Alexandra Duncan - Salvage

I leaned close to my mother’s ear. Fever heat moved off her skin in waves. “Please, Ma,” I whispered. “You got to stop singing now, right so?”

Her eyes opened to glints deep in the shadow of her face. “Ava.” She touched my cheek. I smelled the fever on her breath. “You are the sails, Ava. My girl. You are the sails.”

And I could see. Even with the fever touching her mind, turning her words to a torrent, I could see what she meant. I felt the seed of it in me. That I could give life and comfort and peace, even in the harshest reaches of the Void. And in that moment, the lights whined to life. I squinted up into their glare, and when I looked back, my mother’s eyes had closed again in sleep. Resolve filled me, small as I was, and I knew I would bend with the will of the Mercies to bear life into our crewe some day.

Now as I stand at the back of the procession, I run my mother’s cant through my mind like piece of silk ribbon, like copper sails to trap the sun’s heat . . ._

Ahead, I spot Iri. She glances back over her shoulder and gives me a tight smile. A rumbling clack-clack-clack fills the room as my father orders the big bay doors open, and a sweep of cold air rushes into our ship.

Our procession shuffles forward until we reach the lip of the ship’s outer bay. Before I have time to think, I have put my foot over the threshold and onto the loading ramp, and like that, I am farther from my home than I have ever been in my life. As we step away from the Parastrata, our ship’s gravity gives way, and suddenly everything—the eggcakes, the copper bands, my very legs—weighs heavier on me. I stagger but right myself. The other women slow along with me, but the men don’t so much as flinch. How glad I am to have them circled round us, guarding us from the Earth’s sway. Modrie Reller was right. Its pull is stronger here, outside the pure world of our ship.

The dock is empty, except for two silent vessels resting alongside ours. A bulkhead door separates us from the station proper. My father taps a code into the keypad wired to the door, and it slowly rolls open along the runners in the floor, revealing a long hallway. We push forward in step. A steady roar builds and builds as we near the far end, and then overtakes us when we break out onto the station’s concourse.

People and animals and vendor carts cram the floor. Lights stream and flash in all colors. Men and women shout over one another. Handhelds blip at their owners, heartbeat-quick music shudders, and signs shimmer with fast-moving pictures—a school of fish, a man running, a woman with kohl around her eyes. Somewhere, a lamb’s bleat surfaces above the din. My head goes numb.

The wall of wives presses in against me as we jostle through the packed concourse. Between their shoulders, I catch sight of a man with bread-crust brown skin tinkering on a handheld. Another, with darker skin and blue clothes that ripple and shine like oil, changes the symbols on the sign above the awning of a shop. And another, with pink-blushed pale skin and metal gauges embedded in the soft flesh of his ear, hands out little scraps of paper covered in print. There are women, too, near none of them wearing skirts long enough to cover their boots, and some in men’s trousers. They lord over shops selling handhelds and painted birds and fish as big as my forearm. They shout and boss as loud as men, and smile with all their teeth.

It’s too much. All I can do is hold the platter level, try to keep my feet, and concentrate on the long trail of hair hanging down Kamak’s back in front of me. I pray for it to be over, for us to reach the safety of another crewe’s ship, and leave this pressing crowd behind.

And in the heavens, we will make the world anew, I repeat to myself. We will make the world anew.

The roar of voices dulls as we leave the main concourse. We file through a dim, narrow hall, and stop suddenly.

“Are we there?” I whisper to Kamak. “Is it the Æther?”

She gives me a tight-lipped look that means I should know better than to speak.

Ahead, the rumble of a bulkhead door breaks the silence. Our little parade starts forward and stops again almost immediately.

My father’s greeting carries up the corridor. “So Brother Fortune.”

“So Brother Cerrec.”

Their voices drop so we can no longer hear. I shift from one foot to the other and wish I could lay down the tray of eggcakes. Sweat slicks my palms. The electric light grid above me snaps and clicks.

And then they are calling for me.

“Ava.” My great-grandmother Hannah snaps her fingers. “Come.” Her milky blue eyes magnify in the brittle pair of glasses she’s had to herself since my great-grandmother Laral died.

The women guide me forward. Somehow I manage not to drop the tray, although I’m sure my eyes are wide and rolling like a frightened goat’s. The men at the head of the procession part to let us through, and suddenly I am standing beside my father and Jerej, facing a man with black, laceless boots and a patriarch’s stole. In the split second before I remember to look away, not to look on his face, I see he is sharp jawed and handsome for a silver-haired man, despite a pocked field of radiation burns across one cheek. But his mouth is hard. Behind him, I catch a glimpse of a ship docked, its cargo bay open and filled with members of a dark-haired crewe. The Æther. My heart lifts.

“My daughter, Parastrata Ava,” my father says.

I dip my head and curtsy, holding out the platter in front of me as an offering. “Honored to come to your home, Æther Fortune.”

I feel his hand beneath my chin and the cool metal of his many rings. “Let me look on the bride.” He tilts my face up to his. I hold still as a stunned bird under his hand and cast my eyes to the side as he studies me.

A young man stands behind Æther Fortune. He is a head taller than me, with thick black hair cut close to his head and irises the blue of ozone burn. He keeps his hands clasped behind him. Like a magnet finding its match, his eyes lock on mine.

Luck. My heart skitters. Luck, grown, as I am. I would drop my gaze if I could. No proper so girl should stare at a man like this. But his look holds me as steadily as the hand beneath my chin.

Æther Fortune releases his grip. I fade gratefully down into a curtsy, the platter of eggcakes still held out in front of me. My fingers tremble.

“This is my eldest son, Æther Luck, heir to the captaincy,” Fortune says to my father and brother.

I inch my eyes up above the stack of cakes. Luck executes a small bow. He flicks a brief smile at me, and I duck back behind the platter. My heart pumps heat into every corner of my body. It is in my breasts and my toes, and suddenly I am aware of hidden corners of myself I never knew existed. Luck, heir to the captaincy. And me, a bride.

T he Æther is vast compared to the Parastrata. Its ceilings rise a good meter above our heads and the rooms circle off one another in a labyrinth. But at least the gravity is back to bearable. The Æther crewe eats with men and women separate, like we do, but their galley is so large they don’t need to eat in shifts, men and boys, then women and girls. Little bowls of real salt and oil rest in the center of the galley tables, and the thers make free with them.

“Luxury,” Hannah sniffs, but I see her sprinkle a heaping pinch of salt over the sticky pearl rice the Æther crewe favors.