Sound (16 page)

Chapter 14

I
wake in the big bed, the one my
manman
and I share. The flock of scrap-metal birds I made for her dangle overhead, chiming softly against one another in the morning breeze. I made them for her birthday, I think. Yes, for her birthday, even though it wasn't really her birthday. She told me no one in the Gyre had one, but I had found my own marked down in a journal she kept—April 14—and I wanted her to have one, too.

Salt air and music from our neighbor's staticky radio drift through the open window. Dogs bay, roosters call from rooftop to rooftop, and hammers knock against wood and tin in the distance. I know without looking that this is the Gyre.

“Miyole!” My mother calls, singsong. The scent and sizzle of frying fish reaches my nose, and I sit up.

I pad into the main room. My mother stands at our portable gas stove, a cast-iron pan of fish and sugared plantains browning in the oil.

“You're home!” I say.

She looks up and smiles, almost hiding the weariness in her eyes. “There you are, lazybones. I thought you would sleep all morning.”

I climb onto a stool across from her. “I thought you had a run today.”

“I did it early.” She lifts a cut of fish from the oil and gently turns it. “I thought we could spend the day together.”

My heart becomes the lightest element. “Really?”

“Wi, ma chère.”
She laughs. “Really. Now go get dressed. The day is wasting.”

I look down. I'm wearing my pressure suit. Its airtight quilting is far too hot for a day out under the Pacific sun. I scurry off to our bedroom and lift the lid of our heavy old steamer trunk to pull out my best dress—noon-blue cotton with a white diamond pattern around the neck. Maybe we'll walk to the fish market or take one of the penny ferries around to South Gyre, where our neighbor Mrs. Acosta said she heard they had a flower market. But as I lower the lid, the light from the window changes. A rosy, end-of-day glow bathes the room, and the last bronze
rays of the setting sun glints on my birds' wings.

“Miyole?” My mother sounds worried.

“In here, Manman,” I call.

She arrives at the door, dressed in her flight clothes—boots, red-belted trousers, and a weather-beaten leather jacket. “I have to go now,
ma chère
. It's late.”

I look out the window at the sun melting into the water and then back to her. “But you said we could spend the day together.”

“I know.” She strokes my hair. “Our hours are too short. Your food has gone cold.”

“I don't want you to go.” My eyes prickle. Something wet rolls down my hand, and when I look, my scars have opened up again and my hands are red with my own blood.

“Don't worry.” My mother smiles sadly and looks over my shoulder. “Ava will take care of you.”

I follow her gaze and find Ava sleeping in the bed my mother and I share. Her face and arms have a gray pallor to them, and I can't hear her breathe.

“She's not well. Manman, I don't think you should . . .” I turn back to find my mother gone. I'm speaking to an empty room.

Outside, the sun has set, and the waves crash and roll. The sea smells sick. I race down the steps clinging to the
side of our house and out onto the pontoon that supports it.

“
Manman
!” I shout. Eerie, gray-green clouds thicken in the sky, and rain stings my face.

“Miyole!” The wind nearly drowns out my name.

I look up in the direction of the voice. A small dark-haired boy stands atop the widow's walk of a neighboring pontoon house. My friend, Kai. He points down the string of refitted boats and floating houses to the behemoth of our neighborhood—an old Icelandic research vessel that towers above the rest of the masts and rooftops. People pack the upper decks, peering out the glass into the storm.

“No.” I step back. This is too familiar. I've seen it before. I know what happens to them, and then to Kai and Manman.

As I watch, the ocean's surface drops out from beneath the ship, and a swell as high as her receiving towers looms up in its place. The wave thrusts the ship on her side. The wind and rushing water fill the air, but I can still hear the passengers screaming. The wave crests. For a moment, I think the ship's bow will break over the top of the wall of water, but it hangs a moment too long, fighting gravity, and the wave tips them over.

I haven't moved, but now I'm atop the widow's walk, holding Kai's hand tight as the ocean foams around the
capsized ship. I want to tell him I'm sorry, because even though he hasn't said it, I know his family was aboard the vessel—his father and mother, and all his brothers and sisters. But this is something too big even for sorrow, so I squeeze his hand tighter.

And then my mother's sloop is above us, battling the winds to stay aloft.

“Miyole! Kai!” Manman dangles from an emergency ladder spilling from her sloop's hatch. She holds out her hand. “Reach up to me!”

I am first on the ladder. Manman helps me up halfway, and then goes back for Kai. But he is shorter than I am, and the winds twist the ladder like a strip of tinfoil, so she jumps down to help him.

I pause near the top and look down at them. Manman lifts Kai up high enough so he can plant his feet on the bottom rung. He slips on the wet metal and freezes, terrified, clinging to the braided metal ropes.

“It's all right,
ma chère
!” My mother's voice carries over the wind.

He starts his climb again, slow and trembling, as if he didn't spend his days skipping from rigging to mast to rooftop like a cat.

My mother catches the ladder's tail and looks up at me.
Water swirls around her feet from the waves swamping our neighbor's house. I've never seen her afraid. She has always been fearless, one step ahead and ready to fight, but the look on her face as the widow's walk pitches is solid terror.

An ominous pause interrupts the storm, and then, suddenly, the sea sucks the platform down and out from beneath my mother's feet. Her knee catches the railing as the building drops, and she dangles like a marionette in the wind. A deeper shadow rises against the bruised sky. I stare in awe and terror at the wall of dark water rolling toward us. It reaches above the rooftops, snapping masts and footbridges as it bears down on our small sloop and its lifeline. For a moment the wave freezes, perfect and darkly lustrous, as if the sea has turned to jade, and then a ripple of white forms across its crest, and it curls its massive weight over us.

“Miyole, climb!” Manman screams. It is the voice that warned me against open flames and sharks in the water, amplified. It touches the center of my brain, and I obey.

Hand over hand, I race up the slick rungs. A shudder runs down the ladder as the ship strains to rise through the winds. Two steps from the top, my foot slips. Red flashes before my eyes—I'm falling—and then my hand finds
the steel cable, the side of the ladder, and I jerk to a halt, dangling far above the churning gray sea.

Lightning flashes, illuminating the black wall of water, and for a moment, I see everything as if it's been cast in icy stone—the scraps of wood and the prow of a rowboat caught in the wave's face and my mother and Kai far below. Too far below. And then the rushing sound. I look up as the wave begins collapsing on itself.

One heartbeat.

I scramble back onto the ladder and climb. My hands don't hurt at all, and the rain washes away the blood before I have a chance to think of where it could be coming from.

Two.

The hatch hangs open above me. The rushing builds to a roar.
Up
, my body screams.
Climb!

Three.

I reach the hatch and start to push myself up into the darkened berth. But a roaring force shoves at my back, and suddenly I am underwater, tumbling and turning in the dark. My shoulder slams against a wall. My eyes and throat burn.
I'm drowning.
And then the current reverses course. It gushes away, pulling me with it. I reach out, all instinct now, and catch something—one of the straps my manman used to tie down larger packages. I latch on to it with all
the strength terror has lent me, until the water finishes emptying back into the sea.

The floor levels beneath me. I choke out a lungful of brine and take a wet, shuddering breath. All around me, the remnants of the packages my mother meant to deliver on her last run lie scattered on their sides in a shallow pool covering the length of the berth. The sloop's engines drop their pitch, and suddenly perfect sunlight floods in.

We've flown above the hurricane.

I unwind my arm from the packing strap and crawl to the edge of the hatch. The cloud tops against the blue sky look like paintings of heaven my manman showed me once, the hurricane a vast pinwheel beneath us. And there, the frayed metal ends of a severed emergency ladder whip in the high, empty winds of the stratosphere.

Static hissing . . .

Monsoon on the school roof. The canal by Ava and Rushil's lot at flood stage. An arc of water spraying from a burst valve in one of the city's bilge pipes. Patter, patter down, and we ran through the salt rain, shrieking. . . .

I open my eyes. No rain, no floods. I am on the floor of the
Mendicant's
cockpit, the low, empty rush of the open coms
channel filling the room. I check my hands. No blood. The viewport before me shows nothing but clean, deep black, powdered with stars. My last moments of consciousness come back to me in pieces—the distress call, my mother's voice, the burning, spinning ship. . . .

I pick myself up, head pounding, and skim over the controls. Telemetry shows nothing moving outside, not even a debris field's scattered drift. The warning system lights stay dark, as if they've lost power. What the hell? The last time I looked, they were flashing imminent collision. I saw it with my own eyes.

I push back from the controls and stumble to the unruly forest of wires I half-finished repairing before the distress call came through. I rummage through the tangle until I find the warning system wires, thick, with light green- and-orange-striped insulation. I hold both ends of the connection in disbelief. I never repaired it. The warning system wasn't on, because I hadn't finished reuniting both sides of the snapped wire.

It can't be.
I hurry back to the cockpit displays. My fingers tremble as I scroll through the coms controls and select playback.

Shock,
I remind myself numbly.
You're in shock, that's all.

Unidentified vessel, this is the
Mendicant
. . .
My voice
sounds shell-hard, all business. I listen to myself ask for their coordinates, then pause and ask again, only to stop midsentence.

An eerie silence where my mother's voice should be stretches out on the recording.

I lean closer. Where is it? Where is she?

“Manman?” My own voice whispers back at me in hushed awe.

Still nothing in answer.

“Manman, how . . . Where are you?”

A long pause. The recording plays back my breath, harsh and elevated.
She's going to hyperventilate,
I think, forgetting for a moment that's it's me. And then my own scream. My voice carries the unmistakable stamp of terror. Another clammy wave ripples over my skin, and I ball my hands into fists to keep them from shaking.

I cut off the recording and lean against the controls, my head buried in my hands. No responses from the other ship, no warning alarms, only my own words spoken into the stillness.

I'm going mental. That's the only explanation. Rubio has his birds, and I have my mother's ghost.

I look out at the vast, empty expanse. We're still twelve days out from Enceladus, running on limited telemetry
functions, with who knows how many other technical problems waiting to spring themselves, and the last functioning crew member has officially gone mad.

We limp into orbit around the closest station I've been able to find in the ship's databases, Outpost 247.281.5M. No one answers my calls for an approach vector, so I guide us in blind, using only the telemetry readouts, until the outline of the station appears against the stars. With its docking arms extended, the outpost spins like a windmill in the darkness—smoky-gray shielding nearly disappearing into the black.

No signal lights outline the station's extremities. Either we've just happened to show up in the middle of a power outage, or the station is abandoned. My fantasies about finding a doctor or a neural scan operator shrivel and shrink back into my chest. I might not even find air or gravity on the other side of our hull.

The docking bay doors sense us and slide open.
A good sign,
I think, until I realize that means the station power isn't out—someone turned off the signal lights on purpose, or at least didn't bother to fix them when they burned out.

We should go back
.
Find another outpost, an inhabited one.

But what guarantee do I have that the next station
won't be abandoned, too? Or worse yet, full of the same kind of traffickers who took Cassia's brother?

Ma chère, you didn't finish your rice,
my mother's voice echoes down from the other end of the ship. I whip my head toward the sound before I can stop myself.

It isn't real. She's not there,
I remind myself.

But the thing is, it was real once. I can't filter out the memories anymore. They sneak up on me, but jumbled, out of order. Sometimes my palms will bleed, but when I reach for the bandages, my wounds will close again. My mother's voice will startle me out of sleep, or scenes from the Gyre will superimpose themselves over my vision while I'm lying on my back, completing a repair—paint peeling from white iron railing, the smell of fish frying and the scrabbling of chickens on the roof, leaping the gaps between pontoons with Kai, handing him the string to a danger-red kite, fishing a strand of plastic pearls from the bleached, floating refuse of the Gyre plain and looping them around my neck. Whatever happened to that necklace? Or the red kite? Are they sunk to the ocean floor, along with my mother's bones?