“Have you heard of a home for boys around here?” I ask the white-haired woman who owns the shop. “A state boarding school?”
The woman frowns at me. “Eh?”
“A home for boys without families.” I point up. “From spaceside?”
The woman says something in a language I’ve never heard before. Not Hindi or Marathi or any of the other dialects I’ve heard in the Salt. I squint and lean forward, as if that will help me suddenly understand.
“Kyaa aap hindi boltii hein?” I ask in halting Hindi. Do you speak Hindi?
“Wait,” she says in English and holds up a knobby finger. I stand beside the counter feeling foolish as she hobbles away, and then returns with a girl some few turns older than me wiping her hands with a dish towel.
“You speak English?” the young woman asks. She wears a long-sleeved plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows and a scarf loose wrapped around her neck.
“Right so.” I nod.
She nods with me. “Go ahead. I know it.”
I clear my throat. “I heard there was a state home here for boys from spaceside who got left behind. I was wanting to know if either of you knew where it was, exactly.”
“Oh, the pale boys.” The girl’s eyes go wide. “At the seed bank farm. It’s about an hour’s walk on the trail leading west from here.”
The shopkeeper interrupts her with a pat on the arm and adds something.
“It’s the only building out that way this side of the lake,” the girl says. “You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” I say to her, and then again to the shopkeeper. “Dhanyavad.”
I follow the trail out of town with my jacket buttoned up to my neck and my boots crunching the gravel. Cool, damp air soaks under my collar, but I know I’ll warm up as I go. Only an hour of walking and I might see Luck again. Only an hour and I might touch him, hold him. Late-morning mist clings to the path. When I see him, will I run to him, or will I stand watching him, ticking down the seconds until he sees me? Will he know me, changed as I am? A bird calls from somewhere in the trees, a small, sad sound. What if he’s not there? What if Doya was right and all the boys are younger? What if he was never there, and all I have left is his ghost? Will Soraya take me back after all the trouble and burden I’ve been, especially if I return empty-handed? I try to jog, but the air is thin and leaves me winded after a few strides. I settle for walking as fast as I can.
At last I crest a hill and look down on a farmhouse in a rolling green pasture. A stable some like the one at Revati stands across from the house, beside a small pond. Behind the house, a sprawling complex of greenhouses and gleaming white windowless buildings forms a hexagon in the center of the valley. As I watch, a figure walks from the stables to one of the greenhouses, carrying something.
I half walk, half stumble down the hill. Oh, Mercies, please . . . The person—a man, I can tell for certain now—shifts his burden to one arm and reaches for the door.
“Wait!” I’m out of breath and clammy with sweat.
He turns and I see his face. And he’s tall. And he’s pale.
But he isn’t Luck.
His eyes are brown, his skin a freckled tea-with-cream color, and his face makes him some turns older than Luck. Twenty-something, maybe even thirty. I stop midstride, as if I’ve run into a wall. “Oh.”
“Can I help you?” He takes a step closer to me. “Are you lost?”
“This is the state boarding school, right so? The one for boys what got left by their crewes?”
“It is.” He shifts the box from one arm to another, wary. “What do you want with us?”
I take a deep breath. I have nothing to lose. “I’m looking for someone. Someone from the ther crewe.”
“The ther crewe.” He frowns. “How did you say you heard about us, again?”
“This lady I used to work with told me.” Even as I’m saying it, I hear how cagey I sound.
“A lady you used to work with,” he repeats. “Uh-huh.”
A drip of cold sweat runs down my back. “Please so, if I could only come inside—”
His eyes go wide, and his whole expression changes from guarded suspicion to full-out shock. “Who are you?”
“I . . .” I hesitate. “I was only looking—”
“Are you . . . ” He shakes his head. “But they don’t leave the girls behind. And you don’t look . . .”
I draw myself up. “I’m Parastrata Ava.” The name sounds strange on my tongue. How long since I’ve said it? Half a turn? More?
“Parastrata?” He squints at me. “Aren’t they the ones with the red hair?”
“My grandfather was from groundways,” I say. “From here. That’s why . . .” I guesture at my hair and skin.
He chews his bottom lip in thought.
“Please so,” I say again. “I won’t bother you long. I only need to know if someone’s here and then I’ll be on my way.”
“Hold on.” He unhooks an old crow from his pocket and holds it up to his mouth. “Hena?”
“Go ahead,” a woman’s voice comes back.
“I have a visitor here who says she’s looking for an ther boy. Is Vina in?”
A pause on the line. Then, “A visitor? Very funny, Howe.”
Howe looks at me sidelong. “We don’t usually see anyone who isn’t a social worker or a government inspector.” He raises the crow again. “I’m not kidding, Hena. We have a real live visitor. Can Vina see her?”
“You know she doesn’t like to be disturbed,” the woman replies.
Howe eyes me. “I think she’s going to want to talk to this one.”
The woman sighs. “I’m down in the southwest biome. I’ll run up to the farmhouse and see.”
“Cheers, Hena. Out.” He clips the crow to his pocket again and pulls open the greenhouse door. “Come with me. Hena’s gone to check if the director will see you.”
“Thank you.” I follow him inside.
The air shifts instantly from damp cold to muggy. Waist-high tables covered with rows of delicate green shoots fill the room. Cucumbers, tomatoes, yellow squash, okra, and young carrots reach up for the clouded glass roof. I unbutton my jacket and turn in place, taking in the sea of green around me. And this is only one of the greenhouses I saw from the top of the hill.
“What do you do here? Why do you have so many plants?”
Howe stows his box on a shelf and brushes the dirt from his shirtsleeves. “We’re a self-sustaining outpost. Some of it we eat. But we also run a seed bank here, the oldest one in Himachal Pradesh.” He opens the door to a white-tiled hallway and holds it for me. “This way.”
I step through. “A seed bank?” The woman back in town called it the same thing.
“We grow different plants and harvest their seeds to distribute to farmers.” He closes the door and waves for me to follow him. “You know, so the whole tomato crop doesn’t get wiped out by disease. If one kind gets blight or something, we make sure farmers have other varieties to fall back on.”
“Oh,” I say, even though I’m not sure I understand completely. The right side of the hallway looks out on a garden, boxed in by more greenhouses on the far side. A blank wall, broken only by identical white doors and reinforced windows, runs along the left. We walk in silence past a sterile-looking dormitory, another greenhouse, and then a training room full of the same sort of equipment the men used to keep up their strength aboard the Parastrata. It strikes me how much this place looks like a crewe ship, and I wonder if it’s on purpose to make the boys here feel more at home.
“I have to say, I’ve never heard of a crewe abandoning a girl before,” Howe says.
I look out on the garden, where a row of pear trees is beginning to fruit. “It happens.”
“I’ve worked here seven years and I’ve never seen a crewe girl. Vina will want to hear all about you.”
We stop at a set of steps leading up to a green door with an old-fashioned knob, like the one in Soraya’s house.
&nbs
p; Howe pulls out his crow again. “Hena?”
“Vina’s there. She says to go in whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Hena.”
She snorts. “It’s your funeral.”
The green door opens on a kitchen. Shelves run along every wall and above the counters, every surface crammed with seed packets, clothespins, books, and cheery jars of jam, chutney, and pickles. Sacks of potatoes and pears slump against the bottommost shelves. A stack of plates dries by the sink.
“Vina?” Howe calls.
“In here,” a woman answers from the next room.
We follow the sound of her voice into a small office. She sits at an enormous desk. Wires, used mugs, and scraps of paper litter her workspace, along with a crook-necked lamp, a tablet, and a scanning machine. Behind her, yellowing log books climb the shelves all the way to the ceiling. I crane my neck to read the print on one of the spines. PSYCH EVALS A-B.
Vina doesn’t look up from the tablet she’s been scribbling on. “This had better be good, Howe.”
“Vina, this is Parastrata Ava,” Howe says. “She’s here about some records.”
Vina looks up and narrows her eyes at me.
“My grandfather was from groundways,” I explain again. “That’s why . . .” I wave a hand at my appearance.
Vina nods and steeples her fingers beneath her chin, but still doesn’t say anything.
“I’m looking for someone from another crewe. A boy named ther Luck.”
“I thought you’d want to talk to her,” Howe says. “Seeing as—”
“Thank you, Howe.” Vina nods. “I can take it from here.”
Howe breathes a sigh of relief, and then he’s gone and I’m alone with Vina.
“Well.” Vina leans back in her chair and raises her eyebrows at me. “Would you like to have a seat?” She waves at a tatty blue chair in the corner.
“Thank you, so missus.” I sit, nervous. My eyes flit over the books behind her. GRAIN INTAKE MAY-DECEMBER. WORK SPONSOR RELEASE FORMS. RESIDENT INDEX.
Vina clears her throat. “So you’re looking for someone?”
“Right so.” I shift in my chair. “ ther Luck.”
“How old?” She stares at me, not moving.
“Now?” I try to stop fidgeting and make myself sit up straight. “Um, nineteen or twenty turns—years—I think.”
“That old?” Vina frowns. “And when would he have come here?”
I count back in my head. “Some time in the last eight deci—I mean, months.”
Vina grimaces and clicks her tongue. “I don’t remember anyone that old in the last year. Most of the boys we get are much younger. Thirteen, fifteen. But I’ll check my records.” She spins her chair around and reaches for the log labeled RESIDENT INDEX. “You know, you could have submitted an information request through the feeds. You didn’t need to come all the way out here.”
My body goes hot, and then cold. Why didn’t I think of that? I could have known all this time. I could have found Luck months ago.
“I . . . I didn’t know that.”
“Here we are.” Vina drops the thick log book on her desk. She pages through. “ ther, ther. Yes, okay.”
My heart lifts.
She continues. “ ther Talent, ther Mercy, ther Far.” She flips the page. “ ther Till. ther Keep.”
She looks up at me. Her mouth twists in professional sympathy. “I’m sorry, those are all the boys we’ve found from the ther crewe over the last year.”
I sit stunned for a moment. “Can . . . can I see that book, please?”
“Certainly.” Vina hands it over.
I flip through the pages, reading the same names she recited, each with his own page of data. Intake date. Height. Weight. Approximate age.
“But . . .” My mind skitters, trying to find a way for her words not to be true. “Are there other places—homes, like this one—where he could be?”
“Not really.” Vina lifts the book from my hands. “We get all the boys left in-country and on Bhutto station, but most states don’t want to spend money on rehabilitating a bunch of vagrant boys.”
I open my mouth to protest.
“That’s how they see them,” Vina says quickly. “In most of the backwaters out there they end up stealing to eat, getting in fights, begging. A lot of them wind up in detention facilities. It’s the fortunate ones who are picked up and sent here. And we’re only open because we’re nearly self-sufficient, really. We don’t take much government funding.”
“I see.” I stare blankly at the stack of papers on her desk.
Vina closes the log and replaces it on the shelf. “I’m sorry. I hate to be blunt, but if he didn’t come through here, your chances of finding him are slim to none.” She swivels back to me. “Are you absolutely sure his crewe left him behind?”
I bite my lip. Luck’s face bleeding from his father’s ring. The metal look in ther Fortune’s eyes. “No,” I say. The word tastes like copper.
“That’s good, then.” Vina smiles, but it looks forced. “That’s the best we can hope for, really, that his crewe didn’t abandon him after all.”
“Right so,” I say quietly. But she doesn’t understand. If Luck’s crewe didn’t leave him, that can only mean he’s dead.
“Now, I’ve answered your questions. I hope you’ll be so good as to answer mine.” Vina reaches over to her tablet and taps.
“Recording started,” a mechanical voice says.
Vina leans forward at her desk and laces her fingers together. “We’ve never had a girl from one of the crewes turn up here before. You’re quite the find.”
“Thank you, so missus, but I have to walk back and catch the train. I have people waiting for me.”
She frowns. “You’ve clearly adapted much better than most of our boys. Your experience could be invaluable in improving our socialization techniques.”
I bite my tongue. She sounds like Dr. Lata, trying to overrun me with words. Why should she expect me to tell her things I’ve never even told Rushil or Soraya?
“Thank you, so missus,” I repeat, sharper this time. “No.”
“Well, at least let me offer you some tea before you go.” Vina forces a smile and pushes back her chair. “It’s a long way back to town.”
“Thank you,” I say dully.
Vina bustles around the kitchen, running water into a kettle and crinkling open a wax paper pouch of loose tea. “You know, we have so much to learn from each other,” she calls over the running water. “You could give us such insight into the crewe system. And we can always use a pretty face to help convince parliament to increase our funding.”
A spark of anger flares in my chest. She’s asking me for help? Me? She’s just told me in so many words that Luck is dead, and now she’s grasping at me.
Vina returns with a tea tray, all smiles. “Think about it, Ava. Imagine all the good we could do together.”
I rub the spot between my eyebrows. “I don’t know.” I look toward the green door. An idea strikes me. “Could I talk to the boys?”
It’s a risk but a small one. None of them should be able to figure out who I am by my looks, and if they piece it together, who would they tell?
“The boys?” Vina’s smile fades. She places a cup on the edge of the desk before me and fills it with amber tea. “Why would you want to speak to them?”
“Maybe one of them knows something.” I pick up the cup. “About what happened to Luck.”
“Perhaps.” She pauses, filling her own cup, and her smile creeps back. “Yes, I think that could be managed. In fact, why don’t you stay here tonight?”
I stiffen. “I have to get back. The train—”
“The next train leaves in . . .” Vina checks her crow. “Ninety minutes. I thought you wanted time to speak with the boys?”
“I do, but—”
“Well, then, stay the night.” Vina gives an elegant little shrug that says simple. “Howe will drive you back to the the station tomorrow. A
nd who knows, maybe after you’ve rested, you’ll feel more like talking.”
I grit my teeth. “Right so.” I put my teacup back on her desk, untouched. “I think I’d like to see them now.”
Vina arches an eyebrow. “I have to warn you. They don’t fancy talking to women much.”
I almost laugh. “I think I can handle it.”
“Of course.” Vina nods and picks up her crow. “Howe?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will you escort Miss Parastrata down to the vocational workshop? She’d like to interview some of our charges.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “On my way.”
“See?” Vina says. “I told you we could help each other.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
CHAPTER .34
Howe opens the door to the vocational workshop—a long, windowless room, bright with artificial lights. Sallow-skinned boys with hair of black and red and white-blond sit at tables spread across the room, each intent on a different task. Two scrawny boys hunch over welding pens, fixing electronics, while others peer into tablet screens or sit in small groups, talking. It takes me a slip or two to figure what’s wrong with the scene. I can’t hear anything. Not the whine of the welding pen or the soft tapping of fingers on a trackboard, or the murmur of voices. The room must have a sort of sound shield, some like the one what protects Soraya’s house from the city noise.
“What crewe was your guy again?” Howe asks.
I walk forward. “ ther,” I say, craning my neck to check the faces of the boys at the tablets. As we draw nearer, the sound shield fades and I can hear their fingers clicking. “His name is ther Luck.”
“I think we have a few ther kids over in the socialization workshop.” Howe nods at the group slouched around a table in the corner. Another man with a neat-trimmed black beard, maybe a teacher of some kind, sits at the head of the table, gesturing and talking to them.
The teacher looks up and smiles at us as we approach. “Ah, look everyone. We have visitors. You all know Instructor Howe.” He turns his smile to me. “And what a perfect opportunity to practice our conversation skills. Who would like to ask this young lady her name?”
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