Free Aerie by Maria Dahvana Headley

but then they’re weird in their own ways.”
    â€œNot that you’re at all weird,” says Carol, and gives me a particular look that says ha!
    â€œI came from weird stock,” I say.
    â€œYou did,” says Eve, and laughs. “This is a house of weird people who love you.”
    â€œWe loved Aza too,” says Carol, putting her hand over mine. “We did a toast to her tonight.”
    â€œIf she was your dream, she was a good one,” says Eve. “But I promise, baby, you’ll find love again. There’s lots of love in the world.”
    Which makes me cry, because even if I can’t tell them what’s going on, they get me, at least.
    My moms both hug me. For a second, I feel like nothing can drop out of the sky and make a disaster in the middle of my life. There are no skyships and no Breath climbing down anchor chains. There’s only me, and my parents, and we’re totally safe here in our living room.
    For now.
    The second I get upstairs, I turn on my tablet, open about nine apps, and wait.
    I’m years behind on sleep. I get like three hours a night, which is not enough, but what else am I supposed to do when I’m keeping track of everything that’s happening everywhere in every time zone? Not just on the earth, but in the sky?
    I turn on the video feed to Aza’s house.
    Video feed. Secretly placed cameras. All kinds of dishonest.There are things no one knows but me. And then there are the things a few other people know too.
    Facts I never told Aza, volume one. Three nights after we got back from Svalbard I walked out of Aza’s house and saw a black car.
    â€œGet in,” said the guy I’d met at the airport in Longyearbyen.
    I jumped a fence, crashed into a mailbox, and ran. The car pulled alongside me. When I tried to dial 911 I discovered my signals were jammed.
    â€œWhat do you want?”
    â€œI’m picking you up. You’ve been summoned,” said the guy at the wheel.
    Summoned. Like this was a world of kings. Like I was going to be a knight. Turned out, it wasn’t so different. Knights never had a lot of power either. Swords for hire.
    SkyWatch Assessment Bureau, SWAB for short. Government agencies, for all that they’re completely unfunny in myriad ways, tend to have a warped sense of humor, the secret supernerd kind.
    It’s an agency in charge of watching skyships. S wab the decks, matey . Therefore, SWAB.
    SWAB has been looking upward for a very long time. They were looking other places too, all over the internet, at people accessing information, and the way I was searching for Magonia-related topics, the particular groupings I was using, meant—
    Well, it meant I knew things I wasn’t supposed to know.
    SWAB had video of what Aza did in Svalbard: singing a flood that began to turn the island into the ocean, that cracked theseed repository open, that could’ve ended everything.
    The agency saw all the things I thought no one saw.
    I was terrified they were going to take Aza, and if not them, that Magonia was going to take her instead.
    And so SWAB knew exactly how to get me to do what they wanted me to do.
    They offered me her safety in exchange for her secrets. Tell us everything, listen to everything, report everything, and we’ll protect her. Devil’s bargain. Fine, I’ll burn.
    They installed small and fancy security cameras at Aza’s house, and that was a whole thing, but it was mostly okay. I have the monitors. So do they.
    Since then, I’ve been spending weekends learning languages, nights memorizing coordinates. In the mornings, she’d wake up from nightmares about Magonia, and I’d pretend I hadn’t been beside her all along, recording every word she said in her sleep. The daily reports I’ve given SWAB aren’t much. Basically: school, me, home, stare at sky, communicate with Caru, communicate with me. What Aza and Caru talk about, as far as the