Sound (23 page)

“One in particular. He's a big one. Smart. Not afraid of our perimeter lights.”

“And you want us to . . .” Herr Tsukino trails off.

“I'm afraid we've reached the point where he needs to be destroyed.” Fru Rangnvaldsson locks eyes with Freja's grandfather. “We're prepared to offer you a contract. Eleven hundred upfront, plus a twenty-five percent share in the profits from the rendered carcass.”

“That's illegal, isn't it?” Herr Tsukino frowns. “Hunting harrows?”

“I have a special permit, of course.” Fru Rangnvaldsson's smile is tight. “As I said, everything here has to be aboveboard.”

Herr Tsukino kneads one hand into the other and looks down the table at his crew. “Fifteen hundred and a fifty percent share.”

Fru Rangnvaldsson smiles. “We both know that's not fair market. What do you say to twelve hundred and a thirty-five percent share? More of my people will be in the water than yours.”

Herr Tsukino works his jaw as if he's grinding something between his teeth. “Done.” He sticks out a hand, and Fru Rangnvaldsson shakes it.

Too late, I realize Herr Tsukino's crew includes me. Which means I'm going harrow hunting.

Chapter 21

“I
don't think I can do this.” I stare down at the armored board I'm supposed to pilot through the water.

“It's not like you're out there without a shell,” Freja says. She taps the controls on her own board, and a clear aerodynamic dome slides into place, enclosing her inside it. She trails her hand across the surface again, and it retracts. “See?”

“It's not that. I . . .”

“What, are you afraid?” Freja stares at me, half disbelieving, half delighted.

“Come on, cut it out,” Rubio says. “Miyole's a scientist, not a big-game hunter. She's not used to this kind of thing.”

I grit my teeth. “Thanks, Rubio.”

“What?” He blinks at me.

“If you don't want to help, you can stay here,” Cassia mutters.

Freja looks up. “No, she can't.”

“No,” I agree, gripping the board. “I can't.”

I lie down on the board, seal the dome over me, and try to breathe deep. I will not hyperventilate. I will not throw up. I will not cry.

We exit Rangnvaldsson's spindle and glide through the warm-water docks. My hands won't stop sweating. The perimeter lights illuminate the skeletons of ships growing in the ocean's natural nutrient bath, the new ones no more than a spiderweb-thin scaffolding, the older ones beginning to develop the sheen of mature nacre. They'll be sold as modular replacement grafts. Some of them are probably even marked for the DSRI already.

“Five hundred meters west, twenty fathoms down,” Herr Tsukino's voice crackles across our open coms. “Big bioelectric signature.”

I glance back. Rangnvaldsson's people make up the left flank, with Cassia, Rubio, me, Freja, and the rest of the Tsukino crew on the right, all of us on boards. Freja's grandfather follows behind us in the submersible.

“I want a net formation,” he says. “We come in quiet, surround it on all sides, and close in slow. No one fires until it notices us.”

We pass over tube-worm groves blanketing the ocean
floor. Their bodies flare white in the beams from our boards, with a bloodred portion protruding at the tip, like an engorged tongue. I shudder and concentrate on the water before us. It makes it easier to pretend it's the familiar darkness of space, not an icebound sea.

“Coming up ahead,” Herr Tsukino says. “Be ready to cut your lights and go to heat vision on my signal.”

The seabed drops down, and the pressure inside my dome increases, like a blood pressure cuff squeezing my entire body. Jagged rock formations appear in the periphery of our lights, venting a great dark flume into the water above.

“What is that?” Rubio's voice comes in at a whisper. “Smoke?”

“It's blackwater,” Freja answers. “It's full of minerals.”

“That's what keeps everything down here alive without any sunlight, right?” I say. “The water gets superheated by the geothermal vents and the sea stays warm.” I know I'm babbling, but I'm too nervous to stop.

“A-plus, bureaubrat,” Freja says, but I hear a note of surprise in her voice.

“Too much chatter,” Herr Tsukino's voice breaks in. “Heat vision, everyone.”

I toggle the controls like Freja showed us. At once, the world is a deep black blue, with white-hot streams
shooting up where the blackwater vents were before. The other boarders are a dimmer red, silently angling through the water like Humboldt squid. And then, beyond another cluster of vents, we see it—a thick, sinuous body laid across the abyssal plain, lit up in cold, spectral blue.

“Chaila,”
I whisper. The harrow could easily swallow the submersible, to say nothing of the forty or so of us in the water. It lies between a series of smaller vents, warming itself against them. It might be asleep, but the heat vision makes it impossible to tell whether or not its eyes are closed.
If it has eyes.
I wipe my hands on my sleeves.

“Fan out,” Herr Tsukino says quietly.

I guide my board up into position. We form a sort of domed net around the harrow. No matter which way it swims, one of us will be there to fire on it. The beast lifts its head, maybe sensing the subtle vibrations in the water, and opens its mouth as if tasting the current. I kill my board's propulsion power. Maybe I'm not in exactly the position Herr Tsukino wanted, but it's close enough.

“Now,” he says.

Our rough noose of red stars begins to close on the harrow. Fifty meters. Forty. Thirty.

The harrow lifts its head again.

Twenty-five. Twenty. Fifteen.

The harrow whips to the left, then up at the divers above it. It opens its mouth. A deep wave of sound I more feel than hear shudders through my chest. I release the board's throttle without meaning to.

In one fluid movement, the harrow rises from the ocean floor and lunges at one of the divers. The coms erupt in noise.

“. . . ten degrees—”

“Watch it, Sila—”

“Pull in!”

“Firing!”

A bright flash erupts at my left, and something yellow-warm spills from the harrow's side. The beast screams—a ripple of sound I feel through my body—and jerks away. Another flash. Another spill of heat that dissipates into the cold water.

Blood,
I realize.
It's blood.

To my right, Freja surges forward, followed by Cassia and Rubio.

“Bureaubrat.” Freja's voice fills my ears. “Keep up. You're leaving a hole in the net.”

I fumble at my controls. Below me, the harrow writhes, spouting streams of blood. It rolls left, impossibly fast for something so large, crushing against a low rocky ridge.

“Watch out!”

“On your ten!”

“Up!”

Quick, too quick, one of the boards disappears beneath the harrow's body. My coms fill with an animal scream.

“Cass!” I shout.
Please don't let it be her. Please don't let it be her.
I push my board into a dive. It can't be her. She can't die like this, not when we're so close to finding her brother. It's impossible to tell which red smudge is who, and the coms are a chaos of shrieks and screams, the harrow's subaudible howls shaking through everything.

“Miyole!” Rubio's voice reaches me through the clamor. “She's . . .” But then the shouts and static drown him out again.

I reach for the throttle, but my hand slips on the controls. Heat vision drops away, and my board's lights flicker on. The beam falls on the horror below me. A great, pale, eel-like creature with blank white eyes writhes against the seabed, stirring up clouds of gray-black silt and trailing plumes of blood. It flinches from the light, then whips around and surges toward me, bellowing.

“Lights, Miyole! Lights!” Rubio shouts.

I turn my board and push the throttle, the harrow following mere meters behind me.
Turn the lights off, turn
the lights off.
But how? I start to hyperventilate. Fear has wiped my mind clean. The harrow bears down on me like a lev train.

“Top right screen, bureaubrat. Externals.” Freja's voice is firm over the coms. It's what I need. “The yellow circle. See it?”

Externals. I see it. I tap the controls and the lights extinguish. Back to heat vision. The water in front of me is a flat, dark blue mass punctuated by the bright, condensed burn of the blackwater vents. The board's protective dome vibrates as the harrow bellows again, closer than ever. I glance back. Its mouth gapes open, revealing a second set of jaws inside.

A hot spike of fear shoots through me. I push the board as fast as I can, mind racing. The harrow's screaming—could that be some form of echolocation? Sound waves rebounding off objects, creating a rough map for the creature. The frequency and intensity of the echoes differentiating me from the vents or the water around me. I look down. If I'm right, I could flatten out the sound waves reflecting back to the harrow by dropping close to the seabed.

I dive. The harrow snaps at me, the tip of its snout jostling my board. I drop low over the barren floor, but still it follows.
Not enough.
I maneuver lower, letting my board
skim the rocks and silt and sending up cloudy furrows behind me. The drag slows me, but the harrow pulls back, too. I can lose it. If I keep going, I can lose it.

“Miyole, what are you doing?” Cassia's voice breaks in on the coms.

“Cass!” She's okay. She's alive.

“Bring it back around,” Cassia barks. “You're leading it away from us.”

“It's too fast.” My voice pitches high. “It's going to kill me.”

“Turn around,” Cassia says. “We can't help you if you're moving away from us.”

My hands are wet on the board's controls. I pull up, leaving the safety of the silt cloud. The harrow barrels after me. Cassia and the rest of the divers hover several hundred meters away, dim red dots in the distance.

“Faster, Miyole!” It's Rubio.

“I'm not going to make it!” I shout.

“We're coming to meet you.” Freja's voice. “Just keep moving.”

The harrow jostles me again. I cut right and dive low, sending up another cloud of grit.
Variances in interaural time difference indicate location. . . .

A huge blackwater vent rises before me, jetting its
superheated current into the frigid ocean. Wait . . . a jet. Yes.

I pull away from the floor and power on the board's lights.

“What are you doing?” Freja shouts. “You're making it mad.”

I cut off my coms. I know what an incredibly terrible idea this is, and I need all my concentration to pull it off without getting myself killed.

The harrow howls and snakes after me. I glide low, the nose of my board pointed at the blackwater vent. I've eaten plenty of eel in my life. I only hope this one cooks like all the others. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the creature closing on me, but then I'm at the base of the vent and it's time. I jerk up on the controls, taking my board nearly vertical against its side. Blackwater billows above us, hot enough to sear flesh and boil me alive if I get too close. The harrow surges after me.

I tug the controls left at the last second, skirting the vent's mouth. The harrow plunges straight through the simmering jet. Its scream reverberates through my bones and fills my ears like water. The board's dome rattles around me. My lights flicker and the primary power dies, sending me spiraling headfirst into the rough seabed. I brace myself
as the board hits, bounces, rolls. I land upside down, tipped against a rocky mound, my board's lights strobing.

The world swims, a kaleidoscope of alarms and half-frozen glimpses of the harrow writhing in the flickering lights. Darkness. Teeth. Its great blind eyes rolling. And then the shapes of boards above me, descending on the harrow. They swarm around the monster. It thrashes beneath them, its blood filling the ocean, until at last it shudders and lies still.

Chapter 22

T
he sound of my own panting fills my ears. I reach out and flip the coms back on. “Hello?”

“There she is.” I hear Rubio's voice, full of relief. “She made it.”

“Tell her she's as lucky as she is stupid,” Freja says.

The blood in my face might be from hanging upside down, or it might not. “I . . . um . . . lost propulsion,” I say. “What do I do?”

“Stay there,” Freja says. “We're coming for you.”

One of Rangnvaldsson's crew hitches my board to the back of his own, while Freja does the same for the diver injured when the harrow first rolled. The rest of the divers drive massive hooks into the harrow and attach lines to the back of Herr Tsukino's submersible. We drag the harrow's corpse behind us, all the way back to Rangnvaldsson's headquarters.

We're met on the dock with congratulatory applause and medics for the injured.

“Beautifully done.” Fru Rangnvaldsson clasps Herr Tsukino's hands. “Congratulations on a clean hunt.”

“It wasn't entirely clean.” He glances at the injured diver being hurried away on a stretcher.

Fru Rangnvaldsson waves a hand. “The cost of doing business.”

I catch Freja's eye. Would she be saying that if she had been in the water with us, listening to the woman's screams?

“You're welcome to warm yourselves in the salt baths,” Fru Rangnvaldsson says. “We wouldn't want our guests catching a chill.”

The baths are a series of honeycombed rooms, each one with a deep oval basin and walls carved out of pale pink salt. I sink up to my neck in the steaming bath, close my eyes, and try not to see the harrow chasing me through the icy darkness. The warm salt water buoys me and eases the cramps in my muscles. I drop my head below the water and massage my scalp. This is a million times better than the best hot shower I've ever taken back in Mumbai, and a million squared compared to the cold rag baths we got by with on the
Mendicant
. It's like
sitting in my own private stretch of shallow, sun-warmed ocean.

I finally step out of the bath, rub my hair with a towel, and wrap myself in one of the fluffy blue robes hanging on the inside of the chamber door. I pad down the steamy halls, finally feeling warm for the first time in over a month. And weirdly hungry. Now if I could have a nice bowl of udon and sleep for a week . . .

A small laugh from somewhere ahead interrupts my napping fantasy.

A girl's voice. “Here?”

I round the corner. “Cass?”

In the steaming mist, I make out two figures in robes, one with sleek black hair in a ponytail and one with her wet curly hair hanging in hanks around her shoulders. Time slows. Freja and Cassia. They pull apart, but it's too late. I can't unsee Cassia's lips on Freja's, Freja's hand threaded into Cassia's hair.

Cassia's face drops. “Mi . . .”

All the warmth drains from my chest. I am the harrow, speared through its heart. I don't wait to hear what she has to say. I run.

I grab my freshly washed clothes from a cubby near the salt baths' entrance and dress hurriedly in the changing
room. My vision blurs as I bend to tie my boots. I'm not going to think about it.

I stand, my chest heaving against the unbearable pressure. It hurts. Not only my heart, my whole body. I kick the pink salt wall.
Vaat.
Moving makes the pressure more bearable, so I do it again and again and again.
Screw Cassia and that
kuttiya
. I rub the wet blur from my eyes. I should have known.

“Miss?” A woman with a soft voice knocks on the door. “Are you well, miss?”

I stop, suddenly conscious of the small animal sounds escaping me with each kick. “I'm fine,” I call back, but my voice wavers.

A pause. And then, “Forgive me, miss. I'm coming in.”

I quickly straighten out my shirt, suddenly aware that my hair is a half-dried mess and my eyes are puffy.

A young woman in the pale blue
yukata
of Rangnvaldsson's servants slips inside and closes the door behind her. I've seen her before. She was in the dining room, standing behind Fru Rangnvaldsson as we ate. She takes in my bloodshot eyes and wild hair.

“I heard about what happened with the harrow,” she says quietly. “Anyone would be shaken, miss.”

“It's not that. . . .” I look away and stop.

“I can fetch a cooling soak for your eyes if you like, miss.”

“No, that's okay. And you don't need to call me
miss
.” It's too much like Rubio's old
memsahib
.

She falls silent for a moment. “May I ask you something, miss?”

I sigh and sit heavily on the dressing room's padded bench. “Sure.”

“You came with Herr Tsukino, yes?”

I nod. “That's right.”

She glances over her shoulder and lowers her voice almost to a whisper. “He was asking about slaves.”

The word hits me like a wall.
Slaves.
No one else has said it plainly. The pit of my stomach drops, and I swallow. What am I doing wallowing in self-pity when there are other human beings enslaved around me? “Look . . . we're not really trying to—”

“I know,” she interrupts softly.

I look up. “You do?”

She sits next to me on the bench. “I was brought here on a slaver seven months ago. But they tried to sell me in Ny Kyoto first. Herr Tsukino was one of the few who didn't even want to listen to my captors' pitch.” Her voice is no more than a murmur. She smiles to herself. “He even spit
on their captain. I like to think he did that for me.”

“But . . . I thought Rangnvaldsson only kept indentured servants.” I stare at her. She can't be much older than I am.

She shrugs. “That's what my paperwork says. That Rangnvaldsson sponsored the cost of my transport here, and I'm to compensate them with seven years of service. But they'll only draw up new documents when those years are up. Some of the other servants and laborers have been here twenty, thirty years.”

I lean over and rest my head on my knees, the pieces of her story clicking together. Rangnvaldsson keeps slaves. The DSRI buys from her. The
Ranganathan
might have even have grown in the warm-water docks we passed on our way to hunt the harrow. All those pleasant gardens, the galleys and living quarters, my own odd little lab where I gazed out at the stars—they were built on this, the very thing my mother's people fought and died to end hundreds and hundreds of years ago. This thing that is supposed to be a dark chapter in Earth's history, not something that has traveled with us out into the stars. I feel sick.

I sit up. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Not for me. Not right now, anyway.”

Despair sucks at me. “What, then?”

“There was a boy. A young man,” she says. “He had the same marks on his face as that girl has. What do you call them?” She gestures over the bridge of her nose, where Cassia's freckles are the densest.

“Freckles.” My head feels light.

She nods. “Yes, that.”

“Was he deaf? He couldn't hear?”

She frowns. “Maybe.” Her eyes widen as if she's just solved an equation. “Yes. He never spoke. They said his brain was stunted, but he was always watching everything. Sharp eyes.”

I stand. “That's her brother. Did you . . . is he here?”

She shakes her head. “He's not here. They took him south with all the rest Fru Rangnvaldsson didn't want. I can give you the name.”

Dye mon, gen mon,
my mother would say. Beyond the mountain, another mountain.

“Please,” I say. “Yes.”

She hands me a scrap of paper.

Cryatics Wholesale, Zaius Shelf Port
. One of the
dakait's
other stops.

I look up from the paper and frown. “Fru Rangnvaldsson said they went to Ny Skaderna after here.”

The girl shakes her head. “They had already been to
Ny Skaderna when they stopped here. That's where they were going next.” She points to the paper. “You hear bad things about Kazan Spindle. I was lucky to be sold here.”

A chill runs up my spine, despite the humid air.

“Thank you.” I tuck the paper inside my shirt. “Are you sure . . . I mean, isn't there anything we can do to help you?”

She looks uncertain. “You know people in the DSRI, don't you?”

“How . . .”

She purses her lips. “I saw your face when Fru Rangnvaldsson said it.”

“I guess I do. I mean, I did.”

“I hear they don't allow this sort of thing. What Rangnvaldsson and those slavers do.” She fixes me with a meaningful look.

“They don't.” The image of Commander Dhar at the head of the officers' table comes back to me. Her refusing to lift a finger to save Nethanel. “But I don't know if they'd do anything about it.”

“But they might,” she insists. “They're the closest thing to civilization that makes it out here into the reaches. How could they ignore a thing like this? If you told them . . .”

I look down at my hands. Even if the DSRI would do anything, I'm on the run from them.

“I'm sorry,” I say, guilt crawling over me. “I don't know if I have a way of doing that anymore.”

She looks crestfallen. “Then come back for us,” she finally says. “After you find that boy, after you free him, come back and do the same for us.”

“We . . .” I swallow. I don't want to promise something I can't deliver. “We might not even make it out alive.”

“If you do, though,” she says. “Promise.”

“Okay,” I say. “I promise . . .”

“Petya,” she offers.

“Petya,” I repeat. “I promise.”