Magonia(70)

I’ll drown everyone, all of us, sing until my throat tears out, sing the sky open, sing everything into an abyss—
Another human runs out from near the repository, fighting the wind, shouting into the dark. It’s snowing and hailing and I’m looking down at this person on this little island of ice, a tiny person seen from above.
We’re maybe twenty feet up, hanging in the mist of our song, pulling up the plants, and the world is turning to water, and tears are streaming down my face, from rage and powerlessness, from grief, from desperation.
He’s waving his arms.
I can’t see him through the mist and flood. A person. A drowner.
“Finish it!” Zal bellows. “Flood them.”
I see the world Zal wants. A sea made of the earth. A flash of a ship on a great sea, and of a bird above it all, a bird like Caru. Then gone. A flash of a flood rising up and covering over the world. The sea full of bodies. Drowned.
Someone near me screams. Someone above our ship screams louder.
An anchor drops onto our deck from the massive city above us.
Arrows zing by and stick in the deck beside my feet.
The whole time, Dai’s singing “Don’t stop,” and I’m singing “FLOOD,” even as Amina Pennarum tilts.

Below, that flood is surging up for the person on the ground. He shifts and the mist moves away from him, the one person, the one drowner, his face suddenly visible, and—
A giant squid on a backlit screen.
An alligator at my birthday party.
A hoodie for the hospital.
Driving a car to fetch a hoax.
Together on my front steps.
Jason.










I’m right below her. I can see her. I can see everything, at least every few seconds. It’s like a bad connection.
I see a ship. More than a ship. I see something so insane up there, so high in the sky, way above where the ship is. There’s a city in the clouds.
Mostly hidden, a huge ponderous thing, buildings with spire tops, wind whirling around it.
I’m alive. I didn’t think I would be. The lightning struck, leaving me three burns—one in each hand, and one in the middle of my back.
When I opened my eyes, the groundskeeper was bending over me and saying “Son, you been struck. Should I restart your heart?”
“I think my heart’s beating, thanks,” I said.
Then my heart stopped.
He gave me CPR.
I was in the hospital for the next week. I was pretty much unconscious for four days, with people freaking out all around me. When I finally came to my senses, my body hurt like I’d been beaten up by a gang of giants, and I had long red burns branching down my arms and legs. But I was freakishly okay. In fact, I felt better than I’ve felt ever.
Magonian lightning. I don’t know. I can see things now, no spyglass necessary.
Mr. Grimm was one of the first people who visited me, asking about the lightning, asking about how it felt, and I didn’t know what to tell him, so I described everything. He went very pale. I felt kind of bad for him.
The note un-Aza handed me, the one I’d given real-Aza, it was gone.
So I knew where she was going. And I knew where Aza was going.
Ergo, I knew where I was going.
That got me out of bed, even though I fell over when my feet touched the floor. But there was no version of my life in which I wasn’t getting my ass to Svalbard.
You don’t want to know how I got here, you don’t want to know how much it cost, you don’t want to know how gigantically in deep shit I am. I left a note for Carol and Eve. They’ll never forgive me, except they love me, so they will.
I told them I’d be back and not to worry. I’m going to be explaining for the rest of my life. But hey. Some things you don’t have time to explain in the moment.
The fact that I got here before she did is a miracle.
Forged documents. Hacked computer. Claiming of consular privileges. I have called in favors. I have accrued debts that I will be spending the rest of my life paying off. And I am officially the biggest pain in the ass in the entirety of the dark side of the internet right now, but it was worth it.
I can see her there, every few seconds, a flash of her in a wet suit and a hood, on deck.
She doesn’t look like herself, but I can hear her voice mixed with other voices. It’d be hard not to hear it. Everything else is birds.
There are screaming birds everywhere, but when I blink, I can see that they’re not birds, really, not at all. Nope.
Human bird things. Some kind of hybrids.
I’m forcing myself not to pi, because I can’t do it. I have to be here.
I can see her surrounded by people I can’t understand—“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for”—and up in the sky right above her, there’s this city, sending ropes down to her ship. She’s right there in the middle of it.
Aza, Aza, Aza . . !
I’m running from where I’ve been hiding, and out into the open space, because if she sees me, she can’t—
She can. She keeps singing, and around me things are cracking open. The whole world is breaking into pieces.
This is some kind of earthquake, some kind of natural disaster, and somehow it’s because of her singing. I feel her notes stabbing into the ice around me.
There’s water pouring out of rock where there shouldn’t be, and a hook rising up beside me, coming up through the ground and attached to her ship. It’s minus I don’t even know how many degrees. It would be ironic, my brain informs me, to freeze to death, just after I was almost fried.
I shout her name. She doesn’t respond. I shout harder, but the sky’s full of ships now, and some kind of totally insane battle starts happening.