Read Online Aerie by Maria Dahvana Headley - Free Book Online

circle, and my family’s singing “Happy Birthday.” The candles are lit, and there’re seventeen of them.
    For the first time in years, my wish doesn’t have to be please, let me live .
    I close my eyes, grit my teeth, and blow the candles out. When I open them, Jason’s watching me. I can’t read the look on his face.
    I cut the cake, slicing through the ship in the center, and giving him the piece with the squallwhale. I give each of my parents some clouds and Eli a stormshark. I give myself a piece of sky with nothing in it, so I can imagine Aza Ray Quel on my piece, and Caru singing with her.
    So I can imagine everything I can’t have.
    Later, I walk Jason to his car, and we look out at the sky together, thinking our own thoughts, maybe the same, maybe not. I can see Magonia, because Magonia’s everywhere. No Caru, but also no visible badness. A catamaran moving dozily across the clouds. A small pod of squallwhales, too far away to hear theirsongs. The moon’s full and yellow, and I almost cry, but I don’t.
    â€œShooting star,” Jason says abruptly, and points. We both watch it arc across the sky, shockingly bright. It could be a message from one Magonian captain to another, or maybe it’s just a piece of rock hurtling through the atmosphere. Sound and fury signifying zilch.
    â€œWhat’s going on with you? Really. What aren’t you telling me?” Jason says, his left eyebrow so on point that I can’t evade it. I feel like his brain has bored a hole in mine, and now he’s wandering through all the skull passageways that, for anyone else, would only be accessible with six sets of keys and a series of increasingly arcane lock combinations.
    Okay, then. Look at my soul if you want to look at it. It’s a pissed-off soul.
    I let loose. “Are you ordering me around on purpose?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œ You’re not going anywhere , I quote. Let me just say, if I was going anywhere, it’d be my business. Even if I was going to see if I could find Heyward.”
    I don’t know why I’m so irritated. Jason can be obnoxious. This is a thing I know. I can also be obnoxious. But there’s something in the way he’s been lately, something about how he’s like . . .
    So convinced he knows what’s good for me. How does he know? I don’t even know. But the more he acts like he knows everything about my future happiness, the more I’m like, THERE MAY BE DEVELOPMENTS.
    â€œYou don’t know what Heyward’s like,” he says.
    â€œI don’t? You mean I didn’t have a giant battle with her lastyear? On a ship? Apparently it wasn’t me who did that. Wait, was it you?”
    â€œI spent more time with her than you did,” he says. “She tried to KILL me .”
    Yeah, I want to say. She tried to kill me too. But I nearly turned her to stone using only my voice . If anyone’s got the skills to fight her, it’s me. I compromise.
    â€œMaybe I want to find her because I’m worried she might try that again, on you, on Eli, on my parents. Did you think of that, or did you just think I wanted a random adventure?”
    Jason relents.
    â€œPlease,” he says. “Just . . . don’t go looking for her tonight.”
    I feel prickly all over. “Should I just sit here and wait for her to show up and hurt someone I love?”
    â€œMaybe we should tell someone?”
    â€œWhat someone would that be?”
    â€œThe authorities. There must be someone who could help.”
    I stare at Jason. “WHAT authorities ? Which ones? The ones in charge of Magonia? No one down here knows there’s anything up there! Seriously? You want us to get hauled into some psych ward? Because that’s what’d happen. Or they’d just think we were hoaxing again. We’ve hoaxed before, Kerwin.”
    â€œMaybe things are changing up there,” he says.