Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

Luck and I stand fused in the back of the service locker. This is the last place I should feel safe, but I don’t want to leave.

Luck steps back slowly, carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says, though I’m not sure if he means for touching me again or for what his crewemates said about me. He smiles nervously and pushes the doors open, holds out a hand to help me from the locker. “There’s only the one team of night Fixes. We shouldn’t see anyone else.”

My heart is still skipping. I laugh, half from relief, half from giddiness. The sound fits strange in my throat, like it’s coming from some other girl. Maybe the girl I could be if I was Luck’s wife, without doors to lock me in at night. I grab his hand, and he pulls me into an almost-run. I feel as if the gravity’s low, as if my feet are barely touching the floor as we fly around corners and down a spiraling ramp.

Luck skids us to a stop in front of a heavy, wheel-locked door. He sets his shoulder against the wheel and pushes until it gives with a brief shriek of metal.

“Where are we?” I whisper.

He points to a lettered sign bolted to the door and grins.

I look up at the sign. I know the letters for my own name, A-V-A, but beyond spotting two As in the loops and lines on the door sign, I can’t figure it. I bite my lip and look at Luck. I shake my head.

His smile dies.

“I’m sorry.” My voice wavers. “I lied.”

“Don’t worry on it now.” He smiles at me again, gently, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin tingles at his touch. “We’re going swimming.”

He leans against the door. It swings open on a dim, sloping room filled wall to wall with water. Light from bioluminescent fish and phosphorous deposits crusting the depths lend the water and air an uncanny glow. My mouth falls open. I know it’s only the Æther’s desalination pool, but I feel as if I’ve stepped out of time, as if I’ve stumbled into the Mercies’ private realm.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

When crewes like ours come across a water-bearing planet, we mostly find salt oceans or ice. On the Parastrata, we leach most of our salt out in tanks, but before the water can go through the finer filters and come out potable, it rests awhile in a pond lined with scrubber fish and plants designed to nip out the extra sodium. The Æther’s desalination pool dwarfs ours. It looks deep as two men and far enough across to swallow up the galley. Water weeds sway in the shallows.

Luck strides down the gentle slope to the water’s edge and pulls his shirt up over his head. The lines of his shoulder blades cut sharp bows in his pale back. He turns and looks up at me, something a little wicked in his eye. “Coming in?”

I shift my feet. Suddenly it comes to me how he’ll see the dull foreignness of me once I shed my shirt and skirts. He’ll see all of me.

“You’ll like it, I promise,” Luck says. “The salt’ll keep you from sinking.”

“I . . . I don’t want you to watch me,” I say.

“What if I look away till you’re in?”

I rub one foot against an ankle beneath my skirts. It’s some hot here below the Æther’s cool, civilized berth, and my skin itches with sweat. Half of me wishes Luck was only Llell or Soli so it would be easier to splash into the pool, but the part of me making my heart skip and my skin flush is glad it’s Luck.

“All right,” I say. My voice sounds dangerous, older.

Luck kicks off his trousers and wades into the pool. I try not to look until he’s well beneath the surface, but that small seed of recklessness makes me glance up in time to see the full length of his back diving into the water.

I tug the ties of my skirts loose and try to breathe steady. “Don’t look,” I yell.

“I’m not,” he calls back. He dives and disappears in a flash of feet.

I take a deep breath. He’s going to be my husband. We’ll be bound in a day or two anyway, so I might as well get over my shyness now. In one quick breath, I shed my skirts, strip off my shirt, wrap my arms across my chest, and rush into the pool, naked except for my data pendant and the copper bands. The water hits me with a warm slap, the tickle of sea plants slippery on the soles of my feet. I duck down to wet my hair and wade deeper. The water salts my lips and buoys me with each step, even under the added weight of the copper. My pendant floats, petal light, before me.

Luck surfaces. The phosphorous and fish light him from below in shifting patterns, making him look like a creature out of the tales the wives told us as smallgirls while we helped them spin wool. I glance down at his body and then my own, distorted beneath the surface of the pool. Our skin looks near the same in the half light, near enough maybe it won’t make him stare.

“Your hair looks darker when it’s wet,” Luck says. He kicks closer to me. His eyes drift down to my nakedness, but he drags them up again. He blushes. “Sorry.”

“Yours always looks dark,” I say.

He lets his feet bob up to the surface in front of him. “You’ve really never done this before?”

I think of Llell and me coughing up unfiltered seawater by the side of the tanks. “No.” I let my feet float up, too, so my toes peek out. I smile and wiggle them. “It’s not something you do when you’re so girl.”

“Does that mean you’ve left off being so girl, then?” Luck teases. He gulps up a mouthful of water and spits it out again.

“Right so.” I lift my smile from my toes to him. “You can’t be so girl and a wife.”

He smiles back. “I guess not.” He drops his head back.

I do the same, letting my whole body drift to the surface now he’s not watching. The boys were right. It’s like a warm hand lifting you. I let myself drift on the pool’s surface, like a leaf in a bowl of water.

“Ava.” The water muffles Luck’s voice.

I lift my head and right myself so I’m treading beside him again. “Hmm?”

“Do you want to be married to me?” Luck asks. “I mean, I know we don’t have much of a say, but do you want it?”

I look at him, hair wet and eyes serious.

“You hardly know me,” he says.

But I do, I want to say. Or I want to.

I swim closer. His eyes follow me, darkening as I approach.

“You know I used to daydream about being Soli’s sister.” I swish my hands across the surface of the water between us, making tiny waves that lap against his chest. “I used to imagine you and me and her would spend all morning talking while we milked the goats and learned fixes.”

“Truly?”

I nod. I take a deep breath. “Can I tell you something?”

Luck nods in return.

“My hair really is darker,” I say. “Some like yours. My modries dye it red so I’ll mix better with my crewe.”

“Right so?” Luck frowns and reaches out to finger a strand of my hair. “You’d never know.”

“Do you think it’s a sign from the Mercies?” My body floats closer to him and my knee accidentally brushes his. “Maybe I’m meant for your crewe from the beginning. Maybe I’m meant for you.”

The side of Luck’s mouth lifts. “Maybe you are.”

My limbs throb in time with my heart. “I don’t think I mind,” I say, and close the distance between us.

Blood beats loud in my ears. Luck leans in and touches his lips to mine. They’re warm and laced with salt, and my own lips press back before I know what they’re going to do. I’ve been kissed. I’m kissing Luck. His hand travels around my side, to the small of my back, and pulls my body flush with his. My blood becomes warm oil. We both forget to tread to keep ourselves afloat for a moment, and slide under. Luck pulls away, and we kick ourselves back to the surface. We break the water half laughing, half coughing and sputtering.