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.
“I’m done here,” Lee said, as she tied up her pack. “But on the next planet. Start thinking how you can be a help to me. And don’t keep me waiting. And don’t make me late, ever, and don’t make me sorry that I bent the biggest rule for you. Right?”
Lee smiled, big and toothy-white.
Cade decided it wasn’t the best time to mention that her brother wasn’t actually her brother, and that the creatures she was going to save him from were after her, too. That she was a danger, a drag, the worst kind of liability for a ship that needed to travel without attracting trouble. Cade wasn’t used to being smiled at in a way that she liked. She didn’t want to do anything to collapse that small, bright star.
“Right.”
The nearest spaceport was in Dana City, a half day out. Cade and Lee stood on the Voidvil line, looking at the desert. It blared sun back at them. Midafternoon, and if they walked without stopping, they would get there in the dead center of the night. Not that spaceports slept. Just that the desert got meaner as it got cold. And now, without the Noise in her head, Cade could hear how empty this part of the world was.
“You sure you don’t want to take a skimmer?” Cade asked.
She had handed all of her coin over to Lee for her fare to Hades, so she couldn’t make the call on a skimmer herself. Taking one to Dana City would cost, especially because they were human. But when it came down to it, most palms on Andana were greaseable.
Lee shook her head and slung her pack over a shoulder. “I spend ninety percent of my time in a metal canister,” she said. “We’re walking.” She turned and looked at Cade, sun caught in her sand-colored hair. “Besides. It can’t be so bad with somebody to talk to.”
It had honestly never occurred to Cade to talk to Lee the whole way to Dana. Or any of the way to Dana. Her mouth was still a swollen pit. Besides, Cade didn’t tend to use her voice for much besides growling out songs. But this turned out to not be as difficult as she thought.
Lee would talk for a mile about the things she’d picked up on Andana.
Cade would nod.
Lee would talk for another three miles about where they were headed, and the people they might meet, and how Cade should talk to certain types of customers (overexcited, waterworking), and what to do if their ship got boarded.
Cade would say, “Mmm-hmm.”
At some point, night came on strong and the sun packed it in. Lee’s words dribbled into quiet. Cade was left alone with her own head and the desert—sighs of sand on sand, a groan of wind every once in a while to liven things up. She wasn’t sure how she’d lived in this place for so long without noticing it was unlivable. The Unmakers hadn’t exactly done her a favor by torching her bunker, but she was glad to not be going back.
Hours slunk by, measured in the number of new sand-welts on Cade’s ankles. She reached out for Xan, but instead of transmitting, she tuned in to the soft, patient beat of his waiting. A thrum that started in her mind, but reached out to find echoes in the line of her neck, her fingers. It felt good. Not that Cade had a real frame of reference. She had gotten so used to the club—hands grabbing at her, eyes unpeeling her clothes. But this was different. Good-different. Knowing that Xan waited for her made it easier for Cade to keep walking, over and over the dunes.
“Hey,” Cade said. She was the first to see it.
The spaceport rose from the sand like a radioactive wart. It was the only lit-up building for miles. The rest of Dana City was just a winking suggestion in the background. The spaceport was the thing.
She sent a beaming flash of it to Xan.
“How do we get in?” Cade asked.
“You think I don’t have a plan for this?” Lee said, dropping to a knee in the sweat-cold sand. She seemed to take most things as challenges. And so far, she’d risen to them all. But Cade still doubted that she could get them both off Andana without trouble.
“It’s against the law to be human and in the spaceport at the same time,” Cade said. “Unless you’re getting dumped here.”
“I know.” Lee rummaged in her pack. “I’m Human Express. Twelfth generation.”
With a winning smile and a flourish of the wrist, she shook out a uniform—the blue and white of a spaceport worker. It unwrinkled and Cade saw that it had a thin plastic film attached that would turn human skin a pale blue. There was also an extra rolling eye that could be fitted with a bit of adhesive to the back of the neck. It was an outfit designed to make a human look like a Saea, one of the closest known species. The stitching across the breast pocket read SAEANNA.
“This uniform is cargo class,” Lee said. “Makes it easier to lump around a bunch of stuff and pretend I’m delivering it to someone else.”
“Nice,” Cade said. “But not really enough. I’ve never heard of a two-headed Saea, and the fit for both of us looks . . . snug.” She dropped down and sifted her fingers through the pack. “Have another one of those lurking around in here?”
“I used to.” Lee’s voice fell out of its usual rapid firing and dropped to a rare, slower pace Cade had heard only once before. “Had to stop carrying it around. I’ve covered this route alone for three years now.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how I usually work, too,” Cade said. “Alone.”
She snatched up Lee’s pack and started to walk toward the spaceport. The weight of it meant almost nothing to her arm muscles.
“What are you doing?” Lee asked, running after her and launching herself on Cade’s back. “You rot-faced, sour-livered spacecadet, give it back!”
Cade shook Lee off with a twitch of the shoulder and turned to face her. She dropped the pack in the sand and backed off. Lee’s storminess had returned full force. But this time Cade laughed.
“For what?” Lee mumbled as she rubbed the sand off her pants and the side of her face.
“How much it carries.”
Cade looked Lee over. Three full heads taller. But skinnier than she was, in every instance. A papery slip of a girl.
“Yeah,” Cade said. “This should do.”
Cade—dressed in a light blue skin and stuck with a bonus eye—entered the spaceport by the maintenance door. She marveled at the number of nonhumans streaming up the glass concourses, down the glass stairs. She couldn’t have imagined the number of ships they packed into one dome.
Another Saea stopped her halfway up the stairs. Rolled both eyes at her—the two front ones, at least. It was a greeting. Cade rolled her eyes back.
“Do you know where you’re going?” the Saea asked.
Cade didn’t nod. She didn’t shake her head. She just looked up at him with her best, wide, I’m-a-lost-little-girl eyes. She’d seen those work on almost every male in creation, regardless of species.
“What dock, sweet-arms?”
Cade flashed a four with her fingers, then a two. She could understand Saea well enough, but when it came to speaking it, she sounded like an ancient woman with a stutter and a head cold.
“Forty-two is up the main concourse, then down the left-hand side, all the way to the back.”
She nodded and smiled her thanks at the Saea man, picked up her pack and her guitar case, and hurried onto the concourse. There were more Saea in that crowd, and lots of native Andanans whose slithering arms reminded her of Mr. Smithjoneswhite. She had hundreds of fingers to avoid. The concourse rose and Cade looked down to the crowds on the lower floor—the scuttling crablike Mems and the faintly colored clouds called Remembrists.
Entangled Page 5
