Magonia

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Captain’s Daughter,” the bird people shout, all in one voice. Twenty-five different songs, but they agree on who I am. There seems to be no doubt.

  Everyone feels certain of my identity but me. They stare, waiting.

  I look at the captain.

  “I want to go home,” I say as politely as I can. This feels like my last chance at something I’ve already lost. “Something’s confused, okay? I’m not actually your daughter. I was born in a hospital on earth. My dad made the whole staff margaritas in a blender he’d brought in the car. He had four hundred limes. There are pictures of me being born, bloody ones. I’m not adopted. I’m not who you think I am. I want to go home. My parents are going to think I died. Please, let me go.”

  Another memory surfaces—Jason, oh god, Jason, holding my hand, telling me he’d find me. How can he find me if I’m here?

  The blue-skinned boy from my cabin, the beautiful, rude one, is suddenly right in front of me, and he looks at me directly.

  “Permission to speak?”

  Zal nods. “Granted.”

  “As predicted, she wishes to return to her situation. Perhaps we should listen when she says she doesn’t belong here. Perhaps she’s right. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

  Zal turns me around to face her. “The drowners didn’t know you needed Magonian air. They didn’t know you needed your ship, your canwr, your song, because they know nothing about how we live. There, you were dying. There, you died. Here, you thrive. This is your country, Aza Ray. We’ve brought you home.”

  “But,” I say. “I’m not what you think I am.”

  “Look at yourself,” she says, and smiles, holding out a little mirror. “See who you are.”

  My reflection’s blurred at the edges, dark and tangled, and for a moment all I can focus on is the hair that moves and twists as though it’s made of snakes. It whips around and everywhere, and then it moves away from my eyes and—

  I see my face, kind of, the face I’ve always had, angular and weird, huge eyes but—

  But this girl has wide, full indigo lips instead of my skinny, grimacing ones. And—my eyes—I recognize them as my own, but there used to be a dark blue over the colors I see now—gold and reddish, like fish deep under water.

  This girl has high cheekbones, and when I open my mouth, her teeth are sharper than mine.

  I’m looking at her skin, at her hair, at the echo of my face, then the forever bone-thin-weakling-no-boobs Aza body I’ve always hated, and my body, too, is converted into something else entirely.

  I don’t know what to say I don’t know

  what

  to

  do.

  I want the old me. I want her pale skin and gaspy voice, I want her skinny arms.

  I don’t even notice that I’ve dropped the mirror until glass splinters all over the deck.

  I look up at the captain, my jaw slack. Zal doesn’t flinch. She regards me steadily.

  “You are my daughter, Aza,” she says, and her voice softens. “Your life here is better than it could ever have been below. The undersky is a shadowland, and the drowners are a shadow people. You were kidnapped and placed below as a punishment for my sins, not for your own. None of this was your fault. It was mine.”

  Another black tear on her face.

  “It’s been sixteen years since you were born to me, and fifteen since you were taken. You do not know the pain of it, Aza. You do not know the effects it’s had on Magonia.”

  She straightens up and smiles, shaking her shoulders.

  “But tonight, as is fitting, we celebrate. The time for mourning is done. Tonight we glory in your birth and your return. Dai—”

  She turns to the black-haired boy, who still looks at me, grudgingly, judgingly.

  “—the drowners will be celebrating her birthday with a burial.”

  I jolt.

  “We’ll do something finer. You’ll give Aza a taste of Magonian song, the first she’s heard in fifteen years. The one she’ll join in for the deliverance of her people.”

  He hesitates, but nods, and then closes his eyes for a moment. The skies have gotten much emptier than before. I can’t see any other ships around us now. This ship is moving very quickly, and I feel the wind kick up as, in his chest, he starts singing a complex song full of beats and trills.

  Then his throat starts to sing along with the melody already begun.

  I feel a rattling inside my ribs. This boy—Dai—has a bird in his chest, just as I do.

  They sing together in gorgeous harmony. The sound is so beautiful, I’m blown away.

  In my chest, Milekt trills out, Learn. Sing with him. It’s what you’re meant to do.

  “No,” I say, irritated with Milekt’s insistence, and my own strange desire to do his bidding.

  There is something massively important about song here. I suspect—no, I know—that it can do things.

  It makes me feel nervous and too excited just thinking about trying. It’s a feeling like—

  The thought surges into my head. Jason.

  Dai’s looking down at me with a twisted expression on his face. I hear a fussy trill from his chest too.

  “No,” Dai barks, and thumps his chest with his fist. “It isn’t time. She’s not ready.” His bird shuts up. He spins himself high into the rigging, twisting his arms in rope. The crew stands at attention, and Dai sings another note. As if he’s summoned them, stars wink on all over the sky.

  A few are brighter than the rest, flaming extra hard against the blackness that surrounds them.

  I count. Sixteen of them. So bright that they could be candles.

  Up at the top of the mast, the other birds join in the song, and then my own bird starts, too, from inside my chest. He fills in the gaps in Dai’s song with his own notes.

  I suddenly know that I should be singing too. I almost can’t keep from doing it, but why?

  Seriously? I’m not a singer.

  Finally something starts to emerge. This song, it causes the air to wobble around us, around Dai and me.

  Who is he?

  I don’t know, but my heart is pounding, and then, arcing across the sky, the Northern Lights appear, rippling out in the dark.

  Green

  blue and

  r

  o

  s

  e

  and

  R

  E

  D

  and

  t

  a

  n

  g

  e

  r

  i

  n

  e

  and

  w

  h

  i

  t

  e

  and

  SILVER.

  The colors drape over our ship, and I look at Dai, glowing under the lights.

  He throws his head back and sings a note into the stars, and I feel my chest shake in response. My bird trills again, and another color, pale blue, rushes up from the edge of the Northern Lights.

  Dai climbs halfway up one of the masts—scaling it as though it’s nothing. A soft violet dust falls from the sky.

  I’m jaw-dropped. Zal’s face is gentle as she lays her hand on my chest again.

  “Happy birthday, Aza,” proclaims Dai from up on the mast. He bows his head to me.

  “Happy birthday, Aza,” says the rest of the crew, in unison, and they bow too.

  “Happy birthday, Aza,” says Zal, and she smiles at me.

  This is the birthday I wasn’t supposed to live to. I’m supposed to be dead, but I’m not. I’m supposed to be on earth, but I’m not. I make a noise I don’t know I’m going to make, a long wail of unmistakable despair, and from somewhere deep in the ship, there is a faint answering wail. The crew rustles nervously, looking around, but I clamp my mouth shut.

  I’m supposed to be polite, and respectful, and grateful. But I’m on a ship in the sky and I’ve been kidnapped from my family, and apparently e
veryone I love thinks I’m dead.

  I do a quick pass through my memory, and determine that I don’t remember anything I’m sure is real past chocolate éclairs in my kitchen, footage of a silvery giant squid circling up from the bottom of the ocean, and Jason and I, almost—

  And bang, there it is. The dividing line between fact and fiction. I spin to look at the captain.

  “You said they’d bury me on my birthday. Who’s my family burying if I’m here?” I shout.

  “Enough!” Zal shouts back at me, right into my face, but I’m losing it completely.

  “No! Take me home!”

  “I said this would happen,” Dai says, descending from the mast. “She’s broken.”

  Zal goes rigid. “She is not. Aza is strong enough that no Breath could injure her.” She squares her shoulders, looking carefully at me.

  Then she laughs the kind of loud, booming laugh you’d hate in a movie theater.

  “You are my own daughter, for all that you were raised by drowners,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe what I was told either, not without making sure. Not from strangers. Not even from friends. I will show you, daughter. And then you’ll believe. You’ll know who you are fated to be.”

  And that’s how we end up flying over my funeral.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  “When you die in Magonia,” Zal informs me, “you’ll be given a hero’s farewell, quite unlike this one.”

  She hands me a wood and brass spyglass, and within a moment, I’m looking through it, and down at my high school’s parking lot. I lift my head when she says that.

  “It sounds like my funeral here is already planned.”

  “Living’s a risk, Aza,” she says sharply. “Heroes die young. Would you choose to be less than a hero? Here, the sky will light with fire for you. Our funerals are their sunsets.”

  I see. How comforting. (How insane.)

  Below us, on the ground, people start to come out of my high school, dressed in black. I’m breathing fast, but I’m finefinefine, completely and totally fine—

  —until the moment the crowd parts for the tall guy in the alligator suit.

  Then I’m not fine anymore. I say his name once, quietly, then louder. “Jason.”

  I can see, even from this far away that Jason Kerwin’s faking fine. The alligator head’s in his hand, and I can see his chapped lips through the spyglass. Chewed. I can see his eyes, red rimmed. He looks like something attacked him and won. Again that sound, that pitiful wail, from somewhere deep in the ship. I look up at Zal, but she’s not reacting to it. No one else is either.

  “You see?” Dai mutters, suddenly next to the captain. “It’s the drowner she cried for when she came aboard. Maybe he’s her ethologidion, not—”

  “He’s only a drowner,” the captain says, and snorts. “She can have no bond to that. He’s below even the feathered class.”

  I don’t know what the thing Dai said means, and I don’t care. I’m watching my own funeral procession.

  Jason’s car leads the students and teachers out of the parking lot. They’re honking their horns in rhythm. He has them honking a message. I catch some of it. Not all, but enough.

  Dai’s still muttering, judging the tears on my face as weakness, but everybody else—except for that wailing bird—has the good sense to shut the hell up.

  At the cemetery my parents get out of the car, looking ten years older than the last time I saw them, and I feel a horrible surge inside my heart. The captain has my arm. All I can do is watch.

  Eli stumbles out of the car behind them. Her hair’s not in its usual straight line. She’s given herself more than a trim. She’s cut her hair off, and the bottom is insanely ragged.

  On purpose. It must be. There’s no other explanation.

  I finally get why people are scared of dying. I finally get why no one wants to talk about it. Santa Claus in Reverse is carrying everything about my life away with him in a big sack, and I’m supposed to be fine with it.

  My dad’s carrying a wooden box, the size of a shoe box.

  I accidentally whimper.

  “Is that me? In that box?” I ask the captain. My chest feels too tight, but it’s not because I’m dying anymore. It’s because I’m missing them. I can see my mom’s sweater cuff, unraveling. I can see my dad limping, because stress makes his back go out.

  “Of course not,” Zal says, impatient. “You’re here beside me. They have only the ashes—from the skin,” she says, like we’re talking basics.

  “The skin?”

  “The Breath left it when they brought you up here. Surely you recall your liberation? From the report, it was an unpleasant thing, and close, but you were dying. I’d never have let one of them near you had we not been out of time.”

  Again, the Breath. I keep hearing that term, in that strange tone.

  But down there, my family’s left a gap where I’m supposed to be. I’m a ( ) in the middle of the people who love me, an emptiness in their sentence.

  I feel sobs tsunami-ing up. I can’t move. I can barely see, because now I’m watching black tears drop from my cheeks. I’m feeling my mouth contorting around terrible sounds and the muffled bird below, whatever it is, echoes my lamenting cries. Zal’s head snaps up, and she listens, but says nothing.

  My mom stumbles, and my dad catches her. Jason is between them now, holding them up. How can this be what we’re doing? How can I be dead to them—and alive up here?

  “I want to go home,” I hear my mouth saying, and apparently I don’t care that at home I’m in a box, that at home, my family is carrying me toward a hole in the ground. “Please let me go home.”

  No one on the ship has anything to say to that. Home is where they think I am.

  “Home,” I whisper, but no one cares.

  Jason’s passing out balloons and people are attaching envelopes to the strings. Jason’s the last to let go of his, a big green one. He lifts his head as he does it and for the first time I get a real look at his face.

  He clearly doesn’t see anything, no ship, no sails, no me. He lets go.

  The green balloon is rising, closer, up, up, and I run toward it, stretch for it. I reach, but I can’t get it.

  “Enough,” says Zal, as though anything could be enough. “This is the proof you desired. Now it’s time to begin again. You have much to learn, Aza Ray Quel, and little time.”

  She motions to Dai, who takes the wheel.

  “Rise,” she says. I look at her in horror. She can’t take me away.

  “JASON,” I scream. I hurl the spyglass over the rail with all my strength. “JASON, I’M UP HERE!”

  The ship explodes with shrieks and cursing and feathers; Dai is spinning the wheel hard.

  “LET ME OFF THIS SHIP!” I scream, trying to get my voice down to Jason. “I’M NOT LEAVING THEM! LET ME GO!! JASON!”

  “Retreat!” Zal shouts. Her arms circle my body and she tackles me to the ground. I bash my head on the way down with a sickly crack, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The ship pushes up, away from earth and home.

  All the Rostrae whoosh and shift back into birds, grabbing ropes, and hauling us higher. The batsail’s wings are wide and beating.

  My head feels like it’s detaching from my body.

  My heart feels like it’s still down there. I can’t scream, but I’m sobbing, gasping, and the bird belowdecks is screaming, too, an eerie siren call.

  “May the Breath take you and tear you with their teeth and claws! May the Breath consume you!” Dai growls. He’s taken Zal’s place containing me while she’s back at the wheel. “You think the drowners love you, but you’re wrong. They care for nothing but themselves. They’d kill you if they knew what you are.”

  I feel painkillered, drugged, numb. Maybe concussed. I don’t know anything.

  I keep seeing Jason in his alligator suit. I k
eep thinking about him in the ambulance, telling me he’d find me, that he wouldn’t let me die.

  But he did. He let me go. And I’m up here, and he’s down there.

  “Jason,” I whisper. Dai’s watching my face.

  “You’re bonded to that drowner filth. I knew it.”

  He drags me to my feet and over to where Zal’s working the wheel, moving the ship through heavy clouds, forcing it up into the storm. She shoots Dai a reproachful look, and pins me with her stare.

  “You will learn to follow orders, Aza Ray. You just risked your ship and everyone on it. We’re forced to report the loss of the spyglass to the capital, or risk sanctions. That means that Maganwetar will have official eyes on us. We didn’t need their attention.”

  But I’m elsewhere.

  Jason saw me. We’ve spent our lives seeing each other. He must have seen me.

  “This ship searched for you for years,” the captain says. “Do you want to be taken again? Do you want to be seized?”

  I feel nauseous, blurry-edged, and grief-stricken.

  “But I love them,” I say quietly.

  Zal whispers, her voice raw. Her fingers pinch into my arm, holding me upright. “I don’t care who you love. You will understand what you mean to Magonia.”

  She grits her teeth.

  “I’ve given up nearly everything to reclaim you. You may think this is nothing, but you’re everything to me, Aza Ray, more than the sky and its stars, more than this ship we sail on. You’re loved here, you’re needed here, and even if you don’t respect that, your time below is over.

  “Look around, Aza. Look at your crew. Their survival is up to you. Would you see them perish? Because you refuse to claim your home, your power?”

  Zal’s fingernails have broken the skin on my upper arm now, and I’m wincing. I try to pull away, but she’s staring into my eyes with such intensity I don’t know how to get loose. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but this is the farthest I’ve ever felt from home.

  I cry out. The bird below shrieks.

  “What’s that?” I ask Zal, because I see her face change at the sound. “Is someone hurt?”

  “No,” she says, and that’s all. But I see her eyes well up with black tears, and I wonder about them, even as I’m bleeding.