Magonia(68)

When we get these plants back, the sky will be full of fields of epiphytes. Magonia will be self-sufficient. We can leave earth crops alone. And the capital will lose its power to deprive its people.
The song is full of hope, of green, of spring.
We will harvest the clouds when we get them back. No more skysettlements will starve. And the rest of the things that are wrong here? They can be fixed. Hunger makes wars. Plenty ends them.
Green leaf, Milekt sings. Skyblooms.
I join him, light-fingered as a pickpocket at first, testing my techniques. Dai will sing, too, but right now it’s too delicate. We don’t want to overwhelm the ice.
I sing a little harder to the rock below us. The metals of the entrance and the hidden building. For long seconds nothing happens. Then there’s a low groan. Something in the earth moving.

(Maganwetar is coming, a voice in my head breaks in. We broke every law. We’re breaking more now. There’s no way they’re not going to find us.)
I drive the thought away and focus, and the air starts to shine, a shimmering frozenness. Dai’s opening his mouth—still silent, but ready, Svilken in his chest.
I reach out my hand and take his, and he squeezes my fingers. I sing a section of air into a sheet of ice.
The air is gleaming, a bright, knife-hardness, and I slam the ice, through my voice, into the ground.
I glance at Zal. Her face is lit up with excitement. Her eyes trained only on the destruction I’m causing.
I sing one high note with Milekt, a piercing sound, and there’s a scream from below, a shuddering lurch of stone. I watch the ground divide at the point into which I drove the ice. A crack in the snow, right outside the repository. Water wells out of the crevasse, melted and shifted, turned from stone into liquid.
I pant for a moment, dizzy. Dai holds me tighter. Milekt buzzes around in my lung, and I look over and see Jik. She’s behind the captain, staring at me. Everyone is. Her feathers are standing up all over her shoulders.
“Open the rock!” Zal cries, exultant.
I take a breath from the bottle, and then sing deeper. I feel Dai’s voice before I hear it. He joins his quiet note into my song, and things shift below us.
The change spreads more quickly than I can account for it. The snow on the hillside shudders into liquid and the great shaft of rock above the repository isn’t stone now, no, it’s a column of siltless, clear new water. We hold it with our voices.
Zal maneuvers the ship directly above it; I can see through hundreds of feet of what was, a moment ago, a mountain. It’s now a deep wide well, the rock receeding deeper, and then deeper still until the stone at the bottom suddenly ends. The water wants to spill.
Yes, the water wants to flood, but I stop it, holding it in place with song. I feel Dai tense with the effort of keeping a world in motion motionless.
Through the swirling depths, we glimpse a room.
Shelves and shelves and shelves, lockers full of seeds. The vault.
The water wants to plunge. It wants to gush right into the corridors we’ve reached, but I manage to hold it where it is. Dai and I sing a few more taut notes, and the sinkhole grows wider. The entire surface of the island is churning now.
The crew is gasping, staring, at the force of this power. The hill’s turning to a lake. Inside my chest, Milekt is frantic with effort, battering against me.
The water wants to fall more than I have strength to stop it, so I sing cold and turn acres of hill water into ice. Through it, we can see all the way down, clear as glass.
Room after room, chamber after chamber of cabinets, suddenly lit up. Which seeds will we get? Which of the plants will we carry? There’re too many.
The strongest singers of the crew are starting their own notes now, and I can see cabinets bursting open, packets of seeds gusting into rooms, rising as if in high winds, each wrapped in their waterproofing. Floods have been planned for by the people who constructed this vault.
“Starboard!” Zal yells, and the ship moves, our Rostrae in the sky towing it. I look up and see Jik, her talons clasped on a rope. She’s still staring down at me, but she’s completely in bird form.
“Now, Aza,” Zal says to me.
I sing a melthole in the ice, not so different from where a seal would rise to breathe.
Amina Pennarum’s best fishers and hunters lean over the side. They tug the pulley from the back of our deck—the strong one we use for bringing up livestock—into position.
“Now!” Zal shouts, and the great weighted mass of hooks and snares plummets into the hole I’ve made. The pulley’s flywheels spin and the gripper plunges into the shaft of water and into the center of the hill. Toward the seeds.
I expect it to reach the room we can see, grab what it can, ascend again, to repeat the fishing as long as I can hold the hill. But Zal orders me, “Go deeper.”
Milekt directs our notes. He shrills, and I sing with Dai and Svilken. There are deeper rooms, beneath the main vault. I stutter a second, confused, and a big chunk of the ice flickers for a moment back to stone. I steady my song as quickly as I can.
Lights, much lower in that storage facility than there should be, rooms of hydroponic rows deep in the mountain. Testing rooms with plants struggling into existence.
I sing, controlled, precise, but I feel as though something’s wrong with me. It feels the same way it did when Dai and I accidentally sang that wave together, out of control.
I can feel him behind me, his quiet notes guiding my song, but they feel stronger than they should. My notes are tense and sharp.
At the bottom of the complex, the lowest of these clandestine levels, behind secure doors, guarded by cameras now breaking with sudden cold, are rooms full of secret seeds and plants. There’s a whole level of them. I can only just make them out.