I push the button for tier five. The lift drops, and when the doors roll open for me, I feel even in my skin, balanced and right as I haven’t felt since the moment I stepped off the Parastrata for the first time.
Steam billows up to the commissary ceiling from a row of cookpots and woks. The cooks shuffle their pans over red electric coils and shout back and forth with the people waiting in line. Thick support pillars jut up throughout the room, each spoked by a circle of metal carrels housing the information ports. I slide into an empty one and sit staring blankly at it. A series of silent advertisements rotates on the screen, showing people standing by the seashore, laughing into their handhelds, and others pushing a tiny dog in a screened-in stroller down a tree-lined street. The words flit by too fast for me to make out.
I touch the screen. An orange light pulses to my right, above a slot in the machine. Someone has stuck a piece of adhesive paper to the side of the light, with block letters printed there.
Pa . . . PAY HER. What? No. Here. PAY HERE.
I slide the pay plastic into the slot. The machine sucks it in and spits it back out at me again, but the screen blinks to life, opening up one of the searcher programs I’ve seen Perpétue use. I hunch over the screen and peck in the name I had Miyole spell out for me.
S-O-R-A-Y-A H-E-R-T-Z
Columns of words and pictures spring up and crowd the screen. I sigh. This is going to take some while.
I tick through the links one by one. I hate how slow I am. By the time I figure one link is talking on a dead woman long gone, and another on a girl my age who’s known for her skill at racing a huge beast called a horse, I’ve already chewed up precious minutes. But then, far down at the bottom of the page, I spot a word in the tangled mess of the link. Mumbai. Mumbai! I open the link.
A small, grainy image of a woman standing before a seated crowd spools across the screen. A lavender scarf drapes neatly over her head and around the shoulders of her tailored shirt. A small, dark triangle of hair shows where her scarf pulls back from her brow. I raise my hand unconsciously and touch the ragged tufts of my own hair.
Is it her? Letters float beneath the woman as she speaks.
Dr. Soraya Hertz. My heart leaps. That D-R, that’s what Miyole says I should look for, what groundways folk use to show a person’s a so doctor.
There’s more. The first word is easy. Mumbai. But the next? Un–Univer—Univer-sit—y. University. Mumbai University. I take a deep breath and push on. At, that’s an easy one, but I trip over the next. Kal . . . Kalina. Kalina, it’s no word I know. My heart knocks in my chest. A place, maybe?
“Mumbai University at Kalina,” I whisper aloud. “Dep . . . Depart . . . men—”
“Hey, kid.”
I spin around. Someone thickset—a man, I think at first—stands behind me, thumb hooked under the strap of a traveling bag. Bristly red hair sticks out beneath his short-brimmed hat.
Parastrata. Run.
No. His skin is chapped with windburn. He’s groundways. And then I look again. It’s not a man, but a woman hidden beneath the rough traveling clothes. I’m leaping at shadows. I grip the back of the chair.
“What?” I say.
“You can’t be here ’less you’ve bought something.” She points to the line of people waiting near the commissary kitchens. “That’s the rules, don’t you know?”
“Oh.” I glance at the frozen image of Soraya Hertz. I still have twenty minutes left on the port. “Sorry, so. Thank you. I’ll be straight back.” I stand, pocket my pay plastic, and hurry to the line. I pick out a cup of something that ends up being sweet, spiced tea, too hot to drink just yet, and slide my plastic through a reader, mimicking the people in front of me. But when I get back to my carrel, the red-haired woman has planted herself in my chair. She sits with one leg sprawled out in the aisle, tapping her thumbs against the keyboard.
“Pardon, so missus?” I say quiet.
She doesn’t look up.
“So missus?” I touch her shoulder.
She whirls on me. “What?”
“Can I have my seat back?”
“What, this?” She pulls an innocent face.
The balanced feeling hisses out of me, like air from a pneumatic lift. My first thought is to slink away, but I try to think what Perpétue would do.
“Right so,” I say. “I was looking at something. I claimed that port.”
“Did you now?” She makes a show of looking the terminal up and down. “Now how do you figure that?”
“You’re using the time I paid for.” Precious money what could go to cooking oil or replacement parts for Perpétue’s ship, burning away under this woman’s fingers, and me childish fool enough to fall for her petty trick.
“You accusing me of stealing?”
She’s used to getting away with this, I realize. I wet my lips. “Right so I am, missus.”
Anger ripples over her face, but then she swallows it and smirks. She turns back to the screen. “I guess we’ll see what you can do about it, then.”
I wish to the Mercies I had a knife like Perpétue’s. Then no one would rip me off or step on me or push me aside as though I were windblown trash. No one would grab my face or drag my body where I’ve no want to go. My insides wouldn’t go to jelly when someone yelled at me. I press my nails into the teacup’s soft cardboard sides. Not again. Never again. I dash the cup forward. Its steaming contents splash over the back of the woman’s neck. She screams. The galley goes silent around us.
“Bitch!” she shouts. “I’ll have your guts, you little psychopath!”
I stand still as carved wood. The empty cup hangs from my hand, dripping steaming liquid over my fingers. What have I . . . And then I bolt. Away, dodging tables and pillars, stumbling over chairs, down the corridor to the lifts. It’s only when the door is sliding closed and I’m jamming my finger against the button for tier thirteen that I realize no one has come after me.
I race back to Perpétue’s ship, head down, ignoring the crewmen calling at me. I activate the ship’s cargo doors and crawl up into her dark berth. What have I done? I press my palms over my eyes and sink down against the wall. The woman’s scream still echoes in my head. She wasn’t my father or Jerej or even Modrie Reller. She was a stranger, happy to cheat me the same as that rice broker tried to cheat Perpétue. Only Perpétue never tried to burn his skin off, so far as I knew. Maybe I was wrong to think some bud of my soul was left, that it might be growing back. Else, how could I do something like that?
“Ava?” Perpétue squints into the dark. “I’ve been looking everywhere, fi.”
I can’t stop the awful, animal sound that falls out of my mouth. I turn away from her.
“What’s wrong?” She hurries to kneel by me. “Did someone hurt you?”
“No,” I say, choking on a sob that won’t come. If only that were all it was.
“Tell me, fi, tell me.” She pulls me close and rubs my arms, as if it’s cold I’m suffering from.
I shake my head. “No. You’ll hate me.” I can’t let her see what kind of girl I really am.
“Did you steal something?”
“No.” I wipe the wet blur away from my eyes. “I think I found my modrie. She’s at a place called Mumbai University at Kalina. There was more. I almost had it, but this woman tried to chase me off, and I threw hot tea and burned her.”
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 u
s 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
..................................................................
CHAPTER .18
Perpétue 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 . . .
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