“Starboard!” Zal yells, and the ship moves, our Rostrae in the sky towing it. I look up and see Jik, her talons clasped on a rope. She’s still staring down at me, but she’s completely in bird form.
“Now, Aza,” Zal says to me.
I sing a melthole in the ice, not so different from where a seal would rise to breathe.
Amina Pennarum’s best fishers and hunters lean over the side. They tug the pulley from the back of our deck—the strong one we use for bringing up livestock—into position.
“Now!” Zal shouts, and the great weighted mass of hooks and snares plummets into the hole I’ve made. The pulley’s flywheels spin and the gripper plunges into the shaft of water and into the center of the hill. Toward the seeds.
I expect it to reach the room we can see, grab what it can, ascend again, to repeat the fishing as long as I can hold the hill. But Zal orders me, “Go deeper.”
Milekt directs our notes. He shrills, and I sing with Dai and Svilken. There are deeper rooms, beneath the main vault. I stutter a second, confused, and a big chunk of the ice flickers for a moment back to stone. I steady my song as quickly as I can.
Lights, much lower in that storage facility than there should be, rooms of hydroponic rows deep in the mountain. Testing rooms with plants struggling into existence.
I sing, controlled, precise, but I feel as though something’s wrong with me. It feels the same way it did when Dai and I accidentally sang that wave together, out of control.
I can feel him behind me, his quiet notes guiding my song, but they feel stronger than they should. My notes are tense and sharp.
At the bottom of the complex, the lowest of these clandestine levels, behind secure doors, guarded by cameras now breaking with sudden cold, are rooms full of secret seeds and plants. There’s a whole level of them. I can only just make them out.
I didn’t expect these. A chamber full of twitching root babies in pots. Mandrake roots. A vegetable lamb. Pumpkins fed by blood drips. Those, and more.
THERE. The things I’m looking for: the Magonian epiphytes. The plants from myth. They’re as real as Magonia is.
The drowners have been hiding them.
My voice falters again, but Milekt, Svilken, and Dai are there, singing to me, singing hard into me, forcing me not to stop.
The plants are drifting in the air. They float like seaweed. Their leaves are long and silver. Their roots twist. They’re rooted—in nothing.
Lost Magonian crops, still growing in midair. They’re so beautiful I can barely believe it.
The hook plunges straight through the rooms of drowner crops. The crew moves fast, swiveling the hook. It oscillates in the room of eddying airplants, snags one, two, more on its teeth.
“Bring them up,” Zal shouts.
They crank the handle of the pulley and the rope begins to ascend. It tugs the plants. They shake themselves loose of the air they’ve rooted in. They start to rise through the vault.
We only need enough to start a crop. This will change everything.
It’s almost finished. We have the epiphytes. We can take them and go. I don’t know how afraid I was, of what I don’t know, until the relief starts washing over me.
It’s done, I think. I did it. I’m still singing, but it can ebb.
I glance at Zal for permission to stop, but she’s not looking at me.
“Now,” she says to Dai. “It’s time.”
There’s a hunger and an anger in her voice that makes me feel frozen.
There’s something wrong in the air suddenly. A hum, far away, a sound. My head jerks up to look around, but I can’t see anything, only mist and clouds. Squallwhales.
What’s happening?
I can’t read Dai’s expression. He steps back from me, but I still have his heat, the comfort of him next to me. Then Dai and Svilken join their song entirely to mine, at their peak volume. Our song surges up, pouring out of me.
It’s as though I hit a trip wire. The need to sing is overwhelming. It’s the only thing.
Dai’s notes blast into me. It’s too much. More than I can handle. I have no control. I try to silence my vocal cords.
I can’t, I discover. I can’t.
Power’s pouring out of me, but I’m powerless. I’m being used as a tool in someone else’s hands.
I scream and the scream is my song, Dai’s notes are in my throat and roaring into my ears. In a moment, the song changes.
And what they’re—what we’re singing is Flood.
This isn’t the plan. The plan was the seeds. The plants. But the island starts breaking into pieces. Water rushing into and in from the sea.
Glacial ice collides and batters against the edge of the island. The repository entrance shakes hard. The ice I’ve made from the hill’s stone is shattering, turning into water, and starting to gush.
Zal stands beside me. “We will have our revenge, Aza Ray, on all who’ve wronged us, and all who’ve hurt you. Drown them. Rid the earth of them. When the floods recede, we begin again with the true Magonia.”
I blink, but I can’t stop. My mouth is open and my voice is flying from it, like I’m Caru, like I have wings on every note.
Zal wants this, I realize. She’s wanted it all along.
Below us, the rock island starts turning to ocean.
Flood, Milekt sings now, betraying me, acting against me, and Dai sings deeply with him, harmonizing, focusing the notes that Milekt sings into my whistling melody.
The corridors below are shaking and liquefying, and suddenly, from one of them, sprints a line of humans, uniformed. Soldiers running from somewhere in the building, so many ants, and Amina Pennarum’s hook is rising through the water I’ve made out of solid ground.