Entangled (20 page)

Cade walked on soft feet, slid through the tunnel that connected her to the ship's open spaces.

She headed up the chute to the control room, where she found the pilot's chair empty and the panels dimmed, the brass needles sliding along their dials. The starglass beckoned.

Cade stood in its light-flecked embrace and turned in circles. The first time she could pick out stars from space, but after that it became a blur of black and white, black and white, until the universe went gray. She didn't stop until she hit a patch of black so pure that it almost shone.

Cade stepped toward it and reached out a careful hand—as if even from this distance, her fingertips would be able to feel the desperate pull that waited inside of that black.

Hades.

Cade sent it in a flash to Xan. The word, and its twin—the vision in the starglass. In that moment between seeing and thinking—the moment of understanding—she reached for him.

And what she found was more than comfort, although he sent her that. It was more than a firework of eagerness, although he sent that, too.

When Cade and Xan had first connected on Andana, she'd been overwhelmed by these sensations, the Xan-feelings in her head. But now she was alive to what the connection did to
her
—the amplification of her feelings, the reception of her body, the trembling possibilities of her mind.

Cade sent flashes of Hades, flashes of the brave stars clustered around it, flashes of the ship. He sent her a strong, unbroken line of pulses, to let her know that he could see it all, and that the view was fine. Each moment that passed back and forth between them centered and grounded her.

I missed you,
Cade thought.

But this was more than a simple missing. The lack of him had set her adrift.

Cade had been sending flashes. Now she asked Xan to come and spend a minute on the ship.

See what I see,
she thought.
Leave the Unmakers and come to me.

Even before she reached him, she could be his escape.

She steadied herself against the panels and closed her eyes. When she blinked them open, Xan was with her.

And all of a sudden, she couldn't be still. She ran down the chute, through the night-stilled cabins, past the crates in the cargo hold, past the closed doors. Her muscles stretched wide, her throat opened and released an unfamiliar sound. Cade leapt and rushed, running her hands along the walls and floors as she did, drumming Renna out of her half-sleep, so Xan could feel the racket of life against Cade's fingers. But it wasn't enough. She could feel them both, wanting more. She shed clothes as she went, so he could have the touch of nighttime on her skin. She ran her hands down her arms and sides and stomach, so he could have that, too. Xan pushed her whole body toward wildness, and Cade didn't hold back. He'd been captive for too long. And so had she—on the wrong planets, with the Noise, on ships that never sailed fast enough. So she ran, Xan streaming in her, air hard against her, as she twisted back up the chute to the starglass.

She stared out at Hades and for the first time knew she was looking at him.

 

Cade woke up to thousands of stars and her whole body warm against the floor. It felt softer than a floor had any right to be.

“Thanks,” she mumbled to Renna. She curled up tighter and sighed and almost went back to sleep.

But a firm hand on her shoulder put a stop to that.

“Cadence.”

She looked up and saw Rennik on the other side of the starglass, his arm broken through the black, his four-knuckled fingers resting on her shoulder, just below the curve of her neck.

“Cadence?”

Rennik's hand felt nice, so she let it rest there, his thumb anchored across her collarbone—until she looked past that thumb to the rest of her almost-naked self. Cade bolted to sitting. In one quick-strewn flash, she remembered the trail of clothes she'd left up and down the chute.

“Damp hell.” Cade went so all-over red that she was glad the thin curtain of the starglass stood between them to mute the shade. A thick vein of anger ran through her embarrassment, even though she knew that wasn't fair—Rennik had every right to wake her up if she was sleeping in the middle of his control room.

He knelt across from her, his lips in a ready shape, like there were words he might have to say at any moment. His eyes full-open so the double pupils showed. Cade had to admit that Rennik's predictable face had settled on a new expression. But it was one she didn't have the translation for.

Cade had lost her dignity along with her clothes, but she would have given the last shred—of the dignity, at least—to connect with Rennik in a way that would help her understand him. Give her answers to the questions that she could never seem to crack the surface of. Did he miss his home, or did Hatch not mean home to him? Why did he slog humans all over the universe? Did he ever regret taking Cade onboard? Was he regretting it right now?

Cade curved her back and set her chin to her knees, so he was mostly seeing her face and the short double lines of her shins.

“I promise you won't find me running around again in any state of undress.” She flashed back to the button incident, and added, “Ever.”

Cade got up and scrambled out of the far side of the starglass, so there were two coats of darkness and a thick layer of starshine between them.

“It's not that,” Rennik said, dusting his knees as he stood. Cade watched him closely. “Well, you should probably deal with that, but . . . as soon as you do . . . I have something to show you.”

“Now?” she asked, spotting the nearest piece of clothing—a sock—at the top of the chute.

Rennik cut wide around the starglass, picked up the sock, and tossed it to her in an easy white arc.

“I think you'll want to see this, yes.”

Cade struggled the flimsy bit of cotton as far up her calf as it would go. Now she was almost-naked except for a sock. Perfect. Her instinct was to get clear, avoid Rennik until—forever. But there was a first-class reason to stick around. The last time Rennik wanted to show her something, it had been Moon-White.

“Is it a bass?” she asked.

“No.”

“Drums?”

“You need to see it,” Rennik repeated. His calm made her want to put fingers to metal and shred chords into little tiny pieces. If it wasn't music, and it wasn't Xan, how much would she care about what he wanted to show her? But Rennik's face turned urgent and his hands spread eager, and Cade wanted to know all over again.

“Fine.”

She ran ahead and gathered her clothes, one item at a time, slinging them on in the order she found them. Rennik gave her a healthy lead. After a minute he followed her down to the main cabin and nodded her into his room.

They fit too neatly in the small space. It was hard not to think about how recently all that skin had been exposed.

“Please sit,” Rennik said, pointing at the desk.

She took the curved chair. He sat on the bed.

“I've been looking at this.” Rennik reached into his pocket and held out the circle-glass. “Where it splices, there are bits missing from the playback. Did you know that? At first I thought they'd been cut, but that's not right. They weren't taken out at all. They're still in here, but someone pinched them.”

“Pinched?” Cade forgot her skin and its recent state and leaned in, over the shine-washed facets of the circle-glass. “What else is in there?”

She had always known there must be more to her story—what it meant to be entangled. But she had been so fixed on finding a way to Xan that the rest of it tended to slide when she wasn't looking.

“I haven't been able to restore it all,” Rennik said.

“But . . . some of it?” Cade asked, a hoarse shred of hope in her voice. She wondered if Rennik heard it—or if the great crashing symphony of her human emotions was as bewildering to him as his one-note Hatchum face was to her.

“There's a section . . .” he said, reaching past her to the desk to pick up the projection lamp. “A section I managed to restore to its full length.” Rennick palmed the circle-glass. It looked at home in his hand as he turned it.

“I haven't gone through it,” Rennik said. “It felt wrong to watch it without you.”

Cade nodded.

Renna dimmed the lights and the room grew quiet. Rennik fitted the circle-glass to the lamp and it threw a square of gold onto the wall, which turned into a scene.

A familiar scene. Cadence and Xan, diapered and crib-bound. “These two are optimally suited for entanglement. Our greatest hope lies with them.”

A new stretch of film sprang up where before there'd been a hot white scar. Scientists at work in another part of the lab, surrounded by the most delicate possible equipment—petri dishes and glass droppers and splinter-thin vials.

“Xan is part of our control group—designed and conceived for the purposes of Project QE. All genetic material has been configured for optimal space resistance and entanglement potential.”

A lab-coated man with close-shaven hair and perfectly square teeth held up a petri dish and smiled.

“Cadence, on the other hand, is from the organic group. These children have biological origins. They were planet-born, with no influence or assistance from Firstbloom. More impressively, Cadence's genetic material comes to us from the spacesick subset. Her biological father was a pilot out of the Tirith belt. He flew for an almost unheard-of twelve years before experiencing the first symptoms.”

A picture flashed. Dark hair. Light brown skin. Green eyes. A scowl to beat back the sunrise. Cade's father, through and through.

“He died on a routine run during a sudden fit of spacesick.”

Cade heard the words, but she didn't feel them. She couldn't not have a father one second, have one the next second, and then lose him again. He washed over her like an unbroken wave.

“Cadence is Project QE's greatest success,” the filmstrip pushed on, “and its greatest surprise. Perhaps her father's resistance to spacesick has something to do with her aptitude for entanglement.

“Or perhaps the answer lies with Cadence's mother.”

The woman on the wall—Cade knew her and she didn't. The little white flowers on the blue dress, sky-bright against her skin. That image was captured on the day the woman visited Firstbloom. The day she stood in a corner and cried. The day she gave up her daughter.

 

 

CHAPTER 15

LONG-TERM POTENTIATION: A lasting enhancement in signal transmission between neurons, with implications for learning and memory

It happened in a Firstbloom nursery.

The people stood out against a painful shade of white. Cade inspected the cribs, found the little pale smudge most likely to be Xan. A scientist scuttled back and forth, rocking cribs with one hand and taking notes with the other.

And then there was the woman. Blue dress, white flowers. Her eyes so glassy you couldn't see their color. Her steps loose, muscles limp. She carried Cadence in her arms. Almost dropped her twice.

A white-coated woman with a comfortable manner eased the baby out of her arms. A stocky man smiled and told her that they'd take good care of her little girl.

Cade could have reached back in time and punched that smile to pulp.

But her mother just nodded, up and down, up and down, too many times. Until the scientists told her she could leave.

That's when Cade found out one of her memories was wrong. When her mother stepped back to the corner of the nursery, she didn't cry.

Cadence did.

Wailed in her crib, face red with the welling of blood under her skin, reaching for her mother with too-small hands.

“As you can see, Cadence was saved from a life with a mother in the advanced stages of—”

The voice cut out. The picture disappeared.

 

Cade lost the next ten minutes of her life.

Her head went as white as the now blank wall. She stood up, knocked the chair back, collapsed into a heap on the bed. Rennik sprang up and asked her something—asked her what? She could see the deep curves of his lips in motion, could see the concern sunk into his steady expression, but that was it. The silence inside of her was complete. She waded through shock without moving.

“He never told me,” Cade said. “He never told me . . .”

Rennik took a careful seat on the far end of the bed and spoke to her in soft tones. “Who?”

“Mr. Niven. When they sent him to find me. He never told me about . . . her.”

Rennik turned the circle-glass over and over in his hands. “It's possible he didn't know.”

The silence stirred. Underneath it, anger expanded, pushing into the vacuum where Cade's feelings should be.

“He knew,” Cade said. She remembered the lie now, in crisp detail. “Told me he was there on the night I was born. He kept her from me, because he was afraid I might take off after her instead.”

Rennik studied her from his perch at the end of the bed. “Would you have done that?”

It was such an unfair question. The amount of heat it generated inside of her could have kept a small sun burning for years.

“Yes,” Cade said. “No. I don't know.” She settled on the answer. “No. She's been spacesick for years—if she's even alive—and I need to get to Xan. He needs me.” It was the chant that drew her on, past the planets, past the stars, toward black holes.

“He needs me.”

And for the first time, she hated Xan for it.

This was too much to need, and she had never asked for him. She had hoped for a mother, but she had never been brave or foolish enough to ask for one. And now a mother had been given to her in ten seconds of unpinched film.

After too much space, the nondays and nonnights, the blue of her mother's dress flooded Cade like morning.

She stood up and filled the small room. “I have to know if she's out there.”