Sound

by Alexandra Duncan

  I stand and pick up my med kit.

  “Miyole,” Cassia says.

  I stop.

  “Stay with me,” she says. “Just for a little.”

  My muscles freeze, but my heart skips faster. Beneath the surface, I’m all motion and biology. “Are you sure?”

  Cassia starts to nod, and then winces and catches herself. “I’m sure.”

  I sit on the bunk next to her, gingerly, careful not to jostle her.

  “Not there.” Cassia holds out a hand. “I’m cold. Climb in with me.”

  My stomach fills with butterflies. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Cassia says.

  I climb over her and prop myself up on my side. Beneath the faint smell of my med supplies and the musty bed sheets, Cassia’s scent holds sway. It’s something soft and sharp together, like bread and light vinegar.

  Cassia rolls close to me. “It’s better when you’re here. It’s distracting.”

  I laugh. “Distracting?”

  “Good distracting,” she says. “It gives me something else to think about.”

  She shifts her head on the pillow, and her hair brushes my palm, soft and cool like a silk sari. A current runs through me, as if all my nerve endings are exposed. I know I shouldn’t be feeling this way when Cassia’s sick. I shouldn’t be feeling this way when she’s lost her brother. But her breath falls on my skin and her eyelashes are gold against her freckled cheek and she thinks I’m distracting.

  “Are you awake?” I ask.

  “Mmm.” Her eyelids flutter open. “I want to be, but the medicine . . .”

  “Talk to me,” I say. “Teach me some of those signs you and Milah know.”

  “Okay.” She resettles herself on her side. “We should do the alphabet to start.” She forms her hand into a fist with her thumb free. “That’s A.”

  A dizzying sense of déjà vu comes over me, and all of a sudden I’m back in the Gyre, only I’m the one showing Ava how to write her alphabet. In my memory, we have a glowing tablet screen between us, but can that be right? We were poor in the Gyre. How could we have had a tablet when we had to rummage through bins of thirdhand clothes to find a pair of matching shoes on market day?

  Cassia swats me lazily. “Pay attention.”

  I shake myself back to the present and find my knees trembling. “Sorry,” I say. “Go on.” This is why I shouldn’t try to remember. At least I’m lying down and don’t need to put my head between my knees.

  “Are you all right?” Cassia frowns.

  I make myself smile. “I’m fine.” I’m not the one with the missing brother or the head trauma.

  “Are you sure?”

  I close my eyes. Am I? My pains are such distant ones. They shouldn’t still be bothering me. I’ve had such good luck, so many breaks. I shouldn’t still be wrapped up in my own misfortune. It shouldn’t still hurt this much.

  “I was thinking about my manman,” I admit.

  “Oh.” Cassia traces the line of my hair with one finger. Her pupils are dilated, and I think the medicine might be making her a little looser and softer than usual. “Do you look like her?”

  “I think so,” I say, remembering the odd, unmoored feeling I had facing myself in the mirror before the officers’ dinner. “Sometimes I think I remember everything there is to know about her, and then another detail comes up out of nowhere and hits me when I’m not looking. You know?”

  “Yeah.” She drops her hand to the pillow. “Nethanel said the same about Ume after she died.”

  Her eyes take on a faraway, glazed look. I reach out and lay a hand on her arm through the sheets, but at my touch, her face crumples. She cries quietly, fat tears escaping from beneath her lashes, her body shaking with the effort of containing the sound.

  “Oh, no,” I say. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  She waves me silent and takes a deep, hiccupping breath.

  I swallow. “Teach me more signs,” I say. “Teach me a word.”

  “Yeah.” She wipes her eyes. “Okay.”

  “How do you say ‘sorry’?” I ask.

  She laughs and rubs her eyes again, then makes the A symbol and circles it around her heart. “Like that.”

  I copy her. “What about ‘Don’t cry’?”

  Cassia shakes her head. “I have a better one.”

  “Yeah?” I shuffle closer to her. We are knee to knee beneath the covers.

  She touches a finger to her temple, then drops her hand and clasps it with the other.

  “What’s that one?” I ask.

  “Trust,” Cassia says.

  Chapter 12

  Four days out of dock, Cassia is still sleeping half the day. And then Rubio brings up the birds for the first time. We’re crammed into the crawl space beneath the storage berth and the drums of cryatine, trying to figure out how to dampen the ship’s beacon so we don’t broadcast our position to the Ranganathan or the nests of dakait lurking outside Enceladus’s sister moons.

  “Did you hear that?” Rubio pauses with a jack in his gloved hand and looks up. “It sounds like geese.”

  Half of the Mendicant’s heating elements have shorted out, so we’re both wearing our thermal jackets zipped up to the neck. Our breath forms frosty clouds in the stark blue light of the magnetic torch clipped to the ceiling.

  “Geese?” I follow his gaze.

  “You know.” He moves his hands in a flapping motion. “Geese.”

  I roll my eyes. “I know what geese are.”

  “But you don’t hear them?” The intensity in his voice starts to make me think he isn’t joking.

  “No,” I say cautiously. I look up again. We’ve been trying to keep as quiet as possible so Cassia can rest. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Rubio narrows his eyes as if he thinks I might be lying.

  “Maybe it’s Tibbet,” I say. That cat makes some extraordinarily weird noises, especially when he catches one of the ship’s seemingly endless supplies of mice. “Or some old pneumatics or something.”

  Rubio relaxes a fraction. “Maybe.” He turns back to the coms access panel and concentrates on threading the jack into the line-in. It seals with a click. “Got it.”

  At that moment, the gravity fails.

  My stomach lurches, and an eerie prickling sensation courses over my skin as all the hair on my body rises of its own accord. Above us, the barrels of cryatine rebound against one another with a series of odd metallic echoes. Cassia cries out, startled from sleep, and Tibbet mewls in distress.

  My back hits the top of the access shaft with a soft thump. “Vaat,” I curse.

  “Mierda,” Rubio adds.

  We claw our way out of the shaft and float up into the ship’s main cabin. Cassia hovers outside the sleeping berth, her eyes wide and hair wild. She hugs another of the thermal jackets tight around her body.

  “What happened?” Her lips have gone bloodless and blue in the cold.

  “I don’t know.” I look at Rubio. “We were in there fixing the signal beacon when it went down.”

  “Is it down for good?” Cassia shivers. A few hours or days in zero G won’t hurt us, but longer than that and our muscles will start to atrophy. By the time we reach Enceladus, we’ll be too weak to walk under the moon’s gravity, much less do any rescuing.

  “Only one way to find out.” Rubio flips a multitool in the air.

  I make my way along the wall to Cassia. “You should go back to bed. It won’t take us long to fix.” At least that’s what I hope.

  Cassia hugs her coat tighter and scowls. “I’m tired of sleeping. I feel useless.”

  Rubio keeps his head down, trying to pry up the access panel for the gravity controls and pretending not to hear us.

  “You’re not useless.” I put my arm around her. “You’re hurt. It’s not your fault you—”

  She pushes away. “Stop coddling me. I’m not your baby.”

  “Of course you’re not. What does that even—”

  “Aha!” Rubio inter
rupts.

  Cassia and I both stop short and look down at him.

  Rubio smiles sheepishly and holds up two halves of an insulated wire. “Loose coupling, that’s all.”

  I blink at him, momentarily disoriented. “Oh. Is it fixable?”

  “Sure,” Rubio says, and brings the halves together. Instantly, the gravity snaps back on. Cassia and I tumble to the floor, and a deafening series of crashes echo from the storage room. The cryatine barrels. Tibbet howls from somewhere down the corridor.

  “What the hell, Rubio?” I struggle to my feet as the last of the barrels clangs to a stop.

  “Would you make up your mind?” Cassia huffs.

  “Sorry. Sorry.” Rubio casts a worried look at Cassia, as if she might break, and waves us away. “You two go . . . talk, or whatever. I can fix this.”

  Cassia and I exchange a look. Despite his ramblings about geese, I’ve found myself trusting Rubio more and more over the past few days. Even if he isn’t the best company, he’s an excellent pilot and a competent mechanic. But then again, I’m not the one he tried to kill.

  I look at Cassia. “Your call.”

  She sighs. “Fine.” She spins and disappears down the hall to the sleeping berth. “Thank you,” I mouth at Rubio, and hurry after her.

  Cassia stands with her back to the door, struggling to tie her loose hair in a braid with clumsy, gloved fingers. After the third try, she utters a frustrated growl, pulls the gloves loose with her teeth, and hurls them at the bed.

  “Here,” I say. “Let me.”

  She sits on the bunk. I climb up behind her, unfasten the bandage, and comb through her curly locks with my fingers. I pause over the small area we had to cut short in order to patch up her head.

  “How does it look?” she asks over her shoulder.

  “Better,” I say. The skin is still shiny pink and tender, but there’s no sign of infection. “How does it feel?”

  Cassia grimaces. “Less . . . open, I guess.” But worry overlays her words. “I’m still getting the headaches.”

  “They’ll pass,” I promise, coaxing the knots out of her hair.

  Tibbet stalks in with his ears pointed back and hops up beside her. She rubs one of them between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Talk to me,” I say. I need to do my job and distract her. “Tell me something good. Like what you’re going to do when we get Nethanel back.”

  “I don’t know.” She ducks her head and rubs her hands over her face. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  Neither of us says anything, but the unspoken hangs in the air. What if we don’t get him back? What if we’re too late?

  “A memory, then.” I smooth Cassia’s hair back behind her ears and begin to weave it into a French braid along the side of her head, where it will hide the shorn portion. “Tell me something good you remember.”

  She draws a steadying breath. “Okay.” Her eyes fall on Tibbet, who has contorted himself into an uncomfortable-looking shape and is furiously grooming his back legs. “You want to hear how we got him?”

  “Sure.” I go on braiding.

  A ghost of a smile creeps onto her face. “Nethanel and me, we stole him.”

  I pause. “You stole him?” I glance at Tibbet, who yawns through a mouth of needle-sharp teeth. With all the strays slinking around Mumbai, I sometimes forget how valuable an animal like a cat can be out in the Deep.

  Cassia nods. “Our old tabby died when I was maybe eight and Nethanel was twelve. Our dad didn’t want anyone to know, but we could tell he was broken up about it. He loved that thing. So me and Nethanel are out walking one day when we’ve stopped at a way station, and we see this old woman with a litter of kittens in a birdcage, right?”

  I nod, urging her on.

  “And Nethanel comes up with this plan where I’ll cry and pretend I’m lost, and he’ll sneak up behind and lift one of the kittens out of the cage.” She smiles at the empty air. “Except when I start crying, the old lady doesn’t care. And I have to keep crying louder and louder until she finally comes out from her stall to shoo me off, because I’m chasing her customers away.”

  “Bloody kuttiya,” I mutter.

  Cassia shrugs and smiles slyly over her shoulder. “Well, I mean, we were trying to steal from her.”

  “So what happened?” I tie off her braid and sit back on the bed.

  “Right. So she was trying to push me away, and I bit her.”

  “You bit her?” I snort.

  Cassia nods and shifts so she faces me. “Yup. Right on the calf. So then she was running after me all through the station and screaming, and I thought for sure I was going to end up in one of those mystery stews you always find that far out.”

  “No!” I make a face. “Gross.”

  “Yes.” Her eyebrows arch up in a wicked grin.

  This is the Cassia I want, the one buried beneath all her grief. This is the Cassia that makes me want to grab her hand and swing it between us. I trace a small circle on the bedspread. “So did you get away?”

  Cassia tilts her head side to side. “Well, I’m not soup, am I?”

  I laugh. “No, you’re more of a stew, I guess.”

  “Here.” She moves closer to me. “My turn.”

  I put my hands over my hair. “No, that’s okay.”

  “Come on.” She pokes me in the ribs. “You did mine. Besides, I know all kinds of styles. I do my mother and Milah’s all the time.”

  “It’s gross,” I say. I haven’t washed my hair since before we left the Ranganathan, and I didn’t bring along any of the oils or creams I normally use to keep it under control.

  Cassia frowns. “No, it isn’t.”

  I snort and roll my eyes.

  “I’m serious,” Cassia says. “I love your hair. It’s so pretty when it gets out of your braid like that.” She reaches out and fingers a curl that has escaped along the side of my neck.

  I stop breathing. Our eyes meet, and we both freeze, her fingertips barely touching my skin, my lips slightly parted, as if some galvanic force has passed through us.

  I swallow. “Okay.”

  I turn around on the bed. Somehow, with my back to Cassia, I feel even more aware of her. The rustle of her clothes, the gentle tug of her pulling the tie from my hair, the brush of her fingertips against my scalp as she finger-combs my curls. She hums a tune I don’t recognize as she undoes my braid, something pretty in a minor key, and for some reason it stirs up a brief memory of my mother—combing my hair, twisting it into two springy braids.

  I glance at Tibbet again, who has curled up in a crescent at the foot of the bed and draped his feathery tail over his nose to keep out the cold. Suddenly I understand why she wanted to bring him, why she wouldn’t leave him alone on the dock.

  “So . . . he was worth it?” I say.

  I can hear the smile in Cassia’s voice. “You should’ve seen our father. He tried to pretend like he was mad, but before we left dock, he was mixing up nutrient milk and trying out names on the kitten.”

  “Who named him?” I ask.

  “I did, mostly.” She laughs. “Nethanel wanted to name him Fangmelion, but my father . . .” She stops suddenly, and her hands drop away from my hair. I turn in time to see all the mirth run out of her face. The present is back. Her father is half blind. Her brother has been taken.

  “I’m sorry.” I should have known any memory would bring her back around to this; that the price of memory is remembering.

  “It’s fine.” She shakes herself and forces a smile, but the sallow, pained look has already crept back into the space around her eyes. She looks at her pillow. “Maybe I should lie down again.”

  “Of course.” I rise to go. This is all my fault, leading her thoughts back to her brother. “I’ll just go check on—”

  “No.” She catches me. “Stay. Talk to me. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  I sit down. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Anything.” She eases her head
down onto the pillow, pulls her coat tight against the cold, and closes her eyes. “Tell me about you. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  I draw my knees up to my chest. “A foster sister. Ava. She’s much older than me, though.”

  Cassia opens her eyes. “You’re adopted?”

  I frown. “Is that so weird?”

  “No, of course not,” she says. “I mean, I know you lost your mother, but I thought maybe an aunt or uncle raised you or something. Did you know your family at all?”

  I shift uncomfortably on the bed. “I don’t remember much. I was eight when my mother died, and she didn’t have any family around. I don’t think I ever knew my father.”

  “Really?” Cassia cocks her head at me. “Eight’s pretty old. You must remember something.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I snap.

  Cassia recoils.

  “I’m sorry.” I look down. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I know,” she says. “We’re both tired. And cold.”

  I nod, staring at the empty bunk across the room.

  “Come lie back down.” Cassia holds out a hand to me. “Keep me warm.”

  I climb wordlessly into her bunk, coat and all, and pile up the blankets until we have a warm cocoon around us. Cassia drapes an arm over my hip bone and shifts closer so she can nestle her head against my clavicle.

  I run my hand up and down the quilted lines of her sleeve. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.”

  “Of what?”

  “Being a distraction,” I say.

  “You’re fine.” Cassia’s lashes flutter against my neck as she closes her eyes, and an electric thrill trips through me, melting away the last of my annoyance.

  “I’m sorry I got mad,” I whisper into her hair. It smells like her, like skin and faint oil.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She tightens her grip on my waist and shivers. “I’m sorry for pushing you about your family.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I echo. I wonder if I have my own smell, too, if it loosens all her muscles the way hers does mine.

  Cassia raises her head so our lips almost brush. She slips her hand under the hem of my coat and trails her fingers down over my hip to the small of my back. Heat blooms through me. This is not how friends touch each other. I shiver and flex my toes.