Sound (17 page)

The necklace becomes my
manman
's bones, becomes my
manman
. My
manman
sitting with me over an enormous old paper book full of maps spread out on our kitchen
table. Its pages are wrinkled and warped with age and water damage.

My
manman
smooths it with her hands and taps a small island in a field of faded blue. “That was our homeland,
ma chère
. Before the water rose.”

“But we're not from there.” I wrinkle my nose at the old book's smell. “We're Gyre people.”

“Yes,” my mother agrees. “But we're Haitian, too. Everyone from the Gyre is more than one thing. We all came here from somewhere else. You see?”

I shake my head, my braided pigtails hitting the sides of my face. I like the way they swing, so I keep doing it until my mother puts a hand on my arm.

“Answer me, Miyole. You see?”

I scrunch up my face. “But Haiti's not there anymore. We can't be from a place that isn't.”

“The land is gone,” my mother says. “But the rest of it we brought with us. So long as you and I and all the other Gyre folk from Haiti remember it, it still exists. The same as all the other lands our neighbors are from. As long as we exist, those places still exist, too.”

Guilt fills up my pounding head.
I let myself forget.
No, I made myself forget.
Not only Haiti, but the Gyre, too. Everyone else died in that storm, and I made myself forget.
I know what Ava and Soraya would say—that I had to forget to stay sane and keep functioning—but that doesn't dispel the cold, queasy feeling in my stomach or the prickles of shame traveling through my nervous system. Did the Gyre stop existing when I forgot it?

The stations' walls fill up the viewport, dark and silent, its outer air locks hanging open like slack mouths. I manage to maneuver the ship onto the magnetic docking track and let the station glide us forward. I listen for the reverberation of the air lock sealing around us, change into my pressure suit, and check on Cassia and Rubio before I hurry down to the hatch. They're both well under—sleeping the sleep of the drugged. Tibbet lies curled at his mistress's feet, either guarding her or taking advantage of her body heat. It's hard to tell with him. He's gotten weirder since Cassia stopped getting out of bed. When he isn't sleeping, his eyes stay dilated, and he stalks around the ship crashing into things and making lonely noises. He runs away whenever he sees me, even though I'm the one setting out softened, mashed protein bars for him each day.

“Take care of them, okay?” I whisper, and thank my stars Dr. Osmani isn't here to see me talking to a cat. If I don't get help soon, Tibbet is going to be the one most qualified to fly this ship. Leaving Cassia and Rubio alone
while they're sedated sets off all the alarms from my medic training, but I don't have much choice. The only time Cassia stops vomiting is when she's unconscious, and Rubio will burrow through the walls if I leave him awake.

Down at the hatch, all the door's air-quality indicators show green. There's atmosphere on the other side, or at least the
Mendicant
thinks there is. I cross my fingers that the ship's exterior sensors haven't started malfunctioning, too, and reach up to double-check my pressure helmet. I press the hatch seal release.

The door opens onto a dark hangar, illuminated only by the light streaming from our ship's interior. My suit's readouts show breathable air. Score one for the
Mendicant
's systems. I retract my faceplate.

“Hello?” I call as I step down onto the dock and lift an LED torch over my head. My footsteps echo back to me in the empty space. This place was definitely a functioning dock once. The scuffed markings on the floor and the seams around the repair lifts leave no doubt. But our ship is the only one in the room, and the walls are bare, the typical accordion hoses and robotic arms that line most ship hangars stripped away. On the far side of the hangar, something skitters in the shadows.

“Hello?” I call again. A ripe, mildewed smell permeates
the air. I force myself forward, away from the ship. Midway across the hangar, a black, open corridor looms out of the darkness. I stop short, my heart pumping hard.

Stay calm,
I remind myself, and swallow my panic.
Even if there's no one here, you could still find something to help. Supplies, or even a sunlight simulation chamber.

Unless there
is
someone here . . .
My blood pressure shoots up a notch. I shiver. Not for the first time, I miss the
Ranganathan
's sprawling recreation gardens and its sunlamps. If I were there now, I would submerge myself in a bath of orange-gold vitamins and electrolytes.

The open corridor swallows me. I keep my torch raised and creep forward, hugging the wall. My footsteps patter down into the darkness and bound back. Ahead, the hallway splits. I shine my torch in both directions. To the right, a wheel-locked door; to the left, more darkness.

I choose the door. The wheel sticks at first, but eventually it gives, and I'm able to shoulder it open. Plastic tubs of flame-retardant powder line metal shelves, along with bins of re-breather masks and dusty water bottles. I pick a mask out of the pile and blow the dust from its mouthpiece. Its indicator lights blink on—four green, one orange. I try it on and inhale. Instantly, the air tastes fresher, like a cool drink of filtered water.

I find two other masks that still seem to be working and hook all three to my belt, then stuff my parka's pockets full of bottled water. The labels look at least five years out of date, but I'm willing to chance it. Anything is better than what comes out of the
Mendicant
's moisture recycling system.

I backtrack and make my way down the hall in the opposite direction. What I really need is a station schematic. Clearly the outpost's solar arrays are still drawing enough power to keep the air filtration and artificial gravity systems working, so why not lights, too?

I pass a bank of lifts at what I think must be the center of the station and find an access shaft with a spiral staircase coiling up and down into the darkness like a single strand of DNA. I glance back at the lifts and then down into the narrow abyss.

It's only darkness. It can't hurt you,
I tell myself.
Be smart. It's better than risking getting trapped in a lift shaft if the power really goes out.

But that doesn't stop my knees from shaking as I shuffle out onto the landing.

“Stop it,” I mutter, and slap my legs to bring the feeling back. I grip my torch and peer over the railing again. If this outpost is designed anything like the
Ranganathan
, its
control center and life support system will be at its core, protected from a full-on assault or an accidental collision. That means down.

I take the stairs one at a time, one hand clamped around the handrail, the other clutching my torch. The steps round down and down, split occasionally by landings leading into other levels. After a while, I notice the wall shrinking away from me. Either I'm hallucinating again, or the staircase is broadening. I shine my torch on the riveted metal wall and stretch my hand out to it. One step, two, and then my fingers meet the cold surface.

Definitely broadening,
I think, but then another sensation hits me.
And wet.

I pull my hand back. A dilute red stain covers my glove and a metal tang finds its way to the back of my tongue.
Blood?
I dart my torch beam around, half certain I'll come face-to-face with some needle-fingered monster from the horror stories the girls at Revati used to trade. But I'm alone. I hold the torch above my hand and make myself look again. Not blood, rust.

I laugh, nervously. The sound echoes up the access shaft and rains back down on me. A memory races by—Kai and me, scaling the upper decks of an old research ship. I stepped on a corroded patch, and my foot broke through,
letting loose a downpour of oxidized red flakes on the deck below. Manman had to fly all the way to West Gyre to buy tetanus vaccine.

I aim my LED torch up into the shadows of the access shaft. Somewhere in the darkness, an ominous metal groan sounds.

“Chaila,”
I whisper. Has the stair been making that noise the whole time? Who knows how long this station has before the rust eats all the way through it? One major jolt and the whole thing could crumble.

Get out,
I think. But I've come this far. A station this size has to have a clinic, and that means medical supplies. I can't go back empty-handed. Not now.

The stairwell bottoms out on a level closed off by a reinforced wheel-locked door. I stow my torch in my belt and wipe my damp gloves on my legs. The hatch opens with a shriek. I poke my head inside and let my light play over the walls. A broad hallway lined with load-bearing buttresses opens up before me, and then disappears into darkness. Through the gloom, I make out a sign hanging from the ceiling—
ENVIRONMENTALS
. So I'm going in the right direction, at least.

I sidle through and let the door fall closed behind me. Immediately, my boot slips in something fine and powdery.
I drop my beam to the concrete floor. A thick layer of white, talc-like powder covers it in drifts, and a cold, chemical burn runs up my sinuses and down my throat. Flame retardant, maybe? Like the tubs upstairs? But how did it end up scattered all around the floor?

I take another step and stop. A few meters in front of me, a set of tracks cross through the powder. I'm hardly Wilderness Girl, but even I can tell they're human footprints. I've seen the same imprint on the sand at the Malabar Hill beaches. Cold prickles the back of my neck.

I swallow, but my throat still feels tight. “Hello?”

No one answers. Somewhere deep in the darkness, something scuffles across the floor. A whiff of rot mingles with the chemical burn in the air.

Supplies.
I push myself forward, torch held high. Adrenaline surges in my bloodstream, and my breath comes harsh and fast in my own ears. I've never had a panic attack before, but I've read about them, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the verge of one now. The floor slopes down almost imperceptibly. I shine my light at the walls. Moisture sweats from the pores in the concrete and weeps down the uneven surface. Damp, sticky patches form on the floor, where runoff has seeped into the layer of powder.

Something crunches underfoot. I stop and lift my boot.
A small, yellowed skeleton lies crushed in the sticky mass of powder, tufts of gray fur still adhered to bones. It might have been a rat once, but it's hard to tell now. At least that explains the smell.

I keep walking. The odor of decay thickens, overtaking the chemical scent. Bits of trash—protein bar packages, broken glass, plastic insulation, and other flotsam—begin to pile up along the walls. It rises in drifts and spreads until I'm forced to pick my way down a narrow path at the center of the corridor.

Autolysis initiates the process of decomposition, the rate of which is dependent upon the concentration of enzymes in the material.

I step over an aluminum wrapper smeared with what looks like feces and look up. An orange glow lights the far end of the hallway, bright enough that I can make out the contours of the trash dunes ahead. I switch off my torch. I count out thirty seconds, waiting for my retinas to adjust, and then creep forward, careful to avoid the loose, rolling bottles and cardboard packing tubes littering the floor.

The hallway ends in a landing overlooking a deep, circular room lit by an emergency lantern balanced on the floor. More trash litters the stairs leading down to the
bottom and then tapers away, replaced by a jumble of water barrels, gutted electronics, and stacked cots surrounding a cluster of terminals. A soft lapping sound echoes off the bare walls.

“Hello?” I call again. My voice almost fails me.

The lapping pauses, and then resumes. Whoever—or whatever—is down below has to know I'm here. I briefly think of turning on my heel and retreating back down the refuse-packed corridor, but the idea of someone following me through the dark makes me pause.

“Vaat,”
I whisper, and lower my foot onto the first stair. The whole construction creaks under my weight, a deafening shriek that fills the room and puts my teeth on edge. I flinch and hurry down the rest of the way, images of the stairwell crumbling beneath me flashing through my head.

The structure shudders into silence. An eerie quiet fills the room.

The lapping sound starts again.

“Hello?” I round the water barrels. “Please . . . we need a doctor. Or the med bay, or . . .” I turn.

A figure crouches in the shadow of the stairs, its hands splayed against the wall. Bits of string, metal, and fur hang in its long, tangled black hair. I watch, paralyzed, as it
opens its mouth against the concrete and catches a trickle of water with its swollen tongue.

I step back, banging into the barrels.

The creature beneath the stairs looks up. It pushes its hair from its eyes, wipes its mouth with the back of a pale hand, and locks eyes with me.

Chapter 15

“Y
ou're younger than I thought.” The voice is a harsh, tracheal croak.

Younger?
I squeeze my eyes shut. Maybe this is another hallucination. I open them again. It still stands there, its head cocked to the side quizzically.

“Who . . .” I swallow and try to make my voice stop shaking. “Who are you?”

“I used to think I was Kaede-san.” It's voice is thoughtful, almost sad. “But I know better now.”

We stand in silence a moment. What is there to say after that?

“We heard you coming.”

“We?” I repeat, my throat dry.

It waves its hands in the air, as if gesturing at a cloud of gnats. “Yes. We.”

I decide not to press the issue.

“You need help.” It scuffles closer, out into the lantern light. Its baggy clothes obscure its shape, but I start to think it might be a woman.

“I . . . I need supplies,” I say, though my words sound as if they're echoing from someone else's mouth. “Or access to a medical bay. My friends, they're sick.”

The woman smiles, displaying a red-stained mouth. “We can help.”

Somehow, this isn't entirely comforting. I back around the water barrels, putting another meter of space between us. “You know where the med bay is?”

She shakes her head. “That place is no good, not anymore. But we can help.”

My stomach sinks. “How?”

The woman draws herself up and shakes out her filthy robes. “We are
isha
. We are a doctor.”

I follow her back through the refuse. I could run, but Kaede-san or Isha or whoever she is clearly knows this station better than I do, and that means she might lead me to the medical bay if I play along. She keeps one hand on her head, steadying a makeshift headlamp, and swats at the garbage with a plastic stick she holds in the other.

“They like to bite,” she explains. “Rats.”

I shudder and thank the stars for my pressure suit's boots.

“What should I call you?” I ask.

“You can call us doctor.” She lets out a harsh wheezing sound I take to be a laugh. “Incorruptible Jewel of the Heavens, Lady of the Phoenix, High Priestess of the Winding Cloth—”

I interrupt. “I don't think I'm going to be calling you any of those things.”

She frowns back at me. “Fine. Call us Isha.”

We arrive at a service lift I missed on my way in. A metal bar sticks out of the seam where the double doors meet. Isha leans her weight against it, and the doors roll back, revealing a car with a thick carpet of damp debris and spattered stains on the walls. A single emergency light strip fills the carriage with a dull blue glow.

“This thing still runs?” I ask, incredulous.

Isha bobs her head. “Everything runs.” She looks at me and waggles a finger. “Everything runs, except when we don't want it to run.”

Fantastic.
I make a mental note not to piss off Isha any more than I already have.

She smiles and holds out a hand, inviting me into the lift. “After you.”

The car shrieks as it jolts into motion. I brace myself against the corner to keep from falling, but Isha barely moves.

“What happened here?” I lift my foot to examine something sticky on the bottom of my boot.

“Hubris,” Isha says. “Sloth.”

I frown. “I mean, did everyone leave you behind, or . . . ?”

“Not all of them.” The lift picks up speed as it rises, its indicator lights strobing across Isha's face. “Would you want to see the bodies?”

My heart stops. “What?”

“The bodies,” she repeats matter-of-factly. “The ones that stayed.”

A chill runs through the pit of my stomach. “I . . . I don't know . . .” Did she kill them? Is that what she wants to show me? And if I answer wrong, will she add me to their number? I swallow. “Do you . . . do you want to show them to me?”

“Oh, they would like that.” Isha reaches for the lift's controls. “They're so lonely. No one to mourn for them except us.”

“What about my friends?” I ask.

Isha cocks her head to the side. “Do they want to stay here, too?”

“No,” I say quickly. If I run, will she chase me? “No, we're expected on Enceladus. We . . . we only stopped because they're sick. Once we have some meds, we'll be out of your hair.”

She shrugs. “Suit yourselves.” The lift slows and then jerks to a stop. “Here we are.”

I follow Isha down another dim corridor. A square of light shines at the far end, brilliantly sharp after all this darkness. As we approach, I glimpse the outline of bare trees through the fogged glass.

“Are those your gardens?” They must be, except most larger ships and stations keep tropical plants or evergreens aboard, not deciduous trees. How are the gardens supposed to keep your spirits up with no green?

Isha pauses with her hand on the latch and nods. “But you have to be very quiet.” She drops her voice to a whisper. “They're sleeping.”

“Who?” I ask, but she's already pulled the release and pushed the door back into its pocket.

Sunlight rolls over us. My skin turns to gooseflesh at its touch, and for a moment, I forget everything but the warmth of it. I close my eyes against the silvery glare. The vitamin D tablets I've kept us on throughout the flight are fine for staving off illness, but they're nothing like sunlight,
even simulated sunlight. Never mind the madwoman who led me here, or the fact that I'm not one hundred percent sure she won't murder me. I feel fully alive for the first time in weeks.

“We tend them when we can,” Isha says, close to my ear.

I open my eyes to a squint. A good-sized garden spreads out before us, with naked trees stretched thin along the perimeter and brown patches of what once must have been flower beds spotting the dead grass. I don't understand what I'm seeing on the ground at first. Logs, maybe, or the foundations of a crumbled wall? I step into the garden.

“What . . . ?” I start to say, but then my brain catches up.
Bodies.
The shapes laid out so neatly on the grass are bodies.

Isha passes me and circles a group laid around a tree like wagon spokes. Each rests its head over the roots and points its toes at the sky. Someone has arranged their limbs so their hands rest folded over their rib cages. The only smell is the subtle mineral odor of water and dirt. They've been out here long enough for the environs to soak up the smell of rot.

“What happened? Did you do this?”

“Yes, yes.” Isha murmurs, bending over one corpse with
long blond hair and picking a fallen leaf from the remnants of a shirt. “They were sick. We brought them here to rest.”

“You killed them?” My throat closes on itself.

Isha looks up sharply. “No. They're not dead. They're resting.” She looks down at the blond woman again and smiles. “We take good care of them. Soon they'll be well again. Soon they'll wake up.”

I back away. “I should go. My friends need me.”

“Yes.” Isha stares off at the tree-cloaked far wall, deep in thought, and then snaps her attention back to me. “Yes, your friends. We should see to them.”

I hold up a hand. “I don't think you should . . . I mean, I don't know if they need a doctor after all. I think I can take care of it.”

Isha's look darkens. “You think we're not a good doctor, because we let them fall ill.” She sweeps a hand across the tableau behind her. “We did everything we could to keep it from spreading. Some diseases, you don't see them coming. Too late to stop them. You can treat them and pray. And we were only Kaede-san then.”

“No.” I swallow and open my eyes too wide, like Ava says I always do when I'm lying. Maybe she didn't kill these people, but whatever did has obviously driven her stark raving mad. “It's just . . . you're busy here with
so many patients. I'm sure I can sort it myself.”

“Nonsense.” Isha scoffs. “They're sleeping. And your friends' illnesses are more acute, are they not?”

“Yes,” I admit, against my better judgment.

She nods. “Then we'll go to them. She took an oath. Geneva. Kaede swore.”

“Fine.” I don't want to push her. She was a doctor once. Maybe there's enough knowledge left tucked up in the corners of her memory that she could help. And besides, she knows the way back to the dock better than I do. If she really wanted, she could find the
Mendicant
herself and leave me to find my own way through the station's lightless halls.

I roll back the door to the sleeping berth and peer into the darkness. “Cass?”

“Miyole?” Her voice croaks from disuse.

I move aside to let Isha in. “I brought help.”

Cassia's eyes roll and widen. “What . . . what is that?”

“We are Isha.” The old woman draws close to the bed, the soiled, tattered ends of her cloak trailing after her. She sits at Cassia's side. “And you are the sick.”

Cassia looks to me, her face full of barely lucid horror.

“It's all right.” I try to sound confident. “She's a doctor.”

“She's a witch,” Cassia whispers as Isha reaches out and gently presses the lymph nodes beneath her jaw.

“Yes,” Isha agrees, taking Cassia's limp arm. “That, too.” She lays two filth-stained fingers against the inside of Cassia's elbow, feeling for a pulse.

I chew my lip. “She has a concussion,” I say. “She was on the mend at first, but now . . .” I trail off as Cassia's eyes flutter closed.

Isha inspects Cassia's bandage. “Hmm.”

I pace to the opposite side of the bed. Maybe I should have taken her to Rubio first. It's hard to tell which of them is worse. I turn. “Do you think . . .”

Something catches the yellow light creeping in from the hall and flashes in the corner of my eye.

I whirl around. “What—”

Isha has a knife in her hand, an ugly, narrow thing like the kind used to debone chickens. In one swift movement, she draws the blade down the soft flesh of Cassia's inner arm and ducks to lick up the beads of blood that rise in its wake. Cassia groans in pain.

“Kat le!”
I scramble across the bed. “Get away from her, you bloody
jholar
!”

Isha jumps up and backs into the corner, quick as a
lizard scaling a drainpipe, and points the knife at me. “Stay away. You asked us. You asked us to.”

I skid to a stop well short of the knife. “I never asked you to cut her open!”

I glance back at Cassia. Blood spills onto the bed. I hurry to her side, rip loose one of the sheets, and bunch it up over her arm.
Direct pressure. Elevation,
the part of me that remembers my medic training recites, while the rest of me screams a string of obscenities. I hold the sheet tight against Cassia's wound and raise her arm above her heart.

I never should have brought a madwoman back to our ship, even a madwoman who claimed to be a doctor. Scratch that.
Especially
a madwoman who claimed to be a doctor.

“We were helping.” Isha sounds hurt.

“Screw your bloody help!” I shout, and burst into tears.

Three weeks ago, my worst problem was a crabby Dr. Osmani, and now I'm stranded on a derelict station with two incapacitated crewmates, a knife-wielding witch doctor, a useless cat, and my own fraying line to reality. We're not going to make it. Never mind bringing Nethanel back from the deep; we're going to die here ourselves.

Isha lays a filthy hand on my shoulder. “It's not her head.”

I shrug her away. “Don't touch me.”

“Look, girl.” Isha kneels beside the bed and begins unwinding Cassia's bandage. “It's not her head.”

“Don't touch her,” I spit.

“We can help, see?” Isha smiles at me, tentative. “The sickness, it's not in her head. It's in her blood.”

“What do you mean?” I grip Cassia's arm tighter.

Isha raises her head and breathes in deep. “It's in the air. Poison in the air, poison in her blood.” She cocks her head at me. “Maybe in your blood, too.”

“My blood?” I echo, and shake my head. All Cassia's symptoms point to a concussion. “That doesn't make sense. I'm not sick.”

“Aren't you?” Isha's stare drills into me, and I remember the constant headaches and my mother's voice as her phantom ship bore down on us.

“No,” I say too quickly. “I mean, not like her.”

Isha thumbs the knife. “If you let us taste . . .”

“No. You're not touching anyone else with that thing.”

Isha glowers at me. “You have to let us help. You have to let us taste.”

“Chup kar, k
r
Å«
ra vyakti,”
I growl back.

“You want her to die?” Isha nods at Cassia's gray-pale face. “We can find the poison. We can make her better.”

I look from Cassia to the witch doctor and her knife. All
I have are bad choices. “Do you have to use that?” I look pointedly at the knife.

Isha frowns. “No,” she says, but she sounds disappointed.

“Fine,” I say. “Hand me that bandage.”

I draw the needle from my arm and hold the syringe up to the light. “Is that enough?”

“Maybe,” Isha says.

I glare at her and roll down my sleeve. I can't believe I'm doing this.

“Probably.” She nods.

“Good.” I deposit the blood into a narrow vial and hold it out to her. “Bottoms up.”

Isha sips from the vial, pinkie out, as if she's having high tea. She smacks her lips, and then nods. “Poison.”

My stomach twists. “What kind?” Who knows if there's any truth to what she says, or if I'm only feeding her delusion.

Isha closes her eyes and rotates a wrist above her head like a weather vane. “From the air. Carboxyhemoglobin.”

I search my memory. I know I've heard that word before, but where? Then it comes to me, and my eyes fly wide. “Carbon monoxide poisoning? Is that what you mean?”