Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

The monster, I remember. They were right. . . .

Perpétue smacks the controls and curses the sloop. “Come on.” She brings us in lower, lower, until the waves slap its tile-armored belly.

“Perpétue . . . ,” I say, nervous.

An awful crack breaks through the howling roar. A three-story structure on a barge several roofs down comes loose from its pontoons with a metallic shriek. It tips to the crashing sea, slow, so slow, and then it hits, sending up a flume of dark water and foam. A great wave rolls toward us, snapping the makeshift bridges.

“Perpétue!” I scream, and reach over to pull up on the thrusters. The sloop heaves up just in time to keep the wave from dragging us under.

Perpétue unbelts herself and climbs out of the captain’s seat. “Take the controls.”

“What are you . . .”

“Take them,” she snaps.

I clamber in, snap the shoulder straps over my chest, and grab the thruster handles. Perpétue already has the engines at three-quarters power, trying to fight the wind.

“Bring us low.” Perpétue clips a short-range radio to her collar.

I struggle to keep the sloop righted above the water. It shudders and jags in the wind, but I bring it to hover some thirty feet above the landing pad on Perpétue’s barge.

“Open the hatch.”

I don’t have to ask what she means to do. I pull the hatch release. In a matter of breaths, I see Perpétue out in the gale, clinging to the end of the steel ladder. The wind lifts the ladder sideways, even with her weight added to it. I bring the ship lower. The walls of Perpétue’s house loom dangerously close, windows dark gray as the sea.

The short-range coms crackle. “Ava?”

I flip the coms to hands-free. “Here!”

“Magnetize the ladder. The switch by the hatch release.”

I see the one she means. “Got it!” I snap the switch. The ladder drops to the metal-plated deck.

Crackling silence.

Then, “I’m down.” I can barely make out Perpétue’s voice over the whipping of the wind and the roaring waves. “Try not to go higher or the ladder’ll pull free. I’ll be quick.”

Wind batters the ship, and all around, the water moves in great, rolling, gray-green hills. Debris from the waste plain washes over the decks and swamps Perpétue’s docking well. The far edge of the barge lists to the side, partially swallowed by the waves.

Perpétue’s panting fills the coms channel. “She’s not here!”

“Where else—” But then I see, through the sheets of falling water and crashing waves. Miyole, and Kai beside her, waving from the widow’s walk of a ramshackle construction two roofs down.

“Perpétue!” I shout. The wind shoves the sloop lower, and for a slip, all I see is terrible, deep water with no end, but I bring it up again. I can’t see Miyole anymore, but I know which building it is. “I saw her!”

“Coming!” Perpétue dashes from the house to the ladder, slipping and scrabbling in the wet. She doesn’t bother to climb beyond the bottom rungs. “Up, Ava, quick.”

I pull the ship up, away from Perpétue’s house, and swing wide to come around to the widow’s walk. I hold the sloop steady as Perpétue dangles from the end of the ladder. I squint through the lashing rain. The only metal to latch on to is the thin railing itself.

She’ll never get down, I think, but then a sudden break in the wind drops us almost on top of the neighboring house.

“I see them.” Her voice squawks through the coms. A beat. Then, “I’m down. Sending Miyole up.”

“Right so.” Sweat slicks my palms, but I don’t dare let go to wipe them dry.

At that moment, darkness falls over the viewport. The whole of the Gyre sucks down, away from the sloop.

“Oh, god,” Perpétue’s voice is suddenly clear. Lightning flashes, illuminating a vast wall of water, higher even than the sloop, rolling straight at us. It sweeps up the debris and the structures of the Gyre and hovers above us. It turns white as it begins to curve over.

“Fly, Ava!” Perpétue shouts. “We’ve got the ladder. Fly!”

I jam the thruster controls up, fighting the wind and the blinding rain, engines hot. Pieces of plastic sheeting and plasterboard rush by, and then the wave is there, racing to meet us.

“Up!” Perpétue screams.

But it’s too late.

The wave’s crest slams us sideways, and we spin over the water. The viewport is sky and water, sky and water. I’m going to die, I think, but my body acts without me, fighting for even keel and height. We roar up into the sky, engines at full power. The clouds revolve and thicken, and everywhere is darkness.

Then suddenly bright, cold sun and blue sky. Below, a vast pinwheeled storm sweeps its arms over the water.

“Perpétue! Miyole! Kai!”

The open coms line fisses with static.

I program the ship’s autopilot to keep us in a holding pattern, unstrap myself, and climb below. Waterlogged packages spill across the floor, what’s left of Perpétue’s delivery. The wind whistles from the open mouth of the berth. I crawl to the edge of the sunlit square.

“Please,” I whisper to the Mercies, but then I reach the bolts holding the ladder to the sloop. My hands brush frayed bristles of metal rope. The ladder is gone. I push myself up on my knees, away from the edge. “No.”

A whimper cuts the darkness behind me. I turn.

“Miyole?”

She hugs her knees with bloodied hands and presses her back hard to the berth’s wall. “They were behind me,” she says. “My manman and Kai. They were behind me.” There is nothing we can do but wait while the storm slowly churns its way north and west, away from the Gyre. Or what once was the Gyre. Some hours later we duck back below the tails of the clouds to find the sea below us picked clean and glittering. I check our coordinates. They’re right. I bring us lower and skim back and forth over the water, praying to the Mercies I’ll spot the remains of a pontoon or a piece of driftwood, anything Perpétue and Kai could have caught hold of. But there’s nothing. The Gyre is simply gone. No boats, no pontoons, not a scrap of the waste plain what gathered there over the generations.

A hollow space opens in me, like my chest is filled with Void. It sucks all the air from my lungs. I was not ready for this, this total, spinning loss. Was it even a day ago Perpétue was joking I should fly all our runs? And now her gone. And Miyole . . .

“Miyole.” My voice sounds unsteady, and I feel cold, as if I’m watching everything from somewhere deep inside.

She lifts her head and stares at me from the copilot’s chair. We’ve washed her bleeding hands with saltwater and wrapped them in strips of silk from one of Perpétue’s parcels. I cut open all the packages with Perpétue’s knife while we waited out the storm. Mostly, they were full of oddments and luxuries, gold-painted eggs, cold-sealed vials full of something what might be quicksilver, cloth so thin you could make it flutter with a breath. Nothing useful.

“We’ve got to find someplace to land,” I say.

Miyole nods.

“We can look for your manman and Kai from there,” I say, even though I know they’re empty words. We can look, but they’re sunk to the endless bottom with the monsters and mermaids and all else the Gyre folk liked to talk on around their fires.