Aerie (6 page)

“I spent more time with her than you did,” he says. “She tried to KILL
me
.”

Yeah, I want to say. She tried to kill me too. But I nearly turned her to stone
using only my voice
. If anyone's got the skills to fight her, it's me. I compromise.

“Maybe I want to find her because I'm worried she might try that again, on you, on Eli, on my parents. Did you think of that, or did you just think I wanted a random adventure?”

Jason relents.

“Please,” he says. “Just . . . don't go looking for her tonight.”

I feel prickly all over. “Should I just sit here and wait for her to show up and hurt someone I love?”

“Maybe we should tell someone?”

“What
someone
would that be?”

“The authorities. There must be someone who could help.”

I stare at Jason. “WHAT
authorities
? Which ones? The ones in charge of Magonia? No one down here knows there's anything up there! Seriously? You want us to get hauled into some psych ward? Because that's what'd happen. Or they'd just think we were hoaxing again. We've hoaxed before, Kerwin.”

“Maybe things are changing up there,” he says. “The world's shifting, Aza Ray, all the time.”

And, oh,
OH
, that just pisses me off. Boysplaining.

“You're such a cynic,” he says, and touches my cheek. I barely keep myself from biting his finger. “You have too many factoids, too many details, too much wiki.”

I sing furiously out to Caru. More nothing.

“He's probably just flying out of range,” Jason tells me. He knew exactly what I was doing. I feel a snarled kind of despair.

Jason takes my hand. “It's going to be okay.”

“It's already not okay,” I say, and I shudder, because my own words remind me of dying in an ambulance, Eli crying to my mom, that same sentence coming out of Eli's mouth, me in the middle of leaving.

Déjà vu all over again.

Happy birthday, Aza Ray
.

Am I mad at him? I can't tell. Is he mad at me? I can't tell. We're not looking at each other. We stare out at the sky.

“Don't go looking for her tonight,” Jason says. “Promise?”

“What if she's down here? Do you think I can just let her—”

“Aza,” he says.

“What?”

“Don't do it. Promise me.”

“You're not in charge of me,” I say, and my voice gets a little out of control. “I'm not a project you're running. I'm not an experiment!”

Jason looks at me, and his face is exhausted. “Please,” he says. “I can't lose you again. I'd die. Okay? I'd die.”

I wonder about everything.

“Fine,” I say, after a minute.

I pull out my compass as he's driving away. It points north despite him driving east. I almost text him to say something about that, but I don't, because that suddenly pisses me off too. I just wait for his taillights to go, thinking
we've never done this before, pretended it was fine when it wasn't.

I go back into my quiet house, with my sleeping family, my flight suit still on.

I'm curled up in a nervous, angry, fully dressed ball in the middle of my bed a few hours later, when FLASH!

Caru shrieks into my heart, into my lungs, and I gasp. Ropes, whipping out, things that are birds and aren't, black wings. Caru's screaming. Tangled.

NO, NETTED.

Caru's caught, twisted into a harsh, thorny net, and he's terrified. I'm off the bed in agony, unable to do anything. I look through Caru's eyes and I see—

OH NO, NO, NO.

It's Dai. His face is contorted. Indigo skin, new tattoos. White ones, lightning strikes up and down each of his arms, the rigging of a ghost ship on his back as he spins to reel Caru in.

Dai looks back at me, through Caru, and I swear, I swear he can feel me here. He knows he has my heartbird. He has my heart.

Blackness. Caru's nightmare, being caged in the dark again. He's been hooded.

He screams something at me, to me.
Where the air is mad! Where the wild birds are!

Then the vision ends. I'm in the dark too, in my room, shaking, and I don't know what Caru meant.

I'm panting, gasping, tears streaming down my face.

All that
zugunruhe
meant something. I was at the top of my cage, and the world was spinning out there. My body could feel something. Magonia is calling me back.

I have to get to Caru, NOW. I'm up and stuffing things
frantically into the pockets of my flight suit, compass, little knife—

A sound from outside my window jolts me.

I turn, but I'm not fast enough. Someone's here. All in black. Face covered. More than one someone.

Heyward? A team of Breath? That's who it has to be.

One sound is all I get. There's a hand over my mouth, and I bite, but there's nothing but glove between my teeth as someone gags me with tape.

I get my fists up, try to get my knee up and stamp my foot backward.

Whoever has me makes a sound of pain, but still heaves me over their shoulder.

The tape tugs at the skin around my mouth and I wonder if it's ripping off my skin, if they'll yank off the tape and reveal half my Magonian face. My wrists are jammed together. I'm bent like a broken bird, and we're out and down the back stairs.

Frozen crunching footfalls, a car door, open, a car trunk, open.

They put me inside the trunk, shove my knees painfully up to my chest, put a cloth over my nose and press it hard to my face. I don't inhale. I don't inhale, I don't inhale—

But they cover my mouth, and I choke on bitterness, gasp, breathe it in. I feel myself tilt suddenly, like I'm shrinking down into the smallest version of me, a version that's voiceless, screamless, Aza-less.

They slam the trunk down as the world swims around my eyes. They start the engine.

I don't know where I'm going. I don't know why.

I'm in the dark again, this time without a song to save me, and then the dark is everything I see, everything I know, the inside of my skull a room I'm trapped inside.

I'm seventeen and I'm missing.

I'm as miserable as Aza is when I leave her house. I bring my
other pair of glasses out of my pocket. Just glass. No prescription.

Well, not
just
glass. These are special. Just like the other phone, Aza has no idea I have these. I can see Magonian vessels through them, squallwhales, and more. Nothing crazy up there. Nothing I can
see
, but that doesn't change my suspicion. I send another emergency text. If Heyward's here, I don't have much time.

I'm frenzy-clicking buttons on my phone, working my way through coordinates and patterns, making things make sense, possible trajectories. By the time I get home I'm nearly flat with exhaustion and confusion. It's not even that far between our houses, but getting through twenty-four hours of birthday has left me messed up. Fighting with Aza has left me wrecked.

We never fight.

Does she think she's the only one here who's in charge of anything? Does she think she's the only one with responsibilities?

I stumble up the stairs, pausing only to greet my moms, who are curled on the couch watching a documentary about black holes. Of course they are.

“Condoms,” says Carol.

“Condoms,” says Eve.

This is exactly the wrong moment to say that to me.

“You do know it's Aza's birthday, right?” I say, and both of them flinch.

“Of course,” says Eve.

“It's only been a year,” I say. “A year isn't very long.”

They come to me on the stairs, their faces full of niceness, full of grief.

I don't know why I do this. They don't know anything about what I know, Aza-wise. I'm just making them feel bad. I want someone to feel bad for me. It's perverse, but it's true. I feel miserable, and like no one even notices, because Aza won't let me tell her anything about anything.

“We were talking about Aza tonight,” says Carol.

“About how when you took off to her birthday party, that first year, and we thought you'd been kidnapped—” says Eve.

“Not your best moment,” says Carol. “But then again, not your worst. Early warning for the kind of kid you were going to be.”

“I remember seeing you at the roller rink, in your alligator suit, and thinking, oh no, this one's got his own dreams,” says Eve. “There'll be no controlling him.”

“What dream did you think I had?” I ask, curious in spite of myself.

“At the time I thought maybe you were going to be an Olympic ice-skater or something,” she says. “But that's what's weird about having kids.”

“What?”

“They're themselves from the beginning. You think you
know what they'll do, but you don't. You think you can predict everything based on your own self, but then they're weird in their own ways.”

“Not that you're at all weird,” says Carol, and gives me a particular look that says
ha!

“I came from weird stock,” I say.

“You did,” says Eve, and laughs. “This is a house of weird people who love you.”

“We loved Aza too,” says Carol, putting her hand over mine. “We did a toast to her tonight.”

“If she was your dream, she was a good one,” says Eve. “But I promise, baby, you'll find love again. There's lots of love in the world.”

Which makes me cry, because even if I can't tell them what's going on, they get me, at least.

My moms both hug me. For a second, I feel like nothing can drop out of the sky and make a disaster in the middle of my life. There are no skyships and no Breath climbing down anchor chains. There's only me, and my parents, and we're totally safe here in our living room.

For now.

The second I get upstairs, I turn on my tablet, open about nine apps, and wait.

I'm years behind on sleep. I get like three hours a night, which is not enough, but what else am I supposed to do when I'm keeping track of everything that's happening everywhere in every time zone? Not just on the earth, but in the sky?

I turn on the video feed to Aza's house.

Video feed. Secretly placed cameras. All kinds of dishonest.
There are things no one knows but me. And then there are the things a few other people know too.

Facts I never told Aza, volume one. Three nights after we got back from Svalbard I walked out of Aza's house and saw a black car.

“Get in,” said the guy I'd met at the airport in Longyearbyen.

I jumped a fence, crashed into a mailbox, and ran. The car pulled alongside me. When I tried to dial 911 I discovered my signals were jammed.

“What do you want?”

“I'm picking you up. You've been summoned,” said the guy at the wheel.

Summoned. Like this was a world of kings. Like I was going to be a knight. Turned out, it wasn't so different. Knights never had a lot of power either. Swords for hire.

SkyWatch Assessment Bureau, SWAB for short. Government agencies, for all that they're completely unfunny in myriad ways, tend to have a warped sense of humor, the secret supernerd kind.

It's an agency in charge of watching skyships. S
wab the decks, matey
. Therefore, SWAB.

SWAB has been looking upward for a very long time. They were looking other places too, all over the internet, at people accessing information, and the way I was searching for Magonia-related topics, the particular groupings I was using, meant—

Well, it meant I knew things I wasn't supposed to know.

SWAB had video of what Aza did in Svalbard: singing a flood that began to turn the island into the ocean, that cracked the
seed repository open, that could've ended everything.

The agency saw all the things I thought no one saw.

I was terrified they were going to take Aza, and if not them, that Magonia was going to take her instead.

And so SWAB knew exactly how to get me to do what they wanted me to do.

They offered me her safety in exchange for her secrets.
Tell us everything, listen to everything, report everything, and we'll protect her.
Devil's bargain. Fine, I'll burn.

They installed small and fancy security cameras at Aza's house, and that was a whole thing, but it was mostly okay. I have the monitors. So do they.

Since then, I've been spending weekends learning languages, nights memorizing coordinates. In the mornings, she'd wake up from nightmares about Magonia, and I'd pretend I hadn't been beside her all along, recording every word she said in her sleep. The daily reports I've given SWAB aren't much. Basically: school, me, home, stare at sky, communicate with Caru, communicate with me. What Aza and Caru talk about, as far as the deep details are concerned, is unknown to all of us, no matter how much I've tried to find out. They talk silently, and she's never really told me.

I shared her secrets with the enemies I could most easily imagine, in exchange for what I could buy of her safety from the ones I couldn't.

Aza's secrets should belong only to her and to people she's chosen to tell them to. Instead, I'm technically, no matter how I shake it, one of her betrayers.

I watch on my screen as three guys in black climb the wall
of Aza's house, the same way she climbed the wall of my house last night.

I switch over to the monitor in her room as they climb in her window.

She fights hard, but they get her gagged quickly enough that she can't sing any trouble into the air. I watch them tie her, and take her straight back out and into the trunk of the car.

If anyone sees it, they're kidnappers, not SWAB.

This is what I did to keep her safe. There was no way she wasn't going out looking for Heyward. I don't care what she promised.

I know who she is. I've known her since we were five. So I took it out of her hands. The thought of Heyward getting to her? I couldn't.

My phone buzzes. “There's a car waiting for you.”

I walk out of my house and get in.

“Kerwin,” says the agent behind the wheel.

“Let's go,” I say.

Headquarters is an hour later, in a garage deep underneath a shopping mall. Above us, people are going about their T-shirt buying and shoe attempts. In a bunker below America, we're watching the sky.

I scan my thumbprint, and then I scan my eyeball—thumbprints aren't enough in a world where Magonians might be wearing skins to disguise themselves as human.

If you want to discuss how someone seventeen years old has ended up here, discuss it with the top, not me. For all I know, they're watching me every moment of every day, and
I'm merely a tool. For all
they
know, I'm just their informant, and not someone who's been spending his own every moment at headquarters learning anything he can about how SWAB is working. All that pi committed to memory? I have more than just pi in there. The whole time I've been working here, I've been stuffing the contents of SWAB's archives into my skull.

When I first learned about Magonia I thought it was impossible that no one else knew anything about it. Turns out, I was right.

Yeah, I know how this sounds. This isn't me in a tinfoil hat, though.

Governments know the secrets. They're in charge of making sure normal people don't find out about them and—and this is a scientific term—freak the fuck out.

But come on. There are always leaks. Aliens and conspiracy theories. There are always suspicions in the public. Things get seen. Secrets slip.

I pass the portrait of Amelia Earhart up on the wall. Speaking of secrets. When she disappeared, she was on a mission for SWAB. Official version is that she was captured by Magonia. There are photos of her plane, pictures of talon marks in it. SWAB buried it at sea.

Mystery of brave American hero? Solved.

I look at the picture and know I've done the right thing. If Magonia got to Aza, what would they do to
her
?

They'd use her. Or kill her. I had to keep her safe. I repeat that to myself. I had to. I had to.

I'm right, aren't I?

This isn't how I normally feel about things. Usually, I feel
like everything I'm doing, I'm doing for definite reasons. Justifiable reasons.

This time . . .

This time I'm worried. There's something about it—everything about it, seeing Aza grabbed, taken from her house—that feels like I've just done something totally wrong.

But I had to.

She accused me of trying to run her life, and I—we've never fought like that before.

Since Aza came back down, though, Magonia's gotten steadily more desperate. No one up there is going to look kindly on a chosen one who wouldn't choose them. The sky is full of her enemies. Heyward would drop her in front of Zal, or Dai, or anyone else who wants to kill her.

I had to keep her safe. She'll forgive me. She has to.

Forty people work here. If you saw us, you'd think we were a paper supply company with astonishingly good tech. If you looked closer, you'd see that there are screens on every desk showing ALL the air traffic. Color-coded and tagged so SWAB can follow progress across the skies of the world by nation. And by more than nation.

All around those airplanes and helicopters, there are Magonian ships. SWAB has a monitor that tracks stormsharks, squallwhales, and a bunch of other things too. They tag them with weather balloons, which the stormsharks eat. As for the squallwhales, SWAB seeds clouds for rain, using a mixture of silver iodine and dry ice. The squallwhale perceive it as some kind of skykrill. Voilà, tracking devices in every pod.

SWAB has the premium version of everything I tried to
create last year when I had no access to data or real tools: small-craft monitors, and single-vessel monitors, a crop theft reports section, a board with renderings of known agitators, politicos and pirates alike. There's a portrait of Zal up there, and one of Dai, which I've studied more than I really want to admit. For an alien guy, he's appallingly and objectively good-looking, even to me.

There are other things here too. This agency has a whole roomful of artifacts from Magonia, knives and swords made of a light Magonian metal that feels like tin, but cuts like steel. Some of them don't look like anything you've ever seen before. Their hilts are shaped like birds, and their blades like gleaming feathers. They're sharp enough to cut through a table in a single stroke. There's a flute that's thirty-five thousand years old and made of vulture bone. You can play five notes on it, the five notes that most human voices can encompass. When you play it—I've never heard it, but this is the rumor—despite this being a scale of human notes, there's something about them that's not—glass cracks for a quarter mile in all directions. There are other things, Magonian bows and arrows, Magonian axes, things gotten I don't know how, over I don't know how many years.

Director Armstrong is sitting calmly at his desk, in front of about five monitors showing Aza's face in various versions. Some of them are Magonian, some of them Aza Original, the earth girl I knew for years before all this, and some are Beth Marchon.

“Kerwin,” says the director. “Take a seat.”

He's in his late forties, balding, desk job physique, stubble, a crumpled suit, bad squint. A spy, I've learned in the past year, looks like a spy. Which makes me wonder if I'm starting to look
like a spy too. Armstrong isn't a field agent anymore. He started at NASA before NASA got publicly shrunk. SWAB was always part of the shadow identity of the space program anyway. Now what was NASA is SWAB, and the tech they developed for fifty years is entwined with our Magonian program.

I sit. Well, I kind of sit.

“Your girl's in custody,” he says. “She's safe. And don't worry about Heyward Boyle. We got the tip, and we're on it.”

“Okay,” I say cautiously.

“But you didn't think to tell us about the escape?”

“About
what
?”

“Captain Quel.”