“You’re a drowner,” I say.
“How dare you,” she hisses. “I’m Breath.”
It’s a normal word, but the tone she uses makes me shiver.
I’m circling, trying to keep my distance, but also steering her. She doesn’t know this cemetery.
She knows how to lie, though. She knows how to trick someone into believing in everything. Before she takes it all away again.
Aza liked the Hawaiian traditions, death-wise. Cliff of the dead, and you would leap from it as a ghost, and go where you wanted to go. She wanted to be close to the edge, in case her ghost couldn’t walk.
I feint, figuring out where she’ll go in response, and yes, she steps back, one final step, a bit too far. And I’m so full of hate right now, shaking with so much rage, I see the way she’s going, and I don’t stop moving.
The grass slips out from beneath her and she staggers, gasps, and windmills her arms. I’m seeing her drop and oh god, and I’m shouting and changing my mind, reaching out.
But time goes slow, and she smiles at me, this wide-open, devil-may-care, don’t-give-a-damn smile, a look I’ve only ever seen on one other person’s face.
She falls backward, off the edge of the cliff—
falls
falls
falls
—and then a rope twists out of the sky. She grabs it, clings to it, and climbs. She tugs herself up, up into the clouds.
I pick up the spyglass from the grass by the grave. Now that the lens cap is gone, I can see through it.
After a second, I put it down so I can breathe.
The sky is full of ships and she’s climbing up to one.
My field of vision is all cracked and crisscrossed and busted, a film watched with a broken screen, but even askew and crazed, I can see them between the jags.
Clouds with giant steamers in them. Sails and small boats, junks, catamarans. It’s an armada’s worth. The ship that’s inside the storm is huge and silver, the bottom of a tremendous vessel, something as big as a football field, or more. She’s still climbing to it, up onto its rails. It’s surrounded by dark shapes, by darting, shifting shadows.
Sharks, made of lightning and cloud.
I need to get onto Aza’s ship. I know where it’s going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I’ve really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.
I send a quick text while I stare up, and then an email. I start booking myself out into the distance.
There’s a crack of thunder. I look up to the ship the fake Aza got on, and as I look I see a streak of lightning. And then another. And another.
I dodge out from beneath the tree I’m under, running to my car.
You can survive a lightning storm that way—in a car, if the windows are up. But my car’s too far away, down the hill—
How do you run away from the sky?
The lightning’s all around me, strikes are raining down like spears, clots of fire hitting the damp earth, and I rack my brain—
Metal in my hand. Get rid of it, NOW. I throw the spyglass as hard as I can, watch it bounce off the rocks with a glitter of glass and go over the cliff.
I run another few steps, but there’s no shelter here, no place to hide—
The wind whips up on one side of me. Then the other side. Then behind me. In front of me. I’m surrounded by spinning air and dust and stones.
I look up at the big dark cloud and see lightning zing out of it.
Oh god. Something flips through my brain, wilderness survival. Crouch into a ball so it can’t hit your head. Does that actually work?
Shit shit shit.
There’s a tremendous boom, and something comes down from the dark cloud, a ball of white lightning, fast, faster—
You’re thirty times more likely to die of a lightning strike than of a shark attack. I am about to die of both.
I drop down, crouch, put my arms over my head.
And there’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard and the brightest white I’ve ever seen, and I’m made of it, I’m
I’m made of light
I’m made of heat
And I’m flying
Moms?
Carol, Eve—
Aza—
I’m sorry
I wake up panicked the night after Dai and I sing the wave.
A dream—Jason was in it. I can’t remember it at all, or not enough. The captain’s ghost bird screams horribly. Sky, he shrieks. Sea. Light. Zal. He makes a choking sound. Fall. Die. Night.
The voice seems to be everywhere, all over the ship, all over the sky.
“By the Breath,” I hear even the Magonians cursing, though not at full volume.
“May the Breath take that bird and break him to feathers and bones,” whispers someone not far away from my cabin, and then I hear Wedda hush them.
I sit up. I think about that.
Not “ghost.” Bird.
I think about how the captain’s voice can sometimes be heard, early in the mornings, cooing to something.
To someone.
The bird. She was banned from singing with it.
Kill, Caru screams. Smashed nests, broken song, kill me.
I curl in my cabin, listening to him, my eyes full. If that bird is alive on this ship, how is keeping him here okay? How is listening to him suffer? How is any of it?
Wedda shifts in her berth and her chains jingle softly against each other.
Almost a wind chime, almost a song.
So many tied to this ship, I think. Would they all rather be free? Would they be better off that way? Or are they safe here from the famine that afflicts the cities? Is this ship their home?