Sound

by Alexandra Duncan

  I start. He should be out cold by now.

  “I know you do,” I say, gently as I can. “Get some sleep. They’ll be gone when you wake up.”

  I wait with Rubio until his pulse slows and he stops struggling with his eyelids. Something thumps deep within the Mendicant, and suddenly it strikes me how quiet everything is. This ship was made to house a dozen people or more, not a skeleton crew of three.

  Chaila. I hunch forward and chew on the inside of my lip. The pain in my head pulses with my heartbeat. I need a plan. I can fly the vessel on my own, more or less, but how am I going to sleep if I’m the only one on watch? And with the constant repairs this thing needs, how am I going to keep it from deteriorating into a chill, airless hunk of metal floating through the Deep with our corpses inside?

  A questioning chirrup noise behind me interrupts the silence. I swivel in place and find Tibbet watching me with big, solemn eyes from the doorway.

  “It’s just me and you now,” I say. “Are you any good with a cold fuser?”

  Tibbet hunches over and starts to make a wet, choking noise I’ve learned means he’s about to vomit.

  “Gross,” I tell him. I don’t think any of the cats in Ava and Rushil’s shipyard used to throw up nearly as much as Tibbet. There’s something deeply wrong with this animal.

  He finishes and sniffs the air. His pupils expand, and he bobs his head around the side of the door and darts back into the hallway, sure signs he’s spotted a rat. At least we won’t have vermin chewing on the wires and walls much longer. If I can keep the ship in one piece long enough for it to matter, that is.

  I rise and run my hands through my hair. I haven’t bothered to braid it again. I’m warmer with it covering my neck anyway, and pulling it tight doesn’t help with the headaches I’ve been fighting. I rub my temples. First things first. I have to undo whatever damage Rubio’s done to the cockpit wiring. I look down at him. If I’ve measured the dose right, he should be out for a solid eight hours.

  Vaat, I curse again, and head up to the cockpit.

  I lean my head against the cockpit wall and groan. Even with the small mercy that the wires Rubio ripped out are color coded, it has taken me forever to figure out how they match up. I rub a hand over my eyes and check the time on my crow. Three and a half hours, to be exact. Three and a half hours, and I’m only halfway there.

  I slap a magnetic glow lamp on the side of the access panel alcove and kill the power to the cockpit. The last thing we need is for me to get electrocuted. The diagnostic displays that survived Rubio’s attack wink out, one by one, taking their minute electronic hum with them. In the same moment, the overhead lights flicker and go dark. The glow lamp does little more than cast deep shadows across the cockpit.

  I push my hair out of my eyes and lean into the alcove to begin the painstaking job of reconnecting the wires. The silence filling the room is so complete, it almost feels as if it’s taking on mass. A high, nearly subaudible whine rings deep in my ears. I work my jaw in an attempt to pop them, and the tinny ring softens enough so I can think around it.

  I bite my lip and twist two ragged ends of a wire together. What the hell could be wrong with Rubio? Sleep deprivation? But none of us have been sleeping well, and he’s the only one hearing birds. Not isolation-induced psychosis, either. We all had to attend a seminar on the early warning signs and symptoms before we boarded the Ranganathan. He’s not exhibiting uncontrollable rage or paranoia or other antisocial behaviors. Well, maybe a little bit of paranoia. But he’s not cutting himself or holing up in his bunk, refusing to come out, either. It doesn’t make sense. He’s just . . . hallucinating. I can set a broken bone and bandage a wound, but the brain is trickier territory. If a few hours of forced sleep don’t fix him, I’m out of my depth.

  I shake a cramp out of my hand and reach for a roll of insulating tape. Suddenly the ringing in my head spikes. I clamp my hands over my ears and double over, body pulsing with adrenaline. Fight or flight. Except there’s nowhere to go, and nothing to fight. The sound is inside my head. In that moment, the high, even tone breaks into the melodic chaos of digital static.

  “. . . h . . . p us . . . radius . . . . . . . . . ire . . .”

  A broadcast? I glance at the control panels. That’s impossible. We can’t receive anything with power out in the cockpit and all our telemetry instruments down. I look to the coms console. It stays dark, hibernating with the rest of our functions.

  The signal comes back, stronger this time. “Repeat . . . ny ships w . . . . radius, please help u . . .”

  A distress call. I rush to the coms and press my ear against the speaker, even though common sense tells me I won’t hear anything that way.

  “. . . major functions down. Fire is eating up our oxygen reserves. Please . . .” A woman’s voice begs. “If anyone can hear us . . .”

  Fire. My palms break out in a clammy sweat. There are few things worse than a fire aboard a ship this far out in the Deep, especially if it reaches your oxygen reserves. You’re going to die—fast, if you can’t put out the flames; slow, if you do manage to douse them.

  I jump up and flip the power breaker to the cockpit. No matter if all our systems aren’t online. We have oxygen, and that’s more than I can say for the other ship.

  I race back to the coms and flip them to transmit. “Unidentified vessel, this is the Mendicant—vector 248, D245M. Responding to distress call. What is your position?”

  The speaker beneath the controls stays silent, receiving nothing but static.

  I press the transmit button again. “Unidentified vessel, this is the—”

  “Miyole?” The woman’s voice disintegrates and re-forms. “Ma chère, we’re all alone out here. You have to save me.”

  My skin turns to ice. My mother. It hits me like a wall of frigid water. That’s my mother’s voice. My hand falls away from the transmitter. That’s not possible.

  “Manman?” I whisper.

  “Save me,” she pleads. “Ma chère, don’t leave me alone.”

  “Manman, how . . .” She’s dead. I know she’s dead, but she’s speaking to me. There has to be an explanation. Someone, somewhere must have made a mistake. Maybe Ava and Soraya were wrong. Maybe my dreams of her drifting to safety were true after all. Maybe she’s been waiting out here for me all along.

  “Where are you?” I try to wrestle my voice under control, but it breaks anyway, full of want and loneliness.

  “Ma chère, ma chère,” my mother begs, and then I see it. A ship glides into view, locked in an achingly slow death spiral. Flames glow beneath its skin and spout from its sides where streams of oxygen escape from gouges in its hull.

  My breath stops.

  “I’m sorry, ma chère.” The ship twists abruptly, as if someone has yanked up on the thrust bars in desperation.

  My mind moves too slowly. That’s the same make as Cassia’s old ship, I think dully. I stand paralyzed as the burning vessel crosses our vector and swings toward the Mendicant, head-on. One heartbeat, two . . .

  The ship’s warning system springs to life, flashing red and shaking me from my stupor with a series of high, urgent beeps. I lunge for the controls and push us into a dive. But it’s not enough. Our velocities are too great, the seconds to impact too short. The other ship fills our viewports, spinning out of control.

  “Manman!” I scream, and throw my hands out before me to fend off the blow. The coms screech with feedback and I squeeze my eyes shut.

  Chapter 14

  I wake in the big bed, the one my manman and I share. The flock of scrap-metal birds I made for her dangle overhead, chiming softly against one another in the morning breeze. I made them for her birthday, I think. Yes, for her birthday, even though it wasn’t really her birthday. She told me no one in the Gyre had one, but I had found my own marked down in a journal she kept—April 14—and I wanted her to have one, too.

  Salt air and music from our neighbor’s staticky radio drift through the open window. Dogs bay,
roosters call from rooftop to rooftop, and hammers knock against wood and tin in the distance. I know without looking that this is the Gyre.

  “Miyole!” My mother calls, singsong. The scent and sizzle of frying fish reaches my nose, and I sit up.

  I pad into the main room. My mother stands at our portable gas stove, a cast-iron pan of fish and sugared plantains browning in the oil.

  “You’re home!” I say.

  She looks up and smiles, almost hiding the weariness in her eyes. “There you are, lazybones. I thought you would sleep all morning.”

  I climb onto a stool across from her. “I thought you had a run today.”

  “I did it early.” She lifts a cut of fish from the oil and gently turns it. “I thought we could spend the day together.”

  My heart becomes the lightest element. “Really?”

  “Wi, ma chère.” She laughs. “Really. Now go get dressed. The day is wasting.”

  I look down. I’m wearing my pressure suit. Its airtight quilting is far too hot for a day out under the Pacific sun. I scurry off to our bedroom and lift the lid of our heavy old steamer trunk to pull out my best dress—noon-blue cotton with a white diamond pattern around the neck. Maybe we’ll walk to the fish market or take one of the penny ferries around to South Gyre, where our neighbor Mrs. Acosta said she heard they had a flower market. But as I lower the lid, the light from the window changes. A rosy, end-of-day glow bathes the room, and the last bronze rays of the setting sun glints on my birds’ wings.

  “Miyole?” My mother sounds worried.

  “In here, Manman,” I call.

  She arrives at the door, dressed in her flight clothes—boots, red-belted trousers, and a weather-beaten leather jacket. “I have to go now, ma chère. It’s late.”

  I look out the window at the sun melting into the water and then back to her. “But you said we could spend the day together.”

  “I know.” She strokes my hair. “Our hours are too short. Your food has gone cold.”

  “I don’t want you to go.” My eyes prickle. Something wet rolls down my hand, and when I look, my scars have opened up again and my hands are red with my own blood.

  “Don’t worry.” My mother smiles sadly and looks over my shoulder. “Ava will take care of you.”

  I follow her gaze and find Ava sleeping in the bed my mother and I share. Her face and arms have a gray pallor to them, and I can’t hear her breathe.

  “She’s not well. Manman, I don’t think you should . . .” I turn back to find my mother gone. I’m speaking to an empty room.

  Outside, the sun has set, and the waves crash and roll. The sea smells sick. I race down the steps clinging to the side of our house and out onto the pontoon that supports it.

  “Manman!” I shout. Eerie, gray-green clouds thicken in the sky, and rain stings my face.

  “Miyole!” The wind nearly drowns out my name.

  I look up in the direction of the voice. A small dark-haired boy stands atop the widow’s walk of a neighboring pontoon house. My friend, Kai. He points down the string of refitted boats and floating houses to the behemoth of our neighborhood—an old Icelandic research vessel that towers above the rest of the masts and rooftops. People pack the upper decks, peering out the glass into the storm.

  “No.” I step back. This is too familiar. I’ve seen it before. I know what happens to them, and then to Kai and Manman.

  As I watch, the ocean’s surface drops out from beneath the ship, and a swell as high as her receiving towers looms up in its place. The wave thrusts the ship on her side. The wind and rushing water fill the air, but I can still hear the passengers screaming. The wave crests. For a moment, I think the ship’s bow will break over the top of the wall of water, but it hangs a moment too long, fighting gravity, and the wave tips them over.

  I haven’t moved, but now I’m atop the widow’s walk, holding Kai’s hand tight as the ocean foams around the capsized ship. I want to tell him I’m sorry, because even though he hasn’t said it, I know his family was aboard the vessel—his father and mother, and all his brothers and sisters. But this is something too big even for sorrow, so I squeeze his hand tighter.

  And then my mother’s sloop is above us, battling the winds to stay aloft.

  “Miyole! Kai!” Manman dangles from an emergency ladder spilling from her sloop’s hatch. She holds out her hand. “Reach up to me!”

  I am first on the ladder. Manman helps me up halfway, and then goes back for Kai. But he is shorter than I am, and the winds twist the ladder like a strip of tinfoil, so she jumps down to help him.

  I pause near the top and look down at them. Manman lifts Kai up high enough so he can plant his feet on the bottom rung. He slips on the wet metal and freezes, terrified, clinging to the braided metal ropes.

  “It’s all right, ma chère!” My mother’s voice carries over the wind.

  He starts his climb again, slow and trembling, as if he didn’t spend his days skipping from rigging to mast to rooftop like a cat.

  My mother catches the ladder’s tail and looks up at me. Water swirls around her feet from the waves swamping our neighbor’s house. I’ve never seen her afraid. She has always been fearless, one step ahead and ready to fight, but the look on her face as the widow’s walk pitches is solid terror.

  An ominous pause interrupts the storm, and then, suddenly, the sea sucks the platform down and out from beneath my mother’s feet. Her knee catches the railing as the building drops, and she dangles like a marionette in the wind. A deeper shadow rises against the bruised sky. I stare in awe and terror at the wall of dark water rolling toward us. It reaches above the rooftops, snapping masts and footbridges as it bears down on our small sloop and its lifeline. For a moment the wave freezes, perfect and darkly lustrous, as if the sea has turned to jade, and then a ripple of white forms across its crest, and it curls its massive weight over us.

  “Miyole, climb!” Manman screams. It is the voice that warned me against open flames and sharks in the water, amplified. It touches the center of my brain, and I obey.

  Hand over hand, I race up the slick rungs. A shudder runs down the ladder as the ship strains to rise through the winds. Two steps from the top, my foot slips. Red flashes before my eyes—I’m falling—and then my hand finds the steel cable, the side of the ladder, and I jerk to a halt, dangling far above the churning gray sea.

  Lightning flashes, illuminating the black wall of water, and for a moment, I see everything as if it’s been cast in icy stone—the scraps of wood and the prow of a rowboat caught in the wave’s face and my mother and Kai far below. Too far below. And then the rushing sound. I look up as the wave begins collapsing on itself.

  One heartbeat.

  I scramble back onto the ladder and climb. My hands don’t hurt at all, and the rain washes away the blood before I have a chance to think of where it could be coming from.

  Two.

  The hatch hangs open above me. The rushing builds to a roar. Up, my body screams. Climb!

  Three.

  I reach the hatch and start to push myself up into the darkened berth. But a roaring force shoves at my back, and suddenly I am underwater, tumbling and turning in the dark. My shoulder slams against a wall. My eyes and throat burn. I’m drowning. And then the current reverses course. It gushes away, pulling me with it. I reach out, all instinct now, and catch something—one of the straps my manman used to tie down larger packages. I latch on to it with all the strength terror has lent me, until the water finishes emptying back into the sea.

  The floor levels beneath me. I choke out a lungful of brine and take a wet, shuddering breath. All around me, the remnants of the packages my mother meant to deliver on her last run lie scattered on their sides in a shallow pool covering the length of the berth. The sloop’s engines drop their pitch, and suddenly perfect sunlight floods in.

  We’ve flown above the hurricane.

  I unwind my arm from the packing strap and crawl to the edge of the hatch. The cloud tops against
the blue sky look like paintings of heaven my manman showed me once, the hurricane a vast pinwheel beneath us. And there, the frayed metal ends of a severed emergency ladder whip in the high, empty winds of the stratosphere.

  Static hissing . . .

  Monsoon on the school roof. The canal by Ava and Rushil’s lot at flood stage. An arc of water spraying from a burst valve in one of the city’s bilge pipes. Patter, patter down, and we ran through the salt rain, shrieking. . . .

  I open my eyes. No rain, no floods. I am on the floor of the Mendicant’s cockpit, the low, empty rush of the open coms channel filling the room. I check my hands. No blood. The viewport before me shows nothing but clean, deep black, powdered with stars. My last moments of consciousness come back to me in pieces—the distress call, my mother’s voice, the burning, spinning ship. . . .

  I pick myself up, head pounding, and skim over the controls. Telemetry shows nothing moving outside, not even a debris field’s scattered drift. The warning system lights stay dark, as if they’ve lost power. What the hell? The last time I looked, they were flashing imminent collision. I saw it with my own eyes.

  I push back from the controls and stumble to the unruly forest of wires I half-finished repairing before the distress call came through. I rummage through the tangle until I find the warning system wires, thick, with light green- and-orange-striped insulation. I hold both ends of the connection in disbelief. I never repaired it. The warning system wasn’t on, because I hadn’t finished reuniting both sides of the snapped wire.

  It can’t be. I hurry back to the cockpit displays. My fingers tremble as I scroll through the coms controls and select playback.

  Shock, I remind myself numbly. You’re in shock, that’s all.

  Unidentified vessel, this is the Mendicant . . . My voice sounds shell-hard, all business. I listen to myself ask for their coordinates, then pause and ask again, only to stop midsentence.

  An eerie silence where my mother’s voice should be stretches out on the recording.

  I lean closer. Where is it? Where is she?