An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  Everyone in Quarry Wing stayed out Aster’s way, and it was Frannie from R deck, either Ravine Wing or River if Aster remembered right, who finally got through to her. “Oy, the Surgeon told me to give this to you,” she said, handing Aster an envelope. They passed each other on the way to shifts. Frannie often played messenger woman. She had a lot of contacts and a wide network of friends, lovers, and people who owed her favors, making her perfect for delivering post.

  Aster waited until after shift to read Theo’s letter, doing it in the kitchens while meals of watery porridge were being prepared. She leaned up against the counter, trying to hide from the gaze of watchful guards in the corridors. Here, she felt a little less under scrutiny than she did when out in the wing or in her quarters.

  With steady fingers, she broke the seal, pulled the folded letter out of the envelope, and read:

  Dearest Aster (and that you are, I swear it, more dear to me than any other),

  I’m writing so that I might clarify my intentions regarding our meeting. You won’t pick up your radio. You will not agree to see me. My hope is that your sheer love for the written word will compel you to read.

  Uncle frightens me. He has since I was very young, and though I am sometimes, shamefully, thankful that his affection for me often saved me from the ire of my father, my chief feelings for him are those of absolute disdain. He knows that I hold you in the utmost regard. He is jealous. He is possessive of me. Any time you and I are together, it is fuel for this jealousy, which he will take out against you until he eventually feels the need to remove you from the picture entirely.

  I acted out in fear, in anger, to drive you away, and I regret it. There is something I wish to discuss with you, which I can’t put in paper lest we both be in danger. I believe it will be of great interest to you, however, and this is my way of making it up to you for my callous behavior.

  Kind regards,

  Theo

  He’d written the letter in Q, and it was amusing to see his proper, updeck way of speaking in a language known for its informality. Aster wished he’d told her this before. She didn’t know why people were so indirect.

  * * *

  Theo—the Surgeon, or Surgeon General Smith as he was called by his students—led a seminar on neurophysiology with eleven upperdeck men and one middeck man twice a week, and today Aster had been invited. That was what he’d meant to discuss with her in person. She would not be going as herself; she’d be attending as Aston.

  He rescheduled the seminar to the evening so that she could attend. It began fifteen minutes after her shift. Today there’d be discussion on the pathology of neurodisease, and Aster put away some of her anger and sadness to make way for curiosity. She’d never been in a real school setting, and she looked forward to it. It was a break from Lieutenant, from Lune, from Ainy, from Giselle, from all the troubles troubling her.

  “Are you nervous?” asked Theo when he came to collect her. He examined her up and down in her Aston attire.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I should be the one asking you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and gathered papers and folders into a brown suitcase. “I would rather worry while we’re together than be worrying while apart from you. I really am sorry about those things I said to you in anger and fear.”

  She didn’t want to forgive him yet. “We will be late if we don’t leave soon, no?”

  Theo nodded and pulled on a wool sports jacket over his shirt. Aster opened the hatch for him, held it with the side of her hip as he went through. Tall, Theo had to duck, but he made even that look graceful.

  They climbed the stairs to G deck, strolled a lingering path from Gosling to Granite. Aster jogged to the glass observatory, the Field Decks visible below them through glass, so, so beautiful. Green. Dotted with color. Wild and fragrant.

  “Come, Aster,” said Theo, touching her on the shoulder.

  “Yes, sorry.”

  He guided her around the corner into Gorge Wing, quiet and empty save for one young man running off to a class. He slipped into a cabin at the very end of the corridor. Gorge, along with Gully and Game Hen, were reserved for schooling. “Remember, you are here to observe and enjoy the lesson, but I think it’s best you not participate.”

  Aster was there under the pretense of being the Surgeon’s teaching assistant. She sat outside the circle of desks and took notes.

  “Surgeon Smith?” the lone middeck man said. He asked the most questions, raising his hand uncertainly every five minutes.

  “Yes, Mr. Ludnecki, what is it?”

  Aster looked up, spilling ink from her well onto her notes.

  “You said that pain disorders qualify as neurodysfunction, but what is the difference between neurological and psychological pain?” asked Ludnecki. “Both have chemical components, do they not?”

  Aster rushed silently from her chair to the desk where Theo had set his bags. She dug inside his leather tote as the class continued its conversation.

  “Excuse me, sir? Do you realize your boy is rifling through your things?” asked one of the upperdeck men. Hardly a man. A lad, not quite full-grown yet, with an awkwardness to his skinny limbs.

  “Didn’t you say you wished me to take attendance?” said Aster. She hoped her High tongue impressed the boy who had called her out.

  Theo shot her a confused glance but did not protest. He was still trying to weave his way back into her good graces. “The roster is in the outside pocket,” he said.

  She found the off-white envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper, then started reading out the names: “Evans, Clark?”

  “Surgeon, do we really have to do this?”

  “Quentin, Harry?”

  “Present.”

  When Aster made it to Ludnecki, she was disappointed to find out it was not her Ludnecki. “Ludnecki, Cassidy?”

  “Um, yes. That’s me.” Cassidy, the middeck fellow with light-brown skin and hair gelled back, put a finger into the air.

  “Very well,” said Aster, and returned to her chair.

  “Wait, you didn’t call me,” said someone Aster didn’t care about. In her mind he was a William, Peter, or Steven. Something handsome but tired. “Boy, could you check the list? The name’s Timothy Walton.”

  “We’ll sort it later,” said the Surgeon. “Please, everyone, back to the discussion.”

  Aster took the roster sheet and circled the name again and again, caught up in the silky sway of her pen against the paper. Seamus Ludnecki, not Cassidy, was the man who’d checked out the books Ainy had meant steal, but the surname was uncommon, not one Aster had heard before. Surely Seamus was a brother of Cassidy’s? She underlined Cassidy’s information. He lived on L deck, Laurel Wing. Aster knew it was a sign from Lune. The time for grieving had passed. Now was the season of searching.

  * * *

  Aster stayed in disguise as she made her way to Cassidy’s cabin. “L-31, L-31, L-31,” Aster said aloud, squinting as she looked at the hand-drawn map someone sold for each deck, copied from blueprints, with notes about which guards lurked where. According to said map, she should be there, but she was in Lark Wing. Definitely wrong.

  “Excuse me. I am looking for Laurel Wing,” she said to a woman fiddling with an instrument in the corridor, restringing, it looked like. Her eyebrow was cocked and her mouth hung open as she wrapped the metal wire around a knob.

  “Sure, dove, Laurel Wing’s not far. You got to make it over to starboard side, though,” the woman said.

  “The map specified port.”

  “Someone switched Laurel and Lark around ages ago, long before I was born, so I can’t tell you why. You can cut through Lemon Tree Wing, then turn right at the fork, and you’re there once you get to the end of that passageway.”

  “Thank you.” Aster had seen patients on L deck before, but didn’t know it as well as some of the other middeck levels. Mostly families lived here, like on M. Some folks worked a mandated shift, but others had normal trades. Shoemakers and
watchmakers.

  She reached Laurel fifteen minutes later, found L-31 roughly where it should be. “Hello,” she called from outside the hatch. There was no speaker to buzz. “Hello?” she called out again. “The Surgeon sent me.”

  Beyond the door, there was the shuffling of papers, the thud of something hitting the floor. “One moment,” Cassidy said. He opened the hatch, his face falling when he recognized her. “You.”

  “And you. Cassidy Ludnecki.”

  He tried to shut the hatch but Aster was too quick, slipping into his cabin just as the metal was about to smash her hand.

  “You don’t belong here,” said Cassidy. In Theo’s seminar he’d been reticent, timid, and nervously enthusiastic. Now he was cocky and cavalier.

  “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

  “You’re only a little twit when it’s something important, then? I won’t say it again: you need to get out.” Cassidy loosened his tie and pulled the loop over his head, tossed it onto his cot, then unbuttoned his collar. Sweat dripped from under his chin down his neck, making the black hair there coil. Aster watched him disrobe, and she felt something she could only characterize as . . . distant disappointment. Not the sort of upset that ruined days, but a generic and faraway disillusionment that spoke to her acceptance of a mediocre status quo.

  “It’s been my observation that you middles can go a number of ways,” Aster said. “Everyone I’ve met thus far on L has been very kind. I thought you might be too.”

  “Kindness is unnecessarily glorified,” he responded, his voice a mix of world-weariness and irritation. Too angry to be sad and vice versa.

  “Sometimes it is, yes.” Sometimes it wasn’t. “You must know what it’s like to be talked down to as the only middecker in the Surgeon’s class. But you call me a twit. Why?”

  “Because that’s what you are.” Cassidy popped open a can of peach juice, guzzled it. Peach Jimmy. A thick, fizzy beverage popular among lowdeckers. Old, old, old, from when Matilda left the Lifehouse. A decade ago someone went through the remaining few boxes to copy the recipe—got something pretty close to it and repackaged the new version in the old cans. Aster could taste the carbonated, sticky sweetness on her tongue just watching Cassidy tip the can back and drain those last few drops. She could hardly ever find it. Last harvest year, she’d discovered a whole crate of the old ones, unwrapped, in a random P deck storage crate, tucked among mops, orange-scented cleaner, and moldy oats. “Do you want some? I can cut open the can for you and you can lick the inside, like a dog.”

  Twit, now dog, and she’d heard much worse so many times that she did not care, could not care. She didn’t need much. Didn’t need to be adored and loved and called nice things. All she wished for was perfunctory respect paid to the fact that she was, indeed, alive. Real, breathing, thinking, movable parts and all.

  “You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.”

  She went to his desk, from where he’d pulled out the Peach Jimmy, and got one for herself. She popped it open and took a long sip, not finishing it. Then she opened each of the three that remained, repeating the same behavior. One sip from each.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he snapped.

  “Whatever I want.” She took another long drink from the first can until it was about halfway empty, then poured the remainder on top of his pillow.

  “Stop that right now!”

  Cassidy grabbed her arm and jerked her away from the remaining cans, but she was too close. She pulled out of his grip and succeeded in toppling one of the mostly filled cans with the tip of her finger. The thick juice gathered into a puddle over the papers on his desk. She hoped they were all very important and very irreplaceable.

  “Are you daft?” he said.

  Yes.

  He sighed angrily. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Aster thought he might cry out like they did in plays she’d read: Woe! Lo! Why have the Heavens forsaken their child? She took pity on this weak-boned middeck boy and told him the purpose of her visit: “I’m here because I need to know how to find your brother Seamus.”

  His grip tightened on her arm. “What did you say?” The edges of his hairline frayed into curls from sweat. He was a nervous man, he lived a nervous life, and he’d die young, of a heart attack, most likely. Stress rewired the body, and most likely his had already effectively been transformed on the inside into byways, crossways, tunnels, and bridges of overstimulating hormones. The heart couldn’t handle it.

  A small coffee stain blemished his shirt, apparent now that his blazer was unbuttoned. His shoes, Aster saw, were worn and gray. At some point they’d been black, but that point was many, many years ago.

  “How do you know about Seamus?” His voice cracked the way young teenage boys often did. He began pacing the cabin. Aster remembered the frequency of questions he’d asked at the Surgeon’s seminar, and now she wondered whether that had been a manifestation of his restless intensity.

  “Twenty-five years ago a man named Seamus Ludnecki checked out a book I need,” she said. “I can’t imagine there are many other Ludneckis around.”

  His lips moved to form a response, then stilled. Then he smiled. “You are relentless, yongwa.”

  “Aye. You speak the Low pidgin?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You called me yongwa. Not even the Surgeon calls me that, and he speaks Low like a native.”

  “It’s just something I overheard once. Had a nurse who used it,” Cassidy said.

  “Your accent was perfect.”

  “You could detect my accent with a single word?”

  “Yes.”

  And now more of it made sense. Like the Peach Jimmy, considered a lowbrow drink by even those as high as N deck. And the age of his shoes.

  “Well then, you’re mistaken. I was born on L. I’d have no reason to speak Low.”

  Aster switched to a pidgin dialect used up and down the lowdecks, not particular to a deck, side of ship, or corridor. It was the language guards used to speak to them in. “Why are you lying to me? You are growing flustered, I can tell. You pace and pace and pace.”

  “I can’t understand you when you speak that heathen tongue,” Seamus replied in Middle.

  “Aye, you can, lywa awo deni sylf.” Lying one who denies himself. “Betraya na ver.” Truth betrayer. “Who are you, Seamus Ludnecki of L deck? Something tells me you are not from Laurel Wing. Should I call the Surgeon and let him know?” Aster showed her two-way radio to make the point. “Aston to Theo,” she said into the speaking piece, glad that she remembered at the last second that she was still in disguise.

  A crackly pause, then the Surgeon’s voice: “Here. What do you need?”

  “I am presently with your student, Cassidy Lu—”

  Cassidy reached for the radio, but she pulled it away before he could get his hands on it. “Talk later, Theo. If I a die, the man who did it lives in L-31. Goodbye.” She cut the transmission.

  “Look, it’s not what you think it is, whatever ridiculous scenario you’ve cooked up in your brain.” Cassidy flopped onto his cot, worked his feet out of his shoes. Soon, he’d run out of appropriate garments to take off as an expression of his nerves, and would be naked.

  “Do you or do you not speak Low?”

  After a moment, he looked at her intently and nodded his head once. “I do—though that was the first time in a very long while. You unsettled me, yongwa, broke my rhythm.”

  She asked him where he was really from, and he said R deck, just one level below her. He’d taken over the identity of a middeck man who’d passed away. “It was Seamus who offered me the papers, said his brother had died and there was no reason why a good identity should go to waste. We’d met once during a shift. I wanted to be a doctor more than anything, so I took the o
ffer, no questions asked. I got my own cabin. Got out of work shifts—well, I still have to do two a week, but not like before. That was two years ago.”

  “No one noticed the change?” asked Aster.

  “If they did, they didn’t care,” Cassidy said.

  “Are you still in touch with Seamus?”

  A hesitation. “I’m not.”

  “Are you fibbing to me again, lywa?”

  “You are persistent.”

  “It is important,” she said. “I believe this book may help me find my mother. I have long thought her dead, but now have reason to believe I was wrong.”

  Cassidy seemed softer now, and she wondered if his earlier behavior was his affectation of an upperdeck manner he had developed. “Chasing missing mothers is a losing game, yongwa. Quit now.”

  “It’s foolish to ignore the dead,” she said.

  Cassidy watched her carefully. “Then I say, be foolish.”

  xxii

  It was the nature of a thing to want to know its creator, so that it could know itself. That was what Aster craved, to be able to peer into herself and see more than what Matilda had made her. She’d chosen her path, and that path led her to Seamus. It had taken some prodding, but Cassidy told her where to find him. She hadn’t yet met him in person, but they’d traded written correspondence. His missives were short but polite, and tonight she’d be seeing him face to face.

  Seamus worked three twelve-hour evening shifts a week in Matilda’s Bowels. Aster decided she’d exploit her new boyish facade one more time to sneak in to meet him. It wasn’t necessary, but she liked to do it, to pretend she was a man. It wasn’t the boy part that attracted her. It was the lying part. It was becoming someone else. Her old mistakes were gone because that person didn’t exist. She could learn how to be brave again in a foreign skin.

  The task of shoveling waste into the funnels to be processed into usable materials was an indignity generally reserved for lowdeck men, though it was a big job, and some middeckers had to do it too. Everything in the ship emptied here, the toilets, uneaten food. Fat pipes fed their contents into large cylinders, emptied by the workers into processing churns. Everything down here was like a furnace, hot and stinking.