Aerie Read online

  But what happens when the chosen one makes choices of her own? What happens when she walks away?

  I look at Jason. I’m his chosen one. And he’s mine.

  Jason’s sleeping face is sharp-planed, shadows beneath his cheekbones, a nose maybe bigger than it should be, and more crooked too, given the four times he’s broken it.

  I witnessed all of them. Three times I was the cause. (What can I say? Errors.) I’m looking at his too-long eyelashes, the only part of him that still seems like it belongs to a little kid. I know every mark on his skin. I know everything he was born with, and every scar that came in the years since.

  I know Jason Kerwin as well as I know myself. Probably better, given everything that’s happened. He, unlike me, looks the same as he always has. Though maybe somewhat better to casual observers.

  Time passes. Some people get pretty. Others change bodies entirely.

  Him, though? No matter what he looks like, he’s an alligator on the inside, the same one that crashed my birthday in a reptile costume with a long scaly tail.

  Twelve years later . . .

  Here he is.

  Here I am.

  Here we are.

  I wedge my fingers under the sash and pull.

  CHAPTER 2

  {JASON}

  I wake to the sound of someone trying to sound like no one, my bedroom window opening, a scratching creak. I’m reaching my arm down to grab the telescope beside the bed—a telescope, Kerwin, really?!—when . . .

  My girlfriend (fine, fine, this still sounds impossible to me, still sounds like far more than I could ever deserve in any universe not science fictional) tumbles head over heels onto my floor, and lands in a pile of knees and elbows. She’s managed to climb my drainpipe in the middle of December. It’s not everyone who can shinny straight up two stories.

  Aza Ray, of course, isn’t everyone.

  Aza Ray is the only one.

  I clamp my mouth shut because 1) She’s trying to surprise me and 2) Every time I even glance at her I want to grab both of her hands and never let go.

  This is what happens when you lose someone once. You never really feel safe again. Complication: having that someone be a girl who is always running as fast as she can, not necessarily away from me, but in nine directions at once. Three of them straight up. Causes anxieties.

  She mutters a string of colorful swear words as my window shuts on her forgotten-on-the-sill foot, but she’s fine. She’s just Aza, the superspy version. Yep, she hums a scrap of Pink Panther theme. She can’t help herself. Triumph makes her talkative.

  I pretend I’m beyond asleep so she can have the satisfaction of sneaking up on me.

  Not that I ever sleep. Would anyone?

  Imagine your girlfriend making the water rise up out of a wading pool, and turning it midair into rocks. Imagine her singing a piece of the sidewalk into a sudden lake, and then imagine that lake has no bottom. Imagine this amazing, not-of-this-earth mind, this girl who tells me casually about silver tentacles reaching out of clouds, who sings me notes of Magonian song, who one day made me something out of rain that shimmered green and gray. It wasn’t a gemstone, nor anything I’d ever seen before, and when I asked, Aza shrugged, and said, “Minor meteor, blah-de-blah.”

  Imagine loving her.

  Imagine losing her.

  Everyone thought she was dead. Everyone but me. Someone like Aza couldn’t die.

  I was right, in the end. She hadn’t. She’d become—already was—something else. Something more.

  Now imagine being the guy who has to worry about that, about losing her all over again to a country in the sky.

  My eyes are open to slits. I watch Aza tiptoe across my bedroom. She shakes her hair out of her hat, and tries to silently unzip her—what is she wearing?—and get out of her boots at the same time, which results in another near collapse of tangled limbs. Aza’s failing to navigate her new skin. She’s still not used to this version of herself.

  “Damn it,” she says, bending over me, her clothes half off, her hair standing straight up. “You’re totally awake now, aren’t you?”

  I laugh. “When have I ever not been totally awake?”

  “There was that one time you slept through the night five years ago.”

  “An aberration.”

  She puts an icy, questing hand on my skin, clearly considering jabbing it into my armpit, and so I grab it and roll her under the covers with me, until I can wrap her up completely.

  I get her into my arms, face-to-face, and she’s cracking up.

  “You could’ve come in the front door, you know.” I hide my twitchiness over her being out at night alone (during a storm, no less) with no one watching her, no one even knowing where she is.

  Aza doesn’t ever follow rules. If I try to point out even basic things, she transgresses double time. Storms make me nervous. Every time the sky darkens, I think it’s Aza’s last day of this life, and the first day of something much worse.

  “It’s not like my parents don’t know you sleep over.”

  “It isn’t like Magonians like to use the front door,” she protests, and puts her frozen nose into my neck. “It was a misjudge, though. It’s icy out there. And disgusting. Like, sleet city disgusting.” She shivers. “I don’t have toes anymore.”

  I hold her despite her cold feet trying to sap all the warmth from my body. Like I care about cold feet. Like I care about anything beyond Aza in my bed. Even a year later, I’m still in shock every time. All those years of me being lamentably, silently, secretly in love. All those years of not knowing. She clamps around my ankle bones.

  “Nope, don’t worry, you still have toes,” I say. I feel her smiling into my skin. She wriggles closer. I kiss her, forehead, nose, mouth. I run a hand down her spine and feel the familiar lines of her shoulders, her rib cage, the bones beneath the skin the same ones as ever. Different body, same girl. Same voice.

  Same Aza.

  Why am I so stressed out then? There’s a list of give or take fifty terrible things I keep expecting, chief among them anchors falling out of the sky and a crew of warriors bringing Aza straight back up to Magonia.

  Maybe everyone spends a big part of their time afraid they’re about to lose the love of their life. Maybe most people live like that and it never shows.

  Not everyone’s hiding an alien in their skin, obviously, but everyone’s hiding something. I try to convince myself that it’s normal to be this paranoid, but my life feels like I’m standing on a cliff, the camera panning out to discover Niagara Falls.

  I mean, I’m okay. I’m not saying I’m not. Pi has been largely backgrounded in the last few months, due to a better regimen of pills. They manage anxiety loops efficiently, so I don’t end up spending half of every day caught in a spiral of infinite digit recitation. I still have the kind of mind I have, though, which means I have to map out every bad eventuality and then make plans to evade said eventualities.

  I used to know that the only person I’d ever love was going to die at any moment.

  Now I have hope. Hope, it turns out, is problematic.

  “Hope is the thing with feathers,” says Emily Dickinson inside my head. “That perches in the soul—and sings the tune without the words—and never stops at all—”

  Yeah, the thing with feathers. I want hope to have zero feathers. No feathers, or plumage of any sort, anywhere.

  When we got back from Svalbard last year, I tried to hire someone to guard Aza’s house. I wanted protection, surveillance, but that costs like $3,500 a day. I’m serious. Just for some low-rent service, the kind of thing you hire to see if someone’s husband is cheating, or if someone is stealing from someone else’s business. So THAT was obviously impossible. I had to do other things.

  Those things are what have me sleepless these days.

  In theoretical math there’s a concept called the pea and sun paradox. The Banach-Tarski paradox, if official is what you want. Basically, it’s the idea that you could reorganize
the molecules of a pea into something the size of the sun, or the sun into something the size of a pea. The universe is elastic.

  Aza is elastic.

  I want her pea-close, like she is right now. But there are forces that want to turn her into the sun.

  I glance at the clock. Midnight. I pull out a book of matches. “Shut your eyes,” I tell her.

  She does, though she makes a patented Aza Ray face at me that says I can never surprise her, because hello, she knows everything about everything.

  Not this time.

  “Hold on to this.” I put something in her hand. “Over the floor, not the bed.”

  I strike the match, and then there’s sizzling and spitting. “Open.”

  She opens her eyes. She’s holding a sparkler in the shape of an ampersand.

  “Happy birthday, Aza Ray,” I say.

  It sends off tiny “&” fireworks in the dark of the bedroom. The look on her face says I got it right.

  &, is what I want. & more. &, &, &.

  I hand Aza a little package and she opens it. A compass. A really good one, engraved with a tiny winged ship. I don’t fool around when it comes to birthdays.

  “It goes all directions.”

  “All?”

  “Should work down here,” I tell her. “AND up there. Just in case.” It has a spinning orb in the center, with arrows pointing every possible way.

  She points it at me.

  She smiles. “Seriously, Kerwin?”

  Yeah. So maybe I had a high-tech modification put in. So maybe north is not actually north, but me, all the time.

  It took some doing.

  Minor sensor installed under my skin.

  I know, I know. Untested hackology. But once I learned I could do something like that, was I really not going to do it? I scoured all the clandestine message boards, and I was willing to pay for it. It was already reality, just not in the larger world.

  “Just in case,” I say. She looks at me. Her eyes, even in the dark, are ridiculous, ink with fire underneath.

  “Where do you think I’m going?” Aza asks.

  What if she just decides to go out yondering (I don’t care, it should be a word) into the wild blue?

  “Nowhere, but you never know. It also has a flashlight inside it,” I say. “And other things. It’s like . . . one of those multi-tools.”

  “So if I’m lost in the dark, I can always point north, turn on the flashlight, and find you?” she says.

  “Correct,” I say.

  I’ve run the stats on catastrophe, and I’ve run the stats on love. Lost love, smashed love, messed-up love, star-crossed love. And finally, love as catastrophe. I’m trying to determine if the two are inevitably, inextricably linked. Thus far, my studies are inconclusive.

  “So . . . ,” I say.

  “So,” she says, and smiles at me.

  “So, do you hate it?”

  “Are you real right now?” she asks. “How could I hate it? In what universe could I possibly hate it?”

  “Because I can return it,” I say. I try to take it back. She grabs it from me.

  “How do you return a compass that has YOU programmed into it as north? Do you think I want other people northing at you, Kerwin?” She looks into my face, and smiles.

  “Maybe not,” I say.

  She kisses me hard and presses herself so close to me that there’s no space between us at all. We’re like two pieces of a very particular puzzle.

  Optimistic data to counteract the catastrophic data: my parents are still madly in love. They chose it every day for years, even when the world felt impossible, or at least, that’s what Carol said when I asked her a few months ago. Carol isn’t the romantic one of my moms. Carol’s the realist. Eve would tell me nice things about how love saves you from the rest of the darkness of living. Carol would never go there.

  “Eve has my back,” Carol told me. “Even when I’m at the hospital twenty hours a day, even when my patients are so sick that I feel like I’m failing, and I’m worrying about you at the same time—”

  She gave me a Significant Look. It was ignored. I can’t deal with my moms being worried about me at the same time I’m worried about the fate of the world and more particularly, the fate of Aza.

  “—she can make me crazy. I can make her crazy too. But we’re still here. Nobody better on earth for either of us, far as I can tell.”

  Carol, of course, was saying this with no knowledge of anything that’d gone on lately.

  This is a universe of choosing. Aza chose me. That was a year ago, but here she still is, choosing me, climbing in my window in the middle of a dark and stormy night.

  She sings very quietly, a little scrap of Magonian song. In my bedroom a tiny star appears, floating overhead. It’s blue at the center and red around the edges. It’s so bright I kind of can’t look, except that all I want is to look at it forever.

  I pull out my phone and video her song and the little star. I’m compiling records of the ways her notes bend the air, the ways Magonian sonics can shift matter.

  Seems unreal at first, till you know about breaking glass with a high note, for example. You can also put out a fire with a certain kind of loud note, which displaces all the oxygen in the air. Truth.

  For now, Aza’s song isn’t shaking the world. It’s just a tiny star in my bedroom. She’s getting better at singing and controlling her song.

  “Why do you look like that?” she asks me.

  “Because I’m in love with you, stupid,” I tell her.

  She runs a hand down my side and kisses me again. After a moment, I kiss her back. I try to live in that for the moment. It turns out, I can.

  “I’m in love with you, stupid, too,” she says.

  I roll over and feel her underneath me, her hip bones and ribs and elbows. I can smell the smoke from the ampersand star I gave her, and I can see her face in the light of the Magonian star she’s sung into being.

  I kiss this girl who is mine because of some miracle. I keep my back to the star.

  I only want to look at Aza, and try to forget she might belong somewhere that isn’t with me.

  CHAPTER 3

  {AZA}

  So—first hours of seventeen, I’m beside the person I love more than anyone else in the universe.

  And, yeah, I say that with full knowledge of the size of the universe. I know the options. There’s a whole sky out there, a whole starry map of minds and wings.

  Jason’s the only one who’s ever believed everything about me without me having to convince him. The one who heard. The one who’s been beside me since we were five, and who never left.

  He was holding my hand when I died. He was holding my hand when I wasn’t sure I was worth resurrecting, an alien, a lost singer who’d just almost destroyed all the people on earth.

  He’s been next to me almost since the beginning, and he’ll be beside me at the end, wherever and whenever that is.

  I’m thinking about Heyward. Let me stop. Let me not think about what might be starting to happen. Let me just be here—

  Jason & Aza.

  Just [{{ }} & {{ }}]

  It’s simple, that “&.”

  Except, it isn’t.

  Nothing is.

  I try to medicate by putting my face into Jason’s shoulder and pressing it against his skin. It’s nice there, looking at the insides of my eyelids.

  I could pretend that I came innocently to his bed, where I planned to sleep holding his hand, but how likely is that? We’re red-blooded . . . blue-blooded . . . oh, I don’t know. An indigo- blooded Magonian, and a Jason Kerwin.

  Which is to say, we’ve been having sex for a few months now. Sex isn’t quite how one thinks it’s going to be when one is hearing about it and thinking that it’s the ONLY CATEGORY on earth.

  It’s only one of the onlys (as opposed to “only one of the lonelies,” which is what I used to call myself, because hello, admittedly, drama).

  I thought love + sex would = electr
ic dizzy, some kind of mixed-up pop song, plus great poets, stomach butterflies, blushing-Christmas-morning-meets-new-museum-full-of-previously-undiscovered-flying-insects situation. But in reality, it didn’t look like it was going to be any kind of triumph, the first time. There was no factoid expertise. There’s no learn-one-scrap-of-information-and-pretend-you-know-everything when it comes to sex, or at least, there’s not a successful version of that which ensures both parties have fun.

  I knew exactly nothing about anything and neither did Jason. So, the first time, six months ago, it was . . . less than spectacular.

  As in both of us were nervous—

  and ow (mostly me with ow),

  but also ow for him because I was SO nervous I flailed and whacked him ferociously in the nose (again, poor nose) and then we were both like SORRY I’M SORRY OH GOD VERY SORRY.

  Sex is not unfraught in the first place. I had the added worry there’d be some kind of alien surprise. There wasn’t. It was just your typical weird and awkward and uncertain. At least, I assume it’s typical. I don’t know, but probably, even given every teenage movie ever made, no one starts out with candlelight and a bed covered in rose petals, and if they do? Well, it’s probably still a whole lot of kneecaps and um.

  The second time we attempted, we both ended up taking a step back and asking questions of the universe because we didn’t understand what we’d done differently.

  It worked. It felt like a random miracle that’d never happen again.

  The third time EFFORT + STUDY = SUCCESS. The hoped-for fireworks. The two of us saving each other’s lives casually in the middle of the night. I know how that sounds, but sometimes it’s like that.

  Sex isn’t always magic. That’s lies. Sometimes, regardless of love and like, sex is a bike ride on a bike that has a flat tire.

  Sometimes you get somewhere.

  And sometimes . . .

  Sometimes I think about singing—

  —which wasn’t the same, NO, but was . . . kind of . . . the same?

  Especially singing with Dai. It was easy. It made the sky shake. It made the ocean rise.