Magonia(74)

He moves back from me so that we’re not kissing for a second.
“Aza Ray,” he says. “You hold no horrors for me.”
He breathes me in, and I breathe him in, and when we breathe out the air freezes between us and falls. Snow.
I’m shaking and stupid, and for a second I think I’m not going to know what to do, but then I do.
I grab his face in my hands and kiss him until he’s the one who can’t breathe. I keep my eyes open. So does he. We’ve been not looking at each other for too long. Like, for our whole lives.
Real now.
No more parentheses. No more brackets.
I can hear new sounds out there. Engines, airplanes, helicopters. Whatever we did, people are about to know it all.
“It’s okay. I planned for something like this.”
I look at Jason, and remember how even though I know what he is, I always underestimate him. He smiles at me.
I stagger into the broken, sideways hull of Amina Pennarum, singing camouflage all the way. I know I don’t have long. They’ll never let this wreck stay.
I run as fast as I can through corridors I once knew, past tangled hammocks and twisted ropes to find the skins that Dai took from the Breath ship. It’s dark and smoky in here, and there’s a sizzle not far away, a sting outside, the smell of ozone, but I tear off my uniform and grab the closest skin.
I unzip the cover. I put my hand on the skin, warm, soft, fragile, and I touch it. I feel it touch me. It wraps around me, pressing, crushing, melding to me, melting into me, and inside my body I feel the vibration of Caru, questioning, from outside the vessel.
Okay, I sing. Calm, and I feel him sing back. Feel rather than hear.
The skin closes over me, smooth, perfect, and new, and I tug my clothes back over it and run, run, as the ship collapses around me.
I fling myself out a porthole onto the ice. I look up, but Maganwetar is gone. The ships are gone. The sky and ground are clear of everything but squallwhales and human things, planes in the distance, and cars coming across the island. People are arriving, running across the frozen landscape.
Casually, dressed in my Magonian uniform, breathing a little easier with these borrowed doll lungs, Jason and I walk away from the seed repository.
We walk away like we’re two American teenagers on a field trip who saw something they shouldn’t have seen, but only kind of saw it, officer, because we snuck away to make out.









It takes some seriously heroic lying and bullshitting, and this is where having a little bit of money comes in handy, but in the end I get us on a plane home. Fake passport for her. I said heroic, didn’t I? Yes. Heroic.

I’m not entirely well from the lightning, and I’ve been feeling sick the whole flight. It’s weird and terrifying to be on a plane now, after all this. I don’t know if Aza thinks so. She’s so exhausted that she’s been sleeping for nine hours. I can hear a familiar, ragged edge to her breathing starting again, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.
The skin she’s wearing now is stronger, a new version of what she had before. She has some time, we hope, before things start to fail.
The skin. I think about that. It makes no sense. Aza tried to explain it to me, but finally gave up after she said it was a combination of camouflage and Aqua-Lung. I told her to stop because she wasn’t helping make any sense of this, and she said, “Fine, Jason. It’s magic. I can’t help you. I don’t get it either.”
I think back to that night when Aza and I watched the giant squid—the creature that also seemed fact and fantasy, real and imaginary. That day, we were uncomplicated. I mean, not, but relatively, compared to today. Even that’s something we’re never going to have again.
I’m not looping.
Okay, fine, I’m looping.
Looping as in: this won’t work, this can’t work, what’s coming for us?
As in maybe she isn’t who she was, maybe I’m not who I was, maybe nothing about this is right at all.
As in, maybe she’ll die again. Maybe it will be worse this time than it was last time, except that this time she’ll really be dead.
Loop. Worry. Panic attack quelled by breathing and a pill and a tiny, tiny dose of pi. Shh. Aza not awake and not noticing, and me in the bathroom of the airplane, trying not to fall apart now, after all the weeks of fervent not falling apart I’ve done.
This is completely insane. This was love at first sight. And now, she’s here with me, and I’m here with her, and the whole sky is full of angry people who want her dead.
And is she even staying down here? Can she?
But it doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her. What if one day she looks at me and says, “I want to go back up”?
What if I’m an anchor, snagged, holding her to the rocks?
This is not just Jason and Aza. It’s not me racing against death to save her anymore. It’s us racing against impossible.
I think about my moms. I think about how there was a moment in which they thought they’d never be able to be together. Their families panicked. Two women? No men? They did it anyway. My birth certificate has both of them on it, and they did I-don’t-even-know-what to make that happen.
They were brave. I can’t be less brave than they are.
But even Eve would be scared of what we saw in Svalbard. And maybe of the girl beside me.
At the beginning of the flight, I saw a formation of geese passing our plane, going the other way, and so did Aza. She pressed her face against the glass.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her hand was on the glass, too, as though she was greeting them, but also like she was getting ready to do something. The air felt gritty. After a moment, the geese passed the plane, and she relaxed.