He raises his eyebrows. “Don’t I?”
“No. You think you do, but I’m not . . .” The words stick in my throat. “I’m some bad matter. Everyone around me only gets hurt. And I . . . I did something . . . something so bad my crewe—my people—didn’t want me anymore. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ava.” Rushil rolls his eyes. “What could you possibly have done?”
“There was . . . there was Luck.” When I say his name, something gives in me, and everything comes pouring out, all the parts of my past I’ve hidden away so careful. About Soli and Iri and the way of wives. How I gave myself to Luck, and how we were caught, and how I left him bloodied and shamed. And finally the sentence laid on me, and how Iri saved me, sent me down to the Earth instead of out into the breathless Void.
A tense silence settles between us. “They . . . they tried to put you out alive?” Rushil says at last.
I nod. I let my hair fall over my face.
“Oh, Ava . . .” Rushil tightens his hand over mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But you understand now?”
“I do,” Rushil says.
I sigh. “Good.”
Rushil hooks his thumb around my own. “I don’t care if you’ve been with someone else.”
I pause, shocked. “You don’t?”
“No,” Rushil says. “You’re still you, Ava, either way.”
A slow warmth spreads through my body. In the ashes where my heart was, a small green shoot nudges up through the black.
Without thinking, I lean across the short distance between us and find Rushil’s mouth with mine. He tenses, but then his lips give soft, his hand reaches up to touch my face, and he leans in to me. It’s nothing like kissing Luck. This is different, a slower burn what builds and builds, as if our lips are amplifying the charge between us the longer we stay linked. I never thought anyone would touch me this way again, never thought my heart could carry the charge. I give deeper to the kiss, lost in the unexpected heat of it.
When we finally break away, a nervous laugh bubbles out of me.
Rushil stares at me wide-eyed, out of breath. “Ava, I don’t—”
But I cut him off with another kiss.
We lean back on the ship’s warm tiles. Rushil’s breath is sweet with cloves and cardamom, but a pleasant air of fresh sweat clings to his body in the muggy night, too. His palm is rough as he brushes the hair from the back of my neck, but his touch is gentle. I want nothing but to drown myself in kissing him.
After a time, we roll away from each other and lie shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the sky.
“It’s late,” Rushil says. “Do you have to go home?”
“No.”
“You want to head over to Zarine’s with me?” Rushil tips his head toward me. “She said she scrounged some extra tubing I could have for the sloop.”
I sit up. “My sloop?”
Rushil pushes himself upright. “No, I hear the super-intelligent rats are starting their own Deep Sound Institute.” He smiles and pokes me in the ribs. “Of course yours. Who else’s?”
A tingling, awake feeling tickles under my skin. I feel strong. Young. Whole. I don’t want to go back, not yet. I want to be out, a part of this night with Rushil. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Rushil’s street is near empty, but the closer we come to the hill, the more the streets tick with people. Packs of girls lean against one another, laughing, high heels clacking on the pavement as they walk. Boys Rushil’s age stand in circles under the streetlights, drinking and feigning jabs at each other. Couples stroll by, arm in arm. Rushil reaches back to grab my hand.
“You know this used to be a slum?” he says. “And then they built the railyards and it turned into mostly warehouses. But now—”
Even from far off, the buildings on the hill hum with voices and muffled music and the buzz of solar generators. We trek deeper into the Salt. It isn’t like the south end of the city, all jammed with hot, bright signs trying to draw you in. Here, you have to know where you want to go. Each building is a little boxed glance into another world. A tapri full of clinking cups and waiters edging around the crowded tables. A blue-lit room packed with dancing bodies writhing together under a constant beat. A man glancing up from a wrought-iron basin brimming full with dark water. Dozens of shadows milling behind the gauzy curtains of an upstairs loft.
The street sweepers here have all been scooped up and modded at some point. One trundles by carapaced in a fake turtle shell. Another looks as though it’s been hennaed. Another blares out tinny music as it charges across the street. We ring up and up, closer to the top of the Salt. Every now and then we catch narrow glimpses of the city and its tight-woven carpet of lights between the buildings on the hill’s outer rim.
Two thirds of the way up, Rushil stops. “Here.” He points up at an old warehouse some three stories above us, hanging halfway out over the hill and the lev train tracks below. Thick metal struts anchor the dangling edge to the raw earth of the hill below. A murmur of distant voices and music filters down to us from the lighted windows.
“Here?” I say.
Rushil cups his hands to his mouth and shouts up. “Hey, Zarine! Zarine!”
Someone—a man, not Zarine—leans his head out the window.
“Hey!” Rushil waves his arm. “Let us up.”
A low clank-clank-clank starts above us, and slowly, a platform lowers into view, suspended by metal cables. It touches down in a puff of dust beside us. Rushil hops on, and I follow.
“How do we . . . ,” I start to ask, but Rushil grabs a hand crank built into the side of the platform and turns it in a slow, smooth circle. The platform shudders and lifts from the ground.
“Zarine and some friends put in drywall and plumbing and all. It’s apartments now,” Rushil says, looking up at the base of the warehouse as he rotates the winch. We rise level with building, and the noise builds to a steady hum of voices and music. As Rushil locks the platform in place and secures us to the side of the building, the door flies open, letting out a wave of lamplight and high, twanging music.
“Rushil, you made it!” A tall, curvy woman with a wild toss of hair leans across the gap between the platform and the doorframe to hug Rushil. A black dress hugs her waist, and round brass earrings as big as fists dangle from her ears. Everything about her seems scaled for giants, her hair, her eyes, her legs. Behind her, a kitchen separates us from a warmer room where a small crowd lounges on floor pillows, couches, and round, shell-like chairs, talking and sipping beer or tea in glasses. A handsome, dark-skinned young man with a sitar balances on the back of the nearest couch, cradling the neck of his instrument and picking its strings absentmindedly as he talks to the couple across from him. Ankur, I realize.
“Hey, Zarine.” Rushil hugs her back.
“You must be the one Rushil was talking about.” She takes my arm and helps me across the gap. “Ava, right? Who rescued that little girl?”