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like, normal people who are normally in love, and normally being suspected of sins by our parents. There’s a script for this version. We both feel calmer when there’s a script.
    I take one last glance at the sky as I walk into my house, but even though today is Aza Ray’s birthday/deathday there’s nothing to suggest that today’s anything but ordinary.
    So why is every nerve in my body screaming that something’s about to change?

CHAPTER 4
{JASON}
    I scan the sky with my anomaly app before I drive to pick Aza and Eli up for school. Nothing wrong up there, or at least nothing my phone wants to report. Still, I’m on edge. This doesn’t feel like any kind of birthday to me.
    By which, I mean, it does.
    Every birthday of Aza’s has been a countdown toward something bad, and every year I’ve been hanging streamers and making cake. The only birthday party at which I remember feeling clueless and thus hopeful was the first one I went to, when we were five. By the time we were six, I’d learned about death, and I knew it was going to try to steal Aza from me. By the time we were seven, I’d started writing my apology list, and by the time we were fifteen, it was forty pages long. Not that I ever read it to her. Not that she ever knew.
    It’s not like I haven’t been faking celebration all these years, while going home after every birthday dinner to scan the entirety of the internet for ways to cure someone incurable.
    In some ways, freaking out about just the weather is an improvement. I’ve spent hours looking at old tabloids, comparingthem to medical research, curiosity cabinet and freak show stuff, the horrible things that happened to people unlucky enough to be born spectacular, strange, and inexplicable.
    Aza is, of course, all of the above. There are things I wish I didn’t know: Magonian ships yanked out of the sky, experiments in secret government labs in the desert, Magonian bodies taken apart in the name of science. Given what Aza’s told me, some of them were probably thrown off ships for the crime of being mouths to feed. And that idea cracks my heart open.
    Before Magonia, Aza had no good-bye mode, but there’s always a preemptive good-bye on her face now. She thinks she has me fooled, but I know she’s just-in-casing. Maybe she’s always ten minutes away from taking hold of a skyrope and climbing.
    Fine, there are things to be nervous about. Things I seem to be unable to shake.
    When the girl you love says oh, right, this guy Dai is imprinted on me as my universally fated life and song partner it’s hard to take it in stride. I’m not a jealous guy, normally, but—
    Yeah, I’m full of shit. I’m completely jealous, even when Aza Ray is in my arms.
    Zal and Dai want Aza up there. I want Aza down here.
    Aza wants—
    Aza wants everything.
    But what if everything is elsewhere?
    â€œYou look way weird,” Eli says to me when she gets into the car. “Aza walked. You’re late.”
    â€œYou look way weird too,” I tell Eli, and she snorts.
    â€œPlease. Nothing about this is weird.”
    Eli’s wearing her uniform of perfectly symmetrical everything, buttoned and ironed. She’s like someone unrelated to the messy chaos of Aza-now-Beth, and in reality she is, except she isn’t. They’re sisters. Just weird sisters.
    â€œIt’s not a minor day,” I tell her.
    She gets it. Eli was with me on the last day of Aza’s life as Aza, in the ambulance in the last moments, and she was with me at Aza’s funeral too. Exactly 365 days ago, I was heading to school wearing a rental alligator, and Eli was wearing wrinkled black clothing and a crooked haircut, and both of us had broken hearts.
    Eli shrugs, puts her hand on my shoulder, because actually Eli’s kind in the heart, and gives me a look.
    â€œWe move forward,” she says. “There is no reverse when it comes to