Magonia(66)

“How do they even work?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from everything.
He tilts the skin inside its covering, showing me. There’s an opening at its spine.

“You touch them and they wrap around you. They cover your skin, your organs. The one you had on down below would have made you indistinguishable from a drowner, though it should have degraded after a month or so. I don’t know why it lasted so long.”
I groan at the thought of the past. All I want to do is wrap myself back up in my old skin, my familiar human self, the body I knew everything about, however flawed and Magonian it secretly was. But it’s gone. I’m this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable phoenix.
I put my hand out to unzip the sack on another body: there are all kinds, male and female, and all ages. Dai grabs the casing around the one I have and pulls it away from me.
“Do you want to fall into it?” he warns. “Touch it, and it’ll touch you.”
Inside one of the bags, a skin opens its eyes and looks at us.
I yelp and step back. The girl staring at us is brown-skinned, her hair braided. A girl my age.
Dai shudders, then slings some skins over his arm. “It’s empty. The skins just have reflexes.”
We’re taking treasure, I realize. Spoils for our defeat of the Breath ship. We’re certainly pirates now, if we weren’t before.
The skin watches me all the way out of the room as we carry her.
We load them onto Amina Pennarum, along with provisions, everything we can take.
Milekt and I quietly sing the remaining waspsail loose. It unspirals into the morning. It’s dawn, and below us, ocean, white waves, and a dead Breath ship, falling through the sky, dropping into the sea.
It’ll dissolve swiftly. That’s what happens, or so I’ve been told. In the water, the leftover wrecks of many Magonian ships drift, hidden, barely visible.
If you were diving, I guess you’d never know. Skyship or seaship, they’re just wrecks. And there are so many of them on the ocean floor.
“That’s the last of it,” Zal says. She’s whispering, just to me. I can hear anger in her voice, but other things too. “Caru’s gone. That’s done now. You’re forgiven for it. He was not mine in the first place, not if he betrayed me to Ley.” She’s struggling. “But that’s your last mutiny. Agreed? It ends now.”
My brain is blurred by sorrow, broken by grief.
“No more lies,” Zal continues. “We’re together, you and me, against Maganwetar.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and whispers gently. “No child was ever so wanted.”
Even in the face of her display, I feel nothing. I’m gone inside.
She smiles at me. “The moment I saw you emerge is when my heart woke up. You’re loved, Aza,” she says. “Very loved.”
Loved. By Zal. It offers no comfort. But I’m back aboard Amina Pennarum.
Because Maganwetar hired the Breath that killed Jason.
And so, I am at war.









Sunrise off the starboard, a white, brittle sunrise, stars still visible above the ship’s rail, sun rising not over mountains or horizon, but over this endless ice. Inside my chest, Milekt sings his own song, and I grieve and try to reconcile myself to the thing I thought I already knew—that I’ll never see Jason again, never touch his hand again. I see him in my head for a second, not even looking at me, his intense concentration, the way he focused when he wanted something. I knew everything about him, every detail, every moment, but now I don’t.
I thought I was one who was gone.
I thought I was the one who would leave.
But now—
After a moment, I sing quietly with Milekt. We make a small whirl of white sand out of the moisture in the air above us. It hisses as it spins, and then we let it fall, sandsnow.
The icy world below us shines like an eggshell. We’re near our destination. Close to our mission.
This is what I was born for. There’s nothing else left for me.
I still don’t fit. Heart half on earth, half in the clouds. I’m still different from everyone else. There’s still no place I belong.
There are so many things so terribly wrong with the world below us—the way the rivers change colors from blue to green to brown. The way the smoke slips into the squallwhales and makes them sick, and the way Magonians starve, while earth eats.
I think about the way the capital hoards what little we harvest, leaves Magonians like Dai’s siblings to die of hunger, and murders innocents on earth—
Shh, Aza. Shh. Don’t think about it.
The only solution is to wipe the slate clean. To abandon the old ways. To change everything.
I’m on my way to save not just my own life, but the lives of all of Magonia. And now I have more reason than ever.
A squallwhale from some other pod is off to the side, industriously making snow, eyeing me, before, startled by our speed, it torpedoes forward, pinging and whistling urgently back to us, informing us that we have no business moving at this rate.
Snowmaker! whistles the squallwhale. Homesky! Sing and flee, sing and fly! Trouble the waters, trouble the rain! Shipstop.
Other squallwhales join the song and for a moment, we’re surrounded in every direction, an entire pod of them, calves and mothers and bulls, all of them singing furiously at us, shipstop shipstop, making clouds of snow and pouring them down upon the northern sea. They’re singing a blizzard.
We pay them no heed.
I take a deep breath, pushing all the pain down.
I look out from the deck of Amina Pennarum, down into the ice, and apparently I own this for now. This sea. This sky. Captain’s Daughter. I hear a bird calling from somewhere, a long and mournful call.