Sound (2 page)

Chapter 1

T
he butterflies keep dying. Their gossamer corpses line the back wall of Dr. Osmani's office—spotted swallowtails and dark-tinged bird-wings—all suspended in squat acrylic resin cylinders behind her desk.

“It has to be a genetic disorder.” I hold the latest casualty, a common blue, out to Dr. Osmani in my gloved hand. “They can't handle the atmosphere.”

She looks up from the clutter of broadscreens, holographic potted plants, and old teacups littering her desk, and prods it with the tip of her stylus. The blue lies lifeless on my palm.

Dr. Osmani presses her lips together, her version of a frown. “How do we know it isn't their caretaker's atmospheric algorithms that are the problem?”

I bunch my free hand inside the front pocket of my lab coat and raise my eyes to the rotating model of the doctor's prize show horse, Trafalgar, that occupies the top of the supply closet. Of course Dr. Osmani would blame me. Otherwise, her own genetic engineering would be at fault.

“The bees are healthy,” I point out. I make myself unclench my hand and gingerly slide the blue back into its clear plastic carrying pouch.

“The bees aren't at issue here.” Dr. Osmani shoots me a look that would have frozen me in the first months I was assigned to her. Even her high, sleek chignon looks as if it's glaring down at me.

“Do you want my charts?” I fight the urge to cross my arms. I never cared much for entomology before getting this assignment, but now I love all my pollinators—Lepidoptera and Anthophila alike. I spent my first few weeks aboard memorizing their names.
Brenthis daphne
, with wings like stained glass.
Euthalia nais
, black and gold like a tiger.
Bibasis sena
,
all lavender gray except for a line of orange running along the edge of its wings like fire. The first time Dr. Osmani tried to blame me for the butterflies' failure to thrive, I thought she was right. My body filled up with shame so cold it burned. Could I really have caused them to die? I was so careful. But after I checked and
double-checked my numbers, and the accusations kept coming, that shame curdled into indignation.

“I'm not treating them any less carefully than the bees.” I say. “I can prove it.”

“Let's see the charts, then.” She holds out her hand.

I falter. In my hurry to show Dr. Osmani the blue, I left my handbook with my charts in the pollinators' simulation lab. “I . . . um . . . don't have them with me.”

Her face goes hard as our ship's nacre. She sighs. “And where, pray tell, is your book?”

“In the sim lab?” I know exactly where it is, but when I'm nervous, everything I say tends to come out a question.

“Fine.” She raises her hands in surrender and turns back to her array of screens. “Send me the charts. We'll see what's there.”

I roll my eyes. It's not that I mean to, it's more that it happens without me thinking about it and I don't catch myself in time. My algorithms are solid.

“I saw that, Guiteau,” Dr. Osmani says without looking up.

Chaila
,
I curse silently. When I get nervous, I tend to get “cheeky,” as my foster mother, Soraya, says, which is a nicer way of saying “smart-ass.” She's been trying to wean me off my eye-rolling habit ever since I came to live with
her, but she hasn't been entirely successful. If I were back home, she would apologize for me, or my sister, Ava, would kick my shin to remind me to do it myself, but both of them are hundreds of thousands of kilometers away by now.

Dr. Osmani raises her cool glare at me. “How old are you, Specialist Guiteau?”

The old scars on my palms itch. Dr. Osmani has my records at her fingertips. She trots out questions like these only when she wants to make a point.

“Eighteen.” The lie comes naturally now. Eighteen is the youngest you can be and still qualify to serve on a Deep Sound research and development vessel like ours, the R.S.S.
Ranganathan
. At times like these, I wish I had made myself older when I had my papers altered, but even as tall as I am, I doubt anyone would have believed that.

Dr. Osmani folds her arms and leans over her desk. “You're not some coddled preparatory school student anymore, Ms. Guiteau. Up here, you're a scientist. Do try to act the part.”

Heat surges up my cheeks, and my eyes burn. Until now, Dr. Osmani has been one of the few crew members who hasn't said a word about my schooling. The flight crew especially likes to needle me for having attended Revati Academy, one of Mumbai's best private schools for girls,
and even some of the other research assistants let out a low whistle when I tell them where I studied. No matter how hard I worked at Revati, how I gave up friendships, parties, and weekends to finish my secondary studies so early. No matter that the way I ended up going there in the first place was less than pretty. I'm automatically a spoiled brat for having gotten my education there.

“Right.” I nod, fighting the raging fire under my cheeks. I am not going to cry in front of Dr. Osmani. I won't. “Okay.”

Dr. Osmani seems done with me, so I stuff my hands in my coat pockets and slink for the door.

“Guiteau?”

I stop and turn on my heel.

She points to my bulging pocket.

“Oh.” I double back and hold out the blue.

“Thank you.” She takes the bag from me and then pulls a pair of long pincers from her desk drawer. “That will be all.”

I hurry from the room, but not in time to avoid seeing Dr. Osmani lift the blue from its pouch and gently position it in a thermoplastic mold. Another specimen for her collection.

Outside her office, the corridor teems with people—
engineers, techs, and research assistants dodging through the crowd with handbooks held tight against their chests; flight crews snorting with laughter as they head back from their latest watch; and maintenance and operations workers trundling equipment carts along the moving sidewalks that ferry everyone along. Perfect conditions for disappearing.

I hurry onto the walkway. It whisks me forward, on trajectory for the heart of the ship. The
Ranganathan
is one of the largest research vessels in service, a kilometers-long conch shape spiraling through the depths of space. It's large enough to create its own gravity field as it rotates, and it docks its own fleet of smaller ships for short-range research missions and defense. Dr. Osmani's bioengineering project is only one of thousands inching toward completion in the
Ranganathan
's laboratories. When she's done, we should have several hardy permutations of bees and other pollinators well suited to the harsh conditions down on the moons and planets we're terraforming for our colonists.

But not butterflies, apparently. Not unless we can figure out what's wrong with them.

I step to the right of the moving path, pull off my gloves, and scratch. A thick, pink-white scar cuts across each palm, obscuring my hands' natural lines and making
it impossible for any of Mumbai's street-corner fortune-tellers to read my future. I close my eyes and lean against the handrail, letting the lights from the nature scenes glowing on the wall wash over me. No way am I running all the way to the simulation lab to fetch my handbook so I can play Dr. Osmani's scapegoat for the rest of the afternoon. She's probably forgotten about me anyway.

Not that I don't like my work; I do. Observing the pollinators' behavior, watching for patterns, trying to predict what will help them thrive—I love it all. Seeing a hypothesis come to life is electric. And this position is my path to my own research lab someday, my own experiments. But lately I've started to wonder if it's worth it. I thought I would fit in here better than I did at home in Mumbai. I thought I would be surrounded by people like me, people who understood me. But no. No matter where I go, there's something different about me. I'm too young. I don't look Indian. I can't take a joke.

“Have you had your potassium today?” My wrist coms pipe up in a friendly voice that reminds me of Shushri Advani, the horseback riding instructor back at Revati.
A proper electrolyte balance is vital for maintaining a healthy heart and musculature.

“Not now, Advani-ji,” I mutter, and switch her to
mute. Our coms and pressure suits link together to monitor our heart rate, neural patterns, and respiration for signs of distress. Which would be great, except Advani-ji can't always tell the difference between a potassium deficiency and annoyance.

Around me, the walls and ceiling cycle through scenes from home. A young wood, wet with dew and bathed in green-gold light, springs up alongside the moving path. Ivy rustles, birds sing, and parrot-bright shapes flash among the boughs. Every now and then, I catch a glimpse of a meadow between the leafy branches. You could almost imagine you were back on Earth, if it weren't for the slightly sterile smell. Some of my tension slides away.

“Hey,
memsahib.
” Someone bumps me from behind. “Riding the path like the rest of us? Where's your horse?”

I stiffen and quickly shove my hands in my pockets. I don't have to turn around to know it's Hayden Rubio. The sharp, piney scent of his cologne gives him away. I should never have admitted to taking riding lessons at Revati, but that was before I knew the flight crew couldn't be trusted—especially pretty, green-eyed, tousle-haired Rubio.

I turn, groping in my pockets for my gloves, and give him my best imitation of Dr. Osmani's Penetrating Stare of Doom. “Rubio.”

“Memsahib Guiteau.” He presents me with an elaborate bow.

I raise my eyes to the false blue sky and sigh. The whole memsahib bit is something he picked up from one of those old movies about the British occupation of India, full of fainting, flushed white ladies decked out in neck-high lace and parasols. How he got from them to me, a dark-skinned girl with a sensible braid and a lab coat, I don't know.

“What?” He elbows me. “Is Our Lady of the Bees too good to talk to me?”

“Shut it, Rubio.” I manage to wriggle into one glove.

“She speaks!” He clutches his chest. “My heart. It cannot withstand the magnificence. . . .”

I turn my back on him and try to tug on the other glove. I'm not letting Rubio get to me today. I'm just going to ride the path, and eventually he'll go away.

He bumps me again. “So,
memsahib
—”

My pinkie and ring finger catch in the same hole. “I swear, Rubio, call me that one more time and I'll make you wish you'd been born without a tongue.”

The first time I met him, Rubio wouldn't believe I came from Mumbai. He and his flight squad were younger than my fellow research assistants, around the age my papers said I was, and less prone to reading through meals. I was
tired of eating in silence, so I carried my tray to the far end of their table in the mess during our second week of flight.

He called down the table to me. “Hey, you. Lab girl.”

I looked up and raised my eyebrows. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

I grimaced. “I have a name, you know.”

“Yeah? Care to tell us what it is?”

“Miyole,” I said.

“Miyole what?”

“Guiteau.”

“Miyole Guiteau?” My name sounded flat and nasal the way he said it. He raised his eyebrows and popped a chunk of fried potato into his mouth. “What's that, French or something?”

“Haitian,” I corrected. My mother's ancestral home may have been swallowed by the rising oceans, but she taught me where my name came from. That much I remembered about her, at least.

Rubio scoffed. “Yeah, right. And I boarded in Atlantis.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Haiti.” Rubio took another bite and waved his fork at me. “Not real.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Are you serious?”

“He means not anymore,” one of the other boys put
in. “What with it being drowned and all.”

“That doesn't mean it's not real.” I dropped my fork in my bowl of vegetable biryani, no longer hungry. This wasn't the first time I'd been told my mother's land didn't exist. It had happened at Revati. And at the stables. And even at the university. “That's where my mother's people were from. Originally, I mean.”

“How'd you end up in Mumbai, then?” one of the girls—British, by the sound of her—asked.

“I—” I started to answer, but Rubio cut me off.

“You don't look Indian, either. Don't they mostly have lighter skin than you?”

I rolled my eyes. “No.” How could this
badirchand
end up on an Indian research ship and not know the first thing about the country?

“Rubio, don't be such an ass,” the British girl said.

“Sorry.” Rubio held up his hands in mock apology.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“I'm sorry, it's just you don't really sound Indian, either.” Rubio shrugged. He turned to the others. “You know Sunita? From B Squad? She's from Mumbai, and she doesn't sound anything like that.”

“Sunita's from Chennai,” the first boy said.

I cleared my throat, drawing their attention back to
me. “I was going to say, I'm adopted.” I glared at Rubio. “I've lived in Mumbai since I was eight. I'm as much a Mumbaikar as anyone.”

“Well, pardon me,
memsahib
,” Rubio said, soaking every word in sarcasm. Everyone laughed, and the name stuck.

After that, I went back to eating with the other research assistants and their handbooks. Better to be ignored than mocked.

The scene changes. The forest fades, and suddenly we're skimming a ridge above a series of rolling hills topped by windmills. A sun-bleached town nestles in the valley below. I finally work my hand into the glove.

Rubio leans on the walkway's handrail. “Not much of a sense of humor on you, is there, Guiteau?”

I stare down at the village. “I guess not.”