Salvage (7 page)

I kneel and lift the edge of the curtain so I can run my fingers over the grass. It tickles, but soft, the way a cat's whiskers do. The men say down groundways people grow it simply to walk on, like a living rug, but that seems almost a sacrilege. I lean close and smell. Worms and crickets, like the ones in our compost bale. The soft, rich scent of rot.

I stand and pull the curtain aside. The grass is wet, and I can't explain it, but I smell water in the air. Not the dead, boiled kind I'm used to, either, but something fresh, near live, steeped in gently pulped leaves and loam. I look up. Misters hang from a frame of girders above, alternating with darkened sun-glow lamps. I hesitate. Do the thers truly walk on something living? But they must, or else how could they reach those lemons? And if they don't harvest the lemons, what's the point of this room?

I put one foot over the threshold. The grass is soft, like a baby's hair. I recoil, thinking maybe it's as delicate too, maybe I've crushed it with my weight. But the shoots spring back the moment I pull my foot away. I take a hesitant step, and then another, letting the curtain fall closed behind me. I've always wondered what it would be like to walk on the old silk tapestries hanging in the
Parastrata
's meet rooms, and now I think I know. This is luxury. This is Earth. I think I see a tiny piece of why Saeleas wept to leave it behind.

A curious tang from the lemons sweetens the air. I've heard the oldgirls say lemons are sour and only good for medicines, but my mouth waters all the same. I stop beneath a tree and lift one of the small, bright fruits. It fits perfectly in my palm. For a moment I picture myself snapping the lemon from its branch, sinking my teeth past its waxy skin, drinking the juice inside. But no. These aren't my lemons, not yet. And even if they were, it would be none proper to take a whole one for myself.

When I reach the window, I press my palms against its cool layered glass and look out on the vast spill of stars. The skyport stretches beneath me, seeming to angle down from where I stand, even though I know up and down are only tricks of the ship's gravity field. Bright repair patches stand out on the station's skin, ships cleave to its sides like sucker fish, and clusters of antennae jut from each docking station, all of it bathed in the blue-white glow of the nearby moon.

“Parastrata Ava?”

I whip around. A man sits beneath the low-hanging boughs of the lemon tree behind me. My breath stops. His hands reflect the milky light of the moon, but the rest of him is too far in shadow to see. My heart shudders. This is it, the kind of mistake Llell warned me against. But I didn't listen, and now here I am, caught and vulnerable, at the whim of a stranger who can overmatch both my strength and my word.

I dart from the window. I try to dodge past the tree, but my bridal bands drag down my steps. The man ducks out from beneath the boughs. I hobble left, but he catches me around the waist. I cry out. He claps a hand over my mouth.

“Ava, don't fight.”

I struggle in his grip, try to pitch myself forward onto the ground.

“Ava. It's me, Ava.”

He lets go, and I sprawl on the grass. I roll over, ready to kick him away, and finally get a good look at him.
Luck
. My head feels heavy and light all at once. Oxygen drunk. I drop my head against the soft grass and laugh. It's only Luck.

He reaches a hand down to me. “You're going to get us caught.”

“Sorry.” I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. “I didn't know you were you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I couldn't sleep.” I look down at my naked feet and try to brush away the clips of wet grass stuck to my skirt. What was I thinking, walking out alone in a strange ship? What if it hadn't been Luck underneath that tree? And what must this boy . . . this man, who's supposed to become my husband, think of me, walking his ship half dressed at night? Did he see me thinking on stealing his crewe's lemons?

“I'm sorry. I'll go.” I try to step around him.

“Wait.” Luck catches me by the arm. The warm grip of his fingers on my skin turns my whole body live, magnetized. I gasp. I stop. For the first time, I notice his feet are bare, too, and his hair rumpled.

“I couldn't sleep either,” Luck says. “I go out walking sometimes when I get that way. Or swimming.”

We stare at each other, linked up skin to skin.

“My father asked me to come with him to the meet room tomorrow,” Luck says. “I figure you don't have to guess much to know what that's about.”

“With me here as a bride, you mean.” I keep my head down and finger the copper bands on my wrist, already greening my skin beneath their wires.

“Right so.” He loosens his grip on my arm and stands up formal and straight. “I'm sorry for touching you before we're bound, Parastrata Ava. You were always some proper and . . .”

“I'm not.” My eyes flash up to meet his and—there—they find a place to rest safe again. It's exhilarating, this feeling of doing something dangerous and right, all wrapped up together in my chest. I step closer. “I'm not only some proper. Not always.”

Luck looks down at me. He blinks into my face, as if he's trying to figure out how to mesh me with the smallgirl he knew five turns past.

I fumble for his hand and fold my fingers around his, trying to press what I feel in through his skin. “I've been practicing those fixes Soli taught me. The ones you said I could learn. You remember?”

He laughs. “What, still? After all these turns?”

I drop his hand, hurt. “I taught myself others.”

“No, I mean . . . I'm only surprised, is all. That's none proper for a so girl, from what I saw on your
Parastrata
. I thought you'd be too busy with Priority. But I'm happy. I'm glad.” He reaches out and squeezes my fingers lightly.

“Me too.”

“Do you think . . .” He stops and glances at the entrance to the garden room. “Have you ever been swimming?”

“Swimming?” The word curls strange around my tongue. When we were smallgirls, Llell dared me to go floating in the water converter's desalination pool. We'd heard about some of the older boys sneaking down there, how the water was supposed to float you some like the Void would, but some not.
More like a giant hand holding you up
, one of them had said. But Modrie Reller caught us ankle deep in the filter reeds and made us drink from the salt pool until we vomited brine. Llell and I never went back.

I shake my head.

“Come on.” Luck tugs my hand. “I'll show you.”

“I don't know. . . .”

“You'll be all right,” Luck says. “I swear. I know this ship backward. I know when the night Fixes come and go.”

I hesitate.

“You trust me,” Luck says. “Right so?”

I frown. “You swear it?”

“I swear it.” Luck smiles. “Don't you want to live some before we're bound?”

I think on it. In another few months I might be weighted down with a baby like Soli and busy learning to manage the women at Luck's mother's side. But tonight, no one is looking for me. No one will notice I'm gone from my bed. It is the last night before I am fully a woman.

And so I let him lead me from the garden.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

I
follow Luck through a corridor that forks near the workrooms, and then down a laddered hatch into the hanging serviceways in the bowels of the ship. Heat rises on the wet air, reminding me of the dyerooms on the
Parastrata
. We walk single file above the humming tops of the generators, bathed in smudgy orange light.

A man's voice rings out in the echoes ahead. “. . . go and double back to get it.”

Luck freezes in the middle of the gangway.

“Night Fixes?” I whisper.

Luck nods.

“I thought you said—”

“Hsssh.”
He pulls me after him, back the way we came. We round a corner, and Luck points soundlessly to a double-doored service locker built into the wall. I nod. He pulls both doors open with a faint squeak. Heart knocking, I step over a scatter of loose fixers and dead wires and wedge myself behind a crisscross of rebar, deep in the shadow of the locker. Luck jumps in after me and pulls the door closed. We crush together against the back wall.

“Stay still,” he whispers.

His shoulder presses into my nose. He smells of pulped grass and faint sweat masked by soap, some kind of indefinable Luck smell that lights me up to my heels. I let my hand rest where it's fallen on his chest and breathe slowly, trying to muffle the sound against him so the night Fixes won't hear us.

“. . . point in him taking another wife, you know?” The voices grow louder.

“Talk on,” a second man answers the first. “I've got some trouble what with only two.”

Their steps ring close. Luck presses me against the wall. We both try to breathe shallow and slow, try not to shift our feet into the metal balanced precariously against the wall. Luck lowers his nose so it rests on top of my head. His breath is warm in my hair. I can make out every thread in his shirt, every lock of dark hair touching his neck, every pulse of blood working the veins under his skin. I should be worried about the Fixes, but all I can think on is the gentle bob of Luck's Adam's apple and the way his chest grazes mine.

“You see the bride they brought?”

“Yeh.”

“She's got something odd to her, but I can't figure it.”

“Dunno. To me, they're all some odd with that hair and the way . . .” The voices fade below the generators' hum.

Luck and I stand fused in the back of the service locker. This is the last place I should feel safe, but I don't want to leave.

Luck steps back slowly, carefully. “I'm sorry,” he says, though I'm not sure if he means for touching me again or for what his crewemates said about me. He smiles nervously and pushes the doors open, holds out a hand to help me from the locker. “There's only the one team of night Fixes. We shouldn't see anyone else.”

My heart is still skipping. I laugh, half from relief, half from giddiness. The sound fits strange in my throat, like it's coming from some other girl. Maybe the girl I could be if I was Luck's wife, without doors to lock me in at night. I grab his hand, and he pulls me into an almost-run. I feel as if the gravity's low, as if my feet are barely touching the floor as we fly around corners and down a spiraling ramp.

Luck skids us to a stop in front of a heavy, wheel-locked door. He sets his shoulder against the wheel and pushes until it gives with a brief shriek of metal.

“Where are we?” I whisper.

He points to a lettered sign bolted to the door and grins.

I look up at the sign. I know the letters for my own name,
A-V-A
, but beyond spotting two
A
s in the loops and lines on the door sign, I can't figure it. I bite my lip and look at Luck. I shake my head.

His smile dies.

“I'm sorry.” My voice wavers. “I lied.”

“Don't worry on it now.” He smiles at me again, gently, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin tingles at his touch. “We're going swimming.”

He leans against the door. It swings open on a dim, sloping room filled wall to wall with water. Light from bioluminescent fish and phosphorous deposits crusting the depths lend the water and air an uncanny glow. My mouth falls open. I know it's only the
Æther
's desalination pool, but I feel as if I've stepped out of time, as if I've stumbled into the Mercies' private realm.

“It's beautiful,” I say.

When crewes like ours come across a water-bearing planet, we mostly find salt oceans or ice. On the
Parastrata
, we leach most of our salt out in tanks, but before the water can go through the finer filters and come out potable, it rests awhile in a pond lined with scrubber fish and plants designed to nip out the extra sodium. The
Æther
's desalination pool dwarfs ours. It looks deep as two men and far enough across to swallow up the galley. Water weeds sway in the shallows.

Luck strides down the gentle slope to the water's edge and pulls his shirt up over his head. The lines of his shoulder blades cut sharp bows in his pale back. He turns and looks up at me, something a little wicked in his eye. “Coming in?”

I shift my feet. Suddenly it comes to me how he'll see the dull foreignness of me once I shed my shirt and skirts. He'll see all of me.

“You'll like it, I promise,” Luck says. “The salt'll keep you from sinking.”

“I . . . I don't want you to watch me,” I say.

“What if I look away till you're in?”

I rub one foot against an ankle beneath my skirts. It's some hot here below the
Æther
's cool, civilized berth, and my skin itches with sweat. Half of me wishes Luck was only Llell or Soli so it would be easier to splash into the pool, but the part of me making my heart skip and my skin flush is glad it's Luck.

“All right,” I say. My voice sounds dangerous, older.

Luck kicks off his trousers and wades into the pool. I try not to look until he's well beneath the surface, but that small seed of recklessness makes me glance up in time to see the full length of his back diving into the water.

I tug the ties of my skirts loose and try to breathe steady. “Don't look,” I yell.

“I'm not,” he calls back. He dives and disappears in a flash of feet.

I take a deep breath. He's going to be my husband. We'll be bound in a day or two anyway, so I might as well get over my shyness now. In one quick breath, I shed my skirts, strip off my shirt, wrap my arms across my chest, and rush into the pool, naked except for my data pendant and the copper bands. The water hits me with a warm slap, the tickle of sea plants slippery on the soles of my feet. I duck down to wet my hair and wade deeper. The water salts my lips and buoys me with each step, even under the added weight of the copper. My pendant floats, petal light, before me.