They are human, but they look wrong. They look evil to me now. I feel small and Magonian. I feel like—
I look down at my blue skin, my indigo body, feel my twisting hair.
I haven’t felt this way since I was on earth.
Alien. I feel like an alien.
Heyward assesses me.
“The renegade. Where were you off to?” she hisses.
A redheaded man is in front of me suddenly, and I know him. Oh god, I definitely know him. The medic who took me in the ambulance, the guy who cut me open. He was Breath. He’s the one Zal sent.
He’s scarier without his helmet, his suit unzipped to the waist. I can see a tattoo on his chest, a hurricane wind, flattening a tree into the ocean. It’s as though Breath wear extra insignia on their skin.
“Commander,” he says, and Heyward turns to him.
She’s the commander?
“Confirmation,” she says. “This girl is the one you harvested from amongst the drowners, and brought onto Captain Quel’s ship?”
“One and the same. I delivered her to Captain Quel aboard Amina Pennarum. It is my assessment that Quel intends to use her daughter’s song in direct opposition to Magonian command.” He turns and glares at me. They all do.
My gag gets ripped out, nearly taking my lips with it, and I sputter, spitting and choking, still unable to breathe.
Heyward picks me up from the chair with no effort at all, and shakes me hard enough that my bones rattle. She’s unbelievably strong. I’m tiny compared to her.
“What is this?” I manage to choke out.
Her suit is covered in embroidered rank badges. I may have stolen her life, but she has a new one. My head swims, and my hands shake.
“The rumors about Captain Quel were accurate,” the redheaded Breath says. “It seems she’s gone back to her old ambitions.”
I can’t do anything but cough. My breathing is so short that I’m possibly going to die in this hold.
“Has Captain Quel spoken of Spitsbergen?” she asks me.
I fall into a racking spell of coughing. I’m not telling her anything.
“Or seeds? Plants? She has, I can see it on your face. The same scheme, then.”
“It is our opinion, based on the charts aboard Amina Pennarum, that Captain Quel seeks to use Aza’s song to open the vault,” confirms the redheaded Breath.
“It was the conviction of the drowner as well, judging by his notes on trajectory. More than that,” says Heyward. “Captain Quel seeks to open the world.”
I’m blacking out. I’m blurring around her words, staring at her face. MY face. I can feel my strength ebbing, slipping out of me, something unspooling.
“Take her up. She’s suffocating.”
The Breath half carry me through a sealed corridor, and out into the main ship.
I can breathe again once I’m above deck, and after a coughing spell, the relief is so great I can’t believe I could have forgotten how it felt to not be able to take in air.
I inhale carefully, looking around as surreptitiously as I can. The ship is storm-cloud gray, and teeming with uniformed Breath, anonymous in their helmets. Heyward’s has a transparent face. I can still see her.
The sails are made of hum and speed. No wonder I didn’t hear them coming. One is all gigantic black moths, their wings slow and delicate, but thousands upon thousands of them. Another is wasps. Another black hummingbirds, all working as an army to lift this ship into the sky. The batsail on Amina Pennarum is one entity, reliable. If it’s killed, the ship goes down, but this sail could abandon the ship in a thousand directions. I look at the figurehead. An oarfish. There’s a slanting, tilted name painted on one of the masts: Regalecus.
The Breath, in their helmets, their strange tubes helping them to breathe. That is what strikes fear into their enemies.
By the Breath, they swear. Everyone in Magonia is scared of them.
If you’ve spent your life hooked to various oxygen equipment, like I have, those tubes aren’t quite as foreign to you. I eyeball the line coming out from the Breath’s suits and snaking to something on their backs. Not normal oxygen tanks. Something very small, and portable.
Heyward’s fingers dig into my neck.
“You will be of use, Aza Ray,” she says. “You’ll serve your people. We’re here, on behalf of Maganwetar, to make sure you do.”
My heart fills with Dai, with the image of his family, dead. With the image of him, a little kid, gorging on food from the ship’s hold.
“What does the capital know about its people?” I say.
She sneers. “Are you so easily swayed, Aza Ray? A moment ago, you were human. Now you speak as a Magonian.
“You talked about Magonia when you watched the squid. Who did you speak to after that? Who did you tell?”
I feel my spine freeze.
“How do you know about the squid?” The giant squid footage was a secret. Only Jason and I knew about it.
Heyward looks steadily at me for a moment, and then smiles. “I see why you like him,” she says.
My heart pounds painfully in my chest.
“What do you mean?”
She looks at me, assessing. “He told me everything. And now, so will you. Who else on earth did you speak of Magonia to? Which parts of Captain Quel’s plan are already in motion?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” I say.
“Your boy gave me this,” she says calmly, and hands me a piece of paper. I unfold it.
It’s charred at one edge, but still readable.I { } you more than [[[{{{ }}}]]].