“You have to actually go to school.”
“Independent study.”
She rolls her eyes.
“The history of human innovation is independent study,” I tell her. “We can fly because of people who didn’t go to high school.”
“Those people weren’t my kid,” she says.
Eve joins her, stepping into the room. Without making a big thing of it I put a few papers on top of something on my desk.
Carol takes her usual unhappy gaze around at my stuff. She doesn’t know about the storage units, and she doesn’t need to. Some things have to be bought in bulk.
I don’t know where Aza is. I don’t know what she’s doing. All I know is where she was three weeks ago, when she died holding my hand. And then a few days later, when I heard her voice coming out of the sky.
She’s alive. Aza’s alive.
I know it like I know my own name.
I just need to figure out where.I checked wind currents and mapped the possibilities, at first in a pretty primitive way, and then in a more functional one.
Unusual storm patterns moving east across the country. Reports from weather balloons and satellites.
As far as I can tell, those patterns are moving in an unusually coherent clump, and they’re still over land. I have a master chart at this point, and a program that runs it on a variety of axes. This isn’t just my own obsessive doing. I wish I was a full-on programmer, wish I was a full-on anything other than this, but I know people.
And this is one of the uses for the money earned by my hotel bed-making devices and instant dry-cleaning sprays.
There’s not anything really concrete to go on and I don’t even exactly know what I’ll be going on to do. But there are plenty of scraps out there, things about ships in the sky, things about weather and weirdness. Then there are other things, dug up out of places I’m really not supposed to be looking.
Official places. Government places.
“You need to say good-bye to Aza,” Carol says, and takes Eve’s hand.
“It’s important, baby,” Eve says.
Their front is worryingly unified.
“I DON’T have to,” I tell them, though we’ve been through this already, too many times to count. I was prepared for dead, as prepared as you can be. I wasn’t prepared for this.
Ship. In. The. Sky.
I am not a fool. I haven’t told my moms anything about the ship. They would look at me for about three seconds, and then put me into the car, and take me directly to the children’s hospital (an insult, but it’s where you go until you’re eighteen) where we’d have a speedy meeting with the psychiatric unit. So, no, I don’t tell Carol and Eve about the ship.
In fact, I tell them nothing, beyond: I’m working on a project. My moms have the look of people who might be getting ready to take me offline. The Great Unplug has happened only once before, when I was nine and in the obsessed throes of memorizing a chunk of the OED. The moms did not approve.
Memorizing took up the extra places in my brain that were otherwise occupied with counting down the seconds of Aza’s life until age ten, when the doctors had, at that point, decided she was going to die. It was about this time my moms discerned that meds were required.
“So,” Eve says. “Do we need to take you offline?”
“I’m not even on right now,” I say, lying.
She looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
Yeah, Eve has a bandwidth monitor. I find this hilarious. They got the monitor to keep me from looking at porn, I assume. They were definitely convinced that’s what I was doing when I was working on the OED project. Carol burst into the room, all, AHA! And found me midway through H.
Maybe I’ve looked at some things on the internet in the category of naked. Who hasn’t, I ask you? But there are a million categories I care to look at, and most of them are not porn.
Categories like historic UFOs. Categories like history of flight. Categories like peculiar weather patterns since the eighth century. I’m compiling said categories into one larger thing in my computer. Because, reasons.
“I’d actually not be that unhappy if you were looking at porn,” Eve says, reading my mind, and sighs. “At least you’d be human.”
I look up.
“You wouldn’t be happy,” I tell her.
“I would be reassured that you were normal,” she says.
“Yeah, but I’m not,” I say.
“Go outside,” says Carol.
“It’s cold outside.”
“See a friend?”
“In case you missed it,” I say, playing the illegal card, “my only friend died.”
“She wasn’t your only friend,” Eve says, impervious to my attempt.
“Name another,” I say.
She can’t.
I do have other friends. Those Who Live Online, in Other Time Zones. Mind you, I’m not nine anymore. If I ended up unplugged again, I’d get around it.
“School tomorrow,” says Carol. “We love you, and we understand what you’re going through, but it’s either school, or doctor.”
Understand what I’m going through? They do not. I’m going through the history of civilization, basically. Not a big deal. Only minor work there.
I wait for them to leave my room, and then I’m back in it. There’ve been several sightings since the funeral. One person saw weird lights. Another saw a bright thing near the horizon. Another actually saw something he said was a rope.
Sir, you have my attention. But then he recanted and said some stupid stuff about downed power lines. Whatever.
There were other sightings of the same kind earlier this year—one above Chile, one in the air over Alaska, one over Sicily—but none of them helped me. People, alas, don’t document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.
Now, however, we live in the epoch of the app. The official ones, and these, the nonofficial. Forget jailbreaking your phone, I’m talking about the ones that require you to break that phone out of Alcatraz.
There are a few hundred of us who develop them (See: Friends in Other Time Zones), mainly because someone else on-list dared us. I’m a midlevel amateur at this point, but they magnanimously let me on the message boards, and even allow me to throw down the odd gauntlet to the real players.
Hence: I now have a sky-anomaly app. You just aim your phone at wherever you saw the strange thing—cloud formations, weird lights, storms out of nowhere—and the app plots coordinates and checks with satellite info to gauge air displacement, mass, humidity, condensation of whatever you’re looking at, cross-referenced with similar reports.
The world is sometimes amazing.
Most of the sightings I’m researching are clearly fake, but three have been real, or as real as I can figure. I think they’re from the same clump of impossible sky out of which I heard Aza’s voice.
I’m done with being cautious now. I’m just going to call it what I think it is.
So, henceforth, we will be referring to that piece of sky as Aza’s ship.
Aza’s ship is heading northeast, slowly, spending a lot of time over farming areas. Those areas have been plagued by hailstorms, windstorms, lightning. Tiny tornadoes have scattered and flattened several fields. No crop circles. Just unforeseen, chaotic weather patterns, destroying harvests.
What Aza said she saw—what Aza saw—is part of a long tradition of things seen in the sky since the sixth century. In 1896, for example, there was something called the Mystery Airship scandal. People all over the western US saw skyships, brightly lit, flying fast. People in Illinois saw some kind of airship on the ground, and watched it take flight. After it was gone, they discovered footprints all around the place it had been. And the thing they said, my favorite quote?
“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for.”
Yeah. So that’s where I’m working right now. Something above the clouds.
I interviewed some farmers (I claimed I was reporting
for small newspapers that actually exist, in case they checked) and they talked about it like, well, the world is ending and all I can do is try to harvest when I can. When I asked about the whereabouts of the damaged crops, they kind of didn’t have an answer.
“Well, they’re ruined, son, that means they can’t be sold.”
Most of us don’t notice waste, so if all the corn blows off the cobs, or gets trampled, what we notice is that it’s no longer edible, not that, hey, a lot of it is straight up gone.
There is a pattern. The events, the sightings of the odd lights, the weird white clouds, they’re all moving in a straight line.
There is a destination. I just need to find out where it is. I stare and plot the course. I stab virtual pins into a virtual map.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Amina Pennarum is a fishing boat, I decide, except not, because we’re fishing not in an ocean, but on earth.
A launch loaded down with apples waves a flag to ask us if we want to trade. The robins in its crew lift the boat to our level, and Zal comes out on deck to offer them a sack of dry corn from our hold in exchange for the fruit. We trade for a pig from a small tug. Our Rostrae haul it aboard and it totters past me, heavy and determined. I feel vegetarian just looking at it.
We fly over a field, and a swarm of bees appears over the rail. The cook tromps up from pig butchery, wiping blood from his knife, and barters with them for honey. (Yeah, with them. The bees themselves. They speak to the Rostrae. I don’t know how that works, but it’s a kind of humming whirr from both parties.)
Midafternoon, Amina Pennarum goes low, in a hailstorm created by our squallwhales. The blue jay girl does some of that twitchy lasso work along with a couple of other Rostrae, and the ropes swing out of a little cloud, slipping around something down below, which gives a disgruntled moo.
I stare. Are they pulling up . . . a cow? Our rustlers attach the ropes to the big crane jutting over the edge of our back deck. Its engine runs and we haul the creature up. You’ve never seen surprise until you’ve looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine.
So. Those legends about UFOs stealing cattle? Right, apparently the cause was not UFOs, but Magonian ships.
Mostly it seems we just milk the cows and let them go. The poor girls sit around in a pressurized hold, until they get grumpy for lack of grass. Which is more quickly than you might imagine.
It’s like we’re on a floating farm. Except we don’t grow anything. We just take it. We’ve got corn and wheat, animals that rotate in and out, and animals that end up meals for the Magonian crew.
For a week, the sun rises and sets. I’m put to work, I’m put to bed. Every morning I wake up expecting my room, my comforter, the life I knew.
Every morning, instead, I’m greeted by Wedda’s clucking, scouring, dressing and braiding. And then Dai’s stern face as he lectures me about finding my voice—and gives me something new to scrub until I do.
I feel like I’m in a book written by George Orwell.
Except that this is nicer than Orwell. This is Animal Farm plus Peter Pan, plus . . . squallwhales and bird people. And, somehow—somehow it’s real. I have to keep reminding myself it’s real.
I know it is, because I’ve attempted to determine my aliveness or deadness in several ways. Be she alive or be she dead, I’ll grind her bones to make my bread, fee, fie, foe, fum, and no, that doesn’t help me, but it’s what I mutter when I’m at a loss these days, even though I didn’t climb a beanstalk to get up here. Most of my tests have involved infliction of medium amounts of pain. Vital signs, modified. Each of my experiments yields the same result: alive. Alive and presumably sane, yet completely and utterly messed up.
Because Logical Aza, Rational Aza keeps wanting to wake up—to shake someone by the shoulders and scream ships can’t fly! You can’t sing something into happening!
Except that they can. Except that Magonians do.
I’m trying hard to stay calm and deal with all of this. All things considered, I’m doing reasonably well. Practice gained from years of dying. Credit due.
This morning, I’m in a harness, trying not to look down at earth while I’m carefully washing the figurehead on the ship’s bow: a patchwork bird carved and painted. One crow’s wing, one thrush’s, half of its head an owl’s, half a parrot’s. One heron’s leg and one flamingo’s, and a bird of paradise’s tail. Apparently the mascot of Amina Pennarum is a messy hybrid creature, which makes me feel sympathetic toward it, given that’s exactly how I feel.
“I’ve heard we’re embarking on a special mission,” Dai says. He’s agitated, as usual.
I stare at him, awaiting the further explanation that I know is coming. Dai loves nothing so much as the sound of his own voice. It’s the only reason I know anything about this place.
“Before we got you, we were on field duty, sending Rostrae down to net crops. It was dull. Feed the capital. Send our forage off to them. This new mission, on the other hand, is what Zal’s trained this crew to do.”
I lean forward, but he shuts up, because the golden eagle Rostrae lands on the deck rail, and with a shrieking stretch transforms into a shining woman, her hair to her waist, her eyes yellow.
Another Rostrae lands with her, the girl I keep noticing, the blue jay girl with the electric-blue mohawk. She considers me for a moment, her black eyes with white streaks beneath them, and a yellow stripe on each of her cheekbones. She’s more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen, though she also makes no sense with her combination of human features and beak.
She could be my age, I think, or near it.
“Nice scrubbing,” says the blue jay, and grins. She looks at me for a moment in a way that might be friendly.
I’m shocked to discover a smile spreading across my face. I’ve had plenty of attention since finding myself here, but no one’s been actually friendly.
Do I want a friend? I’ve only ever had Jason.
I look around for Dai, but he’s wandered off, nowhere to be seen. Not surprising. He doesn’t relish fraternizing with those beneath his rank.
“I’m Aza,” I say.
“Thus revealing an impressive grasp of information we both already possess,” she says, and tilts her head.
Is she . . . joking with me?
“I just thought—I want to ask—do you think you might be able to answer some questions for me?”
She shrugs elegantly and her shoulder feathers ruffle. The trim on her uniform is as bright as her plumage.
“Possibly,” she says. “I don’t know how helpful I’ll be. I’m only a sailor.”
“I’m only a skyman,” I tell her, and she laughs.
“An ordinary skyman with more power than all the other officers on this ship combined,” she says, pointing at my insignia. “Captain’s Daughter. Savior of Magonia.”
Savior?
She’s mocking me, clearly.
“It’s Aza,” I insist.
She nods. “I’m Jik. I was born aboard this ship, and I’ve been part of the effort to locate you—ever since I can remember.”
“So I guess, thank you?” I say weakly.
She smiles. “You look ordinary, Aza Ray Quel. It’s hard to believe you’d be capable of so much.”
“What does that mean?” I ask. But Jik turns toward some piece of business and, despite her human form, I see that she has a long, blue-feathered tail. It’s weirdly glamorous—tails on a tuxedo.
I’m entranced.
The Rostrae she’s with don’t correct my scrubbing and washing. The Rostrae seem too busy with their own crew assignments to stop and stare at me.
And soon, it seems they’re sharing a meal.
“Birdseed,” one of them says, looking dismissively at a cake of some kind in his hand.
“We’d be better feeding below, where there IS food,” says Jik. She’s quickly shushed by an
older crew member, a robin.
“Do you wish to make trouble? This is our ship, and we are lucky for it. Not all of us have access the way you do. Your place is assured, but what will become of us when she’s through? Have you thought of that?”
The robin glances suspiciously at me and then walks away, leaving me scrubbing.
“What was that?” I ask Jik.
Jik shrugs.
“Magonians can’t go to ground to bring up wheat. They need us to pull the ships, to net their harvest, and to be their help shipboard. I am a part of the Annapenny as much as the rigging and the sail are. And I’m as easily replaced.”
“That can’t be true,” I argue. “You just said you were born aboard.”
She nods. “Yes, and I’ve done every job on this ship—from knotting nets to braiding hair.” She pauses. “Captain’s Daughter, I don’t know if you know this, but you don’t inspire confidence. You’re pretty unskilled.”
She smirks and looks pointedly at a streak of grime I’ve been unable to buff out of the figurehead.
I laugh. It comes out a giant, sarcastic bark. “I don’t know how to do anything . . . except talk. I’m not great, am I?”
“Perhaps.” Jik regards me a moment. “But you’re not the worst.” She nods to where Dai is striding back into view. Then she flies up to the top of the batsail, grabs a rope, and tugs it until the bat’s wing is straightened out.
“What’s this new mission?” I ask Dai when he’s at my side, keeping my voice low.
“We’re hunting,” says Dai casually.
“Something alive?”
“It’s classified. Ordinary skymen don’t have that information,” he says smugly.
Superior show-off. I’d give him an ostentatious eye roll if it wouldn’t turn into a thing. I’ve already had to endure about a million too many of Dai’s lectures on proper protocol and duty.
He observes the streak of dirt Jik pointed out moments ago. With a “tsk” he takes the brush from my hand and swings like some kind of acrobat out onto the figurehead. Securing himself in place with his feet, he makes quick work of the grime while rattling on about technique. A tuck and a backflip, and he’s returned to the deck again. His movement is so fast and sure, I have small struggles about my gaping jaw. No, thou shalt not gape.
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