Entangled (32 page)

Cade tried to shake her head, but there was so much working against her. She had to wrench to twist it once, tell him
no.

“Listen, Cadence. As soon as we cross that line, the rest of the universe will melt away. We'll be wrapped in the purest light . . . particles that have never touched a human. And all of the matter, everything that's ever fallen into it, will be our home. No more darkness, emptiness, no more nothingness to cross. No one could come and separate us. And time? Time will lose its power. You and I can fit a lifetime of thoughts into the stillness between two breaths. We can live forevers and come out the other side of them and still be together. Even when our bodies have broken down to parts, even when we're atoms marching to the center of the black hole, we'll be entangled.”

A smile broke Cade's surface. Her body had become an ocean, lilting to the rhythm of those words.

“What about—”

“The rest of the universe?” Xan said. “We don't need it.”

He took her hands. Patted them over the second spacesuit.

“Please,” he said. “Put this on.”

Cade pulled the pants over hers, struggled on the thick white jacket. But she wasn't done with her fight against the tide of oncoming black, the surge of Xan's reasons.

“You don't want a life in the universe because you haven't seen it yet,” Cade said. “You've been—”

“What? Coddled? By the scientists who performed tests and experiments that put me under for fifteen years? By the Unmakers who hate our kind—their own kind—so much, they have to dress in costumes and talk to me with knives? I guess I could go to one of those terrible human-hating planets I've heard so much about. You're right that I don't know half of what's out there, Cadence.”

He thought at her, strong and clear.
I know enough.

“All of those things are as horrible as they seem,” Cade said. “And worse.” But . . . what was the rest? Cade had been so sure of her point, and now she couldn't even find it.

“But . . .”

“We can do better, Cadence.”

He said her name like the music it was. She could listen to him say it for the rest of time.

But then there would be no other voices, and there would be no other music. There would be no loudloudloud guitars. There would be no need for new songs, because there would be no one to play them for.

Cade had songs for Ayumi. And for any spacesick who wanted to listen, for anyone who cared.

She made another dash at the controls. Searched for Renna in the window-stripe. The orbital was a dot now, far behind.

She had never thanked Renna for giving her Moon-White. She needed to get back to the ship, back to nights in the soft drumming of her bunk. She had to see Rennik again and figure out why she'd kissed him, and if she wanted to do it again. She had deliveries to make with Lee—they were days behind on Human Express.

“I have friends,” Cade said.

Xan stared at her with a blankness that could have been cut from the black outside the window.

“I don't want to leave them.”

Xan moved around the rim of the chair and positioned himself in front of the hatch. Settled his helmet on. Cade rushed after him and ripped it off.

“These people, Xan, all you have to do is meet them—”

“I have.”

He flashed a look at her temple. Of course. Xan had seen parts of the trip to Hades as they had unfolded in her head.

His face crumpled under terrible pain and his voice turned into one long scrape, like Cade was ripping the words out of his throat, one by one. Like she was forcing him to tell her the terrible-but-true.

“The one with the pale spots on her face betrayed you. The other girl is weak. The Hatchum will never be the human you want him to be. The Darkrider tried to
kill you.
And the ship . . . is a ship.”

Cade would have punched him square in the face if he were anyone else in the universe.

Xan twisted and stared out the window-stripe at the blot of Renna, almost gone.

“Those friends will leave you,” he said. “They'll let you down.”

Maybe,
Cade thought.

But that didn't make them less worth connecting to. Rennik, Renna, Ayumi, Lee, Gori. And Cade's mother. Even if she was dead, or glassed-and-gone. Even if Cade scoured the known planets and never found her. There was a connection to be made—with her memories, with the woman her mother used to be. Cade already felt stronger for it.

If she had wanted to close herself off, shut it all down, she would have stayed on Andana.

Xan's eyes darkened in the oncoming rush of black, to a deep, cold, empty blue. He'd never had a home. Not even a makeshift home, or one that sailed through space. But Cade could change that.

“Please,” she said, setting her hand to his face. “Turn the ship around. Let me show you.”

He pointed to the panic-red of the control panel. Said, without a trace of regret, “It's too late.”

Xan turned Cade to him, squared their shoulders, drummed up one more smile.

“I know it feels important, not to die.”

Cade didn't smile. Deep inside of her, things snapped together. The words the scientists had given her. The meaning she would fill them with.

The purpose.

“We can do more than survive,” Cade said.

Xan's smile flashed wide.

“Right.”

Cade felt acceleration in the hole-suck. The event horizon loomed close. The sad part was that Xan would fall in thinking they understood each other perfectly.

But Cade couldn't spend her last breath on him. Before she crossed the line, she reached out to Renna and her friends onboard and anyone who might be able to listen—in ships, on planets, strangers, her mother, anyone—and sent one wild, simple thought.

Help.

Cade reached so far, so hard, that she found all of her friends in a single burst of thought, their songs all working at once, separate from each other and at the same time sliding into harmony. But it didn't stop there. Beyond them, she felt other minds, thousands, far off but bright, a waiting sea of stars.

The line between space-black and hole-black rushed to meet the ship. Cade tamped her helmet down just as Xan opened the hatch. He grabbed her hand and leapt them into the dark.

Cade flew through sheets and sheets of black, the perfect black of sleeping. Before-birth, after-death black, and just as she was starting to loosen to it she felt a new miracle and—slammed into the light.

 

Gold.

That's what it was inside.

Gold and warmth and closeness.

Things were falling to a perfect point in the distance. Light, ships, bits of stars. And motes of cosmic dust, billions of them, fired to brilliance by the light. Falling, slow and fast at the same time. Like Cade imagined snowflakes—plummeting from a winter-pure sky and then swirling on drafts. Never seeming to touch ground.

Cade swam at the edge of it all. Looked down and saw her outline doused in gold. It was hard for her to understand herself as the same girl who had left a seedy club on Andana.

She looked at Xan. He floated at her side, holding her hand. Soon she wouldn't have a hand to hold but he would be there, always there. He sent her the most beautiful thoughts—thoughts like music, thoughts that moved and flowed through her, with meaning that no words could contain.

But the best thought of all belonged to Cade.

Now we'll never be alone.

So when the darkness crept in, like an ink stain, pooled and reaching, Cade almost swam away from it. Toward the center of the black hole. She almost forgot that she didn't
want
to be in this golden place.

The universe curled its dark fingers toward her.

Cade didn't understand. Now that she was in the black hole she was in it for good. Nothing could cross that line and leave. Even her thoughts could move faster than the speed of light only if they were entangled thoughts, meant for Xan.

Still, the blackness inched.

What's happening?
Xan looked at her, leaking concern. Cade wanted to tell him that she had no idea, but it wasn't true. Because now she remembered.

This was what she'd asked for. Help.

Specifically, Gori.

Cade must have touched his mind. There hadn't been time to be careful—to wait for an invitation. She had breached his thoughts, but this time Gori hadn't tried to kill her. This time, he'd done the opposite. He had aligned himself with dark energy, used his influence to expand the universe in the right direction at the right rate to nudge the event horizon. He had crafted this moment, so she could live.

Cade fell farther into gold, but the darkness swelled just behind it. It came for her, and this time she answered its difficult call. She reached for it with one gravity-crushed hand and tugged on Xan's fingers with the other. He tugged back.

It's beautiful here,
she thought,
but we have work to do.

Cade sent him strength.

Come with me.

She sent him all of her sureness.

It's the right thing. Don't make me go without you.

Xan's eyes were wild, the whites tinted gold.

If Cade left him and went on her own, the Noise might stream into her head and take his place. She could be trapped with it forever, a truly broken radio. The one frequency she needed—gone.

Even if the Noise left her alone, that's what she might be for the rest of her life without him. Alone. Cade had never been able to connect before Xan. What if she couldn't do it without him there? To understand her complicated snarls of feeling? To fill her on the empty nights?

But the worst part of leaving Xan would be the one she couldn't fit into words. It tore through Cade, ruthless and complete as a final chorus.

How much she would miss him.

She looked over at Xan as he plummeted. He was falling, even though he seemed to float, and he wore a smile as he went down. Stretched his arms wide, pressed his eyes open to take in as much of this dense, black-shelled paradise as he could. In the whole time she had been entangled with him, she'd never felt something like this radiating from Xan. An emotion that wasn't tinged with fear, doubt, disappointment, or pain. He was the same person, transposed into a different key. He was all major chords here. All beaming and bright.

The darkness came again and reached for Cade.

Stay.

Xan asked with his thoughts, and with his light-drenched eyes. The word carried her from the edge of the black hole back to him. The tide of darkness washed in weaker each time. Soon it would ebb too far and Cade would be left to the gold, and an endless future with the boy she had promised to save.

Stay,
Xan asked.

And she almost said
yes.

But her mind stretched back, toward the others she had left behind. The ones on the ship. The ones scattered on planets, waiting. Xan couldn't fill all of those spaces now that Cade had opened them.

The darkness made one last, feeble push. Gori could only change the universe for her so much. Cade fought to still herself against the pull of the black hole. When the black rushed up again, she was ready.

Xan's fingers eased out of hers. His thoughts faded. He kept falling into the gold.

Cade let him go.

 

The rest of it was rush and blur—the blink from light to dark, like a full-body switch had been flipped. Gravity tried to screech Cade back into the black hole; it wouldn't give her up without a fight. The event horizon slid away from her body with wrenching slowness. It was minutes-that-felt-like-millennia before Renna inched close and sent Cade a lifeline.

Then she was onboard.

With the sound of familiar voices all around her. First Lee, then Rennik and Ayumi, then all of them in a round.

Is she all right?

Is she breathing?

Cadence, say something.

The whole universe pinched to sound, because her eyes couldn't focus. Someone carried her into the small hidden bedroom and it beat like Cade's heart, only slower, until she fell asleep.

 

Cade woke up with faces over her.

“You!” Lee attack-hugged her and Cade felt all of her organs, one at a time.

“Yeah,” Cade said. “It's me.”

Except that it felt like only half of her.

Lee pulled back and Cade looked up at the grouping of Rennik, Ayumi, and Gori around the bunk. She settled on Gori, who was staring.

“Thank you.”

He sent Cade a blast of cosmic thought—the rush of starlight and sphere-music so sudden and brilliant that it popped her ears.

Ayumi sat at the foot of Cade's bed, crowding her toes. “You look wonderful for someone who's come out of a black hole. Not that I've seen someone come out of a black hole. I wasn't even sure a human
could,
to be honest in a painful sort of way.” She pulled a notebook—the tiniest one Cade had seen yet—out of one of her pockets. “Which reminds me, do you think I could ask you—”

“—a few questions?” Cade finished. “Yeah. But maybe later.”

Rennik, looking at least a foot too tall for the room, stooped down and set a plate of still steaming breakfast on her lap. She looked up at him. The words were a scrape of vocal cords.

“Egg dish?”

Rennik cut a glance at Lee. “Someone told me it was your favorite.”

Lee did her best to look innocent while Cade laughed.

Rennik bent in and smoothed a wrinkle on her pillow. “I'm glad you made it back, Cadence.” She listened close, and thought she heard more under the polite skin of those words, but she couldn't be sure. For now, it was enough that Rennik had said
I
instead of
we.

Cade had more she wanted to tell Rennik, Lee, all of them. But it hurt to talk—not just because her body was recovering from exposure to an absurd amount of gravity.