Magonia (28 page)

Caru looks down at me, eyes wild, wings wide, the red undersides visible. There’s nothing keeping him here. He hangs in the air for a moment, above my boat, and then he arcs up.

He flies, a black-and-red flash of movement and silence, covering stars as he departs.

I hear him sing a bright white note. And then he’s gone. My eyes are full of tears, but I put my oars out and start to turn my launch boat back to my ship. Back to . . . I don’t know what. I aim toward the distant lights of
Amina Pennarum
, grit my teeth, and start rowing against the wind.

There’s a strange sound. My head jerks up. The slap of ropes on wood, and then a rush of bodies rappelling expertly down, the impact of boots in the bottom of my launch.

Six of them, all in black, all wearing helmets, all silent. They’re standing in my boat. Too many of them to fight off, if I even knew how to fight them off.

Oh my god. Oh my god, oh my god. There’s only one thing this could be.
Breath.

OH NO. Aza, Aza, Aza, you have made a serious mistake.

I tilt myself toward the edge of the boat. One of them looks at me and slowly, slowly, shakes its head. Black suits. I can’t see their faces. Huge and muscled. A silent, terrifying, totally covered group of monsters.

This is what everyone has been talking about since I came onboard. Bulbous, reflective eyes, faces a mass of tubes and tissue, all covered in dark, almost invisible against the sky. Monsters, insects with human bodies, nothing I’ve seen, nothing I’ve imagined.

shitshitshit

There’s a voice in my ear, jumbled and garbled, rough, right against my face.

“Aza Ray Quel,” says the voice, gurgling, a broken ocean, someone speaking from deep inside whitenoise.

One of the Breath has my arms, and another has my legs, as though I’m strong enough to really fight them. Maybe I am. I don’t know how strong I am. I don’t know what I’m fighting.

“Aza Ray,” says the voice again, a voice that reminds me of something, but they’re all over my little boat, these black-garbed things, pinning my arms and grabbing me. I scream as they push a
gag into my mouth. Someone yanks a hood over my head, and I can’t see anything after that.

I’m a prisoner. Of the Breath.

I’m hauled out from my launch, hooked to ropes. I swing out across space.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I’m not on Amina Pennarum. I can feel, by lack of sway, the
tremendous space this ship is taking up in the sky. The smell’s different, too, cold metal rather than feathers and twigs.

My heart’s burning and so are my nostrils and lungs. My bones are sticks. It’s like I’m back on earth. Maybe it’s the gag. I test, inhaling. No. I take a tight breath.

My chest is an empty hold in the center of a ship. No Milekt, and no Caru either. I can feel the cold metal of Caru’s ring on my thumb, though I’m not sure how it got there. I don’t remember putting it on.

Breath are walking around me, boots, circling, circling.

One of the monsters rips off my hood, yanking my neck back, tearing out my hair. I wince, but the gag’s still in my mouth.

I’m seeing through tears a hold with metal, rounded walls. It’s bright in here. Bright and dark at once, the way fluorescent lights are. I haven’t seen any for a long time. And looking up, I realize I’m not actually seeing them now. There’s a weird cold, gray lightning cracking along the ceiling, trapped against the walls, but it moves the same way lightning does, a tendril of fire, and then dark again.

A submarine. That’s how this feels. A metal room full of Breath. I inhale, and choke, my lungs tight, my throat closing. They’re going to kill me. I know it. I know it like I’ve never known anything.

One of the Breath takes off its helmet and I realize that it’s a diving helmet, a kind of diving helmet. I brace myself for what I see underneath—

And—

And—

She looks at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.

Long twisted black hair. Smooth pale skin. Needle-bright eyes, pale blue, not indigo. Skinny body, but less skinny than mine. She’s made of muscle.

Aza Ray.

Is standing.

In front of me.

She’s me. Oh my god, she’s me. The me I was. The me I’m not anymore.

I throw myself, hard, backward in the chair I’m tied to and someone catches it, forcing me back into place. I can’t speak. There’s a gag still in my mouth, but I’m biting it.

I can’t understand what I’m looking at. Is this Magonian magic? Is it a mind game? Is she some kind of . . . mirror?

Then, I realize. No, I know what she is. I know exactly what she is.

I know WHO she is.

This is Heyward Boyle. The baby who was taken from my parents by the Breath. This is the girl whose life I was dropped into. This is the girl whose life I lived for fifteen years.

Oh god.

She’s got a tattoo on her wrist, a stylized whirlwind, and I’ve seen it somewhere before. Not all whirlwinds are bad. Some of them bring new seeds to fertile ground. Some of them move ships across the sky. The Breath are the kind of whirlwinds that kill you.

It all unfolds now, in a rush of revelations, the things I’ve heard whispered. The Breath are assassins and special agents. The Breath are mercenaries.

The Breath are humans raised in Magonia.

“Aza Ray Quel,” she says, her voice no longer muffled by oxygen equipment. She stretches her arms and flexes them, and takes a step toward me. I jerk in my chair. Other Breath are taking off their helmets, and they’re dead-eyed, the same way the stormsharks are. Rippling with muscle, and tense as springs.

They are human, but they look wrong. They look evil to me now. I feel small and Magonian. I feel like—

I look down at my blue skin, my indigo body, feel my twisting hair.

I haven’t felt this way since I was on earth.

Alien. I feel like an alien.

Heyward assesses me.

“The
renegade
. Where were you off to?” she hisses.

A redheaded man is in front of me suddenly, and I know him. Oh god, I definitely know him. The medic who took me in the ambulance, the guy who cut me open. He was Breath. He’s the one Zal sent.

He’s scarier without his helmet, his suit unzipped to the waist. I can see a tattoo on his chest, a hurricane wind, flattening a tree into the ocean. It’s as though Breath wear extra insignia on their skin.

“Commander,” he says, and Heyward turns to him.

She’s
the commander?

“Confirmation,” she says. “This girl is the one you harvested from amongst the drowners, and
brought onto Captain Quel’s ship?”

“One and the same. I delivered her to Captain Quel aboard
Amina Pennarum
. It is my assessment that Quel intends to use her daughter’s song in direct opposition to Magonian command.” He turns and glares at me. They all do.

My gag gets ripped out, nearly taking my lips with it, and I sputter, spitting and choking, still unable to breathe.

Heyward picks me up from the chair with no effort at all, and shakes me hard enough that my bones rattle. She’s unbelievably strong. I’m tiny compared to her.

“What is this?” I manage to choke out.

Her suit is covered in embroidered rank badges. I may have stolen her life, but she has a new one. My head swims, and my hands shake.

“The rumors about Captain Quel were accurate,” the redheaded Breath says. “It seems she’s gone back to her old ambitions.”

I can’t do anything but cough. My breathing is so short that I’m possibly going to die in this hold.

“Has Captain Quel spoken of Spitsbergen?” she asks me.

I fall into a racking spell of coughing. I’m not telling her anything.

“Or seeds? Plants? She has, I can see it on your face. The same scheme, then.”

“It is our opinion, based on the charts aboard
Amina Pennarum
, that Captain Quel seeks to use Aza’s song to open the vault,” confirms the redheaded Breath.

“It was the conviction of the drowner as well, judging by his notes on trajectory. More than that,” says Heyward. “Captain Quel seeks to open the world.”

I’m blacking out. I’m blurring around her words, staring at her face. MY face. I can feel my strength ebbing, slipping out of me, something unspooling.

“Take her up. She’s suffocating.”

The Breath half carry me through a sealed corridor, and out into the main ship.

I can breathe again once I’m above deck, and after a coughing spell, the relief is so great I can’t believe I could have forgotten how it felt to not be able to take in air.

I inhale carefully, looking around as surreptitiously as I can. The ship is storm-cloud gray, and teeming with uniformed Breath, anonymous in their helmets. Heyward’s has a transparent face. I can still see her.

The sails are made of hum and speed. No wonder I didn’t hear them coming. One is all gigantic black moths, their wings slow and delicate, but thousands upon thousands of them. Another is wasps. Another black hummingbirds, all working as an army to lift this ship into the sky. The batsail on
Amina Pennarum
is
one
entity, reliable. If it’s killed, the ship goes down, but this sail could abandon the ship in a thousand directions. I look at the figurehead. An oarfish. There’s a slanting, tilted name painted on one of the masts:
Regalecus.

The Breath, in their helmets, their strange tubes helping them to breathe. That is what strikes fear into their enemies.

By the Breath
, they swear. Everyone in Magonia is scared of them.

If you’ve spent your life hooked to various oxygen equipment, like I have, those tubes aren’t quite as foreign to you. I eyeball the line coming out from the Breath’s suits and snaking to something on their backs. Not normal oxygen tanks. Something very small, and portable.

Heyward’s fingers dig into my neck.

“You will be of use, Aza Ray,” she says. “You’ll serve your people. We’re here, on behalf of Maganwetar, to make sure you do.”

My heart fills with Dai, with the image of his family, dead. With the image of him, a little kid, gorging on food from the ship’s hold.

“What does the capital know about its people?” I say.

She sneers. “Are you so easily swayed, Aza Ray? A moment ago, you were human. Now you speak as a Magonian.

“You talked about Magonia when you watched the squid. Who did you speak to after that? Who did you tell?”

I feel my spine freeze.

“How do you know about the squid?” The giant squid footage was a secret. Only Jason and I knew about it.

Heyward looks steadily at me for a moment, and then smiles. “I see why you like him,” she says.

My heart pounds painfully in my chest.

“What do you mean?”

She looks at me, assessing. “He told me everything. And now, so will you. Who else on earth did you speak of Magonia to? Which parts of Captain Quel’s plan are already in motion?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” I say.

“Your boy gave me this,” she says calmly, and hands me a piece of paper. I unfold it.

It’s charred at one edge, but still readable.
I { } you more than [[[{{{ }}}]]].

I can’t speak.

I can’t—

“Where did you get this?”

“He took it from your body,” Heyward says. “When you died. But then you weren’t dead. Or, I wasn’t. He gave it back to me.”

I feel all my blood rising—

“Well, perhaps he didn’t
give
it to me,” she says. “Perhaps I took it from him. The same way he took it from you.”

My fingers and toes go numb, and I’m dizzy and desperate and—

Dead? No, he can’t be—

He—

I stare at her, this monster, and I lose control of my voice.

“NO!” I scream, the note smashed into my hand, and there’s a blood-boiling shriek of answer
from out of the dark above me.

Milekt emerges from the sky, a golden thorn shooting through the air, screaming rage for my disobedience. He drops into my chest and I sing the loudest, highest, most savage note I’ve ever sung. Rage and grief and disbelief—

NO.

A cloud of bats pour out of the night all around us, tugging shreds of dark onto the ship. They drop it over the Breath, blocking their sight as cleanly as if they’d been put under hoods.

NO.

“BOARD!” Dai shouts, out of the invisible, and I see an entire swath of Zal’s starry-camouflage unwrap from around
Amina Pennarum
.

Dai dives into the rigging right above me, twirling a rope. He and Svilken are singing incredibly fast. There’s a giant wind kicking up and the squallwhales are orbiting us, looking ready to sing a hurricane. Dai’s shouting at me, and now, now I start singing.

Jason. Jason. JASON.

It’s that song, that griefsong that slams into a Breath, yanking out his tubes. The Breath falls, clutching his chest, ropes twisting around him.

A boom, a big boom and the
Regalecus

ShAkEs