“You’re leaving us a bride.” Modrie Reller motions Llell forward with a clipped wave. “We have to be sure you arrive looking like one.”
Llell and I can barely meet each other’s eyes as she helps me into fresh skirts, my good, dark-green ones with tiny mirrors surrounded by pale green starbursts. Why is Modrie Reller doing this? Llell can’t have wanted to be my handmaid. She tugs too hard at my skirt ties. The cords dig into my skin, but I bite my lip and keep my tongue still.
Llell finishes with my skirts and laces me into a sleeveless quilted shirt with inlaid copper disks. Afterward, she holds up a mirror while Modrie Reller carefully combs and braids my hair. The dye leaves it shiny, but still some brittle, even after the cooling cloth.
“Hold out your arms,” Modrie Reller says when I am brushed and braided.
I do. She has Llell kneel and wind the copper wire around my ankles and forearms. I try to hold still as she wraps me with practiced, pinching efficiency, but I can tell from the flush along her hands and downturned cheeks that shame is burning her up inside. Meanwhile, the copper weighs heavy on me, making my every move graceful but achingly slow.
Llell narrows her eyes to see better as she doubles the last of the wire into a tiny loop and secures it in place.
“Heavens, Llell.” Modrie Reller rolls her eyes. “Don’t squint. No one wants a squint-eyed wife.”
“Modrie,” I mumble in protest.
“Modrie nothing.” She waves a hand, dismissing me. She flicks out the tip of her fan at Llell. “Now the mirror.”
I try to catch Llell’s eye, but she lifts the heavy mirror again, hiding her own face behind the reflection of mine. Modrie Reller grips my chin as she paints pale shine onto my cheeks.
“There now,” she says when she finishes. “At least you don’t look so Earth bred.”
I can’t see myself, only some other girl. A bride in her thick green skirts and heavy copper wristlets, face shimmer-pale beside her deep red braids. Is that me? I feel as if I’m only a passenger in this body.
“That will do, Llell.” My stepmother flaps open her fan and waves it to cool her neck. “Have your mother bring those tapestries to the bay, the ones for the bride gift.”
Llell slinks from the room. Maybe I can find her before the visiting party leaves, explain how I didn’t ask Modrie Reller to pull her from her duties, didn’t want her forced into being my handmaid . . .
But then Modrie Reller takes my face in her hands and presses a rare kiss on my forehead. The shock of it sinks everything else to the back of my mind. The only other time I’ve ever seen Modrie Reller give a kiss was to my mother’s head as the women dressed her body in her old bridal finery for burial.
“Aren’t you coming with us on the visiting party?” I ask. It’s custom for a girl’s mother and modries to prepare her for her husband on her binding day.
Modrie Reller shakes her head. “Not with the smallone coming so soon.”
“But I’m coming back before the binding, right so? I’ll see you then.”
She shakes her head again. “Iri’s going in my place.” She brushes a stray lock from my forehead and tucks it behind my ear. “She’ll finish making you ready.”
I duck my head. “Right so.”
“One thing more.” Modrie Reller pulls a leather cord from her pocket. A pearly white data pendant, thin as paper, large around as the pad of my thumb, dangles from it. Raised circuitry forms a spiral at its center, like the whorl of a fingerprint. I gasp. Every girl receives such a pendant on her binding. It stores a record of her ancestry, back to the time of Candor and Saeleas. She wears it from that day on, even into death.
“Now, when you leave the ship, you’ll feel the Earth tugging at you, understand?” The pendant gleams in the low light as Modrie Reller knots it behind my neck. “You’ll go heavy, and your breath will come hard, but don’t fear. Your father and Jerej and all the men will keep you safe until you reach the other ship. You marking me?”
“Right so.” I finger the pendant. It rests cool on my collar bone.
“There now.” Modrie Reller smiles tightly. “You’re ready.”
I step forward to throw my arms around her, but she puts out a hand to stop me. She shakes her head and backs away through the arch to the women’s quarters without looking at me again. She has already begun the work of forgetting me.
CHAPTER
.4
My father, Parastrata Cerrec, captain of the Parastrata, walks at the head of our procession. His red hair has thinned and faded yellow-white, but a hand-quilted patriarch’s stole drapes over his shoulders and beneath it, his green robes hang heavy with embroidery. The stole fans out behind him as he leads us across the wide cargo bay of our ship. Jerej follows him, cradling the wooden letterbox that holds my marriage contract. More men trail them, carting bride gifts—one of our pregnant nanny goats, the weighty bales of copper wire and fiberoptic cable that are our stock and trade, and a fighting cockerel. I carry a wide copper platter laden with eggcakes. For the first time in five turns, we have come to Bhutto station for the runend meet, where all the crewe ships join up for trade talks and marriages and treaty drawing.
I stand at the back of our party with the other women, feeling terrified and righteous and brave and pure, all at once. The wives with their armfuls of gifts—green cloth and heavy, coarse-edged paper—surround me. I feel as if I’m walking inside a velvet-lined box, the jewel of our procession. I wish my mother were here, wish she could hold my hand, wish she could see me grown to be a bride.
Once, when I was a smallgirl, our ship hit a solar storm on the way to a runend meet. The men herded all us women and smallones into the baling room, near the heart of the ship, and locked us in tight. But even with all the hulls and floors and doors between us and the Void, the ship bucked and shivered under out feet. My mother was there, sick with the virus that would soon take her. Her face, like mine always some darker than our crewemates’, had gone pale and gray, beaded with fever sweat. Modrie Reller wrapped Ma in a coarse homespun blanket. She left me and Jerej to watch over her, while she hurried off to help quiet the squalling infants. I hugged my knees and watched my mother’s eyes opening and closing while the ship shuddered all around me.
A bang shook the whole room, and the solar-fed lights sputtered out. Darkness swallowed us. Everyone screamed. My mother grasped my hand.
“Ava.” Her voice was raw. “Keep your eyes open.”
I blinked in the dark. After a moment, the dim glow of the ship’s phosphorous strips bloomed, edging everything in blueish-green. I made out the shadow of my mother. My breath quickened. She looked like a skull in the half light. I groped for Jerej’s hand. He yelped in blind fright when my fingers touched his, and I cried out in turn, setting him off again.