My mom stumbles, and my dad catches her. Jason is between them now, holding them up. How can this be what we’re doing? How can I be dead to them—and alive up here?
“I want to go home,” I hear my mouth saying, and apparently I don’t care that at home I’m in a box, that at home, my family is carrying me toward a hole in the ground. “Please let me go home.”
No one on the ship has anything to say to that. Home is where they think I am.
“Home,” I whisper, but no one cares.
Jason’s passing out balloons and people are attaching envelopes to the strings. Jason’s the last to let go of his, a big green one. He lifts his head as he does it and for the first time I get a real look at his face.
He clearly doesn’t see anything, no ship, no sails, no me. He lets go.
The green balloon is rising, closer, up, up, and I run toward it, stretch for it. I reach, but I can’t get it.
“Enough,” says Zal, as though anything could be enough. “This is the proof you desired. Now it’s time to begin again. You have much to learn, Aza Ray Quel, and little time.”
She motions to Dai, who takes the wheel.
“Rise,” she says. I look at her in horror. She can’t take me away.
“JASON,” I scream. I hurl the spyglass over the rail with all my strength. “JASON, I’M UP HERE!”
The ship explodes with shrieks and cursing and feathers; Dai is spinning the wheel hard.
“LET ME OFF THIS SHIP!” I scream, trying to get my voice down to Jason. “I’M NOT LEAVING THEM! LET ME GO!! JASON!”
“Retreat!” Zal shouts. Her arms circle my body and she tackles me to the ground. I bash my head on the way down with a sickly crack, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The ship pushes up, away from earth and home.
All the Rostrae whoosh and shift back into birds, grabbing ropes, and hauling us higher. The batsail’s wings are wide and beating.
My head feels like it’s detaching from my body.
My heart feels like it’s still down there. I can’t scream, but I’m sobbing, gasping, and the bird belowdecks is screaming, too, an eerie siren call.
“May the Breath take you and tear you with their teeth and claws! May the Breath consume you!” Dai growls. He’s taken Zal’s place containing me while she’s back at the wheel. “You think the drowners love you, but you’re wrong. They care for nothing but themselves. They’d kill you if they knew what you are.”
I feel painkillered, drugged, numb. Maybe concussed. I don’t know anything.
I keep seeing Jason in his alligator suit. I keep thinking about him in the ambulance, telling me he’d find me, that he wouldn’t let me die.
But he did. He let me go. And I’m up here, and he’s down there.
“Jason,” I whisper. Dai’s watching my face.
“You’re bonded to that drowner filth. I knew it.”
He drags me to my feet and over to where Zal’s working the wheel, moving the ship through heavy clouds, forcing it up into the storm. She shoots Dai a reproachful look, and pins me with her stare.
“You will learn to follow orders, Aza Ray. You just risked your ship and everyone on it. We’re forced to report the loss of the spyglass to the capital, or risk sanctions. That means that Maganwetar will have official eyes on us. We didn’t need their attention.”
But I’m elsewhere.
Jason saw me. We’ve spent our lives seeing each other. He must have seen me.
“This ship searched for you for years,” the captain says. “Do you want to be taken again? Do you want to be seized?”
I feel nauseous, blurry-edged, and grief-stricken.
“But I love them,” I say quietly.
Zal whispers, her voice raw. Her fingers pinch into my arm, holding me upright. “I don’t care who you love. You will understand what you mean to Magonia.”
She grits her teeth.
“I’ve given up nearly everything to reclaim you. You may think this is nothing, but you’re everything to me, Aza Ray, more than the sky and its stars, more than this ship we sail on. You’re loved here, you’re needed here, and even if you don’t respect that, your time below is over.
“Look around, Aza. Look at your crew. Their survival is up to you. Would you see them perish? Because you refuse to claim your home, your power?”
Zal’s fingernails have broken the skin on my upper arm now, and I’m wincing. I try to pull away, but she’s staring into my eyes with such intensity I don’t know how to get loose. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but this is the farthest I’ve ever felt from home.
I cry out. The bird below shrieks.
“What’s that?” I ask Zal, because I see her face change at the sound. “Is someone hurt?”
“No,” she says, and that’s all. But I see her eyes well up with black tears, and I wonder about them, even as I’m bleeding.
I jolt awake to the sounds of a tortured song, my heart racing, tangled in my hammock. At first, I think the voice is part of a nightmare, but then I hear it again. The same voice I heard before, when I was crying.
Blood bone tear take hurt bite beast, someone screams.
A long wailing shrill, high and horrible, ear-bending. A bird of prey of some sort, the kind of call you might hear when something’s hunting, but much worse, because it has words.
Broken torn kill kill kill me, screams the bird.
Wedda comes into the cabin as I’m trying to get loose from the hammock to help . . . whatever it is.