“. . . point in him taking another wife, you know?” The voices grow louder.
“Talk on,” a second man answers the first. “I’ve got some trouble what with only two.”
Their steps ring close. Luck presses me against the wall. We both try to breathe shallow and slow, try not to shift our feet into the metal balanced precariously against the wall. Luck lowers his nose so it rests on top of my head. His breath is warm in my hair. I can make out every thread in his shirt, every lock of dark hair touching his neck, every pulse of blood working the veins under his skin. I should be worried about the Fixes, but all I can think on is the gentle bob of Luck’s Adam’s apple and the way his chest grazes mine.
“You see the bride they brought?”
“Yeh.”
“She’s got something odd to her, but I can’t figure it.”
“Dunno. To me, they’re all some odd with that hair and the way . . .” The voices fade below the generators’ hum.
Luck and I stand fused in the back of the service locker. This is the last place I should feel safe, but I don’t want to leave.
Luck steps back slowly, carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says, though I’m not sure if he means for touching me again or for what his crewemates said about me. He smiles nervously and pushes the doors open, holds out a hand to help me from the locker. “There’s only the one team of night Fixes. We shouldn’t see anyone else.”
My heart is still skipping. I laugh, half from relief, half from giddiness. The sound fits strange in my throat, like it’s coming from some other girl. Maybe the girl I could be if I was Luck’s wife, without doors to lock me in at night. I grab his hand, and he pulls me into an almost-run. I feel as if the gravity’s low, as if my feet are barely touching the floor as we fly around corners and down a spiraling ramp.
Luck skids us to a stop in front of a heavy, wheel-locked door. He sets his shoulder against the wheel and pushes until it gives with a brief shriek of metal.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
He points to a lettered sign bolted to the door and grins.
I look up at the sign. I know the letters for my own name, A-V-A, but beyond spotting two As in the loops and lines on the door sign, I can’t figure it. I bite my lip and look at Luck. I shake my head.
His smile dies.
“I’m sorry.” My voice wavers. “I lied.”
“Don’t worry on it now.” He smiles at me again, gently, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin tingles at his touch. “We’re going swimming.”
He leans against the door. It swings open on a dim, sloping room filled wall to wall with water. Light from bioluminescent fish and phosphorous deposits crusting the depths lend the water and air an uncanny glow. My mouth falls open. I know it’s only the Æther’s desalination pool, but I feel as if I’ve stepped out of time, as if I’ve stumbled into the Mercies’ private realm.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
When crewes like ours come across a water-bearing planet, we mostly find salt oceans or ice. On the Parastrata, we leach most of our salt out in tanks, but before the water can go through the finer filters and come out potable, it rests awhile in a pond lined with scrubber fish and plants designed to nip out the extra sodium. The Æther’s desalination pool dwarfs ours. It looks deep as two men and far enough across to swallow up the galley. Water weeds sway in the shallows.
Luck strides down the gentle slope to the water’s edge and pulls his shirt up over his head. The lines of his shoulder blades cut sharp bows in his pale back. He turns and looks up at me, something a little wicked in his eye. “Coming in?”
I shift my feet. Suddenly it comes to me how he’ll see the dull foreignness of me once I shed my shirt and skirts. He’ll see all of me.
“You’ll like it, I promise,” Luck says. “The salt’ll keep you from sinking.”
“I . . . I don’t want you to watch me,” I say.
“What if I look away till you’re in?”
I rub one foot against an ankle beneath my skirts. It’s some hot here below the Æther’s cool, civilized berth, and my skin itches with sweat. Half of me wishes Luck was only Llell or Soli so it would be easier to splash into the pool, but the part of me making my heart skip and my skin flush is glad it’s Luck.
“All right,” I say. My voice sounds dangerous, older.
Luck kicks off his trousers and wades into the pool. I try not to look until he’s well beneath the surface, but that small seed of recklessness makes me glance up in time to see the full length of his back diving into the water.
I tug the ties of my skirts loose and try to breathe steady. “Don’t look,” I yell.
“I’m not,” he calls back. He dives and disappears in a flash of feet.
I take a deep breath. He’s going to be my husband. We’ll be bound in a day or two anyway, so I might as well get over my shyness now. In one quick breath, I shed my skirts, strip off my shirt, wrap my arms across my chest, and rush into the pool, naked except for my data pendant and the copper bands. The water hits me with a warm slap, the tickle of sea plants slippery on the soles of my feet. I duck down to wet my hair and wade deeper. The water salts my lips and buoys me with each step, even under the added weight of the copper. My pendant floats, petal light, before me.
Luck surfaces. The phosphorous and fish light him from below in shifting patterns, making him look like a creature out of the tales the wives told us as smallgirls while we helped them spin wool. I glance down at his body and then my own, distorted beneath the surface of the pool. Our skin looks near the same in the half light, near enough maybe it won’t make him stare.
“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet,” Luck says. He kicks closer to me. His eyes drift down to my nakedness, but he drags them up again. He blushes. “Sorry.”
“Yours always looks dark,” I say.
He lets his feet bob up to the surface in front of him. “You’ve really never done this before?”
I think of Llell and me coughing up unfiltered seawater by the side of the tanks. “No.” I let my feet float up, too, so my toes peek out. I smile and wiggle them. “It’s not something you do when you’re so girl.”
“Does that mean you’ve left off being so girl, then?” Luck teases. He gulps up a mouthful of water and spits it out again.
“Right so.” I lift my smile from my toes to him. “You can’t be so girl and a wife.”
He smiles back. “I guess not.” He drops his head back.
I do the same, letting my whole body drift to the surface now he’s not watching. The boys were right. It’s like a warm hand lifting you. I let myself drift on the pool’s surface, like a leaf in a bowl of water.
“Ava.” The water muffles Luck’s voice.
I lift my head and right myself so I’m treading beside him again. “Hmm?”
“Do you want to be married to me?” Luck asks. “I mean, I know we don’t have much of a say, but do you want it?”
I look at him, hair wet and eyes serious.
“You hardly know me,” he says.
But I do, I want to say. Or I want to.
I swim closer. His eyes follow me, darkening as I approach.
“You know I used to daydream about being Soli’s sister.” I swish my hands across the surface of the water between us, making tiny waves that lap against his chest. “I used to imagine you and me and her would spend all morning talking while we milked the goats and learned fixes.”
“Truly?”
I nod. I take a deep breath. “Can I tell you something?”
Luck nods in return.
“My hair really is darker,” I say. “Some like yours. My modries dye it red so I’ll mix better with my crewe.”
“Right so?” Luck frowns and reaches out to finger a strand of my hair. “You’d never know.”
“Do you think it’s a sign from the Mercies?” My body floats closer to him and my knee accidentally brushes his. “Maybe I’m meant for your crewe from the beginning.
Maybe I’m meant for you.”
The side of Luck’s mouth lifts. “Maybe you are.”
My limbs throb in time with my heart. “I don’t think I mind,” I say, and close the distance between us.
Blood beats loud in my ears. Luck leans in and touches his lips to mine. They’re warm and laced with salt, and my own lips press back before I know what they’re going to do. I’ve been kissed. I’m kissing Luck. His hand travels around my side, to the small of my back, and pulls my body flush with his. My blood becomes warm oil. We both forget to tread to keep ourselves afloat for a moment, and slide under. Luck pulls away, and we kick ourselves back to the surface. We break the water half laughing, half coughing and sputtering.
“Sorry.” Luck shakes his head, spattering water everywhere, and laughs. “Maybe we should go where it’s less deep?”
I push the hair out of my eyes. “Right so.”
I splash after him to shallower water, where my toes just brush the bottom of the pool.
“Put your arms around me,” he murmurs.
I oblige, looping my arms around his shoulders. He brings his lips to mine, and this time, we don’t nearly drown. He is salt and warmth and sweat, and I don’t ever want this kiss to end. His fingers sink into my hair and fumble to unbind it. My braids fall. He sweeps them aside to kiss my neck and I shiver. Just like I imagined.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he murmurs, his lips soft on my skin, my ear. “I’ll be a good husband. I’ll make you happy. I swear it.”
“I . . .” I start. But then his hand brushes my breast and all my thoughts fly away, as if swept off by a solar wind, invisible and unknowable.
“I want you, Ava.” Luck pulls back to look in my eyes. He swallows. “Do you . . .”
I teeter in his arms, caught between the swell of heat and an awful nagging at the back of my mind. But Luck’s shoulders and arms are so strong, holding me up, and he’ll care for me. He’ll make me happy. He swore it. I want so much for him to love me, to be worthy of that love, and my heart is everywhere—thrumming in my neck, down my legs, in my wrists, and all in between.
“They’re going to bind us tomorrow.” Luck’s voice is husky. He lifts my hand and interlaces our fingers, our wrists touching as they would beneath the marriage bonds.
“Thread over thread, life over life,” he recites.
I let out a shaky breath. “To make one life,” I finish.
Luck lays me down in the reeds with my head on the metal shore. I can barely breathe. I have that feeling again, that I’m only a passenger in my own body. Luck kneels over me. His breath is hot on my neck and face.
“Have you done this before?” My arms feel weak and my heart beats too fast.
Luck shakes his head. He gropes my back, fumbles. “I don’t want to hurt you. Soli said . . .”
“. . . she would break your toes,” I say, and break into a nervous laugh.
Something about my laugh knocks the awkwardness from us. Luck hugs me close and laughs with me. I can feel him shaking.
He turns serious again. “Are you ready?”
I take a deep breath. “I think so.” I look at him and remember the meeting at the dock, how my gaze flew to him for refuge when the rest of me was trapped still as death.
“So,” I say.
Soli is right. It does hurt some, but then it doesn’t so much anymore, or at least, it’s a sweet kind of hurt. Luck and I move together. The fish brush our bare ankles, the water laps softly against the sides of the pool, and my sense of time, my feeling for night and day, evaporates. I lean my forehead against Luck’s and breathe with him. I can already feel the fibers of my heart growing out, threading together with his where our chests meet.
When it’s over, we lie tangled together in the shallows, the water covering us like a blanket.
Luck kisses my knuckles. “Ava?”
“Hmm?”
“How come your crewe never taught you reading, but they showed you figuring?”
My face goes hot. I prop myself up on one elbow. “I can write my name. And figuring, I taught myself that.”
“You taught yourself?” Luck echoes.
“Mostly.” I shrug.
“But reading . . . what about safety signs and directions on how to make things? Don’t you need it for that?”
“Women don’t read.” I hear Modrie Reller’s words in my mouth. “We’re too busy. We have men to do it for us.”
Luck rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “That’s stupid. What if something happens? What if you have to try to set the distress beacon or tell if something’s poisonous?”
“I’ll have you tell me how to do it.” I gulp a mouthful of saltwater and spit it at him.
He splashes me back. “I’m serious, Ava. After we’re bound, you have to learn how to read. It’s dangerous, not knowing.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “I might be some old for it. Modrie Reller’s always talking on how my father says our brains stop learning well once we’re done growing, and girls are never so good to start with.”
“I don’t know.” Luck draws me close again. “You taught yourself figuring, right so?”
I nod slowly.
“It can’t be harder than that, especially with someone to show you the trick of it.” He traces my collarbone with his forefinger. “You’re sharp, Ava, sharper than any other woman I know. And when we’re bound, you won’t need to hide your hair anymore.”
A lump rises in my throat. I kiss him again, harder this time.
“What in nine hells is this?” A rough, ringing voice cuts the silence.
Luck breaks away from me and staggers back to his knees. I clasp my hands over my chest and sit up.
Two men stand in the doorway, staring down at us. Night Fixes.
I reach for Luck, but he’s too far away.
“Æther Luck?” One of the men cranes his neck, trying to make out what he’s seen. “That the Parastrata bride?”
Luck swallows. “I . . .”
“Get her out of there.” The other Fix, tall and knob boned, shoves past his crewemate. He scoops up Luck’s shirt and hurls it at his face. “And get yourself out.”
Luck catches his shirt. He reaches down to help me up, and the Fixes glare at our joined hands as Luck leads me out of the water, shielding my body with his own. Shame swirls over me and gravity retakes my body as we slosh out of the pool. It fills my veins like lead. At the lip of the pond, the tall Fix yanks my arm up out of Luck’s hand and shoves Luck at his crewemate.
Luck catches himself midstumble. “Where’s your decency?” He looks back at me. “Let her put on some clothes.”
“You’re a fine one to talk on decency.” The stoop-backed Fix glares at him, but he doesn’t move to stop me.
I tie on my skirts and work the clasps of my shirt with shaking fingers. The fabric sticks to my damp skin. They saw us. They know what happened. They must. I want to run to Luck, cling to him, but they stand in my way. What’s happening? I want to ask. They should be angry to find us together, yes, but this fury seems too much when we’re near enough bound. Something’s gone wrong. I try to catch Luck’s eye as the Fixes march us up the spiraling gangway, past the service locker, to the laddered hatch, boots clanging double time.
“Where’re we going?” Luck asks, finally looking up.
“Your father.” The stoop-backed Fix glances at me with a look that says I’m nothing but muck and burnoff. “And hers.”
My breath stops. My father. My legs waver underneath me. The Fixes jerk me forward, push me to the ladder. My arms and legs climb without me, automatonlike. The thought of my father’s eyes on me, forming what I’ve done into words, makes me queasy with shame and regret. What seemed so right in the otherworldly glow of the pool seems unfailingly stupid now. We should have waited. It was only a few days. I wish I could go back, tip the balance so the me in Luck’s arms some minutes past would want to lose her girlhood the proper way. But there’s nothing I can do now, no going ba
ck. It’s done.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER .7
Maybe it won’t be so bad, I try to tell myself as they march us past the women’s quarters and the darkened galley. Soli did worse. Æther Fortune might have flogged Ready, but he wouldn’t flog his own son, would he? And Luck said he would take care of me. Everything will be raveled back right soon.
We stop before a solid door with wood carvings inlaid in the metal. The sight of it sends my heart into a canter. I know this door. The same carvings—our ancestors looking skyward, then boarding their ships, then Saeleas floating weightless with her hair fanned out like an angel—grace the entrance to the captain’s quarters on the Parastrata. I’ve spent hours polishing them at Llell’s side before the Day of Apogee. A scroll of words unrolls from Saeleas’s mouth. I know well enough what they say without reading, the same words my mother whispered in her fever dream. Women of the air, stay aloft and be whole!
Then the whole verse comes back to me, and I ache with dread. I want to run, but my body isn’t done playing traitor, and my limbs lock up.
But woman, her mettle’s thin,
Like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat.
Cover us all, she does,
Tame the stars’ fury and channel life.
In the air, she floats;
A perfect, iridescent thing.
But when her feet touch the ground,
Bare time till she falls crumpled and tarnished.
Women of the air, stay aloft and be whole!
I feel as though the floor is falling out beneath me. The tall Fix steps forward and pounds a fist on the door. I finally catch a glimpse of Luck. His face says he’s as wracked with regret as me, as tarnished as I feel, but he tries to smile at me anyway. Don’t fear. I bow my head and let my damp hair hide my face. How can he protect me if he’s as frozen by shame as I am?
A section of the door creaks open, a little hidden latchport. “What?” says the guard.
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