Entangled (17 page)

Cade sat forward in the navigator's chair. Renna was long-gone, but Cade still whipped fast when she caught something roundish in the corner of her eye.

“I'm just glad you didn't need the ride to Hades,” Ayumi said. “All of those black holes.” She shuddered against the chair straps. “I'm not a bad pilot, mind you, but I do have . . . limitations.”

Ayumi looked like she was about to say more, but Cade let her eyes drift closed. She hadn't slept in days. And if she was headed for the crust of some new nowhere-planet, there was no point in getting-to-know-you games.

 

Cade kept her eyes closed and pretended to sleep, but really she was spending some quality time with her new plan.

Once she reached Hymnia, she would need a ride. One that
didn't
put any good people in danger. She could stow away, or commandeer a ship. If she did stow away, it would mean less chance of the Unmakers finding her—but it also meant she'd never make it to Xan unless she commandeered the ship at the last second. And how would that end? She would tell the pilot what to do, and instead he would take her out to the nearest patch of pitch black and make short work of her.

The one sure way to get to Hades was to learn how to fly, and then find a ship, or steal one. But that would take months.

Xan would be dead before she got to him.

Which left Cade with bottom-of-the-barrel questions. Could she find a new life on Hymnia and forget about him? How many layers of toughness would she need to lacquer on before she didn't feel him anymore? Would she know what happened to him if she never made it to Hades? Would the connection cut if—no,
when
—he died?

Was it time to give up?

Soon it was the only question left. Until the words were a stereo-echo, bouncing in her head.

giveup giveup giveup

And then Xan came for her and her own smile hit her like the rush of space at liftoff and she gasped.

She fell into his room. Fit into his headspace. Cozied up to his emotions.

The fear that she'd grown so used to—the skittering boy-sweat fear—was gone, replaced with a calm. A warm stone at his center, working its warmth outward, filtering through all parts of him.

This was what Xan's confidence felt like.

He stood and stretched until he almost filled the small room. He crossed to the sheet of mirror.

Xan stared at himself. No, his gray eyes were too sharp for that. He stared
into
himself. His skin was still colored like clouds, but the puffs and folds of childhood were gone, thinned down to muscle.

After the threats from Gori, the fight with Lee, the flickers of hesitation when she sat too close to Rennik—this was relief. When she looked at Xan, the things she felt were strong and painful-obvious. He was a strong beat, driven into her in four-four time. Cade needed to feel him, the way first-row spacesicks needed to feel guitar-buzz on their skin. Cade wanted him, like this but closer. Without entanglement and mirrors in the way.

Xan stared out, bruises underlining his eyes. Cade's fingers rose to touch the soft, broken skin, even though it was still so far away. She watched him gather his mouth, all of the muscles tight around the acute slant of his lips. He readied himself to speak to her, out loud, for the first time.

“Cadence.”

She had forgotten she wasn't the only one in the universe who knew that name.

It left a little patch of cloud on the mirror, and the cloud grew as he said, “Please.”

That one word reached into Cade.

And she snapped back onto the ship. She thrashed, the straps scoring her chest, her arms, her breath down to drowning gasps.

“Are you all right?” Ayumi asked. “Cade?”

“Cadence.”

“Cadence.”
Ayumi closed her eyes and said it again. “Pretty. Do you know its—”

“Origins? No.”

Cade just needed to say it. That was her name. Who she really was. She'd gotten to the point where giving up on Xan felt as good as giving up on herself. Her body staged a revolt against the decision to change course. Her mind only agreed with itself half of the time.

“Tell me about that,” Cade said, nodding at the paint on the walls. “Earth history. Effects.” She was desperate to hear something besides the coming-apart strain inside of her.

“Sure,” Ayumi said. “Sure.”

She turned from the controls, and Cade almost leapt to grab them. Then she remembered the auto-course.

“You haven't heard, I would guess, of the caves at Lascaux?” Ayumi asked.

Cade searched her thinning-out thoughts. “Is that a planet in the Mann system?”

“No,” Ayumi said. “It was a place in a country called France. On Earth. The caves at Lascaux kept a record of human life. I wanted to do the same thing. The story starts here.” She pointed one strong finger at the swirled blue-green, that unmistakable sphere. “I'm sure you know the beginning.”

“Earth was blinked out,” Cade said. “An asteroid.” Her breath leveled. Finally. It was easier to talk about the destruction of her home planet than to think about the end of her entanglement.

“That's right,” Ayumi said. “But do you know why?”

Human history wasn't the subject of much small talk on Andana.

“No.”

“On Earth,” Ayumi said, “at the end, humans were more plentiful than we are now. A million times over. And technology kept them ever-so-connected. Across the planet, in an instant, they could transfer voices, thoughts, images.”

It sounded like what Cade could do. Maybe not as intense or particle-based as what Cade could do. A primitive form.

And, of course, thinking about that led her back to thinking about Xan.

“So?” Cade asked through a fresh round of pain. “What happened?”

“Everyone knew the asteroid was coming. People had seen it in their telescopes and done the calculations. They frittered away decades, not-finding a way to save themselves. There was no lack of time, or money, or the resources needed.”

Cade reached her hand and touched the blue-green. It should have been warm and firm; it should have grounded her. But under the skin of paint, it was just a wall.

“What happened then?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

Cade held herself quiet, sure there was more. She must be missing a note that would tie the song together, make it make sense.

“Some ships were built,” Ayumi said, pointing at a line of little gray dabs on the wall. “But it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. Fighting broke out over who should use them. Corrupt lotteries were drawn. Some of the ships were launched into space close to empty.”

Cade followed the lines as they left the safe rings of atmos-phere—the harbor of a home planet—and pressed out into space. The distances between them grew and grew.

“A million humans,” Ayumi said. “That's the top estimate. Instead of banding together, they fought. And then came the Scattering.” Even Cade, on her concrete island in an endless sea of sand, had heard about the Scattering. “Small groups of humans headed into the wide universe, alone.”

“And that's how they stayed,” Cade said.

“For a thousand years,” Ayumi finished.

Until the entangled.

Cade and Xan weren't alone—not like the other humans living in space. Their connection stretched across light-years. A bridge to span the impossible distances.

Mr. Niven had made it clear that Xan had to be saved because entanglement was important. When Cade went after him, she did it for her own reasons—but there were all of these other reasons, lurking behind hers. Would she keep turning away from what entanglement could mean—to the scattered and the spacesick, to the people she'd wanted to call her friends—all because some old hologram brought it up first?

And then there was Xan. Still sitting in a cell in Hades. Still beating a question through her bloodstream.

Asking her not to give up.

The dark in front of the little ship was pushed up and up by the wide rim of a new planet. Its atmosphere spun thick with strands of dark and storm-ridden clouds. The surface showed underneath, pale.

“There she is,” Ayumi said. “Hymnia. Now, before we get any farther, there's something you sh—”

But she didn't finish. Ayumi stared out into white—and white came back to frost her eyes.

She was glassed-and-gone.

 

 

CHAPTER 13

CRITICAL FLUCTUATIONS: A marked increase in variability just before a phase transition

“You're
spacesick?”

Nothing came from Ayumi's wilted lips—which was all the answer Cade needed.

“Dregs.”

This time, she did leap and grab the controls. The fact that they were on an auto-course didn't make her feel safer.

The planet swirled its storm clouds at her. The ship blinked its buttons. Cade flashed one hand in front of Ayumi's face, raised and dropped her arms to test muscle slackness.

The pilot was in a state of complete disconnect. It gave Cade the perfect reason to turn around—and no way to do it.

“Ayumi,” she whispered. “Ayumi,
come on.”

The glass shined on another coat. If Cade was going to redirect the ship, she would have to do it herself.

She searched the buttons and switches for a hailing signal. Nothing looked the same as it did in Renna's control room. And she got no help from the ship—no warm flash or small rumble—to let her know that she was getting close.

At the far end of the panel, Cade found a black-hatched circle that reminded her of a microphone. Next to it was a finger-worn number pad and a red button. She tested the button and heard static.

Static was a start.

But she needed Renna's hailing code. She fluttered through every loose scrap of paper, slammed through every binder, hoping Ayumi had scribbled it down somewhere.

At the same time, she reached out for Xan.

The hailing code,
she thought.
I need the hailing code of the ship the Unmakers boarded. The hailing code. The hailing code.

Cade didn't know how Xan would be able to get it. She knew that however he did, it would be dangerous. But that's what she had figured out, in the second when Ayumi glassed and left her for some star-flecked inner void.

Trust was a dangerous thing.

Cade had thought it would be safe to trust a ride from the girl slumped against the pilot's chair. She'd thought it would be safe not to tell Lee that the Unmakers were following her. It was never safe. It wasn't even a
question
of safe. It was how much you knew, and how much you were willing to risk.

Cade had played the whole thing wrong. And she had lost her best—her only—real chance of getting to Hades.

Her fingers jumped against the number pad. She had the digits punched in before her mind processed them.

340426.

She didn't have time to ask Xan how he'd gotten that number so fast. She felt a single drip of worry, like a bead of sweat.

Cade pushed the red button.

“Ayumi?” Rennik's voice crackled and split, but it was his. “Come in, Ayumi.”

“It's Cadence,” she said. “Cade. Look, I need to get back to you.”

She waited for the well-reasoned, perfectly worded Rennik-style argument, but he didn't make one.

“I'm on an auto-course for Hymnia,” she said.

The planet loomed larger and whiter as Cade shed important minutes. They peeled off behind the ship, dark and too fast.

“What happened to—”

“Later!” Cade said. “Right now, I need to end up
not
fried to atmosphere or crash-landed on an ice cube.”

She pulled out maps and charts. Numbers blurred, lines wavered. Cade wasn't even sure if she was holding the pages the right way.

“I don't know our coordinates . . .” Xan was there with her, trying to read the charts, but he didn't know how to do it, either.

Rennik's words were calm and certain. “I have a lock on you.”

“How did you do that so fast?”

“I had to be sure the Unmakers didn't follow when you broke off from us.”

A hard sigh dropped out of Cade.

“First-class.”

Cade flattened the charts to one side and set her hands against the alien geography of the controls.

“Here's the other problem. I don't know how to fly.”

“At all?”

She wondered if Rennik could hear the shutting of her sudden-dried throat, the failed swallow.

“Uh . . .”

Another crackle.

“Pulling up specs on the ship model,” Lee said. “What did you get yourself into this time?”

Cade glanced at Ayumi's low-swung head, a thin trail of spit running from her lips to her shirt.

“A minor catastrophe.”

“You need to find a square of four lit buttons,” Lee said, “and push all but the top right one. That should turn off the auto-course.”

“Don't you think I should learn a few simple maneuvers before I turn off the—”

“You're about to breach atmosphere,” Rennik said. “There's no time.”

“Maybe I should let the ship land itself and wait—”

Voices jumped out of the transmitter, swelled to a pitch that cramped the small cabin.

“No!”

Rennik pushed on, smoothing over the show of fear. “It's not safe to land a ship without a pilot, no matter how carefully the auto-course is set.”

“And you just told us you're no sort of pilot,” Lee added.

Cade set her fingers against the cluster of buttons—and pushed.

The ship, which had hurtled on a steady course, slowed to a sickening float. For a moment, everything went loose and still. It reminded Cade of the look on Ayumi's face when she glassed out—the look that lived thick on her skin. That unnatural calm.

“What comes next?” Cade asked.

“Renna will fly at top speed in your direction,” Rennik said, “but you need to come toward us. You'll get picked up if you linger in a shipping lane.”