“Still fevered,” it says.
Oh, oh, no no no. Hallucinations in my experience don’t talk, though who knows because I seem to be an entirely new Aza lately, someone who hallucinates ships and gigantic birds and—
“HELP!” I scream. I don’t care if I’m breaking hospital rules by freaking out. This is me giving up on my carefully cultivated hospital-patient-since-forever coolness. “SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
The bed swings so hard I get instantly nauseous. I’m tangled in ropes and twigs, and wrapped in a blanket made of—feathers?
The bird thing has a beakish nose and lips. It’s not a bird. It’s not human. It’s neither. It’s also both.
This: you don’t know what real hallucinating is until you’re doing it. It’s a gigantically big deal.
At least everything’s not on fire, Jason says in my head. Yeah, except everything kind of is on fire. Bent brain, boiled brain, broken brain. The owl’s wearing clothes, but also has plumage. She’s covered in feathers and stripes. She has wings AND hands and she stretches her fingers out to me. She’s the size of a human, but wings, oh, definite wings, and she’s wearing a gray uniform with an insignia. There’s a ship shaped like a bird embroidered on her chest.
Angel? Angel-bird-creature-thing? What the hell am I looking at?
“Who are you? Where am I? Don’t touch me!”
The owl is definitely trying to check my vitals, but hell no, I’m doing it myself. If you’re a person who’s professionally sick, you get to be ridiculously expert in checking yourself for signs of death.
Maybe the poor owl’s a human nurse and I’m a raving feral thing. It’s not my fault if I am. Morphine? But morphine means bad things. If I’m on a morphine drip in a hospital, they’re making it hurt less. Which means I’m dying painfully.
Which means—
Rewind. Back to the ambulance. Back to the dark. Back to the silence and the snow falling down over the world.
Jason, Eli, my dad, my mom, my oh my god, I—
I died.
What. The. Hell.
Aza, what the hell?
Where am I?
I lose it.
I sob, no dignity.
“Where’re my mom and dad?” I manage to ask the owl. “Where’s Jason? How am I not dead?”
The owl clucks. “No need for such fear and fuss, nestling. You’re on a ship. Welcome aboard Amina Pennarum.”
I realize that everything she’s saying is in a language I understand, but it’s not English. I don’t know how I understand it. When I try to focus, I can’t. I look up at her through tears.
The owl’s head rotates all the way around, and then back again like the world globe in my history class, a dented sphere from the 1970s, its face pocked with pencil marks. She has black spots in white hair. She has freckles all over her face, and her skin is pale and kind of silver.
Her fingers are yellow, and scaly, and the nails are black. There are gold rings on all of them, all connected to one another. The rings are connected to something else, under her clothes. I can see chains running up her arms.
Some kind of harness? Is she a prisoner?
Am I a prisoner?
In what country? In heaven? Wait, what heaven? I don’t believe in heaven!
“HELP!” I shout again.
“Hush,” she says, her tone warm but impatient. “May the Breath take you, if you keep shrieking that way. You’re not a newborn, nestling. You are much too shrill. You hurt my ears. Hush now.”
My chest rattles. From inside it—inside my lung—comes one high note. I have an image of the bird in my room. The yellow bird. The one I swallowed.
Four sunrises, the bird in my chest says, in a voice totally normal, except that it is COMING FROM MY LUNG. Four sunrises you slept.
I gasp and brace myself to choke on feathers.
But I’m not choking. I can breathe. I test. I breathe in all the way slowly, and then out all the way, even more slowly. I’ve never been able to do that before.
I stop crying for a second and listen. None of the normal hospital desperation sounds and smells, no people dealing badly with their kid’s upcoming expiration over crap coffee in the waiting room.
My screaming didn’t seem to scare the owl, who is now just looking at me calmly and taking my pulse. I try questions.
If this is a hallucination, she’ll answer like a nurse. If this is heaven—
“Are you an angel?” I ask.
She laughs. “So you can speak politely. We weren’t sure you could. All you’ve done since you got onboard five days ago is shriek, tell everyone you’re dead and that this isn’t how dead is supposed to be, and then pass out again.”
I might be hyperventilating slightly. I get questions out between gasps, but I’m still not coughing. I should be coughing.
“Where am I? What happened? What the hell is this? Who the hell are you? Is this hell? Why are you a bird? Is that a costume? Do you exist? Are you a nurse? Is this a hospital? Am I on a ship?”
The owl looks at me, tilting her head with an expression that looks as though maybe I’ve already had this conversation with her. She tugs at my covers and straightens them. I notice I’m naked.
I have a vision of a morgue. Am I in a morgue? Am I frozen in a drawer? I don’t feel dead. I feel crazily alive.
“Nestling. You were brought aboard in considerable distress, by a Breath summoned in emergency when I and the rest of Amina Pennarum’s Rostrae couldn’t convince you to come peacefully. You would have died down there, trapped inside that skin, had Milekt not found you.