An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

  Samantha turned to Aster, squeezed her tightly, then let go. “My apologies,” she said. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?” She stroked a palm across Aster’s cheek, her fingers cold and clammy.

  “You need to leave,” the guard said, “or I can write you up too.”

  Samantha hesitated a moment and then ascended the maroon-carpeted staircase back toward her upperdeck oasis, the skirts of her dress gathered in her hands.

  Aster let out a quiet, undignified squeal as Samantha disappeared up the steps. She needed to radio Giselle. She hadn’t wished to put her in danger, but she had no choice now. She just hoped there was time. Hoped Giselle was close by, safe, not in custody. She switched her two-way to Giselle’s frequency. She couldn’t talk, of course, but she could tap. She beat her finger over the radio’s microphone to relay a distress message. Mayday. Wildflower Wing. She repeated it three times, then cut off the signal.

  “Follow me,” the guard said. He grabbed Aster by the shoulder, her dandelion roots tumbling to the grated floor, and guided her along.

  Aster looked up when the guard jerked her to a stop. She realized now that he’d said something. “What was that?” she asked. His lips moved, but Aster couldn’t make sense of the sounds issuing therefrom. The Silence had come, and like always, at the worst possible moment. It was a temporary deafness that reminded her of her youth. The stress of it aggravated the condition, and though she wanted to sputter out, Please slow down while I gather my wits, her tongue would not cooperate. She hated the way her mind seized into itself sometimes.

  “Aster,” she heard the guard say. She didn’t know what else he said precisely, but years of similar run-ins told her that it was, no doubt, some variation of the usual: how he was going to whip her good for sassing him; or how she looked ugly, like a horse, with her black skin and moon-fat eyes and flaring nose, and because of this, he was going to have her; or how she looked beautiful, like a horse, and because of this, he was going to have her; or how he liked the way she made her corn grits, with the maple syrup and the cinnamon and the cardamom, and could she teach his woman how to make them like that?; or how she smelled so good, like chicory, or how she smelled so good, like tea, or how she smelled so good, like the ocean, even though nobody on this ship had ever smelled the ocean, because there were no oceans in space.

  She didn’t bother sussing out the specifics.

  “Are you listening?” he asked.

  This, Aster did understand, and she closed her eyes, concentrating deeply, so that her words might return to her. “No,” she finally said, “I’m not listening to you.”

  “You cow.”

  “You cow,” Aster said back, knowing she wasn’t supposed to. Mimicry reminded her how to use words.

  “You want me to teach you a lesson?” he asked, closer now. His breath barbed her neck, chin, lips.

  “All I want is to be on my way.” She slid her hands into a pocket of her medicine belt, felt around for the syringe third to the right. He laughed, a bloated sound rooted to his chest that barely made it past his lips. He stood closer, and she felt his heat.

  “I’ve killed men before,” Aster said, a lie. “If pressed, I’d do it again.” She saw the faintest tremor in his otherwise steady pulse, his neck hiccupping then going still.

  His eyes turned to sickles as he examined her. “Look at me,” he snapped, but Aster’s eyes moved sideways and downward, to the grate beneath her feet. The guard’s boots were scuffed, needed shining, nothing like Samantha’s had been.

  Aster didn’t know what made her squat down, lick her thumb, rub it over the fading black of his shoes. A small peace settled over her as her fingers moved methodically over the leather, making it glisten. The rhythm of the movement allowed her to think.

  The needle in the syringe was a tiny one, meant only for small shots of anesthetic, but Aster thought in a pinch—and it was a pinch—it’d do. As his fingers seized a wad of her hair, yanked her up, she uncapped the syringe and lifted it bit by bit from her pocket.

  Aster stabbed the guard in the hip with the needle. He groaned, then made like he was going to backhand her, but she ducked. Fifty meters to the stairway, she could make that easy, and if the needle slowed him down at all, she had a shot. “Little devil,” the guard said, and grabbed her by her suspenders. She wiggled, bending herself out of his grip. His hand moved to the waistband of her trousers, nearly pulling them off as he yanked her backward.

  A loud pop rang through the corridor, and Aster fell forward, freed from the guard’s grasp. The insides of her ears pounded, and she covered them with her palms.

  “Aster? Aster? You all right?” Giselle had come. Her hand jostled Aster’s shoulder roughly, aggravating her wound. “You didn’t get nipped by the ball thing, did you?” She came around in front of Aster, squatted, her short dress riding up, revealing brown thighs, a silver and brown machine—a rifle—slung over her shoulder with a leather strap. Blood pooled on the floor. “Aster?”

  She shrugged out of Giselle’s hands, stood up. The guard lay still on the floor, opened up and spilling out. The healer in Aster wanted to sew him together.

  “Night Empress,” Aster said, despite knowing this was make-believe. Giselle so looked the part, with her device just like the comic book heroine, launching magic pellets. “You got blood and viscera on me,” she added, though it was only a small amount.

  Giselle checked the gold watch on the dead guard’s wrist. “We need to get on before curfew,” she said, and gestured right, toward the corridor. She ran off, gun bouncing against her back and hips.

  Aster unbuttoned the guard’s shirt, spotted with pink, pulling it off his arms then dragging it from beneath his body. The blood would wash out with a little scrubbing. His trousers, maroon, were soft and thick, lovely against her fingers, not scratchy at all. They’d trade well. Aster yanked them off, then his boots, bundled the clothing into her arms.

  With the heap of thieved clothing in her arms, Aster followed after Giselle. The sound of the gunshot had attracted other guards. They’d reached as far down as the bottom of the Field Decks, skipping overs stairs, jumping down whole flights. “Oy!” Aster heard through the grate of the deck above her, boots stomping.

  “Follow me,” she said. There was a way to get into the air ducts from the furnace cabin, present on each deck, and she made her way portside to get to it.

  “How do we get inside?” asked Giselle, glancing back over her shoulder to see if anyone was approaching.

  Aster took out her key, slid it into the scanner. “Like so,” she said when the door to the Heat Bay opened. It was too warm and low on oxygen to hide there for any significant amount of time, but Aster crawled up the pipe to reach the ceiling, and used her shoulder to bang in an opening to the ducts. Voices came from outside. “In there, we’re coming in,” they said, but Aster knew she had a minute. Officers didn’t carry keys like the one she had—a copy of the Surgeon’s. She hoisted herself into the space she’d made in the ceiling, then reached her hand down to help Giselle climb up.

  Both their palms were sweaty, and Giselle slipped. Aster heard the lock click open, and she tried one more time to pull Giselle up. “Grab my shirt,” she said. Giselle clawed Aster’s cuffs, nails digging into her wrists. Aster edged her body backward so she could pull her up.

  There was no covering the hole she’d made in the false plaster ceiling to reach the duct, so they needed to move quickly. Sweat and grime clung to Aster’s skin as she shimmied through the duct. Her bones moved reluctantly, hinged too tight. Salt made her eyes burn. The feel of the guard’s hand still buzzed against her cheek.

  The pipe smelled of mold and spores. Aster wanted to bottle them up and examine them under the lens of a microscope. They were the Gods and the Heavens. Bacteria sprung into existence first, before bug-eyed fish, before serpents, before thick-legged women with shoulders and backs so strong they could carry their whole families on them. Before they built a ship to fly to touch Gods.
r />   “Would you stop that?” Giselle said.

  “Stop what?”

  “That hollering with your hand.”

  Aster hadn’t realized she’d been smacking her hand against the metal piping as she crawled. “It helps me think,” she said. Giselle was in front, her ass in Aster’s face, her bare feet scarred on the bottoms. “Where have you been?”

  “With your mother,” Giselle said.

  “What?”

  Giselle shrugged from in front of Aster, her knobby shoulders rising. “I got to go,” she said, spying a vent large enough that she could crawl through. “You know where to find me. I’ll explain everything when I can.”

  Before Aster figured out her words, Giselle was gone, and she had no idea at all where to find her. Like that, Giselle had disappeared again.

  ix

  Official news of the Sovereign’s death came at 05:03, Sergeant Thompson waking the women of the cabin via loudspeaker shortly after morning bell. Aster had just settled into her mattress for a quick refresher before her meeting with the Surgeon when Thompson’s voice came on.

  The bell struck three times, followed by: “Rouse yourselves! The Heavens are high, and humankind is low, and daily we must strive to attain that highness to which we are destined. Wakeful minds and wakeful hearts. You’ll be allowed five minutes for mindful prayer before I continue with today’s announcements.”

  Mabel, Pippi, and Vivian yawned awake at Thompson’s address, rubbed their sleep-swollen eyes. Aster felt herself calm as they stirred, soothed by the familiar cadence of blankets shuffling, snores easing into soft wheezes.

  “Nice of you to join us,” said Vivian. “Thought for a moment you’d gone the way of Giselle. You heard from her at all?”

  “Yes,” said Aster, refusing to elaborate.

  Vivian, Mabel, and Pippi had slept on a floor pallet to share body heat. Aster had wished to join them when she returned from the Field Decks, but she didn’t want to impose on their carefully constructed knot. Instead, she’d laid alone on her cot, freezing, wishing Giselle was there. It wasn’t but a few days ago that they had been the ones on a floor pallet, warmed by each other’s bodies as they studied Lune’s journals.

  Aster shivered at the thought that she might not see her bunkmate again. With Nicolaeus dead and Lieutenant in the wings, the possibility seemed more likely than ever. That rifle-machine had only so many bullets. Giselle couldn’t fight off the whole Guard, and Aster doubted she could fight off even one Lieutenant.

  She sat up and pulled her knees into her chest, eyes closed. She didn’t like to be agitated but she was. Her equilibrium had taken a more than sizable decline. Seeing Giselle and then losing her again, the murder of the guard—she hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

  “Someone light a lamp or candle, something,” Vivian said. “It’s dark, and it stinks. I feel like I woke up inside somebody’s nethers.” She emerged from the mass of rugs, quilts, afghans, and floral-print sheets.

  “You are so foul,” said Pippi, looking prim despite the ragged state of her nightclothes. She stood up and flipped on an oil lamp to its lowest setting. Flickering, dim light illuminated the tiny cabin.

  “Turn it higher,” said Vivian, throwing a shabby pillow at Pippi. Pippi turned the dial up one click, and the lamp shined two shades brighter.

  Pippi and Mabel moved off the floor to sit next to each other on their cot, their legs overlapping. Rusted bronze walls cast the room in stubborn darkness, no matter how many lanterns were lit. Mabel and Pippi were always touching in some kind of way to ward off the gloom of it, and that was to say nothing of the cold.

  Vivian went to turn up the receiver of the loudspeaker, a blanket draped around her shoulders like a cape. “Quiet, it’s starting,” she said.

  Again, the bell clanged three times through the loudspeaker before the message: “Now that your hearts have been tempered by prayer, you are ready to hear the Word. It is with a grieving heart that I must inform you that Sovereign Ernest Nicolaeus’s spirit joined the Heavens during the night. Work shifts will continue as scheduled. Labor will be a great balm to you as you mourn. We must not let our sorrow impede Matilda’s journey forward to the Promised Land. The cosmos is large, but our spirits are formidable.”

  “The Sovereign’s dead; long live the Sovereign, I suppose,” said Pippi, stretching and yawning. She removed her scarf and undid the plaits, brushing each one out before putting the smoothed strands into a high bun.

  “Long may he reign and all that,” Vivian said, rolling her eyes. She threw on a thick brown flannel shirt over her nightgown and pulled some work boots over her wool tights. That was the extent of her get-ready routine.

  “I can’t believe how blasé you all are acting,” Mabel said, coughing. She patted her chest and wiped her watering eyes. “Pippi, my spectacles.”

  Pippi was already on it. She handed Mabel her glasses and ointment for her chest. She also picked out Mabel’s clothes from the trunk, all garments she had procured herself in an attempt to improve Mabel’s poor fashion sense. Pippi always had Mabel looking quite smart in a long skirt, blouse, and blazer. The ensemble suited Mabel’s dowdy and academic ways. It was just the sort of outfit a middeck journalist would wear.

  “Have you got anything to say about this?” asked Mabel, the question directed toward Aster. She was doing her cultural anthropologist act, acquiring the facts, investigating, collecting data. Aint Melusine would be proud.

  “You were gone last night,” said Vivian, her hands on her skinny, practically nonexistent hips. She wasn’t quite a perfect rectangle, but almost. She was what an upperdecker might call boyishly built.

  “I had nothing to do with his passing. He’d been ill,” Aster responded before realizing that this incriminated rather than exonerated her. Sovereign Nicolaeus’s poor health had been secret. She only knew because Theo had broken protocol by telling her.

  “Aster!” cried Mabel, working herself into the outfit Pippi had picked out. “How long have you known?”

  “She’s probably the one who made him sick,” said Vivian, but who knew if she really believed it? Her personality revolved around being the rude one, and she kept up the act to maintain her identity. In the process she’d become a caricature of herself.

  It made Aster miss Giselle more. Her meanness was pure, forged from pain. It was a cruelty Aster could understand if not always tolerate. She would always forgive a bitter, scarred thing lashing out.

  “Ill from what, Aster?” asked Mabel. Pippi passed her a belt for her skirt.

  “I’m not sure, precisely,” Aster said, getting her own self ready to meet Theo. She went to the leather trunk to retrieve some clean clothes, her bloody ones from earlier already discarded. She decided on a pair of gray trousers, a dull brown shirt. She buttoned her suspenders to her slacks, then pulled the elastic over her shoulders. It wasn’t a particularly warm outfit, but it didn’t need to be. The middecks weren’t subject to the energy rations.

  “I wondered why he stopped doing the announcements,” Mabel said, invigorated by the prospect of a scandal, “but I figured it was something to do with the blackouts. Like he’d gotten hurt, or they needed to keep him sequestered somewhere for his own protection while they figured it out.” She walked toward her busted radio, turning the knob, searching for the right station.

  “Baby, he only just died. There’s not going to be any news for a while, so why don’t you stop worrying?” said Pippi, squeezing Mabel’s shoulder.

  But Mabel’s idea was a good one. Underground reporters in the lowdecks might have knowledge Aster didn’t and would be broadcasting shortly.

  “I can’t believe he’s dead, really dead. He’s been sovereign since before I was born, and now he’s just—not. This is . . . I don’t know. I need to get writing.” Mabel sat near the radio, ear pressed to the output.

  “I’m meeting the Surgeon now to discuss it,” Aster said. “I will relay any discoveries about Sovereign Nicolaeus’s demise to you when
I return.”

  Mabel smiled but was too distracted to bombard Aster with a list of questions to ask Theo, as she usually might. Aster’s intel made Mabel’s underground news bulletin one of the more popular on Q. She thought of telling her how the guard who’d barged in on them and beaten her last week was now dead, but that was a dangerous piece of knowledge. She could come under scrutiny if the wrong person found out she knew.

  “Will you be at shift today?” asked Pippi.

  “I suspect so. We should be finished by then.” Aster strapped on her medicine belt, looping the leather through a brass buckle. Next, she clipped on her radiolabe. Once it was secure, she pulled out the goggles she kept in the left pouch of her bag and slid them over her face.

  “Don’t pretend like your little Surgeon can’t just write you a pass whenever you want,” said Vivian. She now wore a hat pulled over her ears and a scarf.

  “He can’t,” Aster replied. It was one thing to write passes for free movement and quite another to write one excusing her from shifts. Work was the backbone of morality, and so on and so forth. The Sovereignty’s Guard wouldn’t have it.

  * * *

  J deck’s corridors crisscrossed according to little discernible pattern, but Aster knew the passageways well. Bare bulbs cast a dim yellow glow every few meters, hanging like halos. Aster tapped the side of her fist against every third hatch, bumped her hip into every fifth handwheel. It was a game she played, to focus. The beats her body made, counter to the beats her surroundings made, amplified the hidden sounds: the hiss of steam behind the walls, the creaking of Matilda’s rusty joints. Should footsteps approach from behind, she’d hear them and be ready.

  Aster turned a corner and saw Officer Frederick making his rounds. “Ayo,” he said in greeting. He stood at the intersection of Juniper and Jasper, dark hair pasted wetly to his forehead. Of all the guards who worked the lowdecks, he offended Aster least, though she hadn’t forgotten this morning’s altercation.