But no.
He gets a choice.
“Go,” I tell him. “You’re free. Go. Fly!”
Caru rises from my arm.
Go, I sing. You’re not mine. You belong to yourself.
Caru looks down at me, eyes wild, wings wide, the red undersides visible. There’s nothing keeping him here. He hangs in the air for a moment, above my boat, and then he arcs up.
He flies, a black-and-red flash of movement and silence, covering stars as he departs.
I hear him sing a bright white note. And then he’s gone. My eyes are full of tears, but I put my oars out and start to turn my launch boat back to my ship. Back to . . . I don’t know what. I aim toward the distant lights of Amina Pennarum, grit my teeth, and start rowing against the wind.
There’s a strange sound. My head jerks up. The slap of ropes on wood, and then a rush of bodies rappelling expertly down, the impact of boots in the bottom of my launch.
Six of them, all in black, all wearing helmets, all silent. They’re standing in my boat. Too many of them to fight off, if I even knew how to fight them off.
Oh my god. Oh my god, oh my god. There’s only one thing this could be. Breath.
OH NO. Aza, Aza, Aza, you have made a serious mistake.
I tilt myself toward the edge of the boat. One of them looks at me and slowly, slowly, shakes its head. Black suits. I can’t see their faces. Huge and muscled. A silent, terrifying, totally covered group of monsters.
This is what everyone has been talking about since I came onboard. Bulbous, reflective eyes, faces a mass of tubes and tissue, all covered in dark, almost invisible against the sky. Monsters, insects with human bodies, nothing I’ve seen, nothing I’ve imagined.
shitshitshit
There’s a voice in my ear, jumbled and garbled, rough, right against my face.
“Aza Ray Quel,” says the voice, gurgling, a broken ocean, someone speaking from deep inside whitenoise.
One of the Breath has my arms, and another has my legs, as though I’m strong enough to really fight them. Maybe I am. I don’t know how strong I am. I don’t know what I’m fighting.
“Aza Ray,” says the voice again, a voice that reminds me of something, but they’re all over my little boat, these black-garbed things, pinning my arms and grabbing me. I scream as they push a gag into my mouth. Someone yanks a hood over my head, and I can’t see anything after that.
I’m a prisoner. Of the Breath.
I’m hauled out from my launch, hooked to ropes. I swing out across space.
I’m not on Amina Pennarum. I can feel, by lack of sway, the tremendous space this ship is taking up in the sky. The smell’s different, too, cold metal rather than feathers and twigs.
My heart’s burning and so are my nostrils and lungs. My bones are sticks. It’s like I’m back on earth. Maybe it’s the gag. I test, inhaling. No. I take a tight breath.
My chest is an empty hold in the center of a ship. No Milekt, and no Caru either. I can feel the cold metal of Caru’s ring on my thumb, though I’m not sure how it got there. I don’t remember putting it on.
Breath are walking around me, boots, circling, circling.
One of the monsters rips off my hood, yanking my neck back, tearing out my hair. I wince, but the gag’s still in my mouth.
I’m seeing through tears a hold with metal, rounded walls. It’s bright in here. Bright and dark at once, the way fluorescent lights are. I haven’t seen any for a long time. And looking up, I realize I’m not actually seeing them now. There’s a weird cold, gray lightning cracking along the ceiling, trapped against the walls, but it moves the same way lightning does, a tendril of fire, and then dark again.
A submarine. That’s how this feels. A metal room full of Breath. I inhale, and choke, my lungs tight, my throat closing. They’re going to kill me. I know it. I know it like I’ve never known anything.
One of the Breath takes off its helmet and I realize that it’s a diving helmet, a kind of diving helmet. I brace myself for what I see underneath—
And—
And—
She looks at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.
Long twisted black hair. Smooth pale skin. Needle-bright eyes, pale blue, not indigo. Skinny body, but less skinny than mine. She’s made of muscle.
Aza Ray.
Is standing.
In front of me.
She’s me. Oh my god, she’s me. The me I was. The me I’m not anymore.
I throw myself, hard, backward in the chair I’m tied to and someone catches it, forcing me back into place. I can’t speak. There’s a gag still in my mouth, but I’m biting it.
I can’t understand what I’m looking at. Is this Magonian magic? Is it a mind game? Is she some kind of . . . mirror?
Then, I realize. No, I know what she is. I know exactly what she is.
I know WHO she is.
This is Heyward Boyle. The baby who was taken from my parents by the Breath. This is the girl whose life I was dropped into. This is the girl whose life I lived for fifteen years.
Oh god.
She’s got a tattoo on her wrist, a stylized whirlwind, and I’ve seen it somewhere before. Not all whirlwinds are bad. Some of them bring new seeds to fertile ground. Some of them move ships across the sky. The Breath are the kind of whirlwinds that kill you.
It all unfolds now, in a rush of revelations, the things I’ve heard whispered. The Breath are assassins and special agents. The Breath are mercenaries.
The Breath are humans raised in Magonia.
“Aza Ray Quel,” she says, her voice no longer muffled by oxygen equipment. She stretches her arms and flexes them, and takes a step toward me. I jerk in my chair. Other Breath are taking off their helmets, and they’re dead-eyed, the same way the stormsharks are. Rippling with muscle, and tense as springs.