There are so many things so terribly wrong with the world below us—the way the rivers change colors from blue to green to brown. The way the smoke slips into the squallwhales and makes them sick, and the way Magonians starve, while earth eats.
I think about the way the capital hoards what little we harvest, leaves Magonians like Dai’s siblings to die of hunger, and murders innocents on earth—
Shh, Aza. Shh. Don’t think about it.
The only solution is to wipe the slate clean. To abandon the old ways. To change everything.
I’m on my way to save not just my own life, but the lives of all of Magonia. And now I have more reason than ever.
A squallwhale from some other pod is off to the side, industriously making snow, eyeing me, before, startled by our speed, it torpedoes forward, pinging and whistling urgently back to us, informing us that we have no business moving at this rate.
Snowmaker! whistles the squallwhale. Homesky! Sing and flee, sing and fly! Trouble the waters, trouble the rain! Shipstop.
Other squallwhales join the song and for a moment, we’re surrounded in every direction, an entire pod of them, calves and mothers and bulls, all of them singing furiously at us, shipstop shipstop, making clouds of snow and pouring them down upon the northern sea. They’re singing a blizzard.
We pay them no heed.
I take a deep breath, pushing all the pain down.
I look out from the deck of Amina Pennarum, down into the ice, and apparently I own this for now. This sea. This sky. Captain’s Daughter. I hear a bird calling from somewhere, a long and mournful call.
I could cry, but if I did, it would be black-blue ink tears, and frozen ones. Icicles.
I think of Caru. Maybe he has a roost now, on some ship sailing south, or is flying alone, singing his own song. He’s free, and he’s gone. I envy him.
Sleet ribbons pass my face in long tearing streaks, and silver birdfish leap in the spray, throwing out tendrils of ice and flinging them downward.
I put my hand flat against the center of my chest, trying to keep my heart safe. It hurts.
Launches detach from the edges of the ship, and rise up beside us.
I see crew members rowing into the mist as we push up through the clouds and gray to the edge of the sky, where the moon’s turning color, and night’s beginning to fall.
The deck is covered with ice, and I’m freezing, but I can’t bring myself to go below. Dai’s sitting beside me. Frozen.
I feel wrong. My heart. I miss. I miss.
I reach over and take Dai’s hand. I look at our fingers twisted together. I sing a soft note, and he echoes it, quietly, gently magnifying it. We make a tiny cloud, and he makes it rain, a miniature storm. He looks at me, and blows the cloud away, and together we watch it drift off over the deck rail. He was born to this too. There’s nothing else for him either.
Below us, I’m watching ice floes crashing against one another. I’m seeing the ocean, black between the white plains.
I hear another long call of mourning, from somewhere close.
Caru?
No. My canwr is in my lung. You get the canwr that’s assigned to you, not the one you choose. Milekt is mine. We’re bonded. It’s permanent. I think about what happens when it’s not, and I don’t want that for either of us.
Zal’s pacing the deck, her own voice humming. All the crew is lit up with it—readiness, hunger.
We’re stationing our ship above an old mine in a sandstone mountain, fitted out with everything to keep the world’s seeds safe. Its location is its security. The mountain is its protection.
This is the vault the Breath talked about.
Down there are packets and packets of seeds, hundreds of thousands, sealed against moisture, on rows and rows of shelves, almost a library. These are backups of almost all the edible plants on earth. Rice and apple seeds and broccoli and anything else you can imagine. There are walnuts in deep freeze, and down that old mine shaft, all kinds of tiny bins full of salvation.
Apparently, there are airplants here too. Or so Zal swears.
The vault is a reverse ark—plants not animals, under stone, not on the water. This isn’t a military camp. There are no guns, no soldiers. What’s there to keep the seeds safe is miles and miles of rock.
And I’m the girl who can sing the rock into water. I’m the one who can bring the plants up.
I wonder for a moment what will happen once the rock shifts. Zal promised me again that this would be simple. But what does Zal’s word mean?
I can’t think about it. I’m in charge of myself, no matter what Zal may or may not want. I’ll get the plants out, and we’ll be done.
I feel Milekt singing again, a lullaby. Loyalty.
I wonder where Jik is. I realize I haven’t seen her since we battled with the Breath. I don’t know what she wanted me to do with Caru, or if I did it properly. I wonder if she’s mad at me.
I look down again. The ice is breaking, and between the floes, something swims. A polar bear.
The spray from the Barents Sea splashes up onto our deck, and there are whitecaps on the edge of the rocks bordering Svalbard. I know there’s a tiny town close by, a tiny airport, but the way we came there’s been almost nothing below us but the sweep of ice hills. Now it’s only snow and sea.
This is the closest I’ve been to the ground in a long time. How long exactly, Aza? It feels like forever. I don’t belong down there anymore. But then, I never did.
On the earth, I was never the person in charge of anything, not even my own body. But here, I’m important. Here, I’m the only one capable of doing this—the hard thing—the thing that will save my people.