Magonia(75)

“What just happened?”
“I wasn’t sure what they were doing,” she said, and looked at me with a kind of sheepish expression on this new face I’m still getting used to. “I thought they might be coming for us.”
“Explain,” I said.
“We’re near a Magonian ship right now,” she said. “The geese were in formation around the hull. I don’t know how we got out of there. I don’t know how they let us go.”
I look at her. I don’t know either. We’ve been over everything. Heyward. The ship in the air. This Dai, her partner.
She explained. It wasn’t a happy explanation, hearing her talk about how she was magnetized to him. We compared notes on everything that happened in the last month and a half, and we still have gaps.
There’s nothing hitting the news about what just went down at the vault. I’ve been tracking it the whole flight. About the breach of the seed repository—about the massive earthquake—nothing.
Which means that just beneath the surface, everyone’s freaking out. The military from several different countries. Norwegian. American. Brits. Bunch of others. This can only have been an international incident.
I make sure Aza’s sleeping, and then I pull out the business card I was given on the tarmac at Longyearbyen.
She was in the bathroom. Dude came up, black suit, dark glasses, two words, card, gone. I keep nearly, but not quite, telling her about the agent, who only said, “Thank you.”
Now I wonder how long the feds were following me. I keep thinking Aza doesn’t need to know. Maybe no one needs to know.
If I were them, I wouldn’t hire me. I know more than I should. I think if I were in their shoes, I’d kill me.
I look over again at Aza sleeping beside me. I listen to her breathing. We’re going home, but who knows how long we’re going to be able to stay there.
In this skin, Aza looks like a new person. She isn’t. She’s still entirely Aza. Example: when we got onto the plane, she looked at me and said:
“What’re you looking at?”
“You,” I said.
“Don’t get used to this. I think this skin’s gonna fall apart. That’ll be pretty. I’ll look all rotten corpse and then we’ll see if you want to hold my hand.”
Which is not true. She’ll turn more and more blue, and have a harder and harder time breathing, and eventually what happened before will happen again. And I will still want to hold her hand. We’re just hoping this version is better than what she had before.
She’s got braided black hair and brown skin. Her body’s the same, because the skin shrinks to fit. But other than the obvious changes, because I know she’s Aza, she looks like Aza to me.
Same wide mouth. Same amazing strange eyes. Her voice is Aza’s voice. Her words are Aza’s words.

If I handed her a piece of paper and some scissors, she’d cut out the Empire State Building in three minutes. If I asked her what she thought about anything, she’d instantly have an opinion, whether majorly wrong or not, she’d never hesitate to tell me what she thought. She’s always been this way. She still is.
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Whole flight,” I say.
“Am I still alive?”
“Of course you are.”
“Because it feels like I’m dreaming, coming back here.”
“We’re going to make this work.”
I wish I believed myself. I’ve been the King of Certainty the whole time I’ve known her, but about a lot of things I was faking. I’m faking right now. I don’t know anything. I feel broken and messed up, terrified and convinced I’m about to watch her get shot down by airport security.
Aza kisses me as we’re getting off the plane, full-on enough that I’m pretty sure everyone else in the jetway is blushing, and I’m blushing too. That doesn’t keep me from picking her up and carrying her into the airport, over the threshold that separates this country in the air from home.
Everyone’s laughing, all the people around us. They think we’re cute. Maybe they think we’re a little pukey.
People actually, amazingly, think we’re normal teenagers in love.











I’m expecting a hole where my house was. My family gone. Everyone gone. Or it’ll be surrounded by police, or Breath, someone waiting to take me away and lock me up, in a brig or a cell, same difference. My neighborhood looks wrong. No sky around us. No snow. No ice. The ground stable.
I turn the corner toward my address, expecting retribution. Maganwetar knows where I came from. Zal knows where I’ll go. Someone’s got to be hunting me.
Except for that Breath, willfully letting me go. It must have been on someone’s orders. Whose? It makes me wonder if maybe, maybe we have some time. If Magonian officials want me down here somehow. I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.
I’m not what I should be. I’m illegal. I’m an alien. In all senses of that word. My mother is an assassin and a criminal and probably in jail in Magonia. Maybe I’m an assassin and a criminal too. I wonder about my father. Do I even have one? No one ever said. How come I never asked?
It’s quiet on my street, but not too quiet. A few birds, none of them speaking. All they do is sing.
The sky’s clear. The sun’s shining. There’s nothing up there that would suggest anyone knows I’m down here. I could almost (if I was insane) forget about Magonia.
Not even a breeze. It’s cold, but not as cold as Svalbard.