I turn my head and look at Dai. I’m not sure what all this means, not even sure what I did.
“You did everything,” he says, reading my mind. And he grins, and squeezes my hand hard.
For the first time in my entire life, I have power. More than power. I feel like I belong. Like this is my ship.
Like this is my country.
Like this is my destiny.
There’s the cry of the ghost again, all around me. I glance at Zal, but she’s already walking away. The ship is sailing noticeably faster, and I look up to see Rostrae joined with the batsail to pull us at a greater speed.
And we fly.
It took a lot of walking in small, frustrated circles after I heard Aza’s voice at her funeral, after something fell out of the clouds, but I found it.
It’s here in front of me right now. Under the papers. I’m waiting until the moms leave the house, and I can look at it again for the millionth time.
It’s a spyglass.
It’s old. As in, incredibly old. It’s made of brass and wood. The wood is scarred. You can’t see through it, because it has a lens cap or something, made of hard wood. It fell a long way. The cap is smashed in place over the glass, and I can’t get it off.
It’s scratched all over with strange characters, in a language I haven’t been able to find any kind of translation of.
Yes, you heard me. I can’t get a translation. Not even a wildly erroneous one from someone lurking online.
So there’s that.
In some of the illuminated medieval manuscript stuff, which I ended up wandering around on the Harvard Library’s site, there are bird people, and other kinds of people too. Angels from that period, particularly the ones that deal with crops and weather tend to be human-looking, but feathery. And then there is another section of angels from this period who are just . . . blue.
Not that this is any indication of Magonia, really. No one says “Magonia” in those margins.
But there are similarities.
The history of humans is 73 percent people talking about the weather in freaked-out ways. The discussion of Magonia is basically that: Where did that storm come from? Oh my god, the clouds.
Jacob Grimm—not Mr. Grimm, my English teacher, the fairy-tale guy—talks about a country where people sell the wind. Selected quotes (I’m being kind and not making you scroll through the thousands of pages of information available on the issue):
“The witches of Norway . . . tie up wind and foul weather in a bag and, at the proper moment, undo the knots, exclaiming ‘wind, in the devil’s name’ and then a storm rushes out, lays waste to the land, and overturns ships at sea. . . .
“A violent thunderstorm lasted so long that a huntsman on the highway loaded his gun with a consecrated bullet and shot it off into the middle of the blackest cloud; out of it a naked female fell dead to the ground and the storm blew over in a moment. . . .”
And this is the kicker: “Sometimes the aim of sorcery is not so much to destroy the produce, as to get possession of it, to carry it off the field, either to one’s own garner, or that of a favorite.”
So we’re talking stealing crops. From the stories, the thing in common is that anyone floating around in skyships up there is hungry. And that makes sense. I mean, what the hell would they be eating up there? Gnats?
The crop-destroying storms plotted by my app seem to stay in most places for several days, and then move on.
There was an enormous storm in Iowa a couple of weeks ago, and that storm was one of the few where people actually reported loss of crops. At the end of it, some farmer’s cornfield was stripped, as though locusts or crows had taken it down. Each cob bare. The farmer mentions seeing an eagle that day, right before the storm came in.
The strange reports and stories continue to move along the trajectory I plotted for them with such accuracy that I can nearly predict where the next one will be. So what’s across the sea, to the northeast of America? That’s where it looks to me this thing is heading. No crops on water. The islands out there aren’t fertile—just rock outcroppings in the middle of the ocean.
I’m not pretending this—my being right about Aza—isn’t causing me to have a pretty major existential crisis. I might be reading a few philosophers. I might be losing my way just slightly. Eve and Carol might have reasons to be worried about this whole situation.
I keep waiting for Aza to fall out of the sky and into my arms. I know I sound unbelievably sexist saying that, but I keep imagining catching her like a fireman outside a window.
Just thinking this way makes me want to bang my head against the floor.
If she were here, listening to me, she’d be puking right now because I’m losing all my dignity.
But. I can’t text her, can’t email her. Can’t call her.
This is sucking, Az.
I hate it. I’m scared that maybe I’m missing some kind of giant point, something everyone else knows, that I’m trying to hunt down a dead girl who doesn’t even exist anymore, a dead girl who’s gone and now alive only as a figment of my Vivid Imagination, like Aza always said she had. Me and Aza, Vivid Imaginers. Maybe I should just be taking myself to her grave, and sitting down beside it, and saying, for once and for all, good-bye.
But I don’t think she’s dead. And I don’t think I’m crazy.
I have something in front of me on my screen, a little scrap of video that some girl in Maine took with her phone.
It’s about a second long, the important part. It’s a ship. Just a part of a ship, with portholes and full rigging, sailing out of a cloud and then disappearing.