Sound

by Alexandra Duncan

  I adjust my grip on my med kit and scan the crowd for the first response captain’s red-and-yellow vest, but all I see are standard-issue white suits. I should jump in and help, but where? Do I grab one of the chemical dousers and help suffocate the flames? Join the medics hurriedly prepping burn salves and oxygen tanks? Elbow through the crowd to one of the guards standing shell-shocked with bloodstains all over his uniform?

  The saw changes pitch and grinds to a halt. A shout goes up from the cluster of workers around the Rover’s door. I finally spot the deck captain.

  “Move back!” She waves her arms at us. “Everyone, move back! Fire crews only!”

  The hatch tips to the floor with a heavy clang, and an avalanche of gray smoke pours from the ragged opening, up into the dock’s rafters. The fire crew races to the ship. The responders with the dousing tanks don’t stop, but the rest of us freeze, holding our breath and waiting for the fire crew to reemerge. Seconds pass. Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.

  Then we see them. First, a thin young man in a too-large shirt and vest. For a moment, I think his hair is gray, but then I realize it’s soot. It covers every inch of him. The medics nearest the hatch reach up to help him down, and he stares out at us, disoriented, eyes red in his gray face. Next a woman clutching a screaming baby, then an older, bearded man leaning heavily on one of the fire crew and cradling his left eye. Last, a girl my age spills out, carrying a limp toddler in her arms.

  “Help her!” she shouts as the nearest medics rush to them. “She’s not breathing.”

  I hurry forward. I don’t know how exactly my med kit full of fast-compression bandages and I are planning to help, but I’ll figure that out when I get there. The other medics swarm around the survivors, holding breathing masks to their faces and ripping open packages of skinknit bandages to cover their burns. I’ve almost reached the girl when someone cries out in surprise. A small gray-and-black blur bolts from the ship and hits the deck, parting the crowd in front of me. It skitters straight between my boots and streaks away.

  “Someone catch that animal!” the deck captain shouts.

  No one moves. We haven’t drilled for this.

  “You.” The deck captain locks eyes with me and points. “Go after it. I want that thing quarantined.”

  “Me?” I glance over at the gurney where two other medics are fitting an oxygen mask over the toddler’s small, soot-streaked face. One of them starts chest compressions.

  “Yes, you!” the deck captain shouts. “Go. Now, before it gets loose in the ship!”

  I cast one last look at the little Rover girl—small and fragile as one of my butterflies before it sheds its cocoon—and run back the way I came, down the corridor leading to the gardens. If I’m in luck, the entrance to the gardens will still be sealed off, and it will only be able to run so far.

  I slow as the entrance to the corridor closes over me. Emergency lights still flash, flipping the walls and floor from yellow to gray. A small dark shape moves at the far end, creeping across the floor. It turns and freezes. Its eyes flash at me, an eerie phosphorescence in the near dark.

  A chill runs up my spine. A cat? I’ve heard of ships keeping them as good-luck charms and rat catchers, a throwback to the time when we had only Earth’s seas to explore. The Ranganathan doesn’t keep cats. Its vents are seeded with rodent-repelling biomarkers, and a top-of-the-line research vessel doesn’t need to rely on superstition to make a safe flight.

  Get the cat. Get out, I tell myself. The less time I spend in this yellow twilight, the better. I keep thinking I see shadows in the corner of my eye.

  “Here, cat.” I crouch and move forward slowly with my hand out, feeling more than a little ridiculous. I signed up for first response duty to save lives, not chase down pets. And I don’t even particularly like cats. I’m definitely not letting a dakait take me down for one.

  The animal’s eyes go wide, and it slinks off.

  “Dammit,” I mutter, and follow. I try not to frighten it, but any time I start to close the distance, it startles and bolts ahead. The dakait’s smile plays over in my head, and I squeeze my nails into the nerveless flesh of my palms. Ava would know what to do. She’s good with animals in a way I’ve never been, except when it comes to horses. I try to picture her and Rushil calling the half-feral cats that skulk around their salvage and repair shipyard. I kneel in the middle of the corridor and clear my throat. The cat watches me warily from a distance.

  “Heeere, cat,” I trill in my highest voice, hoping this is not the last thing I say before being knocked unconscious. I swallow and purse my lips to make a kissing noise I’ve seen Rushil do to call the strays. “Here, kitty-kitty.”

  The cat holds perfectly still, sizing me up, no doubt, and then takes a hesitant step in my direction.

  “That’s right.” I drum my fingers on the floor and make the kissing noise again. “Come here, you little sidey bastard.”

  It pads closer, still eyeing me warily. Soot cakes its body, and the fur of its low-dragging tail is singed. It lets out a soft, hoarse mew.

  Guilt softens my voice. I would bolt, too, if I had almost burned to death and some strange giant was chasing me. “Here, little guy.” I hold out my hand again, and it bumps my palm with its head.

  “Okay, very good.” I coax it closer until it rubs against my leg, leaving a sooty streak on my uniform. “Nice cat.”

  I pick it and hold it against my chest. It hooks its claws into my shirt and presses its small body against me. Its heart beats out a rapid thump-thump, and a slight wheeze accompanies its every breath. It won’t stop trembling.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” I stroke the cat awkwardly. “Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay.” The last thing I need is this thing developing supraventricular tachycardia and dying on me. Then I’d be stuck in quarantine until one of the senior medics got around to doing an autopsy.

  I make my way back to the dock, the cat clinging to me the whole time. The crowd has thinned, and the only sign of the fire is a blue haze hanging in the air. The cat mewls hoarsely at me.

  The girl I saw earlier, the one carrying the toddler, stands facing the first response captain, her hands planted on her hips. She can’t be more than my age—my real age, not the one on my records. Oily ash covers her clothes and streaks her skin. Soot weighs down her hair.

  “What do you mean, you’re not going after them?” The smoke has left her voice low and hoarse, and something about it hits me dead in the chest. The glassy sea. Ava skimming the sloop over the water after the storm, when we still thought we might find survivors. When I was hanging on to a thread of hope that we might still find my manman.

  “They have my brother. You have to go after them. You have to get him back.” The girl’s voice cracks, and she falls into a coughing fit.

  The deck captain waits until she can breathe again. “Miss.” She sounds weary. “This is a 128,000-acre research ship. Even if we could spare the fuel to change course, we could never outpace a dakait ship. They’re designed for one thing we’re not, and that’s speed.”

  The girl wipes soot from her eyes. “You have those fighters. They could take them down.”

  The deck captain shakes her head. “They’re short- range only. They gave chase as long as they could.”

  “Some help they were.” The girl hugs her arms to herself. “They let them get away. You couldn’t catch a single one?”

  The deck captain presses her lips into a line.

  I hold the cat tighter. They didn’t catch any of the dakait? A whole DSRI research ship kitted out with fighters and guards, and they still got away? The image of the dakait’s boot slipping away flashes through my mind, followed by a wave of shame. They didn’t let them get away; we did. I did.

  “Let me talk to your captain,” the girl says.

  “Commander,” the deck captain corrects.

  “Captain, commander, I don’t care.” Her voice trembles. “Don’t you know what they’ll do to him?”

  The deck capta
in shifts her feet, weary. “I truly am sorry, miss. You can speak to the commander if you wish, of course.” She waves over one of the medics stowing empty oxygen tanks in a cart. “But first we have to check you over. You’ve been through quite an ordeal—high carbon dioxide exposure, dermal burns . . .”

  “I’m fine,” the girl growls as the medic presses a stethoscopic meter to her chest.

  “Please, miss,” the medic says. “We’re trying to help you.”

  The deck captain turns away and nearly walks into me. “Oh.” Relief flashes across her face. “You caught it.”

  “Yes.” Behind her, the medics lead the girl to one of the gurneys.

  “Very good, crew member . . . ?” She trails off, unsure of my name.

  “Specialist Guiteau. I’m one of Dr. Osmani’s assistants,” I say.

  “Dr. Osmani? You’re in biology, then?”

  “Sort of.” I look past her to the girl, lying on the gurney with her hands over her eyes. “My specialties are more in biomorphology and biomimesis, but . . .”

  “No, that’s perfect,” she interrupts. “You’re exactly the person to take care of this problem.” She gestures at the cat.

  My eyes go as wide as the cat’s. “Me? But . . . no, I don’t—”

  She nods. “You’ve done well with it so far. And if that animal is carrying any diseases, you’ve probably already been exposed to them. I can’t think of a better candidate to run the quarantine and decontamination procedures.”

  My face must go ashen, because she changes her tone and pats me on the arm. “Don’t worry, Specialist. It’s only protocol. I’m sure it’s not carrying anything fatal. I’ll notify Dr. Osmani you’re temporarily on emergency response duty.”

  “Thank you,” I hear myself say.

  I turn to go, but something stops me. “Captain?”

  “Yes?”

  “That little girl, the one who wasn’t breathing,” I say. “Did she make it? Is she okay?”

  The deck captain face softens. “She’ll be fine. They’ve got her on oxygen for a little while. Lucky thing she’s so young. She won’t remember any of this.”

  “Right,” I agree, but part of me doubts it. Even if she doesn’t remember the specifics, even if she tries to forget, will it ever completely go away? Or will it creep back in her nightmares and rise up on her when she smells smoke? Will it meld with who she is, like something grafted on to her genetic code? I cast one last look at the soot-covered girl lying still as a stone effigy on the gurney, then clutch my new charge to me and carry it back to my lab.

  Chapter 3

  The month before I applied to the Deep Sound Research Institute, I was still officially sixteen. So I went to see the only person I knew who could fix my papers, the person who had helped Ava and me when we first came to Mumbai—Rushil.

  As I rode the lev trains down from my own quiet, green neighborhood to the Salt, where Ava and Rushil ran their ship docking yard, the trees shrank away. Old buildings with bright new windows and the ghosts of old hand-painted signs on their brickwork rose up in their place. The lev rails skipped over tapris and juice carts sheltering in their shade, and over a cluster of enormous evacuation pipes meant to pump water back out into the sea and keep the lower city from flooding. The only reason Mumbai didn’t disappear along with so many other seaside cities all those centuries ago was our civil engineering corps. They built the towering levee along our coast and the complex drainage system we still use to this day.

  Of course, it didn’t always work perfectly. I stepped off the train into a squelching stretch of mud and thanked my stars I had remembered to wear my boots. In High Mumbai, we wore open-toed sandals and delicate, embroidered slippers, but down in the Salt, the handful of trash-sucking machines on the streets were losing their battle with the dust and refuse that blew down the open alleys and out into the thoroughfares. The horse dung didn’t help, either.

  I put on my don’t-touch-me glare and started down the street, weaving through the flow of bicycles, other pedestrians, and men and women on horseback. Mumbai’s ban on combustion engines inside the city never seemed strange to me, but the London girls at Revati always complained about it until they heard they got to ride horses through the city.

  I passed the street vendors, shops, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants across from Old Dharavi Station.

  “Chhatri! Chhaata! Brollies and parasols!” shouted a vendor hawking cheap umbrellas. He caught sight of me. “Don’t be caught out in the rains, ladki. You’ll ruin those pretty clothes.”

  I laughed. “Ji nahi. I’ve got plenty of brollies.”

  “What about choodi?” He held up a handful of round metal bracelets. “You can never have enough choodi.”

  I shook my head. If my best friend, Vishva, had been with me like usual, we would have stopped. She shared the vendor’s philosophy on choodi. But Vishva wasn’t with me. Since I had started taking classes at the university instead of Revati, we had seen each other less and less. A wave of loneliness pulled at me. If we still went to school together, she would have tagged along. “For moral support,” she would have said, but really to moon over Rushil. It never fazed Vishva that Rushil was a) married, b) sort of my brother, and c) ten years older than she was. Or maybe that’s why she liked mooning, because she knew it was hopeless.

  I pushed on past the brolly vendor and the other street sellers with their blankets of used crows and tablet parts. Deeper into the Salt, the streets quieted and security fences rose on both sides of the road. A high wall of corrugated metal closed in Rushil and Ava’s lot, with razor wire accordioned along the top.

  I pressed the call button at the gate. “Rushil!”

  “Little Mi?” His voice came back full of static.

  “It’s me. Can I come in?” I would have died if my classmates had overheard him using my childhood nickname, but inside the lot, I didn’t mind. It was one of those half-embarrassing, half-nice things he and Ava did that I was never sure if I liked or hated.

  “Course.” A buzzer sounded, and the gate’s locking mechanism released.

  Inside, a hodgepodge of vessels sat baking on the tarmac, some all streamlined white lines and pristine shield panels, others spilling out their rusted guts around their landing gear. On top of Ava and Rushil’s trailer, one of the scrapyard cats yawned and stretched in the shade of a receiving dish.

  “Rushil?” I called into the quiet.

  “Back here,” he answered. “I’m in the garden.”

  I circled their tiny home and stepped into the small green space wedged between the trailer’s back wall and the corrugated fence. Rushil straightened and wiped his hands on his white, sleeveless shirt as I rounded the corner. Sweat stippled his brow.

  “Hey, Mi.” He hooked a thumb at a plastic bowl brimming with cucumbers on the table behind him. “Soraya want some of these? We’ve got extra.”

  “Nah. You know how weird she is about pickles.” Soraya was probably the only person on the entire subcontinent who didn’t like pickles or chutneys. I dropped into one of the folding chairs beside the table and leaned back in the shade. “I’ll tell her you offered, though.”

  “Oof.” Rushil sank into the other chair and wiped the sweat from his face with both hands. “I’m glad you showed up. I needed a break. To what do I owe the pleasure of madame’s company?”

  I chewed my lower lip, suddenly nervous. “I need a favor.”

  “A favor?” Rushil raised his eyebrows. “You know Ava’s on a run, right? She won’t be back until nightfall.”

  “Not from her,” I said. “From you.”

  “From me?” He frowned.

  I leaned forward in my chair so I was more or less sitting straight. “You remember how when Ava and I first got here, you fixed her up with papers?”

  “Uh-huh.” Rushil nodded, a worried look overtaking his frown.

  “I need . . .” I took a deep breath and let it all out in a rush. “I need you to help me get my papers sorted so I can apply f
or a Deep Sound mission.”

  Rushil sat silent for a moment, and then rocked forward onto his feet. “This heat. I think I need something to drink. What about you? Tea? Water? Juice . . .”

  “Rushil.” I rose and gave him my best imitation of Soraya’s I-am-disappointed stare.

  “Miyole.” He planted his hands on his hips and volleyed the look back. “Ava would kill me. Soraya would kill me.”

  “No, they wouldn’t.” I shook my head. “Not if they understood. It’s not like I’m doing anything bad, really.”

  Rushil rolled his eyes. “It’s not like you’re doing anything good, either. You know what this would take, right? Scamming a bunch of government scientists, hacking the national records database—”

  “It’s not scamming,” I interrupted.

  “Whatever.” Rushil dropped back into his chair and leaned forward with his head in his hands.

  “Please, Rushil,” I said, in the voice I used when I was in pigtails and wanted more sugar for my tea. “I’m so close already. You have to be eighteen for the mission, and I’ll be seventeen by the time they launch. It’s just a little tweak, that’s all.”

  What I didn’t say—what no one knew but me—was that the records Soraya had drawn up for me all those years ago were wrong. The doctor marked me down as nine when I first came to Mumbai, probably because of my height, and no one had ever questioned it. Not my teachers, not Soraya, not even Ava. It was only a matter of months—half a year at most—but I was eight when we fled the hurricane, not nine.

  By the time I figured out the doctor had gotten it wrong, I was afraid to say anything. Soraya and my teachers might decide I was too young for Revati, and I loved Revati. It was the only thing making me wake up each morning, the only thing that could help me forget about my mother long enough to make it to nightfall. And then, later, it had simply seemed too awkward to bring up. Oh, by the way, I know I’ve been going along with this for half my life, but the papers that make me a subcontinental citizen are completely wrong. All of which meant I would be sixteen when the Ranganathan left dock. Not eighteen, not seventeen. Sixteen.