Salvage (10 page)

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.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

T
he 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.