Entangled (24 page)

“How long was I out?” Cade asked, her voice the guttering of a low string.

“A full day,” Lee said.

“And nobody tried to kill me?” It seemed like the longest stretch she'd gone since leaving Andana without a knife pressed to her skin, or a fight on her hands, or a good solid threat.

Lee shrugged. “I rattled you for snoring once.”

“Where's Ayumi?”

“She strapped herself down in the cargo hold,” Lee said. “I told her it wouldn't do, so she went back to her ship to bunk down. She has a strange spin on her particles, that girl.”

Cade almost asked why Ayumi hadn't claimed one of the two empty beds in the room she shared with Lee. But then she thought of Ayumi's condition. The girl clearly wasn't at the stage of spacesick where her hands would invade the nearest patch of skin, but it didn't hurt to be careful.

“What's the story with our new shipmate, do you think?” Lee asked.

“I think she's . . . she's . . .”

The secret wasn't Cade's to tell. And promises had been made.

“She's strange.” The lie came like a fumbled beat, sticking-out and obvious. “You said it yourself.”

Lee shrugged and leapt off the bed. “Come on,” she said as she hoisted herself into the tunnel. She flashed toothy-white brilliance at Cade before she turned and went to work on the panel. “We're close.”

“Close?”

It seemed impossible. So many light-years, so much black had existed between Cade and Xan when this started. And now she was close.

Hades.

Cade could almost feel the hole-suck.

She scrambled through the tunnel. She hit the main cabin with Lee. Rennik waited at the top of the chute, twisting the circle-glass around in his hands, looking nervous and pleased. Cade couldn't tell if she was getting better at seeing the flow of emotions underneath the flat surface, or if he was getting better at showing them to her.

“We're putting down in ten,” he said.

Lee nodded as if that wasn't ridiculous.

“Putting down?” Cade asked. “Hades isn't a place to stop and get leisurely.”

“We're not in Hades,” Rennik said, a twitch of pride in his voice. “Renna changed the course.”

“Renna . . . wait . . .
what?
”

Cade felt herself stiffen—hands, stomach, throat—until she was locked tight and creaking out words.

“What are you talking about?”

“She came up with the most fantastic flight plan, Cadence. It takes us back to the brink of Hades in two days.”

“Back?”

Lee planted herself in front of Cade and got in her face, set and certain.

“It all fits together. We needed time to come up with a plan. The Unmakers know you're coming, and they'll have their traps set. Do you really think you can sail into Hades without them noticing?”

Cade looked for an answer to fling at Lee, but all she had was the sketchiest of ideas—bursting into Hades in Ayumi's little ship and using her entanglement—somehow—to find Xan.

Ayumi crossed the dock with a canvas sack and a thick stack of notebooks, looking refreshed and sleep-scrubbed and anything but spacesick. Anger thrummed out of Cade so hard, it stopped Ayumi in her tracks.

“What's happening?” she asked.

When Cade spoke, she had to press down on each word to keep it from exploding. “That's a very good question.”

“Firstbloom,” Lee said. “We made it to Firstbloom.”

Cade felt a floating, and a fear that spread out from the center of it. Like the moment she looked out of the starglass—when up and down and right and left, morning and night, stopped meaning anything.

“And no one thought to wake me up and . . . tell me about this?”

Ayumi looked at Lee and then down at the floor. “We were so sure you'd want to see it.”

“Why?”

“To figure out what all of this means!” Ayumi burst.

“Everything we know about entanglement comes from a four-minute filmstrip,” Lee said. “Do you understand how big this could be? No more spacesick? No more scatter? You're the one hope left for all of us, Cade. Doesn't that merit a pit stop?”

“It's not your call,” Cade said.

Rennik headed down the chute to meet Cade. He folded his hands over hers and when he pulled them back, she was holding the circle-glass. “There's one more splice here, Cadence. I can restore it, but not with simple means. It will take the original tech.”

And the tech was on Firstbloom.

“The place has been attacked!” Cade said.

“It still shows up on scans and updated flight maps. Which means it's still there.”

“It's a mobile lab station,” Lee tossed in. “Independent. No one will have come to claim the equipment.”

“Or the bodies,” Cade muttered.

“There's so much we could learn,” Ayumi said, shuffling her notebook stack. “So much that we need.”

“I see you've got it all figured out.” Cade managed one step at a time until she was in Rennik's face. “This can't be the course. I need to get to Xan.”

Lee slid herself into the bare inch of space between Rennik and Cade. “We know he's in trouble. But so are all the humans who can't do more than live and die, scattered on horrible planets, treated like spacetrash. I've seen more of it than anyone, and I'm telling you, things are getting dire for our kind. If you can do something to change that . . .”

Cade didn't know if she would be able to make a difference in a problem as wide as the skies. She didn't care about it half as much as she cared about rescuing Xan. But Firstbloom held the secrets of entanglement. Cade's story was one of those secrets.

She'd thought the hope of knowing who she was had come and gone with Mr. Niven, crumpled on the ground in the pile of his old-man clothes. She'd thought that Xan was the one thing she'd ever know about herself—the single, about-to-be-snapped connection to her past.

But the circle-glass had proven her wrong. Her mother had been pinched down to nothing, almost lost.

What else was there to find?

Cade needed to know, for herself—and for Lee, who wanted to be part of the mission, who believed in it even when Cade didn't. For Rennik, who helped Cade over and over when other nonhumans would have showed her the airlock. For Ayumi, who tried to hide a soft flinch in her stare—who focused on what happened to Cade, even as she fought her own battle against all of space.

Since the moment she left Andana, Cade had put Xan first. She had tucked her own cares into his, lied to her shipmates, cared less about them because there wasn't room for it as long as Xan needed her so much. Now, to turn her back on Firstbloom, she would have to put him in front of herself, her friends, and the rest of the human race. Again.

She reached out to Xan and told him where she was headed.

White, clean, sharp as a seven-blade knife.

Firstbloom.

Xan's adrenaline hit her even before his thoughts, and those thoughts were simple. He would be glad to help her punch the guts, blacken the eyes, and sour the organs of everyone on that ship until she had it turned around and pointed at Hades.

Cade didn't want to hurt anyone. What's more, she didn't want to turn around. Renna and the others had been right. It was time to know more about what it actually meant to be entangled.

Xan disagreed.

Violently.

He kept sending her signals to take all of them down. Kept flooding her with help she didn't want. There were no blows, no knives, but this hurt more than the other fights she'd gotten into, because it felt like Cade was fighting herself. Shredding her insides. Bashing her thoughts back. She threw herself to the ground, so she wouldn't collapse.

Cade curled into a ball, holding her muscles in perfect tension. “Two days,” she muttered. “Just two days.”

Hoping Xan could hear it. Hoping he would understand.

 

Cade caught Firstbloom in the starglass as it swam up at the edge of an asteroid field. It was shinier than the dull chunks of space-rock around it—a group of three irregular orbs connected by thin tubes that Cade guessed were bridges. The whole thing looked like a colony of little moons with no planet.

Cade's floating homeland.

Landing would be difficult, because they already had Ayumi's ship on the main dock and there was no one to answer their call and open Firstbloom's hatch. Rennik did the whole thing manually, including a spacewalk in a pressure suit to force the hatch open.

Cade waited at the secondary dock off the cargo hold, with Lee on one side and Ayumi on the other, and Renna sending them regular pulses to let them know Rennik was all right.

The hatch hissed open. The towering door of the dock slid up. Cade stepped through a short spur of walkway and into the lab.

The stillness was the first thing. It was thick and all around, and had settled over the surfaces—the long white tables, the scattered white coats, the hulking white machines—like sheets. The overhead lights were on, content to glare into the distant future, but one in the far corner had given in to a flicker that would sooner or later end in the blink-out. It thrashed in its little glass case.

Lee crowded in, close behind Cade. Ayumi rushed ahead, running her fingertips all over the silent scene.

“It's a graveyard,” Ayumi whispered.

“Then where are the . . . you know . . . dead people?” Lee asked.

Cade and Lee pressed farther into the low-ceilinged, open lab space. Their steps fell soft on the white, stonelike floor.

“You don't see the dead,” Ayumi said. “That's not how it works.”

Graveyards were an old notion, an Earth notion. Humans on Andana were cremated or given sand burials. There was so little good land there, not be wasted on humans. So Cade couldn't be sure if Ayumi was right about the lab.

She swept a look over the hush of it. No bodies. But the machines were like graves, rising white and metallic and humming Everyone Is Gone songs.

Cade and Lee fanned out to look for the tech that would restore the circle-glass. Ayumi filled her canvas sack with anything that might tell her more about the humans who had worked there, or, reaching back, about Earth. They worked out from the center of the room, overlapping each other's circles as they went, doubling each other's steps, making sure.

Cade stopped at the first bridge.

A little pane of plastic sat in the white door. A hollow tube connected the lab to another node about a quarter of a mile in the distance. The doors on both ends had been closed.

Between them, men and women were lined up in a neat row, slumped and strange. There was almost no blood. It could have been some kind of institutional naptime, but eve-ryone's eyes were open. That made it easier for Cade to notice a certain old man, nondescript except for the wrinkles.

Mr. Niven.

Cade ripped in a breath, turned away. Her heart could have been to the expanding edges of space and back in a minute. Xan connected within seconds—she could feel his presence, but he sent nothing. Maybe he was still damp at the fact that she wouldn't fight her friends to get to him faster. Maybe he was silent at the sight of Firstbloom.

Cade decided his measured quiet was better than a brawl inside of her own body.

She stopped searching for the tech for a minute, and scoured the lab for something to offer Xan. She knew she was the one who owed him, this time. She should have been on Hades' doorstep by now. There was nothing she could send that would fill the betrayal-shaped space that had opened up between them.

Cade traced her steps back until she stood in front of a bank of cribs. She knew these from the filmstrip. She knew them from before that. Her memories steered her to a little rectangle on the far side of the grid.

She touched a thin plastic railing, tiny pillows, crisp white sheets. Cade didn't hold back the confused tumble in her chest. She sent it to Xan, along with a flash of the crib, and two words.

Welcome home.

 

 

CHAPTER 17

SUPERPOSITION: The tendency of a quantum system to exist in all possible theoretical states, until observed

The crib creaked.

Or Cade thought it did. But then the sound came again, and Cade placed it behind her.

She had the seven-blade knife out and unsnapped by the time she turned. But it was just Rennik, clunking in his pressure suit, the helmet off and the rest of it shrugged around his body. He looked out of place in the lab—too tall for the low ceilings, too curved for the sharp corners. Sometimes Cade forgot that he wasn't human. But here, in a place where everything was human-made, he stood out like a smashed thumb.

“Anything yet?” he asked.

Cade shook her head. She hadn't expected answers about entanglement to leap out from behind corners. But so far there was equipment and cribs, dust and silence.

“I found something,” Ayumi called from across the lab. “I mean. Someone.”

Cade ran over to where Ayumi had stopped in front of a long desk. A little placard that read
INFORMATION
sat on top of it, undisturbed. Behind it, flickers of light gathered, sparking into something larger and shaped like a person. Arms and a torso pulled themselves together. The head came last, flickering in and out before it snapped into a smile. This projection didn't have a proper body, something elaborate and costumed like Mr. Niven—it was a thin scrap of color and light. At the same time, it was human.

A woman. Middle-aged, with thick dark hair wrapped around her head, a white coat over her patterned dress, and a little brass pin with her name on it.

Andrea.

Cade fought the urge to say hello.

Andrea smiled so thin and tight that at first Cade worried she was about to go spacecadet right in front of them. But no. Andrea leaned forward and folded her transparent hands on the surface of the desk and started to speak in a pleasant, well-modulated tone.