I glance toward Zal, who isn’t looking at us. I watch her take the wheel, this giant thing, big spokes and handles around it, which I’m only really noticing now. It’s made in the shape of the sun, so the handles are the rays, and the ship is steered by rotating.
“But where are we going?” I ask again.
“Your duty is to watch, not talk,” Dai says, sneering a little.
For a moment, I’m not sure exactly what I am supposed to be looking at. Then one of the Magonians sings with his canwr, and operates the crane by crooning into its gears.
Another Magonian’s song lights a fire in a little bowl, and makes a meal of toasted grain. He shares it with his bird.
Let me out, howls Milekt from inside my chest. I feel his grumpy fluttering and battering around in my lung. I’m a canwr, not an ordinary. I’m not meant for this. I’m for singing, not standing around, mute.
I have no time for this complaining bird, but I wouldn’t mind lighting fires with my voice.
“Do I have to let him out?” I ask Dai, and Dai smirks.
“No. Though you might want to. He’ll scratch.”
And he does, his little-bird toes climbing inside my lung.
The thought makes me queasy, but I swallow the rising bile down. “How can there be cities in the sky?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from the scrabbles of Milekt. “What do they float on?”
Dai sighs.
“Do you know everything about the undersky, then? Why their heavens are blue, and how their rooms are lit in the dark? Do drowners know how their airplanes move through the sky? Can you tell me how they fly?”
I’m both sucked in and harrumphed by Dai’s simple questions. Yeah, I DO know those things. Maybe we have things to tell each other. I feel a duel coming on.
I’ll tell you how airplanes fly if you’ll show me what you know about this place.
I’m just opening my mouth to tell him so when he snorts and laughs at me.
“I could talk for a hundred years, Aza Ray Quel, and not tell you everything about Magonia. There was a time when we and the drowners consorted. Then even the worst of our cities, the ones where now everyone starves, were seen as heavens by the people below. And we were angels or, sometimes, gods.”
He pauses. “Have you ever swabbed a deck before?”
“There really weren’t a lot of boats around my house, since you know, no ocean. And, I was sick. So, swabbing . . . um, no.”
Dai holds out a mop and a bucket. I’m about to take them when he lets out a note, and I can hear the bird inside him join the song.
The mop levitates, then whips around, so that it actually scrubs the deck.
He stops. The mop falls to the floor, and is still.
“Sing this deck clean.”
I look into the bucket. There’s a scrubbing brush floating in soapy scum.
“Um,” I say.
“Stop wasting my time. Last night, I threw supernovas into the sky. Surely you can manipulate a mop.”
Milekt perks up and stamps his feet inside my chest. He’s ready. I’m at a loss.
“I’m not—I can’t just start singing,” I tell Dai. Why doesn’t he understand? I barely had enough air to speak before, let alone sing.
“And you’re not willing to learn, apparently,” he says. “So you can scrub the drowner way until you change your mind.”
I sigh. It’s only a matter of time before I get assigned to clean the heads. I’m probably lucky right now, dealing with decks instead of toilets, and so I roll up my uniform sleeves and get down on my knees. In my chest, Milekt shrieks.
Release me! I sing, not scrub.
“Sing then,” I tell Milekt, and it’s totally fine that I’m talking to a bird inside my chest.
I work, but it isn’t easy to clean when all around me are miracles, just casually happening.
I watch a Rostrae deckhand spread his green wings and take flight, with a net made of what seem to be very strong spiderwebs. He slings it out into the sky and brings it back full of moths, which then get fed to the hungry batsail.
I watch a Magonian crew member sing one of the other sails into an unfurling, and the sail shakes itself as though it’s an animal, getting rid of water in its coat.
The Rostrae crew practices rope tricks, lassoing and twisting, but with a crazy kind of grace. What would they lasso up here? I wonder, but I have no idea.
It’s sunny above me, but there’s a pod of squallwhales swimming alongside the ship, making a light rain below. I watch them out of the corner of my eye as I scrub. The calves play together, butting up against the mothers. The babies sing, too, not complicated songs, but long dazzled ones, mostly made of happiness.
Sun, they sing. Sun. Bright. Drink the light.
The mother’s blowhole rainstorms, and the calves whip back and forth, swimming through the fountain like kids in a sprinkler.
They have mothers they trust, and a sky they understand.
I envy them.
Air-traffic-control research. I’m hunched over my desk, hacked into some major things. I could just be listening to controllers talking, hoping to run across something in all the sound, the way the people looked for the giant squid for years: basically, stick a mic down there and hope.
But, luckily things have gotten better, search-wise.
So, I’m using an app (not officially sanctioned, and not mine) to keyword search through everything air traffic control has said, in a variety of city and rural airports, for the past three weeks.
Carol shows up at my bedroom door and looks at me from the doorway for a full three minutes while I scroll.