Entangled (6 page)

“What do you want?” Cade asked.

“Part of you,” the old woman said. “For the shop.”

Cade leveled a glance at the woman, and stuffed in as much contempt as she could fit. “But I'm not dead.”

“You go there,” the old woman said, pointing up, “you're as good as.” She leaned in and whispered, voice coated in age like layers of dust. “The customers, all they want is the tragedy. And that's thick on you, isn't it?”

Cade's stomach flashed cold.

“I might have asked for your hair on another day,” the old woman said, with a glance that inspired Cade to gather it up and tuck it behind her shoulders. “Decent locks, nice shine to them, but I've got plenty at the moment. So . . .” The old woman rattled around with one hand, not taking her eyes off Cade, until she flourished a pair of pliers. She nodded at Cade's mouth. “I'll take one of those.”

“You can't be . . .”

“Serious? But that's just what we are, you and I.” She slapped the pliers down on the table.

Cade grabbed them. Made another frantic round of the market, but no one would slip her one word about Lee. So she stopped at the booth that sold splinter-thin vials of moonshine. Bartered for two of them and took her strange armload of items to the nearest bathroom. It had a mirror, which was good. Not because Cade wanted to see what she was about to do—but it would help her be precise. She uncapped the first bottle and poured the white-hot moonshine straight over the chosen tooth, second from the back on the bottom right-hand side. Then she opened the other bottle and rubbed the fire into her gums until she couldn't feel them. With each slide of her finger, her stomach clenched. The pliers went in cold, and her tongue fought back. But she reached in the prongs, clamped them down.

Cade called out to Xan and concentrated all of her efforts on sending him a picture of herself, staring into a film-blotched bathroom mirror with a pair of metal fingers deep in her mouth. She gave him a chance to tell her to turn back. Not to do it. Not to come for him. She felt the clench of his heart when he saw her, but he didn't tell her to stop.

She sent him one last flash of the plier-glint, the taste of rust.

You had better be worth this.

She pulled.

Xan couldn't keep her from feeling the pain, but he could feel it with her. He was there, and it felt like someone holding her hand tight enough to draw her away from the hurt. He couldn't stop her from slicking one hand with blood or throwing up twice, but he could distract her, shore her up, calm her down—do whatever it took to keep her upright as she stumbled across the market, her fist closed around the chip of bone.

“Back so soon?”

Cade slammed the tooth down.

“Didn't think you would do it,” the old woman said, picking up the tooth as if it were some milk-white diamond, peering at it from all angles.

“Lee,” Cade said through a mouthful of pain.

The old woman pulled the black felt of the curtains behind her booth and let Cade pass through. She smelled the pungence of shoes that, thankfully, masked the other smells of the old woman's trade, and felt the swish of the dark fabric against her screaming-tender cheek.

On the other side, Cade faced the emptiness created by the backs of the booths. A sort of enclosed square. A few merchants sat on crates and counted wares or coin. Cade was sure she'd have to ask at least one more person where she could find Lee, and didn't know how she'd manage with her puffing mouth. But then her eyes settled on a girl at the end of a short line, and Cade knew she could stop the search.

People waited patiently to see the girl, who couldn't have been more than eighteen, just a little older than Cade. She had wild sand-colored hair, pulled up into a complicated series of knots. She didn't have a booth set up, just the line, and from the looks of it, people would be waiting for a while.

She was in the middle of kissing a man, long and hard and studiously. She pulled away every once in a while to write something in a small black notebook.

Cade tacked herself onto the end of the line. The kissing went on and on. Cade wanted to stop watching, but it took her mind off the splintered ache in her mouth.

“All right,” Lee called out. “Who's next?”

 

 

CHAPTER 5

CONSTRAINT VARIABLE: The boundaries of a system within which any process must work

Cade had to watch a few people come and go to figure it out—what Lee was doing, and why the line to see her was filled with feet-tapping, quick-breathing nervebags. It didn't help that Cade had to think through the pain of her voided tooth.

Lee finished with the first man, and a woman stepped forward—she could only be described as a mother, her clothes wrinkled and her face ironed flat with worry. In the black notebook, Lee took down the recipe for a certain kind of cake, crammed with black-market sugar. Cade couldn't see the connection between the kiss and the cake—but more than that she couldn't figure out how this girl was supposed to get her up to space.

Then an old man with square-framed glasses taught Lee a song. His voice shivered like skin at nightfall, but the pitch was true. Cade basked in the distraction of it—at least, until Lee started to sing. She repeated the old man's words, but the rhythm dissolved and the notes weren't right. Cade wanted to nudge them up, out of their flatness.

Lee tried again.

“Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd the wild waves whist, Foot it featly here and there; And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”

The words were strange and wild and not English. But the sounds made perfect sense to Cade.

Her Noise-free head was turning out to be just as musical as before, if not more so. Now Cade could hear one sound at the center of her skull and turn it around, examine it from different angles. Even with her butchered mouth, she could hum the notes better than Lee. The song had gone sour, and Cade knew it, and from the squint of the old man's eyes he knew it, too. But he put a hand on Lee's shoulder and thanked her anyway.

No two people offered Lee the same thing, but she greeted all of their offerings with the same wide smile. And then the man in front of Cade stepped up and she heard Lee ask, “What planet?” and it all made sense.

Lee was part of the Human Express.

Cade had thought it was just a story, a collection of mumbles to help humans feel less alone. The Human Express was a loose network of people who made it their business to deliver messages over tough and sometimes uncharted tracts of space. It was also, in every sense of the word, illegal. Nonhuman species weren't interested in humans keeping in contact with each other. It was one thing to send a few words on a passing work ship, or bribe a half-rotted pilot to carry a letter. But the Human Express did a lot more than that. They took whatever was most important to people as far as it needed to go. The only place the carriers were safe was in space, which was almost impossible to carve into patrollable territories.

The Express being real, and Lee being part of it, meant that Cade had a chance to make it out of the atmosphere. She rushed to send Xan the news—a flash of the scene at the market, a blast of her new hope.

Lee turned her smile on Cade, who had landed at the front of the line. Now she could see the girl in detail—her wide dark double-moon eyes, the freckles scrolled out on her pale skin. She was the negative image of a starry night.

The distance between them was only a few steps, but to Cade it seemed uncrossable.

“Hey,” she called from where she stood in line.

“You.” Lee took a giant step forward, did the real work for her. “Never seen you before.”

“It's a high price of admission.” Cade tapped a finger at her wound. The words came out puffed and soft.

Lee shook her head and swore under her breath. Her storminess was as full and complete as the smiling had been.

“I told that spacecadet, no more teeth.”

She turned her back on Cade for a minute and rummaged around in a canvas pack. When she straightened up, she held a small bottle of antiseptic and a few swabs of cotton. She tossed them to Cade, who caught them in the hand that wasn't busy cradling her monstrous cheek.

“Keep those, courtesy of the Express,” Lee said. “Now what can I do for you today?”

“I was told you could help me,” Cade said. “By . . .” She didn't know how to describe the soft-eyed spacesick who had sent her.
Friend
wasn't the right word.

Lee didn't seem to care. “Don't need a reference.” She flipped to a new page in the notebook. “What planet?”

“Not a planet at all,” Cade said. “It's a place called Hades. I think.”

“Hades, you think?” Lee widened her eyes and pushed a hand up into the wilds of her hair. “Yeah, I've heard of that one. There are humans out there? You sure? I mean, other than the ones that are stuck in hole-suck. I can't exactly get to them.”

Xan was there, in Hades. Cade was sure of it. But she didn't want to leave Andana only to go hurtling in the wrong direction. There had to be some way of knowing where Xan was, of not wasting Lee's time. She got the feeling, just from looking at this girl, that she was someone you wanted on your side and not the other way around.

So Cade reached out to Xan and sent the thought of black holes. Dense and inescapable. Light-devouring. And she thought the words that the Matalan had given her.

A place of negation.

She waited for a response, and Xan sent something just like it back to her—black holes, a string of them over and over. So many black holes that Cade's thoughts were sucked in a hundred different directions at once.

“Yeah,” she said. “I'm sure.”

Cade sighed as the pulling in her head let up. She was left alone with her own thoughts and Lee's face, which might as well have blinked a neon sign that said
THEN AGAIN MAYBE I WON'T.

“Hades is going to cost.” She consulted a list of prices in the back of her notebook. “It is going to cost big and terrible.”

“I have money.” Cade didn't spend much of what Mr. Smithjoneswhite paid her, when he remembered to do it.

“And what am I taking out there for you?” Lee asked, licking the end of her blue pen and spotting her tongue.

“Well. Me.”

Lee shook her head so hard that one of her hair knots came undone. “Don't carry human cargo,” she said. “It's part of the code. I'm twelfth generation. I know the rules. Human Express takes the intangible to the unreachable. And you . . .” She looked Cade up and down. “You're tangible as hell. I know you're a first-timer so I'm going to let this one drain. No humans. No exceptions.”

“But someone told me—”

“Someone was wrong.” Lee looked over Cade's shoulder at the next person in line. Crooked a finger. “Step up.”

Cade was surprised by the sound of her own voice—sharp-edged and rising.

“But I need to get to him!”

She had Lee's attention now, and she couldn't waste it. This was no time to stumble through an explanation of what it meant to be quantum entangled. Cade knew that those words wouldn't clink for Lee the way they did for her.

“I need to find my brother.”

Lee's storminess gathered again. She stepped in close to Cade and lowered her voice to a rumble. “Look, everyone in this line has a brother, sister, husband, kids, somebody to miss. What do you think we're all here about?”

Xan wasn't another one of those much-misseds, those long-losts. Cade knew it sounded the same, but it wasn't the same. Like a note played in two different octaves. You could only tell the difference if you knew how to listen.

“He's in danger,” Cade said. “He's going to be . . .” The word she wanted was
unmade,
but again, she had to scramble for a translation that Lee would understand. “He's going to be killed.”

Cade expected some kind of gasp, but instead she got a lightning-sharp stare. Lee pushed Cade away from the line with two small but firm hands. She stopped at the back of one of the booths. “Wait here.”

“But—”

“Wait. Here.”

Lee went back to her brisk-but-friendly business. She didn't look at Cade once. Her dark-moon eyes didn't even flicker. Cade focused her energies on the little bottle of antiseptic and the cotton swabs, one of which she soaked and lodged in the pain-rimmed emptiness where her tooth had been.

It took the better part of an hour, and then the line was gone. Cade heard a bell ring in the distance, muffled by the booths and the sounds of people scraping to make their last purchases. The market would close in ten minutes.

Lee shut the little black notebook.

“You have to understand,” she said, strolling over to Cade, “if I had this conversation in front of all those people, I would have started a riot. Or had to find a bigger ship.”

“Which conversation?” Cade asked.

Lee's face traded in its normal upbeat airs for something else. A seriously down-tempo cover song. “When you said your brother was going to be killed, you meant it, right? You're not some kind of space junkie using me for a ride?”

“I meant it.”

Lee's dark eyes searched her again, and Cade couldn't help but feel like this girl was on the hunt for her soul. She scoured up and down, then moved in close. So close, Lee's nose almost stubbed hers.

“Fine.”

Cade wondered what Lee found in her face that settled the matter.

“Here's the rest of it,” Lee said. “You come with me, you carry.”

Cade wasn't sure what that meant at first. Then she remembered. Human Express. She would have to work her way to Hades.

“What do you want me to take?” she asked, sick at the thought of people lining up to unload their secret messages and most heartfelt kisses on her.