Salvage (5 page)

But then Modrie Reller takes my face in her hands and presses a rare kiss on my forehead. The shock of it sinks everything else to the back of my mind. The only other time I've ever seen Modrie Reller give a kiss was to my mother's head as the women dressed her body in her old bridal finery for burial.

“Aren't you coming with us on the visiting party?” I ask. It's custom for a girl's mother and modries to prepare her for her husband on her binding day.

Modrie Reller shakes her head. “Not with the smallone coming so soon.”

“But I'm coming back before the binding, right so? I'll see you then.”

She shakes her head again. “Iri's going in my place.” She brushes a stray lock from my forehead and tucks it behind my ear. “She'll finish making you ready.”

I duck my head. “Right so.”

“One thing more.” Modrie Reller pulls a leather cord from her pocket. A pearly white data pendant, thin as paper, large around as the pad of my thumb, dangles from it. Raised circuitry forms a spiral at its center, like the whorl of a fingerprint. I gasp. Every girl receives such a pendant on her binding. It stores a record of her ancestry, back to the time of Candor and Saeleas. She wears it from that day on, even into death.

“Now, when you leave the ship, you'll feel the Earth tugging at you, understand?” The pendant gleams in the low light as Modrie Reller knots it behind my neck. “You'll go heavy, and your breath will come hard, but don't fear. Your father and Jerej and all the men will keep you safe until you reach the other ship. You marking me?”

“Right so.” I finger the pendant. It rests cool on my collar bone.

“There now.” Modrie Reller smiles tightly. “You're ready.”

I step forward to throw my arms around her, but she puts out a hand to stop me. She shakes her head and backs away through the arch to the women's quarters without looking at me again. She has already begun the work of forgetting me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

M
y father, Parastrata Cerrec, captain of the
Parastrata
, walks at the head of our procession. His red hair has thinned and faded yellow-white, but a hand-quilted patriarch's stole drapes over his shoulders and beneath it, his green robes hang heavy with embroidery. The stole fans out behind him as he leads us across the wide cargo bay of our ship. Jerej follows him, cradling the wooden letterbox that holds my marriage contract. More men trail them, carting bride gifts—one of our pregnant nanny goats, the weighty bales of copper wire and fiberoptic cable that are our stock and trade, and a fighting cockerel. I carry a wide copper platter laden with eggcakes. For the first time in five turns, we have come to Bhutto station for the runend meet, where all the crewe ships join up for trade talks and marriages and treaty drawing.

I stand at the back of our party with the other women, feeling terrified and righteous and brave and pure, all at once. The wives with their armfuls of gifts—green cloth and heavy, coarse-edged paper—surround me. I feel as if I'm walking inside a velvet-lined box, the jewel of our procession. I wish my mother were here, wish she could hold my hand, wish she could see me grown to be a bride.

Once, when I was a smallgirl, our ship hit a solar storm on the way to a runend meet. The men herded all us women and smallones into the baling room, near the heart of the ship, and locked us in tight. But even with all the hulls and floors and doors between us and the Void, the ship bucked and shivered under out feet. My mother was there, sick with the virus that would soon take her. Her face, like mine always some darker than our crewemates', had gone pale and gray, beaded with fever sweat. Modrie Reller wrapped Ma in a coarse homespun blanket. She left me and Jerej to watch over her, while she hurried off to help quiet the squalling infants. I hugged my knees and watched my mother's eyes opening and closing while the ship shuddered all around me.

A bang shook the whole room, and the solar-fed lights sputtered out. Darkness swallowed us. Everyone screamed. My mother grasped my hand.

“Ava.” Her voice was raw. “Keep your eyes open.”

I blinked in the dark. After a moment, the dim glow of the ship's phosphorous strips bloomed, edging everything in blueish-green. I made out the shadow of my mother. My breath quickened. She looked like a skull in the half light. I groped for Jerej's hand. He yelped in blind fright when my fingers touched his, and I cried out in turn, setting him off again.

“Hsssh, hsssh.”
My mother squeezed my hand.

The hull shook again. A tooth-aching grind rent the air. Jerej and I grabbed each other, and I tightened my grip on my mother.

“Calm, loves,” Ma said. “The Mercies will hold us. It'll be over soon.”

Jerej's small, chubby hand sweated in mine. His eyes stared wide and unblinking.

“Do you want a story?” my mother asked.

We both nodded.

“What say Saeleas and the Mercies?” my mother said. “Do you want that one?”

We'd heard it reckoned many times before, spoken soft and secret in the dark of the sleeping quarters by our mothers and modries and other women lulling their smallones to rest. Our father chanted it aloud on the Day of Apogee once each turn. Still, we nodded.

My mother closed her eyes.

Once, our greatmother Saeleas found herself alone aboard her husband Candor's ship. He had gone groundways to seek water with his men, and while they walked the Earth, a ripping storm struck and breached the hull. Saeleas was pulled out into the Void, where there is naught of air or warmth or light. Long she fell before the Mercies caught her in their hands. Curious, they carried her through the veils of nebulae and seated her on their footstool, a star-seeded lily, all aglow with the warmth of the softest sun, and breathing out its own air to sustain her
.

Please
, she begged.
Let me return to my husband's side. I am sore needed there
.

But the Mercies said,
Nay, you shall be our pet, pretty one, and give more use through joy than ever you could at your husband's beck
.

Not so
, said Saeleas.
For who shall weave if I am gone?

Men may weave without you
, said the Mercies.

But who shall feed the men and babes if I am gone?
said Saeleas.

Men may feed themselves and babes without you
, said the Mercies.

And who
, said Saeleas,
shall bear forth children if I am gone?

At this the Mercies fell silent, for here was a thing no man could do. And they saw Saeleas carried in her womb the great Neren, father of our race. They took pity and breathed their own life into her lungs, and carried her from their starry thrones home to the arms of her husband. Thus our race was saved by the grace of the Mercies. So do we honor them, for our life is ever in their hands
.

“So you see,” my mother said, her a whisper. “You see the worth of a woman, Ava.” Her eyes rolled back and she let free a cant from our holy song, the Word of the Sky, up into the dark.

“. . . like copper sails to trap the sun's heat.

Cover us all, she does . . .”

-

“Ma, please. . .”

“. . . tame the stars' fury and channel life.”

“
Hsssh
, Ma. Everyone will hear.” I swung my head to make sure none of the other wives had heard her singing. But no. They were too terrored by the storm to notice.

I pinned Jerej with a look. “You won't tell, will you?” I whispered. “You won't tell she sang?”

Jerej shook his head.

“Swear it?”

Jerej's pale cheeks flushed. He nodded.

I breathed out. Even small as I was, I knew my ma shouldn't be singing the Word out loud. She might call down ship strippers or some other bad matter on us, like Mikim the Wayward from our tales. Or worse, the Mercies might choose not to bring us through the storm after all.

My mother mumbled on, quieter, picking up the song further down the line. “Women of the air, stay aloft . . .”

I leaned close to my mother's ear. Fever heat moved off her skin in waves. “Please, Ma,” I whispered. “You got to stop singing now, right so?”

Her eyes opened to glints deep in the shadow of her face. “Ava.” She touched my cheek. I smelled the fever on her breath. “You are the sails, Ava. My girl. You are the sails.”

And I could see. Even with the fever touching her mind, turning her words to a torrent, I could see what she meant. I felt the seed of it in me. That I could give life and comfort and peace, even in the harshest reaches of the Void. And in that moment, the lights whined to life. I squinted up into their glare, and when I looked back, my mother's eyes had closed again in sleep. Resolve filled me, small as I was, and I knew I would bend with the will of the Mercies to bear life into our crewe some day.

Now as I stand at the back of the procession, I run my mother's cant through my mind like piece of silk ribbon, like copper sails to trap the sun's heat . . ._

Ahead, I spot Iri. She glances back over her shoulder and gives me a tight smile. A rumbling
clack-clack-clack
fills the room as my father orders the big bay doors open, and a sweep of cold air rushes into our ship.

Our procession shuffles forward until we reach the lip of the ship's outer bay. Before I have time to think, I have put my foot over the threshold and onto the loading ramp, and like that, I am farther from my home than I have ever been in my life. As we step away from the
Parastrata
, our ship's gravity gives way, and suddenly everything—the eggcakes, the copper bands, my very legs—weighs heavier on me. I stagger but right myself. The other women slow along with me, but the men don't so much as flinch. How glad I am to have them circled round us, guarding us from the Earth's sway. Modrie Reller was right. Its pull is stronger here, outside the pure world of our ship.

The dock is empty, except for two silent vessels resting alongside ours. A bulkhead door separates us from the station proper. My father taps a code into the keypad wired to the door, and it slowly rolls open along the runners in the floor, revealing a long hallway. We push forward in step. A steady roar builds and builds as we near the far end, and then overtakes us when we break out onto the station's concourse.

People and animals and vendor carts cram the floor. Lights stream and flash in all colors. Men and women shout over one another. Handhelds blip at their owners, heartbeat-quick music shudders, and signs shimmer with fast-moving pictures—a school of fish, a man running, a woman with kohl around her eyes. Somewhere, a lamb's bleat surfaces above the din. My head goes numb.

The wall of wives presses in against me as we jostle through the packed concourse. Between their shoulders, I catch sight of a man with bread-crust brown skin tinkering on a handheld. Another, with darker skin and blue clothes that ripple and shine like oil, changes the symbols on the sign above the awning of a shop. And another, with pink-blushed pale skin and metal gauges embedded in the soft flesh of his ear, hands out little scraps of paper covered in print. There are women, too, near none of them wearing skirts long enough to cover their boots, and some in men's trousers. They lord over shops selling handhelds and painted birds and fish as big as my forearm. They shout and boss as loud as men, and smile with all their teeth.

It's too much. All I can do is hold the platter level, try to keep my feet, and concentrate on the long trail of hair hanging down Kamak's back in front of me. I pray for it to be over, for us to reach the safety of another crewe's ship, and leave this pressing crowd behind.

And in the heavens, we will make the world anew
, I repeat to myself.
We will make the world anew
.

The roar of voices dulls as we leave the main concourse. We file through a dim, narrow hall, and stop suddenly.

“Are we there?” I whisper to Kamak. “Is it the
Æther
?”

She gives me a tight-lipped look that means I should know better than to speak.

Ahead, the rumble of a bulkhead door breaks the silence. Our little parade starts forward and stops again almost immediately.

My father's greeting carries up the corridor. “So Brother Fortune.”

“So Brother Cerrec.”

Their voices drop so we can no longer hear. I shift from one foot to the other and wish I could lay down the tray of eggcakes. Sweat slicks my palms. The electric light grid above me snaps and clicks.

And then they are calling for me.

“Ava.” My great-grandmother Hannah snaps her fingers. “Come.” Her milky blue eyes magnify in the brittle pair of glasses she's had to herself since my great-grandmother Laral died.

The women guide me forward. Somehow I manage not to drop the tray, although I'm sure my eyes are wide and rolling like a frightened goat's. The men at the head of the procession part to let us through, and suddenly I am standing beside my father and Jerej, facing a man with black, laceless boots and a patriarch's stole. In the split second before I remember to look away, not to look on his face, I see he is sharp jawed and handsome for a silver-haired man, despite a pocked field of radiation burns across one cheek. But his mouth is hard. Behind him, I catch a glimpse of a ship docked, its cargo bay open and filled with members of a dark-haired crewe. The
Æther
. My heart lifts.

“My daughter, Parastrata Ava,” my father says.

I dip my head and curtsy, holding out the platter in front of me as an offering. “Honored to come to your home, Æther Fortune.”

I feel his hand beneath my chin and the cool metal of his many rings. “Let me look on the bride.” He tilts my face up to his. I hold still as a stunned bird under his hand and cast my eyes to the side as he studies me.