Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“You’re some odd girl,” he said. “You’re the same age as Soli, right?”

I shrugged and nodded again.

“I’m only two turns older than you, then,” he said. “What’re you doing calling me so?”

I shook my head and wished a breach would open in the hull below me and suck me out into space. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

Luck started cleaning again. “All your crewe is odd.”

I let myself look on him. His bangs swung back and forth over his eyes as he scrubbed the floor. His shoulders tensed and rounded with the motion. A strange, light tickle lifted my stomach, and my ears fizzled, as if I’d come too near the engine’s electromagnet.

“Isn’t it the same on your ship?” I asked.

Luck snorted. “No.” He looked up and saw me watching him. “Well, some. Except we clean our own messes and Soli can be on Fixes.”

I sat cross-legged in the hay and straightened my skirt over my knees. I looked over at Soli, sitting on top of the junk locker, eyes narrowed in concentration. “I could never do that.”

“You could,” Luck said. “You’re on Livestock, right so?”

I nodded.

Luck went back to scrubbing. “Fixes is a lot like Livestock, except with less to muck and more figuring. You can do figuring, can’t you?”

I could count, sure, and even do some addings and takings away. But Modrie Reller always told me not to be proud and flaunt, especially not in front of men. I started to shake my head but caught Luck’s eye again. Something about how he was talking to me, how he was looking at me and not past me made me want to step full into recklessness. I changed my shake into a slow nod.

Luck nodded with me. “You could do Fixes, then.”

“But you have to read, right so?”

Luck frowned. “Can’t you read?”

I hesitated. “Course,” I lied. It sounded like what he’d want to hear.

Luck smiled. “You’d be good as Soli after a turn or two.”

I put my hand on the hay between us and leaned forward, mouth open with the start of a question. Blood surged into Luck’s cheeks, brightening them as red as ther thread. Our eyes met again.

“It’s up.” Soli called. She wove through the goats, holding the coaxer aloft so its tubes didn’t drag the ground. “Who wants to try it?”

Luck and I both stood. He held Chinny still while I strapped the coaxer to her and bunched the tubes into the neck of a jug.

“Try knocking that over,” I said to the goat. She glared back at me.

I toggled the controls to green and flipped the regulator switch. The coaxer whirred to life. Chinny bleated unhappily at me, but she didn’t cry out in pain or give me the smug look I knew meant the coaxer wasn’t doing its job. Milk filled the tubes and trickled into the jar.

I clapped my hands. “It’s up!” I grabbed Soli and danced her around. “You did it!”

“Told you she’d have the fix,” Luck said, and grinned at his sister. He leaned over and slapped her on the back, the way I’d only ever seen men do with each other. Then he looked at me, and his blush crept back.

They stayed only a few more days while their father finished trade talks with my great-grandfather Harrah and our crewes sealed the agreement with a pair of marriages—two of our girls to two of their men. I let Soli show me a few fixes on the sly, ’specially some to do with the coaxer and the lift to the chicken coops, while Llell kept a cool distance.

I hardly saw Luck, except for across the room at meals, when the women stood waiting against the wall while the men ate. But he looked at me sometimes, twice at the weddings, and smiled at me once when he passed through the livestock bay with his father, on the way to inspect our copper bales. That was when I started daydreaming, in my slow moments waiting for bread to come out of the machine or lifting and agitating lengths of wool in the dye bath, about what it would be like to be Soli’s sister, to learn fixes and real figuring, to talk on things with Luck and wear neat-trimmed clothes every day.

The chemical smell of dye cuts the air. Modrie Reller’s fingers dig into my scalp. Now Luck will be going on nineteen turns, the right age for taking a firstwife, and me to be married. To someone in the Æther crewe, Modrie Reller said. Perhaps to someone in the captain’s family, if my father matches our stations in the usual way.

“Will I be a firstwife?” I ask Modrie Reller. My heart beats so hard I can almost taste it. Let it be Luck. Please let it be Luck.

“Your father will have it raveled,” she repeats. She pushes my head down over the sink again.

The dye burns. I close my eyes tight and grip the sides of the utility sink. To keep the pain at bay, I think on how it will be to be a bride. How the women will wash me with real, cool water, braid skeins of copper into my hair and slip bracelets over my wrists, fasten my birthright pendant around my neck, and solder coins to my bridal headdress. They will bind my hand to my husband’s at the wrist, and then . . . My imagination falters. After that, they’ll give me over to my husband’s crewe, and I’ll only ever see my ship and birthcrewe at runend meets. It’s too much, like the thought of stepping purposefully from the airlock into the cold nothing of the Void. My half-formed fantasies about Luck and Soli turn to vapor. My legs tremble, half at the thought of leaving my crewe, half from the strain of kneeling over the sink so long.

“There,” Modrie Reller says. She drops a cooling cloth over my head and neck. Iri helps me stand and wraps it in a turban. They have me sit and wait while the cloth does its work, taming the harshness of the dye and unbrittling my hair. When it’s done, Iri unwraps the turban and my hair falls in rust-red waves to my waist. For a little while, at least, I am still one of my crewe.

M odrie Reller sends me off to oversee the smallgirls on kitchen duty. The narrow room is a bustle of hot pans and girls edging past one another with bowls of batter for the eggcakes we’ll bring to the meet. I divvy up the cooling cakes onto platters as they come out of the ovens. Kitchen duty is my favorite. It takes figuring and counting, which I am best at of all the women, better even than Modrie Reller, though I know enough not to say so.

“Careful,” I call to Eme, a child of maybe seven turns, the daughter of my father’s fourthwife. She smacks an egg against the side of the bowl, dripping sticky white all over the table and flecking the dough with shell.

“Here.” I swallow my annoyance. Seven turns is plenty long to learn how to crack an egg. I take one, rap it sharply against the counter, hold it over the bowl, and use my thumbnail to finish the job. “Right so?”

Eme nods. I watch her take an egg, tap it more gently, and carefully empty its contents into the mixing bowl.

“How many did you put in?” I ask.

“Six, like always,” she says.

“But we’re tripling the recipe,” I say. “So you need . . .”

“Sixteen?” she guesses.

“No,” I say. “Try again.”

She counts silently to herself. “Eighteen?”

“Right so,” I say.

Modrie Reller appears in the doorway. “Ava,” she calls over the banging pans and sizzling oil. She looks sharp at me, and I know she’s seen me showing Eme figuring, which is dangerous close to flaunting. “Where are those cakes?”