“I can’t do it,” I say.

I collapse on the damp ground inside the cave. Seaflowers grow around me, their petals like salt-sticky fingers. Mimm and Trick jig at my wrists in comfort. I’ve made about three hundred souls, and Bly has passed them into Uln’s great chest, beckoning him out of shadow little by little, but still the creature’s eyes are glazed. His wings won’t lift with the lightness of flying. And my throat is dry. My bones feel hollow.

Bly paces in the lantern-lit cave. Soon my voice will grow gruff and fade. I’ll have to be silent until it comes back. I won’t be able to make the golden birds. And we won’t be able to save Linna. She’s going to die. She’s going to die.

“What are we going to do?” I whisper.

With every moment that passes, I am losing her. Losing the girl who gave me hoping. Even Mimm and Trick, snuggling against my neck, can’t make me forget.

“Maybe we should rest a bit,” says Bly.

It feels more painful to stop than to carry on. But there are only so many souls a girl can sing before she needs a glass of water. Bly tips rainwater he’s collected into a wooden cup.

“Here,” he says. “This’ll soothe your throat.”

Mimm and Trick follow us out to the mouth of the cave. We sit, watching the sea move under the sinking sun.

Bly turns to face me. “I’ve been thinking,” he says.

My mouth is full of rain. I swallow. “About?”

“The writings.” He scoots closer to me. “See, the First Mother was able to sing souls for the first cloisterwings because she loved them. And I can tell you love Uln — I can tell you love all birds — but I don’t know if that’s enough.”

I couldn’t make shimmer in the cloister, and now I can’t make souls for Uln. Mother Nine was right. I’m a wretched, bone-broken girl. I put down my cup. I hide my face in my hands.

“Delphernia, it’s not you — it’s about purpose. The First Mother made the cloisterwings to be companions. Their purpose was to love her the way she loved them. Because she was lonely. But Uln’s purpose — it’s not love. It’s escape. It’s rebellion. It’s — fight.”

“Fight,” I repeat, unsure.

“Do you think — I don’t know if it’ll work — but do you think you could give your voice claws?”

“Claws.”

“You know, make it harder. Make it sound like it has teeth.”

I cough and laugh at the same time. “Are you speaking in poems, Bly?”

“I’m serious as sea.”

He doesn’t sound serious as sea. He sounds like a man who laps at the sea and says it quenches his thirst. But I have no other plan.

I drink the last of my water. “I suppose I could try,” I say. The cloisterwings chirp, fluffing their feathers on my shoulder. I stroke their backs with one hand.

We walk into the cave again, and I watch the walls, all the creatures Bly has carved, while Mimm and Trick jab at seaflowers.

“Teeth and claws,” I whisper, sitting against a carving of an enormous flickermoth. I close my eyes.

And I try one last time.

I open my mouth and I sing.

Because there are some things that make me wish I had claws. Things that fill my heart with fight. They belong to me in the same way the color blue belongs to the sky.

Mother Nine. Her switch. All the bruises she left on my skin. How she tore the nail from my thumb. The babies in their mossy cribs, their sobbing drawn through bone, and Linna, caught in Mr. Crowwith’s choke of silence. Sveglia Emm, trapped underground, singing the small escapes of captive birds. And most of all the Sea-Singer, who sang a halo of light in a place that would never grow. One woman, standing in a lifeless place, changing the turn of the tides.

My voice grates out — no longer a flying thing. Tired and rough and tender. Because I’m not singing from the place in me that soars. I’m singing from the place in me that hides in the dark and plots at burning cloisters. The place in me that has a fighting heart, a heart that wants to scratch its way to freedom.

I crawl so deeply into the sound that it takes me away from the cave, takes me back in time. I feel hands grabbing, hear voices rattling. I hear the Sea-Singer. She screamed when they took her children away.

And, in the cave, I scream, too.

My voice echoes: a bleeding, ragged thing.

I only open my eyes because Bly’s cold hands are in my hands. I look up and see a rope of light, beaming brighter than any light-strand I’ve ever seen before. I take it in my hands. It’s thick and warm and heavy as stone. There’s a thrumming beneath its surface like anger, like will, like a pounding heart.

I knead the light-strand. My ripped thumb bleeds into its burning, brightening its color into richer flame. Then it struggles out of my grip, expanding and expanding. Mimm and Trick bob around it.

“What’s happening?” says Bly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The light stretches, shapes itself, forming the head of a bird-monster. Dazzling wings fan out above me. The cloisterwings dive into my lap.

A beast hovers above us.

A bird with claws and a sharp-hooked beak, feathers keen as knives.

A bird with fire for blood and blood in her fire.

A bird who’s ready to fight.