Free Aerie by Maria Dahvana Headley Page B

desperate. No one up there is going to look kindly on a chosen one who wouldn’t choose them. The sky is full of her enemies. Heyward would drop her in front of Zal, or Dai, or anyone else who wants to kill her.
    I had to keep her safe. She’ll forgive me. She has to.
    Forty people work here. If you saw us, you’d think we were a paper supply company with astonishingly good tech. If you looked closer, you’d see that there are screens on every desk showing ALL the air traffic. Color-coded and tagged so SWAB can follow progress across the skies of the world by nation. And by more than nation.
    All around those airplanes and helicopters, there are Magonian ships. SWAB has a monitor that tracks stormsharks, squallwhales, and a bunch of other things too. They tag them with weather balloons, which the stormsharks eat. As for the squallwhales, SWAB seeds clouds for rain, using a mixture of silver iodine and dry ice. The squallwhale perceive it as some kind of skykrill. Voilà, tracking devices in every pod.
    SWAB has the premium version of everything I tried tocreate last year when I had no access to data or real tools: small-craft monitors, and single-vessel monitors, a crop theft reports section, a board with renderings of known agitators, politicos and pirates alike. There’s a portrait of Zal up there, and one of Dai, which I’ve studied more than I really want to admit. For an alien guy, he’s appallingly and objectively good-looking, even to me.
    There are other things here too. This agency has a whole roomful of artifacts from Magonia, knives and swords made of a light Magonian metal that feels like tin, but cuts like steel. Some of them don’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before. Their hilts are shaped like birds, and their blades like gleaming feathers. They’re sharp enough to cut through a table in a single stroke. There’s a flute that’s thirty-five thousand years old and made of vulture bone. You can play five notes on it, the five notes that most human voices can encompass. When you play it—I’ve never heard it, but this is the rumor—despite this being a scale of human notes, there’s something about them that’s not—glass cracks for a quarter mile in all directions. There are other things, Magonian bows and arrows, Magonian axes, things gotten I don’t know how, over I don’t know how many years.
    Director Armstrong is sitting calmly at his desk, in front of about five monitors showing Aza’s face in various versions. Some of them are Magonian, some of them Aza Original, the earth girl I knew for years before all this, and some are Beth Marchon.
    â€œKerwin,” says the director. “Take a seat.”
    He’s in his late forties, balding, desk job physique, stubble, a crumpled suit, bad squint. A spy, I’ve learned in the past year, looks like a spy. Which makes me wonder if I’m starting to looklike a spy too. Armstrong isn’t a field agent anymore. He started at NASA before NASA got publicly shrunk. SWAB was always part of the shadow identity of the space program anyway. Now what was NASA is SWAB, and the tech they developed for fifty years is entwined with our Magonian program.
    I sit. Well, I kind of sit.
    â€œYour girl’s in custody,” he says. “She’s safe. And don’t worry about Heyward Boyle. We got the tip, and we’re on it.”
    â€œOkay,” I say cautiously.
    â€œBut you didn’t think to tell us about the escape?”
    â€œAbout what ?”
    â€œCaptain Quel.”
    I take another moment. Because this is . . . this is huge.
    Aza’s mother? Escaped?
    â€œI—I didn’t know.” Shit. What else don’t I know?
    Armstrong gestures to a monitor and it clicks on. Surveillance footage. Not earthbound.
    â€œThis footage is from yesterday.”
    It’s showing Caru, flying. I know Caru. I’ve seen Aza’s heartbird in