Magonia (22 page)

“He sings nonetheless,” says Zal, but something in her face, something in her movements makes me wonder.

“When they broke your bond, did it make him insane?” I ask. “Or was he already insane?”

“You’ve heard the remnant of his song,” she says, her face grief-stricken. “I thought I could heal him, but I could not.” She shakes herself. “Nothing can be done about that now. All we can do is move forward.

“Ley and I, when we were young as you, read the stories of an old Magonia, one free from our destructive relationship with drowners. Those stories are not fantasy, but history. I believed in them. I thought she did too, but she lied.”

Something occurs to me.

“So,” I say, “why? Why did they punish you? What was your crime?”

The look in her eyes startles me. I feel something, and for a second, I don’t know what it is.

“Telling the truth,” she says.

“About what?”

Dai appears from belowdecks, swinging himself around aft.

Zal nods in his direction. “Dai was hatched on a Magonian shipsettlement largely forgotten by the authorities. Once they’d had plenty of food, grain from below, their own small ships to forage, but when the drowner world began to dry up and they needed assistance, Maganwetar denied their rations. His people’s ships degraded into splinters. Their batsails died of old age. There were no squallwhale where he came from. There was no rain at all. His people starved slowly, as below them, drowners starved too. We could see drowner cities burning beneath us, and the green going to brown.

“Their Rostrae fled, taking flight for better forage, nesting in the rigging of official vessels. His father went on a mission, elected by the shipsettlement council. Dai was seven. He was with his father in the launch when they becalmed. They drifted, hungry and parched.

“Dai’s father died trying to let himself down from the launch and onto the ground. His body fell into the desert, his bones picked clean by vultures.”

As Dai works nearby, I notice his arm. A long scar runs its length, something I’d seen, but not understood. Everyone in Magonia seems to have scars.

“Vultures. Similar to the ones that tried to get you.” Zal grins halfheartedly. “He was thin as a husk, and so he mostly escaped predators, but when he returned home, his world was broken into
pieces, everyone skin and bones, everyone dying. His mother. His brother. His sister. Starved by the drowners, who broke their own land and scorched their own earth. And forgotten by a capital who cared nothing for them.”

I take another look, longer this time, at the Magonian boy—my commander, and my taskmaster since boarding
Amina Pennarum
. Suddenly, he seems like only that to me—a boy. Maybe not as strong or sure as he pretends he is.

“I found him,” Zal says, following my gaze. “This ship was hunting for
you
, Aza, searching the skies of the world, when we happened through Dai’s section of horizon. It had not then occurred to me that you might have been dropped undersky. I sailed through his drifting shipsettlement, and docked my own ship, traveling by jolly boat through the empty skyways.

“Dai saw
Amina Pennarum
and stowed away on her, and, days later, I found him in our hold, eating a handful of corn. My heart aches at the pain Dai has known. It is the kind no creature—human, Rostrae, or Magonian—should have to suffer.

“I taught Dai how to sing,” Zal continues. “And I spent years reading the history of Magonia in eggshells, hatchlings that perished before they could fly, abandoned ships, skypictures and squallwhale song—”

This gives me an image of Zal I wasn’t expecting. A Zal kind of in the same category as me, in the library, reading and reading.

“I voyaged through the parts of the sky that went bad first. I watched the heavens toss with winds we had not before seen, whipping storms we had nothing to do with creating. Below us, the seas flooded over drowner coastlines, and crops died.

“They willfully destroy the earth they live on, and in doing so, they destroy us,” says Zal.

They.

What she means is all of humanity.

I try to think of Magonia as I would have when I lived on earth as a human. A parasitic kingdom feeding off of earth’s crops?

But then I imagine Dai, tiny, hungry, in a boat all alone.

I think of my family in their car, driving from place to place, spitting toxic things up into the sky and spilling them down into the ground.

Down there, cities glow out of the dark, red and green and white. As though the whole planet is made of cars trying to get somewhere.

I feel like I was blind when I was down there, and now, what?

“What do you want from me?” I ask.

“Look there,” Zal says.

I follow her finger, pointing into the dark. A mass of clouds which, as we draw near, resolve into something else. Zal stands beside me, her wiry weight against my shoulder. She points to a place darker than the rest.

Our pod of squallwhales, I realize suddenly, isn’t with us. “Where are—”

“They won’t come here,” Dai says, approaching us and once again breaking into my thoughts. “They await us on the other side. Look, Aza. Look at what the drowners did with their poisons.”

Dai aims a light at the mass, and then I see it. It moves a fluke, and then another. A small eye, rolling in the giant squallwhale’s head. There’s a wound on its skin, dripping from its tear duct to its jaw. There are wounds all over the squallwhale, not the wounds of weapons, but of something else. Burns. Bleeding.

It tries to sing, but it can’t. I watch as from its blowhole comes something red. I watch it fall, and I know exactly what this rain is called on earth.

The squallwhale keens and rolls in agony. It blows a storm from its blowhole, toxic red and black shifting to clear, with an oily shimmer. I’ve never seen a squallwhale storm-sing with anything but joy before. The sight makes me feel sick. I have to swallow bile.

“There are many of these, all over Magonia. New ones are being born daily, making storms of poison,” Zal says.

I look into the squallwhale’s eye, and want to cry too.
Sing
, it says, looking at me.
Nightsong
.
Deathsong.
As I watch, several more wounded whales appear and swim past us, their bodies glowing with wrongness.

They can’t even talk to one another. Most of the noise they make is just jumble and screaming.

Milekt starts up a song from inside my chest, and what comes with that song is fury. It shakes me.

As Milekt’s song swells, my momentary thoughts of all the good people on earth, of Eli and my parents and Jason, get tangled up with a rage that makes me clench my fists. I feel Dai beside me, vibrating, too, and in his chest, Svilken sings.

“What are we really doing?” I ask Zal at last. “Where are we going?”

She looks hard at me, staring into my eyes. “The drowners are destroying us, and so are the policies of Maganwetar.” She pauses before continuing. “The capital’s position is that Magonia has no choice but to live hidden from those below. Maganwetar is not the same as most of Magonia, a hungering mass of citizens, scavenging the crops below it wherever it moves. It takes its tithe from whichever ships acquire the best forage. There is more food in Maganwetar than its citizens need, but the capital demands the best of everything, and its leavings are the bruised and the moldering, the shriveled and the withered. Drowners starve and poison even their own people. Yet Maganwetar remains locked in the past when it comes to our policy.”

“It is no longer possible to follow the official position,” Dai says. “The drowners destroy our skies, our people, and our air.”

Humans don’t know about Magonia. They don’t know what they’re doing
, a part of me wants to shout. But I’m looking at this giant animal singing acid rain. And earth knows about acid rain but does nothing to prevent it.

“The capital believes we need drowner crops,” Zal says. “But it’s a myth. There is another way.”

I can’t imagine a miracle that will fix all the burnt, broken places on the face of the earth.

“How?” I ask.

“We need you to retrieve something,” Zal says. “The drowners put it beneath rocks, in a place they thought it would be safe. We need you to turn those rocks to water. You and Dai. Together you’ll be strong enough. Then, we’ll bring it up into the sky.”

“What is it?”

“Aza,” she says. “If the drowners starve themselves, we starve with them. If they destroy our skies, we die with them. We must take back what belongs to us. You will help us steal something that was stolen from us, long ago.” Zal smiles and it pulls me in. “The drowners have our plants underground. In a hidden vault in the frozen North.”

The crew’s been cautious with me, I realize now. But there are a lot of stories about the Magonian epiphytes, because apparently they were magic food, enough for all of the skydwellers. Did some kind of bad bargain with earth take them away?

Are these plants the only thing Magonia wants?

“Why doesn’t Magonia just negotiate with earth?” I say, and Dai looks at me and laughs.

I imagine a delegation of Magonians landing on the lawn of the White House, asking to talk to the president about trade. It’s pretty obvious that said delegation would get shot out of the sky before it even landed.

Okay, yeah. I get that.

“There can be no more wishing for our people, no more relying on others to do the right things. Do you see what you can do? For me? For us?” Zal taps her chest, right over her scar.

I look up at Zal. “A plant,” I say.

She nods. “A plant, yes. And so, so much more. You, Aza, will save your entire people.”

Even though a small part of my brain is muttering about how no deal is ever simple, the angry song Milekt sang is still rattling around in my head, and it drowns out everything else.

“Yes,” I say to Zal.

“Do you swear to it?” she says, and puts out her hand, blue and calloused.

I offer my own hand, but I’m not prepared when she slashes my palm with a tiny silver knife. Inky blood, and pain, a searing sense of flood. I stagger back, but she presses her own palm to mine, her own cut.

“We already share blood, daughter,” she says. “But this is ritual. We’re vowed to our mission now. Swear it.”

Her blood drips onto the deck as the pod of injured squallwhales swim slowly past us.

“I swear,” I say, watching them go, listening to their broken, breathless song. Dai stands beside me, his hand on my back. Somewhere deep in the ship I hear Caru call, just once, a long wail in the dark.

“Daughter,” Zal says, and kisses my forehead.

I close my eyes and for just a moment, I’m on earth again. My mom putting me to bed, keeping me safe, keeping me alive every night.

Then I open my eyes and it’s cold wind all around me, and the fading song of the sick squallwhales as we sail away from them and into the night.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I’m at Dai’s cabin the next morning, pounding on the door.
He opens it, looking like I woke him up.

Does he ever wear a shirt? He stretches his arms out. I try not to be taken in by the look of him, but it’s useless.

He jumped off the boat to save me from vultures and pirates.

Um, you were already in the process of saving yourself
, my brain points out, but I’m not in the mood for logic.

Dai cared. So I can trust him. I want to trust
someone.

“So, I’m not just a normal Magonian singer. My song is different, right?”

“What do you think?” he says, and grins.

“And according to Zal, according to Wedda, according to everyone, you’re supposed to sing with me,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice under control. “That’s supposedly part of your official job description.”

“It is,” he says.

“How come you never do?”

“Because you weren’t ready.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you never did before what you did yesterday,” he says, fairly reasonably.

His eyebrow goes up in a way that reminds me of—

I imagine Jenny Green ringing Jason’s doorbell, looking at him with sympathy in the wake of my death, and him answering the door muttering pi.

No. Jason wouldn’t actually want Jenny Green.

(He might.)

He wouldn’t.

Dai must see the messed-up look on my face.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and he puts his hand on my shoulder. The warmth of it makes its way
through my jacket, and it apparently doesn’t matter that I just got derailed by sad, I feel my heart pounding as though I’m singing all over again.

I’m standing here with a boy who lost his own family, in a totally different way than I lost mine. Who am I to be sad? My family on earth is still alive. His isn’t.

“Fine,” I say, even though I have to grab my own fingers and hold my own hand to keep from touching him. It’s such a want that it’s almost not a want at all, but a need, like the need for water or food.