I’m supposed to be polite, and respectful, and grateful. But I’m on a ship in the sky and I’ve been kidnapped from my family, and apparently everyone I love thinks I’m dead.
I do a quick pass through my memory, and determine that I don’t remember anything I’m sure is real past chocolate éclairs in my kitchen, footage of a silvery giant squid circling up from the bottom of the ocean, and Jason and I, almost—
And bang, there it is. The dividing line between fact and fiction. I spin to look at the captain.
“You said they’d bury me on my birthday. Who’s my family burying if I’m here?” I shout.
“Enough!” Zal shouts back at me, right into my face, but I’m losing it completely.
“No! Take me home!”
“I said this would happen,” Dai says, descending from the mast. “She’s broken.”
Zal goes rigid. “She is not. Aza is strong enough that no Breath could injure her.” She squares her shoulders, looking carefully at me.
Then she laughs the kind of loud, booming laugh you’d hate in a movie theater.
“You are my own daughter, for all that you were raised by drowners,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe what I was told either, not without making sure. Not from strangers. Not even from friends. I will show you, daughter. And then you’ll believe. You’ll know who you are fated to be.”
And that’s how we end up flying over my funeral.
“When you die in Magonia,” Zal informs me, “you’ll be given a hero’s farewell, quite unlike this one.”
She hands me a wood and brass spyglass, and within a moment, I’m looking through it, and down at my high school’s parking lot. I lift my head when she says that.
“It sounds like my funeral here is already planned.”
“Living’s a risk, Aza,” she says sharply. “Heroes die young. Would you choose to be less than a hero? Here, the sky will light with fire for you. Our funerals are their sunsets.”
I see. How comforting. (How insane.)
Below us, on the ground, people start to come out of my high school, dressed in black. I’m breathing fast, but I’m finefinefine, completely and totally fine—
—until the moment the crowd parts for the tall guy in the alligator suit.
Then I’m not fine anymore. I say his name once, quietly, then louder. “Jason.”
I can see, even from this far away that Jason Kerwin’s faking fine. The alligator head’s in his hand, and I can see his chapped lips through the spyglass. Chewed. I can see his eyes, red rimmed. He looks like something attacked him and won. Again that sound, that pitiful wail, from somewhere deep in the ship. I look up at Zal, but she’s not reacting to it. No one else is either.
“You see?” Dai mutters, suddenly next to the captain. “It’s the drowner she cried for when she came aboard. Maybe he’s her ethologidion, not—”
“He’s only a drowner,” the captain says, and snorts. “She can have no bond to that. He’s below even the feathered class.”
I don’t know what the thing Dai said means, and I don’t care. I’m watching my own funeral procession.
Jason’s car leads the students and teachers out of the parking lot. They’re honking their horns in rhythm. He has them honking a message. I catch some of it. Not all, but enough.
Dai’s still muttering, judging the tears on my face as weakness, but everybody else—except for that wailing bird—has the good sense to shut the hell up.
At the cemetery my parents get out of the car, looking ten years older than the last time I saw them, and I feel a horrible surge inside my heart. The captain has my arm. All I can do is watch.
Eli stumbles out of the car behind them. Her hair’s not in its usual straight line. She’s given herself more than a trim. She’s cut her hair off, and the bottom is insanely ragged.
On purpose. It must be. There’s no other explanation.
I finally get why people are scared of dying. I finally get why no one wants to talk about it. Santa Claus in Reverse is carrying everything about my life away with him in a big sack, and I’m supposed to be fine with it.
My dad’s carrying a wooden box, the size of a shoe box.
I accidentally whimper.
“Is that me? In that box?” I ask the captain. My chest feels too tight, but it’s not because I’m dying anymore. It’s because I’m missing them. I can see my mom’s sweater cuff, unraveling. I can see my dad limping, because stress makes his back go out.
“Of course not,” Zal says, impatient. “You’re here beside me. They have only the ashes—from the skin,” she says, like we’re talking basics.
“The skin?”
“The Breath left it when they brought you up here. Surely you recall your liberation? From the report, it was an unpleasant thing, and close, but you were dying. I’d never have let one of them near you had we not been out of time.”
Again, the Breath. I keep hearing that term, in that strange tone.
But down there, my family’s left a gap where I’m supposed to be. I’m a ( ) in the middle of the people who love me, an emptiness in their sentence.
I feel sobs tsunami-ing up. I can’t move. I can barely see, because now I’m watching black tears drop from my cheeks. I’m feeling my mouth contorting around terrible sounds and the muffled bird below, whatever it is, echoes my lamenting cries. Zal’s head snaps up, and she listens, but says nothing.