We’re at her grave. There’s no grass on it yet. The stone is there, though.
It says this:
AZA RAY
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
She says nothing. The rain’s all over her. Her hair’s wet, and her T-shirt sticks to her.
“So, E.E. Cummings,” I say. “You’re the one who taught it to me.”
She nods slowly and rubs her forehead. Something about her cracks open for a moment. She laughs, in a kind of mortified, despairing way.
“Do you ever wonder what your life would be if one thing hadn’t happened? If that one thing made it so that you weren’t you? What if I could remember this poem? I’d be more like you want me to be, then. Wouldn’t I?”
She looks at me for a second, and then walks away, kicking at the dirt around the graves, looking up at the sky.
I’m down on my knees in front of Aza’s grave. I’m looking up at the sky too. I’m thinking about the path of the ship, the way it’s been taking on provisions, the way it’s been traveling northeast, and I’m remembering something. An article Aza and I read together.
I think about what Magonians have been doing for centuries, all those almanacs and stolen harvests in the books I read, in the scraps of information I’ve been digging up. Magonians are hungry. They’re looking for food. I know where they’re going.
It was a photo essay, just a few months ago, a seed grown in India, held in the hand of a woman in a sari. Sealed in a plastic bag. Ready for transfer. Rows of fluorescent lights in a frozen place, long aisles, refrigeration cases.
The Global Seed Vault. In Norway. An underground repository where there are seeds for every plant on earth. Nice and cold, nice and deep, nice and un-tectonic, a safe complex where they keep lychee nuts, raspberries, long almost-lost fruits and vegetables, in case a disaster or rising sea levels take everything. In case humans mess it all up.
I’m shaking my head, muttering, considering. Looping in my revelation. Yeah. It’s right. I’m right.
She’s behind me out of nowhere. Right behind me. I can feel her breathing. She puts her hand over my shoulder and traces her name on the gravestone.
“Who have you been talking to? Who knows about Magonia? Who knows about this?” she asks.
I look at the gravestone. I feel Aza’s hands on my back. I feel her bending. I feel her chin against my skull. I feel her arms, strong around my shoulders. I have a jolt of mortifying lust and a jolt of something else.
“I’m the only one who knows anything,” I say.
I have my hand in my backpack.
“Give me the spyglass,” she says, and I hand it over my shoulder. I watch her do something to the lens cap, twist it in a pattern, and then take it off. She looks through it, up into the sky, and exhales.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s useful, Jason Kerwin. What else do you have to share?”
I feel a rough sharpness against the side of my throat.
“Nothing,” I say. Then I launch myself into her, hard as I can. I slam backward and send her flying. The spyglass is knocked loose and I snatch it, forcing her to the ground. I pin her to the ground beside Aza’s grave and stare at her.
“Who are you,” I say, and my voice is not my voice. “What have you done with Aza?”
She’s stunned. But it only takes a second for her to regain herself. She stares at me, warily, her eyes bright and one of them, suddenly, the wrong color. She was wearing contacts. One of them slipped when she was looking into the rain, and now she has one pale, sky-blue eye, the color of Eli’s eyes, and one dark blue one. She’s got a knife in her hands, stretched tight. That knife was the thing I felt on my neck.
I’m shaking with fury. I’ve been controlling it for a while.
“Aza doesn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. When she does drive, she stops at all stop signs and all lights, because she doesn’t actually have a driver’s license. Aza doesn’t wear jeans. Aza wouldn’t drive past her house, and past Eli. Aza knows all the collected poems of E.E. Cummings.
“And Aza Ray Boyle would never, never, not in a million years, tell me she loved me.
“So who the hell are you?”
I already know part of it. This is someone from up there.
I didn’t want to believe it.
I wanted her back.
But now I know.
“I didn’t do anything with her,” the fake Aza says. “Her mother’s ship picked her up.”
Her mother’s ship.
“Which ship? Where?”
“There are ships everywhere, Jason Kerwin,” she says, and smiles. “There’s a sky full. I guess you can’t see them, can you? I guess you’re not one of the lucky ones. But then, almost no one from here is lucky enough to live in Magonia.”
“Who are you?”
“Are you going to kill me, Jason Kerwin?” she asks, tilting her head, looking at the sky at the same time. “I don’t think you are.”
She ducks forward and gets me around the waist. I’m fighting, twisting. She’s fast and strong and tiny.
She flips backward, lands on her feet, and stares at me from ten feet away.
“You’re not bad,” she says, “for a drowner.”
Drowner. I think about that for a moment. What it means to someone from the sky.
That legend of a person drowning in thin air after he tried to climb down an anchor chain.