Sound Page 18

  We arrive at a service lift I missed on my way in. A metal bar sticks out of the seam where the double doors meet. Isha leans her weight against it, and the doors roll back, revealing a car with a thick carpet of damp debris and spattered stains on the walls. A single emergency light strip fills the carriage with a dull blue glow.

  “This thing still runs?” I ask, incredulous.

  Isha bobs her head. “Everything runs.” She looks at me and waggles a finger. “Everything runs, except when we don’t want it to run.”

  Fantastic. I make a mental note not to piss off Isha any more than I already have.

  She smiles and holds out a hand, inviting me into the lift. “After you.”

  The car shrieks as it jolts into motion. I brace myself against the corner to keep from falling, but Isha barely moves.

  “What happened here?” I lift my foot to examine something sticky on the bottom of my boot.

  “Hubris,” Isha says. “Sloth.”

  I frown. “I mean, did everyone leave you behind, or . . . ?”

  “Not all of them.” The lift picks up speed as it rises, its indicator lights strobing across Isha’s face. “Would you want to see the bodies?”

  My heart stops. “What?”

  “The bodies,” she repeats matter-of-factly. “The ones that stayed.”

  A chill runs through the pit of my stomach. “I . . . I don’t know . . .” Did she kill them? Is that what she wants to show me? And if I answer wrong, will she add me to their number? I swallow. “Do you . . . do you want to show them to me?”

  “Oh, they would like that.” Isha reaches for the lift’s controls. “They’re so lonely. No one to mourn for them except us.”

  “What about my friends?” I ask.

  Isha cocks her head to the side. “Do they want to stay here, too?”

  “No,” I say quickly. If I run, will she chase me? “No, we’re expected on Enceladus. We . . . we only stopped because they’re sick. Once we have some meds, we’ll be out of your hair.”

  She shrugs. “Suit yourselves.” The lift slows and then jerks to a stop. “Here we are.”

  I follow Isha down another dim corridor. A square of light shines at the far end, brilliantly sharp after all this darkness. As we approach, I glimpse the outline of bare trees through the fogged glass.

  “Are those your gardens?” They must be, except most larger ships and stations keep tropical plants or evergreens aboard, not deciduous trees. How are the gardens supposed to keep your spirits up with no green?

  Isha pauses with her hand on the latch and nods. “But you have to be very quiet.” She drops her voice to a whisper. “They’re sleeping.”

  “Who?” I ask, but she’s already pulled the release and pushed the door back into its pocket.

  Sunlight rolls over us. My skin turns to gooseflesh at its touch, and for a moment, I forget everything but the warmth of it. I close my eyes against the silvery glare. The vitamin D tablets I’ve kept us on throughout the flight are fine for staving off illness, but they’re nothing like sunlight, even simulated sunlight. Never mind the madwoman who led me here, or the fact that I’m not one hundred percent sure she won’t murder me. I feel fully alive for the first time in weeks.

  “We tend them when we can,” Isha says, close to my ear.

  I open my eyes to a squint. A good-sized garden spreads out before us, with naked trees stretched thin along the perimeter and brown patches of what once must have been flower beds spotting the dead grass. I don’t understand what I’m seeing on the ground at first. Logs, maybe, or the foundations of a crumbled wall? I step into the garden.

  “What . . . ?” I start to say, but then my brain catches up. Bodies. The shapes laid out so neatly on the grass are bodies.

  Isha passes me and circles a group laid around a tree like wagon spokes. Each rests its head over the roots and points its toes at the sky. Someone has arranged their limbs so their hands rest folded over their rib cages. The only smell is the subtle mineral odor of water and dirt. They’ve been out here long enough for the environs to soak up the smell of rot.

  “What happened? Did you do this?”

  “Yes, yes.” Isha murmurs, bending over one corpse with long blond hair and picking a fallen leaf from the remnants of a shirt. “They were sick. We brought them here to rest.”

  “You killed them?” My throat closes on itself.

  Isha looks up sharply. “No. They’re not dead. They’re resting.” She looks down at the blond woman again and smiles. “We take good care of them. Soon they’ll be well again. Soon they’ll wake up.”

  I back away. “I should go. My friends need me.”

  “Yes.” Isha stares off at the tree-cloaked far wall, deep in thought, and then snaps her attention back to me. “Yes, your friends. We should see to them.”

  I hold up a hand. “I don’t think you should . . . I mean, I don’t know if they need a doctor after all. I think I can take care of it.”

  Isha’s look darkens. “You think we’re not a good doctor, because we let them fall ill.” She sweeps a hand across the tableau behind her. “We did everything we could to keep it from spreading. Some diseases, you don’t see them coming. Too late to stop them. You can treat them and pray. And we were only Kaede-san then.”

  “No.” I swallow and open my eyes too wide, like Ava says I always do when I’m lying. Maybe she didn’t kill these people, but whatever did has obviously driven her stark raving mad. “It’s just . . . you’re busy here with so many patients. I’m sure I can sort it myself.”

  “Nonsense.” Isha scoffs. “They’re sleeping. And your friends’ illnesses are more acute, are they not?”

  “Yes,” I admit, against my better judgment.

  She nods. “Then we’ll go to them. She took an oath. Geneva. Kaede swore.”

  “Fine.” I don’t want to push her. She was a doctor once. Maybe there’s enough knowledge left tucked up in the corners of her memory that she could help. And besides, she knows the way back to the dock better than I do. If she really wanted, she could find the Mendicant herself and leave me to find my own way through the station’s lightless halls.

  I roll back the door to the sleeping berth and peer into the darkness. “Cass?”

  “Miyole?” Her voice croaks from disuse.

  I move aside to let Isha in. “I brought help.”

  Cassia’s eyes roll and widen. “What . . . what is that?”

  “We are Isha.” The old woman draws close to the bed, the soiled, tattered ends of her cloak trailing after her. She sits at Cassia’s side. “And you are the sick.”

  Cassia looks to me, her face full of barely lucid horror.

  “It’s all right.” I try to sound confident. “She’s a doctor.”

  “She’s a witch,” Cassia whispers as Isha reaches out and gently presses the lymph nodes beneath her jaw.

  “Yes,” Isha agrees, taking Cassia’s limp arm. “That, too.” She lays two filth-stained fingers against the inside of Cassia’s elbow, feeling for a pulse.

  I chew my lip. “She has a concussion,” I say. “She was on the mend at first, but now . . .” I trail off as Cassia’s eyes flutter closed.

  Isha inspects Cassia’s bandage. “Hmm.”

  I pace to the opposite side of the bed. Maybe I should have taken her to Rubio first. It’s hard to tell which of them is worse. I turn. “Do you think . . .”

  Something catches the yellow light creeping in from the hall and flashes in the corner of my eye.

  I whirl around. “What—”

  Isha has a knife in her hand, an ugly, narrow thing like the kind used to debone chickens. In one swift movement, she draws the blade down the soft flesh of Cassia’s inner arm and ducks to lick up the beads of blood that rise in its wake. Cassia groans in pain.

  “Kat le!” I scramble across the bed. “Get away from her, you bloody jholar!”

  Isha jumps up and backs into the corner, quick as a lizard scaling a drainpipe, and points the knife
at me. “Stay away. You asked us. You asked us to.”

  I skid to a stop well short of the knife. “I never asked you to cut her open!”

  I glance back at Cassia. Blood spills onto the bed. I hurry to her side, rip loose one of the sheets, and bunch it up over her arm. Direct pressure. Elevation, the part of me that remembers my medic training recites, while the rest of me screams a string of obscenities. I hold the sheet tight against Cassia’s wound and raise her arm above her heart.

  I never should have brought a madwoman back to our ship, even a madwoman who claimed to be a doctor. Scratch that. Especially a madwoman who claimed to be a doctor.

  “We were helping.” Isha sounds hurt.

  “Screw your bloody help!” I shout, and burst into tears.

  Three weeks ago, my worst problem was a crabby Dr. Osmani, and now I’m stranded on a derelict station with two incapacitated crewmates, a knife-wielding witch doctor, a useless cat, and my own fraying line to reality. We’re not going to make it. Never mind bringing Nethanel back from the deep; we’re going to die here ourselves.

  Isha lays a filthy hand on my shoulder. “It’s not her head.”

  I shrug her away. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Look, girl.” Isha kneels beside the bed and begins unwinding Cassia’s bandage. “It’s not her head.”

  “Don’t touch her,” I spit.

  “We can help, see?” Isha smiles at me, tentative. “The sickness, it’s not in her head. It’s in her blood.”

  “What do you mean?” I grip Cassia’s arm tighter.

  Isha raises her head and breathes in deep. “It’s in the air. Poison in the air, poison in her blood.” She cocks her head at me. “Maybe in your blood, too.”

  “My blood?” I echo, and shake my head. All Cassia’s symptoms point to a concussion. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m not sick.”

  “Aren’t you?” Isha’s stare drills into me, and I remember the constant headaches and my mother’s voice as her phantom ship bore down on us.

  “No,” I say too quickly. “I mean, not like her.”

  Isha thumbs the knife. “If you let us taste . . .”

  “No. You’re not touching anyone else with that thing.”

  Isha glowers at me. “You have to let us help. You have to let us taste.”

  “Chup kar, krūra vyakti,” I growl back.

  “You want her to die?” Isha nods at Cassia’s gray-pale face. “We can find the poison. We can make her better.”

  I look from Cassia to the witch doctor and her knife. All I have are bad choices. “Do you have to use that?” I look pointedly at the knife.

  Isha frowns. “No,” she says, but she sounds disappointed.

  “Fine,” I say. “Hand me that bandage.”

  I draw the needle from my arm and hold the syringe up to the light. “Is that enough?”

  “Maybe,” Isha says.

  I glare at her and roll down my sleeve. I can’t believe I’m doing this.

  “Probably.” She nods.

  “Good.” I deposit the blood into a narrow vial and hold it out to her. “Bottoms up.”

  Isha sips from the vial, pinkie out, as if she’s having high tea. She smacks her lips, and then nods. “Poison.”

  My stomach twists. “What kind?” Who knows if there’s any truth to what she says, or if I’m only feeding her delusion.

  Isha closes her eyes and rotates a wrist above her head like a weather vane. “From the air. Carboxyhemoglobin.”

  I search my memory. I know I’ve heard that word before, but where? Then it comes to me, and my eyes fly wide. “Carbon monoxide poisoning? Is that what you mean?”

  Isha nods furiously and points at me. “That’s the one. That’s the one.”

  I press the heels of my palms to my forehead. Of course. Cassia’s headaches, Rubio’s hallucinations. They all make sense now. We covered carbon monoxide poisoning briefly in my medic training, but we never spent much time on it. Early explorers used to come down with it all the time when their air cycling systems failed or their secondary fuel shrouds ended up perforated, but you hardly heard of it happening anymore, especially since ship makers dropped biological fuels altogether. But the Mendicant is old enough to be a hybrid.

  “Yes,” Isha agrees. “Carbon monoxide. Sometimes we forget the words.”

  I look at Rubio asleep on the couch, his face slack and sedated. “That’s what’s wrong with him, too, then?”

  Isha raises the empty blood vial. “We can find out.”

  I make a face. “I don’t think so.” I start for the door, then think better of it and point at Isha. “You stay here. Don’t touch him.”

  Cassia’s eyes flutter open and struggle to focus on me.

  “Hey.”

  She tries to answer and fumbles with the oxygen mask covering her mouth. I catch her hand before she can pull it away.

  “You’re okay.” I squeeze her palm. “You have to leave that on. You’ve been sick.”

  She winces and lifts her injured arm so she can see it above the oxygen canister and mask. We were out of skinknit bandages when I patched her up, so I had to give her old-fashioned sutures and wrap her forearm in clean strips of cloth. She’ll heal, but she’s going to have a very nasty scar. Cassia raises her eyebrows. What happened?

  “Long story.” I scowl, thinking of Isha. She could be up to all kinds of mischief out there in the ship, especially with Rubio still too weak to stop her. Hopefully she hasn’t turned him into a shish kebab by now.

  I pull my own mask up over my nose and mouth and rise to go, but Cassia tightens her grip.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say. “I have to check on Rubio.”

  I find Isha in the common room. She stands facing the wall, smearing something red over its blank surface in the outline of a circle. A moment passes before I realize what it must be. Blood.

  “What are you doing?” I stride over and make a grab for the small bowl of thick red liquid she holds.

  Isha backs away, hissing, and hugs the bowl to her chest with red-stained fingers. Tibbet, watching us from beneath one of the torn lounges, flattens his ears against his head. I tried holding an oxygen mask over his face, too, but he scratched me.

  “I’m sorry.” I hold up my hands. “Sorry.”

  Isha eyes me suspiciously. Her breather hangs loose around her neck. “We’re finishing the treatment.” She dips her two forefingers into the bowl and gives me a warning look before placing them on the wall. “Preventative measures.”

  “Right.” I nod as if this was not completely mental. “Just out of curiosity, where did you get that?” I point at the bowl.

  “It’s our own.” She smiles and paints another swoop of the arc. “Only the best.”

  I glance at Rubio, propped up on the sofa in a cocoon of thermal blankets. He blinks at me groggily and takes a deep draw on his oxygen canister. At least he doesn’t look like he’s been bled in service of Isha’s art project.

  Isha completes the large circle and adds a smaller one at its center.

  “What is it you’re drawing?” I step forward to inspect her work.

  “This ship is sick.” Isha collects another daub and adds a line radiating out from the center circle to the larger one. She shakes her head. “Flying without a Wheel.”

  “A wheel?” An image flashes through my head—the wheel behind the soot on the wall of the burned-out Rover ship. “The Wheel of Heaven?”

  Isha nods. “This station had no Wheel, and look what happened. We fixed it, though, didn’t we? All better now.” She shakes a finger at me. “We thought Rovers would know better.”

  “Us?” I laugh, and then bite my tongue. The more people think we’re simple Rovers, the better. Even deranged hermits with dissociative identity disorder.

  Isha frowns at me, thinking. “Maybe not you and the boy,” she says at last. “But that girl is, certain. You should listen to her.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think she believes in your Wheel
anymore.”

  “Believe in the Wheel.” Isha snorts as if I’ve suggested milking dogs, and adds another spoke.

  “Don’t you?” I glance up at the immense red design forming on the wall.

  “You think magic is real?” Isha pauses with her hand in the blood bowl and arches an eyebrow at me.

  “No,” I say cautiously. What is the protocol when a self-proclaimed witch asks you if you believe in magic?

  “Neither do we.” Isha looks over her work. “The Wheel gives us strength here.” She touches her forehead. “And here.” She touches her heart.

  “So it’s like a psychological trick?” I say. “If you think you’re safe, you’ll fly like you’re safe?”

  “Not a trick,” she says. “A balm.”

  “A balm?” I wrinkle my nose.

  Isha grunts in exasperation. “How many ways can you die out here? Radiation poisoning, decompression exposure, hypothermia, suffocation, immolation.”

  I shrug. Any Deep Sound applicant can recite the dangers in her sleep. “Your point is?”

  “Would anyone venture off her sad, safe world if she didn’t have some hope to cling to?”

  “My world’s not sad,” I shoot back. It’s hardly safe, either, but that doesn’t seem like the best argument to make right now.

  Isha looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read—compassion, maybe. It doesn’t fit her face. “Then you’re a lucky one, aren’t you?” she says.

  I don’t answer. That cold, sick guilt rolls over me again. I know I’m lucky. I could have died many times over between the day the hurricane hit and now. I’ve had more education than I ever could have dreamed of if I’d lived out my life in the Gyre. But now that I remember my mother and the home I lost, I know that luck didn’t come cheap.

  “No,” Cassia says. “Absolutely not.” She clutches Tibbet to her chest and strokes his fur.

  “It’s only a little thing,” Isha says. “Fair payment for saving three lives.”

  “Cass—” I start to say.

  “No,” she interrupts, and glares from me to Isha. “You can have anything else you want, but you’re not taking my cat.”

  Isha snorts. “What do we want with some gunk in a barrel? Blankets? Boots? Not enough. We want the cat.”