I notice a nose-prickling smell of oil and fire. The crew is scrubbing the deck. Black marks. A hole in a rail.
Déjà vu pulls my gaze up again to the bat. There’s a burn on its silken wing, healing, but bad. Something about that, something about a crash—
But it’s gone. I can’t remember.
“Is it hurt?” I ask.
“Don’t bother yourself. Batsails are only animals,” Zal says. “Ours is well-cared for. They don’t understand pain.”
I spin slowly around to look at the rest of the deck. There’s a wheel to steer by. There’s a very solid-looking metal crane, dangling over the side of the vessel, huge and covered with chains and pulleys.
And at the top of the mast, there’s a little house filled with yellow birds. They’re the same kind as the one that flew into my mouth. The one that flew into my lung.
“The canwr,” Zal says. “Our cote of lungsingers. Milekt’s kind.”
I touch the spot on my chest where I feel fluttering, and there’s a severe shriek from the bird in there. Milekt, says the bird in my lung. Milekt.
It’s only when one of the little golden birds above me takes flight that I notice the tethers. It flies out to test the wind, screals, and returns to its perch, tied there by a thin cord. For a moment it looks down at me, black beady eye, but it has nothing to say. It doesn’t shift into anything human-ish.
“This is my ship. Your ship now. This is my crew. And these are the rest of the feathered class,” Zal says. She claps her hands. “Rostrae!” she shouts.
Birds start dropping out of the sky, landing on deck, ropes in their talons. Many of the same birds that came to my backyard, I realize with a jolt. They carry a tangle of ropes, small ones, large ones, some gossamer fine, some heavy as chains, all attached to the masts and deck. Three more owls. Hawks. Crows. Birds I’ve never seen before, tiny and covered in candy wrappers of feathers, bright red and blue and green, pink and silver. It’s as though a piñata has broken.
A golden eagle sails down and looks at me, its eyes the color of caramel, but made of fury. Nothing kind in that gaze. It looks like what it is, a hunter. Its wings must span eight feet. It has talons as long as my fingers.
My knees are shaking, and my head is spinning, but I stay upright. Zal’s hands are on my shoulders.
A hummingbird the size of a bee buzzes up to me and hovers, turned sideways, considering me with one eye at a time. Next to my face, a robin, but not an American robin, a European one. Even here I know things from Jason. Such as, European robins are smaller than ours, and much fiercer. This one looks at me, with a black, gleaming eye, and makes a judgmental chirp.
Then all the birds shift.
They stretch their wings and their bones crackle and groan as they expand, gaining height and weight. Their beaks open and open until faces appear around them, heads bowed with feathers. They ruffle up their plumes and then, with a shiver, a new thing where the bird was standing.
All of the birds have shifted into people.
There’s a tiny, beautiful man where the hummingbird was, his nose a beak, his fingers fluttering, a giant woman where the eagle was, her hair golden feathers, her arms muscular. The robin morphs in ways I can’t even remotely describe into a man with orange-red tattoos on his chest and dark eyes lined in white.
All these imaginary things look at me. All of them salute me, a fantasy made up by some little kid—like the little kid I was, the girl who read every book of Audubon, the girl who cut ships out of paper, and got harassed by the classroom canary.
“Captain’s Daughter,” the bird people shout, all in one voice. Twenty-five different songs, but they agree on who I am. There seems to be no doubt.
Everyone feels certain of my identity but me. They stare, waiting.
I look at the captain.
“I want to go home,” I say as politely as I can. This feels like my last chance at something I’ve already lost. “Something’s confused, okay? I’m not actually your daughter. I was born in a hospital on earth. My dad made the whole staff margaritas in a blender he’d brought in the car. He had four hundred limes. There are pictures of me being born, bloody ones. I’m not adopted. I’m not who you think I am. I want to go home. My parents are going to think I died. Please, let me go.”
Another memory surfaces—Jason, oh god, Jason, holding my hand, telling me he’d find me. How can he find me if I’m here?
The blue-skinned boy from my cabin, the beautiful, rude one, is suddenly right in front of me, and he looks at me directly.
“Permission to speak?”
Zal nods. “Granted.”
“As predicted, she wishes to return to her situation. Perhaps we should listen when she says she doesn’t belong here. Perhaps she’s right. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”
Zal turns me around to face her. “The drowners didn’t know you needed Magonian air. They didn’t know you needed your ship, your canwr, your song, because they know nothing about how we live. There, you were dying. There, you died. Here, you thrive. This is your country, Aza Ray. We’ve brought you home.”
“But,” I say. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“Look at yourself,” she says, and smiles, holding out a little mirror. “See who you are.”
My reflection’s blurred at the edges, dark and tangled, and for a moment all I can focus on is the hair that moves and twists as though it’s made of snakes. It whips around and everywhere, and then it moves away from my eyes and—