Magonia(73)

Cut string, he screams. I feel a hideous racking inside me, guilt. I broke our bond. I had to.
Forget it, Aza. None of it matters. Because Jason.
I sprint across the snow, the tilting landscape.
I push into the repository entrance with Caru behind me, and it’s dark, and still no one. Where is he? Gone? How can he be?
No, I hear footsteps. He runs into something and grunts. “Ow.”
The simplest sound and it causes me to come to my senses.
I’m not ready for this. I can never be ready. I’m not the Aza he knew. I look—
I look like—
I feel my stomach drop. My legs go numb, my tongue trips in my mouth, my whole body crashes and burns with this insane feeling of falling from something so high there’s no end. I feel everything tumble—comet meteor parachute wingless—into him.
“Aza,” he says. He’s coming toward me. “I know you’re here.”
I’m Magonian. He’s human. There’s no version of this that’s okay. I can’t be on earth. I can’t let him see me. Not this way.
“Get off this island,” I warn him, even though I feel my heart splintering. “Get away from here.”
“Aza Ray. Do you know how hard it was to get into this place? I’m breaking laws in maybe five countries. You almost killed me. They almost killed me. And the Norwegians think I’m a curious and slightly stupid schoolboy on a trip to Longyearbyen.”
I’m smiling inside my zipped-up hood because this is vintage Jason. He’s alive. He’s real. But I’m not Aza anymore. I have no idea who I am.
“And in order to get to Longyearbyen, I basically had to bribe God.”
There’s a silence.
“The airport’s less than a mile away,” he says. “If your clothes are warm enough you can walk. And wait. I had a tent with me, but some people took me in. I think my tent sank. Where the water, you know. Was.”
I say nothing.
“Come out, and come home with me,” he whispers. “It’s freezing. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t have to do it alone.”
Caru sings in our voice, this terrifying screamsong voice, this nothing-is-inside-my-heart voice, and we turn the floor to water for a moment, because we’re scared, I admit it, I admit it. Jason’s eyes get huge, and he stumbles, splashes, sinks, recovers.

I can’t be with him I can’t be with him. Caru sings a high awful pitch, a shrill of despair, and agony, and Jason covers his ears in pain. Caru keeps singing with my mouth.
Jason’s gasping, but he looks up again, and I see his face now. The furrow between his eyebrows is deeper than it was. He fidgets in his pockets and stuffs earplugs into his ears.
“Idiot,” he says. “Do you really think I’m leaving without you? Do you really think I’m going back to my full-on meltdown? Reciting pi for three weeks? Talking in my sleep?”
He straightens up, wet to the thighs with water that, after it falls from him, goes back to being concrete. He doesn’t seem to give a damn.
Caru arcs in his voice, Leave leave leave go go go drowner, but then Caru stops singing because I can’t stop crying.
Jason’s in front of me. Things have changed in him. Just like things have changed in me.
No no no. He’s human. I keep reminding myself that I’m not. But oh my god oh my god, my heart. My heart feels human.
“You’ll have to kill me if you want me to go,” Jason says. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
He says nothing for a minute.
“Then we’re even,” he finally says, and his voice breaks with an only slightly muffled sob.
I step out from behind the pillar. Covered completely. I’m wearing the clothes I had to wear to do Zal’s bidding. A suit zipped up all the way to keep me safe from too much oxygen. Emergency war gear. Only my eyes are visible.
No one but me could ever tell that he’s scared. No one but me has ever seen Jason Kerwin cry.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jason says. “You can keep trying to tell me to leave, but it’s not going to work. I came for you. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Aza’s gone,” I singsay.
Jason looks steadily at me. He takes a step toward me.
“Bullshit,” he says.
I take a step back.
He steps. I step.
Another.
Rock wall behind me.
But.
I’m going to leave him.
But.
He reaches out his hand, and like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t even notice it’s a thing, he puts his hand on the hood of my suit, and unzips it, taking the panel away from my face.
My hair uncoils into the freezing air. It twists and moves toward him as though its trying to bite his hands. My skin flares with electricity, storm sparks, too much oxygen.
I can’t breathe this way for long.
I’m here in front of him, Magonian.
Jason doesn’t even flinch.
I try one more time. This body, this person, this skin, this face, these red-gold eyes, the real, freaky version of the girl he knew. He’s looking at me, at my insane Medusa hair, at my too-long fingers and everything not what it was, and I must be hideous to him.
“Do you get it now? I’m not Aza,” I wheeze. “I’m not who you think I am—” and then Jason Kerwin takes one more fast step forward and—
He’s kissing me.
He’s got me in his arms. His human lips. My Magonian mouth. And it’s weather, a surging storm breaking, a vast, warm expanse of sun and of rightness coming across the sky. I’m glowing with it, his skin, my fingertips, his jaw and—