Aerie (17 page)

I open my compass and look at the screen. No one knows
where she is, and I don't either.

I press the button that calls to her. The screen lights up on my end, and I hope for a moment, but nothing. No answer. No Aza. All I see is dark, which cues up even more panic, but I can't do anything about it. All I can do is be here. I try again. Again.

She's not speaking to me, or maybe she's—

She's out of range. That's all. She's out of range.

The burns feel like my heart has been taken out of my chest, and though I know that's not true, it's persuasive. Wedda keeps covering them with new damp bandages. I have a fever. I'm not right at all, and I think that's what I deserve. If I die of this, it's fair. But before that, I have things to do. I feel a chill and then a rush of heat, a shivering questionable thing inside my skin, like I'm collapsing. Pea/Sun. Sun/Pea. I feel like I contain a lot of things I never meant to contain.

You don't know how much you can lie until you find yourself in the middle of it, lying again to cover the lie you already gave out as truth. You don't know how much you can mess your own life up until you're looking out from the inside, and
thinking you're not the person you set out to be.

It's possible to lie to such a degree that you start seeing yourself in the distance, coming over the horizon, because you've been lying to yourself too, telling yourself you're in charge of the narrative when really, you're just messing up someone else's story.

I was never the hero.

I try to let it go. No savior. No hero. Just a person. A person who's now in Magonia, looking at a sky full of planes. I know what kind of planes they are, because I used to look at the monitors, where these planes were being tracked. I was the below, and this was the above.

Now the worlds are one. We're entwined. The planes are casually moving, slowly circling. The Rostrae I'm with ignore them, as birds all ignore planes. They're used to air traffic.

But these are SWAB planes, surveilling, watching the Rostrae, watching Magonia.

If you're from earth, you know what unmarked police cars look like. This is the aerial version. I can see that SkyWatch has the area surrounded. What are they waiting for? Zal to start a war? Aza to show up? The Flock? Any of those things, so that they can be justified in moving in and doing something major?

What do they want? The sky unclaimed? Or someone up here working for them? It occurs to me that it's not beyond governmental policy to recruit a villain to do some dirty work on our behalf. There's plenty of history of that kind of thing. So . . . maybe SWAB has been using Zal to start something, just so it can get a better claim on a war-torn region, the sky.

We move faster than I thought we'd be able to. These barge ships, these nests, seemed unwieldy, and instead, they're agile.
The Rostrae raise a sail made of tightly woven feathers, and it fills with wind. I look up and see that it's actually a kind of wing with at least a forty-foot span. Something blue enough to match the sky.

We're still far from Maganwetar, as far as I can tell, but we're feinting and twisting with way more control than I'd expect. Then I notice that Rostrae are also guiding the raft, high above us, ropes in their talons. And Jik is commanding them all.

Periodically she takes flight and issues an order from above, her wings spread wide, her face ferocious.

Everything is heading for the same place—every rebel in the sky, according to Jik. We're all going to Maganwetar.

I suspect SWAB is following us because they can't see the city. They need a guide, and a fleet of vessels across the sky is enough for them.

At least I understand SWAB's tech. War is toxic science, payloads and gunpowder, jet speeds and pilot capabilities. I don't know how SWAB—or anyone for that matter—thinks they can take Zal and Maganwetar out without creating a giant catastrophe. What would happen if Maganwetar just fell out of the sky? The equivalent of a meteor?

I have dark weird thoughts about other meteors falling to earth. What if some of them were sky cities? What if some of them were civilizations crashing down out of the clouds?

Ice ages and planets tilted in their orbits. Who says life evolved the same way in Magonia as it did on earth? All Magonians need from the ground is food. There's been food longer than there have been humans.

Who is to say that the sky hasn't been warring for thousands and thousands of years, that Magonia wasn't around concurrent
with the dinosaurs? I look at the Rostrae on this ship with me. There's a whole thing in the back of my head regarding birds and evolution. Maybe some Rostrae came from flying dinosaurs. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I will never understand any of this, and that's probably fine, but also a little bit something that my brain would historically have obsessed over.

Too much biology to analyze with no tools. No time. Middle of a war, Jason Kerwin, I remind myself, but I'm still me, what can I do?

We need a weapon, the kind of weapon that can fight against manmade weapons. What's SWAB doing up here? What is their plan? Think about it. I try.

They're hunting the Flock. A weapon powerful enough to attack Zal for them. To cancel Zal's song, to make her unable to sing it. Like they've done to Aza's song. A reversal of her own notes. Is that what the Flock can do as an ethologidion? Is that who he is?

If so, the thought of Dai getting anywhere near Aza again is a painful one. I thought he just amplified her song. What if he can silence her as well?

She's not here. I am. I only have myself to rely on right now, just my brain to use to try to find a means of dealing with this before it gets to her.

Jik points out into the distance.

“Maganwetar's orbit,” she says. There are sparks of lightning—
stormsharks
, I think, and flinch involuntarily. I feel a fiery pain in my chest where I'm wounded. A lightning strike would take me out. I don't even know how I survived it last year, and this year, I'm already broken.

Otherwise, though, Maganwetar is eerily silent, an expanse
of quiet sky. I can't see ships, and I can't see any armada guarding anything. Just a still blueness surrounded by a wall of lightning.

“Where are the squallwhales?” I ask Wedda. I haven't seen any. It's all been Nightingales and Magonian song magic.

“Fled,” she says. “They don't take sides. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless they find someone they'll sing with.”

Which is no one. Not Zal. Not Jik and Wedda. The whales sing their own song. I imagine an entire population of them on the other side of the sky, far from this, and I wish I was with them. Nothing about this is going to end well.

A flash of thoughts about my moms. They think I escaped from a mental hospital. I wasn't okay. I'm still not okay. Really,
not okay
isn't even the right phrase. My face is frozen and my chest is burning. No. My brain is frozen and my heart is burning.

That.

I'm full of darkness, and all the parts of my body orbit around an empty center. I feel like my heart is a black hole. I look at the disabled drone. It's the same as me. Nothing in the middle. I look into its flat black eyes. It's a replica of the bird from thousands of years ago. The archaeopteryx. Its beak is lined with teeth, but it's only the size of a magpie. Someone at SWAB having a joke, reinventing an extinct bird from the Jurassic and turning it into a spying weapon. It has a long, bony tail, which is one of its key traits. This one is made of metal covered in feathers like a fern frond.

What do I do? How can I use it?

Eli sits down beside me, takes the drone like it's nothing, and examines it, turning it around in her hands. It was a smart move SWAB made, sending these up here. It was a less smart
move underestimating Zal's ambition. Of course she took them, or Dai did. It makes sense. Magonia has a long history of harvesting things from the sky, and these were up here in their airspace. But even I'm surprised she was able to repurpose them this way. When Aza described
Amina Pennarum
, when she described Magonia at all, it sounded like something out of the 1700s. I didn't think Magonian technology existed. I knew they used ropes to wrap around intruders, crashing helicopters, maybe planes. No part of me imagined Magonians might be able to use their songs to change earth technology into something they could use for themselves. Another flaw in my thinking, clearly, as it seems that's exactly what's happened here. And it's dumb, because I'm pretty sure Aza could do anything she wants with her song, technology be damned, and
she's
Magonian. I should've seen this coming.

“Send it to get Caru,” Eli says.

“What do you mean?”

“Send it back to Zal's ship. Zal has Caru, yes? And Aza needs Caru so that she can sing the way she's meant to sing. So, get the drone to go in and release him. Unless you have some other crazy brilliant plan, in which case, I'll step back.”

I stare at her. “We don't even know where Aza is.”

Eli looks at me.

“Her heartbird does. Her heartbird can
feel
her. Am I wrong? Isn't that what a bond is? Isn't that what we've been talking about for the past year?”

Um.

I have the drone drive between my thumb and forefinger. I'd been thinking about snapping it half, but instead, finally, slowly, something occurs to me.

Jason Kerwin, you dumbass.

Eli's watching me. “How many remote-control items do you think you and Aza have made over the years?”

“A few,” I say, and think about things ranging from a tiny flying dragon we brought to school in seventh grade to a remote-control floating lemon—don't ask—powered by self-made batteries, which we were pretty sure would be an awesome science project, and which was actually just moldy and messy and surprisingly splatter-ish.

I pull my phone out. No signal, of course, but it has a solar charger, because I wasn't as dumb a few months ago as I was just now. There've been times I was prepared for anything. Maybe let's remember that part of me again.

I charge my phone, then connect the drone to my cell.

My phone chirps. I have a signal connecting the drone to . . .

My phone opens a network, and asks for a password.

OperationAzaRay
I type, on a hunch. I'm right on the first try. Yep. SWAB. Of course this is SWAB. But what I want to know is
why.

And what they thought they were doing sending drones up here, drones that seem to have been taken over by Zal Quel, and by Dai. What was their plan? How do I counteract it?

When I get its drive on-screen, it's not what I thought it was. Things in it are altered. It's not just that these spy drones aren't supposed to be able to drop explosives. It's that they're now also set to broadcast song. Whatever SWAB did with Aza's song, I assume they did it because they were trying to have the option of canceling it out. But these drones are attacking Rostrae, and creating weather magic, or at least that's what it sounds like. What I'm looking at is that particular MP3 file, set inside each of
them. But what I hear when they sing? It's not always the same song. It's twisted and changed. Zal has added something to it, and she seems to every time she sings.

She's controlling them. How's Zal singing with these? She's not supposed to be able to sing at all. That was supposed to be her punishment: no canwr, no song, no Caru, and no Aza.

Now she seems to have all those things but Aza, and I have no idea how it changed.

I don't need to know, though. I only need to figure out how to take power away from her, not to figure out where it came from. I remind myself of that, even as my brain has ideas about every possible way this could have happened.

However she got these Nightingales, whoever worked on them for her, they're tiny screaming speakers singing out her agenda all over the sky, and they're using Aza and Caru's song to sing weather and transformation. With the additional benefit that they can apparently drop explosives on those who don't comply in Magonia. And up here, I'm guessing, that's revolutionary in itself. Earth weapons deployed by a Magonian.

I take the precaution of disabling its song file. I have no interest in hearing this drone sing something suddenly that makes this ship into water, a thing Aza and Caru's song is fully capable of doing.

I go into the network and reprogram the captured drone's signal so that it talks to my phone instead of to anything else. It's fairly straightforward once you know what you're doing.

All this war. All these things made for killing and destroying. These thousands of years of vengeance, and now these, creatures that can kill without you ever seeing them coming.

Sweat is dripping down my back. Cold sweat. I wipe my
forehead. My skull feels like it's splitting and my arms feel like they don't quite belong to me. I feel like my skin is about to boil, my chest a screaming volcano of pain. There are still things seared to my skin, burnt shirt, burnt soul.

I keep working.

“What are you doing?” Jik asks me. Suddenly she's right there and I have the uncomfortable feeling she's been listening to me quietly singing digits of pi for the last hour and a half.

“Tech,” I say.

“What will you do with it?”

“Make things better,” I say, and she looks at me. She looks exhausted.

“
Try
to make things better,” I amend.

“I'll take that,” she says.

Pi circles in my head like a bunch of runners on a track, but I'm running alongside them, and the drone is submitting to my reprogramming. Submitting. Like it's something living. It
has
to submit, because it's a little bit of metal and wire. It's at the mercy of its machinery.

And I'm at the mercy of my own mortal body. I'm pieces of flesh and bone all ready to relent depending on what attacks me. So it's in my interest to make this drone into something that works for me rather than against me. And what do I want this drone to do? I consult the SWAB surveillance network.