“What?” I rock away from Perpétue. My hair grows fast, but it would take weeks on weeks to grow that much. Near on a deciturn. I’ve been here, awake, only ten days. It’s not possible, unless . . . A terrible thought hits me. How long did I sleep? I thought it was hours, days at most. It can’t have been more than a few days.
“No,” I say. “That’s not right. It can’t be.”
Perpétue reaches for a hand mirror and holds it so I can see. Black hair spreads over the crown of my head, then drops to faded red at my temples. Both colors look wrong beside my face, the red unnatural, the black stark and hinting at someone I’ve never been so long as I can remember.
I look up from my reflection. “How long was I asleep?”
Perpétue hesitates.
“Days? A week?”
“A little over a month,” Perpétue says. “You were in so much pain, we had to keep you under until the doctor said your calcium levels were high enough.” She furrows her brow and presses her lips together as if there might be more.
A month. A deciturn. I push myself clumsily to my feet. Blood sings in my ears. I’ve been trapped here below over a full deciturn.
“Ava . . .”
I stagger away from her, into the common room.
“Where are you going?” Perpétue calls after me.
I don’t answer. A deciturn lost. A deciturn . . . I stumble to the front of the house and grapple with the outer door. In truth, I don’t know where I’m going. There are steps outside, I know, leading down to the pontoons and up to the roof with its generator and water tanks and Perpétue’s chickens, but beyond that . . . I’ve been locked away too long, seeing the world in snatches from the window. I want—no, I need to see the sky.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER .14
The air is sudden bright. It smells of salt, smoke, and fish. Far off, a horn sounds. The sun peaks high overhead, but the close-packed structures around me close off most of the sky.
Up, I tell myself. Higher.
I climb the first step. My knees shake and my legs burn. I need to go up. I anchor my other foot on the next stair, try to push myself faster. I waver. I need to see it. . . . I don’t know why. I know I won’t be able to see Luck, or the ships, or even the stars from the rooftop, but some part of me insists I try. Without warning, my legs collapse. I sag down on the third step.
“Ava, here.” Perpétue appears behind me, her hands outstretched.
“No!” I say. Weeks lost to sleep, and more to Perpétue and Miyole dressing me and feeding me and helping me walk. I want no more of it. I want to haul myself back up to the sky. I want to be a woman again. I want to prove my worth so Perpétue won’t throw me out when she finds I have Luck’s child inside me.
I crawl up the stairs, the concrete scraping my knees through my thin underskirt. Perpétue watches from below. The heat presses on me, thick and wet. Sweat rolls down my back. The light blinds my eyes, and the sun burns. Another step. My skin feels tight. Another. At last I reach up and feel nothing. Air. I raise my head. Only the square metal walls of the generator, the water tanks, a line of clothes flapping in the breeze, and the weathered driftwood hutch housing Perpétue’s chickens break my view of the sky.
I walk stiffly out onto the sun-baked roof. The sky stretches up and up, ablaze with blue. I don’t know how, but it seems broader even than the Void, raked with fine, high, swaths of lambs’-wool white in its upper reaches. The sun burns through like bright, new copper. It takes my breath and dulls the pain in my legs.
Luck, I think. I wish he could see this with me.
I reach the wall bordering the edge of the roof and raise a hand to shield my eyes. Perpétue’s house stands level with the other mismatched structures—some ships, some square houses balanced on pontoons, like Perpétue’s, some a floating scavenge of metal, plastic, tarp, and heavy solar panels angled up to the sky. Crossed laundry lines and footbridges made of driftwood connect it all. The structures rise and fall ever so slightly with the sea, as if they rest on a sleeping giant’s chest. The distant, muddled din of voices and puttering motors, rooster calls, and the tinny blare of handhelds carry over the rooftops.
Some ten or twelve buildings down, the enclave gives way to the brink. The floating desert of plastic spreads out to the horizon. When the wind skirts across it, it makes a sound like wings. Along its coast, dividing the trash plain from the clean, blue water, a sun-bleached city of ships unfurls for miles and miles. I spin around. To the other side of Perpétue’s roof, the world gives way to unbroken blue. The sky and its darker sister, the sea.
“Ava.” Perpétue stands at the top of the steps. “Come down. Your skin will burn, fi. You aren’t used to the sun.”
I swallow. “I don’t want to stay inside anymore.” I hear the pleading in my tone.
“I know.” Perpétue runs her tongue inside her bottom lip. “But you really aren’t well enough yet.”
“I’ll work at it.” My voice sounds so small in the wide open. “Please, so missus, I don’t want to be useless. I don’t want to lie there and have you . . .” My throat closes around the rest of my words. I don’t want to lose any more time to sleep.
“If it takes your mind off the hurt, maybe we can give you some chores.” Perpétue nods to herself. “Some small things.”
“I can cook some, and clean.” I say. “I was on livestock duties before. I could keep the chickens. . . .”
Perpétue waves me to a stop. “Slowly, Ava. For now, you can help Miyole with the chickens and maybe cook some. Your body’s still healing, fi. Too much at once and you’ll hurt yourself.”
I let out the breath I’ve been holding. “Right so.”
I feel some small bit more like the girl I was. Feeding chickens is none like minding a whole crewe of women and girls, but at least it’s something to keep my hands busy and my mind awake while I wait for Luck’s child and try to figure out how to find my modrie.
In the middle of the night, I wake with my innards cramped. I stumble to the cleanroom in the dark, but it’s only when I’ve squatted over the chemical bowl that I feel the blood on my legs. I grope for the light string and pull. It clicks on, filling the room with a brown glow. I stand stock still, staring at the streaks of blood on my thighs and nightshirt until I can make myself understand. My bleeding.
No, I think distantly. That’s not right.
So I’m not . . .
A sound halfway between a laugh and a sob breaks out of me. There’s no smallone. There’s no piece of Luck left in me.
I sink down with my back against the door and clutch my waist. I could cry, but I would be making myself. I can’t feel anything but the shock of it. I’ve lost Luck’s smallone. I’ve lost Luck’s smallone. It’s gone. He’s gone. I couldn’t even do the one thing I’m made to do right.
I get up and clean myself. I take a rag and soap, and scrub at the stain on my nightshirt. This, I know. Scrubbing. Cleaning. Everything raveled right. I can put away the thinking, feeling part of me and exist only in my hands.
I dress and pad barefoot to the kitchen. The moon angles bright and pale through the high windows. A tide of longing floods my chest. The sky. It will be different at night, more like home. I can glimpse the Void without the sun burning my skin. I open the door softly and struggle up the steps in the dark. The perimeter lights of the Gyre reflect in the water, but above, the sky is black and deep. The stars shimmer and wane, and closer in, the sun-touched fins of satellites and small craft burn steady as they climb and fall in an arc over the sea.
Distant lights track slowly overhead. Is one of them Bhutto station? Is the Parastrata still there? Usually we would have restocked our supplies and set sail by now, but what if my father and brother left some men behind to look for me? What if they put out the word of what I did among the other crewes. And what of Iri? And Luck? What’s been done wi
th them? Are they there on the station, cast off, or have the Æther and Parastrata already sounded deep and thrust them out into the Void?
The pain flares back, strong and sudden, through my muscles down to the marrow of my bones. A hard fist of panic presses against my throat. Why am I still here? Why did Iri give herself up for me? What is this body for, if not carrying my husband’s children? Why have the Mercies let me live, if I have no purpose?
I am all acid and heat and truth, brimming at the mouth and eyes. My father and brother have killed Iri, certain sure. And Luck is gone, truly gone. ther Fortune will have turned him out into the Void by now, or killed him some other way too horrible to think on.
“Ava?”
I blink the tears from my eyes.
Perpétue walks toward me. “What are you doing?”
All the softness mothering puts on her face is gone. She folds her arms across the long cotton shirt she wears to sleep. Her legs stick out bare. A deep, puckered scar runs up above her right knee and disappears beneath the shirt’s hem.
I gasp. I’ve seen wounds aboard the Parastrata, but few so bad as the mangle of Perpétue’s leg. “Did you. . . what happened to your leg?” I ask without thinking.
Perpétue’s eyes fall. “Surgery.”
“But what . . .”
“You’re welcome here, Ava, but there are things I’ll never question you about, and I’ll ask you to do the same for me,” Perpétue says.
“I’m sorry.” I never meant to give offense, to her of all people.
Perpétue looks down at the rooftop.
“I’m sorry, so missus,” I say again.
Perpétue shakes her head, as if waving the whole matter away. “What’s wrong? You couldn’t sleep?”
I nod.
“Was it the pain?”
I nod again, though it’s a different pain than she means.
Perpétue nods with me, as if she understands. And she must, with her old wound awful as it is.
I look up at the moon. “I’m bleeding.” I can’t look at Perpétue as I admit it.
Alarm twitches in Perpétue’s face. “Where?” She starts toward me.
I lay a hand between my hip bones where the ache is the worst.
“Oh.” Perpétue looks relieved. “That kind of bleeding.”
Anguish and confusion twist in me. “I thought . . .”
Perpétue lays a hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. “No, it’s normal, fi. Sometimes when there’s too much strain on our bodies, our courses stop. It means you’re healing.”
I blink. So I wasn’t ever . . . Relief springs loose in me like a snapped coil, and then confusion mixed with guilt. Maybe I haven’t lost it. Maybe it never was.
I laugh suddenly, from the shock of it. Perpétue looks at me odd, but I can’t help it. My body feels lighter without the weight of the smallone I had imagined growing in me and all the worry that came with it. I’m shamed, thinking on it. What kind of woman am I that wouldn’t want a child? But to know I won’t have to go through the screaming pain I saw the older girls in? To know no one will look on me with shame for bearing a child with no father? To know my body is my own, and I am beholden to no one but myself? I know these are low reasons and all my sisters and modries would hiss to hear me say them, but I can’t help the lightness I feel.
“I’m sorry.” I put on a sober face for Perpétue. “I don’t mean to laugh. It’s only . . .”
“Laugh or cry?” Perpétue finishes for me. “Is that it?”
“Right so.” I nod. “Is that so, what you said? About a woman’s bleeding?”
“Wi.” Perpétue frowns at me. “Didn’t your mother teach you these things?”
“No.” If my mother had lived, she might have, but Modrie Reller didn’t think it proper to talk on such things. Most of what I knew, I learned in whispers from the older girls and from watching the animals. “She died.”
“Ah,” Perpétue says softly. “And him?” She nods up at Bhutto station shining above us.
I’ve never spoken Luck’s name to her, but I suppose I’ve said enough for her to piece together his existence.
I swallow. “He’s gone, too.”
“You loved him?” she asks.
I nod.
“It’s not an easy thing, being widowed.” Perpétue looks out at the ocean, a light breeze ruffling her hair.
Widowed. I don’t know if I have any right to that word, but I feel it fits in me. I wince as a fresh stab of pain shoots across my shoulders.
“You’re hurting, fi.” Perpétue takes my arm. “Come below. I’ve got some painkillers that’ll help you sleep.”
I lean on Perpétue, and with her help I begin the slow descent to the welcome darkness of her home.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER .15
Every day the pain eases. I help Miyole with the chickens, and soon Perpétue lets me cook, though at first I have to fight their stubborn collapsible stove to come away with something that’s not burned. I’m not used to cooking with live flames.
Still, Perpétue seems glad. It gives her more time for checking Miyole’s lessons in the evenings, and the two of them take turns reading to me about the Earth, its oceans and forests and molten depths, its deserts and snows, its peoples and their many wars and fragile peaces. They read reckonings of tides rising and cities turned to shoals, battles over blood-soaked strips of land, and the call to push off into the depths of the stars.
One day, when Perpétue’s away on her runs, Miyole calls at me as I come down from hanging out the wash.
“Ava! Hey, Ava!” She sits at the table, her tablet open in front of her. “Can you help me?”
I drop the laundry basket inside the door and wipe my hands on my skirts. “What do I do?” I come close and stand beside her. The soft blue light—the one Miyole said means it’s casting out for a signal—pulses.
She holds up the tablet. She taps it and drags her pointer finger over its surface. Two columns of grouped symbols spring up. “All you have to do is read me the words and see if I can spell them right.”
I hesitate. I haven’t told Miyole and Perpétue I can’t read; it’s never come up. I take the tablet and sit across from her. It rests cool in my fingers, heavier than what I guessed with my eye. I scan the sheet for something, anything, I recognize. Nothing. Not even an A.
“Orange,” I say at random, too loud.
“Orange,” Miyole says evenly. “O-R-A-N-G-E.”
I pretend to trail my finger down to the next word, as I’ve seen my father and Jerej do over shipping invoices. “Machine,” I say.
Miyole frowns. “M-A-C-H-I-N-E.”
“Um . . .” I bring my eyes up from the pad and search the room for inspiration. “Welding apron.”
“Ava.” Miyole narrows her eyes at me. “What are you doing?” She grabs the tablet from me and scans it. “None of those words are even on here.”
My face goes hot. This is all wrong. I’m alone, cast down on a planet what pains me with every breath. I can barely work a flight of stairs, and a little girl is scolding me. Me, who knew every quirk of the Parastrata’s kitchens, who could walk her halls sunblind, who could have run all the women’s work someday. Loneliness sticks in my throat. Every day, my old life is fading. I can no longer even call up Luck’s ghost to wrap its arms around me. I’m beginning to forget the sound of his voice.
“I . . . ,” I start, and then stop again. “I’m no good at it.”
“At what?” Miyole says.
“Reading,” I say. “My . . . my Luck . . .” I haven’t spoken out his name before. If Perpétue were here, she would catch the break in my words, pick up another piece of my past, but Miyole only stares, kicking her legs under the table and waiting for me to continue. I clear my throat. “Luck was going to teach me.”
“I could teach you,” Miyole offe
rs. “I was teaching Kai, but he said it was boring. I know the alphabet and spelling and grammar and all that.”
“I don’t . . .”
But she’s already running for the ancient chest of drawers. She returns with a pointed stylus and kneels on a chair beside me, head bent over the tablet.
“You want the alphabet first.” She taps the screen and traces the stylus over its smooth surface, then hands it back to me. A large letter A stands out in the top left corner.
I look up at her. Is she going easy on me, starting with one of the only letters I already recognize? “You won’t . . .” I clear my throat. “You won’t tell your mother, will you?”
Miyole chews her lip. “No. Not if you don’t want.”
“Good.” I let out a breath. “Thank you.”
“That’s A.” Miyole nudges the tablet closer. “It’s the first. Try copying it.”
I grip the stylus and make my mark.
Miyole nods, serious. “That’s good.” I hear the echo of Perpétue in her voice. She takes the tablet back from me and draws another letter. “Now try the next one. That’s B.”
By the time Miyole finishes with the alphabet, I ache from the roots of my eyes all the way to the back of my head. My letters stand up wobbly on the screen. I don’t remember half of them, even with the little song Miyole sings to help keep them in order.
“This is worthless.” I push myself away from the table. I need something to keep me busy, something to make me not feel so low and dull. I grab the biggest cookpot, upend a jug of desalinated water into it, slam the cookstove on the table, and start snapping its pieces together. Miyole, so smart. What does she know of how awful hard the world is, with her nice, shiny tablet and her lessons and her ship captain mother? My chest is full of bitter black, smoldering and ready to ignite. I pick up the pot and bring it down on the stove so hard the water sloshes everywhere.
Miyole sits frozen next to my empty seat. “Careful, Ava.” Her voice trembles. “You’ll break it.”
I stop, hands gripping the cookstove’s handles. A tear slips from my eye and lands in the water pot. I’m so churned up I can’t tell whether I’m crying from frustration or sorrow or anger, or some awful mix of the three. I turn away and pick up a sack of beans.
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