No Aza Ray Boyle. No Aza Ray Quel. No Beth Marchon.
That means no Jason Kerwin. That’s what I’m thinking about. Even though I’m still here on earth. The world’s too small, and though I’ve spent my whole life trying to memorize the entirety of it, and it should be a good thing that now there’s less to memorize, I’m looking around at these rooms, and I know that there was a sky full of ships, and I also know that maybe I’ll never see it that way again.
This is how it feels to fall out of the world.
I take a moment and look around the circle, at all of the fucked-up kids in it, who may or may not be reasonable refugees from civilization like myself. We are the bandaged and the beaten up. We are the drugged and the despairing. We are the ones who looked in the mirror and didn’t know our own faces, the ones who crashed our cars when speeding away in the middle of the night, the ones who got so sad that it looked like there was only saltwater out our windows.
Maybe we’re brokenhearted, but why isn’t it rational to have a broken heart? It is utter shit out there, the things you can’t control. The world is full of wrongs, and mess and distress and horror. Who can really be blamed for wanting to dig their way down and live in a hole, or disappear into a cave and never be around humans again? If all people do is hurt each other? If all I managed to do, loving Aza as much as I’m ever going to love anyone, was injure her?
There is a case to be made that I should totally be here, locked away, because the only thing I can do to the people I love is wound their hearts. My moms. Aza. Eli? Maybe not just their hearts. Maybe things I did have resulted in the people I love being captured, kidnapped, pulled out of their lives and into other versions. Even dying.
I want to disappear.
I’m made of guilt. Made of shame. Made of fail.
And suddenly I get all of it, the last fifteen years, all the things Aza was trying to get through in order to live her life. I’m the patient now, and I have no patience. I’m the invalid, the one without validity. No one hears me or believes me.
She spent fifteen years like this. No wonder she got furious with me for trying to dictate her life.
I’ve been loving her all wrong.
I call a nurse.
“What if I wanted to get out of here?” I ask out of the side of my mouth. He looks at me like I’m exactly what I am. A seventeen-year-old patient, not a super-connected hacking machine with the capacity to memorize the universe.
“It takes time,” he says.
I sag, and watch the snow. I take my pills. I drink my water. I look at the locks. I stare at the windows.
Gray sky full of everything.
And I think some thoughts I’ve never thought before. I think thoughts about places in this hospital I might be able to go to hide myself long enough to be gone. Forever.
I’m half gone already. The part of me that is Jason Kerwin is no one without her.
CHAPTER 15
{AZA}
A plane passes us, a passenger jet with a tropical paradise logo. There are people’s heads in the windows, and I can see them reading books, watching movies.
But a little kid is looking out, and for a second I wonder if she sees our boat, traveling across the blue. Then the plane’s gone, and we’re out here alone again, rocking perilously in the wake of its passage.
A year absent from Magonia and what’s changed?
Everything. Nothing. Everything. The sky’s suddenly rose-colored.
Compass in my pocket. North.
I can’t go north.
“Tell me there’s a ship for us up here somewhere,” I say to Heyward. “Tell me you have a plan.”
“There isn’t,” Heyward says. She has a gaspy sound to her voice, a sound I find very familiar. Because, like a Magonian on earth, like me for most of my life, she can’t breathe. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was rogue. I was down there alone, and now I’m up here alone, except that I’m wanted by Magonian authorities. As are you. Maybe you noticed.”
“Can you breathe?”
She nods. “Enough. Breath train for this in case we’re without our equipment. But we need to move. The whole sky is going to be after us soon, not just Magonians, but Nightingales. I think we got away from them with that song, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
The black birds. The . . . the machines. Yes, that’s what they were.
“You saw what they do. If they attack us in this? We need to find something better than this launch.”
We’re no match for anything. We don’t have cannons, nor any crew of Magonian war singers. It’s just us in a little boat, exposed to the elements. No supplies. No nothing.
“How are you at celestial navigation?” I force myself to say. “If we’re going on alone from here, I want to know where ‘here’ is. I spent half the time I was on the ship passed out. I don’t even know how many days have passed.”
“Five days, since Zal escaped.”
Five days. I think of my parents. They’re insane with worry. They must be. Me, Eli—both of us gone? Unless . . . What did Jason tell them? That I left on purpose? That I decided not to stay on earth? And what could he have said about Eli? That she came with me? There’s no Eli here. I so wish there was. I can’t even think about her with Zal and Dai.
I have to get to her.
“We’re in the Tangle, above the Atlantic,” Heyward says. “Magonia recruited Breath from airplanes and ships here in the early days. They messed with navigation. Downed a whole bunch of people, then just took them. Programmed them. Brainwashed them. Like me, but the adult version. It’s not just babies Magonia takes. This is a strange piece of the sky. Compasses point to true north here, not to magnetic north.”
The Tangle. She means the Bermuda Triangle. It makes perfect sense that this would be a Magonian territory. All those legends of ships disappearing in this area, and planes too. That should have occurred to me before.
Against my instincts, I pull the compass out of my pocket. I want to throw it overboard, but instead I open it and look at the screen. Blank.
My compass wouldn’t point to true north. Mine would point to the opposite of true. I put it back in my pocket, feeling like crying all over again. It can’t help me.
“Now the area is less trafficked, by humans and Magonians alike. There’s been a rumor for years of something far to the south of here, an old weapon, well guarded.”
She points.
“Breath don’t sail that deep into the cold but that, apparently, is where it is.” She pauses. “Three guesses on what it is.”
“The Flock,” I say.
“That’s my thought. And according to the drowners, it’s strong enough to defeat a Zal Quel who has much more power than she did when you last saw her.”
“I’m not chasing after a rumor,” I tell Heyward. “We need to get to Eli. She’s probably in Zal’s ship. There’ll be a brig there, and whatever Zal wants with her, it’s going to hurt Eli. She’d only take Eli to get to me.”
“And when you find her? Then what, Aza? Give yourself to Zal in exchange for your sister? Is that your plan? Because fighting Zal’s not going to end well. She’s had a year to figure out how to work on you, and she made use of it. While you were sleeping with your boyfriend, she was planning the end of drowners—”
I bristle instantly. Not only is he not my—
He’s— I can’t.
“Don’t talk about him.”
“Wasn’t Jason why you went back down? You don’t belong there. You know that now, don’t you?”
I wince. No. Yes.
My family. My world. My sister. My life. Did any of it really belong to me? I push it all away. I need my brain to think about other things. My murderous mother, for example.
“We have to do something about Zal.”
“She won’t relinquish her new power easily, and you can hardly sing. You have to practice and strengthen. That was desperation you were singing on the ship, not skill. I heard you. That was a p
anic song.”
She’s right, but what else can I do? “The longer Zal has Eli and Caru, the worse it will be.”
Something moves far out on the edge of the sky, and I feel a pang of misery that shakes me from my head all the way down. An airkraken, silver and brilliant, its tentacles undulating, curling, rolling in the atmosphere. Those cause tropical cyclones, I remember from the last time I saw one. The tentacles twist the air and blast cold down from above. They’re rare, and even Magonian ships tend to move quickly away when one is sighted. No one wants to be caught in a long tentacle of icy wind, twisted and flung up into the sky, higher than anyone has prepared themselves to be flung.
But all I can think of when I see this airkraken is Jason and the giant squid video. It was last year’s birthday present. Stolen from the deep web. My couch downstairs, our hands touching for the first time. We almost kissed, the last moments of my old life.
It feels like a thousand years ago, but it was only last year. Everything hurts, my whole body, my whole soul. Everything I thought I had is gone.
Everything except Magonia.
Airkraken are predators. I don’t care that they’re beautiful. Giant squid too. All they want to do is eat things that are weaker than they are, things that don’t know they’re coming. They work by moving silently and surprising their victims. They wrap their arms around their prey and tear them apart with their razor beaks.
I glance at Heyward. There are plenty of creatures like that in the world.
“Why are you helping me?” I ask her.
“I don’t want the world to end, do you?” Heyward says simply. She breathes in deeply, and for a long moment, she coughs. She looks like it hurt.
“I thought I hated drowners. But it was Breath teaching me to hate them. I stood outside your house for days after they brought you up here last year. I watched your family, your sister, and Jason, learning them. I watched how they grieved you. Breath have no families. No one’s ever loved me like Jason loves you—”
“He doesn’t love me,” I interrupt.
She looks at me, and her face is sad.
“Zal is run by vengeance, not by logic. Dai’s family died of the actions of drowners. He has no desire to let them live. Together they’ll complete Zal’s mission. Even if they have to sacrifice their own lives to do it.”
The wind howls around us, a hollow, lonely wail.
I remember something, belatedly.
“Caru spoke to me, just after he was taken by Dai. I think he was telling me what to look for. ‘Where the air is mad. Where the wild birds are.’”
I don’t know what makes me so sure of what Caru was saying, but I need to get Eli out and away from Zal, back on the ground where she’s safe. Which means I need to make the ground safe, as safe as I can. Not all dangers are Magonian, obviously, but that’s what I have power over, if I have any power at all. If Caru was telling me to find the Flock, then that’s what we need to do.
Heyward bends over with another sad choking cough. Her lips are slightly blue. I imagine Eli up here, breathless, Zal watching her slowly suffocate.
If Zal took her to get to me?
Yeah. She’s gotten to me.
My sister’s a fighter. She won’t stay calm and preserve her air and energy. She’ll have been screaming at them since they took her. I have to get myself to wherever they are, as fast as I can.
But I also know Heyward’s right. I need to be strong enough to fight them.
Where the air is mad. Where the wild birds are.
I stare at the compass and choose south, as far from any northern anything as I can go. I sing a tiny hum into the ship, and we sail, clueless, through the Tangle.
I don’t like needing help from anyone.
But I need help this time.
CHAPTER 16
{JASON}
“You have a visitor,” the nurse tells me, interrupting my miserable thoughts. I move to the visiting room, darkly expecting my moms, who look at me with a mixture of love and guilt whenever they come. I don’t want to see them. They love the hell out of me. It’s a problem to be loved like that if you’re in here considering the end.
But instead it’s Mr. Grimm.
Last time I saw him, I was busted mapping flock deaths and saying “Aza” instead of “Beth.”
Now I’m hospitalized for losing it, and Grimm is confirmed in his suspicion that I’ve been losing it for a while. Like, maybe since Lightning Strike Last Year.
I sit down, warily. Grimm looks at me, his eyes betraying nothing. Not the sympathy face. Not any face.
“Kerwin,” he says. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Fine, Grimm is not unfunny. I can fake normal. As normal as I ever am.
“You didn’t bring me flowers?” I say. “Balloons? Dirigible?”
“Stuffed animal, actually,” Grimm says, and pulls something out of his bag. He sets it on the table between us.
It’s a little yellow bird with a black beak.
I look slowly up at him.
He leans in. “I don’t have time to explain the history of the world. All I can tell you right now is, I know Aza Ray’s alive.”
I’m paralyzed. “What do you know about Aza?”
“Everything,” he says.
Is he cooperating with someone in here? A doctor? Someone to prove that I continue to fall apart?
“Aza’s dead,” I say carefully. “She died a year ago.”
“Kerwin,” Grimm says. “You want to call a girl hopping onto a Magonian launch accompanied by a key Breath operative dead, that’s up to you. But she’s in the Tangle, and currently on the move.”
I’m out of my chair now.
“She escaped?”
“Aza escaped,” he confirms. “She’s in the air, hunting for Eli. You’re the one who got her taken by SWAB in the first place, aren’t you?”
I look around to see who might be listening. No one’s listening. No one’s even watching. I wonder, for a little longer than I wish, if Grimm is real.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You joined them.”
“They blackmailed me,” I protest.
“You think you’re not at fault?”
“I KNOW I’m at fault.” I slump back into the chair, broken by the whole thing. “I’m wearing pajamas. I have no real clothes. And that is the only thing I know. The guy who broke everything. That’s me.”
“Then it’s your job to make it right, Kerwin,” Grimm says.
A very slow, and very startled, and very stupid realization bubbles to the surface of my drug-fuzzed brain. “You’re Breath,” I say. “Aren’t you? You’re not just a weird English teacher. You work for Magonia.”
I want to put my head in my hands, I’ve been so blind.
“You’re supposed to be a genius, Kerwin. Did it never occur to you?”
Grimm rolls up his sleeve and shows me the tattoo of a whirlwind on his wrist. Aza always said he had tattoos covered with makeup. She thought maybe he had some kind of embarrassing something, a pot leaf or a pinup girl. Nope.
“I was Breath. I left. Now I’m rogue. Protecting Aza.”
“But you weren’t protecting Aza,” I say. “As I recall, she died.”
Grimm looks at me contemptuously.
“I was watching her for two years,” Grimm says. “When she started to fail, I was in the process of acquiring a new skin for her, keeping them from finding her. Magonia got to her before I could save her.”
“Why would you be ‘protecting her’ anyway? Why would you care?”
“Some things are bigger than caring, Kerwin,” says Grimm. “Some things are about saving the world. Not to put too fine a point on it. You have a lethal weapon, even if you’re not the one who created it, you do your best to keep it away from someone who’d use it.”
“So generous of you,” I say, because I have suspicions about every part of this. “And Heyward?”
“She’s my asset now,” Grimm says. “She came to
me. She was trying to reintegrate into earth.”
“She was lying,” I say automatically. “She’s not reformed. If anything, she’s taking Aza to Zal. She’s loyal to Magonia.”
Grimm shakes his head. “Things are becoming even more unstable. The sky’s starving, and there’s unrest everywhere. Many are questioning everything they thought they knew. Not just Heyward.
“I think Eli Boyle’s been taken by someone other than Magonia. There’s no indication Zal has her. She was grabbed from down here, early in the morning, same day Aza was taken by SWAB. There weren’t any storms nearby the night Eli went missing. I tracked weather patterns for the entire area. That means it’s not Magonia, and it’s not Breath. They’d need cover, and there was none.”
Something occurs to me, idiotically late. In all my certainty that Zal had Eli, it didn’t occur to me that one of the things Eli does early in the morning is practice.
That tree out by the cemetery. That field.
I look down at my pajamas. I was about to do something I couldn’t come back from. And now everything’s different.
I look up at Grimm. “Get me out of here.”
At three in the morning, I slink through the hallways and down to the office. I pick the lock. Yes, I know how to pick a lock. I have to do something with my brain in the quieter moments.
I open the filing cabinet, find my file, and pull it out, along with the Ziploc of my possessions. My phone with its solar charger. My compass. My ship-viewing glasses. I open a cabinet and find my backpack, intact. Good.
I look at my file. Lot of pages. It says I’ve been working up to this break for years, that I have an active imaginary world, that blah blah blah various diagnoses, and though some of them are valid, Magonia isn’t anything but Magonia. It also says I have a savior complex regarding the late Aza Ray Boyle.
That part is uncomfortable reading.
I put the file back. I replace my things with things scavenged from other files, other people’s phones, other people’s eyeglasses not allowed because of glass. I don’t want SWAB having an easy time knowing where I am, knowing immediately that I busted out with gear they gave me.
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