Entangled (10 page)

She looked down at the place where his fingers met her skin. She still wasn't used to letting people touch her. Cade could see the absence of logic—there was someone prodding at her
mind
a lot of the time—but skin on skin was a different kind of connection. One that made her insides twist.

“Your first mission?” Rennik asked.

Cade reached down the table and nabbed another biscuit. “I've worked my whole life.”

“But you're new to the Express?”

Gori still watched from the end of the table, those dark orbs trained on her.

“It shows all big and obvious, doesn't it?”

Rennik laughed. It made Cade hungry.

“Lee's a good person—the best—but she'll stomp on your feet if you don't keep them moving. And be careful.”

Cade felt the stick of juice in her throat.

“Yeah,” she said. “I'll do that.”

She'd been so busy with worries about Xan and the Unmakers that it had slid right out the back door of her brain. Human Express was dangerous in its own right.

Cade and Lee waited in the main cabin as Rennik set the ship down. There was no way to see the planet as Renna dropped through layers of atmosphere. Cade got her first good glimpse when they settled on something firm, and the walkway uncurled.

Highlea could have been Andana's bigger, older, uglier sister.

Renna sat in an outdoor port. Past a few rows of ships in different stages of falling apart, a strip of dirt and crabgrass gave onto Highlea City. It was ten times as big as Voidvil, at least. Cade couldn't see the end of it.

Like an ocean.

A great big seething sea of human.

Lee slung a canvas pack over one shoulder and handed another to Cade.

“All right,” she said. “Let's collect.”

 

Highlea City was like an ocean in more ways than one. It looked calm, but once Cade tossed herself into it there were waves, and tides, and scuttling creatures that lurked in its dark.

Lee tried to shout directions back to Cade, but her words got lost in a constant smashing surf of voices.

It was almost as loud as the Noise.

But Cade had a clear head now, and it helped her work her way through this blaring new world. Every street she turned down seemed to open into a public square, and every square was busier than Club V on a Saturday night. The force of the crowd tore Cade away from Lee more than once. She had to use her extra strength to push through, brush off, catch up.

Lee led her down a narrow side street lined in tan brick. The smells of clay and bread and spice crowded her even as the people drained out. It was just the two of them, Cade and Lee, standing in front of a door with a hand-lettered sign.

DO NOT ENTER.

In fourteen different languages.

Lee smiled and tightened one of her stray hair knots.

“Universe, but I do love that sign.”

She opened the door and plunged them both into the dark.

A narrow set of stone stairs dropped down story after story until it hit a platform. This was longer than it was wide, and the drop on the far side bottomed out in a damp, shallow curve that ran in both directions into carved-stone circles.

“Old tunnels,” Lee said. “Used to vent natural gases up into the city, but they came up with better piping a couple of decades ago. Now these are filled with spacesicks.”

Cade thought of the glass-eyed men and women she'd known on Andana skittering around in underground gloom.

“They come down here?”

“More like they're dropped down here.”

“That's . . .” Cade couldn't find the word.
Awful
wasn't enough.

It was a good thing Lee had curses to spare. “It's snugging sour, right? The spacesicks get so used to the black out there, people think it doesn't matter if they can see the sun.”

“People can snug themselves.”

Lee grinned at Cade's choice of phrase. But then she cast her eyes down the tunnels and got serious. “I think that was the official reason they gave, you know? Really just wanted the sick out of sight. Reminds people what could happen to them, with one nudge out into space.”

“But you've been in space your whole life.” Cade studied Lee. Clear eyes, a solid set of muscles, hands that kept to themselves. Not one whiff of spacesick about her.

“I spent a lot of time with planetbound relations when I was little,” she said. “Been in space full-time for six years. It takes some longer to catch it than others. I know all the signs, check myself right and regular. And I plan to retire at the ripe old age of twenty.”

Lee turned to one end of the platform. Cade's eyes adjusted down through shades of dark until she could see a little crowd of people. Their edges were unclear, parts of them shaded into the murk.

“All right, all right, step up,” Lee said. The group shuffled like a horde of unsure fans. Cade almost thought one would take out a shiny-barreled marker and ask for an autograph. “We're going to try something new today. If you have an item you're waiting on, come see me. Need to send something off-planet? Meet Cade.”

Lee flourished one of her long, sharp-elbowed arms at Cade.

She did her best to smile.

When that failed miserably, she found a dry patch on the platform and got to work.

First up was a little girl with planet-sized eyes. All she wanted was to hug a mangy cloth rabbit and send it halfway across the known universe. Simple enough. Cade stuffed it in the canvas sack, took down the name, planet, and dropoff point.

Then came an old woman, drowning in her own wrinkles. Cade had a rougher time with this one.

“You want me to
what?
”

“Cry. Tears?”

“I know what they are,” Cade said, but that didn't change the fact that she hadn't produced them, ever. She hadn't cried in the Parentless Center on Andana, when she was told to drum up some misery for the inspectors so the center would get more coin. She hadn't cried when her parents were uncreated in one sentence from Mr. Niven. And she definitely hadn't cried when a song she made up on the spot turned a room of men, women, and spacesicks into watery chaos.

“My son, he died in a cobalt mine collapse. I can't be there at the funeral. But I need them to have my tears.”

Cade shivered away from the old woman's arms. “Look, I'm sorry . . .”

Lee shot her a
don't-snug-this-up
look. Cade remembered, just in time, how much she needed the job.

It was going to get her to Xan.

She had it easy, compared to him. She was surrounded by humans, and he fell asleep to the sounds of Unmakers.

Cade looked down the line of waiting faces, and startled to think that she had it better than they did, too. She doubted most of them were being hunted by double-shadowed beasts—but in one sense she had it good, and she knew it. Entanglement gave her a direct connection to the one person she cared about. If that was broken, how hard would she work, what wouldn't she do, to get a message to him?

Cade couldn't be sure about the trustiness of her tear ducts, but she knew that wasn't what the old woman cared about. “I can't promise sobs,” Cade said. “I can't promise buckets. But I'll do my best.”

The old woman folded her candle-wax hands over Cade's and leaned in close.

“Universe keep you.”

The man at the top of the line jumped forward. He was average height, average weight, average everything. He bounced on the balls of his feet.

“I need to send this to my wife.”

He leapt in, lips trembling an inch from Cade's, so close she could see the thin cracks, the white-chapped corners.

Cade smacked him so far, he tumbled the rest of the line to the ground.

“Hey, hey.” Lee jumped into the mess. She sent wild eye-stabs at Cade as she hauled people to their feet. “Sorry, she's new. You understand.”

Lee left the line behind her with a smile, and pushed Cade into the stairwell. Cade's instinct was to push back, but there was no use starting a fight with her boss.

“Look, I know what you're thinking,” Lee said. “Kissing is the most we do. And it's about sending a message—not snugging. Anyone gets sloppy or handsy or too brass with you, send them to me.”

Lee cracked a knuckle. Cade almost laughed. Lee had some real storminess in her, and Cade didn't doubt she could put up a decent scrap. But Cade had seen lips before, and knew where to send people who shoved them into her face. That wasn't the problem. It wasn't even the problem she expected—the not-wanting-to-be-touched.

It was this: Cade had never kissed someone. And with those cracked lips so close, all of a sudden, it mattered.

“I won't do it,” Cade said.

“Then drain out.”

“What?” Her yelp hit the walls, bounced into the tunnels.

The storm gathered in Lee's face and could break any second. Her words trembled, weighted and electric. “The stairs are right behind you,” she said. “You know how to climb them.”

“But—”

“You can't take tears, you can't take a simple kiss, what else won't you take, Cade? You told me you would work to get to Hades. Right now, all you're doing is dragging me under.”

“Look,” Cade said. “Let me try again—”

“No!” Lee's words lashed at Cade. “There's not one person here you can help that I can't help faster, not one thing you can carry that I can't carry better.”

Cade tried to keep calm. If she let fear override her systems, Xan would be there in a blink. She didn't want him to know how close she was to ruining the whole thing, setting herself back so far that she might not make it before the beasts came to his small room and did something unspeakable.

“But my brother—”

“Is in danger. I know,” Lee said. “That's why I gave you a chance. Not my fault if you squandered it.”

Cade got the feeling that with each word, Xan was another light-year away.

“Please.”

“Look.” Lee burst out a breath. “I'll take you back to Andana. I won't strand you here.”

Andana. Back to Mr. Smithjoneswhite and his tracker. Back to the ruins of Cherry-Red and the bunker. Back to the world she'd never wanted in the first place—and the Unmakers who waited there.

“There's no life for me on Andana.”

Lee cut through the air with her hands. “I can't leave you here. The Highlea force is too active. They find you and trace you back to me, I'm done. That's not a risk I can take.
This
wasn't a risk I could take.”

Lee turned to her waiting line, waved over the stragglers from Cade's. She beckoned the first woman.

Cade went and stood on the edge of the tunnel, breathing in the dark. She wanted a minute alone with her thoughts, but within four seconds she was captured by something more interesting—sounds. Small ones. If the Noise had been with her, she wouldn't have noticed them. The pretty plink of water down the right-hand tunnel. The scrape of shoes on stone. People lived in this deep, forgotten place. Cade thought of stepping into it and never being seen again. She could outrun Lee, Mr. Cracked Lips, the whole crowd. She could disappear into a new world.

But she couldn't find Xan alone.

Then it burst into her perfectly clear head.

“Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd the wild waves whist, Foot it featly here and there; And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”

Cade's voice was high and sweeter than black-market sugar. The tunnel grabbed the strange words, and they traveled into the circles of dark, to live down there. To echo, maybe forever.

Lee half turned from the line to look at Cade. Her words still sharp, electric at the edges. “What was that?”

“What,” Cade said with her best innocent-girl eyes. “Don't remember it?”

Lee's eyebrows crumpled.

“That's the song the old man taught you on Andana. You couldn't sing it to keep the sun from blinking out.”

Cade spun away from the edge of the platform, crossed to Lee.

“So there is something I can carry better than you,” Cade muttered. “A tune.” She turned to the line. “Does anyone here have a song? Music?”

A woman in a long red robe stepped forward.

“I want to send this to my girls . . .”

“Perfect.”

The woman dipped her head low, hair shifting pale under her hood. She hummed through notes that worked over and under each other like woven cloth. When a thread felt rich and full, another would enter and surprise Cade with its color, its fluttering movement, the way it fit so neatly with the others.

Cade picked up a thread and started to sing.

The notes were beautiful. And then the notes themselves weren't enough. Cade scratched the soles of her shoes against the platform, slapped her palms on her thighs, the floor. They came up gritted and pink as raw meat, but the ringing was just what she needed. It filled her head, fizzed in the half-healed space where her tooth had been.

Things would never be the same without Cherry-Red, but Cade could still make music. She could get people to listen. The little crowd stood around her now, in a half-circle, clapping to the beat when they could find it. And further, in the tunnels, other people clanged and rattled, throwing in their voices and their bodies. Wanting to be part of it. The spacesicks. Always her truest fans.

Lee watched the whole thing from her spot on the platform, and one twitch at a time, the smile came back to her face.

The song swelled and broke and swelled again, until it flooded the platform and spread deep into the tunnels and all the way up the long, steep stairs.

The door cracked open.

A thin point of light shone down and landed inches in front of Lee.

“Who's down there?”

The silence was thick, like a blanket, and it fooled Cade into feeling safe. Whoever was up there would close the door. Forget what they thought they heard. Keep moving.