I can’t speak.
I can’t—
“Where did you get this?”
“He took it from your body,” Heyward says. “When you died. But then you weren’t dead. Or, I wasn’t. He gave it back to me.”
I feel all my blood rising—
“Well, perhaps he didn’t give it to me,” she says. “Perhaps I took it from him. The same way he took it from you.”
My fingers and toes go numb, and I’m dizzy and desperate and—
Dead? No, he can’t be—
He—
I stare at her, this monster, and I lose control of my voice.
“NO!” I scream, the note smashed into my hand, and there’s a blood-boiling shriek of answer from out of the dark above me.
Milekt emerges from the sky, a golden thorn shooting through the air, screaming rage for my disobedience. He drops into my chest and I sing the loudest, highest, most savage note I’ve ever sung. Rage and grief and disbelief—
NO.
A cloud of bats pour out of the night all around us, tugging shreds of dark onto the ship. They drop it over the Breath, blocking their sight as cleanly as if they’d been put under hoods.
NO.
“BOARD!” Dai shouts, out of the invisible, and I see an entire swath of Zal’s starry-camouflage unwrap from around Amina Pennarum.
Dai dives into the rigging right above me, twirling a rope. He and Svilken are singing incredibly fast. There’s a giant wind kicking up and the squallwhales are orbiting us, looking ready to sing a hurricane. Dai’s shouting at me, and now, now I start singing.
Jason. Jason. JASON.
It’s that song, that griefsong that slams into a Breath, yanking out his tubes. The Breath falls, clutching his chest, ropes twisting around him.
A boom, a big boom and the Regalecus
ShAkEs
And sags at one end, one sail half gone.
I see Jik slash at a Breath, stronger than I could have imagined, still on Zal’s ship, but fighting for me. I’m screaming hard, this song roaring out of my throat. Because. I can’t. I won’t let this be true.
I sing the hummingbirds loose from the official ship’s sail. They fly, darts of dark, fast, fast, into the sky.
My song rises up, Dai amplifying it, and one wasp detaches itself from the Regalecus’s other sail. Then another. A swarm spins up into the dark. And then, there’s a grinding in the sky. The ship lurches, ponderously, a huge weight settling.
Heyward raises her chin in the air, inhales from her oxygen and starts to launch herself to tackle me to the deck.
NO.
I dive at her instead with everything I have. Every memory. Every rage. Everything.
Jason.
I open my mouth and Milekt and Dai join with me. Sand forms in the space between Heyward and me. I sing the air solid. I sing it full.
Choke, I sing, and I think of her lungs, think of her gasping the way I gasped all my life, strangling on air.
I knock her down, but she’s not that easy. She kicks herself forward, a knife in each hand, trying to get to my chest to cut me open, cut Milekt out. She’s trying to kill my canwr.
I sing harder, deeper. I feel things shattering on this ship, Breath helmets, and bits of rigging.
Heyward’s knife slices my arm.
All I have is my voice, but it pushes her, twists her, wrings her.
All around us, my crew and Zal are fighting Breath.
Heyward’s hurt. She grits her teeth, pure force of will, and launches herself at me again.
I roar, this shrill shrieking noise, and I feel it vibrate my vocal cords, feel my canwr with me, and there’s Heyward in front of me, and a sound, a thundering sound.
JASON, I screamsing.
I can hear what I’m doing, calling to the sky and telling it to come to me. Telling it to empty itself for me.
The air’s cracking. There are flashes of light all around us, the sky splitting, and I’m still making the noise, high and sweet and deadly.
I feel it in my fingers, in my tongue, in my teeth, the beginning of fire.
I’m making a storm now, making the air into it, making parts of our bodies into it.
And we sing.
IF YOU KILL THE PEOPLE I LOVE, I WILL DESTROY YOU.
It’s a deathsong, and I’m not sure whose. If it’s for Jason or Heyward or for the entire universe.
Inside my chest Milekt revolts, refusing that song, and I gasp, choking, trying to breathe.
In that pause, all the Breath dive off the ship, covering themselves in shadows.
Heyward is the last to go, abandoning ship. She shouts in fury, shoots me a look made of ice, and dives off the plank.
They’re gone into the night faster than we can follow.
My song is broken by tears. I can’t. I can’t.
Jason.
I sag. I sing, and I don’t know what I’m singing now, but it’s only grief and after a minute, all I can do is sob.
My crew ransacks Regalecus, hanging in the sky now by a single sail. They open the closets, pushing through the vaults, taking provisions.
I’m with Dai, walking as though I’m asleep. I keep thinking squid. I keep thinking burned. I keep thinking gone.
Dead. Dead?
I feel a kind of blankness. I won’t cry again in front of Dai. I won’t cry at all.
If I do, I’ll never stop.
Dai pulls the curtain off one of the portholes, and it’s startling to see the room cloud lit, gray and piercing.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
“For what?”
“Your friend,” he says.
He looks at me, his expression tight, his mouth a crooked line. “I know you loved him.”