Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

“But I’m not a girl,” I say. I haven’t been for turns.

“A young woman, then,” Soraya says. “All I mean is, your life doesn’t have to be so heavy. There’s so much out there for you, so much you can do.”

“I know. I’m sorry, and true. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Soraya sighs. She looks tired, face thin. “I only want to protect you. I know I’m not your mother, Ava, and you’re nearly an adult. But if anything happened to you . . .” She jostles the teacups as she reaches out and clasps my hand. Her fingers are cold, all tendons and bones.

“I don’t think the way my father did, Ava. You aren’t research. You’re my only living blood. If something happened to you, I . . .” She stops, lets out a sharp breath, and composes herself. “You can’t know what it’s like to have a family again after all this time.”

“You’d have Miyole,” I say.

“Yes,” Soraya says. “But I wouldn’t have you.” She leans back in her chair and holds a hand over her eyes. “Please, Ava. You have to stop running.”

She’s crying, I realize. But why? Only the barest thread of blood connects me and Soraya. But all the blood in the world didn’t stop your crewe from plotting to rid themselves of you from the moment your mother died. It didn’t stop them from trying to discard your mother’s soul along with her body. I think on Soraya and Miyole giggling at each other over dinner, Perpétue holding my arm as I took my first knifing steps on the Earth.

I squeeze Soraya’s hand in mine. “I won’t run off again,” I say. “I swear. I’m sorry, Soraya.”

“I am, too,” Soraya says. “If only I’d found you earlier. If only I’d looked harder when I came aboard to bury your mother . . .”

But I can’t regret it. It’s no good wishing to change what was. If Soraya had spirited me away to Earth when I was younger, I might never have suffered the shame I did after what happened with Luck, and I would have grown up well schooled and groomed and mannered. But then I never would have loved Luck, either. I never would have learned to fly a ship or been there to take the controls while Perpétue climbed down to rescue Miyole. I might not have seen the wonder in this world if it hadn’t been hidden from me so long. I’m not glad of the way it happened, but I can’t be sorry either.

“It’s none of your fault,” I say. She’s not Perpétue. She won’t always understand me or be everything I wish she could be, but she loves me. Not all the people who care for me are gone, after all.

“All that’s past,” I tell her. “This is my life now.”

“Did I get you in trouble?” Rushil turns his head from the tubing brace he’s finished fusing to the sloop’s inner wall and flips up the hood of his welding mask.

I pull my welding goggles down around my neck and let my torch go out. The handlamps hooked above our heads shine dim inside the ship. I blink, half blind. “Some.”

“A lot?”

I shake my head. “I have to tell her where I’m going if I’m out past dark. And I’m supposed to keep the crow on me all the time, so she can call if she needs me.” I make a face at the crow clipped to my belt. “And she wants you coming by for tea someday soon.”

“Tea?” He sucks air past his teeth, as if someone’s kicked him in the shin. “Chaila. I’m in for it, aren’t I?”

I think on what would have happened if it were Modrie Reller meting out punishments, not Soraya. My eyes drift up the darkened conduit to the ceiling.

Rushil follows my gaze. “Do you miss it?”

I drop my head. “What?”

“Being up there,” Rushil says. “Spaceside.”

I bite my bottom lip and lean back against the hull. “Some small bit.” I flip the toggle on my welding torch so it hisses and dies, hisses and dies. “I don’t miss the dye pits or always worrying on being caught and spied on. But circling the dark side of a planet, hanging up there with all those stars like you’re one of them? I do miss that.”

Rushil nods. “I bet it’s beautiful. Everyone says it changes you, seeing the Earth from above.”

My jaw drops. “You’ve never seen it?” I push myself from the wall.

Rushil shakes his head. “I’ve been planetside my whole life.” He laughs shortly. “I’ve never even been outside Mumbai, except for the detention camp.”

Street-smart, clever Rushil, who could thread his way through the Salt blind, has seen less of the universe than me? I fake a cough to cover my shock and scrape around for something to say. I nudge his foot with mine—tap, tap, tap. Our secret code. “You will.”

“You think?” Rushil gives me a pained smile what says he doesn’t believe me.

“Right so.” I bump his arm and smile sideways at him. “You think I want to take this thing up all by myself?”

“You’d take me?” Rushil’s voice breaks with excitement as he says it, and I see a piece of the smallboy he once was.

“Course.” I take his bulky, gloved hand gentle in mine. “It can be our first flight.”

Our eyes meet under the yellow glow of the hand lamps. If I leaned forward a mere slip, I could touch the warm, flat plane of his chest, let the electromagnetic pull take over and meet his lips with mine.

Rushil tucks a strand of sweat-damp hair behind my ear. “You’re beautiful like this, you know?”

I laugh. “What, covered in grease?”

“No,” he says. “Happy.”

We meet chest to chest, and his lips find mine. I don’t know what’s better, the warm press of his mouth or holding him, being held. There are no expectations here, no hurry. Our time is our own. My muscles and bones melt, and the world narrows to this cocoon of yellow light. Even when our lips break apart, his arms stay around me. I rest my head on his shoulder. He leans his temple against mine and we stay there, wrapped in each other.

“Guess we’d better get back to it if we ever want this thing flying, huh?” Rushil finally says.

“Right so.”

He steps back and squeezes my hand, then smiles and pulls the welding mask down over his face. I position my own goggles and fire up my torch. White-hot flame sparks from its tip as it touches the metal. Rushil and I stand back-to-back as we weld neatly spaced rows of tubing braces along the ship’s inner hull and wall. The heat of his body is warmer even than the reach of the flame through my fireproof gloves.

When we’ve fused the last clamp in place, Rushil kills his torch and makes for the hatch. “I need some air.”

I follow after him. The bright daylight clears out my head after the cramped, stuffy confines of the conduit shaft. Rushil and I sit on the lip of the loading hatch and breathe in the fresh afternoon. The sun glints on the fuselage of the ships parked around us.

“So what are you going to name her?” Rushil says.

“Name her?”

“Yeah.” Rushil pats the ship’s hull. “When you register her with the Subcontinental Flight Bureau, you’ve got to give a name for her.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” I never thought to name Perpétue’s ship, since she hadn’t. I stare down at the pavement and swing my legs back and forth. It’s got to be something Miyole would like, something what tells all we’ve been though, me and Miyole and the sloop. Something strong, something . . . I smile.

“Perpétue,” I say. “We’ll call her the Perpétue.”