Unmade (12 page)

They made it to section 19, then the shop.

It was filled with Hatchum.

“Snug it,” Rennik said as he snatched back from the door. Cade had never heard him swear, and maybe it should have rattled her, but she couldn't help liking it. It reshaped his blank, beautiful face into an over-the-top expression. She found it strangely adorable.

Rennik steered Cade and Lee backwards, into the nook outside the door. It was a good thing the shop had actual walls, not just glass.

“Wait here.”

Lee primed herself to argue, but Rennik was right. Lee couldn't leave Cade alone to fend off the nonhuman crowds, and there would be no marching in the shop and telling the Hatchum that Cade was one of their kind.

Rennik flashed a look at Cade. “Don't get yourself into trouble.” He flashed a much more serious one at Lee. “Don't get her into trouble.” Then, with a robe whisk, he was in the shop.

“Don't worry,” Lee said, settling deep into the nook with Cade. “We've done business with this trader before.”

“Does he know about Rennik?” Cade asked.

“Of course. This fellow does a strong and shady business. He'll keep our secret to himself.” Lee punched the words to make them sound extra-true.

Conversation drifted out of the shop in a language Cade had never heard. It sounded basic. Unctuous. Like bites of raw meat. Lee stood within whisper-distance and translated into Cade's ear. “There are four others,” she said. “Ordering the same thing we are, for their orbitals. Well, they're ordering about as much for a year as Renna eats in ten minutes.”

Cade picked out the four other voices. Then the trader's, lower than the others.

A fifth voice.

“That's Rennik,” Lee said, as if Cade wouldn't know his voice anywhere, in any language. “He's ordering Renna's food. Now he's making some kind of excuse about going on a long trip to explain why we need a million pounds more than we should.”

The trader filled the orders for the other Hatchum first. They came out of the shop, orbitals spinning. It was like seeing four of Renna in miniature, each one so tiny Cade could have covered it with her palm.

As soon as Rennik was alone, the trader switched to English. Cade's sore brain thanked him, but Lee's face bleached the dirty white of bone. “That's as much as calling him a human-lover.”

The volume of the conversation dropped, and the trader's voice sounded like a scraped knee. “I heard there was a Hatchum running around this trading station in the company of a human girl. Now if I was that someone, I would be quick about changing my mind.”

“This is not good,” Lee muttered. “This is exactly as not-good as Ayumi said it would be.”

“What . . . and who . . . I carry, is none of your business,”

Rennik said in a soft tone, just this side of a threat.

“I thought you'd like to know.” Cade heard a false smile changing the way the trader shaped his words. “The other ones, the kind that wiped the humans clean, were in here a few days ago and I must tell you, I prefer their business. They're smarter, stronger, have much better sense than humans. No species in any system that wouldn't prefer them. It's why so many went back to finish the job.”

In that moment, the rest of the trading station didn't exist. Just Lee's hand, slipped into Cade's.

“What do you mean?” Rennik asked.

“Cleared up two problems at once, didn't it? No new fight on their hands, no humans crawling under their feet.”

So that was why Cade had only heard survivors on three planets. The original attacks were intense, but not enough to null and void whole cities. Not unless nonhumans went back for the survivors.

“That's sickening,” Lee said. “That's pure, utter sickness. That's . . .”

No word existed for how bad it was. But it wasn't the only thing that stuck wrong-side out in Cade's brain.

“They can't tell that the Unmakers are human?” she asked. “Really?” She had seen one under the robes, a small woman with red hair, nothing special about her.

“I don't know,” Lee said, with an empty shake of her head.

“It's a bunch of costumes,” Cade said. “It's an act.” But the disguises had fooled her for a long time. The Unmakers didn't act human, didn't talk like humans. Maybe there was something in it. Something that went deeper than metal voice boxes and costumes.

“It's a good thing I'm a bad sort,” the trader said, “or I wouldn't sell to you at all. But I need the money. And I must say, there's a bit more pleasure in taking it off the likes of you.”

Lee strained toward the door. Cade clamped her hand tight, held her in place, Lee's pulse leaping in her wrist. Her need to start a fight sat too close to the skin.

Rennik came out of the shop, moving fast. “It'll be loaded by the time we get back.” They turned the corners, hurrying down the same halls in reverse. Nonhumans stared at them, and more stopped to watch every minute.

By the time they made it back to the ship, they were running. The four Hatchum from the shop stood at a window not far from their dock, then stepped into the middle of the hall, stretching across it, forcing Rennik, Cade, and Lee to a stop.

“That's a nice piece of metal,” the tallest one said, in English. “Human-made?”

So Cade wasn't the only one who'd noticed.

Lee peeled back the blue skin-film at her neck, freeing her head from the Saea costume. “Why don't you ask me that again?”

“
Two
humans?” the tall one asked.

“You're making it even harder,” said the one at his right, with the brightest eyes. “Which do we kill first?”

“The quiet one.”

Cade's hands shot to her knives.

As Rennik stepped between her and the tall Hatchum, he loosened the collar of his shirt. Cade had never thought bells could sound threatening. “If it's Hatchum honor you're concerned with,” he said, “you kill me first.”

“He's right.”

Three of the Hatchum cornered Rennik, leaving the weakest-looking one to stand guard over Lee and Cade.

Lee smiled like she couldn't believe her luck.

Cade threw herself into motion, knives flashing as Lee sprang onto the back of one of Rennik's attackers. She toppled him, and Cade moved on to the third, barreling headfirst so that the surprise snugged his balance. She knocked him down again, this time cold. Lee claimed the fourth, who stood there too idiot-faced to defend himself. Rennik rushed to pull out his double blades, but by the time he'd balanced them in his hands, the last Hatchum had hit the floor.

 

Cade sat in the hold, cabbage-smell surrounding her, rank but soothing. Lee and Rennik talked back and forth in low voices. It was a short return flight, and the shuttle wasn't being followed. Those Hatchum would be out for hours, and no one else hated them enough to risk being killed by two human girls.

Rennik came back to the hold and double-checked the crates to make sure the trader hadn't stiffed them—not that there was any going back if he had.

“Do you mind if I . . . ?” He lifted a pinch of robe-cloth.

“Oh,” Cade said. “No.”

Rennik gathered his normal clothes and stood in the far corner of the hold, facing away. Cade knew that he hated the robes, but did he really need to make her watch this? She kept her eyes on her knees.

“Thank you,” Rennik said. No matter how hard she tried not to look, she caught a second of the muscle-shift in his back.

“For what?” Cade asked. “Saving your nonhuman skin?”

His shirt drank the sound of his voice as he pulled it on. “That,” he said, clearing the neck-hole. “And for making sure Renna doesn't spin out, or run out of fuel and spend the rest of her life half-buried in a desert.”

“I know what it's like to get stranded,” Cade said.

Rennik turned, dressed in a black shirt and stone-green pants, plain and comfortable. Instead of going straight back to the controls, he sat down on top of one of the crates, facing in her general direction.

“You don't have to thank me,” Cade said. “It wasn't all my choice.”

“But it comes down to you, Cadence.”

It was true. She felt the constant need to choose the right path for everyone. It kept Cade from Moon-White when she needed music. It broke her chances to be with Rennik. To be with anyone. The scientists had entangled her, the Unmakers had come after the people she loved, and she cared too much to turn her back.

So this was her life.

“I have to help. Renna, the people on these ships, even the ones on Andana. I can't let anyone else get hurt.”

It was Xan all over again.

No—that sounded off-key, even to Cade. Xan had chosen to be left behind. He had seen the universe, a small and twisted chip of it, but enough to make a choice. This was worse. The human race was having the choice made for them.

Cade's eyes flicked to Rennik and found a scratch at the corner of his mouth, sticky with blood. He must have gotten clipped by a fingernail. Or maybe a flying bell.

“You're hurt,” Cade said.

“Oh.” He put his hand up. “It's so small . . .”

Cade crossed the hold in a few steps and set a hand to the side of his face. “It's my fault,” she muttered, tracing the spot to one side of his lips. There was nothing she could do to help, and no reason to touch him except that she couldn't stop her fingers from doing it.

Cade hadn't meant to show that much. To let Rennik feel what she wanted—even if it was just one fraction of her overwhelming need. She couldn't do this. Cade had to give and give and give. When she asked for something back, the universe handed her bombed cities and spacesick mothers.

But Rennik didn't pull back from her hand. He closed his eyes, and his long eyelashes bent over his cheeks. “It's not your fault,” he said with a sun-warmed smile, though there was no sun in sight. “You're not the one who attacked me.”

“No,” Cade said. “I would have done a cleaner job.”

“There are Hatchum who can back up your claim,” Rennik said, “although I'm glad I'm not one of them.”

Whatever warmth Rennik was feeling reached Cade, and she laughed.

“Did I ever tell you about the time Renna and I got into a fight on Esk?”

Cade sat on top of the crate. There wasn't technically enough room for both pairs of hips, even though his were narrow.

“No,” she said. “I don't think I know that one.”

“This was before I met Lee, when Renna was hardly big enough for me to sit in the pilot's chair.”

And it was as if they were back in the days before the worlds started to end, when Cade was stuck in her sick bed and Rennik sat with her. When the universe shrank down to the size of a bedroom, and stayed that way for long enough that Cade had started to think Rennik might never leave her side.

He talked the whole flight, unfolding stories for her—ones she asked for, ones she never would have thought to request.

“Do you ever miss it?” she asked.

Rennik tapped his long fingers on his knees. “Miss what?”

“Home,” Cade said.

“Yes.” The answer surprised her. Rennik never spoke about Hatch.

But then Cade remembered why he'd been kicked out in the first place. Not for associating with humans, not just that. He had cared too much, drawing strong lines between him and the things he loved. Maybe that included Hatch itself.

“It's quite a place,” Rennik said, his eyes half squinting like he was looking at it in the distance, his cheeks tilted as if to catch a wind. “Most of the Hatchum live on plains, which sweep across to the cliffs, and the sea.”

“Hatch has a sea?”

“It has twelve of them. Each one a different shade of blue. Some are calm, some are furious, and some are both, at the same time.”

Cade thrummed with the need to see it. But they were both unwelcome on Hatch. Visiting Rennik's old home was one more item on the fast-growing list of things they would never do together.

“Tell me more about the sea,” Cade said.

Rennik told her about tides, about waves, about blue that bled into sky. At some point Cade closed her eyes, but Rennik knew she wasn't asleep. Cade trusted that he wouldn't stop talking.

As soon as the cabbage was unloaded and Renna had been fed, everyone's focus turned planet-side.

Cade hailed
Everlast,
which was about to run its rescue on Cass 12, and let them know to look out for nonhumans, in addition to the Unmaker threat. Matteo didn't seem like a natural fit for his new position, and Cade worried that he would back out of the mission as soon as she gave him the bad news.

But he listened quietly, and then said, “All the more reason to get to them now.”

Behind him, Cade heard Green and June fighting, and Zuzu shouting cannon-related instructions.

With the trading station behind them and Renna's course set, Cade and Ayumi attacked the mess. They laid out grain-mash and the last of the bin-hardened fruit, toasted bread, powdered milk, freeze-dried eggs.

“It'll give us strength for tomorrow,” Ayumi said. “To gather the survivors.”

Or to face down a fight.

But Lee, for once, didn't remind them how inevitable that might be. The crew ate with a minimum of talk, but it was a good quiet. Mira sat at one of Cade's elbows, and Lee did some hearty slurping near the other. Rennik smiled at Cade from across the table. A true calm settled over him instead of the Hatchum fakery of the trading station.

All around them, Renna digested with shivery delight.

Cade's food turned on her as soon as she stood up from the table. As she climbed the chute, her stomach twisted, and it tightened when she slid through the tunnel in the bedroom. She needed sleep even more than she'd needed a decent meal. But she sat at the lip of her bunk, feet on the floor.