Magonia(30)

Then his throat starts to sing along with the melody already begun.
I feel a rattling inside my ribs. This boy—Dai—has a bird in his chest, just as I do.
They sing together in gorgeous harmony. The sound is so beautiful, I’m blown away.
In my chest, Milekt trills out, Learn. Sing with him. It’s what you’re meant to do.
“No,” I say, irritated with Milekt’s insistence, and my own strange desire to do his bidding.
There is something massively important about song here. I suspect—no, I know—that it can do things.
It makes me feel nervous and too excited just thinking about trying. It’s a feeling like—
The thought surges into my head. Jason.
Dai’s looking down at me with a twisted expression on his face. I hear a fussy trill from his chest too.
“No,” Dai barks, and thumps his chest with his fist. “It isn’t time. She’s not ready.” His bird shuts up. He spins himself high into the rigging, twisting his arms in rope. The crew stands at attention, and Dai sings another note. As if he’s summoned them, stars wink on all over the sky.
A few are brighter than the rest, flaming extra hard against the blackness that surrounds them.
I count. Sixteen of them. So bright that they could be candles.
Up at the top of the mast, the other birds join in the song, and then my own bird starts, too, from inside my chest. He fills in the gaps in Dai’s song with his own notes.
I suddenly know that I should be singing too. I almost can’t keep from doing it, but why?
Seriously? I’m not a singer.
Finally something starts to emerge. This song, it causes the air to wobble around us, around Dai and me.
Who is he?
I don’t know, but my heart is pounding, and then, arcing across the sky, the Northern Lights appear, rippling out in the dark.
Green
blue and
r
o
s
e
and
R
E
D
and
t
a
n
g
e
r
i
n
e
and
w
h
i
t
e
and
SILVER.
The colors drape over our ship, and I look at Dai, glowing under the lights.
He throws his head back and sings a note into the stars, and I feel my chest shake in response. My bird trills again, and another color, pale blue, rushes up from the edge of the Northern Lights.
Dai climbs halfway up one of the masts—scaling it as though it’s nothing. A soft violet dust falls from the sky.
I’m jaw-dropped. Zal’s face is gentle as she lays her hand on my chest again.
“Happy birthday, Aza,” proclaims Dai from up on the mast. He bows his head to me.
“Happy birthday, Aza,” says the rest of the crew, in unison, and they bow too.
“Happy birthday, Aza,” says Zal, and she smiles at me.

This is the birthday I wasn’t supposed to live to. I’m supposed to be dead, but I’m not. I’m supposed to be on earth, but I’m not. I make a noise I don’t know I’m going to make, a long wail of unmistakable despair, and from somewhere deep in the ship, there is a faint answering wail. The crew rustles nervously, looking around, but I clamp my mouth shut.
I’m supposed to be polite, and respectful, and grateful. But I’m on a ship in the sky and I’ve been kidnapped from my family, and apparently everyone I love thinks I’m dead.
I do a quick pass through my memory, and determine that I don’t remember anything I’m sure is real past chocolate éclairs in my kitchen, footage of a silvery giant squid circling up from the bottom of the ocean, and Jason and I, almost—
And bang, there it is. The dividing line between fact and fiction. I spin to look at the captain.
“You said they’d bury me on my birthday. Who’s my family burying if I’m here?” I shout.
“Enough!” Zal shouts back at me, right into my face, but I’m losing it completely.
“No! Take me home!”
“I said this would happen,” Dai says, descending from the mast. “She’s broken.”
Zal goes rigid. “She is not. Aza is strong enough that no Breath could injure her.” She squares her shoulders, looking carefully at me.
Then she laughs the kind of loud, booming laugh you’d hate in a movie theater.
“You are my own daughter, for all that you were raised by drowners,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe what I was told either, not without making sure. Not from strangers. Not even from friends. I will show you, daughter. And then you’ll believe. You’ll know who you are fated to be.”
And that’s how we end up flying over my funeral.









“When you die in Magonia,” Zal informs me, “you’ll be given a hero’s farewell, quite unlike this one.”
She hands me a wood and brass spyglass, and within a moment, I’m looking through it, and down at my high school’s parking lot. I lift my head when she says that.
“It sounds like my funeral here is already planned.”
“Living’s a risk, Aza,” she says sharply. “Heroes die young. Would you choose to be less than a hero? Here, the sky will light with fire for you. Our funerals are their sunsets.”
I see. How comforting. (How insane.)
Below us, on the ground, people start to come out of my high school, dressed in black. I’m breathing fast, but I’m finefinefine, completely and totally fine—
—until the moment the crowd parts for the tall guy in the alligator suit.
Then I’m not fine anymore. I say his name once, quietly, then louder. “Jason.”