Sound Page 2

  I check the temperatures and gas balances—chamber two needs another 0.78 parts per million of nitrogen—and program the misters to deliver the evening dose of nutrient rain. Then I lock the outer door, push a desk chair against the wall, and climb up into my favorite spot in the whole ship.

  Ships like the Ranganathan are grown, not built, which means the occasional imperfection. My lab is one such anomaly. The ceiling curves overhead on one side, cut by a ledge about two meters off the floor. If you shove a chair underneath and boost yourself up, you find an alcove hollowed out of the wall. At the far end of the alcove, a wedge-shaped viewport looks out on the endless expanse of space rushing by.

  I crawl inside and scoot close to the window. I even sleep here sometimes, when my bunkmates bring boys or girls back to our room for the evening.

  I pull off my standard-issue slippers, lean against the pillow I borrowed from one of the crew lounges, and wrap my old sari around me like a blanket. It was one of the few keepsakes from home I was allowed to bring—the first sari Soraya ever bought for me. I only have to run my fingers over the threadbare blue silk and embroidered horses parading around the hem, and I’m back in that Mumbai shop with the old-fashioned wooden floors, twirling in my new clothes.

  Soraya beams and claps for me. Oh, we must get you that one. It’s perfect on you. Isn’t it perfect on her, Ava?

  And then the shop lady, holding up another shimmering swath of cloth next to my face.

  Yes, yes, that one, too.

  That feeling—so light, and everyone smiling, pleased and unworried for once. Even Ava, who was always fretting over money, smiled. And I wore my new sari home on the train.

  “Feeling down?” Advani-ji asks kindly. “Vitamin D infusions can combat feelings of depression. . . .”

  “Hush.” I hit the mute button on my coms again.

  I stare out at the distant glimmer of stars. This is the real reason I signed on. There is no thrill like this on Earth. The depths look so perfectly still, and yet I know they’re alive with radiation, dust, and dark matter. Gravitational fields form tides around stars and pull their satellites along in the eddies. I can feel something moving out there, and moving in me, as if I am a bell sounding with some unseen resonance. I know that’s scientifically inaccurate. There’s not enough matter out there to transmit sound or sensation across the emptiness, but I feel its tug all the same.

  Something gives, like an ice floe breaking free from a glacier, and I waver on the cusp of remembering. Images flicker and flee behind my eyes—a red kite, a black bantam hen strutting on a white-hot roof, a barefoot boy running before me. They’re all there, waiting in a dark little box in my mind, spring-loaded. But do I want to let them out?

  When I was little, Ava used to take me down to the gaats once a year to light a candle in a little paper boat for my mother. To remember her, Ava said. But to remember her means remembering what I lost—the kite, the hen, her. It means risking the quicksand that could suck me down if I’m not careful, if I remember too long, too much. It means risking the small, ungrateful thought that always comes gnawing: Why didn’t my mother stay in the pilot’s seat when the wave came? Why didn’t she send Ava down to rescue me instead? Why couldn’t my mother have been the one to survive?

  I reach into my lab coat pocket and pull out my old handheld crow. It’s next to useless here, away from Earth and its satellites, or any of the people I might want to message, but there is one thing it can still do. I pull up the recordings saved on it, and find the one I want. Maybe today will be the day. Maybe today I’ll make it all the way through.

  Ava’s face appears on the screen, her dark hair swinging in a sharp, neat line at her chin. She wears the weather-worn jacket my mother gave to her before she died, and a stack of bangles on her wrist. Ava isn’t my real sister, but my mother took her in when she was sick and had nowhere else to go. My chest aches at the sight of her. I shouldn’t think those things. Ava loves me. She took care of me after the storm. If it weren’t for her, I never would have met Soraya or grown up with everything I could possibly want. I wish I could talk to her now. She’d tell me what to do about Dr. Osmani, or at least agree with me about what a bloody kuttiya she’s being, and she’d know exactly the right words to dispatch Rubio.

  “Hey, Miyole.” Ava tucks her hair behind her ears and leans closer to the camera. Behind her, her husband, Rushil, passes by in the kitchen, humming the tune to some old movie the two of them love. “Congratulations on getting into the DSRI. I know you’ve been aiming for it ever since you were a smallgirl, and Rushil and I, we’re some proud of you.”

  Rushil sticks his head out of the kitchen to wave. “Hi, Miyole!”

  Ava smiles over her shoulder at him, and then turns back to the camera. “Anyway, I know this means we won’t see you again for a while, so I wanted you to have this.” Her face goes serious. “It’s a recording I found in my sloop’s memory files earlier this year. I didn’t know when to give it to you, exactly. I was thinking maybe when you turned eighteen, but with you going away, now seems like the right time.”

  She leans forward to switch off the camera’s eye, and then pauses. “We love you, Miyole. I know if your mother were here, she’d be proud of you, too.”

  The screen goes black and silent, and then a rush of static kicks in, steady as monsoon rain. I know what’s coming next, but something hard lodges in my throat anyway, and suddenly I’m less certain I can listen at all.

  “Vector five, verified,” a woman’s voice reaches through the static. “Requesting landing coordinates.”

  My mother, Perpétue. When the hurricane came to our home in the Gyre, Ava spotted me and my friend Kai on our neighbor’s widow’s walk and held the sloop steady in the air while my mother climbed down to us. But then the waves came higher and harder. My mother saw the wall of water bearing down on us and pushed me up our ship’s emergency ladder first, but not in time for everyone. The waves pulled her down, and Kai, too. All my nightmares end that way, with a rogue wave and someone or something I love sucked under.

  Silence on the recording, and then: “Coordinates received. Sector B-point-294, field Delta. Assuming approach pattern.”

  We searched for my mother after the storm, but we couldn’t find her. The whole Gyre had been swallowed by the waves. I used to think that meant my mother might still be alive somewhere, floating on a half-sunk pontoon or lying in some Pacific recovery ward, waiting for her memory to return. But I see those thoughts for what they are now—childish fantasies. The first time I heard my mother’s voice on this recording, bits of memory I didn’t know I had forgotten came surging up at me. My mother’s uneven gait on the stairs, and an unmoored surge of joy and expectation. The buttery aroma of roast nuts in a paper bag. My mother cracking their shells with the flat of her knife. And I remembered what I knew all along—that if she was alive, she would have found me.

  The lump in my throat expands, and I break out in a cold sweat. Something moves deep in my brain. I want to forget, but the feeling is there in my blood and bones, my long-untrodden neural pathways. I try to make myself breathe, but I can’t. My palms burn where I cut them clinging to the emergency ladder. Panic swells in me, a great wall of dark water rising and rising until there is no sky. It’s not real, I tell myself. But it is. It’s inside me, always, guarding the passage back to my childhood and the Gyre, waiting to drown me if I stray too close.

  I stop the recording, breathing hard.

  I unclench my hands. My scars are still there, slick with sweat, not blood. It’s too much. I bury my nose in the sari. It’s better—easier—to be Soraya’s daughter, the Mumbai private-school girl who rides horses for sport and spends her evenings studying for exams. Then I can remember Rushil teaching me how to swing a cricket bat at Shivaji Park and the sound of Soraya’s old-fashioned teakettle, not my manman braiding my hair or rubbing lotion into her elbows before bed, not the bright and glassy sea after the storm.

  THMP.

 
I jerk my head up. That noise. It takes a few breathless seconds for my mind to travel back to the present. Something hit the viewport.

  My heart speeds to a steady pound. I lean forward. The viewport’s glass is clear, triple-paned, and incredibly strong. Like the rest of the ship, it’s made of a self-sealing nacre bioengineered to mimic the cellular structure of a mollusk shell. I don’t see a scratch on it. In fact, I don’t see anything but stars and the velvet emptiness of space. I crane my head down, trying for a different view. Nothing. I press my temple against the glass and strain my eyes up to check the vector above us.

  And then I see it—a tangle of beacon lights and metal floating above us, and a fine, icy cloud pouring into the black. I can’t process what it is at first.

  Air, it comes to me. That’s a ship, venting air.

  For a few seconds I can’t breathe, can’t react. I can only watch the strange vessel hemorrhaging in the eerie silence.

  The Ranganathan’s alarm blares to life. The overhead lights cut out and emergency lamps snap on, yellow, in their place. I freeze, as though a deadly current has run through my body, locking my muscles in place. Some part of me is back on the ladder in the midst of the hurricane, my mother screaming for me to climb.

  “ATTENTION, ATTENTION. CODE BLACK,” a woman’s calm voice carries over the insistent whine of the alarms. “ALL FIRST RESPONSE TEAMS TO STATIONS. ALL OTHER CREW MEMBERS, PLEASE PROCEED TO INNER ZONES. REPEAT, CODE BLACK.”

  That’s me. I’m supposed to be a first responder. But I can’t peel myself away from the window. The wave is coming. Lights of one of our security squadrons rush into view as the fighters scramble around the venting hulk. Part of the wreck separates from itself, scattering debris like petals. I breathe in sharp. That ship is breaking apart. But then the detached half fires its engines, finally illuminating the scene enough so I can see what’s truly happening.

  The battered piece of silica and metal venting its precious air is a Rover ship, and the other, the one wheeling around to face our fighters, is a stripper ship, the kind that preys on smaller, unallied vessels. Two of its mates light up against the darkness and silently maneuver into place at its flanks. Dakait. Pirates.

  Chapter 2

  I run through the echoing corridors, bare feet slapping, my lab coat and gloves forgotten, my med kit in my hands. For once, Advani-ji stays silent. Emergency lights flash yellow against the walls.

  “CODE BLACK, CODE BLACK. PLEASE REMAIN CALM. PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO THE NEAREST SECURE LOCATION.”

  I fly down the path to the hangar bay. If the fighters can tow in the dying Rover ship, that’s where they’ll take it. How much air do they have left? I turn up the volume on my coms and select the first response frequency. “Casualties expected,” a woman’s voice intones. “All medical personnel required.”

  “The volume of a cylinder is equal to its height times radius squared times pi,” I recite. Formulas sometimes help me keep my limbic system in check. If I can think about the volume of the Rover ship’s air reserves, I don’t have to think about—

  The wall to the left of me explodes. The corridor crackles with bursts of light as the wall screens shatter. An avalanche of rubble tumbles down, chunks of the Ranganathan’s living skin ripped free. I don’t recall falling, or even stopping, but I’m on the floor, shielding my face. And then the rumbling stops, and the only sound is the alarm blaring on behind the ringing in my ears. I raise my head. Dust hangs in the air. An enormous hunk of metal has pierced the ship’s outer wall and driven itself through the screens. It takes me a moment to recognize it. One of our fighters.

  “Breach, potential casualty, sim lab level, main corridor,” I say into my coms, even though my voice is shaking and I’m not sure they’re still working. Advani-ji emits a low, steady groaning noise that raises the hair on my arms.

  I clamber up the hill of debris, slipping and nearly slicing my arm open on a shard of wallscreen, until I reach the cockpit. Powdered bits of the Ranganathan’s nacre cloud the windows. I hesitate. Someone could be in there. Rubio, maybe. I don’t want to find him dead inside this fighter.

  I rub at the dust with my sleeve and peer in through the cockpit window. Empty. The eject lever has been pulled, and the seat itself, with its temporary life-support systems, is gone. I let myself breathe and immediately cough. A fine powder still fills the air, giving the corridor the unreal air of a misty Mumbai night. All around me, a crinkling-crackling sound rises. Tiny fissures in the walls disappear, and then a shiny, translucent layer of nacre begins to creep out from the crash site and up from the floor, sealing the fighter and all the rubble beneath it. The Ranganathan has begun to scar over.

  My coms babble with digital static. “Casualty report received,” I make out. “Dispatching first response team.”

  “Cancel,” I say back. My knees have begun to tremble. I want to sit down next to a clear stretch of wall, but I know if I do, I won’t get up again. Some other responder will have to take care of me instead of doing her job. “No casualties found. Breach countermeasures in effect.”

  I check myself over. No major injuries, just smudges of ash on my clothes and dust in my hair. My feet are a mess of tiny cuts and powdered nacre caked with blood. I should have been wearing my lab slippers, but they would have been ripped to shreds all the same. If I had been in the same spot a mere second earlier, I would have been crushed beneath the ship.

  The floor beneath me tremors, and the remaining lights flicker.

  “SURFACE BREACH. CODE BLUE, UPPER RECREATION LEVEL.” The calm warning voice returns. “CAUTION. PRESSURE SUIT USE ADVISED.”

  Surface breach. For a moment, I think that’s my report, scrambled in the relay, but no. Code blue. That means critical damage, affecting respiration systems. It’s a different breach altogether. I turn in place. My pressure suit and helmet are back in the lab, equidistant from the hangar. If I turn back, I might not make it to my post.

  During my last year at Revati, a crack formed in the seawall above East Mumbai and flooded the transit lines. Twenty-nine people died in lev train crashes. Another fifteen drowned. Hundreds more ended up in makeshift field hospitals on roofs and train platforms. I wanted to help. I wanted to give blood, but the emergency relief volunteers wouldn’t let me, because I was a kid. And Soraya wouldn’t let me go down to the field hospitals, even though she went herself. All I could do was sit at home watching the feeds, wishing I could seal up that crack in the wall and staunch the world’s hurt with my own blood.

  I know what I have to do now.

  The wreckage blocks my way, so I double back, find the nearest stair, and hurry up it to one of the sublevel access passages we use to transfer volatile or delicate materials we don’t want to risk taking through the main corridor. The floor is cold on my bare feet. The alarm still sounds, but the lights hold steady, illuminating the curve of the shell-gray walls. Ahead, I spot something blocking part of the hall.

  I slow. Another piece of the crashed fighter? It’s metal, but too mangled to identify. The nacre scarring is further along, coalescing into something slick and pearlescent. Behind me, a footstep scuffs the floor. I turn just in time to duck the butt of a slug gun. Adrenaline floods my system, flowing like hot iron through my limbs. I drop to the deck and crawl backward on my elbows until I hit the wreckage. A man stands over me, tall and thickset in patchwork body armor, his straight blond hair pulled back in a topknot. A dakait.

  He raises the gun like a bludgeon. There’s not time to think, nowhere to dodge with my back against the fighter’s remains. I turn my face to the wall. Force equals mass times acceleration. Force equals mass times acceleration. . . .

  A shout echoes down the hall. I open my eyes. Two of the Ranganathan’s guards top the nearest stair and come charging toward us. I want to call out to them, but my voice isn’t working.

  The dakait glances over his shoulder, and then smiles down at me. “Lucky girl.”

  He pivots away, and in that split second, I see
my chance. I can reach out and grab his ankle as he leaps over the twisted metal. I can trip him, cost him precious seconds, and the guards will be on him. I can stop him.

  I see my chance, but my hand won’t move. I can’t make myself reach out. I can’t stop him.

  The dakait clears the rubble and is gone. The guards thunder after him. I’m left alone with the sound of the alarms and my own shallow breath.

  I hyperventilate. I shake. And then I get to my feet again, because I’m still needed.

  I meet one of the guards running back to me, empty-handed.

  “You all right, Specialist?” he asks.

  I nod. My mouth is dry. “He got away?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  The guard shakes his head. “They’re brazen. Trying to board us . . .” He looks over his shoulder, wide-eyed. He’s skinny, with close-cut black hair, barely older than I am. “They had a bore ship. Drove it into the ceiling above the upper recreation gardens.”

  “Chaila,” I whisper. The dakait have to be mad, thinking they can take a DSRI ship. But even as I think that, I remember reading a news story back in Mumbai about a group of dakait taking control of a government supply ship for several hours before security forces regained control. The threat is real enough that we have our own fighters and guards.

  “You sure you’re all right?” the guard asks.

  “Yes.” I try to swallow. “I’m okay.”

  The guard straightens his back. “We’ll rout them, Specialist. Don’t worry. Find yourself a pressure suit and stay out of sight. It won’t be long now.”

  I nod, but as soon as he’s out of sight, I tuck my med kit under my arm and make my way forward through the access passage. If what I’ve seen is any clue, they’ll need all the medics they can get in the hangar bay.

  The hangar is chaos. Emergency crews teem across the floor, lugging chemical dousers and running gurneys. The Rover ship hunkers in the middle of the dock, leaking smoke from the gashes in its skin. A trio in maintenance jumpsuits leans a whining metal saw into the ship’s damaged hatch, trying to pry it open and release any survivors. White-hot sparks spout up and scatter embers across the floor. The thick chemical stink of smoldering metal and plastic burns in my nose.