Sound (9 page)

“I'm sorry.” I start to draw back, but Cassia's fingers twitch as if she's suddenly come awake, and she folds them up in mine.

“Don't.” Her voice is dry. “Don't go yet. Stay with me.”

Cardiac output equals heart rate times stroke volume.

I swallow so my throat won't stick together. “Okay.”

The backs of her fingers brush my palm. I can't feel anything along the tracks of my scars, where the nerve endings are damaged, but everywhere else, her skin is warm on mine. Her hand freezes. I tense. She's felt the lines of waxy scar tissue, and now I know what comes next. Revulsion, or worse, a sick curiosity.

She turns my hand over and sucks in a breath. “What happened?”

I wince. But seconds pass, and she doesn't pull away.

“It was a long time ago,” I say. “I didn't get to a medic in time to stop the scarring.”

She nods, and I remember that access to medics is far less common out here than in the midst of modern Mumbai.
Maybe I'm less of a freak to Cassia than I would be to any of my crewmates aboard the
Ranganathan
.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“It's okay,” I say. “It doesn't hurt anymore.”

She doesn't say anything else, but she doesn't let go of my hand, either. She holds on to it, tight but not too tight, as she stares at the long glass window between her father and us. My skin warms against hers. The warmth travels up my arm, quieting the nervous hum inside me. She doesn't care about my scars. She doesn't need me to prove I belong. She only needs me. I've been looking all my life for a way to make the world a little bit right, and now that I have my chance, I'm not letting go.

Chapter 7

I
lie in my bunk, fully clothed, the privacy shroud pulled closed to shutter the light from my handbook. In an hour and a half, I'm supposed to meet Cassia outside the hangar. Will I be able to fly the shuttle out of dock like I promised? Ava always said flying isn't something you forget, but it's been months since the last time we practiced together.

I roll over and plant my face in the pillow. There are way too many variables, so many ways for everything to go wrong. What if someone finds our supplies hidden aboard the shuttle before we get there? What if someone saw us holding hands? What if someone overheard Cassia and me whispering in the burned-out wreck from the very beginning, and Commander Dhar is only waiting to catch us in the act? Cassia hasn't exactly been quiet
about wanting to go after her brother. Maybe they're watching her. I stifle a groan. I should have stayed up in the common room this evening. I should have talked to my bunkmates like everything was normal and I wasn't about to commit the kind of theft that could end with me brought before the DSRI's correctional board and banned from any future Deep Sound expeditions. Or worse, sent to a detention camp.

Every cold, logical part of me knows this is the stupidest thing I could ever do. I know what Soraya would say. Her voice circles in my head, disappointed, concerned.
You worked so hard for this.
You're throwing away your future.

She was so proud when I told her the DSRI had made an age exemption for me, the first ever. I even gave her fake forms to sign. Why shouldn't she believe it? I had been taking advanced classes at Revati since I was eight. I was accepted to the university when I was fifteen. Why shouldn't the DSRI let me in early, too?

Maybe they wouldn't have cared. Maybe they really would have made the first age exemption ever. But I couldn't risk it. I couldn't bring myself to their attention that way. Because if they said no, I was stuck on Earth until the next DSRI mission, taking courses just to have something to do, bumping into Vishva on the trains, always
being the youngest, the darkest, the exotic outlier in my class. I would have been swimming in circles.

Ava was the one who saved me from that.

Ava was the one who got me here.

A few weeks after I dropped in on Rushil to plead my case for an identity hack, he and Ava invited me down to their place for dinner. I kept waiting for him to say something all through the meal, and then afterward as we sat around the orange glow of a citronella lamp in the back garden. But then it was long after dark and Rushil begged off to go sleep.

“I guess I should head back,” I said.

“Stay a little.” Something about the way Ava said it brought a charge into the air. She had a funny look on her face, as if she were trying to hide a frown.

I lowered myself back into my chair. The lamp cast sharp shadows on Ava's features.

“Rushil told me,” she said.

“Ava—”

“Why would you do that, Miyole?” She leaned forward and looked down at her feet. “Don't you get what you're asking?”

“I do get it,” I said quietly.

“But you did it anyway.” She looks up. “What's your
rush, Mi? It's not like this is the last DSRI mission ever. There's going to be another in, what, three years?”

“Yeah, but I'll be
twenty
by then,” I said.

Ava raised an eyebrow.

I knew how silly it sounded, but it wasn't only another two years studying, it was another two years waiting to do something useful, waiting for my life to begin.

“But if I can go now,” I pressed on, frustrated, “I would turn eighteen only a few months into the voyage. Seventeen and a half? Eighteen? Does it really make that much of a difference?”

“Maybe not.” Ava shrugged. She looked away at her ship, the
Perpétue
, named after my mother. We both knew what she had been doing at my age. Running for her life. Flying a ship all on her own. Taking care of me.

“I'm ready,” I said. “All my friends at Revati are gone and the people I know at university are setting up their practicals and internships. What am I supposed to do, hang around for another couple of years and take more organic chemistry classes?”

“You like organic chemistry,” Ava reminded me.

“That's not the point,” I said.

Ava sighed. “You really want this, don't you?”

“I haven't ever wanted anything else.” We both knew it
was true. Ava was there the first time I announced at dinner that I wanted to be a Deep Sound engineer. She read me science articles at bedtime when I was younger. She saw me studying late all those nights in my room.

Ava stood. “Come on.”

My nerves picked up, half excited, half frightened. “Where are we going?”

Ava didn't answer at first. She picked up the lamp. “You have money?”

“Two thousand rupaye,” I answered.

She nodded. “If I do this for you, you have to promise me something.”

I tried to keep my voice from squeaking. Was she saying what I thought she was saying? “Anything.”

“You never ask Rushil to do anything illegal ever again.” Her features were hard in the lamp glow. “Not even jaywalking.”

I laughed.

“I'm serious, Mi,” Ava said. “He's worked too hard to get out. I love you to death, but you're not putting him in danger again.”

I looked Ava over. She was shorter than me now, and had been since my thirteenth birthday, but I still hadn't gotten used to looking down at her instead of up. She
was half a mother to me. Or maybe that's just what older sisters are.

“I promise.” I put one hand over my heart and held the other up. “No more bothering Rushil.”

“Good,” she said, and blew out the lantern.

Rōṛī Island stood in the middle of a soggy wetland to the east of the city proper, a warren of buildings made from modified metal shipping containers surrounded by banyan and mulberry trees. The skeleton of an abandoned high-rise jutted from the middle like an exposed spine.

Ava and I rented a skiff and poled across to solid ground. A boxy container with its outer doors sawed off served as the island's entrance, full of buzzing, flickering lights, but otherwise empty. Our footsteps clanged and echoed ahead through the tunnel. My skin prickled.

“We can go back,” Ava said quietly. “If you've changed your mind . . .”

“No,” I said, and swallowed my nerves. Only another hour or two, and then everything standing between me and my future would be gone. I glanced up at the tiny black bulbs bulging from the ceiling above us—spider-eye cameras. Walking this tunnel in the pitch-dark would have been less terrifying. At least then I wouldn't
have been able to see the walls and ceiling closing in around us.

A drunk came shuffling the opposite way through the tunnel, muttering under his breath. I moved closer to Ava, who was wearing her jacket open to display the knife at her belt. He passed us with only a dirty look.

Soon we were out in the open air again, rattling up a metal staircase and across a footbridge to the main floor of the skyscraper. Purple and yellow lights, and electronic bhangra so loud its bass drowned out my own heartbeat, pulsed from the open spaces where the building's walls and windows used to be. The bottom floor was packed. A bar backed by a wall of glass bottles stood like an island in the center, surrounded by people dancing or grouped around tables in smoky corners. Somewhere in the darkened floors above us, someone whooped, and a beer bottle shattered on the promenade behind us.

“What is this place?” I shouted over the music. “You're taking me to a club?”

Ava didn't seem to have heard me. “You have to promise never to come here alone,” she shouted as we threaded through the crowd and took a seat at the bar. “And don't tell Vishva about it, either. She's not as street smart as she thinks.”

“Okay.” I nodded. That wouldn't be a problem, seeing as I hadn't so much as talked to Vishva in at least half a year.

Ava leaned in close to my ear. “Put your crow on the counter and hold on to it.”

“What?”

“Just do it,” she said. “You'll see.”

I took my handheld out of my pocket and placed it carefully on the bar in front of me. Almost at once, a man with a thin shirt and ridiculously defined pectoral muscles appeared in front of us, wearing a smile that had an awful lot to do with his eyebrows.

“What can I get you, ladies?” He reached for my crow with one hand and brought up two empty glasses with the other.

I snatched my crow back and looked at Ava.

“We don't want a drink.” She placed one hand flat over her glass's empty mouth. “We need a chat.”

He stood up straight. His smile disappeared. “About what?”

“Papers.” Ava tilted her head at me. “For her.”

He nodded. “Let me make you that drink.”

I frowned. “We don't need—”

Ava put a hand on my arm. “Just wait.”

My hands were sweating. The bartender filled my glass
with a violently blue liquid, then added a layer of something oily and orange to it, and topped it off by dropping in a whole gherkin on a white neon cocktail spear.

“Take the lift down two floors and turn left. Last door on the right,” the bartender said as he slid the drink across to me.

I looked at Ava again. “Got it,” she said.

“And, kid,” the bartender called as I began to walk away. “I wouldn't drink that if I were you.”

A man Ava's age answered the last door on the right. He took one look at the drink in my hand and beckoned me forward.

Ava moved to follow, but he held out a hand to stop her. “One drink, one visitor.”

“We come as a pair,” Ava said. “Auntie Rajni knows me.”

He stared at her, his expression flat. “I said, one drink, one visitor.”

Ava rested her hands on her hips, drawing back her jacket to reveal her knife. “And I said we come as a pair.”

“What's all this fuss?” A woman's throaty voice called from inside. “Is that a drink for me?”

The man sighed and turned to reveal a stout woman in an electronic wheelchair positioned near a bank of
screens in the corner of the room. “Yes, Auntie.”

“You stop harassing these nice young ladies and bring it here, then.” She rolled toward us and held out her hand. She wore sunglasses, even in the dimness of the room, and a system of interwoven braids piled on top of her head, with a shock of gray-white hair running through the construction.

“Auntie Rajni.” Ava stepped forward. “Thank you for seeing us. This is my foster sister, Mi—”

“Yes, yes.” Auntie Rajni stopped her chair beside me and looked meaningfully at the concoction in my hand. I held it out to her. “We drink first, then we talk.”

“Of course.” Ava smoothed her hands over her jacket. I knew that gesture. Ava calming herself, getting herself even keel for some difficult business.

Auntie Rajni fished out the pickle with her thumb and forefinger, then tilted the glass back. No one spoke as she gulped down the whole thing, then popped the pickle in her mouth and crunched it with relish.

“Now,” she said, gesturing to a purple satin sofa. “We sit, like civilized people.”

We sat. The guard took up his position next to the door and pretended not to listen.

“Auntie, as I was saying—” Ava started.

The woman shook a finger in Ava's face. “Not you.” She turned to me. “Her. She's the one with the drink. She's the one wanting something.”

I swallowed. I had been hoping Ava would do the talking for me, and all I would have to do was fork over the funds. I rubbed my palms together and wished I had brought a pair of gloves. I had a dozen pairs in blue velvet, faux yellow leather, and plain black smart cotton, but I hadn't expected to need them for a night at Ava and Rushil's.

“Speak up,” Auntie Rajni said. “I have other business tonight.”

“I, um . . . need some identification work,” I said to the floor.

Auntie Rajni rubbed her chin. “Someone after you, child?”

I looked up, startled. “No. No, it's not that. Nothing like that.”

“No?” Auntie Rajni raised an eyebrow over her glasses and turned to Ava. “This one's not like the girls you usually bring. What are you playing here, Parastrata?”

I darted a look at Ava. Sometimes she would get a message about a runaway girl—a girl like her, who had grown up with the merchant crewes that trawled the Deep—and she would disappear for hours or days. Some of
those girls had even stayed with us while Ava tried to find a place for them. Was she bringing them to this Auntie Rajni for fake papers? Rushil did the same for her when we first landed in Mumbai—got her a work permit so we could get by. But why hadn't she told me what she was up to? I could have helped. I always helped her, especially at first, when it was just the two of us. Weren't we a team? Sisters? Didn't she trust me to keep quiet?

I push the sting to the back of my mind. “I need to be older,” I said. “Eighteen. I need to be eighteen by this spring.”

I held my breath. That had been far more awkward than it sounded in my head, but at least the words were out.

Auntie Rajni paused, then pulled off her sunglasses. One of her eyes was a cloudy blue—blind—but the other shone like mercury. A bionic eye. I tried not to stare and bit down my impulse to ask how it worked. I loved biomimetics and prosthetic grafts, but the problem was, they usually came attached to a person who didn't want to talk about the horrific injury or illness that had made them part machine. Something bad, something violent, must have happened to Auntie Rajni. We could cure most genetic disorders or malformations, but if there was some kind of trauma and
the whole body part needed to be replaced . . .

She turned her quicksilver eye on Ava. “You're bringing me prep-school children who want a beer and
sutta
now?” She glared. “Is that what you think I'm about? There are plenty of simpletons running that business down in your Salt.
Rundi ki bachi
. . .”