A faint tap-tap-tap rings on the ship’s ventral side. “Ava?” A muffled voice reaches up to me. Rushil.
I hurry to wipe my eyes and lean over the ship’s side. “Here,” I say. “It’s me.”
Rushil steps from under the ship, nervously gripping a cricket bat and a hooded lamp.
“What are you . . . Are you okay?” He leans the bat against the sloop’s side and starts up the ladder with the lantern still in one hand.
I wait until he reaches the top to answer. “I . . . I don’t know.” I don’t even know where to begin. There’s too much.
Rushil slides back the lantern’s hood and balances it on the ship. The light reflects in his glasses. “I saw someone up here. I hoped it was you.”
“Is that why you brought your bat?” I know Rushil only means he hoped it was me and not a shipjacker, but a strange, small thrill trips through me all the same.
He grins. “Yeah. I thought you might have been one of those super-intelligent rats that are supposed to live in the drainage pipes. Ankur’s convinced they’re real.”
I laugh. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s only . . . I wanted to be alone some. I didn’t know where else to go.”
Rushil holds the ladder’s top rung. “Do you still want to be? Alone, I mean?”
“What? No.” My words come out half laugh, half cry. I wipe at my eyes again. “No, not any more.”
Rushil climbs up and sits beside me. “Wow, it’s nice up here. I can see why Shruti spends so much time up top.”
I laugh again, and the sadness in me breaks some.
Rushil moves his foot next to mine. At first I think it’s an accident, but then he taps a little rhythm against the side of my boot. I still feel turned out and empty, but I smile and tap back. Rushil lays his hand over mine, and something soft brushes my skin. I look down. A worn strip of leather doubles around his wrist. My cord. I raise my eyes to his, lips parted. He knew I came looking for him. He knew I was sorry.
He doesn’t say anything, but the rough warmth of his palm brings tears to my eyes again.
“I’m not from the Gyre,” I blurt out.
“You’re not?” Rushil blinks. “But Miyole . . . you said . . .”
“She is. Her mother took me in before she died. She’s the one what taught me to fly this ship. But I came from up there.” I let my eyes drift up. Even the brightest stars can’t pierce the city’s haze.
“From . . . from spaceside, you mean?” He squints through his glasses at me as if I must be mistaken.
I nod.
“But your aunt, you said she was from here—”
“It’s complicated.” I take a breath. I have to let him know. “Rushil, you don’t want me.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Don’t I?”
“No. You think you do, but I’m not . . .” The words stick in my throat. “I’m some bad matter. Everyone around me only gets hurt. And I . . . I did something . . . something so bad my crewe—my people—didn’t want me anymore. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ava.” Rushil rolls his eyes. “What could you possibly have done?”
“There was . . . there was Luck.” When I say his name, something gives in me, and everything comes pouring out, all the parts of my past I’ve hidden away so careful. About Soli and Iri and the way of wives. How I gave myself to Luck, and how we were caught, and how I left him bloodied and shamed. And finally the sentence laid on me, and how Iri saved me, sent me down to the Earth instead of out into the breathless Void.
A tense silence settles between us. “They . . . they tried to put you out alive?” Rushil says at last.
I nod. I let my hair fall over my face.
“Oh, Ava . . .” Rushil tightens his hand over mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But you understand now?”
“I do,” Rushil says.
I sigh. “Good.”
Rushil hooks his thumb around my own. “I don’t care if you’ve been with someone else.”
I pause, shocked. “You don’t?”
“No,” Rushil says. “You’re still you, Ava, either way.”
A slow warmth spreads through my body. In the ashes where my heart was, a small green shoot nudges up through the black.
Without thinking, I lean across the short distance between us and find Rushil’s mouth with mine. He tenses, but then his lips give soft, his hand reaches up to touch my face, and he leans in to me. It’s nothing like kissing Luck. This is different, a slower burn what builds and builds, as if our lips are amplifying the charge between us the longer we stay linked. I never thought anyone would touch me this way again, never thought my heart could carry the charge. I give deeper to the kiss, lost in the unexpected heat of it.
When we finally break away, a nervous laugh bubbles out of me.
Rushil stares at me wide-eyed, out of breath. “Ava, I don’t—”
But I cut him off with another kiss.
We lean back on the ship’s warm tiles. Rushil’s breath is sweet with cloves and cardamom, but a pleasant air of fresh sweat clings to his body in the muggy night, too. His palm is rough as he brushes the hair from the back of my neck, but his touch is gentle. I want nothing but to drown myself in kissing him.
After a time, we roll away from each other and lie shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the sky.
“It’s late,” Rushil says. “Do you have to go home?”
“No.”
“You want to head over to Zarine’s with me?” Rushil tips his head toward me. “She said she scrounged some extra tubing I could have for the sloop.”
I sit up. “My sloop?”
Rushil pushes himself upright. “No, I hear the super-intelligent rats are starting their own Deep Sound Institute.” He smiles and pokes me in the ribs. “Of course yours. Who else’s?”
A tingling, awake feeling tickles under my skin. I feel strong. Young. Whole. I don’t want to go back, not yet. I want to be out, a part of this night with Rushil. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Rushil’s street is near empty, but the closer we come to the hill, the more the streets tick with people. Packs of girls lean against one another, laughing, high heels clacking on the pavement as they walk. Boys Rushil’s age stand in circles under the streetlights, drinking and feigning jabs at each other. Couples stroll by, arm in arm. Rushil reaches back to grab my hand.
“You know this used to be a slum?” he says. “And then they built the railyards and it turned into mostly warehouses. But now—”
Even from far off, the buildings on the hill hum with voices and muffled music and the buzz of solar generators. We trek deeper into the Salt. It isn’t like the south end of the city, all jammed with hot, bright signs trying to draw you in. Here, you have to know where you want to go. Each building is a little boxed glance into another world. A tapri full of clinking cups and waiters edging around the crowded tables. A blue-lit room packed with dancing bodies writhing together under a constant beat. A man glancing up from a wrought-iron basin brimming full with dark water. Dozens of shadows milling behind the gauzy curtains of an upstairs loft.
The street sweepers here have all been scooped up and modded at some point. One trundles by carapaced in a fake turtle shell. Another looks as though it’s been hennaed. Another blares out tinny music as it charges across the street. We ring up and up, closer to the top of the Salt. Every now and then we catch narrow glimpses of the city and its tight-woven carpet of lights between the buildings on the hill’s outer rim.
Two thirds of the way up, Rushil stops. “Here.” He points up at an old warehouse some three stories above us, hanging halfway out over the hill and the lev train tracks below. Thick metal struts anchor the dangling edge to the raw earth of the hill below. A murmur of distant voices and music filters down to us from the lighted windows.
“Here?” I say.
Rushil cups his hands to his mouth and shouts up. “Hey, Zarine! Zarine!”
Someone—a man, not Zarine—leans his head out the wi
ndow.
“Hey!” Rushil waves his arm. “Let us up.”
A low clank-clank-clank starts above us, and slowly, a platform lowers into view, suspended by metal cables. It touches down in a puff of dust beside us. Rushil hops on, and I follow.
“How do we . . . ,” I start to ask, but Rushil grabs a hand crank built into the side of the platform and turns it in a slow, smooth circle. The platform shudders and lifts from the ground.
“Zarine and some friends put in drywall and plumbing and all. It’s apartments now,” Rushil says, looking up at the base of the warehouse as he rotates the winch. We rise level with building, and the noise builds to a steady hum of voices and music. As Rushil locks the platform in place and secures us to the side of the building, the door flies open, letting out a wave of lamplight and high, twanging music.
“Rushil, you made it!” A tall, curvy woman with a wild toss of hair leans across the gap between the platform and the doorframe to hug Rushil. A black dress hugs her waist, and round brass earrings as big as fists dangle from her ears. Everything about her seems scaled for giants, her hair, her eyes, her legs. Behind her, a kitchen separates us from a warmer room where a small crowd lounges on floor pillows, couches, and round, shell-like chairs, talking and sipping beer or tea in glasses. A handsome, dark-skinned young man with a sitar balances on the back of the nearest couch, cradling the neck of his instrument and picking its strings absentmindedly as he talks to the couple across from him. Ankur, I realize.
“Hey, Zarine.” Rushil hugs her back.
“You must be the one Rushil was talking about.” She takes my arm and helps me across the gap. “Ava, right? Who rescued that little girl?”
Her words knock me shy and off-balance. Does she mean Miyole? But that wasn’t rescuing. “Oh, no, I . . . I’m not . . .” I try to say, but the rush of voices in the neighboring room drowns me out. Is that who I am? I look at Rushil. Is that how he sees me?
“You want a beer?” Zarine shouts. “Or some tea?”
“Tea,” I say.
“Go on, help yourself to a cutting.” Zarine waves a bangled arm at a clutter of cups and pitchers covering the blocky table in the center of the kitchen. “Rushil?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He throws a look at me. “I was telling Ava you had some tubing for us. . . .”
Zarine sighs and feigns hurt. “I swear, you only want me for my spare parts. You have to promise to stay and at least have some tea after.”
Rushil grins. “I promise.”
Zarine flashes her teeth in another smile. “Come on, I’ve got that tubing downstairs in the utility room.”
Rushil leans close. “You want to come with us?”
A burst of laughter breaks out from the sitting room behind me. I look over my shoulder. Young men and women, all my age or a little older, sit mingled together, easy with one another. I’ve never been in a place like this.
I turn back to Rushil. “I think I’ll stay here.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.” He squeezes my arm briefly and follows Zarine around the crowd of people and out another door. The room suddenly feels dimmer without her, as if a lamp has gone out.
I pour myself a glass of tea and sit cross-legged on the outskirts of the sitting room crowd. Everyone around me is dropped deep in conversation, talking on music and who’s setting up a gallery show and who’s been off planetside and how long, only none of it’s anyone I know.
“Hey, Ava.” Ankur drops down next to me, sitar in hand. “Fancy meeting you here. How do you know Zarine?”
“I don’t.” I take a sip of tea. “Rushil brought me.”
Ankur gestures to the doorway Rushil and Zarine disappeared through. “I lost my muse. You want to sing with me?”
I nearly choke.
“I don’t know.” I swallow, buying time. “I’m not from here. I don’t think I know any of your songs.”
“Not even ‘Melt It Down’?”
I shake my head.
“Or ‘Burn, Sita, Burn’?”
I shake my head again.
“‘Droughtsick’? Everyone knows ‘Droughtsick.’”
I shake my head a third time.
Ankur picks at the sitar’s strings. “Well, why don’t you sing something from where you come from, and I’ll try to play along?”
A nervous current zings through me. Panic. “I can’t.”
“Come on.” Ankur smiles his perfect smile. “Nobody here’s going to bite. I’ll tell them not to trap it for their pages, huh?”
“It isn’t that.” I rest my empty teacup on the floor.
“You one of those shy girls never does anything but listen in on other people talking?” Ankur teases.
“No,” I say, even though he’s probably right. “It’s . . . I’m not supposed to.”
“Not supposed to?” Ankur says.
“Sing.” It feels strange to say, especially here, now.
Ankur stares at me as though I’ve said I’m not supposed to breathe or grow fingernails. “What, is it going to send us hurling ourselves into the trainway? Is it that bad?”
I open my mouth to answer, but then I realize I don’t really know what will happen if I sing. Something bad, something to catch the ears of bad spirits, or so the story of Mikim and the corsairs would have it. But now, I don’t know. Miyole was right. Now that I know more of how the universe works, Mikim’s story makes some little sense. And besides, all the verses in the Word about what befalls a woman in the Earth’s grip, those were only part true. I may be tarnished, but I’m still whole. So maybe nothing will happen if I sing. Maybe no harm will grow from it at all.
“Right so.” My voice croaks. I clear my throat and say it stronger. “Right so.”
“Okay then.” Ankur adjusts his strings. A few of the people around us hush, then others turn their heads our way. “When you’re ready.”
Ankur picks out a single, soft, vibrating note. Another cluster of people go quiet. At that moment, I spot Rushil standing in the doorway, a bundle of plastic tubing under his arm. I close my eyes to block out all the faces looking my way, sink anchor deep in myself, and let out one of the songs I’ve heard through the walls, one I’ve sung inside my head at night in my bunk with my sisters warm at my sides. Saeleas’s song of mourning, the song she sang through her tears as the Earth slipped away, those thousand-some turns ago.
“Farewell to rock and tree and vale,
Farewell to birds high-flying,
For duty calls me far away,
So sing my heart through sighing.”
Ankur strums to match my voice, soft at first, then louder as he catches the scheme. The whole room has gone quiet.
“Pick up, pick up this heavy thread,
Quiet, child, your laughter,
For we must leave this world we know,
And wander e’er hereafter.”
I open my eyes. Rushil stands still past the sea of heads, looking at me as though my song has run him through. I raise my voice and sing Candor’s answering verse to his wife. Ankur doubles the tempo to meet my urgency, his strumming fast. It molds together into something new, something both of this world and not.
“Think not on rock and tree and spring,
Think not on birds high-flying,
Our freedom calls us high away,
For here were our hearts dying.”
My voice breaks and the room blurs, but I blink away the salt from my eyes and fix them on Rushil.
“Mourn not for what you’ve lost, my love,
Think not on what you’re leaving,
Let all your heart and mind hold fast,
This new life you are breathing.”
As the last line rings out of my chest, I let go. Let go Luck, let go my crewe, let go what might have been. Rushil holds my eyes, and I stand empty and clear, ready to be filled with what my life might yet be.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER .37
I creep back to Soraya’s in the dull gray of morning. The house welcomes me with a low beep and a click as the door seals itself shut behind me. I pull off my boots and tiptoe to the stairs, thinking of nothing but soft pillows and the dark comfort of my bed. But then I turn the corner to mount the stairs, and run headlong into Soraya. She loses her grip on the full metal ewer she has balanced in her arms. I stagger forward and manage to catch it before it clangs across the floor, but not before it sloshes cold water down the front of my shirt.
I freeze, soaked through. “Sorry,” I gasp.
Soraya stares down at me, lips parted in surprise. She’s draped a pale blue scarf over her head in preparation for her morning prayers. She looks like some kind of holy woman, clean pressed and fresh from sleep. I’m all too aware of the dust and dried sweat stiffening my clothes and the sour taste of a night without sleep in my mouth. My face goes hot as I remember how I left. Shouting like a spoiled smallgirl.
I shift the ewer in my arms. “You want me to carry this for you?”
Soraya’s breathes out. “Yes, please.”
I haven’t seen her use it before, but I know the water is so Soraya can wash her hands and face and feet before her morning prayers. I’ve seen the ewer newly emptied by the gray-water sink and sitting by her bedside in the evenings. I carry it to the corner of the common room where Soraya keeps her prayer mat rolled and pour the water into a basin.
“Thank you.” She casts an eye at my wet shirt. “Why don’t you go and change, and then we’ll talk?”
I nod and slink away to the stairs, but something makes me look back as I reach them. The sun tips pink light through the glass doors on the east side of the house. Soraya unfurls her prayer mat and eases herself to her knees. She holds her hands together before her and murmurs into the early morning light. I duck my head and disappear up the stairs. If I were her, I’d want to be left alone to my praying.
I look in on Miyole, fast asleep in the rosy darkness of her room. Her breath comes even and her face is peaceful, free of the little furrow that appears between her brows when she’s been worrying. I change my shirt in the close quiet of my room. I spend a long moment contemplating the bed, but I shake myself awake. I owe a talk to Soraya, and better sooner than later.
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