Salvage (20 page)

Perpétue stares into my face as if she's waiting to hear more. She blinks. “Is that all?”

I nod, miserable. Thank the Mercies I didn't have a knife.

Perpétue laughs, then quickly stifles it. “Guess we know you're no angel, then.”

“It was bad, Perpétue. What with . . .” I stumble. “The way . . . If I know what it is to hurt, doesn't that mean I should know better than to bring that back around on someone else?”

“No.”

“No?”

“All this suffering.” Perpétue looks deep and unblinking at me. “It doesn't make us saints, fi. It only makes us human. You understand?”

I shake my head. I don't know if I believe her. “You would never have done that.”

“You think I'm a good person?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Why?”

I look up into the dark recesses of the berth, thinking. “You're kind to me and to Miyole. You never cheat anybody out of their share when we ship in supplies to the Gyre. You're . . .” One of Miyole's words comes to me. “You're
civil
to people.”

Perpétue draws her knife. She turns its blade over in her hands. “You know why I carry this?”

I shake my head. “Protection?”

“That part's show.” She flips the knife and catches it. “Mostly it's so I remember.”

“Remember?”

She holds the blade up to her face, beside the deep scar running ruin through her lips. “This knife gave me that. There was a man. . . .” Perpétue looks away. When she speaks again, her voice has the bite of metal. “Miyole's father. He meant to kill me, but I did for him instead.”

I want to say something, but the air around us has gone so still, I don't dare disturb it.

Perpétue looks at me. “Would it have been
good
, Ava, would it have been
civil
, if I'd let him kill me?”

“No,” I whisper. “But you don't go around cutting people up either. Or burning anyone.”

“There's a balance,” Perpétue says. “There's what you're forced to do, there's what you choose, and everything else—most things—are a mix. At best, you'll spend your life trying not to get hurt, but trying not to do the hurting, either. You won't always come through, but it's the best anyone can do. It's the trying I'd call good.”

Perpétue turns the knife around so its pommel faces me. “Here.”

I look from it to her, confused.

“You're the one who needs it now.”

“I can't,” I say. “It's yours.” I can't imagine me with her knife any more than I can imagine her without it.

“You can,” she says, and presses it into my hand.

My fingers close over the grip.

Perpétue smiles and slaps my shoulder. “Come on, we've got enough cargo to head back planetside. Miyole's waiting.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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P
erpétue lets me break dock and fly us back through the atmosphere. The sky looks sick as we approach the Gyre. Over the open water, clouds mass and muddy themselves to an ashen yellow-gray. Lightning branches above the waves.

“I thought it never stormed here.” I risk a quick look away from the instruments.

“It doesn't.” Perpétue frowns at the thunderheads looming like monstrous prows over the waste plain. Rain begins to fall, mixing with the salt spray clouding our front viewport. “Here, hand over the controls.”

I surrender the captain's seat to her. High swells rock the whole of the Gyre by the time we fight our way through the winds to the Caribbean enclave. Sea and sky churn. Perpétue's face is gray. Neither of us has to speak what the other is thinking.
Miyole
.

We bring the ship to a hover over Perpétue's barge. Waves foam over the deck, and the whole structure rocks to and fro. Something red flashes on the roof. Miyole's kite, snarled in the clothesline. As I watch, it snaps taut, and then the wind snatches it up, out to the roiling gray. The water heaves the docking well up with each crest, then slams it down again into the trough. Impossible to land.

The monster
, I remember.
They were right. . . .

Perpétue smacks the controls and curses the sloop. “Come on.” She brings us in lower, lower, until the waves slap its tile-armored belly.

“Perpétue . . . ,” I say, nervous.

An awful crack breaks through the howling roar. A three-story structure on a barge several roofs down comes loose from its pontoons with a metallic shriek. It tips to the crashing sea, slow, so slow, and then it hits, sending up a flume of dark water and foam. A great wave rolls toward us, snapping the makeshift bridges.

“Perpétue!” I scream, and reach over to pull up on the thrusters. The sloop heaves up just in time to keep the wave from dragging us under.

Perpétue unbelts herself and climbs out of the captain's seat. “Take the controls.”

“What are you . . .”

“Take them,” she snaps.

I clamber in, snap the shoulder straps over my chest, and grab the thruster handles. Perpétue already has the engines at three-quarters power, trying to fight the wind.

“Bring us low.” Perpétue clips a short-range radio to her collar.

I struggle to keep the sloop righted above the water. It shudders and jags in the wind, but I bring it to hover some thirty feet above the landing pad on Perpétue's barge.

“Open the hatch.”

I don't have to ask what she means to do. I pull the hatch release. In a matter of breaths, I see Perpétue out in the gale, clinging to the end of the steel ladder. The wind lifts the ladder sideways, even with her weight added to it. I bring the ship lower. The walls of Perpétue's house loom dangerously close, windows dark gray as the sea.

The short-range coms crackle. “Ava?”

I flip the coms to hands-free. “Here!”

“Magnetize the ladder. The switch by the hatch release.”

I see the one she means. “Got it!” I snap the switch. The ladder drops to the metal-plated deck.

Crackling silence.

Then, “I'm down.” I can barely make out Perpétue's voice over the whipping of the wind and the roaring waves. “Try not to go higher or the ladder'll pull free. I'll be quick.”

Wind batters the ship, and all around, the water moves in great, rolling, gray-green hills. Debris from the waste plain washes over the decks and swamps Perpétue's docking well. The far edge of the barge lists to the side, partially swallowed by the waves.

Perpétue's panting fills the coms channel. “She's not here!”

“Where else—” But then I see, through the sheets of falling water and crashing waves. Miyole, and Kai beside her, waving from the widow's walk of a ramshackle construction two roofs down.

“Perpétue!” I shout. The wind shoves the sloop lower, and for a slip, all I see is terrible, deep water with no end, but I bring it up again. I can't see Miyole anymore, but I know which building it is. “I saw her!”

“Coming!” Perpétue dashes from the house to the ladder, slipping and scrabbling in the wet. She doesn't bother to climb beyond the bottom rungs. “Up, Ava, quick.”

I pull the ship up, away from Perpétue's house, and swing wide to come around to the widow's walk. I hold the sloop steady as Perpétue dangles from the end of the ladder. I squint through the lashing rain. The only metal to latch on to is the thin railing itself.

She'll never get down
, I think, but then a sudden break in the wind drops us almost on top of the neighboring house.

“I see them.” Her voice squawks through the coms. A beat. Then, “I'm down. Sending Miyole up.”

“Right so.” Sweat slicks my palms, but I don't dare let go to wipe them dry.

At that moment, darkness falls over the viewport. The whole of the Gyre sucks down, away from the sloop.

“Oh, god,” Perpétue's voice is suddenly clear. Lightning flashes, illuminating a vast wall of water, higher even than the sloop, rolling straight at us. It sweeps up the debris and the structures of the Gyre and hovers above us. It turns white as it begins to curve over.

“Fly, Ava!” Perpétue shouts. “We've got the ladder. Fly!”

I jam the thruster controls up, fighting the wind and the blinding rain, engines hot. Pieces of plastic sheeting and plasterboard rush by, and then the wave is there, racing to meet us.

“Up!” Perpétue screams.

But it's too late.

The wave's crest slams us sideways, and we spin over the water. The viewport is sky and water, sky and water.
I'm going to die
, I think, but my body acts without me, fighting for even keel and height. We roar up into the sky, engines at full power. The clouds revolve and thicken, and everywhere is darkness.

Then suddenly bright, cold sun and blue sky. Below, a vast pinwheeled storm sweeps its arms over the water.

“Perpétue! Miyole! Kai!”

The open coms line fisses with static.

I program the ship's autopilot to keep us in a holding pattern, unstrap myself, and climb below. Waterlogged packages spill across the floor, what's left of Perpétue's delivery. The wind whistles from the open mouth of the berth. I crawl to the edge of the sunlit square.

“Please,” I whisper to the Mercies, but then I reach the bolts holding the ladder to the sloop. My hands brush frayed bristles of metal rope. The ladder is gone. I push myself up on my knees, away from the edge. “No.”

A whimper cuts the darkness behind me. I turn.

“Miyole?”

She hugs her knees with bloodied hands and presses her back hard to the berth's wall. “They were behind me,” she says. “My manman and Kai. They were behind me.” There is nothing we can do but wait while the storm slowly churns its way north and west, away from the Gyre. Or what once was the Gyre. Some hours later we duck back below the tails of the clouds to find the sea below us picked clean and glittering. I check our coordinates. They're right. I bring us lower and skim back and forth over the water, praying to the Mercies I'll spot the remains of a pontoon or a piece of driftwood, anything Perpétue and Kai could have caught hold of. But there's nothing. The Gyre is simply gone. No boats, no pontoons, not a scrap of the waste plain what gathered there over the generations.

A hollow space opens in me, like my chest is filled with Void. It sucks all the air from my lungs. I was not ready for this, this total, spinning loss. Was it even a day ago Perpétue was joking I should fly all our runs? And now her gone. And Miyole . . .

“Miyole.” My voice sounds unsteady, and I feel cold, as if I'm watching everything from somewhere deep inside.

She lifts her head and stares at me from the copilot's chair. We've washed her bleeding hands with saltwater and wrapped them in strips of silk from one of Perpétue's parcels. I cut open all the packages with Perpétue's knife while we waited out the storm. Mostly, they were full of oddments and luxuries, gold-painted eggs, cold-sealed vials full of something what might be quicksilver, cloth so thin you could make it flutter with a breath. Nothing useful.

“We've got to find someplace to land,” I say.

Miyole nods.

“We can look for your manman and Kai from there,” I say, even though I know they're empty words. We can look, but they're sunk to the endless bottom with the monsters and mermaids and all else the Gyre folk liked to talk on around their fires.

Miyole looks out the window into the soft dusk falling over the ocean. She's aged a million turns since we left her safe on the Gyre before the storm.

“My manman's dead,” she says. “Her and Kai.”

“Do you have any other family?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.

Miyole shakes her head. She turns from the window. “We should go to that place you always talk about. Mumbai,” she says. “We can find your
tante
.”

Dr. Soraya Hertz, Mumbai University at Kalina. It isn't much, but it's more than nothing. One of the sloop's aft engines has taken on a gutter and whine. I haven't been able to check the ship's armored tile plates, but I suspect some of them are damaged or else ripped off altogether in the storm. We need to set down, and soon.

“Right so,” I say. “Mumbai.”

I scroll through the navigation log and select the location of the nearest city east of us—the one with the slippery rice dealer. Once we're nearer to land, we can pick up the network and find Mumbai's coordinates. And then we're gone, skimming unsteadily over the water with the engines at quarter lift. The sun goes down before us. We are alone in the air. I can't afford to look away from the sloop's jittering instrument panels, but I reach out my hand and take Miyole's as the night swallows us whole.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

W
hen we first see Mumbai, I think I've fallen asleep at the controls. Only I could never dream something like this. A towering seawall surrounds the city. Clusters of squat, round buildings cling to the top of it, like the barnacles that grew on the sides of the Gyre's ships. Inside, massive crystalline structures rise from the earth and disappear into the low-lying clouds.
Skyscrapers
, that's the word Perpétue would have used. To the north, the land rises in a patchwork of roofs and trees, divided by gray trainways and the gossamer threads of rivers.

“Miyole,” I say.