Salvage (40 page)

Soraya nods. “My father, your grandfather, built his reputation on this book, this research.” She rests it carefully on the edge of the desk. “He was a controversial man. What he did, that's not how research is done. There was the scandal over his marriage to Maram—my mother left him over it—and so of course everyone wanted to read it.”

“Is that what I am?” I look down at the book. “Is that all we were to him—my mother and grandmother and me? Research?”

I think on Modrie Reller talking up how the so doctor once sent us a pair of cats, a queen and a tom, so we could breed them and sell their offspring to other ships or outposts overrun by rats.
So generous
, all the oldgirls agreed. We could make good money that way. Now I look around at the wealth of this place—water so plentiful we can use it to bathe, and machines to do the cooking and washing—and it's clear that was nothing to him. Those cats were likely strays plucked off the street or bought for the cost of a cup of tea, an afterthought.

You should be grateful he thought of you at all
, Modrie Reller's voice scolds at the back of my head. But he didn't. He didn't care to think on what would become of my mother and me. I always believed he did, that he cherished us from afar. But we were worth no more to him than those cats. He wasn't alive when my mother died, still so young, or when my father tried to trade me off to ther Fortune, but he knew what our lives would be when he left us behind, and he didn't lift a finger to stop it. It's all there in black and white.

I push the chair back and turn to the window. I didn't understand before how mere marks on a screen could cut and ricochet. I didn't understand the power they could have. Suddenly it seems too dangerous to be cooped up here, neatly folded inside when I could burst into flames any minute and bring this whole house, this whole world, down around me.

“I need to go,” I choke out.

“Ava.” Soraya stands, steps between me and the door.

“Please. I can't be in here right now.”

“But it's late.” Soraya wavers. “It's dangerous, a girl out alone at night.”

“Soraya, please.” I hear the desperate, wavering whine in my voice, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. No one has ever cared what happened to me, and right now, I don't either. I only know I need to be away, out of this house, alone. I bolt for the door. Soraya steps aside at the last slip, before I knock into her. I grab my crow from the kitchen charger and stuff it in the pocket of Perpétue's jacket, wrap the leather tight around me, and throw open the front door.

“Ava, wait!” Soraya calls as I duck past the rosewood trees.

But I ignore her. I shut myself down, double my steps, and barrel forward into the humid Mumbai night.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

I
tramp down from the quiet residential paths, house lights winking behind thick shrubbery, to the lev train stop. I ride until I reach the edge of the city and hop off at a random station. The streets teem with people and a whirl of neon and colored signs—
JUICY
pow!
GET SOME NOW
!—
RAM
'
S DREAM
—
HOT
,
HOT HOT
! I thread through narrow streets, dodging a pack of kids staging a water-gun battle and a group of women parading one of their number, a twenty-something girl with hennaed hands and a T-shirt reading
KISS THE BRIDE
, ahead of them. They sing at the top of their lungs. The close buildings and the haze of streetlamps muzzle up the sky and cast everything in a perpetual half day.

Then the buildings part on a footbridge and it rises into view, the Salt, with its water pipes and its light-studded hill looming above me like a great circled hive of lamps and people and buildings. I didn't know where I was going until I was here.

I step quick, half to keep away from the men smoking in alleys and drunks stumbling down the side ways, and half because I can't bear to stand still. All that anger and fear and hate packed tight in me radiates as it burns. The drunks step out of my path and the smokers slip their eyes past me, looking for other girls giving off less heat.

I rattle up against the fence of Rushil's lot. Perpétue's—my—ship curves sleek under several layers of protective sheeting on the other side. I hang against the fence. Now all I feel is empty and old, full up with yearning for something familiar. I key in the number-lock code, slip inside, and race across the darkened lot to the cool, familiar hulk of the sloop.

One sharp tug and the protective sheeting falls around my feet.
My ship. My home
. I punch in half of the code to open the hatch before I remember Rushil and I never finished wiring in the new couplings or the refabricated power cell we gutted from an old fission-powered two-seater. I could open the door manually, but not without enough metal shrieking to wake the entire block.

“Damn.”
I bang the sloop's side with my fist and scan the yard. There, beside a black clipper, a simple steel ladder. I drag it over, lean it against the sloop, and climb the rungs to the top.

Scorch marks from past atmospheric entries streak the tiles, and they still hold the day's heat. I push myself up onto the sloop and sit. From here, I can see all of the Salt and the taller spikes of the city proper beyond, wreathed in a mist of saltwater and light. I wish Perpétue were here to see it. And Luck, him too. The city goes blurry before me. I was wrong. It's not true that no one ever cared for me. It's only that anyone who ever did is gone.

A faint
tap-tap-tap
rings on the ship's ventral side. “Ava?” A muffled voice reaches up to me. Rushil.

I hurry to wipe my eyes and lean over the ship's side. “Here,” I say. “It's me.”

Rushil steps from under the ship, nervously gripping a cricket bat and a hooded lamp.

“What are you . . . Are you okay?” He leans the bat against the sloop's side and starts up the ladder with the lantern still in one hand.

I wait until he reaches the top to answer. “I . . . I don't know.” I don't even know where to begin. There's too much.

Rushil slides back the lantern's hood and balances it on the ship. The light reflects in his glasses. “I saw someone up here. I hoped it was you.”

“Is that why you brought your bat?” I know Rushil only means he hoped it was me and not a shipjacker, but a strange, small thrill trips through me all the same.

He grins. “Yeah. I thought you might have been one of those super-intelligent rats that are supposed to live in the drainage pipes. Ankur's convinced they're real.”

I laugh. “Sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you. It's only . . . I wanted to be alone some. I didn't know where else to go.”

Rushil holds the ladder's top rung. “Do you still want to be? Alone, I mean?”

“What? No.” My words come out half laugh, half cry. I wipe at my eyes again. “No, not any more.”

Rushil climbs up and sits beside me. “Wow, it's nice up here. I can see why Shruti spends so much time up top.”

I laugh again, and the sadness in me breaks some.

Rushil moves his foot next to mine. At first I think it's an accident, but then he taps a little rhythm against the side of my boot. I still feel turned out and empty, but I smile and tap back. Rushil lays his hand over mine, and something soft brushes my skin. I look down. A worn strip of leather doubles around his wrist.
My cord
. I raise my eyes to his, lips parted.
He knew I came looking for him. He knew I was sorry
.

He doesn't say anything, but the rough warmth of his palm brings tears to my eyes again.

“I'm not from the Gyre,” I blurt out.

“You're not?” Rushil blinks. “But Miyole . . . you said . . .”

“She is. Her mother took me in before she died. She's the one what taught me to fly this ship. But I came from up there.” I let my eyes drift up. Even the brightest stars can't pierce the city's haze.

“From . . . from spaceside, you mean?” He squints through his glasses at me as if I must be mistaken.

I nod.

“But your aunt, you said she was from here—”

“It's complicated.” I take a breath. I have to let him know. “Rushil, you don't want me.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Don't I?”

“No. You think you do, but I'm not . . .” The words stick in my throat. “I'm some bad matter. Everyone around me only gets hurt. And I . . . I did something . . . something so bad my crewe—my people—didn't want me anymore. That's why I'm here.”

“Ava.” Rushil rolls his eyes. “What could you possibly have done?”

“There was . . . there was Luck.” When I say his name, something gives in me, and everything comes pouring out, all the parts of my past I've hidden away so careful. About Soli and Iri and the way of wives. How I gave myself to Luck, and how we were caught, and how I left him bloodied and shamed. And finally the sentence laid on me, and how Iri saved me, sent me down to the Earth instead of out into the breathless Void.

A tense silence settles between us. “They . . . they tried to put you out alive?” Rushil says at last.

I nod. I let my hair fall over my face.

“Oh, Ava . . .” Rushil tightens his hand over mine.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “But you understand now?”

“I do,” Rushil says.

I sigh. “Good.”

Rushil hooks his thumb around my own. “I don't care if you've been with someone else.”

I pause, shocked. “You don't?”

“No,” Rushil says. “You're still you, Ava, either way.”

A slow warmth spreads through my body. In the ashes where my heart was, a small green shoot nudges up through the black.

Without thinking, I lean across the short distance between us and find Rushil's mouth with mine. He tenses, but then his lips give soft, his hand reaches up to touch my face, and he leans in to me. It's nothing like kissing Luck. This is different, a slower burn what builds and builds, as if our lips are amplifying the charge between us the longer we stay linked. I never thought anyone would touch me this way again, never thought my heart could carry the charge. I give deeper to the kiss, lost in the unexpected heat of it.

When we finally break away, a nervous laugh bubbles out of me.

Rushil stares at me wide-eyed, out of breath. “Ava, I don't—”

But I cut him off with another kiss.

We lean back on the ship's warm tiles. Rushil's breath is sweet with cloves and cardamom, but a pleasant air of fresh sweat clings to his body in the muggy night, too. His palm is rough as he brushes the hair from the back of my neck, but his touch is gentle. I want nothing but to drown myself in kissing him.

After a time, we roll away from each other and lie shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the sky.

“It's late,” Rushil says. “Do you have to go home?”

“No.”

“You want to head over to Zarine's with me?” Rushil tips his head toward me. “She said she scrounged some extra tubing I could have for the sloop.”

I sit up. “My sloop?”

Rushil pushes himself upright. “No, I hear the super-intelligent rats are starting their own Deep Sound Institute.” He smiles and pokes me in the ribs. “Of course yours. Who else's?”

A tingling, awake feeling tickles under my skin. I feel strong. Young. Whole. I don't want to go back, not yet. I want to be out, a part of this night with Rushil. “Okay. Let's go.”

Rushil's street is near empty, but the closer we come to the hill, the more the streets tick with people. Packs of girls lean against one another, laughing, high heels clacking on the pavement as they walk. Boys Rushil's age stand in circles under the streetlights, drinking and feigning jabs at each other. Couples stroll by, arm in arm. Rushil reaches back to grab my hand.

“You know this used to be a slum?” he says. “And then they built the railyards and it turned into mostly warehouses. But now—”

Even from far off, the buildings on the hill hum with voices and muffled music and the buzz of solar generators. We trek deeper into the Salt. It isn't like the south end of the city, all jammed with hot, bright signs trying to draw you in. Here, you have to know where you want to go. Each building is a little boxed glance into another world. A
tapri
full of clinking cups and waiters edging around the crowded tables. A blue-lit room packed with dancing bodies writhing together under a constant beat. A man glancing up from a wrought-iron basin brimming full with dark water. Dozens of shadows milling behind the gauzy curtains of an upstairs loft.

The street sweepers here have all been scooped up and modded at some point. One trundles by carapaced in a fake turtle shell. Another looks as though it's been hennaed. Another blares out tinny music as it charges across the street. We ring up and up, closer to the top of the Salt. Every now and then we catch narrow glimpses of the city and its tight-woven carpet of lights between the buildings on the hill's outer rim.

Two thirds of the way up, Rushil stops. “Here.” He points up at an old warehouse some three stories above us, hanging halfway out over the hill and the lev train tracks below. Thick metal struts anchor the dangling edge to the raw earth of the hill below. A murmur of distant voices and music filters down to us from the lighted windows.

“Here?” I say.

Rushil cups his hands to his mouth and shouts up. “Hey, Zarine! Zarine!”

Someone—a man, not Zarine—leans his head out the window.

“Hey!” Rushil waves his arm. “Let us up.”

A low
clank-clank-clank
starts above us, and slowly, a platform lowers into view, suspended by metal cables. It touches down in a puff of dust beside us. Rushil hops on, and I follow.