He never met a fact he didn’t want to add to his secret fact-hoard either.
There were things Jason didn’t know, of course, but in the realm of the memorizable, not that much as far as I could tell.
What did he not know? How to be a normal person? Neither did I. But apparently I have a better excuse.
God. Jason, my best friend and the most annoying thing, who’d rattle off a thirty-minute monologue of his mind’s flotsam and jetsam and then cackle when I didn’t have the same levels of geekitude at my disposal.
Jason, who once forced me to dance in front of all the curators at a museum because I lost a bet.
Jason, who once in a while, when I’d be coughing, wouldn’t even be there at all. He’d be standing right next to me, yes, but inside he’d just be a frantic calculating machine, tallying oxygen percentages and dust quotients, pollens and amounts of time between wherever we were and the hospital.
Which I hated, because it reminded me that I was sick.
Some days he’d be muttering to himself, diagramming things he wouldn’t show me, thinking things he wouldn’t discuss.
So he wasn’t perfect, Aza. He wasn’t. It’s just that your brain keeps trying to revise him into something he never was. Never mind that the moment you saw him, your first memory of him in the alligator suit, you thought, Oh god, finally, someone like me.
He’s not like me.
He’s human.
Right, then.
Shut up, Aza’s brain. Shut up.
I hear, from far off inside our ship, the awful cry of that invisible bird again.
No, he sings. Leave me or kill me.
He shifts into wordless screaming, which chills my whole body. The ghost bird—Caru, I remember his name now—sings again, an anguished wail. Everyone pretends it’s not happening. Everyone ignores him.
I try to block out the sound, but then, from nowhere, I get flashes of something I can’t quite—
Someone leaning over me in a crib.
For a moment I see my own tiny hand held in a black gloved one.
And that’s all I have, a gasp of a memory.
Kill me, the ghost bird screams. Broken heart. Broken string.
I’m jolted again by Dai shaking my shoulder.
“Move, if you’re not working,” he says. “You’re in the way of the nets.”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The bird?”
He tilts his head. “No,” he says.
What am I remembering?
I tug Dai’s sleeve. “Magonian babies. What are they like?”
“They?” he says. “We. We hatch. A lot smarter than drowner babies when we do.” He struts a little. “I can remember my own hatching.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed.
“The screaming bird?”
“The ghost,” Dai says tersely.
“Is it a canwr?”
“That’s two questions,” he says grumpily. “Or four, depending how you count.”
“Dai, please.”
“Just—” he hisses, glances around, then pulls me away from the nearest crew members. “Just let it go, Aza. The ghost’s been agitated since you came aboard.”
I pause, thinking. “But, if it is a ghost, it was something else. What was it?”
Dai sighs, impatient with my ignorance. “A heartbird.”
“What’s a heartbird?”
All he says, after a minute, is, “Heartbirds are special, but this one was broken long ago. He can’t hurt you. He’s gone but for his sorrow. I assume that’s why he lingers here.”
“Are you sure he’s—”
“I’ve never seen him, Aza, and I would have if he were real. He’s nothing. Old sadness with a loud voice. Broken bonds are serious things. Sometimes death doesn’t close them. Feed the sail.”
He hands me a small net, and points me toward the fat moths batting about the ship’s lights.
When I bring it its wriggling meal, the batsail looks at me and I look back at it. Its obsidian eyes are weary, and . . . kind?
It sings softly so only I can hear.
Find him, the bat trills. Heartbird.
That night, I sleep badly in my strange hammock; I dream of being kidnapped, of being lost, and of losing everything, and all night, the heartbird’s song haunts my sleep.
Dai and I are out on deck at twilight, sharing watch, peering off into the sky. There’s nothing in view, just a darkening not-much, a shiplessness.
I think about the crew’s tall tales—the ones I’ve overheard or, lately, asked about. They’re reluctant to share with me; they peek around corners, drop their voices to a whisper. Still, I’m learning.
They talk about airkraken, and about ghost ships in the skylanes. They whisper about fields of Magonian epiphytes, these magic plants that can grow in the air. These plants were once so common, they’d halt Magonian ships. Fields of them all over the sky, and their roots would tangle in the batsails’ wings until the Rostrae grew weary, and they fell from the sky.
Some of must be pure legend, of course. But some of it seems worryingly plausible. So it’s not crazy that I’m constantly looking over my shoulder, off the deck rail. If the crew is to be believed, there’s plenty to be afraid of.
“What am I doing?” I mutter to myself after I’ve been staring into the dark for a while. “Nothing’s out there.”
“Everything’s out there,” Dai says.