Salvage

by Duncan, Alexandra

  “No,” I say.

  Miyole shrugs. “My friend Kai doesn’t have one either. My manman says we’re lucky.”

  “It’s some pretty,” I agree.

  Miyole gives me a long, measuring look. “You can use it if you want. But you can’t touch it with sticky fingers, okay? My manman says that’ll break it.”

  I want to smile, but I hurt too much. I can’t even muster the strength to tell her I wouldn’t know how to use it anyway. I nod instead.

  “Okay.” Miyole returns to the tablet, all business. “We haven’t got a network signal here, so there’s only what my manman loaded up the last time she went on a run, but there’s lots to choose from. Did you already learn about the Floods in school?”

  I shake my head.

  “No?” She taps the tablet again. “What about the Third Library of Alexandria? The drowned city of Lanai? The subcontinental levee program?”

  I shake my head.

  “Ooh, no, wait. Terraforming.” She looks over her tablet at me and grins as if she’s found a sweet in her pocket. “I’m learning about that in the lessons Manman bought me on geosciences.”

  I nod and close my eyes.

  Miyole clears her throat importantly. “Terraforming is a lengthy process by which planetary bodies are rendered fit for human habitation through the infusion of gases . . .” She stops and giggles, then sneaks a glance at me and puts on her serious face again. “. . . and the release of geothermal energy. Though scientists have long sought a more ex . . .” She stumbles, then rights herself. “Expedient method of terraforming potentially habitable planetary masses, the process still requires the dedication of multiple generations of colonists to achieve an atmospheric balance that will allow life to flourish where it previously did not. The lifeblood of these colonies is the fleet of government-funded and commercial trading ships whose crews volunteer years of their lives to the service of pro . . . provisioning the colonies. Each flight can take years to reach its destination at sublight speeds. . . .” She sounds some like the oldgirls, reciting their stories, reading the air, their words stiff and formal in their mouths.

  And as she reads, I’m back aboard the Parastata, watching the silent mass of a red planet misted with green slide beneath our hull. I can almost see the stars beyond the thin stretch of the planet’s newborn atmosphere.

  “Ava. Hey, Ava.” Miyole has stopped reading. Her voice is gentle. “Wake up.”

  “I’m awake,” I say. I force my eyes open. “I was remembering. We had a route over the red one. Mars?”

  “You’ve been there?” Miyole bounces up on her knees and hugs the tablet. “I want to go when I’m grown. I’m going to enroll in a flight academy so I can see Mars and Titus and all the little colonies starting up, but my manman says I have to have to keep my math up if I want to do it.” She pauses for breath. “Did you really go?”

  “No. Well, some. I’ve been above it, but women don’t go down on groundways duty.”

  “Why?” Miyole cocks her head at me.

  “We . . . we . . .” I wave my hand heavily in front of me. How can I explain? It would sully us? Leave us crippled, as I am now? “Don’t. We just don’t.”

  Miyole frowns.

  “We can’t,” I say, but even as I say it, I know it makes no sense, when the weight of this world is nothing to her.

  I give up and fold my hands over my knees. Miyole reads more, about nitrogen balances and something called the cascade effect, but the words run through me as if I’m a sieve. Am I really a husk of skin and bone, while my soul floats lost somewhere above the atmosphere? Is that why I hurt so? Can I get it back if I go up to the stars again, or is it burned up, turned to dust in the flare of our entry? And what of all these groundways women, walking and working and having children, all under the Earth’s sway? Are they soulless, too? And Luck . . .

  Thinking on Luck is too hard. It makes my chest hurt.

  I put my hands to my belly, suddenly remembering Soli’s roundness and what Luck and I did in the pool. My own flesh slopes in slightly below my ribs. But it could be early still, I remind myself. The thought moves my heart to pounding and fills me with a mix of dread and hope. It could be, I think. My head feels light. I know I didn’t deserve Iri’s sacrifice, but if I have Luck’s smallone, that might make it worthwhile. Maybe some part of him can live on that way. Is it possible to want something and not want it at once?

  When she finishes reading, Miyole serves herself some stew and sits at the table, swinging her legs. She stares at the light tablet, stopping to tap it every once in a while and swallow another mouthful of soup. When she’s finished, she cleans her bowl, then neatly folds the tablet back into its square and places it carefully in its drawer. She draws out a sheet of cut metal, along with welding goggles and a little handtool. She sits cross-legged on the floor, twist-clicks the end of the tool so it buzzes to life, and leans over the metal sheet.

  “What are you making?” It still hurts to talk, but it’s better than thinking.

  “Hmm?” Miyole looks up at me through the goggles.

  “The hangings.” I gesture around. “You’re the one what makes them?”

  “Oh. Yup.” She holds the piece of metal up so I can see. “This one’s going to be a fish. My manman sells them on her flights sometimes to help buy my lessons.”

  “They’re beautiful,” I say.

  Miyole shrugs, but I catch a small smile at the corner of her mouth.

  I lie on my cot and pretend I can feel Luck’s arms around me as I watch Miyole turn the blank, jagged piece of metal into a scaled fish with lips and eyes and striated fins. The smell of burned metal curls the air. I close my eyes and picture the smallone, Luck’s child, tucked in me. I see Iri again, falling. Blood on her teeth.

  In the high window, the sky goes from pale, hot white to deep, creamy blue. All the sounds below us grow louder: the lap of waves on wood, motors gunning, roosters calling, cats scrapping and yowling, people shouting. Wherever we are, it sounds bigger than I imagined. It’s as if someone has settled a cook-pot lid over us, and all the noises are trapped inside. Miyole runs up to the roof to start the generator, then back down again to flick on the ceiling fans and the single tube light suspended over the kitchen table. I doze.

  The whum-whum roar of the mail sloop vibrates overhead, waking me. Miyole dashes to the window. From my cot, I watch Perpétue’s ship lights whip overhead and listen for the sigh of the burners winding down. A loud metal bang sounds, and a few seconds later Perpétue’s feet beat up the outer stairs. She breezes in, humming to herself, untucks the knife from her belt and drops it on the table alongside a handful of irregular metal scraps.

  “Manman, look!” Miyole holds up the fish, its scales shimmering orange in the low light.

  Perpétue takes it and holds it at arm’s length, careful of the pointed fins. “Lovely.” She smiles at Miyole. “Sharp and lovely, like its maker.”

  “Did you get me more?” the girl asks.

  Perpétue tilts her head to the scraps. “On the table.”

  Miyole skips over. She sifts through the metal while Perpétue takes a yellowed plastic jug of water down from a shelf.

  “How are you, fi? Any better?” Perpétue calls over her shoulder as wets her hands from the jug, then pumps soap into them and rubs them briskly together.

  “So,” I say, even though I’m not sure.

  Perpétue turns to her daughter. “Did she eat?”

  “Yes, manman,” Miyole says. “I read her my lessons.”

  Perpétue splashes water over her hands and dries them on a rag tied to her belt. “That’s good, ma chère.” She kisses her daughter’s head. “Did you eat?”

  Miyole nods.

  “Good. Go and wash up for bed.”

  Perpétue heats a bowl of soup for herself, then breaks down the portable stove and stows it beneath the table. She brings her bowl over and pulls up a chair across from my cot.

  “You’ve been sick.” She takes a bi
te and talks around it. “Your friend, that woman who was with you on Bhutto station, she said you have family planetside?”

  I nod and swallow to clear my throat. Iri, the blood on her teeth. “The so doctor’s daughter. She’s my blood modrie. My mother’s sister.”

  “Your tante?” Perpétue raises her eyebrows. “That’s good. That’s close family.”

  I shake my head. “Not really. I never met her. Or, well . . . she never met me.”

  Perpétue leans back in her chair. “But you know her name. What was it?”

  “Soraya Hertz,” I say carefully. “But I don’t think she knows about me.”

  “You know where she lives?”

  “Mumbai?” I say.

  Perpétue waits. When I don’t say more, she leans forward in the chair again. “That’s it? Just Mumbai?”

  I nod.

  “No street or neighborhood or quarter?”

  I shake my head.

  Perpétue sighs and works her tongue around the inside of her bottom lip, eyes on the fan blades spinning in the breeze. “Anything else about her? Anything to help us track her down?”

  “She’s some kind of doctor,” I say. “And my grandfather, her father, he was a doctor, too.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “He was Hertz, too,” I say.

  “And your tante never married? Never changed her name?” Perpétue rubs her hands together, deep in thought.

  Panic strikes me. What if she’s changed it? What if it isn’t enough to track her down?

  “I only saw her the once, some ten turns back,” I say. “Do you think we can find her?” If Iri were here, she would know what to do.

  Perpétue shakes her head. She rests her forehead on her hands. “I don’t know, Ava.” She looks up at me again. “Mumbai’s a city of a hundred and seventy-five million. Add to that, we don’t know if her name’s the same, or even if she’s still there.”

  One hundred seventy-five million. It’s a number so large my mind can’t grab hold of it. My crewe numbered a slip over two hundred, the Æthers somewhere near five hundred. I don’t think I’ve seen more than one or two thousand people in all my life, counting my time at the station concourses. Any number bigger than that might as well not be real. I fix my eyes on the dark square of sky beyond Perpétue’s shoulder and hug my sides, willing myself not to cry. I want to go back to sleep, to dream of Luck and the private glow that surrounded us after we sealed ourselves. Or better yet, not to dream at all.

  “But we’ll try, Ava.” Perpétue grips my hand, bringing me back. Her fingers are strong. She presses so hard it hurts. “We’ll try.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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

  CHAPTER .13

  “Good, now once more.” Perpétue holds my arm as I take another shuffling step.

  I moan as I bring my foot forward and let my weight fall on it. My legs burn as though someone’s poured fuel into them and set them alight. But I’ve made it from my cot almost all the way to the small cleanroom tucked away between the common room and the sleeping quarters Perpétue and Miyole share. Perpétue has given me my own skirts again, stiff from drying in the sun, but she burned the rag shirt. I wear one of her soft, thin-woven shirts instead. Cotton, she says, from over the sea.

  Two weeks awake in her home and I still cannot walk alone. But I haven’t bled either, at least there’s that to hold on to. The chance of Luck’s child. The air hangs thick with heat and waiting.

  This East Gyre Perpétue brought me to is nothing like what I thought Earthside would be. My modries all told stories of dust and cold so fierce it made the Earth white, but here the air is always wet and warm, like the dyeroom when the pits are at full boil. Sometimes Perpétue’s house bobs and rocks under my feet, and a moaning noise shudders up from below.

  The Gyre is a floating city, Perpétue says, cobbled together from flatbed ships, buildings raised on pontoons, and abandoned research flotillas. She talks on it as I practice walking, to keep my mind off the pain. Deciturns on deciturns ago, even before the time of Candor and Saeleas, the groundways folk thought the sea would gobble up all their waste, so they fed it into the deeps. But instead, it ended up here, where the waters converge in the Gyre, and formed a vast plain of bottles and bags and milky plastic.

  “Some of the first ships came to study the island the trash made and the microbes in the water,” Perpétue explains. “But then, when the Floods drowned the Earth’s islands, other people fled here to make a new life, trawling the garbage. That was the start of the Gyre.”

  Microbes? I want to say, but I need all of my breath to keep walking.

  Perpétue’s house nestles up to the edge of the Caribbean Enclave, lashed to other craft from the lost islands of Jamaica and Cuba and Haiti, what was her ancestors’ home. But there’re folk from every sunken island here, the ice lands and the Philippines and the land of no serpents. She says a body can make a living scavenging and reselling the bits of plastic that make up the Gyre plain. There’s so much the whole city can pick and pick at it and never run out.

  “When you’re well, you can go out and see for yourself,” Perpétue says.

  But that would mean facing all the stares and the same questions Perpétue and Miyole had for me, again and again. What’s wrong with your skin? Why can’t you walk right? What’d you do to make your own people throw you out? Just thinking on it makes me want to lie down.

  “Don’t forget to bend your knees,” Perpétue reminds me.

  Miyole clomps by in a pair of ragged-edged pants, rubber shoes a size too big, and a faded flower-print dress. She carries a danger-red kite almost as tall as she is.

  “Bye, Manman!”

  “Miyole?” Perpétue drops my hand. “Where are you going?”

  “Kite flying with Kai.”

  Perpétue bites the corner of her lip. “You aren’t going down to the brink, are you?”

  Miyole drops her shoulders. “Manman.” She draws the word in a groan.

  Perpétue sighs. Even with the short time I’ve been here, I’ve already caught on they’re about to have the same argument as always.

  “You know how I feel about the brink, ma chére.”

  Miyole rolls her eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Manman.”

  “You tell that to Bjarni’s mother.”

  “You never let me do anything.”

  “I never let you do anything dangerous.”

  “Manman.” Miyole’s voice teeters between a plead and a whine. “I’ll be careful, I swear. Kai needs me. His dad’s sick again, and Song and Hobb and me all promised we’d help him keep up with the picking. We’re flying kites after.”

  Perpétue sighs again, in resignation this time. “All right. Go. But don’t forget to make Kai give you a hook. I don’t want you reaching down in that water with your bare hands.”

  Every morning I watch from the window as a trickle of smallones skip the gaps between the pontoons and climb over the footbridges, on their way down to the brink, where they’ll help their parents fish out a living from the plastic. Not all of them go. Miyole doesn’t, except when she wants. Most mornings she either makes more metal creatures or sits with her tablet, staring and tapping into its light, stopping only to help me walk to the cleanroom or make me take calcium pills to keep my muscles from seizing.

  This whole place is a mystery. Perpétue has no man in the house, so she earns her keep ferrying packages from groundways to the station, and between cities here below. Yet she washes and cooks and pushes Miyole to keep pace with her lessons each evening, and even sometimes cooks more for the sick woman with two smallones on the craft next to ours. I asked once where her husband was, but Perpétue’s face went masklike. I haven’t asked again.

  I lie still and sweating most of the day, watching shadows track across the floor as the sun arcs overhead. Sometimes I find myself wishing th
ey would turn the daylights out sooner, and then I remember it doesn’t work that way down here. The sun keeps its own time. I close my eyes to it and think on Luck. If it’s quiet, I can coax myself into a sort of half dream—waking by Luck’s side, basking in his smile; him singing to our unborn child as it grows larger inside me. I am tender all over, and I remember Modrie Reller and the other wives saying that was a sign you had got a smallone, that you ached, belly and breasts.

  But then Perpétue comes and makes me move and bend and grip as long as I can bear it. She promises we can take Miyole’s tablet up to the top of what was once a research ship in the neighboring Icelanders’ enclave, one of the few spots in the whole Gyre where she can sometimes tap into the wireless networks broadcasting from the distant shores. There are never any storms in Gyre, she says, but elsewhere the Earth is wracking-full of ferocious winds and sudden rainstorms and columns of white-hot fire bolting from sky to land, and a network is a delicate thing.

  “Once you’re strong enough,” she says, a steadying arm on my elbow. “Once you’re well.”

  I make it to the cleanroom. Perpétue has me sit while she runs a bucket of warm water down from the solar-powered boiler on the roof. She helps me wash my hair, and when it’s clean, she sits me on the floor like I’m a smallgirl and combs it. I close my eyes and let myself relax into the gentle tug of the comb as Perpétue’s fingers unsnarl my locks. It brings me to mind of Iri combing my hair, and me doing the same for Lifil and my other sisters. I hope the Mercies give me a boy child, but if it’s a girl, at least one day I can maybe comb her hair like this.

  “Why did you dye your hair?” Perpétue’s voice breaks my reverie.

  I put my hand up to my head. “What?”

  “Your hair,” Perpétue repeats. “You’ve been coloring it, right?”

  “It’s showing?” I say.

  “Wi,” Perpétue says. She lifts a lock of hair and runs it through her fingers until they brush my forehead. “To here.”