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“I'm going to figure you out one day.” He tosses his soft brown hair and shakes a finger at me in mock admonition.

“Try not to strain yourself,” I mutter, and push myself into the flow of people hurrying down the walkway to our left.

I stride along, scenes flipping rapidly on the walls around me—a cobbled street lined with wrought-iron lampposts, a summer garden bright with tinkling fountains,
a quaint neighborhood catching the earliest sun in the solar arrays on its rooftops. Stupid Rubio. I look back to make sure he isn't following me.

What is it with boys like him? All they know how to do is cut you down. Back in Mumbai, I kept my head in my studies like Soraya said, skipped all the parties down in the Salt, and ignored the knot of boys and girls clustered outside Revati's gates after school—all so I could make my way here. And for what? So some swoop-haired
dhakkan
can haunt my every move, making smart-ass comments? This isn't what I signed up for.

Suddenly the arched walls give way, and the roof opens up to a high, vaulted view of the stars above. The walking path slows to a crawl as we approach a rolling, grassy expanse dotted with real wood park benches and topiary bushes cut in the shapes of ostriches, elephants, and jumping dolphins. The upper recreation gardens.

“Chaila,”
I curse. In my fog of pissed-offedness, I've ridden the path too far. The sim labs are back the way I came.

I turn around, find the right stop for the sim labs, and stalk through the observation areas, past anonymous researchers in white full-body anticontamination suits that cover everything but the small oval of their faces. The
assistants in the outer labs raise their heads as I breeze past, but none of them waves or says hello. Maybe if we all weren't so socially awkward, we would have started greeting one another during our first week out of dock. But we didn't, and now it would be even more uncomfortable to start. Just as well. I head for the sanctuary of my lab. Well, really Dr. Osmani's lab, but she hasn't set foot in the place since our second week out of orbit, when she turned habitat maintenance over to me.

I key in my entry code and duck into the darkened room. The outer door slides into place behind me with a solid
click
. The world goes quiet. I lean against the door and close my eyes, breathe it in. This room is where everything makes sense, where everything follows a predictable pattern. It feels more like home than any other place on the ship, even the recreation gardens with their greenways and parks.

The lights flicker on. I blink and shrug out of my lab coat, drop it on the metal work desk next to my handbook, and pull off my gloves. The lights stagger on in the glass simulation chambers, too, illuminating two habitats Dr. Osmani and I have tweaked to perfectly replicate the conditions our specimens will face once they're delivered to the colonies. On the left, lush palms and hyacinths press
against the sweating glass, and vines and moss have already begun to creep up the trees. The chamber on the right is mostly bare, the glass cold to the touch. Low-growing juniper bushes feather across the rocky soil, and the blue flax bobs as the bees come to rest on its blooms. Each chamber is its own slice of world, perfectly re-created.

I check the temperatures and gas balances—chamber two needs another 0.78 parts per million of nitrogen—and program the misters to deliver the evening dose of nutrient rain. Then I lock the outer door, push a desk chair against the wall, and climb up into my favorite spot in the whole ship.

Ships like the
Ranganathan
are grown, not built, which means the occasional imperfection. My lab is one such anomaly. The ceiling curves overhead on one side, cut by a ledge about two meters off the floor. If you shove a chair underneath and boost yourself up, you find an alcove hollowed out of the wall. At the far end of the alcove, a wedge-shaped viewport looks out on the endless expanse of space rushing by.

I crawl inside and scoot close to the window. I even sleep here sometimes, when my bunkmates bring boys or girls back to our room for the evening.

I pull off my standard-issue slippers, lean against the
pillow I borrowed from one of the crew lounges, and wrap my old sari around me like a blanket. It was one of the few keepsakes from home I was allowed to bring—the first sari Soraya ever bought for me. I only have to run my fingers over the threadbare blue silk and embroidered horses parading around the hem, and I'm back in that Mumbai shop with the old-fashioned wooden floors, twirling in my new clothes.

Soraya beams and claps for me.
Oh, we must get you that one. It's perfect on you. Isn't it perfect on her, Ava?

And then the shop lady, holding up another shimmering swath of cloth next to my face.

Yes, yes, that one, too.

That feeling—so light, and everyone smiling, pleased and unworried for once. Even Ava, who was always fretting over money, smiled. And I wore my new sari home on the train.

“Feeling down?” Advani-ji asks kindly. “Vitamin D infusions can combat feelings of depression. . . .”

“Hush.” I hit the mute button on my coms again.

I stare out at the distant glimmer of stars. This is the real reason I signed on. There is no thrill like this on Earth. The depths look so perfectly still, and yet I know they're alive with radiation, dust, and dark matter. Gravitational
fields form tides around stars and pull their satellites along in the eddies. I can feel something moving out there, and moving in me, as if I am a bell sounding with some unseen resonance. I know that's scientifically inaccurate. There's not enough matter out there to transmit sound or sensation across the emptiness, but I feel its tug all the same.

Something gives, like an ice floe breaking free from a glacier, and I waver on the cusp of remembering. Images flicker and flee behind my eyes—a red kite, a black bantam hen strutting on a white-hot roof, a barefoot boy running before me. They're all there, waiting in a dark little box in my mind, spring-loaded. But do I want to let them out?

When I was little, Ava used to take me down to the
gaats
once a year to light a candle in a little paper boat for my mother.
To remember her,
Ava said. But to remember her means remembering what I lost—the kite, the hen, her. It means risking the quicksand that could suck me down if I'm not careful, if I remember too long, too much. It means risking the small, ungrateful thought that always comes gnawing:
Why didn't my mother stay in the pilot's seat when the wave came? Why didn't she send Ava down to rescue me instead? Why couldn't my mother have been the one to survive?

I reach into my lab coat pocket and pull out my old handheld crow. It's next to useless here, away from Earth and
its satellites, or any of the people I might want to message, but there is one thing it can still do. I pull up the recordings saved on it, and find the one I want. Maybe today will be the day. Maybe today I'll make it all the way through.

Ava's face appears on the screen, her dark hair swinging in a sharp, neat line at her chin. She wears the weather-worn jacket my mother gave to her before she died, and a stack of bangles on her wrist. Ava isn't my real sister, but my mother took her in when she was sick and had nowhere else to go. My chest aches at the sight of her. I shouldn't think those things. Ava loves me. She took care of me after the storm. If it weren't for her, I never would have met Soraya or grown up with everything I could possibly want. I wish I could talk to her now. She'd tell me what to do about Dr. Osmani, or at least agree with me about what a bloody
kuttiya
she's being, and she'd know exactly the right words to dispatch Rubio.

“Hey, Miyole.” Ava tucks her hair behind her ears and leans closer to the camera. Behind her, her husband, Rushil, passes by in the kitchen, humming the tune to some old movie the two of them love. “Congratulations on getting into the DSRI. I know you've been aiming for it ever since you were a smallgirl, and Rushil and I, we're some proud of you.”

Rushil sticks his head out of the kitchen to wave. “Hi, Miyole!”

Ava smiles over her shoulder at him, and then turns back to the camera. “Anyway, I know this means we won't see you again for a while, so I wanted you to have this.” Her face goes serious. “It's a recording I found in my sloop's memory files earlier this year. I didn't know when to give it to you, exactly. I was thinking maybe when you turned eighteen, but with you going away, now seems like the right time.”

She leans forward to switch off the camera's eye, and then pauses. “We love you, Miyole. I know if your mother were here, she'd be proud of you, too.”

The screen goes black and silent, and then a rush of static kicks in, steady as monsoon rain. I know what's coming next, but something hard lodges in my throat anyway, and suddenly I'm less certain I can listen at all.

“Vector five, verified,” a woman's voice reaches through the static. “Requesting landing coordinates.”

My mother, Perpétue. When the hurricane came to our home in the Gyre, Ava spotted me and my friend Kai on our neighbor's widow's walk and held the sloop steady in the air while my mother climbed down to us. But then the waves came higher and harder. My mother saw the wall
of water bearing down on us and pushed me up our ship's emergency ladder first, but not in time for everyone. The waves pulled her down, and Kai, too. All my nightmares end that way, with a rogue wave and someone or something I love sucked under.

Silence on the recording, and then: “Coordinates received. Sector B-point-294, field Delta. Assuming approach pattern.”

We searched for my mother after the storm, but we couldn't find her. The whole Gyre had been swallowed by the waves. I used to think that meant my mother might still be alive somewhere, floating on a half-sunk pontoon or lying in some Pacific recovery ward, waiting for her memory to return. But I see those thoughts for what they are now—childish fantasies. The first time I heard my mother's voice on this recording, bits of memory I didn't know I had forgotten came surging up at me. My mother's uneven gait on the stairs, and an unmoored surge of joy and expectation. The buttery aroma of roast nuts in a paper bag. My mother cracking their shells with the flat of her knife. And I remembered what I knew all along—that if she was alive, she would have found me.

The lump in my throat expands, and I break out in a cold sweat. Something moves deep in my brain. I want to forget,
but the feeling is there in my blood and bones, my long-untrodden neural pathways. I try to make myself breathe, but I can't. My palms burn where I cut them clinging to the emergency ladder. Panic swells in me, a great wall of dark water rising and rising until there is no sky.
It's not real,
I tell myself. But it is. It's inside me, always, guarding the passage back to my childhood and the Gyre, waiting to drown me if I stray too close.

I stop the recording, breathing hard.

I unclench my hands. My scars are still there, slick with sweat, not blood. It's too much. I bury my nose in the sari. It's better—easier—to be Soraya's daughter, the Mumbai private-school girl who rides horses for sport and spends her evenings studying for exams. Then I can remember Rushil teaching me how to swing a cricket bat at Shivaji Park and the sound of Soraya's old-fashioned teakettle, not my
manman
braiding my hair or rubbing lotion into her elbows before bed, not the bright and glassy sea after the storm.

THMP.

I jerk my head up.
That noise.
It takes a few breathless seconds for my mind to travel back to the present.
Something hit the viewport.

My heart speeds to a steady pound. I lean forward. The viewport's glass is clear, triple-paned, and incredibly
strong. Like the rest of the ship, it's made of a self-sealing nacre bioengineered to mimic the cellular structure of a mollusk shell. I don't see a scratch on it. In fact, I don't see anything but stars and the velvet emptiness of space. I crane my head down, trying for a different view. Nothing. I press my temple against the glass and strain my eyes up to check the vector above us.

And then I see it—a tangle of beacon lights and metal floating above us, and a fine, icy cloud pouring into the black. I can't process what it is at first.

Air,
it comes to me.
That's a ship, venting air.

For a few seconds I can't breathe, can't react. I can only watch the strange vessel hemorrhaging in the eerie silence.

The
Ranganathan
's
alarm blares to life. The overhead lights cut out and emergency lamps snap on, yellow, in their place. I freeze, as though a deadly current has run through my body, locking my muscles in place. Some part of me is back on the ladder in the midst of the hurricane, my mother screaming for me to climb.

“ATTENTION, ATTENTION. CODE BLACK,” a woman's calm voice carries over the insistent whine of the alarms. “ALL FIRST RESPONSE TEAMS TO STATIONS. ALL OTHER CREW MEMBERS,
PLEASE PROCEED TO INNER ZONES. REPEAT, CODE BLACK.”

That's me. I'm supposed to be a first responder. But I can't peel myself away from the window. The wave is coming. Lights of one of our security squadrons rush into view as the fighters scramble around the venting hulk. Part of the wreck separates from itself, scattering debris like petals. I breathe in sharp.
That ship is breaking apart.
But then the detached half fires its engines, finally illuminating the scene enough so I can see what's truly happening.

The battered piece of silica and metal venting its precious air is a Rover ship, and the other, the one wheeling around to face our fighters, is a stripper ship, the kind that preys on smaller, unallied vessels. Two of its mates light up against the darkness and silently maneuver into place at its flanks.
Dakait.
Pirates.

Chapter 2

I
run through the echoing corridors, bare feet slapping, my lab coat and gloves forgotten, my med kit in my hands. For once, Advani-ji stays silent. Emergency lights flash yellow against the walls.

“CODE BLACK, CODE BLACK. PLEASE REMAIN CALM. PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO THE NEAREST SECURE LOCATION.”

I fly down the path to the hangar bay. If the fighters can tow in the dying Rover ship, that's where they'll take it. How much air do they have left? I turn up the volume on my coms and select the first response frequency. “Casualties expected,” a woman's voice intones. “All medical personnel required.”

“The volume of a cylinder is equal to its height times radius squared times pi,”
I recite. Formulas sometimes
help me keep my limbic system in check. If I can think about the volume of the Rover ship's air reserves, I don't have to think about—

The wall to the left of me explodes. The corridor crackles with bursts of light as the wall screens shatter. An avalanche of rubble tumbles down, chunks of the
Ranganathan
's living skin ripped free. I don't recall falling, or even stopping, but I'm on the floor, shielding my face. And then the rumbling stops, and the only sound is the alarm blaring on behind the ringing in my ears. I raise my head. Dust hangs in the air. An enormous hunk of metal has pierced the ship's outer wall and driven itself through the screens. It takes me a moment to recognize it. One of our fighters.

“Breach, potential casualty, sim lab level, main corridor,” I say into my coms, even though my voice is shaking and I'm not sure they're still working. Advani-ji emits a low, steady groaning noise that raises the hair on my arms.

I clamber up the hill of debris, slipping and nearly slicing my arm open on a shard of wallscreen, until I reach the cockpit. Powdered bits of the
Ranganathan
's nacre cloud the windows. I hesitate. Someone could be in there. Rubio, maybe. I don't want to find him dead inside this fighter.

I rub at the dust with my sleeve and peer in through the cockpit window. Empty. The eject lever has been pulled, and the seat itself, with its temporary life-support systems, is gone. I let myself breathe and immediately cough. A fine powder still fills the air, giving the corridor the unreal air of a misty Mumbai night. All around me, a crinkling-crackling sound rises. Tiny fissures in the walls disappear, and then a shiny, translucent layer of nacre begins to creep out from the crash site and up from the floor, sealing the fighter and all the rubble beneath it. The
Ranganathan
has begun to scar over.

My coms babble with digital static. “Casualty report received,” I make out. “Dispatching first response team.”

“Cancel,” I say back. My knees have begun to tremble. I want to sit down next to a clear stretch of wall, but I know if I do, I won't get up again. Some other responder will have to take care of me instead of doing her job. “No casualties found. Breach countermeasures in effect.”

I check myself over. No major injuries, just smudges of ash on my clothes and dust in my hair. My feet are a mess of tiny cuts and powdered nacre caked with blood. I should have been wearing my lab slippers, but they would have been ripped to shreds all the same. If I had been in the same spot a mere second earlier, I would have been crushed beneath the ship.

The floor beneath me tremors, and the remaining lights flicker.

“SURFACE BREACH. CODE BLUE, UPPER RECREATION LEVEL.” The calm warning voice returns. “CAUTION. PRESSURE SUIT USE ADVISED.”

Surface breach.
For a moment, I think that's my report, scrambled in the relay, but no.
Code blue.
That means critical damage, affecting respiration systems. It's a different breach altogether. I turn in place. My pressure suit and helmet are back in the lab, equidistant from the hangar. If I turn back, I might not make it to my post.

During my last year at Revati, a crack formed in the seawall above East Mumbai and flooded the transit lines. Twenty-nine people died in lev train crashes. Another fifteen drowned. Hundreds more ended up in makeshift field hospitals on roofs and train platforms. I wanted to help. I wanted to give blood, but the emergency relief volunteers wouldn't let me, because I was a kid. And Soraya wouldn't let me go down to the field hospitals, even though she went herself. All I could do was sit at home watching the feeds, wishing I could seal up that crack in the wall and staunch the world's hurt with my own blood.

I know what I have to do now.

The wreckage blocks my way, so I double back, find the nearest stair, and hurry up it to one of the sublevel access passages we use to transfer volatile or delicate materials we don't want to risk taking through the main corridor. The floor is cold on my bare feet. The alarm still sounds, but the lights hold steady, illuminating the curve of the shell-gray walls. Ahead, I spot something blocking part of the hall.

I slow. Another piece of the crashed fighter? It's metal, but too mangled to identify. The nacre scarring is further along, coalescing into something slick and pearlescent. Behind me, a footstep scuffs the floor. I turn just in time to duck the butt of a slug gun. Adrenaline floods my system, flowing like hot iron through my limbs. I drop to the deck and crawl backward on my elbows until I hit the wreckage. A man stands over me, tall and thickset in patchwork body armor, his straight blond hair pulled back in a topknot. A
dakait.

He raises the gun like a bludgeon. There's not time to think, nowhere to dodge with my back against the fighter's remains. I turn my face to the wall.
Force equals mass times acceleration. Force equals mass times acceleration. . . .

A shout echoes down the hall. I open my eyes. Two of the
Ranganathan
's guards top the nearest stair and come
charging toward us. I want to call out to them,
but my voice isn't working.

The
dakait
glances over his shoulder, and then smiles down at me. “Lucky girl.”

He pivots away, and in that split second, I see my chance. I can reach out and grab his ankle as he leaps over the twisted metal. I can trip him, cost him precious seconds, and the guards will be on him. I can stop him.

I see my chance, but my hand won't move. I can't make myself reach out. I can't stop him.

The
dakait
clears the rubble and is gone. The guards thunder after him. I'm left alone with the sound of the alarms and my own shallow breath.

I hyperventilate. I shake. And then I get to my feet again, because I'm still needed.

I meet one of the guards running back to me, empty-handed.

“You all right, Specialist?” he asks.

I nod. My mouth is dry. “He got away?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

The guard shakes his head. “They're brazen. Trying to board us . . .” He looks over his shoulder, wide-eyed. He's skinny, with close-cut black hair, barely older than I am.
“They had a bore ship. Drove it into the ceiling above the upper recreation gardens.”

“Chaila,”
I whisper. The
dakait
have to be mad, thinking they can take a DSRI ship. But even as I think that, I remember reading a news story back in Mumbai about a group of
dakait
taking control of a government supply ship for several hours before security forces regained control. The threat is real enough that we have our own fighters and guards.

“You sure you're all right?” the guard asks.

“Yes.” I try to swallow. “I'm okay.”

The guard straightens his back. “We'll rout them, Specialist. Don't worry. Find yourself a pressure suit and stay out of sight. It won't be long now.”

I nod, but as soon as he's out of sight, I tuck my med kit under my arm and make my way forward through the access passage. If what I've seen is any clue, they'll need all the medics they can get in the hangar bay.

The hangar is chaos. Emergency crews teem across the floor, lugging chemical dousers and running gurneys. The Rover ship hunkers in the middle of the dock, leaking smoke from the gashes in its skin. A trio in maintenance jumpsuits leans a whining metal saw into the ship's damaged hatch,
trying to pry it open and release any survivors. White-hot sparks spout up and scatter embers across the floor. The thick chemical stink of smoldering metal and plastic burns in my nose.

I adjust my grip on my med kit and scan the crowd for the first response captain's red-and-yellow vest, but all I see are standard-issue white suits. I should jump in and help, but where? Do I grab one of the chemical dousers and help suffocate the flames? Join the medics hurriedly prepping burn salves and oxygen tanks? Elbow through the crowd to one of the guards standing shell-shocked with bloodstains all over his uniform?

The saw changes pitch and grinds to a halt. A shout goes up from the cluster of workers around the Rover's door. I finally spot the deck captain.

“Move back!” She waves her arms at us. “Everyone, move back! Fire crews only!”

The hatch tips to the floor with a heavy clang, and an avalanche of gray smoke pours from the ragged opening, up into the dock's rafters. The fire crew races to the ship. The responders with the dousing tanks don't stop, but the rest of us freeze, holding our breath and waiting for the fire crew to reemerge. Seconds pass. Thirty. Sixty. Ninety.

Then we see them. First, a thin young man in a too-large shirt and vest. For a moment, I think his hair is gray, but then I realize it's soot. It covers every inch of him. The medics nearest the hatch reach up to help him down, and he stares out at us, disoriented, eyes red in his gray face. Next a woman clutching a screaming baby, then an older, bearded man leaning heavily on one of the fire crew and cradling his left eye. Last, a girl my age spills out, carrying a limp toddler in her arms.

“Help her!” she shouts as the nearest medics rush to them. “She's not breathing.”

I hurry forward. I don't know how exactly my med kit full of fast-compression bandages and I are planning to help, but I'll figure that out when I get there. The other medics swarm around the survivors, holding breathing masks to their faces and ripping open packages of skinknit bandages to cover their burns. I've almost reached the girl when someone cries out in surprise. A small gray-and-black blur bolts from the ship and hits the deck, parting the crowd in front of me. It skitters straight between my boots and streaks away.

“Someone catch that animal!” the deck captain shouts.

No one moves. We haven't drilled for this.

“You.” The deck captain locks eyes with me and points.
“Go after it. I want that thing quarantined.”

“Me?” I glance over at the gurney where two other medics are fitting an oxygen mask over the toddler's small, soot-streaked face. One of them starts chest compressions.

“Yes, you!” the deck captain shouts. “Go. Now, before it gets loose in the ship!”

I cast one last look at the little Rover girl—small and fragile as one of my butterflies before it sheds its cocoon—and run back the way I came, down the corridor leading to the gardens. If I'm in luck, the entrance to the gardens will still be sealed off, and it will only be able to run so far.

I slow as the entrance to the corridor closes over me. Emergency lights still flash, flipping the walls and floor from yellow to gray. A small dark shape moves at the far end, creeping across the floor. It turns and freezes. Its eyes flash at me, an eerie phosphorescence in the near dark.

A chill runs up my spine. A cat? I've heard of ships keeping them as good-luck charms and rat catchers, a throwback to the time when we had only Earth's seas to explore. The
Ranganathan
doesn't keep cats. Its vents are seeded with rodent-repelling biomarkers, and a top-of-the-line research vessel doesn't need to rely on superstition to make a safe flight.

Get the cat. Get out,
I tell myself. The less time I spend
in this yellow twilight, the better. I keep thinking I see shadows in the corner of my eye.

“Here, cat.” I crouch and move forward slowly with my hand out, feeling more than a little ridiculous. I signed up for first response duty to save lives, not chase down pets. And I don't even particularly like cats. I'm definitely not letting a
dakait
take me down for one.

The animal's eyes go wide, and it slinks off.

“Dammit,” I mutter, and follow. I try not to frighten it, but any time I start to close the distance, it startles and bolts ahead. The
dakait
's smile plays over in my head, and I squeeze my nails into the nerveless flesh of my palms. Ava would know what to do. She's good with animals in a way I've never been, except when it comes to horses. I try to picture her and Rushil calling the half-feral cats that skulk around their salvage and repair shipyard. I kneel in the middle of the corridor and clear my throat. The cat watches me warily from a distance.

“Heeere, cat,” I trill in my highest voice, hoping this is not the last thing I say before being knocked unconscious. I swallow and purse my lips to make a kissing noise I've seen Rushil do to call the strays. “Here, kitty-kitty.”

The cat holds perfectly still, sizing me up, no doubt, and then takes a hesitant step in my direction.

“That's right.” I drum my fingers on the floor and make the kissing noise again. “Come here, you little
sidey
bastard.”

It pads closer, still eyeing me warily. Soot cakes its body, and the fur of its low-dragging tail is singed. It lets out a soft, hoarse
mew
.

Guilt softens my voice. I would bolt, too, if I had almost burned to death and some strange giant was chasing me. “Here, little guy.” I hold out my hand again, and it bumps my palm with its head.

“Okay, very good.” I coax it closer until it rubs against my leg, leaving a sooty streak on my uniform. “Nice cat.”

I pick it and hold it against my chest. It hooks its claws into my shirt and presses its small body against me. Its heart beats out a rapid
thump-thump
, and a slight wheeze accompanies its every breath. It won't stop trembling.