Nisha

I’ve counted every single day Rel has been in her bleed. Four days. She has two more days, maybe three, before the gold door takes her from me.

There’s fruit on the shelf by her bunk, the offworld kind that bruises if you hold it too hard. It showed up three mornings back like a gift, and her slop’s come sweet since, cinnamon and sugar stirred through the same grey mash the rest of us choke down.

She bit into the good cheek that first morning, groaned like it was the finest thing ever grown, decided out loud it had to come from a world where nobody works and everybody sleeps late. Then she turned it soft-side up and pressed it on me, because the bruised part goes tender and that’s the part I like, and she knows the things I like.

This morning she eats less of it, and slower, but the soft side still finds me anyway.

She’s up before I’ve finished, one hand pressed low on her belly, restless in a way the cramp doesn’t explain. She eases into the gap between the bunks and her hip clips the ledge by Gelda’s, sending a row of needles skittering. She doesn’t look down.

I crouch and set them right, smallest to largest, the way Gelda keeps them. Gone already to the cutting room. She’d have had a fit.

I put the fruit down half-eaten and don’t pick it back up.

“You shouldn’t be walking,” I tell her, the way I’ve told her every morning since it started, and she keeps ignoring me. She holds the warmstone out to me without looking, the smooth gray stone the matrons give us for exactly this, and I take it without being asked. I feed it into the steam-tap and wait out the hiss and the scalding quiet until it comes back almost too hot to hold, then cross back and tuck it low against her belly, under the sash.

“What would I do without you,” Rel says into my hair. “Come on. We’re going down to the docks before someone remembers we’re here.” She loops her arm through mine and leans, and I let her, and we go.

One of the bunk-rooms is bare when we pass, a matron already hauling the bedding off the frame.

Rel doesn’t slow. “Dara,” she says, nodding at it. “Went through the gold door last night.”

I’ve never heard the name.

Something flickers across her face and is gone before I can read it. Then she’s tugging me on, faster than before.

We continue down the service stair as it takes us under, and the Garden loosens its grip a step at a time. The bloom-sweetness thins and quits, all those pumped-in flowers and warm sugar bleeding out of the air. Bare permacrete underfoot now, the cold coming up through it, the pipes overhead sweating and ticking. Nobody polishes down here. Nobody tunes the air to keep our cheeks dry. The matrons don’t come where the men aren’t, and the men never see the underside, so it’s the one place in the Garden nobody’s counting us.

The moment we’re through, Rel’s shoulders come down from around her ears. Mine too. She lets go of my arm and goes ahead to the railing, the grate ringing under her, and leans into it like she’s been waiting all morning. Maybe she has. Worth the walk and the ache both, just to look at something that isn’t the inside of the Garden.

The dock spreads out below us through the grate, loud and bright and filthy, and wider than anything inside the Garden has ever let me see at once. The freighters squat in their berths with their bellies open, and the loaders crawl over them, quick and easy, like the weight comes off them the nearer the hulls they get. This is where the Garden eats from.

I cross to her side and look where she’s looking: crates of the offworld fruit that bruises if you hold it wrong, bolts of cloth still bound in their wrappers, sealed yellow cases stamped for the cutting room, sacks of black soil and whole young trees with their roots balled in burlap, all of it going up the lifts to the Conservatory so the grounds can keep looking like they grew that way. A man works the foot of the lift with a slate, marking each load through with the side of his thumb as it rises.

“None of it’s from here,” Rel says, like it pleases her. “Not one thing up there. The whole place is a lie.”

The air up there is something they pump in. This isn’t. Scorched: hot metal, machine-oil, the green of all that produce sweating in the heat. I’ve decided I like it.

Out past the freighters the cargo lifts off the decks on its own. The big crates rise slow and steady inside columns of air gone thick and shimmering, like air over a hot vent, and ride the columns up and across the gap and settle soft onto the stacks, and nothing touches them along the way. Haulwells, I’ve heard the loaders call them. I could watch it all morning. Whatever holds the crates up doesn’t hurry, doesn’t care who’s watching.

An entire world down there that has nothing to do with the Garden, running on without us, and for as long as the warmstone keeps its heat Rel and I get to lean on the rail and pretend we’re part of it.

Then a freighter in the nearest berth puts down its ramp, and a line of girls comes down it. Small ones, much younger than me, picking their way into the dock-glare with their arms wrapped around themselves against the cold. From the dark under the lifts a matron walks out to meet them, slate-gowned, unhurried, a slate in the crook of her arm. She stops at the foot of the ramp and counts them off as they come, a flick of the stylus for each.

Low under my ribs, lower than my stomach, something shifts: slow and heavy, the way a sleeping thing rolls toward a sound. The breath goes out of me. For a second the whole dock seems to lean toward that ramp, or I do, I can't tell, and I’ve got the rail in both hands before I knew I reached for it. Then it settles, folds back down, gone. Below me I see the little ones again, filing off the ramp after the matron into the dark under the lifts. The dock lets go. My hands don’t, not right away.

Beside me Rel has been watching the line too; she breathes out, turns her face from the ramp, and goes looking down the dock for something easier to land on.

“Him,” she says, nodding at a loader hauling a crate twice his size. “Three wives, on three different moons, and not one of them knows about the others.”

“He looks tired enough for three wives.”

“That’s how you can tell.” She shifts off her sore side and settles against the rail. We’ve played this since we were small enough to fit both our heads through the railing gap—you pick a stranger and hand them an entire life, the bigger the better. “When he’s too old to haul, he’ll quit all three and go live somewhere with a sea. The kind with tides.”

“You always give them oceans.”

“Because you can’t tag an ocean and sell it.”

Out over the gap a crate is halfway across when the haulwell under it guts out.

It drops. There’s a loader right under it—I see him see it—and he throws himself flat as the thing comes down where he stood and splits against the deck, a shriek of metal and a white gout of packing-frost blooming up through the grate, cold enough to taste from where we stand. The whole dock goes still.

Then a foreman’s voice crosses it, flat and bored, and the men are moving again. The one who almost died gets up and waves off the hands that reach for him, like almost dying embarrasses him worse than it scared him. Another minute and there’s nothing left to show it happened.

My heart won’t slow down. Down on the deck the men have already gone back to it, like a man almost dying is just part of the morning—and I don’t understand how they go back under those crates at all. Rel laughs, a little shaky. “Did you see him move? He’s fine, right?” She says it like she needs it to be true, so I give it to her.

“He’s fine.” The breath I’ve been holding goes out of me.

She turns her back on the whole berth anyway, like not looking at it will put it behind her. Her fingers are white around the warmstone. “Oh, come on. Pick one.” She nods at the dock without looking at it. “Don’t let me have all the fun.” She’s smiling, but there’s something too quick about it.

I find a woman near the berth-master’s booth, gray at the temples, a slate she keeps checking though I’d wager she knows every line on it by heart. “Her,” I say. “She counts the freighters in and out. Has for thirty years. She had a daughter who got counted onto one of these and shipped out, the same flick of a stylus as those little ones just now. She never found out where it took her, alive somewhere past the Rim or long gone, and a long time ago she stopped checking the manifests for the name. But she still looks up every time a hull comes in from the Rim. Just to be sure.”

Rel’s quiet a moment. “See, that’s the thing about yours,” she says. “You never let them find anybody.”

I shrug. I hadn’t decided that on purpose. It just came out that way.

“Forget them.” She knocks her shoulder into mine. “You. If you got the ocean—what would you even do with it?”

I think about it. I really do.

“I’d make sure you didn’t drown in it,” I say.

She laughs, like she didn’t expect to, and doesn’t make me find a better answer. I’m glad, because it’s the only kind I have.

I'd rather stay here than have an ocean. Here, with Rel, the warm rail under us, her laughing at something I said. I’m still holding onto it when I feel her go somewhere else: her shoulder against mine first, then her whole face, pulled toward something past me.

I look at her instead of at whatever it is. Something’s gone tight in her face, and her hand’s closed hard around the warmstone. The cramp’s left a flush high on her cheeks that almost passes for health, and her chin’s tipped up like she’s decided, against all evidence, that today will behave. Whatever’s down there will have to be very lucky to deserve a look like that.

Then I follow her eyes, and there he is.

Taren.

He comes down the loading ramp of the freighter in the far berth, the big battered one with the patched hull that his father runs, a slate under one arm, his sleeves shoved up, a smear of engine grease along his jaw he hasn’t noticed. He’s our age, maybe a year past it. We have built this boy an entire life over two years of railings. He has been a prince in hiding, a runner for the Pale Chord, and, once, memorably, a boy raising a clutch of orphaned lizard-hawks alone on an asteroid. The truth is we know three things about him: his name, which we overheard; that his father is hard with him but not cruel; and that he sometimes looks up at the gallery grate when he thinks no one’s watching, which means he’s noticed us too.

“Don’t,” I say, because I can feel it coming.

“Don’t what.” She’s already smiling.

“Rel.”

But she’s leaned over the railing into the light where he can see her, and she’s lifted one hand in a little wave, and she’s called down, not loud, the dock swallows loud, but pitched to carry. “You’ve got grease on your face!”

Taren looks up. Finds her. Startled, then sheepish, then scrubbing at the wrong side of his jaw with the back of his hand, all of it over in about a second and a half.

“Other side,” Rel calls, delighted.

He gets it on the second try. He’s grinning now, the helpless grin of a boy who’s been noticed by a pretty girl and has no idea what to do with it, and he holds up the slate as if to say I’m working, and Rel holds up both hands as if to say I would never keep you from it, and it’s the most either of them has ever said to the other. I have pressed myself back from the railing into the shadow of a pipe-housing where no eyes can reach, and my whole face is hot, and I can’t stop smiling.

Underneath it, where I almost don’t have to look: I want it to be me. To lean into the light and have someone down there look up and pick my face out of the dark and be glad it was mine. Just once, to be the one who gets looked at, instead of the one who keeps watch so somebody else can be.

I don’t let it stay. There’s no use wanting to be looked at by a boy I’ve never once waved to.

“You’re going to get us flagged,” I hiss.

“For waving?” But she steps back from the light too, because she may be reckless, but she’s not stupid, and she knows the difference better than anyone. She’s breathing a little quick. From the lean, from the cramp, from him. I can’t tell, and I don’t think she can either. She presses the warmstone harder against her belly and laughs, just to herself, just because.

Below, Taren’s father barks something, and the boy ducks his head and goes back to his tally, and the moment ends. But he glances up one more time before he disappears into the freighter’s belly.

“He likes you,” I say.

“He likes a girl on a railing.” She picks at a fleck of rust on the rail, rolls it off her thumb, watches it fall. “Can’t disappoint him from up here. It stays perfect that way.” Then, quieter: “You only get to keep what you don’t reach for.”