Entangled (2 page)

Cade knew this had nothing to do with her. People didn't want her. They wanted the music, this string of notes that kept them beating in time with something other than themselves, in touch with something
more
than themselves. Cade wanted that, too. It was the only thing she and these slummers had in common.

The last chorus trickled out, weak. Cade wanted to play harder, faster, louder—but she would get one note away from hitting a stride and he would be there again, looking up at her, pale and patient. Lab coat.

Cade wondered if he was just another one of her looped-out admirers. But he didn't have the look. He was calm and at least halfway to old—with eyes that rarely seemed to blink. Like they had to be reminded to do it, for appearances.

He stared on and on, his eyes insisting on some kind of connection. But Cade was connected to no one, and the few people who had pretended to care about her were useless. At best. Cade sliced one of her meanest looks at lab coat, one of her very best
back off
s. Then she stared at the bar, at the stairs, at the walls, but the white of his coat was always there, catching the corner of her eye.

Cade stirred things up again, built a new and terrible song. The song to demolish all songs, to smash the Noise, to put an end to the horrible world in her head. She crested to the top of it, reached her fingers for the next note, felt the strings close around the trenches she dug, over and over, into her skin.

And then.

Dark. Quiet.
Hush.

The Noise blinked off.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

QUANTUM UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE: States that the more carefully one property has been measured, the less possible it becomes to know any other property

Cade pummeled through song after song.

The Noise might have flickered last week, but this was full shutdown. Cade had trouble hearing notes over the wash of silence in her head. She needed to get clear and figure this out.

She made it to the end of her set, prodded by a splinter of hate for Mr. Smithjoneswhite. Then she ran off the stage and pinballed down a short black hall. The balance in her head was wrong, or gone. It felt like walking on a string over a deep ravine. With each step, she slipped, was deeper into the mist—or made of it. Cade was alone in her hollowed-out head.

She worked past the snake of the bathroom line to the room at the end of the hall where performers could trash whatever they needed to trash, fade out, snug fans. Cade went on last, which meant she had the place to herself. She plunked down in front of the mirror. A whole sheet of it, only cobwebbed at the corners with cracks.

I must have done it,
she thought.
Actually done it. Played so loud that I scared off the Noise.

She examined her head from twelve different angles. Tried to see past the sinkholes of knotted dark hair and the second skin of makeup, through her olive eyes, through their black pits, into the welcome new void.

I wonder how long it'll last.

And then.

At least I can still think in here. That's something.

Behind her, a voice slivered through the cracks around the door.

“Cade?”

No knock. Usually her fans knocked and when she opened the door—if she opened the door—they smiled up at her, little puddles of apology, like their hands just couldn't help themselves. She either flashed her nastiest smile or her seven-blade knife.

“Cade?”

She didn't have time to waste on this. She had a head to spread out in. Get comfortable.

“What?” she cried, toward the hall.

“Cade?”

She would stop this thing in utero. She put on her tough girl face, a third skin that clapped on tight over the makeup. Flung open the door.

The white outline of a man flashed against the dark hall.

Lab coat. Of course.

He looked older than she'd thought, his hair a muddle of gray and black. His wrinkles seemed to—not fade, or shift as he moved his face, but—blink. Like wiggles of static.

“You felt it, didn't you,” he said. “Just now. The shift.”

Cade took a tiny step, like a caught breath, backwards. This old spacecadet must have been talking about some important event in the relationship he'd invented for them in his head. She thought of his showy, obvious spot in the second row. Best to be careful. Cade crossed her arms, pursed her mouth so tight the lipstick pebbled.

“Shift?”

“I need you to listen to me,” the old man said. Urgent words, but his voice was even.

“Sure,” Cade said. But her eyes said,
No. Get off. Step back.

“I know things about you.”

He reached out one wrinkle-spurting finger, and Cade crumpled away from it. But he didn't touch her. He didn't even try. Just hovered near her temple—a straight line from his cracked old fingernail into her brain.

“The shift,” he said. “It's different now, Cadence. Can't you feel it?”

He waited for her to respond, but Cade was stunned to a full stop.

“What did you call me?” she asked.

“Cadence.”

She let the old man in.

He stood in the armpit of shadow just behind the door, facing the sheet of mirror. Cade weighed her options—keep him, waste him, send him on his nerve-shattering way.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I have both a name and a number,” he said. “The number is for paperwork and formalities. You can call me Mr. Niven.”

“How do you know what's happening to me?” she asked. “No, wait. First of all, how do you know—”

“Your name. Cadence. Born June third, 3112.” He was using the Earth calendar. Definitely human. But the rote way he reported things—feeding them out like strings of facts—felt strange.

“I know your name because I know you,” he said. “I know you because I was there on the night you were born, and for the first eight hundred and twenty-nine days of your life. This period and duration of acquaintance makes us old friends, Cadence.”

“I don't have friends,” she said. “New, old, or otherwise.”

But she was still hung up on those three letters, tacked to the end of her name. The nudge from bare-bones Cade to the sweet, curving fleshiness of Cadence. There had been times—bottomless nights in the bunker—when she'd been sure she made the name up, just to prettify herself, or pretend she had a past that she didn't.

But she did. And here it was. Babbling at her.

“You weren't born on Andana,” Mr. Niven said. “You were born on Firstbloom.”

That was a mobile lab station. One of the few that had been set up—in space, of course, since no planet would host a troop of human scientists. Rotating crews so no one stayed long enough to turn spacesick.

Firstbloom. Cade had heard of it, sure, but it had just been a word. Not the place where she was born.

“No parents,” Mr. Niven said. “You were bred and raised for Project QE.” He kept slinging facts, and Cade took them like punches.

No parents. No parents? But she'd never had parents, so what did it matter if they were just globs of genetic material or flesh and blood? And this way she'd never have to waste one more thought on how they died, or if they had just left her, or if they had loved her. It was better this way. Cade had seen enough tubies to know that they turned out fine, and sometimes much better than their parented counterparts.

When she reached the other half of what Mr. Niven had said, though, it brought her brain up short.

“Project what?”

“Project QE. Shorthand, of course. For Quantum Entanglement.”

Each new unknown was a serious blow to the side of the head. Cade sat down—slumped there, a heap of slit-up clothes and chipped nail polish and toughness melting off her in sheets.

“What is that?” Her words came out small. “What is quantum entanglement?”

“It will be easier if I show you.” Mr. Niven reached for the top button of his shirt without so much as glancing down.

Cade's hand swerved three times. Once to fish out her knife, twice to unsnap it, three times to deal out the short, flat blade that worked best on humans. She slid the tip of the knife through the stale air of the dressing room toward Mr. Niven's chin—which didn't so much as bob. Cade never should have let him in that room. Her wrist itched to undo the mistake.

But Mr. Niven had a few buttons popped now, and what Cade saw against his pale, almost transparent skin stopped her. A hole in the gulch at the center of his collarbone. Or not a hole. It glinted. A dark circle of glass embedded in the skin. He closed his eyes and the hole flooded with light, and the light streamed together, focused itself on the grime-white wall, and burst into a picture.

Mr. Niven was a projector. Cade wondered if it was an upgrade that came standard with being a scientist.

The picture took a minute to set and harden. White walls. White light. A room full of babies.

Cade dropped the knife and didn't even know it until she heard the clatter.

“Am I one of those . . . ?”

“Shhh,” Mr. Niven said, the sound full of crackle, like it was being heated on a burner. “We are about to begin.”

“Hello,” a voice boomed out of Mr. Niven's mouth. Not his voice. Hearty, cheerful. It even changed the shape of his lips, stretched them wide around the warm sounds. “Welcome to Project QE.” A few shots of babies crawling at each other, blinking their damp eyes, crabbing their little hands. “You might wonder why you're looking at a room full of infants.”

Here was the childhood Cade almost-remembered. She didn't know whether to touch the makeshift screen with soft fingertips or run as fast as she could back to her bunker.

“These children have been split into pairs based on careful breeding and selection,” the voice boomed. “Final tests and preparations are being carried out, and soon this batch of standard human children will undergo the process of quantum entanglement.”

“You've said that twice now,” Cade muttered, “but what does it—”

A flash of white, so hot Cade had to throw a hand to her eyes. Something had been spliced out. The picture flicked back on two babies sharing the frame. Swaddled in spotless white diapers. Out of the two, it was simple enough to find herself. A swirl of black hair, light-brown skin, green-black eyes. The other was pale as a cloud and twice as fat, in a soft-folded, babyish way.

“Here we have Cadence and Xan.”

Xan.

The name clinked, like Cade was a metal bank and the name Xan was the first coin she'd ever dropped into it.

Xan.

That name meant something. More than that. It was
worth
something. But Cade would have to come back to it later to figure out what, because the great big mouthy voice boomed on.

“These two are optimally suited for entanglement. Our greatest hope lies with them.”

Another white-hot flash. Another splice.

The two babies sprawled in a new room, whiter, if possible, than the last one. “Cadence and Xan took well to the process. After a brief period of confusion and rest, the two began to bond at an intense level long thought inaccessible to the human species.”

Cade felt the prickle of something in her chest. Pride. Not that she had earned it. All she had done was be a baby, bred for a certain purpose. It was the same feeling she had to dismiss all the time, when she smashed through a new song or splayed her fingers into an unreachable chord. She wasn't a good musician. It was just a response to the Noise, a necessary knee jerk. And those babies were just bundles of instinct and genes.

“Cadence and Xan are a wonderful pair,” the not-Niven said. “Perfectly entangled.”

“Entangled?” Cade asked. Again.

“Shhh,” Mr. Niven said, and he was just his old man self for a moment, thin-lipped and scolding.

Cade was one curled knuckle away from sending him to the floor. But Mr. Niven had answers, and Cade was only starting to slam together the questions. So she let him stay on his feet. For now.

The picture on the wall changed to a diagram of bouncing circles, chalk-white on black. “When we entangle two particles on a quantum level, they are no longer bound to the physics that restrict human action.” Two circles flowed together, down a narrow stream, and parted, now picked out in blue to show they were different than the rest.

“Entangled particles react to each other, balance each other, and transmit impulses faster than the speed of light.” One circle spun clockwise. Less than a blink later, the other circle spun, counter. “Entanglement is an ancient fact, known to humans for over a millennium, but applications have been limited. Certainly, prior to these trials, no one has attempted to entangle two humans on the quantum level.”

Back to babies. They were older now—Cade could tell by the full heads of hair, the sprouting bottom teeth. It hurt to look at that little girl and see how different she was from the mostly grown version. How happy.

Baby Cadence smiled and Xan puckered his face into a frown. Baby Cadence laughed, and Xan shredded the air with a wail.

“Their moods are attuned when in proximity. But they can transmit even more fantastic streams of information. What's more, they exhibit none of the human tendencies toward spacesick. While the spacesick detach from themselves, the entangled remain grounded in the strength of their connection with each other. The state is permanent, unaffected by cell turnover, due to our unique method of bonding particle interactions with the Higgs Field prior to entanglement.

“We at Firstbloom can now say it is possible to keep the human mind safe from space. We can do more than struggle, more than survive. Our hope is that Cadence and Xan will show us how.”

The picture faded to white, and soon there was only the wall.

Mr. Niven coughed, chasing off the other voice that had been making use of his throat. He didn't budge from his spot behind the door. It was Cade who made the move, closer, needing to know more.