And I have to do it now. I picture the airplants in Magonian skies again, fields and fields of them. No one starving. No more dying.
We’re wheezing, all of us who aren’t Rostrae. We can’t stay this low for very long. My lungs are compacting and quivering, and inside them, everything’s both cold and tight. That part’s okay. That’s accounted for. I’m not wearing a helmet. I have to sing, but in order to sing, I need to be able to breathe. I have a bottle of high Magonian air. I can gasp from it if I have to.
The batsail sings me a song that if I were human, I wouldn’t be able to hear. There are no other bats here. It’s too cold for them. Here it’s Arctic foxes and polar bears. But the batsail isn’t fussy about work. I think about how Zal told me it was just an animal. It isn’t. It sings me comfort. It calms my soul.
The night gets a little darker, but it’s all snow and ice down there, a kind of glowing gray.
Zal is beside me, looking hard at me. “Are you uncertain?” she says.
“No,” I tell her. “I know what to do.”
On cue, Milekt makes a golden sound from inside my chest.
Ready, ready, ready, Milekt sings. His claws are in my lung, holding on, and his beak is stabbing me.
Ready, I sing with Milekt. I zip up my suit, pull up my hood, walk out onto the deck, and stand at the rail. I catch my breath and it’s not just this drowner air that makes me gasp. A tall gray shaft spikes right out of the permafrost. It’s a splinter in the hillside. This is the repository entrance.
Milekt starts to sing the first notes of the song we’ve been practicing since Ley died. An old song, something Magonians sang hundreds of years ago.
When we get these plants back, the sky will be full of fields of epiphytes. Magonia will be self-sufficient. We can leave earth crops alone. And the capital will lose its power to deprive its people.
The song is full of hope, of green, of spring.
We will harvest the clouds when we get them back. No more skysettlements will starve. And the rest of the things that are wrong here? They can be fixed. Hunger makes wars. Plenty ends them.
Green leaf, Milekt sings. Skyblooms.
I join him, light-fingered as a pickpocket at first, testing my techniques. Dai will sing, too, but right now it’s too delicate. We don’t want to overwhelm the ice.
I sing a little harder to the rock below us. The metals of the entrance and the hidden building. For long seconds nothing happens. Then there’s a low groan. Something in the earth moving.
(Maganwetar is coming, a voice in my head breaks in. We broke every law. We’re breaking more now. There’s no way they’re not going to find us.)
I drive the thought away and focus, and the air starts to shine, a shimmering frozenness. Dai’s opening his mouth—still silent, but ready, Svilken in his chest.
I reach out my hand and take his, and he squeezes my fingers. I sing a section of air into a sheet of ice.
The air is gleaming, a bright, knife-hardness, and I slam the ice, through my voice, into the ground.
I glance at Zal. Her face is lit up with excitement. Her eyes trained only on the destruction I’m causing.
I sing one high note with Milekt, a piercing sound, and there’s a scream from below, a shuddering lurch of stone. I watch the ground divide at the point into which I drove the ice. A crack in the snow, right outside the repository. Water wells out of the crevasse, melted and shifted, turned from stone into liquid.
I pant for a moment, dizzy. Dai holds me tighter. Milekt buzzes around in my lung, and I look over and see Jik. She’s behind the captain, staring at me. Everyone is. Her feathers are standing up all over her shoulders.
“Open the rock!” Zal cries, exultant.
I take a breath from the bottle, and then sing deeper. I feel Dai’s voice before I hear it. He joins his quiet note into my song, and things shift below us.
The change spreads more quickly than I can account for it. The snow on the hillside shudders into liquid and the great shaft of rock above the repository isn’t stone now, no, it’s a column of siltless, clear new water. We hold it with our voices.
Zal maneuvers the ship directly above it; I can see through hundreds of feet of what was, a moment ago, a mountain. It’s now a deep wide well, the rock receeding deeper, and then deeper still until the stone at the bottom suddenly ends. The water wants to spill.
Yes, the water wants to flood, but I stop it, holding it in place with song. I feel Dai tense with the effort of keeping a world in motion motionless.
Through the swirling depths, we glimpse a room.
Shelves and shelves and shelves, lockers full of seeds. The vault.
The water wants to plunge. It wants to gush right into the corridors we’ve reached, but I manage to hold it where it is. Dai and I sing a few more taut notes, and the sinkhole grows wider. The entire surface of the island is churning now.
The crew is gasping, staring, at the force of this power. The hill’s turning to a lake. Inside my chest, Milekt is frantic with effort, battering against me.
The water wants to fall more than I have strength to stop it, so I sing cold and turn acres of hill water into ice. Through it, we can see all the way down, clear as glass.
Room after room, chamber after chamber of cabinets, suddenly lit up. Which seeds will we get? Which of the plants will we carry? There’re too many.
The strongest singers of the crew are starting their own notes now, and I can see cabinets bursting open, packets of seeds gusting into rooms, rising as if in high winds, each wrapped in their waterproofing. Floods have been planned for by the people who constructed this vault.