Aerie Read Online Free PDF Page B

my moms is biologically my mom. Could be either of them. My skin tone is somewhere between. That’s the awesomeness of my moms for you, actual awesome, not being sarcastic. They don’t care what people think. They do it their way, and I do it mine.
    It’s not like the history of humans is full of perfect examples of how to live. Why not invent a new way?
    Magonians: same deal. Tons of things about both places, fucked up. Rostrae, after all, are up there, enslaved by Magonians. There’s that, and all the ways I’m trying to figure that out. The scientific ways. The daily ways.
    God. I’m on high alert for everything today.
    Not only am I on high alert, I suddenly remember, I’m also in high school . I make my way in, passing a variety of people in the hallway, all of whom give me the look that says apparently I’m not hiding anything well today.
    I pass Mr. Grimm, who’s been looking at me too closely ever since last year and the lightning strike. I prefer less attention.
    â€œJason,” he says. “Don’t think no one noticed you sitting in your car. You get a pass today, but that’s it. Are you sick?”
    Why is he everywhere?
    â€œI’m okay,” I say, but actually—
    Maybe Eli was right. I’ve missed two class periods by sitting in my car gnawing on the universe. I didn’t even feel time passing.
    Once I get into the room, I look over at Aza, who’s three desks away being Beth. I discover that I have no idea what’s going on in her head.
    She looks happy. But not like she’s thinking about me.
    I wasn’t thinking about her either, was I? I was thinking about everything else in the sky and sea and wilderness. I was thinking about failures on every level, and about how I don’t know how to fix them.
    So, we’re even?
    Aza’s staring into space.
    I’m staring into Aza.
    I catch a flicker of expression on her face, her forehead crinkling, her eyes far away, and I wonder if she’s talking to Caru, her heartbird, or if she’s got a headache. Or, maybe, she’s thinking about how to go back to her sky kingdom.
    Paranoid, Kerwin. Paranoid.
    I change my focus and run in-brain stats on fixing the problems between Magonia and earth. All the old-school data on skyships is still part of my collation. Centuries of reports of temperature crises, and weather meltdowns. Miracle books from the 1400s, the parts that depict rains of leaves and tendrils, and other things. Triangulating that with the activities of people on earth.
    I know from super plants, at least a little bit. There’s no magic food crop I’ve hit on that can provide enough for everyone on earth and above, not without huge vulnerabilities.
    I think about, alphabetically, almonds (which require too much water), bananas, catastrophic chemicals, drought, dust, garbage patches, GMO, heat waves, ice storms, Magonia, oil spills, ozone, parasites, parch, pesticides, shrivel, whirlwinds. There are plenty of other categories in the alphabet of collapse. What if they all happened at once? What if Magonia stopped making weather?
    I’m trying to pluck things that’re Magonian apart from things that are earth-based, and trying to figure out how much of earth knows about Magonia. Some people definitely have known over the years.
    There was a rain of something called angel hair the otherday, a shiny fiber, like a ticker tape parade, falling from the sky. The official version is that it’s chaff dropped by military aircraft to keep them from being recognized on radar. The reflective strips confuse things.
    According to Aza, though, it’s also a thing Magonian ships do, making a cloud of tiny objects around themselves so that they don’t look like ships. It’s a kind of surveillance camouflage. Except Magonian ships employ Rostrae and canwr to do that job, not little showers of reflective aluminum strips. I imagine standing beneath a fall of that.