Luck looks down at me. He blinks into my face, as if he’s trying to figure out how to mesh me with the smallgirl he knew five turns past.
I fumble for his hand and fold my fingers around his, trying to press what I feel in through his skin. “I’ve been practicing those fixes Soli taught me. The ones you said I could learn. You remember?”
He laughs. “What, still? After all these turns?”
I drop his hand, hurt. “I taught myself others.”
“No, I mean . . . I’m only surprised, is all. That’s none proper for a so girl, from what I saw on your Parastrata. I thought you’d be too busy with Priority. But I’m happy. I’m glad.” He reaches out and squeezes my fingers lightly.
“Me too.”
“Do you think . . .” He stops and glances at the entrance to the garden room. “Have you ever been swimming?”
“Swimming?” The word curls strange around my tongue. When we were smallgirls, Llell dared me to go floating in the water converter’s desalination pool. We’d heard about some of the older boys sneaking down there, how the water was supposed to float you some like the Void would, but some not. More like a giant hand holding you up, one of them had said. But Modrie Reller caught us ankle deep in the filter reeds and made us drink from the salt pool until we vomited brine. Llell and I never went back.
I shake my head.
“Come on.” Luck tugs my hand. “I’ll show you.”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“You’ll be all right,” Luck says. “I swear. I know this ship backward. I know when the night Fixes come and go.”
I hesitate.
“You trust me,” Luck says. “Right so?”
I frown. “You swear it?”
“I swear it.” Luck smiles. “Don’t you want to live some before we’re bound?”
I think on it. In another few months I might be weighted down with a baby like Soli and busy learning to manage the women at Luck’s mother’s side. But tonight, no one is looking for me. No one will notice I’m gone from my bed. It is the last night before I am fully a woman.
And so I let him lead me from the garden.
CHAPTER
.6
I follow Luck through a corridor that forks near the workrooms, and then down a laddered hatch into the hanging serviceways in the bowels of the ship. Heat rises on the wet air, reminding me of the dyerooms on the Parastrata. We walk single file above the humming tops of the generators, bathed in smudgy orange light.
A man’s voice rings out in the echoes ahead. “. . . go and double back to get it.”
Luck freezes in the middle of the gangway.
“Night Fixes?” I whisper.
Luck nods.
“I thought you said—”
“Hsssh.” He pulls me after him, back the way we came. We round a corner, and Luck points soundlessly to a double-doored service locker built into the wall. I nod. He pulls both doors open with a faint squeak. Heart knocking, I step over a scatter of loose fixers and dead wires and wedge myself behind a crisscross of rebar, deep in the shadow of the locker. Luck jumps in after me and pulls the door closed. We crush together against the back wall.
“Stay still,” he whispers.
His shoulder presses into my nose. He smells of pulped grass and faint sweat masked by soap, some kind of indefinable Luck smell that lights me up to my heels. I let my hand rest where it’s fallen on his chest and breathe slowly, trying to muffle the sound against him so the night Fixes won’t hear us.
“. . . point in him taking another wife, you know?” The voices grow louder.
“Talk on,” a second man answers the first. “I’ve got some trouble what with only two.”
Their steps ring close. Luck presses me against the wall. We both try to breathe shallow and slow, try not to shift our feet into the metal balanced precariously against the wall. Luck lowers his nose so it rests on top of my head. His breath is warm in my hair. I can make out every thread in his shirt, every lock of dark hair touching his neck, every pulse of blood working the veins under his skin. I should be worried about the Fixes, but all I can think on is the gentle bob of Luck’s Adam’s apple and the way his chest grazes mine.
“You see the bride they brought?”
“Yeh.”
“She’s got something odd to her, but I can’t figure it.”
“Dunno. To me, they’re all some odd with that hair and the way . . .” The voices fade below the generators’ hum.
Luck and I stand fused in the back of the service locker. This is the last place I should feel safe, but I don’t want to leave.
Luck steps back slowly, carefully. “I’m sorry,” he says, though I’m not sure if he means for touching me again or for what his crewemates said about me. He smiles nervously and pushes the doors open, holds out a hand to help me from the locker. “There’s only the one team of night Fixes. We shouldn’t see anyone else.”
My heart is still skipping. I laugh, half from relief, half from giddiness. The sound fits strange in my throat, like it’s coming from some other girl. Maybe the girl I could be if I was Luck’s wife, without doors to lock me in at night. I grab his hand, and he pulls me into an almost-run. I feel as if the gravity’s low, as if my feet are barely touching the floor as we fly around corners and down a spiraling ramp.
Luck skids us to a stop in front of a heavy, wheel-locked door. He sets his shoulder against the wheel and pushes until it gives with a brief shriek of metal.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
He points to a lettered sign bolted to the door and grins.
I look up at the sign. I know the letters for my own name, A-V-A, but beyond spotting two As in the loops and lines on the door sign, I can’t figure it. I bite my lip and look at Luck. I shake my head.
His smile dies.
“I’m sorry.” My voice wavers. “I lied.”
“Don’t worry on it now.” He smiles at me again, gently, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin tingles at his touch. “We’re going swimming.”
He leans against the door. It swings open on a dim, sloping room filled wall to wall with water. Light from bioluminescent fish and phosphorous deposits crusting the depths lend the water and air an uncanny glow. My mouth falls open. I know it’s only the Æther’s desalination pool, but I feel as if I’ve stepped out of time, as if I’ve stumbled into the Mercies’ private realm.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
When crewes like ours come across a water-bearing planet, we mostly find salt oceans or ice. On the Parastrata, we leach most of our salt out in tanks, but before the water can go through the finer filters and come out potable, it rests awhile in a pond lined with scrubber fish and plants designed to nip out the extra sodium. The Æther’s desalination pool dwarfs ours. It looks deep as two men and far enough across to swallow up the galley. Water weeds sway in the shallows.