Magonia(25)

Jason, Eli, my dad, my mom, my oh my god, I—
I died.
What. The. Hell.
Aza, what the hell?
Where am I?
I lose it.
I sob, no dignity.
“Where’re my mom and dad?” I manage to ask the owl. “Where’s Jason? How am I not dead?”
The owl clucks. “No need for such fear and fuss, nestling. You’re on a ship. Welcome aboard Amina Pennarum.”
I realize that everything she’s saying is in a language I understand, but it’s not English. I don’t know how I understand it. When I try to focus, I can’t. I look up at her through tears.
The owl’s head rotates all the way around, and then back again like the world globe in my history class, a dented sphere from the 1970s, its face pocked with pencil marks. She has black spots in white hair. She has freckles all over her face, and her skin is pale and kind of silver.
Her fingers are yellow, and scaly, and the nails are black. There are gold rings on all of them, all connected to one another. The rings are connected to something else, under her clothes. I can see chains running up her arms.

Some kind of harness? Is she a prisoner?
Am I a prisoner?
In what country? In heaven? Wait, what heaven? I don’t believe in heaven!
“HELP!” I shout again.
“Hush,” she says, her tone warm but impatient. “May the Breath take you, if you keep shrieking that way. You’re not a newborn, nestling. You are much too shrill. You hurt my ears. Hush now.”
My chest rattles. From inside it—inside my lung—comes one high note. I have an image of the bird in my room. The yellow bird. The one I swallowed.
Four sunrises, the bird in my chest says, in a voice totally normal, except that it is COMING FROM MY LUNG. Four sunrises you slept.
I gasp and brace myself to choke on feathers.
But I’m not choking. I can breathe. I test. I breathe in all the way slowly, and then out all the way, even more slowly. I’ve never been able to do that before.
I stop crying for a second and listen. None of the normal hospital desperation sounds and smells, no people dealing badly with their kid’s upcoming expiration over crap coffee in the waiting room.
My screaming didn’t seem to scare the owl, who is now just looking at me calmly and taking my pulse. I try questions.
If this is a hallucination, she’ll answer like a nurse. If this is heaven—
“Are you an angel?” I ask.
She laughs. “So you can speak politely. We weren’t sure you could. All you’ve done since you got onboard five days ago is shriek, tell everyone you’re dead and that this isn’t how dead is supposed to be, and then pass out again.”
I might be hyperventilating slightly. I get questions out between gasps, but I’m still not coughing. I should be coughing.
“Where am I? What happened? What the hell is this? Who the hell are you? Is this hell? Why are you a bird? Is that a costume? Do you exist? Are you a nurse? Is this a hospital? Am I on a ship?”
The owl looks at me, tilting her head with an expression that looks as though maybe I’ve already had this conversation with her. She tugs at my covers and straightens them. I notice I’m naked.
I have a vision of a morgue. Am I in a morgue? Am I frozen in a drawer? I don’t feel dead. I feel crazily alive.
“Nestling. You were brought aboard in considerable distress, by a Breath summoned in emergency when I and the rest of Amina Pennarum’s Rostrae couldn’t convince you to come peacefully. You would have died down there, trapped inside that skin, had Milekt not found you.
“This isn’t hell, but the sky,” she continues, “and I’m not hell either, but Wedda. Greetings, it’s nice to meet you too. I am no bird. I’m Rostrae. And of course this isn’t a costume. These are my feathers.”
Right, that explains everything.
This is some kind of meltdown. My brain floods with things I’ve read, Milton, William Blake, and Moby-Dick, plus Disney movies viewed unwillingly in children’s hospitals plus Christmas specials, plus New-Agey yoga moves that put your brain into some kind of cosmic release state, and I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Think.
Settle, instructs the bird in my chest. Nest. Feed.
“She hungers, it’s true,” Wedda says, talking casually to my rib cage. “It’s not natural to sleep so long.”
She leans over and starts trying to feed me something with a spoon, spilling food on my face. I fail to open my mouth, but she smashes the spoon against my lips, and I finally give in and take a bite of something sort of oatmeal-esque.
I can feel wind coming in from somewhere. Like, ocean breeze. The sounds I first vaguely thought were the beeping of machines are not beeping at all. They’re birds. Birds singing and screeching and peeping.
“Why are you here?” I ask the owl.
“I’m your steward,” she says. “The officers aboard Amina Pennarum all have stewards from the feathered class. You don’t know anything, little one, and you have a lot to learn. You’ve been gone a long time.”
Disregard the words “gone a long time.”
“What ocean is this? Is this the Pacific? Are we on a cruise ship? A hospital ship?”
She laughs again. “When you came aboard, you were a nestling fallen off the mast and too young to fly. But now, I think you’re recovering. Questions and questions. Let’s get you into uniform. You’ve been in bed long enough. You’re in need of fresh air, and exercise.”
“I’m fine,” I say, uneasy and lying. “I can dress myself. I can feed myself too. I don’t need a steward.”