The first time she’d seen a guitar. She was nine years old, and an older boy had smuggled it in. A tatty old acoustic, but when the boy put his fingers to those strings and played one of the two chords he knew, Cade could hear that this was a sound to beat back the Noise.
She wanted to stay in that moment a while—wait for the slide of the wood under her hands, the glue-and-sawdust smell, the first press of the strings, the buzz and stumble of notes, the smile of the boy.
But Ayumi pressed in close with her notebook. “What about before that?”
“I don’t know,” Cade said. “It’s the Firstbloom scientists you want to ask. But they’re dead.” She thought of the Niven-pile on the floor of the dressing room. “Of course, sometimes that doesn’t stop them.”
Ayumi nodded and started to wander the room. Cade wondered if she was being given up on. Without someone standing so close, she had time and space to think herself back, and back, farther than she’d ever thought before.
It came to her in white shards, mostly—the edge of a crib, the egg-bright glare of overhead lights. The sharp coats of the scientists. Faces came in different variations, but all of the features were the same—mouths firm and muscles set, eyes the grimmest Cade had ever seen. She even caught a glimpse of a much-younger Niven, proving that he’d been a person before he was a projection.
Firstbloom. Cade didn’t even know she had memories of Firstbloom.
She made out the forms of other babies, crawling or clapping their little hands or crying. The more Cade flipped through moments, the more the babies seemed to be crying.
In one small chip of memory, she saw a woman in a pale blue dress with white flowers on it, standing in a corner. She was crying, too.
Then came Xan.
He stared out at Cade with those steady gray eyes, and things made sense. Things felt right. Some of them even felt easier. No wonder the Noise had been so unwelcome in her head. It had a lot to measure up to.
“Hey, Ayumi,” Cade said. “I think I found . . .”
Cade turned and caught her in the false deeps of the starglass.
“ . . . what you were looking for.”
Ayumi was swathed in space and suns and planets, her fingers spread and pulsing, her eyes thick with shine.
“Isn’t it this wild, perfect thing?” she asked, looking out. “Don’t you want it to . . . just . . . swallow you?”
Cade grabbed Ayumi’s wrist and tugged. “Come on.” But the girl was pasted to the stars. “Come on. We need to go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere we can be alone. No galaxies. No nebulae. No endless, meaningless black. Just the two of us.”
Ayumi’s arm went limp. She let herself be led out of the control room, but she kept her eyes trained on the starglass until it was out of sight.
Cade hurried Ayumi down the chute, and dropped her on the first crate in the cargo hold.
“Now I need to ask you some questions.” Cade grabbed Ayumi’s notebook and held her hand out for the pen. Ayumi winced but handed it over—she knew the rules of the game, and she played along.
“How long have you been spacesick?” Cade asked.
Ayumi twisted her fingers. “A little less than a year,” she whispered.
“But you keep flying.”
“That’s not, technically, a question—”
“Why do you keep flying, when you know it could get you killed?” Cade left out the part about getting other people killed.
“What I’m doing, the information I’m gathering, it holds such importance,” Ayumi said. “I can’t stop because there are risks.”
Cade had snatched Ayumi’s notebook for show, but she found herself writing those words in her harsh, slow lettering.
I can’t stop because there are risks.
If Ayumi had gambled on Cade understanding the concept, it worked.
“There’s more to it, though,” Ayumi said. “Earth has been my life for as long as I can remember. Space was just the way to get what I needed at first. It was dark and it was necessary. But the more I flew, the more I . . . loved it. I can’t explain this if it’s something you’ve never felt. But I love it.”
Cade sat down on a crate across from Ayumi and inspected her, from the tips of her dark curls to the curves of her feet. Her eyes were lit up, warm. She was one of the most alive people Cade had ever met. Ayumi couldn’t be spacesick. But, of course, any human could—that was the point. The number-one reason the human race was still strung out across a hundred planets in thirty different systems, a thousand years after the Scattering.
“Isn’t spacesick what happens when you can’t stand it?” Cade asked. “When your mind and body check themselves out and never come back?”
“That’s the very common, very wrong explanation,” Ayumi said. “The truth is easier to see if you know a little more about the origins of spacesick. About Earth.”
A flick of nerves set off a chain reaction up Cade’s spine. “So what am I missing?”
“Space euphoria.”
“Is that more sick babble or—”
“No!” Ayumi’s face pulled tight, so pained and there that Cade was relieved. “Space euphoria is ancient. The name for one of the first stages of spacesick . . . although people on Earth didn’t know it at the time. It started when Earth pilots, not even space pilots, just atmosphere muckers, punched through enough layers to feel the disconnect. They were flooded with a strange delight. The same one”—she closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose like she was inhaling half the universe—“the same one I feel with liftoff.
“The normal bonds . . . to people, to planets . . . all of it breaks.”
Cade could see that becoming a problem, fast.
Words from the spacesick bay floated across blackness and time. “Space is beautiful,” Cade said, “but it doesn’t give a dreg.”
Ayumi’s smile disappeared. She raked her fingers on the surface of her crate. “There’s no way to face it forever as this flawed little speck. There’s no right perspective, now that we don’t have our planet. So people give in to it. Lose all traces of themselves. Some of them . . .”
Cade could fill in the blanks on this one. “Suicide?”
“Sacrifice,” Ayumi corrected. “But only in space. They go back to the birthplace of all things.”
“But the planetbound I met didn’t love space at all. When I asked them how to leave Andana, they hissed.”
“They’re fighting it,” Ayumi said, and the flinch in her eyes let Cade know that the fight was real, and it hurt, and it was probably happening inside Ayumi at that moment. “It’s easier to keep it back when you can’t see the flash and perfection of the stars, don’t have constant reminders of how small, how nothing you are in the face of it. We’re all fighting it, Cadence. It helps that I have these facts about Earth. I’ve even dreamt about Earth.” She smiled, and sailed off into that beautiful thought—then came crashing back. “It’s not enough. That’s where the touching comes in.”
The mention of it electrified Cade’s skin. She felt it against her clothes, the crates, the air.
“You must think it’s some depraved act,” Ayumi said. “But that touching is the body’s last effort to feel human.”
Cade shifted back, recalibrated her breath. Ayumi stared off into the distance, unchanged.
“You’re so calm about all of this,” Cade said. “Like you don’t care if it happens to you.”
“It’s in me,” Ayumi said. “It’s in all of us.”
Cade wasn’t sure why, but she needed Ayumi to be wrong. Ayumi was wrong. Cade was the proof.
“But what about me? I’m entangled and—”
“And you’re one of how many?”
Cade couldn’t give her a number, but she knew it was a small one. How many of those babies from the filmstrip had made it as far as she and Xan had? How many had been hunted down by the Unmakers? How many pairs were alive, and awake, and together?
Cade’s though
ts dead-ended when Ayumi’s hand met her knee. But this wasn’t a sudden, empty spacesick touch. It was urgent.
“I have to ask, you, Cadence . . . I’ve found the Express, and the idea of entanglement, all of it at once. There’s so much here I need to know. Please don’t tell the others about me. Lee . . .” Ayumi blushed, and full-eclipsed her face with her hands. “Lee would want me to leave, I know she would.”
Cade had seen that scenario acted out. It would be useless to argue.
It would do no good to have a spacesick onboard, and it would do even less to have a secret spacesick that no one else knew about. It would mean keeping one eye on Ayumi at all times, constant worries and glass-checks. But when Cade opened her mouth to say drain out, the words didn’t come.
She knew what it meant to be banished from the ship, and she couldn’t do that to Ayumi, send her back to a drifting alone-state.
“We’ll be in Hades soon,” Cade said. “It’s a rough place. If this gets worse, you have to go home.”
Ayumi put out her hand to shake.
“That’s fair,” she said. “But, you know . . . you use that word, home, incorrectly. Earth was home. We lost the one place we were made for, Cadence. And space wants us back.”
Cade left Ayumi in the hold, up to her elbows in Human Express cargo, safe from the siren wail of space. Cade couldn’t talk about all that emptiness anymore. She needed to feel something.
She stopped in the mess and stuffed herself with whatever Rennik had been planning to transform into dinner. Sheets of crackers and heels of bread and ropes of salty dried meat. She went at the shelves with abandon and stepped back, so overfull she lurched in the false-grav. But the food didn’t make a dent in what she was not-feeling. She headed up the chute again, through the square tunnel, and into the furtive little bedroom.
Moon-White was just where Cade had left her.
She picked up the guitar and struck it without thinking, without planning, big careless sounds that spread into a song. The notes were so close to perfect that Cade could have pushed them to it, but it didn’t seem to matter. She had gotten too used to an audience. Even when she thought she didn’t want them at Club V they had been there, caring when she couldn’t.
She tossed the guitar on the bed and curled herself around it. She pulled the sheets up and tucked in close to the wall.
Then she remembered Renna.
She put one hand on the wall and plucked an open chord. Renna found the beat and gave it back to her in little bursts. Cade strummed and strummed until her fingertips blistered.
It was the best conversation she’d had all day.
Cade couldn’t get herself out of the pale desert between asleep and awake. Her arms hung loose around Moon-White, but she hadn’t played in hours. Lee twitched and snored in the top bunk.
Cade walked on soft feet, slid through the tunnel that connected her to the ship’s open spaces.
She headed up the chute to the control room, where she found the pilot’s chair empty and the panels dimmed, the brass needles sliding along their dials. The starglass beckoned.
Cade stood in its light-flecked embrace and turned in circles. The first time she could pick out stars from space, but after that it became a blur of black and white, black and white, until the universe went gray. She didn’t stop until she hit a patch of black so pure that it almost shone.
Cade stepped toward it and reached out a careful hand—as if even from this distance, her fingertips would be able to feel the desperate pull that waited inside of that black.
Hades.
Cade sent it in a flash to Xan. The word, and its twin—the vision in the starglass. In that moment between seeing and thinking—the moment of understanding—she reached for him.
And what she found was more than comfort, although he sent her that. It was more than a firework of eagerness, although he sent that, too.
When Cade and Xan had first connected on Andana, she’d been overwhelmed by these sensations, the Xan-feelings in her head. But now she was alive to what the connection did to her—the amplification of her feelings, the reception of her body, the trembling possibilities of her mind.
Cade sent flashes of Hades, flashes of the brave stars clustered around it, flashes of the ship. He sent her a strong, unbroken line of pulses, to let her know that he could see it all, and that the view was fine. Each moment that passed back and forth between them centered and grounded her.
I missed you, Cade thought.
But this was more than a simple missing. The lack of him had set her adrift.
Cade had been sending flashes. Now she asked Xan to come and spend a minute on the ship.
See what I see, she thought. Leave the Unmakers and come to me.
Even before she reached him, she could be his escape.
She steadied herself against the panels and closed her eyes. When she blinked them open, Xan was with her.
And all of a sudden, she couldn’t be still. She ran down the chute, through the night-stilled cabins, past the crates in the cargo hold, past the closed doors. Her muscles stretched wide, her throat opened and released an unfamiliar sound. Cade leapt and rushed, running her hands along the walls and floors as she did, drumming Renna out of her half-sleep, so Xan could feel the racket of life against Cade’s fingers. But it wasn’t enough. She could feel them both, wanting more. She shed clothes as she went, so he could have the touch of nighttime on her skin. She ran her hands down her arms and sides and stomach, so he could have that, too. Xan pushed her whole body toward wildness, and Cade didn’t hold back. He’d been captive for too long. And so had she—on the wrong planets, with the Noise, on ships that never sailed fast enough. So she ran, Xan streaming in her, air hard against her, as she twisted back up the chute to the starglass.
She stared out at Hades and for the first time knew she was looking at him.
Cade woke up to thousands of stars and her whole body warm against the floor. It felt softer than a floor had any right to be.
“Thanks,” she mumbled to Renna. She curled up tighter and sighed and almost went back to sleep.
But a firm hand on her shoulder put a stop to that.
“Cadence.”
She looked up and saw Rennik on the other side of the starglass, his arm broken through the black, his four-knuckled fingers resting on her shoulder, just below the curve of her neck.
“Cadence?”
Rennik’s hand felt nice, so she let it rest there, his thumb anchored across her collarbone—until she looked past that thumb to the rest of her almost-naked self. Cade bolted to sitting. In one quick-strewn flash, she remembered the trail of clothes she’d left up and down the chute.
“Damp hell.” Cade went so all-over red that she was glad the thin curtain of the starglass stood between them to mute the shade. A thick vein of anger ran through her embarrassment, even though she knew that wasn’t fair—Rennik had every right to wake her up if she was sleeping in the middle of his control room.
He knelt across from her, his lips in a ready shape, like there were words he might have to say at any moment. His eyes full-open so the double pupils showed. Cade had to admit that Rennik’s predictable face had settled on a new expression. But it was one she didn’t have the translation for.
Cade had lost her dignity along with her clothes, but she would have given the last shred—of the dignity, at least—to connect with Rennik in a way that would help her understand him. Give her answers to the questions that she could never seem to crack the surface of. Did he miss his home, or did Hatch not mean home to him? Why did he slog humans all over the universe? Did he ever regret taking Cade onboard? Was he regretting it right now?
Cade curved her back and set her chin to her knees, so he was mostly seeing her face and the short double lines of her shins.
“I promise you won’t find me running around again in any state of undress.” She flashed back to the button incident, and added, “Ever.”
Cade got up and scrambled out of the
far side of the starglass, so there were two coats of darkness and a thick layer of starshine between them.
“It’s not that,” Rennik said, dusting his knees as he stood. Cade watched him closely. “Well, you should probably deal with that, but . . . as soon as you do . . . I have something to show you.”
“Now?” she asked, spotting the nearest piece of clothing—a sock—at the top of the chute.
Rennik cut wide around the starglass, picked up the sock, and tossed it to her in an easy white arc.
“I think you’ll want to see this, yes.”
Cade struggled the flimsy bit of cotton as far up her calf as it would go. Now she was almost-naked except for a sock. Perfect. Her instinct was to get clear, avoid Rennik until—forever. But there was a first-class reason to stick around. The last time Rennik wanted to show her something, it had been Moon-White.
“Is it a bass?” she asked.
“No.”
“Drums?”
“You need to see it,” Rennik repeated. His calm made her want to put fingers to metal and shred chords into little tiny pieces. If it wasn’t music, and it wasn’t Xan, how much would she care about what he wanted to show her? But Rennik’s face turned urgent and his hands spread eager, and Cade wanted to know all over again.
“Fine.”
She ran ahead and gathered her clothes, one item at a time, slinging them on in the order she found them. Rennik gave her a healthy lead. After a minute he followed her down to the main cabin and nodded her into his room.
They fit too neatly in the small space. It was hard not to think about how recently all that skin had been exposed.
“Please sit,” Rennik said, pointing at the desk.
She took the curved chair. He sat on the bed.
“I’ve been looking at this.” Rennik reached into his pocket and held out the circle-glass. “Where it splices, there are bits missing from the playback. Did you know that? At first I thought they’d been cut, but that’s not right. They weren’t taken out at all. They’re still in here, but someone pinched them.”
Entangled Page 15
