Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

We set down in one of the mud-washed docking yards, next to a high cinder-block wall. Perpétue leaves me to guard the sloop while she goes off in search of the rice broker. She keeps gone a long while. At midday, I open my lunch tin and find Miyole has packed it full of tatty reading books, the paper kind, what she and Kai must have stolen from a kindling pile somewhere. They’re all stories for smallones about talking dogs and magical creatures like zebras. I try to read them as I wait. I do. But my brain stumbles and sticks. I toss them into the empty berth, knowing I’ve sounded out the words like Miyole’s showed me, but I haven’t gotten the trick of how to piece them together into sense. I cradle my head in my hands. Give me numbers any day.

Perpétue finally comes back with the rice broker, a short man with slick hair and a silver jacket, followed by a line of thin, bare-chested men with sacks balanced on their shoulders. No loading machines here. The rice broker tries to have the men stow the rice straight away, but Perpétue stops them and slashes open the top of one bag with her knife.

She half smiles at the rice broker. “No sand this time, I see.”

“No, lady.” He rubs one hand nervously across his neck. “No sand.”

She drops two pay squares into his hands. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

Perpétue whistles up at the children watching our trade from along the wall and tosses a handful of candies in their direction. They yelp and spring after them.

“Kob kun kaa, lady!” shouts one girl missing both her front teeth.

By the time we make it back to Gyre, hull full of rice, the sun is a pink ribbon slipping down over the horizon. We land the sloop at the supply docks some clicks down from home, sign our cargo in with the suppliers, and join the other captains who run supplies around a fire one of them lit in a metal drum.

Perpétue presses a sweating bottle into my hand and takes another for herself. She pops the top from mine with the dull side of her knife and clinks our bottles together. “To first mates.”

I tilt the bottle back. The liquid hits my tongue, sour and full and cold. I make a face.

“Ah, young one here,” a round woman in a bright purple dress teases. “You never had a beer before, kid?”

I shake my head.

Everyone laughs, but it’s all smiles and good nature, even from the men, as if I’m one of them.

“Where’d you find this one, Perpétue?” the round woman asks.

“This is Ava. She’s got the makings of a natural mechanic,” Perpétue says proudly, and she tells them all about the cold fuser and my first run. No one notices she never answers the question, and soon enough, talk turns to other things, the price of fuel cells and the monster Miko found and what it means.

“I’m going up spaceside again soon,” Perpétue says as we stand by the fire. “I want you to join me, fi.”

“Oh,” I say. It comes on me how the Gyre has become my life, how the constant pull of work has smoothed away the bits of glass still in my flesh, and here I am, washed ashore and laughing, one of a crew. And now to face the Void again . . . I look up at the sky, with its stars hidden by the fat yellow moon. To see the place where I lost Luck and Iri and everything I knew. Sadness tugs at me, but it doesn’t push me under. I wonder if that means my soul is growing back.

“How do you feel, going up there again?” Perpétue asks.

“I don’t know.” I grip the bottle tighter. My crewe will be long off on a new run, but I can’t shake the prickles of fear what crawl over my skin when I think on my father’s face, on Jerej and Æther Fortune. What if they aren’t gone? What if they’re hanging in port, waiting for me to surface? What if they’re still looking for me?

I hug my arms close. I’m worrying too much. They surely aren’t there anymore. And to see the stars again in all their unblinking span, to see that one piece of home . . .

“I wouldn’t ask if I thought you weren’t ready,” Perpétue says.

I draw a deep breath and nod. I’m going back to Bhutto station.

I button my red shirt, fasten the work trousers over my hips, and buckle the belt around my waist. At first I felt naked without my skirts, but now my legs swing free and light. I tie my data pendant snug against my neck. Only one thing left to do before we go. I comb my hair forward with my fingers and stare into Perpétue’s cleanroom mirror. My hair tumbles past my waist, straight and black to my ears, then wisping in faded, brittle red the rest of the way. I hold out a hank of it, raise Perpétue’s kitchen shears, and saw away until the long red locks fall to the floor. I lift another handful and cut. Lift, cut, fall, lift, cut, fall, until my hair hangs ragged around my ears.

I stare at my face. I am a different girl. Older, cheeks sharp planed from my months recovering and working aboard the sloop. I’m stronger, too, I can tell, although my body still feels heavy and ungainly under this Earth’s weight. But my skin has warmed from pale gray to a honey hue now that I’m more accustomed to the sun.

I gather the hair from the floor for composting, snap off the light, wave good-bye to Miyole, and jog down the stairs to where Perpétue awaits me in the docking well. She’s been teaching me fixes. New fixes, better, more intricate than ever the ones I learned off Soli, but the same at their core. I can reroute power to the secondary fuel drive, unjam the landing gear, swap out the glow panels in the cockpit, operate the emergency cooling sluice, and more besides. And now, Perpétue says, I’m good enough with numbers I can try my hand at flying.

I pull myself up into the cockpit. Perpétue glances sidelong at my hair from the copilot’s seat but doesn’t say anything. I settle myself into the captain’s chair, look down at the array of instruments spread out under my hands, and try to recall how to breathe.

“Remember, how I showed you,” Perpétue says.

I force a breath and tick down my checklist. Check my safeties, engine warm-up and temperature readings a go, hull pressurized, coolant levels good, no smallones or animals lingering under the thrust burners.

We kick up in a cloud of salt and grit. The engine reaches a healthy rumble-roar as we shoot up over the Gyre. My heart goes weightless. I push the ship faster, riding the thrill of commanding something so powerful.

“Steady, fi.” Perpétue winks at me, and I realize I’m grinning.

I ease off of the thrusters. The Gyre shrinks to an uneven gray line between the blue and the waste plain, and then we rise higher still, until the Earth lies curved below us. The atmosphere thins and darkens. High winds rock the cabin.

“Are you ready?” Perpétue checks her shoulder straps.

“Right so.” I push us forward, and the ship surges under my touch.

We break through the atmosphere with a small shudder. My stomach lurches as the ship’s artificial gravity takes over. My lungs blossom full of air, and the small lingering pains I carry with me vanish. I am featherlight and strong.

“You feel that?” Perpétue asks.

I turn to her slowly, eyes wide. The hairs on my scalp prickle. I nod.

“Every time,” Perpétue says, and lets out a giddy laugh. “Every single time it’s like that.”

I smile with her and breathe deep, drunk with the sudden luxury of not fighting my body for movement and air. Our ship rotates as we pierce the Void, so the stars spin out against the black, like a fan opening. Perpétue has me guide the sloop around the Earth’s curve until the lights of Bhutto station come in to view, blinking in high rotation above the planet. I grip the controls. Is the Parastrata docked there? The ther?