There’s nothing. Milekt is in my throat, binding my song. Milekt himself. A suicide mission? An endsong? He’s taking me down with his own body? I feel like I’m choking, but there’s enough room for me to breathe, a tiny bit. Not to sing. I’m mute. Not the way I was on the prison ship. A new way. No tech. This is a living thing, inside my voice, stopping my song like a cork. My broken canwr. Motionless. I— I cough. Like a dying girl. Like Aza Ray Boyle, blue in the lips, blue in the fingers, broken in the soul, missing her family in advance. And below me is their house. Below me is everything I knew when I was learning about the world. Lightning strikes my backyard. Lightning sets a tree on fire. Right by the bedroom windows. Wind is coursing over the landscape, flattening it. Rivers rise up and I watch them begin to flow over the ground, flooding the land where I live, the places I wanted to pick flowers, but couldn’t, because I was Magonian and couldn’t breathe. The places I wanted to play, but couldn’t, because I was this, and the earth was not my home.
