Salvage (42 page)

She's crying, I realize.
But why?
Only the barest thread of blood connects me and Soraya.
But all the blood in the world didn't stop your crewe from plotting to rid themselves of you from the moment your mother died. It didn't stop them from trying to discard your mother's soul along with her body
. I think on Soraya and Miyole giggling at each other over dinner, Perpétue holding my arm as I took my first knifing steps on the Earth.

I squeeze Soraya's hand in mine. “I won't run off again,” I say. “I swear. I'm sorry, Soraya.”

“I am, too,” Soraya says. “If only I'd found you earlier. If only I'd looked harder when I came aboard to bury your mother . . .”

But I can't regret it. It's no good wishing to change what was. If Soraya had spirited me away to Earth when I was younger, I might never have suffered the shame I did after what happened with Luck, and I would have grown up well schooled and groomed and mannered. But then I never would have loved Luck, either. I never would have learned to fly a ship or been there to take the controls while Perpétue climbed down to rescue Miyole. I might not have seen the wonder in this world if it hadn't been hidden from me so long. I'm not glad of the way it happened, but I can't be sorry either.

“It's none of your fault,” I say. She's not Perpétue. She won't always understand me or be everything I wish she could be, but she loves me. Not all the people who care for me are gone, after all.

“All that's past,” I tell her. “This is my life now.”

“Did I get you in trouble?” Rushil turns his head from the tubing brace he's finished fusing to the sloop's inner wall and flips up the hood of his welding mask.

I pull my welding goggles down around my neck and let my torch go out. The handlamps hooked above our heads shine dim inside the ship. I blink, half blind. “Some.”

“A lot?”

I shake my head. “I have to tell her where I'm going if I'm out past dark. And I'm supposed to keep the crow on me all the time, so she can call if she needs me.” I make a face at the crow clipped to my belt. “And she wants you coming by for tea someday soon.”

“Tea?” He sucks air past his teeth, as if someone's kicked him in the shin. “
Chaila
. I'm in for it, aren't I?”

I think on what would have happened if it were Modrie Reller meting out punishments, not Soraya. My eyes drift up the darkened conduit to the ceiling.

Rushil follows my gaze. “Do you miss it?”

I drop my head. “What?”

“Being up there,” Rushil says. “Spaceside.”

I bite my bottom lip and lean back against the hull. “Some small bit.” I flip the toggle on my welding torch so it hisses and dies, hisses and dies. “I don't miss the dye pits or always worrying on being caught and spied on. But circling the dark side of a planet, hanging up there with all those stars like you're one of them? I do miss that.”

Rushil nods. “I bet it's beautiful. Everyone says it changes you, seeing the Earth from above.”

My jaw drops. “You've never seen it?” I push myself from the wall.

Rushil shakes his head. “I've been planetside my whole life.” He laughs shortly. “I've never even been outside Mumbai, except for the detention camp.”

Street-smart, clever Rushil, who could thread his way through the Salt blind, has seen less of the universe than me? I fake a cough to cover my shock and scrape around for something to say. I nudge his foot with mine—
tap, tap, tap
. Our secret code. “You will.”

“You think?” Rushil gives me a pained smile what says he doesn't believe me.

“Right so.” I bump his arm and smile sideways at him. “You think I want to take this thing up all by myself?”

“You'd take me?” Rushil's voice breaks with excitement as he says it, and I see a piece of the smallboy he once was.

“Course.” I take his bulky, gloved hand gentle in mine. “It can be our first flight.”

Our eyes meet under the yellow glow of the hand lamps. If I leaned forward a mere slip, I could touch the warm, flat plane of his chest, let the electromagnetic pull take over and meet his lips with mine.

Rushil tucks a strand of sweat-damp hair behind my ear. “You're beautiful like this, you know?”

I laugh. “What, covered in grease?”

“No,” he says. “Happy.”

We meet chest to chest, and his lips find mine. I don't know what's better, the warm press of his mouth or holding him, being held. There are no expectations here, no hurry. Our time is our own. My muscles and bones melt, and the world narrows to this cocoon of yellow light. Even when our lips break apart, his arms stay around me. I rest my head on his shoulder. He leans his temple against mine and we stay there, wrapped in each other.

“Guess we'd better get back to it if we ever want this thing flying, huh?” Rushil finally says.

“Right so.”

He steps back and squeezes my hand, then smiles and pulls the welding mask down over his face. I position my own goggles and fire up my torch. White-hot flame sparks from its tip as it touches the metal. Rushil and I stand back-to-back as we weld neatly spaced rows of tubing braces along the ship's inner hull and wall. The heat of his body is warmer even than the reach of the flame through my fireproof gloves.

When we've fused the last clamp in place, Rushil kills his torch and makes for the hatch. “I need some air.”

I follow after him. The bright daylight clears out my head after the cramped, stuffy confines of the conduit shaft. Rushil and I sit on the lip of the loading hatch and breathe in the fresh afternoon. The sun glints on the fuselage of the ships parked around us.

“So what are you going to name her?” Rushil says.

“Name her?”

“Yeah.” Rushil pats the ship's hull. “When you register her with the Subcontinental Flight Bureau, you've got to give a name for her.”

“I . . . I don't know.” I never thought to name Perpétue's ship, since she hadn't. I stare down at the pavement and swing my legs back and forth. It's got to be something Miyole would like, something what tells all we've been though, me and Miyole and the sloop. Something strong, something . . . I smile.

“Perpétue,”
I say. “We'll call her the
Perpétue
.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

O
n the morning after we finish refitting the sloop, I rise early. I tug on my canvas trousers, my boots, a Mumbai-style shirt edged with gold embroidery, and the jacket I inherited from Perpétue. I straighten the data pendant on its silver chain at my neck and check to be sure Perpétue's knife and my crow are secure in my belt. Then I kiss Miyole and Soraya good-bye over their tea, and take the train down to the shipyard to meet Rushil.

I'm shaky at first when I kick in the ship's burners and lift off from the yard, but by the time Navi Flightport patches in with our exit trajectory, my hands hold the push bars steady. Rushil perches on the edge of the passenger seat so he can take in the view of Mumbai fading to a jeweled thumb of land as the sky grows dark around us. The winds bounce and jog us as we cross their streams.

“Better strap in,” I say, eyes locked ahead. The break in the atmosphere looms before us, growing darker as the wisps of air sweep thin.

We burst through, into the cold stillness of space. Rushil takes in a breath. The stars burn steady, but none so bright as the Earth beneath us. I sneak a look at him.

“Is it how you thought?”

“It's so much more . . .”

I reach for his hand and push us on to Bhutto station.

We make dock on the commerce tier. Rushil links his fingers through mine as we step down on the docking floor. His eyes fly everywhere, taking in the bustle of passengers from every corner of the world, the holograms and vendors, and the laborers trucking carts of goods through the tight-packed crowds.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” His eyes have a faraway, stunned look, like a bird that's flown into a window. “It's just so . . . so . . .”

“It takes some getting used to.” I press my lips together, trying not to laugh.

He remembers to blink and turns to me. “I guess this is how you felt when you first got to Mumbai, huh?”

“Some.” I smile up at him.

My crow pings at my belt. I look down at the time. “
Chaila
. My appointment's in fifteen minutes. You have the specs for those air scrubbers?”

Rushil pats his crow.

“I'll see about the shipping license, then,” I say. The tremor in my voice is half fear, half excitement. “Wish me luck.”

Rushil squeezes my hand tight and laughs. “Stop worrying, okay?” He kisses me quick. “You'll do fine.”

“I know.” I go up on tiptoe and kiss him back. “Meet me back here?”

“Two hours?”

I nod. “Two hours.”

I stand outside the flight authority office, clutching my tablet to my chest. The forms are all done inside, only waiting to be transferred and accepted, along with a small bribe for the flight officials to keep things moving smoothly. When my turn comes, I step up to the window.

A square-jawed woman wearing the uniform of the Bhutto Station Authority stares dully out at me. I slide my tablet across the counter with the square of pay plastic on top. She pockets the plastic without looking up from my form. “Ava Parastrata?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Ship's name?”

“The
Perpétue
.” I've whispered it to myself so many times as I lay in bed at night or cold-fused protective insulation between the layers of the ship's hull, I can say it now without stumbling.

“Sign here.” She flips the tablet around to face me and holds out a stylus.

I mark my first and last name, neat and even. No one would know I couldn't string together the letters a mere turn past.

The official scans my tablet, and a seal appears over the document on the screen. She stretches out a tired smile for me. “Congratulations, Captain. Make sure you upload that into your ship's identification signal. Good flying.”

I can't help but smile back wide. I walk away through the thronging corridor, staring down at the seal on my screen. Captain Ava Parastrata. I could almost skip. Here I am, walking sure and fearless in a place I once thought would swallow me live. From now on, I choose where I want to go.

I don't notice the woman balancing a baby in one arm and a box in the other, standing in the middle of the corridor, until it's too late. I knock into her full speed. She manages to hold on to the baby but drops the box of thumb-sized CO
₂
cartridges. They clatter to the floor.

“Sorry, so missus.” I drop to my knees and grab at them.

The woman doesn't move. “What did you call me?”

“So missus . . . ,” I begin, and glance up.

A pair of ocean-blue eyes look down at me. She wears her black hair in a messy braid tucked behind her cocked-out ears. She and her baby are both cloud pale, with blue veins branching under their skin. She stares at me.

I stand. “Soli?”

She fixes on the pendant at my neck and frowns, then reaches out a hand to touch it. “Ava?”

“Right so.” My eyes water. “Oh, Soli.”

“Mercies.” She pulls me close with her free arm, the cartridges forgotten. The baby squawks in protest.

She pulls back but keeps a tight grip on my arm. “We thought you were dead. We looked for you such a long time. And then your father said you
were
dead, that you had fallen down groundways—”

“My father?” I frown. “What are you doing out alone, Soli?”

“Oh, don't worry on that now.” Soli's eyes are soft, but new-laid care lines fan out at their corners. She looks as if she's aged five turns in the time since I saw her last. “They'll want to see you.”

“Who?”

Soli's smile creeps in with a touch of mischief. “You'll see.” She repositions the baby on her hip and grabs my hand. “Everything is different now, Ava. Things have changed, ever since . . .” She closes her mouth as if she's thought better of what she was about to say.

I pull back. “Ever since what? Different how?”

“It's better if you see.” She tugs at my hand. “Hurry on. Truly, Ava, they'll be so glad.”

I shudder with a sudden thought.
Luck. Could he . . .

No. Luck is dead
. I can't start spinning wild fantasies, only to have them crushed again. I check my crow. Thirty minutes until I'm supposed to meet Rushil back at the sloop. Bare time, but some. Enough to see what Soli means.

“Right so,” I agree, and Soli's face lights up.

I follow her through Bhutto station's corridors, my heart and steps quickening. She chatters on about her baby—Heart, a boy—and marriages and other crewe gossip, and all the while, her son peeks out at me from her shoulder. I remember my first glimpse of Soraya when I was a smallgirl, her certain step and unflinching gaze, how grand and strange she was. I give Heart a small smile. He buries his face against Soli's neck and stuffs his pudgy finger in his mouth, but then glances back and gives me a gap-toothed smile.We take the lift down to tier twelve and come to the big metal doors of a docking bay. Soli lets go of my hand to open the latchport.

I step back, suddenly flush with worry. What if things aren't so different? What if her crewemen still despise me? What if this whole thing is a trap meant to lure me back to justice? I watch Soli tap in a code and push the door open.

She glances back. “Come how, Ava? I promise, everything's fine.”

I search her face, with its tired eyes and knitted brows. Soli would never betray me. No matter what else has changed, I know that. I step through the latchport.