Sound (6 page)

“All right.” Jyotsana holds up her hands in surrender but shoots Madlenka a look that says she doesn't believe me for a second. They're all in their early twenties, which means they think they have some kind of sixth sense when it comes to my love life.

“So where
are
you going?” Lian folds her lab coat neatly and drops it in the laundry chute.

“I . . . um . . . the mid-tier officers' dining room?”

“The middle tier?” Madlenka gasps, and the three of them dissolve in excited shrieks.

“
Aiyo
, really?”

“So exciting!”

“How did you get an invite?”

“Is that what you're wearing?” Madlenka nods at the dress uniform still dangling in my hand.

“Y . . . yes?”

Madlenka shakes her head. “You have to dress up more than that.”

Jyotsana agrees. “This is
mid-tier
, Miyole. This is your chance. You have to make them notice you.”

My stomach flutters. “I . . . I don't know if I want that.” I just want everyone to leave me alone and let me figure out what's wrong with the pollinators. If they notice me, I want it to be for my work, not my outfit.

“Of course you do.” Madlenka pulls her hair back, all business. “These are the first officers. Make a good impression, and they can get you any assignment you want.”

She's right; this is my way to my own lab, my own experiments. No more Dr. Osmani. All of us who signed on as research assistants know the way it works. On the outbound journey, all that matters is preparing for the
terraforming drops, but on the way back, some of us will get the chance to take over the unused labs, run our own experiments. And the first officers are the ones who choose.

“Don't worry.” Lian takes my arm. “We'll help you.”

Jyotsana has already opened my locker and pushed my uniforms aside to look at the clothes I brought from home.

“Ooh.” She pulls out a gold- and red-stamped sari with a startlingly blue
choli
and skirt to wear underneath.

“No way.” The
choli
shows my arms and stops at the bottom of my rib cage, leaving most of my stomach bare, which is exactly what you want on a humid Mumbai afternoon, but not at an officers' dinner. Our prep instructions for the
Ranganathan
told us we could bring one item of civilian formal wear, but the moment I stepped on board and saw everyone in their long sleeves and high collars, I stuffed my sari at the back of my locker.

“But it's so pretty.” Jyotsana holds the outfit up to me. “You look way better in bright colors anyway.”

Madlenka nods. “And a lot of the first officers are from India, so it can't hurt to let them know you are, too.”

I make a face. “I don't know. Isn't that kind of . . . what's the word? Nepotism? Favoritism?”

Madlenka rolls her eyes and shrugs. “It's called ‘how the world works.'”

Jyotsana laughs. “You're so serious, Miyole.”

“Here.” Lian takes the sari and drapes it over the shoulder of my dress uniform. “What if you wear it over your blues like this?”

“I . . . I guess.” Something about the uniform makes the gold cloth slightly more sober and elegant.

“Excellent!” Jyotsana claps her hands. “Put it on! Put it on!”

I change into my blues and let Jyotsana help me drape the sari, while Lian attacks my hair with her expert fingers. If I close my eyes, I'm back in the Gyre, my mother gently tugging my hair into braids. Another regret—forgetting how to replicate the intricate styles she did for us both on Seventh Market days. Soraya and Ava both tried to fix it the way I described, but their own hair was so different from my own. It was never the same.

Giggling bubbles up around me. I open my eyes. Madlenka is coming after me with her lipstick.

“Oh, no.” I lean back, pulling out the neat tuck Jyotsana has just finished at my waist and making Lian yank my hair.

Madlenka sighs and raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Will you trust us? God, you're exactly like my fifteen-year-old cousin. You'd think you'd never gone to a dinner before.”

I shut my mouth and let Madlenka go to work. That's
far closer to home than I want anyone to know.

When they're finished, they push me in front of the door mirror. I stop short, disoriented. The girl staring back looks nothing like me. The sari gives me hips I never have in my regular uniform, and the gold brings out the honey-brown tint in my eyes. Lian has even managed to braid my hair into an elegant spiral at the top of my head—I guess it's true what they say about needing nimble fingers to work in robotics. But it's the lips that put a hitch in my breath. That red . . . the fullness—my mother's face flashes before me, her hair a halo of free-floating curls, her lips painted the color of a crimson sunbird, the blurred memory snapping into perfect focus.

I steady myself against the wall. In my memories, my mother is always beautiful, perfect. But now I remember the scar slicing through the left side of her mouth, the stiffness when she smiled. It never stopped her from picking out the brightest colors to paint her lips. It's her. I look so much like her.

“Miyole?” Lian touches my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

In the mirror, my face has gone gray. I look like I might throw up.

“I'm fine.” I turn away from the mirror and clear my throat. “Thanks for this. Really.”

“Any time.” Lian exchanges a worried look with Jyotsana and Madlenka. “You're sure you're okay?”

“Never better.” I remember to make myself smile this time. Smiling always used to throw Ava and Soraya off my case when either of them went all mother hen on me.

“You'd better go,” Madlenka says. “You don't want to be late to your first officers' dinner.”

I escape into the corridors and wipe at the lipstick with the back of my hand. Normally I take the emergency stairwells to move from deck to deck—I run into fewer people that way—but I don't want to show up in the mid-tier dining room looking like I've come straight from a three-kilometer sim run, so I head for the lifts instead.

I find a spot near the back of the car, next to the window that overlooks the decks as we pass. A crowd of maintenance and repair technicians push in after me, several of them eyeing my outfit. The doors begin to slide shut, but a shout from the other side stops them short.

“Wait! Hold the door.”

A carefully tousled brown head joins the crowd at the front of the lift. “Thanks.”

I press myself against the window and sink down. Rubio. Perfect. Not for the first time, I curse my bad luck
at being one of the tallest girls aboard the
Ranganathan
. Maybe he'll step off in a tier or two and never even notice I'm in the same car. I catch myself rubbing the smooth scar on my left palm, and clasp my hands to make myself stop.

The lift drops in a smooth descent. The upper recreation gardens spread out below us, green and orderly, dotted with crew members cleaning up debris from the attack. Its domed ceiling has already scarred over where the
dakait
breached the
Ranganathan
's skin. Part of the hedge maze has burned down to blackened twigs, but I can still make out its design—a central hub and twenty-four spokes closed inside a circle, the wheel of life. The sign graces my adopted country's flag, but more than that, it means dharma, duty—the keystone of ship life. We each have a role in bringing life out to the Deep, to the shadowed worlds at the sun's farthest reach, even if that role occasionally feels ridiculous or pointless, like, say, chasing down a tomcat or putting on a sari to go to dinner with the first officers.

The lift stops even with the green lawns of the recreation garden. The maintenance techs pile out, but Rubio only steps aside to let them pass.

Don't let him see me. Don't let him see me,
I beg. But it's no
use. Rubio glances over and catches sight of me as the door slides closed.

His eyes light up. “Hey, memsahib!”

Dammit.

“Rubio.” I straighten my spine and let my tone frost over with formality.

He makes his way to the back of the lift as it drops below the recreation level. The windows go black.

“Nice.” His eyes flick over my sari and then home in on my breasts.
Charming.
“Where're you headed so dressed up?”

I stiffen. “First officers' dining room.”

“No way.” He jostles my shoulder in a far too friendly manner and grins. “Me, too.”

“You?” For the first time, I notice he's dressed in his blues as well.

My face must offer up a clear diagram of my feelings on the subject, because Rubio laughs. “Yes, me. My squadron helped chase off those
dakait
.” He arches an eyebrow. “What'd you do to get invited?”

“Nothing,” I mutter, and stare past him at the dark window. Unless you count bathing a half-feral cat, which would be the most embarrassing reason to be invited to dinner ever. So it can't be that.

“Come on, memsahib, you can tell me,” he says. “It
must have been something pretty good to get you invited down there.” He nods to the floor below us, the first officers' tier at the heart of the ship.

“Really. It was nothing.”

“You're on the first response team, right?” His eyes go wide. “Did you rescue one of those Rovers? Did you, like, bring them back from the brink of death or something?”

I almost laugh, but he looks so earnest. “Hardly.”

“Tell me, Guiteau.” He's reached the point of begging, which would be immensely satisfying if I were really holding a tidbit of information out of his reach.

But I'm not. And for once, he's dropped his stupid nickname for me.

“Honestly, I don't have any clue why they invited me. I got stuck behind some wreckage and was almost last on the scene. All I did was . . . um . . .” I trail off.

“What?” He smiles, a flicker of mischief reigniting in his eyes.

Let one of the
dakait
get away. Fail at everything I was supposed to do.

“Tie up some loose ends,” I finish.

“Hmph.” He shoots me an unsatisfied look but doesn't say anything else.

The lift drops back into the open air above the middle
recreation level, and the glass brightens again to let in the artificial sunlight streaming down from the rafters. The gardens are eerily empty, though. Usually, someone has a pickup game of cricket going on the pitch, or off-duty couples are lounging on the grass. Everyone must be on extra duty or too shaken up to go out. A slimy finger of guilt creeps back into my stomach. I should be with them, not clean and pressed and going to a dinner.

The lift slows to a stop with a soft
bong
.

“That's us.” Rubio inspects his hair in the metal doors. “You ready for this, memsahib?”

I sigh. Rubio can't fight his true nature forever. Or even for a handful of minutes, apparently. The moment the doors slide open, I speed out of the lift and stalk down the rolling walkway at brisk clip, trying to get away from myself as much as him.

I arrive at the officers' quarters first, Rubio jogging up behind me. The doors whisk open on a spacious sitting room, with white synthetic-leather couches and false windows flooded with ultraviolet light perfectly simulating late afternoon on the subcontinent. The ceiling plays an image of a hanging garden, hibiscus swaying gently in the breeze. On the far side of the parlor, an old-fashioned set of hinged doors opens onto the dining room.

“Name?”

I jump. A clerk at an antique wooden desk with claw feet sits immediately inside the door. She stands and rounds the desk, tablet at the ready.

“Um . . .” I'd heard the first officers liked their pomp and ceremony, but this was more than I'd expected. The ship's security system could do the same job and spare the clerk's labor for something more useful.

She smiles and taps her stylus against the screen, waiting.

“Science Specialist Miyole Guiteau?” I cringe. Ugh.
It's not a question.

“Here you are. Have a pleasant evening, miss.” She waves me ahead and turns to Rubio. “And you? Name?”

A burst of laughter spills out of the dining quarters. I hang back in the sitting room, watching. A long table laid with linen napkins, china, and crystal fills most of the inner room. Near the back, a group of officers in dress blues cluster around the bar, sipping some kind of cherry-red spirit from glass tumblers. I spot Dr. Osmani, wrapped in white raw silk from neck to toe. She smiles, more with her mouth than with her eyes, as the officer beside her says something.

At least I'm not the only one overdressed.

One of the officers, a handsome older man with a smooth brown face and white hair combed up into a subtle pompadour, spots me. “Ah, our guests have arrived.” He waves me closer. “Come in, come in. Can I offer you a drink? Wine? Sherry?”

“Um . . .” Soraya never drinks, though she keeps wine and beer in the house in case she has guests to dinner. I've mostly fallen in with her, not out of any religious feeling like hers, but because the few times I tried it, the alcohol muffled up my head and blunted my thoughts. I didn't like the screen it lowered between me and the world.

“I don't—” I begin.

“We'd both love a sherry.” Rubio sidles up beside me. “Thank you, sir.”

“Good lad.” The old man winks at Rubio and turns away.

“What are you doing?” I hiss. “I don't want a drink.”

“You do when the head of telemetry offers.” He keeps his eyes on the old man splashing red liquid into two more tumblers.

“But I—”

“You don't have to drink it. You just have to let him fix it for you.” Rubio rolls his eyes. “Honestly, memsahib, an upper cruster like you, I'd have thought you've been
to your share of these things.”

“I keep telling you, I'm not—” But the telemetry officer and his pompadour return with our drinks.