Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “We did nothing to Xan that he didn’t agree to. Some of it he suggested himself.”

  “So he politely asked you to knock him unconscious?”

  “That was an oversight.” Unmother waved Cade’s words off with one of her soft hands. “Xan overestimated his strength and healing abilities. He’ll be fine. Our best medical team is attending to him.”

  The confusion Cade felt in that moment climbed into her head and rivaled the Noise. It made no sense, and that fact pounded on a loop, threaded through with static and random sound.

  Nosensenosensenosense.

  “But you stole him . . .”

  “The place we took him from wasn’t his home, Cadence. It was a laboratory where he was brutally experimented on.” Unmother’s lips tightened, her volume kicked down a few notches. “You, of all people, must understand that.”

  Cade thought back to a screen full of crawling babies. She didn’t need a lecture on how the Firstbloom scientists were less-than-perfect.

  “Still . . .” She grabbed for words. “Why would Xan want you to hurt him?”

  “It was desperate, Cadence, but we needed you to get here.” She stood up and paced. “Xan is an intelligent, receptive young man. He figured out within the space of a few hours that we were human.”

  Cade flushed, sour-faced, embarassed. She had come halfway across the universe without an inkling. But Unmother didn’t seem to care about that. She had a story to tell, and she wasn’t letting Cade’s emotions get in the way.

  “Xan asked our aims, and we found that there was a great deal we could agree on. But all of our plans hinged on you, Cadence. Teams were sent to recover you, of course.” The attack on Renna. The Unmakers who had come to find her, following Mr. Smithjoneswhite’s tracer code. The howls that reached for her through the walls. “There were difficulties and delays, moments when we thought you wouldn’t come.

  “He was the one who came up with the idea,” Unmother said, getting animated now, laying it out for Cade like she was letting her in on the secret plan. “He set out the thresholds of our actions. He was never in mortal danger. Flesh wounds, strategic bruises. We made things look more dire than they were.”

  Unmother nodded at the pile of creature on the floor—metal and plastic, molded and bound. “We have some experience with theatrics.”

  So the costumes were a twisted bit of playacting. But the pain—that had been real. For fleeting moments it had torn at Cade’s skin, churned her insides. She clutched herself across the middle, remembering.

  “Why?”

  Unmother cocked her head. “Perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough.”

  “No,” Cade said. She nodded at the little room, the costume parts, the ship. “Why . . . all of it?”

  Unmother sighed. She stopped her pacing in front of the mirror, blocking out its silver-glint.

  “So it will never happen again.”

  “But no one has ever been entangled before,” Cade said. “Xan and I are the first.”

  “Yes,” Unmother said. “But the human race has been connected before. And nothing good came of it. When humans flourished on their own planet, they had technologies that kept people as connected as could be imagined. Do you know what happened, Cadence? Wars, terrible violence. I’m sure you know that Earth blinked out, but did you know that it was all but destroyed at that point? The soil, air, even the oceans. Tainted with chemicals. Choked with trash. Ruined.”

  Cade knocked against the wall, her breath gone, her thoughts boiled down to a whimper. She had been allowed to think, her whole life, that Earth was a perfect, untouched blue-green paradise she couldn’t be a part of because some asteroid said otherwise. Now it was another nonplace, like the black holes—sucking in her hope and thoughts like light, giving nothing back.

  “That was why humans looked to space,” Unmother said. “To escape from the messes they had made, and start making them all over again on some new planet. The Scattering was the best thing that happened to humans, and to the rest of the universe. Apart, humans are weak. Together, they are a great force—used for destruction.”

  It didn’t escape Cade’s blunt-edged sense of irony that she was being told this by an Unmaker.

  “You do a bit of destruction yourselves.”

  “We work hard, yes . . . fight . . . to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.” Unmother thought what she was saying was noble and true. Cade thought it was a jumble of noise, added to the Noise in her head.

  “What was done by the scientists on Firstbloom has to be undone. If you and Xan live, the path to a new age will be clear. And we can’t let that happen, Cadence. We’re sworn against it. For the good of all.”

  “You’re going to murder us,” Cade said.

  “We’re not as brutal as you’d like to think.” Unmother’s soft hands, soft voice, inched Cade toward believing it—but everything she knew about the Unmakers tore her in the other direction. “We do things to intimidate, to keep people safe—which means keeping them apart. Yes, there have been times when we’ve used violence, but those few times have stemmed a tide so much greater.” Unmother leaned in and put a hand to Cade’s hair. Cade twitched away. “There is no need for us to hurt you, if you can see the reason in what we’re saying.”

  Cade slammed into her wild, blinding fear of the Unmakers. This woman was willing to do horrible things to Xan. The reasons didn’t matter. Xan mattered. And because Cade still had to save him, first she needed to know what she was up against.

  “If I do agree with you?” Cade asked. “What then?”

  “An act of pure selflessness.” A new gleam captured Unmother’s eyes, made her whole body sing bright. “A sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice.” The word soured in Cade’s mouth. “I can tell you right now, I’m not going to volunteer to be murdered.”

  “You should see Xan, before you decide anything,” Unmother said as she gathered up her robes and her thin metal bones, the pieces of her other self. “You did come all this way.”

  The woman left Cade on the crumpled sheets, back pressed to the wall.

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAOS: A deterministic system, such as a quantum system, which is nonetheless impossible to predict

  Cade sat forward on the bed. She could hear a single pair of footsteps, heading down the hall.

  The next person she saw would be Xan. Cade was sure of it.

  Whether he came to her or she went to him, whether they were thrown together by the Unmakers or the simple fact of their own small but important gravities, collapsing into each other. Cade would meet him soon.

  She had been fed so many strange, hopeless ideas by Unmother, but she hadn’t lost one drop of her faith in Xan. He had seen through the Unmakers’ disguises. He must have been able to see through their elaborate reasoning, too. He wouldn’t have been taken in. And if Xan was working with the Unmakers, he couldn’t have held all of that back from Cade when they were connected—could he?

  No. Cade was sure of that. She was sure of him. But she felt a new tremor underneath what she was sure of—a thrum that wandered up and down her spine and shot into her fingertips, electrified her awareness. So when the door flew open and Cade was sure it would be Xan—and it wasn’t him at all, it was Rennik with his head high and his hands tied behind his back—the thrum gathered. Grew.

  “Yes, thank you,” Rennik said to the Unmakers guarding the door. “I won’t be a minute.”

  The Unmakers shut him in. Rennik turned to face Cade, and strain broke through in a hundred small ways—the setting of his forehead, the leap of a vein, the crunch of fingers into a ready fist.

  “Lee?” she asked. “Ayumi? Renna?” Even, “Gori?”

  “All fine,” Rennik said.

  Cade sighed. After the first wave of fear passed, a new one bobbed up. “You’re prisoners.”

  “Oh, this?” Rennik tossed a backwards nod at the ties on his wrists. “We were captured, but the bonds are a formality. Renna is cleared for deep
space, so I have every right to be in Hades, and the Unmakers don’t care to start a war. Not with the Hatchum, at least.”

  “But I thought you were”—her voice swam to a low note—“an outlaw.”

  “Yes, but I don’t go around telling that to people who capture me.”

  “What about the others?” Cade asked. “None of them are Hatchum. How are we getting them out of here?”

  “I made it clear to our hosts that I was holding the humans in custody, and that the confiscation of Hatchum prisoners would also result in war.”

  Cade’s first sigh was thin with relief. The second was curt, almost a laugh. “They don’t care about the others,” she said. “Just me.”

  Rennik’s whole noble bearing collapsed.

  “You . . . were not negotiable.”

  Cade’s throat closed, full-stop. She had to work it open to ask, “So how did you get in here?”

  “I made up a story about intelligence you’re carrying that only I can extract. I made you out as a rat who stowed aboard the ship, a rat I only recently flushed out—and the canny leader of a human resistance.” Rennik couldn’t seem to fight down the smile that spread across his face. “They were all too eager to believe me.”

  “Easier to believe that lie than the truth,” Cade said. “That a Hatchum could be neck-deep in helping humans.”

  Rennik held out his bound wrists. “I have five minutes. It’s enough time to prove them wrong, Cadence.”

  She looked up, tracing the lines of his arms, the concerned face, the urgent eyes.

  “Cadence?” he asked again.

  Unmother had called her that. The scientists on Firstbloom, too. But it was the name Cade’s mother had given her, once, and she still loved to hear it coming from the right mouths. Rennik had been using it ever since she got back from the shipping lanes of Hymnia. She hadn’t noticed until now, when her name was the only thing in a too-small room.

  It sounded right.

  “We need to leave,” Rennik said. “Lee is in a cell down the hall. They would have left her onboard the ship with Gori, but she resisted surrender.” Cade couldn’t help it—she laughed at the thought of Lee turning her explosive combinations of curse words on the Unmakers. “We’ll collect her on our way back to Renna.”

  Cade shook her head. An escape plan had crash-landed in her lap, but she couldn’t take it. Not without Xan.

  “Rennik, you have to go,” she said. “You all have to go.”

  “Renna would be offended by that, to say the least. She’s attached to you. And I . . .” Rennik shifted from one foot to the other, and back. “I said I was coming to Hades with you. I won’t leave unless you’re onboard.”

  Cade grabbed his wrists.

  “Let me get to work on this.”

  Rennik sat at the perfect edge of the bed, facing away from Cade. Her fingers lighted on the ties. She tried not to look too hard at the impossible knots. She focused on Rennik’s wide back, the sharp scrawl of his profile.

  “She was killed by . . . them,” Rennik said.

  Cade hadn’t wanted Lee to face the Unmakers for her sake. But it was just as bad for Rennik—in a different way.

  Cade pried free a strand of the knot on Rennik’s left hand. There were still at least ten strands on each. She worked a nail in. The muscles that rivered down Rennik’s back tightened as he started to speak.

  “It happened after the banishment. Renna had been spaceworthy for years, and I had been running passengers, so I kept running passengers. But without the proper connections and the expected paperwork, I could only get the worst clearance on the seediest planets. And I couldn’t take Lee and Moira everywhere they needed to go for the Express, not without putting them in more danger. It sounds ridiculous when I say it now.” Rennik laughed—an uncorked sound—so loud that Cade worried about the guards. But he wasn’t afraid. He was safe in the folds of another time, a story-space where the pain was in the past.

  “I was the one who arranged that flight from Sligh,” Rennik said. “I was the one who told her it would be safe.”

  Cade’s hands went numb on the ties. She rubbed across her knuckles, got them working, and watched Rennik’s face as sadness and panic shot under it like flickers of fire.

  “It’s happening again,” he said.

  Cade couldn’t see his eyes now, they were turned away. All she could do was redouble her attack on the knots.

  “You didn’t fail her,” Cade said. “I know that you swore—”

  “To help humans,” Rennik said. “I do that where I can, Cadence. But it’s not just that. Not all humans remind me of her.”

  One of the knots came undone.

  “And I do?”

  “Of course.”

  Cade swore quietly. Her fingers scraped along a row of three small knots underneath the one she’d picked loose.

  “Sit tight,” Cade said.

  But something inside of her wouldn’t be still. She tried to call up the precise words Rennik had used to describe Moira. Fierce, imperfect, in love with too much. Fierce, Cade could understand. Imperfect—that was as obvious as sweat under the noon sun. But she had never been compared to someone who cared too much.

  She worked at the small knots.

  “You really are just like her,” Rennik said. “You’re scowling back there, I can feel it. All those knots. She would have scowled, too.”

  Rennik shone at the memory of this girl who was gone, and Cade could see that Moira wasn’t really gone—not for him. The connection was live, and Rennik used it to steer him through his days.

  Cade rested her hands on his upturned wrists. When she talked, the words went over his shoulder. “The knots are too much,” she said. “I can’t undo them. So you’re going to have to tell me if you want me to stop.”

  Before he could say something too reasonable and ruin it, Cade swung to Rennik’s side and centered his face between her numb hands. The distance between them was inches, or galaxies. She stared at him for less than a second. More than an unraveled light-year. Scale made no sense. Time lost the firmness of its hold. Now Rennik’s calm was not a Hatchum oddity. His eyes coded their signs in a language Cade could read. He filled them with patience. Steadiness. A yes that wouldn’t make her flinch, or alter the course.

  The distance between them was impossible.

  Then it was gone.

  Time and the solidness of things rushed back up to meet them as soon as Cade reached the high curve of Rennik’s mouth. Her hands slid down his face, down the front of him like glass. Her lips took a few moments to find the pulse of this specific kiss—slow, with a linger on the upbeat. And then it was warmth and softness in matched rhythms. Over much too fast.

  “Why did you do that?” Rennik asked, looking at her at a much closer range than anyone had before. She couldn’t take in his whole face at once, so she focused on the outside crease of his left eye.

  “Because I might die. Because of Moira. I don’t know.”

  Rennik nodded as if that made perfect sense. But his legs shook, even under the light pressure of her hands.

  “It’s time,” he said. “We have to go.”

  Cade shook her head. “I need to get to Xan.” His name chased off the moment, and Cade landed back in a cold cell on a dangerous ship in a vast stretch of nowhere. “I came all the way here, Rennik. I can’t leave without him.”

  “We’ll find him on our way out,” Rennik said, and he was on his feet, headed for the door.

  “It’s not that simple,” Cade said. “He might be working with the Unmakers.” She didn’t believe it, but she had to be ready in case it turned out to be true.

  “If he’s on their side, don’t trust him,” Rennik said. “Don’t even look at him, if it can be avoided.”

  But her connection to Xan would never let her rest until he was conscious, until she saw him, until he was safe.

  A knock sounded in the thick metal door.

  Rennik slumped, and in the soft white light, tired and
etched, he looked exactly human. “We have to get Lee and get out of this place. If you think we can find him in time . . .”

  Another knock, and a kick at the door.

  “I can do it,” Cade said.

  Rennik braced a shoulder against the metal, ready in case the Unmakers decided to slam it in.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Cade stood up with a mattress-creak. Crossed the room to the mirror. The mirror that all of a sudden made sense—because the Unmakers who’d put it there had been human this whole time. Cade wanted to tell Rennik, but their minutes were up. She tipped the mirror, and it shattered on the cold white floor.

  The Unmakers were in the room in less than ten seconds.

  In that time, Cade grabbed a shard of cracked mirror, sliced the ties off Rennik’s wrists, stooped again for a handful of mirror dust.

  She stuck the shard in the swirled robes of the first Unmaker and wrenched it up, drawing a line from the collarbone. Now that she knew they were costumed, she could use it against them. Instead of cracking herself on plastic and metal, she tore the cloth from the Unmaker’s face. As soon as she saw the blear of pale blue eyes, she tossed the mirror dust.

  The Unmaker screamed—a reedy, unamplified sound. Now that Cade knew they were human, her fear was scaled down in proportion. Two humans against a Noise-battered Cade and a soft-hearted Hatchum? She had seen enough bar fights on Andana to know what made a fair one.

  She kicked low and swept the legs of the second Unmaker.

  He went down with a head-crack on glass.

  Fair enough.

  “How many in the halls?” Cade ran out of the small room, Rennik trailing.

  “Patrols of two,” he said. “And a few large groups, but they were out on the perimeter. This is the heart of the ship.”

  Of course it was. No windows. Fewer clues about where prisoners were held. Ringed on all sides by Unmakers, so that if someone did escape, they wouldn’t stay escaped for long.

  “Are all of the holding cells in this cluster?” Cade asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Rennik said. “But I know where they took Lee.”