Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“Pardon, so missus?” I say quiet.

She doesn’t look up.

“So missus?” I touch her shoulder.

She whirls on me. “What?”

“Can I have my seat back?”

“What, this?” She pulls an innocent face.

The balanced feeling hisses out of me, like air from a pneumatic lift. My first thought is to slink away, but I try to think what Perpétue would do.

“Right so,” I say. “I was looking at something. I claimed that port.”

“Did you now?” She makes a show of looking the terminal up and down. “Now how do you figure that?”

“You’re using the time I paid for.” Precious money what could go to cooking oil or replacement parts for Perpétue’s ship, burning away under this woman’s fingers, and me childish fool enough to fall for her petty trick.

“You accusing me of stealing?”

She’s used to getting away with this, I realize. I wet my lips. “Right so I am, missus.”

Anger ripples over her face, but then she swallows it and smirks. She turns back to the screen. “I guess we’ll see what you can do about it, then.”

I wish to the Mercies I had a knife like Perpétue’s. Then no one would rip me off or step on me or push me aside as though I were windblown trash. No one would grab my face or drag my body where I’ve no want to go. My insides wouldn’t go to jelly when someone yelled at me. I press my nails into the teacup’s soft cardboard sides. Not again. Never again. I dash the cup forward. Its steaming contents splash over the back of the woman’s neck. She screams. The galley goes silent around us.

“Bitch!” she shouts. “I’ll have your guts, you little psychopath!”

I stand still as carved wood. The empty cup hangs from my hand, dripping steaming liquid over my fingers. What have I . . . And then I bolt. Away, dodging tables and pillars, stumbling over chairs, down the corridor to the lifts. It’s only when the door is sliding closed and I’m jamming my finger against the button for tier thirteen that I realize no one has come after me.

I race back to Perpétue’s ship, head down, ignoring the crewmen calling at me. I activate the ship’s cargo doors and crawl up into her dark berth. What have I done? I press my palms over my eyes and sink down against the wall. The woman’s scream still echoes in my head. She wasn’t my father or Jerej or even Modrie Reller. She was a stranger, happy to cheat me the same as that rice broker tried to cheat Perpétue. Only Perpétue never tried to burn his skin off, so far as I knew. Maybe I was wrong to think some bud of my soul was left, that it might be growing back. Else, how could I do something like that?

“Ava?” Perpétue squints into the dark. “I’ve been looking everywhere, fi.”

I can’t stop the awful, animal sound that falls out of my mouth. I turn away from her.

“What’s wrong?” She hurries to kneel by me. “Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” I say, choking on a sob that won’t come. If only that were all it was.

“Tell me, fi, tell me.” She pulls me close and rubs my arms, as if it’s cold I’m suffering from.

I shake my head. “No. You’ll hate me.” I can’t let her see what kind of girl I really am.

“Did you steal something?”

“No.” I wipe the wet blur away from my eyes. “I think I found my modrie. She’s at a place called Mumbai University at Kalina. There was more. I almost had it, but this woman tried to chase me off, and I threw hot tea and burned her.”

Perpétue stares into my face as if she’s waiting to hear more. She blinks. “Is that all?”

I nod, miserable. Thank the Mercies I didn’t have a knife.

Perpétue laughs, then quickly stifles it. “Guess we know you’re no angel, then.”

“It was bad, Perpétue. What with . . .” I stumble. “The way . . . If I know what it is to hurt, doesn’t that mean I should know better than to bring that back around on someone else?”

“No.”

“No?”

“All this suffering.” Perpétue looks deep and unblinking at me. “It doesn’t make us saints, fi. It only makes us human. You understand?”

I shake my head. I don’t know if I believe her. “You would never have done that.”

“You think I’m a good person?”

“Right so,” I say.

“Why?”

I look up into the dark recesses of the berth, thinking. “You’re kind to me and to Miyole. You never cheat anybody out of their share when we ship in supplies to the Gyre. You’re . . .” One of Miyole’s words comes to me. “You’re civil to people.”

Perpétue draws her knife. She turns its blade over in her hands. “You know why I carry this?”

I shake my head. “Protection?”

“That part’s show.” She flips the knife and catches it. “Mostly it’s so I remember.”

“Remember?”

She holds the blade up to her face, beside the deep scar running ruin through her lips. “This knife gave me that. There was a man. . . .” Perpétue looks away. When she speaks again, her voice has the bite of metal. “Miyole’s father. He meant to kill me, but I did for him instead.”

I want to say something, but the air around us has gone so still, I don’t dare disturb it.

Perpétue looks at me. “Would it have been good, Ava, would it have been civil, if I’d let him kill me?”

“No,” I whisper. “But you don’t go around cutting people up either. Or burning anyone.”

“There’s a balance,” Perpétue says. “There’s what you’re forced to do, there’s what you choose, and everything else—most things—are a mix. At best, you’ll spend your life trying not to get hurt, but trying not to do the hurting, either. You won’t always come through, but it’s the best anyone can do. It’s the trying I’d call good.”

Perpétue turns the knife around so its pommel faces me. “Here.”

I look from it to her, confused.

“You’re the one who needs it now.”

“I can’t,” I say. “It’s yours.” I can’t imagine me with her knife any more than I can imagine her without it.

“You can,” she says, and presses it into my hand.

My fingers close over the grip.

Perpétue smiles and slaps my shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got enough cargo to head back planetside. Miyole’s waiting.”

P erpétue lets me break dock and fly us back through the atmosphere. The sky looks sick as we approach the Gyre. Over the open water, clouds mass and muddy themselves to an ashen yellow-gray. Lightning branches above the waves.

“I thought it never stormed here.” I risk a quick look away from the instruments.

“It doesn’t.” Perpétue frowns at the thunderheads looming like monstrous prows over the waste plain. Rain begins to fall, mixing with the salt spray clouding our front viewport. “Here, hand over the controls.”

I surrender the captain’s seat to her. High swells rock the whole of the Gyre by the time we fight our way through the winds to the Caribbean enclave. Sea and sky churn. Perpétue’s face is gray. Neither of us has to speak what the other is thinking. Miyole.

We bring the ship to a hover over Perpétue’s barge. Waves foam over the deck, and the whole structure rocks to and fro. Something red flashes on the roof. Miyole’s kite, snarled in the clothesline. As I watch, it snaps taut, and then the wind snatches it up, out to the roiling gray. The water heaves the docking well up with each crest, then slams it down again into the trough. Impossible to land.