Magonia(39)

I scrub until my fingers bleed blue, and as I scrub, I chant.
“Jason, Eli, Greta, and Henry. Jason Eli Greta Henry. Jasoneligretahenry. And Aza.”
When I look up, Zal’s standing above me, a disappointed look on her face.
She kneels, and extends her hand to help me back on deck.
“I started out at the lowest rank on this ship and made my way up to captain, faster than anyone imagined,” she tells me. “These were the years when everything went wrong. Magonian ships couldn’t harvest enough to sustain even our own sailors. Our squallwhales sickened. Our people began to know hunger.
“Our problems are worse now than they were before. The world is overtaken with drowner poisons. Magonians suffer and die. We’re at their mercy.

“You’ll soon understand, Aza, what it means to be in charge of the future of your people. Some of us are born to crew ships, and some are born to captain them. This ship was my salvation, as it will be yours. And as you will be to your people.”
Zal puts her hand on my back, and it feels strangely good. Is it because she’s my mother? Or is it because of her power aboard the ship? Is it because part of me likes being in favor, being special?
“Amina Pennarum sails for treasure, Aza,” Zal whispers. “You’ll be the one who raises it from the deep.”
“Treasure?” I ask. “What do you mean?”
“Learn to sing for us,” she says. “And you’ll see. You must see.”
My brain whirrs. Is there actually still treasure in the world? The notion is exciting. I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways.
I think about the bird I keep hearing—the one who, every night, sings along with my emotions, my pain—the one Wedda called a ghost.
I mean, obviously it’s not really a ghost? But what do I know about Magonia? There could easily be ghosts all over this sky. I wouldn’t know about it. I’m a stranger here.
Zal takes the ship’s wheel, her charts open to some highly cartographed territory. I can see monsters drawn in the margins.
Below us, for a moment, I see a flash of earth, but then a squallwhale comes between us and the ground, stirring the air until there is only cloud, and we’re only a thing hidden inside it.
Jason (stop it, Aza, just stop thinking about him, just stop) would love it here. He’d be prowling around with his hands out, asking question after question after question. And people would answer him, because he never met an expert who wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to know.
He never met a fact he didn’t want to add to his secret fact-hoard either.
There were things Jason didn’t know, of course, but in the realm of the memorizable, not that much as far as I could tell.
What did he not know? How to be a normal person? Neither did I. But apparently I have a better excuse.
God. Jason, my best friend and the most annoying thing, who’d rattle off a thirty-minute monologue of his mind’s flotsam and jetsam and then cackle when I didn’t have the same levels of geekitude at my disposal.
Jason, who once forced me to dance in front of all the curators at a museum because I lost a bet.
Jason, who once in a while, when I’d be coughing, wouldn’t even be there at all. He’d be standing right next to me, yes, but inside he’d just be a frantic calculating machine, tallying oxygen percentages and dust quotients, pollens and amounts of time between wherever we were and the hospital.
Which I hated, because it reminded me that I was sick.
Some days he’d be muttering to himself, diagramming things he wouldn’t show me, thinking things he wouldn’t discuss.
So he wasn’t perfect, Aza. He wasn’t. It’s just that your brain keeps trying to revise him into something he never was. Never mind that the moment you saw him, your first memory of him in the alligator suit, you thought, Oh god, finally, someone like me.
He’s not like me.
He’s human.
Right, then.
Shut up, Aza’s brain. Shut up.
I hear, from far off inside our ship, the awful cry of that invisible bird again.
No, he sings. Leave me or kill me.
He shifts into wordless screaming, which chills my whole body. The ghost bird—Caru, I remember his name now—sings again, an anguished wail. Everyone pretends it’s not happening. Everyone ignores him.
I try to block out the sound, but then, from nowhere, I get flashes of something I can’t quite—
Someone leaning over me in a crib.
For a moment I see my own tiny hand held in a black gloved one.
And that’s all I have, a gasp of a memory.
Kill me, the ghost bird screams. Broken heart. Broken string.
I’m jolted again by Dai shaking my shoulder.
“Move, if you’re not working,” he says. “You’re in the way of the nets.”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The bird?”
He tilts his head. “No,” he says.
What am I remembering?
I tug Dai’s sleeve. “Magonian babies. What are they like?”
“They?” he says. “We. We hatch. A lot smarter than drowner babies when we do.” He struts a little. “I can remember my own hatching.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed.
“The screaming bird?”
“The ghost,” Dai says tersely.
“Is it a canwr?”
“That’s two questions,” he says grumpily. “Or four, depending how you count.”
“Dai, please.”
“Just—” he hisses, glances around, then pulls me away from the nearest crew members. “Just let it go, Aza. The ghost’s been agitated since you came aboard.”