“It’s only an elevation shaft, Ava.” She says it soothing, like I would talk to the goats, and her tone unknots my snarl of panic enough to keep me running.
We race to the doors. I push myself faster, air coming hard. The nearest door must sense our weight on the floor tiles and begins to slide open. Iri and I turn our bodies sideways to fit through and careen into the tiny room. I spin. Jerej and the Watches shove through the crowd and bear down on us. The doors pause, sensing their weight.
I look up. There—a grid pad beside the sliding doors. It’s larger than the pattern lock on the latchport, its symbols a snarl of lines and curves all pressed against one another. And then above the grid, a panel with an orange-yellow line of light shining around its edges, some like the one inside the women’s quarters aboard the Æther. I slap my hand against it just as Jerej reaches us. He shouts, but the door slides closed, cutting off his cry. My stomach drops as we shoot up the shaft.
CHAPTER
.10
Our first blind trip up the shaft takes us to the repairs tier, where carracks and frigates and barques lie with their innards spilled open, solar sails tattered and rent, hulls hefted up on lifts, while sparks rain down around them. We try again, and the shaft dumps us out in a long, narrow hallway somewhere in the depths of the station, lined with greasy windows. Barracks for the station’s crews, I guess, or those wanting a cheap bed between ship transfers.
We duck under lines of damp laundry strung across the corridor. A thickset girl with a metal barrel balanced on one shoulder nudges her way through the tangle. We press flat against a wall to let her pass. An older woman with lank hair and sores clustered around her mouth stares at us from one of the doorways, a grubby-faced baby toddling across the cramped room behind her. Farther on, another door swings open behind us. A pink-faced man with rotten teeth leans out.
“You ladies after some company?” He takes a wavering step toward us. The sour reek of alcohol wafts from his soiled clothes. “I got a room here if you want some company.”
Iri shakes her head and presses me forward.
“One drink? We’re friends, aren’t we?” the man calls after us. “We can be friends.”
We stride away as fast as we can without running. The hall goes on and on, smeary windows narrowing into infinity. I think the roof must be slowly sloping down on us, and any minute I’m sure another door will swing open, someone worse will block our path. The Parastrata’s wives are full of stories of girls who’d wandered away from their crewes being robbed or raped or cut up in tiny pieces and fed into nutrition recyclers.
Finally the hall ends in a round metal service door. Iri pulls it open and steps into the dark. I try to follow, but the moment I put my foot down, the ground shifts, as if I’m wheeling into a fall. I cry out and reach for Iri’s hand.
“Here, Ava.” Iri catches me.
The wheeling stops as suddenly as it started. I look around. We’re standing in a long service shaft. The lights above us fizz on, but behind us and ahead, the shaft fades roundly into blackness. I turn to my right, to the door that brought us here. The dim corridor with its grimy windows has flipped on its side, so all the windows now lie where the floor and ceiling should be.
“What . . . ,” I start to ask.
“It’s the gravity,” Iri whispers. “The stationmakers changed its direction to make it easier to move things between levels.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I never knew men could change gravity. I thought it was only something that was.
“Forward or back?” Iri asks.
“Forward,” I say. The Parastrata’s tier hangs somewhere ahead or above us, but I don’t want to think on what might be lurking in the tiers even lower than where we are now.
We walk. As we reach each new section, the lights click on before us and snuff out behind. Our footsteps echo into the dark. Each tier has its own door, with its own narrow window looking out onto the tipped level. Someone has bolted vinyl plates stamped with symbols beside each doorframe. I stare at them hopelessly, praying the trick of reading will come to me if I stare long enough. After we’re bound, I’ll show you how to read. . . .
My Luck. Have they sent him out to meet the Void? He’s the captain’s own son. Surely his life must be worth more than mine. Someone on his crewe will save him, as Iri saved me. Or maybe if we tell the right people, they can help us. We can save him ourselves.
How many more levels above us? How far have we come? At last we peek through a door and find a concourse stretched broad in front of us, bustling with people lugging bags and pushing hover trolleys of small crates. I crack the door to get a better look. The sweet smell of well-scrubbed air rushes in, along with the crackle of advertisements from nearby speakers and handhelds. This level is some like the Parastrata’s, with its vendors and food stands, but brighter. Boxed holograms of ferns and flowers extend down the center of the concourse, flanked by white benches.
“The passenger tier,” Iri breathes in my ear.
“Security alert.” A cool, toneless woman’s voice interrupts the stream of advertisements. I shrink back. The voice echoes up the shaft. “Sixteen year-old girl reported missing. Last seen in the company of an older female relative, believed to have abducted the girl. Both have red hair, of merchant tribe descent. Please report to the nearest security station if you see these individuals. Code five-two-nine.”
Iri and I stare at each other, wide-eyed. Damn. I slam the door shut. How did they do that? How did they know? Jerej or my father must have talked someone into helping to hunt us down. They must have told them what I did. No one will help us now. I slump against the door, my heart choking me. I have to push the thought of Luck away, or I’ll lie down here and never get up again. We have to keep moving.
I clear my throat. “What now?”
Iri kneels at the center of the shaft. “I thought on that.” She turns out her pockets and produces rolls of homespun cloth, copper handspools, dull, greening coins from a bridal headdress, seemingly anything of value she could fit in her pockets before she fled.
“For trade,” she says.
“Trade?” I echo her dumbly.
Iri nods. “I know someone what could help us groundways.”
“You know someone groundways?” I gape at her, the danger of Jerej and the Watches momentarily forgotten. She might as well have said she knows some Void zephyrs.
“I do.” Iri sets her mouth in a line, as if she’s unsure how much to trust telling me.
I crouch down next to her and finger one of the corroded coins. “Who?”
“You remember,” Iri says slowly. “You remember when your mother went on to the Void, how the so doctor’s daughter came aboard to sort things with your great-grandfather Harrah?”
Her strange figure, with only her hands and face uncovered, passes before my eyes like a ghost. Turrut and Hah. Maybe she’s come to snatch you ’way.
“I remember.”