Aerie (7 page)

I take another moment. Because this is . . . this is huge.

Aza's mother? Escaped?

“I—I didn't know.” Shit. What else don't I know?

Armstrong gestures to a monitor and it clicks on. Surveillance footage. Not earthbound.

“This footage is from yesterday.”

It's showing Caru, flying. I know Caru. I've seen Aza's heartbird in the flesh. He looks like a normal bird, if you don't know what he is. A falcon, yes, but a bird.

Here he's flying with another bird I don't know. Little, yellow, twisting in the air in front of him, and crying a distress call. Caru flies closer.

Oh no. Oh, SHIT. Because I DO know who that bird is. There's no other canwr it could be. Milekt.

Aza's former canwr flits frantically away into the dark, leading Caru on, and Caru's following, until they get to a ship, on the deck of which is—

Dai.

The imprinted. The intended.

I feel my heart shift in my chest, because he's as good and as bad as reported. Trouble. Worse than trouble.

This isn't live. It's already happened, whatever I'm about to see, and I have about ten terrible possibilities in my head. Did they kill Caru? I want to shut my eyes, but I have to watch. Aza's going to—

I can't even think about what Aza's going to do.

Milekt lands on one of Dai's shoulders. He has two canwr now, one Milekt, the other—I assume—Svilken, and they look as hungry as he does.

And then. Dai twirls a rope and nets Caru.

SHIT. He's reeling Caru out of the sky, and Aza's heartbird fights furiously, screaming, panicking.

Dai gets Caru within reach, and I see into his eyes. He's angry, and focused, singing a furious song with Svilken.

My stomach drops. My heart lurches. Everything in me knows I did the wrong thing, because I just got Aza put into custody, her heartbird's been captured, and she can't do anything about it. She's going to be—

The director pauses the video.

“What the hell?” I ask Armstrong.

“You tell me,” he says. “We had no warning. It gets worse.”

“How'd we even get this footage?”

“Stay calm,” says Armstrong, and he suddenly looks more in charge than he looked a minute ago. “We sent up some surveillance drones in recent weeks, and we have a few contacts in Magonia.”

He shows a different video, again, an aerial point of view.

And what I'm seeing is unbelievable. I saw her once before,
but she was on a ship, and at that point, I knew almost nothing about Magonia.

Aza's mother, Zal, paces a gray cell, her wild black hair cropped, her hands cuffed. She's dressed in a night-dark uniform, nothing like her
Amina Pennarum
regalia. Milekt flies into her cell, wings flat against his body, snatching a key from off a hook as he goes.

Milekt drops the key into Zal's hand. There are burns on her palm. Cuts all over her fingers. But her hand closes around the key, and her face changes.

Zal takes off the jumpsuit, her back turned. I see the tattoo on her back, white lines, thousands of them.

She's etched with Aza's face, like a blueprint. Her skin is covered in marks, whip scars, lashes, deep and angry. Aza's face looks out from her shoulders, set into an expression I've never seen on it before.

She looks full of rage.

Zal puts on a new uniform. Neutral gray, like a storm cloud that's not going to rain. No insignia. She wraps a scarf around her head, covering everything but her eyes. She reaches her arm around the bars, and unlocks her cell. A long dark hallway. Dead Rostrae guards. Feathers in blood underfoot.

Zal runs down an alley, and leaps off the edge—the edge? Onto the deck of a ship. I see Caru, chained to the mast.

Dai's managed to break Aza's mother out of prison.

The footage ends. I'm back in my seat, in shock.

“If we have that, how is Zal Quel still alive? Why did no one take her out?”

“Surveillance isn't the same as conflict,” says the director. He's gnawing a pen like it's going to morph into a breadstick.
“We're not in this war. At least, not officially.”

I hesitate. “Zal's going to come after Aza's family, her parents, I don't even know who else. Me? Aza won't stand for it. We have to tell her.”

“You're here, therefore you're safe,” says Armstrong. “Aza's in custody too. Quel has no access to her.”

“That's not going to matter to Aza,” I say. “
Zal and Dai have Caru
. That alone would be enough. Now that Zal's escaped? There are probably already Breath on the way to Aza's house. Heyward was already sighted. Aza's going to go insane if we don't—”

“It's not my job to keep your girlfriend happy,” the director says dismissively.

I want to leap across the desk and strangle him.

“She's the only reason you have me. Where is Aza?”

“We'll keep you informed, Kerwin,” he says. “But right now, your job is to stay here and shut up.”

“You got all your information from ME,” I say.

The director puts his pen down.

“We thank you for that intelligence. It was very helpful in assessing a terrorist risk.”

Every hair on my skin stands up.
Terrorist.

Nononononononono. That's all I've got in my head, a string of negatives. If they think Magonia's a terrorist state then Aza is . . . a terrorist. That classification is something you don't ever come back from. It follows you till you're at the business end of a drone strike.

“Your girl isn't human, Kerwin. You're not considering the implications of what this could mean in war. She's a weapon. Zal Quel can deploy her.”

I take a second to keep from screaming with rage.

“I know what she is, sir.” I manage the “sir” because it finally occurs to me that I'd better pretend as hard as I can that all is well, or I'm never getting back into the world where I can actually DO something about the thousand ways I've fucked up. “I know
who
she is too. Love runs Aza. If she was working with Zal Quel, she'd be betraying earth, and betraying me. She already proved she wouldn't do either.”

A voice in my head reminds me that this time I betrayed
her
.

I stand up, but Armstrong grips my shoulder and propels me to a seat. Stronger than he looks.

“What about Heyward?” I ask. “What about her?”

“Don't worry about that.”

I'm writhing with guilt and shame. I have a mental flipbook of eleven months' worth of Aza curled up on my bed beside me, telling me she loved me. I have texts from her. I have notes in her handwriting that are diagrams of bat bones, and little twists of rope, love notes in Magonian sailing language.

Jesus Christ, I've failed her. Failed her in so many ways. Seduced by the idea that I could get access to all this information, all this classified, all this wrongness. Seduced by maps and tech. By being
special
.

Because I wanted to be special, like she is. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be what I am, a spying, lying secretkeeper.

One of the monitors with Aza's face on it shifts before my eyes, and as I get ushered into a conference room, I see her smile go from bright, to darkness. It's like watching a total eclipse.

I hear the lock click on the conference room door, throw myself at it, but nothing's moving. I'm inside a glass room, looking out at SWAB, and they can all look in at me.

If her family's in danger, it's . . .

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307

My fault. If she's in danger, it's

816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644

My fault.

SWAB knows what she did in Svalbard because
I
told them. They know
how
she did it, the song she sang, because
I
recorded it and handed it over. Because I thought I could protect her from Magonia that way. Because I thought I was keeping her safe.

I'm the sun being reorganized into a pea, collapsing all of the things I thought I knew into the one thing I
really
know.

I'm the one who's supposed to be protecting Aza from Magonia. Not only from Magonia, but from
earth
.

If she's in mortal danger, if she's without her heartbird, and she's being held captive somewhere, if she's being seen as a
terrorist
—

I'm the one who did it to her.

Aza's imprisoned, and so am I.

But I'm the reason we're both in cells. I'm the one who got this wrong.

I wake up nauseated. Head spinning. Whatever they made
me inhale, it caused me to sleep. I don't know for how long.

My stomach is twisted now, and my body hurts. My throat feels stopped up and thick.

I try to make a noise, and I—

NO.

There's something stopping me, a dampening, something around my notes, clutching them like a tight scarf.

My song is . . . strangled. They've done something to it. I can't feel it with my hands, but it's there. Like I swallowed a stopper. My VOICE is frozen. I can't speak.

I choke and try to spit it out, but nothing. It's in there too securely, whatever it is. I can feel it vibrating a tiny bit, and whatever it's doing, it's silencing me. When I bark out a noise, it hurts, like a shock, but I don't make a sound. A jolt of pain zinging into my vocal cords. My internal song, the one I use with Caru, is somehow dampened too, wrapped in wet towels and made into nothing.

I choke and cough and gasp, and nothing happens. I curl up in the corner of my cell with my knees to my chest, freaking
out. I try to whisper, and find I can make a tiny sound that way, the barest rasp of words. No song, but a murmur.

There's hissing and spitting, humming, muttering all around me. I can hear growls and moans. I'm not the only prisoner here.

I never thought about prison before. Never imagined what it might actually feel like. What it feels like is
tension
. The air is crackling with want, and everyone here wants OUT. Out doesn't mean anything about safety. It doesn't mean anything about good or bad. It means everyone living wants to be free.

“Is this the one?” It's the kind of accent that sounds good amplified but in private sounds fake. “Doesn't look like much. Looks like a normal girl.”

“I AM normal,” I whisper. My voice is almost nothing, no words that carry. Just pain.

“Did you think you were going to get away after you attacked the repository? Did you think no one noticed?”

Jason and I escaped from Svalbard very smoothly, calmly, in disguise as normal people. It was almost a year ago, and no one's said anything. I was dumb enough to imagine no one knew it was an
un
natural disaster.

“Whoever said I attacked anything is wrong,” I choke out, automatically, though Aza? If they're saying it, they already know.

A screen in the upper corner of my cell goes on and I see myself on a security camera video, suited up in my Magonian uniform. Jason walks up to me and I watch us kiss. All of this is my major memory of that day, and from this angle, it looks like exactly what it is.

Boy meets alien.

Renewed pangs of panic. If I'm in this prison, being
questioned about things Jason was involved in too? That means something bad must also be happening to him. I think of him driving away from my house.

Mid-fight. Fuck.

“Who are you?” I whisper or don't. “Where's Jason? Is he here?”

“You have a job to do,” the voice says. “You didn't get taken back into Magonia. There were reasons for that. You owe someone your life. Now tell us, who have you been working for? Are you working for
them
?”

The voice echoes and rattles around my cage.

“Who?”

“For Magonia.”

“No!” I manage, before things get high-pitched, screaling sounds, shrieking, rattling. My ears burn with something that isn't song. I can see the occupants of the other cages hurting too, doubling over, holding their hands over their ears. It's like a flute, but . . . not.

“We want the Flock,” says the voice.

“Which flock?” I whisper. “Rostrae? Canwr?”

I have no idea what they're talking about.

The screaling sounds give one more loud, high-decibel blast that makes me dizzy and queasy before it's done. I'm left in ear-ringing silence again. In the dark. In the not-silent silence. Whispers and churrs all around me. My eyes adjust and I start to see the blurry things that are captive in other cells.

Not Magonian, and not things I know from earth either.

There are gills on a woman. A tail on another. Something rolling and twisting in a tank, like a cat made of smoke. I catch sight of an eye, pale green and enormous, but nothing else. The
smoke flips over. For just a second I see a mouth, a hiss, red tongue, fangs. A giant man made of what looks like roots, kneeling in his cage, too large to stand upright. There's something swimming in a dark green, algae-encrusted tank, and the way that tail flips . . .

No. I'm not going to say mermaid. I can't.

Other things I have no words for. There's a cell full of fire, and shapes are in there, moving, flashing tails and whipping limbs.

I'm in a prison full of monsters. Some of them are looking back at me. I hear a gravelly voice coming from behind me. One of the prisoners.

“They took us,” it says. “From our homes. They took us from our families.”

I spin, trying to see who's talking to me, but I can't tell. Other voices come in. A twisting babel of lament.

“They hold us here,” hisses something else.

Anything can happen, Aza Ray
, Jason says inside my head, and I have a flashing memory of myself singing notes to make rain into rocks.
Anything can happen, and if it doesn't, it's because something else happened instead
.

Oh god, Jason. Oh god, everything.

I feel exhausted. I have no song. I only have terrifying, echoing flashes of the things Caru showed me, just before I got grabbed.

What's happening to Caru while I'm here? Does Dai really have him?

Time passes. Someone yanks me out of my cell, injects me with anesthetic that doesn't stop the pain, and peels a slice of my human skin back with a Magonian knife. A human knife
would just show normal human flesh, while a Magonian one slices through the camouflage. Enough wound to show the Magonian flesh beneath it, blue and shiftingly tattooed with things that, in Magonian terms, explain everything about me. I bleed first red, then indigo, and then they're satisfied and bandage me up.

Maybe it's to scare me. It works.

Pain and the possibility of death. They were nothing to me before.

When you're no longer used to them, they're terrifying.

I sleep in fits and starts, trying to calm myself enough to be strong when something changes. I don't know how long I try to sleep, but long enough that when it comes, the voice jolts me awake.

“We have someone for you to see,” the voice says.

My cell opens and people drag me down a dark hall, past dark cells that hiss and spit at me. Fire twisting in them, and smoke, tentacles and whipping mermaid tail.

Then I'm looking out across steel-gray, aircraft-carrier-sized decks. We're on a ship. The ocean around us is steel gray too. Where are we?

It's hot. There's a wind, and up above us, seagulls, which mean maybe land isn't SO far away, but I have no idea how far.

I want the birds to be Rostrae or canwr so much I feel like crying. I want them to be Caru. I open my mouth and start to sing a trill—but the guard grabs me and twists my arms.

Open deck. On it, small planes and helicopters, parked. I must have come in on one of these. There are two chairs and a table.

“You can speak,” the guard tells me as they handcuff me
to a chair. “Your voice will return, but only enough for the minimum.”

I feel something loosen around my throat, and I gag and close my eyes for a moment.

When I open them, there she is.

Across the table from me, also cuffed. Skinny body, her muscles smaller than I remember, her hair cut off. It used to be long, in a ponytail. Now it's hacked, like she did it herself. She looks exhausted. She looks broken.

The last time I saw her, she was fighting me on the deck of a ship, commanding an entire team of soldiers. She stares at me, her eyes reminding me so much of Eli's that for a second I feel like that's what's happening.

She looks human. She IS human. It's me who isn't.

Heyward Boyle.