Entangled (18 page)

“Picked up or smashed into,” Lee muttered.

Cade spread her fingers. Said goodbye to one more terrible planet, and the life she might have lived there.

“Let's go.”

Rennik and Lee pounded out a string of directions. Press this button. Jam those switches to the right.

Xan wanted to help, too. As Cade worked, he nudged her muscles in what he must have thought were helpful directions. Cade tried to hold him back—how much could he know about flying a ship? He'd been coma-soured and bedridden his whole life.

“Steer clear of all orbits and fly straight,” Rennik said.

“Don't answer hailing codes,” Lee added. “Just in case.”

Faster,
Xan told her.
Clamp down and don't let go.

The little ship clunked around in a wide arc and cut into open space. Bits of trash clung and cluttered the flight path, and, with Lee's help, Cade fixed the blast-wipers. Broke up the problems. She followed instructions, but barely—she felt like the ship kept leaping ahead of her as soon as she caught up. Which meant there were seconds, whole lurching minutes, when Cade didn't have control. Planets and moons and other ships crowded on all sides—and with two voices stuffed in her ears and one inside of her head, Cade's mind hit maximum capacity.

So she tried not-listening. Banished all other input—and within thirty seconds, found herself wrestling the orbit of some rogue moon. The cabin slapped on another layer of distraction. The glare of sirens and a bright-red beat.

“So what you need to do is . . .” Lee said.

Xan twitched her fingers to a set of switches that calmed the lights and the sirens.

“Don't worry,” Rennik said. “Those are just warning levels. You're going to be fine as long as you bear down and left.”

Cade did want their help. As much as she could get. But there were too many strands of sound and feeling, and she couldn't pick them apart and find what she needed and process it in time to make the right call.

She would have to learn how to channel all of it at once.

Fast.

She balanced the input, like the levels on speakers, so she could hear the information coming in from Rennik, the instructions from Lee, feel the deep tug of Xan in her body, and add her own instinct, too—trust her fingers to unlock the secrets of the console and her muscles to find the rhythms of the ship.

She needed all of it. The full band.

Cade dialed voices in and out, funneled the words down to action. Her hands reached and slid.

The ship slammed forward.

She wasn't good at it. She wasn't in the same galaxy as good.

The sight of an asteroid field set every one of her nerves on their shattered ends. She didn't know how to play an asteroid field.

It was time to improvise.

A massive rock swam up close, showed its underside. Cade held the course. Let her fingers find the button to throw them vertical at the right moment and fling them free. Clusters of space-rock spread beneath the little ship like false land, but the holes that gaped between the rocks showed the truth—that space was dark and forever-deep.

There, on the other side of the field, smaller than the smallest asteroid, round and perfect and headed their way—

“Renna.” Cade sang it again, to the transmitter. “Renna. I have you in sight.” Cade sailed close, and Renna threw out a burst of false-grav. The little ship surrendered. Let itself be sucked in.

The transmitter crackled and cut out. Xan retreated. Cade's adrenaline levels crashed like a Voidvil slummer after a long Saturday night.

Something stirred and shifted next to Cade. The lump in the pilot's chair was coming back to life.

“Nice timing, spacecadet.”

Ayumi's brown eyes flutter-blinked, and her curls flew in ten different directions as she looked around. “Where are we?”

“Back with Renna.” Cade couldn't hide the sag of relief in her voice.

“But that's fantastic! I was hoping to make a full study of . . .” Ayumi wiped the corner of her lip. Pulled herself up straight against the chair. “Did I . . .”

Cade sighed.

“Yeah. You did. In a real way.” She offered Ayumi a hand. The girl walked like she'd just figured out what legs were for.

“It's our last chance to catch this ride,” Cade said. “Try to keep it together.”

 

The homecoming was less than Cade hoped for.

Rennik and Lee straggled into the main cabin. They had worked feverish-hard to get Cade back, and now they were treating her like a biohazard. Rennik wavered on his feet. Lee kept a meaningful distance. Renna was taut and silent, waiting it out until Cade's place on the ship was sorted. Gori stared down at the whole thing from his bunk.

“What happened?” Rennik asked.

“Ayumi . . .” Cade waited as the girl stumbled across the dock. “We got clipped by the thruster of another ship, took a bad rattle. She passed out.”

Ayumi's step bobbled deep, and she almost fell.

“You lost consciousness while flying?” Rennik asked, rushing to help. He laced an arm under Ayumi's and led her to the bottom of the chute, where he helped her sit while he frowned at her head.

“Oh, utterly,” Ayumi said, catching on to Cade's game and playing it with all the enthusiasm of a bad liar. “But it's nothing to worry about. All reversible damage. Not
even
damage! Nondamage. I'm entirely to blame. I kept Cadence busy talking when I should have kept an eye on the shipping lane. I checked and double-checked and triple-checked the course, but incoming ships can move so fast and—”

Cade cleared her throat. Now that Ayumi had gummed the air with words, Cade remembered how much she needed to say. It had all been building in her since she faced the white of Hymnia.

She crossed to Lee, took her by the shoulders, and started with the truth.

“I was never lying when I told you there's someone I need to save. But he's not my brother. He and I are . . .” Cade didn't know how to say it except to say it. There was only one word for this in the whole universe—no translation.

“He and I are entangled.”

That was what she owed Lee. Not a string of apologies like that same flat note blasted over and over. The truth, in all of its shining complicated harmonies. It was the one thing she'd owed Lee—and anyone she wanted to call a friend—from the start. She could only hope that saying it now would be enough.

Her words met a wall of blankness. Everyone stared at her. No one seemed to know what to say.

“Entangled?” Lee asked, with a steep double-eyebrow spike. “Is that some prettified way of saying you and this boy are . . .?”

“No.” Cade lost a bit of her measured cool and fired up, cheeks first. “No, no. We're
quantum
entangled—it means we're connected to each other, particle for particle. It was done when we were babies. In a lab.”

Lee's eyebrows spiked higher.

Cade's voice—and her sureness—faltered. She needed to explain all of it better than she was now.

“The Unmakers are our enemies,” she said, using Mr. Niven's words. “They want to stop us from what we're meant to do.”

“And what's that?”

“I wasn't sure for a long time. When Ayumi told me about Earth, that helped.” Cade still didn't understand it completely, and when she thought about the hugeness of it, she could hear the blood in her ears. Cade knelt down to refocus, fingertips to the floor. The coolness of Renna infused her with calm. “I think the scientists who created entanglement want us to reverse what happened to the human race. The Scattering. Spacesick.”

Lee bolted her arms across her chest. It was impressive—how tight she could hold on to a grudge. She had told Cade about her sister, worked to make sure she flew safe. But not wanting someone to die and letting that someone back into their lives were two different things, with a universe between them.

“The scientists . . .” Cade said. “They talked about hope. For the future. For something more than survival.”

She reached into her pocket and tightened her fingers around the facets of the circle-glass.

“I'll show you.”

 

Cade led them all to the control room.

“Rennik, do you have a projection lamp?” she asked.

“We should,” he said. “There was a stretch of a few months when Renna liked to have old slides of Hatch projected on her walls. She goes through phases. But we won't talk about those. She might teach us a lesson by turning the gravity off.” He headed to a far corner of the room, but Cade heard him mutter, “Again.”

He came back with a tall, slender projection lamp and set it on the control panel. It was dim, but filled with the potential for shine. Cade tamped the circle-glass into it and pointed the whole thing toward the back wall.

“Hello,” boomed a voice. “Welcome to Project QE.”

Babies invaded the wall, oversized and toddling at each other. This time, Cade sorted them quickly. She found herself—the one at the center of the crowd, holding her small hands in her lap while the others flailed. She knew the cloud-skinned boy, crawling at her.

Xan was perfect. Xan was the point.

Cade watched the crew watching the film. Rennik studied it with his customary sweep of the eyes—calm and quick. Ayumi was enthralled. She inched closer to the picture every time a new pair of puffed cheeks came into view. Lee followed along, mouthing the narrator's words, committing them to memory like a good carrier. Gori was the same old Gori. Silent. Unmoving.

Cade felt like she had pinned back her chest and showed them all her hard-drumming heart.

“ . . . this batch of standard human children will undergo the process of quantum entanglement.”

A hot second of white. Cade had forgotten about those splices.

It came to the part with two babies facing each other, and Ayumi broke into Cade's thoughts with a yelp.

“That's you!”

Everyone drew closer to the screen, to see if it was true. Ayumi ran to the wall and traced the line of Baby Cadence's arm with one finger.

“That really is you,” she whispered.

“These two are optimally suited for entanglement,” the announcer said. “Our greatest hope lies with them.”

The film spliced again—Rennik winced at the searing.

Then it was the same two babies but later, then bouncing circles, then babies again, and fade to white.

“That's entanglement,” Cade said. “In five minutes or less.”

She held her breath.

The universe inched outward.

Rennik stood up in front of the lamp, absorbing the beam of light with his bent-over body. “That explains quite a bit,” he said. “Do you mind if I take a look at this?” He touched the rim of the circle-glass with a finger.

“Sure,” Cade said.

He ran his long fingers over the glass ridges. “I'm glad you made it back, Cadence.”

He was gone before she could say anything—turning the slow build of warmth in Cade to an outraged fizz.

“Nice to see you, too,” she called after him.

Gori crossed the room and circled Cade, eyes leveled directly at her brain. He breathed in once, twice, and let the air out in a rusty hiss. It wasn't exactly pleasant, but the lack of a knife tickling the base of Cade's throat seemed like a leap in the right direction.

Gori went off—to his bunk, or to expand into a dark energy balloon.

“Cadence!”

She spun just in time to see Ayumi collapse into yet another pilot's chair. Cade rushed to the armrest and looked down to find a pair of glass-free brown eyes. In fact, they were lively and ticking all over the place.

“Are you all right?” Cade asked.

“Notebooks!” Ayumi cried. “I need all of my notebooks. I need to write down all of this. And cross-index it. Right away.”

She jumped up, adding as she ran, “If I had left you on that planet, Cadence, I never would have forgiven myself. Of course, I never would have known not to forgive myself. Which would have made it
even worse
. . . whether I knew it or not.”

Cade spun again and found herself almost alone. Renna gently rumbled the floor under her feet to get her attention. Cade put one hand to the ground and smiled as Renna picked out the beat of Cade's heart and played it back to her.

Not bad, for a
welcome back.

It was down to Cade and Lee—Lee, who had been strangely quiet and soft around the edges since about halfway through the filmstrip. Now she floated toward Cade like she was in a dream state. “Is it true?” she asked, all of the bluster and brass gone out of her voice. “Is it true you can't get spacesick? . . .
Ever?
I know people on the Express who would give their left leg for that. And the ones stranded on all those planets? If they didn't have to be so afraid all the time? That's first-class, Cade. I mean, that's, that's . . . important.”

Lee reached out and circled Cade's wrist with her thin fingers.

“It could change everything.”

Cade had heard those words before, she had even thought them herself—but somehow when Lee said them, they were worth more.

“So what do we do now?” Lee paced the room, slipping into the brisk business mode she used when she collected for the Express.

“We?”

Lee pressed a hand to the sharp line of her collarbone. “You think you're going to change the fate of the human race without us?”

Cade shook her head carefully.

“Snugging right you're not!”

Lee nodded once and headed out. “I'm going to make us all an egg dish and think about this.”

Cade had the control room to herself. But instead of looking out at the stars, she wandered to the top of the chute and watched as people crossed and recrossed the main cabin, calling out to each other. The whole place hummed with work being done. Three humans, two nonhumans, and one ship, on the same course. Cade thrilled to the sound of it. Her life had been the same stale chorus over and over, and this was a welcome new verse.