Magonia(27)

Someone’s come in. A woman tall enough to brush the ceiling.
“Captain,” says one of my visitors. “We’ve been assessing the new addition to Amina Pennarum—”
The woman snarls at the rest of the people in the room. “You presume to discuss her condition without me? You presume to debate whether she is who and what I say she is?”
She’s right in front of me then, bending over me. The woman has coils of black hair twisted into complicated knots, oil-field slick eyes atop navy blue. Slanted cheekbones. Sharp nose, eyebrows like slashes of ink, arms ribboned with tattoos, spirals, feathers, and clouds made of words.
I recognize her. I know her face. I know her tattoos.
I know her. I’ve been dreaming about her for years. The two of us. A flock of birds.
The woman reaches out a trembling hand and touches my face.
“Ah . . . zah,” she whispers, the voice not coming from her mouth, but from her throat.
The way she says my name is almost the way Jason and I say it when we’re leaving room for the &. Nobody else says it that way. Her voice grinds. It’s not the same as the other blue-person voices in the room, which are smooth. There’s something different about it. It’s harsher, stranger, a wounded whisper.
“I’m Aza,” I squeak, in the most normal voice I can manage.
She turns to Wedda.
“She’s healthy? Her fever’s down?”
“It is,” says Wedda. “She’s regaining her strength.”
“Explanations?” I try to say, but my voice is dying in my throat. I look down at my blue hands. They are extremely blue. Too blue.
The woman (the captain?) touches my face again, with cold, pointed fingers. I want my family very hard. I want my mom, and I want my dad, and I want Eli and I want Jason.
“So, where’s my mother?” I say. I try to be casual about it. I do not make any of the whimper-y sounds I want to make.
“Here,” the captain says.

“No. Where’s my mom?” I say more urgently, in a shameful little-kid way. I want to hide my face in my mom’s sweater, and I want her hugging me.
Her voice floats to me through my memory. You can go if you have to go, Aza—
Oh god, my poor mom thinks I’m dead. She’d be here otherwise. That’s the only way this could have happened.
Wings all around me, and faces pressing in closer, blue faces, feathered faces with beaks.
Wedda fluffs herself, a mother hen instead of an owl.
“Stand back,” she says, loud and intimidating. “Let the little nestling breathe. She has no notion of who you are, nor of what happened to her.” They shuffle back, but only slightly.
I touch my chest, looking for the comfort of the crooked center bone in my rib cage. It’s there. But it feels—suddenly—like a wishbone.
I want a stethoscope. I want my doctor. I want her knocking at my chest, hunting for intruders, because this is INTRUDER CENTRAL. This is hallucinatus maximus.
There are all these familiar things, these déjà vu things, from the planks on the wall, to the way the captain’s face moves, inches from mine. The way it looks, the way she looks.
She has a strange necklace, and it hangs over me as she bends, almost hitting me. A tiny little nub of something—coral or bone?—embedded in clear resin at the bottom.
The earth tilts. I feel like I’m not in my body.
“Milekt found you,” the captain says. “We reeled you up from the drowners, just in time. You were almost gone.”
She covers her mouth and pauses a moment. Her eyes are filled with emotion. “But you’re finally home.”
In my heart, in this crooked, half-crushed heart I’ve always had, there’s a dizzy, weird thing.
“I don’t even know you,” I whisper.
“Of course you don’t remember how it was before you were taken, when we were on Amina Pennarum together. You were so small. You were only a baby. But even then you were . . . extraordinary.”
A tear glitters down the captain’s cheek, dark as ink from an exploding fountain pen. She presses her hand against my face, in the same place my mom would, and I stay still this time, overtaken by this strange sense of:
H O M E
O     M
M     O
E M O H
“I’m Captain Zal Quel,” she says. “You’re aboard the ship Amina Pennarum.”
I blink. She’s still here. She’s still looking at me expectantly. I’m still here. I’m still looking at her.
“You’re the Captain’s Daughter, Aza.”
And when I continue to stare, speechless, she finishes her sentence with the words I somehow knew she was going to say.
“I am your mother. And this is Magonia.”









No.
I shove hard out the door, through feathered people, blue arms, gray uniforms, and I’m running, running, running through a corridor lined with hammocks.
“Magonia,” Jason said. But we were talking about fairy tales, not reality. He was talking about history and hallucinations. It was crazy! I was sick!
I push past the crowd, the bird inside my lung screaming at me. Respect your station! Zal’s the captain! Salute her!
I slingshot myself up the ladder to the upper deck, push open the hatch, and sprint out into the light.
I’m expecting to breathe in the fresh air and cough, to touch the hospital gown embroidered with my name, and to feel frozen on my back where the thing gaps, but I stumble out into the cold air, and there’s no parking lot. No earth.