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candidate to run the quarantine and decontamination procedures.”
    My face must go ashen, because she changes her tone and pats me on the arm. “Don’t worry, Specialist. It’s only protocol. I’m sure it’s not carrying anything fatal. I’ll notify Dr. Osmani you’re temporarily on emergency response duty.”
    â€œThank you,” I hear myself say.
    I turn to go, but something stops me. “Captain?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThat little girl, the one who wasn’t breathing,” I say. “Did she make it? Is she okay?”
    The deck captain face softens. “She’ll be fine. They’ve got her on oxygen for a little while. Lucky thing she’s so young. She won’t remember any of this.”
    â€œRight,” I agree, but part of me doubts it. Even if she doesn’t remember the specifics, even if she tries to forget, will it ever completely go away? Or will it creep back in her nightmares and rise up on her when she smells smoke? Will it meld with who she is, like something grafted on to her genetic code? I cast one last look at the soot-covered girl lying still as a stone effigy on the gurney, then clutch my new charge to me and carry it back to my lab.

Chapter 3
    T he month before I applied to the Deep Sound Research Institute, I was still officially sixteen. So I went to see the only person I knew who could fix my papers, the person who had helped Ava and me when we first came to Mumbai—Rushil.
    As I rode the lev trains down from my own quiet, green neighborhood to the Salt, where Ava and Rushil ran their ship docking yard, the trees shrank away. Old buildings with bright new windows and the ghosts of old hand-painted signs on their brickwork rose up in their place. The lev rails skipped over tapris and juice carts sheltering in their shade, and over a cluster of enormous evacuation pipes meant to pump water back out into the sea and keep the lower city from flooding. The only reason Mumbai didn’t disappear along with so many other seaside cities allthose centuries ago was our civil engineering corps. They built the towering levee along our coast and the complex drainage system we still use to this day.
    Of course, it didn’t always work perfectly. I stepped off the train into a squelching stretch of mud and thanked my stars I had remembered to wear my boots. In High Mumbai, we wore open-toed sandals and delicate, embroidered slippers, but down in the Salt, the handful of trash-sucking machines on the streets were losing their battle with the dust and refuse that blew down the open alleys and out into the thoroughfares. The horse dung didn’t help, either.
    I put on my don’t-touch-me glare and started down the street, weaving through the flow of bicycles, other pedestrians, and men and women on horseback. Mumbai’s ban on combustion engines inside the city never seemed strange to me, but the London girls at Revati always complained about it until they heard they got to ride horses through the city.
    I passed the street vendors, shops, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants across from Old Dharavi Station.
    â€œ Chhatri! Chhaata! Brollies and parasols!” shouted a vendor hawking cheap umbrellas. He caught sight of me. “Don’t be caught out in the rains, ladki . You’ll ruin those pretty clothes.”
    I laughed. “ Ji nahi. I’ve got plenty of brollies.”
    â€œWhat about choodi ?” He held up a handful of round metal bracelets. “You can never have enough choodi .”
    I shook my head. If my best friend, Vishva, had been with me like usual, we would have stopped. She shared the vendor’s philosophy on choodi . But Vishva wasn’t with me. Since I had started taking classes at the university instead of Revati, we had seen each other less and less. A wave of loneliness pulled at me. If we still went to school together, she would have tagged along. “For moral support,” she