Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  But now Cade wasn’t alone. Not quite. She had the pieces of Mr. Niven in her pocket. And, in her head, a picture of the boy. The cloud-skinned boy. The one she was entangled with.

  She sat down on the piece of scavenged plastic foam she used as a bed. It squealed at her, but Cade bore down and squished it into silence. She needed silence so she could wander into the mists of her head and find the place where she’d dropped his name.

  Xan.

  She clinked in other words, one at a time.

  Cadence.

  Firstbloom.

  Entangled.

  These were tokens of a past that Cade had been cast out of. She didn’t know if she wanted it back, but she did want these words. They belonged to her. There was another one she needed to add, waiting for her on that scrap of paper from Mr. Niven’s pocket. She opened it, and the lines where it had been folded were scars—thick and white and raised.

  The characters sprawled. The first one reminded her of an s, but backwards. The middle letter was a b, she was sure of it. The last was an H, tall and crossed in the middle, one of her ladder rungs. But it was a capital, and came at the end of a word. A capital at the end of a word couldn’t be English—could it? Cade didn’t think so. But her lessons in the Parentless Center hadn’t been easy to sit through.

  Cade was left with two letters, second and fourth. She spun through the alphabet, but she didn’t know these shapes. She wondered if she was looking at the curves and angles of a lost Earth language. It had been half a millennium since the decision was made, by nonhumans, that English would be the one accepted form of speech and writing for all humans living in space. Not because it was the prettiest or the most practical or the easiest to understand. Because it was common, and nonhumans weren’t interested in learning more than one stick-figured, thick-tongued set of words.

  If this note really was written in something other than English, Cade was done. She could try to track down a translator, but she didn’t know what she was translating from. Unless the note wasn’t for her at all. Maybe it was for Xan.

  Cade felt Mr. Niven’s influence on her like fingerprints. She tossed the paper across the room. She wasn’t Firstbloom’s messenger girl. These scientists scrambling her particles didn’t mean she owed them favors—in fact, it was the other way around.

  Cade burrowed as deep as her plastic-foam bed let her. Tried to burrow even deeper, into sleep. She would think about Xan in the morning. About whether she wanted to think about him at all.

  Cade woke up and wasn’t even sure of it for five minutes. No more Noise meant there was no static-prickled difference between dreaming and awake.

  The room she slept in didn’t give her much to go on. In the dark, it could have been the slate of a standard nightmare. But one finger of light reached down from a crack in the cover of the bunker, and led Cade to a patch of shine on the other side of the room. The mirror-tip caught her eye and threw back a dim picture.

  Which gave her an idea.

  If Project QE had nonhuman enemies, writing something that could be read backwards, in a mirror, would keep it safe.

  Cade thrashed onto her other side and faced the pocked cement wall. If she was right, it would mean her enemies were real. She tried to convince herself that everything Niven had said was a lie.

  But he was from her white-painted past—her own faded memories and her gut confirmed it. He was real, Xan was real, and entanglement was real. If it wasn’t, the inside of Cade’s head would be just like everyone else’s.

  Maybe the danger was real, too. Maybe the boy who used to be the most important thing in her small universe had been taken.

  Cade got up and scraped the tenderness of her feet on the cement. In the dark, she found the slip of paper and crawled up to the mirror. Refocused her eyes. Reversed the word. It was blocked out in perfect, plain English.

  Hades.

  There was a reason Cade didn’t go to Voidvil on Sunday mornings.

  A hundred reasons, really, and Cade could see them running thick and obvious in the streets.

  Voidvil was at its worst after the riot of a Saturday night. Men and women with spacesick had been up for too long without sleep. The needing smiles of the night before were traded in for burst-vessel skin and slitted frowns. A few tents were propped in the crust of alleys or slung across empty lots, offering forgiveness for whatever-you-did-last-night, only a few coins. Nobody bought it.

  Cade scanned the buildings. She’d seen the word Hades before, splashed in neon over a gape-mouthed door. It was the name of a club on the near side of town. She would find out what the word meant, and maybe that would tell her how much trouble Xan was in.

  Not that she cared. She cared about being able to go right back to not-caring.

  The staircase to Hades put the one at Club V to shame. It twisted down, a spiral with pegs and spikes set in at random. Cade climbed, listening to her steps as they tested, sounded, called the all-clear.

  Club Hades was a circle of sand-brick, with a sand-brick stage set inside of it like a ripple. A single person worked around the rim of the stage, broom in hand.

  She was nonhuman—and therefore the owner or the bartender. But she wasn’t a native of Andana like Mr. Smithjoneswhite. She stood tall and slender and had a much more reasonable number of limbs. She was one of the Matalan—a species of women who had some of the qualities of plants. They could photosynthesize and wore clothes spun with threads of sunlight over birch-pale, paper skin. This one rustled as she swept the floor. She grew purple flowers in her hair.

  “No drinks,” she said. “Noon.” Her English was clear and her voice bent with ease, like it was giving in to a wind Cade couldn’t feel.

  Cade walked up to the bar and set her guitar case on a stool. She was sure that the word on Mr. Niven’s paper had something to do with the enemies of Project QE. She needed her cool, and she needed a cover.

  “I play at Club V,” she said. “Saturday nights. I go on last.” That meant she was the best act the club had.

  “Dregs,” she said. “You’re Cade?”

  “No dregs. I am.”

  The Matalan dropped a few petals on the floor, bloomed new ones. It was like blushing.

  “And you want to play here?”

  “No,” Cade said. “I want to look around. On the condition that none of this makes its way back to the too-many-fingers owner of a certain other club.”

  The Matalan’s eyes were swirled dark, like wood knots, and she narrowed them at Cade. She knew that Cade was scoping the club—or at least, that’s what Cade wanted her to think. The cover was working, but it didn’t come without a risk. If the Matalan didn’t trust Cade or didn’t want to deal with the possible mess of Mr. Smithjoneswhite, she might kick Cade back up the stairs, or make a discreet call to the bouncer and—wait. Cade had heard of musicians whose hands had been mangled and guitars smashed to atoms for less. She tightened her clutch on Cherry-Red’s case.

  “Sure.” The Matalan tipped her chin out at the club. “Take a look.”

  Cade walked away, but she couldn’t keep herself from watching the Matalan. All the woman did was sweep—skitter and gather, dust and air. But she was so beautiful, it could have been a dance. Loveliness didn’t shift through her and leave, like the passing of a season. It was part of her, sewed up in her skin. Even when she shed her coat and went winter-stark, she would be beautiful. This was how she could live in the void. Humans had nothing that touched the fringe of this grace.

  Cade walked the stage, the back rooms, the bathrooms, the dusty-bottled strip behind the bar. Nothing made her think of Mr. Niven or Xan or Project QE. She circled back to the Matalan. Watched for a minute as she tipped at the waist, tapped dust into a bin.

  “Nice place.”

  Cade tried to imagine for a second that the Matalan was one of her enemies. But the fight would have started bubbling under the skin of their conversation by now. Cade had a sense for these things. The Matalan kept one swirled-knot eye on her, but
other than that she didn’t seem to care.

  “The name of this club,” Cade said. “What does it mean?”

  “Death,” the woman said, with a smile.

  Cade smiled back, but there was strain in the thread of her lips. “Brass.”

  “Stole the name from an Earth story,” the Matalan said. “It means ‘underworld,’ and this club is an underworld. Took me years of seeing people come in and out to know how good a name it was.”

  Cade slapped the side of her guitar case. It was an unspoken agreement. Meant she could be counted on for a set. The Matalan widened her eyes—no, just the whites. Stretched them into white-pointed stars.

  “Saturday?” Cade asked.

  The Matalan nodded.

  But Cade didn’t leave, even though they both had their answers. She got the feeling, from the twist of the Matalan’s mouth, that she had more to say. Cade pushed one foot at the edge of a pile of swept dust. Swirled it into a glittering cloud.

  “You want to see the real Hades,” the Matalan said, “take a trip out to my planet and keep spinning.”

  “It’s an actual place?” The inside of Cade’s skull rattled, empty, wanting to be filled with this.

  “Sure.”

  A real place. Of course. Mr. Niven was telling Cade where to go.

  She gritted her teeth and thought about Xan. Not Niven. Xan. He had been innocent like she was, used like she was. Two babies—one left to a coma-blanked life, the other spat down in the desert. It wasn’t so different. Except now he was in a place named after death.

  Alone.

  “What’s out there?” Cade asked.

  “I’ve been there,” the Matalan said. “Past the rock planets and the gas planets and the ice orbs. Where the systems go thin. A mean place. No life, just a few stray strands of light. All over, black holes. It is a place of negation. That’s a name for it—Hades. One of its names.”

  Cade had to get off Andana.

  It smacked into her over and over again, in waves, the need to leave. It followed her down the noon-washed streets. It crossed the line into the desert with her. It made decent company on the walk.

  This was a strong, pure feeling, one that comforted Cade when everything else was confused. It was enough to guide her feet, unruffle her nerves, and set the ragged rhythms of her heart at ease.

  And then there was the other dimension of it, the one that shimmered in front of her, beautiful and strange.

  Needing to leave wasn’t Cade’s idea.

  Andana was the sort of planet that brought on an endless parade of escape fantasies. But Cade had given up on those a long time ago, for the same reason she’d stopped touching underneath her skirt after the first few times she’d tried. A girl could get lost in that sharp a wanting. So she shut down the fantasies, yanked down the hem. Screeched the production of desire to a halt.

  Now here it was—the need to leave—whole and certain, set down in her head by somebody else.

  When the Noise had turned off, Cade had been stunned by silence. And of course she had her thoughts, sometimes low and murmured—more often a rough, ragged mess. But this was different. It didn’t come the way other thoughts or feelings came—rising up, trickling in. This arrived whole. Delivered, or dropped out of the sky. And it had the stamp of someone else on it. Impressions that didn’t match Cade’s—of another body, another mind. Senses that pulled the world in at a different slant than hers did.

  This feeling, this need-to-leave, was laced with fear. But it wasn’t Cade-fear. Cade-fear was deep and thumping, and it felt like bass, and it tasted like metal. This was someone else’s fear. It screeched and clamored. It even had a smell. Antiseptic and old sheets and boy-sweat.

  This was Xan-fear.

  He needed Cade to come and find him. He was reaching out across millions of light-years and—asking her. Not demanding it. Just needing it.

  Needing her.

  She wouldn’t go for the scientists on Firstbloom. She wouldn’t even go for herself, firm in the stance that she didn’t need anyone, and Xan was still one of anyone. But she would go for the boy. Maybe because he’d turned off the Noise, and this was the only way to thank him. Maybe because they’d drooled onto the same blankets once. Or because he was like her—lab-altered, experimental, with no one else to count on. It didn’t matter.

  She would find Hades. She would find Xan.

  Cade felt something else, and this time she knew it was hers.

  Happiness.

  For the first time in years, a shock of happiness, knowing that she could help, and that it might even matter.

  There was a new mechanism to her steps now, a coil in her heels that made them lighter. She could have filled the desert with music. She could almost hear it now, the spreading of warm-centered chords.

  Once Cade had it all decided, she wanted to send a message to Xan. Some way of letting him know to hold tight.

  I’ll get there.

  She used the words, but words alone wouldn’t reach. What she needed was simpler than words. Raw thought. Not nuanced, but powerful. When her words reached Xan they would reach him as thought—a shape, an idea.

  Hold on. I’ll get there.

  She sent two feelings with the words—inside the hollowed-out bodies of words—her new happiness, and a twist of courage, paid out like a rope.

  But it didn’t last.

  She cut the rope, it went slack, mind to black, when she saw the smoke behind the dunes.

  Her dunes. The ones that opened onto her bunker.

  Cade flattened and fitted herself to the shadow side of the nearest rise. Crawled under a thin blanket of sand.

  The smoke rose and spread, and with it came sounds. Piercing high, thrumming low, nothing in between.

  Not death sounds. Death would have been a comfort compared to these. Death was a bed—warm, dark, waiting. These were the sounds of what waited past death. The sounds of undoing.

  Cade pushed herself up on the heels of her hands, breathed in a mouthful of sand. She crawled to the line at the top of the dune—sharp, but at any second it could crumble or be carried off by wind, and show where she was hiding.

  She raised her head and risked one look.

  A circle of beasts. Not a species Cade knew—too broad, with ridged backs and bent legs. If they were common on Andana, she would have heard of them by now, or seen one in the club. But Cade had never caught wind of these creatures. Taller than the tallest man. Covered in rags of space-black. Moving in a slow, practiced shuffle. Each of them cast two shadows.

  Cade’s body was a chant.

  Heart, muscle, blood.

  No. No. No.

  She couldn’t go back to the bunker. She had the circle-glass and the paper that spelled out Hades in her pocket. She had money sewn into her clothes and stuffed into the toe-points of her boots. She had her guitar.

  Cade knew she had to leave, but she sat there behind the crest of the dune, watching.

  These were the enemies Mr. Niven had warned her about, the enemies of the entangled. Cade had only half believed in them but now she could see them, hear them, feel them much too close.

  They had come to unmake her.

  She wondered if, somewhere else in the universe, Xan could smell her fear, like smoke.

  CHAPTER 4

  ELEMENTARY PARTICLES: The building blocks of the universe

  Getting off Andana seemed like a better idea with each sand-filled step. Cade would have to start at the bottom, though, to figure out how to get all the way up to space. She’d have to visit the only people she knew who had ever been there.

  The spacesick bay was one of the largest buildings in Voidvil, a converted hangar from the days when humans had been cleared to pilot low-flying craft. It stood at the southern edge of town, cramped by weeds, painted the color of bandages.

  Cade shuddered at the thought of the spacesicks’ glassed-and-gone eyes, their sweat-pasted skins. Spacesick had noticeable symptoms, and they marched in a predictable order�
�the glassy look, the utterly detached and voided calm, the absentminded touching. For the ones who hadn’t been in space long, it came in fits and starts. Those who had been exposed longest were completely adrift in their sickness, and didn’t know who they’d been before space claimed their minds—no names, no histories. Cade had never known about her past, so maybe she should have felt a kinship with them.

  But she didn’t.

  She knocked at a small door that had been cut into the larger, craft-sized door. A woman answered it, wearing a brown dress and unfortunate shoes. She couldn’t have been more than five years older than Cade, but she looked as if she’d burrowed deep into each one of those years. She was a nurse, or had appointed herself as one. There was no money to be had in watching spacesicks; it was the work of people who were either pumped full of religion, or fuzzed on enough drugs to know what was worth stealing from the medical supplies. Cade decided not to trust her.

  “Who are you here to see?” the woman asked in a voice like the best black-market nail polish—shiny and impossible to chip.

  “Umm . . .” Cade didn’t have a specific name. She didn’t know the names of her fans, just that there were hordes of them in that bay. She could describe them by the way they looked, the way they danced. The white-haired teenage boy whose shrugging moves said I’m-Too-Good-For-This-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here. The clatch of girls with hips and hands that kneaded the air. The woman who hooted at the end of every number like a desert owl. The middle-aged men with rubber arms, roaming eyes. Cade knew them all. She couldn’t ignore them, standing in the front row every Saturday night. But she didn’t think that’s what the pretend nurse wanted to hear.

  “I need to see a friend.”

  “Your friend have a name?” the pretend nurse asked.

  Cade edged in a shoulder and tried to see the inside of the hangar. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing . . .”