Magonia(43)

But it’s not a shark.
Red eyes, hooked beak, long neck covered in rough pink scales, hungry and joyful. Its wings beat slowly, up and down, their tips peeking from the top of the clouds, and it starts to sing out, calling to others. It grabs my clothes in its talons, and my falling slows.
Dead thing, I hear, a whistle croak. Dead thing falling.
Vultures.
Another flaps into me, bumping my side with its beak, wings cutting at my skin. The first vulture drops me. Dead animal, the new one whistles, dead, dead, sweet new dead blood, dead.
There’s a clattering cackle, birds surrounding me, looking into my eyes.
Dead thing! they shout, all their voices colliding with me. They’re huge, and starving.
Then I hear a scream from above, a precise song with beats of silence and rattling percussion, tiny clacking beak closing and opening, guttural whistling of rage and relief.
Milekt. I turn my head and see him diving, a golden beacon.
SING, he screams, and I tap my chest, opening it for the first time without help, and Milekt is in.
I open my mouth and because this is it, I give in.
I feel a surge up from my lungs into my vocal cords and instantly—harmony.
Millekt and I are singing together for the first time. With one voice we chant this single two-pronged note. It is a howl of holding, it is a screamed lullaby, no sound I could ever make alone.
With the song, something changes. The air feels . . . denser.
I’m hanging from the wind now, like I’m floating in a swimming pool. There is tension in the air beneath me, the feeling of it supporting me—
I stop falling. My heart slows. Between my feet I see the earth still far below and I—I hover.
A rope with a hook attached comes spinning down from above. There’s a violent snap as I’m grabbed by my jacket. Then they’re reeling me in, yanking me up through the sky, jolting and tugging.
I’m heaved into a launch boat. It’s Dai, sweating, swearing, bleeding.
“Oh my god,” I say, gasping. That’s all I’ve got. “Oh my god.”
Dai grabs me and holds me tight, and I’m uncertain. I think for a moment I’m still singing, but I’m not. I’m crying and panicked, my heart pounding hard.
“I saw you fall,” he says. “I wouldn’t have gotten to you in time if you and Milekt hadn’t sung. I thought you were gone.”
I’m shaking and shaken. So is he. His arms wrap around me, and mine around him, and—
Rostrae all around us—the birds from my ship, led by Jik, some of them midtransformation, their arms half feathered.

The spotted wings of the sparrow, the golden brown feathers of the eagle-woman. The hummingbird a buzzing dart.
My crew. They’re saving me.
Dai takes my hand.
“You’re pretty good with the mop handle,” he says, and for a second, I’m laughing, and I don’t know why. I’m shaking with adrenaline, wobbling and surging and I want to sing and fly and battle some more.
The Rostrae lift our launch boat up, through the fog and white again, through clouds scented with lightning, and into the shadow of the ship.
I look down at the deck of the Amina Pennarum as we rise up to its level. I look at Dai.
His face goes ashen. All over the deck, there are dead bodies and when I look around, in disbelief, I see our crew has lost.
Blood and feathers and gore, and the pirates—now I finally get a look at them, are all over the place—a group of ragged Magonians and Rostrae. They hurl ropes around us the moment our launch is in reach, and yank us down, and we don’t have time to do anything. I’m grabbed by a big pirate, my arms wrenched behind my back, and Dai is too.
Zal’s tied up, bloody faced. I see her see me, and take in a gasping breath of relief. Wedda’s near her, and half the crew, many of them wounded.
“A trap,” Zal spits at the pirate captain, whose back is to me. “It is against the laws of the sky to tempt a ship toward false rescue. You killed that captain and crew to summon me under their signal, and no doubt they were innocent. I’d expect as much from you.”
The pirate turns toward Zal. She has long gray hair, twisted into ropes of knots, nothing like Zal’s pattern. These are a whole other kind of complicated.
What would normally be the whites of her eyes are dark blue. The sides of her cheeks draw up as though there’re strings attached to them, and maybe someone’s trying to make her smile, but she’s baring her teeth instead. She’s thin in a way that looks hungry, not purposeful. Her face is sunken. She’s wearing a tight uniform, but it’s got tears and bare spots all over it.
“Where are you heading, Zal Quel? We’ve heard rumors you brought something lost up from below. You don’t sail as invisibly as you imagine. We knew which quadrant you flew in, and the sky? It whispers. I heard a rumor among the corsairs that you’d brought a girl aboard,” she says. “Where is she?”
Dai makes the mistake of glancing at me.
The pirate captain’s head whips around and she looks at me too. A blade is suddenly at my throat. I feel its edge. I’m holding my breath, panicking.
“Identify yourself,” the captain of the pirates bellows into my face.
“Don’t,” says Zal, nearly levitating with rage, and with something else too. Fear? “You owe her nothing. Keep silent, Amina Pennarum crew. If we plank-walk, we do it without words.”
The pirate captain looks closely at me, examining me, and I feel like prey. Dizzy and tiny, skinny, unmuscled, and powerless.
She pokes me in the chin with her sword, and it doesn’t tickle. It hurts.
“Who was that singing, girl? Was it you? This boy leapt off the ship midbattle to bring you up, and Amina Pennarum’s Rostrae saved you. You are not what you seem. No, I think you’re much more.”