Magonia (23 page)

I try in vain to swallow down the guilt and the weirdness and the want and every single thought except about what’s in front of me. Dai shrugs on his shirt and jacket, giving me so much view of his back, his shoulders, his profile, I have to actually shut my eyes.

“You’re shy,” he says, reappearing beside me, and he laughs.

“You weren’t wearing enough,” I say.

“Drowner,” he says, but for the first time, it’s in a teasing voice.

“Exhibitionist,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“Someone who has a compulsive need to show other people his attractiveness,” I say. Primly.

Then I curse internally.

I’m awkward because of exhaustion. Because of the insanity of yesterday coupled with the captain’s ghost bird calling me in my sleep—calling for the sky, calling for freedom.

But it’s dead, I remind myself. A dead thing is already free.

Something else kept me awake as well. Want. I felt the power of my song and there was no doubt it could go further. That it could be stronger. There was
more
to it.

Whatever more there is, I want it.

“You’re the first mate,” I say. “You’re supposed to be professional.”

“And you are beautiful, Aza Ray Quel, Daughter of Zal, singer of sky into stone,” he says. “Even if you do need singing lessons. And lessons in everything else too.”

Then he’s past me and out of his cabin, up the ladder before I can say anything at all.

I climb the ladder behind him. The inside of my skin is too hot, and my brain is too small. My ears burn, and my heart pounds.

I hoist myself up on deck, and distract by looking at an airplane, far down, underneath our squallwhales.
Aza Ray,
I think.
Aza Ray, your life is so gigantically not what you thought it was going to be
. Your life is awesome, in the old sense. As in, full of awe. Though, um, the old word for “awesome” was actually . . . “awful.” A factoid from a certain person creeps in. I shake my head fast to rid myself of things I can’t think about.

“You have to play by the rules,” Dai tells me, sitting down on the deck beside me. “This isn’t about you. This is about Magonia. You’re just a piece of it.”

“Then what are the rules?”

“We’re bonded to sing together.
I’m your
ethologidion.”

“You know I don’t know what that word means,” I say, because he uses it with a tone meant, I swear, to drive me crazy.

“
Your partner
. You have your skills and I have mine, and they’re compatible. I’ve never heard of anyone singing the way you can, except for Zal, and that was before I knew her. I was trained—she trained me—to complement your strengths.”

I can’t decide if this is creepy or cool.

“I don’t need a partner. Zal doesn’t sing with one,” I say.

He snorts, like I’m completely clueless.

“Zal can’t sing at all anymore,” he says. “But I’m here and alive only because of her. I’m loyal to her. If she breaks Maganwetar’s laws, I’ll break them with her. We’re all on the same mission. Are you?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice wobbling for reasons I can’t quite figure out.

“Then we have to learn how to sing together. I think we’re halfway there.” He runs his fingertip down my cheek, and I turn away. “Tell me you don’t want to sing with me, Aza Ray.”

“What if I said no?” I ask, just to check.

“Things aren’t disposable here the way they are undersky. There, they throw things away. Here, we keep them forever.”

I consider him for a moment and think—

(Forever.)

Then—

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

I stare out at the sky, the way I made it hold me up yesterday. I wasn’t flying. I was floating.

“I conquered an invading ship,” I say.

“You did,” he says. “But were you sure you could? I wasn’t. You need to learn how to control it. I’m a focus for you. A magnifying glass in front of the sun. My song will make yours stronger.”

“So in this analogy I’m the sun?” I say.

He doesn’t smile.

“Yes,” he says. He takes my chin in his fingers and looks at me. I look back.

His eyes are long-lashed and very, very dark. He leans in and I want to laugh because it’s so ridiculous, it’s so
stupid
.

(The last time I was this close to a boy’s face I—I don’t think about that. Nope. I don’t.)

“Like this,” Dai says and sings a note into my mouth, very quietly, more of a breath than a note.

I pause for a second, shaky, and then sing a note back. We’re both without our birds, so it’s not official, what we’re doing.

It is, however, totally enough. I sing my note in Magonian, the note that means “
rise
.” Dai joins in with this low note, this undercurrent, which is part “rise” and part “more.”

I feel my heart start pounding again, and I can see his pulse in the side of his neck, beating nearly in time with mine.

His note gets louder, and mine does too. We increase our volume together, and as we do, I notice that my hand is on his chest, where his heart is, near where Svilken should be, but isn’t.

I yank my hand back, feeling scalded.

I’m blushing severely. I don’t know how that looks on Magonian skin. Dai smiles at me, and hums a different note. He puts out his fist, and knocks once on my breastbone. My chest opens for Milekt, which startles me totally. It feels intensely intimate, Dai initiating this. Milekt flies down and in.

I rap as coolly as I can on Dai’s chest, and it, too, opens like a window. His canwr flies down from her perch, too, and into his lung.

He’s as awkward as I am, suddenly.

“We’re in this together,” Dai says. “Zal’s plan. There’ll be consequences if we fail.”

“It would help if I knew the entirety of Zal’s plan,” I tell him. “So, if you feel inclined to tell me, now would be an excellent time.”

“When you were a baby, you sang something that pulled an entire lake up from undersky, turned it into ice, and dropped it back down again,” Dai informs me. “It’s pretty legendary. Also illegal. It got a lot of attention from the drowners, and then a lot of attention from Maganwetar. If you could do that, what else could you do?”

The deck sways beneath us. I look up into the rigging, where Jik is perched, sitting on a sail-supporting rope. The expression on her face is both curious and suspicious.

When I make eye contact with her, she turns away.

Dai stares at me intently, and after a moment, he puts out his hand and touches my fingertips.

“I’ll sing a storm cloud now,” Dai says. “And then we’ll sing a raindrop.”

He makes a high-pitched noise that flattens my ears to the sides of my head, and a miniature cloud mists into being. Svilken sings with him, and between us, in the frozen air, a raindrop appears. I open my mouth, and blow the rain away, like I’m blowing out birthday candl—

A flash of memory, a chocolate éclair.

“What should I wish for?” I hear myself asking Dai, and he looks at me, uncomprehending.

My wind is still blowing, gusting between us invisibly. Without his prompting, I turn the raindrops to ice—each one a prism containing a tiny rainbow.

“You have to learn how to do this,” he frowns. “There are songs that have been sung since the beginning of Magonia. You can’t just make up new ones.”

Milekt agrees with Dai. He sings briefly with Svilken.

Obedience
, sing Milekt and Svilken from our chests,
duty
.

I inhale, reach out, and take Dai’s other hand, and the four of us sing together.

All of us, a single song, four voices bonded into one, and the sky around us blazes up insanely bright. My whole body shakes. Dai’s in front of me, his eyes on mine. He’s shaking too. The song is sweet, but deep in my chest, it’s hard as hell. This is a song that takes immense effort to sing.

Something’s about to happen. I feel as though we’re holding each other up as our voices twine.

I watch as a coil of rope on the deck rises up of its own volition, called by our song, as planks
start to loosen, and the crew starts to rise even as they stand on deck, not flying,
rising
, because we’re singing them rising.

I feel something starting to detach somewhere else, far below us, and I look over the deck rail to the ocean. A wave is rising up, a curve of water so huge I can’t see its edge. The water stretches toward us.

Dai leans toward me and I lean toward him, and we sing into each other’s lungs. All over my body every cell calls out. The notes shimmer, and I feel as though we’re ascending, but not in a safe way. We’re rising toward a fall.

I can tell he feels the same way. We’re singing a tsunami until I come to my senses and pull back, gasping.

“Stop!” I manage, even as my whole body wants to keep going, even as I want to keep singing. If this is what singing is, I want to stay this way forever, but I can’t. He looks as ragged as I do.

“Oh,” he says. I’ve never seen him look surprised before. “Oh.” He staggers.

The wave folds with a distant crash back into the ocean. My heart slows.

I think about what a tsunami can do. I think about the fact that I created that wave from nothing—from air—from breath.

The ability everyone was talking about. My power. I know it now. And
our
power. I know that too.

It feels terrifying.

It feels amazing.

Dai gives me half a smile, and I try to give him one back, still reeling.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“I’m back,” Aza says. She’s standing on my doorstep. “I came
home.
”

No.

I held her hand as I rode with her to the hospital.

I held her hand as she died.

I held her hand until they told me I couldn’t hold her hand anymore.

I read the coroner’s report.

There was a body. Her body.

I’m hyperventilating.

I’m passing out? I’m breathing too fast? Am I starting to scream?

“What are you looking at?” she asks me, stopping me from all that, in a classic Aza tone.

A mirage. I’m staggering through the Sahara. I’m a dying man looking at the bouncing of sunlight, but no, because sunlight just rang my doorbell and pounded on my front door. Sunlight is staring at me and pursing her lips.

“Aza,” I say. That’s all I can say. I can’t even get close to letting anything else out of my mouth.

“Jason Kerwin,” she says. “It’s nice to see you too.”

She holds out her hands. Not blue.

She comes in for a—

I don’t, I—

She presses her mouth to mine, very quickly, not the way someone who is dead would, not the way a ghost would, and before I can even tell what’s happening, she’s leaned back again and she’s looking at me.

I might fall over or run away, or—

Super-fast calculation of probabilities that I can’t compute, of time travel that I can’t do, of doppelgängers that I can’t imagine, of secret twin sisters, of Hitchcock movies, of
Vertigo
.

Vertigo, that’s where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don’t let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don’t do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to.

In one and a half seconds flat, I compare my in-brain Aza to the girl in front of me.

She looks healthy. Strangely so. I can’t see any veins under the surface of her skin, the way I’ve always seen them. I’ve made a career of watching her blood running through her body, but now it’s invisible. Her mouth is not only
not
blue, she’s wearing lipstick. Her cheeks are pink. I’ve never seen the clothes she’s wearing. They’re new. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her hair brushed before.

The last time I saw her, her strange ocean-depths eyes were shut. I was the one who shut them. Now, she’s—

Aza holds out her arms in exasperation.

“Aren’t you happy to see me at all?” she asks, and her voice is Aza’s voice, a little snarky, a little hurt. But not breathless. I can’t even process that.

“I thought you’d be happy. I can’t believe you haven’t even hugged me yet. I
kissed
you.”

My heart’s pounding so hard it should be rattling the window glass, and then I pick her up off the steps and hold her as tightly as I can, and she’s not gasping, not coughing. She’s in my arms. She’s in my—

How can she be well? The last time I saw her, she was dead. I hold her out from me and stare.

“Did I dream it?”

“No,” she says. “You didn’t dream it.”

“Am I crazy?”

“Maybe,” she says. “Tell me what you’ve been doing the last four weeks and I’ll tell you if you’re
crazy.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m really here.”

“
Aza Ray Was Her
,” I say. She looks at me curiously.

“Aza Ray is me.” She smiles.

Which, as always, takes me down. Her smile is like no one else’s. Even though it’s weird to see her normally dark-purple mouth painted pink.

She drops out of my arms and walks past me into the house. I stand for a second looking out at my street, which seems to have become a street in heaven, and then I follow her into my living room.