Salvage

CHAPTER .1

The morning before our ship, Parastrata, docks at the skyport, I rise early. I climb over my littlest sister, Lifil, and the other smallgirls curled together like puppies on our bunk. Out in the common room, the rest of the women and girls lie sleeping in the dark, humid simulation of night. As I wind up my hair and bind it with a work rag, I mark how Modrie Reller’s—my stepmother’s—bunk is empty. She must have spent the night in my father’s quarters, even some months gone with child again as she is.

I fasten the clasps of my shift at my shoulders, step first into my light skirts, then my quilted ones, and tie them all at my waist until they hang heavy around my hips. I lean forward to check their length. Only the barest hint of toe peeks out from beneath the hem.

Right so. I smile to myself in the dark. Today will be a good day. Everything balanced, everything raveled right.

I tuck my folding fan into my pocket and make my way to the hatch. Nan and Llell and some of the other grown girls stir on the mattresses cramping the floor as I punch in the pattern code to unlock the door—circle, bar, bar, slant. Only Modrie Reller and I know the pattern. Me, since I’m so girl of our ship, and her, since she’s firstwife to the Parastrata’s captain, at least ever since a fever took my mother to the Void ten turns past. Nan tried to get me to tell the pattern one time, so she could sneak off to her cats in the livestock bay, but I told her no. My father can trust me and Modrie Reller, but it’s hardly safe if all the women and girls know.

I heave the door open on its rollers and creep out into the hallway. The faint, moon-blue light of a biolume bowl washes the walls. I think on going back and hurrying the others along so I won’t be caught alone out in the corridors, but I am the so girl and my father’s eldest daughter, besides. No one would dare say anything to me. And a few minutes by myself is too choice to pass up when I spend near every minute of the day hemmed in by other people. I roll the door partway closed behind me.

I breathe deep. Without the heat and breath of so many women pressed together in one room, the air is less close, almost cool. One of our canaries pipes a question at me from its cage in an alcove along the wall. I bend close and work the tip of my finger between the bars. The canary quirks its head at me, its eyes small, inky spots in the half light.

“Ava,” Llell hisses behind me. She leans out of the hatch, still working the tie of her outer skirt. “Wait on us, huh?”

I pull my finger from the cage, straighten up, and fold my arms in feigned impatience.

Llell squints at me, uncertain.

“Hurry on, then,” I say. Sometimes I forget Llell can’t read my looks. I have to speak aloud if I want her to do what needs doing. Her eyes are bad, like her mother’s and all her brothers’ and sisters’.

Llell nods and ducks back into the sleeping quarters.

There’s doctors on the waystations what can fix bad eyes, but Priority says it’s only for those on Flight and Fixes duty. It’s not worth the cost if you’re only assigned to the kitchens or the nurseries, much less cleaning or the dyeworks. Maybe someday Llell and her mother can share a pair of glasses like my great-grandfather’s widow Hannah has.

Across the corridor, a porthole looks out on the darkness of the Void, speckled bright with stars like a vast, black egg. A distant silver-gray moon hangs against it, and farther out, a blue planet mottled cloud white and brown-green slips into view, a bright halo circling it. Earth, the seat of all our woes.

I step up to the glass. The skyport floats somewhere above the blue planet, still some far to be seen with the naked eye. But come endday, we’ll dock our ship, and we’ll join the other crewes for our first endrun meet in five turns. A nervy, electric thrill trips through my body at the sight of the moon and its world, so impossibly near and far at once. Sometimes I forget the true, endless scope of the Void and coax myself to thinking our ship is all the universe there is. But then we pass a moon or a world, hanging lonely and luminous in the dark, and it comes to me the sheer stretch of the emptiness we live in. I touch my hand to the porthole’s cool, scored surface, and trace the curve of the Earth.

No. I tamp out the thought, tuck my hands under my arms, and look away so I see only our ship. If I’ve taken to gazing out portholes like a silly, Earthstruck girl, I truly must be in need of marrying, as Modrie Reller’s son Jerej teases. All the oldgirls say we younger ones are drawn to the Earth, even though its touch means our ruin. They say even Saeleas, our first patriarch’s wife, fell weeping when our people departed some thousand turns past, and she had seen its desolation with her own eyes. They say ever since, our women have harbored a wanting for the Earth like a soft, rotten spot in our souls.

It is our men who risk to walk it when the need comes, our men who gird themselves and shield us from its pull, who must purify themselves with oil and water after suffering its weight. And in turn, all we need do is remember how our ship is life, the true world, the pure world. I whisper a piece from the Word of the Sky to keep me raveled.

“Clean the dust from our feet,

Our hair, our clothes.

Bring us oil, bring us water,

And in the heavens

We will make a world anew.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Nan says as she finally emerges from the sleeping quarters, followed by Llell.

I stand straight to inspect them. They’ve bound up their red hair in work rags, like mine, and their green skirts brush the floor. Well, Llell’s do. Nan needs to let out the hem of her dress. She’s grown again, and the bare tops of her feet show. If you weren’t looking close, you’d think we were sisters, all dressed alike, except my skin is dull and dark, like my mother’s was, whereas theirs holds a translucent pearl. Lell and all the boys used to tease me on my coloring before I became so girl, but not now. Everything is different now.

I nod my approval and sweep off in the direction of the livestock bay, the other girls in tow.

“Hurry on,” I call over my shoulder. “We want to be done and out of the way for the docking, right so?”

“Right so,” Llell mutters.

“Right so,” Nan chirps, Llell’s blithe echo.

The ship is still observing night, so the solar-fed lights are out. Strips of phosphorous lining the hallway bathe our bare feet in a dim blue glow, and the biolume bowls hanging from the ceiling at every turn keep us from descending into complete darkness. As we reach the bend before the gangway, the daylights buzz to life. Turrut, one of the boys near our age, barrels around the corner with an armful of dioxide canisters for the workrooms clutched to his chest. We shrink against the wall and duck our heads as one, waiting for him to pass. Sometimes Turrut will tease us, try to rouse some words out of us so he can hold it over our heads later, maybe make us do his chores, but today he’s too busy. He flies by without a word.

As he disappears around the bend, Llell hurries forward and falls into step beside me. She keeps her neck bent so our heads are even and speaks down to her feet. “You right know you shouldn’t walk out without us.”

I don’t answer. Llell’s father may head the dyeworks, but her mother is only a fourthwife and a half-blind dyegirl, a nobody.

“What if you come on some trouble?” She doesn’t look up at me. “What if Turrut or . . . or the captain catches you out alone?”

I stop in my tracks. Nan almost bumps into us.

“Llell,” I say, pulling all the sternness of Modrie Reller’s voice into my own. “I don’t need you to tell me what’s proper. Are you forgetting my place?”

Llell falls quiet. She scratches the inside arch of her foot with her big toe.

“If you and Nan and the others would rise with me, I wouldn’t need to walk out alone, would I?”

Llell makes a face but doesn’t say anything.

“How can we protect one another’s honor if you’re still asleep?”

Llell stares at the floor. “Right so,” she says quietly.

A twinge of remorse nips at me. I want to reach out and squeeze her hand, as we did when we were younger and neither of us knew what our stations meant. But I am the so girl. I lift my head and continue along the corridor.

The warm, heavy stink of offal, synthetic hay, and animal bodies hits us as I activate the doors to the livestock bay. I leave the chickens to Llell. They’re hateful and like to nip, but she doesn’t mind them so much as the rest of us. I let Nan wander off in search of the cats, even though Llell and I both know she has her pockets full of leftover bean cake from the kitchens and she’s going to spoil them for mousing. I start on the goats.

I unhook the coaxer from its peg on the bulkhead wall and lead the first of the nanny goats into the outer paddock for milking. Above me, Llell activates the pneumatic lift and rides it up to the chicken coop, filling the bay with an awful grinding sound. She coo-coos softly to the birds as it comes to a stop. I strap the first goat into the coaxer, notch the dial to the yellow setting in the middle, and go back into the paddock for another goat to milk by hand while the coaxer does its work on the first. The second one is testy. She tries to step on my feet and kick over the pail as I pull milk from her udders, but I’ve been milking every day since I was a smallgirl near five turns. I know all the goats’ tricks. I hitch in her lead and hold her back left leg still.

Beside me, the coaxer choke-rattle-grinds, and the first goat bleats in fright. She tries to bolt, but the heavy machinery weighs her down. She rears. I jump up and pull the milking pail out of the way before the second goat can bolt and knock it over. The tang of too-hot metal floods the air.

“Hshhh, hshhh.” I lay a calming hand on the goat’s neck and unstrap her. The second she’s free, she runs for the far side of the paddock in a kick of hay, flaps her ears, and stamps in annoyance. I tap the regulator face on the coaxer’s side. It’s stuck on the low setting, and trying to rev itself to catch up. I check over both shoulders to see if Llell or Nan is lurking behind me. No one. I’m alone.

I pop off the faceplate. The coaxer’s old, some turns older than me, and sometimes its belts slip. The last time this happened, we had to turn it in at the Fixes’ workshop and it took deciturns to get it back, since the coaxer’s not Priority. But now no one’s watching, so I can try one of the fixes I learned from my friend Soli at the runend meet some five turns past. I slide the faceplate away. The interlocking cogs in the coaxer’s innards have been stripped, ground completely smooth.

“No. Oh, no.” I groan softly. I could fix it, but for that I’d need parts. And if I go to the requisitions master and tell him what I need, he’ll ask how I know what the fix is. And then it’ll come out someone’s taught me fixes. So girl or no, that’s hardly proper.

Nan scurries up, brushing crumbs from her hands. I snap the faceplate back on the coaxer and drop it into my lap in one smooth movement.

“It’s bust again?” Nan asks.

I nod. “I’ll take it by the Fixes after we finish.” I have no choice.

“How many more?” she asks.

“Thirteen.” I point to the pen of waiting goats.

Nan leads out another goat, a spotted one, and we both bend our heads over our work. It’s some peaceful, the rattle of milk as it hits the pail, my knees on the warm hay, knowing Nan is beside me and the ship is extending its solar arms to the sun to power up the grids and wake everyone for the last day of our journey. I’m thinking on how maybe I could gut some of the other machines in the junk locker for salvage parts, slip around the Fixes, and get our coaxer working again. . . .

“Ava,” Nan whispers.

I glance up and see her eyes locked somewhere behind me. I look over my shoulder. Modrie Reller has crossed the gangway. She’s bearing down on us like a hawkship, her long, gray, copper-shot hair coiled in braids at the base of her skull and her fan swinging from a cord around her wrist. She moves quick and practiced, despite the round of pregnancy at her waist, like a caravel accustomed to sailing under heavy cargo. Iri, my great-grandfather’s youngest widow and Modrie Reller’s constant shadow, trails in her wake. I jump to my feet and brush the hay from my skirts.

The pneumatic lift rumbles above us. Llell is coming down, a crate of fresh brown eggs in her arms. The noise from the lift drowns out any hope of talk, but the question is all over her face. What’s happening?

“Ava,” Modrie Reller says. Her words are clear, even over the lift’s gears. “Come with us.”

I look back at Llell and Nan. They both stare openly at me, straw and muck all over their skirts. I brush myself down one last time, step out of the pen, and let the gate’s latch fall closed behind me.

Modrie Reller doesn’t speak as she leads the way through the halls. Iri and I trail in her wake with our heads bent modestly, so we don’t look on the faces of any men by mistake. We pass the open arched doorways of the main corridor, the kitchens, the hydroponic gardens, the men mixing a slurry of paste, dung, and fabric remnants for paper, the dyegirls heating urine and water in vats while the older women bend over their weaving. Along the way, the caged canaries stand sentry for bad matter in the air. We move past the men’s training room with its walking machines and pressure chamber for keeping them strong enough to bear the Earth’s weight, and through the sleeping quarters, now almost empty. Modrie Reller pushes aside a heavy woven tapestry picturing Saeleas, haloed in copper-point stars.

We duck into the tiled cleanroom on the other side, where Kamak sits rubbing oil into the stretched skin of her stomach. She is pregnant with her third child. Modrie Reller gives her a tight smile and a nod as we bustle past. We cut through the narrow service corridors and stop short in a small room with a utility sink, its metal drain limed with age. Iri pulls the door shut behind us.

Now I know why we’re here. They’re going to dye my hair.

When I was born, my hair was auburn like my mother’s, not too far from my crewemates’ heads of amber and rust. But it darkened as I grew, until it was black like a canary’s eye, and the oldgirls started talking. They said it was the curse, the bad matter left on us when my grandmother married a man from Earth, a visiting so doctor who took my grandmother for his secondwife. Crewes take such marriages every few decades, like a tonic. It brings new blood into our line. The so doctor was good, the oldgirls say, took care of my grandmother and the girl that came from their union, my own mother.

But when he passed, the so doctor’s daughter by his firstwife came meddling, sending messages and even booking passage to the skyport to find us. I was only a smallgirl then, but I remember the sight of her stalking down the gangways beside our old captain, my great-grandfather Harrah, her head swathed in dark cloth and her arms covered. The deep brown of her face, brown as paper, looking out at us. How tall she was, the same height as my great-grandfather, and how she stared into everyone’s eyes—even the men—as if she were looking for someone. She walked so sure and steady, as if she weren’t tracking the Earth’s taint through our ship.

Hah and Turrut snuck into her room in the passenger’s quarters while she rested and said they saw her head uncovered. They said her hair was black like mine and teased she was a bad spirit come up after me from the Earth. Maybe she come an’ snatch you away.

I cried and ran to find Iri, who brought me to Modrie Reller. That was the day they began dyeing my hair.

Modrie Reller tugs on a pair of hide gloves, the kind we use in the dyeworks.

“So soon?” I ask. They’ve only just dyed my hair three weeks ago. The Void black at my roots is no more than a thin line, unnoticeable unless you’re looking for it. I turn to Iri. Iri may be my great-grandfather’s widow, but she’s younger even than Modrie Reller, having been bound to my great-grandfather when she younger than I am now and he only a turn or two from death. She’s some like an older sister to me, telling the why of things in whispers when Modrie Reller’s back is turned. She levels her gaze at me but doesn’t speak. She flicks her eyes to Modrie Reller. Not now. Not in front of your stepmother.

“Kneel,” Modrie Reller says.

I do.

Only then does she continue. “This is your father’s order.” She pulls a dye tube wrapped in oilskin from deep in her pockets and twists off the cap. “This runend meet, he’s decreed you’re to be a bride.”

CHAPTER .2

“A bride?” I try to keep my face calm.

“Right so.” Modrie Reller looks pointedly at my hair. “We don’t want the other crewes thinking something’s wrong with the Parastrata’s so girl.”

Iri smiles at me, kind. “Or passing off some palsied goats or brittle old plasticine in exchange for our Ava.”

I laugh, but nervously. A bride. I know from watching the girls who’ve gone before me that I ought to chirrup and gab at the news, or else flush pink and do a poor job of hiding my pleasure behind a demure smile. Instead all I feel is dizzy, like the gravity has failed. I’ve always known I would be a bride, and sometime around now, in my sixteenth turn. It’s the Mercies’ will, after all. But I was never one of those girls to play wedding when I was younger, like Nan, or run it over and over in my mind at night while I stared up at the bunk above me. Suddenly Jerej’s teasing weighs heavy on me. Has he known all this time?

“Who. . .” My throat sticks. I glance up and see Iri watching me close. “Who will it be?”

Modrie Reller shakes her head. “No knowing. A man from the Æther crewe, most likely. Your father was talking on how it’s time to reseal our trade contract with them. But don’t think on it. Your father and my Jerej will have it raveled.”

The Æther crewe. My heart skips a little faster. My friend Soli, my only friend in the whole Void beyond the Parastrata’s hull, and her birthbrother, Luck, both belong to the Æther. Soli and I met five turns past, when Æther Fortune brought all his wives and their smallones aboard our ship for trade talks.

The day they came aboard, Modrie Reller dragged me out of the kitchens and made me sit with my handloom in the sticky heat of the women’s quarters, where she and my great-grandfather’s widows were supposed to entertain the women of the Æther retinue. The whole room sweated in silence, perched on quilted floor pillows, fans flapping to stir the air. The men’s rowdy singing bled through the walls.

Modrie Reller pushed me down beside a dark-haired Æther girl with cocked-out ears and the same blue-veined, lucent shimmer to her skin all the spacefaring crewes shared after generations on generations hidden away from the sun—all except me, of course. I peeked over my loom at her as I pushed the thread tight with my shuttle. She was what I might look like if my hair grew out in its true shade, if I were taller and all the color had been bred out of my skin. Her clothes looked machine made, all the stitches tight and even. I watched as she wove a strand of the Æther crewe’s trademark red silk thread into her fabric.

She caught me staring and scowled. “What’re you looking on?”

I ducked my head and crouched over my own knobby weaving. “Nothing,” I said. “That’s some pretty, is all.”

“Oh,” she said, as if that were natural. “Right so.”

I swallowed and finished another row. I glanced at her again. “What’s your name?”

“Solidarity with the Stars.”

I blinked. “Come how?”

“Solidarity with the Stars,” she repeated, a bit of miff in her voice.

“Don’t you have a luckname?” I asked. On the Parastrata, all parents gave their children names that circled, so we could find our way if we were lost, they said.

“My name is a luckname,” she said.

“Isn’t.”

“Is,” she said, voice rising. “Don’t you know the Word? Where it says, Call to mind always what our ancestors desired; forget it not. That’s where it’s from.”

“Oh.” I picked at a thick snarl of wool. “It’s some long, isn’t it?”

“No,” Solidarity with the Stars said. “Least, not specially. We’re all named that way. My brother’s called Luck Be with Us on This Journey, only we call him Luck for short.”

We fell quiet again. Our shuttles knocked against the sides of our looms.

“You can call me Soli, if you want,” Solidarity with the Stars said, breaking the silence. “That’s how my brother calls me.”

She looked over and smiled, and it made me feel almost the same height. I smiled back.

“So, what’s yours?” she asked.

“My what?” I said.

“Your luckname.” She tilted her head and bugged out her eyes to show me she thought I was slow.

“Ava,” I said.

“Are you on Fixes?” Soli said. “I’m on Fixes.”

“No.” On the Parastrata, women stuck to what we knew, cooking, weaving, dyeing, mending, and growing children. Everything would come unraveled if we started fixing the ship. It’s only a step from fixing to flying, my father said. And then where would we be? You can’t nurse a baby and run a navigation program at the same time.

She must be lying, I decided. Trying to puff herself up. I pushed another thread tight.

“What duties are you on, then?” Soli bumped me with her elbow.

“Kitchens,” I said, and then wished I’d thought to lie. “Livestock, and sometimes dyeworks.” Modrie Reller made me work the vats once a deciturn so I wouldn’t forget what real labor was or where I could end up if I didn’t work hard at my other duties.

“My brother Luck’s on Livestock,” Soli said. “He says he likes it.” She wrinkled up her face, stuck out her tongue, and made a gagging noise.

I giggled, even though I didn’t mind Livestock duty so much myself. Me and Llell would whisper over boys while we collected eggs and mucked the stalls. She had eyes for Jerej, and neither of us understood yet how unlikely a pairing that would be.

Soli’s mother flicked her eyes up from her work and looked sharp at us. “Hssh.”

Soli and me bit our lips and went back to work. When her mother turned away, we grinned at each other over our frames.

From then to the end of the Æthers’ trade visit, we kept tight. Soli tried to talk Modrie Reller into putting her on Fixes while the Æthers were aboard, but my stepmother gave her a sour smile and said she didn’t think that could be managed. Soli ended up on Livestock with me and Llell instead.

Which I’m glad of, because if she hadn’t, I never would have met Luck.

Soli, Llell, and me were coming around the corner into the livestock bay, milking pails banging against our knees, when I saw him, crouched beside one of our goats.

“Æther Luck, what’re you doing here?” Soli barked and tramped toward him. “Don’t you mind we switched duties?”

Llell and I exchanged a wide-eyed look—Did Soli just shout down her brother?—and hurried in her wake.

Luck shot to his feet. Bristles of hay still clung to the knees of his pants. He rose a half head taller than his sister, but blood flushed his cheeks at her tone. He hung his head so his dark bangs fell over his eyes. A quarter-full pail sat by the goat he’d been milking. My eyes went wide. It was Chinny, our most troublesome, hand-stamping goat. She’d broken one of Llell’s fingers once and always found a way to overturn her pail, simply to spite whoever milked her.

Luck looked up and our eyes met. Blue like welding flame ringed his irises, growing darker as it moved in on his pupils, like the patches of deep ocean you see from close orbit. Nothing like the brown or muddy-green color we shared on the Parastrata. I knew I wasn’t supposed to look on him like that. I never would have looked, except I couldn’t help some of Soli’s Soliness rubbing off on me.

Chinny chose that exact moment to knock over the pail. Milk gushed around Luck’s shoes and swamped the hay.

“Damn!” Luck jumped back. I expected him to jerk Chinny’s lead and twist her long, floppy ear, which is what I’d been shown to do when the goats got nasty. Instead, he sighed and rubbed his forehead so his hair stuck up sideways. “You don’t have a coaxer, do you?”

I unhinged my gaze from his and looked down into the hay. “Right so,” I said. “But it’s always broke, and they say the fix isn’t in it.”

“Soli’ll fix it,” Luck said. “Won’t you, Soli?”

“I’ll take a look,” Soli agreed.

“But you’re . . . ,” I started to say.

Luck and Soli’s odd looks stopped me. Soli couldn’t really do fixes, could she?

My face went hot. “I mean, you’re a guest here.” I hadn’t truly believed Soli about her being on Fixes, but if her brother said so, maybe it was true.

“Plus, you’re a girl,” Llell butted in. “Girls can’t do fixes.”

“Can.” Soli crossed her arms and turned to me. “Show it to me.”

I led them to the back of the pens, clapping my hands to move the goats out of our way. Llell and me tried to keep our distance from Luck, but he walked so close his arm nearly brushed mine. I flipped up the lid of the junk locker, leaned inside, and rattled around until I brought up the coaxer, a foam-lined udder bowl sprouting brittle plastic tubes for milk. I handed it to Luck, and he tossed it to Soli.

“The regulator’s all bust.” I shot a nervous look at Llell. This was real now. What if someone came in and caught us with Luck, and doing fixes no less? I swallowed and looked back at Soli. “It either drips milk and takes forever, or it pulls too hard and burns out.”

“You have my fixers?” Soli asked Luck.

He unsnapped a vinyl pack from his belt and tossed it to her. “I wish you’d keep them. Their head Fix keeps talking on how slow I am.”

“It’s only till the meet’s over. Then you can go back to your precious sheep.” Soli popped open the pack and unrolled it across the top of the junk locker. Dozens of shiny silver readers and tools glistened in its pockets. Soli selected one with a power jack and an amp reader and snapped it into the coaxer’s line-in.

“This might take a minute, depending what’s wrong,” she said. She hopped up on the locker beside her tools and looked up at me. “I could show you the fix, if you want.”

“No.” Llell cut in. She shot a hard look at me and her voice went high. “I don’t think we should be here, Ava.”

I hesitated. They were all looking at me, Soli and Llell and Luck. The words snarled up in my throat, and all I could come up with was a high-pitched “Umm . . .”

Llell spun on her heel. “Hurry on, Ava. We’re leaving.”

Soli snorted and rolled her eyes. “What’re you afraid of?”

I paused, darting my eyes from my old friend to the new.

Llell turned back. “Ava.” It was one sharp word, but it said so much. Come here, and obey, and choose. I wasn’t so girl then, not yet, and because of my odd skin, Llell was the one stooping to be my friend.

I shook my head. “I’m staying,” I said quietly.

Llell’s eyes shot wide. “Come how?”

“I’m staying.”

Llell’s face crumpled, and then went hard and cold. “Right so.” She swept one last look at me and edged out of the bay. I chewed on my lower lip as I watched her go.

“You sure you don’t want to learn?” Soli raised an eyebrow at me.

I backed up a step. “No, no.”

Soli shrugged and set about prying the casing from the regulator.

“I should clean up Chinny’s mess,” I said.

“I’ll help you,” Luck said.

“Mmmn,” Soli agreed, already bent over her work.

“No.” I accidentally looked at Luck again and pushed my eyes down. This was going too far. “That’s not men’s work.”

A twitch of confusion passed Luck’s face. He frowned. “It is on the Æther. Besides, it’s my fault. I wasn’t s’posed to be on this duty firstways.”

“Please.” My voice rose. “Let me do it.”

I grabbed a pitchfork and a mucking brush and pushed my way through the goats. Chinny stood by herself near the gate, slowly chewing a mouthful of hay.

“Some bad matter, you.” I aimed a halfhearted kick at her. “Shoo.”

I started pitching the sopping hay into the big, boxy methane digester at the side of the paddock, studiously ignoring Luck. Modrie Reller said the methane digester would churn dung, old hay, and whatever else we slopped into it down to a tank in the ship’s guts, where it would rot away. Then the methane coming off the rot would turn to fuel for powering lights or raising the pneumatic lift, whatever the ship needed. A footstep scuffed behind me in the hay. I froze.

“Here.” Luck eased the brush from under my arm. “At least let me hold that while you’re clearing up.”

I nodded, face and arms hot, and went back to my work.

“Um . . .” Luck slapped the brush against his leg absentmindedly and looked up at the rafters, where a pair of sparrows nested. “How long’s the coaxer been bust, then?”

I hefted another forkful of wet hay into the digester’s mouth. “Half a turn.” My words came out a grunt.

“And your Fixes don’t have it up yet?”

“Nothing wrong with our Fixes.” I stopped pitching hay and glared at him. “It’s not Priority, is all.”

“I didn’t mean it bad.” He squatted next to me and pushed the mucking brush across the milk-damp floor. “Soli’ll have it up. Don’t worry.”

“Will you stop cleaning!” My voice came out shrill. I slapped a hand over my mouth.

Luck looked at me as if I’d bitten him.

I dropped my head and my voice. “I’m sorry. I mean, please, so, don’t trouble yourself with it.”

Luck laughed. “Did you just call me so?”

I nodded and peeked up.

“You’re some odd girl,” he said. “You’re the same age as Soli, right?”

I shrugged and nodded again.

“I’m only two turns older than you, then,” he said. “What’re you doing calling me so?”

I shook my head and wished a breach would open in the hull below me and suck me out into space. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

Luck started cleaning again. “All your crewe is odd.”

I let myself look on him. His bangs swung back and forth over his eyes as he scrubbed the floor. His shoulders tensed and rounded with the motion. A strange, light tickle lifted my stomach, and my ears fizzled, as if I’d come too near the engine’s electromagnet.

“Isn’t it the same on your ship?” I asked.

Luck snorted. “No.” He looked up and saw me watching him. “Well, some. Except we clean our own messes and Soli can be on Fixes.”

I sat cross-legged in the hay and straightened my skirt over my knees. I looked over at Soli, sitting on top of the junk locker, eyes narrowed in concentration. “I could never do that.”

“You could,” Luck said. “You’re on Livestock, right so?”

I nodded.

Luck went back to scrubbing. “Fixes is a lot like Livestock, except with less to muck and more figuring. You can do figuring, can’t you?”

I could count, sure, and even do some addings and takings away. But Modrie Reller always told me not to be proud and flaunt, especially not in front of men. I started to shake my head but caught Luck’s eye again. Something about how he was talking to me, how he was looking at me and not past me made me want to step full into recklessness. I changed my shake into a slow nod.

Luck nodded with me. “You could do Fixes, then.”

“But you have to read, right so?”

Luck frowned. “Can’t you read?”

I hesitated. “Course,” I lied. It sounded like what he’d want to hear.

Luck smiled. “You’d be good as Soli after a turn or two.”

I put my hand on the hay between us and leaned forward, mouth open with the start of a question. Blood surged into Luck’s cheeks, brightening them as red as ther thread. Our eyes met again.

“It’s up.” Soli called. She wove through the goats, holding the coaxer aloft so its tubes didn’t drag the ground. “Who wants to try it?”

Luck and I both stood. He held Chinny still while I strapped the coaxer to her and bunched the tubes into the neck of a jug.

“Try knocking that over,” I said to the goat. She glared back at me.

I toggled the controls to green and flipped the regulator switch. The coaxer whirred to life. Chinny bleated unhappily at me, but she didn’t cry out in pain or give me the smug look I knew meant the coaxer wasn’t doing its job. Milk filled the tubes and trickled into the jar.

I clapped my hands. “It’s up!” I grabbed Soli and danced her around. “You did it!”

“Told you she’d have the fix,” Luck said, and grinned at his sister. He leaned over and slapped her on the back, the way I’d only ever seen men do with each other. Then he looked at me, and his blush crept back.

They stayed only a few more days while their father finished trade talks with my great-grandfather Harrah and our crewes sealed the agreement with a pair of marriages—two of our girls to two of their men. I let Soli show me a few fixes on the sly, ’specially some to do with the coaxer and the lift to the chicken coops, while Llell kept a cool distance.

I hardly saw Luck, except for across the room at meals, when the women stood waiting against the wall while the men ate. But he looked at me sometimes, twice at the weddings, and smiled at me once when he passed through the livestock bay with his father, on the way to inspect our copper bales. That was when I started daydreaming, in my slow moments waiting for bread to come out of the machine or lifting and agitating lengths of wool in the dye bath, about what it would be like to be Soli’s sister, to learn fixes and real figuring, to talk on things with Luck and wear neat-trimmed clothes every day.

The chemical smell of dye cuts the air. Modrie Reller’s fingers dig into my scalp. Now Luck will be going on nineteen turns, the right age for taking a firstwife, and me to be married. To someone in the Æther crewe, Modrie Reller said. Perhaps to someone in the captain’s family, if my father matches our stations in the usual way.

“Will I be a firstwife?” I ask Modrie Reller. My heart beats so hard I can almost taste it. Let it be Luck. Please let it be Luck.

“Your father will have it raveled,” she repeats. She pushes my head down over the sink again.

The dye burns. I close my eyes tight and grip the sides of the utility sink. To keep the pain at bay, I think on how it will be to be a bride. How the women will wash me with real, cool water, braid skeins of copper into my hair and slip bracelets over my wrists, fasten my birthright pendant around my neck, and solder coins to my bridal headdress. They will bind my hand to my husband’s at the wrist, and then . . . My imagination falters. After that, they’ll give me over to my husband’s crewe, and I’ll only ever see my ship and birthcrewe at runend meets. It’s too much, like the thought of stepping purposefully from the airlock into the cold nothing of the Void. My half-formed fantasies about Luck and Soli turn to vapor. My legs tremble, half at the thought of leaving my crewe, half from the strain of kneeling over the sink so long.

“There,” Modrie Reller says. She drops a cooling cloth over my head and neck. Iri helps me stand and wraps it in a turban. They have me sit and wait while the cloth does its work, taming the harshness of the dye and unbrittling my hair. When it’s done, Iri unwraps the turban and my hair falls in rust-red waves to my waist. For a little while, at least, I am still one of my crewe.

CHAPTER .3

Modrie Reller sends me off to oversee the smallgirls on kitchen duty. The narrow room is a bustle of hot pans and girls edging past one another with bowls of batter for the eggcakes we’ll bring to the meet. I divvy up the cooling cakes onto platters as they come out of the ovens. Kitchen duty is my favorite. It takes figuring and counting, which I am best at of all the women, better even than Modrie Reller, though I know enough not to say so.

“Careful,” I call to Eme, a child of maybe seven turns, the daughter of my father’s fourthwife. She smacks an egg against the side of the bowl, dripping sticky white all over the table and flecking the dough with shell.

“Here.” I swallow my annoyance. Seven turns is plenty long to learn how to crack an egg. I take one, rap it sharply against the counter, hold it over the bowl, and use my thumbnail to finish the job. “Right so?”

Eme nods. I watch her take an egg, tap it more gently, and carefully empty its contents into the mixing bowl.

“How many did you put in?” I ask.

“Six, like always,” she says.

“But we’re tripling the recipe,” I say. “So you need . . .”

“Sixteen?” she guesses.

“No,” I say. “Try again.”

She counts silently to herself. “Eighteen?”

“Right so,” I say.

Modrie Reller appears in the doorway. “Ava,” she calls over the banging pans and sizzling oil. She looks sharp at me, and I know she’s seen me showing Eme figuring, which is dangerous close to flaunting. “Where are those cakes?”

“Near done,” I call back. “Ten cooling, two cooking, two to go.”

“Finish up and go clean yourself.” Modrie Reller snaps open her fan and beats the steaming air away from her face. “Your father wants you for the visiting party.”

The pan of eggcakes wobbles in my hands. Me, on the visiting party? In our crewe, it’s rare for an unwed girl to set foot outside the ship. I had thought the Æthers—or whoever my father and brother chose, but please let it be the Æthers—would come aboard to claim me when the time came, like they did for those girls at the meet five turns past.

I grip the pan more firmly so the cakes don’t slide to the floor. “As you say, Modrie.”

Eme and the other smallgirls make wide eyes at me. Modrie Reller turns to go, and I clap my hands at them so they won’t spot my nerves. “Enough now. Hurry on.”

I’m itchy with sweat and covered in flour by the time we finish the cakes. I gather my oil cask and strigil as I make my way to the women’s cleanroom. I am reaching to pull aside the tapestry of Saeleas that covers the door when the shipwide alarm sounds. My heart jolts. I race back into the corridor. A group of men—Fixes—led by my brother Jerej thunders down the hall in the direction of the control room, leaving the few women about wide-eyed and flattened against the walls in their wake.

I pick up my skirts and hurry after Jerej, careful to keep far enough back so they won’t spot me. I know I should leave it to them to fix what’s gone wrong. I should keep to my own duties and be content to worry quietly with the other women. But I can’t help myself. This ship is my home, too, and some small part of me thinks the Fixes might let me help if they were desperate enough. Oh, Ava, they would say. If only we had known what a talent she had for fixes sooner . . .

The alarm stops as Jerej and the others reach the control room door. I hover outside and listen.

“. . . said you had fixed it.” The head Fix, Balab’s, voice reaches me first.

“We did fix it,” my brother says.

Balab snorts. “Not well enough.”

“I told you, we need a new pressure seal on the piston.” Frustration creeps into Jerej’s voice, making him sound younger than his fifteen years. “I can patch it all you want, but that boom’s never going to work proper unless it’s got a new seal.”

I sigh with relief. It’s only the boom again, one of the arms that spreads and retracts our solar sails. The men must have been pulling it in to prepare for docking when it broke.

“You’re the heir,” Balab says. “You try convincing Cerrec the seal’s Priority. See where you get.”

“Maybe I will.” Jerej snaps back.

“Do,” Balab says. “But in the meantime, get down there and patch it up so the whole spar doesn’t snap off when we dock. The rest of you, back to your duties.”

I scurry away from the door and squeeze into one of the canary alcoves just in time. Jerej stalks past me.

I slip out after him and shadow him down the hall, into the access stair to the Parastrata’s innards. We pass the reactor engines humming behind their lead barriers and cross a gangway suspended over the murky desalination pool. Whenever I’m on kitchen duty, I volunteer to run things down to the Fixes in this part of the ship. I used to hope I’d get to see the reactor, but then I heard some of the men say it can melt your skin if you get too close. Jerej disappears down the last flight of stairs, into the dim sail storage berth. He stops at the bottom and stares at the half-folded boom.

“I know you’re there.” His voice echoes in the bare room.

I freeze, heart racing.

He looks over his shoulder and frowns up at me, stopped halfway down the steps. “What are you skulking down here for, Ava?”

“I wasn’t skulking,” I say.

He rolls his eyes. “Sneaking, then. What is it you want?”

“I, um . . .” I fiddle with the fan in my skirt pocket. “I thought I could help.”

“Help?” He laughs, and then looks down at the broken boom and the mess of hydraulic fluid all over the floor. “All right, you can help.”

I grin and start down the last flight of stairs, but Jerej stops me at the bottom.

He points to a bucket of rags beneath the steps. “You can sop all this up so I don’t slip.”

Of course. He would never let me help with the fix itself. Why should he? But I nod anyway and fetch the rags. At least I can watch Jerej at his work, see if I can pick up anything new. And then when I’m with Soli and Luck, the thers will see how good I am and let me on Fixes.

I watch Jerej from the corner of my eye as I clean. He pulls out the pins holding the boom’s casing in place and lifts it away to show the arm’s inner works. It looks some like a skinned goat’s leg, only with metal rods and tensile wire where the bones and ligaments would be, and a piston for the knee. I can see how it should work, the hydraulics easing the boom along its path, but with no pressure, the whole operation is jammed.

Jerej removes the piston from its mount. The seal curls up on one end, blown open by the force of the hydraulics.

Jerej grunts in displeasure. “Hand me that adhesive, would you, Ava?”

I glance at the supply shelves behind me. Cans and tubs of all sizes fill the levels, each with their own indecipherable label across the front. I could no more pick out the one he wants than fly the ship.

Jerej looks up and rolls his eyes. “The red can. Top shelf, on the right.”

I fetch it to him and step back to watch.

Jerej coats the seal in sticky spray, fits it back onto the piston, and pulls a device with a wide muzzle from the fixes dangling at his belt. It buzzes softly as he moves it around the edges of the seal.

“What’s that?” I say.

Jerej throws me a half-amused look. “A cold fuser. What else?”

“What’s it do?” I ask, even though I can guess it’s somehow meant to help the seal stick better.

Jerej raises his eyebrows. “It doesn’t interrupt me when I’m working.”

“Sorry.” I drop my sodden rag into the bucket and grab a clean one. Learning fixes is well and good, but Jerej is right. His work is Priority. I shouldn’t be pestering him.

Jerej fits the piston back into the arm, refills the hydraulic chamber, and snaps the casing around it once again.

“There. That should last us till we dock, at least.” Jerej wipes his hands on his trousers and buzzes up to the control room with the handheld hanging from his belt. “So Balab, are you there?”

“Right so.” The older man’s voice comes back.

“I’ve got it raveled,” Jerej says. “Start it up.”

An electric hum fills the air. The boom shudders to life and resumes its slide, folding itself gracefully into sections.

Jerej pockets his handheld and grins. “Told that oldboy I’d do it.” He looks at me, and for a moment, I see the smallboy he was when we were younger, the one who played chase with me in the hangar bay before we were old enough for our separate duties.

Behind him, the metal arm jams and a deafening bang rocks the air. The boom jerks and collapses on itself with a shriek I feel in my teeth.

“Damn!” Jerej jumps clear of the spar and holds out a hand to shield me. In the distance, the warning alarm starts up again.

His handheld crackles to life—Balab, cursing him blue and laying out his plans for my brother’s worthless hide.

“I hear you,” Jerej shouts into the handheld. “I’m on it.

“Damn,” he says again, once the alarm has shut off. He runs a hand through his hair and kicks the boom. “Worthless. How am I supposed to do a proper fix with scrap for a seal?”

I bite my lip. “Maybe . . .”

Jerej frowns at me. “What?”

“What if you made it so it didn’t push so hard?”

“You mean decrease the pressure?” Jerej shakes his head. “That seal’s so bust, Lifil could break it.”

I reach past him and finger the seal’s frayed edge. It’s not the center that’s weak, only the outer rim. It’s like trying to keep the top on a jar of preserves without a ring.

“What if you had something . . .” I trail off and hurry to the supply shelves. I rummage through until I find what I need—a round rubber belt with enough give to fit over the mouth of the piston.

Jerej makes a face. “What’s that for?”

“To keep it in place,” I explain. “You lower the pressure, see? Then you put the seal back on and put this over it, around the sides.”

“I don’t know.” He takes the belt from me. “I guess . . . it might do. The casing wouldn’t fit back over it, though.”

A moment of doubt creeps up on me. “That won’t hurt it, will it?”

Jerej frowns in thought. “Not in the short run. I s’pose no casing’s better than no boom at all.”

I hover near the stairs as Jerej tries my fix. When it’s in place, he calls up to Balab again.

“You’d better have it this time,” the head Fix grumbles.

The hum starts back up. Slowly, the boom moves back on track, clicking as each section snaps into place. I hold my breath. It’s slower this time with the pressure turned low, but the seal holds. The last length of the arm clicks home, and the machinery powers itself down with a sigh.

“It worked!” Jerej grabs my shoulder and lets out a short laugh.

I laugh with him, and for a span of breath, we are those children again, running free across the bay.

Then suspicion chills Jerej’s features. He steps away from me and narrows his eyes. “How . . . how did you know that fix?”

“I didn’t,” I say. My mouth has gone dry. “Just a lucky guess.”

We stare at each other in uncomfortable silence. The other Fixes would never let him hear the end of it if they found out a girl had made the fix for him.

“I only wanted to help,” I say. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Jerej’s mouth sharpens into a line. “No. You won’t.”

I catch my breath, stung. Jerej is right. He’d be teased, sure, but we both know I’d have more to lose if it came out I was the one to find the fix. Even so, it hurts to hear him say it.

“You should go,” he says. “You’ve got your own chores.”

“Right so,” I agree. And without another look at him, I flee up the stairs.

The girls my age are still off on their duties, so most of the women bathing themselves are wives, some only a few turns older than me, their bellies big with child. They smile on me and whisper to their neighbors as I kneel on the cleanroom tile beside them. The word I’m to be a bride must be making the rounds.

I cover my hands and arms with oil and try to ignore the leaden feeling in my stomach.

Never let them see you doubt, I hear Modrie Reller say. A so girl is a beacon to her people. She is our mother Saeleas reborn in virgin glory.

I lift my chin and concentrate on wicking away the day’s flour and dirt with the dull, curved blade of my strigil. Let them talk. As gossip goes, it isn’t the bad kind. Far better than any rumor about my unnatural interest in fixes. Maybe it’s better to be remembered this way, the dutiful daughter, not anyone extraordinary. I will be like Saeleas. I will be a story my crewemates tell their smallones of how a woman may be raised high by virtue and obedience.

I find Modrie Reller waiting for me back in the women’s quarters, Llell at her side. I stop dead. Llell’s arms are full of copper bands and quilted cloth, her eyes fastened to the floor. By all rights, she should be the one being washed and prepared for betrothal, since she’s near a full turn older than me, and we both know it. Modrie Reller knows it, too. It’s pure cruelty to make her attend another bride. I flash a look at my stepmother, but her face is serene.

“You’re leaving us a bride.” Modrie Reller motions Llell forward with a clipped wave. “We have to be sure you arrive looking like one.”

Llell and I can barely meet each other’s eyes as she helps me into fresh skirts, my good, dark-green ones with tiny mirrors surrounded by pale green starbursts. Why is Modrie Reller doing this? Llell can’t have wanted to be my handmaid. She tugs too hard at my skirt ties. The cords dig into my skin, but I bite my lip and keep my tongue still.

Llell finishes with my skirts and laces me into a sleeveless quilted shirt with inlaid copper disks. Afterward, she holds up a mirror while Modrie Reller carefully combs and braids my hair. The dye leaves it shiny, but still some brittle, even after the cooling cloth.

“Hold out your arms,” Modrie Reller says when I am brushed and braided.

I do. She has Llell kneel and wind the copper wire around my ankles and forearms. I try to hold still as she wraps me with practiced, pinching efficiency, but I can tell from the flush along her hands and downturned cheeks that shame is burning her up inside. Meanwhile, the copper weighs heavy on me, making my every move graceful but achingly slow.

Llell narrows her eyes to see better as she doubles the last of the wire into a tiny loop and secures it in place.

“Heavens, Llell.” Modrie Reller rolls her eyes. “Don’t squint. No one wants a squint-eyed wife.”

“Modrie,” I mumble in protest.

“Modrie nothing.” She waves a hand, dismissing me. She flicks out the tip of her fan at Llell. “Now the mirror.”

I try to catch Llell’s eye, but she lifts the heavy mirror again, hiding her own face behind the reflection of mine. Modrie Reller grips my chin as she paints pale shine onto my cheeks.

“There now,” she says when she finishes. “At least you don’t look so Earth bred.”

I can’t see myself, only some other girl. A bride in her thick green skirts and heavy copper wristlets, face shimmer-pale beside her deep red braids. Is that me? I feel as if I’m only a passenger in this body.

“That will do, Llell.” My stepmother flaps open her fan and waves it to cool her neck. “Have your mother bring those tapestries to the bay, the ones for the bride gift.”

Llell slinks from the room. Maybe I can find her before the visiting party leaves, explain how I didn’t ask Modrie Reller to pull her from her duties, didn’t want her forced into being my handmaid . . .

But then Modrie Reller takes my face in her hands and presses a rare kiss on my forehead. The shock of it sinks everything else to the back of my mind. The only other time I’ve ever seen Modrie Reller give a kiss was to my mother’s head as the women dressed her body in her old bridal finery for burial.

“Aren’t you coming with us on the visiting party?” I ask. It’s custom for a girl’s mother and modries to prepare her for her husband on her binding day.

Modrie Reller shakes her head. “Not with the smallone coming so soon.”

“But I’m coming back before the binding, right so? I’ll see you then.”

She shakes her head again. “Iri’s going in my place.” She brushes a stray lock from my forehead and tucks it behind my ear. “She’ll finish making you ready.”

I duck my head. “Right so.”

“One thing more.” Modrie Reller pulls a leather cord from her pocket. A pearly white data pendant, thin as paper, large around as the pad of my thumb, dangles from it. Raised circuitry forms a spiral at its center, like the whorl of a fingerprint. I gasp. Every girl receives such a pendant on her binding. It stores a record of her ancestry, back to the time of Candor and Saeleas. She wears it from that day on, even into death.

“Now, when you leave the ship, you’ll feel the Earth tugging at you, understand?” The pendant gleams in the low light as Modrie Reller knots it behind my neck. “You’ll go heavy, and your breath will come hard, but don’t fear. Your father and Jerej and all the men will keep you safe until you reach the other ship. You marking me?”

“Right so.” I finger the pendant. It rests cool on my collar bone.

“There now.” Modrie Reller smiles tightly. “You’re ready.”

I step forward to throw my arms around her, but she puts out a hand to stop me. She shakes her head and backs away through the arch to the women’s quarters without looking at me again. She has already begun the work of forgetting me.

CHAPTER .4

My father, Parastrata Cerrec, captain of the Parastrata, walks at the head of our procession. His red hair has thinned and faded yellow-white, but a hand-quilted patriarch’s stole drapes over his shoulders and beneath it, his green robes hang heavy with embroidery. The stole fans out behind him as he leads us across the wide cargo bay of our ship. Jerej follows him, cradling the wooden letterbox that holds my marriage contract. More men trail them, carting bride gifts—one of our pregnant nanny goats, the weighty bales of copper wire and fiberoptic cable that are our stock and trade, and a fighting cockerel. I carry a wide copper platter laden with eggcakes. For the first time in five turns, we have come to Bhutto station for the runend meet, where all the crewe ships join up for trade talks and marriages and treaty drawing.

I stand at the back of our party with the other women, feeling terrified and righteous and brave and pure, all at once. The wives with their armfuls of gifts—green cloth and heavy, coarse-edged paper—surround me. I feel as if I’m walking inside a velvet-lined box, the jewel of our procession. I wish my mother were here, wish she could hold my hand, wish she could see me grown to be a bride.

Once, when I was a smallgirl, our ship hit a solar storm on the way to a runend meet. The men herded all us women and smallones into the baling room, near the heart of the ship, and locked us in tight. But even with all the hulls and floors and doors between us and the Void, the ship bucked and shivered under out feet. My mother was there, sick with the virus that would soon take her. Her face, like mine always some darker than our crewemates’, had gone pale and gray, beaded with fever sweat. Modrie Reller wrapped Ma in a coarse homespun blanket. She left me and Jerej to watch over her, while she hurried off to help quiet the squalling infants. I hugged my knees and watched my mother’s eyes opening and closing while the ship shuddered all around me.

A bang shook the whole room, and the solar-fed lights sputtered out. Darkness swallowed us. Everyone screamed. My mother grasped my hand.

“Ava.” Her voice was raw. “Keep your eyes open.”

I blinked in the dark. After a moment, the dim glow of the ship’s phosphorous strips bloomed, edging everything in blueish-green. I made out the shadow of my mother. My breath quickened. She looked like a skull in the half light. I groped for Jerej’s hand. He yelped in blind fright when my fingers touched his, and I cried out in turn, setting him off again.

“Hsssh, hsssh.” My mother squeezed my hand.

The hull shook again. A tooth-aching grind rent the air. Jerej and I grabbed each other, and I tightened my grip on my mother.

“Calm, loves,” Ma said. “The Mercies will hold us. It’ll be over soon.”

Jerej’s small, chubby hand sweated in mine. His eyes stared wide and unblinking.

“Do you want a story?” my mother asked.

We both nodded.

“What say Saeleas and the Mercies?” my mother said. “Do you want that one?”

We’d heard it reckoned many times before, spoken soft and secret in the dark of the sleeping quarters by our mothers and modries and other women lulling their smallones to rest. Our father chanted it aloud on the Day of Apogee once each turn. Still, we nodded.

My mother closed her eyes.

Once, our greatmother Saeleas found herself alone aboard her husband Candor’s ship. He had gone groundways to seek water with his men, and while they walked the Earth, a ripping storm struck and breached the hull. Saeleas was pulled out into the Void, where there is naught of air or warmth or light. Long she fell before the Mercies caught her in their hands. Curious, they carried her through the veils of nebulae and seated her on their footstool, a star-seeded lily, all aglow with the warmth of the softest sun, and breathing out its own air to sustain her.

Please, she begged. Let me return to my husband’s side. I am sore needed there.

But the Mercies said, Nay, you shall be our pet, pretty one, and give more use through joy than ever you could at your husband’s beck.

Not so, said Saeleas. For who shall weave if I am gone?

Men may weave without you, said the Mercies.

But who shall feed the men and babes if I am gone? said Saeleas.

Men may feed themselves and babes without you, said the Mercies.

And who, said Saeleas, shall bear forth children if I am gone?

At this the Mercies fell silent, for here was a thing no man could do. And they saw Saeleas carried in her womb the great Neren, father of our race. They took pity and breathed their own life into her lungs, and carried her from their starry thrones home to the arms of her husband. Thus our race was saved by the grace of the Mercies. So do we honor them, for our life is ever in their hands.

“So you see,” my mother said, her a whisper. “You see the worth of a woman, Ava.” Her eyes rolled back and she let free a cant from our holy song, the Word of the Sky, up into the dark.

“. . . like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat.

Cover us all, she does . . .”

-

“Ma, please. . .”

“. . . tame the stars’ fury and channel life.”

“Hsssh, Ma. Everyone will hear.” I swung my head to make sure none of the other wives had heard her singing. But no. They were too terrored by the storm to notice.

I pinned Jerej with a look. “You won’t tell, will you?” I whispered. “You won’t tell she sang?”

Jerej shook his head.

“Swear it?”

Jerej’s pale cheeks flushed. He nodded.

I breathed out. Even small as I was, I knew my ma shouldn’t be singing the Word out loud. She might call down ship strippers or some other bad matter on us, like Mikim the Wayward from our tales. Or worse, the Mercies might choose not to bring us through the storm after all.

My mother mumbled on, quieter, picking up the song further down the line. “Women of the air, stay aloft . . .”

I leaned close to my mother’s ear. Fever heat moved off her skin in waves. “Please, Ma,” I whispered. “You got to stop singing now, right so?”

Her eyes opened to glints deep in the shadow of her face. “Ava.” She touched my cheek. I smelled the fever on her breath. “You are the sails, Ava. My girl. You are the sails.”

And I could see. Even with the fever touching her mind, turning her words to a torrent, I could see what she meant. I felt the seed of it in me. That I could give life and comfort and peace, even in the harshest reaches of the Void. And in that moment, the lights whined to life. I squinted up into their glare, and when I looked back, my mother’s eyes had closed again in sleep. Resolve filled me, small as I was, and I knew I would bend with the will of the Mercies to bear life into our crewe some day.

Now as I stand at the back of the procession, I run my mother’s cant through my mind like piece of silk ribbon, like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat . . ._

Ahead, I spot Iri. She glances back over her shoulder and gives me a tight smile. A rumbling clack-clack-clack fills the room as my father orders the big bay doors open, and a sweep of cold air rushes into our ship.

Our procession shuffles forward until we reach the lip of the ship’s outer bay. Before I have time to think, I have put my foot over the threshold and onto the loading ramp, and like that, I am farther from my home than I have ever been in my life. As we step away from the Parastrata, our ship’s gravity gives way, and suddenly everything—the eggcakes, the copper bands, my very legs—weighs heavier on me. I stagger but right myself. The other women slow along with me, but the men don’t so much as flinch. How glad I am to have them circled round us, guarding us from the Earth’s sway. Modrie Reller was right. Its pull is stronger here, outside the pure world of our ship.

The dock is empty, except for two silent vessels resting alongside ours. A bulkhead door separates us from the station proper. My father taps a code into the keypad wired to the door, and it slowly rolls open along the runners in the floor, revealing a long hallway. We push forward in step. A steady roar builds and builds as we near the far end, and then overtakes us when we break out onto the station’s concourse.

People and animals and vendor carts cram the floor. Lights stream and flash in all colors. Men and women shout over one another. Handhelds blip at their owners, heartbeat-quick music shudders, and signs shimmer with fast-moving pictures—a school of fish, a man running, a woman with kohl around her eyes. Somewhere, a lamb’s bleat surfaces above the din. My head goes numb.

The wall of wives presses in against me as we jostle through the packed concourse. Between their shoulders, I catch sight of a man with bread-crust brown skin tinkering on a handheld. Another, with darker skin and blue clothes that ripple and shine like oil, changes the symbols on the sign above the awning of a shop. And another, with pink-blushed pale skin and metal gauges embedded in the soft flesh of his ear, hands out little scraps of paper covered in print. There are women, too, near none of them wearing skirts long enough to cover their boots, and some in men’s trousers. They lord over shops selling handhelds and painted birds and fish as big as my forearm. They shout and boss as loud as men, and smile with all their teeth.

It’s too much. All I can do is hold the platter level, try to keep my feet, and concentrate on the long trail of hair hanging down Kamak’s back in front of me. I pray for it to be over, for us to reach the safety of another crewe’s ship, and leave this pressing crowd behind.

And in the heavens, we will make the world anew, I repeat to myself. We will make the world anew.

The roar of voices dulls as we leave the main concourse. We file through a dim, narrow hall, and stop suddenly.

“Are we there?” I whisper to Kamak. “Is it the Æther?”

She gives me a tight-lipped look that means I should know better than to speak.

Ahead, the rumble of a bulkhead door breaks the silence. Our little parade starts forward and stops again almost immediately.

My father’s greeting carries up the corridor. “So Brother Fortune.”

“So Brother Cerrec.”

Their voices drop so we can no longer hear. I shift from one foot to the other and wish I could lay down the tray of eggcakes. Sweat slicks my palms. The electric light grid above me snaps and clicks.

And then they are calling for me.

“Ava.” My great-grandmother Hannah snaps her fingers. “Come.” Her milky blue eyes magnify in the brittle pair of glasses she’s had to herself since my great-grandmother Laral died.

The women guide me forward. Somehow I manage not to drop the tray, although I’m sure my eyes are wide and rolling like a frightened goat’s. The men at the head of the procession part to let us through, and suddenly I am standing beside my father and Jerej, facing a man with black, laceless boots and a patriarch’s stole. In the split second before I remember to look away, not to look on his face, I see he is sharp jawed and handsome for a silver-haired man, despite a pocked field of radiation burns across one cheek. But his mouth is hard. Behind him, I catch a glimpse of a ship docked, its cargo bay open and filled with members of a dark-haired crewe. The Æther. My heart lifts.

“My daughter, Parastrata Ava,” my father says.

I dip my head and curtsy, holding out the platter in front of me as an offering. “Honored to come to your home, Æther Fortune.”

I feel his hand beneath my chin and the cool metal of his many rings. “Let me look on the bride.” He tilts my face up to his. I hold still as a stunned bird under his hand and cast my eyes to the side as he studies me.

A young man stands behind Æther Fortune. He is a head taller than me, with thick black hair cut close to his head and irises the blue of ozone burn. He keeps his hands clasped behind him. Like a magnet finding its match, his eyes lock on mine.

Luck. My heart skitters. Luck, grown, as I am. I would drop my gaze if I could. No proper so girl should stare at a man like this. But his look holds me as steadily as the hand beneath my chin.

Æther Fortune releases his grip. I fade gratefully down into a curtsy, the platter of eggcakes still held out in front of me. My fingers tremble.

“This is my eldest son, Æther Luck, heir to the captaincy,” Fortune says to my father and brother.

I inch my eyes up above the stack of cakes. Luck executes a small bow. He flicks a brief smile at me, and I duck back behind the platter. My heart pumps heat into every corner of my body. It is in my breasts and my toes, and suddenly I am aware of hidden corners of myself I never knew existed. Luck, heir to the captaincy. And me, a bride.

CHAPTER .5

The Æther is vast compared to the Parastrata. Its ceilings rise a good meter above our heads and the rooms circle off one another in a labyrinth. But at least the gravity is back to bearable. The Æther crewe eats with men and women separate, like we do, but their galley is so large they don’t need to eat in shifts, men and boys, then women and girls. Little bowls of real salt and oil rest in the center of the galley tables, and the thers make free with them.

“Luxury,” Hannah sniffs, but I see her sprinkle a heaping pinch of salt over the sticky pearl rice the Æther crewe favors.

I look across the crowded galley and spot Luck at a table with a group of other young men. His friends are laughing over some joke, but he’s staring straight at me, a small, warm smile playing at the corners of his mouth. A welcome fire runs through me. I duck my head, but the feel of his eyes on me is irresistible. I have to look again.

That smile of his tugs at my own lips and fills me with a glow. I imagine the smooth skin of his inner wrist flush with mine, the binding ribbon winding around and around, trapping and sanctifying the heat between us. After the rite, we’ll be alone in the marriage chamber, and he’ll comb my bride’s braids loose with his fingers. His hand will travel from my neck to my shoulder, and then unsnap the clasps of my shift. . . .

A sharp rap from Hannah’s fan lands on my knuckles. She doesn’t have to say a word. I’m being undignified, smiling like an idiot for the whole galley to see. I rub my hand and wrestle my face back under control. But even the threat of my great-grandmother’s fan doesn’t keep me from stealing glances at Luck until it’s time to clear the table.

I don’t see Soli until after dinner when the ther women usher us into a visiting room piled thick with woven rugs. I kneel alongside them. Soli sits on the other side of the circle, but I only recognize her by the way her face lights up when she catches sight of me. She’s near tall as her brother, but she’s hidden her ears behind her long hair, done up in marriage braids. Her own pendant hangs around her neck—black, but with a shifting sheen that changes colors, like a drop of oil. She grins and mouths something. We need to talk.

Hannah and Iri and the Æther women produce collapsible looms from their inner pockets and begin setting up their weaving. A bubble of panic rises in my chest. Modrie Reller said nothing on bringing a loom, but of course now it seems clear she shouldn’t have to say something so simple to me. I feel in my pockets, as if by some miracle one might appear. Nothing.

“Ava,” Iri says lowly. She has been sitting beside me all this time, slowly unwinding a skein of algae-green wool.

I look up. Iri silently holds out the pieces of an extra loom for me. The tight feeling in my chest eases. I don’t know why Iri looks out for me, except she never did have smallones of her own before my great-grandfather died, and none of the men aboard the Parastrata have tried to take her as a wife, maybe out of respect for my great-grandfather. I nod my thanks, quickly snap the frame together, and reach into the common thread basket for a skein of my own.

“Our colors please your eye, then, Parastrata Ava,” Soli’s mother says without looking up from her own weaving.

I glance down at the yarn in my hand. The thread is the Æthers’ smooth red silk. It shows bright against my dark green skirts. “Yes,” I say. “It’s. . . it’s some beautiful.”

“Beautiful, she says.” Soli’s mother smiles to the women beside her, then turns back to me, her face suddenly solemn. “But if you use it long enough, you might start to think it dull.”

I recognize some kind of test in that, even if I don’t know what it is exactly.

“Never.” I lock my spine straight and look at her evenly, drawing on my imitation of Modrie Reller. “Firstwife Æther, I’m not some changing girl. I won’t go shifting on you and yours.”

She watches me with eyes half lidded. All around us the looms clack softly, and the other women peer sideways at us over their handwork.

Finally Soli’s mother nods. “Right so, then.”

I let the air out of my lungs. I’ve passed. The other women return their attention to their weaving and murmured conversations. Soli rises and picks her way to me. My jaw drops. Soli’s long red skirt swells over a soft, rounded lump at her waist. She’s gotten herself pregnant.

“Soli, when? Who?” I grab her hand as she eases down beside me. I want to throw my arms around her, I’ve missed her so, but the older women wouldn’t stand for such a display. I settle for squeezing her hand tighter. “Tell me everything.”

“Let me hold your thread for you, sister,” Soli says aloud, but her face is bright to bursting with news, her cheeks flush. She leans close as she unwinds the skein. “His name’s Ready, the requisitions officer. We had our binding close on half a turn past.”

I glance down. I’ve seen lots of women pregnant on the Parastrata, and even some births. Soli looks too far gone for half a turn. “That’s some fast.”

Soli giggles, sounding a moment like the smallgirl I remember. “But I got my pick, didn’t I? That we have to talk on later, without all these stuffed-up oldgirls hanging round.”

“He’s nice?” I ask. I stop my weaving and look up. “He’s not old, is he?”

“Nah.” Soli shakes her head. “Only five turns older. Perfect.”

“Oh.” I look down.

Soli nudges me. “Don’t chew on it. Talk I hear says you’re getting an even younger one.” Soli’s eyes shine so I almost think they’re wet.

“How’d you . . . ,” I start to ask.

“Come, Ava, it’s clear as empty you’re still sweet on Luck,” Soli says. “And he’s sweet on you, too. Couldn’t stop staring at you on the dock today.”

That rush of heat sweeps through me again, and I fumble with my thread. If only my bridal bands weren’t making me so slow and clumsy.

“Think, you’ll be my sister and our babies can play together.”

The warmth changes to pure fire in my cheeks. They say a baby makes a new, small world all your own, and then the Earth will stop calling to you. That’s what I want, but . . . But I’ve only begun fixing the idea of being a wife in my head, trying on Luck’s face as the man snapping the coins from my bridal veil, the inside of Luck’s wrist bound to mine. And now babies. Of course I knew that would come. It’s what my body is made for, but . . . Soli’s belly stares at me. It’s one more piece too real. And it makes me some uneasy the way things are raveling up exactly how I dreamed, and so fast. It makes me worry I’ve left something out.

Soli and me lie face-to-face on her bunk in the women’s quarters. It’s not something married girls usually do, but all the Æther women know we were friends as smallgirls, and what with me about to be married, they’re willing to let us pretend we’re children a few nights longer. The air blows cool and fresh through the vents, and the dimmers carry us gently into ship’s night.

“Ready’s some strong,” Soli whispers under the blankets. She lies on her back with her head turned to me. “He can pick me up, even with the baby, and he’s always slipping me nice things from requisitions. Like the other day, he gave Hydroponics some extra grams of nutrient soak, and they held back an orange for him, so he gave it to me.”

I suck my bottom lip. My father gave me a slice of orange once when I was a smallgirl, and even now I can taste the sweet bite under my tongue. “Did your father pick him for you?” I ask.

Soli shakes her head and grins. “Ready and I picked each other.”

I raise my eyebrows and open my eyes wide, trying to make out her face in the near dark. Crewes hardly ever let a love match through, especially when it’s the captain’s daughter up for marriage and her husband might end up heir to the captaincy.

“How’d you fix it?” I ask.

Soli runs a hand over her belly. “I let them catch me.”

“What?” My voice rings out.

“Hsshh.” One of the older women shushes from the bunk below us.

Soli drops her voice even lower. “I’ve seen girls do it before. I had already got the baby, and I knew some sure my father wouldn’t drop me on a port somewhere or let me go around the ship unmarried. So the next time I was in the cleanroom, I let my mother catch sight of me and of course she went and told my father. He called us into the meet room. Then Ready, he confessed it in front of everyone, and they had us bound the next day.”

“Wasn’t your father angry?” I ask.

“Some sure.” Soli picks at the inside of the blanket. “He wanted to push Ready out the airlock at first, but then he decided he’d rather have a legitimate grandchild, so he only had him flogged after the binding instead.”

“Soli,” I whisper, not sure what else to say.

“I got my way, didn’t I?” She turns her head to me.

I nod. Soli strokes her belly absentmindedly.

“What about Ready?” I ask. “What if he comes calling for you tonight?”

“He won’t,” Soli says, eyes still closed. “Not till after the baby’s born and I’m healed up.”

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“What, having a baby? I’m guessing so from all the screaming the other girls do.”

“No,” I say. “The other thing.”

“Oh.” Soli rolls heavily on her side to face me. “At first, but not so bad if he’s careful. And it’s much better after that. Are you worried?”

I tuck my chin into my chest and hug my arms. I nod.

“Don’t.” She rubs my arm. “When we heard you were coming as a bride, I figured you might be for Luck, so I told him how he’d better not hurt you or I’d break all his toes. He’ll be careful. You’ll see.”

I smile at her, even though we can barely make out the whites of each other’s teeth in the close dark. Soli rolls on her back again, and I turn to the wall. She’s asleep in a few slips, her breath falling slow and regular. I lie awake, rubbing the smooth surface of my data pendant. Iri and Hannah snore lightly in the bunk below us. Some of the smallgirls whisper and break out in patters of giggles, but those peter out too, leaving only breath and the lulling hum of the air scrubbers.

I sit up. The heat coming off Soli is too much, even with cool air wafting in on us through the ventilation slits. I slide to the bottom of the bunk and sit there, my legs dangling with the extra weight of my bands. The air is wonderful fresh. It brings me awake, makes me almost giddy. I glance around at the other women in their bunks. How can anyone sleep with the air so pure? How can they expect me to sleep? My new home is beckoning me. There are rooms to explore, corridors and serviceways to memorize. And as much as it shames me to say it, I want to put some distance between myself and Soli’s belly.

I drop lightly to the floor. I leave my outermost skirt, with its clacking, flashing mirrors, but tie on my plainer inner skirts and move quietly to the door. Like all the doors I’ve seen aboard the Æther, this one shows a shaded view of its other side—an empty hallway. The door doesn’t have a pattern lock, but it doesn’t have a manual handhold for pulling, either. I feel along the door’s edges and on the wall where a control panel should be. Nothing. I kneel. A thin, red-lined square glows where the handhold might be. I press my palm to it experimentally. The door slides up with a silent swish of air, and I jump back, stifling a cry. The Æther crewe doesn’t even lock its women in at night. Strange.

I step into the hall and touch a matching square on the other side, sending the door hushing down behind me. An empty silence cottons the corridor, and deep in my veins I feel the familiar thrill of being the only one awake. I go left, away from the ship’s galley and entryway, into a section of the ship I haven’t seen yet. My feet pat-pat along the cool floor.

I pass a run of rooms lined with man-high tanks for trapping gas and tabletop centrifuges, miniatures of the one I’ve seen from afar in our engine room. I stand with my hand pressed to the waist-high glass, taking in the sterile order of the rooms. Diagrams crammed with mysterious writing paper the walls. I tiptoe on, past more workrooms. Then comes the men’s training room, with all the weight equipment sleek and new, not rust-speckled and wrapped in brittle sealing tape like aboard the Parastrata. I smile. Won’t Soli’s mother be shocked when she sends me off on some errand and I already know my way?

Beyond the training room, the floor slopes up gently. The air thickens with humidity and the smell of earth. Hydroponics. But when I reach the darkened room at the end of the corridor, I hesitate. This is nothing like Hydroponics on our ship, squeezing as much produce from as little nutrients and water as possible. I peer through the clear insulating curtain stretched across the door. Fog lies over a carpet of tender grass stretching all the way to the back of a room near large as the Parastrata’s outer bay. Dense shadows gather beneath the lemon trees staggered along the green. The far wall is one long window, looking out on the stars.

I kneel and lift the edge of the curtain so I can run my fingers over the grass. It tickles, but soft, the way a cat’s whiskers do. The men say down groundways people grow it simply to walk on, like a living rug, but that seems almost a sacrilege. I lean close and smell. Worms and crickets, like the ones in our compost bale. The soft, rich scent of rot.

I stand and pull the curtain aside. The grass is wet, and I can’t explain it, but I smell water in the air. Not the dead, boiled kind I’m used to, either, but something fresh, near live, steeped in gently pulped leaves and loam. I look up. Misters hang from a frame of girders above, alternating with darkened sun-glow lamps. I hesitate. Do the thers truly walk on something living? But they must, or else how could they reach those lemons? And if they don’t harvest the lemons, what’s the point of this room?

I put one foot over the threshold. The grass is soft, like a baby’s hair. I recoil, thinking maybe it’s as delicate too, maybe I’ve crushed it with my weight. But the shoots spring back the moment I pull my foot away. I take a hesitant step, and then another, letting the curtain fall closed behind me. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to walk on the old silk tapestries hanging in the Parastrata’s meet rooms, and now I think I know. This is luxury. This is Earth. I think I see a tiny piece of why Saeleas wept to leave it behind.

A curious tang from the lemons sweetens the air. I’ve heard the oldgirls say lemons are sour and only good for medicines, but my mouth waters all the same. I stop beneath a tree and lift one of the small, bright fruits. It fits perfectly in my palm. For a moment I picture myself snapping the lemon from its branch, sinking my teeth past its waxy skin, drinking the juice inside. But no. These aren’t my lemons, not yet. And even if they were, it would be none proper to take a whole one for myself.

When I reach the window, I press my palms against its cool layered glass and look out on the vast spill of stars. The skyport stretches beneath me, seeming to angle down from where I stand, even though I know up and down are only tricks of the ship’s gravity field. Bright repair patches stand out on the station’s skin, ships cleave to its sides like sucker fish, and clusters of antennae jut from each docking station, all of it bathed in the blue-white glow of the nearby moon.

“Parastrata Ava?”

I whip around. A man sits beneath the low-hanging boughs of the lemon tree behind me. My breath stops. His hands reflect the milky light of the moon, but the rest of him is too far in shadow to see. My heart shudders. This is it, the kind of mistake Llell warned me against. But I didn’t listen, and now here I am, caught and vulnerable, at the whim of a stranger who can overmatch both my strength and my word.

I dart from the window. I try to dodge past the tree, but my bridal bands drag down my steps. The man ducks out from beneath the boughs. I hobble left, but he catches me around the waist. I cry out. He claps a hand over my mouth.

“Ava, don’t fight.”

I struggle in his grip, try to pitch myself forward onto the ground.

“Ava. It’s me, Ava.”

He lets go, and I sprawl on the grass. I roll over, ready to kick him away, and finally get a good look at him. Luck. My head feels heavy and light all at once. Oxygen drunk. I drop my head against the soft grass and laugh. It’s only Luck.

He reaches a hand down to me. “You’re going to get us caught.”

“Sorry.” I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. “I didn’t know you were you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” I look down at my naked feet and try to brush away the clips of wet grass stuck to my skirt. What was I thinking, walking out alone in a strange ship? What if it hadn’t been Luck underneath that tree? And what must this boy . . . this man, who’s supposed to become my husband, think of me, walking his ship half dressed at night? Did he see me thinking on stealing his crewe’s lemons?

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.” I try to step around him.

“Wait.” Luck catches me by the arm. The warm grip of his fingers on my skin turns my whole body live, magnetized. I gasp. I stop. For the first time, I notice his feet are bare, too, and his hair rumpled.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Luck says. “I go out walking sometimes when I get that way. Or swimming.”

We stare at each other, linked up skin to skin.

“My father asked me to come with him to the meet room tomorrow,” Luck says. “I figure you don’t have to guess much to know what that’s about.”

“With me here as a bride, you mean.” I keep my head down and finger the copper bands on my wrist, already greening my skin beneath their wires.

“Right so.” He loosens his grip on my arm and stands up formal and straight. “I’m sorry for touching you before we’re bound, Parastrata Ava. You were always some proper and . . .”

“I’m not.” My eyes flash up to meet his and—there—they find a place to rest safe again. It’s exhilarating, this feeling of doing something dangerous and right, all wrapped up together in my chest. I step closer. “I’m not only some proper. Not always.”

Luck looks down at me. He blinks into my face, as if he’s trying to figure out how to mesh me with the smallgirl he knew five turns past.

I fumble for his hand and fold my fingers around his, trying to press what I feel in through his skin. “I’ve been practicing those fixes Soli taught me. The ones you said I could learn. You remember?”

He laughs. “What, still? After all these turns?”

I drop his hand, hurt. “I taught myself others.”

“No, I mean . . . I’m only surprised, is all. That’s none proper for a so girl, from what I saw on your Parastrata. I thought you’d be too busy with Priority. But I’m happy. I’m glad.” He reaches out and squeezes my fingers lightly.

“Me too.”

“Do you think . . .” He stops and glances at the entrance to the garden room. “Have you ever been swimming?”

“Swimming?” The word curls strange around my tongue. When we were smallgirls, Llell dared me to go floating in the water converter’s desalination pool. We’d heard about some of the older boys sneaking down there, how the water was supposed to float you some like the Void would, but some not. More like a giant hand holding you up, one of them had said. But Modrie Reller caught us ankle deep in the filter reeds and made us drink from the salt pool until we vomited brine. Llell and I never went back.

I shake my head.

“Come on.” Luck tugs my hand. “I’ll show you.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“You’ll be all right,” Luck says. “I swear. I know this ship backward. I know when the night Fixes come and go.”

I hesitate.

“You trust me,” Luck says. “Right so?”

I frown. “You swear it?”

“I swear it.” Luck smiles. “Don’t you want to live some before we’re bound?”

I think on it. In another few months I might be weighted down with a baby like Soli and busy learning to manage the women at Luck’s mother’s side. But tonight, no one is looking for me. No one will notice I’m gone from my bed. It is the last night before I am fully a woman.

And so I let him lead me from the garden.

CHAPTER .6

I follow Luck through a corridor that forks near the workrooms, and then down a laddered hatch into the hanging serviceways in the bowels of the ship. Heat rises on the wet air, reminding me of the dyerooms on the Parastrata. We walk single file above the humming tops of the generators, bathed in smudgy orange light.

A man’s voice rings out in the echoes ahead. “. . . go and double back to get it.”

Luck freezes in the middle of the gangway.

“Night Fixes?” I whisper.

Luck nods.

“I thought you said—”

“Hsssh.” He pulls me after him, back the way we came. We round a corner, and Luck points soundlessly to a double-doored service locker built into the wall. I nod. He pulls both doors open with a faint squeak. Heart knocking, I step over a scatter of loose fixers and dead wires and wedge myself behind a crisscross of rebar, deep in the shadow of the locker. Luck jumps in after me and pulls the door closed. We crush together against the back wall.

“Stay still,” he whispers.

His shoulder presses into my nose. He smells of pulped grass and faint sweat masked by soap, some kind of indefinable Luck smell that lights me up to my heels. I let my hand rest where it’s fallen on his chest and breathe slowly, trying to muffle the sound against him so the night Fixes won’t hear us.

“. . . point in him taking another wife, you know?” The voices grow louder.

“Talk on,” a second man answers the first. “I’ve got some trouble what with only two.”

Their steps ring close. Luck presses me against the wall. We both try to breathe shallow and slow, try not to shift our feet into the metal balanced precariously against the wall. Luck lowers his nose so it rests on top of my head. His breath is warm in my hair. I can make out every thread in his shirt, every lock of dark hair touching his neck, every pulse of blood working the veins under his skin. I should be worried about the Fixes, but all I can think on is the gentle bob of Luck’s Adam’s apple and the way his chest grazes mine.

“You see the bride they brought?”

“Yeh.”

“She’s got something odd to her, but I can’t figure it.”

“Dunno. To me, they’re all some odd with that hair and the way . . .” The voices fade below the generators’ hum.

Luck and I stand fused in the back of the service locker. This is the last place I should feel safe, but I don’t want to leave.

Luck steps back slowly, carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says, though I’m not sure if he means for touching me again or for what his crewemates said about me. He smiles nervously and pushes the doors open, holds out a hand to help me from the locker. “There’s only the one team of night Fixes. We shouldn’t see anyone else.”

My heart is still skipping. I laugh, half from relief, half from giddiness. The sound fits strange in my throat, like it’s coming from some other girl. Maybe the girl I could be if I was Luck’s wife, without doors to lock me in at night. I grab his hand, and he pulls me into an almost-run. I feel as if the gravity’s low, as if my feet are barely touching the floor as we fly around corners and down a spiraling ramp.

Luck skids us to a stop in front of a heavy, wheel-locked door. He sets his shoulder against the wheel and pushes until it gives with a brief shriek of metal.

“Where are we?” I whisper.

He points to a lettered sign bolted to the door and grins.

I look up at the sign. I know the letters for my own name, A-V-A, but beyond spotting two As in the loops and lines on the door sign, I can’t figure it. I bite my lip and look at Luck. I shake my head.

His smile dies.

“I’m sorry.” My voice wavers. “I lied.”

“Don’t worry on it now.” He smiles at me again, gently, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin tingles at his touch. “We’re going swimming.”

He leans against the door. It swings open on a dim, sloping room filled wall to wall with water. Light from bioluminescent fish and phosphorous deposits crusting the depths lend the water and air an uncanny glow. My mouth falls open. I know it’s only the Æther’s desalination pool, but I feel as if I’ve stepped out of time, as if I’ve stumbled into the Mercies’ private realm.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

When crewes like ours come across a water-bearing planet, we mostly find salt oceans or ice. On the Parastrata, we leach most of our salt out in tanks, but before the water can go through the finer filters and come out potable, it rests awhile in a pond lined with scrubber fish and plants designed to nip out the extra sodium. The Æther’s desalination pool dwarfs ours. It looks deep as two men and far enough across to swallow up the galley. Water weeds sway in the shallows.

Luck strides down the gentle slope to the water’s edge and pulls his shirt up over his head. The lines of his shoulder blades cut sharp bows in his pale back. He turns and looks up at me, something a little wicked in his eye. “Coming in?”

I shift my feet. Suddenly it comes to me how he’ll see the dull foreignness of me once I shed my shirt and skirts. He’ll see all of me.

“You’ll like it, I promise,” Luck says. “The salt’ll keep you from sinking.”

“I . . . I don’t want you to watch me,” I say.

“What if I look away till you’re in?”

I rub one foot against an ankle beneath my skirts. It’s some hot here below the Æther’s cool, civilized berth, and my skin itches with sweat. Half of me wishes Luck was only Llell or Soli so it would be easier to splash into the pool, but the part of me making my heart skip and my skin flush is glad it’s Luck.

“All right,” I say. My voice sounds dangerous, older.

Luck kicks off his trousers and wades into the pool. I try not to look until he’s well beneath the surface, but that small seed of recklessness makes me glance up in time to see the full length of his back diving into the water.

I tug the ties of my skirts loose and try to breathe steady. “Don’t look,” I yell.

“I’m not,” he calls back. He dives and disappears in a flash of feet.

I take a deep breath. He’s going to be my husband. We’ll be bound in a day or two anyway, so I might as well get over my shyness now. In one quick breath, I shed my skirts, strip off my shirt, wrap my arms across my chest, and rush into the pool, naked except for my data pendant and the copper bands. The water hits me with a warm slap, the tickle of sea plants slippery on the soles of my feet. I duck down to wet my hair and wade deeper. The water salts my lips and buoys me with each step, even under the added weight of the copper. My pendant floats, petal light, before me.

Luck surfaces. The phosphorous and fish light him from below in shifting patterns, making him look like a creature out of the tales the wives told us as smallgirls while we helped them spin wool. I glance down at his body and then my own, distorted beneath the surface of the pool. Our skin looks near the same in the half light, near enough maybe it won’t make him stare.

“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet,” Luck says. He kicks closer to me. His eyes drift down to my nakedness, but he drags them up again. He blushes. “Sorry.”

“Yours always looks dark,” I say.

He lets his feet bob up to the surface in front of him. “You’ve really never done this before?”

I think of Llell and me coughing up unfiltered seawater by the side of the tanks. “No.” I let my feet float up, too, so my toes peek out. I smile and wiggle them. “It’s not something you do when you’re so girl.”

“Does that mean you’ve left off being so girl, then?” Luck teases. He gulps up a mouthful of water and spits it out again.

“Right so.” I lift my smile from my toes to him. “You can’t be so girl and a wife.”

He smiles back. “I guess not.” He drops his head back.

I do the same, letting my whole body drift to the surface now he’s not watching. The boys were right. It’s like a warm hand lifting you. I let myself drift on the pool’s surface, like a leaf in a bowl of water.

“Ava.” The water muffles Luck’s voice.

I lift my head and right myself so I’m treading beside him again. “Hmm?”

“Do you want to be married to me?” Luck asks. “I mean, I know we don’t have much of a say, but do you want it?”

I look at him, hair wet and eyes serious.

“You hardly know me,” he says.

But I do, I want to say. Or I want to.

I swim closer. His eyes follow me, darkening as I approach.

“You know I used to daydream about being Soli’s sister.” I swish my hands across the surface of the water between us, making tiny waves that lap against his chest. “I used to imagine you and me and her would spend all morning talking while we milked the goats and learned fixes.”

“Truly?”

I nod. I take a deep breath. “Can I tell you something?”

Luck nods in return.

“My hair really is darker,” I say. “Some like yours. My modries dye it red so I’ll mix better with my crewe.”

“Right so?” Luck frowns and reaches out to finger a strand of my hair. “You’d never know.”

“Do you think it’s a sign from the Mercies?” My body floats closer to him and my knee accidentally brushes his. “Maybe I’m meant for your crewe from the beginning. Maybe I’m meant for you.”

The side of Luck’s mouth lifts. “Maybe you are.”

My limbs throb in time with my heart. “I don’t think I mind,” I say, and close the distance between us.

Blood beats loud in my ears. Luck leans in and touches his lips to mine. They’re warm and laced with salt, and my own lips press back before I know what they’re going to do. I’ve been kissed. I’m kissing Luck. His hand travels around my side, to the small of my back, and pulls my body flush with his. My blood becomes warm oil. We both forget to tread to keep ourselves afloat for a moment, and slide under. Luck pulls away, and we kick ourselves back to the surface. We break the water half laughing, half coughing and sputtering.

“Sorry.” Luck shakes his head, spattering water everywhere, and laughs. “Maybe we should go where it’s less deep?”

I push the hair out of my eyes. “Right so.”

I splash after him to shallower water, where my toes just brush the bottom of the pool.

“Put your arms around me,” he murmurs.

I oblige, looping my arms around his shoulders. He brings his lips to mine, and this time, we don’t nearly drown. He is salt and warmth and sweat, and I don’t ever want this kiss to end. His fingers sink into my hair and fumble to unbind it. My braids fall. He sweeps them aside to kiss my neck and I shiver. Just like I imagined.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he murmurs, his lips soft on my skin, my ear. “I’ll be a good husband. I’ll make you happy. I swear it.”

“I . . .” I start. But then his hand brushes my breast and all my thoughts fly away, as if swept off by a solar wind, invisible and unknowable.

“I want you, Ava.” Luck pulls back to look in my eyes. He swallows. “Do you . . .”

I teeter in his arms, caught between the swell of heat and an awful nagging at the back of my mind. But Luck’s shoulders and arms are so strong, holding me up, and he’ll care for me. He’ll make me happy. He swore it. I want so much for him to love me, to be worthy of that love, and my heart is everywhere—thrumming in my neck, down my legs, in my wrists, and all in between.

“They’re going to bind us tomorrow.” Luck’s voice is husky. He lifts my hand and interlaces our fingers, our wrists touching as they would beneath the marriage bonds.

“Thread over thread, life over life,” he recites.

I let out a shaky breath. “To make one life,” I finish.

Luck lays me down in the reeds with my head on the metal shore. I can barely breathe. I have that feeling again, that I’m only a passenger in my own body. Luck kneels over me. His breath is hot on my neck and face.

“Have you done this before?” My arms feel weak and my heart beats too fast.

Luck shakes his head. He gropes my back, fumbles. “I don’t want to hurt you. Soli said . . .”

“. . . she would break your toes,” I say, and break into a nervous laugh.

Something about my laugh knocks the awkwardness from us. Luck hugs me close and laughs with me. I can feel him shaking.

He turns serious again. “Are you ready?”

I take a deep breath. “I think so.” I look at him and remember the meeting at the dock, how my gaze flew to him for refuge when the rest of me was trapped still as death.

“So,” I say.

Soli is right. It does hurt some, but then it doesn’t so much anymore, or at least, it’s a sweet kind of hurt. Luck and I move together. The fish brush our bare ankles, the water laps softly against the sides of the pool, and my sense of time, my feeling for night and day, evaporates. I lean my forehead against Luck’s and breathe with him. I can already feel the fibers of my heart growing out, threading together with his where our chests meet.

When it’s over, we lie tangled together in the shallows, the water covering us like a blanket.

Luck kisses my knuckles. “Ava?”

“Hmm?”

“How come your crewe never taught you reading, but they showed you figuring?”

My face goes hot. I prop myself up on one elbow. “I can write my name. And figuring, I taught myself that.”

“You taught yourself?” Luck echoes.

“Mostly.” I shrug.

“But reading . . . what about safety signs and directions on how to make things? Don’t you need it for that?”

“Women don’t read.” I hear Modrie Reller’s words in my mouth. “We’re too busy. We have men to do it for us.”

Luck rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “That’s stupid. What if something happens? What if you have to try to set the distress beacon or tell if something’s poisonous?”

“I’ll have you tell me how to do it.” I gulp a mouthful of saltwater and spit it at him.

He splashes me back. “I’m serious, Ava. After we’re bound, you have to learn how to read. It’s dangerous, not knowing.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “I might be some old for it. Modrie Reller’s always talking on how my father says our brains stop learning well once we’re done growing, and girls are never so good to start with.”

“I don’t know.” Luck draws me close again. “You taught yourself figuring, right so?”

I nod slowly.

“It can’t be harder than that, especially with someone to show you the trick of it.” He traces my collarbone with his forefinger. “You’re sharp, Ava, sharper than any other woman I know. And when we’re bound, you won’t need to hide your hair anymore.”

A lump rises in my throat. I kiss him again, harder this time.

“What in nine hells is this?” A rough, ringing voice cuts the silence.

Luck breaks away from me and staggers back to his knees. I clasp my hands over my chest and sit up.

Two men stand in the doorway, staring down at us. Night Fixes.

I reach for Luck, but he’s too far away.

“Æther Luck?” One of the men cranes his neck, trying to make out what he’s seen. “That the Parastrata bride?”

Luck swallows. “I . . .”

“Get her out of there.” The other Fix, tall and knob boned, shoves past his crewemate. He scoops up Luck’s shirt and hurls it at his face. “And get yourself out.”

Luck catches his shirt. He reaches down to help me up, and the Fixes glare at our joined hands as Luck leads me out of the water, shielding my body with his own. Shame swirls over me and gravity retakes my body as we slosh out of the pool. It fills my veins like lead. At the lip of the pond, the tall Fix yanks my arm up out of Luck’s hand and shoves Luck at his crewemate.

Luck catches himself midstumble. “Where’s your decency?” He looks back at me. “Let her put on some clothes.”

“You’re a fine one to talk on decency.” The stoop-backed Fix glares at him, but he doesn’t move to stop me.

I tie on my skirts and work the clasps of my shirt with shaking fingers. The fabric sticks to my damp skin. They saw us. They know what happened. They must. I want to run to Luck, cling to him, but they stand in my way. What’s happening? I want to ask. They should be angry to find us together, yes, but this fury seems too much when we’re near enough bound. Something’s gone wrong. I try to catch Luck’s eye as the Fixes march us up the spiraling gangway, past the service locker, to the laddered hatch, boots clanging double time.

“Where’re we going?” Luck asks, finally looking up.

“Your father.” The stoop-backed Fix glances at me with a look that says I’m nothing but muck and burnoff. “And hers.”

My breath stops. My father. My legs waver underneath me. The Fixes jerk me forward, push me to the ladder. My arms and legs climb without me, automatonlike. The thought of my father’s eyes on me, forming what I’ve done into words, makes me queasy with shame and regret. What seemed so right in the otherworldly glow of the pool seems unfailingly stupid now. We should have waited. It was only a few days. I wish I could go back, tip the balance so the me in Luck’s arms some minutes past would want to lose her girlhood the proper way. But there’s nothing I can do now, no going back. It’s done.

CHAPTER .7

Maybe it won’t be so bad, I try to tell myself as they march us past the women’s quarters and the darkened galley. Soli did worse. Æther Fortune might have flogged Ready, but he wouldn’t flog his own son, would he? And Luck said he would take care of me. Everything will be raveled back right soon.

We stop before a solid door with wood carvings inlaid in the metal. The sight of it sends my heart into a canter. I know this door. The same carvings—our ancestors looking skyward, then boarding their ships, then Saeleas floating weightless with her hair fanned out like an angel—grace the entrance to the captain’s quarters on the Parastrata. I’ve spent hours polishing them at Llell’s side before the Day of Apogee. A scroll of words unrolls from Saeleas’s mouth. I know well enough what they say without reading, the same words my mother whispered in her fever dream. Women of the air, stay aloft and be whole!

Then the whole verse comes back to me, and I ache with dread. I want to run, but my body isn’t done playing traitor, and my limbs lock up.

But woman, her mettle’s thin,

Like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat.

Cover us all, she does,

Tame the stars’ fury and channel life.

In the air, she floats;

A perfect, iridescent thing.

But when her feet touch the ground,

Bare time till she falls crumpled and tarnished.

Women of the air, stay aloft and be whole!

I feel as though the floor is falling out beneath me. The tall Fix steps forward and pounds a fist on the door. I finally catch a glimpse of Luck. His face says he’s as wracked with regret as me, as tarnished as I feel, but he tries to smile at me anyway. Don’t fear. I bow my head and let my damp hair hide my face. How can he protect me if he’s as frozen by shame as I am?

A section of the door creaks open, a little hidden latchport. “What?” says the guard.

“We need to see Æther Fortune and the Parastrata captain.” The Fix spits.

“What? Now?” says the guard. Then he catches sight of me, hair snarled with briny water, only half dressed in my shirt and underskirts, and he jumps as if someone has touched a bare wire to his skin.

The Fixes march us into the captain’s quarters. Men’s laughter rings through the sickly sweet smoke clouding the air. The crewemen lounge on oversize pillows of hide and silk, shouting and singing and throwing back glasses of clear rice wine. My heartbeat doubles. I’ve never been in men’s quarters before, except for the times Modrie Reller sent me in to clean, and the rooms were empty then. My father’s yellow-white hair stands out bright as a nova in a sea of dark heads. Æther Fortune sits beside him. My arms and face burn. Panic crackles beneath my skin. I try to break for the door, but they catch me and spin me around to face my father again.

My father’s eyes narrow at me like a cat’s. A hush spreads out around us.

He stands and shifts his gaze to the Fixes. “What are you doing with my so girl?”

“Your so girl,” says one of the Fixes, sticky with sarcasm. “We caught her naked in the desalination reservoir, letting young Æther Luck put his hands to her.” He shoves Luck forward.

Æther Fortune shoots to his feet. “My son?”

“We thought you’d want to talk on what they were doing there, exactly, in the full middle of night,” the Fix says.

My father’s eyes are metal. “And what were you doing with our bride, Æther Luck?”

“I thought . . .” Luck’s head drops. “We . . .”

No, I think, despair creeping over me. Don’t act the smallboy, not now.

“Speak up.” My father looms over him. “Let us hear you.”

“I . . . we were sealing our bond,” Luck says. He lifts his head and tries to stare back at my father, but I can see he’s shaken. The look on my father’s face is enough to make me want to drop to my knees and beg mercy. “We thought it wouldn’t matter so soon before the binding.”

“Wouldn’t matter?” Æther Fortune pushes forward. Blood flushes his cheeks and throat. “Wouldn’t matter?”

“I know it was wrong,” Luck says. “But I care some lot for Ava and once we’re bound it won’t—”

My father looks as though he’s going to strike him, but it’s Æther Fortune who does it. He hits Luck close-fisted across the eye. There is a snap, and Luck doubles over, clutching his face.

I stifle a cry.

“My own son.” Æther Fortune grabs Luck by the back of the neck and pulls him up.

Luck swallows, a bruise already purpling his cheekbone. “Father . . .”

“It matters to me,” he says coldly, and strikes Luck again with his ring hand.

Luck drops to the floor. His face is bleeding. He touches the cut and stares at the red smear in confusion. ther Fortune levels a kick at his ribs. Luck collapses, all the air driven from his lungs.

“No!” I try to run to him, but the Fix holds me back.

Luck’s father delivers another kick, and then another, and another. I cover my eyes, but I can’t escape the sound of it—the thick blows, the grunts. Finally, an ther crewemen puts a restraining hand on his arm.

The captain steps back, breathing hard, and smoothes his hair. “It matters to me,” he says again. “Ready the airlock.”

“Please.” I stretch out my hand and step between Luck and his father. “I let him.”

A silence falls over the room, broken only by the sound of Luck wheezing. Æther Fortune and my father turn to me slowly, and I realize what I’ve done. I should never have spoken, not at all. I know that; any so girl worth her salt knows that. My father and Æther Fortune stare at me as if one of the goats has opened its mouth and formed human speech.

I drop to the ground and hold up my hands in supplication. “Your mercy, so father.”

“You consented?” my father hisses. His eyes are cold as the Void.

I bow my head and nod, terrified and bewildered. My father looks as though he wants to cut my throat.

“So captain.” Luck staggers to his feet, clutching his ribs. “So father, punish me as you did Soli’s husband. The blame is mine, not Ava’s. We can still be bound, and make everything right.”

“And what . . .” Æther Fortune’s voice is dangerous. “What makes you think you can steal my bride, small Luck?”

Silence.

“Your bride?” Luck darts a horrified look at me.

“Yes, my bride.” Æther Fortune flexes his hands into fists. His pockmarks stand out in sickly moons over his reddening face. “The ink’s fresh, but the contract’s signed.”

Luck swallows. “I thought with it being time for me to take a wife, and you talking on how I’d need to marry before I take the captaincy . . .” His voice trails to nothing.

“So you’re taking the captaincy too, then?” Æther Fortune’s voice rises. “The way you’ve taken my bride? Is that what you are? My own son, an adulterer and a traitor?” He pushes Luck backward. One of the Fixes catches him before he hits the ground and pushes him back to his feet. Æther Fortune rounds on my father, breathing hard. “And you, with your some pretty lies about your virtuous daughter and her skilled hands. Now we see what they’re skilled at.”

“Brother Fortune,” my father says. “On me and my wives, our regrets. Our deep apologies. Let me find you another girl from my crewe. A better bride, pure, more docile. I have a younger daughter by my third wife near enough come to womanhood. You could take her now and . . .”

“I want nothing of yours, Parastrata.” Spit flies from Æther Fortune’s mouth. “Your lies or your girls or your metals. We’re done. Leave my ship.”

“So brother,” my father says a soothing voice. “Only . . .”

“Leave my ship,” Æther Fortune repeats, and it comes to me he wouldn’t need a knife to kill at all.

The Parastrata men stand tense and ready, their wine long forgotten at their feet. My father jerks his chin. His men file into two flanking columns as my father stalks from the room. He brushes past me on his way to the door, as if I’m vapor. It feels like a kick to the chest; I can’t draw breath. I glance at Luck, his eye swollen and a line of blood welling over the bridge of his nose. I want to run to him, press a cool hand to his face, wipe away the blood, but his father steps between us.

“You would have been my wife, girl.” His pale blue eyes are filled with hate. “Now you’re nothing.”

I stumble back and trip over my own skirt, coming down hard on my elbow. I scrabble to my feet. I am alone, near naked, and without my kinsmen’s protection. I see my father disappearing through the small latchdoor, his men retreating after him. One of them turns. Jerej, doing me the small mercy of waiting.

I cast a last look at Luck. He stares back, his features cracked with blood and heartbreak. He cannot save himself, much less me. What will his crewe do to him? It will be worse than Æther Ready’s fate, certain sure. It will be the airlock, like his father said, or worse.

I have no choice. I hurry after Jerej. The Æther men turn away as I push through them to my brother.

“Jerej . . .” I say when I reach the latchdoor.

He pivots and sweeps out of the captain’s quarters. I follow, running as best I can.

“Jerej.”

His boots clap the floor. He doesn’t answer.

“Please, wait for me!” My voice pitches down the curve of the corridor, and I hate the way it sounds. All panicked and girlish high as it echoes back. Jerej steps up his pace. Tears sting my eyes like chemical burn and dread lodges in my throat. “Please . . .”

I can feel the threads between Luck and me snapping with every step. I trip, skin my palms and knees, pick myself up again, and push myself after Jerej. He doesn’t stop, even when I fall. A sharp bend in the hallway swallows him up.

“Wait!”

I round the corner and stop short.

“Jerej.” My father looks at me. For a moment I think he’s going to speak to me, and I would welcome it, even if his words hit me like a slap. But he speaks for my brother. “Take that back to the ship. We’ll collect the women and meet you there.”

“Father . . .” I say.

He turns away and gestures for his men to follow. Jerej grips my shoulder and pushes me in the opposite direction, to the exit bay. I don’t fight as he yanks me along the corridor, down the ramp. The close, once-safe walls of the Æther give way to the high, open bay. The weight of the station’s gravity drops on me once more. The concourse stands near empty now the station is observing night. Dim blue light from the few open shops falls over the grit and dung and wasted bits of food and paper littering the broad midway floor. A thin scum of debris sticks to the soles of my feet as Jerej herds me along. I cling to him, even though his grip hurts my arm.

“Jerej,” I whisper. “Please, I didn’t know.”

I pull back to slow him down. Maybe if I talk, I can keep him from locking me up in the Parastrata, I think wildly. Maybe he’ll take me back to the Æther. Maybe it’s not too late to unpick this snarl and ravel everything back right.

“I know I did wrong.” My voice shakes. “But I would never have done it if I hadn’t thought it was Luck you meant to bind me to. I swear, Jerej.”

He glances at me but doesn’t slow his pace.

“If you would speak to Father for me.” I wipe at my eyes. Doesn’t he remember us as smallones together? Watching my mother in the midst of the storm? The times he dropped his beancake at supper and I gave him my own? Shouldn’t that matter now? “Please, so brother . . .”

“I’m none of your brother.” Jerej stops and glares at me. “My sister Ava is dead. And you, you’re naught but some bad matter left over. Don’t you see what you’ve done?” Jerej stands close to me, too close, and his words are soft with menace. “Two decaturns of trade with the Æthers, gone to vapor because of you.”

“I didn’t know,” I say. “How was I to know . . .”

“You weren’t,” Jerej says. “You were supposed to keep your legs together and do as you were told.”

I drop my head and let Jerej pull me to the Parastrata’s dock. I don’t raise my eyes again until I hear the bay door seal itself behind us, and the humid air of my home ship swallows us once more.

CHAPTER .8

I huddle on the floor of the utility closet where Modrie Reller and Iri dyed my hair at the beginning of the day—or was it the day before? Two days? I’ve lost track of time since Jerej sealed the door behind me. The old-fashioned vapor light built into the ceiling doesn’t cycle on and off with the rest of the ship; it burns constantly with a tik-tik-tik, like a fingernail tapping the base of my skull. Dried salt crusts my arms and legs, and the copper coils at my wrists and ankles stick to my stained skin. At one point, I fall into an uneasy sleep and dream Luck has coaxed me to the broad window in the Æther’s garden. We stand looking out at the stars.

“Did you know you can walk on them?” Luck says.

“Truly?” I say.

Luck climbs up into the window and steps out. He balances on the tiny pinprick of a star. “You just have to keep moving,” he says, and jumps to the next one.

We can’t, I say, but I follow him out into the Void anyway. I pull back my skirts and leap out onto the nearest star. It holds firm under my feet, solid as glass. I look up at Luck.

“You can run,” he says. He grins and breaks away from me, across the starry field.

I push myself after him. The stars come closer the faster I run, until they form a shining pebbled path beneath my feet. I laugh. My skirt weighs nothing and my legs carry me like water. I’m not even winded.

Winded. I stop and look down at my feet. But I’m in the Void, I remember. I shouldn’t be able to breathe at all. My blood should be frozen in my veins, my lungs sucked empty of air and collapsed. I look up to warn Luck, but he’s gone. The Void stretches out empty around me. I open my mouth to call for him, and the emptiness rushes in and siphons all the air out of me.

I wake, gasping, on the utility room floor.

After that, I try not to sleep. Instead, I hug my knees to my chest and rock and play what’s happened over and over, imagining it different. In one version, I never leave Soli’s bunk. In another, I lie and tell Luck I’ve been swimming before, go back to bed, and marry Æther Fortune. I don’t kiss Luck. I don’t hold him close in the water. I never give him the chance to love me. In my wildest version, Luck and I break away from the Fixes and flee the ship, but my imagination falters once we’ve reached the concourse, so instead I imagine Luck talking his father down, convincing him to bind us after all.

Maybe he will, I think. Maybe Soli will speak for us. Maybe Jerej . . .

The door lock clicks. I scramble to my feet and try to stamp the numbness out of them. They haven’t forgotten me. A mix of relief and dread twists in my gut. The hinges squeal as the door swings open. Modrie Reller stands on the other side. Half of me wants to shrink into the corner and half wants to run to her, to break down crying with relief at the sight of her. Modrie Reller’s face is still, blank. She holds an armful of heavy green cloth close to her chest. I recognize my good mirrored skirt, the one I wore when I was so briefly a bride, the one I left behind on the Æther.

Maybe, I think, and stop myself. The best I might get is if they’ve talked Æther Fortune into going through with our binding, though I know that’s more than I deserve. More likely they’ve found some nobody on the Parastrata willing to take me as one of his later wives, at least to smooth out the look of things. I’ll end up a dyegirl all my life, like Llell’s mother, but a fifth or sixth wife, lower even than her. And maybe someday when I’m old, my crewe will forget what brought me so low. I’ll take it, I say to myself. Anything to lift this shame off of me, anything not to be locked back in the room with the tik-tik-tik of the vapor light. I open my mouth to say it, but Modrie Reller stops me.

“Not a word,” she says. “Follow me.”

I shuffle after her, careful to keep my head down. If I don’t raise my eyes, I don’t have to look into the faces of the people we pass. They all know. Out of the corner of my eye, I see our Fixes and Cleaners turn their heads to stare as I walk in Modrie Reller’s wake. I know how I must look, my skin patchy with grime and my clothes stiff with sweat. An adulteress, a criminal, a whore. Their eyes light my skin on fire.

I follow the hem of Modrie Reller’s skirt up from the bowels of the ship. She pauses at the back door of the cleanroom, tips up my chin with her hand, and looks at me, as if she’s trying to record my face in her mind. I wrap my hand around hers, childlike. For a moment, I think she means to speak to me, but she spins on her heel and pushes the door to the cleanroom open. A broad half moon of women stands waiting for us along the tiled wall. Iri and Hannah and my great-grandfather’s other widows, Llell’s mother, Lifil’s mother and Eme’s, and all my father’s other wives. Near all the women of the ship are here.

For one bright moment, I think they’ve come to prepare me for a binding. Æther Fortune, one of the papermakers or Cleaners or Fixes, I don’t care, so long as everyone stops hating me and the world stands solid beneath me again. But then I notice there are no children. Children always come to bindings to bless the bride and remind her of her purpose.

“What’s happening?” My voice sounds high and shaky.

“Sisters.” Modrie Reller’s voice rings out over the silent tiled room. She traps my shoulders beneath her hands. “We come to prepare our daughter for burial.”

Lifil’s mother lets out a moan, then Hannah and Iri and all the rest. Together, they lift their voices in a high, keening wail. Each voice laps over the others, one woman reaching her highest pitch as her sister pauses to draw breath. The fine hairs of my neck stand on end. They close in on me as one, arms outstretched.

“Please.” I try to back away. Because suddenly it comes to me what my bridal skirt means, what Jerej’s words meant. My sister Ava is dead. I remember Modrie Reller’s kiss on my mother’s cold forehead and the loose, papery feel of her skin as we washed her body, the stiffness setting into her limbs as we dressed her in her skirts and coiled bridal bands around her thin joints, the heaviness of her head as we lifted it to refasten the data pendant around her neck. The only other time a woman wears her bridal finery is at her burial. Once we’ve broken dock and sounded deep enough, they’re going to turn me out, still breathing, into the Void.

Modrie Reller catches me by both arms and holds me hard to her breast as the other women converge on me. Pale hands unclip my soiled shirt and pull at my skirt ties. I see them undress me as if I am watching from above while this happens to another girl. My clothes disappear into the thicket of hands. They pry the tarnished copper coils from my wrists and ankles, leaving only their spectral green imprints on my skin.

Iri holds a water vessel over her head, and the other women greet her with a new frenzy of wailing. Her eyes look past me as she cracks the seal and tips a stream of lukewarm water over my head.

The shock of it brings me crashing back into myself. The water soaks my hair and rinses the salt from my skin in rivulets.

“No!” I twist a hand out of Modrie Reller’s grasp and lunge into the press of women. I’m not ready to be buried. I’m not ready to meet the Void. I stumble. The other women lift me to my feet and send me back into Modrie Reller’s steel grip, wailing and crying all the louder as they do. I look up. For a single slip, shock freezes me in place. It’s Llell. She moans, but her eyes kindle with something else, and I remember and regret all the times I’ve spoken hard to keep her in her place.

The women surge forward again, swallowing Llell in their ranks. I kick at them as they wash my body with water and oil, tie me into my skirts. They leave my chest bare, but weave my hair back into thick wedding braids and bind it with copper wire. They wind fresh wire from my ankles up my calves and around and around my forearms, until I can hardly bear the weight of it. Modrie Reller lowers a headdress bangled with a few cheap coins across my brow, and suddenly the wailing stops.

Modrie Reller lays her hands on my head.

“Come the last breath of stars,

Their dust fall

And make us all.

Come the last breath of man,

And dust give back again.”

The women repeat her words in whispers, and each leans in to kiss my forehead, to touch my hair one last time.

I’m going to die.

They lift me up on their shoulders and carry me from the cleanroom. I am floating again, not on water, but on a sea of hands as we flow out through the sleeping quarters, into the ship’s central corridor. The men stop their work and stand in silence to watch our procession.

I’ll never see Luck again. I’ll never be a true bride.

We pass the kitchens and the hydroponic gardens and the canaries. The small yellow birds hop frantically in their cages, alarmed by the voices and the charge in the air.

I’ll never have smallones of my own.

We empty out into the storage bay. The goats trot away from the gate and crowd together at the back of the paddock, bleating.

My hands will never weave again. They’ll never practice fixes.

The women press together, two abreast, as we file into a shadowed canyon formed by stacks of copper bales, crates of sand, and reams of fiberoptic cable. They lower me to my feet. I hug my arms over my bare chest to keep myself from shivering. This way they’re taking me, this is the path to the coldroom, where we store bodies until we can return to the depths of the Void to give them a proper burial among the stars. This is where my mother’s body lay until the so doctor’s daughter came to bury her. Anger sparks in my chest. I deserve to be punished, yes. But to die? I don’t want to die.

I won’t make it easy. I stop walking. My funeral procession shudders and jams behind me. For a moment, I think it’s worked, but then they haul me up with their work-hard arms and drag me to the front. I curse you with my death, I think.

Modrie Reller stops by the coldroom door. It stands ajar, seeping frost smoke into the warm bay. Thin blue light from a biolume bowl built into the ceiling bathes the floor, doing more to form shadows than to illuminate the empty crates and metal-slabbed niches where bodies are meant to lie.

The women release me at the threshold. Modrie Reller rests her hand on my head. “May the Mercies carry your soul to rest, Parastrata Ava.”

CHAPTER .9

The floor sticks to my bare feet when I forget to move. I pace from one end of the coldroom to the other beneath the twilight of the biolume bowl and its circling fish. The metal slabs are empty, thank the Mercies. If I were trapped in here with a body, I might try slicing open my own neck with the sharp ends of the copper wire around my wrists. That might be the smart thing in any case. I’d prefer the burn of metal opening my veins, the slow sleep falling over me as my heart fails.

But no.

Modrie Reller and all of them, that’s what they want. They hope I’ll die of cold in here or else invent some way to hurry myself into death and save them the grisly task of venting me into the Void. I curse you, I think, and walk faster to keep my blood flowing to my fingers and toes, keep the tremors in my muscles at bay. I pull the cheap headdress from my hair and throw it. I won’t make my death easy.

But it’s cold. Layers of frost rime the marble slabs, leaving them glistening like an oil slick. No Mercies will come to save a girl like me. I’m on my own. My feet burn, my arms burn, my chest burns. Inside and out, the cold rubs me raw. I need warmth. I’ve heard a chill so deep can blacken a man’s fingers and toes, rot them from his body. At least my ears are warm, I think, and laugh aloud, bitterly, my breath cloudy in the faint blue light.

My ears. I bury my fingers in my hair. The cold eases so slightly I wouldn’t notice if I weren’t holding my breath. But it eases. I rip the copper bindings from my hair and unknot the braids. My hair hangs heavy, almost to my waist. I spread it over my bare shoulders and arms like a cloak. Not as cold, but not enough.

I search the room over, looking for something useful. Anything to draw the cold away from me. Anything to create warmth. Think, think. There has to be a fix for this.

At least they mean to bury you with the stars, I tell myself bitterly. It could be worse. My crewe could choose to bury me beneath the ground. But that’s only for the worst among us, the murderers and heretics whose souls might come back to haunt the ship if we let them loose in the Void. They say when a body is buried in the ground, its soul goes to dust along with its flesh.

I shiver and push the thought away. My soul isn’t going anywhere. It’s staying inside my body. I clink through the dioxide canisters in the corner and push aside a few frozen legs of goat swinging from hooks at the back of the room. Nothing. The broken crates are plastic and wouldn’t burn, even if I had some way of making fire. And open flame on a ship is the worst kind of disaster that can happen, short of a hull breach. It burns up the oxygen in the air and shorts out vital systems. With us still docked, it might spread to the station, gobbling up oxygen and destabilizing the older ships’ fission cores.

I rub my arms and spin in a slow circle. Metal door, metal walls, metal floors. I look up into the soft glow of the biolume. Small fish and krill, alight with their own body chemistry, circle in the thick nutrient bath filling the glass bowl. The mixture must protect them from the cold, insulate them somehow, or else their bodies would freeze and go out. I shove a crate underneath the bowl, climb up, and try to pry it from the ceiling. There are no screws or rivets around the biolume’s metal housing, but a thin gap runs along its perimeter where it meets the ceiling. If I could pry it down somehow . . .

Think, Ava. It’s only another fix.

My eyes fall on the heavy rings of copper circling my arm. Maybe . . .

I strip off the loops, pull a length of the wire straight, and wrap the rest of it tight around the straight piece so it won’t bend easily. Every few moments I pause to rub my hands together and stop shivering. When my makeshift fix is ready, I shove the thin tip into the seam between the biolume housing and the ceiling. With a grunt, I thrust it in deeper and pry down until a crack sounds inside the frame. One side of the biolume sags away from the ceiling. A trickle of nutrient oil rolls down the outside of the glass.

I work the wire lever around the frame. Soft pops echo in the room every time I free a section, until only a thin metal lip cleaves to the ceiling. I stand with my left hand balancing the slippery bowl, my right straining to pull down the last strip. With a shriek, it comes loose.

I waver on top of the crate. I drop my fixer and clutch the biolume to my breast with both hands. A wave of nutrient oil spills over my chest. Instantly, my skin warms, as if someone has pressed a hand to my breastbone. I gasp. I steady the bowl, climb down from the crate, and balance the biolume on one of the empty metal slabs. I dip in my hand. Warmth floods my fingers. The fish, cool and scaly, brush my skin. I slather the oil down my arm. It leaves my skin gritty with krill, but a pleasant ache spreads over me, soaks into my muscles.

I rub the oil over my neck, my face, my shoulders. My body shakes, not from cold, but with relief as the numbness creeps from my skin and crackling fires flare up inside me as my nerve endings reignite. I reach down to scoop more from the bowl and stop. The nutrient oil has sunk below the bowl’s halfway mark. The fish circle together around the bottom, their bodies twisted awkwardly to keep themselves submerged. If I take the oil I need, I’ll kill the fish. And once their bodies stop processing chemicals, their lights will go out. I’ll be alone in the dark.

Panic spikes in my chest, and a tiny sob breaks out of me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Stupid, girlish, crying over fish. It’s not that I love them, really, the way Nan loves the bay cats, but their desperate writhings at the bottom of the bowl, the way they flop and crowd together, leave my heart ringing.

I scoop out a thin handful of oil and rub it over my right foot. Toe, arch, heel flare painfully back to life. The fish shift press against one another. They no longer have room to circle.

I take more and massage the feeling back into my left foot. The fish turn themselves flat on their sides to keep their gills away from the open air. The oil’s surface kisses their ventral fins.

I dip in my hand again. My skin brushes their slick bodies. I have to push them aside to draw out more oil. I close my eyes. Their tails slap and thrash against my skin.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. Hot lines of tears rim my eyes as I cover my sides with oil.

The fish twitch and gasp. Some have already stopped moving. The room tips closer to darkness as the light leaves their skin.

I rip two strips of cloth from the hem of my bridal skirt and wrap them around my feet. I pull myself up into one of the niches and lean forward, clutching my knees. I don’t know how long the oil will keep the cold at bay, but is seems wise to touch as little of the cold metal as possible. I watch as the light from the bowl dims and dims, until only one fish still glows underneath the bodies of the others. Shadows swallow the walls, the floor, the ceiling.

Don’t go out, don’t go out.

But then the weak blue glow falters and true black closes over me.

My mind drifts to Luck. Is he locked in some cold, dark room like me? Has his father beaten him again? Is he waiting for his own push into the Void? Or is he already dead? I imagine him holding me, his strong hands smoothing my hair. Lying beside him in the water. He can’t be dead if I can still remember him so clearly. He can’t be dead when I love him so. Please, I beg the Mercies. Please, let him live.

At first I think the creak of the door is part of a dream, but then light, bright harsh light, streams under my cracked eyelids. I sit up. Iri holds a flash lantern above her head. Her skin reflects the light like a bone moon.

“Stay away from me.” My voice is rough and raw from the cold. I stumble numbly out of the niche and back to the nearest wall. Iri. That betrayal hurts worst of all. Have the others sent her with some new punishment? Or is she here to do me a mercy and see I’m not breathing when I meet the Void?

“Hssh.” Iri holds out a hand to quiet me and squints into the dark room. Her eyes go wide when she sees the biolume dead on the table. She looks at me in an appraising way.

I peer past her. She’s alone. No Modrie Reller or Hannah or any of the other women. My mind clicks over slowly, still thick with sleep and panic, as I try to piece together what it means.

“Ava.” Iri holds out her hand to me. “Come on.”

I stand locked in place. I know there’s something I ought to ask her, but my mouth hangs open, and no words come.

“Hurry on, girl.” A twitch of annoyance crosses Iri’s face. “It’s only an hour till newday.”

I peel myself away from the wall. Iri turns and sweeps out of the coldroom. I follow in a fog. The air of the bay clings heavy and beautifully warm on my skin. I half wonder if I’m still asleep and this is a dream.

Iri stops to seal the door to the coldroom behind us.

“What . . . ,” I whisper.

She cuts me off with a sharp motion of her hand. She presses her forefinger to her lips.

I follow her through the dark canyon of stacked cargo, out into the livestock bay. Only the steady pat of our bare feet on the floor and the rustle of our skirts disturb the silence. The goats look up as we pass, but they flap their ears and settle back into sleep on the hay. Even the chickens keep silent for once. Thank you, Mercies.

Iri pauses inside the outer bay door. She pulls a small square of fabric from the belt of her skirt and hands it to me. “Put this on,” she whispers.

I unfold the fabric. A worn green shirt, patched and rubbed thin in spots. She must have rescued it from the rag pile. I look up at her.

“You can’t go out of the ship like that.” She nods to my chest, then glances down to the torn hem of my skirt and the rags around my feet. “I would’ve brought shoes, but I couldn’t without Firstwife Reller noticing.”

I pull the shirt over my head and cinch its frayed laces so it fits me. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

“There are some of us didn’t want a hand in what’s to be done with you, Ava.” Iri speaks low. “There are some what say, there but for the Mercies go I.” She reaches up and activates the bay doors.

This close, the shriek and rumble of the doors vibrates through my whole body. My heart throws itself against my chest.

“What are you thinking?” I shout to Iri over the deafening roar of the bay doors rolling open and the pneumatic thunk of the ramp descending to the station floor.

“It’s the only way out,” she shouts back.

I glance behind us. Any second, my brother or Modrie Reller or someone is bound to come. There isn’t any way no one heard the doors, even at this hour, and the Watches are sure to see the outer door’s been activated. Even now, silent alarms are flashing in the watchroom.

The ramp hits the floor with a rattling thud, and the pneumatics whine in relief.

“Come on.” Iri charges down the ramp, skirts swaying around her ankles with every long stride.

I rush after her, afraid to look back. We pass the gravity shift—I feel a sudden thump in my chest—and reach the latchdoor to the concourse. Iri unrolls a scrap of paper from her skirt pocket. She bends close to the pattern lock to compare the symbols she’s copied to the ones on the door’s lock grid.

Behind us, a single shout echoes from the open bay.

“Hurry, Iri.” I glance at the symbols on the grid. There are only ten of them, but they’re as foreign to me as they must be to Iri. She presses a halting finger to the first symbol in the sequence, a sharp one with two open tines on top.

More shouts.

Iri punches the second symbol, an easy one, a simple line.

The men come into view at the top of the ramp. The Watches, and among them, Jerej. He spots me. Something awful races across his face, and I know if he catches me, it won’t be the coldroom I go back to.

“Iri, please.”

She falters on the last symbol. Her finger hovers over the keypad. It’s a tricky one, a rounded symbol with a tail, and there’s another like it on the grid, only flipped. I pray to the Mercies and mash the final key for her.

The latchdoor releases. We run full tilt into the concourse. The vendors are rolling up the metal grates covering their storefronts to begin newday. I smell baking bread and the sharp twinge of ozone. The station’s Cleaners have swept the floor of all its late-night filth, and our bare feet slap the shining floor panels as we push through the gravity.

The latchdoor bangs open again at our backs. “Stop them!” Jerej shouts, but the vendors ignore him, and the few early morning passengers only turn their heads to stare after us in a daze. Jerej breaks into a run, the other men chasing behind. They don’t strain under the gravity as we do. With every step, they gain on us.

Iri and I dart around a corner, onto a broad, open causeway, longer across than the Parastrata and Æther put together, and domed in glass. The whole Void opens up above us. I gasp. Crowds of people shuffle across the causeway like bees on the face of a hive. Iri tugs my hand. We plunge into the thick of the crowd. I match her step and we lift our knees, run faster than any girls on any crewe have ever run. My lungs are tight and fighting now. My palm sweats in hers, but I grip her harder so we won’t slip apart.

At the far end of the causeway, a series of black-sheened doors leading to tiny, glowing-white rooms slide open and shut. As we close in, I see one door seal closed over a woman in a clinging black bodysuit with an orange robe draped over her shoulder, then open in a matter of heartbeats to reveal a man with skin as leached of color as his hair. I pull Iri’s hand, slowing us.

“It’s only an elevation shaft, Ava.” She says it soothing, like I would talk to the goats, and her tone unknots my snarl of panic enough to keep me running.

We race to the doors. I push myself faster, air coming hard. The nearest door must sense our weight on the floor tiles and begins to slide open. Iri and I turn our bodies sideways to fit through and careen into the tiny room. I spin. Jerej and the Watches shove through the crowd and bear down on us. The doors pause, sensing their weight.

I look up. There—a grid pad beside the sliding doors. It’s larger than the pattern lock on the latchport, its symbols a snarl of lines and curves all pressed against one another. And then above the grid, a panel with an orange-yellow line of light shining around its edges, some like the one inside the women’s quarters aboard the Æther. I slap my hand against it just as Jerej reaches us. He shouts, but the door slides closed, cutting off his cry. My stomach drops as we shoot up the shaft.

CHAPTER .10

Our first blind trip up the shaft takes us to the repairs tier, where carracks and frigates and barques lie with their innards spilled open, solar sails tattered and rent, hulls hefted up on lifts, while sparks rain down around them. We try again, and the shaft dumps us out in a long, narrow hallway somewhere in the depths of the station, lined with greasy windows. Barracks for the station’s crews, I guess, or those wanting a cheap bed between ship transfers.

We duck under lines of damp laundry strung across the corridor. A thickset girl with a metal barrel balanced on one shoulder nudges her way through the tangle. We press flat against a wall to let her pass. An older woman with lank hair and sores clustered around her mouth stares at us from one of the doorways, a grubby-faced baby toddling across the cramped room behind her. Farther on, another door swings open behind us. A pink-faced man with rotten teeth leans out.

“You ladies after some company?” He takes a wavering step toward us. The sour reek of alcohol wafts from his soiled clothes. “I got a room here if you want some company.”

Iri shakes her head and presses me forward.

“One drink? We’re friends, aren’t we?” the man calls after us. “We can be friends.”

We stride away as fast as we can without running. The hall goes on and on, smeary windows narrowing into infinity. I think the roof must be slowly sloping down on us, and any minute I’m sure another door will swing open, someone worse will block our path. The Parastrata’s wives are full of stories of girls who’d wandered away from their crewes being robbed or raped or cut up in tiny pieces and fed into nutrition recyclers.

Finally the hall ends in a round metal service door. Iri pulls it open and steps into the dark. I try to follow, but the moment I put my foot down, the ground shifts, as if I’m wheeling into a fall. I cry out and reach for Iri’s hand.

“Here, Ava.” Iri catches me.

The wheeling stops as suddenly as it started. I look around. We’re standing in a long service shaft. The lights above us fizz on, but behind us and ahead, the shaft fades roundly into blackness. I turn to my right, to the door that brought us here. The dim corridor with its grimy windows has flipped on its side, so all the windows now lie where the floor and ceiling should be.

“What . . . ,” I start to ask.

“It’s the gravity,” Iri whispers. “The stationmakers changed its direction to make it easier to move things between levels.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I never knew men could change gravity. I thought it was only something that was.

“Forward or back?” Iri asks.

“Forward,” I say. The Parastrata’s tier hangs somewhere ahead or above us, but I don’t want to think on what might be lurking in the tiers even lower than where we are now.

We walk. As we reach each new section, the lights click on before us and snuff out behind. Our footsteps echo into the dark. Each tier has its own door, with its own narrow window looking out onto the tipped level. Someone has bolted vinyl plates stamped with symbols beside each doorframe. I stare at them hopelessly, praying the trick of reading will come to me if I stare long enough. After we’re bound, I’ll show you how to read. . . .

My Luck. Have they sent him out to meet the Void? He’s the captain’s own son. Surely his life must be worth more than mine. Someone on his crewe will save him, as Iri saved me. Or maybe if we tell the right people, they can help us. We can save him ourselves.

How many more levels above us? How far have we come? At last we peek through a door and find a concourse stretched broad in front of us, bustling with people lugging bags and pushing hover trolleys of small crates. I crack the door to get a better look. The sweet smell of well-scrubbed air rushes in, along with the crackle of advertisements from nearby speakers and handhelds. This level is some like the Parastrata’s, with its vendors and food stands, but brighter. Boxed holograms of ferns and flowers extend down the center of the concourse, flanked by white benches.

“The passenger tier,” Iri breathes in my ear.

“Security alert.” A cool, toneless woman’s voice interrupts the stream of advertisements. I shrink back. The voice echoes up the shaft. “Sixteen year-old girl reported missing. Last seen in the company of an older female relative, believed to have abducted the girl. Both have red hair, of merchant tribe descent. Please report to the nearest security station if you see these individuals. Code five-two-nine.”

Iri and I stare at each other, wide-eyed. Damn. I slam the door shut. How did they do that? How did they know? Jerej or my father must have talked someone into helping to hunt us down. They must have told them what I did. No one will help us now. I slump against the door, my heart choking me. I have to push the thought of Luck away, or I’ll lie down here and never get up again. We have to keep moving.

I clear my throat. “What now?”

Iri kneels at the center of the shaft. “I thought on that.” She turns out her pockets and produces rolls of homespun cloth, copper handspools, dull, greening coins from a bridal headdress, seemingly anything of value she could fit in her pockets before she fled.

“For trade,” she says.

“Trade?” I echo her dumbly.

Iri nods. “I know someone what could help us groundways.”

“You know someone groundways?” I gape at her, the danger of Jerej and the Watches momentarily forgotten. She might as well have said she knows some Void zephyrs.

“I do.” Iri sets her mouth in a line, as if she’s unsure how much to trust telling me.

I crouch down next to her and finger one of the corroded coins. “Who?”

“You remember,” Iri says slowly. “You remember when your mother went on to the Void, how the so doctor’s daughter came aboard to sort things with your great-grandfather Harrah?”

Her strange figure, with only her hands and face uncovered, passes before my eyes like a ghost. Turrut and Hah. Maybe she’s come to snatch you ’way.

“I remember.”

Iri stacks the coins. They click-click-click like dripping water. “I knew her some.”

“Knew her?”

“Yes,” Iri says. “If we reach her, she’ll help.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

Iri looks up. “Because she helped before.”

Something in Iri’s tone tells me not to press. Whatever the so doctor’s daughter helped her do, it’s something that can’t be spoken aloud, even now, some ten turns later.

“Do you know where she is?” I ask instead.

“Groundways,” Iri says.

“But groundways where?”

“Earth. Mum—” Iri stumbles over the word. “Mumbai.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. A city, I think.”

I think on the colonies and outposts the men have come back telling us about. Little clusters of airtight buildings surrounded by fields of solar panels, nitrogen pumps, and domed dioxide converters. Even with Earth close packed as it is, could it be so hard to find a person once you’ve got it narrowed down to a single city?

“We send out a call to her?” I ask. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”

Iri looks uneasy. She shakes her head.

“What then?”

Iri hesitates.

“You can’t mean . . .” I recoil. I think I know what Iri means to do. “Oh, no.”

“Only for a little bit, Ava.”

“No.”

“Don’t you hear? They’ve got the whole station looking for us. They could be listening if we send out a call. The only way to reach her safe is to go there. Go groundways. I heard some of the men talking once on how you can rent out a slot on a ferry ship. You can pay to keep your name hidden, even.”

“No,” I say again. “Iri, what are you thinking? We can’t.” As if in warning, the lights above us power down, leaving us in darkness. We’ve been still too long.

“Look how we are without the ship,” I say. Winded and lead boned, ready to cave to the Earth’s call. “Going groundways might kill us.” Or worse.

“The so doctor’s daughter bears it,” Iri says quietly. She knows the Word as well as I.

But who knows what living groundways has done to the so doctor’s daughter, how it’s changed her? Is she still even a woman, or do you have to become something else to bear the Earth beneath your feet?

“No, Iri,” I say into the dark. “Please, no.”

She touches my arm. “It’s the only way I can figure, Ava.”

“We can sign ourselves on a work detail with one of the industrial shippers. Or hire out here for some duties, doing cleaning or what. Or beg our way onto a new crewe. I heard Jerej say one time the Nau crewe’s too interbred. They need women—”

“Aviso de seguridad,” the woman’s smooth voice interrupts, rounding into its next language cycle.

Iri huffs. “No shipper’s going to hire us with that over our heads, and no crewe will take us either, not even the Nau. You forget, you’re dead as much to them as to the Parastrata. And I’m no prize as a wife either, especially on a crewe desperate for birthers.”

She glances down at her flat stomach and pulls her eyes away before she thinks I see. But I do. I see. It pains her. The weight of what Iri has done in saving me falls on me. She’s given up any chance of marrying again, given up all chance of trying for smallones, and all for me.

“I’ll do it.” I hear myself say the words. “I’ll go.”

Iri and I climb out of the service shaft into the passenger tier. The world tips again as gravity realigns itself, but I’m ready for it this time. We slip into the crowd pushing its way along the concourse. Men and women walk freely here, and we melt into the flow of print silks and hyperbaric suits, dark skin and pale. I look for Jerej and the Watches. No sign of them, not yet at least.

“Avis de sécurité.”

Doors line both sides of the concourse, each with a desk or booth stationed beside it. A dark-skinned woman with a burst of gold-tipped black curls, a white shirt cut to show off her collarbone, trousers, and knee-high boots sits by the nearest one, splay-legged on a chair. Behind her, a latchport joins her short-range sloop to the station. She tracks us a few paces out of the corner of her eye, expertly cracking a nut between her palm and the flat of a long knife. She crumbles the shell to the floor and pops the meat into her mouth. A deep, puckered scar trails down the side of her nose and interrupts her red-painted mouth on one side. I press closer to Iri.

“There,” Iri says. She steers us to a set of booths before the gangway to a fat passenger ferry. A ghostly image of a comet circling a planet rotates above the booths, and the woman on the other side of the glass wears the same symbol pinned to her lapel. She is all clean and smooth. Her dark hair shines, her lips shimmer an eye-aching pink-orange, and soft glitters and pigments dust all the planes of her face.

“Welcome to Hyakutake Stellar Transit.” The woman leans forward with a smile. “Our service is simply stellar! Where can we fly you today?”

“M-Mumbai,” says Iri.

The woman shakes her head, but her smile doesn’t falter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”

“Mumbai,” I blurt out.

She shakes her head again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”

I narrow my eyes. Something is off, the way her hair bobs exactly the same each time she shakes her head, the same lilts and dips on the same words.

“A hologram,” I say, and as I say it, I notice the faint transparency of the woman’s shoulders. I step to one side, and she shrinks flat in the glass.

Iri nods as if she knows this already. “Mumbai,” she repeats, clear and confident.

“Transit to Mumbai will require overland transport from landing point: Dubai International Spaceport,” the hologrammed woman says. A transparent map springs up in the top corner of the glass, showing the overland path the hologram proposes in glowing blue. “Would you like to book overland passage now or when you arrive?”

“What’s the cost?” Iri says.

The woman shakes her head again and smiles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say ‘now’ or ‘when I arrive.’”

“Now,” Iri says, sharp in her hurry. She checks over her shoulder. “What’s the cost, please?”

“Your ticketing options are displayed here.” The projection gestures to her left, and a long pattern of columned symbols expands above her hand. Sparse Vs and As scatter through the words, but they do me no good.

“Please select your preferred pricing choice by touching the screen.”

A toneless overhead voice slips itself between us, a soft warning. “Jĭng bào . . .”

I look at Iri, worried. Her lips press thin. “We need someone live,” she says to me. She scans the crowded concourse. “Some small boat, someone we can bargain with.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” The hologram shakes her head again and smiles.

“Never mind. Cancel.” Iri waves her hand at the hologram. “We don’t . . . cancel.”

The lines of symbols fade, leaving only the woman projected in the glass. “Thank you for considering Hyakutake Stellar Transit for your travel needs.” She freezes with her chin slightly tilted, smiling mouth wide.

We slink away. Iri’s eyes dart from ship to ship. No one manning the ticketing carrel of the midsized utilitarian carrier, only another hologram. A tall man with a shaved head glaring out at us from beside a needle-nosed transport. An older woman steeped in fuel and alcohol fumes sitting by the last ship.

Iri creeps up to the man, head bowed in respect. “Please, so, we could book passage?”

He chews something slowly, looking her over. “Can you pay?”

Iri opens a fold of her cloth bundle to display the treasures she robbed from the Parastrata.

The man plucks up one of the coins and rubs it with his thumb. A smudge of green wears off on his skin. He tosses it back to Iri with a look of disgust. “Credit only.”

“Please, so, those are bride coins,” I put in.

“Worthless is what they are,” he says. “What, you think I can fuel a ship on rags and moldy coins?”

Iri shrinks as though he’s slapped her. I start to speak back, but she loops her arm through mine and hurries us away. We stop in the center of the concourse. People elbow around us, dodge us as we stand like stone, Iri’s treasures cradled between us.

“We can’t go arguing, calling eyes on ourselves.” She shakes her head over the bundle. “I thought it was worth something.”

“Me too.” We’ve never not been able to get something through trade with the other crewes or one of the colony outposts. Could the people close in to Earth really be this different from us? How do you bargain with them? I look up, over Iri’s shoulder. The woman with the knife has her head cocked in our direction again, the scar down her face making her expression unreadable.

Iri sees me looking. She turns. “Her?” She spins back around to me. A smile picks at the corners of her mouth. “Perfect, Ava. Good watching.”

“No, wait, Iri.” Something about the scarred woman makes me uneasy. Mercies know what walking on the Earth has done to her, if it’s made her mind and soul as malformed as her face. In the oldgirls’ stories, you can always read the map of someone’s soul by her looks. I try to catch Iri, but she slips out of my grasp and strides up to the woman.

I hang back, unsure. The knife woman looks from Iri to me, back to Iri. Iri waves her free hand in circles, holds it out, pleading, and proffers the stolen bundle. The woman takes it, weighs its heft in her hand, and looks back at me.

Iri follows her gaze. “Ava, come.” She waves me closer, new hope simmering in her eyes.

I hug my arms across my chest, duck my head, and walk quick to Iri’s side. I scan the crowd for signs of the Watches and step light, in case I have to run again.

“This is Captain Guiteau.” Iri says. She puts her arm around my shoulders and speaks to the scarred woman. “You see, we’re neither of us much heavy.”

The captain hands the bundle back to Iri, but she keeps her eyes on me. “I don’t doubt it. But this is only a mail sloop, ladies. Now, if you’ve got packages, or you want me to take any of that down to the surface . . .” She nods at Iri’s armful of cloth. “That I can do. Certified delivery.”

When she speaks, only the right side of her mouth moves, the undamaged side. The corner sliced by the scar stays stiff, making her every word a grimace. It was some bad, whatever made this cut. I look away quick so she won’t see me staring.

“Please.” Iri tries again, quietly. “There’s a woman we know groundways what can give you more, if you only take us to her. Just a space on the cargo floor, that’s all I’m asking.”

Captain Guiteau shakes her head. “I can’t put live people in my cargo hold. It’s not temperature regulated, much less space tight. I’m not landing with two dead bodies mixed up in my delivery.”

“Please, so captain . . .”

The handheld clipped to the captain’s belt crackles to life. “Security alert . . .”

Captain Guiteau flicks her eyes down to the handheld. She looks at me and deliberately switches it off. “What’s down there you need so bad?” She folds her arms across her chest.

The words won’t leave my mouth. I look to Iri.

“Her . . . ” Iri searches for the word. “Her modrie. Her mother’s sister.”

My mother’s sister. I’ve never heard it put together that way, what the so doctor’s daughter was to my mother. My mind fumbles, trying to fit the words with my memories. My mother’s sister. My blood modrie. Maybe she come an’ snatch you ’way.

Captain Guiteau watches me. I look away and stare blindly at the crowd. Only a day or two ago, so many people pressed together made me feel near drowned, but now it’s easier to watch them flowing up and down both sides of the concourse, like fish moving together. I watch their heads bobbing. Bird’s-eye black and white and brown and red. I stop. Red. I try to tie my thoughts together. Red. A cluster of red hair surging along the edge of the crowd.

I clutch Iri’s arm. She follows my gaze and sees what I’ve seen. My father and Jerej, tense with purpose, and a whole party of flame-haired men fanning out through the crowd.

“Run, Iri,” I whisper. I grip her hand and tug.

“Wait!” the captain calls.

Iri hesitates.

No. Go, we’ve got to go. I pull her.

Captain Guiteau’s eyes flick from me to Iri, Jerej to my father, the Watches to me. I can see her mind making its final rotation, all the pieces falling into their lines.

In that moment, my father turns. He sees me, sees Iri. He shouts at Jerej over the steady shuffle and hum of the crowd. Some of the passengers slow and stare, more and more eyes snapping on to us. Any moment they’ll come shoving through the crowd and drag me and Iri back to the Parastrata’s coldroom, but Iri waits, her eyes locked on the captain of the mail sloop. Time slows. My father thrusts a gaping passenger aside. Jerej signals the other men with a wave of his arm.

The captain purses her mouth. Decides. “I can take one.”

Iri doesn’t hesitate. “Ava. Take Ava.” She thrusts the bundle of cloth at me and pushes me into the captain’s arms. “Run. Go now.”

“But—” I stare dumbly at the bundle.

Captain Guiteau locks a hand around my wrist. “This way.” She tucks her long knife inside her belt and pulls me after her to the latchdoor joining her ship to the station, wrenches it open. “Quick, now.”

I turn in time to see my father tackle Iri to the ground. Her chin smacks the floor hard, a sound like an egg cracking. “Soraya Hertz,” Iri shouts. Blood coats her teeth. “Your modrie, her name is Soraya Hertz. Don’t forget!”

The captain pulls me through the door. It swings shut and locks with a fisss, but not before I catch sight of Iri struggling on the floor beneath three men, while a crowd of open-mouthed travelers looks on.

“Iri!”

I nearly break free, but the captain is fast and stronger than me. “Come on, fi. There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“But . . .”

“She wanted this.” Captain Gitueau spins me around so our eyes meet. “You understand? She wanted you to get away. Now we’ve got to get away. So we run.” She releases my arm.

I run.

CHAPTER .11

The mail sloop’s gravity field is low. My stomach flips and my hair stands on end as Captain Guiteau veers out of the station’s orbit, toward the vast, luminous curve of blue. I hold on tight, strapped into one of the ship’s two narrow seats, as the entire cabin judders under the engines’ vibrations. I’m going to be sick. I clutch my stomach and close my eyes, trying not to think about the looming brightness below or the blood in Iri’s mouth or the fact that I am leaving Luck behind.

“It’s okay,” Captain Guiteau says. The ship’s burners whine down. “We’re out of it now.”

I open my eyes. Only a slim crescent of Void is visible in the viewport. The rest is bright, too bright, as if a ship’s solar sails are angled face-on at me. I squint and put up my hand to block the light.

“Who are those men after you?” Captain Guiteau concentrates on pushing down one of the levers on her console by its tape-wrapped handle. “You want to tell me?”

“My father.” I can’t look at her, can’t look out at the bright planet, can’t close my eyes without seeing Iri and Luck. I turn my head to the wall. “My brother, too.”

“What’d you do to rile them so? Steal something? Kiss a boy they don’t like?”

The teasing’s clear in her voice, but it cuts me too close. A sharp chemical burn arcs through my nose and eyes. I will not cry, not now.

“Something bad,” I manage. Something so bad even she can’t imagine it, this scarred, Earthborn woman who treks between Earth and sky without a man to guard her, who paints her ruined lips. So bad she’s the one pitying me.

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth what they had in mind to do to you.” Her voice dips quiet again. She makes a careful study of the flickering needles and signals streaming over the console.

“How do you know what they were going to do?” For the first time I notice something sad and soft in the corners of her fierce mouth.

“That look on their faces? I’ve seen it before.” She frowns. “It always means the same thing.”

I stare at her. I can’t put my mind around her brokenness and her boldness, how it can all be wrapped up in the same person.

The cabin wall behind her catches my eye. A host of flat metal figures hang from nails driven into the bulkhead—sunbursts and crowned snakes and roosters—all rattling in time with the engines.

“What are those?”

She glances up from the controls and smiles briefly. “Good-luck charms. My little girl makes them for me.”

I mean to ask if they work, but Earth swells in the viewport and my mouth goes dry.

“Buckled in?” the captain asks. And then an afterthought. “You ever been planetside?”

I shake my head.

She casts a worried look at me, but it’s too late. We’re going in. “Hold tight,” she says. “The gravity’s going to hit you bad.”

Vibrations pick up all along the sloop’s body as we breach the atmosphere, building until the ship rocks beneath us. I cling to my crossed shoulder straps with both hands.

A flare of light explodes across the viewport, and something kicks me in the chest, hard, knocking all the wind out of me. I try to draw breath, but my lungs won’t listen. They hang heavy, as if they’ve been dipped in lead. The ship plummets, speed pushing me into the seat. Darkness speckles my vision. I gasp. Is this it? Is this what the oldgirls meant when they warned us of the Earth’s touch? Is this how it feels to have your soul shucked from your body? The muscles in my legs, my hands, my head, my eyelids, all of them weigh on me. My skin has turned to a shell. My heart labors against my chest, aching with every ragged beat.

“Hang in there,” Captain Guiteau shouts over the clamor. “I’m taking us lower. Once we’re down, we can drop speed and lose a few Gs.”

I can’t make sense of her words. Everything moves slow, slow, with the beat of my heart. I don’t know this woman. She could do anything to me and no one would ever hear of it. Panic pierces my fog, pulls me up sharp enough to force my eyes open on the blazing white cloud tops.

“Close your eyes,” the captain says. “Keep your mind on your breathing. We’re almost there.” As she says it, the burners whine back and the rattling steadies to a soft chak-a-chak-a-chak. The weight on my body eases some, enough to let me breathe shallow and clear the spots from my eyes.

Captain Guiteau snaps several switches on the console. “What was your ship’s gravity rating?” she asks, not looking at me.

Gravity rating?

“I don’t . . .” But then I remember the training room and how the men on groundways duty prepare themselves before they go down. They strap on weighted belts and run to keep their hearts and bodies used to the strain of the Earth’s pull.

“Long-range ships mostly don’t go below point six-eight Gs,” the captain says, thinking aloud. “You’ve really never been planetside before? What were your people, traders?”

“Merchant crewe.” I stop, breathe. The effort of talking is burning through all my energy.

“I know folk buck that ninety-days regulation, but I’ve never heard of anyone going their whole life without touching down planetside unless their ship’s rated a full one G,” the captain mutters. “Your people kept you on a cardiovascular conditioning regimen at least, right?”

I don’t know what she’s saying, but it doesn’t matter. “Women of the air, stay aloft,” I whisper, and smile bitterly to myself.

The captain shoots a glance at me. “You okay, fi?”

I shake my head and let my eyes close. My body feels old and crushed with pain. “I’m dead.”

“Dead?” she asks carefully, as if she thinks I might be dream talking, half gone with pain and fatigue.

I nod. The sun’s glare sweeps over my face as the ship ducks out from beneath a cloud, turning the world inside my eyelids red. “Dead.”

CHAPTER .12

Heat. Clinging, humid, the kind that leaves my lungs boiled and limp. The kind I woke to each newday on the Parastrata. For a moment, I think I’m back, back home, with Lifil curled beside me, Iri and Luck both safe. But then I work my eyes open and the light floods in, heavy and gold, like the whole world is drowned in cooking oil. A smallgirl of maybe eight turns leans over me. Short black braids spring out below her ears. She looks at me with wide eyes a deep honey-amber, some shades lighter than her dark brown skin.

She breathes in sharp. “Manman, she opened her eyes!”

I close them again and try to remember. The world bobbing up and down, a violently blue sky. My hair soaked in sweat. Shouting and hands on my arms, lifting me. A glimpse—water all around and a . . . a . . . what’s it called? A boat, painted deep purple and pink and yolk yellow, its roof stacked high with parcels and riders, cutting away through deep water. Then patchwork walls and tin roofs baking under the sun’s glare. The smell of fuel smoke soaking the air, and everywhere constant, baking light and voices.

And then shade. The tik-tik-tik of a fan spinning lazily overhead. A man’s hand, large and cool and dry, resting on my forehead. “Li fret . . .” His voice, rustling soft like the papery skin of his hand. “Ki sa li genyen?”

The captain, speaking low in the same language, folding something into his hand. The man’s fingers pressed to the pulse below my jaw and something fitted over my nose, piping cool, sweet oxygen to my aching lungs. A needle prick at the inside fold of my arm, and the drop into nothingness.

Until now. I try to push myself up, but my muscles quake with the effort and I fall back on the cushioned pallet, covered in sweat. It feels as though someone is digging his thick, clumsy fingers into my muscles, pulling them apart thread by thread. All I can do is lie still and wait for my limbs to unlock.

The smallgirl stares at me in fright. “Manman!”

Captain Guiteau sticks her head into the room. She’s shed her jacket and beaded belt in favor of a heavy leather mechanic’s apron and welding goggles.

She kneels by my side. “Hand me one of those calcium packs, Miyole.”

Captain Guiteau hangs a floppy bladder full of chalk-white liquid from a metal hook above my bed and connects it to a small plastic something sticking out of my arm.

“Give it a minute, fi.” Captain Guiteau brushes the damp hair from my forehead.

The cramps pulse and fade. My muscles unlock, but my body feels shattered. I lie back, breathing hard. A streaky painting of a pink woman with a fish tail covers the wall above me. A whirring fan balances in one of the room’s high windows. I look around. Captain Guiteau and Miyole crouch by my head, watching me anxiously. A wall of green-painted shelves stands behind them, bowed in the middle by the weight of food and mechanical parts stacked ceiling high.

“There now.” Captain Guiteau helps me push myself up until I’m leaning against the wall. The glass in me grinds against my bones as I move, but when I look down, my skin is smooth as ever. How can the captain and this smallgirl move so quick and easy under the Earth’s grip?

Another wave of nausea ripples over me. I close my eyes, breathing hard despite the thin, flexible tubes pumping air into my nose. I finger the gummy piece of tape bound around my elbow. My own clothes are gone, replaced by a white, wash-worn shift that barely covers my knees. I clutch at my neck for the data pendant. It still hangs there, warm against my skin.

“W-Where am I?” My throat feels burned and raw; my stomach tender and empty, as if someone’s been kicking my middle with a hard boot. The smell of sick lingers in the air.

“East Gyre,” the captain says. She must see the look on my face, because she continues. “In the Pacific. You’re Earthside, fi.”

Earthside. I lean forward and try to push myself to my feet, but my legs give out. I slump back against the wall. “Iri . . .” It’s as if my tongue has become mud. I can’t make the rest of it come out.

“Don’t move too much or you’ll pull out the IV.” The captain reaches behind her back to pull the ties on her leather apron. “You want some water? Something to eat?”

“Water.”

The captain nods to the smallgirl, Miyole. She scurries off and brings back warm, bitter-tasting water in a pewter cup.

“It’s the quinine,” Miyole says quietly as I drink. “So you don’t catch blood sickness from the mosquitos.”

I sip, trying to ignore the bitterness and the cramp spreading all through my stomach. I can’t remember the last time I ate, but it might have been the feast my first—and last—night aboard the Æther. Miyole watches me drink, serious faced, and takes the cup away when I’ve finished.

The captain loops her apron on a nail and wipes her hands on a rag. “I’ve got to make a run up to Bhutto station and then to Cuzco, but we’ll talk when I’m back.” She looks to the smallgirl. “Try to keep her awake, Miyole. The longer she sits up, the better.”

“Wi, Manman.”

“Come and hug me,” the captain says. She kneels down and holds out her arms. The smallgirl runs into them.

“Be careful,” Miyole says. “Promise, Manman.”

“Wi, ma chére.” The captain touches her head to Miyole’s. She starts for the door.

“Please,” I say. There’s so much I need to ask her. Where exactly I am and why I’m so weak and why I’m not dead altogether. And I should thank her. And I don’t even know . . .

“It can wait,” the captain says.

“But I don’t even know your name.” I don’t recognize my own voice.

“Perpétue.” She gives a funny half bow, half salute. “Gyre Parcel Service. And my daughter, Miyole. But believe me, Ava, the rest can wait.”

I close my mouth and let my head fall against the wall. I nod. With a wave, Perpétue disappears out the back door, and a few minutes later a high whine fills the air, followed by a thrumming whum-whum, like the giant fans deep in the Parastrata’s innards. The shriek and roar of the mail sloop’s burners build and lift her away.

“Watch,” Miyole says. She runs to the window on the other side of the room and points up to a bare patch of bleached sky.

I squint as the sloop races by, up and away into the blinding sun. Its engines judder and fade. A chorus of sharp squawks erupt from the roof.

“What’s that?” I whisper.

“Manman’s chickens.” Miyole drops down beside me and crisscrosses her legs. “Manman said you could have soup. You want soup?”

I clear my throat. “Please so.”

Miyole hops up and darts to the kitchen on the other side of the room. She sings a little song under her breath in that other language as she unfolds a portable stove, balances a heavy stew pot on top, and draws two fresh, fat fish out of the plastic cooler shoved against the wall. My eyes widen. We have our biolumes, of course. And once my father made a trade with the Nau crewe for cases on cases of tiny fish preserved in salt and oil, but I’ve never seen any like this. I didn’t know they could grow so big. Miyole scrapes the scales from the meat. Then, with a few deft turns of her knife, she hacks off the heads, slices the fins away, and slits their bellies.

“. . . si li pa dodo, krab la va manjé . . .” Blue flames flare beneath the pot.

When she’s done, Miyole carries a fragrant bowl of broth to me, taking tiny, careful steps to keep it from spilling. She presses a spoon into my hand. Small chunks of tender white meat float in the broth. I could near cry, it smells so good. But the spoon feels like a length of rebar, heavy and unwieldy. My hand shakes as I lift it to my mouth.

Miyole watches me as I struggle with the spoon. “My manman says you were off planetside too long, and that’s why you’re sick and your muscles don’t work right.”

I clamp the spoon in my mouth. The soup is mild and thick. I thought the fish might be salty, but instead it’s light. It eases my stomach.

“Were your people punishing you, keeping you off gravity like that?” Miyole asks.

I shake my head, sip another spoonful.

“Why, then?”

I hesitate. And only men will bear its touch. But if that’s so, how can Captain Guiteau and Miyole manage? My head hurts. I’m not hungry anymore.

“I don’t know.” I put the soup aside and let the spoon clatter down into the near-full bowl.

Miyole hugs her knees and sticks the end of one braid in her mouth. She stares at me. “Why’re you so pale?”

“Pale?” My eyes pop open. Me, pale? All my life, I’ve only wished to be lighter, more like the rest of my crewe. “Most of my crewe doesn’t have any color to them.”

“Really?” She scrunches up her face as if she doesn’t believe me.

I nod. “I’ve got more than most on account of my mother’s father.”

“Was he a spaceside person like you?”

I shake my head. “He was from here, from groundways. He was a so doctor.”

“Why didn’t he make them keep you on gravity?”

“He died.” My throat aches from talking. I close my eyes. “My mother too.”

A few slips of silence tick by, and then Miyole jostles my knee. “Hey, miss. Hey, Ava.”

I open my eyes.

“My manman says to keep you awake.”

“I’m awake,” I say. “It hurts . . .” It hurts to talk, I try to say, but my voice fails me.

Miyole rocks, hugging her knees and sucking on her hair. “You want me to read to you?”

“You can read?”

Miyole gives me a funny look. “Course I can.” She stands.

“Please so, then.”

Miyole runs to an ancient chest of drawers, pulls a metal key from beneath the neck of her shirt, and fits it into top drawer lock. She tugs it open. A moment later, she returns with a piece of clear plastic folded into a neat square. As she unfolds its leaves, they lock open and seal together into a thinner sheet. The moment they join, the sheet lights up from within, as if she’s holding a little shard of sky in her hand. Pictures and symbols pulse across its surface, playing bright colors over Miyole’s hands and face.

“Okay,” Miyole says. “You want a true story or a made-up one?”

I stare at the light sheet, mesmerized. “A true story,” I say finally.

Miyole sees me staring. “What, haven’t you got tablets where you come from?”

There’s no point lying. I’ve seen screens lit and all the men gathered round, but only from the doorway to my father’s quarters. I always sneaked glimpses as I arranged the cups of rice wine and then scurried out again before I could be noticed, but I’d swear we had nothing like this.

“No,” I say.

Miyole shrugs. “My friend Kai doesn’t have one either. My manman says we’re lucky.”

“It’s some pretty,” I agree.

Miyole gives me a long, measuring look. “You can use it if you want. But you can’t touch it with sticky fingers, okay? My manman says that’ll break it.”

I want to smile, but I hurt too much. I can’t even muster the strength to tell her I wouldn’t know how to use it anyway. I nod instead.

“Okay.” Miyole returns to the tablet, all business. “We haven’t got a network signal here, so there’s only what my manman loaded up the last time she went on a run, but there’s lots to choose from. Did you already learn about the Floods in school?”

I shake my head.

“No?” She taps the tablet again. “What about the Third Library of Alexandria? The drowned city of Lanai? The subcontinental levee program?”

I shake my head.

“Ooh, no, wait. Terraforming.” She looks over her tablet at me and grins as if she’s found a sweet in her pocket. “I’m learning about that in the lessons Manman bought me on geosciences.”

I nod and close my eyes.

Miyole clears her throat importantly. “Terraforming is a lengthy process by which planetary bodies are rendered fit for human habitation through the infusion of gases . . .” She stops and giggles, then sneaks a glance at me and puts on her serious face again. “. . . and the release of geothermal energy. Though scientists have long sought a more ex . . .” She stumbles, then rights herself. “Expedient method of terraforming potentially habitable planetary masses, the process still requires the dedication of multiple generations of colonists to achieve an atmospheric balance that will allow life to flourish where it previously did not. The lifeblood of these colonies is the fleet of government-funded and commercial trading ships whose crews volunteer years of their lives to the service of pro . . . provisioning the colonies. Each flight can take years to reach its destination at sublight speeds. . . .” She sounds some like the oldgirls, reciting their stories, reading the air, their words stiff and formal in their mouths.

And as she reads, I’m back aboard the Parastata, watching the silent mass of a red planet misted with green slide beneath our hull. I can almost see the stars beyond the thin stretch of the planet’s newborn atmosphere.

“Ava. Hey, Ava.” Miyole has stopped reading. Her voice is gentle. “Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” I say. I force my eyes open. “I was remembering. We had a route over the red one. Mars?”

“You’ve been there?” Miyole bounces up on her knees and hugs the tablet. “I want to go when I’m grown. I’m going to enroll in a flight academy so I can see Mars and Titus and all the little colonies starting up, but my manman says I have to have to keep my math up if I want to do it.” She pauses for breath. “Did you really go?”

“No. Well, some. I’ve been above it, but women don’t go down on groundways duty.”

“Why?” Miyole cocks her head at me.

“We . . . we . . .” I wave my hand heavily in front of me. How can I explain? It would sully us? Leave us crippled, as I am now? “Don’t. We just don’t.”

Miyole frowns.

“We can’t,” I say, but even as I say it, I know it makes no sense, when the weight of this world is nothing to her.

I give up and fold my hands over my knees. Miyole reads more, about nitrogen balances and something called the cascade effect, but the words run through me as if I’m a sieve. Am I really a husk of skin and bone, while my soul floats lost somewhere above the atmosphere? Is that why I hurt so? Can I get it back if I go up to the stars again, or is it burned up, turned to dust in the flare of our entry? And what of all these groundways women, walking and working and having children, all under the Earth’s sway? Are they soulless, too? And Luck . . .

Thinking on Luck is too hard. It makes my chest hurt.

I put my hands to my belly, suddenly remembering Soli’s roundness and what Luck and I did in the pool. My own flesh slopes in slightly below my ribs. But it could be early still, I remind myself. The thought moves my heart to pounding and fills me with a mix of dread and hope. It could be, I think. My head feels light. I know I didn’t deserve Iri’s sacrifice, but if I have Luck’s smallone, that might make it worthwhile. Maybe some part of him can live on that way. Is it possible to want something and not want it at once?

When she finishes reading, Miyole serves herself some stew and sits at the table, swinging her legs. She stares at the light tablet, stopping to tap it every once in a while and swallow another mouthful of soup. When she’s finished, she cleans her bowl, then neatly folds the tablet back into its square and places it carefully in its drawer. She draws out a sheet of cut metal, along with welding goggles and a little handtool. She sits cross-legged on the floor, twist-clicks the end of the tool so it buzzes to life, and leans over the metal sheet.

“What are you making?” It still hurts to talk, but it’s better than thinking.

“Hmm?” Miyole looks up at me through the goggles.

“The hangings.” I gesture around. “You’re the one what makes them?”

“Oh. Yup.” She holds the piece of metal up so I can see. “This one’s going to be a fish. My manman sells them on her flights sometimes to help buy my lessons.”

“They’re beautiful,” I say.

Miyole shrugs, but I catch a small smile at the corner of her mouth.

I lie on my cot and pretend I can feel Luck’s arms around me as I watch Miyole turn the blank, jagged piece of metal into a scaled fish with lips and eyes and striated fins. The smell of burned metal curls the air. I close my eyes and picture the smallone, Luck’s child, tucked in me. I see Iri again, falling. Blood on her teeth.

In the high window, the sky goes from pale, hot white to deep, creamy blue. All the sounds below us grow louder: the lap of waves on wood, motors gunning, roosters calling, cats scrapping and yowling, people shouting. Wherever we are, it sounds bigger than I imagined. It’s as if someone has settled a cook-pot lid over us, and all the noises are trapped inside. Miyole runs up to the roof to start the generator, then back down again to flick on the ceiling fans and the single tube light suspended over the kitchen table. I doze.

The whum-whum roar of the mail sloop vibrates overhead, waking me. Miyole dashes to the window. From my cot, I watch Perpétue’s ship lights whip overhead and listen for the sigh of the burners winding down. A loud metal bang sounds, and a few seconds later Perpétue’s feet beat up the outer stairs. She breezes in, humming to herself, untucks the knife from her belt and drops it on the table alongside a handful of irregular metal scraps.

“Manman, look!” Miyole holds up the fish, its scales shimmering orange in the low light.

Perpétue takes it and holds it at arm’s length, careful of the pointed fins. “Lovely.” She smiles at Miyole. “Sharp and lovely, like its maker.”

“Did you get me more?” the girl asks.

Perpétue tilts her head to the scraps. “On the table.”

Miyole skips over. She sifts through the metal while Perpétue takes a yellowed plastic jug of water down from a shelf.

“How are you, fi? Any better?” Perpétue calls over her shoulder as wets her hands from the jug, then pumps soap into them and rubs them briskly together.

“So,” I say, even though I’m not sure.

Perpétue turns to her daughter. “Did she eat?”

“Yes, manman,” Miyole says. “I read her my lessons.”

Perpétue splashes water over her hands and dries them on a rag tied to her belt. “That’s good, ma chère.” She kisses her daughter’s head. “Did you eat?”

Miyole nods.

“Good. Go and wash up for bed.”

Perpétue heats a bowl of soup for herself, then breaks down the portable stove and stows it beneath the table. She brings her bowl over and pulls up a chair across from my cot.

“You’ve been sick.” She takes a bite and talks around it. “Your friend, that woman who was with you on Bhutto station, she said you have family planetside?”

I nod and swallow to clear my throat. Iri, the blood on her teeth. “The so doctor’s daughter. She’s my blood modrie. My mother’s sister.”

“Your tante?” Perpétue raises her eyebrows. “That’s good. That’s close family.”

I shake my head. “Not really. I never met her. Or, well . . . she never met me.”

Perpétue leans back in her chair. “But you know her name. What was it?”

“Soraya Hertz,” I say carefully. “But I don’t think she knows about me.”

“You know where she lives?”

“Mumbai?” I say.

Perpétue waits. When I don’t say more, she leans forward in the chair again. “That’s it? Just Mumbai?”

I nod.

“No street or neighborhood or quarter?”

I shake my head.

Perpétue sighs and works her tongue around the inside of her bottom lip, eyes on the fan blades spinning in the breeze. “Anything else about her? Anything to help us track her down?”

“She’s some kind of doctor,” I say. “And my grandfather, her father, he was a doctor, too.”

“Do you know his name?”

“He was Hertz, too,” I say.

“And your tante never married? Never changed her name?” Perpétue rubs her hands together, deep in thought.

Panic strikes me. What if she’s changed it? What if it isn’t enough to track her down?

“I only saw her the once, some ten turns back,” I say. “Do you think we can find her?” If Iri were here, she would know what to do.

Perpétue shakes her head. She rests her forehead on her hands. “I don’t know, Ava.” She looks up at me again. “Mumbai’s a city of a hundred and seventy-five million. Add to that, we don’t know if her name’s the same, or even if she’s still there.”

One hundred seventy-five million. It’s a number so large my mind can’t grab hold of it. My crewe numbered a slip over two hundred, the Æthers somewhere near five hundred. I don’t think I’ve seen more than one or two thousand people in all my life, counting my time at the station concourses. Any number bigger than that might as well not be real. I fix my eyes on the dark square of sky beyond Perpétue’s shoulder and hug my sides, willing myself not to cry. I want to go back to sleep, to dream of Luck and the private glow that surrounded us after we sealed ourselves. Or better yet, not to dream at all.

“But we’ll try, Ava.” Perpétue grips my hand, bringing me back. Her fingers are strong. She presses so hard it hurts. “We’ll try.”

CHAPTER .13

“Good, now once more.” Perpétue holds my arm as I take another shuffling step.

I moan as I bring my foot forward and let my weight fall on it. My legs burn as though someone’s poured fuel into them and set them alight. But I’ve made it from my cot almost all the way to the small cleanroom tucked away between the common room and the sleeping quarters Perpétue and Miyole share. Perpétue has given me my own skirts again, stiff from drying in the sun, but she burned the rag shirt. I wear one of her soft, thin-woven shirts instead. Cotton, she says, from over the sea.

Two weeks awake in her home and I still cannot walk alone. But I haven’t bled either, at least there’s that to hold on to. The chance of Luck’s child. The air hangs thick with heat and waiting.

This East Gyre Perpétue brought me to is nothing like what I thought Earthside would be. My modries all told stories of dust and cold so fierce it made the Earth white, but here the air is always wet and warm, like the dyeroom when the pits are at full boil. Sometimes Perpétue’s house bobs and rocks under my feet, and a moaning noise shudders up from below.

The Gyre is a floating city, Perpétue says, cobbled together from flatbed ships, buildings raised on pontoons, and abandoned research flotillas. She talks on it as I practice walking, to keep my mind off the pain. Deciturns on deciturns ago, even before the time of Candor and Saeleas, the groundways folk thought the sea would gobble up all their waste, so they fed it into the deeps. But instead, it ended up here, where the waters converge in the Gyre, and formed a vast plain of bottles and bags and milky plastic.

“Some of the first ships came to study the island the trash made and the microbes in the water,” Perpétue explains. “But then, when the Floods drowned the Earth’s islands, other people fled here to make a new life, trawling the garbage. That was the start of the Gyre.”

Microbes? I want to say, but I need all of my breath to keep walking.

Perpétue’s house nestles up to the edge of the Caribbean Enclave, lashed to other craft from the lost islands of Jamaica and Cuba and Haiti, what was her ancestors’ home. But there’re folk from every sunken island here, the ice lands and the Philippines and the land of no serpents. She says a body can make a living scavenging and reselling the bits of plastic that make up the Gyre plain. There’s so much the whole city can pick and pick at it and never run out.

“When you’re well, you can go out and see for yourself,” Perpétue says.

But that would mean facing all the stares and the same questions Perpétue and Miyole had for me, again and again. What’s wrong with your skin? Why can’t you walk right? What’d you do to make your own people throw you out? Just thinking on it makes me want to lie down.

“Don’t forget to bend your knees,” Perpétue reminds me.

Miyole clomps by in a pair of ragged-edged pants, rubber shoes a size too big, and a faded flower-print dress. She carries a danger-red kite almost as tall as she is.

“Bye, Manman!”

“Miyole?” Perpétue drops my hand. “Where are you going?”

“Kite flying with Kai.”

Perpétue bites the corner of her lip. “You aren’t going down to the brink, are you?”

Miyole drops her shoulders. “Manman.” She draws the word in a groan.

Perpétue sighs. Even with the short time I’ve been here, I’ve already caught on they’re about to have the same argument as always.

“You know how I feel about the brink, ma chére.”

Miyole rolls her eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Manman.”

“You tell that to Bjarni’s mother.”

“You never let me do anything.”

“I never let you do anything dangerous.”

“Manman.” Miyole’s voice teeters between a plead and a whine. “I’ll be careful, I swear. Kai needs me. His dad’s sick again, and Song and Hobb and me all promised we’d help him keep up with the picking. We’re flying kites after.”

Perpétue sighs again, in resignation this time. “All right. Go. But don’t forget to make Kai give you a hook. I don’t want you reaching down in that water with your bare hands.”

Every morning I watch from the window as a trickle of smallones skip the gaps between the pontoons and climb over the footbridges, on their way down to the brink, where they’ll help their parents fish out a living from the plastic. Not all of them go. Miyole doesn’t, except when she wants. Most mornings she either makes more metal creatures or sits with her tablet, staring and tapping into its light, stopping only to help me walk to the cleanroom or make me take calcium pills to keep my muscles from seizing.

This whole place is a mystery. Perpétue has no man in the house, so she earns her keep ferrying packages from groundways to the station, and between cities here below. Yet she washes and cooks and pushes Miyole to keep pace with her lessons each evening, and even sometimes cooks more for the sick woman with two smallones on the craft next to ours. I asked once where her husband was, but Perpétue’s face went masklike. I haven’t asked again.

I lie still and sweating most of the day, watching shadows track across the floor as the sun arcs overhead. Sometimes I find myself wishing they would turn the daylights out sooner, and then I remember it doesn’t work that way down here. The sun keeps its own time. I close my eyes to it and think on Luck. If it’s quiet, I can coax myself into a sort of half dream—waking by Luck’s side, basking in his smile; him singing to our unborn child as it grows larger inside me. I am tender all over, and I remember Modrie Reller and the other wives saying that was a sign you had got a smallone, that you ached, belly and breasts.

But then Perpétue comes and makes me move and bend and grip as long as I can bear it. She promises we can take Miyole’s tablet up to the top of what was once a research ship in the neighboring Icelanders’ enclave, one of the few spots in the whole Gyre where she can sometimes tap into the wireless networks broadcasting from the distant shores. There are never any storms in Gyre, she says, but elsewhere the Earth is wracking-full of ferocious winds and sudden rainstorms and columns of white-hot fire bolting from sky to land, and a network is a delicate thing.

“Once you’re strong enough,” she says, a steadying arm on my elbow. “Once you’re well.”

I make it to the cleanroom. Perpétue has me sit while she runs a bucket of warm water down from the solar-powered boiler on the roof. She helps me wash my hair, and when it’s clean, she sits me on the floor like I’m a smallgirl and combs it. I close my eyes and let myself relax into the gentle tug of the comb as Perpétue’s fingers unsnarl my locks. It brings me to mind of Iri combing my hair, and me doing the same for Lifil and my other sisters. I hope the Mercies give me a boy child, but if it’s a girl, at least one day I can maybe comb her hair like this.

“Why did you dye your hair?” Perpétue’s voice breaks my reverie.

I put my hand up to my head. “What?”

“Your hair,” Perpétue repeats. “You’ve been coloring it, right?”

“It’s showing?” I say.

“Wi,” Perpétue says. She lifts a lock of hair and runs it through her fingers until they brush my forehead. “To here.”

“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.

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 with 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.

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 offers. “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.

When I turn around again, Miyole sits tense in her chair, hands tight around the tablet, as if she might use it to fend me off. Her mouth is set in a line I know I’ve seen on Perpétue’s face too, something older than her years, something fierce that knows what it is to be broken and to mend.

“Don’t be angry,” she says.

“I’m sorry.” I drop the bag on the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .” But I don’t know what to say, so I go about making our dinner, even though it’s some early and I’ll need to heat it again when Perpétue comes home. Miyole stares at her tablet without touching it, refusing to look on me.

I close the lid over the cookpot. “You want to hear a story?” I ask, gentle, for it’s what I remember most of my mother, the stories she told when I was frightened.

Miyole looks up. She’s only a smallgirl again. She stares at me without blinking some moments, then nods.

“What kind?” I ask.

Miyole looks away. “An adventure.”

“What about the story of how Lord Candor came to be a hero?” I say.

“Who?” Miyole screws up her face at me.

“Candor,” I say. “One of the fathers of the crewes. A great man.”

Miyole shrugs. “Okay.”

I take a breath. “Right so.”

“When Lord Candor married his secondwife Mikim, she was young and fair. As the years passed, she gave him many fine sons. But Mikim grew haughty, for Candor’s firstwife Saeleas had given him only girls, and Mikim knew her sons would succeed their father.

“Now, in those days the skies were wild, and men had much to fear, not only from the cold kiss of the Void and the chaos wrought by storms, but from ship strippers and corsairs. Candor fought many battles with these raiders, and guarded his sons and wives well, for it was known the corsairs took all they captured as slaves. Then one day, on the long dark trek back from the farthest outpost, three corsairs swept down on Candor’s ship, blazing fire. In his wisdom, Candor fled. His ship’s guns had been crippled in the fray. He hid his craft in the shadow of a moon, while above the corsairs prowled, searching for him.

“The women and smallones of Candor’s ship were much afraid. Mikim gathered them together in the belly of the ship and bid everyone sing to drive away their fear. But once their voices joined, their song grew so loud, it rang through the decks and out into the black of the Void itself.

“And the corsairs pricked up their ears.

“Candor hurried below. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Quiet your voices. The raiders stalk above, and only silence will save us.’

“Candor’s other wives fell silent at once, but Mikim laughed. ‘Husband, how little you know! Our voices will never reach their ears. The Void is vast.’

“‘All the same,’ Candor, ever patient, said. ‘I beg you, obey me this once and keep silent, for the sake of our sons and your sister-wives.’

“But Mikim did not mind her husband. When Candor left, again she raised her voice and sang. Her song drove through the ship’s hull and fell on the corsairs’ ears. And before Candor could fix his craft and bring her up fighting, the raiders fell on him. They laid open his ship and snatched away all his wives and smallones, including Mikim and her sons. Candor they mocked and left for dead on the barren moon.

“Candor’s heart filled with grief and rage. With what few of his men remained, he rebuilt his ship, stronger and faster, made it a machine of war. And with it, he chased down the raiders who had stolen his family, and one by one, reclaimed his wives and sons, all except Mikim. Candor harried the corsairs out into the deep, blank edges of the Void, but he never found his secondwife. The Mercies saw fit to humble her and keep her from her kin until the end of her days. So her name hangs as a banner of warning to all who harbor rebellion in their hearts.

“In memory of Mikim’s fault, his other wives gathered together and agreed. From that day, though a woman might hear the sacred songs, she would no more sing them, nor lift her voice above her husband’s. So the songs and scrolls of the Word were given over to men’s keeping, and there they rest safe to this day.

“This pleased the Mercies well, and they blessed Candor with many sons. By faithful Saeleas, he fathered the great Neren, whose deeds are ever sung. In time, his children numbered so many they took up their own ships and spread to every reach of the Void. So Candor’s name is ever spoken, and all his children bless him.”

I fold my hands on the metal table and smile, lost in the sweet rhythm of the story and the memory of my mother’s voice reciting it.

“That’s ridiculous,” Miyole says. “No one could have heard her.”

I blink away my reverie. “What?’

“It wasn’t her fault,” Miyole says. “That isn’t how sound works in space. Don’t you know?”

“It’s . . . it’s the story,” I stammer. “That’s just the way it is.”

“It’s stupid the way it is,” Miyole says. “Candor and them were out to find someone to blame, that’s all. They wanted to make themselves feel better ’cause they couldn’t find her in the end, so they made her the bad guy.”

“No . . .”

“Ava,” Miyole says in a voice that brings all my arguing to an end. “That Mikim lady was right. Sound doesn’t travel in space.”

My mouth hangs open. The Void is my home. Surely that’s one thing I should know more about than Miyole. Still, she every day trots out words and ideas I’ve never run across before—canopy and combustion engine and extinct. I can’t even hold down the letters that roll so easily from her tongue. She could be right. She’s most like right.

“I don’t . . . ,” I begin.

A shirtless smallboy with a thick cap of straight black hair and skin like browned butter comes hurtling through the door. “Miyole!” His eyes are wide. “You got to come down and see!”

Miyole swivels in her chair. Her face comes alight. “Kai!” But then she glances at me and her smile drops. “I can’t. I’m not s’posed to leave her.”

Kai takes me in with a quick look. “You’re that Ava girl, huh?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Bring her with you,” he says to Miyole. “You’ve got to see this.”

I do my best to keep up with them. They clatter down Perpétue’s steps and streak across the swinging driftwood bridges connecting each low-slung barge to the next. By the time I reach the bottom, they’ve disappeared. I pause. All the Gyre is quiet around me in the heat of the day. The barges creak as they bob in the water and the pontoon deck burns my bare feet.

To my right, the doors over the insulated well where Perpétue locks up her sloop at night stand closed. I edge out over them and peer down into the gap between Perpétue’s barge and the next. Two meters down, the gap turns to a deep, sloshing pit of seawater. Miyole and Perpétue told me the depths are full of sharks, awful black-eyed fish with rows of jagged teeth. I shudder and back away.

“Ava!” Miyole waves to me from the top of the neighboring barge. “Hurry up!”

I pick my way over the rickety footbridge. The sea moves, blue and bottomless, beneath my feet. I try not to look down.

Miyole grabs my hand as soon as I reach the other side and pulls me into a fast walk. I wish she would slow down so I could take in more of Gyre—there’s so much more to see than I could make out from the roof—but she’s anxious to catch up with Kai and reach the brink. My first real brush with the city is a blur of music blaring tinny from the upper levels of barges, faded paint peeling from the walls, a boy with a pole full of dangling fish balanced over his shoulder, and sweat-sheened men and women building new walls or lookouts on their roofs. One of the barges has a glass bottom, clear down to the sea and all the dark shapes moving in it. I pull Miyole to a halt when we step up onto it.

“What’s wrong?” She frowns at me.

I look down.

She laughs. “What, this? It’s solid.” She jumps up and down to demonstrate. “Don’t worry. We go over it all the time.”

“Please.” I close my eyes. “Don’t do that.”

Miyole sighs and stops. “You sound like my manman.” She tugs at my hand again. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

As we near the brink, the raised pontoons give way to a broad shore of wood and plastic platforms built level with the water. Rafts and small, aluminum boats with oars rest at their moorings. Beyond, the waste plain extends, flat and bleached by sun and salt, to the horizon. A clump of people has gathered by the very tip of the shore. Kai spots us from the back of the crowd and waves. We hurry to him.

“It’s a monster,” Kai whispers in hushed awe as we sidle to the front of the crowd. “Miko and her boys found it washed up in the middle of the plain. They say it’s fresh. Maybe a shark killed it.”

At the water’s edge, a stout woman with short-cropped black hair and wrinkled, sun-browned skin stands over the dead beast. Its grayish, rubbery body splits into eight puckered arms, all twined around one another in death. One glazed eye looks on us.

Miyole shoves Kai’s shoulder. “That’s no monster, fishbrain. It’s a squid.”

“A giant squid,” the woman—Miko, she must be—standing over it corrects. She nudges its body with the butt of a hooked spear. “Forty footer.”

“Did a shark kill it?” Kai asks eagerly.

Miko shakes her head. “No. No marks on it, see?”

“Those don’t come up to the surface, not on purpose.” Miyole looks to Kai and me and the people standing behind us. “They’re deep creatures. I read about it.”

“It’s a bad sign,” says a red-faced woman with hair the yellow-white of the waste plain. “Means a storm’s stirring up.”

The man beside her laughs. “Everyone knows the Gyre doesn’t get storms. It’s what makes it the Gyre.”

“What do you know about it, eelkin?”

“More than you, you great frozen shark-breathed bat.”

The crowd breaks out in shouts.

“. . . could have died of anything . . .”

“Who do you think you are, telling me how the sea is?”

“. . . pure chance . . .”

“. . . could have killed it, at that . . .”

Miko slams the butt of her spear against the dock—three short raps. Everyone falls silent.

“My sons and I scavenged it, so I’ll say what it means.” Her voice arcs over the crowd. She grins. “And I say it means a feast.”

A shout of agreement goes up from the crowd, and men and women with their fishing knives and hooked spears close in to help butcher the beast, their quarrels forgotten.

That night, a thousand small cookfires spring up at the lip of the brink. Some of the smallones fetch their kites, and we watch them flutter against the sunset. Miyole and I sit with Kai’s family around their raised fire trough while chunks of squid steam and crackle over the flames. When I bite into my share and its hot juices run down my chin, it’s enough to make me forget the hard lines of pain in my legs and back. Miyole tells a story she read, about a fish-tailed girl who falls in love with a prince and trades her voice for a pair of legs. Only when she gets them, it ends up the prince doesn’t love her and every step she takes is like walking on knives. The sadness of it hangs on to me even when Miyole is done. Then Kai’s brothers and sisters coax a little stringed instrument into their father’s hands.

“Sing with us, Ava,” Miyole begs when Kai’s father starts to hum a song they all know.

I shake my head. I couldn’t sing, even if I knew the words. I sit listening to the strum of music and popping fire and the gentle lap of water, and I wonder if there really might be such a place as doesn’t have storms.

CHAPTER .16

Miyole kneels beside Kai and his older brothers and sisters on his family skiff as his mother paddles them into the Gyre plain. The sun hasn’t broken above the water yet, but the sky is lavender and warming. The waste plain radiates a soft, eerie glow, as if it’s lit from within, rather than above. Some of the other scavengers have already rowed so far out into it, they’re nothing more than dark shapes on the horizon.

“Be back before the sun’s high,” I shout to Miyole. “Your mother said.”

“I will,” she yells back. “Don’t forget to practice your reading.”

“Right so!”

I wave again and turn away. Miyole’s tablet keeps stories inside it. Now I’ve got my alphabet, she wants me to try out the sounds of words by reading stories what try to trick with their words that sound near the same. There are so many words to remember, new kinds of animals and things to do with the sky and the movement of the Earth. Some what I thought were empty words—drift and dawn and noon—make more sense now than ever they did closed up in the Parastrata.

But oh, the numbers. Much simpler. Clean, elegant marks, one for each of my fingers. Miyole helps me draw them on my knuckles in ink, and I match the symbols to my counting as I cook and wash, scatter grain for the chickens on the rooftop, and draw my mind away from my little lingering pains. Perpétue still offers me her pills, but they give me drowning dreams. The worst is the one where Modrie Reller feeds me stones and leads me to the dark water gap between the pontoons, then pushes my head below the waves. All the while, Lifil and Miyole splash together on the sunlit surface.

I wander back over the Gyre’s bridges. This is my favorite time of day, the hush straight before sunrise. Most of the scavengers have already gathered on the shore and everyone else is still indoors, cooking breakfast, or waking children, or hanging out clothes to dry. I can drift among the houses and ships alone, my own ghost.

“Luck,” I whisper. “Are you there?”

And I know it’s only fancy, but I listen anyway.

“I miss you,” I tell the air, and I wait for some sign, a gull blown off course or a sudden shift in the wind.

Perpétue’s house comes into view, and my emptiness slips away. There is no room for ghosts here. I pad across the deck and mount the stairs. I have chickens to feed and laundry to hang, and then reading to practice. Twice now, Perpétue has offered to take me up the Icelanders’ tower to search the network for my modrie, but I’ve put her off. The more I learn about reading, the more I see what a fool I’d seem if she found out how little I know. Sometimes I take out Miyole’s tablet and sit looking into its bright, blank screen, trying to work up the will to bring it to life, practice tapping my own words into it. But the most I can ever do is stare at its pulsing blue network light and the word fading in and out beside it, the one I know best now. Searching . . . Searching . . .

“Ava?” Perpétue’s voice rings up from the sloop’s docking well. “Is that you?”

I pause on the stairs, hurry to the side of the well, and poke my head over its lip.

Perpétue stands ankle deep in salt-clouded water, working a hand pump. The ship rises on its struts behind her.

She shades her eyes and looks up at me. “We’ve got a leak. Give me a hand?”

“Right so.” I lower myself down the ladder and splash in beside her. The cold water seeps into my skirt hem, making it leaden.

“Keep pumping.” Perpétue turns the handle over to me and kneels in the water to feel along the seam where the docking well’s floor meets the wall. She doesn’t seem to mind the cold water soaking her up to her knees, but all I can think on is how fast the docking well would fill if the leak got worse, how my heavy clothes might drag me to the bottom as the water rose around my head. I wouldn’t even need a bellyful of stones. I pump faster.

“Ah, wi. Here it is.” Perpétue sloshes to her feet and fetches an L-shaped piece of metal and a cold fuser, like the kind I’d seen Jerej use. She kneels again. The cold fuser fills the water with blue light and a muffled hum, and the surface boils in sudden, choppy ripples. But then there’s a choking sound, and the light cuts out sudden.

“Damn.” Perpétue pulls the fuser out of the water and smacks its side with the heel of her hand. “Always shorting.”

If this machine’s anything like the piston seal or the coaxer Soli showed me how to fix, I might could do it. Couldn’t I? Do I dare ask her? Before I let myself think on it too hard, I push the words out. “Could I look at it, so missus?”

“You?” Perpétue’s face is all surprise.

“Right so.” I try not to mind how the water’s creeping up along my leg and hold out my hand. “I could try.”

Perpétue shrugs and hands it over. “You can’t make it any worse.”

I turn the fuser over in my hands, careful to avoid its burning cold mouth. It looks well raveled, all except a hairline crack in the groove above its trigger. I carry the cold fuser over to the wall where Perpétue keeps her fixers mounted and choose one I know will make the machine’s casing open easy as a hand unfolding. Perpétue drops a worktable down from the wall and snaps on a light for me. The water laps at my calves, but I clamp my teeth together and ignore it. Perpétue doesn’t seem to mind, but then again, she’s wearing boots up to her knees. I lay the cold fuser open and lean in close to inspect it. Tiny beads of moisture dot the workings and the metal around the power cell.

“The seal’s cracked,” I say. “It’s the water what’s shorting it out.”

I reach for a drying fix and hold it over the fuser long enough to steam off the water, then check the connections and snap the machine back together. It closes seamlessly around itself. All the while, Perpétue watches me.

“D’ you have any of that gummy stuff what’s sticky on one side and metal on the other?” I ask. The water touches the back of my knees.

Perpétue raises her eyebrows. “Steel adhesive?” She presses the catch on a drawer built into the wall and rummages through its depths. She comes up with a tight-coiled spool of exactly the stuff I need. “This?”

“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.

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.

“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.

I push the button for tier five. The lift drops, and when the doors roll open for me, I feel even in my skin, balanced and right as I haven’t felt since the moment I stepped off the Parastrata for the first time.

Steam billows up to the commissary ceiling from a row of cookpots and woks. The cooks shuffle their pans over red electric coils and shout back and forth with the people waiting in line. Thick support pillars jut up throughout the room, each spoked by a circle of metal carrels housing the information ports. I slide into an empty one and sit staring blankly at it. A series of silent advertisements rotates on the screen, showing people standing by the seashore, laughing into their handhelds, and others pushing a tiny dog in a screened-in stroller down a tree-lined street. The words flit by too fast for me to make out.

I touch the screen. An orange light pulses to my right, above a slot in the machine. Someone has stuck a piece of adhesive paper to the side of the light, with block letters printed there.

Pa . . . PAY HER. What? No. Here. PAY HERE.

I slide the pay plastic into the slot. The machine sucks it in and spits it back out at me again, but the screen blinks to life, opening up one of the searcher programs I’ve seen Perpétue use. I hunch over the screen and peck in the name I had Miyole spell out for me.

S-O-R-A-Y-A H-E-R-T-Z

Columns of words and pictures spring up and crowd the screen. I sigh. This is going to take some while.

I tick through the links one by one. I hate how slow I am. By the time I figure one link is talking on a dead woman long gone, and another on a girl my age who’s known for her skill at racing a huge beast called a horse, I’ve already chewed up precious minutes. But then, far down at the bottom of the page, I spot a word in the tangled mess of the link. Mumbai. Mumbai! I open the link.

A small, grainy image of a woman standing before a seated crowd spools across the screen. A lavender scarf drapes neatly over her head and around the shoulders of her tailored shirt. A small, dark triangle of hair shows where her scarf pulls back from her brow. I raise my hand unconsciously and touch the ragged tufts of my own hair.

Is it her? Letters float beneath the woman as she speaks.

Dr. Soraya Hertz. My heart leaps. That D-R, that’s what Miyole says I should look for, what groundways folk use to show a person’s a so doctor.

There’s more. The first word is easy. Mumbai. But the next? Un–Univer—Univer-sit—y. University. Mumbai University. I take a deep breath and push on. At, that’s an easy one, but I trip over the next. Kal . . . Kalina. Kalina, it’s no word I know. My heart knocks in my chest. A place, maybe?

“Mumbai University at Kalina,” I whisper aloud. “Dep . . . Depart . . . men—”

“Hey, kid.”

I spin around. Someone thickset—a man, I think at first—stands behind me, thumb hooked under the strap of a traveling bag. Bristly red hair sticks out beneath his short-brimmed hat.

Parastrata. Run.

No. His skin is chapped with windburn. He’s groundways. And then I look again. It’s not a man, but a woman hidden beneath the rough traveling clothes. I’m leaping at shadows. I grip the back of the chair.

“What?” I say.

“You can’t be here ’less you’ve bought something.” She points to the line of people waiting near the commissary kitchens. “That’s the rules, don’t you know?”

“Oh.” I glance at the frozen image of Soraya Hertz. I still have twenty minutes left on the port. “Sorry, so. Thank you. I’ll be straight back.” I stand, pocket my pay plastic, and hurry to the line. I pick out a cup of something that ends up being sweet, spiced tea, too hot to drink just yet, and slide my plastic through a reader, mimicking the people in front of me. But when I get back to my carrel, the red-haired woman has planted herself in my chair. She sits with one leg sprawled out in the aisle, tapping her thumbs against the keyboard.

“Pardon, so missus?” I say quiet.

She doesn’t look up.

“So missus?” I touch her shoulder.

She whirls on me. “What?”

“Can I have my seat back?”

“What, this?” She pulls an innocent face.

The balanced feeling hisses out of me, like air from a pneumatic lift. My first thought is to slink away, but I try to think what Perpétue would do.

“Right so,” I say. “I was looking at something. I claimed that port.”

“Did you now?” She makes a show of looking the terminal up and down. “Now how do you figure that?”

“You’re using the time I paid for.” Precious money what could go to cooking oil or replacement parts for Perpétue’s ship, burning away under this woman’s fingers, and me childish fool enough to fall for her petty trick.

“You accusing me of stealing?”

She’s used to getting away with this, I realize. I wet my lips. “Right so I am, missus.”

Anger ripples over her face, but then she swallows it and smirks. She turns back to the screen. “I guess we’ll see what you can do about it, then.”

I wish to the Mercies I had a knife like Perpétue’s. Then no one would rip me off or step on me or push me aside as though I were windblown trash. No one would grab my face or drag my body where I’ve no want to go. My insides wouldn’t go to jelly when someone yelled at me. I press my nails into the teacup’s soft cardboard sides. Not again. Never again. I dash the cup forward. Its steaming contents splash over the back of the woman’s neck. She screams. The galley goes silent around us.

“Bitch!” she shouts. “I’ll have your guts, you little psychopath!”

I stand still as carved wood. The empty cup hangs from my hand, dripping steaming liquid over my fingers. What have I . . . And then I bolt. Away, dodging tables and pillars, stumbling over chairs, down the corridor to the lifts. It’s only when the door is sliding closed and I’m jamming my finger against the button for tier thirteen that I realize no one has come after me.

I race back to Perpétue’s ship, head down, ignoring the crewmen calling at me. I activate the ship’s cargo doors and crawl up into her dark berth. What have I done? I press my palms over my eyes and sink down against the wall. The woman’s scream still echoes in my head. She wasn’t my father or Jerej or even Modrie Reller. She was a stranger, happy to cheat me the same as that rice broker tried to cheat Perpétue. Only Perpétue never tried to burn his skin off, so far as I knew. Maybe I was wrong to think some bud of my soul was left, that it might be growing back. Else, how could I do something like that?

“Ava?” Perpétue squints into the dark. “I’ve been looking everywhere, fi.”

I can’t stop the awful, animal sound that falls out of my mouth. I turn away from her.

“What’s wrong?” She hurries to kneel by me. “Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” I say, choking on a sob that won’t come. If only that were all it was.

“Tell me, fi, tell me.” She pulls me close and rubs my arms, as if it’s cold I’m suffering from.

I shake my head. “No. You’ll hate me.” I can’t let her see what kind of girl I really am.

“Did you steal something?”

“No.” I wipe the wet blur away from my eyes. “I think I found my modrie. She’s at a place called Mumbai University at Kalina. There was more. I almost had it, but this woman tried to chase me off, and I threw hot tea and burned her.”

Perpétue stares into my face as if she’s waiting to hear more. She blinks. “Is that all?”

I nod, miserable. Thank the Mercies I didn’t have a knife.

Perpétue laughs, then quickly stifles it. “Guess we know you’re no angel, then.”

“It was bad, Perpétue. What with . . .” I stumble. “The way . . . If I know what it is to hurt, doesn’t that mean I should know better than to bring that back around on someone else?”

“No.”

“No?”

“All this suffering.” Perpétue looks deep and unblinking at me. “It doesn’t make us saints, fi. It only makes us human. You understand?”

I shake my head. I don’t know if I believe her. “You would never have done that.”

“You think I’m a good person?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Why?”

I look up into the dark recesses of the berth, thinking. “You’re kind to me and to Miyole. You never cheat anybody out of their share when we ship in supplies to the Gyre. You’re . . .” One of Miyole’s words comes to me. “You’re civil to people.”

Perpétue draws her knife. She turns its blade over in her hands. “You know why I carry this?”

I shake my head. “Protection?”

“That part’s show.” She flips the knife and catches it. “Mostly it’s so I remember.”

“Remember?”

She holds the blade up to her face, beside the deep scar running ruin through her lips. “This knife gave me that. There was a man. . . .” Perpétue looks away. When she speaks again, her voice has the bite of metal. “Miyole’s father. He meant to kill me, but I did for him instead.”

I want to say something, but the air around us has gone so still, I don’t dare disturb it.

Perpétue looks at me. “Would it have been good, Ava, would it have been civil, if I’d let him kill me?”

“No,” I whisper. “But you don’t go around cutting people up either. Or burning anyone.”

“There’s a balance,” Perpétue says. “There’s what you’re forced to do, there’s what you choose, and everything else—most things—are a mix. At best, you’ll spend your life trying not to get hurt, but trying not to do the hurting, either. You won’t always come through, but it’s the best anyone can do. It’s the trying I’d call good.”

Perpétue turns the knife around so its pommel faces me. “Here.”

I look from it to her, confused.

“You’re the one who needs it now.”

“I can’t,” I say. “It’s yours.” I can’t imagine me with her knife any more than I can imagine her without it.

“You can,” she says, and presses it into my hand.

My fingers close over the grip.

Perpétue smiles and slaps my shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got enough cargo to head back planetside. Miyole’s waiting.”

CHAPTER .18

Perpétue lets me break dock and fly us back through the atmosphere. The sky looks sick as we approach the Gyre. Over the open water, clouds mass and muddy themselves to an ashen yellow-gray. Lightning branches above the waves.

“I thought it never stormed here.” I risk a quick look away from the instruments.

“It doesn’t.” Perpétue frowns at the thunderheads looming like monstrous prows over the waste plain. Rain begins to fall, mixing with the salt spray clouding our front viewport. “Here, hand over the controls.”

I surrender the captain’s seat to her. High swells rock the whole of the Gyre by the time we fight our way through the winds to the Caribbean enclave. Sea and sky churn. Perpétue’s face is gray. Neither of us has to speak what the other is thinking. Miyole.

We bring the ship to a hover over Perpétue’s barge. Waves foam over the deck, and the whole structure rocks to and fro. Something red flashes on the roof. Miyole’s kite, snarled in the clothesline. As I watch, it snaps taut, and then the wind snatches it up, out to the roiling gray. The water heaves the docking well up with each crest, then slams it down again into the trough. Impossible to land.

The monster, I remember. They were right. . . .

Perpétue smacks the controls and curses the sloop. “Come on.” She brings us in lower, lower, until the waves slap its tile-armored belly.

“Perpétue . . . ,” I say, nervous.

An awful crack breaks through the howling roar. A three-story structure on a barge several roofs down comes loose from its pontoons with a metallic shriek. It tips to the crashing sea, slow, so slow, and then it hits, sending up a flume of dark water and foam. A great wave rolls toward us, snapping the makeshift bridges.

“Perpétue!” I scream, and reach over to pull up on the thrusters. The sloop heaves up just in time to keep the wave from dragging us under.

Perpétue unbelts herself and climbs out of the captain’s seat. “Take the controls.”

“What are you . . .”

“Take them,” she snaps.

I clamber in, snap the shoulder straps over my chest, and grab the thruster handles. Perpétue already has the engines at three-quarters power, trying to fight the wind.

“Bring us low.” Perpétue clips a short-range radio to her collar.

I struggle to keep the sloop righted above the water. It shudders and jags in the wind, but I bring it to hover some thirty feet above the landing pad on Perpétue’s barge.

“Open the hatch.”

I don’t have to ask what she means to do. I pull the hatch release. In a matter of breaths, I see Perpétue out in the gale, clinging to the end of the steel ladder. The wind lifts the ladder sideways, even with her weight added to it. I bring the ship lower. The walls of Perpétue’s house loom dangerously close, windows dark gray as the sea.

The short-range coms crackle. “Ava?”

I flip the coms to hands-free. “Here!”

“Magnetize the ladder. The switch by the hatch release.”

I see the one she means. “Got it!” I snap the switch. The ladder drops to the metal-plated deck.

Crackling silence.

Then, “I’m down.” I can barely make out Perpétue’s voice over the whipping of the wind and the roaring waves. “Try not to go higher or the ladder’ll pull free. I’ll be quick.”

Wind batters the ship, and all around, the water moves in great, rolling, gray-green hills. Debris from the waste plain washes over the decks and swamps Perpétue’s docking well. The far edge of the barge lists to the side, partially swallowed by the waves.

Perpétue’s panting fills the coms channel. “She’s not here!”

“Where else—” But then I see, through the sheets of falling water and crashing waves. Miyole, and Kai beside her, waving from the widow’s walk of a ramshackle construction two roofs down.

“Perpétue!” I shout. The wind shoves the sloop lower, and for a slip, all I see is terrible, deep water with no end, but I bring it up again. I can’t see Miyole anymore, but I know which building it is. “I saw her!”

“Coming!” Perpétue dashes from the house to the ladder, slipping and scrabbling in the wet. She doesn’t bother to climb beyond the bottom rungs. “Up, Ava, quick.”

I pull the ship up, away from Perpétue’s house, and swing wide to come around to the widow’s walk. I hold the sloop steady as Perpétue dangles from the end of the ladder. I squint through the lashing rain. The only metal to latch on to is the thin railing itself.

She’ll never get down, I think, but then a sudden break in the wind drops us almost on top of the neighboring house.

“I see them.” Her voice squawks through the coms. A beat. Then, “I’m down. Sending Miyole up.”

“Right so.” Sweat slicks my palms, but I don’t dare let go to wipe them dry.

At that moment, darkness falls over the viewport. The whole of the Gyre sucks down, away from the sloop.

“Oh, god,” Perpétue’s voice is suddenly clear. Lightning flashes, illuminating a vast wall of water, higher even than the sloop, rolling straight at us. It sweeps up the debris and the structures of the Gyre and hovers above us. It turns white as it begins to curve over.

“Fly, Ava!” Perpétue shouts. “We’ve got the ladder. Fly!”

I jam the thruster controls up, fighting the wind and the blinding rain, engines hot. Pieces of plastic sheeting and plasterboard rush by, and then the wave is there, racing to meet us.

“Up!” Perpétue screams.

But it’s too late.

The wave’s crest slams us sideways, and we spin over the water. The viewport is sky and water, sky and water. I’m going to die, I think, but my body acts without me, fighting for even keel and height. We roar up into the sky, engines at full power. The clouds revolve and thicken, and everywhere is darkness.

Then suddenly bright, cold sun and blue sky. Below, a vast pinwheeled storm sweeps its arms over the water.

“Perpétue! Miyole! Kai!”

The open coms line fisses with static.

I program the ship’s autopilot to keep us in a holding pattern, unstrap myself, and climb below. Waterlogged packages spill across the floor, what’s left of Perpétue’s delivery. The wind whistles from the open mouth of the berth. I crawl to the edge of the sunlit square.

“Please,” I whisper to the Mercies, but then I reach the bolts holding the ladder to the sloop. My hands brush frayed bristles of metal rope. The ladder is gone. I push myself up on my knees, away from the edge. “No.”

A whimper cuts the darkness behind me. I turn.

“Miyole?”

She hugs her knees with bloodied hands and presses her back hard to the berth’s wall. “They were behind me,” she says. “My manman and Kai. They were behind me.” There is nothing we can do but wait while the storm slowly churns its way north and west, away from the Gyre. Or what once was the Gyre. Some hours later we duck back below the tails of the clouds to find the sea below us picked clean and glittering. I check our coordinates. They’re right. I bring us lower and skim back and forth over the water, praying to the Mercies I’ll spot the remains of a pontoon or a piece of driftwood, anything Perpétue and Kai could have caught hold of. But there’s nothing. The Gyre is simply gone. No boats, no pontoons, not a scrap of the waste plain what gathered there over the generations.

A hollow space opens in me, like my chest is filled with Void. It sucks all the air from my lungs. I was not ready for this, this total, spinning loss. Was it even a day ago Perpétue was joking I should fly all our runs? And now her gone. And Miyole . . .

“Miyole.” My voice sounds unsteady, and I feel cold, as if I’m watching everything from somewhere deep inside.

She lifts her head and stares at me from the copilot’s chair. We’ve washed her bleeding hands with saltwater and wrapped them in strips of silk from one of Perpétue’s parcels. I cut open all the packages with Perpétue’s knife while we waited out the storm. Mostly, they were full of oddments and luxuries, gold-painted eggs, cold-sealed vials full of something what might be quicksilver, cloth so thin you could make it flutter with a breath. Nothing useful.

“We’ve got to find someplace to land,” I say.

Miyole nods.

“We can look for your manman and Kai from there,” I say, even though I know they’re empty words. We can look, but they’re sunk to the endless bottom with the monsters and mermaids and all else the Gyre folk liked to talk on around their fires.

Miyole looks out the window into the soft dusk falling over the ocean. She’s aged a million turns since we left her safe on the Gyre before the storm.

“My manman’s dead,” she says. “Her and Kai.”

“Do you have any other family?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.

Miyole shakes her head. She turns from the window. “We should go to that place you always talk about. Mumbai,” she says. “We can find your tante.”

Dr. Soraya Hertz, Mumbai University at Kalina. It isn’t much, but it’s more than nothing. One of the sloop’s aft engines has taken on a gutter and whine. I haven’t been able to check the ship’s armored tile plates, but I suspect some of them are damaged or else ripped off altogether in the storm. We need to set down, and soon.

“Right so,” I say. “Mumbai.”

I scroll through the navigation log and select the location of the nearest city east of us—the one with the slippery rice dealer. Once we’re nearer to land, we can pick up the network and find Mumbai’s coordinates. And then we’re gone, skimming unsteadily over the water with the engines at quarter lift. The sun goes down before us. We are alone in the air. I can’t afford to look away from the sloop’s jittering instrument panels, but I reach out my hand and take Miyole’s as the night swallows us whole.