Salvage (2 page)

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.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

“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.