Salvage (3 page)

Luck looked up and our eyes met. Blue like welding flame ringed his irises, growing darker as it moved in on his pupils, like the patches of deep ocean you see from close orbit. Nothing like the brown or muddy-green color we shared on the
Parastrata
. I knew I wasn't supposed to look on him like that. I never would have looked, except I couldn't help some of Soli's Soliness rubbing off on me.

Chinny chose that exact moment to knock over the pail. Milk gushed around Luck's shoes and swamped the hay.

“Damn!” Luck jumped back. I expected him to jerk Chinny's lead and twist her long, floppy ear, which is what I'd been shown to do when the goats got nasty. Instead, he sighed and rubbed his forehead so his hair stuck up sideways. “You don't have a coaxer, do you?”

I unhinged my gaze from his and looked down into the hay. “Right so,” I said. “But it's always broke, and they say the fix isn't in it.”

“Soli'll fix it,” Luck said. “Won't you, Soli?”

“I'll take a look,” Soli agreed.

“But you're . . . ,” I started to say.

Luck and Soli's odd looks stopped me. Soli couldn't really do fixes, could she?

My face went hot. “I mean, you're a guest here.” I hadn't truly believed Soli about her being on Fixes, but if her brother said so, maybe it was true.

“Plus, you're a girl,” Llell butted in. “Girls can't do fixes.”

“Can.” Soli crossed her arms and turned to me. “Show it to me.”

I led them to the back of the pens, clapping my hands to move the goats out of our way. Llell and me tried to keep our distance from Luck, but he walked so close his arm nearly brushed mine. I flipped up the lid of the junk locker, leaned inside, and rattled around until I brought up the coaxer, a foam-lined udder bowl sprouting brittle plastic tubes for milk. I handed it to Luck, and he tossed it to Soli.

“The regulator's all bust.” I shot a nervous look at Llell. This was real now. What if someone came in and caught us with Luck, and doing fixes no less? I swallowed and looked back at Soli. “It either drips milk and takes forever, or it pulls too hard and burns out.”

“You have my fixers?” Soli asked Luck.

He unsnapped a vinyl pack from his belt and tossed it to her. “I wish you'd keep them. Their head Fix keeps talking on how slow I am.”

“It's only till the meet's over. Then you can go back to your precious sheep.” Soli popped open the pack and unrolled it across the top of the junk locker. Dozens of shiny silver readers and tools glistened in its pockets. Soli selected one with a power jack and an amp reader and snapped it into the coaxer's line-in.

“This might take a minute, depending what's wrong,” she said. She hopped up on the locker beside her tools and looked up at me. “I could show you the fix, if you want.”

“No.” Llell cut in. She shot a hard look at me and her voice went high. “I don't think we should be here, Ava.”

I hesitated. They were all looking at me, Soli and Llell and Luck. The words snarled up in my throat, and all I could come up with was a high-pitched “Umm . . .”

Llell spun on her heel. “Hurry on, Ava. We're leaving.”

Soli snorted and rolled her eyes. “What're you afraid of?”

I paused, darting my eyes from my old friend to the new.

Llell turned back. “Ava.” It was one sharp word, but it said so much.
Come here
, and
obey
, and
choose
. I wasn't so girl then, not yet, and because of my odd skin, Llell was the one stooping to be my friend.

I shook my head. “I'm staying,” I said quietly.

Llell's eyes shot wide. “Come how?”

“I'm staying.”

Llell's face crumpled, and then went hard and cold. “Right so.” She swept one last look at me and edged out of the bay. I chewed on my lower lip as I watched her go.

“You sure you don't want to learn?” Soli raised an eyebrow at me.

I backed up a step. “No, no.”

Soli shrugged and set about prying the casing from the regulator.

“I should clean up Chinny's mess,” I said.

“I'll help you,” Luck said.

“Mmmn,” Soli agreed, already bent over her work.

“No.” I accidentally looked at Luck again and pushed my eyes down. This was going too far. “That's not men's work.”

A twitch of confusion passed Luck's face. He frowned. “It is on the
Æther
. Besides, it's my fault. I wasn't s'posed to be on this duty firstways.”

“Please.” My voice rose. “Let me do it.”

I grabbed a pitchfork and a mucking brush and pushed my way through the goats. Chinny stood by herself near the gate, slowly chewing a mouthful of hay.

“Some bad matter, you.” I aimed a halfhearted kick at her. “Shoo.”

I started pitching the sopping hay into the big, boxy methane digester at the side of the paddock, studiously ignoring Luck. Modrie Reller said the methane digester would churn dung, old hay, and whatever else we slopped into it down to a tank in the ship's guts, where it would rot away. Then the methane coming off the rot would turn to fuel for powering lights or raising the pneumatic lift, whatever the ship needed. A footstep scuffed behind me in the hay. I froze.

“Here.” Luck eased the brush from under my arm. “At least let me hold that while you're clearing up.”

I nodded, face and arms hot, and went back to my work.

“Um . . .” Luck slapped the brush against his leg absentmindedly and looked up at the rafters, where a pair of sparrows nested. “How long's the coaxer been bust, then?”

I hefted another forkful of wet hay into the digester's mouth. “Half a turn.” My words came out a grunt.

“And your Fixes don't have it up yet?”

“Nothing wrong with our Fixes.” I stopped pitching hay and glared at him. “It's not Priority, is all.”

“I didn't mean it bad.” He squatted next to me and pushed the mucking brush across the milk-damp floor. “Soli'll have it up. Don't worry.”

“Will you stop cleaning!” My voice came out shrill. I slapped a hand over my mouth.

Luck looked at me as if I'd bitten him.

I dropped my head and my voice. “I'm sorry. I mean, please, so, don't trouble yourself with it.”

Luck laughed. “Did you just call me so?”

I nodded and peeked up.

“You're some odd girl,” he said. “You're the same age as Soli, right?”

I shrugged and nodded again.

“I'm only two turns older than you, then,” he said. “What're you doing calling me so?”

I shook my head and wished a breach would open in the hull below me and suck me out into space. “I didn't mean any harm.”

Luck started cleaning again. “All your crewe is odd.”

I let myself look on him. His bangs swung back and forth over his eyes as he scrubbed the floor. His shoulders tensed and rounded with the motion. A strange, light tickle lifted my stomach, and my ears fizzled, as if I'd come too near the engine's electromagnet.

“Isn't it the same on your ship?” I asked.

Luck snorted. “No.” He looked up and saw me watching him. “Well, some. Except we clean our own messes and Soli can be on Fixes.”

I sat cross-legged in the hay and straightened my skirt over my knees. I looked over at Soli, sitting on top of the junk locker, eyes narrowed in concentration. “I could never do that.”

“You could,” Luck said. “You're on Livestock, right so?”

I nodded.

Luck went back to scrubbing. “Fixes is a lot like Livestock, except with less to muck and more figuring. You can do figuring, can't you?”

I could count, sure, and even do some addings and takings away. But Modrie Reller always told me not to be proud and flaunt, especially not in front of men. I started to shake my head but caught Luck's eye again. Something about how he was talking to me, how he was looking at me and not past me made me want to step full into recklessness. I changed my shake into a slow nod.

Luck nodded with me. “You could do Fixes, then.”

“But you have to read, right so?”

Luck frowned. “Can't you read?”

I hesitated. “Course,” I lied. It sounded like what he'd want to hear.

Luck smiled. “You'd be good as Soli after a turn or two.”

I put my hand on the hay between us and leaned forward, mouth open with the start of a question. Blood surged into Luck's cheeks, brightening them as red as ther thread. Our eyes met again.

“It's up.” Soli called. She wove through the goats, holding the coaxer aloft so its tubes didn't drag the ground. “Who wants to try it?”

Luck and I both stood. He held Chinny still while I strapped the coaxer to her and bunched the tubes into the neck of a jug.

“Try knocking that over,” I said to the goat. She glared back at me.

I toggled the controls to green and flipped the regulator switch. The coaxer whirred to life. Chinny bleated unhappily at me, but she didn't cry out in pain or give me the smug look I knew meant the coaxer wasn't doing its job. Milk filled the tubes and trickled into the jar.

I clapped my hands. “It's up!” I grabbed Soli and danced her around. “You did it!”

“Told you she'd have the fix,” Luck said, and grinned at his sister. He leaned over and slapped her on the back, the way I'd only ever seen men do with each other. Then he looked at me, and his blush crept back.

They stayed only a few more days while their father finished trade talks with my great-grandfather Harrah and our crewes sealed the agreement with a pair of marriages—two of our girls to two of their men. I let Soli show me a few fixes on the sly, 'specially some to do with the coaxer and the lift to the chicken coops, while Llell kept a cool distance.

I hardly saw Luck, except for across the room at meals, when the women stood waiting against the wall while the men ate. But he looked at me sometimes, twice at the weddings, and smiled at me once when he passed through the livestock bay with his father, on the way to inspect our copper bales. That was when I started daydreaming, in my slow moments waiting for bread to come out of the machine or lifting and agitating lengths of wool in the dye bath, about what it would be like to be Soli's sister, to learn fixes and real figuring, to talk on things with Luck and wear neat-trimmed clothes every day.

The chemical smell of dye cuts the air. Modrie Reller's fingers dig into my scalp. Now Luck will be going on nineteen turns, the right age for taking a firstwife, and me to be married.
To someone in the Æther crewe
, Modrie Reller said. Perhaps to someone in the captain's family, if my father matches our stations in the usual way.

“Will I be a firstwife?” I ask Modrie Reller. My heart beats so hard I can almost taste it.
Let it be Luck. Please let it be Luck
.

“Your father will have it raveled,” she repeats. She pushes my head down over the sink again.

The dye burns. I close my eyes tight and grip the sides of the utility sink. To keep the pain at bay, I think on how it will be to be a bride. How the women will wash me with real, cool water, braid skeins of copper into my hair and slip bracelets over my wrists, fasten my birthright pendant around my neck, and solder coins to my bridal headdress. They will bind my hand to my husband's at the wrist, and then . . . My imagination falters. After that, they'll give me over to my husband's crewe, and I'll only ever see my ship and birthcrewe at runend meets. It's too much, like the thought of stepping purposefully from the airlock into the cold nothing of the Void. My half-formed fantasies about Luck and Soli turn to vapor. My legs tremble, half at the thought of leaving my crewe, half from the strain of kneeling over the sink so long.

“There,” Modrie Reller says. She drops a cooling cloth over my head and neck. Iri helps me stand and wraps it in a turban. They have me sit and wait while the cloth does its work, taming the harshness of the dye and unbrittling my hair. When it's done, Iri unwraps the turban and my hair falls in rust-red waves to my waist. For a little while, at least, I am still one of my crewe.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

M
odrie Reller sends me off to oversee the smallgirls on kitchen duty. The narrow room is a bustle of hot pans and girls edging past one another with bowls of batter for the eggcakes we'll bring to the meet. I divvy up the cooling cakes onto platters as they come out of the ovens. Kitchen duty is my favorite. It takes figuring and counting, which I am best at of all the women, better even than Modrie Reller, though I know enough not to say so.

“Careful,” I call to Eme, a child of maybe seven turns, the daughter of my father's fourthwife. She smacks an egg against the side of the bowl, dripping sticky white all over the table and flecking the dough with shell.

“Here.” I swallow my annoyance. Seven turns is plenty long to learn how to crack an egg. I take one, rap it sharply against the counter, hold it over the bowl, and use my thumbnail to finish the job. “Right so?”

Eme nods. I watch her take an egg, tap it more gently, and carefully empty its contents into the mixing bowl.

“How many did you put in?” I ask.

“Six, like always,” she says.

“But we're tripling the recipe,” I say. “So you need . . .”

“Sixteen?” she guesses.

“No,” I say. “Try again.”

She counts silently to herself. “Eighteen?”

“Right so,” I say.

Modrie Reller appears in the doorway. “Ava,” she calls over the banging pans and sizzling oil. She looks sharp at me, and I know she's seen me showing Eme figuring, which is dangerous close to flaunting. “Where are those cakes?”

“Near done,” I call back. “Ten cooling, two cooking, two to go.”