Sound

by Alexandra Duncan

  “Even if we did,” Commander Dhar interrupts, “what would happen if she found him? We’d be sending her to her death, or at least into slavery, if the dakait didn’t kill her outright. This girl is under our protection now. Her safety is our concern.”

  “Then she could find them, and report back—”

  “To who?” Rubio snorts. “We’re not the law. We can’t police the whole system.”

  “Someone should.” I lean forward, digging my nails into my scarred palms. “We’re the ones who know about it. We can’t stand by and let this happen.”

  Dr. Osmani clears her throat and stares at me with her cold fish eyes. “Specialist Guiteau, may I remind you we are a research ship, not a paramilitary vessel?”

  “But we can still stop them.” I turn to Commander Dhar, my heart drumming. I have to make this right. “Please. One shuttle. You were going to give it up anyway.”

  For a moment, she hesitates, and I think she might say yes. But then she drops her eyes and shakes her head. “We can’t let Ms. Kaldero throw away her life for someone who’s good as dead.”

  For a split second, I am both in the officers’ dining room and clinging to the iron railing of a widow’s walk in the midst of the Gyre’s first and only typhoon. Rain lashes my face and my hands burn. A high, whining sound fills my ears. I try to push down the memory, but it throbs through me, radiating out from my bones. What if my mother and Ava hadn’t come after me that day? What if they’d seen the storm and given me up as dead? What if they’d done that same math and decided my one life wasn’t worth risking the two of theirs?

  “But it’s her choice.” My chest constricts. I always cry when I’m angry, but I’m not going to do it now. “She knows what she’s asking. It’s her life.”

  “She thinks she does.” Commander Dhar meets my gaze with a sad, even look, and I know at once she isn’t talking only about Cassia. “But she’s just a girl. She doesn’t see it’s not that simple. If she goes after them and gets herself killed, she won’t be the only one that suffers. When she’s older, when she has a command of her own and people’s lives depend on her, then she’ll understand. We have to do what’s best for the greatest number of people.”

  It’s as if someone has pitched a tuning fork to the exact frequency of my memories. My palms burn. I can’t get enough air. “But—”

  “I think the commander has given sufficient consideration to your request, Specialist.” Dr. Osmani says.

  The whine sharpens and then drops. My pulse comes roaring back into my ears.

  “Of course.” I stand and shove my chair back, trying not to let the shaking I feel starting at my core spread out to my limbs. I stop before Commander Dhar. “Thank you for the lesson in moral relativity, Commander.” My voice shakes only on the last word.

  Utter silence swallows the room.

  “Memsahib . . . ,” Rubio mutters under his breath.

  I ignore him. I ignore all of them. Part of me knows I’m making a terrible mistake, insulting the commander herself, but most of me doesn’t care. I make for the door, hands and bones on fire, storming by the stunned officers and the clerk on my way out.

  My whole life, I’ve wanted to work on a Deep Sound research ship. When I was a little girl in the Gyre, I would sit up on our roof and watch the distant lights of the ships and satellites orbiting overhead while the chickens clucked softly around my feet. I never lost that scrap of memory, maybe because it was safe, or maybe because that wanting was an indelible part of me. Then, in my first year at Revati Academy, the instructors arranged for us to tour a research ship docked in orbit, one of the Ranganathan’s smaller, older sisters. We walked the ship’s pristine hallways two by two, Vishva and I holding hands, goggling at the researchers and techs in their smart white jumpsuits and soft-soled slippers. I couldn’t have put into words what I felt then. Every person aboard carried a measured, peaceful industry with them down the corridors, smoothly interlocking their duties, as if they all knew their own small part was vital to the vessel’s perfect clockwork.

  I had never seen people work this way before, not in the frenetic pace of Mumbai, where everyone crushed up against his neighbor in competition for customers, time, profit, or in the Gyre, where one steady, monotonous day collecting trash on the waste plain bled into another. All I knew then, a wide-eyed girl aboard her first Deep Sound ship, was that this was what I wanted. This was the closest human beings got to perfection.

  All of that crumples behind me as I stalk away from the dining quarters. The lift doors close—for once it’s empty, thankfully—and my breath fills the small space, harsh and loud, as if I have been running. I cover my face with my hands and slide down against the corner. Did I imagine that shipside harmony all those years ago? Was I so young I couldn’t see past the surface? Or have research ships changed? I thought I would be happy here. I thought I would be with people like me. But they aren’t. They’re exactly like Vishva, thinking only of themselves, ready to cast off anyone who’s no longer of use.

  The lift opens near the upper recreation gardens, and a crowd of techs and research assistants pile in, laughing. I struggle to my feet and push my way out.

  “Feeling stressed?” Advani-ji asks. “Exercise can reduce anxiety. Why not try taking a walk in the recreation gardens?”

  “Fine,” I say, even though I feel more like crushing the grass and snapping branches from the hedge maze than taking a stroll along the gardens’ designated walking paths.

  I tramp through the neatly trimmed foliage into the Ashoka wheel. The maze isn’t really so much a maze as it is a meditation path that swallows you in green and spits you out near the same place you entered. Normally, the solitude of the wheel brings my heart rate down, helps me troubleshoot whatever’s gone wrong with the pollinators or figure out a way to avoid the crowds in the mess hall, but tonight it doesn’t help. This is bigger than my own petty anxieties.

  I leave the hedges behind and keep walking, past the gardens and down the moving sidewalks. The arched walls and ceiling play a lavender twilight dotted with fireflies, and then a stark mesa at sunset, the clouds striating the darkening sky with pink and gold. It’s all fake, nothing more than electrical impulses skittering across a screen. This whole place is an illusion, even down to our supposed mission. Who cares if there are only bees and no butterflies on the colonies? If a human life isn’t worth fighting for, why are theirs?

  The corridor opens onto the hangar where we brought in the Rover ship. The pathway rolls to a stop, emptying me into the wide, darkened bay. On the far end, the blackened wreck of the Rover ship hunches beneath a fire-dampening tarp. All my thoughts snuff out, and then my pulse comes back, shuddering through my veins. The ship, the ship, the ship.

  I approach, my footsteps amplified by the cavernous latticework of metal girders far above my head. Outside the wreck, I pause. A burned, oily smell lingers in the air; more than a smell—I can taste it. It takes on mass in my lungs. The Ranganathan’s microbionic air scrubbers must still be hard at their invisible work, cleaning the air, but they haven’t managed to erase all traces of tragedy yet.

  I lift the edge of the tarp and duck inside. My slippers stir the ash. I blink, willing my eyes to hurry up and dilate, but when they finally do, there isn’t much to see. Only the curved metal frame remains overhead, most of the fuselage burned away around it. A line of storage lockers back against one of the partially intact sides, metal faces either punched in or coated with ash, and chunks of plating and insulation litter the floor. The hull on the far side bows out, its tattered edges twisted like tinfoil. Explosive decompression. It doesn’t take much to destroy a ship, especially a small one without as many built-in fail-safes as the Ranganathan. One small, hull-penetrating round, and the whole vessel can burst open to space like a flower blooming in fast motion.

  On the one remaining inner wall, someone has swiped away the ash, revealing a muted red-and-yellow design—thick lines radiating out against a field of shadow blue, a wrea
th of flowers with stars in place of pistils all around.

  A muffled sob echoes through the gutted ship.

  I start. “Hello?”

  The crying stops. “Who’s there? What do you want?” Cassia’s voice reaches out of the shadows, tremulous and defiant.

  “It’s me.” I squint into the darkness. Cassia sits in the entrance to one of the ship’s gangways. “Miyole.”

  She doesn’t answer, only rubs her eyes on her sleeve.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.” I step closer. “The air’s still full of carcinogens.”

  I expect her to come back at me with some comment about the rain calling the ocean wet, but she doesn’t. Instead she drops her head into her hands and kneads her scalp.

  “Cassia?” Her silence is far worse than the crying.

  “Your commander says we can rebuild this.” She brings up her head. Red rims her eyes. “Do you think she’s even been to see what’s left?”

  “I don’t know.” I don’t know if Commander Dhar truly hasn’t seen the extent of the Rover ship’s damage, or if she was simply giving Cassia and her family an excuse to stay aboard. One look at their vessel, and even those of us in bioscience would know it was beyond repair.

  Cassia drops her head back against the door frame. She looks up at the expanse of tarp where the ceiling should be. “Milah learned to walk here. We used to play Sparks and Kettles. That was Nethanel’s favorite when we were little.”

  I don’t know what to say. Soraya would know. She always knew when I needed soothing words and when I needed to be left alone up in the branches of the Japanese maple in the corner of our back garden. But she isn’t here. It’s just clumsy, awkward me. I finger the hem of my sari and stare down into the ash. I wish I was wearing my work clothes and not this costume. It feels even more out of place in the midst of the Rover ship’s destruction. I hesitate for a moment, then sit down next to Cassia on the blackened floor.

  “Do you think she’ll remember him?” Cassia asks, almost too quiet for me to hear.

  I look up. “Your brother?”

  “Her father,” she corrects, though the words sound as if they’re shredding her throat. “Nethanel’s not just my brother. He’s her father, too.”

  I rub a spot on the floor. The soot smudges my fingers, oily and opaque, but the floor isn’t any cleaner, either. It’s as if it’s spreading, staining everything it touches. Cassia’s palms are thick with it.

  I look up at the red-and-yellow design on the wall facing us and then back at her hands. “That drawing,” I say. “What is it?”

  Cassia glances up and scowls. “The Wheel of Heaven.”

  “Does it mean something?”

  “It’s supposed to protect us. You know, keep misfortune out of our path.” She pulls at a loose thread on her trouser cuff. “Some help it’s been. First Milah’s mother, and now this. Nethanel . . .”

  Guilt rolls over me again. If I had stopped that dakait, his ship might have been caught waiting for him instead of bolting. We might have had time to stage a rescue or negotiate a trade—him for Nethanel. Cassia might still have her brother. Milah might still have her father.

  “I’m sorry.” I look at her. “I wish I could have stopped it.”

  Cassia scoffs. “You say it like it’s over.” She scowls at the wheel, and then at me. “It isn’t over until we have him back.”

  Helplessness wells up in my chest. That feeling of watching disaster unfold and not being able to do anything but watch the feeds. “If I could go back . . . ,” I start to say, and then stop. What good would it do Cassia to know I had a chance to save her brother and failed?

  I change tactics. “Maybe the commander will change her mind.” Even as I say it, I hear how ridiculous it sounds.

  Cassia gives a short, bitter laugh. “Right. The commander.”

  “I want to help.” I reach for her sleeve, but stop short and let my hand fall to the floor between us. “I just . . . I don’t know what else to do.”

  Cassia looks down at my hand, then up at me. Our eyes meet. Dark circles hang beneath hers, like bruises. Something raw and charged passes between us—it’s as if my whole body is holding its breath. This feels different from hanging out with Vishva or any of the girls I knew back home. Different even than my crush on Karishma. The hairs on my arms rise.

  “If I could get to Ceres,” she says cautiously. “I know someone who could help.”

  My throat goes dry. I know what she’s asking. Part of me has known where this was going since the moment I stormed out of the officers’ dining hall. I close my eyes.

  “We have scouting shuttles,” I say in a low voice. “The ones Commander Dhar was talking about. They’re short-range, but they could be modded.”

  I open them again. Cassia is watching me with the silent intensity of a starving animal about to be fed.

  “It wouldn’t hurt the mission if one went missing,” I go on. “The commander almost said as much.”

  Cassia stares at me, her brows knit, her lips pressed together. “And one of those . . . It could reach Ceres Station?”

  I nod. “Not much farther, but if someone could find the right parts on Ceres . . .”

  “And this person,” Cassia says slowly, careful to keep her face neutral. “She could do this alone?”

  “As long as she can fly a ship.” I nod.

  Her face falls. “And if she can’t?”

  I falter. I assumed all the Rovers knew how to fly. It would be like living on a boat and never learning how to swim. Except that happened all the time, I suddenly remember. Most of our neighbors in the Gyre thought my mother was crazy for taking me in the water. You want your girl to be shark bait, Miss Captain, you?

  I bite my lip. “Not even a little bit?”

  Cassia shakes her head. “I worked on the water recycling system. Kept up the air filters.”

  I swallow. Things just got several magnitudes more complex. “In that case, she would need someone to fly for her.”

  Cassia stifles a groan and grinds her palms into her eyes. When she lowers her hands, a half-moon of soot marks her cheek. “Someone has to stay behind with Milah and the baby. Aunt Rebekah, probably. My father’s injured too badly. And Ezar . . .” She shakes her head and looks up at me, helpless. “He’s willing to think Nethanel’s dead. He wouldn’t have the stomach for a rescue anyway.”

  Dead. A rescue.

  Times stops. My whole body hums, as if the bees have built a hive inside me. Skimming the water, searching for my mother’s body. Milah holding Tibbet’s limp frame. Cassia, full of righteous fire, staring down the commander. When I was younger, Ava insisted on showing me how to pilot my mother’s old sloop. Just in case, she said. I thought it was pointless. I could have used those dusty afternoons to finish my homework or go out riding with Vishva. I already knew I wanted to be a scientist, not a pilot.

  But I learned the basics.

  I learned enough.

  Cassia has to do this thing, and if she can’t fly herself, there is only one other way it can be done. I know what I have to do. I know how to make it right. All at once, the bees rise to an unbearable hum, and then stop.

  “I could go,” I say in the silence. “I could fly for you.”

  Chapter 6

  One of the first things the early Deep Sound pioneers figured out was that if you spend too much time with the same people day after day in an enclosed space, all the fake gardens in the universe wouldn’t stop you from going truly and profoundly insane. The stress, the isolation, it gets to you, and you start doing things you would never think of doing under the open sky, like starting fistfights or stabbing one another with cutlery. Or screaming at your commander and storming out of an officers’ dinner.

  Which is why, the morning after my outburst at dinner, I find my schedule full of mindfulness training and appointments with the ship’s counselors.

  “It could be worse.” Lian peeks over my shoulder at the handbook screen and shrugs.

&nbs
p; And she’s right. It could be far worse. The Ranganathan’s administration could have recorded the incident as a disciplinary misdemeanor, rather than a case of stress-induced emotional reactivity. Still.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” I glance at my other suitemates’ empty bunks.

  Lian hesitates and gives me a sideways look. “I’m pretty sure they already know.”

  My stomach sinks.

  Lian looks guilty. “Actually, I’m pretty sure everyone knows.”

  I stare at her for half a second before it hits me. Oh, no. “Rubio.”

  Lian nods. “Rubio.”

  “Chaila.” I drop back on my bunk and pull my pillow over my face. “At least tell me the thing with the officers made him forget about the cat.”

  Lian stays silent a beat too long. I peek out from under the pillow at her.

  “I heard about that, too.” Lian grimaces. “At the mess this morning.”

  I groan and roll over. What did I ever do to deserve Hayden Rubio? It’s not for much longer, I remind myself. Two more days, and we’ll be near enough for the shuttle to reach Ceres Station. Then Rubio will be the least of my problems.

  I hurry through my morning duties—check the pollinator habitats, program the nutrient rain timer, and tweak the atmospheric mix. By some small, anomalous grace, none of the butterflies have died overnight. A blue-black sparrowtail perches on a mossy branch above me, gently folding and unfolding its wings. Graphium cloanthus, a glassy bluebottle.

  Guilt twists in my chest. These fragile creatures—the bees and butterflies—their lives have been my responsibility since I came on board. I’ve watched them and their ancestors inch through their larval stages, cocoon themselves beneath leaves, burst forth in a flurry of wings, mate, lay their eggs, and die. I’ve stolen their eggs for Dr. Osmani’s genetic alterations and sneaked them back into place afterward. I’ve charted every iteration’s effect on their life span.

  But now there’s something more important to be done, something I can’t ignore. Help Cassia. Rescue Nethanel. Make sure Milah grows up with at least one of her parents. I know it’s the right thing to do, but I still feel seasick whenever I think about it. It isn’t only the prospect of stealing a shuttle and the mountain of trouble that goes along with that. Or the knowledge that I’m giving up the years of work it took to make it to the DSRI. Or the thought of how disappointed Soraya will be when she finds out what I’ve done, because she’ll never, ever understand. Maybe it’s all of those things. Or maybe it’s all the unknown factors in between. “Rescue Nethanel” is just a hypothesis. The outcome could just as easily be that we get caught stealing the shuttle, or we make it to Ceres Station, but we lose the trail. Nethanel disappears into the unending night of space.