“I—”
“I know what it’s like,” he cuts in. “I know how it feels to lose someone you love.”
I shut my eyes for a moment and stay in the dark. I stay there a while.
“What were you doing?” he finally asks me.
“When?”
“When you took off with Zal’s heartbird,” he says.
“Nothing,” I say dumbly. “I made a mistake.”
“You set the falcon free,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Dai nods. “Even if he betrayed Zal long ago, he had no memory of it. It’s better to set him free. He had no song, no use. He should have been released.”
Dai opens a cabinet in the corner. I catch a glimpse of something pale, something fleshy. A body?
Oh god, what if it’s—
“They’re just skins,” Dai says. “Same as the one you were in. Though impressive ones. New versions. Maganwetar must plan to go down amongst them now. That’s useful knowledge.”
He rifles through them. They’re each encased in their own bag. I shiver. Dai takes my hand. That does me no good. He pulls one of the skins out from inside the closet.
It’s less than a body. Flat, deflated, almost a piece of clothing. She’s pale and sad, her face peaceful. A lifelike doll-woman, hanging inside a clear sack, zipped into it. Her hair is long and blond. Her skin is pale, and her eyes are shut. Her lips are just slightly open.
“How do they even work?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from everything.
He tilts the skin inside its covering, showing me. There’s an opening at its spine.
“You touch them and they wrap around you. They cover your skin, your organs. The one you had on down below would have made you indistinguishable from a drowner, though it should have degraded after a month or so. I don’t know why it lasted so long.”
I groan at the thought of the past. All I want to do is wrap myself back up in my old skin, my familiar human self, the body I knew everything about, however flawed and Magonian it secretly was. But it’s gone. I’m this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable phoenix.
I put my hand out to unzip the sack on another body: there are all kinds, male and female, and all ages. Dai grabs the casing around the one I have and pulls it away from me.
“Do you want to fall into it?” he warns. “Touch it, and it’ll touch you.”
Inside one of the bags, a skin opens its eyes and looks at us.
I yelp and step back. The girl staring at us is brown-skinned, her hair braided. A girl my age.
Dai shudders, then slings some skins over his arm. “It’s empty. The skins just have reflexes.”
We’re taking treasure, I realize. Spoils for our defeat of the Breath ship. We’re certainly pirates now, if we weren’t before.
The skin watches me all the way out of the room as we carry her.
We load them onto Amina Pennarum, along with provisions, everything we can take.
Milekt and I quietly sing the remaining waspsail loose. It unspirals into the morning. It’s dawn, and below us, ocean, white waves, and a dead Breath ship, falling through the sky, dropping into the sea.
It’ll dissolve swiftly. That’s what happens, or so I’ve been told. In the water, the leftover wrecks of many Magonian ships drift, hidden, barely visible.
If you were diving, I guess you’d never know. Skyship or seaship, they’re just wrecks. And there are so many of them on the ocean floor.
“That’s the last of it,” Zal says. She’s whispering, just to me. I can hear anger in her voice, but other things too. “Caru’s gone. That’s done now. You’re forgiven for it. He was not mine in the first place, not if he betrayed me to Ley.” She’s struggling. “But that’s your last mutiny. Agreed? It ends now.”
My brain is blurred by sorrow, broken by grief.
“No more lies,” Zal continues. “We’re together, you and me, against Maganwetar.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and whispers gently. “No child was ever so wanted.”
Even in the face of her display, I feel nothing. I’m gone inside.
She smiles at me. “The moment I saw you emerge is when my heart woke up. You’re loved, Aza,” she says. “Very loved.”
Loved. By Zal. It offers no comfort. But I’m back aboard Amina Pennarum.
Because Maganwetar hired the Breath that killed Jason.
And so, I am at war.
Sunrise off the starboard, a white, brittle sunrise, stars still visible above the ship’s rail, sun rising not over mountains or horizon, but over this endless ice. Inside my chest, Milekt sings his own song, and I grieve and try to reconcile myself to the thing I thought I already knew—that I’ll never see Jason again, never touch his hand again. I see him in my head for a second, not even looking at me, his intense concentration, the way he focused when he wanted something. I knew everything about him, every detail, every moment, but now I don’t.
I thought I was one who was gone.
I thought I was the one who would leave.
But now—
After a moment, I sing quietly with Milekt. We make a small whirl of white sand out of the moisture in the air above us. It hisses as it spins, and then we let it fall, sandsnow.
The icy world below us shines like an eggshell. We’re near our destination. Close to our mission.
This is what I was born for. There’s nothing else left for me.
I still don’t fit. Heart half on earth, half in the clouds. I’m still different from everyone else. There’s still no place I belong.