We slow to pass through a crowded section of the city. People pack the broad avenue outside the window, most of them on foot, but some on horses. And then in the flow of bobbing heads, I spot a broad, gray animal face with great flapping ears. My mother started to see things when the virus took her. She would reach out, even when there was nothing there. Am I getting sick the same way? I close my eyes tight and open them again. The animal is still there. Its back rises level with our train car, and it holds its long, armlike nose in an elegant curl.
“Miyole.” I pick at her shoulder. “Do you see that?”
Miyole looks at it and shrugs. “It’s an elephant.”
An elephant. I remember a picture in one of Miyole’s tablet stories. I had thought it was imaginary, like the Void zephyrs or zebras. A canopied platform rests on its leathery back. A woman sits behind the animal’s ears, and a man, three children, and a silver-haired woman ride behind her.
The old woman beside Miyole glares at me and clears her throat. I’m stepping on the hem of her dress. I back away with an apologetic glance.
The train stops at another station. I know I should step off, look for water again, try to figure out where we are, but there are so many people, all of them packed in tight like fish. My legs feel too heavy to move. I can’t call up the energy it would take to edge my way through the crowd, much less pull Miyole after me, so I watch the unfamiliar station names glide along the windows. The world is getting bigger and bigger and I am shrinking in it.
Finally the buildings drop back from the trainway and the crowd thins. Clusters of man-tall pipes run alongside our window for a time, and then veer off into a different part of the city. Light still fills the sky, but it has a tarnished look to it, like old metal. The day is nearly spent. A hill rises into view. Houses and naked pipes crawl up all of its sides but one, a sheer face that drops down to rooftops below.
The train glides to a stop.
“End of transit line,” the overhead voice tells us.
All of the remaining passengers file to the exits. I look down at Miyole, who has fallen asleep in her seat, her head slumped against my shoulder. I wish I could do that. Lie down and drop out of the world for a space. I glance around. The train is completely empty now, the doors standing open.
My eyes ache. My body is so heavy I would swear Mumbai has its own, more powerful gravity. I want Perpétue. I want her to tell me, “Don’t worry, fi,” and find my modrie for me so this can be over. I want Iri or, better, my own long-gone mother to pull me against the warmth of her chest. I want Luck to stroke my hair and tell me he’ll fix everything.
But he won’t. None of them will.
“Miyole,” I whisper. “Time to keep moving.”
We walk out onto the train platform. The train sighs behind us, waves of heat rolling off its metal skin. Across the street, shops selling tea and long bolts of lightweight cloth pack in close to the road. Reddish stains color the bottom of the white plaster walls, as if the foundations had been dipped in a dye bath. Men and women shuffle along, or else thread their way carefully through the crowd atop jingling two-wheeled machines and the occasional horse. Maybe here we’ll have more luck with water.
I spot a smartboard near a cluster of benches and a stunted tree in a concrete pot. I squint at the board. Scratches cloud its face, and the low angle of the sun washes out the letters and lines on its display.
A man in a light blue uniform makes his way down the platform toward us, stopping every few strides to check inside the empty train cars.
He takes in our clothes before he speaks. “You girls are waiting for the next train?” His voice is buoyant and rolling.
I nod.
“We’ll not be leaving for another two hours.” He waves a hand at the train. “Maintenance stop.”
I stare at him dully. Maintenance stop? I know what those two words mean, but my mind won’t put them together. All I can do is stare at the badge on his shirt, glinting in the late sun.
“Why don’t you go find some dinner?” He smiles. “Come back in a few hours when the line is running again.”
My despair must be showing on my face, because his smile dissolves. “Are you lost? How long have you been traveling?”
“Since the morning,” Miyole pipes up, her voice a soft rasp.
He sighs. “You didn’t bring extra money for water, did you?” He shakes his head and fumbles at the water bottle clipped to his belt, holds it out to us, annoyed. “Here.”
I snatch it up and hand it to Miyole. She drinks long and deep, a little trickle running down the side of her chin. At last she pulls back with a gasp for air and hands the bottle over to me. The water is cool—perfect—almost sweet. I drink and drink until the last drop is gone.
The look of annoyance is gone from the train man’s face, replaced by a furrow of concern between his brows.
I hold the empty bottle out to him. “Thank you, so.”
He shakes his head. “Keep it.” He looks from me to Miyole as if he wants to say something. He shakes his head. “You girls take care of yourselves, okay?”
I don’t know what to say. What other choice do we have? He backs away and resumes his inspection of the train cars.
I hand the plastic bottle to Miyole, and she crinkles it in her hands, click-pop, like a heartbeat. Across the street, a gaggle of smallones races along a cinderblock wall, laughing, and cart pushers shout promises of juice and fried things and tea, switching between English and the other language.
My stomach growls. The water has woken it back up and cleared my head some.
“Are you hungry?” I ask Miyole. Maybe I can work out some trade with one of the vendors. I can carry and clean for them, or practice my fixes.
Miyole shakes her head. Click-pop, click-pop.
“Still thirsty?” I say.
She nods.
I close my eyes and call up my memory of the city from above. There were streams and rivers, weren’t there? If we can find one of those, we can fill the bottle back up. We can look for water while we’re stuck here, and then we can figure out where we are and get back on the train. We’ll find my modrie and everything will be all right.
I tug on Miyole’s hand. “Come on. We’ll find some water.”
She shakes her head and looks up at me. “I’m tired, Ava.”
Her eyes are wide and bloodshot with grief and exhaustion. They’re her mother’s eyes.
“I know.” I kneel down beside her. “Here. Climb up.”
Miyole loops her arms around my neck, and I lift her up onto my back.
We join the crowd moving along the street. Lights flicker on in the shop windows and flash along the edges of one of the gigantic pipes rising above the rooftops. People stand on the second tier balconies above the stores, laughing and calling out to one another, or scolding dogs and calling children in from the streets. Small green machines scuffle along the road, scraping horse droppings and bits of trash off the pavement and tilting it into their mouths. Dust muddies the air.
A girl in an elaborately wrapped orange dress and gold and blue bangles leans beneath an awning, intent on her handheld.
“Pardon,” I say. “Do you know where we can find water?”
She looks up at us and frowns, shakes her head as if she’s confused.
She doesn’t understand, I realize, and wish for the hundredth time that Perpétue was with us. She always seemed to know at least some scraps of language wherever we landed.
I point to the water bottle and hold up a hand in a helpless gesture.
She twists her mouth as if she’s thinking, then shakes her head again and drops her gaze back to her handheld.
We keep walking. I smell salt in the air, but I can’t see the ocean. A muffled hum and a rushing noise grow in my ears as we pass beneath the elevated pipe. The flashing red lights illuminate a puddle on the muddy ground. Water. I almost drop Miyole. As we stand watching, a drop falls from the pipe into the puddle.
“Look!” I let
Miyole down.
I hold out my tongue to catch the next falling drop, but when it hits, it tastes of salt and iron.
I spit it out. “Seawater.”
Miyole stares at the puddle.
“Don’t worry.” I try to smile. “We’ll find some.”
I lift Miyole and keep walking. We pass a series of small landing fields crammed with ships of all sizes. Lean, patchy animals throw themselves at the mesh fences as we pass. It takes me a moment to place the right name to them. Dogs. In Miyole’s picture books, they were always helpful creatures, playing with sticks and chasing away strangers. Only now we’re the strangers, I s’pose. Miyole tightens her grip on my neck.
“Maybe we should go back,” I say. The sky isn’t black, exactly, like it was in the Gyre at night, but it has taken on an odd purple glow. Ships scud overhead, lights blinking against the velvet darkness.
We turn around. The street is empty except for a lone sweeping machine trundling along in the distance. We pass the dogs and landing fields, and the massive pipe dripping seawater. My legs shake with weariness. Only a bit longer and we should see the trainway and the platform with its smartboard that can tell us where to go. If nothing else, we can get out of the heat, which hasn’t let up despite the darkness.
I walk and walk, Miyole growing heavier on my back. I should have seen the station by now, I’m sure of it. I stop and turn in a circle. The streets all look the same in the dark, and I don’t see as many people out, except for two women with tight-cut dresses and eyes ringed in glittering paint loitering beneath a streetlamp. Most of the shop windows are dark. I push on past another row of buildings, and another, as fast as I can go. Any breath now, I’ll see the station. It has to be there.
Shouts and laughter ring out ahead. A group of men saunter down the other side of the street, heading in our direction. The hair on my arms rises. Run, my body says. But that would only catch their eyes. I don’t think they’ve seen us yet. I whirl around. A few paces back, an alley opens between two buildings. I make for it.
“Ava, what—”
“Hsshh.” I crouch behind a pile of garbage, Miyole still clinging to my back, and wait until they’ve passed.
I creep out again and walk faster, running on fear now. The road curves and another raised pipe appears against the sky. Its winking signal lights blink on and off, showing and swallowing a symbol painted across its underside—two sets of jagged lines intersecting, forming diamond shapes.
I stop. I know I haven’t seen this before. I double back the other way. Still no station. Nothing I recognize. I try to swallow the panic creeping up the back of my throat, but there’s no stopping it. We’re lost.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
CHAPTER .20
The morning sun hits the water, near blinding me. I can’t remember which word I’m supposed to use. Creek? River? Stream? It’s the bigger kind, but not the very biggest. Miyole would know, but she’s asleep under a lean-to of shipping pallets in the alley where we spent the night, and I don’t want to rouse her. Let her stay away from this world as long as possible. And when she wakes, at least I’ll have water.
I roll up the legs of my pants, pull off my boots, and tie their laces together so I can sling them over my shoulder. Then I slip down the muddy bank and slosh into the shallows. The water is cool. On the opposite shore, a group of people wade into the slow-moving current to bathe. Farther down, a group of gangly boys in shorts stand on a concrete slab jutting out over the water. As I watch, one of them pushes another over the side, and then they’re all shrieking and jumping in. Swimming, I think. I clamp my mind closed on the memories that try to rush me.
A ship passes low overhead, sending a thrum through my body I can feel as much as hear. It follows the water’s path upstream, then pivots right and sinks between the rooftops. I lower our bottle beneath the current. We were so close to this place last night. If only we had walked a few streets over.
I lift the bottle from the water and tilt it back to drink.
“Wait!” The bottle flies from my hand and splashes down into the mud.
“Nine hells!” I wheel around, my body singing for a fight, and come face-to-face with a boy maybe a turn or two older than me. Sweat plasters his black, short-cropped hair to his neck and temples. He wears thick, squarish glasses with black plastic rims. Tattoos scroll down his bare brown arms and up his neck.
“Sorry.” He steps back and holds up his hands. His nose has been broken and mended and his eyebrows angle down, as if he’s thinking. “You don’t want to drink that. Unless you’re bulimic or something.”
I make a face. “Bulimic?”
He bends down and scoops my bottle out of the mud. “Yeah. You know . . .” He pretends to gag and vomit into the river.
I stare at him.
He gives me an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. I guess maybe that wasn’t the best way—” He stops himself, takes a breath, and holds out a hand. “Let me start over. Hi, I’m Rushil. You don’t want to drink the canal water. It’ll make you sick.”
I take his hand. “Ava.” I glance over at the people swimming. “What about them?”
“It’s all right for swimming and washing and all that,” Rushil says. “But for drinking, you really want the filtered stuff from the stores.”
I drop down onto a rock jutting out from the bank and stare at my muddy feet. “That’s what everyone says.”
Rushil peers at me as if he’s taking me in for the first time. “You okay? You don’t look so good.”
I think about lying, but I’m too tired. I shake my head.
“You just get here?”
I raise my eyebrows. “It’s that clear?”
“Well, you’re not dressed like a Mumbaikar.” He looks pointedly at Perpétue’s leather jacket tied around my waist. “Most people around here don’t go in for the whole dead cow thing.”
I look down. Any leather we had aboard the Parastrata was goat hide, and I’d thought this was the same. “How do you know it’s . . .” What did he say again? “Cow?”
“Point taken,” he says. “If anyone asks, I’d just say it’s synthetic.”
I cover my eyes with a hand. “Look, as much as I’d like to sit around talking about cows . . .”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” He holds out a hand to help me up. “Come on, I’ll show you where you can get water.”
I shake my head. “We don’t have any money. We used the last of it to dock our ship.”
Rushil raises his eyebrows. “Your ship?” I can’t tell if the look on his face is surprise or alarm. “Where is it?”
“Navi Flightport?” Why does everything I say turn into a question?
“Navi?” Rushil grimaces and sucks air past his teeth as if he’s stubbed a toe. “You’d better get it out of there before they make you start paying in blood.”
My skin goes cold, despite the sun. “Blood?”
He catches the look on my face. “Oh . . . no.” He laughs. “It’s just a . . . you know, an expression.”
“Oh,” I say.
“But you really should take your ship out of there,” Rushil says. “Especially if you’re staying awhile.”
He looks out over the water at the boys jumping into the canal and then down at his feet. “I’ve got a shipyard. You can dock with me for much less.”
Ah. So that’s it. I couldn’t figure why some strange boy would want to help me for nothing, but this makes more sense.
“I told you.” I sigh. “We’re out of money.” So piss off, I want to add, but I hold my tongue.
“Wait.” Rushil looks up, unfazed by my tone. “We?”
“Me and Miyole.”
“Miyole?”
“She . . .” I falter. How much do I want him to know about us? “She lost her mother. I’m looking after her.”
“A kid?” He blinks. “Where is
she?”
I nod to the buildings at the top of the bank. “She’s asleep back there in the alley.”
“In the alley?” His face darkens, and suddenly he changes from a boy hanging out by the canal to a young man full of purpose. “Come on. Get up.”
My hand creeps down to Perpétue’s knife. “Why?”
“Because you can’t leave a kid asleep in an alley.” He rolls his eyes. “That’s why.”
I lead him quickly back up onto the street. I can’t help staring at the ink scrolled around his arms. A horse and its rider. A tiger savaging a soldier. A formless, blossoming design some like the intricate ironwork on the doors and balconies we’ve passed. A name around his wrist. His arms are strong beneath the tattoos. Not bulky, but muscled in a way that makes me think he works with them.
“No offense, but what are you doing in the Salt?” Rushil interrupts my thoughts.
My face flames. I look down, away from his arms. “The Salt?”
Rushil waves his hand at the streets around us. “The Salt. Well, Old Dharavi on the maps, but no one calls it that except the transit authority.”
“We got lost,” I say. “We were looking for my modrie, and—”
“Your what?”
“My . . . my . . .” I sift through my memory, trying to think of the word Perpétue used for Soraya. “My tante?”
Rushil shakes his head.
“My mother’s sister,” I say.
“Your auntie?” he says. “Shouldn’t she have met you at the flightport?”
“She didn’t know we were coming.” I swallow. “In fact, I’m not even sure she knows I exist.”
That makes Rushil shut his mouth. We walk the rest of the way to the alley in silence.
I kneel down beside Miyole and shake her shoulder. “Mi?”
She starts awake. “Manman?” She blinks the sleep from her eyes, and I watch her face contort as the memory of the last days falls back over her.
My throat tightens. “It’s me, Miyole.” I look behind me. “And that’s Rushil.”
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