I drop lightly to the floor. I leave my outermost skirt, with its clacking, flashing mirrors, but tie on my plainer inner skirts and move quietly to the door. Like all the doors I’ve seen aboard the Æther, this one shows a shaded view of its other side—an empty hallway. The door doesn’t have a pattern lock, but it doesn’t have a manual handhold for pulling, either. I feel along the door’s edges and on the wall where a control panel should be. Nothing. I kneel. A thin, red-lined square glows where the handhold might be. I press my palm to it experimentally. The door slides up with a silent swish of air, and I jump back, stifling a cry. The Æther crewe doesn’t even lock its women in at night. Strange.
I step into the hall and touch a matching square on the other side, sending the door hushing down behind me. An empty silence cottons the corridor, and deep in my veins I feel the familiar thrill of being the only one awake. I go left, away from the ship’s galley and entryway, into a section of the ship I haven’t seen yet. My feet pat-pat along the cool floor.
I pass a run of rooms lined with man-high tanks for trapping gas and tabletop centrifuges, miniatures of the one I’ve seen from afar in our engine room. I stand with my hand pressed to the waist-high glass, taking in the sterile order of the rooms. Diagrams crammed with mysterious writing paper the walls. I tiptoe on, past more workrooms. Then comes the men’s training room, with all the weight equipment sleek and new, not rust-speckled and wrapped in brittle sealing tape like aboard the Parastrata. I smile. Won’t Soli’s mother be shocked when she sends me off on some errand and I already know my way?
Beyond the training room, the floor slopes up gently. The air thickens with humidity and the smell of earth. Hydroponics. But when I reach the darkened room at the end of the corridor, I hesitate. This is nothing like Hydroponics on our ship, squeezing as much produce from as little nutrients and water as possible. I peer through the clear insulating curtain stretched across the door. Fog lies over a carpet of tender grass stretching all the way to the back of a room near large as the Parastrata’s outer bay. Dense shadows gather beneath the lemon trees staggered along the green. The far wall is one long window, looking out on the stars.
I kneel and lift the edge of the curtain so I can run my fingers over the grass. It tickles, but soft, the way a cat’s whiskers do. The men say down groundways people grow it simply to walk on, like a living rug, but that seems almost a sacrilege. I lean close and smell. Worms and crickets, like the ones in our compost bale. The soft, rich scent of rot.
I stand and pull the curtain aside. The grass is wet, and I can’t explain it, but I smell water in the air. Not the dead, boiled kind I’m used to, either, but something fresh, near live, steeped in gently pulped leaves and loam. I look up. Misters hang from a frame of girders above, alternating with darkened sun-glow lamps. I hesitate. Do the thers truly walk on something living? But they must, or else how could they reach those lemons? And if they don’t harvest the lemons, what’s the point of this room?
I put one foot over the threshold. The grass is soft, like a baby’s hair. I recoil, thinking maybe it’s as delicate too, maybe I’ve crushed it with my weight. But the shoots spring back the moment I pull my foot away. I take a hesitant step, and then another, letting the curtain fall closed behind me. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to walk on the old silk tapestries hanging in the Parastrata’s meet rooms, and now I think I know. This is luxury. This is Earth. I think I see a tiny piece of why Saeleas wept to leave it behind.
A curious tang from the lemons sweetens the air. I’ve heard the oldgirls say lemons are sour and only good for medicines, but my mouth waters all the same. I stop beneath a tree and lift one of the small, bright fruits. It fits perfectly in my palm. For a moment I picture myself snapping the lemon from its branch, sinking my teeth past its waxy skin, drinking the juice inside. But no. These aren’t my lemons, not yet. And even if they were, it would be none proper to take a whole one for myself.
When I reach the window, I press my palms against its cool layered glass and look out on the vast spill of stars. The skyport stretches beneath me, seeming to angle down from where I stand, even though I know up and down are only tricks of the ship’s gravity field. Bright repair patches stand out on the station’s skin, ships cleave to its sides like sucker fish, and clusters of antennae jut from each docking station, all of it bathed in the blue-white glow of the nearby moon.
“Parastrata Ava?”
I whip around. A man sits beneath the low-hanging boughs of the lemon tree behind me. My breath stops. His hands reflect the milky light of the moon, but the rest of him is too far in shadow to see. My heart shudders. This is it, the kind of mistake Llell warned me against. But I didn’t listen, and now here I am, caught and vulnerable, at the whim of a stranger who can overmatch both my strength and my word.
I dart from the window. I try to dodge past the tree, but my bridal bands drag down my steps. The man ducks out from beneath the boughs. I hobble left, but he catches me around the waist. I cry out. He claps a hand over my mouth.
“Ava, don’t fight.”
I struggle in his grip, try to pitch myself forward onto the ground.
“Ava. It’s me, Ava.”
He lets go, and I sprawl on the grass. I roll over, ready to kick him away, and finally get a good look at him. Luck. My head feels heavy and light all at once. Oxygen drunk. I drop my head against the soft grass and laugh. It’s only Luck.
He reaches a hand down to me. “You’re going to get us caught.”
“Sorry.” I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. “I didn’t know you were you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” I look down at my naked feet and try to brush away the clips of wet grass stuck to my skirt. What was I thinking, walking out alone in a strange ship? What if it hadn’t been Luck underneath that tree? And what must this boy . . . this man, who’s supposed to become my husband, think of me, walking his ship half dressed at night? Did he see me thinking on stealing his crewe’s lemons?
“I’m sorry. I’ll go.” I try to step around him.
“Wait.” Luck catches me by the arm. The warm grip of his fingers on my skin turns my whole body live, magnetized. I gasp. I stop. For the first time, I notice his feet are bare, too, and his hair rumpled.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” Luck says. “I go out walking sometimes when I get that way. Or swimming.”
We stare at each other, linked up skin to skin.
“My father asked me to come with him to the meet room tomorrow,” Luck says. “I figure you don’t have to guess much to know what that’s about.”
“With me here as a bride, you mean.” I keep my head down and finger the copper bands on my wrist, already greening my skin beneath their wires.
“Right so.” He loosens his grip on my arm and stands up formal and straight. “I’m sorry for touching you before we’re bound, Parastrata Ava. You were always some proper and . . .”
“I’m not.” My eyes flash up to meet his and—there—they find a place to rest safe again. It’s exhilarating, this feeling of doing something dangerous and right, all wrapped up together in my chest. I step closer. “I’m not only some proper. Not always.”