I take another look, longer this time, at the Magonian boy—my commander, and my taskmaster since boarding Amina Pennarum. Suddenly, he seems like only that to me—a boy. Maybe not as strong or sure as he pretends he is.
“I found him,” Zal says, following my gaze. “This ship was hunting for you, Aza, searching the skies of the world, when we happened through Dai’s section of horizon. It had not then occurred to me that you might have been dropped undersky. I sailed through his drifting shipsettlement, and docked my own ship, traveling by jolly boat through the empty skyways.
“Dai saw Amina Pennarum and stowed away on her, and, days later, I found him in our hold, eating a handful of corn. My heart aches at the pain Dai has known. It is the kind no creature—human, Rostrae, or Magonian—should have to suffer.
“I taught Dai how to sing,” Zal continues. “And I spent years reading the history of Magonia in eggshells, hatchlings that perished before they could fly, abandoned ships, skypictures and squallwhale song—”
This gives me an image of Zal I wasn’t expecting. A Zal kind of in the same category as me, in the library, reading and reading.
“I voyaged through the parts of the sky that went bad first. I watched the heavens toss with winds we had not before seen, whipping storms we had nothing to do with creating. Below us, the seas flooded over drowner coastlines, and crops died.
“They willfully destroy the earth they live on, and in doing so, they destroy us,” says Zal.
They.
What she means is all of humanity.
I try to think of Magonia as I would have when I lived on earth as a human. A parasitic kingdom feeding off of earth’s crops?
But then I imagine Dai, tiny, hungry, in a boat all alone.
I think of my family in their car, driving from place to place, spitting toxic things up into the sky and spilling them down into the ground.
Down there, cities glow out of the dark, red and green and white. As though the whole planet is made of cars trying to get somewhere.
I feel like I was blind when I was down there, and now, what?
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Look there,” Zal says.
I follow her finger, pointing into the dark. A mass of clouds which, as we draw near, resolve into something else. Zal stands beside me, her wiry weight against my shoulder. She points to a place darker than the rest.
Our pod of squallwhales, I realize suddenly, isn’t with us. “Where are—”
“They won’t come here,” Dai says, approaching us and once again breaking into my thoughts. “They await us on the other side. Look, Aza. Look at what the drowners did with their poisons.”
Dai aims a light at the mass, and then I see it. It moves a fluke, and then another. A small eye, rolling in the giant squallwhale’s head. There’s a wound on its skin, dripping from its tear duct to its jaw. There are wounds all over the squallwhale, not the wounds of weapons, but of something else. Burns. Bleeding.
It tries to sing, but it can’t. I watch as from its blowhole comes something red. I watch it fall, and I know exactly what this rain is called on earth.
The squallwhale keens and rolls in agony. It blows a storm from its blowhole, toxic red and black shifting to clear, with an oily shimmer. I’ve never seen a squallwhale storm-sing with anything but joy before. The sight makes me feel sick. I have to swallow bile.
“There are many of these, all over Magonia. New ones are being born daily, making storms of poison,” Zal says.
I look into the squallwhale’s eye, and want to cry too. Sing, it says, looking at me. Nightsong. Deathsong. As I watch, several more wounded whales appear and swim past us, their bodies glowing with wrongness.
They can’t even talk to one another. Most of the noise they make is just jumble and screaming.
Milekt starts up a song from inside my chest, and what comes with that song is fury. It shakes me.
As Milekt’s song swells, my momentary thoughts of all the good people on earth, of Eli and my parents and Jason, get tangled up with a rage that makes me clench my fists. I feel Dai beside me, vibrating, too, and in his chest, Svilken sings.
“What are we really doing?” I ask Zal at last. “Where are we going?”
She looks hard at me, staring into my eyes. “The drowners are destroying us, and so are the policies of Maganwetar.” She pauses before continuing. “The capital’s position is that Magonia has no choice but to live hidden from those below. Maganwetar is not the same as most of Magonia, a hungering mass of citizens, scavenging the crops below it wherever it moves. It takes its tithe from whichever ships acquire the best forage. There is more food in Maganwetar than its citizens need, but the capital demands the best of everything, and its leavings are the bruised and the moldering, the shriveled and the withered. Drowners starve and poison even their own people. Yet Maganwetar remains locked in the past when it comes to our policy.”
“It is no longer possible to follow the official position,” Dai says. “The drowners destroy our skies, our people, and our air.”
Humans don’t know about Magonia. They don’t know what they’re doing, a part of me wants to shout. But I’m looking at this giant animal singing acid rain. And earth knows about acid rain but does nothing to prevent it.
“The capital believes we need drowner crops,” Zal says. “But it’s a myth. There is another way.”
I can’t imagine a miracle that will fix all the burnt, broken places on the face of the earth.