Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“No, Iri,” I say into the dark. “Please, no.”

She touches my arm. “It’s the only way I can figure, Ava.”

“We can sign ourselves on a work detail with one of the industrial shippers. Or hire out here for some duties, doing cleaning or what. Or beg our way onto a new crewe. I heard Jerej say one time the Nau crewe’s too interbred. They need women—”

“Aviso de seguridad,” the woman’s smooth voice interrupts, rounding into its next language cycle.

Iri huffs. “No shipper’s going to hire us with that over our heads, and no crewe will take us either, not even the Nau. You forget, you’re dead as much to them as to the Parastrata. And I’m no prize as a wife either, especially on a crewe desperate for birthers.”

She glances down at her flat stomach and pulls her eyes away before she thinks I see. But I do. I see. It pains her. The weight of what Iri has done in saving me falls on me. She’s given up any chance of marrying again, given up all chance of trying for smallones, and all for me.

“I’ll do it.” I hear myself say the words. “I’ll go.”

Iri and I climb out of the service shaft into the passenger tier. The world tips again as gravity realigns itself, but I’m ready for it this time. We slip into the crowd pushing its way along the concourse. Men and women walk freely here, and we melt into the flow of print silks and hyperbaric suits, dark skin and pale. I look for Jerej and the Watches. No sign of them, not yet at least.

“Avis de sécurité.”

Doors line both sides of the concourse, each with a desk or booth stationed beside it. A dark-skinned woman with a burst of gold-tipped black curls, a white shirt cut to show off her collarbone, trousers, and knee-high boots sits by the nearest one, splay-legged on a chair. Behind her, a latchport joins her short-range sloop to the station. She tracks us a few paces out of the corner of her eye, expertly cracking a nut between her palm and the flat of a long knife. She crumbles the shell to the floor and pops the meat into her mouth. A deep, puckered scar trails down the side of her nose and interrupts her red-painted mouth on one side. I press closer to Iri.

“There,” Iri says. She steers us to a set of booths before the gangway to a fat passenger ferry. A ghostly image of a comet circling a planet rotates above the booths, and the woman on the other side of the glass wears the same symbol pinned to her lapel. She is all clean and smooth. Her dark hair shines, her lips shimmer an eye-aching pink-orange, and soft glitters and pigments dust all the planes of her face.

“Welcome to Hyakutake Stellar Transit.” The woman leans forward with a smile. “Our service is simply stellar! Where can we fly you today?”

“M-Mumbai,” says Iri.

The woman shakes her head, but her smile doesn’t falter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”

“Mumbai,” I blurt out.

She shakes her head again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”

I narrow my eyes. Something is off, the way her hair bobs exactly the same each time she shakes her head, the same lilts and dips on the same words.

“A hologram,” I say, and as I say it, I notice the faint transparency of the woman’s shoulders. I step to one side, and she shrinks flat in the glass.

Iri nods as if she knows this already. “Mumbai,” she repeats, clear and confident.

“Transit to Mumbai will require overland transport from landing point: Dubai International Spaceport,” the hologrammed woman says. A transparent map springs up in the top corner of the glass, showing the overland path the hologram proposes in glowing blue. “Would you like to book overland passage now or when you arrive?”

“What’s the cost?” Iri says.

The woman shakes her head again and smiles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say ‘now’ or ‘when I arrive.’”

“Now,” Iri says, sharp in her hurry. She checks over her shoulder. “What’s the cost, please?”

“Your ticketing options are displayed here.” The projection gestures to her left, and a long pattern of columned symbols expands above her hand. Sparse Vs and As scatter through the words, but they do me no good.

“Please select your preferred pricing choice by touching the screen.”

A toneless overhead voice slips itself between us, a soft warning. “Jĭng bào . . .”

I look at Iri, worried. Her lips press thin. “We need someone live,” she says to me. She scans the crowded concourse. “Some small boat, someone we can bargain with.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” The hologram shakes her head again and smiles.

“Never mind. Cancel.” Iri waves her hand at the hologram. “We don’t . . . cancel.”

The lines of symbols fade, leaving only the woman projected in the glass. “Thank you for considering Hyakutake Stellar Transit for your travel needs.” She freezes with her chin slightly tilted, smiling mouth wide.

We slink away. Iri’s eyes dart from ship to ship. No one manning the ticketing carrel of the midsized utilitarian carrier, only another hologram. A tall man with a shaved head glaring out at us from beside a needle-nosed transport. An older woman steeped in fuel and alcohol fumes sitting by the last ship.

Iri creeps up to the man, head bowed in respect. “Please, so, we could book passage?”

He chews something slowly, looking her over. “Can you pay?”

Iri opens a fold of her cloth bundle to display the treasures she robbed from the Parastrata.

The man plucks up one of the coins and rubs it with his thumb. A smudge of green wears off on his skin. He tosses it back to Iri with a look of disgust. “Credit only.”

“Please, so, those are bride coins,” I put in.

“Worthless is what they are,” he says. “What, you think I can fuel a ship on rags and moldy coins?”

Iri shrinks as though he’s slapped her. I start to speak back, but she loops her arm through mine and hurries us away. We stop in the center of the concourse. People elbow around us, dodge us as we stand like stone, Iri’s treasures cradled between us.

“We can’t go arguing, calling eyes on ourselves.” She shakes her head over the bundle. “I thought it was worth something.”

“Me too.” We’ve never not been able to get something through trade with the other crewes or one of the colony outposts. Could the people close in to Earth really be this different from us? How do you bargain with them? I look up, over Iri’s shoulder. The woman with the knife has her head cocked in our direction again, the scar down her face making her expression unreadable.

Iri sees me looking. She turns. “Her?” She spins back around to me. A smile picks at the corners of her mouth. “Perfect, Ava. Good watching.”

“No, wait, Iri.” Something about the scarred woman makes me uneasy. Mercies know what walking on the Earth has done to her, if it’s made her mind and soul as malformed as her face. In the oldgirls’ stories, you can always read the map of someone’s soul by her looks. I try to catch Iri, but she slips out of my grasp and strides up to the woman.

I hang back, unsure. The knife woman looks from Iri to me, back to Iri. Iri waves her free hand in circles, holds it out, pleading, and proffers the stolen bundle. The woman takes it, weighs its heft in her hand, and looks back at me.