The skin she’s wearing now is stronger, a new version of what she had before. She has some time, we hope, before things start to fail.
The skin. I think about that. It makes no sense. Aza tried to explain it to me, but finally gave up after she said it was a combination of camouflage and Aqua-Lung. I told her to stop because she wasn’t helping make any sense of this, and she said, “Fine, Jason. It’s magic. I can’t help you. I don’t get it either.”
I think back to that night when Aza and I watched the giant squid—the creature that also seemed fact and fantasy, real and imaginary. That day, we were uncomplicated. I mean, not, but relatively, compared to today. Even that’s something we’re never going to have again.
I’m not looping.
Okay, fine, I’m looping.
Looping as in: this won’t work, this can’t work, what’s coming for us?
As in maybe she isn’t who she was, maybe I’m not who I was, maybe nothing about this is right at all.
As in, maybe she’ll die again. Maybe it will be worse this time than it was last time, except that this time she’ll really be dead.
Loop. Worry. Panic attack quelled by breathing and a pill and a tiny, tiny dose of pi. Shh. Aza not awake and not noticing, and me in the bathroom of the airplane, trying not to fall apart now, after all the weeks of fervent not falling apart I’ve done.
This is completely insane. This was love at first sight. And now, she’s here with me, and I’m here with her, and the whole sky is full of angry people who want her dead.
And is she even staying down here? Can she?
But it doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her. What if one day she looks at me and says, “I want to go back up”?
What if I’m an anchor, snagged, holding her to the rocks?
This is not just Jason and Aza. It’s not me racing against death to save her anymore. It’s us racing against impossible.
I think about my moms. I think about how there was a moment in which they thought they’d never be able to be together. Their families panicked. Two women? No men? They did it anyway. My birth certificate has both of them on it, and they did I-don’t-even-know-what to make that happen.
They were brave. I can’t be less brave than they are.
But even Eve would be scared of what we saw in Svalbard. And maybe of the girl beside me.
At the beginning of the flight, I saw a formation of geese passing our plane, going the other way, and so did Aza. She pressed her face against the glass.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her hand was on the glass, too, as though she was greeting them, but also like she was getting ready to do something. The air felt gritty. After a moment, the geese passed the plane, and she relaxed.
“What just happened?”
“I wasn’t sure what they were doing,” she said, and looked at me with a kind of sheepish expression on this new face I’m still getting used to. “I thought they might be coming for us.”
“Explain,” I said.
“We’re near a Magonian ship right now,” she said. “The geese were in formation around the hull. I don’t know how we got out of there. I don’t know how they let us go.”
I look at her. I don’t know either. We’ve been over everything. Heyward. The ship in the air. This Dai, her partner.
She explained. It wasn’t a happy explanation, hearing her talk about how she was magnetized to him. We compared notes on everything that happened in the last month and a half, and we still have gaps.
There’s nothing hitting the news about what just went down at the vault. I’ve been tracking it the whole flight. About the breach of the seed repository—about the massive earthquake—nothing.
Which means that just beneath the surface, everyone’s freaking out. The military from several different countries. Norwegian. American. Brits. Bunch of others. This can only have been an international incident.
I make sure Aza’s sleeping, and then I pull out the business card I was given on the tarmac at Longyearbyen.
She was in the bathroom. Dude came up, black suit, dark glasses, two words, card, gone. I keep nearly, but not quite, telling her about the agent, who only said, “Thank you.”
Now I wonder how long the feds were following me. I keep thinking Aza doesn’t need to know. Maybe no one needs to know.
If I were them, I wouldn’t hire me. I know more than I should. I think if I were in their shoes, I’d kill me.
I look over again at Aza sleeping beside me. I listen to her breathing. We’re going home, but who knows how long we’re going to be able to stay there.
In this skin, Aza looks like a new person. She isn’t. She’s still entirely Aza. Example: when we got onto the plane, she looked at me and said:
“What’re you looking at?”
“You,” I said.
“Don’t get used to this. I think this skin’s gonna fall apart. That’ll be pretty. I’ll look all rotten corpse and then we’ll see if you want to hold my hand.”
Which is not true. She’ll turn more and more blue, and have a harder and harder time breathing, and eventually what happened before will happen again. And I will still want to hold her hand. We’re just hoping this version is better than what she had before.
She’s got braided black hair and brown skin. Her body’s the same, because the skin shrinks to fit. But other than the obvious changes, because I know she’s Aza, she looks like Aza to me.