Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“Easy, Ava.” Perpétue’s voice nudges me gently. “Check our vectors.”

I drop my eyes to the instrument readouts. The numbers trickle up and down. It still takes all my concentration to translate them into sense.

“We need to bear up,” I say, eyes locked to the vector display. “Thirty-four degrees portside.”

“Good.” Perpétue watches as I guide the ship smoothly into our assigned entry bay. We touch down with a muffled thunk. “Pretty soon I can kick back while you fly this thing on all our runs.”

I laugh, but nervously. I’m already scanning the bay. We power down and unload our cargo of smelted plastic and cold-packed fish onto a trolley. Six other small ships share the dock with us, and the floor is thick with men. Some of them drag their cargo across the floor on carts like ours, while others sit with their legs dangling from their ships’ open berths, spitting tobacco on the grimy floor and swilling coffee. I try to keep my head down, but I start every time someone brushes by me, or when the men break out in riotous laughter. I can’t help looking up, searching faces for a sign of someone I know.

One of the men catches me looking. A rangy, bearded man in a knit cap. “Hey, girlie!” He whistles, as if to call a stray dog. “Girlie. Hey.”

I catch Perpétue’s look telling me to act like I don’t hear, but it’s too late. My eyes meet his.

“I got a nice slot on my crew for you.” He slaps his knee in invitation. “If you don’t mind working up a sweat.”

I stare at him, fish mouthed, till his meaning sinks in, then flush hot and duck into the sloop’s hold with my face on fire.

“Eyes on your own crew, hákarl sucker,” Perpétue spits back. She sticks her head in the hold. “Ava—”

“I’m sorry.” I pick up another bundle of plastic and drop it on the hand truck with a clatter. “I don’t know how to do this right, Perpétue.”

“You’re doing well,” she says. “I should have warned you. Around these crews, you can’t be a girl. You’ve got to be hard, be one of them. Here.” She grabs my hands and molds them into fists, then pries the center finger up. “That’ll speak wonders for you.”

We try it out on the bearded crewman as we climb out of the hold. He goes red. His mates laugh and hoot and prod him until he shakes his head and goes back to his work. But we’re left in peace to unload the rest of our cargo and truck it to the distribution deck for our pay.

Perpétue presses a slip of pay plastic into my hand. “There’s information ports you can rent outside the commissary on tier five. See if you can dig up something about that tante of yours.”

“Alone?” I ask, suddenly uncertain. I’ve got only the barest idea how to use an information port, and that from watching Perpétue do it on our runs. “What about you?”

“I’m going to pick up some fission cakes, and then I’ll be down on tier thirteen, taking in packages,” Perpétue calls as she wheels our empty trolley to the service lift. “I’ll find you when we’ve got enough of a load to head back.”

I stand on the deck, surrounded by pallets of fruit and steel sheeting, clutching the thin square of plastic. I make for the personnel lifts, head ducked low, but I can’t keep my eyes from fluttering up to the face of every man who passes me.

I close myself in the lift. A strange, dizzy familiarity tugs at me. If I shut my eyes, all I see is Jerej running, the door closing, the look on his face, and then blood on Iri’s teeth. My father, holding her down. Soraya Hertz, don’t forget. . . . I open my eyes. I’m alone in the lift. The keypad stares back at me. Only this time, I recognize the etched numbers: TIERS 1 TO 42. A thrill zips through me. One to forty-two. What perfect lines the world falls into with this small scrap of knowledge. I’m a different girl than I was the last time I was here. I don’t have anything to be afraid of.

I push the button for tier five. The lift drops, and when the doors roll open for me, I feel even in my skin, balanced and right as I haven’t felt since the moment I stepped off the Parastrata for the first time.

Steam billows up to the commissary ceiling from a row of cookpots and woks. The cooks shuffle their pans over red electric coils and shout back and forth with the people waiting in line. Thick support pillars jut up throughout the room, each spoked by a circle of metal carrels housing the information ports. I slide into an empty one and sit staring blankly at it. A series of silent advertisements rotates on the screen, showing people standing by the seashore, laughing into their handhelds, and others pushing a tiny dog in a screened-in stroller down a tree-lined street. The words flit by too fast for me to make out.

I touch the screen. An orange light pulses to my right, above a slot in the machine. Someone has stuck a piece of adhesive paper to the side of the light, with block letters printed there.

Pa . . . PAY HER. What? No. Here. PAY HERE.

I slide the pay plastic into the slot. The machine sucks it in and spits it back out at me again, but the screen blinks to life, opening up one of the searcher programs I’ve seen Perpétue use. I hunch over the screen and peck in the name I had Miyole spell out for me.

S-O-R-A-Y-A H-E-R-T-Z

Columns of words and pictures spring up and crowd the screen. I sigh. This is going to take some while.

I tick through the links one by one. I hate how slow I am. By the time I figure one link is talking on a dead woman long gone, and another on a girl my age who’s known for her skill at racing a huge beast called a horse, I’ve already chewed up precious minutes. But then, far down at the bottom of the page, I spot a word in the tangled mess of the link. Mumbai. Mumbai! I open the link.

A small, grainy image of a woman standing before a seated crowd spools across the screen. A lavender scarf drapes neatly over her head and around the shoulders of her tailored shirt. A small, dark triangle of hair shows where her scarf pulls back from her brow. I raise my hand unconsciously and touch the ragged tufts of my own hair.

Is it her? Letters float beneath the woman as she speaks.

Dr. Soraya Hertz. My heart leaps. That D-R, that’s what Miyole says I should look for, what groundways folk use to show a person’s a so doctor.

There’s more. The first word is easy. Mumbai. But the next? Un–Univer—Univer-sit—y. University. Mumbai University. I take a deep breath and push on. At, that’s an easy one, but I trip over the next. Kal . . . Kalina. Kalina, it’s no word I know. My heart knocks in my chest. A place, maybe?

“Mumbai University at Kalina,” I whisper aloud. “Dep . . . Depart . . . men—”

“Hey, kid.”

I spin around. Someone thickset—a man, I think at first—stands behind me, thumb hooked under the strap of a traveling bag. Bristly red hair sticks out beneath his short-brimmed hat.

Parastrata. Run.

No. His skin is chapped with windburn. He’s groundways. And then I look again. It’s not a man, but a woman hidden beneath the rough traveling clothes. I’m leaping at shadows. I grip the back of the chair.

“What?” I say.

“You can’t be here ’less you’ve bought something.” She points to the line of people waiting near the commissary kitchens. “That’s the rules, don’t you know?”

“Oh.” I glance at the frozen image of Soraya Hertz. I still have twenty minutes left on the port. “Sorry, so. Thank you. I’ll be straight back.” I stand, pocket my pay plastic, and hurry to the line. I pick out a cup of something that ends up being sweet, spiced tea, too hot to drink just yet, and slide my plastic through a reader, mimicking the people in front of me. But when I get back to my carrel, the red-haired woman has planted herself in my chair. She sits with one leg sprawled out in the aisle, tapping her thumbs against the keyboard.