Sound

by Alexandra Duncan

  Rubio runs a hand through his hair. “Listen. I’m the only one with security experience here and—”

  “Well, I’m the only one with smuggling experience,” Cassia interrupts. “And I say we bring it in.”

  “Okay.” Rubio shrugs. “You go get it, then.”

  “Gladly,” Cassia says.

  “Hold on.” I step in. “Cass, your head—”

  “I’m fine.” She scowls over my shoulder at Rubio. “I’m not afraid like some people.”

  “You’re still getting over a concussion and carbon monoxide poisoning. The last thing you should do is try to walk outside.”

  “I can do it,” she insists.

  “No,” I say, and I hear my manman’s voice in my own, firm, in control. “You can’t.” I glance at Rubio. “But I can.”

  The first time I did a spacewalk sim, I barely made it out of the antigravity chamber before I threw up. Second time: same. Third time: same. Luckily for me, the DSRI doesn’t expect its scientists to be experts at zero G, so three successful sim runs were all I needed, and throwing up outside the sim chamber was still considered a success.

  I stand in the Mendicant’s cramped air lock, waiting for the air pressure to bottom out so the ship doesn’t eject me like a projectile as soon as Cassia and Rubio pop the lock. We’re stopped several dozen meters from the drop sphere. I reach behind my back to double-check the tether hooked to my pressure suit. I will not hyperventilate. I’ve done this before. Well, more or less.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Rubio calls over the coms.

  “Yes.” No.

  “Because I could try to fit in your suit. We could rig it—”

  I roll my eyes, even though Rubio can’t see me. “Please. You’re half a head taller than me.”

  The atmospheric indicator lights around my helmet’s faceplate change from blue to yellow to red. We found a set of five bulky pressure suits in one of the Mendicant’s storage lockers, but something had chewed holes big enough to poke a finger through the outer insulating layers. My suit is it.

  “Enough.” Cassia’s voice relays into my ear. “Ready, Miyole?”

  Outside the small viewport, the Deep is thick with stars, like sugar spilled over a black tablecloth. It’s gorgeous. It’s majestic. But I prefer looking at it from behind dozens of layers of self-healing nacre and radiation shields.

  I take a steadying breath. “Ready.”

  The air lock door winds open. I step up to the black.

  Imagine throwing yourself from Mumbai’s tallest skyscraper. Imagine drifting alone in an endless blank sea. Imagine being sealed, awake, in a light-tight coffin. Now combine those things, and add a dose of vertigo.

  I make my way along the Mendicant’s side, one hand on its fuselage, until I reach its farthest spar. The drop sphere hangs some twenty meters in front of me, like a tiny, pale moon. I brace my feet against the ship, ready to kick off and launch myself out to grab it. My blood pressure rises, thumping beneath my collarbone. I look down at the endless kilometers of nothing below me. If my tether snaps, if I fly too far . . .

  A memory engulfs me.

  I am a little girl. I am up to my neck in water, treading, a trace of salt on my lips.

  A boy—Kai, my friend Kai—splashes me. “Can’t catch me, slow dough!”

  I growl and show my teeth—my best shark impression. “Huh-uh. I’m going to eat you up!”

  And then I’m flying, arms churning the water, as I race after him. I am fast and powerful in the ocean, like the dolphins we sometimes see at sunset. I’m gaining, and then I’m level with him. We swim far, as far out from the docks as we’ve ever gone, and then far as the older boys and girls. In a burst of speed, I overtake him. The rush of it carries me on, giddy glee flooding my arms with strength. I am made for this. I could swim forever.

  “Miyole!” Kai’s cry is far behind me.

  I slow and kick myself around to look back. His head is a tiny dark shape bobbing in the water. The docks and pontoons of East Gyre rock gently behind him, stretched as far as I can see. From here, my home looks like a collection of little play ships and houses, small enough I could pick them up in my hand. I’ve never swum out so far before.

  “Miyole!” Kai’s voice barely carries to me. “Come back!”

  I look from him to the open sea at my back. A stocky boat chugs along the horizon, as far from me as I am from the docks. Suddenly, the adrenaline drains out of me. I’m no longer powerful, no longer made for the sea. I’m a small thing with aching arms, too far from the Gyre’s steady ships and footbridges. The blue beneath me is too blue, the depths too deep, and I am alone.

  “Mi? Miyole?”

  I blink.

  “Mi?” Cassia’s voice is back in my ear. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  I hear my own breathing before I can register what it is—harsh, quick gasps filling my helmet.

  I gulp them down. “I’m okay,” I say. “I’m okay. Just out of practice.”

  Rubio’s voice now. “You’ve got to breathe slow so you don’t burn all your oxygen too fast.”

  “Okay.” I know that, but I’m too short of breath to argue with him.

  I close my eyes, concentrate on the simple physics of what I’m about to do. Push off from the ship’s side, but not too hard. Force divided by mass equals acceleration. Grab the sphere. Mass times velocity equals a change in momentum. Wait for Cassia and Rubio to winch my tether back in. Time equals distance divided by rate.

  I steady myself, open my eyes, and jump.

  The sphere comes up fast, smacking me in the chest so hard I barely remember to wrap my arms around it. The impact spins me around, and I find myself facing the Mendicant, my tether trailing loose behind me like a ghostly umbilical cord. The ship’s wedge-shaped face stares blankly back. Vertigo starts to overtake me, but I squeeze my eyes shut.

  “Got it!” I say.

  I try to keep my eyes closed tight as Cassia and Rubio reel me back in, but every few minutes, the not knowing is worse than the knowing, and I have to peek out from beneath my eyelashes. The Mendicant grows before me, dirty white against the darkness, like an unbleached clamshell. And then I’m touching down in the air lock, the ship’s gravity steady under my feet, and the door seals behind me.

  Rubio’s face appears in the inner air lock window. “You okay?” he mouths.

  I give him a thumbs-up and sink down against the wall, clutching the drop sphere to my chest as the air pressure gradually climbs back to normal. The lights around my faceplate fade from red to yellow to blue—safe atmosphere and pressure—and I pull off my helmet.

  Cassia rushes in and takes the drop sphere, while Rubio holds out a hand to help me up. I look from him to Cassia, ignore Rubio’s hand, and push myself upright. I’m sure I would forget about her if it was my family we were hunting for. I would snatch up that sphere first, too.

  We follow Cassia into the common room, where she kneels on the floor and places the sphere in front of her. Rubio backs up against the wall, as far from the device as he can go. Cassia rolls her eyes at him and touches a finger to the sensor on the sphere’s top. Its upper half splits and retracts, revealing a small metal tube cushioned inside.

  Cassia picks it up. It fits easily inside her palm.

  I lean in. “It looks like . . . lipstick?”

  Cassia holds the tube up to the light, examining the hairline seam around its circumference. She raises an eyebrow at Rubio. “Still think it’s a bomb?”

  He looks at his feet and shrugs.

  Cassia twists the tube. It pops open with a quick hiss of depressurizing air, depositing a heavy-gauge needle jack into her hand.

  I take a sharp breath. I’ve seen one of those before—a box of them, actually—in Ava and Rushil’s house, of all places.

  What’s that?

  Something for my friend Soli. You remember I told you about her?

  But why does she need so many?

  She gives them away. Present
s. For crewe girls, like I was. So they can find their way here, if they want.

  “Okay . . .” Rubio squints at the jack. “That’s for . . . ?”

  Cassia holds it up to the light. “It’s some kind of manual line-in, I think.”

  Rubio pushes away from the wall and leans over us. “To what?”

  Cassia shakes her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t think anyone was still using these. I’m not even sure the ship has a connector for it.”

  I clear my throat. “It’s a directional.”

  “A directional?” Rubio says.

  “Sure. It hooks in to your ship’s navigation system.” I reach for the jack. “It stores a preprogrammed set of coordinates. Ava, my sister—she hides them inside fans.”

  Cassia and Rubio both stare at me.

  “It’s a long story.” I clear my throat. “We should plug it in, see where it wants us to go.”

  We make our way to the cockpit.

  “What if it doesn’t fit?” Cassia asks.

  “It’s an old ship. It’s bound to have a line-in port.” I drop down in the captain’s seat and scan the controls. There. A port the size of a hypodermic needle. It all makes sense now. Newer ships wouldn’t have a directional port, wouldn’t be able to read the coordinates. This was left especially for us.

  “See?” I push the directional home with a click.

  A tooth-rending screech blares through the Mendicant’s coms system, followed by a babble of digital static. I clap my hands over my ears. Cassia jumps back, and Rubio slaps a hand down on the controls to silence the ship’s internal coms.

  “Vaya.” He rubs his ears. “What was that?”

  “New coordinates.” I point to the navigation readout: -84.0219, -23.9082, a-18. “That must be our drop point.”

  I expect the gas giant to take my breath away, but when I finally see it up close, I feel nothing. It looks so perfectly geometric, like a child’s rendering; it doesn’t seem real. Even its shadows are too neat and sharp. Telemetry lights up as we pass the nitrogen farming operations on Titan, Enceladus’s sister moon, and then runs wild as we follow the coordinates to our destination. Ice crystals from the planet’s outer ring fizzle against our shields. And then there it is—Enceladus—a ghostly mirror of ice reflecting light from the planet and its other nearby moons.

  Once, when I was little, Ava and Rushil took me to a Diwali festival down in the Salt, and Rushil bought a sugar rock for me. It was the size of a cricket ball and so hard I couldn’t bite it. Enceladus looks exactly like it. Like I could put it in my mouth. Like I could hold it on my tongue until the enzymes in my saliva begin to dissolve it.

  We fall into orbit with the other ships waiting for entry clearance. From just above the moon’s atmosphere, its imperfections come into relief—craters, canyons, ridges, and boreholes leading down to the liquid ocean beneath its icy crust.

  “What’s that?” Rubio points to a dazzling white flume rising from the moon’s southern pole.

  “An austral geyser.” I lean toward the viewport, my voice rising in excitement. That’s what I couldn’t remember. “Enceladus is cryovolcanic. It has such a high degree of orbital eccentricity that it’s subject to tidal heating, but the atmosphere is so cold, the erupting liquid freezes on contact.”

  Rubio raises both eyebrows. “Um . . . English?”

  “It’s an ice volcano,” Cassia says.

  Rubio’s eyes widen. “Please tell me we’re giving that a wide berth.”

  Cassia laughs. “Only crazy people fly near volcanos.”

  “Actually . . .” I glance at the coordinates we skimmed off the Dakait log.

  Rubio groans. “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s one of the places they set down,” I hurry to say. “But only if we don’t find anything at the coordinates in Ny Karlskrona. We should check there first.”

  “And Sweetie’s delivery,” Cassia puts in. “I want that done with so we’re free and clear to look for Nethanel.”

  Rubio glances over at me. “Where’s that take us?”

  “The drop sphere coordinates?” I bring up the navigation screen. “It looks like they’re in Ny Kyoto.”

  Rubio grunts. “Sounds like a party.”

  We come in above Ny Kyoto. Nothing moves on the surface but gusts of powdered snow. It snakes between the spindle towers that mark each building’s anchor point below the ice. From above, the city looks like a forest of needles—silver gray and glistening. We touch down on Onsen Subport, at the marker for pad 134. For a moment, we stare out at the whipping snow. Then a high-pitched squeal rises from somewhere outside, and the ship drops beneath us.

  “Caray!” Rubio braces himself against the controls.

  We stop short, a meter lower than we were on touchdown.

  “Sorry,” Cassia says. “I should have warned you. They get air pockets between the ice and the landing plates sometimes. Makes it a little bumpy.”

  Something thumps below us, and the landing plate begins to descend with a muffled hum. A chasm of ice rises around us, until the sky and blinding snow are only a bright, distant circle. The tenor of the hum changes. Dark water creeps up over the front viewport.

  Something deep in my brain moves. All that water, covering us, bearing down on us . . . My nightmares always end like this. The Great Levee around Mumbai has broken and the hurricane has come again. I am trapped inside—sometimes at home, sometimes at Revati or the university—and the water is rising against my window, sealing me under the sea. I back against the bulkhead, breathing hard.

  “Mi?” Cassia frowns at me. “What’s the matter?”

  I shake my head. My heart beats so hard I’m afraid I’m going to throw it up.

  I squeeze my eyes closed. I’m not drowning. This isn’t the hurricane. This is Enceladus, and this is how they live here, beneath the ocean. It keeps them warm, keeps them alive. Average water temperature of -6 degrees Celsius near the ice, warming as the depth increases and in proximity to the poles, I recite to myself.

  Rubio lets out a low whistle. “Vaya.”

  I open my eyes. The water is aglow. All around us are structures like I’ve never seen before, enormous veins of lights, thicker around than Mumbai’s biggest skyscrapers. Maybe bigger than a dozen city blocks. They reach down from their anchor points in the permanent layer of ice to the murky depths kilometers below. Dozens of them. Hundreds. A whole inverted city.

  I gape. “What is this?”

  “Ny Kyoto,” Cassia says.

  Other ships scud by, smaller ones more suited for the water. As the landing pad moves us closer to one of the structures, I make out segments in its length, like cells along a bamboo shoot. The scientist in me stirs. “What are those buildings made of?”

  “Spindles,” Cassia corrects. “I don’t know. Something flexible. They have to be able to move a little when the current changes.”

  A porthole opens in the side of the nearest spindle, scattering more light through the water. The landing plate deposits us inside. Behind us, a muffled thump sounds, and the water drains from the dock. For a moment, everything is silent.

  Our coms crackle on. “Mighty slow skepp you’ve got there,” a man’s voice croaks. “You’re late.”

  I raise my eyebrows at Cassia. These are our buyers? The man’s accent sounds so much like the dakait, his words coming from the back of his throat, like theirs did. I have to remind myself it only means he’s Enceladan, too. We knew this. It shouldn’t be a surprise. It shouldn’t be setting off alarms in my head, but it is.

  Cassia flicks the transmitter. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Hmph,” he grunts. “And the cargo?”

  “All ready for you,” Cassia answers.

  My eyes skip over the empty dock. Something’s wrong. Where is everyone?

  Cassia gives me a sideways glance. A small furrow forms in the center of her brow. “Why don’t you show yourself so we can bring the cargo out to you?”

  A long pause. Then: “Yo
u know your call signature isn’t transmitting. Some warning you were coming before you tried to dock would have been polite. Makes everyone think something’s off. Makes everyone a little gun-shy.”

  Cassia looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

  Chaila. In all the chaos, I forgot about the signal dampener Rubio and I installed. It must be affecting our long-range coms, too.

  “Sorry,” I mouth.

  “We . . . had a few mechanical problems,” Cassia says. “But we’re here. Nothing’s wrong.”

  Someone mutters indistinctly on the other end. A pause, and then the bay doors on the far side of the dock unbolt and begin to roll open. Figures in faded brown-and-gray jumpsuits and knee-high wading boots file in, rifles slung across their backs.

  “In that case,” the man on the coms says, “welcome to Enceladus.”

  Chapter 19

  The hatch opens on a small army of people with drawn guns. Okay, maybe not an army, but definitely a regiment. Or a contingent. Rubio would probably know the right word, but this doesn’t seem like the best time to start discussing semantics with him. They aren’t exactly pointing their weapons at us, but they aren’t holstered, either. The air smells like saline and iron.

  We file out onto the dock. We’re wearing the body armor we scavenged, but it covers us only from shoulder to hip. Cassia scowls at the first person we pass, a tall, thin man in coveralls and a knit cap with a scuffed-up rifle he needs two hands to support.

  They won’t shoot us. I try to focus on the stained yellow walls behind our welcoming party. Faded words in kanji and what I think is Swedish cover the surface. They aren’t dakait. They’re businesspeople, Sweetie’s contacts. A few words and this will all be cleared—

  A phlegmy cough from the back of the room interrupts my thoughts. The crowd parts, and a squat man in a floor-length coat shuffles forward. His hair is white around the temples and at the tip of his short, bristly beard.

  “Herr Tsukino,” Cassia says, so quietly only I can hear.

  “Välkomna!” I recognize the voice from our coms, the throaty rasp. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had some of our friend Sweetie’s associates as guests.”