Salvage

by Duncan, Alexandra

  Children run by us as they barrel around the trees in a game of chase.

  “If you look on it, so missus, you’ll see,” I say. “You only have to look. That’s all I ask.”

  “No,” she says, hoarse. She tugs at the scarf wrapped around her neck and shoulders. “I don’t have to.” The satiny cloth parts, and there it hangs, strung on a silver chain at the hollow of her throat, a data pendant twin to mine.

  The tapri is loud, brimming full of people, but Soraya finds us a quiet spot at a table wedged between a wall and a window.

  “I think I saw you,” she says, studying my face. “When I came aboard to bury your mother, I saw a little dark-haired girl. You were running with the other children, but I didn’t think anything of it. They told me Ete never had any children, that she was cursed.”

  Cursed. I swallow. “I saw you too. But these boys, they were teasing me and saying you were a giant come to take me away, so I hid.”

  Miyole looks up from her yogurt drink and eyes us curiously.

  Soraya shakes her head. “But I don’t understand why they lied to me about you.”

  I do, I think, but I don’t say it aloud. What good would it do to tell her my crewe thought her corrupt, an outsider muddying our pure world with traces of the Earth? They must have wanted her gone, wanted all our ties severed.

  She holds her pendant up to the light. “This was your mother’s. Iri and your great-grandmother Laral gave it to me when we buried her.” Her face changes suddenly; she looks stricken. “If I had known she had a daughter, I never would have taken it.”

  Iri. I push my tea away, suddenly queasy. “It’s no matter.”

  Soraya frowns and leans forward over her own cup of tea. “Are you married, then?” She says it quietly, as though speaking to someone who’s fallen ill.

  I close my hand over the pendant. “No.”

  “No?” Soraya frowns.

  “No.” I say it firm. I can’t talk on this, not now, not with her, not ever.

  Soraya straightens herself in her chair. “So you flew here?”

  “Right so,” I say.

  “By yourselves?” She glances at Miyole and pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket to mop up the yogurt Miyole has dripped all over her shirt. “Here, dear.”

  I nod. “Miyole’s mother showed me.” I stir my tea. It seems wrong to say Perpétue’s name now, as if the sound of it is still too loud for human ears.

  “You poor girl,” Soraya says, still dabbing at Miyole’s collar. And then to me. “You should have come to me sooner. Straightaway.”

  “I couldn’t.” I talk down into my tea. “I mean, I wasn’t sure . . .”

  “Of course.” Soraya lays her hand awkwardly over my own, then pulls away again quickly.

  “Iri said something, before they . . . before she . . . when I left,” I fumble. “She said you helped her with something, something worse than . . . I mean, something secret.”

  Soraya purses her lips. “Yes, Iri. And Laral, too. They’re the ones who showed me your mother’s body. They told me she was my sister.”

  My great-grandmother Laral? I see her body again, waiting peaceful for the Void to accept her. Her bone-white hair in marriage braids, her skin thin and yellow like aged rice paper. “But what did you help them do?”

  “Bury your mother,” Soraya says. “You know that. But it’s not the way you think. Your great-grandfather Harrah didn’t want her buried ad astra. He wanted me to bring her body back here and bury it beneath the earth or burn it, the way we do—”

  A small sound escapes my throat. Even with all the crimes on my head, my crewe still meant to give me over to the Void. They never would have done me the shame of burying me beneath the earth.

  “But Iri and Laral couldn’t let that happen,” Soraya continues. “They found me and brought me to her body. They told me what it meant, and together we buried her with the stars.”

  I work my mouth. “But . . . why?” I finally push out. “Why would my great-grandfather do that to her?”

  Soraya picks a piece of lint from her lap and flicks it away. “Harrah said she was cursed. Her looks made her hard to marry off, and then she had trouble getting pregnant. He said her ghost would tail your ship and bring everyone bad luck.”

  Her words hit me full in the chest. I touch my hair. Some bad matter. Everything comes together. Modrie Reller dying my hair. My father and brother trying to marry me off-ship. My kinswomen so eager to send me into the Void. They were trying to sever the ties to me, too. First my grandfather, and then all the rest of them. Did no one want us?

  “The important thing is, you’re here now. You don’t have to worry anymore.”

  That brings my head up. “You’ll help us?”

  Soraya nods. She taps her spoon against the lip of her teacup—clink clink clink. “You’ll have to come and live with me. Both of you.”

  “You mean it?” I sit stunned, my tea forgotten. After all this time, so easy . . .

  “Of course.” She leans back in her chair. “We can enroll you both at Revati Academy. The headmistress is a friend of mine. I’m sure we can work something out so you won’t have to wait until the next semester begins.”

  “Thank you, so missus. That’s some kind, but I couldn’t go. I’ve got my job to keep up with.” Miyole would love that, but me?

  “Your job?” She blinks. “How old are you?’

  “Sixt—no.” I was only some few months shy of my birth date when Modrie Reller told me I was to be a bride. “Seventeen.”

  Soraya huffs. “You don’t need to work at seventeen. You need to be in school.” She checks the time on her crow. “You can give them your notice tomorrow.”

  “But how will I pay back Rushil?” My voice sounds panicked. “And what about the ship?”

  “The ship?”

  “The sloop,” I say. “What we came here in. We’ve got it docked nearby, and I still owe Rushil some weeks’ rent.”

  “How much do you owe?” Soraya asks.

  “One hundred and fifty,” I say. “Plus another two hundred if we’re going to keep it there another month.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing.” Soraya waves her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll cover the docking fees until we figure out what to do with the ship. Is it in salable condition?”

  “Salable?”

  “Is it ready to sell, or will it need repairs?”

  Sell the sloop? Maybe I’ve made an awful mistake coming to Soraya after all. She doesn’t even know me. How can she ask me to stop working, sell the sloop, and go to school? What if things don’t work out with her, or something happens to her? I’d have nothing.

  “It . . . it needs repairs,” I say cautiously.

  “Well, we can have someone take a look at it later.” Soraya smiles over at Miyole. “Did you get enough to eat?”

  Miyole slurps the last of her drink and grins. “Yup.”

  Miyole. I’m not doing this for me. If I have to sell the sloop to keep her safe, so be it.

  The sun has sunk below the rooftops by the time we leave the tapri. Even though I’m still some angry with Rushil, I mean to tell him what’s happened, where we’re going. But he and Pala aren’t in his trailer when we go to collect our things. Even the shipyard cats are hiding. A patchwork of plastic and metal cover the gaping hole in the fence. Soraya stands awkwardly inside the gate, clutching her shoulder bag and darting her eyes at every dog barking or shout from the street while I stuff our few possessions in a rice sack and seal up the ship.

  “Aren’t we going to say bye to Rushil?” Miyole asks as I turn the hand crank to close the loading ramp. Rushil and I haven’t finished replacing the burned-out power couplings to the door motor yet. We had planned to fix the coolant conduits first, but now I don’t know if that will ever happen. I had gotten used to spending my off days and evenings with him, tearing out the old lines and scraping crusty coolant residue from the ship’s inner hull, but the Wailers put an end to all that.

  “No,
” I say, glancing at Soraya. “We can’t wait.”

  “But I was making a present for him,” Miyole says. She clanks through the rice sack and pulls out the dragonfly she was making the first day I found her up and about. “He won’t know where we went.”

  “You can leave it for him,” I say. “We’ll write him a note so he won’t worry.”

  I scribble out a few lines on a scrap of cardboard—found my mowdri. leaving. will send pament for ship dokking. miyole wants you to hav this—and leave it and the creature on his doorstep. My eyes prickle as I stand. If it hadn’t been for him, Miyole might still be curled up in the dark, wasting away. I didn’t want it to come to this. I want nights singing the coffee and tea song by the bay and Miyole playing with Pala and the dignity of earning my own keep. I want to bring Perpétue’s ship back to life. I want Rushil to make me laugh. But I make myself walk away anyhow.

  This is all his fault, I remind myself, wiping furiously at my eyes. If he hadn’t coaxed me away from the shipyard, if he hadn’t convinced me to leave Miyole alone, if he hadn’t ever taken up with the Wailers. . . .

  The train that carries us up to Soraya’s house is smaller and less crowded than the ones I ride most days, all clean white steel and unscratched windows. We pass quiet houses, some with deep-shaded porches and an old look to them, others new and round, with gardens on their roofs. My modrie must be rich someways, I figure, living on higher ground in the north city. I doubt the lines ever flood here.

  Miyole holds my hand tight as we leave the train and walk to Soraya’s place. Her house is one of the older-looking ones, narrow and long, made of brick and wood. A covered porch full of potted ferns peeks out from the second story. A single rosewood tree stands in the narrow strip of dirt between her house and the road.

  The lights quietly turn themselves on as Soraya lets us through the front door. The air wafts cool on my skin, and the walls swallow all the city’s sound. We walk through a low-sunk sitting room with cushioned chairs, gleaming wood floors, and shelves for paper books built into the wall. The back end of the room is all glass, looking out on a brick-walled garden. A tree with star-shaped leaves, so purple they’re near black, shades the corner of the yard.

  “You’ll want to wash, maybe.” Soraya twists her hands. “Unless . . . are you still hungry?”

  I am, but Miyole’s eyes are heavy and she’s swaying on her feet. “Thank you, missus,” I say. “But maybe, if you had a place she could sleep . . .”

  “Of course,” Soraya says.

  I pick up Miyole, and she lays her head on my shoulder. Soraya leads the way up a flight of waxed wood stairs to a hallway splitting off into five rooms, each with its own sliding door, rugs cushioning the floors, and thick windows of double-paned glass.

  Soraya stops at the last room on the right. A quilt in soft rose, green, and blue covers the bed, and a long desk rests against the near wall. A brass telescope on a stand stares blindly up at the shuttered window, and an empty birdcage peeks out from one corner.

  “This was my room when I was a girl,” Soraya says, swiping a thin coat of dust from the desk. “This is my family’s house. I mean our. Our family’s. I really should hire someone to dust in here.”

  The room smells musty but clean. I settle Miyole on the bed and fold the blankets over her, then follow Soraya out into the hall.

  “The bathroom’s there.” She points to the door across from Miyole’s. “Take as long as you want. You can sleep in the next room down. It was my mother’s study when we all lived here. It’s the guest room now.”

  She says it sad, and I can’t think but Soraya’s mother must be gone now, too.

  Soraya smiles tightly. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. My room is on the bottom floor. First on the right.”

  And then I’m alone in the quiet, cavernous house. Soraya’s cleanroom has its own tile compartment where the water spigot lives, closed off by heavy glass doors. When I step inside to investigate, hot water shoots down from overhead and I scramble back to the tiled corner, clothes dripping. Rushil didn’t have running water on his lot, so whenever we wanted to bathe, we went down to the river.

  I work at the spigot’s handles until I think I have the trick of it, and a stream of water patters down around my feet like warm rain. I undress and stand under the flow. I thought I understood luxury before, but this is beyond anything I could have imagined. Sweet-smelling soaps and creams in pump bottles rest on a ledge inside the tiled room. I lift each of them to my nose and smell, letting the warm water slough the dust and sweat from my hair and skin. I feel some sick thinking what the expense of all this water must be, what precious stuff is swirling around the drain at my feet. I turn off the water, lather soap over myself, then turn the spigot again and quickly rinse off.

  Afterward, I wrap myself in a thick, downy towel and pad across the hall to the room Soraya said could be mine. The porch I saw from the street extends from this room, and through its open glass wall, the harsh orange and purple of the Mumbai sunset breaks in. A wide, pillowed bed heaped with midnight-blue blankets soft as fluffy rice takes up most of the room. A sleeping gown and a matching robe wait folded at the food of the bed. Soraya must have left them. The faint scent of her perfume hovers in the cloth.

  I change and sit on the bed, sunk deep in the silence of the house. Soraya must have some sort of shield against the noise, for even in this plush place, we’re still in the city, more or less. I stand. The glass wall to the porch slides open for me, and I push out into the warmer air. The brilliant lights of south Mumbai shine beyond the rooftops. I can just see the trains crawling in a curve where the towering seawall meets the water. The luminous buildings reflect one another, until the city hazes over with its own brilliance. Rushil is out there somewhere. Did he find the note? Is he wondering what happened to us?

  I don’t need to worry over Rushil anymore. Soraya will take care of the ship docking fees and everything else to do with him. And maybe, since the fees are so little to her, she might help me buy a ticket to Khajjiar. I can let myself think on finding Luck again. I can let myself hope.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER .30

  I wake to the full brightness of the midmorning sun and make my way downstairs. Miyole sits on back steps, facing the purple tree. She wears one of Soraya’s button-down blouses like a dress, and someone has combed out her hair and coaxed it into four springy braids. A book rests open on her lap. She doesn’t hear me through the thick glass doors.

  The kitchen is empty and quiet, except for a machine on the counter making a burbling noise.

  “Hello?” I call. “Sor—so missus?”

  Only silence. I look back along the hallway where Soraya said her room would be. At the end stands a dark wood door.

  “So missus?” I say again, softer this time. My bare feet sink into the carpet as I edge down the hall. Is that the door to her room? I can’t remember half of what she told me last night. Most of the other doors in Soraya’s house slide sideways into neat pockets when they open, but this one is heavy wood with an aged brass door knob and a tiny glass eye fitted into the wood at head height. I turn the handle.

  “Ava?”

  I spin around. Soraya stands at the open end of the hallway, staring at me.

  “I—” My face goes hot. The door on the right, I suddenly remember. She said the door on the right.

  “There’s nothing in there,” she says sharply. She pulls the door shut. And then, softer, “Are you hungry? I have breakfast ready.”

  I follow her, shamefaced, to the dining table. What was in that room? Something private, I s’pose. Something you don’t show to a girl you’ve known for less than a full day, even if she is your half-sister’s daughter.

  Soraya hands me a plate of golden potatoes mixed with rice and a small bowl of papaya. She sits across
from me at the table and sips her tea as I eat.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Right s—I mean, yes, thank you.” I’ve never slept so soundly in my whole life. It was like falling asleep on a cloud.

  “Would you like some tea?” She gestures to the carafe in the center of the table. “Miyole and I already drank a whole pot earlier.”

  “Thank you.” I reach for the tea, but Soraya waves me away.

  “You sit. Eat. Let me pour.”

  I watch her fill my cup. Should I ask her about Khajjiar? Last night everything seemed so simple—I thought it would be nothing to ask, but now I don’t know. I’m a stranger here, living at her expense. I can’t afford to ask for too much, especially since the roof over Miyole’s head depends on it, too. And what if I press to go to Khajjiar and he isn’t there?

  Soraya finishes pouring my tea and settles herself back in her seat. “Whenever you’re done eating, we can go. We have plenty to do to make sure you’re ready for Revati Academy and your residency papers are in order.”

  “Right so, missus,” I say and smile. Whatever she wants us to do, I’ll do, so long as it keeps Miyole safe.

  “Please,” my modrie says. “Soraya.”

  I nod. “Soraya.”

  Miyole comes in from the garden, places her book on the table, and leans her head against my shoulder. Her hair is soft and clean, and it comes to me what a poor job I’ve done of caring for her. When was the last time I made sure her hair was washed or her clothes properly scrubbed? I lean my head against hers.

  Soraya pushes back her chair and carries the dishes to the kitchen. “I need to stop in with my lawyer to start my custody registration for you and Miyole,” she calls over her shoulder. “And after that I thought maybe we could go pick out handhelds for both of you, since neither of you seem to have one.”

  “Really?” Miyole perks up.

  Soraya comes back around the corner. “Yes, really.” She smiles at Miyole, and I can read her pleasure in sorting these things clearer than any words. “You’ll need one if you’re going to be at school all day.”