Salvage (15 page)

“G
ood, now once more.” Perpétue holds my arm as I take another shuffling step.

I moan as I bring my foot forward and let my weight fall on it. My legs burn as though someone's poured fuel into them and set them alight. But I've made it from my cot almost all the way to the small cleanroom tucked away between the common room and the sleeping quarters Perpétue and Miyole share. Perpétue has given me my own skirts again, stiff from drying in the sun, but she burned the rag shirt. I wear one of her soft, thin-woven shirts instead.
Cotton
, she says, from over the sea.

Two weeks awake in her home and I still cannot walk alone. But I haven't bled either, at least there's that to hold on to. The chance of Luck's child. The air hangs thick with heat and waiting.

This East Gyre Perpétue brought me to is nothing like what I thought Earthside would be. My modries all told stories of dust and cold so fierce it made the Earth white, but here the air is always wet and warm, like the dyeroom when the pits are at full boil. Sometimes Perpétue's house bobs and rocks under my feet, and a moaning noise shudders up from below.

The Gyre is a floating city, Perpétue says, cobbled together from flatbed ships, buildings raised on pontoons, and abandoned research flotillas. She talks on it as I practice walking, to keep my mind off the pain. Deciturns on deciturns ago, even before the time of Candor and Saeleas, the groundways folk thought the sea would gobble up all their waste, so they fed it into the deeps. But instead, it ended up here, where the waters converge in the Gyre, and formed a vast plain of bottles and bags and milky plastic.

“Some of the first ships came to study the island the trash made and the microbes in the water,” Perpétue explains. “But then, when the Floods drowned the Earth's islands, other people fled here to make a new life, trawling the garbage. That was the start of the Gyre.”

Microbes?
I want to say, but I need all of my breath to keep walking.

Perpétue's house nestles up to the edge of the Caribbean Enclave, lashed to other craft from the lost islands of Jamaica and Cuba and Haiti, what was her ancestors' home. But there're folk from every sunken island here, the ice lands and the Philippines and the land of no serpents. She says a body can make a living scavenging and reselling the bits of plastic that make up the Gyre plain. There's so much the whole city can pick and pick at it and never run out.

“When you're well, you can go out and see for yourself,” Perpétue says.

But that would mean facing all the stares and the same questions Perpétue and Miyole had for me, again and again.
What's wrong with your skin? Why can't you walk right? What'd you do to make your own people throw you out?
Just thinking on it makes me want to lie down.

“Don't forget to bend your knees,” Perpétue reminds me.

Miyole clomps by in a pair of ragged-edged pants, rubber shoes a size too big, and a faded flower-print dress. She carries a danger-red kite almost as tall as she is.

“Bye, Manman!”

“Miyole?” Perpétue drops my hand. “Where are you going?”

“Kite flying with Kai.”

Perpétue bites the corner of her lip. “You aren't going down to the brink, are you?”

Miyole drops her shoulders. “Manman.” She draws the word in a groan.

Perpétue sighs. Even with the short time I've been here, I've already caught on they're about to have the same argument as always.

“You know how I feel about the brink,
ma chére
.”

Miyole rolls her eyes. “Nothing's going to happen to me, Manman.”

“You tell that to Bjarni's mother.”

“You never let me do
anything
.”

“I never let you do anything
dangerous
.”

“Manman.” Miyole's voice teeters between a plead and a whine. “I'll be careful, I swear. Kai needs me. His dad's sick again, and Song and Hobb and me all promised we'd help him keep up with the picking. We're flying kites after.”

Perpétue sighs again, in resignation this time. “All right. Go. But don't forget to make Kai give you a hook. I don't want you reaching down in that water with your bare hands.”

Every morning I watch from the window as a trickle of smallones skip the gaps between the pontoons and climb over the footbridges, on their way down to the brink, where they'll help their parents fish out a living from the plastic. Not all of them go. Miyole doesn't, except when she wants. Most mornings she either makes more metal creatures or sits with her tablet, staring and tapping into its light, stopping only to help me walk to the cleanroom or make me take calcium pills to keep my muscles from seizing.

This whole place is a mystery. Perpétue has no man in the house, so she earns her keep ferrying packages from groundways to the station, and between cities here below. Yet she washes and cooks and pushes Miyole to keep pace with her lessons each evening, and even sometimes cooks more for the sick woman with two smallones on the craft next to ours. I asked once where her husband was, but Perpétue's face went masklike. I haven't asked again.

I lie still and sweating most of the day, watching shadows track across the floor as the sun arcs overhead. Sometimes I find myself wishing they would turn the daylights out sooner, and then I remember it doesn't work that way down here. The sun keeps its own time. I close my eyes to it and think on Luck. If it's quiet, I can coax myself into a sort of half dream—waking by Luck's side, basking in his smile; him singing to our unborn child as it grows larger inside me. I am tender all over, and I remember Modrie Reller and the other wives saying that was a sign you had got a smallone, that you ached, belly and breasts.

But then Perpétue comes and makes me move and bend and grip as long as I can bear it. She promises we can take Miyole's tablet up to the top of what was once a research ship in the neighboring Icelanders' enclave, one of the few spots in the whole Gyre where she can sometimes tap into the wireless networks broadcasting from the distant shores. There are never any storms in Gyre, she says, but elsewhere the Earth is wracking-full of ferocious winds and sudden rainstorms and columns of white-hot fire bolting from sky to land, and a network is a delicate thing.

“Once you're strong enough,” she says, a steadying arm on my elbow. “Once you're well.”

I make it to the cleanroom. Perpétue has me sit while she runs a bucket of warm water down from the solar-powered boiler on the roof. She helps me wash my hair, and when it's clean, she sits me on the floor like I'm a smallgirl and combs it. I close my eyes and let myself relax into the gentle tug of the comb as Perpétue's fingers unsnarl my locks. It brings me to mind of Iri combing my hair, and me doing the same for Lifil and my other sisters. I hope the Mercies give me a boy child, but if it's a girl, at least one day I can maybe comb her hair like this.

“Why did you dye your hair?” Perpétue's voice breaks my reverie.

I put my hand up to my head. “What?”

“Your hair,” Perpétue repeats. “You've been coloring it, right?”

“It's showing?” I say.

“Wi,”
Perpétue says. She lifts a lock of hair and runs it through her fingers until they brush my forehead. “To here.”

“What?” I rock away from Perpétue. My hair grows fast, but it would take weeks on weeks to grow that much. Near on a deciturn. I've been here, awake, only ten days. It's not possible, unless . . . A terrible thought hits me. How long did I sleep? I thought it was hours, days at most. It can't have been more than a few days.

“No,” I say. “That's not right. It can't be.”

Perpétue reaches for a hand mirror and holds it so I can see. Black hair spreads over the crown of my head, then drops to faded red at my temples. Both colors look wrong beside my face, the red unnatural, the black stark and hinting at someone I've never been so long as I can remember.

I look up from my reflection. “How long was I asleep?”

Perpétue hesitates.

“Days? A week?”

“A little over a month,” Perpétue says. “You were in so much pain, we had to keep you under until the doctor said your calcium levels were high enough.” She furrows her brow and presses her lips together as if there might be more.

A month. A deciturn. I push myself clumsily to my feet. Blood sings in my ears. I've been trapped here below over a full deciturn.

“Ava . . .”

I stagger away from her, into the common room.

“Where are you going?” Perpétue calls after me.

I don't answer. A deciturn lost.
A deciturn . . .
I stumble to the front of the house and grapple with the outer door. In truth, I don't know where I'm going. There are steps outside, I know, leading down to the pontoons and up to the roof with its generator and water tanks and Perpétue's chickens, but beyond that . . . I've been locked away too long, seeing the world in snatches from the window. I want—no, I
need
to see the sky.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

T
he air is sudden bright. It smells of salt, smoke, and fish. Far off, a horn sounds. The sun peaks high overhead, but the close-packed structures around me close off most of the sky.

Up
, I tell myself.
Higher
.

I climb the first step. My knees shake and my legs burn.
I need to go up
. I anchor my other foot on the next stair, try to push myself faster. I waver.
I need to see it. . . .
I don't know why. I know I won't be able to see Luck, or the ships, or even the stars from the rooftop, but some part of me insists I try. Without warning, my legs collapse. I sag down on the third step.

“Ava, here.” Perpétue appears behind me, her hands outstretched.

“No!” I say. Weeks lost to sleep, and more to Perpétue and Miyole dressing me and feeding me and helping me walk. I want no more of it. I want to haul myself back up to the sky. I want to be a woman again. I want to prove my worth so Perpétue won't throw me out when she finds I have Luck's child inside me.

I crawl up the stairs, the concrete scraping my knees through my thin underskirt. Perpétue watches from below. The heat presses on me, thick and wet. Sweat rolls down my back. The light blinds my eyes, and the sun burns. Another step. My skin feels tight. Another. At last I reach up and feel nothing. Air. I raise my head. Only the square metal walls of the generator, the water tanks, a line of clothes flapping in the breeze, and the weathered driftwood hutch housing Perpétue's chickens break my view of the sky.

I walk stiffly out onto the sun-baked roof. The sky stretches up and up, ablaze with blue. I don't know how, but it seems broader even than the Void, raked with fine, high, swaths of lambs'-wool white in its upper reaches. The sun burns through like bright, new copper. It takes my breath and dulls the pain in my legs.

Luck
, I think. I wish he could see this with me.

I reach the wall bordering the edge of the roof and raise a hand to shield my eyes. Perpétue's house stands level with the other mismatched structures—some ships, some square houses balanced on pontoons, like Perpétue's, some a floating scavenge of metal, plastic, tarp, and heavy solar panels angled up to the sky. Crossed laundry lines and footbridges made of driftwood connect it all. The structures rise and fall ever so slightly with the sea, as if they rest on a sleeping giant's chest. The distant, muddled din of voices and puttering motors, rooster calls, and the tinny blare of handhelds carry over the rooftops.

Some ten or twelve buildings down, the enclave gives way to the brink. The floating desert of plastic spreads out to the horizon. When the wind skirts across it, it makes a sound like wings. Along its coast, dividing the trash plain from the clean, blue water, a sun-bleached city of ships unfurls for miles and miles. I spin around. To the other side of Perpétue's roof, the world gives way to unbroken blue. The sky and its darker sister, the sea.

“Ava.” Perpétue stands at the top of the steps. “Come down. Your skin will burn, fi. You aren't used to the sun.”

I swallow. “I don't want to stay inside anymore.” I hear the pleading in my tone.

“I know.” Perpétue runs her tongue inside her bottom lip. “But you really aren't well enough yet.”

“I'll work at it.” My voice sounds so small in the wide open. “Please, so missus, I don't want to be useless. I don't want to lie there and have you . . .” My throat closes around the rest of my words.
I don't want to lose any more time to sleep
.

“If it takes your mind off the hurt, maybe we can give you some chores.” Perpétue nods to herself. “Some small things.”

“I can cook some, and clean.” I say. “I was on livestock duties before. I could keep the chickens. . . .”

Perpétue waves me to a stop. “Slowly, Ava. For now, you can help Miyole with the chickens and maybe cook some. Your body's still healing, fi. Too much at once and you'll hurt yourself.”

I let out the breath I've been holding. “Right so.”

I feel some small bit more like the girl I was. Feeding chickens is none like minding a whole crewe of women and girls, but at least it's something to keep my hands busy and my mind awake while I wait for Luck's child and try to figure out how to find my modrie.

In the middle of the night, I wake with my innards cramped. I stumble to the cleanroom in the dark, but it's only when I've squatted over the chemical bowl that I feel the blood on my legs. I grope for the light string and pull. It clicks on, filling the room with a brown glow. I stand stock still, staring at the streaks of blood on my thighs and nightshirt until I can make myself understand. My bleeding.