It takes me a second to get my bearings after the impact. I’m surrounded by cracking wood. Magonians are gasping and screaming, choking and whimpering in the heavy air of earth. I don’t even look. I move fast.
I have to get to Jason.
I haul myself over the railing and drop a few feet onto the rock. I gasp air from my bottle.
Zal leaps over the rail behind me. Then she’s in front of me on the ice, this raging woman, my screaming mother, this warrior, my captain. But down here she’s not as strong as I am. I’m used to earth. I know how to walk here. I know how to survive on less than I need here.
The stakes have changed. I’m not the daughter who serves. I’m not the girl who came aboard Amina Pennarum, scared and delicate.
Zal reaches for my face, trying to grab my bottle for herself. I push her, and she falls backward.
Milekt flies at me and flutters around screaming ragesongs as Breath rappel down onto Amina Pennarum from Maganwetar, and seize Zal.
Zal screams and fights, but she has no power over them. She has no song. She’s struggling to breathe but she battles hard. I sing her weapons into paralysis.
I wait for them to try to grab me too. I won’t let them.
I sing a tiny note of warning, and Caru echoes it.
The Breath before me holds up a hand. Not Heyward. This is a Breath I’ve never seen before. He stares at me for a moment, and then turns back to Zal. They’re not taking me. I don’t know why, but they’re not.
The note I sang with Caru echoes in the air, and all around me there’s stillness. Protection. Strength.
Then he’s gone, hauling Zal up into the Magonian command ship. Zal shakes in the air, upended, flipped like a whale, choking on air. As, one by one, is her crew.
“Betrayer,” Zal screams as she goes.
Dai is pulled up after her, unconscious from the fall. My heart clenches and my eyes fill, watching him hauled up. We’re still attached; our bond isn’t gone. Not gone at all. Though we didn’t choose each other, we’re supposed to sing together, no matter what.
I don’t think this is the end of Dai and me.
I don’t think I’m that lucky.
I see Milekt land on him as he rises, a dart of gold on his shoulder, abandoned by me. Dai has two birds now, one on each shoulder, one for each lung. Milekt shrills maddened bird loathing at me as he ascends.
Cut string, he screams. I feel a hideous racking inside me, guilt. I broke our bond. I had to.
Forget it, Aza. None of it matters. Because Jason.
I sprint across the snow, the tilting landscape.
I push into the repository entrance with Caru behind me, and it’s dark, and still no one. Where is he? Gone? How can he be?
No, I hear footsteps. He runs into something and grunts. “Ow.”
The simplest sound and it causes me to come to my senses.
I’m not ready for this. I can never be ready. I’m not the Aza he knew. I look—
I look like—
I feel my stomach drop. My legs go numb, my tongue trips in my mouth, my whole body crashes and burns with this insane feeling of falling from something so high there’s no end. I feel everything tumble—comet meteor parachute wingless—into him.
“Aza,” he says. He’s coming toward me. “I know you’re here.”
I’m Magonian. He’s human. There’s no version of this that’s okay. I can’t be on earth. I can’t let him see me. Not this way.
“Get off this island,” I warn him, even though I feel my heart splintering. “Get away from here.”
“Aza Ray. Do you know how hard it was to get into this place? I’m breaking laws in maybe five countries. You almost killed me. They almost killed me. And the Norwegians think I’m a curious and slightly stupid schoolboy on a trip to Longyearbyen.”
I’m smiling inside my zipped-up hood because this is vintage Jason. He’s alive. He’s real. But I’m not Aza anymore. I have no idea who I am.
“And in order to get to Longyearbyen, I basically had to bribe God.”
There’s a silence.
“The airport’s less than a mile away,” he says. “If your clothes are warm enough you can walk. And wait. I had a tent with me, but some people took me in. I think my tent sank. Where the water, you know. Was.”
I say nothing.
“Come out, and come home with me,” he whispers. “It’s freezing. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t have to do it alone.”
Caru sings in our voice, this terrifying screamsong voice, this nothing-is-inside-my-heart voice, and we turn the floor to water for a moment, because we’re scared, I admit it, I admit it. Jason’s eyes get huge, and he stumbles, splashes, sinks, recovers.
I can’t be with him I can’t be with him. Caru sings a high awful pitch, a shrill of despair, and agony, and Jason covers his ears in pain. Caru keeps singing with my mouth.
Jason’s gasping, but he looks up again, and I see his face now. The furrow between his eyebrows is deeper than it was. He fidgets in his pockets and stuffs earplugs into his ears.
“Idiot,” he says. “Do you really think I’m leaving without you? Do you really think I’m going back to my full-on meltdown? Reciting pi for three weeks? Talking in my sleep?”
He straightens up, wet to the thighs with water that, after it falls from him, goes back to being concrete. He doesn’t seem to give a damn.
Caru arcs in his voice, Leave leave leave go go go drowner, but then Caru stops singing because I can’t stop crying.