Entangled (16 page)

“Waiting in the mess. Studying our dietary habits.”

Lee coughed up a weak-throated chuckle. Cade couldn't even smile back.

“I never wanted to tell you,” Lee said. “Or anyone. But I think you need to hear this.”

She nodded at the end of the bed, and Cade sat down near the white hills of Lee's feet.

“I used to make runs with my family,” Lee said. “Did you know that?”

Cade shook her head. “You never told me.”

“I guess we both left a lot of blanks.”

Cade didn't know how to answer that, so she let the silence do the work. It had a weight that warped the air around unsaid things.

“Two fathers and a sister,” Lee said. “She was five years older than me. So much prettier.” Lee's face turned into a dense grid of emotion. “Moira was the sort of perfect where you don't even hate her for it.

“On a run to Wex 12, one of our dads was picked up. Local force. They detained him for forty-two hours in a sonically padded holding cell. Released him for lack of evidence.” Her laugh came out strong, but Cade didn't take that as a good sign. “We were on a planet where they still cared about evidence, even when it came to humans. Our other dad had been fighting off spacesick for years, but the glass was starting to come right and regular.

“That was when our parents decided the Express had gotten too dangerous. They wanted me and Moira to join them in retirement on some subtropical disaster of a planet. But we were in love with the Express—addicted to it. We weren't going to spend the best stretch of our careers peeling coconuts and sleeping under somebody else's stars.”

Lee stopped talking, and Cade wanted time to stop with her. Ayumi and her ship could wait. Even Xan could wait. Cade had never been patient for someone before, and she wanted to be patient for Lee.

“Moira and I made promises to both retire when I hit twenty. We hugged our parents under the palm trees. Filled our sacks. Left.

“Moira wanted new routes. She said we needed to branch out. There were more people who needed us to carry, and it was our job to find them. She was always like that. Caring too much about people we'd never met, and even more about the ones we had. Well . . . I didn't like the looks of the pilot who picked us up on Sligh, no matter how human he was, no matter how many stories he slung about his nieces back home. He didn't look like he made friends with little girls.”

Cade's lungs sent up a sharp knock. She wasn't breathing.

“We got out past the Tirith Belt when we saw the lights. Yellow lights. Boarding. It happens all the time. It was a class of ship we'd never seen before. But there are thousands of models. We had no real reason to be worried. Moira looked at me . . . we had the same eyes, Cade. It's something, to look in your own eyes and face down that much fear.”

Cade could see it. Two sets of dark moons. And the Unmakers' ship, coming fast. Lee's words were so strong that Cade could almost climb inside the story and live the rest.

“They didn't ask, and didn't listen. They did terrible things to her. I heard them say . . . she deserved it. Because that's what humans did, hurt each other. Hurt everything they put their hands on. She'd been pretending to be better than that, but she was human, so she couldn't be. So this was the right and honest way to end her. The Unmakers killed Moira before she could say a word. But that doesn't mean they did it fast. It was more like . . . they twisted her out of herself . . . one twist at a time.

“Moira was brave. She wouldn't have begged. The pilot, though, he did. That's how I knew he'd sold our lives. But the Unmakers killed him, all the same. Just a little too fast for him to mention where I was hiding.”

Lee put her head down. Pushed out all the breath she hadn't used.

Cade didn't know if she should put an arm around Lee or leave her alone for the rest of time.

“She would have taken you,” Lee said. “Back on Andana, when you asked, Moira would have said yes. So that's what I did, too.”

Cade wondered if there was more to it, though. She thought back to the story she'd told in the market—about her soon-to-be-killed brother. Lee's face had changed; she had studied Cade so carefully before she said
yes.
In that moment, Lee had decided she and Cade had something in common.

Then the Unmakers showed up, and it turned out they had too much in common.

Lee sank down in the blankets. “Don't get that weird cadet of a pilot killed, okay?” She looked at the square of fabric under her hands. Spoke to the stitches. “Don't get yourself killed.”

Lee's face went into shutdown, and sleep couldn't be far behind. So that was it. The end of what Lee had to say to her. Cade stood to go, but something stuck her to the door handle.

“Why did you tell me?” She thought Lee had reached the limit of her caring a good while ago.

Lee shrugged.

“It's a fate I wouldn't wish on enemies, Cade. And you're not that.” She closed her eyes and spoke the last words in a once-upon-a-time whisper. “You're no Moira, but we did make a brass team.”

 

Ayumi had made herself at home in the mess. She had also found a way to clatter every dish at the same time.

“What are you doing?” Cade asked, taking in the lit flame on the stove, the stack of dry goods on the table, the clusters of pots on the floor. Ayumi pressed a steaming cup under her nose.

“Old Earth recipe,” she said. “Well, as close as I could get it.”

A fresh green smell folded around them.

“It's like . . .”

“Grass,” Ayumi said. “I made it for your friend. It should do her good.” She ran for the door, turned back with a tea-slosh. “I'll meet you here. We'll leave as soon as she's drained the cup. Even though I'd rather make a full study of this ship and its cargo. We'll go. We'll go. I promise.”

Ayumi rushed across the main cabin, dripping tea as she went.

She passed Rennik, who had climbed down the chute and was headed toward the mess. Headed toward Cade. She had never noticed how good he was at moving around the ship, how even in the false-grav he knew how to carve out space. She hadn't spent time with the fact that his eyes made her think of autumn—a season that lasted for all of three days on Andana.

She'd been too busy for that.

But now her minutes on the ship were numbered. She would have to do all of her noticing. Fast.

“I'm sorry,” Cade said. The words slipped out this time. Easier than they had with Lee, but they still sounded wrong.

“For what?” he asked.

Choosing Rennik's ship. Getting him almost-killed. Not caring because she had someone else to care about more.

“I punched you.”

He looked down at his chest, absently.

“Oh,” he said. “I suppose you did.”

Rennik sat down in the chair at her side, leaving a slice of space between him and the door, a slice of space between him and Cade. He looked straight ahead, hands twisting over each other, fingers hooking and unhooking, the patterns so close to regular that she could turn them into a beat, anticipate.

Cade kept trying to do that. Make a song out of his hands.

“Look . . .” she said.

Rennik surprised her by having something that he needed to say so much, he cut through her still forming words.

“I don't like the idea of passing you off.” He snarled a hand through his hair. Broke his perfect finger-patterns. “It's not right. Once you're a member of this crew, it's final. Renna feels that as much as I do . . . if not more. We don't make these decisions lightly.”

We.
That one little word hit Cade with asteroid force. Rennik thought of himself as part of a
we
—and ever since Cade had left Andana, she did, too. Which meant Rennik was like her, in a way she'd thought no one was.

She didn't know what to do with that information. So she pushed at a pile of tea leaves on the table.

“You're free to come and go, of course,” Rennik said. “But those creatures are after you, Cade. I don't want you on another ship.”

Her body blared hot, like it did when the lights at the club hit her all at once, branding their reds and yellows.

“It's not safe,” Rennik added.

“Right.”

“Of course, you weren't safe here, either,” he said, all of the air vacuumed out of the words. “We could have taken better precautions.” Rennik was still hurting over something he thought was his fault.

But the boarding was pure Cade. She had crashed into their lives, trailing Unmakers behind her. And now she wanted to do the same thing to Ayumi—draw a line from here to
more
trouble.

“You did what you could.” Cade wanted to thank him for the calm he'd shown in the face of the Unmakers. For his unwavering Rennik-ness. Even if that same Rennik-ness did sometimes make her want to set things on fire.

Cade looked for words to hold all of that, but she couldn't find them.

Her fingers dropped to Rennik's wrist, before she could remind them how much she didn't like touching.

Rennik didn't shake her off. But maybe he should have.

“You shouldn't let me do that if I'm spacesick, right?”

“I shouldn't be sitting so close to you, either,” he said in those unreadable tones Cade knew so well.

The stage lights were back. Brighter. Cade felt as alive and ready as she had in any of those preshow moments. But she was just sitting in the mess. She willed her body not to pump so much red, to wash down to a cool blue.

Rennik's eyes were patient and told her nothing. She didn't know if he was protecting himself from her or not—but he should be.

Cade snatched her hand back. Blamed the drawn-out nature of the whole thing on inertia. Stood up.

That was how Cade could say she was sorry. She could leave, and never hurt them again.

Ayumi came back to the door with an empty cup and restless fingers.

“Shall we?”

It was time to leave. But Cade couldn't leave. And she couldn't stay. The things Lee had told her, Moira's fate—she couldn't be the reason that happened, not to anyone.

Now Cade was the one who trailed Ayumi across the main cabin, toward the dock.

“Where to?” Ayumi asked.

“Nearest habitable surface,” Cade said. “I need to get planetbound.”

 

 

CHAPTER 12

ESCAPING AN ATTRACTOR: When a particle has excess momentum, it is possible for it to fling itself out into undifferentiated space

Ayumi's ship was like nothing Cade had ever laid her space-sore eyes on.

They passed through a whirring engine room, into a half-lit hold. It brimmed on every surface with more of what Ayumi called
artifacts
—anything and everything that related to Earth. Books that had lost their pages. Pages that had abandoned their books. Tacked-up photographs of an ocean. An old map of somewhere called New Jersey, worn through in places and curled over at the edge.

Ayumi trailed her fingers over the objects and smiled at them like old friends. She led Cade through a low door, into the main room. It held a pilot's chair, a navigator's chair, and two passenger seats, their backs high, fabric slicked down by time and bodies. There was a row of colored buttons and stubby switches, and over that, a central span of glass.

All of it looked standard-issue. But the walls sang out, strange.

Paint covered them, bleeding indigo into purple, purple into black. The colors of night sky and space, an echo of what sat outside the window. But more than that, too. There were planets and moons, small craft careening from one colorful blip to another. Broken white lines trailed the spaceships, forming sharp-angled patterns, like constellations. One whole stretch of the right-hand wall was marbled in blue-green.

“What is this?” Cade asked.

“History,” Ayumi said. “Specifically, the end of Earth history and its effects. The artistic merit is questionable.” She squinted at an awkward nebula. “The artistic merit is questionable
at best.
”

“But it's part of your project?” Cade asked.

Ayumi's face seared with heat. “It's not a project. It's a purpose. And yes.”

By the time they settled into the chairs, and Cade struggled her arms through the straps, Ayumi had traded in her crisped pride for a shy smile. “Would you like to learn?”

“Maybe later.” Cade needed to put some distance between herself and a ship full of souring memories.

Ayumi nodded. Tried—and failed—to pretend she didn't want to tell Cade all about the end of Earth history and its effects. Then she turned to face the blackness in the window, and her disappointment wiped clean. Ayumi's brown eyes took in space views like fresh water after a drought.

The little ship lifted off with a lurch and a knock—like crashing into nothing. Cade pulled her straps tighter, set her teeth against each other, and gritted out the ride. Minute after bumpy minute. She had gotten used to Renna's easy flightstyle.

“I set an auto-course for Hymnia,” Ayumi said. “It's the nearest planet with a human settlement, one that isn't basically a prison camp or a work colony. It even has a fountain in the square that sometimes has water in it! And fish! But people tend to spear the fish and eat them. I would take you back to Rembra, but it's a months-long flight in the other direction, and—”

“No,”
Cade said.

“—you seem to be in a bit of a hurry,” Ayumi finished.

Cade fidgeted with the stub of a switch, until she remembered it might be wired to something important.

“I'm not really spacesick.”

Ayumi's face, which so far had been as readable as fresh ink, changed. “I didn't think so.”

“Is that part of your . . . purpose . . . too?” Cade asked.

“No,” Ayumi said, with a tight little smile. “I have an eye for these things.”