“You ladies after some company?” He takes a wavering step toward us. The sour reek of alcohol wafts from his soiled clothes. “I got a room here if you want some company.”
Iri shakes her head and presses me forward.
“One drink? We’re friends, aren’t we?” the man calls after us. “We can be friends.”
We stride away as fast as we can without running. The hall goes on and on, smeary windows narrowing into infinity. I think the roof must be slowly sloping down on us, and any minute I’m sure another door will swing open, someone worse will block our path. The Parastrata’s wives are full of stories of girls who’d wandered away from their crewes being robbed or raped or cut up in tiny pieces and fed into nutrition recyclers.
Finally the hall ends in a round metal service door. Iri pulls it open and steps into the dark. I try to follow, but the moment I put my foot down, the ground shifts, as if I’m wheeling into a fall. I cry out and reach for Iri’s hand.
“Here, Ava.” Iri catches me.
The wheeling stops as suddenly as it started. I look around. We’re standing in a long service shaft. The lights above us fizz on, but behind us and ahead, the shaft fades roundly into blackness. I turn to my right, to the door that brought us here. The dim corridor with its grimy windows has flipped on its side, so all the windows now lie where the floor and ceiling should be.
“What . . . ,” I start to ask.
“It’s the gravity,” Iri whispers. “The stationmakers changed its direction to make it easier to move things between levels.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I never knew men could change gravity. I thought it was only something that was.
“Forward or back?” Iri asks.
“Forward,” I say. The Parastrata’s tier hangs somewhere ahead or above us, but I don’t want to think on what might be lurking in the tiers even lower than where we are now.
We walk. As we reach each new section, the lights click on before us and snuff out behind. Our footsteps echo into the dark. Each tier has its own door, with its own narrow window looking out onto the tipped level. Someone has bolted vinyl plates stamped with symbols beside each doorframe. I stare at them hopelessly, praying the trick of reading will come to me if I stare long enough. After we’re bound, I’ll show you how to read. . . .
My Luck. Have they sent him out to meet the Void? He’s the captain’s own son. Surely his life must be worth more than mine. Someone on his crewe will save him, as Iri saved me. Or maybe if we tell the right people, they can help us. We can save him ourselves.
How many more levels above us? How far have we come? At last we peek through a door and find a concourse stretched broad in front of us, bustling with people lugging bags and pushing hover trolleys of small crates. I crack the door to get a better look. The sweet smell of well-scrubbed air rushes in, along with the crackle of advertisements from nearby speakers and handhelds. This level is some like the Parastrata’s, with its vendors and food stands, but brighter. Boxed holograms of ferns and flowers extend down the center of the concourse, flanked by white benches.
“The passenger tier,” Iri breathes in my ear.
“Security alert.” A cool, toneless woman’s voice interrupts the stream of advertisements. I shrink back. The voice echoes up the shaft. “Sixteen year-old girl reported missing. Last seen in the company of an older female relative, believed to have abducted the girl. Both have red hair, of merchant tribe descent. Please report to the nearest security station if you see these individuals. Code five-two-nine.”
Iri and I stare at each other, wide-eyed. Damn. I slam the door shut. How did they do that? How did they know? Jerej or my father must have talked someone into helping to hunt us down. They must have told them what I did. No one will help us now. I slump against the door, my heart choking me. I have to push the thought of Luck away, or I’ll lie down here and never get up again. We have to keep moving.
I clear my throat. “What now?”
Iri kneels at the center of the shaft. “I thought on that.” She turns out her pockets and produces rolls of homespun cloth, copper handspools, dull, greening coins from a bridal headdress, seemingly anything of value she could fit in her pockets before she fled.
“For trade,” she says.
“Trade?” I echo her dumbly.
Iri nods. “I know someone what could help us groundways.”
“You know someone groundways?” I gape at her, the danger of Jerej and the Watches momentarily forgotten. She might as well have said she knows some Void zephyrs.
“I do.” Iri sets her mouth in a line, as if she’s unsure how much to trust telling me.
I crouch down next to her and finger one of the corroded coins. “Who?”
“You remember,” Iri says slowly. “You remember when your mother went on to the Void, how the so doctor’s daughter came aboard to sort things with your great-grandfather Harrah?”
Her strange figure, with only her hands and face uncovered, passes before my eyes like a ghost. Turrut and Hah. Maybe she’s come to snatch you ’way.
“I remember.”
Iri stacks the coins. They click-click-click like dripping water. “I knew her some.”
“Knew her?”
“Yes,” Iri says. “If we reach her, she’ll help.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
Iri looks up. “Because she helped before.”
Something in Iri’s tone tells me not to press. Whatever the so doctor’s daughter helped her do, it’s something that can’t be spoken aloud, even now, some ten turns later.
“Do you know where she is?” I ask instead.
“Groundways,” Iri says.
“But groundways where?”
“Earth. Mum—” Iri stumbles over the word. “Mumbai.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. A city, I think.”
I think on the colonies and outposts the men have come back telling us about. Little clusters of airtight buildings surrounded by fields of solar panels, nitrogen pumps, and domed dioxide converters. Even with Earth close packed as it is, could it be so hard to find a person once you’ve got it narrowed down to a single city?
“We send out a call to her?” I ask. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”
Iri looks uneasy. She shakes her head.
“What then?”
Iri hesitates.
“You can’t mean . . .” I recoil. I think I know what Iri means to do. “Oh, no.”
“Only for a little bit, Ava.”
“No.”
“Don’t you hear? They’ve got the whole station looking for us. They could be listening if we send out a call. The only way to reach her safe is to go there. Go groundways. I heard some of the men talking once on how you can rent out a slot on a ferry ship. You can pay to keep your name hidden, even.”
“No,” I say again. “Iri, what are you thinking? We can’t.” As if in warning, the lights above us power down, leaving us in darkness. We’ve been still too long.
“Look how we are without the ship,” I say. Winded and lead boned, ready to cave to the Earth’s call. “Going groundways might kill us.” Or worse.
“The so doctor’s daughter bears it,” Iri says quietly. She knows the Word as well as I.
But who knows what living groundways has done to the so doctor’s daughter, how it’s changed her? Is she still even a woman, or do you have to become something else to bear the Earth beneath your feet?
“No, Iri,” I say into the dark. “Please, no.”
She touches my arm. “It’s the only way I can figure, Ava.”
“We can sign ourselves on a work detail with one of the industrial shippers. Or hire out here for some duties, doing cleaning or what. Or beg our way onto a new crewe. I heard Jerej say one time the Nau crewe’s too interbred. They need women—”
“Aviso de seguridad,” the woman’s smooth voice interrupts, rounding into its next language cycle.
Iri huffs. “No
shipper’s going to hire us with that over our heads, and no crewe will take us either, not even the Nau. You forget, you’re dead as much to them as to the Parastrata. And I’m no prize as a wife either, especially on a crewe desperate for birthers.”
She glances down at her flat stomach and pulls her eyes away before she thinks I see. But I do. I see. It pains her. The weight of what Iri has done in saving me falls on me. She’s given up any chance of marrying again, given up all chance of trying for smallones, and all for me.
“I’ll do it.” I hear myself say the words. “I’ll go.”
Iri and I climb out of the service shaft into the passenger tier. The world tips again as gravity realigns itself, but I’m ready for it this time. We slip into the crowd pushing its way along the concourse. Men and women walk freely here, and we melt into the flow of print silks and hyperbaric suits, dark skin and pale. I look for Jerej and the Watches. No sign of them, not yet at least.
“Avis de sécurité.”
Doors line both sides of the concourse, each with a desk or booth stationed beside it. A dark-skinned woman with a burst of gold-tipped black curls, a white shirt cut to show off her collarbone, trousers, and knee-high boots sits by the nearest one, splay-legged on a chair. Behind her, a latchport joins her short-range sloop to the station. She tracks us a few paces out of the corner of her eye, expertly cracking a nut between her palm and the flat of a long knife. She crumbles the shell to the floor and pops the meat into her mouth. A deep, puckered scar trails down the side of her nose and interrupts her red-painted mouth on one side. I press closer to Iri.
“There,” Iri says. She steers us to a set of booths before the gangway to a fat passenger ferry. A ghostly image of a comet circling a planet rotates above the booths, and the woman on the other side of the glass wears the same symbol pinned to her lapel. She is all clean and smooth. Her dark hair shines, her lips shimmer an eye-aching pink-orange, and soft glitters and pigments dust all the planes of her face.
“Welcome to Hyakutake Stellar Transit.” The woman leans forward with a smile. “Our service is simply stellar! Where can we fly you today?”
“M-Mumbai,” says Iri.
The woman shakes her head, but her smile doesn’t falter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”
“Mumbai,” I blurt out.
She shakes her head again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”
I narrow my eyes. Something is off, the way her hair bobs exactly the same each time she shakes her head, the same lilts and dips on the same words.
“A hologram,” I say, and as I say it, I notice the faint transparency of the woman’s shoulders. I step to one side, and she shrinks flat in the glass.
Iri nods as if she knows this already. “Mumbai,” she repeats, clear and confident.
“Transit to Mumbai will require overland transport from landing point: Dubai International Spaceport,” the hologrammed woman says. A transparent map springs up in the top corner of the glass, showing the overland path the hologram proposes in glowing blue. “Would you like to book overland passage now or when you arrive?”
“What’s the cost?” Iri says.
The woman shakes her head again and smiles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say ‘now’ or ‘when I arrive.’”
“Now,” Iri says, sharp in her hurry. She checks over her shoulder. “What’s the cost, please?”
“Your ticketing options are displayed here.” The projection gestures to her left, and a long pattern of columned symbols expands above her hand. Sparse Vs and As scatter through the words, but they do me no good.
“Please select your preferred pricing choice by touching the screen.”
A toneless overhead voice slips itself between us, a soft warning. “Jĭng bào . . .”
I look at Iri, worried. Her lips press thin. “We need someone live,” she says to me. She scans the crowded concourse. “Some small boat, someone we can bargain with.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” The hologram shakes her head again and smiles.
“Never mind. Cancel.” Iri waves her hand at the hologram. “We don’t . . . cancel.”
The lines of symbols fade, leaving only the woman projected in the glass. “Thank you for considering Hyakutake Stellar Transit for your travel needs.” She freezes with her chin slightly tilted, smiling mouth wide.
We slink away. Iri’s eyes dart from ship to ship. No one manning the ticketing carrel of the midsized utilitarian carrier, only another hologram. A tall man with a shaved head glaring out at us from beside a needle-nosed transport. An older woman steeped in fuel and alcohol fumes sitting by the last ship.
Iri creeps up to the man, head bowed in respect. “Please, so, we could book passage?”
He chews something slowly, looking her over. “Can you pay?”
Iri opens a fold of her cloth bundle to display the treasures she robbed from the Parastrata.
The man plucks up one of the coins and rubs it with his thumb. A smudge of green wears off on his skin. He tosses it back to Iri with a look of disgust. “Credit only.”
“Please, so, those are bride coins,” I put in.
“Worthless is what they are,” he says. “What, you think I can fuel a ship on rags and moldy coins?”
Iri shrinks as though he’s slapped her. I start to speak back, but she loops her arm through mine and hurries us away. We stop in the center of the concourse. People elbow around us, dodge us as we stand like stone, Iri’s treasures cradled between us.
“We can’t go arguing, calling eyes on ourselves.” She shakes her head over the bundle. “I thought it was worth something.”
“Me too.” We’ve never not been able to get something through trade with the other crewes or one of the colony outposts. Could the people close in to Earth really be this different from us? How do you bargain with them? I look up, over Iri’s shoulder. The woman with the knife has her head cocked in our direction again, the scar down her face making her expression unreadable.
Iri sees me looking. She turns. “Her?” She spins back around to me. A smile picks at the corners of her mouth. “Perfect, Ava. Good watching.”
“No, wait, Iri.” Something about the scarred woman makes me uneasy. Mercies know what walking on the Earth has done to her, if it’s made her mind and soul as malformed as her face. In the oldgirls’ stories, you can always read the map of someone’s soul by her looks. I try to catch Iri, but she slips out of my grasp and strides up to the woman.
I hang back, unsure. The knife woman looks from Iri to me, back to Iri. Iri waves her free hand in circles, holds it out, pleading, and proffers the stolen bundle. The woman takes it, weighs its heft in her hand, and looks back at me.
Iri follows her gaze. “Ava, come.” She waves me closer, new hope simmering in her eyes.
I hug my arms across my chest, duck my head, and walk quick to Iri’s side. I scan the crowd for signs of the Watches and step light, in case I have to run again.
“This is Captain Guiteau.” Iri says. She puts her arm around my shoulders and speaks to the scarred woman. “You see, we’re neither of us much heavy.”
The captain hands the bundle back to Iri, but she keeps her eyes on me. “I don’t doubt it. But this is only a mail sloop, ladies. Now, if you’ve got packages, or you want me to take any of that down to the surface . . .” She nods at Iri’s armful of cloth. “That I can do. Certified delivery.”
When she speaks, only the right side of her mouth moves, the undamaged side. The corner sliced by the scar stays stiff, making her every word a grimace. It was some bad, whatever made this cut. I look away quick so she won’t see me staring.
“Please.” Iri tries again, quietly. “There’s a woman we know groundways what can give you more, if you only take us to her. Just a space on the cargo floor, that’s all I’m asking.”
Captain Guiteau shakes her head. “I can’t put live people in my cargo hold. It’s not te
mperature regulated, much less space tight. I’m not landing with two dead bodies mixed up in my delivery.”
“Please, so captain . . .”
The handheld clipped to the captain’s belt crackles to life. “Security alert . . .”
Captain Guiteau flicks her eyes down to the handheld. She looks at me and deliberately switches it off. “What’s down there you need so bad?” She folds her arms across her chest.
The words won’t leave my mouth. I look to Iri.
“Her . . . ” Iri searches for the word. “Her modrie. Her mother’s sister.”
My mother’s sister. I’ve never heard it put together that way, what the so doctor’s daughter was to my mother. My mind fumbles, trying to fit the words with my memories. My mother’s sister. My blood modrie. Maybe she come an’ snatch you ’way.
Captain Guiteau watches me. I look away and stare blindly at the crowd. Only a day or two ago, so many people pressed together made me feel near drowned, but now it’s easier to watch them flowing up and down both sides of the concourse, like fish moving together. I watch their heads bobbing. Bird’s-eye black and white and brown and red. I stop. Red. I try to tie my thoughts together. Red. A cluster of red hair surging along the edge of the crowd.
I clutch Iri’s arm. She follows my gaze and sees what I’ve seen. My father and Jerej, tense with purpose, and a whole party of flame-haired men fanning out through the crowd.
“Run, Iri,” I whisper. I grip her hand and tug.
“Wait!” the captain calls.
Iri hesitates.
No. Go, we’ve got to go. I pull her.
Captain Guiteau’s eyes flick from me to Iri, Jerej to my father, the Watches to me. I can see her mind making its final rotation, all the pieces falling into their lines.
In that moment, my father turns. He sees me, sees Iri. He shouts at Jerej over the steady shuffle and hum of the crowd. Some of the passengers slow and stare, more and more eyes snapping on to us. Any moment they’ll come shoving through the crowd and drag me and Iri back to the Parastrata’s coldroom, but Iri waits, her eyes locked on the captain of the mail sloop. Time slows. My father thrusts a gaping passenger aside. Jerej signals the other men with a wave of his arm.
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