Sound by Alexandra Duncan Page B

grunted. “Well, you can stay or you can go, butyour friend doesn’t get in without ID.”
    I looked helplessly at Vishva. Don’t leave me out here alone. Fake IDs were expensive, and I’d never needed one before. Vishva had said I wouldn’t need one.
    She glanced over her shoulder at Siobhan and Chandra standing under the pulsing lights of the dance floor, and then back at me. “Sorry, Mi.” She backed up another step.
    A small, sharp pain shot through my chest. “Vishva . . .”
    â€œI’ll find you later, okay?” She angled her way into the crowd and shouted over the music. “We’ll go up to the hill, like you wanted. Keep your crow on.”
    My eyes burned, but I wasn’t about to cry in front of a bouncer and a whole line of people. That would be later, alone on the train, when I started to wonder whether they’d turned me away because I truly looked so young or if my being too dark and foreign had something to do with it. Instead I stared dumbfounded as my best friend disappeared into the darkness and thrash of bodies without so much as a backward look.
    Another alarm chimes, warning me it’s time to get dressed if I’m going to make it to the officers’ tier on time. I can’t keep dwelling on some dumb high school slight. Besides,my failed attempt to get into Pradeep’s was what gave me the idea to tweak my records and get myself here. If Vishva hadn’t dumped me for her new friends that night, I might still be knocking around Mumbai, waiting for my life to begin. Someone else would have had to rescue the universe’s traumatized cats.
    I stand and shake out my dress uniform, brush invisible flecks of lint from the sleeves, and hold it up against me before the full-length mirror on the back of the door.
    â€œIt’ll be fine,” I tell myself. If it was a mistake, surely they would have sorted it by now.
    At that moment, the door slides open, and all three of my bunkmates walk in.
    â€œWhoa-ho,” Madlenka whoops as she shrugs out of her lab coat. “Fancy. Going somewhere special tonight, Miyole?”
    Jyotsana and Lian grin when they see what I’m holding.
    â€œIs it a boy?” Jyotsana’s eyes light up. “It’s a boy, isn’t it? Is it that security pilot who’s always following you around?”
    For a split second, I think spontaneous human combustion might be possible after all. “Rubio?” I say faintly.
    â€œThat’s him,” Jyotsana agrees. “The one with the hair, right?”
    â€œNo,” I choke out. “Definitely not. No.”
    â€œCome on, Jyotsana, not everyone’s into boys.” Madlenka rolls her eyes at me sympathetically. Her girlfriend works in propulsion maintenance, and once, when we were playing Truth or Dare during our first week aboard, she got me to admit to having a debilitating and unrequited crush on a girl from my biochem class at the university. Her name was Karishma, and she had hair all the way down to her waist. She was also six years older than I was and secretly engaged to our teaching assistant, but I didn’t know that at the time.
    â€œNo,” I say again, more forcefully than I mean to. “It’s no one, okay?” I don’t have time in my life for crushes anymore.
    â€œAll right.” Jyotsana holds up her hands in surrender but shoots Madlenka a look that says she doesn’t believe me for a second. They’re all in their early twenties, which means they think they have some kind of sixth sense when it comes to my love life.
    â€œSo where are you going?” Lian folds her lab coat neatly and drops it in the laundry chute.
    â€œI . . . um . . . the mid-tier officers’ dining room?”
    â€œThe middle tier?” Madlenka gasps, and the three of them dissolve in excited shrieks.
    â€œ Aiyo , really?”
    â€œSo exciting!”
    â€œHow did you get an