Entangled (11 page)

Then the blanket ripped off.

Footsteps slammed down the stairs—so many sets that, even with her first-class hearing, Cade couldn't count them. People on the platform started to babble or moan. Lee brushed them to the edge and set them off down the right-hand tunnel. She grabbed the canvas sacks and Cade's hand in one sweep. Cade jumped into the left-hand tunnel just as the first pair of boots hit the bottom of the stairs.

Lee sped down one branch of the tunnel and then another, catching them up in puddles and slamming into circles of dead-end stone. Their shoes stuttered as they rounded back. Within three turns it was clear. Lee had no idea where she was going.

With Cade's heartbeat running triple-time, the connection to Xan kicked in. She could feel his worry—the worry that she would never reach him. Cade didn't need this. Not now. She didn't need a flood of someone else's feelings. She didn't even need his strength or steadiness.

She just needed a way out.

The thin beam of light nipped at her heels. Feet slammed behind them, close.

Cade hit a long stretch of tunnel with at least ten branches, and her ears picked out something new.

The beat she had been slapping into the floor, stinging into her palms. Now she heard it banged into the walls and splashed out in the water. At first she thought she was mad, a regular spacecadet.

But the beat drew her on, and then she knew.

The spacesicks were telling her the way.

As soon as she tugged on Lee's hand and started running in the right direction, other beats sprang up, other sounds. Someone who didn't know better would follow them. The Highlea force branched into two groups, then four. Their footsteps thinned and threaded in all the wrong directions.

Cade could have looked every one of those spacesicks in the glassy eye and planted kisses on their hungry lips.

She followed the right beat, let the rest fall behind.

 

Cade and Lee came up from the tunnels into the middle of a sun-streaked, bustling square. There were plenty of people ready and willing to stare at them.

Lee shook off, from her wet-clumped hair to her squelching feet. She ran, and Cade watched as her legs pumped fast, watched as Lee grew small. But just before she took the corner at full speed and disappeared down an alley, she turned. Ran all the way back to a stunned Cade.

“Come on!” she said. “Let's drain.”

Cade had been sure that getting them found out, followed, and almost caught meant she was out of the Express. Done. Without a hope of making it to Xan.

Lee grabbed her arm.

“So you got into a bit of trouble,” she said. “Got yourself out of it, too. That makes you one of us.”

 

 

CHAPTER 8

ACTION AT A DISTANCE: In violation of the Principle of Locality, two objects separated in space have an unmediated interaction

It looked like being “one of us” meant letting Lee spill the contents of your stories to anyone who would listen.

“And then she busts into it . . . these notes high and wild . . .”

Rennik raised his already dramatic eyebrows, even though he'd heard this part three times.

“And then the door at the top of the stairs
slams!”
Lee ticked a finger in one direction, then the other. “No, wait. I missed a part.”

The three of them stood in Rennik's cabin. He hadn't invited them in, at least not until Lee attacked the door with what she insisted was a secret knock. Rennik's room was small but thick with comforts—blankets made of supersoft wool, little prints of planets done in pale colors, actual books on an actual shelf. Cade didn't know the titles, but the presence of pasteboard and paper and spines was enough to explain his old-fashioned grasp of English. The room was made for someone tall like Rennik, curved like Rennik. The walls and furniture didn't seem to give a big-bang about straight lines. They were more interesting and organic than that. When Cade's arm brushed against the wall she felt it pulse in and out, slow and shallow—like breathing.

“Then we tore into the tunnels,” Lee said. She frowned, her freckles drooping. “No, wait. I missed another part.”

“Of course you didn't,” Rennik said. “You're just having some . . . trouble with the chronological construct.”

The blankness of his face made it impossible for Cade to tell if he was helping Lee out or making fun of her—or both.

“We tore into the tunnels!” Lee cried, committing to it this time.

The retelling was shined-up and overblown—still, it sent Cade back to those tight spaces, the heart-stop of dead ends.

Rennik watched Cade. She could feel his worry even though his face was resistant to the idea of wrinkling. If he wanted to say something, he should say it. It made her feel tight and coiled inside, having to guess. Did the story make him worried for the ship? For Lee? For her? His eyes bore down, and Cade noticed his double pupils for the first time. A thin ring of darker black that circled around the first—the difference between night on a well-lit planet and the pits of space, right there in his eyes.

“You should have seen Cade tear through those tunnels when she heard the song come back,” Lee said. “The spacesicks knew the whole snugging thing! They pounded it out and—”

“We should find you something to play,” Rennik said, looking straight at Cade.

Her heartbeat went soft and shushed and hopeful.

“Like . . . an instrument?”

“
Like
an instrument is precisely what I mean,” Rennik said. He reached to the desk and scribbled a few notes to himself—in English. Cade was starting to wonder if he'd tossed his own language out with the spacetrash. “I don't have anything . . . traditional onboard. But we'll see what we can do.”

Lee crowded in next to Rennik so she could see his notes, and Cade couldn't see much of anything.

“This is for the Express, right?” Lee asked.

Rennik capped his pen with a liquid-firm click. “Of course.”

Cade didn't give one good snug what it was for. She would have something to play. To keep the beat on, to set her voice to, maybe even—if she was lucky—to strum. She lit so pure with happiness that she was sure Xan could feel it.

She tried to hide her wattage from Rennik, even if he had been the one to spark it. If he saw the true force of her feeling and responded with calm, she might burst. In a shards-all-over sort of way.

Rennik edged toward the door. “If you ladies will excuse me, I need to be sure that Renna's on course.”

That reminded Cade of something she wanted to ask. She figured she had enough good standing to trade it against one stupid question.

“If you're here with us,” she said, “who's flying the ship?”

He put a hand to the wall and laughed. “Renna flies herself for the most part. She would hate to think I took all the credit for her abilities just because I'm the one with the face. Faces are ridiculous, according to Renna. They make you think you know a person when all you know is a few twitching inches of skin.” He patted the wall and Cade could feel the room . . . sigh. “I do set the courses. I check bearings, make suggestions.”

The wall shuddered a warning.

“Gentle suggestions.”

“So if you're not a pilot, what are you?” Cade asked.

“An outlaw,” Rennik said. “It's a full-time occupation.”

“We should know.” Lee cocked a leg up on Rennik's desk chair. She looked half fierce, half adorable.

“I carry goods,” Rennik said, “and most of those are legitimate.”

“And he carries us, and we're not.”

“Yes, my passengers would be the bottom-feeders of the universe, if it had a bottom.”

Lee gasped, but her smile was there, firm beneath the outrage. Cade got the feeling that she wasn't bothered by his comment at all.

Cade thought of the two things she'd done with her life—headlining at Club V, and now this. She'd gotten into both because she needed to, and because she was the one who could. There had never been much choice involved.

“How did you get into outlawing?” she asked.

Rennik flashed a look at Lee, and they both went tighter than overtuned strings.

“Long story,” Lee said.

“Yes.” Rennik leaned over Lee and pretended to whisper. “Even longer than the one you just told me four times.”

She pummeled him on his shoulders and arms as he left. As soon as he passed through the door, she shut it.

“So,” Lee said, flopping down on top of the soft-blanketed bed. “Boys or girls or both?”

“What?”

Cade's head rang with the question like she was getting reverb.

“This is basic, Cade. You don't need to look at me like I'm ten shades of green. Boys . . . or girls . . . or both?”

Cade sat down at Rennik's desk, in the welcoming palm of the chair.

“Is this because of the kiss-attack on Highlea?”

“No,” Lee said, playing a pouncy game with a loose string on one of the blankets. “I'm just curious.”

Cade thought through the scene that had just unfolded in front of her. “Is it because of Rennik?”

“Now I hate you,” Lee said, “and I'm still curious.”

Cade didn't have an answer shined up and ready to go, so she stalled.

“What about you?”

“Both,” Lee said with a big, cosmic sigh. “Not that it matters when you work the Express. I can't keep someone waiting for me in every spaceport. Well . . .” She scrunched up her freckles. “I
could,
but I won't. Too much mess, too many appointments to keep. Your turn.”

Cade's knowledge of coupling was wobbly at best. She had seen men and women together in different combinations on the streets of Voidvil. She paid less attention to their man-or-woman-liness than to how unhappy they looked—faces puckered and pure-sour when they turned to each other, wide and searching for something better when they turned away. The fans that came on to her at the club were men and women, with an emphasis on men. Most of them were spacesicks, and all of them were fevered-up with wanting her. It had never occurred to Cade to want them back.

Now she wondered if that could change. She was noticing things about people that she'd never noticed before. The sweep of faces, the intricacies of hands. She still didn't want anyone to touch her—and at the same time she did want them to.

Then there was Xan. Cade's feelings for him were strong. Visceral. They touched every part of her and sped through her bloodstream. But he wasn't just a
boy.
It was more basic than that, and more complicated at the same time.

“I haven't had time to think about it, I guess.”

Lee had been patient, waiting for Cade's answer, but now she jumped on it and, with a sweet laugh, tore it apart. “You were living in a desert, alone, for five years and you didn't have time to
think
about it?”

“Look,” Cade said. All of a sudden the tough girl was back, singing her old standards. “You're abandoned on an ashtray planet as a little girl, you don't see a lot of people. It doesn't come up.”

“Didn't you have friends?” Lee looked at Cade with wide and wary eyes, like Cade had changed from a human into a strike-anywhere match.

“No,” Cade muttered. “You can be the first. If you're interested in the position.”

“What about your family?” Lee asked.

“What about yours?” Cade tossed the questions back to deflect—but she was surprised to find how interested she was in Lee's answers.

Lee put all of her focus into ripping the stray string out of Rennik's blanket. She didn't look like she wanted to say much, but she never dodged a direct question. Cade wondered what it was like, to live that open and honest—not just with one person who'd been planted inside of her head, but with everyone.

The string popped away from the blanket. Lee picked her words with care. “My family is . . . not on the Express anymore.”

“Planetbound?” Cade asked.

“Most of them.”

“Because of spacesick?”

Lee twisted the string around and around her fingertip. It darkened to a violent purple.

“Most of them.”

“I'm a tubie.” Cade had never said the word out loud. It sounded strange in her ears. Hollow.

“A tubie with a brother,” Lee said, perking up a little bit. “First-class outrageous.”

Cade had forgotten that Xan was supposed to be her brother. It had seemed like a harmless lie at the time. But now—when she thought about him—she wasn't so comfortable with it. Her cheeks splashed warm.

“Yeah, well, Xan and I are special.”

Lee stood up and closed in, on her toes, like she might tip forward and crash-hug Cade. Lee was sweetness and storm tossed together in equal parts, but whenever the conversation took a turn toward family, her eyes doubled in wideness, and she became—almost—somber. “So this brother who's about to be killed,” she said, “he's the one person you have in your life?”

“Well . . . we've . . . never actually . . . met.”

Lee laughed and pressed a hand to her forehead.

“Cade, I have seen a lot of strange things in this universe,” she said. “But you rank higher every time you open your mouth.”

Lee didn't even know the half of it.

 

Cade thought about telling Lee more than once in the next few days—when they woke up in the same secret bedroom or sat together at lunch after Rennik drained out and Gori sat, not-eating, and stared at Cade for an hour. But no matter how many opportunities she had, she couldn't get herself to say it.

I'm entangled.

My particles are connected on a subatomic level to the particles of someone I haven't seen since I was two, and I need to save him from double-shadowed creatures, so we can change the fate of the human race.

Or something.