Salvage

by Duncan, Alexandra

  “Right so.” I nod my thanks. I pull off a strip and press it over the crack above the trigger. Quick, quick, I tell it. I wish Perpétue would go back to pumping, but I don’t dare say so, and she seems content to watch me work, even as the water inches up around us. As soon as the steel tape finishes sealing itself, I mash the fuser’s bright red ON button. It powers up with a healthy whine and all its indicator lights blink on, one by one.

  “Try it now.” I hand the fuser over to Perpétue.

  She gives me a long, appraising look.

  But I’m thigh deep in saltwater and my chest is a panic. I hurry to the pump and begin bailing seawater back out of the docking well while Perpétue finishes working on the leak. I don’t look up again until the fuser goes quiet and the water drops below my knees.

  I find Perpétue watching me. “You want to go on a run, fi?” she asks.

  “I . . . I don’t . . . a run?”

  “I’ve been needing a first mate to help me. Load cargo. Maybe learn a thing or two about flying.” Perpétue turns the cold fuser in her hands. “I always thought maybe Miyole would want to fly with me when she was older, but really, I could use the help now. Runs are safer that way. And you.” Perpétue carefully hangs the cold fuser on the wall, next to all her other fixers. “You’ve got more in you than feeding chickens, fi.”

  I blink at her. Me, flying? My father’s words rattle around the back of my head. You can’t nurse a baby and run a navigation program.

  “I don’t know.” I look from Perpétue to the sloop to the square of cloud-patched sky above our heads.

  Perpétue follows my gaze. “They threw you out,” she says. “That doesn’t mean you’re worthless. It only means they didn’t see your worth.”

  I look back at her in the shadow of the docking well.

  Her jaw is set and her eyes alight. “You can show them,” she says. “You can make your own way.”

  In that moment, something ignites in me, as if all the pain and sorrow of these past months was fuel soaking the rags of my heart, and Perpétue’s words a torch held to it.

  I am angry. There’s power in that. I can taste it in my mouth, giving me heat, giving me something to live for.

  “Right so,” I say.

  We spend the night at home, check to make sure Miyole has everything she needs for the day, and set out before the sun breaks. I’m dressed in Perpétue’s old clothes: a faded red shirt speckled with white dots and cinched to my waist with a thick brown belt, calf-high boots, and a pair of heavy work trousers. The feel of fabric hugging my legs is some odd, and the boots more so. It feels some like armor, the kind Lord Candor was said to wear.

  Perpétue laughs when she sees me squirming in my new clothes. “Get used to it, fi.” She smiles roughly. “It’s time to see what you can do.”

  Perpétue’s hands dance over the controls as we lift off. The Gyre shrinks beneath us, and for the first time, I see how truly vast the waste plain is. A body could row for days and not reach West Gyre on the other side.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as a long strand of green islands skips by beneath us.

  “West.” Perpétue doesn’t look away from the viewport. “And north. I’ve got a hull full of scavenge to sell in Mirny. Then we take those profits to a rice broker down in New Bangkok and cart the rice and probably some desalination pills back to the suppliers in Gyre. I want you to watch me, Ava. Follow what I do.”

  Perpétue talks me through some small tricks to running the sloop. Here is the throttle, for pushing fuel and pressing us faster. Here, the altitude readout, always pulsing with numbers. I test myself to see if I can sort them out and name them before they blink away. Some three hundred kilometers out, the long-range coms finally pick up a network signal and flicker to life.

  We break over a rocky coast and a green stretch of grasslands. Perpétue guides the sloop north. Ice forms on the craft’s wings and the land rolls up into hills, and then mountains, carpeted thick with spiking green trees. Pines, Perpétue names them. Every now and then a city or a town scabs up out of the forest, as if the Earth has cracked and buildings and lights and roads are what leaked out. Farther north, a fine white dust cakes the land. Snow. The Earth flattens to a dull, white-gray swath.

  “There.” Perpétue points.

  I squint. “I don’t see . . .” But then I do. A giant hole lies open in the Earth north and west of us, whorled around the edges with thin lines spiraling down into its depths, as if some enormous creature has bored down into the bedrock. Tiny, snow-covered buildings scatter out around it like pebbles.

  Perpétue takes us lower. “Mirny used to mine diamonds, before people figured out how to manufacture them.” As we slow and dip down, the thin lines around the hole’s mouth become roads leading down into the mine. “You’ve got to be careful to keep away from the cut. The air currents suck ships down in there all the time.”

  Perpétue kicks the engines down to quarter power and slows us over a fenced-in landing field covered in a dirty slush of ice melt. A handful of ships sit in dock. Groundcrawlers cart pallets of scavenge from the ships—metals, plastics, foams, paper and cardboard, even what looks like a rotting mash of plants wrapped tight in thick translucent packing sheets.

  We settle down in an empty corner of the docking yard. I follow Perpétue below, where she pulls two thick coats from a storage locker in the berth and hands one to me. She unseals the door and leads us out into the gray. The cold bites my lungs. The smell of cooking oil soaks the air as one of the groundcrawlers rumbles by. Corn diesel, I remember. One of those things Miyole read to me about. I rub my hands together and look around. Bare white trees spindle up beyond the fence. The air rattles with groundcrawler engines and the shriek of their forked limbs as they lift stacks of pallets. Men and women, so bundled up in hats and coats I can’t tell them apart, shout over the roar. My breath comes out smoke.

  We don’t stay long at the docking yard. Perpétue speaks to a woman with chapped cheeks in a thick, rolling language I don’t understand—“Kak dela! Skol’ko let, skol’ko zim!”—while the groundcrawlers empty stacks of scavenged plastic from our sloop’s berth. Perpétue and the woman grip arms and slap each other on the back, and the woman hands over five small squares of pay plastic all threaded through with copper circuits. Then we’re off again.

  Mountains scrape by beneath us, then a pale, stony desert, and shiny rivers gold under the sun. At last we drop lower and skim a vast plain, divided into a patchwork of flooded fields. Men and women bend, ankle-deep in mud, then shield their eyes and look up as the shadow of our ship passes over them. In the distance, a city rises out of the haze.

  We set down in one of the mud-washed docking yards, next to a high cinder-block wall. Perpétue leaves me to guard the sloop while she goes off in search of the rice broker. She keeps gone a long while. At midday, I open my lunch tin and find Miyole has packed it full of tatty reading books, the paper kind, what she and Kai must have stolen from a kindling pile somewhere. They’re all stories for smallones about talking dogs and magical creatures like zebras. I try to read them as I wait. I do. But my brain stumbles and sticks. I toss them into the empty berth, knowing I’ve sounded out the words like Miyole’s showed me, but I haven’t gotten the trick of how to piece them together into sense. I cradle my head in my hands. Give me numbers any day.

  Perpétue finally comes back with the rice broker, a short man with slick hair and a silver jacket, followed by a line of thin, bare-chested men with sacks balanced on their shoulders. No loading machines here. The rice broker tries to have the men stow the rice straight away, but Perpétue stops them and slashes open the top of one bag with her knife.

  She half smiles at the rice broker. “No sand this time, I see.”

  “No, lady.” He rubs one hand nervously across his neck. “No sand.”

  She drops two pay squares into his hands. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  Perpétue whistles up at the children watching our trade
from along the wall and tosses a handful of candies in their direction. They yelp and spring after them.

  “Kob kun kaa, lady!” shouts one girl missing both her front teeth.

  By the time we make it back to Gyre, hull full of rice, the sun is a pink ribbon slipping down over the horizon. We land the sloop at the supply docks some clicks down from home, sign our cargo in with the suppliers, and join the other captains who run supplies around a fire one of them lit in a metal drum.

  Perpétue presses a sweating bottle into my hand and takes another for herself. She pops the top from mine with the dull side of her knife and clinks our bottles together. “To first mates.”

  I tilt the bottle back. The liquid hits my tongue, sour and full and cold. I make a face.

  “Ah, young one here,” a round woman in a bright purple dress teases. “You never had a beer before, kid?”

  I shake my head.

  Everyone laughs, but it’s all smiles and good nature, even from the men, as if I’m one of them.

  “Where’d you find this one, Perpétue?” the round woman asks.

  “This is Ava. She’s got the makings of a natural mechanic,” Perpétue says proudly, and she tells them all about the cold fuser and my first run. No one notices she never answers the question, and soon enough, talk turns to other things, the price of fuel cells and the monster Miko found and what it means.

  “I’m going up spaceside again soon,” Perpétue says as we stand by the fire. “I want you to join me, fi.”

  “Oh,” I say. It comes on me how the Gyre has become my life, how the constant pull of work has smoothed away the bits of glass still in my flesh, and here I am, washed ashore and laughing, one of a crew. And now to face the Void again . . . I look up at the sky, with its stars hidden by the fat yellow moon. To see the place where I lost Luck and Iri and everything I knew. Sadness tugs at me, but it doesn’t push me under. I wonder if that means my soul is growing back.

  “How do you feel, going up there again?” Perpétue asks.

  “I don’t know.” I grip the bottle tighter. My crewe will be long off on a new run, but I can’t shake the prickles of fear what crawl over my skin when I think on my father’s face, on Jerej and Æther Fortune. What if they aren’t gone? What if they’re hanging in port, waiting for me to surface? What if they’re still looking for me?

  I hug my arms close. I’m worrying too much. They surely aren’t there anymore. And to see the stars again in all their unblinking span, to see that one piece of home . . .

  “I wouldn’t ask if I thought you weren’t ready,” Perpétue says.

  I draw a deep breath and nod. I’m going back to Bhutto station.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER .17

  I button my red shirt, fasten the work trousers over my hips, and buckle the belt around my waist. At first I felt naked without my skirts, but now my legs swing free and light. I tie my data pendant snug against my neck. Only one thing left to do before we go. I comb my hair forward with my fingers and stare into Perpétue’s cleanroom mirror. My hair tumbles past my waist, straight and black to my ears, then wisping in faded, brittle red the rest of the way. I hold out a hank of it, raise Perpétue’s kitchen shears, and saw away until the long red locks fall to the floor. I lift another handful and cut. Lift, cut, fall, lift, cut, fall, until my hair hangs ragged around my ears.

  I stare at my face. I am a different girl. Older, cheeks sharp planed from my months recovering and working aboard the sloop. I’m stronger, too, I can tell, although my body still feels heavy and ungainly under this Earth’s weight. But my skin has warmed from pale gray to a honey hue now that I’m more accustomed to the sun.

  I gather the hair from the floor for composting, snap off the light, wave good-bye to Miyole, and jog down the stairs to where Perpétue awaits me in the docking well. She’s been teaching me fixes. New fixes, better, more intricate than ever the ones I learned off Soli, but the same at their core. I can reroute power to the secondary fuel drive, unjam the landing gear, swap out the glow panels in the cockpit, operate the emergency cooling sluice, and more besides. And now, Perpétue says, I’m good enough with numbers I can try my hand at flying.

  I pull myself up into the cockpit. Perpétue glances sidelong at my hair from the copilot’s seat but doesn’t say anything. I settle myself into the captain’s chair, look down at the array of instruments spread out under my hands, and try to recall how to breathe.

  “Remember, how I showed you,” Perpétue says.

  I force a breath and tick down my checklist. Check my safeties, engine warm-up and temperature readings a go, hull pressurized, coolant levels good, no smallones or animals lingering under the thrust burners.

  We kick up in a cloud of salt and grit. The engine reaches a healthy rumble-roar as we shoot up over the Gyre. My heart goes weightless. I push the ship faster, riding the thrill of commanding something so powerful.

  “Steady, fi.” Perpétue winks at me, and I realize I’m grinning.

  I ease off of the thrusters. The Gyre shrinks to an uneven gray line between the blue and the waste plain, and then we rise higher still, until the Earth lies curved below us. The atmosphere thins and darkens. High winds rock the cabin.

  “Are you ready?” Perpétue checks her shoulder straps.

  “Right so.” I push us forward, and the ship surges under my touch.

  We break through the atmosphere with a small shudder. My stomach lurches as the ship’s artificial gravity takes over. My lungs blossom full of air, and the small lingering pains I carry with me vanish. I am featherlight and strong.

  “You feel that?” Perpétue asks.

  I turn to her slowly, eyes wide. The hairs on my scalp prickle. I nod.

  “Every time,” Perpétue says, and lets out a giddy laugh. “Every single time it’s like that.”

  I smile with her and breathe deep, drunk with the sudden luxury of not fighting my body for movement and air. Our ship rotates as we pierce the Void, so the stars spin out against the black, like a fan opening. Perpétue has me guide the sloop around the Earth’s curve until the lights of Bhutto station come in to view, blinking in high rotation above the planet. I grip the controls. Is the Parastrata docked there? The ther?

  “Easy, Ava.” Perpétue’s voice nudges me gently. “Check our vectors.”

  I drop my eyes to the instrument readouts. The numbers trickle up and down. It still takes all my concentration to translate them into sense.

  “We need to bear up,” I say, eyes locked to the vector display. “Thirty-four degrees portside.”

  “Good.” Perpétue watches as I guide the ship smoothly into our assigned entry bay. We touch down with a muffled thunk. “Pretty soon I can kick back while you fly this thing on all our runs.”

  I laugh, but nervously. I’m already scanning the bay. We power down and unload our cargo of smelted plastic and cold-packed fish onto a trolley. Six other small ships share the dock with us, and the floor is thick with men. Some of them drag their cargo across the floor on carts like ours, while others sit with their legs dangling from their ships’ open berths, spitting tobacco on the grimy floor and swilling coffee. I try to keep my head down, but I start every time someone brushes by me, or when the men break out in riotous laughter. I can’t help looking up, searching faces for a sign of someone I know.

  One of the men catches me looking. A rangy, bearded man in a knit cap. “Hey, girlie!” He whistles, as if to call a stray dog. “Girlie. Hey.”

  I catch Perpétue’s look telling me to act like I don’t hear, but it’s too late. My eyes meet his.

  “I got a nice slot on my crew for you.” He slaps his knee in invitation. “If you don’t mind working up a sweat.”

  I stare at him, fish mouthed, till his meaning sinks in, then flush hot and duck into the sloop’s hold with my face on fire.

&nbs
p; “Eyes on your own crew, hákarl sucker,” Perpétue spits back. She sticks her head in the hold. “Ava—”

  “I’m sorry.” I pick up another bundle of plastic and drop it on the hand truck with a clatter. “I don’t know how to do this right, Perpétue.”

  “You’re doing well,” she says. “I should have warned you. Around these crews, you can’t be a girl. You’ve got to be hard, be one of them. Here.” She grabs my hands and molds them into fists, then pries the center finger up. “That’ll speak wonders for you.”

  We try it out on the bearded crewman as we climb out of the hold. He goes red. His mates laugh and hoot and prod him until he shakes his head and goes back to his work. But we’re left in peace to unload the rest of our cargo and truck it to the distribution deck for our pay.

  Perpétue presses a slip of pay plastic into my hand. “There’s information ports you can rent outside the commissary on tier five. See if you can dig up something about that tante of yours.”

  “Alone?” I ask, suddenly uncertain. I’ve got only the barest idea how to use an information port, and that from watching Perpétue do it on our runs. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to pick up some fission cakes, and then I’ll be down on tier thirteen, taking in packages,” Perpétue calls as she wheels our empty trolley to the service lift. “I’ll find you when we’ve got enough of a load to head back.”

  I stand on the deck, surrounded by pallets of fruit and steel sheeting, clutching the thin square of plastic. I make for the personnel lifts, head ducked low, but I can’t keep my eyes from fluttering up to the face of every man who passes me.

  I close myself in the lift. A strange, dizzy familiarity tugs at me. If I shut my eyes, all I see is Jerej running, the door closing, the look on his face, and then blood on Iri’s teeth. My father, holding her down. Soraya Hertz, don’t forget. . . . I open my eyes. I’m alone in the lift. The keypad stares back at me. Only this time, I recognize the etched numbers: TIERS 1 TO 42. A thrill zips through me. One to forty-two. What perfect lines the world falls into with this small scrap of knowledge. I’m a different girl than I was the last time I was here. I don’t have anything to be afraid of.