The boy looks me up and down, and I feel myself blushing crazily. I glance down quickly, because I feel as though I might be naked again, but I’m totally covered. Good thing Wedda was in charge of buttons.
“Aza Ray Quel is skin and bones,” barks the boy, and looks accusingly toward Wedda. “She’s supposed to be fit for duty. Can she even walk? Can she sing? She is half what she should be. By the Breath, I thought she was supposed to be the one.”
He puts out his hand and pokes my shoulder, hard, which mobilizes me.
“Excuse me?” I manage. “Who are you?”
Everyone’s staring at me, diagramming me, bird people and blue people alike. They’re making little sounds of displeasure. “Can someone please tell me why I’m here?”
“This can’t be right,” one of the blue people says to Wedda. “This pitiful nestling cannot be the one we’ve been hunting all this time, Aza the Kidnapped. She’s nothing.”
“She’s damaged by her time among the drowners,” someone else says.
“And by the Breath that brought her aboard. That probably damaged her too. It carried her,” says another, in a tone of revulsion and horror. “I heard it cut her from the skin she was in. Unspeakable.”
The room shudders.
“It’s shocking she lives at all, after that,” says the first blue person.
I feel seasick now. One of the blue people touches my chest with sharp knuckles, prodding, and I hear the bird inside my lung trilling, raspy and muffled.
“Her canwr’s nested in her lung,” Wedda says. “He’d never nest in another. That’s proof enough for the captain, and it’s proof enough for me.”
There’s a sudden jostling, a murmuring. Whispers and sounds of discomfort. Everyone seems paralyzed, and then everyone’s standing at attention.
Someone’s come in. A woman tall enough to brush the ceiling.
“Captain,” says one of my visitors. “We’ve been assessing the new addition to Amina Pennarum—”
The woman snarls at the rest of the people in the room. “You presume to discuss her condition without me? You presume to debate whether she is who and what I say she is?”
She’s right in front of me then, bending over me. The woman has coils of black hair twisted into complicated knots, oil-field slick eyes atop navy blue. Slanted cheekbones. Sharp nose, eyebrows like slashes of ink, arms ribboned with tattoos, spirals, feathers, and clouds made of words.
I recognize her. I know her face. I know her tattoos.
I know her. I’ve been dreaming about her for years. The two of us. A flock of birds.
The woman reaches out a trembling hand and touches my face.
“Ah . . . zah,” she whispers, the voice not coming from her mouth, but from her throat.
The way she says my name is almost the way Jason and I say it when we’re leaving room for the &. Nobody else says it that way. Her voice grinds. It’s not the same as the other blue-person voices in the room, which are smooth. There’s something different about it. It’s harsher, stranger, a wounded whisper.
“I’m Aza,” I squeak, in the most normal voice I can manage.
She turns to Wedda.
“She’s healthy? Her fever’s down?”
“It is,” says Wedda. “She’s regaining her strength.”
“Explanations?” I try to say, but my voice is dying in my throat. I look down at my blue hands. They are extremely blue. Too blue.
The woman (the captain?) touches my face again, with cold, pointed fingers. I want my family very hard. I want my mom, and I want my dad, and I want Eli and I want Jason.
“So, where’s my mother?” I say. I try to be casual about it. I do not make any of the whimper-y sounds I want to make.
“Here,” the captain says.
“No. Where’s my mom?” I say more urgently, in a shameful little-kid way. I want to hide my face in my mom’s sweater, and I want her hugging me.
Her voice floats to me through my memory. You can go if you have to go, Aza—
Oh god, my poor mom thinks I’m dead. She’d be here otherwise. That’s the only way this could have happened.
Wings all around me, and faces pressing in closer, blue faces, feathered faces with beaks.
Wedda fluffs herself, a mother hen instead of an owl.
“Stand back,” she says, loud and intimidating. “Let the little nestling breathe. She has no notion of who you are, nor of what happened to her.” They shuffle back, but only slightly.
I touch my chest, looking for the comfort of the crooked center bone in my rib cage. It’s there. But it feels—suddenly—like a wishbone.
I want a stethoscope. I want my doctor. I want her knocking at my chest, hunting for intruders, because this is INTRUDER CENTRAL. This is hallucinatus maximus.
There are all these familiar things, these déjà vu things, from the planks on the wall, to the way the captain’s face moves, inches from mine. The way it looks, the way she looks.
She has a strange necklace, and it hangs over me as she bends, almost hitting me. A tiny little nub of something—coral or bone?—embedded in clear resin at the bottom.
The earth tilts. I feel like I’m not in my body.
“Milekt found you,” the captain says. “We reeled you up from the drowners, just in time. You were almost gone.”
She covers her mouth and pauses a moment. Her eyes are filled with emotion. “But you’re finally home.”