Magonia

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  She reminds me so much of a nurse; matter-of-fact, and intolerant of smack. I have a pang of good memory, a nurse laughing in the middle of the night, hearing it down the hallway outside my hospital room. Oh god, where am I? What happened to me?

  Wedda gives me a tight blue jacket and trousers, a shirt and underwear made of something soft. Then she tugs at me until I’m dressed. So much for being a functional person who can do everything for herself. I feel so weak that I barely understand buttons, and these buttons are more along the lines of hooks.

  “But,” I say hopelessly. “What’s Rostrae?”

  “You were taken when you were very small. You remember nothing at all, do you?”

  “Taken.”

  She nods, as though Taken isn’t a thing. But it is.

  “A Rostra, little one, is what the people below would call a bird. Except that Rostrae are birds who aren’t always birds,” she says. “My kind travels in drowner skies, and up here too. Not all birds you see below are like us. Only a few.”

  I think about birds: crows, magpies, sparrows. I imagine a whole flock of geese shape-shifting into creatures like Wedda, but on the surface of a lake. There are fairy tales with that sort of thing in them. And ancient myths.

  I think about all the birds on my lawn that day, whenever that day was. It’s a firm piece of memory—all those many kinds of birds, staring at me, and ropes flying through the window—

  Also Drowner? What’s a drowner?

  She pushes my feet into boots made of gray leather. “These, for example, are made of dove skin,” she informs me. “Not Rostrae.”

  Right. I feel their fluttering silenced hearts through their dead skin.

  Nope. No, that is impossible. I shake my head. I do not understand any of that.

  “Are you prepared, nestling?” Wedda asks, fluffing her feathers back into place.

  “For what?”

  “It’s time for you to meet the ship.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Captain!” Wedda shouts. “Aza Ray Quel is awake!”

  Outside the cabin, birds screech, and with a big whoosh of weird I realize the noise I’ve been hearing is language, birds arguing about who gets to see me first.

  The door bangs open, and a rush of not-people enter. Wings of all colors, and beneath the wings are faces. I take a queasy step backward, and Wedda keeps me stable.

  Oh god, Aza. What’s happening?

  Bright blue feathers on a girl with an indigo mohawk. Red-feathered breast on a man with a long skinny face and dark hair.

  Rostrae. All in uniform.

  They bow. I don’t know why.

  Then there are the others, just a few of them, uniformed as well, wearing medals and insignia. These are tall, thin people who at first look human, but have dark blue lips and blue skin. Delicate bones, pale cloudy patterns on throats. If I saw them against the blue sky, I might not see them at all. They’re like humans, enough like humans that—

  What are we talking about here, Aza? What, exactly, are we talking about?

  Humans?! LIKE humans?!

  You don’t believe in this. This is UFOs and tinfoil hats and hoax-central, Jason Kerwin-style. This is—

  Beautiful, interrupts my brain, at which point the rest of my senses notice the tall blue person standing directly in front of me. His skin is no color that exists. Bluer than mine has ever been. He has black hair and eyes so dark I can’t see the pupils. He’s staring at me so intensely that it’s not a certainty I won’t become a crumpled-up pile of knees and elbows. I make an embarrassing snorting sound, which is me choking on nothing.

  The boy looks me up and down, and I feel myself blushing crazily. I glance down quickly, because I feel as though I might be naked again, but I’m totally covered. Good thing Wedda was in charge of buttons.

  “Aza Ray Quel is skin and bones,” barks the boy, and looks accusingly toward Wedda. “She’s supposed to be fit for duty. Can she even walk? Can she sing? She is half what she should be. By the Breath, I thought she was supposed to be the one.”

  He puts out his hand and pokes my shoulder, hard, which mobilizes me.

  “Excuse me?” I manage. “Who are you?”

  Everyone’s staring at me, diagramming me, bird people and blue people alike. They’re making little sounds of displeasure. “Can someone please tell me why I’m here?”

  “This can’t be right,” one of the blue people says to Wedda. “This pitiful nestling cannot be the one we’ve been hunting all this time, Aza the Kidnapped. She’s nothing.”

  “She’s damaged by her time among the drowners,” someone else says.

  “And by the Breath that brought her aboard. That probably damaged her too. It carried her,” says another, in a tone of revulsion and horror. “I heard it cut her from the skin she was in. Unspeakable.”

  The room shudders.

  “It’s shocking she lives at all, after that,” says the first blue person.

  I feel seasick now. One of the blue people touches my chest with sharp knuckles, prodding, and I hear the bird inside my lung trilling, raspy and muffled.

  “Her canwr’s nested in her lung,” Wedda says. “He’d never nest in another. That’s proof enough for the captain, and it’s proof enough for me.”

  There’s a sudden jostling, a murmuring. Whispers and sounds of discomfort. Everyone seems paralyzed, and then everyone’s standing at attention.

  Someone’s come in. A woman tall enough to brush the ceiling.

  “Captain,” says one of my visitors. “We’ve been assessing the new addition to Amina Pennarum—”

  The woman snarls at the rest of the people in the room. “You presume to discuss her condition without me? You presume to debate whether she is who and what I say she is?”

  She’s right in front of me then, bending over me. The woman has coils of black hair twisted into complicated knots, oil-field slick eyes atop navy blue. Slanted cheekbones. Sharp nose, eyebrows like slashes of ink, arms ribboned with tattoos, spirals, feathers, and clouds made of words.

  I recognize her. I know her face. I know her tattoos.

  I know her. I’ve been dreaming about her for years. The two of us. A flock of birds.

  The woman reaches out a trembling hand and touches my face.

  “Ah . . . zah,” she whispers, the voice not coming from her mouth, but from her throat.

  The way she says my name is almost the way Jason and I say it when we’re leaving room for the &. Nobody else says it that way. Her voice grinds. It’s not the same as the other blue-person voices in the room, which are smooth. There’s something different about it. It’s harsher, stranger, a wounded whisper.

  “I’m Aza,” I squeak, in the most normal voice I can manage.

  She turns to Wedda.

  “She’s healthy? Her fever’s down?”

  “It is,” says Wedda. “She’s regaining her strength.”

  “Explanations?” I try to say, but my voice is dying in my throat. I look down at my blue hands. They are extremely blue. Too blue.

  The woman (the captain?) touches my face again, with cold, pointed fingers. I want my family very hard. I want my mom, and I want my dad, and I want Eli and I want Jason.

  “So, where’s my mother?” I say. I try to be casual about it. I do not make any of the whimper-y sounds I want to make.

  “Here,” the captain says.

  “No. Where’s my mom?” I say more urgently, in a shameful little-kid way. I want to hide my face in my mom’s sweater, and I want her hugging me.

  Her voice floats to me through my memory. You can go if you have to go, Aza—

  Oh god, my poor mom thinks I’m dead. She’d be here otherwise. That’s the only way this could have happened.

  Wings all around me, and faces pressing in closer, blue faces, feathered faces with beaks.

  Wedda fluffs herself, a mother hen instead of an owl.

  “Stand back,” she says, loud and intimidating. “Let the little nestling breathe.
She has no notion of who you are, nor of what happened to her.” They shuffle back, but only slightly.

  I touch my chest, looking for the comfort of the crooked center bone in my rib cage. It’s there. But it feels—suddenly—like a wishbone.

  I want a stethoscope. I want my doctor. I want her knocking at my chest, hunting for intruders, because this is INTRUDER CENTRAL. This is hallucinatus maximus.

  There are all these familiar things, these déjà vu things, from the planks on the wall, to the way the captain’s face moves, inches from mine. The way it looks, the way she looks.

  She has a strange necklace, and it hangs over me as she bends, almost hitting me. A tiny little nub of something—coral or bone?—embedded in clear resin at the bottom.

  The earth tilts. I feel like I’m not in my body.

  “Milekt found you,” the captain says. “We reeled you up from the drowners, just in time. You were almost gone.”

  She covers her mouth and pauses a moment. Her eyes are filled with emotion. “But you’re finally home.”

  In my heart, in this crooked, half-crushed heart I’ve always had, there’s a dizzy, weird thing.

  “I don’t even know you,” I whisper.

  “Of course you don’t remember how it was before you were taken, when we were on Amina Pennarum together. You were so small. You were only a baby. But even then you were . . . extraordinary.”

  A tear glitters down the captain’s cheek, dark as ink from an exploding fountain pen. She presses her hand against my face, in the same place my mom would, and I stay still this time, overtaken by this strange sense of:

  H O M E

  O M

  M O

  E M O H

  “I’m Captain Zal Quel,” she says. “You’re aboard the ship Amina Pennarum.”

  I blink. She’s still here. She’s still looking at me expectantly. I’m still here. I’m still looking at her.

  “You’re the Captain’s Daughter, Aza.”

  And when I continue to stare, speechless, she finishes her sentence with the words I somehow knew she was going to say.

  “I am your mother. And this is Magonia.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  No.

  I shove hard out the door, through feathered people, blue arms, gray uniforms, and I’m running, running, running through a corridor lined with hammocks.

  “Magonia,” Jason said. But we were talking about fairy tales, not reality. He was talking about history and hallucinations. It was crazy! I was sick!

  I push past the crowd, the bird inside my lung screaming at me. Respect your station! Zal’s the captain! Salute her!

  I slingshot myself up the ladder to the upper deck, push open the hatch, and sprint out into the light.

  I’m expecting to breathe in the fresh air and cough, to touch the hospital gown embroidered with my name, and to feel frozen on my back where the thing gaps, but I stumble out into the cold air, and there’s no parking lot. No earth.

  No.

  There’s only a sky. A huge sky.

  And it is full of ships.

  All directions, at all distances, all kinds—small sailing vessels, big ships similar to this one. Ships veiled by their own weather.

  A bank of vessels moves together, bringing a larger storm with them. Little boats, catamarans, yachts, freighters—all moving through the sky.

  All flying. The ships are flying, yes, yes, that’s exactly what’s happening, and they don’t have wings. They’re just . . . floating along in the middle of nothing.

  And I’m standing on the deck of a huge ship too. Sails and rigging. Planks. We rock gently in the breeze.

  In a moment, Zal’s behind me, holding me up, because I’m swaying like I don’t even have legs, a jellyfish.

  “Aza Ray Quel, this is your country,” she announces, her voice booming over the deck. “These are your country’s ships. Amina Pennarum is first among them. There is no better and no braver than she.”

  A crew of blue people clusters around us.

  “These are her officers.”

  “Captain’s Daughter,” they say in unison, these uniformed blues with their impossible whistling voices. They raise their hands to their brows. They salute me in the same way everyone saluted the captain.

  Throwing up is the only rational option.

  I lean abruptly over the rail and look into the tossing clouds there, stomach spinning.

  Something enormous looks back at me. Sleek silver skin with a slight pattern on it, tiny eyes. It blinks at me, opens its feathery fins, and scatters drops of rain. It fountains a gust of wind and rain out of its . . . blowhole?

  It swims sideways through a cloud, and as it swims, it sings.

  Sea of stars, it trills—in words, kind of, but not. Greetings, it sings in a beautiful voice. Sea of rains and snow.

  Legions of therapists have tried to make me understand the supposed healing powers of tears. I’ve never understood them until now.

  “Don’t cry, Captain’s Daughter. It’s only a squallwhale,” says a feathered crew member from behind me.

  Indigo mohawk. The blue jay girl, I realize.

  Only a squallwhale. I glance over at the giant creature—it’s not below us now, but above the level of the deck rail.

  “One of our pod,” says Zal. “They make storms to hide us from drowner eyes. They’re part of our camouflage.”

  I stare at the shifting vaporous edges of these creatures, half whale, half climate.

  “Not all the clouds you’ve spent your life looking at are squallwhales, but some are.”

  More of that, then. “Not all, but some.”

  I look down, past all the ships in the sky, past the cloudy, misty whales, and suddenly below me, there is a checkerboard of green fields and roads and buildings. Earth. I’m paralyzed with wanting, but I’m not allowed to keep looking down.

  “This is Amina Pennarum’s mainsail,” Zal says, pointing up the mast.

  The mainsail looks down at me and makes a high sound of recognition, a cry of song.

  Flyer, it says. Welcome, firefly.

  The mainsail is a giant bat.

  Giant, as in the size of a living room. A tremendous white-silver bat, its body chained to the mast, its fingerlike bones splayed, stretched out, wings wide open for the wind. It looks down at me, its teeth slightly apart, tasting the air. Girl, it says, and whirrs a high whirr.

  A crew member flies up to bat face level and offers the bat something fluttering from a bucket. A moth, I realize. Albeit one the size of my head.

  The bat snaps it up, and moves its wings and I feel us sailing faster.

  I notice a nose-prickling smell of oil and fire. The crew is scrubbing the deck. Black marks. A hole in a rail.

  Déjà vu pulls my gaze up again to the bat. There’s a burn on its silken wing, healing, but bad. Something about that, something about a crash—

  But it’s gone. I can’t remember.

  “Is it hurt?” I ask.

  “Don’t bother yourself. Batsails are only animals,” Zal says. “Ours is well-cared for. They don’t understand pain.”

  I spin slowly around to look at the rest of the deck. There’s a wheel to steer by. There’s a very solid-looking metal crane, dangling over the side of the vessel, huge and covered with chains and pulleys.

  And at the top of the mast, there’s a little house filled with yellow birds. They’re the same kind as the one that flew into my mouth. The one that flew into my lung.

  “The canwr,” Zal says. “Our cote of lungsingers. Milekt’s kind.”

  I touch the spot on my chest where I feel fluttering, and there’s a severe shriek from the bird in there. Milekt, says the bird in my lung. Milekt.

  It’s only when one of the little golden birds above me takes flight that I notice the tethers. It flies out to test the wind, screals, and returns to
its perch, tied there by a thin cord. For a moment it looks down at me, black beady eye, but it has nothing to say. It doesn’t shift into anything human-ish.

  “This is my ship. Your ship now. This is my crew. And these are the rest of the feathered class,” Zal says. She claps her hands. “Rostrae!” she shouts.

  Birds start dropping out of the sky, landing on deck, ropes in their talons. Many of the same birds that came to my backyard, I realize with a jolt. They carry a tangle of ropes, small ones, large ones, some gossamer fine, some heavy as chains, all attached to the masts and deck. Three more owls. Hawks. Crows. Birds I’ve never seen before, tiny and covered in candy wrappers of feathers, bright red and blue and green, pink and silver. It’s as though a piñata has broken.

  A golden eagle sails down and looks at me, its eyes the color of caramel, but made of fury. Nothing kind in that gaze. It looks like what it is, a hunter. Its wings must span eight feet. It has talons as long as my fingers.

  My knees are shaking, and my head is spinning, but I stay upright. Zal’s hands are on my shoulders.

  A hummingbird the size of a bee buzzes up to me and hovers, turned sideways, considering me with one eye at a time. Next to my face, a robin, but not an American robin, a European one. Even here I know things from Jason. Such as, European robins are smaller than ours, and much fiercer. This one looks at me, with a black, gleaming eye, and makes a judgmental chirp.

  Then all the birds shift.

  They stretch their wings and their bones crackle and groan as they expand, gaining height and weight. Their beaks open and open until faces appear around them, heads bowed with feathers. They ruffle up their plumes and then, with a shiver, a new thing where the bird was standing.

  All of the birds have shifted into people.

  There’s a tiny, beautiful man where the hummingbird was, his nose a beak, his fingers fluttering, a giant woman where the eagle was, her hair golden feathers, her arms muscular. The robin morphs in ways I can’t even remotely describe into a man with orange-red tattoos on his chest and dark eyes lined in white.

  All these imaginary things look at me. All of them salute me, a fantasy made up by some little kid—like the little kid I was, the girl who read every book of Audubon, the girl who cut ships out of paper, and got harassed by the classroom canary.