Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

Maybe, I think, and stop myself. The best I might get is if they’ve talked Æther Fortune into going through with our binding, though I know that’s more than I deserve. More likely they’ve found some nobody on the Parastrata willing to take me as one of his later wives, at least to smooth out the look of things. I’ll end up a dyegirl all my life, like Llell’s mother, but a fifth or sixth wife, lower even than her. And maybe someday when I’m old, my crewe will forget what brought me so low. I’ll take it, I say to myself. Anything to lift this shame off of me, anything not to be locked back in the room with the tik-tik-tik of the vapor light. I open my mouth to say it, but Modrie Reller stops me.

“Not a word,” she says. “Follow me.”

I shuffle after her, careful to keep my head down. If I don’t raise my eyes, I don’t have to look into the faces of the people we pass. They all know. Out of the corner of my eye, I see our Fixes and Cleaners turn their heads to stare as I walk in Modrie Reller’s wake. I know how I must look, my skin patchy with grime and my clothes stiff with sweat. An adulteress, a criminal, a whore. Their eyes light my skin on fire.

I follow the hem of Modrie Reller’s skirt up from the bowels of the ship. She pauses at the back door of the cleanroom, tips up my chin with her hand, and looks at me, as if she’s trying to record my face in her mind. I wrap my hand around hers, childlike. For a moment, I think she means to speak to me, but she spins on her heel and pushes the door to the cleanroom open. A broad half moon of women stands waiting for us along the tiled wall. Iri and Hannah and my great-grandfather’s other widows, Llell’s mother, Lifil’s mother and Eme’s, and all my father’s other wives. Near all the women of the ship are here.

For one bright moment, I think they’ve come to prepare me for a binding. Æther Fortune, one of the papermakers or Cleaners or Fixes, I don’t care, so long as everyone stops hating me and the world stands solid beneath me again. But then I notice there are no children. Children always come to bindings to bless the bride and remind her of her purpose.

“What’s happening?” My voice sounds high and shaky.

“Sisters.” Modrie Reller’s voice rings out over the silent tiled room. She traps my shoulders beneath her hands. “We come to prepare our daughter for burial.”

Lifil’s mother lets out a moan, then Hannah and Iri and all the rest. Together, they lift their voices in a high, keening wail. Each voice laps over the others, one woman reaching her highest pitch as her sister pauses to draw breath. The fine hairs of my neck stand on end. They close in on me as one, arms outstretched.

“Please.” I try to back away. Because suddenly it comes to me what my bridal skirt means, what Jerej’s words meant. My sister Ava is dead. I remember Modrie Reller’s kiss on my mother’s cold forehead and the loose, papery feel of her skin as we washed her body, the stiffness setting into her limbs as we dressed her in her skirts and coiled bridal bands around her thin joints, the heaviness of her head as we lifted it to refasten the data pendant around her neck. The only other time a woman wears her bridal finery is at her burial. Once we’ve broken dock and sounded deep enough, they’re going to turn me out, still breathing, into the Void.

Modrie Reller catches me by both arms and holds me hard to her breast as the other women converge on me. Pale hands unclip my soiled shirt and pull at my skirt ties. I see them undress me as if I am watching from above while this happens to another girl. My clothes disappear into the thicket of hands. They pry the tarnished copper coils from my wrists and ankles, leaving only their spectral green imprints on my skin.

Iri holds a water vessel over her head, and the other women greet her with a new frenzy of wailing. Her eyes look past me as she cracks the seal and tips a stream of lukewarm water over my head.

The shock of it brings me crashing back into myself. The water soaks my hair and rinses the salt from my skin in rivulets.

“No!” I twist a hand out of Modrie Reller’s grasp and lunge into the press of women. I’m not ready to be buried. I’m not ready to meet the Void. I stumble. The other women lift me to my feet and send me back into Modrie Reller’s steel grip, wailing and crying all the louder as they do. I look up. For a single slip, shock freezes me in place. It’s Llell. She moans, but her eyes kindle with something else, and I remember and regret all the times I’ve spoken hard to keep her in her place.

The women surge forward again, swallowing Llell in their ranks. I kick at them as they wash my body with water and oil, tie me into my skirts. They leave my chest bare, but weave my hair back into thick wedding braids and bind it with copper wire. They wind fresh wire from my ankles up my calves and around and around my forearms, until I can hardly bear the weight of it. Modrie Reller lowers a headdress bangled with a few cheap coins across my brow, and suddenly the wailing stops.

Modrie Reller lays her hands on my head.

“Come the last breath of stars,

Their dust fall

And make us all.

Come the last breath of man,

And dust give back again.”

The women repeat her words in whispers, and each leans in to kiss my forehead, to touch my hair one last time.

I’m going to die.

They lift me up on their shoulders and carry me from the cleanroom. I am floating again, not on water, but on a sea of hands as we flow out through the sleeping quarters, into the ship’s central corridor. The men stop their work and stand in silence to watch our procession.

I’ll never see Luck again. I’ll never be a true bride.

We pass the kitchens and the hydroponic gardens and the canaries. The small yellow birds hop frantically in their cages, alarmed by the voices and the charge in the air.

I’ll never have smallones of my own.

We empty out into the storage bay. The goats trot away from the gate and crowd together at the back of the paddock, bleating.

My hands will never weave again. They’ll never practice fixes.

The women press together, two abreast, as we file into a shadowed canyon formed by stacks of copper bales, crates of sand, and reams of fiberoptic cable. They lower me to my feet. I hug my arms over my bare chest to keep myself from shivering. This way they’re taking me, this is the path to the coldroom, where we store bodies until we can return to the depths of the Void to give them a proper burial among the stars. This is where my mother’s body lay until the so doctor’s daughter came to bury her. Anger sparks in my chest. I deserve to be punished, yes. But to die? I don’t want to die.

I won’t make it easy. I stop walking. My funeral procession shudders and jams behind me. For a moment, I think it’s worked, but then they haul me up with their work-hard arms and drag me to the front. I curse you with my death, I think.

Modrie Reller stops by the coldroom door. It stands ajar, seeping frost smoke into the warm bay. Thin blue light from a biolume bowl built into the ceiling bathes the floor, doing more to form shadows than to illuminate the empty crates and metal-slabbed niches where bodies are meant to lie.

The women release me at the threshold. Modrie Reller rests her hand on my head. “May the Mercies carry your soul to rest, Parastrata Ava.”

T he floor sticks to my bare feet when I forget to move. I pace from one end of the coldroom to the other beneath the twilight of the biolume bowl and its circling fish. The metal slabs are empty, thank the Mercies. If I were trapped in here with a body, I might try slicing open my own neck with the sharp ends of the copper wire around my wrists. That might be the smart thing in any case. I’d prefer the burn of metal opening my veins, the slow sleep falling over me as my heart fails.