Same wide mouth. Same amazing strange eyes. Her voice is Aza’s voice. Her words are Aza’s words.
If I handed her a piece of paper and some scissors, she’d cut out the Empire State Building in three minutes. If I asked her what she thought about anything, she’d instantly have an opinion, whether majorly wrong or not, she’d never hesitate to tell me what she thought. She’s always been this way. She still is.
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Whole flight,” I say.
“Am I still alive?”
“Of course you are.”
“Because it feels like I’m dreaming, coming back here.”
“We’re going to make this work.”
I wish I believed myself. I’ve been the King of Certainty the whole time I’ve known her, but about a lot of things I was faking. I’m faking right now. I don’t know anything. I feel broken and messed up, terrified and convinced I’m about to watch her get shot down by airport security.
Aza kisses me as we’re getting off the plane, full-on enough that I’m pretty sure everyone else in the jetway is blushing, and I’m blushing too. That doesn’t keep me from picking her up and carrying her into the airport, over the threshold that separates this country in the air from home.
Everyone’s laughing, all the people around us. They think we’re cute. Maybe they think we’re a little pukey.
People actually, amazingly, think we’re normal teenagers in love.
I’m expecting a hole where my house was. My family gone. Everyone gone. Or it’ll be surrounded by police, or Breath, someone waiting to take me away and lock me up, in a brig or a cell, same difference. My neighborhood looks wrong. No sky around us. No snow. No ice. The ground stable.
I turn the corner toward my address, expecting retribution. Maganwetar knows where I came from. Zal knows where I’ll go. Someone’s got to be hunting me.
Except for that Breath, willfully letting me go. It must have been on someone’s orders. Whose? It makes me wonder if maybe, maybe we have some time. If Magonian officials want me down here somehow. I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.
I’m not what I should be. I’m illegal. I’m an alien. In all senses of that word. My mother is an assassin and a criminal and probably in jail in Magonia. Maybe I’m an assassin and a criminal too. I wonder about my father. Do I even have one? No one ever said. How come I never asked?
It’s quiet on my street, but not too quiet. A few birds, none of them speaking. All they do is sing.
The sky’s clear. The sun’s shining. There’s nothing up there that would suggest anyone knows I’m down here. I could almost (if I was insane) forget about Magonia.
Not even a breeze. It’s cold, but not as cold as Svalbard.
And there—my house is there. In front of me, itself. Yellow front door. Blue car in the driveway. Dented side.
It’s the dent that starts me crying. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe I’m just coming home after school, getting out of Jason’s car, probably gasping a little. Normal. Except that I have Jason beside me holding my hand, and that would never have happened before all this. There was no official version of Jason and me before.
There’s a rip in the neckline of his shirt, and he has a smudge on his face. I want to laugh, because a smudge? After everything? Only a smudge?
The world isn’t over, though, and here we are. Like humans. Some more like humans than others.
I look up at Jason. I can feel the sides of his fingers against mine. I can feel his heart beating through his thumb.
“What do you think?” he asks me, as though he doesn’t know already.
“My parents are home,” I say.
“You ready?”
“Not even.”
“Maybe we should jump off the garage,” he says.
“Maybe we should fly in,” I say, which almost makes me sob, because. Obvious reasons. There are losses to this. Big ones.
I don’t have a plan. Where else in the world would I go but here? Home. Not home. Home.
I turn around and start walking in the opposite direction of my house. Nope. I can’t see my parents, not this way. Look at me. I’m not me—
“Do you know,” Jason says, his voice tense as mine, talking fast, a definite sign of barely hidden anxiety. “Do you know about the Ganzfeld Effect?”
“No,” I say. I’m listening, but I’m not stopping. He’s not going to seduce me with factoids. I walk faster.
“It’s the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for missing signals. For example, if you look at a clear blue sky without context, you start to hallucinate. Look at snow too long, and you’ll see cities.”
“That’s not what Magonia is,” I interrupt, irritated that he can even remotely say this after all he’s just seen.
“The students of Pythagoras used to go into dark caves and stay there in order to bring it on. Wisdom out of nothing. Astronauts say they see the same thing. And Arctic explorers.”
I feel his fingers lace through mine. He keeps talking without stopping. He’s not letting me get away.
“Prisoners in solitary. There’s a term for that version. Prisoners’ cinema. Colors at the edge of night, figures and forms. Some people think the cave paintings in Lascaux were done in the dark, someone painting the things they saw when there was nothing else to see. Hands out, dipping fingers in pigment and painting in pitch-black, from visions. You could only see them if you stayed there long enough, looking.”