Iri stacks the coins. They click-click-click like dripping water. “I knew her some.”
“Knew her?”
“Yes,” Iri says. “If we reach her, she’ll help.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
Iri looks up. “Because she helped before.”
Something in Iri’s tone tells me not to press. Whatever the so doctor’s daughter helped her do, it’s something that can’t be spoken aloud, even now, some ten turns later.
“Do you know where she is?” I ask instead.
“Groundways,” Iri says.
“But groundways where?”
“Earth. Mum—” Iri stumbles over the word. “Mumbai.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. A city, I think.”
I think on the colonies and outposts the men have come back telling us about. Little clusters of airtight buildings surrounded by fields of solar panels, nitrogen pumps, and domed dioxide converters. Even with Earth close packed as it is, could it be so hard to find a person once you’ve got it narrowed down to a single city?
“We send out a call to her?” I ask. “Is that what you’ve got in mind?”
Iri looks uneasy. She shakes her head.
“What then?”
Iri hesitates.
“You can’t mean . . .” I recoil. I think I know what Iri means to do. “Oh, no.”
“Only for a little bit, Ava.”
“No.”
“Don’t you hear? They’ve got the whole station looking for us. They could be listening if we send out a call. The only way to reach her safe is to go there. Go groundways. I heard some of the men talking once on how you can rent out a slot on a ferry ship. You can pay to keep your name hidden, even.”
“No,” I say again. “Iri, what are you thinking? We can’t.” As if in warning, the lights above us power down, leaving us in darkness. We’ve been still too long.
“Look how we are without the ship,” I say. Winded and lead boned, ready to cave to the Earth’s call. “Going groundways might kill us.” Or worse.
“The so doctor’s daughter bears it,” Iri says quietly. She knows the Word as well as I.
But who knows what living groundways has done to the so doctor’s daughter, how it’s changed her? Is she still even a woman, or do you have to become something else to bear the Earth beneath your feet?
“No, Iri,” I say into the dark. “Please, no.”
She touches my arm. “It’s the only way I can figure, Ava.”
“We can sign ourselves on a work detail with one of the industrial shippers. Or hire out here for some duties, doing cleaning or what. Or beg our way onto a new crewe. I heard Jerej say one time the Nau crewe’s too interbred. They need women—”
“Aviso de seguridad,” the woman’s smooth voice interrupts, rounding into its next language cycle.
Iri huffs. “No shipper’s going to hire us with that over our heads, and no crewe will take us either, not even the Nau. You forget, you’re dead as much to them as to the Parastrata. And I’m no prize as a wife either, especially on a crewe desperate for birthers.”
She glances down at her flat stomach and pulls her eyes away before she thinks I see. But I do. I see. It pains her. The weight of what Iri has done in saving me falls on me. She’s given up any chance of marrying again, given up all chance of trying for smallones, and all for me.
“I’ll do it.” I hear myself say the words. “I’ll go.”
Iri and I climb out of the service shaft into the passenger tier. The world tips again as gravity realigns itself, but I’m ready for it this time. We slip into the crowd pushing its way along the concourse. Men and women walk freely here, and we melt into the flow of print silks and hyperbaric suits, dark skin and pale. I look for Jerej and the Watches. No sign of them, not yet at least.
“Avis de sécurité.”
Doors line both sides of the concourse, each with a desk or booth stationed beside it. A dark-skinned woman with a burst of gold-tipped black curls, a white shirt cut to show off her collarbone, trousers, and knee-high boots sits by the nearest one, splay-legged on a chair. Behind her, a latchport joins her short-range sloop to the station. She tracks us a few paces out of the corner of her eye, expertly cracking a nut between her palm and the flat of a long knife. She crumbles the shell to the floor and pops the meat into her mouth. A deep, puckered scar trails down the side of her nose and interrupts her red-painted mouth on one side. I press closer to Iri.
“There,” Iri says. She steers us to a set of booths before the gangway to a fat passenger ferry. A ghostly image of a comet circling a planet rotates above the booths, and the woman on the other side of the glass wears the same symbol pinned to her lapel. She is all clean and smooth. Her dark hair shines, her lips shimmer an eye-aching pink-orange, and soft glitters and pigments dust all the planes of her face.
“Welcome to Hyakutake Stellar Transit.” The woman leans forward with a smile. “Our service is simply stellar! Where can we fly you today?”
“M-Mumbai,” says Iri.
The woman shakes her head, but her smile doesn’t falter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”
“Mumbai,” I blurt out.
She shakes her head again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Where would you like to go?”
I narrow my eyes. Something is off, the way her hair bobs exactly the same each time she shakes her head, the same lilts and dips on the same words.
“A hologram,” I say, and as I say it, I notice the faint transparency of the woman’s shoulders. I step to one side, and she shrinks flat in the glass.
Iri nods as if she knows this already. “Mumbai,” she repeats, clear and confident.
“Transit to Mumbai will require overland transport from landing point: Dubai International Spaceport,” the hologrammed woman says. A transparent map springs up in the top corner of the glass, showing the overland path the hologram proposes in glowing blue. “Would you like to book overland passage now or when you arrive?”
“What’s the cost?” Iri says.
The woman shakes her head again and smiles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Please say ‘now’ or ‘when I arrive.’”
“Now,” Iri says, sharp in her hurry. She checks over her shoulder. “What’s the cost, please?”
“Your ticketing options are displayed here.” The projection gestures to her left, and a long pattern of columned symbols expands above her hand. Sparse Vs and As scatter through the words, but they do me no good.
“Please select your preferred pricing choice by touching the screen.”
A toneless overhead voice slips itself between us, a soft warning. “Jĭng bào . . .”
I look at Iri, worried. Her lips press thin. “We need someone live,” she says to me. She scans the crowded concourse. “Some small boat, someone we can bargain with.”