“This isn’t hell, but the sky,” she continues, “and I’m not hell either, but Wedda. Greetings, it’s nice to meet you too. I am no bird. I’m Rostrae. And of course this isn’t a costume. These are my feathers.”
Right, that explains everything.
This is some kind of meltdown. My brain floods with things I’ve read, Milton, William Blake, and Moby-Dick, plus Disney movies viewed unwillingly in children’s hospitals plus Christmas specials, plus New-Agey yoga moves that put your brain into some kind of cosmic release state, and I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Think.
Settle, instructs the bird in my chest. Nest. Feed.
“She hungers, it’s true,” Wedda says, talking casually to my rib cage. “It’s not natural to sleep so long.”
She leans over and starts trying to feed me something with a spoon, spilling food on my face. I fail to open my mouth, but she smashes the spoon against my lips, and I finally give in and take a bite of something sort of oatmeal-esque.
I can feel wind coming in from somewhere. Like, ocean breeze. The sounds I first vaguely thought were the beeping of machines are not beeping at all. They’re birds. Birds singing and screeching and peeping.
“Why are you here?” I ask the owl.
“I’m your steward,” she says. “The officers aboard Amina Pennarum all have stewards from the feathered class. You don’t know anything, little one, and you have a lot to learn. You’ve been gone a long time.”
Disregard the words “gone a long time.”
“What ocean is this? Is this the Pacific? Are we on a cruise ship? A hospital ship?”
She laughs again. “When you came aboard, you were a nestling fallen off the mast and too young to fly. But now, I think you’re recovering. Questions and questions. Let’s get you into uniform. You’ve been in bed long enough. You’re in need of fresh air, and exercise.”
“I’m fine,” I say, uneasy and lying. “I can dress myself. I can feed myself too. I don’t need a steward.”
Wedda sighs. “By the very Breath! I don’t need a nestling to dress either, but you and I aren’t in charge of that, so I suggest you make it easier on us both and let me do it. Then we can go about our business.”
She reminds me so much of a nurse; matter-of-fact, and intolerant of smack. I have a pang of good memory, a nurse laughing in the middle of the night, hearing it down the hallway outside my hospital room. Oh god, where am I? What happened to me?
Wedda gives me a tight blue jacket and trousers, a shirt and underwear made of something soft. Then she tugs at me until I’m dressed. So much for being a functional person who can do everything for herself. I feel so weak that I barely understand buttons, and these buttons are more along the lines of hooks.
“But,” I say hopelessly. “What’s Rostrae?”
“You were taken when you were very small. You remember nothing at all, do you?”
“Taken.”
She nods, as though Taken isn’t a thing. But it is.
“A Rostra, little one, is what the people below would call a bird. Except that Rostrae are birds who aren’t always birds,” she says. “My kind travels in drowner skies, and up here too. Not all birds you see below are like us. Only a few.”
I think about birds: crows, magpies, sparrows. I imagine a whole flock of geese shape-shifting into creatures like Wedda, but on the surface of a lake. There are fairy tales with that sort of thing in them. And ancient myths.
I think about all the birds on my lawn that day, whenever that day was. It’s a firm piece of memory—all those many kinds of birds, staring at me, and ropes flying through the window—
Also Drowner? What’s a drowner?
She pushes my feet into boots made of gray leather. “These, for example, are made of dove skin,” she informs me. “Not Rostrae.”
Right. I feel their fluttering silenced hearts through their dead skin.
Nope. No, that is impossible. I shake my head. I do not understand any of that.
“Are you prepared, nestling?” Wedda asks, fluffing her feathers back into place.
“For what?”
“It’s time for you to meet the ship.”
“But I’m—”
“Captain!” Wedda shouts. “Aza Ray Quel is awake!”
Outside the cabin, birds screech, and with a big whoosh of weird I realize the noise I’ve been hearing is language, birds arguing about who gets to see me first.
The door bangs open, and a rush of not-people enter. Wings of all colors, and beneath the wings are faces. I take a queasy step backward, and Wedda keeps me stable.
Oh god, Aza. What’s happening?
Bright blue feathers on a girl with an indigo mohawk. Red-feathered breast on a man with a long skinny face and dark hair.
Rostrae. All in uniform.
They bow. I don’t know why.
Then there are the others, just a few of them, uniformed as well, wearing medals and insignia. These are tall, thin people who at first look human, but have dark blue lips and blue skin. Delicate bones, pale cloudy patterns on throats. If I saw them against the blue sky, I might not see them at all. They’re like humans, enough like humans that—
What are we talking about here, Aza? What, exactly, are we talking about?
Humans?! LIKE humans?!
You don’t believe in this. This is UFOs and tinfoil hats and hoax-central, Jason Kerwin-style. This is—
Beautiful, interrupts my brain, at which point the rest of my senses notice the tall blue person standing directly in front of me. His skin is no color that exists. Bluer than mine has ever been. He has black hair and eyes so dark I can’t see the pupils. He’s staring at me so intensely that it’s not a certainty I won’t become a crumpled-up pile of knees and elbows. I make an embarrassing snorting sound, which is me choking on nothing.