Salvage (11 page)

“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.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

O
ur 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.”