Entangled (14 page)

The mourning period was over before it started.

Lee chanced a whisper. “What's happening?”

Cade turned and took in Lee's violent folding and clenching. Her fight to keep perfectly still. How fully she was losing it.

The time Cade had spent with her was the closest she'd ever gotten to a real friendship. And now Lee was certain the Unmakers had come for her. Cade couldn't look her in the face and lie about it.

“They want me.”

The shine blinked out of Lee's eyes.

“You have a tracer on you,” she whispered. “And you knew it. You brought it onto this ship. You brought . . .
them.
”

Cade's thoughts shot back to the spaceport on Andana, the last-minute standoff with Mr. Smithjoneswhite. Once she'd shaken free of his slithering hands and cracked that atmos-phere she thought she'd never hear about the tracer again. “Look, Lee . . .”

“Shut it.”

Her hands flew over Cade's clothes, ripping, searching.

“What are you—”

“You don't grow up on the Express without learning how to take off a tracer. You should have told me straight off. Now shut. your. sour. face.”

Cade held her arms out and let herself be searched. Heat flooded her neck, her arms and legs, to the tips of her fingers and toes. Lee's hands slid up the right side of her shirt and stopped at the nipped-in bend of her waist. “It's right here.”

“How can you tell?”

Lee looked at her with a sharpness that could have sliced through metal. “The texture of the skin is different. Rough, raised.” She held a palm out to Cade. “Knife.” Cade pulled it out of her pocket and Lee had it out of her fingers in the same heartbeat.

“This tracer is imprinted in the skin, not underneath. Like a tattoo, but one you can't see under plain light.” She clicked through the blades and settled on the long, precise, needlelike one.

“Clamp down on something.”

Cade held the edge of the bunk. Her bottom teeth dragged against the top ones as Lee tore into her flesh. She carved out a small, square piece.

With the tracer pinched between two fingers, Lee climbed to the top left bunk and worked at one of the ceiling panels. She dumped the panel on the bed and hoisted herself, elbows first, into the gap. Cade waited. Lee's head popped back into the room, hair knots first.

“Oh. Please. Make me do all the work.”

Cade followed in a kind of trance, perforated by the
stab, stab, stab
of the skinless patch on her side.

Lee reached past her and shifted the ceiling panel back into place. She led Cade down a twist of tunnels, plummeting through the depths of the ship, and opened another panel, this one in the wall of the cargo room.

The Unmakers were one door-slide from seeing them.

“It's a good thing Rennik didn't let me come on that little tour,” Lee whispered. “I know the inventory
so well
now.”

She crept in and crossed straight to a pile of crates, blew off a thin dusting of sand, and pried the lid off the top one.

“There,” she said, dropping in the thin flutter of skin with all the engine parts.

Cade waited in the walls to see what came next.

 

Lee and Cade pressed together for at least an hour as the Unmakers looked for the tracer and Rennik crashed back and forth between pretending to help and icing them out.

“If that had been a strong tracer code, they would have found us in under a minute,” Lee whispered. “Must be old, or used.”

Cade sent up a halfhearted thank you to Mr. Smithjoneswhite, for being such a cheap bastard.

The door to the cargo hold flew open and Cade heard the sounds of the little tracer-hunting party. Somewhere deep in her mind, she noticed Xan for the first time that night—even though her body had been humming the End of Times song for two hours straight. Maybe her fear was starting to lose its edge. Or maybe she was just getting used to Xan's company.

“We've been in here before,” an Unmaker said.

It was the first time Cade heard a twitch of emotion in one of their voices. Frustration, pure and obvious.

“Yes, but the tracer code . . .” said another.

“Is useless,” Rennik said. “Like I told you.”

Cade had heard fear claim his throat as she ran out of the control room, but now it sounded like he had a solid grip on his patience. She wondered how often Rennik's composed surface was just that—a surface, with something else beating underneath.

There was a crack of crates being tipped over and the assorted clangs and slumps of cargo hitting the floor.

“Here,” Rennik said. “Is this what you're looking for?”

Cade didn't need to see it to know he was holding up the patch of skin with the tracer code. The right side of her waist ached an echo.

“Looks like this girl of yours dropped it at the spaceport,” Rennik said. “I watch the crates, of course, but not closely enough to notice . . . this.”

And then, without warning, the Unmakers let loose the sound—the beyond-death cry. It went on and on, as Cade's blood hammered out a response. If Xan had been missing for most of the boarding, he was definitely with her now, listening. But there was nothing for him to say, no form of soothing he could send, that would cancel out that sound. Lee pressed so close into Cade's cut side that it flared up with pain, then went numb.

The wail didn't seem to have one shred of an effect on Rennik. “Yes, well, if you're all done here . . .”

Cade could almost see him studying the white-slivered moons of his fingernails. She let a tiny smile slip.

“It would be a simple thing to destroy this ship,” one of the Unmakers said.

The smile died. Cade and Lee both put hands out to touch Renna. The walls clenched tight.

“One button,” an Unmaker said. “The work of a few moments.”

Rennik pushed on, flat-voiced and unimpressed, but Cade heard his breath rise to a new pitch. “If you meant to do that, you would have done it by now. You're afraid the Hatchum will come after you. You're not wrong to be.”

The Hatchum were known as relentless fighters, and loyal to the point of triumph, idiocy, or death—whichever came first. Cade wondered if even the Unmakers feared them.

Voices spiraled down until they were more feeling than noise.

“You mistake us.”

“We would die here, and know happiness.”

“But then there is the girl.”

The Unmakers left, their words still troubling the ground.

 

 

CHAPTER 10

QUANTUM REALM: The nano-scale used to measure quantum effect—which can operate at a macro level

Lee waited another hour before she would open the panel in the wall. She finally emerged, shining and refreckled, into the light of the cargo hold.

“You were . . . amazing,” Cade said. “Impossible. You saved my life.”

Lee tossed out words—dark as thunderclouds, with twice the rumble. “I saved
all of our lives.
”

It stopped Cade short.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “You did it fast and first-class.”

She followed Lee up the chute to the control room, wanting to thank her at least eight times a minute. But Lee was silent in a way that warned Cade to be silent, too.

Rennik stood at the panels, not even pretending to steer. He was in almost the same place he'd been when Cade left him. The same dials. His hands clutched to the same knuckle-gleaming white. Cade felt like she could step backwards and land in that moment—nudge time back a bit more, and feel Rennik's hand on her shoulders, where before she'd felt only hollowness, and a hard outline of fear.

“Rennik.” Lee crossed to him, pushing time forward. “I need the hailing codes.”

Cade hadn't been able to hear the full drain of the act Rennik had put on for the Unmakers, but she could see it now. The skin beneath the double hooks of his cheekbones drawn tight. The corners of his eyes perked to hold the lids up.

“Now?” he asked.

“No,” Lee said. “In a thousand light-years.”

It should have been a joke, but it was too sharp around the edges. Lee's words stabbed the air. Rennik took them—like he always took the brunt of Lee—and absorbed it without a wince.

He pulled out a thick binder of charts, maps, and timetables. Started to page through. “Human codes?”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “Start hailing anything that bleeds red.”

“Are you sure this needs to be done—”

“
Now,
yeah.” Lee drummed her fingers on the wall. On Renna.

Cade knew that she should let it go. Lee had saved her from a dark, double-shadowed fate. She'd earned some strange behavior. But this was strange behavior that might steer Cade away from Xan.

“What's the new, can't-wait business?”

Lee pressed her hands against the control panels—splayed them hard into branching lines of bone.

“This isn't about the Express. And you know it.”

Lee waited until Rennik turned away, then swiveled and stuck to Cade's side with magnetic force.

“I trusted you,” she whispered. At that moment, from that distance, she looked old. Every hatch in her skin, every too-pale inch a bit of proof, and it all added up. Lee was a human girl who'd grown up where no human should.

Her voice changed into something loud, airy, all for show.

“It's Cade. I'd cancel the run for her if I could, but it's too important. So we'll find her a new ride. She needs to get planetbound.”

Planetbound?

Cade's nerves crackled and her muscles tightened one full key-turn, like they did when a punch was about to make contact with her gut. “Lee?”

“Don't look at me like that,” Lee said. “I'm doing this for your own good.” She clapped on her most solemn, honest face, and lied. “We need to get Cade off this ship.”

Rennik opened his mouth, but before he could ask—“Yes,
now,
” Lee said. “She's spacesick.”

 

Cade dragged Lee out of the control room. Rennik stared, but didn't stop her. Even Lee didn't stop her. She let herself be marched down the chute and shoved into the hidden room. Cade faced her in the thin bar of space between the beds.

“What in the blinked-out stars are you doing?”

Lee answered with a shoulder to the stomach. She drove Cade up, onto her toes and off balance. Cade saw flashes of white room, flashes of blue shirt, until things came back together around the swing of Lee's fist.

Cade rushed at Lee, forced her to the floor.

“It had to be
them
after you, didn't it,” Lee said.

“The Unmakers?”

Cade's torso slanted over Lee's at an uncomfortable angle, trapped her. Lee went limp under the makeshift cage.

“They don't have names,” she said. “I asked on twenty planets.” Lee's chin pitted, trembled. Light brown hair crossed her face like fine cracks. “It had to be
them.
Of course it did.”

Her wrist jerked to one side, sudden enough that it smashed through Cade's grip. And then Lee was at her again. Fingernails, knees, whatever she could point at Cade.

Cade fought back.

But she didn't let herself feel it, not fully. She paced her breath slow in the hopes of muffling her own heart. If she wasn't careful, the automatic connection to Xan would snap on, and she didn't want his help. It wouldn't be fair to meet Lee with doubled-up strength. Cade's own muscles and her training, courtesy of Club V, should have been enough to counter Lee's blows, to block and absorb. But Lee swung and swung and wouldn't stop. She was a glitching machine.

The ground underneath them went full earthquake, and lurched Cade out of the action. Lee landed in front of the tunnel on the far side of the room. It took Cade a rattled second to figure out that the disturbance had been Renna breaking up the fight.

“Thanks,” Cade muttered.

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” Lee asked the room, rubbing at her elbow.

Cade sat there, 2 percent of her mind taking stock of her bruises. The other 98 percent narrowed in on Lee's words.

It had to be
them.

Cade had brought the Unmakers. The damage Lee could do was nothing compared to what they would have done. And not just to Cade—to everyone who had ever helped her.

“This was my fault.” The words came out weak, like the bridge of a song. Something Cade couldn't get right, no matter how hard she tried. She reached a few stiffened fingers and touched Lee's arm.

“I mean it, Lee. I didn't know . . .”

Lee spun on Cade. “Don't.” She shook her arm, and Cade's fingers slid off. She was still new to the business of touching, and she didn't have much practice in saying she was sorry, but she got the strong sense she'd done both of them wrong. She was about to try again, but Lee's death-to-traitors stare sent her reeling back to her old ways.

“Don't expect me to grovel,” Cade said. “What I did . . .” The voices of the Unmakers grated, low and metal, against her thoughts. “What I did was a mistake. You knew exactly what it meant when you told that lie.”

Lee came in close, but this time she kept her fists to herself, attacking Cade with a rasp-edged whisper.

“You're surprised I would lie to get you off this ship? Really?”

Even Cade knew it was the kind of question you didn't actually answer.

“I think that's funny,” Lee whispered. “I think that's a first-class
riot.
You brought the worst fate in the universe down on our heads, which never would have happened if you'd bothered to tell me the truth.”

Cade dropped to her heels, swept over with nausea—and it had nothing to do with the fight or the exhaustion or even the fact that the room had broken into waves under her feet. Cade was more scared for Xan than she'd ever been.

“The worst fate in the universe?” she repeated.