Aerie (9 page)

I never deserved her to begin with, and now she knows it. I
try again on the compass and nothing. I try again. Again.

“What are you doing?” Eve asks, leaning over me. I'm not even hiding the compass. I'm not bothering to hide anything. I don't have it in me to lie anymore, to pretend I'm not who I am. Who I am is Jason Kerwin, who's been in love with Aza Ray Boyle since he was five; Jason Kerwin, who just betrayed the girl he loves. Jason Kerwin the monster, the failure, the abyss of idiocy, the creature made entirely of shame.

Eli gone? I can't even—

“I lost her,” I say to my moms. I can barely get the words out.

Eve looks at me, worried. “Who, baby?”

“Beth, he means,” says Carol, glancing quickly at Eve. “Did you break up? What happened? Where is she? Where's Eli? Are she and Beth together? Tell us.”

“AZA. I LOST AZA!” I say, and now I'm sobbing, now I'm shaking, now I'm losing everything.

I can't stop. It all comes pouring out of my mouth, all of my secrets, all of Aza's secret's, all the world's secrets. Magonia and SWAB, Aza and Beth, Zal and Dai. Everything.

I open my computer to show them proof, but all that's there is video of Aza's house.

I try to log into SWAB, but I get an access denied. I try to show them the SWAB car out the window, but it's gone. My moms are looking at each other, and still, I can't stop talking.

“No one's really looked up, not since what,
War of the Worlds
, Orson Welles on the radio scaring listeners half to death with his report of ships from the sky. Different kind of ships. Same kind of thing!”

“Baby,” says Eve. “Okay, hang on for a second. Jase.”

I can't, I don't have time, there's no time, I have to explain.

“No! You don't get it! This could be
War of the Worlds
any day now. Over our heads there's an armada. Aza's mother wasn't even put in prison for owning slaves but for trying to war against earth, trying to drown us, and take back the Magonian airplants. Did they even ever work? They exist, but I think their capabilities are seriously in question. Mom? Would they work?”

“Honey,” says Eve, and her hand is on my back. “Just slow down for a second. We're listening, but slow down. You're talking really fast, okay?”

I can tell they don't believe me. I bring out books. I open websites. I try to prove it to them.

“Magonians sometimes fall off ships. That's been true for centuries—these things from medieval histories are all the result of Magonians falling overboard and landing among humans. There's a database at SWAB filled with Magonian sequencing. And there's a case at SWAB full of samples. Hair. Skin cells. The oldest date to the late 1800s!”

I keep going. Now it's out there. Now I can't keep from telling them everything all at once. I know how it sounds, but
I can't stop. It's a relief to tell all the things I've memorized, all the things I've hunted down.

“And last year! The helicopter after Aza died, the medical helicopter that crashed. It was attacked by Aza's mother's ship! There's a recording, the black box, and the pilot, the medic, they saw the ship—”

My moms look at each other.

“How long has it been since you slept?” Carol asks me.

“I've
been
sleeping,” I say. I'm not even here. I'm hurtling through space.

Because I lost her.

I lost her.

I lost her.

“They have Eli,” I tell Carol, and even my voice sounds wrong to me. “Zal Quel has Eli. MAGONIA HAS HER.”

“I know,” she says. “It'll be okay. We're going to get you some help. You'll be okay. I promise. We're going to help you so you're okay. Trust me.”

“Just call Aza's parents! They know! They'll tell you!”

And I stop, because Eve's choking back a sob.

Then Eve's getting my coat. Carol's packing a bag.

I get my backpack myself. It's just full of paper, but it comforts me to have it. I need it. I drop the compass in. I drop my phone in. I wish I could drop myself into it too.

Carol puts her arm around me, and Eve takes the other side. We go down the stairs in a sea of pi, a whirling mass of past and numbers. I'm a catastrophe. How did this happen? I thought I had this.

Carol's opening the car door. I see Eve smudge a tear off her cheek, but she turns to me and smiles.

“We've got you,” she says. “We've got this. This isn't beyond us, okay? You're safe. No one's leaving you to do this alone. Love is permanent. We're right here.”

We drive. My mom is holding my hand and telling me I'm going to be okay.

I don't feel okay.

I've been this route a million times before, with Aza coughing and choking. I've been driving in opposition to this route for the last year. Literally around the other side of town to avoid it.

We turn the corner and there it is, all white and tall, pretty trees and nice picket fencing to distract you from the fact that this is the children's hospital.

I have sway with some of the people from Aza's department, but no one in psychiatric. I feel slow. Like my brain's locked, and I'm on the outside. All the places I keep to store my memories, all the rooms, closed. I'm just walking down hallways, looking at doorknobs.

Is this real? Are we really here?

Birds are quietly landing on the dried-up winter lawn. One by one, owl and eagle, hummingbird, blue jay. More.

There are people coming out of the hospital, and toward us. I let go of Eve and Carol and take off running as fast as I can, stumbling, leaping over some kind of decorative this-isn't-a-hospital icy pond.

I have no idea where I'm going except for directly at the huge flock of birds landing in the center of the hospital grounds.

“HELP!” I'm shouting, like I can talk to Rostrae, like I can talk to birds at all. They look at me, but nothing happens. Maybe they're not Rostrae. Maybe no one can help me.

“HELP!!!!”

And then someone tackles me and they're putting my wrists in restraints. I look up from the ground, and at the birds. Eye level. Are they birds? Are they not?

Am I lost? Losing?

“It's okay,” says Carol. “Don't panic. You're just having a little—”

A little what?

“Episode,”
she says, like I've ever had an episode like this before. This isn't anything like my memorizing chunks of the OED, or like pi. This is a disaster, everywhere, all over the world, and Aza's in the middle of it. This is the beginning of the end.

“Aza got taken! They're going to kill her! She's on a ship! She's in prison! It's my fault, it's my fault, everything is my fault, make them take me instead—”

Someone jabs a needle into my thigh, and I feel myself twisting out of my skin, trying to fight whatever it is, my brain full of dark, my body limp.

“He'll sleep now,” someone says.

I see Carol's face, and then her head tilts and she's an owl. I see Eve, her face close to mine, looking into my pupils, and then she's an eagle, and then I can't keep my eyes open.

My skin and my brain aren't affiliated with each other. I'm separate from myself, separate from anything that makes sense.

I catch a glimpse of that tiny green hummingbird flying up, up, a twisting whirl of feathers, and then the dark covers the edges of my eyes, and I live in it for a moment.

I know I'm a liar. Maybe I lied to myself too.

What if the last year has been some kind of wish that I hallucinated into being? What if Aza's funeral was real, and that was the last thing that actually was?

What if I'm just a guy who lost his shit?

What if there's no Magonia? What if there's no any of this?

Maybe there's no country in the sky. Maybe this is Jason Kerwin, seventeen-year-old shit-loser, and maybe my brain has secretly revised itself.

It's preferable to the other idea—that I'm the worst person on earth, who sold out the girl I love, and everything horrible is my fault—

I fall, tearing myself apart as I land. I'm here, on the ground, not in the sky. I don't even know where the sky is.

Or if there is a sky.

Or if there is a me.

Or if there's anything but nothingness.

I'm on my back in the grass, looking up at a darkening flock of birds, the sky covered, coursing over the rest like an oil spill, a rushing tide of wings.

Doesn't anyone understand what's happening?

That's Magonia. Everything up there is wrong.

And Aza. And Eli. And

Oh god

What did I do?

My heart is origamied into a flat packet full of everything
Jason and I ever said to each other, everything we ever whispered.

Every lie he ever told me.

I'm cataloguing every moment of the last year, every time he was probably full of shit, every time he was telling me he loved me when what he really meant was
I'm not who you think I am—

I thought I was strong enough for anything, but I'm not strong enough for this.

Footsteps are coming down the hall. The curtains drop, and fluorescent lights blind me. My cell is open, but open so fast I can't do anything.

Then Heyward's pushed in, and they lock it up again.

“You're not going anywhere unless you talk to me,” she says. “I don't like this either, but we're in here for as long as they feel like keeping you.”

I don't know why she isn't ending me right now. I can't believe she'd ever want to do anything with me but get her revenge.

Imagine the life she would've had on earth.

Imagine the life she's had in Magonia. Her mind poisoned like mine was. Filled with lies about righteous wars, about justifiable annihilation.

Zal and I would've flooded the world.

I am not the Captain's Daughter.

I'm the dictator's.

The zealot's.

The terrorist's daughter.

Which means I belong here. If we're talking about biological inheritance, Heyward's the clean one. I'm the one who's made of danger.

“You have to talk to me,” she says.

I can't be sure if the tightness in my throat is betrayal, or manipulation. I can still only whisper. I point.

“They'll fix that,” she informs me, and signals to a camera I hadn't noticed before, up high in the corner of my cell. Someone up there's been watching me.

Jason's people. Spying on me. I don't even know for how long. Rage. And grief.

After a second I feel the bonds around my voice loosen. Not enough to sing. My song is still pinned like a butterfly in a case. But I can whisper stronger than before.

“Whose side are you on?”

“The side that keeps me alive. Zal, your mother, I was on her side. In the end, her plan was . . . unsustainable. And now? Now it's insane. I left Magonia.” She pauses. “I want to go home.”

“Home?”

“To the life I was supposed to have.”

Her whole body trembles for a second.

“You mean
my
life,” I say.

“Your life,” she replies. “Yes. The one I missed.”

Her face looks like she's telling the truth. Other faces have looked that way.

“This is a place for monsters,” says Heyward. “That's why you're here. It's a place for things SWAB want to use as weaponry against human enemies, and against enemies elsewhere. Do you want to be their weapon? You've done that once before and you refused Zal at the last moment. Will you work for them instead?”

No. It's too much. I've had enough.

“Get away from me,” I tell her.

“You missed the last year in the sky. You missed what happened up there. This is the beginning of a war. Zal's escaped. She's going to make it happen with or without you. They're trying to stop her, but they need the Flock.”

She's scared too, I realize. Which is the strangest thing I've seen today.

“Why?”
I ask. “Why would you come back to earth? You had power. You were a captain.”

“It's a slave kingdom,” she says. “Even for the Breath. We thought we were free, but we were working for Magonia, and we couldn't leave. If you attempt to quit they put a bounty on your head, hunt you down, and kill you. I risked my life coming here, but I did it anyway. Because I wanted to feel . . . what I felt . . . when I was here before. I couldn't let earth get taken away without trying to save it.”

What she
felt
? When? When she met Jason? When she tried to kill him? My heart contracts.

“You don't have to believe me,” she says. “But it's true. You
had this beautiful life, and you didn't ever appreciate it. You had people who loved you. You felt safe. I've never felt that way. I've been learning to fight since I can remember. Now we're all about to be fighting. No one is safe. Unless you help me.”

“Help you?”

“Help them,” she says. She looks up at the camera. “Footage.”

The television in the corner of my cell goes on, and I see the deck of a ship, and then closer in, the ship's wheel. At the wheel is—

I step back involuntarily, queasy, press my back against the wall.

I haven't seen her in a year. I'm already off guard, too open, heart too shaky, and then. My mother.

Her body is covered with more tattoos than she had the last time I saw her, hauled up from the ice in Svalbard, dragged screaming into Maganwetar, a city of whirlwinds and storms.

Magonian tattoos are part of the way our skin is, our loves and hates written on us, visible to everyone. My mother's a criminal. She's a murderer. She's a monster. Her tattoos show it. She has the most violent, brilliant scars.

The footage shows her from behind first, her shoulders, as she steers the ship. And on her back, I see my own face. My whole body rejects the image. I shake.

She has
my face
tattooed on her skin.

Is it love? Hate?

Probably both. I'm part of what made her a monster. Maybe she was already terrible, but then I was kidnapped. She spent fifteen years hunting the sky for me, and I don't know what happened to her in those years. I can't imagine them, and I don't want to. Whatever she is, we're here.

I refocus, forcing myself to look at what the images on the screen are telling me. Dai's beside her, and he's navigating. Caru is there too, tied to the ship. He's screaming, fighting the bonds around his wings, flying out into the sky, and then yanked back in. As he screams, I watch something getting closer, approaching like it was called to the ship, another dark twirling object. Blades. Wings. There are things out there that . . . aren't birds. I don't know what they are.

Zal's sailing her ship through a sky full of Rostrae screaming battle cries, diving against her. I can see her purposefully plowing into the Rostrae closest, running them down, but they're fighting. They're flying at her, even as her ship's cannons shoot into their midst.

Rostrae are falling dead out of the clouds. I gasp, feeling their flight broken, feeling their bones crackling. I don't know these Rostrae, but I'm watching them die.

The video pauses on Zal, her face frozen.

Another film comes onto the screen. This time it's wobbly footage, half-degraded, of more of those things flying; black, birdlike, twisting. There are Magonian ships in this footage, and I watch the black things flying into the sails, watch smoke and flames shoot out of the ship's holds, out off the decks, crew panicking, jumping out into the abyss, batsails burning—

I'm crying when the footage stops. I was already broken.

I remember what I heard Carol say. Is Eli missing? If she is, she can only be up there with Zal, right?

“What's Zal done with my sister? Where is she?”

“Your sister?”

“Eli,” I manage. “Someone took her. It has to be Zal. Who else would it be?” Something occurs to me. “That's why you
were down there, isn't it? That's why her friends saw you. You were sent for Eli?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “It's you. I came . . .
they
came . . . for you. I changed my mind and deflected. No one was sent for Eli.”

I choke on that, and then swallow and keep myself together. I have to stay together. I can't lose it. I have to be strong enough, even if—

Even if anything.

This is what
chosen
really means.

People choose you. People tell you, this is your job forever. You have no choice. You have no say. Running, hiding is useless.

Heyward just looks at me, weirdly patient.

“I don't know anything about Eli being taken. Zal Quel was in prison until a few days ago. Dai was released a few months ago, I don't know why or how. Those black things, Nightingales, they call them. They're some kind of new weapon. And they're deadly.”

These other birds, these Nightingales, are the things Caru saw on the edge of the sky, on my birthday. The visions he sent showed me that.

The Nightingales are singing Magonian song. I play it back in my head. No, not just Magonian, more precise than that. They're singing
Caru's
song, but twisted somehow.

How is that possible? Each heartbird's song is different. None more so than Caru's.

How are they singing
my
heartbird's song?

Zal didn't get what she wanted. I broke her plans for drowning the earth. What does she want now?

“She wants
you
,” says Heyward. “Why do you think she
took
your
bird? Just for fun? She can't sing with Caru. She wants Caru because
you
want Caru. She's drawing you out. Otherwise, she'd kill him.”

On the screen, lightning flashing, dark clouds full of stormsharks. Dai's face, covered in rain, and then Zal's face, wet with both rain and blood. Not her own blood.

“How do you have this? How am I seeing it?”

“They have airborne spy cameras up there,” Heyward says. “
They
, as in the people in charge of this ship.”

Where is Eli? Where is she?

“Audio,” says Heyward. The screens go dark and something crackles on in the cell. Zal's voice. I'd know it anywhere. She's speaking to a crowd.

“Magonians,” she says. “Your leaders are liars. Your slaves have rebelled. Your children starve, and your songs shrivel. The food you take from the drowners is poisoned, and their crops kill your families. We must take Maganwetar, and once they can no longer oppose us, we must destroy the drowners.”

I hear the Nightingales screaming a tormented, twisted Caru song. I hear the shrieks that call for flood, for death, for the sky raining rocks. I hear a cheering crowd speaking Magonian.

My stomach twists as I listen. I ran back to my family on earth, and I left Zal and Dai alive. Maybe if I'd stayed in Magonia—

“ZAL QUEL! HAIL!”

Heyward grabs my face and turns it so I look at her.

“Old stories are tempting to a starving sky,” she says. “She's whipping them up, preying on their honor and hunger, to get them to war against the ground. There are singers up there in her service, and weather she has control over.”

I lurch back so she's not touching me.

“Did she send you to kill me?” I sputter.

Heyward looks at me. “No. I told you the truth. I left Magonia. I thought I could just—”

“What?”

“Change my life,” she says, and her face is rueful. “What was I thinking? Now Zal Quel is loose. There is no more home.”

A shiver racks my exhausted body. “Someone has to sing her into silence,” I say. “I don't think I can do it alone.”

Heyward nods. “We need to find the Flock.”

Frustration level to ten. “The Flock. Again. What is it?!”

“All I know is that it's strong enough to kill her. They've been watching Zal a long time. The Flock is the only thing she fears. I thought you'd know more.”

I don't know what she's talking about, and it makes me angry. The camera above me makes me angry. And in my rage I have a tiny capacity for song. I force sounds out and shriek a high and damaging note, things starting to twist in the air around us.

I feel the cell starting to bend to my tones, but Heyward gives me a look.

It's a look that says
wait
.

I blink.

Then she's leaping toward me, flipping backward, her leg up in the air and kicking. She hits me in the throat, and I'm gagging, choking, bent over double, trying to scream, and no one's coming to help me, no one's opening the cell. There are soldiers outside watching her as she grabs my arms and twists them, as she puts her hands around my neck.

I wait for her to break it like a bird's throat, but instead I find—

The thing they've done to my voice—it's broken instead. Heyward's mouth is just over my ear and she whispers, “We're getting out of here. I don't work for them. I work for myself.”

I feel Heyward's hands around my throat, prying at something, and I feel my song opening up again, more and more, until I know I have the whole thing, my voice back. She unlatches something I can't see from around my neck, and I'm free.

“NOW!” Heyward shouts.

And I sing.

I sing the walls of the cell into shattering, like that, sand from glass, sand to water. The floor of the prison is suddenly covered with ice. I sing a haywire song, something that isn't anything I know, all the elements at once, no Caru, but I can sing it anyway.

The corners of the prison light up, and the guards each find themselves surrounded by fire. I sing softness into the walls, mire into the floors, and they're up to their ankles, their boots caught as they shout for help. Heyward is with me as we jump the barrier that used to be a cell wall, and we run as I sing other cells into collapse.

My song is full of grief and rage. I don't know what I'm doing.

My song is Jason's betrayal and Eli's absence and Caru, trapped. My song is the nightmare of being my mother's daughter.

An empty center to my heart, and the song echoes inside it.

The notes course through my bloodstream, like the cold of an IV when it's just inserted, when all of a sudden your blood turns to ice and saline. Soldier-sailors run through the prison, wearing
body armor and flotation gear, trying to cover their ears.

I sing the glass of the cells into oblivion. I sing a prison break, because even though I don't know what these prisoners did, I can't leave them to be tortured.