Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Cade could see now that it was made of the same stuff as the walls. A thick, dependable sort of white clayish material. The strings stretched thin and soft, like strands of hair. It was acoustic, which meant Cade couldn’t play it in her trademark ear-destroying fashion. But it didn’t need a current, which meant she could play it anywhere. From one end of the universe to the other.

  “She made this? For me?”

  Cade’s hands couldn’t wait for the answer. She reached for the half-circle of the guitar’s neck, caught the body in her other hand. It had a bit of shine and was cool to the touch. Rennik let go with a linger, making sure the instrument didn’t fall. But he had nothing to worry about. Cade pulled it to her like a needed breath.

  “There aren’t any other musicians onboard,” Rennik said. “Unless you count Renna. She makes something like music, if you know how to listen. Lee is tone-deaf, and I don’t think we’ll see Gori bursting out in song anytime soon.”

  “What about you?” Cade spared his four-knuckled fingers a glance. They thinned to long fingertips, and there was an ease to them, a sureness that made Cade trust they would land in the right places. There was serious potential in those hands.

  “So?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Rennik said.

  But he was smiling. He started out of the room and stopped in the door, turning around with one hand on the frame. He looked up at the ceiling, at the walls, at the whole first-class ship.

  “In case you were still wondering . . . this means she likes you.”

  He closed the door on his way out, leaving Cade with the guitar. She picked it up, touched its thin fretboard and deeply curved side. She rushed her fingers over the strings, made a breathless run through her scales. They sounded like spun silver. All she wanted was to spend hours sinking into this instrument, until her fingers blistered and her mind melted down to music.

  But she set the guitar on the softest cushion she could find, and hid it so it wouldn’t tempt her, at least not until she was done.

  Cade had an entangled boy to get back to.

  She closed her eyes to look for Xan again. She didn’t get far before something stopped her.

  A snap.

  The stare of two dark, lashless eyes.

  Gori had her own seven-blade knife at her throat.

  CHAPTER 9

  NON-OBVIOUS CAUSALITY: A complicated interplay of factors resulting in a given outcome

  Cade was impressed. He picked the right blade and everything.

  “Gori . . .”

  The tip of the squat, triangular blade nicked the soft patch between her collarbones.

  “Look, Gori, whatever you think I did . . .”

  His face loomed close, eyes filmy, with crumbs at the corners—like he’d been sitting in a strong wind with his eyelids pinned open.

  “The reaching has become too much,” he whispered. The fingers of his knifeless hand worked the air. “To have you grasping at me all the time, it is not to be allowed.”

  Cade put her palms up to show him that she wasn’t reaching for anything.

  “Probing, prying, filth-minded human,” he said, twisting the blade a bit closer.

  Cade didn’t jump. Didn’t cry sour. She stayed calm.

  Maybe it was knowing that Xan would come and help her. Maybe it was enough that Cade knew Gori had her all wrong. She looked down at his short, stout frame, at the robes that clung to the patterns of his shriveled skin.

  “I don’t want to touch you,” she said, with complete honesty and a touch of brass. “I’ll keep to myself.”

  Gori skittered the point of the knife up to her chin.

  “This is not a game,” he said. “Rules are rules. There is no going back if you break them.”

  Cade swallowed against the press of the knife-tip.

  “Consider them intact.”

  Gori blinked his dark double spheres. Tossed the knife across the room. “Do this again,” he said, “and I will not pretend there is a difference between air and skin. I will let the blade prove it.”

  As soon as Cade had herself pulled together—knife snapped firm and lodged in her pocket, buttons triple-checked—she pounded up the chute to the control room.

  It was one thing to keep a firm head through an attack. It was another to let it blow past and pretend it had never happened. As much as Cade wanted to reach out to Xan again and find out more about the Unmakers, she knew it was best to devote some time to the people on her own ship who might want to kill her.

  Mr. Niven had told Cade that she had enemies. Plural. Maybe the Unmakers weren’t alone in hating the entangled. Cade wondered if any of the other babies from that lab on Firstbloom had grown up with the same range of nonhuman troubles, or if she and Xan were special.

  In the control room, she found Rennik bent in his usual position, twisting dials. He looked deep into the starglass, studied what he saw there, and made adjustments to a few knobs.

  “Rennik,” she said, slipping in at his side.

  A new tension lit up around him like a forcefield. Cade didn’t have time for fallout from the button incident.

  “Rennik, I need to know about Gori.”

  “Gori?” The forcefield weakened, but Rennik kept his eyes trained on the panels. “He’s the first Darkrider I’ve had onboard. I’m still figuring him out myself.”

  “I don’t know a lot about Darkriders.” Cade had thought to ask Xan, but he wasn’t likely to have picked up much about them in his coma. Sometimes it was hard for Cade to remember that Xan wasn’t the best and only person to talk to about everything. But Rennik—a well-traveled Hatchum—seemed like the clear source of information on nonhuman species.

  “All I know is that Darkriders don’t have a planet,” Cade said. “And that they can see dark energy.”

  “Not . . . see it, exactly,” Rennik said, twisting a knob, twisting it back.

  “What, then?”

  He stepped to the starglass, and waited for Cade to follow. The darkness circled around them. Rennik looked out past the planets of the system they were traveling through, to the thick white spatter of stars.

  “The Darkriders did have a planet once. A fine planet. Home to millions of Gori’s kind.”

  Cade looked into the distance and tried to follow the trail of Rennik’s eyes, but her center swam off. There was no up in space, no down. She set her fingertips on Rennik’s arm just long enough to get her bearings.

  “Gori’s planet was pulled apart,” Rennik said.

  “By . . . ?”

  “Dark energy.”

  Cade focused on the deeps of the starglass, overwhelmed. Not by the vast, sparkling spread of what she could see, but by what she couldn’t. Dark matter, dark energy—no matter how much she could point out and name in the starglass, there was so much more to the universe. The powers that held it together and spread it apart.

  “I thought dark energy was just another force,” Cade said. “Benign.”

  Rennik nodded. “For the most part. It pushes the universe, speeds its expansion. It doesn’t get mixed up with matter. Just shifts the worlds and the suns and space, farther and farther into . . . well, we’re not sure what.

  “I have a dial to measure it,” he said. “There.”

  He pointed to the far end of a panel. Most of the dials were clear glass and eye-smarting copper. This one was covered in smoked glass, backed in dull black and topped with a shiny black needle. It measured the slow-but-sure rate of the universe’s expansion.

  “In the case of Gori’s planet,” Rennik said, “something went wrong. A few believe it was a gathering of dark energy, a whirlpool, a sort of natural disaster. Others think a Darkrider made it happen—by accident or design. Those who survived had the gift of sensing dark energy. They knew what was coming, even when no one believed them. They could move their families to the safety of space before it hit.”

  This story was about the Darkriders, and some planet Cade had never heard of, but she couldn’t help
thinking about Earth. Her blue-green mother planet, swirled with clouds and capped in ice. It was hers no matter where she lived. Hers no matter how long-dead.

  Cade bullied herself back to thoughts of Gori.

  “So the Darkriders don’t see dark energy, they sense it,” she said. “How?”

  Rennik looked up from his star-trance. “Where did all of this sudden curiosity come from, Cade?”

  She ran her fingers over the black dial. “Can’t a girl ask about the wonders of the universe?”

  “It’s not a particularly human trait.” Here came the flatness again, the simple factual pitch in Rennik’s voice that drove Cade a special kind of insane.

  “I thought you were pro-human,” she said.

  Rennik turned his thoughtful eyes on Cade. “I like the in- dividuals I like, regardless of whether they happen to be hu- man.”

  Cade’s voice had the metal edge of a snapped string. “How . . . advanced of you.”

  But she couldn’t fluster Rennik. His double pupils didn’t flash wide, his smooth skin didn’t crease.

  She almost told him about Gori and the show he’d put on with her seven-blade knife. That would have gotten some kind of reaction. But it also would have complicated things. As calm as Rennik looked now, she had no way of knowing what he would do with a murderous passenger. She needed information, not more issues.

  “So,” she prompted. “This sensing that Darkriders do . . .”

  “From what I can tell, it’s a kind of meditation.”

  “You mean that rapture state Gori goes into? When he puffs up and gets all gaseous?” Cade remembered the mass of gray skin, the unblinking black eyes. The breathing in, and in, and in some more.

  “What’s moving through him isn’t matter,” Rennik said. “We sense him to be larger because our minds can’t process what’s actually happening.”

  “Don’t make me ask—”

  “He’s letting dark energy move through him.”

  Cade nodded. The more she nodded, the more sense it made. The more sense it made, the less she liked it.

  “To do that,” she said, “does Gori have to open his mind?”

  Rennik shrugged. “I would think so.”

  Cade’s breath left in a rush.

  “What is it?” Rennik asked.

  She pressed her head into her hands. “Gori was right.”

  Cade had been reaching out—but not with her fingers. While she was trying to connect to Xan, she must have bumped against the boundaries of Gori’s thoughts and almost breached them.

  If she had done that, he would have killed her.

  Cade could almost understand—she felt a spot of rage, dark-purple and painful, like Lee’s string-throttled finger, when she thought about someone intruding in her head. She had no interest in getting into Gori’s.

  But what if she couldn’t control it?

  Cade couldn’t go the rest of the way to Hades without transmitting to Xan. But she didn’t know if it was safe to tell Gori she was entangled. She didn’t know if it was safe to tell anyone. Cade gulped in breath, but none of it reached her brain. She looked down at the dials and the needles danced, unreadable.

  “How soon do we get to Hades?” she asked.

  “Cade, tell me what’s wrong . . .”

  She ran back to the starglass. The stars rushed up to meet her, blurring into ragged white strings. They settled back into prettiness, and she looked for Hades again. She still hadn’t found it, but it was out there somewhere. A place of negation. A collection of snipped-out bits of space, darker than dark.

  What she found was gray and close, and moving toward them. Fast.

  “Is that a ship?” she asked.

  Rennik stepped in to see what she was seeing. A passenger ship in the shape of a closed palm.

  “Cade,” he said, “it would be best if you went and found Lee.”

  Lights blinked yellow and outlined the ship as it flew.

  Rennik turned to Cade and put his hands on her shoulders. All his ease slipped off. “Find Lee and get into the human’s cabin. Now.” He moved down the control panels. “Don’t come out until I tell you it’s safe.”

  Cade started to run, was halfway out the door when he said it.

  “We’re being boarded.”

  The little room where Cade and Lee slept was bright—too bright.

  “What if someone sees the cracks of light around the edges of the panel?”

  Lee paced around the square in perfect, crisp lines.

  “Good point.”

  She patted the wall and Renna did her part, sliding the room into a dusky state. “Rennik gets so worried about these boardings,” Lee said. “Every time. The exact same amount of too-worried.”

  But Cade noticed that Lee’s hands were shaking.

  “Come on.” Lee picked up handfuls of clothes from a pile on the floor. The Saea outfit. Cade’s old Andanan skirts. Her own spare set of pants and plain shirt. She pressed them into Cade’s arms. “Here. Help.”

  They reached in and plugged the tunnel, so that if someone did open the panel it would look like a storage unit. When that was done, they sat in what seemed a lot like silence, even though Lee stuffed it full of babble.

  “We go to Menno next, and that’s a nice planet, a fine place. Then Czisk, which has these jungles you won’t believe, the colors of it. Purple trees! And then we coast straight past Leiden, no humans there, and we hit the Grestle belt . . .”

  Cade pulled her knees to her chest. She made herself as small as possible, but she couldn’t keep her fingers from wandering. They reached out to the bunk and stroked the side of her new guitar, which she’d had just enough time to nab from the common room. It sat there, tuned and patient, waiting to be played.

  “What’s that?” Lee whispered, noticing it for the first time.

  Cade held the guitar out—the faint light of it claiming the darkness like a stretch of night sky. It hung between them, and in that one suspended second, it earned a name.

  “Moon-White,” Cade said. “Renna made it for me.”

  “Ohh.” Lee’s eyes took in the instrument with such tender care that Cade decided it would be safe to let her hold it. “Brass.” Lee’s finger caught on a string and the sound spun out and filled the room. Cade clapped a hand over the thin metal. The note buzzed into her skin.

  “Renna is a wonder,” Lee whispered.

  “Sure is.”

  Lee held the guitar out to Cade as some kind of proof. “Nothing bad will happen.”

  Cade cradled Moon-White and dreamed of the songs she would tease out of the strings as soon as the boarding was over. With nothing else to do, Lee’s voice limped back to chatting. “So after the Grestle belt, we . . .”

  “Shhh.”

  Cade’s ears picked it up first—of course.

  Steps coming up the chute.

  “And this is our resident Darkrider, Gori,” Rennik said, his voice laced with fake-smile. The clothes in the tunnel and the panel muffled things, but Cade could hear well enough.

  “And up at the top is the control room,” Rennik said.

  “We have no interest in the control room,” said a new voice—but not entirely new. A known voice. Smooth and deep and as unexpected as the ground opening up.

  From the shuffling sounds of their steps, Cade put the Unmakers at four. She could only hear them, but her other senses rose up and filled in with memories. She felt the touch of metallic breath on her face. Saw double-shadows and space-black robes. Smelled smoke.

  “Right, then,” Rennik said, the strain pressing through his friendly tone. “I can show you the common room, or my cabin—”

  “We came for one thing.”

  “The girl.”

  Cade’s body was a chant.

  Heart, muscle, blood.

  No, no, no.

  But then she looked over at Lee and saw that her long, pinched-tight body was chanting the exact same thing.

  Heart, muscle, blood.

  Lee
thought the Unmakers had come for her.

  “Have you seen those . . . things before?” Cade asked. No sound, just the careful shaping of lips.

  Lee turned her dark-moon eyes on Cade, shining at her in the gloom. “Have you?”

  “There are no humans on this ship,” Rennik said. An- nounced, really. Cade got the feeling he wanted them to hear from their hiding spot. “There are barely any passengers. My Renna is cargo class, cleared for twenty-two systems and deep space.”

  “We know the clearances of this ship.”

  “Yet . . .”

  Cade waited for them to say that they’d tracked her—that they knew her thoughts, could hear her heartbeat, sniff out her blood.

  “We traced the girl here.”

  Traced?

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rennik said. Flat. Unhelpful. Hatchum, through and through. For the first time, Cade understood just how useful that maddening calm could be.

  “We were sold a tracer code on Andana.”

  “Andana?” Rennik said, as if he’d just heard of the place. “Yes, I did go to port there last week. But all I picked up were some sand-crusted engine components.”

  Feet shuffled up and down the chute, paired with a few low murmurs. “The tracer code tells us a different story.”

  “Those are notoriously easy to tamper with,” Rennik said. “I used them on a shipment of crab fruit once and ended up with ten crates of sawdust. Whoever sold this to you must be a practiced liar.”

  Cade fitted a hand to one of her faded bruises. They had gone past mottled black, past purple, to the last phase—tooth-rot yellow.

  “A tracer?” Lee mouthed. “What are they talking about? I don’t have any tracer on me . . .”

  “Go back and take it up with your Andanan,” Rennik said.

  “He is no longer with us.”

  So the Unmakers had snuffed out Mr. Smithjoneswhite. At first, Cade couldn’t tell if she was shaken or thrilled. All she could think of was the slurp of his voice, reminding her that she belonged to him, in name and deed, for the rest of time.

  The mourning period was over before it started.

  Lee chanced a whisper. “What’s happening?”