“Get to her!” I yelled to the matriarch beneath my toes, and she was already doing it, already slicing through blue ocean, around the back of her bleeding son, to cut off a hunter, to get to the tiny being without gills. And the orcas, like waterborne missiles, convened, surrounding the thrashing thing. They released a hailstorm of sound bullets at it. The bullets—the same horrible frequency as the creature’s screams, in every color I know—bounced off his shell, some penetrating the weaker parts of him. They were jamming his echolocation. Blinding him. The monster stopped thrashing, MoFo eyes swiveling, their stalks waving, like the fingers pockmarked across its back must have once done. The Changed One was stunned, jerking violently, orienting. Its antennae flailed, toothbrush bristles twitching, hunting in that ravenous way they do once they’ve succumbed to this rot. The matriarch pulled alongside my nestling. I tugged at her with my beak as she thrust her vigorous arms up onto the body of the old whale, heaving herself up next to her dorsal fin.
“Go now!” I yelled to the matriarch. She didn’t. She held her space. One whale, in an ambush at torpedo speed, clenched down on some of the carapace’s rigor mortis fingers, flipping the Changed One onto its back. It swung its remaining claw in retaliation, drawing a red wound along the whale’s cheek. Upside down, the hideous underbelly, the rotten plastron of the Changed One showed. Bloody tissue and clumped algae smeared its pallid shell. Another whale emitted a deep sonic boom of sound. The thundering force of indigo hit so hard, algae and wet flesh were blown off the Changed One. It was some sort of signaling, because I saw—from the top of the matriarch and the careful confines of Dee’s pulsing fingers—the large male whale, the bleeding son, charge the underside of the Changed One. He bit down on a soft spot, where the pod had signaled. He tore the creature’s shell clean off its body. And underneath was a MoFo body.
Dee stared at the scene from above the waterline. She gasped. The body was deeply deformed, amputated from finishing its transformation. Emaciated and maggot white, limbs like long-lost bones. Feet ripped off by the whale where they had fused to shell. The feet sank with the empty carapace, releasing bubbles of protest. The MoFo was almost transparent. A hole where genitals should have been. Its imitation crustacean head too big, empty eyes still searching, it was now silent. It started a slow descent. Sinking down, down, down to its lowest place yet—the bottom of the ocean floor.
The orcas circled the matriarch’s son, pinging him with gentle sounds shaped like maple leaves, glinting green and silver. Dee nuzzled me with her beak, then placed me gently onto the matriarch. Before I could protest, Dee had plunged into the red waters, thrashing over to the male whale. She nuzzled him, running her hand across his skin, careful to avoid the gleaming raw gash in his side. She lifted herself onto his back, red rivers running off her. She lay her head onto his shining skin and stroked her fingers across his back, as if he were a beloved owlet or baby Oomingmak shivering for his life. She began the hum of the hive. Hum of healing. The killer whales started to hum back to her. The pod slipped into formation and began to move.
I looked back, and all I saw were the dashed dreams of a boat and a sad swatch of distressed denim floating on red water.
The MoFo hadn’t finished evolving; the weakest part of his shell had left him vulnerable. The whales had known. They’d seen inside of him with sound.
And Dee had known something. The Changed One had gone after her, the implications of this I couldn’t bring myself to think about. But she had named her species. And she had not been afraid or let The Black Tide take her. I looked at her, surrounded by great guardians, the sea wolves, and saw that she was busy with her healing, humming to the whale, smoothing her hand and heart across his ivory eye patch. Dee wasn’t panicking about who she was and what she might become. She knew who she was. A stargazer. Evergreen daughter. Buddy to the bees. Empress of owls and last legacy. A Blackwing’s very best. A healer. My gutsy, ocean-hearted nestling was back. The whales had given her that.
“Crow.” The matriarch addressed me in a controlled, hushed tone. “This is what you’ve been hiding from your nestling? This is the dark truth of Aura?”
I nodded as we skimmed the top of an ocean that seemed to be contemplating this too. “There are different types of them. Yes. Many in Aura.”
“So…now we have met the Beast.” And I thought of the orca’s algae-covered story.
They delivered the last human to the glass-eyed Beast so that mankind could pay back an earthly debt. So that mankind could, in its last blowhole breath, be reminded of itself.
“I fear for your nestling,” she said, and my blood froze. I had never told her I called Dee my nestling. Perhaps she read it on my heart.
As we traveled, the pod spoke to one another in a hectic hive of morphing shapes too rapid and ornate for me to fully comprehend, just as their names were. But I could extrapolate. The orcas hadn’t seen anything like this. Which meant that what was happening in Aura had only just started in Echo. It meant that The Changing was not just happening on land. It was happening across worlds.
Footnotes
1Dammit, the guy who came up with that name would have loved my fin joke.
2MoFos smacked themselves to express approval.
Chapter 13
S.T.
Some Sloshy Bit of the Bering Sea
According to one of the books at the Nightmute library, salt water has many beneficial and healing properties. It can be an antibiotic, good for detoxing and skin infections, and apparently MoFos used it for “colonic irrigation,” which sounds very sophisticated and I presume it to be some sort of farming practice, perhaps the judicious hydrating of cucumbers. After days and nights of being sloshed around and pummeled with salt, Dee’s hair now resembled a homeless Angora rabbit. Yours truly was a bitter old crabstick—cantankerous, not my charming self. I learned that the Ocean is a living being with liquid blue bones. At times she felt like the gentle womb of a benevolent mother. Other times, she was a jade-eyed dragon. And I don’t think she liked me very much. She garbled from a moist mouth, gushing an ancient, burbling language that might as well have been Klingon. She had brackish moods and mysterious appetites and seemed frustrated in her search for something, her desire ferocious and foamy. I wished she’d figure it out—my damn legs felt like microwaved Pocky sticks. It was no warm bath in the sink, let me tell ya. Our drinking water came when the sky felt generous enough to urinate on us. Mouth and beak opened to fat clouds, and we’d gulp as if we were crispy lumps of moss desiccated by drought. I was getting sick of all this kumbaya singing that was going on. If it weren’t for the endless supply of salmon heads that were lobbed in my direction, I would have asked everyone for a big ol’ slice of “shut the fuck up.”
Dee, however, was happier than I’d seen her in years, the thrill of the water world glistening in her eyes. One morning, as the ocean mimicked glass, a ring of sea otters swarmed her, paws blooming open like flowers to offer her shellfish. She slurped each like a fine Jell-O shot. We watched the otters hold paws, so they didn’t lose one another in the ocean’s vastitude, and wrap their little pups in kelp. We swam alongside a pod of narwhals, who were adventuring south into uncharted territory. In this terrifying new world, what a tremendous advantage to be born with a sword sticking out of your melon. They lifted their speckled heads from the water and waved their teeth at us for good luck.1 We met ratfish and lingcod, spot shrimp and rock crabs. Dall’s porpoises, also sensing the temporary truce with the orcas, leapt above the waves and frolicked, calling to Dee, squealing with excitement when she responded.
“She is real!” called a chatty pod of beluga whales, their skin like gloating moons. Even wolf eels, the uncontested winners of the “Ocean’s Ugliest” contest (imagine a vacuum-packed Philly cheesesteak, blasted overnight in an industrial-sized kiln, and bedazzled with gerbil turds), showed up. They oozed grimly to the surface to see if what they’d heard was true, that Dee was not the tale of a whale. Tiny, globular moon jellies pulsed an
d strobed nightclub colors in her presence. Great lion’s mane jellyfish waved tangled masses of orange-sherbet tentacles among the scaly shimmy of the excited fish that hung with them for protection. Anemones and the scaled, even those venturing up from the ocean’s secret depths—longnose lancet fish, mosshead warbonnet, kelp poacher, and krill—pulsed with waves of delight. Dee was an Echo celebrity.
“No paparazzi; move along, please!” I told them. No one understood me—story of my life. Dee was finally happy, but I was a grumpster. I missed Migisi and the feathereds. I was worried constantly and had gnarly stomach issues. I’d never spent so much time away from the rumination of tree roots, from the peep and chirrup of Aura’s network. From a world where aspens quake and cedars weep. I longed for the sylvan spells a forest casts. I felt like I was withering. Plus, I was molting, so I was the physical embodiment of Gene Simmons’s toupee, if it had absconded from a yacht by way of a salty breeze in order to brawl with a boat propeller.
There are no words in any language for the cocktail of feelings that shook inside me when, after donkey’s years at sea, shoreline came into view. Excitement thrashed its wings. Panic clamped its jaws on the chambers of my heart. Dread, an anvil inside me, bottomed out. And then, a tiny flicker of butterfly beats. Hope.
The dorsal fins, all twelve (I think), cruised like smoke-black spirits through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, land on either side of us calling to me. On one side, Canada; on the other, the United States of America. I had a clear mind map of this whole region from working on the islands with Big Jim! I listened for Aura’s call, but the shoreline was still too far. Trees were broccoli florets, buildings hidden by great green beards. And suddenly we were gliding through the familiar, whispery waters of Puget Sound, passing Port Townsend and Marrowstone Island. Then Whidbey Island was on my left, and I felt a siren song so strong that I finally understood the unnerving inclination to burst into a Broadway number, shared by the black-billed magpie and the Lin-Manuel Miranda. I hopped up and down, longing to feel the tickle of grass and the great rumble of Web—that matrix of minerals below. Dee’s eyes were large as plates (more tectonic than dinner), drinking in the newness of it all. My nestling stared at the regal, icing-capped giants of the Olympic mountain range with cracked lips parted.
Just when I thought I’d explode from the anticipation, we were there. To our left, a long pier jutted out into the water, where the ferries used to pollinate, dropping off their passengers with a bee’s diligence. A sliver of beach hugged the mainland. Driftwood logs for MoFo sitting pleasure. A cement walkway. A wooden statue—some MoFo’s loving rendering of a killer whale. In an eerie display of art imitating life, the whale had a chunk of wood missing from its back and the distinctive tattoo of teeth.
Against every earthly and waterly odd we had made it to land. We were in Edmonds.
I cawed out. “Hooray! Hoor—”
The orca matriarch bucked, sending me into the chilly waters of Puget Sound. I flapped frantically, scuttling onto her back like a scolded Suffolk sheep.
Dee turned to face Edmonds—finally, my nestling was here, looking at our homeland—and, oh, I had so much to show her! I wanted to show her where Big Jim and I came in this little city to fix electrical shitstorms, to lay pipes and then lay on the floor after slamming happy hour mai tais at A Very Taki Tiki Bar and Grill on Main. Big Jim met Tiffany S. for a drink there soon after they first met. Through the walls, a MoFo sang about three little birds on his doorstep, and I liked it. Tiffany S. wore a dress tight as sausage casing and Big Jim wore a sunburn so bad he looked like slapped ham. Big Jim’s Very Taki advances seemed Very Obvious to me; he spent most of the evening staring at her boobs. I had always found his obsession with them odd—his own chiminea-shaped boobs seemed perfectly adequate to me.
“He wants to get to know you better; he likes you,” Big Jim told Tiffany S. as I stuck my beak into her face. It wasn’t at all true. I was already on the fence about her after she wouldn’t let me pluck the sequins off her purse. I was in her face because I’d seen a spider on her eye, so I snatched it off and ate it.
“My eyelash!” she screeched. Big Jim spent the rest of the date apologizing profusely to her boobs.
Big Jim kissed Tiffany S. goodbye on her nose and watched her wobble away in high heels, contrails of Chanel N°5 trailing behind her. As we stumbled from A Very Taki Tiki Bar, the Edmonds murder watched me from Starbucks’s rain gutters. I sat on Big Jim’s shoulder as he zigzagged back to the Ford F-150, where we slept that night, Dennis and Big Jim in an Olympic snore-off. An Edmonds fledgling had cried out to me. He’d been quickly shushed by his mother, and I—emboldened by a few sips of mai tai—had squawked, “Fuck you, dudes!” at them in Big Jim’s voice, causing him to convulse with laughter.
This memory once brought me pride. Now, it made me want to hide in a sewer hole. I wish I’d known then that a crow is a brilliant being, worthy of the utmost respect. Maybe I’d been riled up after sensing that something was different about Tiffany S. There had been so many MoFo ladies—the librarian, the lawyer, the gastromancer who conversed with dead people via tummy rumbles, the psychic we underestimated (she’d told Big Jim that the human population was about to be wiped out, which had really killed the vibe of mini golf), the bodybuilder, the one who wouldn’t let me steal her earrings, the pet oncologist, the one from Zimbabwe, the one with six children, the one with dead mice in her pockets (Detective Turd eked them out, and she had to come clean about being an Indian python mom). These strange species of MoFo blew in and out of our lives like empty Cheeto® bags. But Tiffany S. and Big Jim had a fire between them. Maybe I’d felt an overwhelming instinct to put it out.
The whales slowed, approaching shallow water. They would not go farther. Dee seemed to understand what was happening. She nuzzled the back of the male whale, his side stolen by the claw of some unspeakable thing now Pepto-Bismol pink. She whispered sounds I couldn’t hear.
“Our world is changing as yours has. We all have a part to play. Stay brave, Crow,” said the matriarch in a snowing of small sounds, a peppering of purple.
“We will not forget that you saved us,” I said to her.
“Our bones will remember one another. We were swept together by the stars and the sounds of the sea. I hope that your heart song is heard and that we hear it before it is our turn to come to the beach. Dee is the last of our sister species. Remind her of the code of together. We all swim alongside one another.”
“Um, yes,” I answered. I hadn’t a clue. Honestly, she might as well have been reciting Shakespeare in Hungarian while wearing a retainer.
And then another sound filled us. Raindrop notes bouncing off clouds. Dee’s eyes shot toward the beach. There, on top of a bleached throne of driftwood, was a sky queen.
Migisi. Relief broke me open. Dee let out the ebullient call of a bald eagle. She leapt into the sound and started a cetacean’s swim to shore, stopping next to the matriarch to allow me to hop onto her head. Dark sails of dorsal fins shrank and disappeared into the horizon. We took a few moments to celebrate and chirrup, nestling our toes into the sand, overwhelmed with grainy gratitude.
Land. Home.
“Migisi! Where have you—”
Migisi fluttered down to the beachfront and gave me a look that could puree a pineapple. Her eyes were the twin daggers of some son of a gun with an ax to grind. I swallowed my question but was so happy to see her that I squeaked. I like to think she noticed how strong my thighs were after an eternity of squatting on a cetacean. Migisi landed—graceful as airborne silk—on Dee’s arm. Eagle and MoFo stared at one another, eyes glittering.
But we now had a major problem on our wings. The sooner we got to UW Bothell to reconnect with my murder and get Dee into a safety bunker like the one in Toksook, the sooner I could breathe again. But what lay between us and Bothell remained as mysterious as the contents of Tiffany S.’s purse.
I knew from years of listening to Aura, to horrible sounds and terrifying warni
ngs, that whatever had happened, it was bad.
Dee tucked me into her arm. Rivulets of Puget Sound slipped from her face, rolling off my feathers. We began a tense trek up the beach, along the cement trail, across rusted train tracks, and up Edmonds’s Main Street.
And holy Funyuns, had it changed.
Edmonds looked like a Jägermeister hangover.
Grass sprouted its revenge between pavement cracks. Jungled weeds looked like magical beanstalks for mice. Vines hung everywhere, draped like Christmas lights that once festooned this city, a city that used to glow with winter cheer. Tree limbs had ransacked storefronts with the Hulk’s pea-green wrath. Dee padded catlike in her wet mukluks. Her heart pounding against her rib cage caused my wing to pulse.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “We’re home.” It just didn’t feel like it. Dee lay all her trust in me as she strode into a strange, eerie city. Migisi’s daffodil eyes ricocheted like pinballs, and we needed them to. The last time I’d tuned in to Aura, I’d heard chaos. And now—nothing but maddening silence. Where were the birds?
Ramshackle stores. Busted windows. Emerald ferns bursting in viridescent fireworks. My skin shivered. Dee squeezed me gently in her palm. We passed a theater whose movie posters had been clawed out. Sign hanging like a loose tooth. Caved roof, its belly filled with brick and debris. A Schwinn bicycle being slowly digested by weeds. To the right, movement—creepy curtains of an old ’50s-style diner floating like ghoulish fingers. A MoFo mannequin in roller skates severed at the torso. Closer inspection revealed her eyes had been gouged out. Dee knelt to touch the statue’s turquoise hat. My heartbeat made my vision throb. What did she make of this? Everything here was new to her. A flash of anger overtook me. Dee wasn’t getting to see the real Edmonds—a proper movie theater, the real replication of a 1950s burger bar. She was owed authenticity—clean streets, trimmed grass, the plump smell of a burger arguing with a grill, cheese oozing lazily over its sides. She was given a cheap imitation, a masterpiece ravaged and shat upon. A hollow home.
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