The month before I started classes at the university, I met Vishva and a gaggle of other girls from our class at the train stop near my house.
“Miyole!” Vishva threw up her hands and tottered over to me on silver stilettos. Her long hair coiled in a sleek black chignon at the side of her head, and her flowing orange shirt had been slashed perfectly to show her shoulders. She grabbed me in a hug. “You came!”
“Of course I came.” I looked down at my flat shoes and plain lavender shirtdress. Even with Vishva in heels, our heads were still level. Only I looked like a freakishly tall ten-year-old hanging out with a group of actual teenagers. “Where are we going?”
“You tell me.” Vishva grinned. “It’s your farewell party.”
I gave her a playful shove and rolled my eyes. “I told you, it’s not farewell. I’ll still be in the city, just over at the university. We’ll see each other all the time.”
I could have gone farther. I’d been accepted to colleges in Bangalore, Oxford, Zurich, Cairo, Kolkata, and Jaipur, too, but Soraya hadn’t wanted me straying so far from home until I was at least eighteen. So Mumbai University it was.
“So, where are we going?” Vishva asked.
“Up to Malabar Hill?” I suggested.
Vishva wilted. “Again? Seriously? And do what, sneak into one of the cafés and hope we catch a glimpse of Liam Chowdhury?” She said his name like we hadn’t both been obsessed with his movies and filled our feeds with nothing but pictures of him for the past two years.
I frowned. “What’s wrong with Liam Chowdhury?”
“Nothing.” Vishva flopped her hands against her sides. “It’s just . . . chaila, Mi. Don’t you want to do something different for a change?”
I scratched my ankle with the top of my shoe and glanced at the other girls. My second-closest friend, Aziza, was off visiting her father in Istanbul, so Vishva had brought along a group of girls I knew from class but didn’t hang around with unless we had to do a project together or something. Most of them were busy with their crows or talking, but Siobhan Nguyen and Chandra Avninder, two of the wealthiest girls in our school, were clearly listening in.
I shifted from one foot to the other. “Like what?”
Vishva’s eyes sparkled, and I realized she had been waiting for me to ask that all along. She glanced at Siobhan and Chandra. “Your sister lives down in the Salt, doesn’t she?”
I eyed Vishva. What was she up to? She knew exactly where Ava and Rushil lived. She’d been to their house for tea a million times before. “Yes?”
Vishva hurried on. “So you know your way around, yeah?”
Siobhan and Chandra were definitely listening now. They weren’t even pretending to scroll through the feeds on their crows. And Vishva was giving me a look that said she might spontaneously combust if I didn’t go along with whatever she had planned.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I know my way around.”
“Brilliant. There’s this club called Pradeep’s that just opened on the hill and Chandra says they don’t check ID for girls, so we could definitely get in.” Vishva threw a smile over her shoulder at our classmates, then turned back to me. “What do you think?”
I looked down at my dress. Definitely more iced fruit on Malabar Hill than club wear. And Pradeep’s . . . I liked the Salt, but I didn’t particularly like its clubs. Packed-in crowds, loud music, flashing lights, people screaming at one another over the bass, a miasma of smoke, sweat, spilled drinks, perfume, and cologne choking the air. I knew some people liked it—I knew Vishva liked it—but something about being trapped in a dark room where no one could hear me put me ill at ease.
“Can’t we go down to the talkies instead?” I whispered.
“We go to the talkies every week.” Vishva drooped over like a marionette with her strings cut. “Come oooonn, Miyole.”
I sighed. Siobhan and Chandra had gone back to their crows, but they were obviously still listening. Maybe it would be more fun than it looked. Maybe I’d love it. I liked dancing, after all, even if I wasn’t as coordinated as Vishva, and what were clubs for if not dancing?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Vishva squealed. “I knew it! This is going to be so jhakaas! You’re going to love it, Mi.”
We rode the train down to the Salt, everyone gabbing the whole way. Vishva dug in her purse and found gold shimmer cream to paint on my eyelids, and Chandra’s friend Drishti loaned me her belt so I’d look a little less like I was heading to a violin recital. Vishva tried to get me to undo my braids, but I slapped at her hands until she left me alone. I didn’t like anyone touching my hair except Soraya.
We piled off the train at Sion Station and started up the hill. Vishva and the other girls huddled together, pointing and giggling at everything we passed and shrieking when they accidentally stepped in mud puddles. A chai vendor glared at them over his cart, and farther down the street, a twentysomething guy nudged his friend and ogled Siobhan as she stopped to take a picture of one of the street-sweeper bots someone had graffitied to look like a turtle shell.
Unease fluttered in my stomach. Normally when I came to the Salt, I dressed in plain clothes and boots. I tried not to draw attention to myself. But my Revati friends were so obviously tourists, rich girls acting out every stereotype imaginable of the spoiled private-school girl slumming it on a weekend night.
I walked a little slower, put another meter of distance between myself and the group.
“Miyole!” Vishva shouted back down the street. “Hurry up! We don’t know where we’re going.”
My heart fell. Not them. Us. I was one of them.
We arrived at Pradeep’s as the sun disappeared behind the levee wall. Bass thumped through the red-painted cinder block walls, and the wind picked up, plastering my skirt against my legs and peppering us with grit from the streets.
“Bleh.” Vishva turned her back to the wind and shuffled closer to me. “This is going to be so jhakaas, Miyole. You’ll see.”
A big man with close-cropped hair and a tight black shirt stood at the entrance, eyeing each person as they passed and occasionally cracking his stony face to wink at one of the girls.
Vishva and the others giggled as he whistled at them and waved them through, but when I stepped up, he held out a hand.
“Wait a second.” He looked me up and down, and suddenly I wished I had let Vishva do something with my hair after all. “How old are you, kid?”
I glanced at Vishva, standing openmouthed just inside the door.
“Nineteen?” My voice squeaked.
The doorman shook his head. “I don’t think so. Let’s see some ID.”
“She’s with me.” Vishva stepped back into the entryway. “She’s my friend.”
The doorman looked between the two of us and cocked an eyebrow at Vishva. “You nineteen, too?”
She stepped back. “No. Um . . . eighteen. I’m eighteen.”
He grunted. “Well, you can stay or you can go, but your friend doesn’t get in without ID.”
I looked helplessly at Vishva. Don’t leave me out here alone. Fake IDs were expensive, and I’d never needed one before. Vishva had said I wouldn’t need one.
She glanced over her shoulder at Siobhan and Chandra standing under the pulsing lights of the dance floor, and then back at me. “Sorry, Mi.” She backed up another step.
A small, sharp pain shot through my chest. “Vishva . . .”
“I’ll find you later, okay?” She angled her way into the crowd and shouted over the music. “We’ll go up to the hill, like you wanted. Keep your crow on.”
My eyes burned, but I wasn’t about to cry in front of a bouncer and a whole line of people. That would be later, alone on the train, when I started to wonder whether they’d turned me away because I truly looked so young or if my being too dark and foreign had something to do with it. Instead I stared dumbfounded as my best friend disappeared into the darkness and thrash of bodies without so much as a backward look.
> Another alarm chimes, warning me it’s time to get dressed if I’m going to make it to the officers’ tier on time. I can’t keep dwelling on some dumb high school slight. Besides, my failed attempt to get into Pradeep’s was what gave me the idea to tweak my records and get myself here. If Vishva hadn’t dumped me for her new friends that night, I might still be knocking around Mumbai, waiting for my life to begin. Someone else would have had to rescue the universe’s traumatized cats.
I stand and shake out my dress uniform, brush invisible flecks of lint from the sleeves, and hold it up against me before the full-length mirror on the back of the door.
“It’ll be fine,” I tell myself. If it was a mistake, surely they would have sorted it by now.
At that moment, the door slides open, and all three of my bunkmates walk in.
“Whoa-ho,” Madlenka whoops as she shrugs out of her lab coat. “Fancy. Going somewhere special tonight, Miyole?”
Jyotsana and Lian grin when they see what I’m holding.
“Is it a boy?” Jyotsana’s eyes light up. “It’s a boy, isn’t it? Is it that security pilot who’s always following you around?”
For a split second, I think spontaneous human combustion might be possible after all. “Rubio?” I say faintly.
“That’s him,” Jyotsana agrees. “The one with the hair, right?”
“No,” I choke out. “Definitely not. No.”
“Come on, Jyotsana, not everyone’s into boys.” Madlenka rolls her eyes at me sympathetically. Her girlfriend works in propulsion maintenance, and once, when we were playing Truth or Dare during our first week aboard, she got me to admit to having a debilitating and unrequited crush on a girl from my biochem class at the university. Her name was Karishma, and she had hair all the way down to her waist. She was also six years older than I was and secretly engaged to our teaching assistant, but I didn’t know that at the time.
“No,” I say again, more forcefully than I mean to. “It’s no one, okay?” I don’t have time in my life for crushes anymore.
“All right.” Jyotsana holds up her hands in surrender but shoots Madlenka a look that says she doesn’t believe me for a second. They’re all in their early twenties, which means they think they have some kind of sixth sense when it comes to my love life.
“So where are you going?” Lian folds her lab coat neatly and drops it in the laundry chute.
“I . . . um . . . the mid-tier officers’ dining room?”
“The middle tier?” Madlenka gasps, and the three of them dissolve in excited shrieks.
“Aiyo, really?”
“So exciting!”
“How did you get an invite?”
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Madlenka nods at the dress uniform still dangling in my hand.
“Y . . . yes?”
Madlenka shakes her head. “You have to dress up more than that.”
Jyotsana agrees. “This is mid-tier, Miyole. This is your chance. You have to make them notice you.”
My stomach flutters. “I . . . I don’t know if I want that.” I just want everyone to leave me alone and let me figure out what’s wrong with the pollinators. If they notice me, I want it to be for my work, not my outfit.
“Of course you do.” Madlenka pulls her hair back, all business. “These are the first officers. Make a good impression, and they can get you any assignment you want.”
She’s right; this is my way to my own lab, my own experiments. No more Dr. Osmani. All of us who signed on as research assistants know the way it works. On the outbound journey, all that matters is preparing for the terraforming drops, but on the way back, some of us will get the chance to take over the unused labs, run our own experiments. And the first officers are the ones who choose.
“Don’t worry.” Lian takes my arm. “We’ll help you.”
Jyotsana has already opened my locker and pushed my uniforms aside to look at the clothes I brought from home.
“Ooh.” She pulls out a gold- and red-stamped sari with a startlingly blue choli and skirt to wear underneath.
“No way.” The choli shows my arms and stops at the bottom of my rib cage, leaving most of my stomach bare, which is exactly what you want on a humid Mumbai afternoon, but not at an officers’ dinner. Our prep instructions for the Ranganathan told us we could bring one item of civilian formal wear, but the moment I stepped on board and saw everyone in their long sleeves and high collars, I stuffed my sari at the back of my locker.
“But it’s so pretty.” Jyotsana holds the outfit up to me. “You look way better in bright colors anyway.”
Madlenka nods. “And a lot of the first officers are from India, so it can’t hurt to let them know you are, too.”
I make a face. “I don’t know. Isn’t that kind of . . . what’s the word? Nepotism? Favoritism?”
Madlenka rolls her eyes and shrugs. “It’s called ‘how the world works.’”
Jyotsana laughs. “You’re so serious, Miyole.”
“Here.” Lian takes the sari and drapes it over the shoulder of my dress uniform. “What if you wear it over your blues like this?”
“I . . . I guess.” Something about the uniform makes the gold cloth slightly more sober and elegant.
“Excellent!” Jyotsana claps her hands. “Put it on! Put it on!”
I change into my blues and let Jyotsana help me drape the sari, while Lian attacks my hair with her expert fingers. If I close my eyes, I’m back in the Gyre, my mother gently tugging my hair into braids. Another regret—forgetting how to replicate the intricate styles she did for us both on Seventh Market days. Soraya and Ava both tried to fix it the way I described, but their own hair was so different from my own. It was never the same.
Giggling bubbles up around me. I open my eyes. Madlenka is coming after me with her lipstick.
“Oh, no.” I lean back, pulling out the neat tuck Jyotsana has just finished at my waist and making Lian yank my hair.
Madlenka sighs and raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Will you trust us? God, you’re exactly like my fifteen-year-old cousin. You’d think you’d never gone to a dinner before.”
I shut my mouth and let Madlenka go to work. That’s far closer to home than I want anyone to know.
When they’re finished, they push me in front of the door mirror. I stop short, disoriented. The girl staring back looks nothing like me. The sari gives me hips I never have in my regular uniform, and the gold brings out the honey-brown tint in my eyes. Lian has even managed to braid my hair into an elegant spiral at the top of my head—I guess it’s true what they say about needing nimble fingers to work in robotics. But it’s the lips that put a hitch in my breath. That red . . . the fullness—my mother’s face flashes before me, her hair a halo of free-floating curls, her lips painted the color of a crimson sunbird, the blurred memory snapping into perfect focus.
I steady myself against the wall. In my memories, my mother is always beautiful, perfect. But now I remember the scar slicing through the left side of her mouth, the stiffness when she smiled. It never stopped her from picking out the brightest colors to paint her lips. It’s her. I look so much like her.
“Miyole?” Lian touches my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
In the mirror, my face has gone gray. I look like I might throw up.
“I’m fine.” I turn away from the mirror and clear my throat. “Thanks for this. Really.”
“Any time.” Lian exchanges a worried look with Jyotsana and Madlenka. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Never better.” I remember to make myself smile this time. Smiling always used to throw Ava and Soraya off my case when either of them went all mother hen on me.
“You’d better go,” Madlenka says. “You don’t want to be late to your first officers’ dinner.”
I escape into the corridors and wipe at the lipstick with the back of my hand. Normally I take the emergency stairwells to move from deck to deck—I run into fewer people that way—but I don’t want to show up in the mid-
tier dining room looking like I’ve come straight from a three-kilometer sim run, so I head for the lifts instead.
I find a spot near the back of the car, next to the window that overlooks the decks as we pass. A crowd of maintenance and repair technicians push in after me, several of them eyeing my outfit. The doors begin to slide shut, but a shout from the other side stops them short.
“Wait! Hold the door.”
A carefully tousled brown head joins the crowd at the front of the lift. “Thanks.”
I press myself against the window and sink down. Rubio. Perfect. Not for the first time, I curse my bad luck at being one of the tallest girls aboard the Ranganathan. Maybe he’ll step off in a tier or two and never even notice I’m in the same car. I catch myself rubbing the smooth scar on my left palm, and clasp my hands to make myself stop.
The lift drops in a smooth descent. The upper recreation gardens spread out below us, green and orderly, dotted with crew members cleaning up debris from the attack. Its domed ceiling has already scarred over where the dakait breached the Ranganathan’s skin. Part of the hedge maze has burned down to blackened twigs, but I can still make out its design—a central hub and twenty-four spokes closed inside a circle, the wheel of life. The sign graces my adopted country’s flag, but more than that, it means dharma, duty—the keystone of ship life. We each have a role in bringing life out to the Deep, to the shadowed worlds at the sun’s farthest reach, even if that role occasionally feels ridiculous or pointless, like, say, chasing down a tomcat or putting on a sari to go to dinner with the first officers.
The lift stops even with the green lawns of the recreation garden. The maintenance techs pile out, but Rubio only steps aside to let them pass.
Don’t let him see me. Don’t let him see me, I beg. But it’s no use. Rubio glances over and catches sight of me as the door slides closed.
His eyes light up. “Hey, memsahib!”
Dammit.
“Rubio.” I straighten my spine and let my tone frost over with formality.
He makes his way to the back of the lift as it drops below the recreation level. The windows go black.
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