“It would help if I knew the entirety of Zal’s plan,” I tell him. “So, if you feel inclined to tell me, now would be an excellent time.”
“When you were a baby, you sang something that pulled an entire lake up from undersky, turned it into ice, and dropped it back down again,” Dai informs me. “It’s pretty legendary. Also illegal. It got a lot of attention from the drowners, and then a lot of attention from Maganwetar. If you could do that, what else could you do?”
The deck sways beneath us. I look up into the rigging, where Jik is perched, sitting on a sail-supporting rope. The expression on her face is both curious and suspicious.
When I make eye contact with her, she turns away.
Dai stares at me intently, and after a moment, he puts out his hand and touches my fingertips.
“I’ll sing a storm cloud now,” Dai says. “And then we’ll sing a raindrop.”
He makes a high-pitched noise that flattens my ears to the sides of my head, and a miniature cloud mists into being. Svilken sings with him, and between us, in the frozen air, a raindrop appears. I open my mouth, and blow the rain away, like I’m blowing out birthday candl—
A flash of memory, a chocolate éclair.
“What should I wish for?” I hear myself asking Dai, and he looks at me, uncomprehending.
My wind is still blowing, gusting between us invisibly. Without his prompting, I turn the raindrops to ice—each one a prism containing a tiny rainbow.
“You have to learn how to do this,” he frowns. “There are songs that have been sung since the beginning of Magonia. You can’t just make up new ones.”
Milekt agrees with Dai. He sings briefly with Svilken.
Obedience, sing Milekt and Svilken from our chests, duty.
I inhale, reach out, and take Dai’s other hand, and the four of us sing together.
All of us, a single song, four voices bonded into one, and the sky around us blazes up insanely bright. My whole body shakes. Dai’s in front of me, his eyes on mine. He’s shaking too. The song is sweet, but deep in my chest, it’s hard as hell. This is a song that takes immense effort to sing.
Something’s about to happen. I feel as though we’re holding each other up as our voices twine.
I watch as a coil of rope on the deck rises up of its own volition, called by our song, as planks start to loosen, and the crew starts to rise even as they stand on deck, not flying, rising, because we’re singing them rising.
I feel something starting to detach somewhere else, far below us, and I look over the deck rail to the ocean. A wave is rising up, a curve of water so huge I can’t see its edge. The water stretches toward us.
Dai leans toward me and I lean toward him, and we sing into each other’s lungs. All over my body every cell calls out. The notes shimmer, and I feel as though we’re ascending, but not in a safe way. We’re rising toward a fall.
I can tell he feels the same way. We’re singing a tsunami until I come to my senses and pull back, gasping.
“Stop!” I manage, even as my whole body wants to keep going, even as I want to keep singing. If this is what singing is, I want to stay this way forever, but I can’t. He looks as ragged as I do.
“Oh,” he says. I’ve never seen him look surprised before. “Oh.” He staggers.
The wave folds with a distant crash back into the ocean. My heart slows.
I think about what a tsunami can do. I think about the fact that I created that wave from nothing—from air—from breath.
The ability everyone was talking about. My power. I know it now. And our power. I know that too.
It feels terrifying.
It feels amazing.
Dai gives me half a smile, and I try to give him one back, still reeling.
“I’m back,” Aza says. She’s standing on my doorstep. “I came home.”
No.
I held her hand as I rode with her to the hospital.
I held her hand as she died.
I held her hand until they told me I couldn’t hold her hand anymore.
I read the coroner’s report.
There was a body. Her body.
I’m hyperventilating.
I’m passing out? I’m breathing too fast? Am I starting to scream?
“What are you looking at?” she asks me, stopping me from all that, in a classic Aza tone.
A mirage. I’m staggering through the Sahara. I’m a dying man looking at the bouncing of sunlight, but no, because sunlight just rang my doorbell and pounded on my front door. Sunlight is staring at me and pursing her lips.
“Aza,” I say. That’s all I can say. I can’t even get close to letting anything else out of my mouth.
“Jason Kerwin,” she says. “It’s nice to see you too.”
She holds out her hands. Not blue.
She comes in for a—
I don’t, I—
She presses her mouth to mine, very quickly, not the way someone who is dead would, not the way a ghost would, and before I can even tell what’s happening, she’s leaned back again and she’s looking at me.
I might fall over or run away, or—
Super-fast calculation of probabilities that I can’t compute, of time travel that I can’t do, of doppelgängers that I can’t imagine, of secret twin sisters, of Hitchcock movies, of Vertigo.
Vertigo, that’s where I am. Pi wants to take over, but I don’t let it. Looping wants to occur, but I remain sentient, and I don’t do any of the various forms of out-freaking I want to.