The Vanished Birds Read online

  * * *

  —

  It was in the cargo bay where the music was loudest, and where the veteran was most tormented. The sounds of the Debby trended downward, collecting like sediment among the crates and catwalks of the bay; an ecosystem of sound, amplified by the concave walls and the cathedral ceiling. Footsteps and plate clatter and muffled causeway conversations—the white noise of ship life the veteran had no problem phasing out when she rolled out her mat, sat with pretzeled legs, and fell inward, unfurling in her mind the bloodied knots of her post-trauma. This was the hour in the day Sonja most looked forward to. The hour she could breathe. But with the white noise now came the music, and she soon found she could not phase it out, for unlike the step and clatter of the crew, the music had shape, and story. It had pain. It shattered the temple of peace she made for herself in her meditations, and left behind only her agitations. She cursed. She stormed the causeways, proclaiming her displeasure as she banged plates in the kitchen when she was making her meals. She went further. When Nia got word that she’d kicked the boy’s door one night to get him to stop, she confronted her in the cargo bay, interrupting her railing pull-ups with a single warning. “I’m only going to tell you once. Do not kick our guest’s door again.”

  Sonja let go of the railing, her boots thudding onto the grating below. “I was trying to get some sleep.”

  “You have plugs. Use them.”

  “Plugs. I have plugs.” Sonja slapped her towel over her shoulder, her face screwed up like she was about to let fly some choice words, before she saw Nia’s humorless smile and checked herself, blunting her sharp tone. She was nothing if not respectful of hierarchy. “It’s not just me, Captain,” she said, looking away. “The others won’t say it, but they’re just as pissed as I am.”

  “None of them kicked his door.”

  “Someone will.”

  Nia knew she was right. The proof was in Durat’s sleep-deprived eyes, and Baylin’s skittered mind as he fumbled through his repairs of the rotting ship. When she met with Baylin to discuss his work for the week, she learned of all the tasks he had fallen behind on; the tertiary lav door that was still jammed and the fried sublights of the causeway. “And the Grav?” she muttered. “Please tell me you haven’t forgotten about the Grav.”

  “I didn’t forget,” he said. “But it’s not fixed.”

  Nia breathed through her nose. “I thought you said you’d fix it.”

  “I tried. But it’s old—can only do so much. We’ll need to buy a replacement when we get to Pelican.”

  “Will we be safe till then?”

  The young man nodded, playing nervously with some small oblong tool in his gummed-up hands. “Worst that should happen is some light carbonation—zero-G bubbles popping up around the ship. Expect a few lunches to float off your plate, but that should be the extent of it.” In a small voice, he added, “I hope.”

  She sighed. “Add it to the requisitions list.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Before she walked up the steps that led out of the engine room, she turned. Said, “You’re the most important person on this ship. We don’t fly if you don’t.”

  He blushed. “I understand.”

  “So be honest: Is the boy’s music distracting you?”

  He smiled confidently. “I’ve lived in loud places all my life,” he said. “This is nothing.”

  But she saw the truth behind his words. The hesitation before the smile. She climbed the steps with a sigh, knowing something would have to be done about the music, and that it would have to be done soon.

  But not yet.

  She was still listening.

  The music played while she made him his meals. Before they left Umbai-V, Kaeda had told her the boy liked sweet things, so she served him a bowl of sweet rice for breakfast, and flavored nutrient porridge with zucar for lunch. Dinner was reconstituted vegetables and vat-meat slices, with a candied fruit for dessert. Three times a day she brought him his meal, and would lean against the wall and observe him as he ate his food one-handed, his free hand gripping the flute. They wouldn’t speak during these meals, or make eye contact, and when he was done eating, she would gather his plates and slot them into the kitchen wash like giant coins while from the vent above her head she would hear the opening notes to his song. The terrible, insistent beauty of it.

  The music was her constant companion. It was there when she exercised with Sonja, or chatted with Durat in the cockpit, or read old books in her quarters. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing and just listen. Would allow the music to seep into the folds of her and bring forth thoughts of Kaeda. Would relive the midnight memories of sweat on skin, and the taste of his mouth sweetened by a lifetime of dhuba—memories that were paired with the dark suspicion that he had returned the flute to her as an insult.

  No one knew about their affair, not even Nurse, who prided herself on being the captain’s closest confidante. During their clandestine drinking session near the end of the week, when the lights were off and they were the last two women awake within millions of kilometers, sipping bourbon from tin cups and playing a few hands of Tropic Shuffle by the light of Nia’s desk lamp, Nia made no mention of Kaeda. She let Nurse lead the conversation.

  “I’ll deal,” Nurse said, shuffling the cards.

  The games were played in quiet as Nia worked through troubling thoughts. And though Nia knew all of Nurse’s obvious tells—the way she rubbed the material of her sari between finger and thumb when she had a good hand—that night she was too distracted to use this knowledge to her advantage, surprising them both as she lost each of the rounds. “You’ve lost your edge,” Nurse said as she poured herself a winner’s cup.

  Nia smiled weakly. “Just giving an old woman her due handicap.”

  “How kind you are. Another round then.” She gave Nia the warning look. “Without help.”

  After the last hand was dealt and Nia had lost for good, she swallowed the rest of her bourbon, held the glass to her lips, and said, “You’re staring at me.”

  “You have a face worth staring at,” Nurse said.

  Nia smiled. “Say what it is you want to say.”

  “Even if it’s the obvious?”

  “I could use obvious right now.”

  “Something has to be done about the music,” Nurse said. “We all know this.” She slid the cards back into the box. “There are compassionate ways of putting a stop to it. The boy may not be able to speak, but he understands us well enough. We can set up certain times in the day that he’s allowed to play, decide areas in the ship where the sounds don’t travel so far. But I know this has already occurred to you.” She tossed the box of cards onto the desk and looked into Nia’s eyes. “You’re stalling.”

  “You’re right,” Nia said.

  “So she admits it,” Nurse said playfully, “but she doesn’t say why.”

  “The why is…difficult.” Nia was about to pour herself another glass, but stopped as soon as she touched the bottle. “I realized something recently.”

  “What did you realize?”

  “I’d forgotten what day my sister had died.” Nia smiled, embarrassed, but Nurse was attentive, and nodded for her to continue. “Something I should remember, right? I checked once, years ago. Saw the day and date on the Feed. Thought I’d carry that number with me till the end…but I just let myself forget.” She gazed into the lamplight, the burn of bulb on her retina, the echo of a young woman’s shout as she begged Nia not to leave. A little sister who grew up without her; an entire life, spent and emptied, while Nia whittled away the years in the Pocket, running as far as she could from home. The day she learned her sister had died decades her senior was the first time she experienced Compression Panic. She thought that day would stick to her heart like a tumor. But somehow it receded, became just another shadow in the attic. One among many. S
he sighed. “I’ve let myself forget a lot of things.”

  “Like what?” Nurse asked.

  Like the flute, she wanted to say, but the moment was over, and her heart’s door shut without ceremony. “I’m sorry,” she said with an awkward smile. “I don’t know where that came from.” When Nurse reached out to touch her hand, she pulled away. “I think I’m going to call it for the night.”

  At the hatch, Nurse stopped the door from closing with her hand.

  “Please,” she said. “For my sake, if not yours. Take it easy on yourself.”

  “I will,” Nia promised. “And congratulations on winning the game.”

  “I don’t think my wins tonight count.” Nurse walked down the dark causeway, back to her hatch, a hand raised in good night. “Save your congratulations for when I earn it.”

  Nia returned to her desk, rubbing the bourbon throb from her brain as she flicked on the lamp. She opened a fresh notebook, in the mood to write. During their last voyage to Pelican Station, she had struck up a conversation with a historian in one of the greenery pubs on Schreiberi Wing, who with wild red eyes taught her the craft of the haiku, claiming such art would open her senses and make her more receptive to the spirit channels that were woven into the station transmission signals by beings they could not see. Now there were journals on her desk filled with practice poems, some better than others, and most, in her opinion, terrible. But regardless of skill or spirit channel, she’d discovered that she liked writing the damn things. The words helped her organize the hurricane. And so, that night, she put pencil to paper, and wrote:

  The flute from Macaw,

  Cheaply made and out of tune,

  Was a terrible

  Was without

  Had no

  She tore the sheet from the notebook, ripped it up into many pieces. Dropped the confetti into the wastebasket. She had started a new piece when she noticed in her periphery the shreds of paper rise up, and hover over the rim, suspended in air. They twirled in the lamplight like sprites.

  For a moment she feared the haunting of old ghosts before she remembered the malfunctioning Grav that Baylin had yet to fix. With a sigh she waited for the bubble to pass, and when the shreds of paper drifted back down into the basket, where they were meant to be, she undressed and slipped into bed, the writing mood gone. She lay staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, no closer to sleep than she had been at the desk, her legs so restless they could’ve gotten up on their own and walked out the hatch had she let them. As she had with the panic attack, she told herself the feeling would pass, that it was just the alcohol, and that, as with all her nights, it was just a matter of waiting it out. But it didn’t pass. She lay with her fists curled tight against her eyes, pressing against the boil of troubled thoughts in her head, the what-ifs and should’ve-beens, all the bad things she was made of, until she heard from the vents the notes of the boy’s music.

  They were soft, the notes; barely audible, but there. She didn’t know the song, but she knew the feeling. Took comfort that there was at least one other person who was kept awake by the past. Her shoulders relaxed. Her fists bloomed into open palms, and the blood returned to her knuckles. From the back of her throat, she murmured along with his melody. Their voices in a tentative dance as she hummed her way into a calm and dreamless sleep.

  For a week the boy played his flute.

  And then someone broke it.

  * * *

  —

  It was the morning of the eighth day in the Pocket. A distant, omnipresent rattle in the Debby’s bones as it sailed the rapids of the Diffident Current. With his breakfast balanced in the crook of her arm, Nia opened the boy’s hatch, her eyes widening when she found him sitting on the floor by the cot, with the two broken halves of the flute laid out before him. She put the bowl of sweet rice down on the table and crouched at his side. “Did you break it?” she asked.

  He limply shook his head.

  “It’s okay if you did. It’s okay if it was an accident.”

  But still he shook his head.

  “Did you find it like this?”

  He nodded.

  Nia silently gathered up the flute halves and gave him a curt gesture to eat. As he lamely played with his spoon, she walked across the corridor, and let the anger fly as she punched the ship-wide channel.

  “Everyone to the kitchen. Now.”

  They knew better than to delay. In five minutes, her crew filed into the communal seating area, trading confused murmurs. The confusion was cut to the quick when she tossed the broken flute onto the table, the pieces skittering.

  “Who did this?” she asked.

  Bodies stiffened. They traded suspicious looks as they decided the likelihood of who was to blame, a silent play of one act that ended with all the actors pointing at Sonja. The veteran let out a harsh laugh. “Yeah, I get it. I do. But this one wasn’t me.”

  “Of course it was you,” Durat said. “You’ve been threatening to break it ever since we folded.”

  “Fuck off. It was a joke.” There was a rare panic in her voice as suspicions sharpened on her—if there was anything Sonja could not abide, it was someone thinking she had broken the captain’s rule. To Nia, she conceded, “I hated the music. You knew that. Everyone knew that. But I knew it was the only thing the cracked kid had.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I’m not a damn monster.”

  “ ‘I’m not a monster’—fantastic defense.”

  Sonja glared at Durat.

  “I can’t even imagine doing something like that,” Baylin said, his legs jouncing under the table. “Not like I’d have the time to go and break his flute; like you said, Captain, I’m the busiest person on the ship—”

  Durat rolled his eyes.

  “Unlike others,” he continued, staring pointedly at Durat, “who do nothing but play games in the cockpit.”

  “Dexterity exercises,” Durat said. “They’re dexterity exercises.” His grin wavered. He patted his hands on the table. “Regardless. Captain, I’m not sure why this is an issue. I doubt there’s anyone here who wasn’t at least a little bothered by the noise. Maybe we should just let it go?”

  She slammed her palm on the table; the flute halves jumped.

  “My ship,” she said, her eyes as cold as moons. “Nothing happens on my ship without my say-so. You disrespect our passenger, you disrespect me.”

  Durat lowered his head, cowed.

  Nurse, who had up until that point been leaning on the wall, listening, said, “The captain’s right. Someone acted way out of line. There’s no disputing the point. But”—her arms uncrossed, then recrossed—“the fact of the matter is it happened. The flute’s broken. This minor inquisition isn’t going to reverse that.”

  “ ‘Minor inquisition’?” Nia bared her teeth. “You think I’m being unreasonable.”

  “Of course not,” Nurse said. She brushed a lock of gray hair from her eyes. “All I am saying is that you have made your point. Unless you plan on jettisoning the culprit out the airlock for a moment of stupidity, I think Durat’s right. We should move on.”

  The two women stared at each other.

  “I’d like to speak to you alone,” Nia said.

  The crew scattered. Within seconds, only Nia and Nurse were in the dining area, staring at each other from across the table, their faces half-lit by the bulbs that hung above the counter. Nurse put on a brave face, defiant even, but Nia could see she was anxious; how one hand rubbed the hem of her red sari as if to furrow a hole through the fabric.

  “Did you do it?” Nia asked.

  “Yes,” Nurse said.

  Nia smiled, not believing any of this. “Why?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if it didn’t.”

  “We have four months till we reach Pelican Station,
” Nurse said. She spoke quickly. It was obvious the words were rehearsed beforehand. “Four months stuck in this ship, together. I’ve served in many ships, I’ve seen crews fall apart. You know what I’ve seen. That I know what can happen when…it’s never because of any one thing, but an accumulation of tiny cuts. I felt that the boy’s flute was a cut. So I did my job and I healed it.”

  “You broke it.”

  “For the better, Nia.”

  “Captain,” she corrected, “and what’s for the better is not for you to decide. That’s my job.” She stepped toward her. “I’m docking your paycheck by ten percent.”

  Nurse scoffed. “That seems extreme. What I did was in the best interest of the crew and endangered no one.”

  “Ten percent.”

  Nurse opened her mouth.

  Closed it.

  “Yes, Captain,” she replied with a tight smile, then walked out of the kitchen.

  Nia let out a breath. She rolled her neck, her bowstrung muscles. She scooped up the cracked halves of the flute and tucked them into the drawer of her bedroom desk, believing it was better the boy did not see it again, not like this.

  His bowl of sweet rice was empty when she returned. He was scraping the spoon against the bottom of the bowl, scooping whatever grains still remained. She was never good with children. Comforting them was a skill she’d never had any cause to practice. So with an awkward lightness, she patted him on the shoulder, and hoped that would suffice.