flying from their heights.

Caru sings a screal, and together we sing
Rise
.

All the birds in miles sing it with us. Maganwetar rises, a whoosh of air behind it, a song in its wake. Around it, I sing a wall of clouds.

I see Wedda peering over the edge of the city. I see all these Rostrae who fought, all these Magonians who were taken unwillingly by Zal, and by this version of certainty.

There are lots of versions of certainty. There are things happening in every corner of every world that look like this.
On earth as it is in heaven.
Is that the saying? It means something else, of course. It means the heavens are good, and earth is less so, that earth should strive to be like the sky.

I'm not so sure. I think about what goes on everywhere, and . . . everything happens. People trust leaders they shouldn't trust. People listen just because someone is singing loudly.

“You could stay here,” says Jik.

Carpe omnia
. I want everything. But I don't want to be
anyone's ruler. I don't want to be anyone's queen. I don't even want to be anyone's captain, except my own.

That's my choice. I want to go between.

Then I see my sister in front of me, free. She holds out her arms, and the look on her face—

Jason's at her feet, horribly still.

There's no version of
everything
without him in it. Some things are forever. This is one of them.

I leap.