Sound (8 page)

All of that crumples behind me as I stalk away from the dining quarters. The lift doors close—for once it's
empty, thankfully—and my breath fills the small space, harsh and loud, as if I have been running. I cover my face with my hands and slide down against the corner. Did I imagine that shipside harmony all those years ago? Was I so young I couldn't see past the surface? Or have research ships changed? I thought I would be happy here. I thought I would be with people like me. But they aren't. They're exactly like Vishva, thinking only of themselves, ready to cast off anyone who's no longer of use.

The lift opens near the upper recreation gardens, and a crowd of techs and research assistants pile in, laughing. I struggle to my feet and push my way out.

“Feeling stressed?” Advani-ji asks. “Exercise can reduce anxiety. Why not try taking a walk in the recreation gardens?”

“Fine,” I say, even though I feel more like crushing the grass and snapping branches from the hedge maze than taking a stroll along the gardens' designated walking paths.

I tramp through the neatly trimmed foliage into the Ashoka wheel. The maze isn't really so much a maze as it is a meditation path that swallows you in green and spits you out near the same place you entered. Normally, the solitude of the wheel brings my heart rate down, helps me troubleshoot whatever's gone wrong with the pollinators or
figure out a way to avoid the crowds in the mess hall, but tonight it doesn't help. This is bigger than my own petty anxieties.

I leave the hedges behind and keep walking, past the gardens and down the moving sidewalks. The arched walls and ceiling play a lavender twilight dotted with fireflies, and then a stark mesa at sunset, the clouds striating the darkening sky with pink and gold. It's all fake, nothing more than electrical impulses skittering across a screen. This whole place is an illusion, even down to our supposed mission. Who cares if there are only bees and no butterflies on the colonies? If a human life isn't worth fighting for, why are theirs?

The corridor opens onto the hangar where we brought in the Rover ship. The pathway rolls to a stop, emptying me into the wide, darkened bay. On the far end, the blackened wreck of the Rover ship hunches beneath a fire-dampening tarp. All my thoughts snuff out, and then my pulse comes back, shuddering through my veins.
The ship, the ship, the ship.

I approach, my footsteps amplified by the cavernous latticework of metal girders far above my head. Outside the wreck, I pause. A burned, oily smell lingers in the air; more than a smell—I can taste it. It takes on mass in my
lungs. The
Ranganathan
's microbionic air scrubbers must still be hard at their invisible work, cleaning the air, but they haven't managed to erase all traces of tragedy yet.

I lift the edge of the tarp and duck inside. My slippers stir the ash. I blink, willing my eyes to hurry up and dilate, but when they finally do, there isn't much to see. Only the curved metal frame remains overhead, most of the fuselage burned away around it. A line of storage lockers back against one of the partially intact sides, metal faces either punched in or coated with ash, and chunks of plating and insulation litter the floor. The hull on the far side bows out, its tattered edges twisted like tinfoil. Explosive decompression. It doesn't take much to destroy a ship, especially a small one without as many built-in fail-safes as the
Ranganathan
. One small, hull-penetrating round, and the whole vessel can burst open to space like a flower blooming in fast motion.

On the one remaining inner wall, someone has swiped away the ash, revealing a muted red-and-yellow design—thick lines radiating out against a field of shadow blue, a wreath of flowers with stars in place of pistils all around.

A muffled sob echoes through the gutted ship.

I start. “Hello?”

The crying stops. “Who's there? What do you want?”
Cassia's voice reaches out of the shadows, tremulous and defiant.

“It's me.” I squint into the darkness. Cassia sits in the entrance to one of the ship's gangways. “Miyole.”

She doesn't answer, only rubs her eyes on her sleeve.

“You shouldn't be in here.” I step closer. “The air's still full of carcinogens.”

I expect her to come back at me with some comment about the rain calling the ocean wet, but she doesn't. Instead she drops her head into her hands and kneads her scalp.

“Cassia?” Her silence is far worse than the crying.

“Your commander says we can rebuild this.” She brings up her head. Red rims her eyes. “Do you think she's even been to see what's left?”

“I don't know.” I don't know if Commander Dhar truly hasn't seen the extent of the Rover ship's damage, or if she was simply giving Cassia and her family an excuse to stay aboard. One look at their vessel, and even those of us in bioscience would know it was beyond repair.

Cassia drops her head back against the door frame. She looks up at the expanse of tarp where the ceiling should be. “Milah learned to walk here. We used to play Sparks and Kettles. That was Nethanel's favorite when we were little.”

I don't know what to say. Soraya would know. She always knew when I needed soothing words and when I needed to be left alone up in the branches of the Japanese maple in the corner of our back garden. But she isn't here. It's just clumsy, awkward me. I finger the hem of my sari and stare down into the ash. I wish I was wearing my work clothes and not this costume. It feels even more out of place in the midst of the Rover ship's destruction. I hesitate for a moment, then sit down next to Cassia on the blackened floor.

“Do you think she'll remember him?” Cassia asks, almost too quiet for me to hear.

I look up. “Your brother?”

“Her father,” she corrects, though the words sound as if they're shredding her throat. “Nethanel's not just my brother. He's her father, too.”

I rub a spot on the floor. The soot smudges my fingers, oily and opaque, but the floor isn't any cleaner, either. It's as if it's spreading, staining everything it touches. Cassia's palms are thick with it.

I look up at the red-and-yellow design on the wall facing us and then back at her hands. “That drawing,” I say. “What is it?”

Cassia glances up and scowls. “The Wheel of Heaven.”

“Does it mean something?”

“It's supposed to protect us. You know, keep misfortune out of our path.” She pulls at a loose thread on her trouser cuff. “Some help it's been. First Milah's mother, and now this. Nethanel . . .”

Guilt rolls over me again. If I had stopped that
dakait
,
his ship might have been caught waiting for him instead of bolting. We might have had time to stage a rescue or negotiate a trade—him for Nethanel. Cassia might still have her brother. Milah might still have her father.

“I'm sorry.” I look at her. “I wish I could have stopped it.”

Cassia scoffs. “You say it like it's over.” She scowls at the wheel, and then at me. “It isn't over until we have him back.”

Helplessness wells up in my chest. That feeling of watching disaster unfold and not being able to do anything but watch the feeds. “If I could go back . . . ,” I start to say, and then stop. What good would it do Cassia to know I had a chance to save her brother and failed?

I change tactics. “Maybe the commander will change her mind.” Even as I say it, I hear how ridiculous it sounds.

Cassia gives a short, bitter laugh. “Right. The commander.”

“I want to help.” I reach for her sleeve, but stop short
and let my hand fall to the floor between us. “I just . . . I don't know what else to do.”

Cassia looks down at my hand, then up at me. Our eyes meet. Dark circles hang beneath hers, like bruises. Something raw and charged passes between us—it's as if my whole body is holding its breath. This feels different from hanging out with Vishva or any of the girls I knew back home. Different even than my crush on Karishma. The hairs on my arms rise.

“If I could get to Ceres,” she says cautiously. “I know someone who could help.”

My throat goes dry. I know what she's asking. Part of me has known where this was going since the moment I stormed out of the officers' dining hall. I close my eyes.

“We have scouting shuttles,” I say in a low voice. “The ones Commander Dhar was talking about. They're short-range, but they could be modded.”

I open them again. Cassia is watching me with the silent intensity of a starving animal about to be fed.

“It wouldn't hurt the mission if one went missing,” I go on. “The commander almost said as much.”

Cassia stares at me, her brows knit, her lips pressed together. “And one of those . . . It could reach Ceres Station?”

I nod. “Not much farther, but if someone could find the right parts on Ceres . . .”

“And this person,” Cassia says slowly, careful to keep her face neutral. “She could do this alone?”

“As long as she can fly a ship.” I nod.

Her face falls. “And if she can't?”

I falter. I assumed all the Rovers knew how to fly. It would be like living on a boat and never learning how to swim.
Except that happened all the time,
I suddenly remember. Most of our neighbors in the Gyre thought my mother was crazy for taking me in the water.
You want your girl to be shark bait, Miss Captain, you?

I bite my lip. “Not even a little bit?”

Cassia shakes her head. “I worked on the water recycling system. Kept up the air filters.”

I swallow. Things just got several magnitudes more complex. “In that case, she would need someone to fly for her.”

Cassia stifles a groan and grinds her palms into her eyes. When she lowers her hands, a half-moon of soot marks her cheek. “Someone has to stay behind with Milah and the baby. Aunt Rebekah, probably. My father's injured too badly. And Ezar . . .” She shakes her head and looks up at me, helpless. “He's willing to think
Nethanel's dead. He wouldn't have the stomach for a rescue anyway.”

Dead. A rescue.

Times stops. My whole body hums, as if the bees have built a hive inside me.
Skimming the water, searching for my mother's body. Milah holding Tibbet's limp frame.
Cassia, full of righteous fire, staring down the commander.
When I was younger, Ava insisted on showing me how to pilot my mother's old sloop. Just in case, she said. I thought it was pointless. I could have used those dusty afternoons to finish my homework or go out riding with Vishva. I already knew I wanted to be a scientist, not a pilot.

But I learned the basics.

I learned enough.

Cassia has to do this thing, and if she can't fly herself, there is only one other way it can be done. I know what I have to do. I know how to make it right. All at once, the bees rise to an unbearable hum, and then stop.

“I could go,” I say in the silence. “I could fly for you.”

Chapter 6

O
ne of the first things the early Deep Sound pioneers figured out was that if you spend too much time with the same people day after day in an enclosed space, all the fake gardens in the universe wouldn't stop you from going truly and profoundly insane. The stress, the isolation, it gets to you, and you start doing things you would never think of doing under the open sky, like starting fistfights or stabbing one another with cutlery. Or screaming at your commander and storming out of an officers' dinner.

Which is why, the morning after my outburst at dinner, I find my schedule full of mindfulness training and appointments with the ship's counselors.

“It could be worse.” Lian peeks over my shoulder at the handbook screen and shrugs.

And she's right. It could be far worse. The
Ranganathan
's
administration could have recorded the incident as a disciplinary misdemeanor, rather than a case of stress-induced emotional reactivity. Still.

“You won't tell anyone, will you?” I glance at my other suitemates' empty bunks.

Lian hesitates and gives me a sideways look. “I'm pretty sure they already know.”

My stomach sinks.

Lian looks guilty. “Actually, I'm pretty sure everyone knows.”

I stare at her for half a second before it hits me.
Oh, no.
“Rubio.”

Lian nods. “Rubio.”

“Chaila.”
I drop back on my bunk and pull my pillow over my face. “At least tell me the thing with the officers made him forget about the cat.”

Lian stays silent a beat too long. I peek out from under the pillow at her.

“I heard about that, too.” Lian grimaces. “At the mess this morning.”

I groan and roll over. What did I ever do to deserve Hayden Rubio?
It's not for much longer,
I remind myself. Two more days, and we'll be near enough for the shuttle to reach Ceres Station. Then Rubio will be the least of my problems.

I hurry through my morning duties—check the pollinator habitats, program the nutrient rain timer, and tweak the atmospheric mix. By some small, anomalous grace, none of the butterflies have died overnight. A blue-black sparrowtail perches on a mossy branch above me, gently folding and unfolding its wings.
Graphium cloanthus
, a glassy bluebottle.

Guilt twists in my chest. These fragile creatures—the bees and butterflies—their lives have been my responsibility since I came on board. I've watched them and their ancestors inch through their larval stages, cocoon themselves beneath leaves, burst forth in a flurry of wings, mate, lay their eggs, and die. I've stolen their eggs for Dr. Osmani's genetic alterations and sneaked them back into place afterward. I've charted every iteration's effect on their life span.

But now there's something more important to be done, something I can't ignore. Help Cassia. Rescue Nethanel. Make sure Milah grows up with at least one of her parents. I know it's the right thing to do, but I still feel seasick whenever I think about it. It isn't only the prospect of stealing a shuttle and the mountain of trouble that goes along with that. Or the knowledge that I'm giving up the years of work it took to make it to the DSRI. Or the thought
of how disappointed Soraya will be when she finds out what I've done, because she'll never, ever understand. Maybe it's all of those things. Or maybe it's all the unknown factors in between. “Rescue Nethanel” is just a hypothesis. The outcome could just as easily be that we get caught stealing the shuttle, or we make it to Ceres Station, but we lose the trail. Nethanel disappears into the unending night of space.

I shake off the thought. “They'll assign you someone else,” I say to the glass. “Someone good.” Maybe Dr. Osmani herself will spend some time with the pollinators and see that I wasn't the one killing them after all.

I send off my morning report and race downstairs to the wellness level, avoiding the crowds on the lift. I don't want to see loads of people on a good day, and if Lian is right about Rubio's gossip reaching everyone, I especially want to stay hidden today.

The walls of the wellness level glow with a soft, lunar blue. Calm settles over me as I navigate the corridors. I know the ship is subtly manipulating my emotions, bathing me in shades empirically proven to exert a soothing influence, but my amygdala doesn't care that it's being had. My shoulders start to relax. A hologram of interlaced tree branches overhangs the ceiling, a blue sky sparkling
beyond them. Only the smell gives away the lie—crisp, sterilized air where there should be leaves and damp earth.

I stop and double-check the schedule on my handbook.
SEMINAR ROOM 12A—MINDFUL FOCUS WORKSHOP
. I hug the screen to my chest and slip down the hall, checking the display on each glass doorway I pass until I find the one that matches my schedule.

The counselor sits at a table with his back to me, talking to a young man in a pale gray flight uniform. I know the pilot. Alan Hwang. A few weeks ago, he took one of the fighters out into the black and tried to sit in it until he ran out of oxygen. I can't be as bad off as he is, can I? I didn't try to off myself, after all. Maybe that's why I'm still on partial duty rotation and Alan has been confined to the wellness level for almost a month straight. I guess preadmission psych tests don't catch everything.

My forehead bumps the glass with a light
thump
. The counselor turns, smiles beatifically, and waves me in.

I square my shoulders. The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can concentrate on socking away supplies and using Jyotsana's security clearance to hack the
Ranganathan
's logs. The
dakait
ship's call signature, the shuttle's security override codes, it's all there, waiting for me to download to my crow. But for now, I have to act normal, or as normal as
someone undergoing a psych evaluation can be. I activate the door.

“Mindfulness increases accuracy and precision,” Advani-ji reminds me. “Daily practice can reduce overall anxiety.”

Alan looks up at me as I walk in. He seems healthy enough—maybe even a little pudgy—but his gaze is dull and subdued, like he doesn't have the energy to meet my eyes. No wonder. He's nineteen and his career as a pilot is over before it started, on top of whatever took him out into the emptiness in the first place.

I sit down across from him at the broad table in the center of the room. Stacks of pastel origami paper sit between us.

“Specialist Guiteau, right?” our instructor says. “So glad you could join us. Today we're learning how to make cranes.”

If I have one good thing to say about origami, it's that it keeps me from worrying that I've made a horrible mistake, that I'll get caught and end up like Alan, everything over before it's begun. I go over the plan in my head as I fold, check it for glitches. Tomorrow, during ship's night, we'll pass within a short flight of Ceres Station. Three hours into
third shift, when the flight and deck crews have retired to their bunks, I'll meet Cassia on the hangar floor. We'll sneak aboard a shuttle together, and the rest depends on speed and surprise. And Commander Dhar's distaste for altering the
Ranganathan
's course simply to chase one tiny ship. I fold my koi paper in half so it forms a triangle and crease it with my thumb.

“How's it coming, Miyole?”

I jump. David, the counselor, smiles warmly and leans over my shoulder to inspect my work. Everyone else on the ship goes by his or her title and surname, but for some reason, the counselors are always simply David or Yumiko or Stjepan. I guess so we'll feel comfortable opening up about our innermost fears and anxieties to them or something.

“Fine.” I gesture at the growing pile of therapy cranes I've managed to finish folding over the last hour. I tried doing them with my gloves on at first, but that didn't turn out so well. At least Alan and David don't seem like the gossiping types. So far, they either haven't noticed my scarred hands, or they don't care.

David plucks a bird out of the pile and examines it. He straightens out its beak, which, if I'm honest, I wasn't the most careful about folding.

“You're rushing.” David gently places the crane back down on the table in front of me.

“I'm not trying to,” I lie.

He takes a seat next to me and pulls a fresh piece of paper from the top of the stack. “It doesn't matter how many you make, you know.”

“I know.” I sigh and flick the lopsided bird back into the pile with its flock.

David folds his paper in half and creases it in one smooth, practiced motion. “Can I ask you something?”

I shrug.

“Do you like taking walks?”

I frown. “I guess.” Back in Mumbai, I liked swimming and riding better, but water's too scarce for that out here, and we don't have any use for horses.

He opens up the paper and folds it in the opposite direction, so the creases cross each other. “This isn't a race. Think of it more as a walk. A stroll. Something you do simply for the pleasure of doing it.” The square slip of paper becomes a diamond.

I nod and look down to pick at a hangnail. “I get it.”

I don't mention how I never walk for fun, only when my coms remind me I'm falling behind on my weekly exercise quota or I'm too worked up to think straight. Or
when I want to avoid the crowds in the lifts. I don't have room in my life for things without a purpose.

David finishes with a flourish and hands me a perfect paper crane with movable wings. “Be where you are, Miyole. If you're stuck up here”—he taps his head—“you'll only make yourself anxious over things you can't change. You'll miss everything out here.” He spreads his hands to indicate this room, the ship, the universe.

And I know he's right, in a way. I should appreciate what I have. Out of all the billions of people on Earth, only a million or so have the education to qualify for a Deep Sound research mission, and out of those, only a few thousand actually end up selected to serve. I could have been born in the Siberian wastes, far from the center of the world. I could have grown up poor and been forced to take a factory job before I finished school, or worse. I could have died in that hurricane. Instead, all my dreams have come true. My pollinators will bring life and food to a newly terraformed colony. Someday people will live there and ease the overcrowding on Earth.

But all of that is so far away, so abstract. Cassia and Milah need me now. And there is something I can change. I have the chance to do for Milah what no one could ever do for me—give her back one of her parents. What good
is all my luck and education if I can't do that? What good is my being here if I can't at least try to right this one wrong?

After the workshop, I'm supposed to spend an hour walking in the gardens. Instead, I wander wellness, keeping an eye out for Cassia. She's bound to be here somewhere. Her father has been getting skin grafts to cover his burns, and today bionics is replacing his injured eye. I know I probably should be avoiding her, but my stomach feels like it's percolating. My whole body quivers with nerves, as if I've downed an entire pot of tea in one sitting. I'll feel calmer when I see her.

“Wellness tip,” Advani-ji chirps. “Have you had enough liquid today? Drinking water can reduce an elevated heart rate.”

“Stuff it,” I mutter, and switch her to silent.

I find Cassia in one of the visitation anterooms, watching her father sleep in a hospital bed on the other side of a glass partition. White gauze covers his left eye, and a tube snakes down his throat, parting his lips. His chest rises and falls regularly, but patches of sickly pale tissue show through the red, flaking skin along his shoulder and neck, where the medics haven't finished applying their dermal grafts yet. Cassia sits in the dark, eyes wide and
back straight, almost swallowed by the white expanse of couch filling most of the room.

I sink down next to her. For a moment, neither of us says anything.

Then she speaks, raw and throaty, without breaking her gaze from her father's bed. “We shouldn't be seen together.”

“I know.” I stare straight ahead beside her. “I just . . .”

I needed to see you,
I want to say.
I need you to remind me why I'm doing this.
For a fleeting moment, an impulse to reach out and squeeze her hand flitters through me. But Cassia holds herself so stiff, as if moving might cause her pain.

“How is he?” I nod at her father.

“Better.” She finally turns to look at me and scratches unconsciously at her own bandages. “Your people fitted him with an eye.”

“His body's accepting it?”

She nods and half laughs. “It's even the same color as the one he lost.”

“That's . . . good.” I don't know what else to say.

“Right.” Bitterness seeps into her voice and she looks away again. “It's great. Everything's perfect now. He can go right back to bidding out on repair jobs, like nothing ever happened.”

My anger flares up like a shield. “You know that's not what I meant.”

Cassia clenches her jaw. She glares at me, and I glare right back.

Cassia looks away first. “I'm sorry.” She lowers her voice, but her words tremble with the effort. “It's not that I'm not grateful. It's just . . . I know my father would give up that new matching eye if it would bring Nethanel back.”

“I know.” Before I realize what I'm doing, I lay my hand over hers. Her fingers rest cold and still beneath mine. Whatever fire was in her moments ago has burned out, making her touchable.

She looks down at our hands, and suddenly my body flashes hot with embarrassment. What am I doing? I don't want another incident like the one my final year at Revati, when we played the kissing-bottle game and my spin landed on Kiran. She had long brown arms, skin almost as dark as mine, and a funny dent in one of her knees that sealed my crush, for some reason. She had been smiling at me across the circle—shy, from underneath her long dark lashes, and I had been wondering if there was an algorithm that would help you control where the bottle stopped. When we kissed, it was chaste and slow, and an electric ripple shot through my nervous system. If I'd had feathers,
that kiss would have ruffled them. But when Kiran pulled back, she scrunched up her face and made a big show of wiping off her lips, then trying to wipe her hands on all the other guys and girls around the circle. Since then, I've tried to be more cautious, more private. Not make assumptions.