Jason’s in front of me. Things have changed in him. Just like things have changed in me.
No no no. He’s human. I keep reminding myself that I’m not. But oh my god oh my god, my heart. My heart feels human.
“You’ll have to kill me if you want me to go,” Jason says. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
He says nothing for a minute.
“Then we’re even,” he finally says, and his voice breaks with an only slightly muffled sob.
I step out from behind the pillar. Covered completely. I’m wearing the clothes I had to wear to do Zal’s bidding. A suit zipped up all the way to keep me safe from too much oxygen. Emergency war gear. Only my eyes are visible.
No one but me could ever tell that he’s scared. No one but me has ever seen Jason Kerwin cry.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jason says. “You can keep trying to tell me to leave, but it’s not going to work. I came for you. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Aza’s gone,” I singsay.
Jason looks steadily at me. He takes a step toward me.
“Bullshit,” he says.
I take a step back.
He steps. I step.
Another.
Rock wall behind me.
But.
I’m going to leave him.
But.
He reaches out his hand, and like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t even notice it’s a thing, he puts his hand on the hood of my suit, and unzips it, taking the panel away from my face.
My hair uncoils into the freezing air. It twists and moves toward him as though its trying to bite his hands. My skin flares with electricity, storm sparks, too much oxygen.
I can’t breathe this way for long.
I’m here in front of him, Magonian.
Jason doesn’t even flinch.
I try one more time. This body, this person, this skin, this face, these red-gold eyes, the real, freaky version of the girl he knew. He’s looking at me, at my insane Medusa hair, at my too-long fingers and everything not what it was, and I must be hideous to him.
“Do you get it now? I’m not Aza,” I wheeze. “I’m not who you think I am—” and then Jason Kerwin takes one more fast step forward and—
He’s kissing me.
He’s got me in his arms. His human lips. My Magonian mouth. And it’s weather, a surging storm breaking, a vast, warm expanse of sun and of rightness coming across the sky. I’m glowing with it, his skin, my fingertips, his jaw and—
He moves back from me so that we’re not kissing for a second.
“Aza Ray,” he says. “You hold no horrors for me.”
He breathes me in, and I breathe him in, and when we breathe out the air freezes between us and falls. Snow.
I’m shaking and stupid, and for a second I think I’m not going to know what to do, but then I do.
I grab his face in my hands and kiss him until he’s the one who can’t breathe. I keep my eyes open. So does he. We’ve been not looking at each other for too long. Like, for our whole lives.
Real now.
No more parentheses. No more brackets.
I can hear new sounds out there. Engines, airplanes, helicopters. Whatever we did, people are about to know it all.
“It’s okay. I planned for something like this.”
I look at Jason, and remember how even though I know what he is, I always underestimate him. He smiles at me.
I stagger into the broken, sideways hull of Amina Pennarum, singing camouflage all the way. I know I don’t have long. They’ll never let this wreck stay.
I run as fast as I can through corridors I once knew, past tangled hammocks and twisted ropes to find the skins that Dai took from the Breath ship. It’s dark and smoky in here, and there’s a sizzle not far away, a sting outside, the smell of ozone, but I tear off my uniform and grab the closest skin.
I unzip the cover. I put my hand on the skin, warm, soft, fragile, and I touch it. I feel it touch me. It wraps around me, pressing, crushing, melding to me, melting into me, and inside my body I feel the vibration of Caru, questioning, from outside the vessel.
Okay, I sing. Calm, and I feel him sing back. Feel rather than hear.
The skin closes over me, smooth, perfect, and new, and I tug my clothes back over it and run, run, as the ship collapses around me.
I fling myself out a porthole onto the ice. I look up, but Maganwetar is gone. The ships are gone. The sky and ground are clear of everything but squallwhales and human things, planes in the distance, and cars coming across the island. People are arriving, running across the frozen landscape.
Casually, dressed in my Magonian uniform, breathing a little easier with these borrowed doll lungs, Jason and I walk away from the seed repository.
We walk away like we’re two American teenagers on a field trip who saw something they shouldn’t have seen, but only kind of saw it, officer, because we snuck away to make out.
It takes some seriously heroic lying and bullshitting, and this is where having a little bit of money comes in handy, but in the end I get us on a plane home. Fake passport for her. I said heroic, didn’t I? Yes. Heroic.
I’m not entirely well from the lightning, and I’ve been feeling sick the whole flight. It’s weird and terrifying to be on a plane now, after all this. I don’t know if Aza thinks so. She’s so exhausted that she’s been sleeping for nine hours. I can hear a familiar, ragged edge to her breathing starting again, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.