Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

I lean on Perpétue, and with her help I begin the slow descent to the welcome darkness of her home.

E very day the pain eases. I help Miyole with the chickens, and soon Perpétue lets me cook, though at first I have to fight their stubborn collapsible stove to come away with something that’s not burned. I’m not used to cooking with live flames.

Still, Perpétue seems glad. It gives her more time for checking Miyole’s lessons in the evenings, and the two of them take turns reading to me about the Earth, its oceans and forests and molten depths, its deserts and snows, its peoples and their many wars and fragile peaces. They read reckonings of tides rising and cities turned to shoals, battles over blood-soaked strips of land, and the call to push off into the depths of the stars.

One day, when Perpétue’s away on her runs, Miyole calls at me as I come down from hanging out the wash.

“Ava! Hey, Ava!” She sits at the table, her tablet open in front of her. “Can you help me?”

I drop the laundry basket inside the door and wipe my hands on my skirts. “What do I do?” I come close and stand beside her. The soft blue light—the one Miyole said means it’s casting out for a signal—pulses.

She holds up the tablet. She taps it and drags her pointer finger over its surface. Two columns of grouped symbols spring up. “All you have to do is read me the words and see if I can spell them right.”

I hesitate. I haven’t told Miyole and Perpétue I can’t read; it’s never come up. I take the tablet and sit across from her. It rests cool in my fingers, heavier than what I guessed with my eye. I scan the sheet for something, anything, I recognize. Nothing. Not even an A.

“Orange,” I say at random, too loud.

“Orange,” Miyole says evenly. “O-R-A-N-G-E.”

I pretend to trail my finger down to the next word, as I’ve seen my father and Jerej do over shipping invoices. “Machine,” I say.

Miyole frowns. “M-A-C-H-I-N-E.”

“Um . . .” I bring my eyes up from the pad and search the room for inspiration. “Welding apron.”

“Ava.” Miyole narrows her eyes at me. “What are you doing?” She grabs the tablet from me and scans it. “None of those words are even on here.”

My face goes hot. This is all wrong. I’m alone, cast down on a planet what pains me with every breath. I can barely work a flight of stairs, and a little girl is scolding me. Me, who knew every quirk of the Parastrata’s kitchens, who could walk her halls sunblind, who could have run all the women’s work someday. Loneliness sticks in my throat. Every day, my old life is fading. I can no longer even call up Luck’s ghost to wrap its arms around me. I’m beginning to forget the sound of his voice.

“I . . . ,” I start, and then stop again. “I’m no good at it.”

“At what?” Miyole says.

“Reading,” I say. “My . . . my Luck . . .” I haven’t spoken out his name before. If Perpétue were here, she would catch the break in my words, pick up another piece of my past, but Miyole only stares, kicking her legs under the table and waiting for me to continue. I clear my throat. “Luck was going to teach me.”

“I could teach you,” Miyole offers. “I was teaching Kai, but he said it was boring. I know the alphabet and spelling and grammar and all that.”

“I don’t . . .”

But she’s already running for the ancient chest of drawers. She returns with a pointed stylus and kneels on a chair beside me, head bent over the tablet.

“You want the alphabet first.” She taps the screen and traces the stylus over its smooth surface, then hands it back to me. A large letter A stands out in the top left corner.

I look up at her. Is she going easy on me, starting with one of the only letters I already recognize? “You won’t . . .” I clear my throat. “You won’t tell your mother, will you?”

Miyole chews her lip. “No. Not if you don’t want.”

“Good.” I let out a breath. “Thank you.”

“That’s A.” Miyole nudges the tablet closer. “It’s the first. Try copying it.”

I grip the stylus and make my mark.

Miyole nods, serious. “That’s good.” I hear the echo of Perpétue in her voice. She takes the tablet back from me and draws another letter. “Now try the next one. That’s B.”

By the time Miyole finishes with the alphabet, I ache from the roots of my eyes all the way to the back of my head. My letters stand up wobbly on the screen. I don’t remember half of them, even with the little song Miyole sings to help keep them in order.

“This is worthless.” I push myself away from the table. I need something to keep me busy, something to make me not feel so low and dull. I grab the biggest cookpot, upend a jug of desalinated water into it, slam the cookstove on the table, and start snapping its pieces together. Miyole, so smart. What does she know of how awful hard the world is, with her nice, shiny tablet and her lessons and her ship captain mother? My chest is full of bitter black, smoldering and ready to ignite. I pick up the pot and bring it down on the stove so hard the water sloshes everywhere.

Miyole sits frozen next to my empty seat. “Careful, Ava.” Her voice trembles. “You’ll break it.”

I stop, hands gripping the cookstove’s handles. A tear slips from my eye and lands in the water pot. I’m so churned up I can’t tell whether I’m crying from frustration or sorrow or anger, or some awful mix of the three. I turn away and pick up a sack of beans.

When I turn around again, Miyole sits tense in her chair, hands tight around the tablet, as if she might use it to fend me off. Her mouth is set in a line I know I’ve seen on Perpétue’s face too, something older than her years, something fierce that knows what it is to be broken and to mend.

“Don’t be angry,” she says.

“I’m sorry.” I drop the bag on the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .” But I don’t know what to say, so I go about making our dinner, even though it’s some early and I’ll need to heat it again when Perpétue comes home. Miyole stares at her tablet without touching it, refusing to look on me.

I close the lid over the cookpot. “You want to hear a story?” I ask, gentle, for it’s what I remember most of my mother, the stories she told when I was frightened.

Miyole looks up. She’s only a smallgirl again. She stares at me without blinking some moments, then nods.

“What kind?” I ask.

Miyole looks away. “An adventure.”

“What about the story of how Lord Candor came to be a hero?” I say.

“Who?” Miyole screws up her face at me.

“Candor,” I say. “One of the fathers of the crewes. A great man.”

Miyole shrugs. “Okay.”

I take a breath. “Right so.”

“When Lord Candor married his secondwife Mikim, she was young and fair. As the years passed, she gave him many fine sons. But Mikim grew haughty, for Candor’s firstwife Saeleas had given him only girls, and Mikim knew her sons would succeed their father.

“Now, in those days the skies were wild, and men had much to fear, not only from the cold kiss of the Void and the chaos wrought by storms, but from ship strippers and corsairs. Candor fought many battles with these raiders, and guarded his sons and wives well, for it was known the corsairs took all they captured as slaves. Then one day, on the long dark trek back from the farthest outpost, three corsairs swept down on Candor’s ship, blazing fire. In his wisdom, Candor fled. His ship’s guns had been crippled in the fray. He hid his craft in the shadow of a moon, while above the corsairs prowled, searching for him.