Entangled (28 page)

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.”

“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.