Aerie (25 page)

I'm a million miles across the sky. Pi, but beyond it. I've found
the end of an endless number. I've gotten to the final digit. It's beautiful there.

Someone's shaking me back into my body. A raw whisper. “Jason. Jason. Come on.”

The voice it sounds like isn't who I think it is. I'm still here, barely. Hallucinating still, probably. Too far gone to come back.

Something lands on my chest. I feel wings, feathers, pain, too much pain, and then even more, because a beak nips my nose.

I open my eyes. It's Caru, right there, staring at me with falcon pupils, and singing a low trill. And then a bat. A strange, silver bat, looking into my eyes and singing with Caru.

And then it's Aza. I'm looking at her, finally, touching her again, finally, even if this isn't real.

Her eyes are gold and indigo and orange, her skin blue and tattooed in white lines, ship rigging and sails, anchors and swords. All the things she loves, that's what she told me once, that's how Magonian tattoos work.

I'm not on there.

This is her coming to tell me she's leaving. I'm ready. I can do it.

Her skin is covered with Magonia. Squallwhales and batsails, a tentacle from an airkraken wrapping around one arm and onto her neck. She's got a flock of canwr flying across her shoulders, and on one cheek I can see a shifting constellation, which shines as brightly as any star.

“Jason,” she whispers. “Jason. You can't die, okay? I need you.”

“I'm fine,” I say. “I've been dying for days. I'll just keep doing it.”

“Liar,” she says, and the word contains all the versions of liar I've ever been. “You're not fine. Even when you were fine, you weren't fine.”

She rips open my shirt and looks at my burns. I see on her face how bad it is.

“I don't know how to sing this,” she says, and looks up at Dai. He shakes his head.

“I have something for you,” I say.

She looks at me, her eyebrow up, in a very Aza Ray expression.

“A weird fact. I'm going to win with this one.”

“You don't have to win,” Aza says, and she's crying. “We're not competing.”

“I've been saving it,” I tell her. “For a special occasion. But now I don't know if I'm going to make it that far, so you get it now.”

“You're blatantly not dying,” she tells me. “You have sixty, seventy years to win—”

“So,” I interrupt. “This is a thing that happened during World War II. An inventor created a plan involving bats. A lot
of bats were captured, and rigged out with tiny bombs. They were chilled and put into a cargo drop, in the anticipation of dropping tiny bats on Japan and setting the country on fire. Everyone was sure that the bats would do their bidding. The idea was that bats would roost in flammable areas and create firebombs in barns. The rural country would be panicked and everyone would surrender, thinking there were soldiers hiding everywhere. That was the plan. It was diagrammed out. It was even tested, but the bats had their own opinions. They chewed through their cords, flew away, and set the testing facility on fire.”

Aza's looking down at me, her face covered in blue-black tears.

“The bats did what they were meant to do,” I say. “No one could make them be anything they weren't meant to be. All they wanted to do was roam the sky.”

“I don't want to roam the sky, Jason,” she says.

“You might, and that would be reasonable,” I say.

“Everything is possible,” I say.

“Carpe omnia,”
says Eli to Aza, and Aza looks at her for a moment, and then smiles.

“Everything,” says Aza as she turns to me.

“You don't love me anymore,” I tell her. “And I don't need to give you permission to leave, but you have it. I screwed you over. I thought I was doing the right thing, but the right thing was complicated, and I was stupid. Now? I don't know what any right thing is anymore. I'm sorry.”

She holds up her hand—

“Let me apologize,” I say.

“You already did. You apologized with the voice of, like, a
hundred Nightingales. But look,” she says.

Aza holds out her right arm and shows me the inside of it. It's a tattoo of a wing. I recognize it instantly. It's one of those wings we broke our ankles with when we were kids, jumping off the garage. These dumb wings we made from Da Vinci diagrams.

We're not kids anymore, and something about that makes me want to cry more than anything else.

Back then, we both thought if we were together we'd be able to fly. But love isn't enough to save you from everything. It's not even enough to save you from yourself.

I want to tell her that. I don't want to tell her that.

She holds out her other arm and shows me the other wing. Both these wings were busted on the ground outside her garage.

I almost can't look at her, except that I don't know how to stop looking at Aza Ray. I can't imagine my life without her. Even if falling for her is like falling for a shooting star.

What am I supposed to do?

Here she is, in front of me. Here she is, the same girl she always was.

I have one photo of Aza, the real Aza, taken secretly on my phone, when we were in Svalbard. I took it as she ran back to the ship to put on the Beth skin, and I never told her.

I spent the last year looking at that picture of Aza, wishing I could see her like that again, wishing I knew everything about her the way I did the moment I took it. Wishing she knew everything about me too.

Because something that can happen when you know everything about each other is that it takes only a little bit of time to know nothing again. A few months, a few lies.

She's blue and wild in the photo, her skin deeper than lake
water, her hair in knots around her, her eyes red, orange, and indigo. She's alien, but I know her so well. She looks like Aza in this photo, not like anyone or anything else.

And here she is again.

I can't stand it, and yet here I still am, with this girl I met when we were five and didn't know anything about the world.

Before we knew how hard it would be to be together. Before we knew how much we needed each other. Before we knew anything except that she was going to die, and I was going to try to keep her alive.

Here she is. Alive. I didn't keep her that way.

Here she is, and it wasn't me who kept her going. She did it herself. She can't keep me alive either.

“A skin!” she shouts suddenly.

What?

“Dai! Get a skin!”

Dai takes off running.

Aza's eyes are full of dark blue tears. She tenses her jaw and swallows. She's as scared as I am.

“Do you still love me, Jason Kerwin? At all?”

Aza Ray is an idiot just like I'm an idiot. I was born to love her. I was born to do all kinds of other things too, but this part? This part I can't avoid.

“I still love you, Aza Ray Boyle.”

“Do you love me if I'm Aza Ray Quel?”

“I do.”

“Do you love me if I'm neither of those names? If I don't believe in anything sometimes? If I don't trust anyone? If sometimes the whole sky goes dark inside my head and I try to tell
you that everything is nothing?”

“What about you?” I ask her. “Do you love me even if I lied to you? If I ask for forgiveness?”

“If I ask for forgiveness,” she says.

We stare at each other for a moment and then we say it at once.

“I forgive you.”

“I'm a mess,” she says, “but I choose you.”

Dai hands her something.

I'm flat on my back, screwed up, half ruined, and Aza places the skin onto me, and I feel it join with my skin, move around me, change me to fit.

I have no idea what's happening. No idea why this is working. This is something that makes no sense, has nothing to do with science. This is me inside of magic.

This is not the first time I've been surrounded by magic.

Caru is singing loudly with the bat, and Aza and Dai start singing too, and I feel her hand on my chest, where my heart is, where my canwr would be singing if I had one.

I feel myself starting to come back.

I'm made of pieces that could assemble the sun, or a pea, and it could go either way. Love is not this simple thing. Love isn't this obvious thing.

It's not about that first moment of knowing. It's about what you keep doing after you break each other's hearts. It's about choosing each other on terrible days as well as on beautiful ones.

It's about picking each other up off the floor and then laughing about it later. You can go pretty far into disaster as
long as you're willing to look at each other again. You can fix a lot of failures.

You can fail as long as you keep trying.

It's a long journey up from below the ground, up into the sky. It's a long journey through a life I had, which is now totally changed.

Aza sniffles and wipes her nose. Nothing about it is beautiful. Everything about it is beautiful.

I stand before her in my new skin. What do I look like? I have no idea.

Am I human? Am I Magonian? Am I both?

“You hold no horrors for me,” she says.

I pick her up off the deck and hold her as tightly as I can. She holds me back.

We're two lost things becoming one found thing again.

And here we are, me, Jason, Eli, and Dai, standing in a city
none of us came from.

We step into a ship, given to us by Jik. There are skins in the hold. Supplies for our journey back to the ground, and for me to return when I wish.

Vespers orbits, trilling, singing some radio frequency love song, some half magic involving music brought from below and from the stars as well. I can hear her drawing from every edge of everything. I thought Vespers would die when the Flock went. But now I have another heartsinger, not a bird this time, but a bat. I inherited her song, and she chose me too. Along with Caru. Together now, the three of us.

With Caru, Vespers sings, the two of them old partners. I feel things moving all over the sky, clouds and rain, sunsets and sunrises. Squallwhales. They sang with me too.

Dai's given me his song, and in his song, I can tell there's nothing left of his fury.

The sky has edges and he's familiar with them. He's going to where he came from to see if there is a city there still, to broker
with earth if there's not. He's been sent by Jik, and he will be a first mate to Wedda.

And this isn't the end of us singing together. Why should it be? You only have one of these lives, these precious, wild, strange lives. I don't have a version of my life where we never sing again. Why would I be that dumb? When I can try to have everything?

I can try.

There are still problems.

The agency Jason worked with, SWAB, and their warfare against the sky. The world below, hating the world above. The world above, hating the world below. Hunger and confusion, starvation and fury. I have plans, but what do I know about plans? Crop science plans, Jason's mom. Breathing plans, my mom.

Things that can be solved.

Healed.

Hoped for.

I look down off of Maganwetar and consider our houses, from high above. Weather crises. Our parents at home, wondering what's happening up here. Jason, now changed. Maybe not forever. I don't even know what he looks like now. He looks like himself to me. I see him inside of anything.

We're on our way home. But we have other places to go too, or at least, I do. To my parents, to tell them this is okay. To Jason's parents, who are going to have to learn things from the beginning. Though, if you ask me, I'm not sure they don't have some idea about things. I look at them, and I wonder. They're not the usual parents.

Whose are?

There is so much I don't know. There's so much everyone
doesn't know. It could all go wrong again. The thing about trusting someone is that you have to do it anyway, even if you know it might end in disaster. Not being able to trust anyone means you spend your life alone.

I don't want to be that version. That's dying girl all over again. So now I'm girl between worlds. I'm all the things I've been, and none of them, at once.

Maybe I don't have everything, but that doesn't mean I'm not reaching for it. Good morning, world. This is the new version of Aza Ray, walking between the edges, balancing on the impossible still wearing a flight suit and a pair of unlikely boots.

Below us, off the coast, there are still boats moving, and whales. Our ship goes low, sung over the sea by me and Caru. The skyship glides over the cloud waves for a moment, and then I feel it touch the sea itself.

There are things in the ocean. I saw them in the prison. I saw them, and now I know that if I want the world to be better, I have to do some things. Sing some things. All over it. Flying fish are here suddenly, leaping over the edges of the ocean, over the ship, and I hear their song.

Some birds, they've proven, navigate by means of magnets in their beaks. Not magnets exactly but ferrous deposits, which function as compasses. There was a test years ago, in which they tried to see if humans had magnets too, if any of us had directional sense that worked that way. Apparently some people maybe do. They can walk miles across a landscape, always knowing where north is.

Other birds navigate by means of star maps. They sit in their nests as chicks, staring out until they find the North Star. I'm serious. They then memorize the shit out of the sky. Once the
star maps are in place in their bird skulls, they are free to fly anywhere, always knowing where they are.

Me, I know where north is, because everything else gets memorized from that position. If the people I love are in front of me, I know the whole sky.

My past was flight. Maybe my future is everything at once.

I look at Eli. I look at Jason. They each have one of my hands, but no one's keeping me here.

“All good?” I ask Eli. I take off my boots and unzip my suit.

“If you don't take me down there at some point, there will be hell to pay,” Eli informs me.

“I need to see a kraken,” says Jason. “I warn you now. Air-kraken, seakraken, I don't care, but it's going to have to happen.”

“Noted,” I say.

This is a clear sky, and the entirety of it is covered in birds and clouds, squallwhales singing nothing but their own songs, no rain, no darkness. I take off the flight suit.

I take a step forward. I look at the tattoos on my own arms, the wings. I spread those wings.

I feel a tattoo getting written across my collarbone right now, the words Jason wrote to me a year ago.

I {   } you more than [[[{{{((   ))}}}]]].

But this time it's not just about the two of us. It's about life, and the size of the world. It's about being part of everything at once. It's about all the worlds, all one thing. It's about singing one song, and that song, that song—

With my wings spread, with my arms open, I dive into the ocean, singing my own flock, bringing flying fish and whales and dolphins, singing a roar into the depths of the world, just as I sang one into the heights.

I sing joy into the dark.

I sing my heart into saltwater, and with me, all the fish in the sea, and all the birds in the sky, with me all the song in the world. We sing an entwining song.

We make it up as we go, all of us living things singing together, bringing light back into the bodies of the living. We sing against collapse, against despair, against shipwreck.

All of us breathers

All of us swimmers

All of us flyers

All of us sailors

In the dark, I see the flash of a tail, a woman swimming into the depths, and I follow her down.

And I listen to the sound of singing. Everything, everywhere.