Sound (19 page)

Chapter 17

T
he
dakait
woman utters a scream of rage that dissolves into a wet gurgle. I turn in time to see Isha draw her knife across the struggling woman's throat. Her eyes roll black with a mix of terror, fury, and confusion. A second later, they dull, and Isha lets her drop.

I blink from Isha to Cassia in disbelief. “What did you do?” My own voice rings high in my ears. I can understand Isha—she's plain mad—but Cassia?

“What did you do?” I say again.

Cassia crouches down over the first
dakait
's body. She doesn't look at me as she speaks. “What I had to,” she says. “For Nethanel.”

“Carajo.”

I turn. Rubio holds the youngest
d
akait
by his collar. The boy's eyes go wide, taking in the corpses, and then
he doubles over and vomits. Rubio lets go of his shirt and backs against the bulkhead.

The solid
click
of another slug chambering brings me wheeling back around.

Cassia stands looking at me. “What should we do with him?”

A sick feeling creeps over me. “What do you mean?”

“Not many options.” Cassia examines the gun in her hands.

“No.” My mouth is dry. “No. Look at him, Cassia. He's not any older than we are.”

Cassia regards him coldly. “So?”

“I . . . we . . . ,” I stammer. What did I expect? To turn the
dakait
over to the DSRI or the Satellite Authority? I haven't been thinking beyond each crisis as it unfolds—steal the shuttle, deal with Sweetie, keep Cassia alive, keep the ship running, keep all of us alive.

“No one is coming to help us out here, Miyole,” Cassia says. “We're the only justice there is.”

“This isn't justice.” I glance at the boy.
Warume,
I remember. That's what the woman called him. “It's vengeance.”

Cassia scowls. “Splitting hairs.”

“How much blood do you want on your hands?” I plant
myself between her and the boy. “Nethanel could still be alive. Killing a bunch of
dakait
isn't going to keep him that way.”

Cassia waves the gun in the boy's direction. “We can't take him with us.”

“So the only other choice is to kill him?”

Cassia turns up her hands. “What do you suggest?”

I look from her to Rubio, who has gone as green as I feel, and then to Isha, cleaning her knife with the hem of her skirt. A profoundly bad idea comes to me.

“Maybe . . .” I try to swallow. “Isha, you want company, right?”

“Company.” She repeats the word as if it's foreign to her. “Yes. The cat. Good company.”

“What if you could have something better than a cat?”

Isha cricks her head to the side, listening.

“What if you could have someone to talk to?” I spare a glance at Cassia. “What if you had someone who could talk back?”

Cassia and Isha look at the
dakait
boy. He stares back at them, face slick with sweat.

“What do you say?” My heart pounds. I don't know if this is justice, but it's better than murder. “Wouldn't you rather have him than Tibbet?”

The witch sniffs the
dakait
boy. “Will he catch rats?”

“Sure.” Rubio steps in. “He's great at catching rats. All the rats you want.”

I send him a warning glare.
Don't oversell it.
“What do you think, Cass?”

If only there was time to show her Isha's patients and the filthy warrens in the depths of the station. Then she would know my plan isn't as merciful as it seems.

“Wait.” The
dakait
boy whimpers. “Don't I get a say?”

“Sure.” Cassia gives him a cold smile. “Why not? Let's hear your plan.”

He swallows. “Let me go. I didn't take your brother or anybody. All I did was work the door saw.”

Cassia laughs. “Try again.”

The
dakait
boy looks from Isha to his crewmates' bodies. “Do me like them, then.” He lifts his chin, but for all his bravado, he's shaking. “I'm not staying here with that wrecked old witch.” He spits at Isha's feet.

Cassia's eyes light up, but there's something wrong with them. One time when I was visiting Ava and Rushil, their neighbor had to put down a rabid dog. Her eyes are like that—glassy—seeing, but not seeing. This isn't the girl I know. This is a stranger.

“Perfect.” She smiles to herself and then at Isha. “He's all yours.”

Nutrition bar wrappers and cellophane crinkle under my boots as I duck into the
d
akait
ship. I inch down the narrow corridors, trying not to touch the walls. The whole place stinks of piss and alcohol. Even the corner of the
Mendicant
where Tibbet has chosen to do his business doesn't smell this bad.

I reach the cockpit and squint into the harsh blue-white light bleeding up from behind the wall panels. More wrappers and bottles litter the controls, and a tiny hologram of a naked woman gyrates over the coms station. Charming. I pick up a flak jacket slung across one of the seats and sit down. There's information here. Coordinates for where the
dakait
have been. Docking codes. Maybe even names.

The litter rustles behind me, and I spin around.

Rubio stands in the doorway, looking as skeevy as I feel. “Find anything?”

“Not yet.” I bring up the docking log. Something yellow and tacky is spattered across the screen. “I'm thinking we should bring in a decontamination crew.”

“Heh.” Rubio shoves his hands in his pockets and gazes up at a yellow-brown stain on the wall.

We both stay silent, me flipping through the logs,
Rubio nodding his head and taking in the room. Finally I can't take it anymore.

“Is she coming?”

Rubio freezes and then shakes his head. “She said she didn't want to see where they kept him.”

I turn back to the controls. “I guess that's for the best.”

“Miyole . . . ,” Rubio starts.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“I'm as freaked out as you.” Rubio takes a seat next to me and runs a hand through his hair. “I've never seen anyone . . . kill before.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “You never shot anyone down?”

He laughs. “
Vaya
, Mi. I've only been on security detail for a year. They teach you to shoot across the bow. Warning shots.”

I don't say anything.

“I mean, all that blood . . .”

Blood—the
dakait
, my mother, the man on our bedroom floor with my eyes.

“Rubio.” I raise my voice. “I said I don't want to talk about it. I want to find what we need and get out of here, okay?” I don't want to think the thoughts tapping at the back of my mind.
Should I ever have trusted Cassia? How
much do I know her, even now? Is this whole rescue mission a mistake?

“Fine.” He raises his hands and stands up. “I get it.”

I sigh. “Look, I'm sorry. Can you go back to fixing the air scrubbers and let me finish up with this?” I wave at the screen. “I just can't right now. This place is creeping me out.”

“Yeah.” Rubio shrugs. “All I'm saying is, we should keep a close eye on Cassia. I don't know what she's going to do when we get down on the surface, and I'd like to come out of this alive.”

I hole up in the cockpit while Cassia and Rubio sleep, trying to concentrate on the information from the
dakait
ship's log. It's no use. I can't unsee the blood or the look on Cassia's face. I can't force that other memory—the man with my eyes, my
manman
taking the gun from me—back to the depths where it belongs. I can't look at Cassia without it all refreshing before me. I've been sleeping beneath a pile of coats on one of the common room couches or scrunched sideways in the pilot's chair since we left Isha's station. That is, when I sleep.

I rub my eyes and try to focus. The
dakait
made a host of port calls on Enceladus.

Dock Roppyaku, East Block Subport, Ny Kyoto: 36.637864, 155.522461

Aoki Diagnostik, Shio Subport, Ny Kyoto: 36.637865, 155.522460

Rangnvaldsson Keramik, Ny Karlskrona, Kyushu Province: 36.375480, 127.441406

Cryatics Wholesale, Kazan Spindle, Zaius Shelf Port: -76.052861, -89.472656

Norling Buki-ko, Jämtlands län, Ny Skaderna: -74.00182, -63.942321

A-1 Such
í
ru
, Hiroi Glaciär Spindle, Ny Skaderna: -70.81924, -64.11021

Enceladus was supposed to be one of the
Ranganathan
's ports of call, too—there was some talk about taking shore leave if we were on schedule—but I only remember the very basics about it. I should have paid more attention to the docking briefs in my preflight packet. I trail a finger over the names and pull up Ny Kyoto from the Mendicant's data banks.

Founded by Japanese and Swedish refugees fleeing rising tides, Ny Kyoto was the first colony established on Enceladus. Research indicates great potential for bioengineering ship components in the moon's subterranean oceans. . . .

I close the screen and groan. Clearly no one has
updated the
Mendicant
's data banks in at least fifty years. Enceladus has been growing ship parts for decades. The skeletons of the
Ranganathan
and her sisters were born in the Enceladan ocean yards.

I scroll back up to the port call roster and press my fingertips against my temples, as if that will help me remember. Ny Kyoto, that's one of the biggest population centers. And the one with the Swedish name—if the coordinates are right, it's not too far from the city. That puts the others near the southern pole. Something itches in the back of my mind. Wasn't there something dangerous at the south pole? Riptides, maybe? There was some reason no major cities formed there.

What were you doing?
Where did you leave him?
I don't know any Swedish and my Japanese is terrible, but some of the locations look like businesses of some kind—
Cryatics Wholesale, Aoki Diagnostik
. And
buki-ko
,
that has something to do with weapons, but I can't remember what.

I lean back in my chair and grind the heels of my hands into my eyes. We have the coordinates, but they could mean anything. And then there's Sweetie's delivery. Hopefully we haven't missed his message telling us the location of our drop point by diverting course to Isha's station. There's
nothing to do but wait until we reach Enceladus and see for ourselves.

I turn off the cockpit's overhead lights and try to sleep, but my mind keeps turning over. Vishva and I always used to play If I Had a Time Machine back when we were at Revati together.

If I had a time machine, I'd go back and tell myself not to come to school the day Sanjita read my note about Roshan to the whole class.

I'd go back and tell the engineers about how the levee was going to breach.

I'd tell Mummy not give my stepfather a second chance.

I'd warn my mother about the hurricane.

If I had one now, how far would I go back and do things differently? Back to the moment I told Cassia I'd fly for her? To my missed chance to stop the
dakait
? To the moment I asked Rushil to fix my records for me? Or maybe even farther—back to save my mother, back to before the sea swallowed Earth's islands so we could have ridden out any storm on land and I would have a place to call my home. I lean forward and pull up the
Mendicant
's data-bank entry on Haiti. The ship's records may be woefully out-of-date, but Haiti drowned hundreds of years before this ship was built, and as far as I can tell,
its entry is more or less right. Or at least, it matches my memories from world history class.

The former slaves of Haiti won their years-long battle for independence from the French in 1804, under the command of Toussaint L'Overture.

It always felt so distant back then. My books weren't talking about anything to do with me. Now my mother's words run through my head as I read, like two streams weaving and curving together.
We were the first in the age of slavery to strike off our chains. Be proud of that,
ma chère.
Your people saw the chance for freedom and took it, no matter what the rest of the world said.

I read on, words sparking memories, memories sparking memories, until I fall into a fitful sleep.

I am in my
manman
's bedroom. I am playing with my doll. She has a long, dark braid, almost as long as her whole body, and I like to hold her by the tip of it and spin us both around and around.

Heavy footsteps mount the stairs outside, a measure too slow to be my
manman
's. Fear sinks into my chest like a spider. The
front door unlocks, and the steps are in the house. I dive under the
bed. Too late, I look back. My doll is all alone in the center of the bedroom floor. I wriggle forward to grab her, but the footsteps turn my way. I pull my arm back under the bed just in time.

Two scuffed, pointy boots stop in the doorway. I want to squeeze my eyes shut, but I know if I do, I'll open them again and he'll be bending down, looking under the bed.

“Miyole!” he shouts, hitting the last syllable of my name hard.

I don't move. I am boneless, trembling.

He reaches down and snatches my doll. I stifle a little exhalation—
oh
. Where is he taking her? What is he going to do with her?

His footsteps retreat into the kitchen. I listen to him taking things off the shelf, making food, talking to someone on his satellite phone. Eventually I fall asleep beneath the mattress.

I wake to the sound of my
manman
's sloop roaring overhead. The spider lets go of my chest. She's home. I crawl out from beneath the bed and peek around the corner into the living room. He sits in his big yellow chair, clipping his fingernails. No sign of my doll. I sneak into the hallway, where he can't see me, to wait for my
manman
and throw my arms around her legs as soon as she comes in the door.