Aerie (11 page)

A plane passes us, a passenger jet with a tropical paradise
logo. There are people's heads in the windows, and I can see them reading books, watching movies.

But a little kid is looking out, and for a second I wonder if she sees our boat, traveling across the blue. Then the plane's gone, and we're out here alone again, rocking perilously in the wake of its passage.

A year absent from Magonia and what's changed?

Everything. Nothing. Everything. The sky's suddenly rose-colored.

Compass in my pocket. North.

I can't go north.

“Tell me there's a ship for us up here somewhere,” I say to Heyward. “Tell me you have a plan.”

“There isn't,” Heyward says. She has a gaspy sound to her voice, a sound I find very familiar. Because, like a Magonian on earth, like
me
for most of my life, she can't breathe. “I wasn't lying when I said I was rogue. I was down there alone, and now I'm up here alone, except that I'm wanted by Magonian authorities. As are you. Maybe you noticed.”

“Can you breathe?”

She nods. “Enough. Breath train for this in case we're without our equipment. But we need to move. The whole sky is going to be after us soon, not just Magonians, but Nightingales. I think we got away from them with that song, but I don't know how long that's going to last.”

The black birds. The . . . the
machines.
Yes, that's what they were.

“You saw what they do. If they attack us in
this
? We need to find something better than this launch.”

We're no match for anything. We don't have cannons, nor any crew of Magonian war singers. It's just us in a little boat, exposed to the elements. No supplies. No nothing.

“How are you at celestial navigation?” I force myself to say. “If we're going on alone from here, I want to know where ‘here' is. I spent half the time I was on the ship passed out. I don't even know how many days have passed.”

“Five days, since Zal escaped.”

Five days. I think of my parents. They're insane with worry. They must be. Me, Eli—both of us gone? Unless . . . What did Jason tell them? That I left on purpose? That I decided not to stay on earth? And what could he have said about Eli? That she came with me? There's no Eli here. I so wish there was. I can't even think about her with Zal and Dai.

I have to get to her.

“We're in the Tangle, above the Atlantic,” Heyward says. “Magonia recruited Breath from airplanes and ships here in the early days. They messed with navigation. Downed a whole bunch of people, then just took them. Programmed them. Brainwashed them. Like me, but the adult version. It's not just babies
Magonia takes. This is a strange piece of the sky. Compasses point to true north here, not to magnetic north.”

The Tangle. She means the Bermuda Triangle. It makes perfect sense that this would be a Magonian territory. All those legends of ships disappearing in this area, and planes too. That should have occurred to me before.

Against my instincts, I pull the compass out of my pocket. I want to throw it overboard, but instead I open it and look at the screen. Blank.

My compass wouldn't point to true north. Mine would point to the opposite of true. I put it back in my pocket, feeling like crying all over again. It can't help me.

“Now the area is less trafficked, by humans and Magonians alike. There's been a rumor for years of something far to the south of here, an old weapon, well guarded.”

She points.

“Breath don't sail that deep into the cold but that, apparently, is where it is.” She pauses. “Three guesses on
what
it is.”

“The Flock,” I say.

“That's my thought. And according to the drowners, it's strong enough to defeat a Zal Quel who has much more power than she did when you last saw her.”

“I'm not chasing after a rumor,” I tell Heyward. “We need to get to Eli. She's probably in Zal's ship. There'll be a brig there, and whatever Zal wants with her, it's going to hurt Eli. She'd only take Eli to get to me.”

“And when you find her? Then what, Aza? Give yourself to Zal in exchange for your sister? Is that your plan? Because fighting Zal's not going to end well. She's had a year to figure
out how to work on you, and she made use of it. While you were sleeping with your boyfriend, she was planning the end of drowners—”

I bristle instantly. Not only is he not my—

He's— I can't.

“Don't talk about him.”

“Wasn't Jason why you went back down? You don't belong there. You know that now, don't you?”

I wince. No. Yes.

My family. My world. My sister. My life. Did any of it really belong to me? I push it all away. I need my brain to think about other things. My murderous mother, for example.

“We have to do
something
about Zal.”

“She won't relinquish her new power easily, and you can hardly sing. You have to practice and strengthen. That was desperation you were singing on the ship, not skill. I heard you. That was a panic song.”

She's right, but what else can I do? “The longer Zal has Eli and Caru, the worse it will be.”

Something moves far out on the edge of the sky, and I feel a pang of misery that shakes me from my head all the way down. An airkraken, silver and brilliant, its tentacles undulating, curling, rolling in the atmosphere. Those cause tropical cyclones, I remember from the last time I saw one. The tentacles twist the air and blast cold down from above. They're rare, and even Magonian ships tend to move quickly away when one is sighted. No one wants to be caught in a long tentacle of icy wind, twisted and flung up into the sky, higher than anyone has prepared themselves to be flung.

But all I can think of when I see this airkraken is Jason and the giant squid video. It was last year's birthday present. Stolen from the deep web. My couch downstairs, our hands touching for the first time. We almost kissed, the last moments of my old life.

It feels like a thousand years ago, but it was only last year. Everything hurts, my whole body, my whole soul. Everything I thought I had is gone.

Everything except Magonia.

Airkraken are predators. I don't care that they're beautiful. Giant squid too. All they want to do is eat things that are weaker than they are, things that don't know they're coming. They work by moving silently and surprising their victims. They wrap their arms around their prey and tear them apart with their razor beaks.

I glance at Heyward. There are plenty of creatures like that in the world.

“Why are you helping me?” I ask her.

“I don't want the world to end, do you?” Heyward says simply. She breathes in deeply, and for a long moment, she coughs. She looks like it hurt.

“I thought I hated drowners. But it was Breath teaching me to hate them. I stood outside your house for days after they brought you up here last year. I watched your family, your sister, and Jason, learning them. I watched how they grieved you. Breath have no families. No one's ever loved me like Jason loves you—”

“He doesn't love me,” I interrupt.

She looks at me, and her face is sad.

“Zal is run by vengeance, not by logic. Dai's family died of the actions of drowners. He has no desire to let them live. Together they'll complete Zal's mission. Even if they have to sacrifice their own lives to do it.”

The wind howls around us, a hollow, lonely wail.

I remember something, belatedly.

“Caru spoke to me, just after he was taken by Dai. I think he was telling me what to look for.
‘Where the air is mad. Where the wild birds are.
'
”

I don't know what makes me so sure of what Caru was saying, but I need to get Eli out and away from Zal, back on the ground where she's safe. Which means I need to make the ground safe, as safe as I can. Not all dangers are Magonian, obviously, but that's what I have power over, if I have any power at all. If Caru was telling me to find the Flock, then that's what we need to do.

Heyward bends over with another sad choking cough. Her lips are slightly blue. I imagine Eli up here, breathless, Zal watching her slowly suffocate.

If Zal took her to get to me?

Yeah. She's gotten to me.

My sister's a fighter. She won't stay calm and preserve her air and energy. She'll have been screaming at them since they took her. I have to get myself to wherever they are, as fast as I can.

But I also know Heyward's right. I need to be strong enough to fight them.

Where the air is mad. Where the wild birds are.

I stare at the compass and choose south, as far from any
northern anything as I can go. I sing a tiny hum into the ship, and we sail, clueless, through the Tangle.

I don't like needing help from anyone.

But I need help this time.

“You have a visitor,” the nurse tells me, interrupting my miserable
thoughts. I move to the visiting room, darkly expecting my moms, who look at me with a mixture of love and guilt whenever they come. I don't want to see them. They love the hell out of me. It's a problem to be loved like that if you're in here considering the end.

But instead it's Mr. Grimm.

Last time I saw him, I was busted mapping flock deaths and saying “Aza” instead of “Beth.”

Now I'm hospitalized for losing it, and Grimm is confirmed in his suspicion that I've been losing it for a while. Like, maybe since Lightning Strike Last Year.

I sit down, warily. Grimm looks at me, his eyes betraying nothing. Not the sympathy face. Not any face.

“Kerwin,” he says. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Fine, Grimm is not unfunny. I can fake normal. As normal as I ever am.

“You didn't bring me flowers?” I say. “Balloons? Dirigible?”

“Stuffed animal, actually,” Grimm says, and pulls something out of his bag. He sets it on the table between us.

It's a little yellow bird with a black beak.

I look slowly up at him.

He leans in. “I don't have time to explain the history of the world. All I can tell you right now is, I know Aza Ray's alive.”

I'm paralyzed. “What do you know about Aza?”

“Everything,” he says.

Is he cooperating with someone in here? A doctor? Someone to prove that I continue to fall apart?

“Aza's dead,” I say carefully. “She died a year ago.”

“Kerwin,” Grimm says. “You want to call a girl hopping onto a Magonian launch accompanied by a key Breath operative dead, that's up to you. But she's in the Tangle, and currently on the move.”

I'm out of my chair now.

“She escaped?”

“Aza escaped,” he confirms. “She's in the air, hunting for Eli. You're the one who got her taken by SWAB in the first place, aren't you?”

I look around to see who might be listening. No one's listening. No one's even watching. I wonder, for a little longer than I wish, if Grimm is real.

“Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. You joined them.”

“They blackmailed me,” I protest.

“You think you're not at fault?”

“I KNOW I'm at fault.” I slump back into the chair, broken by the whole thing. “I'm wearing pajamas. I have no real clothes. And
that
is the only thing I know. The guy who broke everything. That's me.”

“Then it's your job to make it right, Kerwin,” Grimm says.

A very slow, and very startled, and very stupid realization bubbles to the surface of my drug-fuzzed brain. “You're Breath,” I say. “Aren't you? You're not just a weird English teacher. You work for Magonia.”

I want to put my head in my hands, I've been so blind.

“You're supposed to be a genius, Kerwin. Did it never occur to you?”

Grimm rolls up his sleeve and shows me the tattoo of a whirlwind on his wrist. Aza always said he had tattoos covered with makeup. She thought maybe he had some kind of embarrassing something, a pot leaf or a pinup girl. Nope.

“I
was
Breath. I left. Now I'm rogue. Protecting Aza.”

“But you weren't protecting Aza,” I say. “As I recall, she died.”

Grimm looks at me contemptuously.

“I was watching her for two years,” Grimm says. “When she started to fail, I was in the process of acquiring a new skin for her, keeping them from finding her. Magonia got to her before I could save her.”

“Why would you be ‘protecting her' anyway? Why would you care?”

“Some things are bigger than caring, Kerwin,” says Grimm. “Some things are about saving the world. Not to put too fine a point on it. You have a lethal weapon, even if you're not the one who created it, you do your best to keep it away from someone who'd use it.”

“So generous of you,” I say, because I have suspicions about every part of this. “And Heyward?”

“She's my asset now,” Grimm says. “She came to me. She
was trying to reintegrate into earth.”

“She was lying,” I say automatically. “She's not reformed. If anything, she's taking Aza to Zal. She's loyal to Magonia.”

Grimm shakes his head. “Things are becoming even more unstable. The sky's starving, and there's unrest everywhere. Many are questioning everything they thought they knew. Not just Heyward.

“I think Eli Boyle's been taken by someone other than Magonia. There's no indication Zal has her. She was grabbed from down here, early in the morning, same day Aza was taken by SWAB. There weren't any storms nearby the night Eli went missing. I tracked weather patterns for the entire area. That means it's not Magonia, and it's not Breath. They'd need cover, and there was none.”

Something occurs to me, idiotically late. In all my certainty that Zal had Eli, it didn't occur to me that one of the things Eli does early in the morning is
practice
.

That tree out by the cemetery. That field.

I look down at my pajamas. I was about to do something I couldn't come back from. And now everything's different.

I look up at Grimm. “Get me out of here.”

At three in the morning, I slink through the hallways and down to the office. I pick the lock. Yes, I know how to pick a lock. I have to do
something
with my brain in the quieter moments.

I open the filing cabinet, find my file, and pull it out, along with the Ziploc of my possessions. My phone with its solar charger. My compass. My ship-viewing glasses. I open a cabinet and find my backpack, intact. Good.

I look at my file. Lot of pages. It says I've been working up to
this break for years, that I have an active imaginary world, that
blah blah blah
various diagnoses, and though some of them are valid, Magonia isn't anything but Magonia. It also says I have a savior complex regarding the late Aza Ray Boyle.

That part is uncomfortable reading.

I put the file back. I replace my things with things scavenged from other files, other people's phones, other people's eyeglasses not allowed because of glass. I don't want SWAB having an easy time knowing where I am, knowing immediately that I busted out with gear they gave me.

An hour later, I'm in Grimm's car. We pull away like we're headed for an early morning coffee rather than escaping a locked ward and looking for a girl stolen by—maybe—a country in the sky.

It's so easy to escape, I think to my shame, the only thing that was keeping me in there was the lingering suspicion that I might actually need to stay in.

Which is still lingering.

Savior complex.

Yeah. It's not like I'm your usual.

Grimm's silent. I look behind us, expecting to see SWAB, police, but there's no one on the highway. We're alone. The whole horizon is black, lightning moving like strobes. My SWAB glasses are showing me ships all over the sky.

I open my backpack and bring out the information I swiped from SWAB on my way out the door the last time around.

“SWAB's been trying to source images of Maganwetar for years,” I say.

“They still haven't put eyes on it?” Grimm asks.

“No. And it's pissing them off. They're using drone
surveillance, and a couple of small planes taking unusual paths. It looks like they want to overtake it. Use it to bring weather to some places on earth and . . .”

“And deny it to others. If you control the weather, you control drought, for yourself, and for your enemies.”

“SWAB wants to control the weather. Whatever they want with Aza, they want to use her.”

Grimm looks over at me, assessing.

“Not bad,” he says grudgingly, and drives.

I can see the field, a big wide expanse of nothing. There should be a giant skeletal tree right there at the edge of it, a black, perfectly straight-lined tree bigger than any tree for miles.

But there isn't.

We pull over and get out of the car. Just a field. Nothing in it. Windblown, trampled cornstalks. A crater where the tree used to be.

There's a print on the smooth clay of one side of the crater. I look more closely. A small human handprint.

A shining object on the ground. Eli's phone, in its distinctive constellation case, dark blue enamel, silver stars in the positions they were in the moment Eli was born. A gift from Aza with a manufacturing assist from me.

Grimm's instantly mobilized, shoveling away at the edge of the pit, banging a stake into the ground. Attaching ropes to it.

“What happened?” I ask.

“A bounty hunter,” says Grimm. “This is worse than I thought. It will have taken Eli on a Magonian contract.”

“Who?”

“Not who. What. A mandrake.”

I . . . what? “A mandrake.”

A mandrake isn't a sentient creature. It's a
root
. A root that people used to think could scream and kill people with the sound of its voice. Folklore. Plants that walked and talked, old-school witchery, that kind of thing, and even as I think that, I think, yeah, skyships,
that
kind of thing.

Who am I to decide on what's possible? I should know that by now, if I know nothing else. Who am I to decide if there's such a thing as a mandrake bounty hunter?

An old Aza phrase, coined in a moment of total indecision. “Analysis equals paralysis, Jason, let's just go!”

Is this good advice? No one said it was. But it's the only advice I have in my head right now.

“Everyone up there is looking for Aza, and the mandrakes are high-end hunters, no surprise one of them would come looking here,” Grimm says. “They just misjudged the fact that SWAB—”

He gives me a look of disdain—

“—got to Aza before they could. I'm guessing they didn't realize they'd gotten the wrong sister. Otherwise, Aza and Eli would both be captive, to be sold to Zal for the highest price they could get. Mind you, I'm just as wanted as she is. Breath is a permanent job. If you leave, you're a fugitive—”

Something catches my eye on the cemetery cliff. Something on the edge.

That tree. It shouldn't be there.

“Grimm—” I say.

But Grimm's looking too, and his face changes.

“RUN!” he shouts. “NOW! GO!”

The tree on the edge of the cliff disappears before my eyes. Like that. GONE. Like it's been sucked away, or taken by a sinkhole.

The sky starts screaming, and it's suddenly full of birds. I'm hearing shrieking and wings, and I'm standing here, in the middle of this cornfield, with feathers falling all around me.

There's a ripple in the surface of the earth, in the crater. The field starts to roll up, right next to my feet, like a carpet unfurling backward, the whole field shuddering and shaking. An earthquake?

“Go, Kerwin!” Grimm shouts. He has rope and some sort of torch, and he's looping the rope frantically into a knot.

I can't keep my balance. I'm running over the ruts in the field, and the whole of the ground is moving, and in the sky, birds everywhere, still screaming, a flock of them spinning hard above me.

My foot gets stuck in a hole I swear wasn't there before, and I'm yanking at my ankle, trying to get it loose, when something lurches up out of the earth, fast-moving with tons of spiky branches, and even as my brain identifies it as “tree,” I know it's not.

It has arms and legs. It's made of roots, or wood, pale and twisted. It has a
face
. A face that is gnarled and set in a howl. It rises up out of the ground with a wailing moan.

My foot's stuck. I can't move. I'm still not moving when Grimm steps in front of me, and the thing that isn't a tree, that isn't a person, snatches him up in one fist.

It must be thirty feet tall.

Things go into slow motion. I can't absorb what I'm hearing, Grimm screaming, fighting, and then his spine making a
noise a spine shouldn't make, a broken crack like the sound of something being trampled.

The mandrake bends over and picks me up too, claw hands, splintered fingers, crushing me in its fist. I'm shouting and my body is in agony, my lungs bursting, my brain a morass of numbers, thousands of numbers, shaken out of sequence, a collapse of decimals, data—

Then birds screaming—

Birds screaming—

Feathers falling—

Birds are diving at the mandrake, bombing it from above—

It's crushing me, turning me to pulp, ribs cracking, body breaking—

When it looks up at the birds and howls. It dives into the crater.

The cries of birds and then nothing.

Darkness and the screal of wind through my ears, as we

F

  A

      L

          L

through the earth.