Aerie (16 page)

I almost told her about SWAB then. Almost told her everything. But I didn't. She woke up, turned her head, and kissed me without even opening her eyes. She trusted me totally.

There I was, untrustworthy.

I want her back. I want another chance. Will I get one? We all get our versions of heaven. Was this mine? Almost nothing makes any sense to me. But it doesn't matter if it makes sense. Doesn't matter if I have a plan. Doesn't matter if she ever forgives me.

I can't let her pay for my mistakes.

If she never loves me again, that doesn't matter either, not in the larger sense of the world. There are things I've got to do.

I hold the compass in my hand, an island of cool in my burned skin. It's intact, by some miracle.

I open it, but just as I do, there's a sound, a humming buzz coming directly at us out of the sky, and a song. I KNOW that song. It's a voice that is—

“Ghost bird!” shrills Wedda.

Jik jolts beside me. “NO, NIGHTINGALE!” she screams.

She twitches her arms, tosses her head back, and now she's all feathers, brilliant blue, black, and white. She springs off the deck, and instantly, she's flying right at the dark shape buzzing toward us, like she's something more than flesh and hollow bones.

She reminds me of Aza, who doesn't care, Aza who's always been looking at a horizon of darkness. Death was nothing to her until it was. Jik seems to be the same. Fearless. No wonder Aza liked her.

Jik taunts the thing, twisting in the air in front of it, singing a song of barks and high coughs, swooping around it like a trick pilot.

It rolls and twists, and then tries to twist again, too quickly. It leaves half of itself rolled over, while the other half is flipped to expose its underside.

Jik dives and snatches its feathers into her beak, and Wedda comes to grab the wing in her talons.

Jik and Wedda bend the bird's wings back and bring it down, triumphant. It's making a clattering sound, the sound of something frustrated against glass, a sound like I'd make if I got stuck in a revolving door and had to bash against it, no progress.

It's a sound I wouldn't mind making right now, because everything is making brand-new sense to me. Yeah, Jason. You know some things at least.

I kneel to look at it. It's light. Maybe it weighs two pounds. It's small too. Six inches long, extra significant wingspan of a couple feet, and the wings are totally articulated and flexible. It's supposed to be convincing.

It
is
convincing, from a distance at least. It has a beak, and a face, and it's made of something that's a mixture of metal and plastics.

I feel like half my brain—more than half—takes a moment to catch up, but I'm there in a second. The un-bird looks at me with its un-eyes.

It's a drone, in other words. A really good one. I've never seen one this close before. Most of them are just little robots with spinning helicopter wings. They don't usually look like birds. They look like what they are. This one is special.

“This would be a Nightingale,” Jik, now a girl again, tells me.

Wedda is shaking off her bird-ness too, turning back into a part owl/part woman/part warrior in armor. “Where are the rest? Is it a scout?”

Wedda's scanning the sky. “It's alone.”

“Do they know we're here?” Eli asks. “Is that why it came to attack?”

“They will soon enough. That one sings back to the rest,” says Jik.

Or doesn't sing. It's a drone. That means it's connected to the rest of the drones by network. All the Nightingales know what this one knows.
Knows
being the nonscientific term. The Nightingales are sending everything to one network. No doubt owned by SWAB.

This Nightingale is focusing on me and its eyeballs click. Which galvanizes me. Hell no.

Its wings start to arc inward, toward my shoulders, and at the tip of each one there are blades. I scramble to find the panel on its abdomen. Two seconds later I have the thing open and I'm looking at its circuits. Two seconds after that I've disarmed it by yanking the battery pack.

I check out the little orb of camera that retracts inside its belly, and I cover its glass eyeball. I've seen the footage from these. It's intense. High def, with recommendations for dispersing payloads. It gives you a target and then it gives you a little
X
mark for blowing to smithereens whatever that target is.

I fumble as carefully as I can until I discover the tiny but effective explosive waiting for deployment in its central core.

My heart definitely stops for a second, then starts again as I disable the explosive.

I shut the Nightingale down completely, and all it gets out from its backup battery is one last note, a shrill trill that sounds like a love song.

It doesn't seduce me.

I pry out the little drive inside the bird and consider it, because it's not like I have the tools to do . . . anything.

Jik looks at me.

“We've killed dozens of them, boy. We know more about the Nightingales than you do. There's a huge flock of them, and they're canwr. Strange canwr, but canwr all the same.”

“Don't call me boy,” I say. “We're the same age.”

“You
are
a boy, though. Human.”

She stares at me, her eyes appalling blueness.

“The captain's Nightingales aren't birds,” I say. “They're drones. They have motors, not hearts. They're using Caru's song, the one he sings with Aza.”

“And you know that how?”

“They belong—or belonged—to SWAB. I didn't know what they had up here taking footage, but now I do. I'm an idiot. Spy drones disguised as birds. The song they're singing came from recordings I gave SWAB of Aza and Caru. That's why they sound like that. The rest, I don't know. They aren't supposed to be able to do this. They've been . . . reprogrammed.”

They're full of strangeness, full of something more than
science, something more like magic. . . . That song isn't just a recording. It's linked to something living. I heard it shift as it sang. Which means that someone's singing with them.

And since it seems they now belong to Zal Quel . . .

I know who it must be.

The Flock's birds take wing and lift Heyward off the deck,
carefully gliding her into a cabin, their movements lighter than air.

The Flock sings hard, his little bat singing with him. After a moment, the crane joins him, and they sing together, the two canwr perched on Heyward's chest. I notice the texture of the air changing. It's denser.

The song is trying to save her.

But she's human.

She doesn't have a crooked heart leaning over on its side to make room for a song.

She's seizing. I'm holding her hand, and she's clenching her fingers, hard.

Her eyes open and she focuses on me. The corner of her mouth turns up and she gives me a look that is Eli, that is me, that is our parents, that is every moment of last year, the ambulance, and I see what she's telling me.

She's telling me she has to go.

I can't let her. I can't. She hasn't had a chance to know the
things I have. To live the life that was hers, not mine—oh my god, my parents. Eli.

NO.

“You're not dying,” I tell her. “You're coming with me!”

But she's looking at me like I'm a thousand miles from her. Her skin is paler and paler, her body is cooler, and her eyes are rolling back.

“NO!” I shout.

I can feel her going. I can feel her leaving like birds taking off from a lake. Like she's the water and everything in it is slowing, slowing, freezing—

Until there is nothing left but a ripple; peaceful, beautiful circles that move and widen and fade. One last breath, my fingers hard in hers, her clinging to me, me clinging to her, and then—

I feel her go.

I feel everything leave her.

The heartbird sings a high note.

The Flock is singing too, he and his birds, a strange twisting song. The dart is still in her chest, a bright red spot around a black spike.

She took that dart to keep it from taking me. I don't have a song for this.

The Nightingales killed her.

Zal killed her.

I'm on my knees on the floor without even knowing I'm falling. The birds are singing that song, a griefsong, a song of misery with me. They're making clouds around her, covering her in a bank of whiteness, and I can see outside the ship the
same thing happening, all a blanket of grief and paleness, all for this.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

He's not who I want. This stranger, this singer on the edge of the sky. I want my mother. I want Eli. I want . . . Jason.

But this is who I have. A hand on my shoulder. A girl dead in front of me, a girl who should be alive.

I lose control of my sobs. I cry for everything, everyone, for the life I took from her without even knowing I'd done it. I was loved in
her
life. Her family. Her house. I won sixteen years of love. She lost everything.

The Flock's many canwr perch all over my shoulders and hair, on both of us, and they sing, all except the two heartbirds, who stay with Heyward's body, singing a high, sweet song, trilling words.

“Caladrius and Vespers are singing the girl to the land of the dead,” says the Flock.

I want that to be a place that's real. I want there to be something that makes this better.

No. Don't be stupid, Aza.

She was dying from the moment the dart pierced her skin. The Flock looks at me, and his face isn't as expressionless as it's been. He looks genuinely sorry. He should be. If he'd been faster—

I think of my mom standing in the backyard, looking up at the sky for her lost daughter. Here we are, lost together.

I'm the only one who can take revenge on the person who did this. It was Zal's Nightingale, and Zal's orders.

I stand over Heyward and look at her body. Still as a painting.
Look at her, Aza Ray, keep her in your memory. This girl with pale skin and black hair, this girl who is you and at the same time, the opposite. You're going to keep her in your heart as long as you're alive, so you'd better get it right.

Her eyes, shut, her body, not as thin as mine was when I had the body that pretended to be hers. She has curves inside that uniform. She has human bones.

She was always human. And me? I'm the alien standing at the deathbed of the person I was supposed to be.

I open my mouth and try to sing the song I know is due Heyward Boyle. I sing a star to light the night over her. A deathday rather than a birthday.

I sing a star ringed in blue and silver, a star that as the night passes spins into a black center. I sing a star that could be spotted in a thousand years, and I name it my sister's name.

But the whole time, my song is twisted with something ugly. I can't keep it out. I'm so angry. Why does it have to be
like this
? Why did Zal do this? Why does Zal even exist? And why is she my mother?

I want to find her.

I want to kill her.

I want nothing to do with her, no history, no future. I want to be myself again, someone who didn't inherit this rage, someone who isn't being moved by Zal even now. I want to be in charge of my own life. Instead, she's pulling strings from across the sky.

The Flock is watching me sing, and I feel like he can see it, the red border on the edge of the star, the note in my voice that sounds like a knife, but there's nothing I can do to make it go away.

In the morning, I wrap Heyward in a sail, and the Flock carries her to the edge of the deck. The clouds are light out here. The sun's never set. It's just circled the sky. Everything looks like mother-of-pearl, like we're at the bottom of some sea I've never heard of.

I haven't slept. The Flock's canwr are with me, on my arms, and they're comfort, but not enough. I thought I'd imagined everything that could ever happen. I thought I was the one who'd be dying. I think of all those years when my parents and Eli and Jason were watching me go, and of that day when I went, and I know, now, I know how everyone was broken by it. I know that everyone, for the past year, has been scraping the pieces of their hearts together. Hurting as hard as I was.

I know that Jason—

The thought itself is enough to strangle me. Both with fury and with sadness.

That Jason did what he did because he couldn't bear
this feeling
I'm feeling right now. He couldn't bear it if I died again.

The birds are singing a ritual.

Fuck rituals. They don't make it better. You do them because you're trying to manage the corners of existence, trying to make it okay to leave in the middle of the party.

But maybe that doesn't matter, when you go. Maybe you just fly out from yourself and you're relieved of all the things you carried.

Maybe you just walk into the dark.

Maybe.

I thought I knew, but I don't know.

I think of my dad jumping on the trampoline and flipping backward into the night. I think of my mom looking up at the
sky, staring deep into the black behind the stars, looking for her lost daughter.

I think of Eli—

I can't think of Eli.

The Flock sings over Heyward, and his birds sing too. There are feathers in her shroud, feathers from each canwr. There's an apology list I wrote.

“Who was she to you?” the Flock asks.

“My sister,” I say. “She was my sister.”

He looks at me, and decides not to press it. Together, we roll her over the edge, and off into the sky, over and over through the icy silver morning light. Where will she land? I don't know. In the frozen ocean, and maybe in a thousand years someone will find her, wrapped in Magonian threads, my apologies next to her in an iceberg.

I'm sorry you didn't get to live your life.

I'm sorry you never had anyone who loved you.

I'm sorry you had to learn to fight.

I'm sorry I took your family.

I'm sorry you died.

Now I carry you with me.

The Flock sings with his canwr, moving them across the sky with a few notes, a wave of thousands of birds singing her into the sea. He has so many. Not only a couple of heartbirds, but all the birds in the sky sing with him. None of them seem trapped or forced. They all sing with their own voices. A sheet of small green birds rises in an arc, and circles the ship, spiraling up into the sky and down again. Next come other birds, his little
hawks, hanging in the air and then diving as one, together a line of talons and hooked beaks. They all merge together, these canwr, and Caladrius, the heartbird crane, flies at their head, graceful, long and pale in the sky.

The Flock sings like nothing I've ever heard. His voice is bright and strange, and sounds not like music, but like birds in a storm.

The song he sings fills my mind with images, the images brought to it by the bat, who sings a cave in a cloud filled with a colony of silver bats, and by the crane, who sings a song of birds swooping across the sky, their beautiful feathers floating in the wind, and the rest of his flock, the falcons, an eagle, all singing at once, their memories of an unbroken world, a world in which the sky and sea and land are not divided, but one.

I see trees bending in sky winds and then, from the bat's song, the roots of the same trees, hanging in the darkness beneath the ground, silvered and trembling. I see insects twisting in the air, clouds of gnats and tiny moths, and then, a dive into the water, clouds of small fish to feed hatchling birds.

The Flock sings a song that is nature in her glory, in her balance, a song that is life and death, on either side of a long string of breaths. A song in which death is normal, not tragic, not horrible, nothing out of line with life. All in the same string.

Like pi, I think, like that. A string of numbers and at either side of them a beginning and an end, and we never know where they stop.

It's summer here, over Antarctica, which means it's never night, but a constant glittering pale, and the Flock's song divides the midnight sun into blinding sparks. All the birds fly in a circle around the sun as he sings, their colors merging into the
light, so that they make a rainbow entirely of wings. A perihelion. I stare at it.

A deathsong. A funeral song.

Our funerals are their sunsets
, Zal told me last year.

My own birthday, a glowing aurora borealis.

Heyward's burial, a rainbow around the sun.

I watch it. I watch it. Rainbows aren't enough. Beauty isn't enough.

“Teach me how you sing with so many canwr,” I say.

“There's no teaching this,” he says. “And it's not a song that can be sung by everyone.”

Twinge of anger. “So it belongs only to you?”

“It is a song I can sing,” he says, and shrugs his gray shoulders. “That's all. You have your own song, I am certain, and you will use it for your own purposes. I use mine for these.”

He sings a note, and his flock of canwr echo it. I watch the air condense, harden, take shape. An iceberg forms in the sky as it drifts down into the waters below us. A green-blue hulk, a floating piece of thin air become tremendous and solid.

It shifts as it hits the water, and groans, but it's diamond sharp, bright, made of the sky rather than the sea. It's new ice beside old ice.

It's something much larger than I can do, something stronger than I've ever done, even in Svalbard, when I was at my strongest, singing destruction with Dai.

It's stronger than the song I sang after that, with Caru, my heart full of love for Jason, when I reversed the damage I'd done.

I haven't sung like that since. I don't know if I know how to sing like that anymore.

Love? I don't have enough. I'm too broken to use my voice that way, or to let my heart use
me
that way. Flat origami, all the folds crushed in on themselves, no room for anything to expand, no room for me to open myself up. I don't even know how to start.

But the Flock's doing something in the same category as me. I can shift the elements. He's much stronger than me, though, and all the canwr? They amplify him in ways I can't touch.

If I could sing like he's singing, I could sing new icebergs to replace the ones that are gone. I could unmelt parts of the sea. I could make things better.

But that's not why I want to learn this song, not right now. I want to use it for something darker, the way the Flock used it to wreck a Magonian ship, the way he sang a wave and a sinking.

I pause. There's only one thing to tell him. The truth.

“I need to kill Zal Quel.”

He looks at me for a moment, his face unreadable.

“More death, then? You care nothing for life, the women of Magonia. All of you, fixated on power and war. All of you, killers.”

I'm stunned. The women? This is, as ever, another world.

“I have no help for that,” he says. “But I can offer a place for sleep, a place for calm. My ship is called
Glyampus
, and you are welcome here. It may seem transparent, but from the sky, none of Magonia's ships can find us. From below, we look like a wisp of iridescent cloud. My song hides us. When you are on my ship, you are safe, and you will sleep. There is more to sing than these bitter songs, and when you wake, perhaps you will try to sing some of those instead.”

And that is all he'll say. He ignores me, and goes into his own cabin, while I sit staring at the frozen sky. There's nothing to hear or see out here.

It's a silent world made of ice and a slowly moving cold sun.

It's the middle of nowhere, and I'm in it.