Sound (4 page)

“Hey, it's okay.” I stroke the cat awkwardly. “Don't be scared. Everything's okay.” The last thing I need is this thing developing supraventricular tachycardia and dying on me. Then I'd be stuck in quarantine until one of the senior medics got around to doing an autopsy.

I make my way back to the dock, the cat clinging to me the whole time. The crowd has thinned, and the only sign of the fire is a blue haze hanging in the air. The cat mewls hoarsely at me.

The girl I saw earlier, the one carrying the toddler, stands facing the first response captain, her hands planted on her hips. She can't be more than my age—my real age, not the one on my records. Oily ash covers her clothes and streaks her skin. Soot weighs down her hair.

“What do you mean, you're not going after them?” The smoke has left her voice low and hoarse, and something about it hits me dead in the chest. The glassy sea. Ava skimming the sloop over the water after the storm, when we still thought we might find survivors. When I was hanging on to a thread of hope that we might still find my manman.

“They have my brother. You have to go after them. You have to get him back.” The girl's voice cracks, and she falls into a coughing fit.

The deck captain waits until she can breathe again. “Miss.” She sounds weary. “This is a 128,000-acre research ship. Even if we could spare the fuel to change course, we could never outpace a
dakait
ship. They're designed for one thing we're not, and that's speed.”

The girl wipes soot from her eyes. “You have those fighters. They could take them down.”

The deck captain shakes her head. “They're short- range only. They gave chase as long as they could.”

“Some help they were.” The girl hugs her arms to
herself. “They let them get away. You couldn't catch a single one?”

The deck captain presses her lips into a line.

I hold the cat tighter. They didn't catch any of the
dakait
? A whole DSRI research ship kitted out with fighters and guards, and they still got away? The image of the
dakait
's
boot slipping away flashes through my mind, followed by a wave of shame.
They
didn't let them get away;
we
did. I did.

“Let me talk to your captain,” the girl says.

“Commander,” the deck captain corrects.

“Captain, commander, I don't care.” Her voice trembles. “Don't you know what they'll do to him?”

The deck captain shifts her feet, weary. “I truly am sorry, miss. You can speak to the commander if you wish, of course.” She waves over one of the medics stowing empty oxygen tanks in a cart. “But first we have to check you over. You've been through quite an ordeal—high carbon dioxide exposure, dermal burns . . .”

“I'm fine,” the girl growls as the medic presses a stethoscopic meter to her chest.

“Please, miss,” the medic says. “We're trying to help you.”

The deck captain turns away and nearly walks into me.
“Oh.” Relief flashes across her face. “You caught it.”

“Yes.” Behind her, the medics lead the girl to one of the gurneys.

“Very good, crew member . . . ?” She trails off, unsure of my name.

“Specialist Guiteau. I'm one of Dr. Osmani's assistants,” I say.

“Dr. Osmani? You're in biology, then?”

“Sort of.” I look past her to the girl, lying on the gurney with her hands over her eyes. “My specialties are more in biomorphology and biomimesis, but . . .”

“No, that's perfect,” she interrupts. “You're exactly the person to take care of this problem.” She gestures at the cat.

My eyes go as wide as the cat's. “Me? But . . . no, I don't—”

She nods. “You've done well with it so far. And if that animal is carrying any diseases, you've probably already been exposed to them. I can't think of a better candidate to run the quarantine and decontamination procedures.”

My face must go ashen, because she changes her tone and pats me on the arm. “Don't worry, Specialist. It's only protocol. I'm sure it's not carrying anything fatal. I'll notify Dr. Osmani you're temporarily on emergency response duty.”

“Thank you,” I hear myself say.

I turn to go, but something stops me. “Captain?”

“Yes?”

“That little girl, the one who wasn't breathing,” I say. “Did she make it? Is she okay?”

The deck captain face softens. “She'll be fine. They've got her on oxygen for a little while. Lucky thing she's so young. She won't remember any of this.”

“Right,” I agree, but part of me doubts it. Even if she doesn't remember the specifics, even if she tries to forget, will it ever completely go away? Or will it creep back in her nightmares and rise up on her when she smells smoke? Will it meld with who she is, like something grafted on to her genetic code? I cast one last look at the soot-covered girl lying still as a stone effigy on the gurney, then clutch my new charge to me and carry it back to my lab.

Chapter 3

T
he month before I applied to the Deep Sound Research Institute, I was still officially sixteen. So I went to see the only person I knew who could fix my papers, the person who had helped Ava and me when we first came to Mumbai—Rushil.

As I rode the lev trains down from my own quiet, green neighborhood to the Salt, where Ava and Rushil ran their ship docking yard, the trees shrank away. Old buildings with bright new windows and the ghosts of old hand-painted signs on their brickwork rose up in their place. The lev rails skipped over
tapris
and juice carts sheltering in their shade, and over a cluster of enormous evacuation pipes meant to pump water back out into the sea and keep the lower city from flooding. The only reason Mumbai didn't disappear along with so many other seaside cities all
those centuries ago was our civil engineering corps. They built the towering levee along our coast and the complex drainage system we still use to this day.

Of course, it didn't always work perfectly. I stepped off the train into a squelching stretch of mud and thanked my stars I had remembered to wear my boots. In High Mumbai, we wore open-toed sandals and delicate, embroidered slippers, but down in the Salt, the handful of trash-sucking machines on the streets were losing their battle with the dust and refuse that blew down the open alleys and out into the thoroughfares. The horse dung didn't help, either.

I put on my don't-touch-me glare and started down the street, weaving through the flow of bicycles, other pedestrians, and men and women on horseback. Mumbai's ban on combustion engines inside the city never seemed strange to me, but the London girls at Revati always complained about it until they heard they got to ride horses through the city.

I passed the street vendors, shops, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants across from Old Dharavi Station.

“
Chhatri! Chhaata!
Brollies and parasols!” shouted a vendor hawking cheap umbrellas. He caught sight of me. “Don't be caught out in the rains,
ladki
. You'll ruin those pretty clothes.”

I laughed. “
Ji nahi.
I've got plenty of brollies.”

“What about
choodi
?” He held up a handful of round metal bracelets. “You can never have enough
choodi
.”

I shook my head. If my best friend, Vishva, had been with me like usual, we would have stopped. She shared the vendor's philosophy on
choodi
. But Vishva wasn't with me. Since I had started taking classes at the university instead of Revati, we had seen each other less and less. A wave of loneliness pulled at me. If we still went to school together, she would have tagged along. “For moral support,” she would have said, but really to moon over Rushil. It never fazed Vishva that Rushil was a) married, b) sort of my brother, and c) ten years older than she was. Or maybe that's why she liked mooning, because she knew it was hopeless.

I pushed on past the brolly vendor and the other street sellers with their blankets of used crows and tablet parts. Deeper into the Salt, the streets quieted and security fences rose on both sides of the road. A high wall of corrugated metal closed in Rushil and Ava's lot, with razor wire accordioned along the top.

I pressed the call button at the gate. “Rushil!”

“Little Mi?” His voice came back full of static.

“It's me. Can I come in?” I would have died if my
classmates had overheard him using my childhood nickname, but inside the lot, I didn't mind. It was one of those half-embarrassing, half-nice things he and Ava did that I was never sure if I liked or hated.

“Course.” A buzzer sounded, and the gate's locking mechanism released.

Inside, a hodgepodge of vessels sat baking on the tarmac, some all streamlined white lines and pristine shield panels, others spilling out their rusted guts around their landing gear. On top of Ava and Rushil's trailer, one of the scrapyard cats yawned and stretched in the shade of a receiving dish.

“Rushil?” I called into the quiet.

“Back here,” he answered. “I'm in the garden.”

I circled their tiny home and stepped into the small green space wedged between the trailer's back wall and the corrugated fence. Rushil straightened and wiped his hands on his white, sleeveless shirt as I rounded the corner. Sweat stippled his brow.

“Hey, Mi.” He hooked a thumb at a plastic bowl brimming with cucumbers on the table behind him. “Soraya want some of these? We've got extra.”

“Nah. You know how weird she is about pickles.” Soraya was probably the only person on the entire subcontinent
who didn't like pickles or chutneys. I dropped into one of the folding chairs beside the table and leaned back in the shade. “I'll tell her you offered, though.”

“Oof.” Rushil sank into the other chair and wiped the sweat from his face with both hands. “I'm glad you showed up. I needed a break. To what do I owe the pleasure of madame's company?”

I chewed my lower lip, suddenly nervous. “I need a favor.”

“A favor?” Rushil raised his eyebrows. “You know Ava's on a run, right? She won't be back until nightfall.”

“Not from her,” I said. “From you.”

“From me?” He frowned.

I leaned forward in my chair so I was more or less sitting straight. “You remember how when Ava and I first got here, you fixed her up with papers?”

“Uh-huh.” Rushil nodded, a worried look overtaking his frown.

“I need . . .” I took a deep breath and let it all out in a rush. “I need you to help me get my papers sorted so I can apply for a Deep Sound mission.”

Rushil sat silent for a moment, and then rocked forward onto his feet. “This heat. I think I need something to drink. What about you? Tea? Water? Juice . . .”

“Rushil.” I rose and gave him my best imitation of Soraya's I-am-disappointed stare.

“Miyole.” He planted his hands on his hips and volleyed the look back. “Ava would kill me.
Soraya
would kill me.”

“No, they wouldn't.” I shook my head. “Not if they understood. It's not like I'm doing anything bad, really.”

Rushil rolled his eyes. “It's not like you're doing anything good, either. You know what this would take, right? Scamming a bunch of government scientists, hacking the national records database—”

“It's not
scamming
,” I interrupted.

“Whatever.” Rushil dropped back into his chair and leaned forward with his head in his hands.

“Please, Rushil,” I said, in the voice I used when I was in pigtails and wanted more sugar for my tea. “I'm so close already. You have to be eighteen for the mission, and I'll be seventeen by the time they launch. It's just a little tweak, that's all.”

What I didn't say—what no one knew but me—was that the records Soraya had drawn up for me all those years ago were wrong. The doctor marked me down as nine when I first came to Mumbai, probably because of my height, and no one had ever questioned it. Not my teachers, not
Soraya, not even Ava. It was only a matter of months—half a year at most—but I was eight when we fled the hurricane, not nine.

By the time I figured out the doctor had gotten it wrong, I was afraid to say anything. Soraya and my teachers might decide I was too young for Revati, and I loved Revati. It was the only thing making me wake up each morning, the only thing that could help me forget about my mother long enough to make it to nightfall. And then, later, it had simply seemed too awkward to bring up.
Oh, by the way, I know I've been going along with this for half my life, but the papers that make me a subcontinental citizen are completely wrong.
All of which meant I would be sixteen when the
Ranganathan
left dock. Not eighteen, not seventeen. Sixteen.

“A little tweak.” Rushil laughed and shook his head, but then his eyes took on a glossy look. He rubbed a hand over his chin, thinking. “You'd need a good, solid hack to stand up to a government review. All the bells and whistles.”

I smiled. “You know I'm good for it.”

“I know you are.” He looked at me, and suddenly he seemed tired, older than his twenty-seven years. “You're sure this is what you want?”

The smiled drained from my face. I knew what it would cost Rushil to get back in contact with Mumbai's network
of hackers and purveyors of false documents. He tried so hard to keep any kind of criminal element away from his business, away from Ava, which was next to impossible for a kid raised among the gangs of the Salt, and there I was asking him to put his toe back in their waters. I could have backed off then. Maybe I should have. But that meant I would have had to spend the next two years shuttling between the university and home, stagnating in the same air while another class of my friends flew off to London or Chennai or Baghdad to launch their own lives. Even Vishva would be really and truly gone next year.

I swallowed. “It's what I've always wanted.”

And that, at least, was no lie.

“You are the very devil,” I tell the cat.

We stand faced-off in the lab, me with a syringe, gloved hands, and a crisscross of dermal bandages on my arms, the cat backed up against the stainless-steel storage cabinets, with its ears flat against its head and its coat puffed out to double its size. It turned out to be a curry-colored tabby with a rice-white belly beneath the ash, but that makes it no less terrifying now. I managed to wash the soot from its coat at the price of several deep gashes down my forearm, but every time I move in with the needle, the cat lets out a
low, dangerous sound, bares its fangs, and hisses at me like a goose.

“What's wrong with you?” I've been reduced to pleading with the cat. “I'm trying to help.”

A high tone sounds throughout the lab. Someone at the door.

I point the needle at my charge. “You stay there.”

It emits another throaty growl but stays in place.

I go up on tiptoe and peek out the porthole. The Rover girl peers back in at me. Without the coating of ash, her hair hangs in damp honey-brown curls to her shoulders. A dense field of freckles covers her pale face, as if someone has spilled a cinnamon pot across the bridge of her nose. She's holding the toddler. They both wear the loose-cut blue tunic and trousers the medical ward gives their patients. Thick bandages sleeve the older girl's arms, and toddler has an oxygen feed taped beneath her nose.

The Rover girl frowns when she sees me and tries to say something I can't hear through the door.

“Hold on,” I shout back, even though I know she can't hear me, either. I duck down to click on the intercom and pop back up into view. “I couldn't hear you. Say again?”

“They said you had our cat.” The roll in her voice is sharp, like a hill cut off by a cliff.

“That's right.” I try to match the impatience in her voice. “I'm administering the standard quarantine tests.” Behind me, the cat issues another warning yowl.

She shifts the toddler to her other hip. “They said you should be done by now.”

“Well, I'm not.” I try to tamp down the annoyance in my voice.
Be professional.
I'm a research assistant, a representative of the DSRI, and the Rovers have been through hell. “I mean, I'll be done shortly, so if you'll kindly wait—”

“Wheels of heaven!” She swivels away for a second, and when she turns back, her jaw is tight, making her sharp chin stick out even more. She looks down at the toddler. “Look, Milah's gone through a lot today. She only wants to see the cat, and then we'll go.”

“I can't let you see the cat,” I try to explain. “Not until I've finished the quarantine procedure.”

“Then finish it,” she snaps.

“I'm trying,” I shoot back. “If people would stop interrupting me, and if your mangy beast would cooperate!” I clap my hand over my mouth. I didn't mean to say that last part out loud.

She closes her eyes, heaves a sigh, and swallows down whatever she was about to say. “If you let me in, I can calm him down, and then you can get whatever tests you need. He's probably scared, is all.”

I chew my lip. It's against regulations to break quarantine until I've finished the tests, but she has been living with the cat this whole time, and she hasn't caught anything deadly. The med ward wouldn't have let her out unless she was pathogen- and parasite-free. What could it hurt?

“If I let you in, you won't be able to leave until we finish processing the test results,” I warn.

“Fine.” A flicker of impatience crosses her face again, and she bounces the toddler on her hip.

I deactivate the lock. “It's your skin.”

“Thank you.” She edges in while the door is still opening. “You don't know how much this means to Milah and me.”

I shrug, not sure what to make of her.

“Hey now, Tibbet.” The Rover girl kneels and speaks softly to the cat, perched atop the counter. “It's okay. I'm here now.”

The beast stops its goose noises and lowers its back, but its eyes stay black and dilated. An uneasy growl reverberates in its throat.

Milah stares wide-eyed at the cat, frozen beside the older girl. “Bit?” she asks.

The older girl glances at her. “Yes, Tibbet's mad, isn't he? He doesn't like this place.” She cuts her eyes at me as she says the last part.

I pick up the syringe.
Professional,
I remind myself. “I have a sedative whenever you're ready.”

The Rover girl turns back to the cat. “Here, Tibbet. Everything's okay now. No one's going to hurt you.”

The animal hesitates on the counter edge. We all hold our breath, but then it finally hops down and pads cautiously to the Rovers.

“That's it,” the girl croons, stroking the cat's head. “That's right.” She looks up at me and nods.
Now.

I kneel beside her and slide the needle beneath the cat's skin. It stiffens for a moment as I push the tiny dose of ketaphine, and then slowly relaxes in her arms. Its tongue lolls out, an undignified little pink tab.