Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  The Unmakers had already stormed the main cabin—a dozen, and more behind them. Cade was so focused on the incoming swirl of space-black robes that it took her a few seconds to find Ayumi. Her dark curls cut a path down the chute. She was still much too far from the dock when an Unmaker caught up.

  The floor around Cade grumbled and shook, but the patch she was standing on didn’t obey the same rules. The Unmakers groaned to the floor one by one until Cade and Ayumi were the only ones left standing, stuck to their spots.

  Cade pressed a palm to the wall and sent Renna some serious thanks. The ship wasn’t armed, but she could fight.

  The Unmakers found their footing and started up the pitch-and-roll of the chute toward Ayumi.

  She was trying to talk the monsters back. She cast words into the fray like faint knife-jabs. “It’s possible you think humans are your enemies because you don’t know enough . . . enough . . . about us,” she stammered. “There are a lot of untruths about the human race that have spread . . . I’d be happy to dispel those . . . and give you a more complete picture of . . .”

  The Unmakers closed a half-circle on one side of her.

  Cade ran at Ayumi, full-tilt, from the top of the chute. Xan sent all the speed he’d stored over weeks of sitting, body spoiling. Cade remembered running with him through the ship at night—how fast they’d gone. She felt her muscles tighten, her feet arch and pound, arch and pound. She snatched Ayumi’s hand and started to run them both up in the direction of the control room. She hoped they could take the tunnels through Renna’s center, find some other path to the little ship. The first set of Unmakers pressed tight on their heels, trundling up the chute.

  No one made it to the top.

  Cade’s feet floated away from the ground. Her feet, and everything above them. She turned to find that Ayumi had lifted off the ground beside her. The air was full of Unmakers.

  Renna had turned off the gravity.

  It was a good thing Cade had a first-class grip on Ayumi’s hand. “Hold on to me.”

  Ayumi nodded. Her curls bobbed and streamed above her head.

  Cade and Ayumi wilted in the no-grav, but the Unmakers were worse. Their small hands clutched the air, frantic. The rest of their bodies hung motionless. The main cabin filled with constellations of loose arms and splayed legs.

  Cade and Ayumi hit a wall and sprang off, legs forcing them in at least two different directions. Their crudely knotted fingers kept them from drifting, but all their feet could agree on was where not to aim.

  Ayumi nodded at the dock. The Unmakers hadn’t claimed it yet—there was still a chance. Cade sent Xan hope. The most she’d felt since she’d set eyes on the spaceport on Andana.

  She hit the wall a second after Ayumi. Two sets of knees bent deep and sent them shooting through the unbound air.

  Gloved hands reached for Cade. The wails of Unmakers sounded thin in her ears. One last push against the wall, and she crossed the dock without looking back. Later—if there was a later—Cade would have to measure and mourn what she had left behind.

  The little ship was untouched by the madness of the cabin. The Unmakers tried to recalibrate their paths and come after Cade and Ayumi, but the loose, unwieldy air slowed them too much. Ayumi sealed the door and flipped a few switches. Gravity rushed back, slamming them down. Cade hit the floor just behind the navigator’s chair; Ayumi scrambled for the controls.

  “Go go go go go go,” Cade said.

  But Ayumi was already gone.

  She was flying before she hit the seat, before she strapped in, before she breathed out. Her flightstyle was still a symphony of clunk-and-clatter, but this time Ayumi poured all her certainty into it, worked the panels with such a confidence that Cade flushed to watch it. Ayumi didn’t notice. She didn’t have eyes for anything but space, and for the first time Cade wasn’t going to get in the way.

  They shot into an open field and shook off the unwanted ships like rain. Ayumi rolled, twisted, tumbled them.

  “I’ve never actually had a reason to use half these tricks,” she said under her breath as she slammed buttons.

  She dropped in a sudden dive, turned her broad side to a black hole, and shook off another three ships. It was breath-stealing, life-bending to watch. Cade shot forward against the straps of her seat so she could see all of it.

  So this was what it was like to be the audience.

  Cade would have loved the ride, except for two things. There were still ships on their backside—only two, but they were the fastest, meanest two, the ones that forced Ayumi into trickier and trickier evasions.

  Also, Xan.

  The Unmakers that swarmed into his room this time didn’t bother to drag him down the hallway. They breathed such staleness into his face that Cade’s stomach puckered. And then, the pain. Whatever they’d held back during their other visits, they unleashed it now. Knives were drawn, stitches groaned open, bruises burst under stretched-tight skin. Blood spoiled the sheets, slicked the floor, collected in Xan’s mouth.

  Cade sent everything she had—strength, hope, a steady beat, the knowledge that she would be there soon.

  He sent her numbers and agony.

  Cade spat the incoming coordinates at Ayumi.

  “Cadence,” she said, eyes sliding from the controls to Cade’s face and back again. “Are you okay?”

  Cade clutched herself where the shadow-pains hurt worst. Ayumi translated Xan’s numbers into a course and punched it into the ship.

  But things switched in the space of one shallow breath, and now Ayumi was the not-okay one. Her eyes glassed. Her fingers wavered. Her chin drooped low, over the controls.

  “No,” Cade said. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

  But Ayumi was already gone.

  Cade could do only one thing—and it meant taking some of her mind off Xan. She had to make a choice—and the black holes were starting to pull, spinning the ship toward event horizons. Behind them, the Unmakers had almost caught up. Cade felt the rumble of much larger ships.

  Unless Ayumi shook this fit of spacesick, they would be lost.

  Cade had to fight fast, with every weapon she had. She unstrapped and climbed out of the navigator’s seat so she could sling her arms around Ayumi and fasten them tight. She shivered her hands over Ayumi’s upper arms. Pressed her face to the side of Ayumi’s face.

  She didn’t look out the window at the blackness and nothing that was calling their names. She looked at Ayumi—the broadness of her cheek, the stretches of soft skin under her eyes, the strong line of her neck. All the parts that would add up to the girl she knew—if Cade could call her back.

  She reached out with her mind and found Ayumi’s thoughts, low and muffled. Pumped music into her, tried to shore her against the indifference of space. Cade didn’t have time for anything fancy. She thumped a reliable double-beat.

  In a little room somewhere else in Cade’s mind, the Unmakers drained out. Xan was fading.

  She sent as much noise as she could, as much of herself as she could, to both of them.

  Ayumi’s hands shot out and she gasped her way back to the controls. She swerved out of the pull of a black hole and slid a last-second dive past one of the Unmakers’ ships, so close they must have felt the heat from her thrusters.

  Cade let out a wild cheer—and kept driving the beat to Xan.

  But he was almost gone. The corners of his mind inked with darkness. It crept inwards, spotting the room until there were only pinholes of color and light.

  And then nothing.

  Into Cade’s head—a crash of sound, a flood of chaotic volume, a thousand notes like crossed wires, the heart- curdling smash of static. Cade had no hope of sending music now. Xan had been knocked out cold.

  The Noise was back.

  Cade put her head down between her knees. When she came back up for air, the Noise was still there. Ayumi had glassed out again—her fingers dangled limp on a switch.

  With so much static between her ears, Cade could
n’t reach out and help her.

  The little ship lurched and tipped in a new direction, under the influence of the nearest black hole. Cade reached for the controls, but couldn’t even pretend she knew where to start. The Noise had no help to offer, nothing but interference in a hundred different keys. Outside the window, a complete, consuming blackness.

  The fall toward it sped up and up and up.

  One of the Unmakers’ ships snatched them back from the edge, and Cade almost sighed.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER 19

  EXPECTATION VALUE: The predicted mean value of the results of an experiment

  Dark, robe-shadowed nonfaces. Small hands and metal-breath, touching and breathing and in her space.

  Out, Cade thought.

  But she couldn’t be sure she was saying it. The Noise hammered so loud that when she moved her lips, she didn’t know if the words pushed past them, into the needle-cold, antiseptic air.

  Unmakers milled around Cade. They could see a broken doll of a girl in tattered clothes, but they couldn’t hear what had smashed her. A fresh round of coma static. Cade wanted to broadcast the bursting, crackling, mess. Get it out, out, out.

  The Unmakers shuffled a step back from Cade’s bedside.

  So she was talking.

  The space-black robes hovered over her for minutes or hours. When the Unmakers drained out, Cade looked over the room—not a simple task for eyes tenderly connected to a rasping brain. The fact that she’d seen a matching room in the confines of her own head made it easier to know what she was looking at. A rectangle of windowless walls. A narrow bed that barely fit the width of her hips. A sheet of mirror. Strange. Mirror. How many times had she seen it in Xan’s room without wondering—why would the Unmakers have a mirror? Cade had been so sure that nonhumans didn’t use it. So why a perfect, uncracked sheet of it, why here? So humans would feel more at home in their cells? So they could stare at their bodies, scan the bone-molded, skin-papered landscapes of their emotions, search for their souls one more time before they were unmade?

  Something tapped at the door—more than a scratch but less than a knock. Cade tried to get up but her muscles were paste. Another tap. She wondered if someone had come to help—Lee, Rennik, Ayumi without the glass. Maybe even Xan.

  But no, that made no sense, because Cade still had the Noise in her head. If Xan came out of his coma, the Noise would dissolve into silence. And at the door—that was a draft from an overhead vent, that was the rattle of a rogue hinge, that was no one. Cade had the Noise, and Cade had no one. She was alone. The same absolute alone she’d been on Andana.

  She had no idea how she’d survived it before.

  The Unmakers came in with long shiny needles that stopped her thoughts and brought on sleep.

  In fits between dead stretches of black, Cade did her best to focus her mind and reach out.

  For Xan, but he was passed out in his own little cell. For Ayumi, but she was deep in space-rapture somewhere. For Rennik, but he’d never been listening hard enough. For Gori, but he might kill her if she made it through this alive. For Renna, but she was off skirmishing with black holes. For Lee, but—

  Cade didn’t know who she was fooling. The Noise was the real reason she couldn’t connect. All of those other reasons were part of a mean little game she made up to distract herself. The No-One-Ever-Cared-So-Let-It-Go game. Twenty or thirty rounds in, and she was getting good.

  But somewhere deep, past the sting of the points she kept scoring against herself, Cade knew that the Noise was to blame. It had splintered her connection with Ayumi at the most important moment. She tried to push through bursts of Noise, wrench aside heavy gray-white curtains of static. In one wild moment, she used the song from the pinched circle-glass to reach for her mother, reached so hard that she feared her mind would snap like a stretched-too-far rubber band.

  And it did. Snap.

  Cade came back to herself screaming. Her arms and legs slashed at the sheets. Now the sound in her head was also pain, each note a blade into the soft parts of her brain. She held her head in her hands, and all she heard was Noise, Noise, Noise, and her fingers were covered in tears.

  Cade cried. Maybe for the first time since her mother left her on Firstbloom. There was nothing to dull the torn edges of her sobs, not even the soft pulse of a wall under her fingertips. Putting a hand out was second nature now, but this ship was not a friend. This ship was a cold, dead nothing. A shined-up set of bones.

  The Unmakers came. Cade spat in their nonfaces. She screamed and they were silent.

  “Take me to Xan,” she said.

  The Unmakers didn’t move.

  Cade lunged at them, fingernails first, all sweat and spent muscles. The Unmakers pinned her to walls, to the bed, to the cold of the floor. She didn’t have the strength of two humans anymore. She didn’t have the strength of one.

  “Take me to Xan,” Cade screamed.

  The Unmakers held her down.

  “Take me!”

  The Unmakers lifted her with their small hands and slammed her back on the bed.

  “Take me to Xan,” she said in a stubborn whisper, “Take me to Xan,” so many times the words were just a shape, a sound, their meaning scooped out.

  Cade waited until she was alone. No. That was wrong—alone was her state of being now. She waited until the Unmakers drained out. She tested her toes against the floor, half expecting her knees to crumple and bones to crack down their softened lengths. She had been in bed too long, dripped out on universe-knows-what.

  But Cade’s jellied muscles tensed. Her bones held. She made it across the room in two steps and tapped the door open with a knuckle.

  Metal breath. A slam. Cade was closed in with one of them.

  She squared off with the largest Unmaker she’d ever seen. Cade stepped backwards until her legs hit the bed, and the force of it folded her down to sitting. The Unmaker started to remove robes in tissue-thin layers. They pooled on the floor until there was nothing left but a cling of fabric on a gruesome frame.

  So there would be no slicing for Cade. No torture. This was something worse. She would have to look at the stripped-bare body of one of these monsters. Come face to face with a creature that chose life in the underworld—and fight off whatever it wanted to do to her.

  Cade’s hand went to her pocket. No knife. Of course no knife. Her strength—the strength of the entangled—could have made it an even match, but she was drained and disconnected. And knifeless.

  The Unmaker’s hands reached in, and it started to dismantle itself, piece by piece—the bits of it coming out of the last thin pulp of dark fabric. Lengths of metal and plastic, a little metal voicebox, a light kit complicated enough to cast a double shadow, clipped to a firm plastic collar. The small hands peeled off gloves, unwound more fabric.

  Underneath it—a smooth, breakable stretch of skin. A frame that might as well have been glass, a fusion of weakness and beauty. A face that would have been at home on Earth.

  Cade’s body was a chant.

  Heart, muscle, blood.

  No, no, no.

  “You’re . . . human?”

  The woman who was an Unmaker shrugged off the last of her elaborate costume, black robe unspooling from her hips. Underneath, she wore a white undershirt, tight-fitting dark pants. She was beautiful, with long curls of red hair and a fine-boned face, a gathering storm of wrinkles. This woman must have been around the age Cade’s mother was, wherever she was. Even though none of their features matched, the connection of their ages and something else—a calm set to their faces—struck Cade.

  “Everyone on this ship is human, Cadence,” the woman said, sitting on the end of the bed.

  “Don’t call me . . .”

  “Cadence?” She cocked her head. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  Cade gathered her knees to her chest and made herself small at the head of the bed. She had no intention of sharing the details of herself with this woman who was, after all,
an Unmaker. One of the people who had killed Lee’s sister. Who had taken Xan. Tortured him.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “I don’t have one,” the woman said. “Not anymore. I gave it up.”

  She let the words leave her mouth without fuss, each one a small plink, unweighted by loss. This woman had discarded her name. Clipped it off like a toenail.

  “What do people call you?” Cade asked.

  The woman shifted on the blanket and said nothing. Cade couldn’t tell if that was an evasion, or if that was the answer—she was called nothing. Unmaker was just a title Cade had come up with a long time ago, in the billows of the smoke from her bunker. As far as she knew, as far as Lee had known, the whole tribe of them went nameless.

  “Well, I’m going to call you something,” Cade said. “You see, I sort of have to. It’s what humans do.”

  The woman shifted and creased the thin sheets. “Please don’t.”

  Cade worried that this wouldn’t end well. So she let the name business go, but in her head she labeled the woman. The one who was the same age as her mother and had the same air about her. Redder hair, finer bones. But still. Cade started to wonder if the Unmakers knew about her mother, and had sent this woman to activate Cade’s memories, render her enemies un-hateable.

  This woman who sat at the end of the bed, looking at her with infinite care, was not her mother. No matter that the blue of her eyes matched the blue of that Firstbloom dress. This was not her mother. There were no familiar songs stored in those soft-lined hands. Not. Her. Mother. The name almost created itself.

  Unmother.

  “A lot of us didn’t want to tell you the truth,” Unmother said. “Not all of it. We worked out partial truths that might have been more . . . palatable. But Xan insisted that you would be open to—”

  “Xan.” Cade’s palms burst out sweating. “Where is he?”

  “He’s mending,” Unmother said, her voice coated thick with patience.

  “The things you did to him,” Cade said. “You tortured him. Broke him. And when you did that to him, you did it to me.”