Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

I lie still and sweating most of the day, watching shadows track across the floor as the sun arcs overhead. Sometimes I find myself wishing they would turn the daylights out sooner, and then I remember it doesn’t work that way down here. The sun keeps its own time. I close my eyes to it and think on Luck. If it’s quiet, I can coax myself into a sort of half dream—waking by Luck’s side, basking in his smile; him singing to our unborn child as it grows larger inside me. I am tender all over, and I remember Modrie Reller and the other wives saying that was a sign you had got a smallone, that you ached, belly and breasts.

But then Perpétue comes and makes me move and bend and grip as long as I can bear it. She promises we can take Miyole’s tablet up to the top of what was once a research ship in the neighboring Icelanders’ enclave, one of the few spots in the whole Gyre where she can sometimes tap into the wireless networks broadcasting from the distant shores. There are never any storms in Gyre, she says, but elsewhere the Earth is wracking-full of ferocious winds and sudden rainstorms and columns of white-hot fire bolting from sky to land, and a network is a delicate thing.

“Once you’re strong enough,” she says, a steadying arm on my elbow. “Once you’re well.”

I make it to the cleanroom. Perpétue has me sit while she runs a bucket of warm water down from the solar-powered boiler on the roof. She helps me wash my hair, and when it’s clean, she sits me on the floor like I’m a smallgirl and combs it. I close my eyes and let myself relax into the gentle tug of the comb as Perpétue’s fingers unsnarl my locks. It brings me to mind of Iri combing my hair, and me doing the same for Lifil and my other sisters. I hope the Mercies give me a boy child, but if it’s a girl, at least one day I can maybe comb her hair like this.

“Why did you dye your hair?” Perpétue’s voice breaks my reverie.

I put my hand up to my head. “What?”

“Your hair,” Perpétue repeats. “You’ve been coloring it, right?”

“It’s showing?” I say.

“Wi,” Perpétue says. She lifts a lock of hair and runs it through her fingers until they brush my forehead. “To here.”

“What?” I rock away from Perpétue. My hair grows fast, but it would take weeks on weeks to grow that much. Near on a deciturn. I’ve been here, awake, only ten days. It’s not possible, unless . . . A terrible thought hits me. How long did I sleep? I thought it was hours, days at most. It can’t have been more than a few days.

“No,” I say. “That’s not right. It can’t be.”

Perpétue reaches for a hand mirror and holds it so I can see. Black hair spreads over the crown of my head, then drops to faded red at my temples. Both colors look wrong beside my face, the red unnatural, the black stark and hinting at someone I’ve never been so long as I can remember.

I look up from my reflection. “How long was I asleep?”

Perpétue hesitates.

“Days? A week?”

“A little over a month,” Perpétue says. “You were in so much pain, we had to keep you under until the doctor said your calcium levels were high enough.” She furrows her brow and presses her lips together as if there might be more.

A month. A deciturn. I push myself clumsily to my feet. Blood sings in my ears. I’ve been trapped here below over a full deciturn.

“Ava . . .”

I stagger away from her, into the common room.

“Where are you going?” Perpétue calls after me.

I don’t answer. A deciturn lost. A deciturn . . . I stumble to the front of the house and grapple with the outer door. In truth, I don’t know where I’m going. There are steps outside, I know, leading down to the pontoons and up to the roof with its generator and water tanks and Perpétue’s chickens, but beyond that . . . I’ve been locked away too long, seeing the world in snatches from the window. I want—no, I need to see the sky.

T he air is sudden bright. It smells of salt, smoke, and fish. Far off, a horn sounds. The sun peaks high overhead, but the close-packed structures around me close off most of the sky.

Up, I tell myself. Higher.

I climb the first step. My knees shake and my legs burn. I need to go up. I anchor my other foot on the next stair, try to push myself faster. I waver. I need to see it. . . . I don’t know why. I know I won’t be able to see Luck, or the ships, or even the stars from the rooftop, but some part of me insists I try. Without warning, my legs collapse. I sag down on the third step.

“Ava, here.” Perpétue appears behind me, her hands outstretched.

“No!” I say. Weeks lost to sleep, and more to Perpétue and Miyole dressing me and feeding me and helping me walk. I want no more of it. I want to haul myself back up to the sky. I want to be a woman again. I want to prove my worth so Perpétue won’t throw me out when she finds I have Luck’s child inside me.

I crawl up the stairs, the concrete scraping my knees through my thin underskirt. Perpétue watches from below. The heat presses on me, thick and wet. Sweat rolls down my back. The light blinds my eyes, and the sun burns. Another step. My skin feels tight. Another. At last I reach up and feel nothing. Air. I raise my head. Only the square metal walls of the generator, the water tanks, a line of clothes flapping in the breeze, and the weathered driftwood hutch housing Perpétue’s chickens break my view of the sky.

I walk stiffly out onto the sun-baked roof. The sky stretches up and up, ablaze with blue. I don’t know how, but it seems broader even than the Void, raked with fine, high, swaths of lambs’-wool white in its upper reaches. The sun burns through like bright, new copper. It takes my breath and dulls the pain in my legs.

Luck, I think. I wish he could see this with me.

I reach the wall bordering the edge of the roof and raise a hand to shield my eyes. Perpétue’s house stands level with the other mismatched structures—some ships, some square houses balanced on pontoons, like Perpétue’s, some a floating scavenge of metal, plastic, tarp, and heavy solar panels angled up to the sky. Crossed laundry lines and footbridges made of driftwood connect it all. The structures rise and fall ever so slightly with the sea, as if they rest on a sleeping giant’s chest. The distant, muddled din of voices and puttering motors, rooster calls, and the tinny blare of handhelds carry over the rooftops.

Some ten or twelve buildings down, the enclave gives way to the brink. The floating desert of plastic spreads out to the horizon. When the wind skirts across it, it makes a sound like wings. Along its coast, dividing the trash plain from the clean, blue water, a sun-bleached city of ships unfurls for miles and miles. I spin around. To the other side of Perpétue’s roof, the world gives way to unbroken blue. The sky and its darker sister, the sea.

“Ava.” Perpétue stands at the top of the steps. “Come down. Your skin will burn, fi. You aren’t used to the sun.”

I swallow. “I don’t want to stay inside anymore.” I hear the pleading in my tone.

“I know.” Perpétue runs her tongue inside her bottom lip. “But you really aren’t well enough yet.”

“I’ll work at it.” My voice sounds so small in the wide open. “Please, so missus, I don’t want to be useless. I don’t want to lie there and have you . . .” My throat closes around the rest of my words. I don’t want to lose any more time to sleep.