I suspect SWAB is following us because they can’t see the city. They need a guide, and a fleet of vessels across the sky is enough for them.
At least I understand SWAB’s tech. War is toxic science, payloads and gunpowder, jet speeds and pilot capabilities. I don’t know how SWAB—or anyone for that matter—thinks they can take Zal and Maganwetar out without creating a giant catastrophe. What would happen if Maganwetar just fell out of the sky? The equivalent of a meteor?
I have dark weird thoughts about other meteors falling to earth. What if some of them were sky cities? What if some of them were civilizations crashing down out of the clouds?
Ice ages and planets tilted in their orbits. Who says life evolved the same way in Magonia as it did on earth? All Magonians need from the ground is food. There’s been food longer than there have been humans.
Who is to say that the sky hasn’t been warring for thousands and thousands of years, that Magonia wasn’t around concurrent with the dinosaurs? I look at the Rostrae on this ship with me. There’s a whole thing in the back of my head regarding birds and evolution. Maybe some Rostrae came from flying dinosaurs. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I will never understand any of this, and that’s probably fine, but also a little bit something that my brain would historically have obsessed over.
Too much biology to analyze with no tools. No time. Middle of a war, Jason Kerwin, I remind myself, but I’m still me, what can I do?
We need a weapon, the kind of weapon that can fight against manmade weapons. What’s SWAB doing up here? What is their plan? Think about it. I try.
They’re hunting the Flock. A weapon powerful enough to attack Zal for them. To cancel Zal’s song, to make her unable to sing it. Like they’ve done to Aza’s song. A reversal of her own notes. Is that what the Flock can do as an ethologidion? Is that who he is?
If so, the thought of Dai getting anywhere near Aza again is a painful one. I thought he just amplified her song. What if he can silence her as well?
She’s not here. I am. I only have myself to rely on right now, just my brain to use to try to find a means of dealing with this before it gets to her.
Jik points out into the distance.
“Maganwetar’s orbit,” she says. There are sparks of lightning—stormsharks, I think, and flinch involuntarily. I feel a fiery pain in my chest where I’m wounded. A lightning strike would take me out. I don’t even know how I survived it last year, and this year, I’m already broken.
Otherwise, though, Maganwetar is eerily silent, an expanse of quiet sky. I can’t see ships, and I can’t see any armada guarding anything. Just a still blueness surrounded by a wall of lightning.
“Where are the squallwhales?” I ask Wedda. I haven’t seen any. It’s all been Nightingales and Magonian song magic.
“Fled,” she says. “They don’t take sides. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless they find someone they’ll sing with.”
Which is no one. Not Zal. Not Jik and Wedda. The whales sing their own song. I imagine an entire population of them on the other side of the sky, far from this, and I wish I was with them. Nothing about this is going to end well.
A flash of thoughts about my moms. They think I escaped from a mental hospital. I wasn’t okay. I’m still not okay. Really, not okay isn’t even the right phrase. My face is frozen and my chest is burning. No. My brain is frozen and my heart is burning.
That.
I’m full of darkness, and all the parts of my body orbit around an empty center. I feel like my heart is a black hole. I look at the disabled drone. It’s the same as me. Nothing in the middle. I look into its flat black eyes. It’s a replica of the bird from thousands of years ago. The archaeopteryx. Its beak is lined with teeth, but it’s only the size of a magpie. Someone at SWAB having a joke, reinventing an extinct bird from the Jurassic and turning it into a spying weapon. It has a long, bony tail, which is one of its key traits. This one is made of metal covered in feathers like a fern frond.
What do I do? How can I use it?
Eli sits down beside me, takes the drone like it’s nothing, and examines it, turning it around in her hands. It was a smart move SWAB made, sending these up here. It was a less smart move underestimating Zal’s ambition. Of course she took them, or Dai did. It makes sense. Magonia has a long history of harvesting things from the sky, and these were up here in their airspace. But even I’m surprised she was able to repurpose them this way. When Aza described Amina Pennarum, when she described Magonia at all, it sounded like something out of the 1700s. I didn’t think Magonian technology existed. I knew they used ropes to wrap around intruders, crashing helicopters, maybe planes. No part of me imagined Magonians might be able to use their songs to change earth technology into something they could use for themselves. Another flaw in my thinking, clearly, as it seems that’s exactly what’s happened here. And it’s dumb, because I’m pretty sure Aza could do anything she wants with her song, technology be damned, and she’s Magonian. I should’ve seen this coming.
“Send it to get Caru,” Eli says.
“What do you mean?”
“Send it back to Zal’s ship. Zal has Caru, yes? And Aza needs Caru so that she can sing the way she’s meant to sing. So, get the drone to go in and release him. Unless you have some other crazy brilliant plan, in which case, I’ll step back.”
I stare at her. “We don’t even know where Aza is.”
Eli looks at me.
“Her heartbird does. Her heartbird can feel her. Am I wrong? Isn’t that what a bond is? Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about for the past year?”
Um.
I have the drone drive between my thumb and forefinger. I’d been thinking about snapping it half, but instead, finally, slowly, something occurs to me.
Jason Kerwin, you dumbass.
Eli’s watching me. “How many remote-control items do you think you and Aza have made over the years?”
“A few,” I say, and think about things ranging from a tiny flying dragon we brought to school in seventh grade to a remote-control floating lemon—don’t ask—powered by self-made batteries, which we were pretty sure would be an awesome science project, and which was actually just moldy and messy and surprisingly splatter-ish.
I pull my phone out. No signal, of course, but it has a solar charger, because I wasn’t as dumb a few months ago as I was just now. There’ve been times I was prepared for anything. Maybe let’s remember that part of me again.
I charge my phone, then connect the drone to my cell.
My phone chirps. I have a signal connecting the drone to . . .
My phone opens a network, and asks for a password.
OperationAzaRay I type, on a hunch. I’m right on the first try. Yep. SWAB. Of course this is SWAB. But what I want to know is why.
And what they thought they were doing sending drones up here, drones that seem to have been taken over by Zal Quel, and by Dai. What was their plan? How do I counteract it?
When I get its drive on-screen, it’s not what I thought it was. Things in it are altered. It’s not just that these spy drones aren’t supposed to be able to drop explosives. It’s that they’re now also set to broadcast song. Whatever SWAB did with Aza’s song, I assume they did it because they were trying to have the option of canceling it out. But these drones are attacking Rostrae, and creating weather magic, or at least that’s what it sounds like. What I’m looking at is that particular MP3 file, set inside each of them. But what I hear when they sing? It’s not always the same song. It’s twisted and changed. Zal has added something to it, and she seems to every time she sings.
She’s controlling them. How’s Zal singing with these? She’s not supposed to be able to sing at all. That was supposed to be her punishment: no canwr, no song, no Caru, and no Aza.
Now she seems to have all those things but Aza, and I have no idea how it changed.
I don’t need to know, though. I only need to figure out how to take power away
from her, not to figure out where it came from. I remind myself of that, even as my brain has ideas about every possible way this could have happened.
However she got these Nightingales, whoever worked on them for her, they’re tiny screaming speakers singing out her agenda all over the sky, and they’re using Aza and Caru’s song to sing weather and transformation. With the additional benefit that they can apparently drop explosives on those who don’t comply in Magonia. And up here, I’m guessing, that’s revolutionary in itself. Earth weapons deployed by a Magonian.
I take the precaution of disabling its song file. I have no interest in hearing this drone sing something suddenly that makes this ship into water, a thing Aza and Caru’s song is fully capable of doing.
I go into the network and reprogram the captured drone’s signal so that it talks to my phone instead of to anything else. It’s fairly straightforward once you know what you’re doing.
All this war. All these things made for killing and destroying. These thousands of years of vengeance, and now these, creatures that can kill without you ever seeing them coming.
Sweat is dripping down my back. Cold sweat. I wipe my forehead. My skull feels like it’s splitting and my arms feel like they don’t quite belong to me. I feel like my skin is about to boil, my chest a screaming volcano of pain. There are still things seared to my skin, burnt shirt, burnt soul.
I keep working.
“What are you doing?” Jik asks me. Suddenly she’s right there and I have the uncomfortable feeling she’s been listening to me quietly singing digits of pi for the last hour and a half.
“Tech,” I say.
“What will you do with it?”
“Make things better,” I say, and she looks at me. She looks exhausted.
“Try to make things better,” I amend.
“I’ll take that,” she says.
Pi circles in my head like a bunch of runners on a track, but I’m running alongside them, and the drone is submitting to my reprogramming. Submitting. Like it’s something living. It has to submit, because it’s a little bit of metal and wire. It’s at the mercy of its machinery.
And I’m at the mercy of my own mortal body. I’m pieces of flesh and bone all ready to relent depending on what attacks me. So it’s in my interest to make this drone into something that works for me rather than against me. And what do I want this drone to do? I consult the SWAB surveillance network.
I’m myself again for this moment, in a way I haven’t been in a year. I’m the Jason Kerwin I’m supposed to be, the guy who learned how to do this shit when he was eleven. Hacking it out. Like not exactly a badass, but like someone who kind of knows something.
Does it redeem me?
Can anything?
I replace the panel on the bird’s belly. I put its camera back in. I smooth its fake feathers into place. I instruct it via phone to wake up, and there, it does. I check it with my phone, and it’s back online.
Ancient wing, the middle ground between a dinosaur and a modern avian. And here, the one in my hand, is the middle ground between a modern bird and a full-on shiny metal robot. It’s something made by men trying to play god over this kingdom in the sky.
Of course, as happens every time, the humans lost control of their creations. You only have to look at the history of the world to know the stories about that. There are plenty of them.
Now the sky is full of drones, and I think SWAB has no idea that the drones they think they’re controlling are actually under Zal’s sway. I’m pretty sure the song they’re singing has been altered enough by Magonian magic that it can do whatever Zal wants it to do.
Mine, though, is missing its voice.
All it is now is a flyer on a mission. My mission.
CHAPTER 23
{AZA}
I wake up in strange surroundings, a little room with transparent walls, where I’m looking at a flock of birds surrounding my bed, hovering all around me, hanging in the air: falcons, swallows, and swifts, and I’m swaying in a hammock, where a tiny bat is singing into my ear.
I’m on a ship called Glyampus, and my heart is pounding.
But it wasn’t real. I rattle through my skull. That was a nightmare, a vision. It didn’t happen.
No.
It did.
Heyward’s dead.
This, for once, isn’t something my brain invented. I look at my hands, but there’s no blood on them. I feel like there should be something visible, something that shows everyone I’m not the hero I’m supposed to be.
I failed her.
Chosen one. Chosen by whom?
Chosen by Jason to be his best friend. Wrong choice.
Chosen by Zal to be her weapon. Wrong choice.
Chosen by my mother and father to love, chosen and kept alive by them.
They’re the ones I think about now, when I think chosen one. When I think they thought I was worth saving.
I have to be worth saving.
The bat sings a weird little trill.
“You sound like Elvis,” I whisper to her.
“Vespers amuses herself picking up radio frequencies from the science station below us.” I jerk my head up and see the Flock walking into the room. “She likes to sing with all the other creatures that sing. Bats, whales, humans, the tiniest things on earth. Everything has a song.”
I sit up, hearing that. It reminds me of my mother and her singing mice, and that reminds me of the fact that I’m here for real, not there, and that everything below me is in danger and I’ve been sleeping through it.
Vespers flies off, singing all the way. I hear the bat shift her signal to talk radio, a news station.
“Flooding,” says the talk radio through Vespers. “Ten thousand dead.”
“Where?” I ask the Flock. He shrugs.
“It’s Zal,” I tell him, but I don’t know for sure. It could also be everything below messing with everything up here. It could also be chemicals and catastrophe. It could be anything, any of the possible terrible things on earth or in the heavens, and I have no idea which it actually is.
I can’t stay here sleeping in the middle of a lost part of the sky, no information, no one but us out here. They sent that ship after Heyward and me. We’ve already been attacked. Does Zal know the Flock is out here? Her old enemy?
Some enemy, this singer who has no intention of teaching me to sing. Maybe he’s my enemy too.
“You have to help me,” I plead again. “Teach me how you sing the way you do. Teach me how to fight her.”
“Did Zal send you here to take me back to her? We are long done with singing, she and I.”
“But . . . you sang with her? You know her song? Then you can help me defeat her. Just teach me how! She didn’t send me. I came here myself.”
“Don’t ask me to have dealings with Zal,” he says.
I flinch at those words, but he keeps talking.
“Without the drowners’ earth, there are no nests, no caves, no hives. My song depends on the things of the world as well as the sky. She would drown the world.”
The Flock looks increasingly wizened and ancient. Me, I feel increasingly dark. He won’t teach me. He won’t help me fight Zal. He’s barely here. He wants to sit out the entire conflict from his safe perch in uninhabited sky.
“She sent that warship that caught us. It was hers, but she must have been sending it at you! She didn’t know where we were,” I try, even though I have a deep suspicion I’m wrong about this. “Why else would she send a whole warship, full of Nightingales?! You’re her enemy.”
“She sent it for YOU,” he replies. “Not me. She doesn’t know I’m here, and I wish it to remain that way. I wish her to imagine that you dropped into the sea with your shipmate, a dead thing. If she is to cease pursuing your song, she must think you’re dead. She thinks I’m dead, and that’s how I wish it to stay.”
“Does she really think you are? Are you sure?”
He looks steadily at me.
“I am as g
ood as dead,” he says. “I don’t touch Magonia, and Magonia does not touch me.”
I won’t give up.
“I’m not asking you to SEE Zal,” I say. “I only want you to show me how to sing like you do.”
“So you can kill your mother?” says the Flock. “She is your mother, is she not?”
I don’t say anything. What is there to say? I want to kill her. I want revenge. Who wouldn’t want that? On someone like Zal? She’s a dictator. She’s a murderer. Never mind how she got that way, never mind that she’s my mother.
“I don’t wish for you to kill her. I don’t wish any of this. I never expected to live this long, to watch the sea broken, to watch the sky broken. The squallwhales are dying and the oceans beneath us are full of poisons. The ice is melting. There are gaps in the sky.”
Vespers glides through the room singing a quick song in a newscaster voice about thousands dead somewhere else, this time because of a huge storm that came out of nowhere and flattened half an island. My stomach lurches.
“You know who’s doing this!” I say. “How can you just do nothing? She’s calling down a flood, and she’s using my heartbird’s song to do it. And my song too. She has him captive, and everything about it is going to end with all of us dead. Do you want to be dead?”
He walks away from me.
“I can make things better!” I shout after him.
He looks over at me, his eyes gleaming and golden. “But will you choose to?” he says. “You are her daughter.”
“I’m myself,” I say. “I’m trying.”
Am I? My brain is full of visions of Zal, of taking Eli back, Caru back, getting vengeance for all the horrible things she’s done, all the horrible things she WILL do if I let her. I have to get to her. I have to stop her.
I have to kill her. It’s HAVE to. It’s not a matter of what I want.
My brain is full of Jason too, of showing him that I never needed him to be strong, that I can do it alone. I’m strong enough with or without his love. My brain is full of finding Dai and showing him the same things, these boys who both lied to me, these boys who both pretended to love me.
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