Salvage (17 page)

“The women and smallones of Candor's ship were much afraid. Mikim gathered them together in the belly of the ship and bid everyone sing to drive away their fear. But once their voices joined, their song grew so loud, it rang through the decks and out into the black of the Void itself.

“And the corsairs pricked up their ears.

“Candor hurried below. ‘Please,' he begged. ‘Quiet your voices. The raiders stalk above, and only silence will save us.'

“Candor's other wives fell silent at once, but Mikim laughed. ‘Husband, how little you know! Our voices will never reach their ears. The Void is vast.'

“‘All the same,' Candor, ever patient, said. ‘I beg you, obey me this once and keep silent, for the sake of our sons and your sister-wives.'

“But Mikim did not mind her husband. When Candor left, again she raised her voice and sang. Her song drove through the ship's hull and fell on the corsairs' ears. And before Candor could fix his craft and bring her up fighting, the raiders fell on him. They laid open his ship and snatched away all his wives and smallones, including Mikim and her sons. Candor they mocked and left for dead on the barren moon.

“Candor's heart filled with grief and rage. With what few of his men remained, he rebuilt his ship, stronger and faster, made it a machine of war. And with it, he chased down the raiders who had stolen his family, and one by one, reclaimed his wives and sons, all except Mikim. Candor harried the corsairs out into the deep, blank edges of the Void, but he never found his secondwife. The Mercies saw fit to humble her and keep her from her kin until the end of her days. So her name hangs as a banner of warning to all who harbor rebellion in their hearts.

“In memory of Mikim's fault, his other wives gathered together and agreed. From that day, though a woman might hear the sacred songs, she would no more sing them, nor lift her voice above her husband's. So the songs and scrolls of the Word were given over to men's keeping, and there they rest safe to this day.

“This pleased the Mercies well, and they blessed Candor with many sons. By faithful Saeleas, he fathered the great Neren, whose deeds are ever sung. In time, his children numbered so many they took up their own ships and spread to every reach of the Void. So Candor's name is ever spoken, and all his children bless him.”

I fold my hands on the metal table and smile, lost in the sweet rhythm of the story and the memory of my mother's voice reciting it.

“That's ridiculous,” Miyole says. “No one could have heard her.”

I blink away my reverie. “What?'

“It wasn't her fault,” Miyole says. “That isn't how sound works in space. Don't you know?”

“It's . . . it's the story,” I stammer. “That's just the way it is.”

“It's stupid the way it is,” Miyole says. “Candor and them were out to find someone to blame, that's all. They wanted to make themselves feel better 'cause they couldn't find her in the end, so they made her the bad guy.”

“No . . .”

“Ava,” Miyole says in a voice that brings all my arguing to an end. “That Mikim lady was right. Sound doesn't travel in space.”

My mouth hangs open. The Void is my home. Surely that's one thing I should know more about than Miyole. Still, she every day trots out words and ideas I've never run across before—
canopy
and
combustion engine
and
extinct
. I can't even hold down the letters that roll so easily from her tongue. She could be right. She's most like right.

“I don't . . . ,” I begin.

A shirtless smallboy with a thick cap of straight black hair and skin like browned butter comes hurtling through the door. “Miyole!” His eyes are wide. “You got to come down and see!”

Miyole swivels in her chair. Her face comes alight. “Kai!” But then she glances at me and her smile drops. “I can't. I'm not s'posed to leave her.”

Kai takes me in with a quick look. “You're that Ava girl, huh?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Bring her with you,” he says to Miyole. “You've got to see this.”

I do my best to keep up with them. They clatter down Perpétue's steps and streak across the swinging driftwood bridges connecting each low-slung barge to the next. By the time I reach the bottom, they've disappeared. I pause. All the Gyre is quiet around me in the heat of the day. The barges creak as they bob in the water and the pontoon deck burns my bare feet.

To my right, the doors over the insulated well where Perpétue locks up her sloop at night stand closed. I edge out over them and peer down into the gap between Perpétue's barge and the next. Two meters down, the gap turns to a deep, sloshing pit of seawater. Miyole and Perpétue told me the depths are full of sharks, awful black-eyed fish with rows of jagged teeth. I shudder and back away.

“Ava!” Miyole waves to me from the top of the neighboring barge. “Hurry up!”

I pick my way over the rickety footbridge. The sea moves, blue and bottomless, beneath my feet. I try not to look down.

Miyole grabs my hand as soon as I reach the other side and pulls me into a fast walk. I wish she would slow down so I could take in more of Gyre—there's so much more to see than I could make out from the roof—but she's anxious to catch up with Kai and reach the brink. My first real brush with the city is a blur of music blaring tinny from the upper levels of barges, faded paint peeling from the walls, a boy with a pole full of dangling fish balanced over his shoulder, and sweat-sheened men and women building new walls or lookouts on their roofs. One of the barges has a glass bottom, clear down to the sea and all the dark shapes moving in it. I pull Miyole to a halt when we step up onto it.

“What's wrong?” She frowns at me.

I look down.

She laughs. “What, this? It's solid.” She jumps up and down to demonstrate. “Don't worry. We go over it all the time.”

“Please.” I close my eyes. “Don't do that.”

Miyole sighs and stops. “You sound like my manman.” She tugs at my hand again. “Come on. We're almost there.”

As we near the brink, the raised pontoons give way to a broad shore of wood and plastic platforms built level with the water. Rafts and small, aluminum boats with oars rest at their moorings. Beyond, the waste plain extends, flat and bleached by sun and salt, to the horizon. A clump of people has gathered by the very tip of the shore. Kai spots us from the back of the crowd and waves. We hurry to him.

“It's a monster,” Kai whispers in hushed awe as we sidle to the front of the crowd. “Miko and her boys found it washed up in the middle of the plain. They say it's fresh. Maybe a shark killed it.”

At the water's edge, a stout woman with short-cropped black hair and wrinkled, sun-browned skin stands over the dead beast. Its grayish, rubbery body splits into eight puckered arms, all twined around one another in death. One glazed eye looks on us.

Miyole shoves Kai's shoulder. “That's no monster, fishbrain. It's a squid.”

“A giant squid,” the woman—Miko, she must be—standing over it corrects. She nudges its body with the butt of a hooked spear. “Forty footer.”

“Did a shark kill it?” Kai asks eagerly.

Miko shakes her head. “No. No marks on it, see?”

“Those don't come up to the surface, not on purpose.” Miyole looks to Kai and me and the people standing behind us. “They're deep creatures. I read about it.”

“It's a bad sign,” says a red-faced woman with hair the yellow-white of the waste plain. “Means a storm's stirring up.”

The man beside her laughs. “Everyone knows the Gyre doesn't get storms. It's what makes it the Gyre.”

“What do you know about it, eelkin?”

“More than you, you great frozen shark-breathed bat.”

The crowd breaks out in shouts.

“. . . could have died of anything . . .”

“Who do you think you are, telling me how the sea is?”

“. . . pure chance . . .”

“. . . could have killed it, at that . . .”

Miko slams the butt of her spear against the dock—three short raps. Everyone falls silent.

“My sons and I scavenged it, so I'll say what it means.” Her voice arcs over the crowd. She grins. “And I say it means a feast.”

A shout of agreement goes up from the crowd, and men and women with their fishing knives and hooked spears close in to help butcher the beast, their quarrels forgotten.

That night, a thousand small cookfires spring up at the lip of the brink. Some of the smallones fetch their kites, and we watch them flutter against the sunset. Miyole and I sit with Kai's family around their raised fire trough while chunks of squid steam and crackle over the flames. When I bite into my share and its hot juices run down my chin, it's enough to make me forget the hard lines of pain in my legs and back. Miyole tells a story she read, about a fish-tailed girl who falls in love with a prince and trades her voice for a pair of legs. Only when she gets them, it ends up the prince doesn't love her and every step she takes is like walking on knives. The sadness of it hangs on to me even when Miyole is done. Then Kai's brothers and sisters coax a little stringed instrument into their father's hands.

“Sing with us, Ava,” Miyole begs when Kai's father starts to hum a song they all know.

I shake my head. I couldn't sing, even if I knew the words. I sit listening to the strum of music and popping fire and the gentle lap of water, and I wonder if there really might be such a place as doesn't have storms.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

M
iyole kneels beside Kai and his older brothers and sisters on his family skiff as his mother paddles them into the Gyre plain. The sun hasn't broken above the water yet, but the sky is lavender and warming. The waste plain radiates a soft, eerie glow, as if it's lit from within, rather than above. Some of the other scavengers have already rowed so far out into it, they're nothing more than dark shapes on the horizon.

“Be back before the sun's high,” I shout to Miyole. “Your mother said.”

“I will,” she yells back. “Don't forget to practice your reading.”

“Right so!”

I wave again and turn away. Miyole's tablet keeps stories inside it. Now I've got my alphabet, she wants me to try out the sounds of words by reading stories what try to trick with their words that sound near the same. There are so many words to remember, new kinds of animals and things to do with the sky and the movement of the Earth. Some what I thought were empty words—
drift
and
dawn
and
noon
—make more sense now than ever they did closed up in the
Parastrata
.

But oh, the numbers. Much simpler. Clean, elegant marks, one for each of my fingers. Miyole helps me draw them on my knuckles in ink, and I match the symbols to my counting as I cook and wash, scatter grain for the chickens on the rooftop, and draw my mind away from my little lingering pains. Perpétue still offers me her pills, but they give me drowning dreams. The worst is the one where Modrie Reller feeds me stones and leads me to the dark water gap between the pontoons, then pushes my head below the waves. All the while, Lifil and Miyole splash together on the sunlit surface.

I wander back over the Gyre's bridges. This is my favorite time of day, the hush straight before sunrise. Most of the scavengers have already gathered on the shore and everyone else is still indoors, cooking breakfast, or waking children, or hanging out clothes to dry. I can drift among the houses and ships alone, my own ghost.

“Luck,” I whisper. “Are you there?”

And I know it's only fancy, but I listen anyway.

“I miss you,” I tell the air, and I wait for some sign, a gull blown off course or a sudden shift in the wind.

Perpétue's house comes into view, and my emptiness slips away. There is no room for ghosts here. I pad across the deck and mount the stairs. I have chickens to feed and laundry to hang, and then reading to practice. Twice now, Perpétue has offered to take me up the Icelanders' tower to search the network for my modrie, but I've put her off. The more I learn about reading, the more I see what a fool I'd seem if she found out how little I know. Sometimes I take out Miyole's tablet and sit looking into its bright, blank screen, trying to work up the will to bring it to life, practice tapping my own words into it. But the most I can ever do is stare at its pulsing blue network light and the word fading in and out beside it, the one I know best now.
Searching . . . Searching . . .

“Ava?” Perpétue's voice rings up from the sloop's docking well. “Is that you?”

I pause on the stairs, hurry to the side of the well, and poke my head over its lip.

Perpétue stands ankle deep in salt-clouded water, working a hand pump. The ship rises on its struts behind her.

She shades her eyes and looks up at me. “We've got a leak. Give me a hand?”

“Right so.” I lower myself down the ladder and splash in beside her. The cold water seeps into my skirt hem, making it leaden.

“Keep pumping.” Perpétue turns the handle over to me and kneels in the water to feel along the seam where the docking well's floor meets the wall. She doesn't seem to mind the cold water soaking her up to her knees, but all I can think on is how fast the docking well would fill if the leak got worse, how my heavy clothes might drag me to the bottom as the water rose around my head. I wouldn't even need a bellyful of stones. I pump faster.

“Ah,
wi
. Here it is.” Perpétue sloshes to her feet and fetches an L-shaped piece of metal and a cold fuser, like the kind I'd seen Jerej use. She kneels again. The cold fuser fills the water with blue light and a muffled hum, and the surface boils in sudden, choppy ripples. But then there's a choking sound, and the light cuts out sudden.