Aerie (10 page)

The ship is all monsters now, running, flying, leaping, and I sprint with Heyward up the stairs. She's yelling at me, telling me which way to go, and I'm still singing. We burst out into the open air, onto the upper deck.

I see the winged monster take off into the sky, feathers rotating and turning, the creature inside them sleek and smooth as a fish. Gone, shooting across the blue.

The leopard made of smoke arcs backward and flips above the deck, a plume of burning air. The smoke hurts my eyes. I turn my head away from it as fast as I can, only to see the man with the lava in his hands start throwing molten rock at soldiers, none of whom know what to do.

“DOWN!” Heyward yells.

A movement over my head, and I drop to the deck. Close to me. A sound. A hum like a hive of bees. Something dark flashes past, close enough to touch my hair.

One of the soldiers turns to look at me and I see his expression, like the faces of kids I used to see in the hospital, the ones who weren't gonna make it and knew it.

The song gets louder and louder. It's coming from outside me, from the air. The soldiers are still running and they're all tearing at their armor and dropping their weapons.

I see soldiers starting to fall, unable to breathe, and I remember something, a thing about what sound can do. It can collapse your lungs, if it's the right tone.

I'm
Magonian
. That's something
I
can do, if I sing the right way, but this isn't me. This is coming out of the sky.

The birdsong is higher still, and louder, amplified, and they're humming. The sounds they make aren't from the natural world. They're recorded and altered. They're . . . mechanized.

It's the song I'd sing with Caru, made poisonous. Electrified, turned into something nonliving and made of spikes.

KILL
, the song sings, from a hundred birds at once.
Die. Break now. Deathsong, killsong, screamsong.

The soldiers are all leaping off the ship.

Heyward grabs me and yanks me out of the way, just as a cloud of smoke covers the deck where I was. She lets go of me and leaps out, running. Do I follow her? My semi-sister, the lost child.

She almost killed Jason. She almost killed
me
.

But the sky is attacking us both.

There's a huge lurch and waves higher than they were a second ago explode over the deck. Small detonations, fire dropping through the decks, and this ship has got to be powered by something. Fuel tanks? Where are they?

Shitshitshit.

I sing a path, shifting parts of the wet on deck—seawater and, oh god, blood—to stone, to steps, to a place for us to run. There's violence everywhere. Confusion. People are screaming, dying.

A red dot appears in the shine of Heyward's black hair. I throw myself at her knees, knocking her out of the range of whatever's aiming at her.

And then, a gift from nowhere: I see the Magonian launch
that sat in a lab earlier, being experimented on. It was far enough from me that I thought I'd never see it again, but I melted all the walls. The launch is still here, floating above the deck.

I grab the edge of the little wooden boat and heave myself up into it, reaching out my hand to get Heyward too. I wonder what I'm doing, but then it's done.

This is a Magonian vessel. It wants the clouds. It rises. I stand up and SING.

We sway, but it's okay. The song is supporting us. I've braided the hull of the boat to the wind. I know some things, and others are coming back to me. I learned them all on my mother's ship and now I need them.

Heyward is beside me, and we're rising up.

The last thing I see as I look out from this launch is the team of soldiers screaming at me from a hundred feet down. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.

I sing us faster, move us harder across the sky, away from those things on the ship, away from whatever Zal sent to attack us. To seize us? Faster. Faster. As far away as I can get us. I sing so hard my lungs feel broken, until I'm panting, gasping. I look down again.

Blue earth, blue water, blue sky.

I spin, searching. It's a Magonian boat. That means there are Magonian materials on it. That's all I need. Something sharp. Finally, I find a small nail made of Magonian metal, jabbed halfway into a plank and pointed enough for my purposes.

I take off my flight suit, and put the tip of the nail to my arm.

I'm not supposed to do this, my mind's screaming at me, but
we're all in bodies that are dying, from the moment we open our eyes.

I cut.

It hurts, but it doesn't take much to shed a Magonian skin, once you start. It's like a zipper. The kind of zipper every part of you is programmed not to open.

This body, this body that's been kissed and held and danced with on earth, this body that's been mine for a year? It was never mine. Just like the last body, the one everyone called Aza Ray, was never mine. Both things were fake.

Was
everything
fake?

I
wasn't faking.

I reveal an entire blue arm. I'm used to brown skin now, not this flesh tattooed with constellations, not this gleaming Magonian skin, this utterly not-human skin.

Let go of the body you loved him with.

Let go of the skin he touched. Let go of the fingers that touched him. Let go of the mouth he kissed. Let go of the body that slept beside his, the body that curled into his arms in the middle of the night when he was the only one who could comfort you after you lost your home in the sky.

Let go of love.

Let go of who you were when he was lying to you.

Let go of all of it, earth and the world below.

You're Magonian, Aza Ray. Quit denying it. This is who you are.

You need this body, this strength, this fight. You need to be all the way again. You need to be exactly, entirely what you are.

It's time to grow up. It's time to go back.

I tug Beth Marchon over my head, and roll her off my body, feeling the skin surrender, the bond that attached everything to everything ebbing. Feeling my Magonian hair unfurling, my skin taking in the high air, even alongside the grief of losing yet another human self, another chance at happiness.

I loved him.

Loved?
Oh god, do I past tense it now?

Does my heart live inside my chest, broken? Does it just stay there? Do you die of this feeling?

I'm naked for a moment and then I put my flight suit back on.
Carpe omnia
. ELI. That's why I'm doing this. My sister. My heart.

I stretch my Magonian arms, feel my Magonian song, the vocal cords unbinding from their human covering.

In a movie version of my life, I'd be whole now. I'd feel complete. As we rise to the country I came from, I'd heal the crack in the center of my heart as easily as I shed the skin.

But I don't.

{I—}

{&,&,&}

I can't crack now.

There's a clock some people made that's supposed to keep perfect time for ten thousand years, a system of weights and pulleys, of gears and hope, and ten thousand years from now, it will still be telling us what time it is, so we can keep track of the seconds we have with the people we love.

I didn't know I'd have so few of them with Jason. I thought we'd be forever. Nothing could take us away from each other besides dying, yet here I am, alive, and there he is, alive—

I'm sailing as fast as I can back to the country I came from.

I let myself cry for what I've lost. I don't even care that Heyward's watching.

I can't stop.

I cry over the edge of the launch, my tears mixing with the rain.

No pictures, no phone. No internet. Unplugged.

Long hallways, locked doors, and each room full of prisoners. People who fell apart. People whose nearest and dearest took one look at them and went, “Nope, you're done.”

I'm sent to group therapy and I say, “I never tried to kill myself,” and everyone looks at me like
yeah right
, and I shift my weight and try to look exactly like someone who really never tried to kill himself, which is exactly the person I am, but I can tell I look wrong anyway.

How can I not?

Aza Aza Aza

I'm broken.

A doctor informs me that I really am broken. She tells me that I had a psychotic break, except I swear I didn't. But maybe that's how everyone feels when something in their brain goes haywire.
No, no, I'm fine,
really.
Except that you're wearing your shoes on your hands.

The brain is running the show. If the brain's got it wrong, everything else goes wrong too.

“I never tried to kill myself,” says someone in the group, and
then explains that instead, he swallowed three pairs of scissors, which were not to kill himself, but to kill the spirits of the dead that had possessed him.

I look at this person and feel very sad for him. Whatever happened, it happened in a major way, and now here he is, swallowing sharp things in an attempt to barter with the fates. Which I don't
think
I'm doing.

But . . .

You.

Never.

Know.

I'm in a locked ward full of people who are fucked up. We are all fucked up together.

I can't help but think of the place Aza's in. This isn't all that different. She's there, I'm here, and there's no normal. Maybe not for anyone.

“I hear you believe in aliens,” says a kid.

And I say, because I'm momentarily foolish, “No, I believe in
one
alien.”

“I hear you tried to blow up your high school,” says another kid, and after the millionth time that comes up, I say, “Fine, sure.”

“I heard you said you were a spy,” and I say, “No, I never said that. I never said any of that,” and I take my pills and sip my water, keep breathing despite the fact that every inhale is a struggle, knowing that if she never speaks to me again, I will deserve it.

Everything has a little border of yellow, of weird shine. I don't know what drugs I'm even taking. And honestly, I don't care.

Who am I to say what's true? Maybe everything is. Maybe falling apart is a normal response to the way the world looks,
weirder and warmer every day, people starving and being consumed by cracks in the earth, by tidal waves, by drought and plague. All that sounds very biblical, but it's also very actual.

Very Magonian.

I watch the weather like I'm in charge of it. In group I say, conscientiously, “I know I'm not responsible for every horrible thing that has ever happened and will ever happen in the universe.”

(In truth, I might be.)

“I know I have to forgive myself for my best friend dying.”

(No, I don't, not for her dying the first time, not for her being taken prisoner now. I don't have to forgive myself.)

“Do you believe in people in the sky, Jason?” asks the group leader.

“No,” I say.

“Ships that sail in the clouds?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

“Do you believe your friend is still alive? Do you believe in aliens?”

“No, yes, no, YES,” I say. “YES! YES, I DO. CAN WE STOP FUCKING TALKING ABOUT IT?”

If I hadn't lost it already, I'd be losing it now. I think I'm losing more of it. Whatever “it” is.

Single bed. No Magonia. No contact from SWAB, who are probably happy I'm here, stuck. Imprisoned. Out of their way now that they have no use for me. It's not like me talking about SWAB is a risk for them. I'm here, binned, and they're out there doing whatever they're doing.

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.