Magonia(35)

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.









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.