Her words knock me shy and off-balance. Does she mean Miyole? But that wasn’t rescuing. “Oh, no, I . . . I’m not . . .” I try to say, but the rush of voices in the neighboring room drowns me out. Is that who I am? I look at Rushil. Is that how he sees me?
“You want a beer?” Zarine shouts. “Or some tea?”
“Tea,” I say.
“Go on, help yourself to a cutting.” Zarine waves a bangled arm at a clutter of cups and pitchers covering the blocky table in the center of the kitchen. “Rushil?”
“I’m good, thanks.” He throws a look at me. “I was telling Ava you had some tubing for us. . . .”
Zarine sighs and feigns hurt. “I swear, you only want me for my spare parts. You have to promise to stay and at least have some tea after.”
Rushil grins. “I promise.”
Zarine flashes her teeth in another smile. “Come on, I’ve got that tubing downstairs in the utility room.”
Rushil leans close. “You want to come with us?”
A burst of laughter breaks out from the sitting room behind me. I look over my shoulder. Young men and women, all my age or a little older, sit mingled together, easy with one another. I’ve never been in a place like this.
I turn back to Rushil. “I think I’ll stay here.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.” He squeezes my arm briefly and follows Zarine around the crowd of people and out another door. The room suddenly feels dimmer without her, as if a lamp has gone out.
I pour myself a glass of tea and sit cross-legged on the outskirts of the sitting room crowd. Everyone around me is dropped deep in conversation, talking on music and who’s setting up a gallery show and who’s been off planetside and how long, only none of it’s anyone I know.
“Hey, Ava.” Ankur drops down next to me, sitar in hand. “Fancy meeting you here. How do you know Zarine?”
“I don’t.” I take a sip of tea. “Rushil brought me.”
Ankur gestures to the doorway Rushil and Zarine disappeared through. “I lost my muse. You want to sing with me?”
I nearly choke.
“I don’t know.” I swallow, buying time. “I’m not from here. I don’t think I know any of your songs.”
“Not even ‘Melt It Down’?”
I shake my head.
“Or ‘Burn, Sita, Burn’?”
I shake my head again.
“‘Droughtsick’? Everyone knows ‘Droughtsick.’”
I shake my head a third time.
Ankur picks at the sitar’s strings. “Well, why don’t you sing something from where you come from, and I’ll try to play along?”
A nervous current zings through me. Panic. “I can’t.”
“Come on.” Ankur smiles his perfect smile. “Nobody here’s going to bite. I’ll tell them not to trap it for their pages, huh?”
“It isn’t that.” I rest my empty teacup on the floor.
“You one of those shy girls never does anything but listen in on other people talking?” Ankur teases.
“No,” I say, even though he’s probably right. “It’s . . . I’m not supposed to.”
“Not supposed to?” Ankur says.
“Sing.” It feels strange to say, especially here, now.
Ankur stares at me as though I’ve said I’m not supposed to breathe or grow fingernails. “What, is it going to send us hurling ourselves into the trainway? Is it that bad?”
I open my mouth to answer, but then I realize I don’t really know what will happen if I sing. Something bad, something to catch the ears of bad spirits, or so the story of Mikim and the corsairs would have it. But now, I don’t know. Miyole was right. Now that I know more of how the universe works, Mikim’s story makes some little sense. And besides, all the verses in the Word about what befalls a woman in the Earth’s grip, those were only part true. I may be tarnished, but I’m still whole. So maybe nothing will happen if I sing. Maybe no harm will grow from it at all.
“Right so.” My voice croaks. I clear my throat and say it stronger. “Right so.”
“Okay then.” Ankur adjusts his strings. A few of the people around us hush, then others turn their heads our way. “When you’re ready.”
Ankur picks out a single, soft, vibrating note. Another cluster of people go quiet. At that moment, I spot Rushil standing in the doorway, a bundle of plastic tubing under his arm. I close my eyes to block out all the faces looking my way, sink anchor deep in myself, and let out one of the songs I’ve heard through the walls, one I’ve sung inside my head at night in my bunk with my sisters warm at my sides. Saeleas’s song of mourning, the song she sang through her tears as the Earth slipped away, those thousand-some turns ago.
“Farewell to rock and tree and vale,
Farewell to birds high-flying,
For duty calls me far away,
So sing my heart through sighing.”
Ankur strums to match my voice, soft at first, then louder as he catches the scheme. The whole room has gone quiet.
“Pick up, pick up this heavy thread,
Quiet, child, your laughter,
For we must leave this world we know,
And wander e’er hereafter.”
I open my eyes. Rushil stands still past the sea of heads, looking at me as though my song has run him through. I raise my voice and sing Candor’s answering verse to his wife. Ankur doubles the tempo to meet my urgency, his strumming fast. It molds together into something new, something both of this world and not.
“Think not on rock and tree and spring,
Think not on birds high-flying,
Our freedom calls us high away,
For here were our hearts dying.”
My voice breaks and the room blurs, but I blink away the salt from my eyes and fix them on Rushil.
“Mourn not for what you’ve lost, my love,
Think not on what you’re leaving,
Let all your heart and mind hold fast,
This new life you are breathing.”
As the last line rings out of my chest, I let go. Let go Luck, let go my crewe, let go what might have been. Rushil holds my eyes, and I stand empty and clear, ready to be filled with what my life might yet be.
CHAPTER
.37
I creep back to Soraya’s in the dull gray of morning. The house welcomes me with a low beep and a click as the door seals itself shut behind me. I pull off my boots and tiptoe to the stairs, thinking of nothing but soft pillows and the dark comfort of my bed. But then I turn the corner to mount the stairs, and run headlong into Soraya. She loses her grip on the full metal ewer she has balanced in her arms. I stagger forward and manage to catch it before it clangs across the floor, but not before it sloshes cold water down the front of my shirt.