Aerie Read online

  Because if she’s here, someone sent her.

  Zal, Dai, someone else. She’s an assassin by training, and a Boyle by birth. If she’s here, she’s here to get me.

  I want to go/I don’t want to go/I want to fight/I don’t want to fight/I miss singing/I—

  I miss Magonia.

  It pisses me off that I miss Magonia, but I do. I don’t want to. I want it to be nothing I’d ever want again. But.

  I walk to school, because I need privacy for peering into every shadow, staring at every corner, and there’s no Heyward in any of them. If she came through the school, looking the way she does, she’d be insane. She has the face of a dead girl. She’d get attention, fast.

  I get to class early and call to Caru.

  I seek him with my mind and—

  FLASH. I’m soaring directly at the sun, stretching myself to test my speed, twisting and diving, dropping with my wings folded. My body’s an unidentified flying object.

  Well, not my body. Caru’s. My heartbird’s. He sings to me from Magonian skies. I sing a note back to him. For a moment, me on earth, my canwr in the sky, we make a note we can only sing together. Mine’s silent. His is loud. Caru flies free, at his own speed, and with his own destinations. When he connects to me, I see what he does.

  Heyward? I ask him. He doesn’t answer. He’s more interested in flying than in thinking about the past. I, on the other hand? Am mired. It’s my birthday and everything feels wrong.

  Understatement. I spend the first two class periods of my birthday in the center of wrongville. It’s the weirdest and saddest feeling to have to pretend that you’re someone else, when on the inside you’re exactly the same Aza you always were. I’m a riddle without a solution. I’ve always been that, except now it’s a different riddle. I was a dying girl. Now I’m an alien. Not Name That Disease, but Name That Species.

  I still don’t know how I’m supposed to LIVE here.

  In Magonia, I was a captain’s daughter with a song strong enough to change the world, but on earth, I’m Teenager. Version 1.0.

  People my age are considered adults in Magonia. There, I could be a captain by now. I could be anything but what I am. Rudderless.

  “BETH MARCHON! ARE YOU WITH ME?”

  My teacher, Mr. Grimm, is leaning over my desk, his face a hundred kinds of no. Jason’s at his desk a few seats away, and I catch a glimpse of his face. He looks as spaced out as I was.

  “Beth, were you . . . singing? Even if I were phoning this in, teacher-wise, that’d be a pretty clear indication you weren’t listening to the lecture, don’t you think? Are you planning to be part of this classroom’s activities or are you starting an a cappella group? If it’s the latter, perhaps you can make your way down the hall.”

  Um. Wow.

  “Yes, hi, I’m here. Sorry. That was an accident.”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” says Grimm.

  I still like Mr. Grimm. He’s as weird as ever, that PE teacher look with a brain like a steel trap. I should know better than to drift off into the Caru-zone while I’m in his classroom. He notices.

  “I’m back.”

  The class looks at me like I’m wrongness personified, but that’s nothing new, not in this body or the former one. I have to have some sympathy. They haven’t been flying with a heartbird. They’ve been stuck here on earth.

  “Quiz,” says Grimm.

  “Pencils up!” I say, sounding a bit too Aza Ray.

  Grimm sighs, and says, “Beth, maybe we can spare the lip.”

  Grimm has his back to me at the board, so I slip back into Caru’s flight. A big pod of squallwhales pass, and I look at their gray spines as they sing their rain up toward me and down again into the world below. I’m light and strong, my feathers sleek, my wings cupping the wind, and I glide, easily. The air carries me.

  This isn’t confusion.

  This is simple, the kind of flight Caru’s wings were made for, and with him, I’m weightless.

  I occasionally ask Caru to fly over Maganwetar, the capital, to confirm Zal’s imprisonment, but not today. Today he goes wherever he pleases. My heartbird, no matter how strong he is, is damaged. Years in isolation with no partner left him touched. And touchy.

  And I—

  I’m damaged too.

  I didn’t grow up knowing how to sing with Caru. We have to make it up as we go. His bond was with my mother, but it was torn away as a punishment for her first attempt to drown the world.

  Mind you, that didn’t keep her from trying again—with me.

  A canwr can’t be without a match with which to sing. Caru spent fifteen years screaming to himself in a cage, and now he has to fly fast to keep himself from remembering the dark.

  So, we’re a pair.

  He’s shown me nests on rocky cliffs, and high ice caves at the edge of the sky. He’s shown me an airkraken—a fog-topus with long, smoky tentacles, and a few flying things I have no words for.

  Our atmosphere is alive. Each bit of weather created by something breathing. I wish humans, any humans, had known it sooner. Everything could have been different.

  I get another quick flash of a sunset somewhere, the clouds scarlet, and Caru’s path through them, lit as he sings. Even though there’re things wrong in the world, there are things to be grateful for. This is one of them.

  I pick up my pencil, pull out my paper, and focus myself on the realities of being on this earth, quiz-taking, even if Caru’s out spinning through a sunset.

  “A song sung in the Forest of Arden,” says Grimm. “Lyrics. Go.”

  Interesting choice. Luckily, I’ve got this. I scratch them in a furious scribble. Shakespeare wrote a lot about birds and weather. I like his storms especially. What was Shakespeare doing with his life that he came up with this kind of material? No one knows. So who’s to say he wasn’t wandering on a skyship?

  Under the greenwood tree

  Who loves to lie with me,

  And turn his merry note

  Unto the sweet bird’s throat,

  Come hither, come hither, come hither:

  Here shall he see

  No enemy

  But winter and rough weather.

  Mind you, I have some definite enemies, but today I sit at my desk and try to forget them. Outside the sky’s gray and full of beautiful monsters, but in here it’s warm, and everyone around me is writing.

  I have a family who loves me. I have a boyfriend who loves me. I should be grateful.

  I glance over at him.

  North.

  He’s looking out into space, not back at me.

  For a moment, inaudibly, my heartbird and I sing together, right here in the middle of the usual. Actually silently this time. We sing a quick storm, enough to drench a dry field. Magonia and earth could work together, and why the hell don’t they? Rain + fields = crops. Crops + Magonia = happiness.

  Instead, everyone down here is clueless and everyone up there is scared of/hates “the drowners.” It’s stupid. But on earth, no one shares. Half the world starves. Apparently sentient creatures have selfishness and fear in common across the universe.

  Caru trills, and I get a flash of his flight beside a squallwhale, his wings tucked to his sides, the rain created by our song pouring over his falcon head.

  I close my eyes and feel his pleasure. He scans the horizon, and far out at the edge, there’s a black dot, very small at first, and then larger. I can’t figure out what it is. Some kind of bird?

  Something about it gives me a chill, and I tell Caru to stay away.

  It moves in a tilted, jerking way, and then Caru banks with the squallwhale and I lose sight of it again. Just clouds and stars as the vision fades.

  I shudder. Whatever that was, it wasn’t anything I liked. Be careful, I sing silently to Caru, but he is too busy flying to respond.

  I’m left with a feeling of edginess that’s nothing reasonable. Caru’s tough. He takes care of himself. He fights better than anything else in the sky.
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  So why am I on edge?

  I know why. You don’t have a birthday like my last one and feel calm the next time that day comes around. It’s normal that I feel like this. Nothing weird about it.

  I wonder for a second, though, if I should’ve gotten Caru to fly over Zal’s prison. Just to check.

  But somehow, I don’t do it.

  Instead, I turn to Jason and blow him a kiss, trying to ground myself back in this world.

  I just barely keep myself from blowing him not a kiss, but a tiny storm cloud.

  But I don’t. I’m in control.

  CHAPTER 6

  {JASON}

  After school, Aza takes off.

  “If you love something set it free,” says my brain, so annoyingly, quoting off of some poster I saw when I was seven in a dentist’s office, so I let her go and pretend it’s not a thing. I’ve been off my game all day, worried, sleepless, stressed out, taking risks I shouldn’t take. Distracted by the sky.

  I got busted in Grimm’s class for tracking mass bird deaths. Whole flocks falling, a combination of news alerts and radar. It’s not bird flu. It’s just death. Sometimes it’s flocks that get unlucky, and end up in rocket or jet paths, but thousands of blackbirds fell from the sky six hundred miles from here this morning, and I went through every record, trying to find out why.

  Could be some loser setting off fireworks near a roosting flock.

  Or.

  There are other things in the category of rains of birds. It rained red in Kerala, India, in 2001, and again in 2012. Apparently there was a terrestrial algae bloom in the sky, like a red tide, but cloud-based instead. Every time I think about it, there’s science, and then there’s Magonia.

  The yellow rain political incident that took place in the early 1980s? Just like it sounds, except that it was—maybe—a battle between the US and Russia over chemical weapon supplies. When the yellow rain, which fell all over Laos and Cambodia beginning in 1975 was analyzed, it was discovered to be honeybee crap. That’s the official story. It’s never been unclassified.

  So . . . maybe it was Magonian. And the governments, various, are just covering their collective asses.

  These are the things I think about these days. I think about ways that Magonian poisons might be hidden in earth rainstorms. How easy it would be to take us, the mostly unsuspecting populace, out in pretty much exactly the way Aza’s mother intended.

  Good thing I wasn’t the one fighting for the other side.

  Grimm came up behind me as I was plotting the whole thing on my tablet, and he looked at it with way too much interest. It’s graphs and grids, and mostly encoded, but . . .

  “Special project, Kerwin?”

  I mean, it wasn’t like anyone but me would understand what I was looking for.

  “Yeah, for science,” I claimed.

  It was scientific. Unfortunately it also had a variety of images of strange birds found dead in various places around the globe.

  Grimm leaned forward, pointing at one of the images.

  “What kind of bird is that exactly?” he asked.

  It’s a video of something part bird, part human, made by me with input from Aza, and a whole lot of entry-level CGI. She wanted me to understand the Rostrae. I edited an eagle together with a skydiver. She told me I got pretty close. It’s amazing what you can make with basic software and a brain.

  “Nothin’. Just foolin’ around,” I said, using a voice that could not have been more unlike my real voice. Far more in the 1950s sitcom category than the Kerwin category. “I’m working on it with Az—with Beth.”

  Sleep deprived. Mistakes made. Grimm walked away with the sympathy face on, and I vowed to be more careful. Not a good thing to slip like that. Not a good thing at all. No one wants a drama involving guidance counselors, parent calls, god forbid, the school nurse. Not on Aza’s birthday.

  Eli takes one look at me after school and says, “Nope.”

  She hijacks me to her version of working out, directing me to the edge of town, where she’s found a tree with several perfectly straight limbs. I don’t like it here already. It’s right down the hill from the cemetery—the one where Aza was, but really wasn’t, buried. It’s also where I last saw Heyward.

  “What?” I ask. “You couldn’t go to an actual gym? Those exist, you know.”

  “Gyms are indoors,” she says. “You need sunlight. You’re like a plant dying without photosynthesis.”

  “I’m not a plant. I’m a person. Don’t we have birthday stuff to do?”

  “You’re totally transparent, Kerwin,” she says. “You’re having a brain melt.”

  She gets out of the car and runs to her tree. Two seconds later, she’s flipped upside down into the branches. She pokes her head out of the leaves.

  “Climb out of your skull, sister’s boy,” she shouts.

  “That’s not yoga,” I shout after her.

  “You don’t know how to do yoga anyway,” she says.

  I consider doing the sole pose (crane) that I learned purely to taunt Aza, but why? She’s right.

  “Look,” she says. Eli hangs by her fingertips from a branch, and swings. She’s freakishly strong and nimble. She reminds me of last year, of Heyward, and no wonder. They’re biologically sisters.

  Eli is benign, of course. Well, mostly.

  Heyward, on the other hand, is an assassin. Or, at least, almost.

  Eli’s swinging on the branch like it’s a bar, and she flips herself up and over into a handstand in the middle of a tree. The Boyle sisters, all three of them, two human, one not, are nothing if not capable.

  “Eli,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says, upside down.

  “I’m never going to do that.”

  “You need to do something,” she says, swinging back down the other direction. “You’re OCD on toast.”

  I shrug. “This is not news.”

  “Do you tell Aza what’s going on in your head? Do you tell her how much you remember about her dying?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s too terrible to talk about. I’ve been lying about it since it happened.”

  “I don’t either,” she says. “I do this instead. This one’s called Midnight. I invented it.”

  She flips upside down again, into an in-tree, straight-up handstand that pretends there are no ships in the sky, no rains of birds, no polluted squallwhales, no enemy captains, no entire other civilization trying to kill us all.

  “You spend too much time worrying,” she says.

  “Either way, there’s no way I could ever do what you’re doing,” I say, granting her the admiration she deserves. She’s an athlete, and she’s good. Never mind that she’s kind of inventing a sport.

  “You might be able to do a modified version,” she says hopefully.

  “I might also be able to fly,” I say.

  Eli rolls her upside-down eyes, reminding me totally of Aza, and simultaneously shaming me into realizing my poor choice of words.

  She swings down and looks at me.

  “Look, reality. I just want another person strong enough,” she says. “If they come for her. This time, we know about them. I’m not letting her go. Not again.”

  For a second I see Eli’s worry right there on the surface. That’s rare.

  Then it’s gone and I watch her do her whole routine on the branches, running along them barefoot to train for balance. I’ve seen the Breath—humans integrated into Magonia, either kidnapped from earth as babies, or rarely, adult defectors into the sky—with almost supernatural abilities. Heyward’s one of them. Eli’s apparently been doing her own version of Breath training out here in this field.

  Okay then. We all deal differently.

  I watch her kick the ass of an imaginary enemy for a while, out in this freezing field. Who but Eli works out outside in the winter? I’m huddled in my coat and hat, hunched against the wall that borders the field, thinking dark thoughts about Dai and Magonia, about fate and freak-outs.

 
“Up,” says Eli, and I realize I’m so exhausted that I’ve managed to pass out right here, completely by accident. Not a good sign. “I’m done.”

  “I’m awake,” I say.

  “Better be. You have to make a birthday cake,” she says. “And one day, you’ll be up in that tree with me. Mark my words.”

  “One day,” I say, but. This is who I am. The back of my brain twitches around everything, just the way Eli’s body does. We both just want to keep everyone safe. Different kinds of gymnastics.

  So we get into my car, and drive. That’s apparently as good as it’s going to get today. It’s okay. I can stay in this limbo state. I certainly have before. When I wasn’t sure of Aza’s feelings, I was like this 24/7, scratching notes on every surface, imagining scenarios of rejection, and never trying to plan a future with us both in it.

  When we pull into the Boyle driveway, Aza’s sitting on the steps wearing that flight suit. Still no clue where it came from, but it’s perfect. It has a fur collar. She looks very Amelia Earhart, which gives me a qualm, which qualm I banish.

  She waves at me, but her face says she’s still as far away as she’s been all day.

  “You clearly just got carried here by a parade and nine ponies,” Eli says to her.

  Aza comes back to life, but in a bluish way.

  “Only eight ponies,” she says.

  “You need cake. Both of you do. I can’t be the only happy person on this birthday. Someone is gonna start baking said cake, posthaste, because there can be no more of this. Hear me,” Eli says as she makes her way into the house, giving me a look.

  I sit down next to Aza instead.

  “Give it up,” I say. “If you try to tell me you’re fine, you’re only going to prove to me you’re not.”

  “I’m okay,” she says, not in her most convincing voice.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  She sighs.

  “Eli told me one of her friends thought they saw me yesterday. Meaning me me. Heyward.”

  I’m instantly on fire. How did I not know this? Who failed? Everyone? Definitely Eli, because Eli should have told me.

  “But I’ve been all over, looking, this morning, and afternoon, and she’s nowhere. If she were here, there’d be a Breath ship nearby. There’s not.”