Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “Pinched?” Cade forgot her skin and its recent state and leaned in, over the shine-washed facets of the circle-glass. “What else is in there?”

  She had always known there must be more to her story—what it meant to be entangled. But she had been so fixed on finding a way to Xan that the rest of it tended to slide when she wasn’t looking.

  “I haven’t been able to restore it all,” Rennik said.

  “But . . . some of it?” Cade asked, a hoarse shred of hope in her voice. She wondered if Rennik heard it—or if the great crashing symphony of her human emotions was as bewildering to him as his one-note Hatchum face was to her.

  “There’s a section . . .” he said, reaching past her to the desk to pick up the projection lamp. “A section I managed to restore to its full length.” Rennick palmed the circle-glass. It looked at home in his hand as he turned it.

  “I haven’t gone through it,” Rennik said. “It felt wrong to watch it without you.”

  Cade nodded.

  Renna dimmed the lights and the room grew quiet. Rennik fitted the circle-glass to the lamp and it threw a square of gold onto the wall, which turned into a scene.

  A familiar scene. Cadence and Xan, diapered and crib-bound. “These two are optimally suited for entanglement. Our greatest hope lies with them.”

  A new stretch of film sprang up where before there’d been a hot white scar. Scientists at work in another part of the lab, surrounded by the most delicate possible equipment—petri dishes and glass droppers and splinter-thin vials.

  “Xan is part of our control group—designed and conceived for the purposes of Project QE. All genetic material has been configured for optimal space resistance and entanglement potential.”

  A lab-coated man with close-shaven hair and perfectly square teeth held up a petri dish and smiled.

  “Cadence, on the other hand, is from the organic group. These children have biological origins. They were planet-born, with no influence or assistance from Firstbloom. More impressively, Cadence’s genetic material comes to us from the spacesick subset. Her biological father was a pilot out of the Tirith belt. He flew for an almost unheard-of twelve years before experiencing the first symptoms.”

  A picture flashed. Dark hair. Light brown skin. Green eyes. A scowl to beat back the sunrise. Cade’s father, through and through.

  “He died on a routine run during a sudden fit of spacesick.”

  Cade heard the words, but she didn’t feel them. She couldn’t not have a father one second, have one the next second, and then lose him again. He washed over her like an unbroken wave.

  “Cadence is Project QE’s greatest success,” the filmstrip pushed on, “and its greatest surprise. Perhaps her father’s resistance to spacesick has something to do with her aptitude for entanglement.

  “Or perhaps the answer lies with Cadence’s mother.”

  The woman on the wall—Cade knew her and she didn’t. The little white flowers on the blue dress, sky-bright against her skin. That image was captured on the day the woman visited Firstbloom. The day she stood in a corner and cried. The day she gave up her daughter.

  CHAPTER 15

  LONG-TERM POTENTIATION: A lasting enhancement in signal transmission between neurons, with implications for learning and memory

  It happened in a Firstbloom nursery.

  The people stood out against a painful shade of white. Cade inspected the cribs, found the little pale smudge most likely to be Xan. A scientist scuttled back and forth, rocking cribs with one hand and taking notes with the other.

  And then there was the woman. Blue dress, white flowers. Her eyes so glassy you couldn’t see their color. Her steps loose, muscles limp. She carried Cadence in her arms. Almost dropped her twice.

  A white-coated woman with a comfortable manner eased the baby out of her arms. A stocky man smiled and told her that they’d take good care of her little girl.

  Cade could have reached back in time and punched that smile to pulp.

  But her mother just nodded, up and down, up and down, too many times. Until the scientists told her she could leave.

  That’s when Cade found out one of her memories was wrong. When her mother stepped back to the corner of the nursery, she didn’t cry.

  Cadence did.

  Wailed in her crib, face red with the welling of blood under her skin, reaching for her mother with too-small hands.

  “As you can see, Cadence was saved from a life with a mother in the advanced stages of—”

  The voice cut out. The picture disappeared.

  Cade lost the next ten minutes of her life.

  Her head went as white as the now blank wall. She stood up, knocked the chair back, collapsed into a heap on the bed. Rennik sprang up and asked her something—asked her what? She could see the deep curves of his lips in motion, could see the concern sunk into his steady expression, but that was it. The silence inside of her was complete. She waded through shock without moving.

  “He never told me,” Cade said. “He never told me . . .”

  Rennik took a careful seat on the far end of the bed and spoke to her in soft tones. “Who?”

  “Mr. Niven. When they sent him to find me. He never told me about . . . her.”

  Rennik turned the circle-glass over and over in his hands. “It’s possible he didn’t know.”

  The silence stirred. Underneath it, anger expanded, pushing into the vacuum where Cade’s feelings should be.

  “He knew,” Cade said. She remembered the lie now, in crisp detail. “Told me he was there on the night I was born. He kept her from me, because he was afraid I might take off after her instead.”

  Rennik studied her from his perch at the end of the bed. “Would you have done that?”

  It was such an unfair question. The amount of heat it generated inside of her could have kept a small sun burning for years.

  “Yes,” Cade said. “No. I don’t know.” She settled on the answer. “No. She’s been spacesick for years—if she’s even alive—and I need to get to Xan. He needs me.” It was the chant that drew her on, past the planets, past the stars, toward black holes.

  “He needs me.”

  And for the first time, she hated Xan for it.

  This was too much to need, and she had never asked for him. She had hoped for a mother, but she had never been brave or foolish enough to ask for one. And now a mother had been given to her in ten seconds of unpinched film.

  After too much space, the nondays and nonnights, the blue of her mother’s dress flooded Cade like morning.

  She stood up and filled the small room. “I have to know if she’s out there.”

  Cade expected Rennik to say something reasonable and useless, about charting courses and distances to and from Hades and how many people there were out there on how many planets and how they would never, ever find her.

  Instead he looked up at her, his eyes so steady, she didn’t need to be planetbound to feel grounded.

  “Of course.”

  Surprise stopped Cade’s whole body for a beat. There was something in that answer, something about Rennik, that she didn’t understand. But there was no time to untangle it.

  “I can’t change the course,” she said. “I still have to get to Xan.”

  “Right.”

  “Stop agreeing with me,” Cade said. “It’s making me nervous.”

  Rennik smiled, and Cade—somehow—laughed.

  Rennik put the circle-glass on the bed. “You care about them,” he said. “Both of them.”

  Cade ran a finger along one of the facets of the glass. “The scientists thought I was some kind of wonder child. So I’ll do what can’t be done. I’ll find them both.”

  After a few bites of breakfast, Cade put whatever scraps of a plan she had into action. First, she enlisted Lee and Ayumi, who were in the cargo hold sorting Human Express deliveries. Lee named items and checked them off a long list. Ayumi reached for each one with a fresh-ignited fire. Cade would have felt bad interru
pting if she didn’t know Ayumi had seen all of it at least four times by now.

  “We’re going to find my mother,” Cade said.

  Ayumi dropped an armful of fluttery papers. “I didn’t think you had a—”

  “Neither did I.”

  “But this changes your story!” Ayumi said. “I’ll have to write it down. There are endless ramifications—”

  “Which we’re not going to talk about right now.” Ramifications threaded through Cade’s mind on an endless loop. She didn’t need help on that count.

  Lee shrugged. “I’m getting used to the strange revelations,” she said. “But if you’re a sand-slug pretending to be a girl who’s pretending to be entangled, you should tell me right now.”

  “Where are we going?” Ayumi asked. She tensed from fingers to toes and flicked a glance toward the dock where her little ship waited.

  “Not space,” Cade said. “Here. On the ship.”

  “Can’t get into too much trouble on the ship,” Lee said. “Can we?”

  The ground rippled underneath them, unsettling their feet. That was Renna, telling a joke.

  Cade led Ayumi and Lee through the main cabin. They didn’t have far to go, and there was only one preparation to make.

  Cade checked her pocket for the seven-blade knife, snapped and safe in its little cloth bed.

  “Meet our guide,” she said, as they rounded the second twist in the chute.

  Lee’s lips pinched together on one side, unimpressed.

  “Gori?”

  He was stretched out on his bunk, head propped up on pillows, not sleeping.

  “Right,” Cade said. “Gori.”

  He didn’t look up from his musings on his own feet.

  “Gori,” Cade tried again. “Hey. Gori? Darkrider?”

  This was an interesting turn. Ever since Cade set foot on the ship all Gori had done was stare at her. While she was eating, talking, passing by. He pinned those glossy eyes on her and didn’t let up. Stared without stopping, without shame, without a Sorry for all of that staring. And now that she needed him to look up, he couldn’t be bothered.

  “What happened before, with us, was an accident,” Cade said. “I guess I never got the chance to tell you that.”

  Gori didn’t budge. He wasn’t even noticeably breathing.

  Lee elbowed her way to the bunk. Crossed her arms and took up as much space as possible—short of puffing herself out in a rapture state. “Look. Cade here wants to talk to you. She’s doing you the favor of making it out loud and not in your head, so listen up.”

  Gori’s eyes rose slightly. He spoke to his kneecaps.

  “If the girl breaches the mind of a Darkrider, she has to be killed.”

  “That’s a lovely sentiment,” Lee said. “But that’s not what the girl . . . what Cade . . . wants to do.”

  “Look,” Cade said. “The more I know about my . . . abilities, the more I can control them, the less likely I am to go barging into your brainspace, right?”

  Gori stared at her.

  “That’s more like it,” Cade muttered.

  But now that she had Gori’s attention, she wasn’t quite sure how to handle it—it was a delicate thing, and a dangerous one—glass that could crack at the simplest touch. Cade fumbled for words to keep the moment intact.

  She would never have guessed Ayumi would be the one to step forward and break the silence.

  “Cadence has a purpose,” she said. “One that’s still forming. But she needs a guide. The universe won’t mind if you take a minute away from admiring it. The universe will be here when you get back.”

  Gori took a break from staring at Cade to stare at Ayumi. She held up well under his scrutiny, drawing herself tall, holding her shoulders back like she might sprout wings. She must have said something that made sense in Gori’s differently wired brain, because he nodded and shuffled out of his bunk.

  The four of them settled into the common room—not Cade’s favorite place, but it was quiet and out of the way. Of Rennik, in particular. Cade wanted to give him time to work on the circle-glass. See what else he could recover.

  Gori looked over at Ayumi as she piled up pillows to sit on. “How does she need to be guided?”

  “I’m glad you’re such great friends now,” Cade said, “but you can talk to me.”

  Gori blinked at Cade and didn’t hide the frustration in his snapping lids. “How do you need to be guided?”

  “You told me once that I reached out to you, and almost entered your mind,” Cade said. “I want to do that on purpose. To someone else. I need to find someone.” She used the word someone instead of mother, because mother was too new. Not a word she was ready to give away.

  “You want to find a human?” Gori asked. “One human?”

  Cade knew that she should only care about finding Xan—in her mind or out in the universe. And not just because the Unmakers had him. She got the feeling that other people weren’t supposed to matter as much once you were entangled. But she couldn’t forget the picture of her mother huddled in a corner of Firstbloom.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Cade said in small tones, but not backing away from the words. “I have one human to find.”

  Gori turned to Ayumi again, his blinks speeding in tempo. “You see how this is useless.”

  “I would beg to differ,” Ayumi said. “You don’t know what she’s capable of. There’s nothing useless about Cadence.”

  “Cadence can hear you,” she said. “Cadence feels much more useful when you talk to her.”

  Gori sighed and looked at Cade. Or maybe he had never looked at her, even with all of that staring. Maybe he looked near her. His eyes reminded her of two flies, dark and impatient, searching for a place to land.

  “At least she’s listening,” Gori said. “Now listen to this: be careful.”

  A friendly reminder that if their lesson soured, he might be forced to slit her throat.

  Gori took a breath so deep that it seemed to reshape the room, suck in the walls. Cade watched for the first sign of the expansion that would turn Gori into a mountain of dark energy. His arms lifted and his chest inched out. His wrinkles filled in like dried-out riverbanks, flooding.

  “To begin connecting is to open,” Gori said. “To open yourself is a task. You have to set yourself to this task as often as you can, in order to relearn the borders between self and not-self.”

  “Cade’s not exactly a novice at this,” Lee said, bristling with borrowed pride. “She’s entangled.”

  “Yes,” Gori said. “I, too, saw the little movie.”

  “So shouldn’t this be easy?” Cade asked.

  “There is easy and there is possible.” He breathed in, puffed out. “Entanglement is a matter of particles. It is a collapse. All space is one space. All time is one time. Entangled particles know that.”

  “But we don’t live that way,” Lee said. “We’d all be on top of each other, for one thing.” A shiver worked its way up her shoulders. “Squishy.”

  “The human with the knotted head is right,” Gori said. “For all particles to exist in such a state at all times, there would be no universe as we know it. So we have selves and we have boundaries and we have your mind and we have this other mind.”

  He waved his ballooning hand at Cade. “The girl—”

  “Cadence,” Ayumi said.

  Gori stared at her, perfectly still.

  Ayumi’s curls shivered, but she stood her ground. “If you know the names of all the stars in the universe, you can learn one more.”

  Gori moved on. “Cadence has grown used to a quick and direct channel . . . a shortcut . . . that connects her to a single human. But to find another, she has to leave the safety of the channel. She has to be open to all.”

  “But I only want one,” Cade said.

  The woman in the blue dress.

  Cade had a mother, and that fact could knock her down at any moment. Capsize her. She had to push it deep in a safe place just so she could se
e straight, just so she could walk. But even then, she felt different. Knowing that her mother was real, and might be out there, had tipped her inner balance.

  “So this is how I find her?” Cade asked. “By finding . . . everyone?”

  It sounded like the opposite of what she meant to do. It sounded like crossing the deserts on Andana and getting lost on purpose, in order to find your way. You’d end up dead of thirst or, at the least, scraped so raw with sand you’d never be able to look at a grain of it without screaming.

  “Give it a try,” Ayumi said.

  Gori nodded and breathed and grew.

  Cade settled into her pillows. “One little thing,” she said. “How do I open myself?”

  “Whatever you were doing last time will be a start,” Gori said.

  Cade closed her eyes. Last time, she had been reaching for Xan. She had been wanting to get to him. She had been unbuttoning her shirt, too, but she hoped that wasn’t an important part of the equation.

  Cade breathed deep. She tried to hold it in, the way Gori did, but the air sat in her lungs and weighed them down like stones. So she breathed normally. Picked a point across the room. She let everything else melt around it, in the strange but simple way that harmonies bend themselves around the strength of a melody.

  Cade was afraid that if she reached for Xan, that’s exactly who she would find. So instead she reached—and didn’t look for him. Just reached. Like stretching a muscle she didn’t know she had. Soon she was straining and dripping, hot and sweaty-cold at the same time. The harmonies grew thick, and pushing out into the air was like walking through music.

  Then, a new song.

  Fierce and bright, with bursting high notes, sudden plunges, and the wild, sliding rhythms of a fiddle.

  She could tell, somehow, that this was Lee.

  It wasn’t music, really, but that’s what it sounded like to Cade. This was raw thought, the kind she’d first heard on Andana. Thought without words, thought without laid-on form.

  And then another song. Harmonies that spread and then weaved themselves back together, flecked with warmth.