But when he passed, the so doctor’s daughter by his firstwife came meddling, sending messages and even booking passage to the skyport to find us. I was only a smallgirl then, but I remember the sight of her stalking down the gangways beside our old captain, my great-grandfather Harrah, her head swathed in dark cloth and her arms covered. The deep brown of her face, brown as paper, looking out at us. How tall she was, the same height as my great-grandfather, and how she stared into everyone’s eyes—even the men—as if she were looking for someone. She walked so sure and steady, as if she weren’t tracking the Earth’s taint through our ship.
Hah and Turrut snuck into her room in the passenger’s quarters while she rested and said they saw her head uncovered. They said her hair was black like mine and teased she was a bad spirit come up after me from the Earth. Maybe she come an’ snatch you away.
I cried and ran to find Iri, who brought me to Modrie Reller. That was the day they began dyeing my hair.
Modrie Reller tugs on a pair of hide gloves, the kind we use in the dyeworks.
“So soon?” I ask. They’ve only just dyed my hair three weeks ago. The Void black at my roots is no more than a thin line, unnoticeable unless you’re looking for it. I turn to Iri. Iri may be my great-grandfather’s widow, but she’s younger even than Modrie Reller, having been bound to my great-grandfather when she younger than I am now and he only a turn or two from death. She’s some like an older sister to me, telling the why of things in whispers when Modrie Reller’s back is turned. She levels her gaze at me but doesn’t speak. She flicks her eyes to Modrie Reller. Not now. Not in front of your stepmother.
“Kneel,” Modrie Reller says.
I do.
Only then does she continue. “This is your father’s order.” She pulls a dye tube wrapped in oilskin from deep in her pockets and twists off the cap. “This runend meet, he’s decreed you’re to be a bride.”
CHAPTER
.2
“A bride?” I try to keep my face calm.
“Right so.” Modrie Reller looks pointedly at my hair. “We don’t want the other crewes thinking something’s wrong with the Parastrata’s so girl.”
Iri smiles at me, kind. “Or passing off some palsied goats or brittle old plasticine in exchange for our Ava.”
I laugh, but nervously. A bride. I know from watching the girls who’ve gone before me that I ought to chirrup and gab at the news, or else flush pink and do a poor job of hiding my pleasure behind a demure smile. Instead all I feel is dizzy, like the gravity has failed. I’ve always known I would be a bride, and sometime around now, in my sixteenth turn. It’s the Mercies’ will, after all. But I was never one of those girls to play wedding when I was younger, like Nan, or run it over and over in my mind at night while I stared up at the bunk above me. Suddenly Jerej’s teasing weighs heavy on me. Has he known all this time?
“Who. . .” My throat sticks. I glance up and see Iri watching me close. “Who will it be?”
Modrie Reller shakes her head. “No knowing. A man from the Æther crewe, most likely. Your father was talking on how it’s time to reseal our trade contract with them. But don’t think on it. Your father and my Jerej will have it raveled.”
The Æther crewe. My heart skips a little faster. My friend Soli, my only friend in the whole Void beyond the Parastrata’s hull, and her birthbrother, Luck, both belong to the Æther. Soli and I met five turns past, when Æther Fortune brought all his wives and their smallones aboard our ship for trade talks.
The day they came aboard, Modrie Reller dragged me out of the kitchens and made me sit with my handloom in the sticky heat of the women’s quarters, where she and my great-grandfather’s widows were supposed to entertain the women of the Æther retinue. The whole room sweated in silence, perched on quilted floor pillows, fans flapping to stir the air. The men’s rowdy singing bled through the walls.
Modrie Reller pushed me down beside a dark-haired Æther girl with cocked-out ears and the same blue-veined, lucent shimmer to her skin all the spacefaring crewes shared after generations on generations hidden away from the sun—all except me, of course. I peeked over my loom at her as I pushed the thread tight with my shuttle. She was what I might look like if my hair grew out in its true shade, if I were taller and all the color had been bred out of my skin. Her clothes looked machine made, all the stitches tight and even. I watched as she wove a strand of the Æther crewe’s trademark red silk thread into her fabric.
She caught me staring and scowled. “What’re you looking on?”
I ducked my head and crouched over my own knobby weaving. “Nothing,” I said. “That’s some pretty, is all.”
“Oh,” she said, as if that were natural. “Right so.”
I swallowed and finished another row. I glanced at her again. “What’s your name?”
“Solidarity with the Stars.”
I blinked. “Come how?”
“Solidarity with the Stars,” she repeated, a bit of miff in her voice.
“Don’t you have a luckname?” I asked. On the Parastrata, all parents gave their children names that circled, so we could find our way if we were lost, they said.
“My name is a luckname,” she said.
“Isn’t.”
“Is,” she said, voice rising. “Don’t you know the Word? Where it says, Call to mind always what our ancestors desired; forget it not. That’s where it’s from.”
“Oh.” I picked at a thick snarl of wool. “It’s some long, isn’t it?”
“No,” Solidarity with the Stars said. “Least, not specially. We’re all named that way. My brother’s called Luck Be with Us on This Journey, only we call him Luck for short.”
We fell quiet again. Our shuttles knocked against the sides of our looms.
“You can call me Soli, if you want,” Solidarity with the Stars said, breaking the silence. “That’s how my brother calls me.”
She looked over and smiled, and it made me feel almost the same height. I smiled back.
“So, what’s yours?” she asked.
“My what?” I said.
“Your luckname.” She tilted her head and bugged out her eyes to show me she thought I was slow.
“Ava,” I said.
“Are you on Fixes?” Soli said. “I’m on Fixes.”
“No.” On the Parastrata, women stuck to what we knew, cooking, weaving, dyeing, mending, and growing children. Everything would come unraveled if we started fixing the ship. It’s only a step from fixing to flying, my father said. And then where would we be? You can’t nurse a baby and run a navigation program at the same time.