Salvage (19 page)

I gather the hair from the floor for composting, snap off the light, wave good-bye to Miyole, and jog down the stairs to where Perpétue awaits me in the docking well. She's been teaching me fixes. New fixes, better, more intricate than ever the ones I learned off Soli, but the same at their core. I can reroute power to the secondary fuel drive, unjam the landing gear, swap out the glow panels in the cockpit, operate the emergency cooling sluice, and more besides. And now, Perpétue says, I'm good enough with numbers I can try my hand at flying.

I pull myself up into the cockpit. Perpétue glances sidelong at my hair from the copilot's seat but doesn't say anything. I settle myself into the captain's chair, look down at the array of instruments spread out under my hands, and try to recall how to breathe.

“Remember, how I showed you,” Perpétue says.

I force a breath and tick down my checklist. Check my safeties, engine warm-up and temperature readings a go, hull pressurized, coolant levels good, no smallones or animals lingering under the thrust burners.

We kick up in a cloud of salt and grit. The engine reaches a healthy rumble-roar as we shoot up over the Gyre. My heart goes weightless. I push the ship faster, riding the thrill of commanding something so powerful.

“Steady, fi.” Perpétue winks at me, and I realize I'm grinning.

I ease off of the thrusters. The Gyre shrinks to an uneven gray line between the blue and the waste plain, and then we rise higher still, until the Earth lies curved below us. The atmosphere thins and darkens. High winds rock the cabin.

“Are you ready?” Perpétue checks her shoulder straps.

“Right so.” I push us forward, and the ship surges under my touch.

We break through the atmosphere with a small shudder. My stomach lurches as the ship's artificial gravity takes over. My lungs blossom full of air, and the small lingering pains I carry with me vanish. I am featherlight and strong.

“You feel that?” Perpétue asks.

I turn to her slowly, eyes wide. The hairs on my scalp prickle. I nod.

“Every time,” Perpétue says, and lets out a giddy laugh. “Every single time it's like that.”

I smile with her and breathe deep, drunk with the sudden luxury of not fighting my body for movement and air. Our ship rotates as we pierce the Void, so the stars spin out against the black, like a fan opening. Perpétue has me guide the sloop around the Earth's curve until the lights of Bhutto station come in to view, blinking in high rotation above the planet. I grip the controls. Is the
Parastrata
docked there? The
ther
?

“Easy, Ava.” Perpétue's voice nudges me gently. “Check our vectors.”

I drop my eyes to the instrument readouts. The numbers trickle up and down. It still takes all my concentration to translate them into sense.

“We need to bear up,” I say, eyes locked to the vector display. “Thirty-four degrees portside.”

“Good.” Perpétue watches as I guide the ship smoothly into our assigned entry bay. We touch down with a muffled
thunk
. “Pretty soon I can kick back while you fly this thing on all our runs.”

I laugh, but nervously. I'm already scanning the bay. We power down and unload our cargo of smelted plastic and cold-packed fish onto a trolley. Six other small ships share the dock with us, and the floor is thick with men. Some of them drag their cargo across the floor on carts like ours, while others sit with their legs dangling from their ships' open berths, spitting tobacco on the grimy floor and swilling coffee. I try to keep my head down, but I start every time someone brushes by me, or when the men break out in riotous laughter. I can't help looking up, searching faces for a sign of someone I know.

One of the men catches me looking. A rangy, bearded man in a knit cap. “Hey, girlie!” He whistles, as if to call a stray dog. “Girlie. Hey.”

I catch Perpétue's look telling me to act like I don't hear, but it's too late. My eyes meet his.

“I got a nice slot on my crew for you.” He slaps his knee in invitation. “If you don't mind working up a sweat.”

I stare at him, fish mouthed, till his meaning sinks in, then flush hot and duck into the sloop's hold with my face on fire.

“Eyes on your own crew,
hákarl
sucker,” Perpétue spits back. She sticks her head in the hold. “Ava—”

“I'm sorry.” I pick up another bundle of plastic and drop it on the hand truck with a clatter. “I don't know how to do this right, Perpétue.”

“You're doing well,” she says. “I should have warned you. Around these crews, you can't be a girl. You've got to be hard, be one of them. Here.” She grabs my hands and molds them into fists, then pries the center finger up. “That'll speak wonders for you.”

We try it out on the bearded crewman as we climb out of the hold. He goes red. His mates laugh and hoot and prod him until he shakes his head and goes back to his work. But we're left in peace to unload the rest of our cargo and truck it to the distribution deck for our pay.

Perpétue presses a slip of pay plastic into my hand. “There's information ports you can rent outside the commissary on tier five. See if you can dig up something about that
tante
of yours.”

“Alone?” I ask, suddenly uncertain. I've got only the barest idea how to use an information port, and that from watching Perpétue do it on our runs. “What about you?”

“I'm going to pick up some fission cakes, and then I'll be down on tier thirteen, taking in packages,” Perpétue calls as she wheels our empty trolley to the service lift. “I'll find you when we've got enough of a load to head back.”

I stand on the deck, surrounded by pallets of fruit and steel sheeting, clutching the thin square of plastic. I make for the personnel lifts, head ducked low, but I can't keep my eyes from fluttering up to the face of every man who passes me.

I close myself in the lift. A strange, dizzy familiarity tugs at me. If I shut my eyes, all I see is Jerej running, the door closing, the look on his face, and then blood on Iri's teeth. My father, holding her down.
Soraya Hertz, don't forget. . . .
I open my eyes. I'm alone in the lift. The keypad stares back at me. Only this time, I recognize the etched numbers:
TIERS
1
TO
42. A thrill zips through me. One to forty-two. What perfect lines the world falls into with this small scrap of knowledge. I'm a different girl than I was the last time I was here. I don't have anything to be afraid of.

I push the button for tier five. The lift drops, and when the doors roll open for me, I feel even in my skin, balanced and right as I haven't felt since the moment I stepped off the
Parastrata
for the first time.

Steam billows up to the commissary ceiling from a row of cookpots and woks. The cooks shuffle their pans over red electric coils and shout back and forth with the people waiting in line. Thick support pillars jut up throughout the room, each spoked by a circle of metal carrels housing the information ports. I slide into an empty one and sit staring blankly at it. A series of silent advertisements rotates on the screen, showing people standing by the seashore, laughing into their handhelds, and others pushing a tiny dog in a screened-in stroller down a tree-lined street. The words flit by too fast for me to make out.

I touch the screen. An orange light pulses to my right, above a slot in the machine. Someone has stuck a piece of adhesive paper to the side of the light, with block letters printed there.

Pa . . .
PAY HER
.
What? No. Here
.
PAY HERE
.

I slide the pay plastic into the slot. The machine sucks it in and spits it back out at me again, but the screen blinks to life, opening up one of the searcher programs I've seen Perpétue use. I hunch over the screen and peck in the name I had Miyole spell out for me.

S-O-R-A-Y-A H-E-R-T-Z

Columns of words and pictures spring up and crowd the screen. I sigh. This is going to take some while.

I tick through the links one by one. I hate how slow I am. By the time I figure one link is talking on a dead woman long gone, and another on a girl my age who's known for her skill at racing a huge beast called a horse, I've already chewed up precious minutes. But then, far down at the bottom of the page, I spot a word in the tangled mess of the link.
Mumbai
. Mumbai! I open the link.

A small, grainy image of a woman standing before a seated crowd spools across the screen. A lavender scarf drapes neatly over her head and around the shoulders of her tailored shirt. A small, dark triangle of hair shows where her scarf pulls back from her brow. I raise my hand unconsciously and touch the ragged tufts of my own hair.

Is it her? Letters float beneath the woman as she speaks.

Dr. Soraya Hertz
. My heart leaps. That
D-R
, that's what Miyole says I should look for, what groundways folk use to show a person's a so doctor.

There's more. The first word is easy. Mumbai. But the next?
Un–Univer—Univer-sit—y. University
. Mumbai University. I take a deep breath and push on.
At
, that's an easy one, but I trip over the next.
Kal . . . Kalina
. Kalina, it's no word I know. My heart knocks in my chest. A place, maybe?

“Mumbai University at Kalina,” I whisper aloud. “Dep . . . Depart . . . men—”

“Hey, kid.”

I spin around. Someone thickset—a man, I think at first—stands behind me, thumb hooked under the strap of a traveling bag. Bristly red hair sticks out beneath his short-brimmed hat.

Parastrata. Run
.

No. His skin is chapped with windburn. He's groundways. And then I look again. It's not a man, but a woman hidden beneath the rough traveling clothes. I'm leaping at shadows. I grip the back of the chair.

“What?” I say.

“You can't be here 'less you've bought something.” She points to the line of people waiting near the commissary kitchens. “That's the rules, don't you know?”

“Oh.” I glance at the frozen image of Soraya Hertz. I still have twenty minutes left on the port. “Sorry, so. Thank you. I'll be straight back.” I stand, pocket my pay plastic, and hurry to the line. I pick out a cup of something that ends up being sweet, spiced tea, too hot to drink just yet, and slide my plastic through a reader, mimicking the people in front of me. But when I get back to my carrel, the red-haired woman has planted herself in my chair. She sits with one leg sprawled out in the aisle, tapping her thumbs against the keyboard.

“Pardon, so missus?” I say quiet.

She doesn't look up.

“So missus?” I touch her shoulder.

She whirls on me. “What?”

“Can I have my seat back?”

“What, this?” She pulls an innocent face.

The balanced feeling hisses out of me, like air from a pneumatic lift. My first thought is to slink away, but I try to think what Perpétue would do.

“Right so,” I say. “I was looking at something. I claimed that port.”

“Did you now?” She makes a show of looking the terminal up and down. “Now how do you figure that?”

“You're using the time I paid for.” Precious money what could go to cooking oil or replacement parts for Perpétue's ship, burning away under this woman's fingers, and me childish fool enough to fall for her petty trick.

“You accusing me of stealing?”

She's used to getting away with this
, I realize. I wet my lips. “Right so I am, missus.”

Anger ripples over her face, but then she swallows it and smirks. She turns back to the screen. “I guess we'll see what you can do about it, then.”

I wish to the Mercies I had a knife like Perpétue's. Then no one would rip me off or step on me or push me aside as though I were windblown trash. No one would grab my face or drag my body where I've no want to go. My insides wouldn't go to jelly when someone yelled at me. I press my nails into the teacup's soft cardboard sides.
Not again. Never again
. I dash the cup forward. Its steaming contents splash over the back of the woman's neck. She screams. The galley goes silent around us.

“Bitch!” she shouts. “I'll have your guts, you little psychopath!”

I stand still as carved wood. The empty cup hangs from my hand, dripping steaming liquid over my fingers.
What have I . . .
And then I bolt. Away, dodging tables and pillars, stumbling over chairs, down the corridor to the lifts. It's only when the door is sliding closed and I'm jamming my finger against the button for tier thirteen that I realize no one has come after me.

I race back to Perpétue's ship, head down, ignoring the crewmen calling at me. I activate the ship's cargo doors and crawl up into her dark berth.
What have I done?
I press my palms over my eyes and sink down against the wall. The woman's scream still echoes in my head. She wasn't my father or Jerej or even Modrie Reller. She was a stranger, happy to cheat me the same as that rice broker tried to cheat Perpétue. Only Perpétue never tried to burn his skin off, so far as I knew. Maybe I was wrong to think some bud of my soul was left, that it might be growing back. Else, how could I do something like that?

“Ava?” Perpétue squints into the dark. “I've been looking everywhere, fi.”

I can't stop the awful, animal sound that falls out of my mouth. I turn away from her.

“What's wrong?” She hurries to kneel by me. “Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” I say, choking on a sob that won't come. If only that were all it was.

“Tell me, fi, tell me.” She pulls me close and rubs my arms, as if it's cold I'm suffering from.

I shake my head. “No. You'll hate me.” I can't let her see what kind of girl I really am.

“Did you steal something?”

“No.” I wipe the wet blur away from my eyes. “I think I found my modrie. She's at a place called Mumbai University at Kalina. There was more. I almost had it, but this woman tried to chase me off, and I threw hot tea and burned her.”