I push the chair back and turn to the window. I didn’t understand before how mere marks on a screen could cut and ricochet. I didn’t understand the power they could have. Suddenly it seems too dangerous to be cooped up here, neatly folded inside when I could burst into flames any minute and bring this whole house, this whole world, down around me.
“I need to go,” I choke out.
“Ava.” Soraya stands, steps between me and the door.
“Please. I can’t be in here right now.”
“But it’s late.” Soraya wavers. “It’s dangerous, a girl out alone at night.”
“Soraya, please.” I hear the desperate, wavering whine in my voice, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. No one has ever cared what happened to me, and right now, I don’t either. I only know I need to be away, out of this house, alone. I bolt for the door. Soraya steps aside at the last slip, before I knock into her. I grab my crow from the kitchen charger and stuff it in the pocket of Perpétue’s jacket, wrap the leather tight around me, and throw open the front door.
“Ava, wait!” Soraya calls as I duck past the rosewood trees.
But I ignore her. I shut myself down, double my steps, and barrel forward into the humid Mumbai night.
CHAPTER
.36
I tramp down from the quiet residential paths, house lights winking behind thick shrubbery, to the lev train stop. I ride until I reach the edge of the city and hop off at a random station. The streets teem with people and a whirl of neon and colored signs—JUICY pow! GET SOME NOW!—RAM’S DREAM—HOT, HOT HOT! I thread through narrow streets, dodging a pack of kids staging a water-gun battle and a group of women parading one of their number, a twenty-something girl with hennaed hands and a T-shirt reading KISS THE BRIDE, ahead of them. They sing at the top of their lungs. The close buildings and the haze of streetlamps muzzle up the sky and cast everything in a perpetual half day.
Then the buildings part on a footbridge and it rises into view, the Salt, with its water pipes and its light-studded hill looming above me like a great circled hive of lamps and people and buildings. I didn’t know where I was going until I was here.
I step quick, half to keep away from the men smoking in alleys and drunks stumbling down the side ways, and half because I can’t bear to stand still. All that anger and fear and hate packed tight in me radiates as it burns. The drunks step out of my path and the smokers slip their eyes past me, looking for other girls giving off less heat.
I rattle up against the fence of Rushil’s lot. Perpétue’s—my—ship curves sleek under several layers of protective sheeting on the other side. I hang against the fence. Now all I feel is empty and old, full up with yearning for something familiar. I key in the number-lock code, slip inside, and race across the darkened lot to the cool, familiar hulk of the sloop.
One sharp tug and the protective sheeting falls around my feet. My ship. My home. I punch in half of the code to open the hatch before I remember Rushil and I never finished wiring in the new couplings or the refabricated power cell we gutted from an old fission-powered two-seater. I could open the door manually, but not without enough metal shrieking to wake the entire block.
“Damn.” I bang the sloop’s side with my fist and scan the yard. There, beside a black clipper, a simple steel ladder. I drag it over, lean it against the sloop, and climb the rungs to the top.
Scorch marks from past atmospheric entries streak the tiles, and they still hold the day’s heat. I push myself up onto the sloop and sit. From here, I can see all of the Salt and the taller spikes of the city proper beyond, wreathed in a mist of saltwater and light. I wish Perpétue were here to see it. And Luck, him too. The city goes blurry before me. I was wrong. It’s not true that no one ever cared for me. It’s only that anyone who ever did is gone.
A faint tap-tap-tap rings on the ship’s ventral side. “Ava?” A muffled voice reaches up to me. Rushil.
I hurry to wipe my eyes and lean over the ship’s side. “Here,” I say. “It’s me.”
Rushil steps from under the ship, nervously gripping a cricket bat and a hooded lamp.
“What are you . . . Are you okay?” He leans the bat against the sloop’s side and starts up the ladder with the lantern still in one hand.
I wait until he reaches the top to answer. “I . . . I don’t know.” I don’t even know where to begin. There’s too much.
Rushil slides back the lantern’s hood and balances it on the ship. The light reflects in his glasses. “I saw someone up here. I hoped it was you.”
“Is that why you brought your bat?” I know Rushil only means he hoped it was me and not a shipjacker, but a strange, small thrill trips through me all the same.
He grins. “Yeah. I thought you might have been one of those super-intelligent rats that are supposed to live in the drainage pipes. Ankur’s convinced they’re real.”
I laugh. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s only . . . I wanted to be alone some. I didn’t know where else to go.”
Rushil holds the ladder’s top rung. “Do you still want to be? Alone, I mean?”
“What? No.” My words come out half laugh, half cry. I wipe at my eyes again. “No, not any more.”
Rushil climbs up and sits beside me. “Wow, it’s nice up here. I can see why Shruti spends so much time up top.”
I laugh again, and the sadness in me breaks some.
Rushil moves his foot next to mine. At first I think it’s an accident, but then he taps a little rhythm against the side of my boot. I still feel turned out and empty, but I smile and tap back. Rushil lays his hand over mine, and something soft brushes my skin. I look down. A worn strip of leather doubles around his wrist. My cord. I raise my eyes to his, lips parted. He knew I came looking for him. He knew I was sorry.
He doesn’t say anything, but the rough warmth of his palm brings tears to my eyes again.
“I’m not from the Gyre,” I blurt out.
“You’re not?” Rushil blinks. “But Miyole . . . you said . . .”
“She is. Her mother took me in before she died. She’s the one what taught me to fly this ship. But I came from up there.” I let my eyes drift up. Even the brightest stars can’t pierce the city’s haze.
“From . . . from spaceside, you mean?” He squints through his glasses at me as if I must be mistaken.
I nod.
“But your aunt, you said she was from here—”
“It’s complicated.” I take a breath. I have to let him know. “Rushil, you don’t want me.”