“You think I’m a good person?”
“Right so,” I say.
“Why?”
I look up into the dark recesses of the berth, thinking. “You’re kind to me and to Miyole. You never cheat anybody out of their share when we ship in supplies to the Gyre. You’re . . .” One of Miyole’s words comes to me. “You’re civil to people.”
Perpétue draws her knife. She turns its blade over in her hands. “You know why I carry this?”
I shake my head. “Protection?”
“That part’s show.” She flips the knife and catches it. “Mostly it’s so I remember.”
“Remember?”
She holds the blade up to her face, beside the deep scar running ruin through her lips. “This knife gave me that. There was a man. . . .” Perpétue looks away. When she speaks again, her voice has the bite of metal. “Miyole’s father. He meant to kill me, but I did for him instead.”
I want to say something, but the air around us has gone so still, I don’t dare disturb it.
Perpétue looks at me. “Would it have been good, Ava, would it have been civil, if I’d let him kill me?”
“No,” I whisper. “But you don’t go around cutting people up either. Or burning anyone.”
“There’s a balance,” Perpétue says. “There’s what you’re forced to do, there’s what you choose, and everything else—most things—are a mix. At best, you’ll spend your life trying not to get hurt, but trying not to do the hurting, either. You won’t always come through, but it’s the best anyone can do. It’s the trying I’d call good.”
Perpétue turns the knife around so its pommel faces me. “Here.”
I look from it to her, confused.
“You’re the one who needs it now.”
“I can’t,” I say. “It’s yours.” I can’t imagine me with her knife any more than I can imagine her without it.
“You can,” she says, and presses it into my hand.
My fingers close over the grip.
Perpétue smiles and slaps my shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got enough cargo to head back planetside. Miyole’s waiting.”
CHAPTER
.18
Perpétue lets me break dock and fly us back through the atmosphere. The sky looks sick as we approach the Gyre. Over the open water, clouds mass and muddy themselves to an ashen yellow-gray. Lightning branches above the waves.
“I thought it never stormed here.” I risk a quick look away from the instruments.
“It doesn’t.” Perpétue frowns at the thunderheads looming like monstrous prows over the waste plain. Rain begins to fall, mixing with the salt spray clouding our front viewport. “Here, hand over the controls.”
I surrender the captain’s seat to her. High swells rock the whole of the Gyre by the time we fight our way through the winds to the Caribbean enclave. Sea and sky churn. Perpétue’s face is gray. Neither of us has to speak what the other is thinking. Miyole.
We bring the ship to a hover over Perpétue’s barge. Waves foam over the deck, and the whole structure rocks to and fro. Something red flashes on the roof. Miyole’s kite, snarled in the clothesline. As I watch, it snaps taut, and then the wind snatches it up, out to the roiling gray. The water heaves the docking well up with each crest, then slams it down again into the trough. Impossible to land.
The monster, I remember. They were right. . . .
Perpétue smacks the controls and curses the sloop. “Come on.” She brings us in lower, lower, until the waves slap its tile-armored belly.
“Perpétue . . . ,” I say, nervous.
An awful crack breaks through the howling roar. A three-story structure on a barge several roofs down comes loose from its pontoons with a metallic shriek. It tips to the crashing sea, slow, so slow, and then it hits, sending up a flume of dark water and foam. A great wave rolls toward us, snapping the makeshift bridges.
“Perpétue!” I scream, and reach over to pull up on the thrusters. The sloop heaves up just in time to keep the wave from dragging us under.
Perpétue unbelts herself and climbs out of the captain’s seat. “Take the controls.”
“What are you . . .”
“Take them,” she snaps.
I clamber in, snap the shoulder straps over my chest, and grab the thruster handles. Perpétue already has the engines at three-quarters power, trying to fight the wind.
“Bring us low.” Perpétue clips a short-range radio to her collar.
I struggle to keep the sloop righted above the water. It shudders and jags in the wind, but I bring it to hover some thirty feet above the landing pad on Perpétue’s barge.
“Open the hatch.”
I don’t have to ask what she means to do. I pull the hatch release. In a matter of breaths, I see Perpétue out in the gale, clinging to the end of the steel ladder. The wind lifts the ladder sideways, even with her weight added to it. I bring the ship lower. The walls of Perpétue’s house loom dangerously close, windows dark gray as the sea.
The short-range coms crackle. “Ava?”
I flip the coms to hands-free. “Here!”
“Magnetize the ladder. The switch by the hatch release.”
I see the one she means. “Got it!” I snap the switch. The ladder drops to the metal-plated deck.
Crackling silence.
Then, “I’m down.” I can barely make out Perpétue’s voice over the whipping of the wind and the roaring waves. “Try not to go higher or the ladder’ll pull free. I’ll be quick.”
Wind batters the ship, and all around, the water moves in great, rolling, gray-green hills. Debris from the waste plain washes over the decks and swamps Perpétue’s docking well. The far edge of the barge lists to the side, partially swallowed by the waves.
Perpétue’s panting fills the coms channel. “She’s not here!”
“Where else—” But then I see, through the sheets of falling water and crashing waves. Miyole, and Kai beside her, waving from the widow’s walk of a ramshackle construction two roofs down.
“Perpétue!” I shout. The wind shoves the sloop lower, and for a slip, all I see is terrible, deep water with no end, but I bring it up again. I can’t see Miyole anymore, but I know which building it is. “I saw her!”
“Coming!” Perpétue dashes from the house to the ladder, slipping and scrabbling in the wet. She doesn’t bother to climb beyond the bottom rungs. “Up, Ava, quick.”
I pull the ship up, away from Perpétue’s house, and swing wide to come around to the widow’s walk. I hold the sloop steady as Perpétue dangles from the end of the ladder. I squint through the lashing rain. The only metal to latch on to is the thin railing itself.
She’ll never get down, I think, but then a sudden break in the wind drops us almost on top of the neighboring house.