A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(76)

She laid the bones out on a length of fabric she’d scavenged from a bench in a wrecked skiff. It was clean and in good shape, but too rough for clothes. She was glad to have found a use for it.

Owl pulled up her medical files and helped Jane arrange the pieces in the right way. Some bones were missing. Jane felt bad about that, but she’d tried her best to find them all. There was only so much she could do.

Jane cleaned the scrap off the wagon and laid the bones on it. She thought about it more, and started rearranging their fingers.

‘What are you doing?’ Owl said.

‘They’re bunkmates,’ Jane said. ‘They should be holding hands.’

Owl closed her eyes and bowed her head. Music started playing, a song Jane hadn’t heard before. It was weird music, but cheerful, too, all bouncing flutes and drums.

‘What is this?’

Owl smiled sad. ‘It’s an album Max liked when he was small. Aandrisk music. This one’s called “A Prayer for Iset the Eldest”. It’s tied to a folk legend about an elder who lived five hundred years.’

‘Is that true?’

‘I highly doubt it. But the song is supposed to have been played after her death. A celebration of a long life well lived.’

Jane looked at the fingerbones, now intertwined. ‘They didn’t have that.’

‘No. But they should have.’ Owl paused. ‘And you still could.’ The music danced gently. An Aandrisk voice hummed along with the drums. Another joined it, then another, and another, a group blending together. Jane and Owl listened, saying nothing. The song eventually faded away. ‘Do you want to say something to them?’ Owl said.

Jane licked her lips, feeling nervous for no reason. The dead girls couldn’t hear her. Even if she said the wrong thing, they wouldn’t care . . . right? ‘I don’t know who you were,’ she said. ‘I don’t know your names or numbers, or . . . or what your task was.’ She frowned. This was already all wrong. ‘I don’t care about your task. That’s not what’s important. That should never have been the most important thing. What’s important is that you were good girls who – who found out how wrong things are. And you died, and you were probably scared when it happened. That’s so unfair, and I am so, so angry about it. I wish you had been here so we could’ve helped each other. I wish we could’ve been friends. Maybe we could’ve gotten out of here together.’ She rubbed the back of her head. ‘I don’t know who you were. But I remember others. I remember my bunkmate Jane 64, who said’ – she smiled – ‘that I was the “most good” at fixing little stuff. She slept without moving and she was . . . kind. She was a kind friend, and I remember her. I remember Jane 6, who could sort cables super fast. I remember Janes 56, 9, 21, 44, 14, and 19, who died in the explosion. I remember Jane 25, who asked too many questions – and was probably the smartest of all of us, now that I think about it. I remember the Janes, the Lucys, the Sarahs, the Jennys, the Claires. The Marys. The Beths.’ She wiped her face on her forearm, eyes stinging. ‘And I’ll remember you, too.’

Owl couldn’t be with Jane for the next part of the funeral plan. Jane wished she could be. The walk to the waterhole was way too quiet. All she could hear was the rattle of the wagon of bones in tow. She needed to make some noise. The music back at the shuttle had felt like the right sort of thing to do for a funeral, but she didn’t know any songs like that.

‘Engines on,’ Jane sang softly. ‘Fuel pumps, go. Grab your gear, there’s lots to know. The galaxy is where we play, come with us, we know the way . . .’ It wasn’t nearly as good as the song Owl had picked, but the bones had been little girls once, and Jane bet they’d have liked Big Bug.

After she got to the waterhole, she put on the pair of huge rubber boots that had been in the cargo bay from day one. They were enormous on her, but they went up past her knees, which was what she needed. She picked up the fabric that the bones rested on, holding it wide as she could between her arms. The bones shifted together. Some of the lizard-birds near the bank looked up.

‘I hope this is okay with you,’ Jane said to the bones. She stepped carefully into the water, trying not to jostle the bones any more than she had to. ‘I can’t launch you to space, and you don’t have any nutrients I can make anything out of.’ She walked forward. The water was dirty and polluted, but it gave life, too. It gave life to the lizard-birds and the fungus and the bugs, and even the dogs, the bastard dogs who’d made a meal out of these kids. The water gave her life, too. ‘So, um, in sims, sometimes they talk about fossils. Fossils are great, because they mean there’s a chance somebody will find you a long long time from now and what’s left of you can teach them things about who you were. I don’t know if this will work, but I know you need water and mud for fossils, and this is the best I’ve got.’ She stopped in the middle of the pond. The lizard-birds chirped. The water lapped at her huge boots. She felt like she should say something more, but what else was there? The bones couldn’t hear her anyway. She didn’t know why she was talking. She didn’t have any more words left, just a heavy chest and a whole lot of tired. She laid the fabric into the water. The water reached up, bleeding through, tugging it down. The bones sank and vanished.

As Jane headed back home, she decided something, and she knew it better than she’d ever known anything. She would die someday – no getting around that. But nobody would find her bones in the scrapyard. She wasn’t going to leave them there.