Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

He shakes his head. “Keep it.” He looks from me to Miyole as if he wants to say something. He shakes his head. “You girls take care of yourselves, okay?”

I don’t know what to say. What other choice do we have? He backs away and resumes his inspection of the train cars.

I hand the plastic bottle to Miyole, and she crinkles it in her hands, click-pop, like a heartbeat. Across the street, a gaggle of smallones races along a cinderblock wall, laughing, and cart pushers shout promises of juice and fried things and tea, switching between English and the other language.

My stomach growls. The water has woken it back up and cleared my head some.

“Are you hungry?” I ask Miyole. Maybe I can work out some trade with one of the vendors. I can carry and clean for them, or practice my fixes.

Miyole shakes her head. Click-pop, click-pop.

“Still thirsty?” I say.

She nods.

I close my eyes and call up my memory of the city from above. There were streams and rivers, weren’t there? If we can find one of those, we can fill the bottle back up. We can look for water while we’re stuck here, and then we can figure out where we are and get back on the train. We’ll find my modrie and everything will be all right.

I tug on Miyole’s hand. “Come on. We’ll find some water.”

She shakes her head and looks up at me. “I’m tired, Ava.”

Her eyes are wide and bloodshot with grief and exhaustion. They’re her mother’s eyes.

“I know.” I kneel down beside her. “Here. Climb up.”

Miyole loops her arms around my neck, and I lift her up onto my back.

We join the crowd moving along the street. Lights flicker on in the shop windows and flash along the edges of one of the gigantic pipes rising above the rooftops. People stand on the second tier balconies above the stores, laughing and calling out to one another, or scolding dogs and calling children in from the streets. Small green machines scuffle along the road, scraping horse droppings and bits of trash off the pavement and tilting it into their mouths. Dust muddies the air.

A girl in an elaborately wrapped orange dress and gold and blue bangles leans beneath an awning, intent on her handheld.

“Pardon,” I say. “Do you know where we can find water?”

She looks up at us and frowns, shakes her head as if she’s confused.

She doesn’t understand, I realize, and wish for the hundredth time that Perpétue was with us. She always seemed to know at least some scraps of language wherever we landed.

I point to the water bottle and hold up a hand in a helpless gesture.

She twists her mouth as if she’s thinking, then shakes her head again and drops her gaze back to her handheld.

We keep walking. I smell salt in the air, but I can’t see the ocean. A muffled hum and a rushing noise grow in my ears as we pass beneath the elevated pipe. The flashing red lights illuminate a puddle on the muddy ground. Water. I almost drop Miyole. As we stand watching, a drop falls from the pipe into the puddle.

“Look!” I let Miyole down.

I hold out my tongue to catch the next falling drop, but when it hits, it tastes of salt and iron.

I spit it out. “Seawater.”

Miyole stares at the puddle.

“Don’t worry.” I try to smile. “We’ll find some.”

I lift Miyole and keep walking. We pass a series of small landing fields crammed with ships of all sizes. Lean, patchy animals throw themselves at the mesh fences as we pass. It takes me a moment to place the right name to them. Dogs. In Miyole’s picture books, they were always helpful creatures, playing with sticks and chasing away strangers. Only now we’re the strangers, I s’pose. Miyole tightens her grip on my neck.

“Maybe we should go back,” I say. The sky isn’t black, exactly, like it was in the Gyre at night, but it has taken on an odd purple glow. Ships scud overhead, lights blinking against the velvet darkness.

We turn around. The street is empty except for a lone sweeping machine trundling along in the distance. We pass the dogs and landing fields, and the massive pipe dripping seawater. My legs shake with weariness. Only a bit longer and we should see the trainway and the platform with its smartboard that can tell us where to go. If nothing else, we can get out of the heat, which hasn’t let up despite the darkness.

I walk and walk, Miyole growing heavier on my back. I should have seen the station by now, I’m sure of it. I stop and turn in a circle. The streets all look the same in the dark, and I don’t see as many people out, except for two women with tight-cut dresses and eyes ringed in glittering paint loitering beneath a streetlamp. Most of the shop windows are dark. I push on past another row of buildings, and another, as fast as I can go. Any breath now, I’ll see the station. It has to be there.

Shouts and laughter ring out ahead. A group of men saunter down the other side of the street, heading in our direction. The hair on my arms rises. Run, my body says. But that would only catch their eyes. I don’t think they’ve seen us yet. I whirl around. A few paces back, an alley opens between two buildings. I make for it.

“Ava, what—”

“Hsshh.” I crouch behind a pile of garbage, Miyole still clinging to my back, and wait until they’ve passed.

I creep out again and walk faster, running on fear now. The road curves and another raised pipe appears against the sky. Its winking signal lights blink on and off, showing and swallowing a symbol painted across its underside—two sets of jagged lines intersecting, forming diamond shapes.

I stop. I know I haven’t seen this before. I double back the other way. Still no station. Nothing I recognize. I try to swallow the panic creeping up the back of my throat, but there’s no stopping it. We’re lost.

T he morning sun hits the water, near blinding me. I can’t remember which word I’m supposed to use. Creek? River? Stream? It’s the bigger kind, but not the very biggest. Miyole would know, but she’s asleep under a lean-to of shipping pallets in the alley where we spent the night, and I don’t want to rouse her. Let her stay away from this world as long as possible. And when she wakes, at least I’ll have water.

I roll up the legs of my pants, pull off my boots, and tie their laces together so I can sling them over my shoulder. Then I slip down the muddy bank and slosh into the shallows. The water is cool. On the opposite shore, a group of people wade into the slow-moving current to bathe. Farther down, a group of gangly boys in shorts stand on a concrete slab jutting out over the water. As I watch, one of them pushes another over the side, and then they’re all shrieking and jumping in. Swimming, I think. I clamp my mind closed on the memories that try to rush me.

A ship passes low overhead, sending a thrum through my body I can feel as much as hear. It follows the water’s path upstream, then pivots right and sinks between the rooftops. I lower our bottle beneath the current. We were so close to this place last night. If only we had walked a few streets over.

I lift the bottle from the water and tilt it back to drink.

“Wait!” The bottle flies from my hand and splashes down into the mud.

“Nine hells!” I wheel around, my body singing for a fight, and come face-to-face with a boy maybe a turn or two older than me. Sweat plasters his black, short-cropped hair to his neck and temples. He wears thick, squarish glasses with black plastic rims. Tattoos scroll down his bare brown arms and up his neck.