Magonia (16 page)

He stops. The mop falls to the floor, and is still.

“Sing this deck clean.”

I look into the bucket. There’s a scrubbing brush floating in soapy scum.

“Um,” I say.

“Stop wasting my time. Last night, I threw supernovas into the sky. Surely you can manipulate a mop.”

Milekt perks up and stamps his feet inside my chest. He’s ready. I’m at a loss.

“I’m not—I can’t just start singing,” I tell Dai. Why doesn’t he understand? I barely had enough air to speak before, let alone sing.

“And you’re not willing to learn, apparently,” he says. “So you can scrub the drowner way until you change your mind.”

I sigh. It’s only a matter of time before I get assigned to clean the heads. I’m probably lucky right now, dealing with decks instead of toilets, and so I roll up my uniform sleeves and get down on my knees. In my chest, Milekt shrieks.

Release me! I sing,
not
scrub.

“Sing then,” I tell Milekt, and it’s totally fine that I’m talking to a bird inside my chest.

I work, but it isn’t easy to clean when all around me are miracles, just casually happening.

I watch a Rostrae deckhand spread his green wings and take flight, with a net made of what seem to be very strong spiderwebs. He slings it out into the sky and brings it back full of moths, which then get fed to the hungry batsail.

I watch a Magonian crew member sing one of the other sails into an unfurling, and the sail shakes itself as though it’s an animal, getting rid of water in its coat.

The Rostrae crew practices rope tricks, lassoing and twisting, but with a crazy kind of grace.
What would they lasso up here?
I wonder, but I have no idea.

It’s sunny above me, but there’s a pod of squallwhales swimming alongside the ship, making a light rain below. I watch them out of the corner of my eye as I scrub. The calves play together, butting up against the mothers. The babies sing, too, not complicated songs, but long dazzled ones, mostly made of happiness.

Sun
, they sing.
Sun. Bright. Drink the light.

The mother’s blowhole rainstorms, and the calves whip back and forth, swimming through the fountain like kids in a sprinkler.

They have mothers they trust, and a sky they understand.

I envy them.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Air-traffic-control research. I’m hunched over my desk,
hacked into some major things. I
could
just be listening to controllers talking, hoping to run across something in all the sound, the way the people looked for the giant squid for years: basically, stick a mic down there and hope.

But, luckily things have gotten better, search-wise.

So, I’m using an app (not officially sanctioned, and not mine) to keyword search through everything air traffic control has said, in a variety of city and rural airports, for the past three weeks.

Carol shows up at my bedroom door and looks at me from the doorway for a full three minutes while I scroll.

They take effort, social graces, but the moms will kill me if I abandon them completely in favor of a person they think is a ghost. So I say, “Hi.”

“You have to go to school, kiddo.”

“I
am
going to school,” I say.

It’s not a lie. Periodically I show up and pass tests. I’m still part of a grief exemption. And I saved my sick days in case. So I have a couple of weeks’ worth for the year, before anything too truant happens. People are probably relieved not to have to see me anyway.

“You have to actually
go
to school.”

“Independent study.”

She rolls her eyes.

“The history of human innovation is independent study,” I tell her. “We can fly because of people who didn’t go to high school.”

“Those people weren’t my kid,” she says.

Eve joins her, stepping into the room. Without making a big thing of it I put a few papers on top of something on my desk.

Carol takes her usual unhappy gaze around at my stuff. She doesn’t know about the storage units, and she doesn’t need to. Some things have to be bought in bulk.

I don’t know where Aza is. I don’t know what she’s doing. All I know is where she was three weeks ago, when she died holding my hand. And then a few days later, when I heard her voice
coming out of the sky.

She’s alive. Aza’s alive.

I know it like I know my own name.

I just need to figure out where.I checked wind currents and mapped the possibilities, at first in a pretty primitive way, and then in a more functional one.

Unusual storm patterns moving east across the country. Reports from weather balloons and satellites.

As far as I can tell, those patterns are moving in an unusually coherent clump, and they’re still over land. I have a master chart at this point, and a program that runs it on a variety of axes. This isn’t just my own obsessive doing. I
wish
I was a full-on programmer, wish I was a full-on anything other than this, but I know people.

And this is one of the uses for the money earned by my hotel bed-making devices and instant dry-cleaning sprays.

There’s not anything really concrete to go on and I don’t even exactly know what I’ll be going on to do. But there are plenty of scraps out there, things about ships in the sky, things about weather and weirdness. Then there are other things, dug up out of places I’m
really
not supposed to be looking.

Official places. Government places.

“You need to say good-bye to Aza,” Carol says, and takes Eve’s hand.

“It’s important, baby,” Eve says.

Their front is worryingly unified.

“I DON’T have to,” I tell them, though we’ve been through this already, too many times to count. I was prepared for dead, as prepared as you can be. I wasn’t prepared for
this
.

Ship. In. The. Sky.

I am not a fool. I haven’t told my moms anything about the ship. They would look at me for about three seconds, and then put me into the car, and take me directly to the children’s hospital (an insult, but it’s where you go until you’re eighteen) where we’d have a speedy meeting with the psychiatric unit. So, no, I don’t tell Carol and Eve about the ship.

In fact, I tell them nothing, beyond: I’m working on a project. My moms have the look of people who might be getting ready to take me offline. The Great Unplug has happened only once before, when I was nine and in the obsessed throes of memorizing a chunk of the OED. The moms did not approve.

Memorizing took up the extra places in my brain that were otherwise occupied with counting down the seconds of Aza’s life until age ten, when the doctors had, at that point, decided she was going to die. It was about this time my moms discerned that meds were required.

“So,” Eve says. “Do we need to take you offline?”

“I’m not even on right now,” I say, lying.

She looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

Yeah, Eve has a bandwidth monitor. I find this hilarious. They got the monitor to keep me from looking at porn, I assume. They were definitely convinced that’s what I was doing when I was working on the OED project. Carol burst into the room, all, AHA! And found me midway through
H
.

Maybe I’ve looked at
some
things on the internet in the category of naked. Who hasn’t, I ask you? But there are a million categories I care to look at, and most of them are not porn.

Categories like historic UFOs. Categories like history of flight. Categories like peculiar weather patterns since the eighth century. I’m compiling said categories into one larger thing in my computer. Because, reasons.

“I’d actually not be that unhappy if you
were
looking at porn,” Eve says, reading my mind, and sighs. “At least you’d be human.”

I look up.

“You wouldn’t be happy,” I tell her.

“I would be reassured that you were normal,” she says.

“Yeah, but I’m not,” I say.

“Go outside,” says Carol.

“It’s cold outside.”

“See a friend?”

“In case you missed it,” I say, playing the illegal card, “my only friend died.”

“She wasn’t your only friend,” Eve says, impervious to my attempt.

“Name another,” I say.

She can’t.

I do have other friends. Those Who Live Online, in Other Time Zones. Mind you, I’m not nine anymore. If I ended up unplugged again, I’d get around it.

“School tomorrow,” says Carol. “We love you, and we understand what you’re going through, but it’s either school, or doctor.”

Understand what I’m going through? They do not. I’m going through the history of civilization, basically. Not a big deal. Only minor work there.

I wait for them to leave my room, and then I’m back in it. There’ve been several sightings since the funeral. One person saw weird lights. Another saw a bright thing near the horizon. Another actually saw something he said was a
rope
.

Sir, you have my attention
. But then he recanted and said some stupid stuff about downed power lines. Whatever.

There were other sightings of the same kind earlier this year—one above Chile, one in the air over Alaska, one over Sicily—but none of them helped me. People, alas, don’t document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.

Now, however, we live in the epoch of the app. The official ones, and these, the nonofficial. Forget
jailbreaking
your phone, I’m talking about the ones that require you to break that phone out of Alcatraz.

There are a few hundred of us who develop them (See: Friends in Other Time Zones), mainly because someone else on-list dared us. I’m a midlevel amateur at this point, but they magnanimously let me on the message boards, and even allow me to throw down the odd gauntlet to the real players.

Hence: I now have a sky-anomaly app. You just aim your phone at wherever you saw the strange thing—cloud formations, weird lights, storms out of nowhere—and the app plots coordinates and checks with satellite info to gauge air displacement, mass, humidity, condensation of whatever you’re looking at, cross-referenced with similar reports.

The world is sometimes amazing.

Most of the sightings I’m researching are clearly fake, but three have been real, or as real as I can figure. I think they’re from the same clump of impossible sky out of which I heard Aza’s voice.

I’m done with being cautious now. I’m just going to call it what I think it is.

So, henceforth, we will be referring to that piece of sky as Aza’s ship.

Aza’s ship is heading northeast, slowly, spending a lot of time over farming areas. Those areas have been plagued by hailstorms, windstorms, lightning. Tiny tornadoes have scattered and flattened several fields. No crop circles. Just unforeseen, chaotic weather patterns, destroying harvests.

What Aza said she saw—what Aza
saw
—is part of a long tradition of things seen in the sky since the sixth century. In 1896, for example, there was something called the Mystery Airship scandal. People all over the western US saw skyships, brightly lit, flying fast. People in Illinois saw some kind of airship on the ground, and watched it take flight. After it was gone, they discovered footprints all around the place it had been. And the thing they said, my favorite quote?

“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for.”

Yeah. So that’s where I’m working right now.
Something above the clouds.

I interviewed some farmers (I claimed I was reporting for small newspapers that actually exist, in case they checked) and they talked about it like, well, the world is ending and all I can do is try to harvest when I can. When I asked about the whereabouts of the damaged crops, they kind of didn’t have an answer.

“Well, they’re ruined, son, that means they can’t be sold.”

Most of us don’t notice waste, so if all the corn blows off the cobs, or gets trampled, what we notice is that it’s no longer edible, not that, hey, a lot of it is straight up
gone
.

There is a pattern. The events, the sightings of the odd lights, the weird white clouds, they’re all moving in a straight line.

There is a destination. I just need to find out where it is. I stare and plot the course. I stab virtual pins into a virtual map.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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