Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

No crowd meets us this time, but some of the crewemen and women stare warily after me as Soli leads me through the ship. Earthborn. Filth. Unnatural. I can almost hear them.

We veer off down one of the ther’s looping cooridors. Another crewewoman passes us going the opposite way and gives me an undisguised scowl.

I hurry to match steps with Soli. “Where are we going?”

“The women’s quarters.” She shoots a look at my clothes. “I thought you might want to put on something more . . . presentable.”

I stop short. Presentable?

Soli continues on a few paces before she realizes I’ve stopped. She turns and frowns. “Come, Ava. Don’t you want to look nice?”

“Soli.” My mouth has gone dry, and my heart is beating high and tight. “What is this? Enough games. Tell me true.”

Soli sighs and sags her shoulders, then addresses the baby. “Your modrie Ava won’t let us have any fun, will she?”

“Modrie?” I echo. I can’t breathe. “Soli, what . . .” My crow pings at my side. I should be making my way back to the sloop now.

“Hurry on.” Soli doubles back the way we came, throwing her words over her shoulder. “But I’m telling it true. You have to see for yourself.”

I tap out a quick message to Rushil as we walk—RUNNING LATE. DON’T WORRY—and hurry to catch up with Soli. We arrive at the pair of doors closing off the captain’s quarters. Saeleas is still there in the wood, words scrolling out from her mouth, only now I can read them. Women of the air . . . The last time I stood here, I was soaking wet and shaking with fear and shame. An echo of that feeling flutters through me.

Soli raps her knuckles on the wood, and the doors open. I step inside with her, each of us holding tight to the other’s arm. Floor pillows and thick rugs still lap over each other in drifts, but the lights have been tuned brighter, and with only some dozen people gathered around the captain’s dais, the room feels near naked. They stand as we draw near, and it clicks for me what’s different. A few among the gathered are women. And one of them stands out more than the rest, with her clay-red hair and green eyes.

Llell. What is Llell doing here?

But then the man at the center of the group turns. My steps falter. A pair of ozone-blue eyes. Bruised half-moons of tired skin well beneath them. His dark hair has grown long enough to tuck behind his ears. The stiff, embroidered stole of the captaincy drapes heavy on his shoulders.

“Luck?” I can barely breathe the name.

He looks up. Confusion passes over his face as he looks from me to Soli, and then back again.

“It’s her, Luck.” Soli’s voice shakes with excitement. “I found her.”

Luck blinks. He sucks in a breath. “Ava?”

I nod. “Right so. It’s me.”

He steps down from the dais and closes the distance between us in a few heartbeat-quick steps.

“How . . . ,” I start to say.

But Luck clutches me to him, as if he’s been starved for me this whole time. “Thank the Mercies,” he says into my hair.

My body locks to his with a force that shakes my bones. Luck, alive.

“I thought you were dead,” I say into his shoulder.

He rocks me side to side, strokes my hair, kisses the crown of my head. “I’m not dead. I’m not dead,” he repeats, as though trying to make himself believe it so much as me. “But Llell said they . . . she said they bathed you for burial and everything.”

“They did,” I say. “But Iri helped me slip them, and I went down groundways to my blood modrie—”

“Your blood modrie?”

“Right so.” There’s so much to tell. I look around the room. Besides Llell and Soli, I don’t recognize anyone, though the man with his arm around Soli’s waist must be her husband, Ready. “Is Iri . . . ?”

Luck shakes his head. “When we went to bargain with your father, she was already long dead. Soli tried to talk on it with some of the women, but she said they wouldn’t even speak her name.”

Some part of me knew it would ravel up this way. I knew it the moment I saw her fall, but the blow of it still rings me through.

“You’re bound to be weary,” Luck says. “Come, we can sit and talk in my quarters. We have all the time we need, now.”

Rushil, I think faintly, and glance down at my crow. He’ll be waiting for me. But this is too important. This is the sort of thing what stops.

“Right so,” I hear myself say.

“Very good.” Luck claps his hands to dismiss the small crowd around the dais. They all file out except Llell, who I mark now is wearing a flowing ther-red dress, and Soli with her baby in her arms.

“Would you find some food and drink for our Ava?” he asks them.

“Course.” Soli sends me a smile. Llell grimaces, but follows her without a word.

Luck steps back to look at me, gripping my arms as if he fears I’ll ghost away. “When your father said you had gone off with that groundways woman, we counted you dead. We were sure she took you down to the Earth with her. None of us thought you’d be strong enough to bear up under it.”

“I bore it.” I swallow down the memory of the curling, bitter pain of my first few months down groundways. “It was none easy, but I bore it.”

Luck pulls me to him again. “I’m sorry. On me and all my crewe, I’m sorry.”

“I’m well.” I move back a slip. “Well and healed.” I shake my head and wipe my eyes against my jacket shoulder. “But you, I thought they would have sent you out to meet the Void, same as me.”

Luck nods. “My father was talking on it, but he wanted us clear of the spaceport first, so the station authority wouldn’t interfere. Only it ends up some on our crewe thought he was taking too many brides, turning out too many boys. I s’pose it was some too much, what passed with you and me. They said it was my rightful time to take a firstwife, and he had tried to take her instead. So they mutinied. My mother and her brothers came and got me from the brig, and the rest . . . It was his body we sent out to the Void, not mine.”

“You killed him?”

“Yes.” Luck grips my hand. “I don’t regret it. I thought he had killed you, Ava. I thought his hand brought about your death. So I took the captaincy from him.”

“The captaincy?” I can barely keep pace with what Luck is saying.

“And I turned the ship around,” he says. “Came back to claim you from the Parastrata, but you weren’t there. They said at first they had put you out into the Void. But Llell . . .” He stops. “I knew something else had happened, only I couldn’t fix on what until I talked your father into telling me.”

“You talked my father into telling you? How?”

Luck smiles sheepishly and shrugs. “You know, the Æther’s some known for its rice-wine stills.” He glances up to the door where Soli and Llell disappeared. A worried look flits across his face. “Among other things.”

“Other things?” A twinge of unease spiders down my throat.

“I’m sorry.” Luck kisses me hard on the top of my forehead. “Forgive me, Ava. I’m sorry I took their word you were dead. But I’ve found you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you now. Not ever again.”

His words curl around me, strong and warm like his arms and shoulders. And I want, oh, I want it to be true, that this man has the power to keep all hurt from me. For him to be the balm to all my cares . . .