Entangled (31 page)

“Hey!” Cade said. “Those are my friends. You said so yourself. Stop trying to shake them.”

“You might want to call them off. It's dangerous out here. If you don't know where you're headed.” The sweat on his forehead stood out pale on his skin like a line of shivering blisters.

Cade could do it. She could call Renna off—without tech, without trouble. She had made it to Hades and collected Xan. They were safe and away from the Unmakers. She could reach out into her friends' heads and find a way to tell them,
I don't need you anymore. Get safe. Go home.

Instead, she turned to Xan.

“Look,” Cade said, “I love a surprise as much as the next lab-altered girl, but where are we going?”

“You're going to think it's perfect.” He touched his schematic like a charm, then touched her wrist. “Promise.”

That one word cast a spell on Cade, sure as the opening chords of an old throat-worn song. There was no fighting it. She had promised to cross the universe for Xan, and here she was. If he promised that they were headed to a place worth being, she would listen.

But she still didn't leave the window, didn't stop watching Renna. She imagined Rennik at the controls, smooth and calm, looking like a pane of glass but underneath molten, hot-hearted, caring too much. She missed Lee's arm around her shoulder, there when she wanted it and there when she thought she didn't. And she had more to learn from Gori. As much as she could stand. And Moon-White, she needed to get back to Moon-White, and her fingers on frets. And who would make sure Ayumi recovered and didn't go full-on spacesick? She had songs to play inside that girl's head.

That was when Cade knew—she'd lagged in her connection with Xan not because she was bad at being entangled, but because she'd been too busy making connections with people who weren't him.

“So you have a plan,” Cade said, still staring at the remains of the old plan. The ship and the people who had gotten her this far. “You could have transmitted it to me at any point. Why wait?”

“I needed to know that I could trust you, Cadence,” he said, looking surprised that it needed to be said.

Cade thought of the times she'd felt him hold something back and assumed he was doing it to keep her safe, to shield her from the worst of the torture.

“You were
testing me?”

“No,” he said. “That's not the word I would use. I was taking my time. To get to know you. All the facts and ideas I had about you came from our . . . technicians,” he said with a caustic rasp in his throat. “And since I couldn't trust them, how could I know to trust you?”

Cade's fingers rested on the back of the pilot's chair, inches away from Xan. Anger surged through their tips, up her arms, straight to her center. She fought it down by casting herself back to the days on Andana when she'd first learned about Xan—when she didn't trust Mr. Niven and didn't know what to make of entanglement. Before she had learned to be so fierce about Xan, to care about him as much as she cared about herself.

“I spent years being filled up on the whispers of Firstbloom,” he said. “How strong you were, how superior to me. It should have made me hate you, but it didn't. It fed the need to find you. To see what you were, to know for myself. When you called me, I woke up. When I called you, you came. There's one step left, Cadence. This is the one we take together.”

Cade felt the rightness of this wash over her. She moved to the side of the chair, touched his shoulder, then dropped her arm down across his chest, held him close. He smelled like sheets and sleep, like triple-washed air and ice. Clean and good and pure things. He was going to tell her, finally, the meaning of entanglement. Unfold its secrets for her, uncrumple the directions to the life she had been living. The purpose she'd been straining to find.

Xan looked from space to Cade and back again. “It wasn't fully formed, when I woke up. The plan. Strange, but the people back on the station gave it to me. Of course, they didn't know that's what they were doing. Those people . . .”

“I call them Unmakers,” Cade said.

Xan held her arm to his chest, clasped her there. The connection was closed. In space. In time. If someone saw them in shadow, they would look like one figure. He leaned in and pulled her toward him with the hand that wasn't working the controls. The softness of his breath was hers now. The hundred blues and the one hint of green that swirled his eyes. It was all hers.

Kissing was nothing compared to this. Not that she planned to mention that fact to Xan.

“Unmakers,” he said with a laugh. “That's . . . appropriate.”

“Tell me what happened.” Cade could have gone swimming in his mind and come up clutching the story. But she was tired of all the grasping, the working to get to him. She wanted him to give the story to her, as a gift.

“I woke up on Firstbloom,” he said. “For a minute. Less. A flicker. And then . . . I woke up again, and I was there, on that station, in that cell. You know the one.” Cade saw it in one here-and-gone blink of white, courtesy of Xan's mind or her own memories—she couldn't be sure which.

“The Unmakers wanted us because they were afraid,” Xan said. “Some new era of man.” His voice grew large and filled the pod. “Spacesick cured! The Scattering—reversed! Maybe even a new home planet! With the entangled leading the charge.” Cade felt the optimism of those words clang in the air. But the way Xan spoke them was all brass and no substance. He shook his head. “It's the same delusion the scientists had.”

“Delusion?” Cade wasn't so sure. The more she saw of what her mind could do, the more she was convinced that she could help the spacesicks. And with spacesick cleared, maybe the Scattering
could
be reversed.

A home planet?
Cade thought.

That's one I haven't heard before.

“Ridiculous, right?” Xan pushed a lever forward to the sticking point. The pod sped past another string of black holes. It seemed like they were headed deeper into Hades.

“The need to stop humans from becoming more than they are now is what drives the Unmakers,” Xan said. “They wouldn't stop until they had both of us. I was a captive on Firstbloom. Easy to pluck. You were harder to find and much, much harder to catch.” He shot an arm around her waist. “But I knew you were coming. You were as strong as the scientists said, and more. There was no question in my mind that you would make it to the station. Even if it did take some . . . reminding.”

Cade knew this part. Or at least, the version Unmother had told her. She dropped to one knee and ran a hand along Xan's arm, inspected his scars with a critical eye. Thin crosses of pure white flesh. She'd seen enough wounds to know that these could never bleed out. They were shallow, painful. Showy.

“Did you really let the Unmakers torture you?”

“Here,” he said, shifting to his feet. “Take the seat for a minute.”

“But I don't know how to—”

“Fly?” he said. “That's all right. It's on a sort of autopilot.”

She dropped down and put her hands on the panels, at the ready, like she'd seen Rennik and Ayumi do. Her eyes slid from the view in front of her to Xan as he wrenched open the door of a small closet.

“You didn't answer me,” Cade said.

Again, she could go into his head and plunder his thoughts, if it came down to that. But she wanted to hear the words.

“Xan?”

The thin closet held a spacesuit. No. Two spacesuits. He pulled out the pieces of one and started to assemble it over his clothes.

“I let the Unmakers torture me to prove that I was on their side. It was the strongest pact I could think of under the circumstances. It wasn't hard to figure out them out. All they care about, all they understand, is sacrifice. Pain. To talk to them about beauty, connection, love . . . it's a waste. So I didn't. I showed them what they wanted to see.”

“And what is that?” Cade asked.

Xan strapped on the gloves and stood in front of her, suited up to his neck in thick white fabric.

“A human, ready for sacrifice.”

Cade's stomach did—as Lee called it—the gravity ballet. It rose up and pressed her insides. She checked to be sure Renna was still bobbing alongside the ship. But she'd fallen back.

“Xan,” she said, her voice so thin, it was almost transparent. “The Unmakers wanted me to—”

“I know what they want. I let them think I wanted the same things, the same sort of sacrifice, for the same reasons. It granted me trust, and the information I needed to help us escape. I'm sure that's why we haven't been followed. They'll send a crew after us soon enough, to be sure the job is done.”

“The job?”

Something was wrong. Something in Cade's stomach. Something in her heart. And around the ship, a new smoothness in the air. Cade kept her eyes on Xan's lips.

He would explain.

“Death isn't enough for the Unmakers,” he said. “Not a mundane death. Not for us. We're too dangerous. If even the least particle of us is left intact, it could be studied. Others could be entangled.”

It's not enough for us to die,
Cade thought.
We need to be unmade.

“So they brought me here,” Xan said. “To Hades. And they lured you . . .”

“Here. To Hades.” The warning of the Matalan floated back to Cade, across time and space. From some pit of a bar on Andana to this particular nowhere, surrounded on all sides by black holes.

A place of negation.

It all rushed together in Cade's head. The place. The plot. The sacrifice that the Unmakers demanded.

It made sour, twisted sense. But it still sounded impossible when Cade said it.

“They want to feed us to a black hole.”

Xan gathered her hands in his, the fabric of the suit catching on her skin.

“No, Cadence. They want us to feed
ourselves
to a black hole.”

Cade untacked her eyes from Xan's face and turned. The black in front of the ship was the darkest she'd ever seen. The darkest she could imagine. So much dark that light seemed like a lie someone had told her once.

Cade focused on Xan's face, and gave him one more chance to tell her that she was wrong.

“Please,” Cade said. “Tell me you didn't steer us into the blackest black hole in Hades.”

Xan smiled. And didn't say a thing.

 

 

CHAPTER 22

BLACK HOLE: A region of inescapable gravity

Cade looked out and saw black, black, black, stretched so wide there were no edges. She sat down at the controls, which she could push in any direction without nudging the ship's course. A seamless path straight into the black.

Cade remembered Xan's words.

“Autopilot?”

He looked up from fiddling with the second spacesuit. Blinked those innocent blues.

“You told me the ship was on a sort of
autopilot,
” Cade said. “What we're
on
is a crash course with the gravity of the biggest black hole I've ever seen.” She poured herself out of the pilot's chair and marched the two steps it took to get in Xan's face.

“This is the plan?”

Xan held out a helmet. “What the Unmakers don't understand is that we're not sacrificing ourselves at all.”

Cade crashed the helmet to the floor. Xan winced and held his breath.

“You said you weren't on their side!” Cade cried. Her insides went hot and threatened to turn explosive. She burst out of the little atmosphere Xan liked to share with her—but all she had to look at were the black hole and the controls she couldn't work well enough to keep them out of it. So she turned back to Xan and let him have the full heat of her stare.

Cade had never felt so lied to. And lied-to was the basis of most of her life.

Xan stared back, steady in the face of her nova rage. “I'm not on their side, Cadence. And I'm not on the side of the scientists or the spacesicks or the humans who need a savior.” He stepped forward. Stood so close that his pain was more than a gallery of scars. It was a thickening she could feel in the air.

“Can't you tell the difference?” he asked. “I'm on
our
side.”

Cade went back to slamming at the controls. Punched in new courses, one on top of the other, only to have the control panel burst into a chorus of red lights. If Xan had reached out for her thoughts, he would have found a crackling mess. Instead he held out an armload of white.

The second spacesuit.

“You'd better put this on,” he said. “I planned this. For us. I told the Unmakers that my one request was to see the inside of the black hole before I died. I wanted to see it with you, Cadence. The ship will start to collapse once we cross the event horizon, but the suits will keep us alive—”

“For how long?”

Xan shook his hanging-down head and the balance in the room shifted—fast. Xan's eyes shaded and his face went slack with disappointment. It shouldn't have been allowed. There was only room for one broken heart on this ship. Cade had come all this way to find Xan. The disappointment belonged to her. She wanted it
back.

Tears starred Xan's cheeks. Cade fought an unwanted urge to listen.

“I thought it would make sense to you. We're entangled, Cadence. The laws of the universe are different when it comes to us. It takes a normal person a few minutes to die inside of a small black hole. But this is the largest one in the universe. And we're
not
normal.

“So light can't escape a black hole. Our thoughts move faster than the speed of light. So matter can't escape. Once we're inside, we won't want to. The Unmakers think a black hole is some kind of punishment, a netherworld, a nonverse.”

“What do you think it is?”

“For us?” he said. “A paradise.”