Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“Parastrata Ava?”

I whip around. A man sits beneath the low-hanging boughs of the lemon tree behind me. My breath stops. His hands reflect the milky light of the moon, but the rest of him is too far in shadow to see. My heart shudders. This is it, the kind of mistake Llell warned me against. But I didn’t listen, and now here I am, caught and vulnerable, at the whim of a stranger who can overmatch both my strength and my word.

I dart from the window. I try to dodge past the tree, but my bridal bands drag down my steps. The man ducks out from beneath the boughs. I hobble left, but he catches me around the waist. I cry out. He claps a hand over my mouth.

“Ava, don’t fight.”

I struggle in his grip, try to pitch myself forward onto the ground.

“Ava. It’s me, Ava.”

He lets go, and I sprawl on the grass. I roll over, ready to kick him away, and finally get a good look at him. Luck. My head feels heavy and light all at once. Oxygen drunk. I drop my head against the soft grass and laugh. It’s only Luck.

He reaches a hand down to me. “You’re going to get us caught.”

“Sorry.” I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. “I didn’t know you were you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” I look down at my naked feet and try to brush away the clips of wet grass stuck to my skirt. What was I thinking, walking out alone in a strange ship? What if it hadn’t been Luck underneath that tree? And what must this boy . . . this man, who’s supposed to become my husband, think of me, walking his ship half dressed at night? Did he see me thinking on stealing his crewe’s lemons?

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.” I try to step around him.

“Wait.” Luck catches me by the arm. The warm grip of his fingers on my skin turns my whole body live, magnetized. I gasp. I stop. For the first time, I notice his feet are bare, too, and his hair rumpled.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” Luck says. “I go out walking sometimes when I get that way. Or swimming.”

We stare at each other, linked up skin to skin.

“My father asked me to come with him to the meet room tomorrow,” Luck says. “I figure you don’t have to guess much to know what that’s about.”

“With me here as a bride, you mean.” I keep my head down and finger the copper bands on my wrist, already greening my skin beneath their wires.

“Right so.” He loosens his grip on my arm and stands up formal and straight. “I’m sorry for touching you before we’re bound, Parastrata Ava. You were always some proper and . . .”

“I’m not.” My eyes flash up to meet his and—there—they find a place to rest safe again. It’s exhilarating, this feeling of doing something dangerous and right, all wrapped up together in my chest. I step closer. “I’m not only some proper. Not always.”

Luck looks down at me. He blinks into my face, as if he’s trying to figure out how to mesh me with the smallgirl he knew five turns past.

I fumble for his hand and fold my fingers around his, trying to press what I feel in through his skin. “I’ve been practicing those fixes Soli taught me. The ones you said I could learn. You remember?”

He laughs. “What, still? After all these turns?”

I drop his hand, hurt. “I taught myself others.”

“No, I mean . . . I’m only surprised, is all. That’s none proper for a so girl, from what I saw on your Parastrata. I thought you’d be too busy with Priority. But I’m happy. I’m glad.” He reaches out and squeezes my fingers lightly.

“Me too.”

“Do you think . . .” He stops and glances at the entrance to the garden room. “Have you ever been swimming?”

“Swimming?” The word curls strange around my tongue. When we were smallgirls, Llell dared me to go floating in the water converter’s desalination pool. We’d heard about some of the older boys sneaking down there, how the water was supposed to float you some like the Void would, but some not. More like a giant hand holding you up, one of them had said. But Modrie Reller caught us ankle deep in the filter reeds and made us drink from the salt pool until we vomited brine. Llell and I never went back.

I shake my head.

“Come on.” Luck tugs my hand. “I’ll show you.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“You’ll be all right,” Luck says. “I swear. I know this ship backward. I know when the night Fixes come and go.”

I hesitate.

“You trust me,” Luck says. “Right so?”

I frown. “You swear it?”

“I swear it.” Luck smiles. “Don’t you want to live some before we’re bound?”

I think on it. In another few months I might be weighted down with a baby like Soli and busy learning to manage the women at Luck’s mother’s side. But tonight, no one is looking for me. No one will notice I’m gone from my bed. It is the last night before I am fully a woman.

And so I let him lead me from the garden.

I follow Luck through a corridor that forks near the workrooms, and then down a laddered hatch into the hanging serviceways in the bowels of the ship. Heat rises on the wet air, reminding me of the dyerooms on the Parastrata. We walk single file above the humming tops of the generators, bathed in smudgy orange light.

A man’s voice rings out in the echoes ahead. “. . . go and double back to get it.”

Luck freezes in the middle of the gangway.

“Night Fixes?” I whisper.

Luck nods.

“I thought you said—”

“Hsssh.” He pulls me after him, back the way we came. We round a corner, and Luck points soundlessly to a double-doored service locker built into the wall. I nod. He pulls both doors open with a faint squeak. Heart knocking, I step over a scatter of loose fixers and dead wires and wedge myself behind a crisscross of rebar, deep in the shadow of the locker. Luck jumps in after me and pulls the door closed. We crush together against the back wall.

“Stay still,” he whispers.

His shoulder presses into my nose. He smells of pulped grass and faint sweat masked by soap, some kind of indefinable Luck smell that lights me up to my heels. I let my hand rest where it’s fallen on his chest and breathe slowly, trying to muffle the sound against him so the night Fixes won’t hear us.

“. . . point in him taking another wife, you know?” The voices grow louder.

“Talk on,” a second man answers the first. “I’ve got some trouble what with only two.”

Their steps ring close. Luck presses me against the wall. We both try to breathe shallow and slow, try not to shift our feet into the metal balanced precariously against the wall. Luck lowers his nose so it rests on top of my head. His breath is warm in my hair. I can make out every thread in his shirt, every lock of dark hair touching his neck, every pulse of blood working the veins under his skin. I should be worried about the Fixes, but all I can think on is the gentle bob of Luck’s Adam’s apple and the way his chest grazes mine.

“You see the bride they brought?”

“Yeh.”

“She’s got something odd to her, but I can’t figure it.”

“Dunno. To me, they’re all some odd with that hair and the way . . .” The voices fade below the generators’ hum.