“I see them.” Her voice squawks through the coms. A beat. Then, “I’m down. Sending Miyole up.”
“Right so.” Sweat slicks my palms, but I don’t dare let go to wipe them dry.
At that moment, darkness falls over the viewport. The whole of the Gyre sucks down, away from the sloop.
“Oh, god,” Perpétue’s voice is suddenly clear. Lightning flashes, illuminating a vast wall of water, higher even than the sloop, rolling straight at us. It sweeps up the debris and the structures of the Gyre and hovers above us. It turns white as it begins to curve over.
“Fly, Ava!” Perpétue shouts. “We’ve got the ladder. Fly!”
I jam the thruster controls up, fighting the wind and the blinding rain, engines hot. Pieces of plastic sheeting and plasterboard rush by, and then the wave is there, racing to meet us.
“Up!” Perpétue screams.
But it’s too late.
The wave’s crest slams us sideways, and we spin over the water. The viewport is sky and water, sky and water. I’m going to die, I think, but my body acts without me, fighting for even keel and height. We roar up into the sky, engines at full power. The clouds revolve and thicken, and everywhere is darkness.
Then suddenly bright, cold sun and blue sky. Below, a vast pinwheeled storm sweeps its arms over the water.
“Perpétue! Miyole! Kai!”
The open coms line fisses with static.
I program the ship’s autopilot to keep us in a holding pattern, unstrap myself, and climb below. Waterlogged packages spill across the floor, what’s left of Perpétue’s delivery. The wind whistles from the open mouth of the berth. I crawl to the edge of the sunlit square.
“Please,” I whisper to the Mercies, but then I reach the bolts holding the ladder to the sloop. My hands brush frayed bristles of metal rope. The ladder is gone. I push myself up on my knees, away from the edge. “No.”
A whimper cuts the darkness behind me. I turn.
“Miyole?”
She hugs her knees with bloodied hands and presses her back hard to the berth’s wall. “They were behind me,” she says. “My manman and Kai. They were behind me.” There is nothing we can do but wait while the storm slowly churns its way north and west, away from the Gyre. Or what once was the Gyre. Some hours later we duck back below the tails of the clouds to find the sea below us picked clean and glittering. I check our coordinates. They’re right. I bring us lower and skim back and forth over the water, praying to the Mercies I’ll spot the remains of a pontoon or a piece of driftwood, anything Perpétue and Kai could have caught hold of. But there’s nothing. The Gyre is simply gone. No boats, no pontoons, not a scrap of the waste plain what gathered there over the generations.
A hollow space opens in me, like my chest is filled with Void. It sucks all the air from my lungs. I was not ready for this, this total, spinning loss. Was it even a day ago Perpétue was joking I should fly all our runs? And now her gone. And Miyole . . .
“Miyole.” My voice sounds unsteady, and I feel cold, as if I’m watching everything from somewhere deep inside.
She lifts her head and stares at me from the copilot’s chair. We’ve washed her bleeding hands with saltwater and wrapped them in strips of silk from one of Perpétue’s parcels. I cut open all the packages with Perpétue’s knife while we waited out the storm. Mostly, they were full of oddments and luxuries, gold-painted eggs, cold-sealed vials full of something what might be quicksilver, cloth so thin you could make it flutter with a breath. Nothing useful.
“We’ve got to find someplace to land,” I say.
Miyole nods.
“We can look for your manman and Kai from there,” I say, even though I know they’re empty words. We can look, but they’re sunk to the endless bottom with the monsters and mermaids and all else the Gyre folk liked to talk on around their fires.
Miyole looks out the window into the soft dusk falling over the ocean. She’s aged a million turns since we left her safe on the Gyre before the storm.
“My manman’s dead,” she says. “Her and Kai.”
“Do you have any other family?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.
Miyole shakes her head. She turns from the window. “We should go to that place you always talk about. Mumbai,” she says. “We can find your tante.”
Dr. Soraya Hertz, Mumbai University at Kalina. It isn’t much, but it’s more than nothing. One of the sloop’s aft engines has taken on a gutter and whine. I haven’t been able to check the ship’s armored tile plates, but I suspect some of them are damaged or else ripped off altogether in the storm. We need to set down, and soon.
“Right so,” I say. “Mumbai.”
I scroll through the navigation log and select the location of the nearest city east of us—the one with the slippery rice dealer. Once we’re nearer to land, we can pick up the network and find Mumbai’s coordinates. And then we’re gone, skimming unsteadily over the water with the engines at quarter lift. The sun goes down before us. We are alone in the air. I can’t afford to look away from the sloop’s jittering instrument panels, but I reach out my hand and take Miyole’s as the night swallows us whole.
PART II
CHAPTER
.19
When we first see Mumbai, I think I’ve fallen asleep at the controls. Only I could never dream something like this. A towering seawall surrounds the city. Clusters of squat, round buildings cling to the top of it, like the barnacles that grew on the sides of the Gyre’s ships. Inside, massive crystalline structures rise from the earth and disappear into the low-lying clouds. Skyscrapers, that’s the word Perpétue would have used. To the north, the land rises in a patchwork of roofs and trees, divided by gray trainways and the gossamer threads of rivers.
“Miyole,” I say.
She stirs awake. We both stare at it, the city growing before us. The sloop’s controls lie forgotten underneath my hands, until the coms channel crackles and a clipped voice directs us to somewhere called Navi Flightport on the outskirts of the city. I guide us lower and eastward, where the houses become concrete, and then crooked roofs and blue tarp, swaths of shanties blossoming along the edges of a swamp. At last the flightport comes into view. The sloop rocks as we descend through the air currents and finally touch down with a clumsy bang on the landing pad.
The ship’s as bad as I feared. There are gaps in its skin where the wind tore shield tiles free. The whining aft engine is a snarl of bent, blackened metal. We can limp along without it, but there’ll be no more runs up to Bhutto station or even across the sea until we find a way to fix it. I still have the square of pay plastic Perpétue gave me for the information port, but it takes near half what’s on it to dock the sloop at Navi Flightport for a day, and the rest to buy our own entry into the city without “papers,” as the uniformed woman corralling us through the entry gates calls them, though she really means a palm-sized smartcard what tracks our comings and goings.