Sound (5 page)

Milah looks up, alarmed. “Bit dead?”

“No, no.” The Rover girl rubs Milah's arm. “He's only sleeping, see?” She pets its fur.

Milah frowns. “Like Mama?”

The Rover girl hesitates. “No, Little Pea.” She reaches out and strokes Milah's hair. “Your mama isn't
waking up, remember? But Tibbet will.”

Milah raises a small hand to her chin and makes a series of signs with her fingers, looking intently at the older girl the whole time.

A bolt of pain flickers across the Rover girl's face. “No,” she says calmly, and signs in return. “He's coming back. I promise.”

It takes me a moment to piece together what their movements mean. I've seen it in movies, and once we had a unit about it in the biomedical history class I took at the university. Before there were genetic cures and implants for deafness, people who couldn't hear talked with their hands. But that was forever ago.

“Is she . . . she's deaf?” I blurt out.

The Rover girl glares at me. “No.”

“But then—”

“Her father is,” she interrupts. “My brother, Nethanel. The one they took.”

The words thump against my chest.
Her father. My brother. The one they took.
All the pieces tumble into place. No wonder she's been frantic. No wonder she's been sharp. Guilt balloons in my chest again. If I hadn't been frozen with fear, if I had just reached out and stopped that
dakait
. . .

“Oh.” I swallow. “What did she say?”

The Rover girl's throat works silently for a moment. “She asked if Nethanel had gone to be with her mama.”

“Oh.” What can I even say?
Sorry about your brother. I might have had the chance to stop the people who took him, but I guess we'll never know. On the plus side, someday your niece will forget about her father.

I look away, busy myself with preparing the next syringe. Behind me, the two of them continue their talk in a flurry of hands and soft murmurs. I try to block them out, give them some privacy, and focus on something other than my guilt. Line up the diagnostic strips. Program the pathogen analyzer. Right the boxes of swabs and syringe heads the cat scattered across the counter.

I check over my shoulder. Milah has that look little kids get where their faces seem like they're about to crumple. It hits the small soft spot in the center of my chest, and before I know what I'm really doing, I'm reaching up into my alcove and pulling down my sari.

Milah goggles at me as if I've produced a bird from thin air, like a street magician.

I shake out the sari. “Here.” I spread it out on the ground, picnic style, and scoop up the limp bundle of fur.
“You hold him, and I'll take some blood. We'll be out of here in no time.”

The Rover girl shoots me a small, grateful smile, settles Milah on the worn fabric, and piles the cat in her lap. His mouth hangs open and his legs splay sideways, but Milah strokes his back and coos at him anyway.

“Good job,” I say. “You're an excellent assistant.”

I draw the cat's blood and pipe it onto the diagnostic strips. Milah babbles on behind me, murmuring soothing sounds that aren't quite words.

The older girl clears her throat. “Thank you.”

I finish fitting the strips into the analyzer and push the loading door closed. “No trouble.” I glance over my shoulder at her and heat fills my cheeks.
Professional.
“I mean, I'm happy to be of service.”

The Rover girl stands, holds out a hand. “I'm Cassia.”

I take it, even though I feel weird and formal—adult—doing so. “Miyole.”

We drop hands and stand, awkward. Behind me, the analyzer whirrs softly.

“Thanks for letting her see Tibbet.” She nods at Milah and smiles again, just a little bit.

I shrug. “It's nothing. I wasn't getting anywhere with him.”

“It's only . . . she wanted something familiar, you know?”

“Yeah.” I glance at my sari and then down at my gloves. My scars itch beneath the latex. “I get that.” More than she knows.

Cassia looks at me, and her face softens. “Yeah?”

That one word taps my chest, and suddenly the words are coming out. “I lost my mother, too.”

I haven't said it in years. Not to anyone aboard the
Ranganathan
. Not to any of my professors at the university. Not to anyone who hasn't known me since I was a child.

“Oh.” Cassia leans against the counter beside me. “I'm sorry.”

We stand in silence for a moment, side by side, not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of her shoulder beside mine.

“Who raised you?” she asks. “Your father?”

I hesitate, another set of memories pulling at me like an undertow. Darkness. A steamer trunk. A flash and the very air torn apart. I push them away. If I follow them down, I'm not sure I'll come back up.

“No,” I say. “Not him.”

The pathogen analyzer winds to a halt and beeps out a quick, four-beat tone. I shake myself. There's no
time for any of that in the present.

“It's done.” I pull up the results on my handbook. Cassia peers over my shoulder.

“He's fine.” I say, running a finger down the list of results. “A few minor pathogens and a case of
otodectes cynotis
, but nothing we can't treat.”

“Oto-what?” Cassia throws a worried look at her niece, who has just planted a kiss on top of the cat's head.

“Ear mites.” I dismiss it with a wave.

She makes a face, and I can't help it—I laugh. For one brief moment, the heaviness in me dissolves. Milah looks up at us, puzzled.

“Sorry.” I pull back my smile.
Neutral. Professional.
I'm supposed to be helping her, not pouring out my own sad history or subjecting her to my mad cackling.

“No, it's fine. It's . . .” Cassia's mouth twists. She blinks and looks away, but not before I see tears running down her cheeks.

“Oh, no.” I reach for her but stop short. “Please. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean . . .”

“No, it's not your fault.” She wipes furiously at her cheeks. “I just . . . I forgot about all of it for a second.” Her eyes have dried, but her skin is still red and blotchy.

Part of me wants to put an arm around her, make her
some tea, rub her back the way Soraya did when I woke up crying in the middle of the night.
But she's not a little kid,
I remind myself.
She's my age, and I barely know her.

“Sorry.” She sniffs. “Stupid, crying.”

“It's not,” I say. “I'd be shaken up, too, after everything you've been through. The attack, losing your brother—”

“I haven't lost him.” Some of the fire surges back into her voice.

I frown. “But the
dakait
. . .”

“I'm not afraid of a few jackers.” The implication is there.
Unlike your captain.

Her words hit me too hard. I step back.

“No one wanted this to happen.” I cross my arms. “We all did our best.”

She snorts.

All the soft parts of me harden over. “You know we can't break trajectory. The whole terraforming process depends on us hitting our payload deliveries exactly right. Commander Dhar would say the same.”

“I'll find a way to do it myself, then. No matter what your commander says, I'm going to get my brother back.”

I shake my head. “You'll get yourself killed.”

Her jaw tightens. “Maybe.” Her red-rimmed eyes pierce me. “Don't you have something you'd die for?”

Faces skim across my memory—Ava, Soraya, the blurred shadow of my mother. Hands on the ladder.
Climb, Miyole!
The broken seawall filling the feeds and drowning in a well of my own uselessness.

“Of course I do,” I say quietly. I don't know what that thing is, exactly, but I can feel the edges of it. If my mother had it in her to sacrifice herself for someone else, maybe I do, too. Maybe she gave that to me. Maybe she inscribed it on my DNA or passed it to me when the wave took her. I meet Cassia's eyes, and an electric crackle arcs between us.

“I do,” I say.

Chapter 4

I
slink away to the women's residential quarters and close myself in the showers. All my bunkmates are still on duty, thankfully, and the place has a rare quiet, like a back garden surrounded by a sound-dampening net. Every time I close my eyes, I see the
dakait
's foot slipping out of reach and the Rover ship burning against the stars. All of it happens again and again in cold, perfect silence. Is that what Cassia's brother hears? Not the peaceful patter of water and the hush of the air circulators, but an absolute absence of sound? A shiver passes through me, despite the warm water. I stand under the shower long after the soft chime warns me I've used up my daily allotment, staring at the wall tiles without really seeing them.

Afterward I pad out to the living quarters. My handbook lies faceup on my bunk, blinking with an update.

SCHEDULE CHANGE: 18:00 SPC. GUITEAU TO MIDDLE-TIER OFFICERS' DINING ROOM

Officers' dining room? Middle tier?
My eyes go wide. That's where the commander eats. Why would they want me, of all people? Dining with the commander is the kind of honor you get for pulling survivors from flaming wreckage, not for failing to stop a
Dakait
and serving as kebab-slicing practice for a fifteen-pound tomcat. There must be some mistake. Any minute now, the duty clerks will realize the error and wipe it from my schedule.

I comb out my hair and try to wrangle it into something other than the poufy bell shape it likes to take when it isn't tied down in a braid. I could never understand why Ava always wanted her hair cut short when she was able to grow it out so long. I look down at my handbook. The message hasn't gone away. I sigh and wrestle my hair into two tight French braids that meet at the base of my skull, then pull my midnight-blue dress uniform from my clothing locker and spread it flat on my bunk. I haven't worn it this whole journey. I haven't needed to, since I spend most of my days in my lab coat or my everyday pressure suit. I run my hand over the brass buttons. No point putting it on when I'll be pulling it right back off.

I check the message again. Still blinking. SCHEDULE CHANGE.

I know I should be excited. This is my chance to shine in front of the senior officers. But what I really want is to find Cassia and Milah and take them to the mess hall for biryani and okra—comfort food—and then maybe show them the gardens.
Cassia.
Our conversation in the lab comes rushing back to me, and I wince. What made me tell her about my mother? I've been so careful to leave that behind, to be the Mumbai version of myself, and then I go spilling it to a person I've only just met. Even back home, the only person outside my family I told was Vishva. But Vishva was my best friend, almost family herself, at least until the months before I left.

I pull my crow from my pocket and check the clock:
20:34 SATURDAY, 7 APRIL
. I still have it set to Mumbai time. Sometimes it's comforting to look at it and think,
Oh, it's lunchtime at Revati
, or imagine Soraya riding the trains home from an afternoon class at the university. I've managed not to think about Vishva for several months, but something about Cassia brought her back.
Where is she now?
I wonder.
What's she doing?

Saturday evening. Vishva is likely at a dance club down in the Salt, sweating and swinging her long dark hair everywhere. Or else she's off with a boy, snogging on a rowboat in the shadow of the Great Levee. I don't
really know. We were inseparable those first few years—always choosing each other as partners on school outings and running the biomimesis club together after school. President and vice president. First and second in our class.

And then we were fifteen, and I was leaving Revati for college, and everything changed. Vishva changed.

The month before I started classes at the university, I met Vishva and a gaggle of other girls from our class at the train stop near my house.

“Miyole!” Vishva threw up her hands and tottered over to me on silver stilettos. Her long hair coiled in a sleek black chignon at the side of her head, and her flowing orange shirt had been slashed perfectly to show her shoulders. She grabbed me in a hug. “You came!”

“Of course I came.” I looked down at my flat shoes and plain lavender shirtdress. Even with Vishva in heels, our heads were still level. Only I looked like a freakishly tall ten-year-old hanging out with a group of actual teenagers. “Where are we going?”

“You tell me.” Vishva grinned. “It's your farewell party.”

I gave her a playful shove and rolled my eyes. “I told you, it's not
farewell
. I'll still be in the city, just over at the university. We'll see each other all the time.”

I could have gone farther. I'd been accepted to colleges in Bangalore, Oxford, Zurich, Cairo, Kolkata, and Jaipur, too, but Soraya hadn't wanted me straying so far from home until I was at least eighteen. So Mumbai University it was.

“So, where are we going?” Vishva asked.

“Up to Malabar Hill?” I suggested.

Vishva wilted. “Again? Seriously? And do what, sneak into one of the cafés and hope we catch a glimpse of Liam Chowdhury?” She said his name like we hadn't both been obsessed with his movies and filled our feeds with nothing but pictures of him for the past two years.

I frowned. “What's wrong with Liam Chowdhury?”

“Nothing.” Vishva flopped her hands against her sides. “It's just . . .
chaila
, Mi. Don't you want to do something different for a change?”

I scratched my ankle with the top of my shoe and glanced at the other girls. My second-closest friend, Aziza, was off visiting her father in Istanbul, so Vishva had brought along a group of girls I knew from class but didn't hang around with unless we had to do a project together or something. Most of them were busy with their crows or talking, but Siobhan Nguyen and Chandra Avninder, two of the wealthiest girls in our school, were clearly listening in.

I shifted from one foot to the other. “Like what?”

Vishva's eyes sparkled, and I realized she had been waiting for me to ask that all along. She glanced at Siobhan and Chandra. “Your sister lives down in the Salt, doesn't she?”

I eyed Vishva. What was she up to? She knew exactly where Ava and Rushil lived. She'd been to their house for tea a million times before. “Yes?”

Vishva hurried on. “So you know your way around, yeah?”

Siobhan and Chandra were definitely listening now. They weren't even pretending to scroll through the feeds on their crows. And Vishva was giving me a look that said she might spontaneously combust if I didn't go along with whatever she had planned.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I know my way around.”

“Brilliant. There's this club called Pradeep's that just opened on the hill and Chandra says they don't check ID for girls, so we could definitely get in.” Vishva threw a smile over her shoulder at our classmates, then turned back to me. “What do you think?”

I looked down at my dress. Definitely more iced fruit on Malabar Hill than club wear. And Pradeep's . . . I liked the Salt, but I didn't particularly like its clubs. Packed-in crowds, loud music, flashing lights, people screaming at one
another over the bass, a miasma of smoke, sweat, spilled drinks, perfume, and cologne choking the air. I knew some people liked it—I knew Vishva liked it—but something about being trapped in a dark room where no one could hear me put me ill at ease.

“Can't we go down to the talkies instead?” I whispered.

“We go to the talkies every week.” Vishva drooped over like a marionette with her strings cut. “Come oooonn, Miyole.”

I sighed. Siobhan and Chandra had gone back to their crows, but they were obviously still listening. Maybe it would be more fun than it looked. Maybe I'd love it. I liked dancing, after all, even if I wasn't as coordinated as Vishva, and what were clubs for if not dancing?

“Okay,” I said. “Let's go.”

Vishva squealed. “I knew it! This is going to be so
jhakaas
! You're going to love it, Mi.”

We rode the train down to the Salt, everyone gabbing the whole way. Vishva dug in her purse and found gold shimmer cream to paint on my eyelids, and Chandra's friend Drishti loaned me her belt so I'd look a little less like I was heading to a violin recital. Vishva tried to get me to undo my braids, but I slapped at her hands until she left me alone. I didn't like anyone touching my hair except Soraya.

We piled off the train at Sion Station and started up the hill. Vishva and the other girls huddled together, pointing and giggling at everything we passed and shrieking when they accidentally stepped in mud puddles. A chai vendor glared at them over his cart, and farther down the street, a twentysomething guy nudged his friend and ogled Siobhan as she stopped to take a picture of one of the street-sweeper bots someone had graffitied to look like a turtle shell.

Unease fluttered in my stomach. Normally when I came to the Salt, I dressed in plain clothes and boots. I tried not to draw attention to myself. But my Revati friends were so obviously tourists, rich girls acting out every stereotype imaginable of the spoiled private-school girl slumming it on a weekend night.

I walked a little slower, put another meter of distance between myself and the group.

“Miyole!” Vishva shouted back down the street. “Hurry up! We don't know where we're going.”

My heart fell. Not them.
Us.
I was one of them.

We arrived at Pradeep's as the sun disappeared behind the levee wall. Bass thumped through the red-painted cinder block walls, and the wind picked up, plastering my skirt against my legs and peppering us with grit from the streets.

“Bleh.” Vishva turned her back to the wind and shuffled closer to me. “This is going to be so
jhakaas
, Miyole. You'll see.”

A big man with close-cropped hair and a tight black shirt stood at the entrance, eyeing each person as they passed and occasionally cracking his stony face to wink at one of the girls.

Vishva and the others giggled as he whistled at them and waved them through, but when I stepped up, he held out a hand.

“Wait a second.” He looked me up and down, and suddenly I wished I had let Vishva do something with my hair after all. “How old are you, kid?”

I glanced at Vishva, standing openmouthed just inside the door.

“Nineteen?” My voice squeaked.

The doorman shook his head. “I don't think so. Let's see some ID.”

“She's with me.” Vishva stepped back into the entryway. “She's my friend.”

The doorman looked between the two of us and cocked an eyebrow at Vishva. “You nineteen, too?”

She stepped back. “No. Um . . . eighteen. I'm eighteen.”

He grunted. “Well, you can stay or you can go, but
your friend doesn't get in without ID.”

I looked helplessly at Vishva.
Don't leave me out here alone.
Fake IDs were expensive, and I'd never needed one before. Vishva had said I wouldn't need one.

She glanced over her shoulder at Siobhan and Chandra standing under the pulsing lights of the dance floor, and then back at me. “Sorry, Mi.” She backed up another step.

A small, sharp pain shot through my chest. “Vishva . . .”

“I'll find you later, okay?” She angled her way into the crowd and shouted over the music. “We'll go up to the hill, like you wanted. Keep your crow on.”

My eyes burned, but I wasn't about to cry in front of a bouncer and a whole line of people. That would be later, alone on the train, when I started to wonder whether they'd turned me away because I truly looked so young or if my being too dark and foreign had something to do with it. Instead I stared dumbfounded as my best friend disappeared into the darkness and thrash of bodies without so much as a backward look.

Another alarm chimes, warning me it's time to get dressed if I'm going to make it to the officers' tier on time. I can't keep dwelling on some dumb high school slight. Besides,
my failed attempt to get into Pradeep's was what gave me the idea to tweak my records and get myself here. If Vishva hadn't dumped me for her new friends that night, I might still be knocking around Mumbai, waiting for my life to begin. Someone else would have had to rescue the universe's traumatized cats.

I stand and shake out my dress uniform, brush invisible flecks of lint from the sleeves, and hold it up against me before the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

“It'll be fine,” I tell myself. If it was a mistake, surely they would have sorted it by now.

At that moment, the door slides open, and all three of my bunkmates walk in.

“Whoa-ho,” Madlenka whoops as she shrugs out of her lab coat. “Fancy. Going somewhere special tonight, Miyole?”

Jyotsana and Lian grin when they see what I'm holding.

“Is it a boy?” Jyotsana's eyes light up. “It's a boy, isn't it? Is it that security pilot who's always following you around?”

For a split second, I think spontaneous human combustion might be possible after all. “Rubio?” I say faintly.

“That's him,” Jyotsana agrees. “The one with the hair, right?”

“No,” I choke out. “Definitely not. No.”

“Come on, Jyotsana, not everyone's into boys.” Madlenka rolls her eyes at me sympathetically. Her girlfriend works in propulsion maintenance, and once, when we were playing Truth or Dare during our first week aboard, she got me to admit to having a debilitating and unrequited crush on a girl from my biochem class at the university. Her name was Karishma, and she had hair all the way down to her waist. She was also six years older than I was and secretly engaged to our teaching assistant, but I didn't know that at the time.

“No,” I say again, more forcefully than I mean to. “It's no one, okay?” I don't have time in my life for crushes anymore.