Magonia (25 page)

“So, E.E. Cummings,” I say. “You’re the one who taught it to me.”

She nods slowly and rubs her forehead. Something about her cracks open for a moment. She laughs, in a kind of mortified, despairing way.

“Do you ever wonder what your life would be if one thing hadn’t happened? If that one thing made it so that you weren’t you? What if I could remember this poem? I’d be more like you want me to be, then. Wouldn’t I?”

She looks at me for a second, and then walks away, kicking at the dirt around the graves, looking up at the sky.

I’m down on my knees in front of Aza’s grave. I’m looking up at the sky too. I’m thinking about the path of the ship, the way it’s been taking on provisions, the way it’s been traveling northeast, and I’m remembering something. An article Aza and I read together.

I think about what Magonians have been doing for centuries, all those almanacs and stolen harvests in the books I read, in the scraps of information I’ve been digging up. Magonians are hungry. They’re looking for food. I know where they’re going.

It was a photo essay, just a few months ago, a seed grown in India, held in the hand of a woman in a sari. Sealed in a plastic bag. Ready for transfer. Rows of fluorescent lights in a frozen place, long aisles, refrigeration cases.

The Global Seed Vault. In Norway. An underground repository where there are seeds for every plant on earth. Nice and cold, nice and deep, nice and un-tectonic, a safe complex where they keep lychee nuts, raspberries, long almost-lost fruits and vegetables, in case a disaster or rising sea levels take everything. In case humans mess it all up.

I’m shaking my head, muttering, considering. Looping in my revelation. Yeah. It’s right. I’m right.

She’s behind me out of nowhere. Right behind me. I can feel her breathing. She puts her hand over my shoulder and traces her name on the gravestone.

“Who have you been talking to? Who knows about Magonia? Who knows about this?” she asks.

I look at the gravestone. I feel Aza’s hands on my back. I feel her bending. I feel her chin against my skull. I feel her arms, strong around my shoulders. I have a jolt of mortifying lust and a jolt of something else.

“I’m the only one who knows anything,” I say.

I have my hand in my backpack.

“Give me the spyglass,” she says, and I hand it over my shoulder. I watch her do something to the lens cap, twist it in a pattern, and then take it off. She looks through it, up into the sky, and exhales.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s useful, Jason Kerwin. What else do you have to share?”

I feel a rough sharpness against the side of my throat.

“Nothing,” I say. Then I launch myself into her, hard as I can. I slam backward and send her flying. The spyglass is knocked loose and I snatch it, forcing her to the ground. I pin her to the ground beside Aza’s grave and stare at her.

“Who are you,” I say, and my voice is not my voice. “What have you done with Aza?”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

She’s stunned. But it only takes a second for her to regain
herself. She stares at me, warily, her eyes bright and one of them, suddenly, the wrong color. She was wearing contacts. One of them slipped when she was looking into the rain, and now she has one pale, sky-blue eye, the color of Eli’s eyes, and one dark blue one. She’s got a knife in her hands, stretched tight. That knife was the thing I felt on my neck.

I’m shaking with fury. I’ve been controlling it for a while.

“Aza doesn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. When she does drive, she stops at all stop signs and all lights, because she doesn’t actually have a driver’s license. Aza doesn’t wear jeans. Aza wouldn’t drive past her house, and past Eli. Aza knows all the collected poems of E.E. Cummings.

“And Aza Ray Boyle would never, never, not in a million years, tell me she loved me.

“So who the hell are you?”

I already know part of it. This is someone from
up there
.

I didn’t want to believe it.

I wanted her back.

But now I know.

“I didn’t do anything with her,” the fake Aza says. “Her mother’s ship picked her up.”

Her mother’s ship.

“Which ship? Where?”

“There are ships everywhere, Jason Kerwin,” she says, and smiles. “There’s a sky full. I guess you can’t see them, can you? I guess you’re not one of the lucky ones. But then, almost no one from here is lucky enough to live in Magonia.”

“Who are you?”

“Are you going to kill me, Jason Kerwin?” she asks, tilting her head, looking at the sky at the same time. “I don’t think you are.”

She ducks forward and gets me around the waist. I’m fighting, twisting. She’s fast and strong and tiny.

She flips backward, lands on her feet, and stares at me from ten feet away.

“You’re not bad,” she says, “for a drowner.”

Drowner. I think about that for a moment. What it means to someone from the sky.

That legend of a person drowning in thin air after he tried to climb down an anchor chain.

“
You’re
a drowner,” I say.

“How dare you,” she hisses. “I’m
Breath
.”

It’s a normal word, but the tone she uses makes me shiver.

I’m circling, trying to keep my distance, but also steering her. She doesn’t know this cemetery.

She knows how to lie, though. She knows how to trick someone into believing in everything. Before she takes it all away again.

Aza liked the Hawaiian traditions, death-wise. Cliff of the dead, and you would leap from it as a
ghost, and go where you wanted to go. She wanted to be close to the edge, in case her ghost couldn’t walk.

I feint, figuring out where she’ll go in response, and yes, she steps back, one final step, a bit too far. And I’m so full of hate right now, shaking with so much rage, I see the way she’s going, and I don’t stop moving.

The grass slips out from beneath her and she staggers, gasps, and windmills her arms. I’m seeing her drop and oh god, and I’m shouting and changing my mind, reaching out.

But time goes slow, and she smiles at me, this wide-open, devil-may-care, don’t-give-a-damn smile, a look I’ve only ever seen on one other person’s face.

She falls backward, off the edge of the cliff—

falls

falls

falls

—and then a rope twists out of the sky. She grabs it, clings to it, and climbs. She tugs herself up, up into the clouds.

I pick up the spyglass from the grass by the grave. Now that the lens cap is gone, I can see through it.

After a second, I put it down so I can breathe.

The sky is full of ships and she’s climbing up to one.

My field of vision is all cracked and crisscrossed and busted, a film watched with a broken screen, but even askew and crazed, I can see them between the jags.

Clouds with giant steamers in them. Sails and small boats, junks, catamarans. It’s an armada’s worth. The ship that’s inside the storm is huge and silver, the bottom of a tremendous vessel, something as big as a football field, or more. She’s still climbing to it, up onto its rails. It’s surrounded by dark shapes, by darting, shifting shadows.

Sharks, made of lightning and cloud.

I need to get onto Aza’s ship. I know where it’s going. I
think
I know, even though all I really know, all I’ve really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.

I send a quick text while I stare up, and then an email. I start booking myself out into the distance.

There’s a crack of thunder. I look up to the ship the fake Aza got on, and as I look I see a streak of lightning. And then another. And another.

I dodge out from beneath the tree I’m under, running to my car.

You can survive a lightning storm that way—in a car, if the windows are up. But my car’s too far away, down the hill—

How do you run away from the sky?

The lightning’s all around me, strikes are raining down like spears, clots of fire hitting the damp earth, and I rack my brain—

Metal in my hand. Get rid of it, NOW. I throw the spyglass as hard as I can, watch it bounce off the rocks with a glitter of glass and go over the cliff.

I run another few steps, but there’s no shelter here, no place to hide—

The wind whips up on one side of me. Then the other side. Then behind me. In front of me. I’m surrounded by spinning air and dust and stones.

I look up at the big dark cloud and see lightning zing out of it.

Oh god. Something flips through my brain, wilderness survival. Crouch into a ball so it can’t hit your head. Does that actually work?

Shit shit shit.

There’s a tremendous boom, and something comes down from the dark cloud, a ball of white lightning, fast, faster—

You’re thirty times more likely to die of a lightning strike than of a shark attack. I am about to die of both.

I drop down, crouch, put my arms over my head.

And there’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard and the brightest white I’ve ever seen, and I’m made of it, I’m

I’m made of light

I’m made of heat

And I’m flying

Moms?

Carol, Eve—

Aza—

I’m sorry

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

I wake up panicked the night after Dai and I sing the wave.

A dream—Jason was in it. I can’t remember it at all, or not enough. The captain’s ghost bird screams horribly.
Sky
, he shrieks.
Sea. Light. Zal.
He makes a choking sound.
Fall. Die. Night.

The voice seems to be everywhere, all over the ship, all over the sky.

“By the Breath,” I hear even the Magonians cursing, though not at full volume.

“May the Breath take that bird and break him to feathers and bones,” whispers someone not far away from my cabin, and then I hear Wedda hush them.

I sit up. I think about that.

Not “ghost.”
Bird.

I think about how the captain’s voice can sometimes be heard, early in the mornings, cooing to something.

To someone.

The bird. She was banned from singing with it.

Kill
, Caru screams.
Smashed nests, broken song, kill me.

I curl in my cabin, listening to him, my eyes full. If that bird is alive on this ship, how is keeping him here okay? How is listening to him suffer? How is any of it?

Wedda shifts in her berth and her chains jingle softly against each other.

Almost a wind chime, almost a song.

So many tied to this ship, I think. Would they all rather be free? Would they be better off that way? Or are they safe here from the famine that afflicts the cities? Is this ship their home?

The solution to starvation seems so simple. Just a matter of providing food to a bunch of people who are hungry. Jason’s mom Eve once told me that if everyone shared the resources they had, there’d be enough for everyone. Instead, we have this— parts of the world that have too much, and other parts that have nothing.

Magonia has nothing.

I think about Dai’s family. I think about Dai. I think about how I’ve never been hungry. I think about how I’ve never even really thought about hunger before.

Nothing is perfect here. Nothing is perfect down there either.

I spend the next few days privately trying to figure out where the captain’s canwr is hidden, and publicly practicing the old Magonian songs Milekt and Dai have taught me. I sing the moisture in the air into sand, then the sand back into water. I sing quietly, tiny things, a small piece of ice made of a drop of rain, a drop of rain made of a stone. I sing things into their opposites.

I’m not perfect yet. Sometimes a note makes the air crackle, and Milekt scolds me. Sometimes a note meant to turn water to stone turns it to fire instead, and Milekt shrills and pecks me inside the lung.

But not so secretly, I keep hold of the missed note. Because water into fire? Um, hell yes.