The sky roils black, and full of fast wind, lightning sparking out of every raindrop. There’s a weight in everything.
People have started to cover their heads and their faces.
Sand starts to pour from the sky, from the clouds that surround their ship, wrapping around the pirates, making them stagger. A rain of pebbles. Then larger rocks, and people are screaming and dodging.
The air gets muddy between me and the silver-haired pirate captain, who’s yelling orders at her crew. I see the enemy ship tilt, lurching up onto one end.
Zal is staring at me with a kind of eager joy.
There’s something I learned from Jason last year. Sous rature. If you need a certain word to communicate something, but that word happens to have years of baggage, and you want to get rid of the baggage it comes with, you cross it out, but use it anyway. Some people do it like this: love.
With this song, I write over the place where the old Aza was. I’m not that person. I’m Aza. I scream a song, punk rock without a microphone, the kind that makes boulders fall from the heavens.
Transforming rain into rock.
Destroying all those that can hear it.
I’m avalanching the sky.
I have no idea how I’m doing it.
A rock the size of my head lands on our attackers’ deck and splinters the boards.
I sing something that unbinds my crew’s hands, something I don’t even know. I move rope and chain. I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s unfolding from the song. I don’t know how it’s happening but everything’s shifting, whirring, surging around me and Milekt.
Like I’m in a movie,
like I’m not me,
like I’m someone I never imagined—bigger, stronger, and fearless. I grab the pirate captain’s sword and twist it to point at her chest.
Milekt trills in my lung, his own solo song of triumph. I open my mouth and let loose a whoop.
I am standing in the center of the deck, this time with a sword, not a mop.
I am the Captain’s Daughter. I’m everything they thought I was, and more.
“On your knees,” I tell Ley. I nod at Jik and she ties the pirate’s wrists. My crew moves quickly to disarm the rest of the pirates, and suddenly, Amina Pennarum has won.
Zal is free of her bonds, and laughing, looking completely exhilarated. Her shirt is torn. I can see a long scar running down the center of her chest. From what?
“Surrender, Ley!” she shouts in triumph. “This sky is not yours to command.”
But Ley doesn’t surrender. She stands, bound, looking defiantly at Zal.
“Where were you heading, Zal? To the north? Breaking every vow you made? You and I both know you want a new world. Maganwetar will not forgive you twice. They’ll take you for treason, and this time you will both be executed—”
Zal looks sharply at Dai, and he moves quickly, gagging Ley with his scarf.
“Who else knows we have her?” Zal says, looking around at the other pirates. “From where did the rumor come? Who spoke to you?”
They just look at Ley. All the pirates are on our deck, bound.
“If you will not answer, you’ll share her fate.”
They remain silent. Zal nods at me.
“Sink that ship, and its pitiful cargo,” Zal says.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Sing it,” she says. “Sing the sky into sand, Aza. Do what you just did, and sink them. Milekt knows the song.”
Milekt sings a new note and I join him, following his lead. We sing rocks onto the chains fastening the other ship’s bat to their mast. We can all see the links breaking until finally they’re gone.
Their batsail stretches its wings, and for the first time I wonder how batsails end up tethered to these ships in the first place. The pirate sail spreads its wings and billows out and is gone, gliding out into the dark as the empty ship sags in the sky.
When I finally turn to look at Zal, I see her standing beside Ley, staring down at her, a hawk studying a rabbit. Except that they’re both birds of prey.
Milekt and I sing heavy air into the pirate ship, and without its batsail, it drops. I sing sand until I can’t see it anymore. Until all it can do is crash onto the world below.
At this height, there will be little left when it lands. What will the humans call it? Asteroid? Meteorite? There’s so much they don’t know.
I stagger a little, because my knees have gone weak. I look around. Everyone’s staring at me, the Rostrae and the Magonian crew alike, Zal and Dai and Jik, everyone.
“Take Ley to my cabin,” Zal says, and two Rostrae carry the other captain down the ladder and into the belowdecks. She doesn’t even struggle. She just looks at me evenly, and so does everyone else, my whole crew. The rest of the bound pirates go too, into the brig.
There is blood on the deck and holes in the ship and prisoners now in the hold and I wonder if I’ve done something massively wrong, something that I can’t—that no one can ever—take back.
And then I hear it. Streaks of bird voice, long trills and screams.
Jik is grinning and Dai is shouting in triumph, and with a great noise our own batsail spreads its wings and we push out hard, our squallwhales singing us a storm.
Cheers and shouting as the crew sets about making our ship whole again. And I’m glowing with what I just did, the craziness of it, the confusion, the Aza of it.
I’m dizzy, and so is Milekt. I can feel him inside my chest.
This, then.
This is what everyone meant when they said sing. This is what they meant about power. Dai’s hand is in mine. I don’t know how it got there, but it sends a pulse through me. Zal takes my other hand in hers and raises it up. We stand there, on the deck of our ship, surrounded by our crew and I’m maybe someone who’s finally been found. Dai looks at me.
“Together, Aza,” he says.
“Together,” Zal says.
“Together,” I whisper, because this is nothing I’ve ever felt. The batsail sings out to me, and Milekt, in my chest, sings too. The Rostrae look at me, and the Magonian crew nods in approval.
I turn my head and look at Dai. I’m not sure what all this means, not even sure what I did.
“You did everything,” he says, reading my mind. And he grins, and squeezes my hand hard.
For the first time in my entire life, I have power. More than power. I feel like I belong. Like this is my ship.
Like this is my country.
Like this is my destiny.
There’s the cry of the ghost again, all around me. I glance at Zal, but she’s already walking away. The ship is sailing noticeably faster, and I look up to see Rostrae joined with the batsail to pull us at a greater speed.
And we fly.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
It took a lot of walking in small, frustrated circles after I heard Aza’s voice at her funeral, after something fell out of the clouds, but I found it.
It’s here in front of me right now. Under the papers. I’m waiting until the moms leave the house, and I can look at it again for the millionth time.
It’s a spyglass.
It’s old. As in, incredibly old. It’s made of brass and wood. The wood is scarred. You can’t see through it, because it has a lens cap or something, made of hard wood. It fell a long way. The cap is smashed in place over the glass, and I can’t get it off.
It’s scratched all over with strange characters, in a language I haven’t been able to find any kind of translation of.
Yes, you heard me. I can’t get a translation. Not even a wildly erroneous one from someone lurking online.
So there’s that.
In some of the illuminated medieval manuscript stuff, which I ended up wandering around on the Harvard Library’s site, there are bird people, and other kinds of people too. Angels from that period, particularly
the ones that deal with crops and weather tend to be human-looking, but feathery. And then there is another section of angels from this period who are just . . . blue.
Not that this is any indication of Magonia, really. No one says “Magonia” in those margins.
But there are similarities.
The history of humans is 73 percent people talking about the weather in freaked-out ways. The discussion of Magonia is basically that: Where did that storm come from? Oh my god, the clouds.
Jacob Grimm—not Mr. Grimm, my English teacher, the fairy-tale guy—talks about a country where people sell the wind. Selected quotes (I’m being kind and not making you scroll through the thousands of pages of information available on the issue):
“The witches of Norway . . . tie up wind and foul weather in a bag and, at the proper moment, undo the knots, exclaiming ‘wind, in the devil’s name’ and then a storm rushes out, lays waste to the land, and overturns ships at sea. . . .
“A violent thunderstorm lasted so long that a huntsman on the highway loaded his gun with a consecrated bullet and shot it off into the middle of the blackest cloud; out of it a naked female fell dead to the ground and the storm blew over in a moment. . . .”
And this is the kicker: “Sometimes the aim of sorcery is not so much to destroy the produce, as to get possession of it, to carry it off the field, either to one’s own garner, or that of a favorite.”
So we’re talking stealing crops. From the stories, the thing in common is that anyone floating around in skyships up there is hungry. And that makes sense. I mean, what the hell would they be eating up there? Gnats?
The crop-destroying storms plotted by my app seem to stay in most places for several days, and then move on.
There was an enormous storm in Iowa a couple of weeks ago, and that storm was one of the few where people actually reported loss of crops. At the end of it, some farmer’s cornfield was stripped, as though locusts or crows had taken it down. Each cob bare. The farmer mentions seeing an eagle that day, right before the storm came in.
The strange reports and stories continue to move along the trajectory I plotted for them with such accuracy that I can nearly predict where the next one will be. So what’s across the sea, to the northeast of America? That’s where it looks to me this thing is heading. No crops on water. The islands out there aren’t fertile—just rock outcroppings in the middle of the ocean.
I’m not pretending this—my being right about Aza—isn’t causing me to have a pretty major existential crisis. I might be reading a few philosophers. I might be losing my way just slightly. Eve and Carol might have reasons to be worried about this whole situation.
I keep waiting for Aza to fall out of the sky and into my arms. I know I sound unbelievably sexist saying that, but I keep imagining catching her like a fireman outside a window.
Just thinking this way makes me want to bang my head against the floor.
If she were here, listening to me, she’d be puking right now because I’m losing all my dignity.
But. I can’t text her, can’t email her. Can’t call her.
This is sucking, Az.
I hate it. I’m scared that maybe I’m missing some kind of giant point, something everyone else knows, that I’m trying to hunt down a dead girl who doesn’t even exist anymore, a dead girl who’s gone and now alive only as a figment of my Vivid Imagination, like Aza always said she had. Me and Aza, Vivid Imaginers. Maybe I should just be taking myself to her grave, and sitting down beside it, and saying, for once and for all, good-bye.
But I don’t think she’s dead. And I don’t think I’m crazy.
I have something in front of me on my screen, a little scrap of video that some girl in Maine took with her phone.
It’s about a second long, the important part. It’s a ship. Just a part of a ship, with portholes and full rigging, sailing out of a cloud and then disappearing.
It checks out with my charts, the weather conditions. Other people saw something, and there was a jokey news piece about illusions. Sky mirages and long winters. Newscasters made fun of the people in Maine, saying they were drinking too much. There was a piece in the Onion that spoofed the whole thing pretty accurately, a bunch of drunk people looking up at the sky and seeing ships. Exactly what people said in the 1890s.
I saw something out Aza’s window that day, the day she died. I saw a mixed-up flock of birds on her lawn—majorly out of season. I heard something in the sky on the day of her funeral, and I don’t think I’m losing it I’m not losing it.
After Aza’s funeral, after her voice coming out of the sky, I remembered the helicopter. Of course.
I know what you’re thinking. Pretty stupid, Jason, to not think of it before, right?
Yep, pretty dumb, because there’s a black box.
That’s a new thing for helicopters. Not all of them have them, but life flights get sent out into insane weather.
Today, I got what I needed. Through some of my more reliable and illegal back channels, I had it emailed to my most secret account.
I hit play on the helicopter audio. It’s all communications with the hospital at first, talking about where exactly the life flight needs to go to pick us up, and I can picture it in the most horrible way. All over again, us in the ambulance, Aza beside me.
The audio shifts to the medic in the ambulance itself, updating the copter on Aza’s condition.
I have to move the cursor. I’m afraid I’m going to hear the rattling, terrified sound she made at the end, and I can’t hear it again.
A second later, I’m listening to something else, the flight, the pilot, and the medic in the copter with him, talking about the storm.
“Whoa. This came out of nowhere,” the pilot says.
“Global warming,” says the medic. “We okay?”
“Yeah, it’s good, we’re fine,” he says.
There’s a moment.
“Wait. Did you see that?”
“What?”
“What the”—jumbled sounds—“is that a—”
“Ropes? Oh my god—”
And then there’s a sound, a huge, screeching ripping of metal, smashing of glass, crush and tear and screaming from both of them, and what they say, what they try to say is—
Yeah, no, because I can’t. They died right after this. I can’t listen to their last words. It’s too horrible.
A moment later, there’s a huge explosion. Singing and shrieking. The sound of flapping wings.
Birds.
Someone says, in the faintest and most scratchy voice:
“What are you?”
That’s all there is to the audio. I keep listening to it over and over again. Between the first talk about the storm and the crash, maybe two minutes.
I have to give that a moment. I have to sit with it, because. All of it. The sounds of people dying. The sounds of birds. Last words. Last things said before these poor people fell out of the sky, tumbling down, on fire.
The pilot and medic, their families don’t have this. Only me, and the people I got it from. It wasn’t just the two of them that died, but the medic from our ambulance too. He ran out trying to flag them down, and they never found his body.
I’m sitting at my desk, not crying, but—
Yeah, I am. I’m crying.
What are you?
That was the night Aza died, and five days later, I heard her voice coming out of the sky.
No, not paranoid, not looping, no. Not conspiracy, not obsessive, wrong notions in my head.
I’m sure, if this hit the internet, some people would say the pilot and medic were confused by the storm, air pressure, and lack of oxygen.
That “ropes” was not really what they said at all.
But if not “ropes,” what?
Out my window there’s suddenly a lot of wind and rain. I get up and shut it. Freezing.
What are you? What are you? The voice repeats and repeats in my head—when the doorbell rings.
Carol or Eve,
forgetting keys. It’s almost always Eve. Her brain gets snarled on things and then any hope of not forgetting is over. Not that I’m not exactly the same. Lots of not being picked up at school in my childhood. I spent afternoons at Aza’s. And that was fine by me.
I close the tab with the black box audio, just in case, and make my way to the front door.
Someone rings again, and then bangs. Not Eve. She’d be outside my window, tapping the glass, and performing “face of the forgetful mother” for me.
I have a moment of nervousness. I’m doing the kind of hack stuff that if it gets traced back, causes you to be investigated, locked up, and/or sued into oblivion.
I peer out the side window, but I can’t see a police cruiser. No flashing lights. Of course, if it was federal, there wouldn’t be. I scan the trees across the street just in case. Lots of wind out there. Blowing.
Maybe I’m paranoid. (Looping?) I worry about myself for a second.
The person hits the door again, hard. All I can see is a shoulder in a blue coat, and a little bit of black hair in a ponytail.
Calm down, Jason. Maybe someone’s trying to give the neighborhood religion.
Have you thought about hell lately?
Nope, I’ll say. Everything else, yeah, but not hell. Or not exactly.
I unlock the door. I open it.
Aza is standing on my front steps.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Zal wakes me, shaking my hammock. “Daughter,” she says. “On deck.”
It’s not as though I’m asleep. I’ve been thudding with exhaustion since the pirates and the song—but then I started thinking about what got said on deck. And how many gaps there are to fill in between the words Ley and Zal spoke, and what I know.
You and I both know you want a new world.
I trust this is not merely a sentimental recovery for you.
The one to deliver us from all our hardship.
Magonia Page 15