Unmade (18 page)

Cade peeled back, in the grip of a new fear. “Does Renna get jealous?”

“She's going to love this,” Rennik said. “It will give her a whole new set of reasons to sulk and disagree with me.”

Cade laughed. She felt a double pull—toward the new fleet, toward Rennik—but for the first time in months, it wasn't too much. Cade let herself feel the future directions and the present. Every warm and skin-sweet thing about the present.

“Really,” Rennik said, not breaking his hold on her. “I should set the course to meet
Everlast.
”

“Good,” Cade said, fake-inspecting him. “I wouldn't want you to stop being Rennik just because we're—”

“What?” Rennik asked, in a tone that bordered on flirty. Universe help them, Rennik was being
flirty.

“Because we're together,” Cade said.

She broke from the circle of his arms and walked off to an inner beat. A new confidence lived in her hips, pulsed in her fingers. It felt as good as any kiss, to know that she could walk away from him and he would be there when she got back.

Survivors filled the control room, taking spins in the starglass to see all the ships. They filled the mess with excited new talk. What jobs they might hold on
Everlast.
The people they hoped to reunite with.

Ayumi stood at the center of a group of survivors, talking louder and brighter than anyone else. As soon as she noticed Cade, she burst out of formation and ran, sweeping up both of Cade's hands.

“I need to take the shuttle out.”

Dark spots floated through Cade's brain. “I thought you didn't need to run that mission anymore.” The song had worked—the show had decided it. There was still hope to cure spacesick here, with the fleet.

Ayumi dragged out her words. “I'm not sure about that.” She abruptly switched tracks, filling with the quick swell of happiness that comes before tears. “Right now I need to meet the survivors from Rembra.”

Cade felt stupid and selfish and fumbled out a quick, “How many?”

Ayumi wore her tears like a badge of pride. “Every damn one.” Her inner note-taker kicked in and she added, “Four hundred and ninety-six.”

It was the first good number Cade had heard in a long time. “Of course you can go.”

Ayumi didn't drop her claim on one of Cade's hands. She ran, almost skipping, for the dock. “You need to meet them, too! That's a big percentage of your fleet!” Cade let herself be dragged through the hold, into the flight cabin. She let Ayumi's happiness flood through her battered gates.

Cade sat in the nav chair of the shuttle, Ayumi's paintings of space all around. Earth stretched along the wall over her shoulder, blue and green and calm. Ayumi warmed the shuttle into flight mode and slid it away from Renna. They were half-detached from the ship when her eyes thickened and her body cut out. She had gone full spacesick.

Cade snatched the controls. Rage almost crashed her system—not because Ayumi had put Cade's life at risk again, but because there were so many people who didn't know what they were signing on for when Ayumi took the pilot's chair.

Cade got Rennik on the com and had him lead her into the dock, one metal-crunch at a time. When Ayumi came back, gasping, Cade was ready to fling the whole sour truth in her face. But Ayumi was already mid-babble. “I have to go. I have to go. I have to—”

“We'll meet the Rembrans later.” Ayumi's explosion of nerves forced Cade to be the calm one, which made her even angrier. “We'll get to them after we rendezvous with
Everlast.
Your people aren't going anywhere.”

“No,” Ayumi said. “But I am.” She stood up, stacking and restacking notebooks with frantic energy, not even looking as she smashed the covers, shedding loose paper. “I have to run the planet-finding mission
now.
”

“You can't,” Cade said, pulling Ayumi out of the pilot's chair, ordering her hands to be gentle. “Not if you're glassing out like this.”

Ayumi slammed a stack of notebooks down in front of Cade. “That's
why
I have to run it. Does that not make sense to you?”

Cade pushed Ayumi away, double-handed. “Setting you loose to die? No, it doesn't really make sense.” But Cade's anger was like fire in a vacuum—a twisting burst, then gone. “Please.”

Ayumi breathed for what might have been the first time since the glass broke. She gathered herself into the strong, shoulders-back posture that she saved for special occasions, when she knew she was going to get what she wanted. “This shuttle belongs to the Earth-Keeper of Rembra, and I'm the last one there is. If I can help us to a new . . .”

Cade flashed her eyes wide, daring Ayumi to use the word
home.

“. . . place to live, I have to do it.”

Ayumi's confidence held, but Cade wasn't done. She knew something that could stop the mission, and keep her friends safe, while she worked on a cure. She wouldn't sacrifice them to a random glass-out or an unworthy planet. Not to anything. Cade marched straight across the dock and bellowed into the guts of the ship: “Lee!”

The sound didn't stop the celebrations in the main cabin, but Lee poked her head around the corner of the mess. It looked like she had been turning old boxes into confetti. Specks of it littered her hair.

“What?” A whoop came from behind her, and she turned like it was a hand pulling her back to the party.

Cade's voice was stronger. “There's something you need to know.”

Ayumi caught up. Cade had promised not to tell her secret to anyone, including Lee,
especially
Lee. But what if Ayumi was one good fit away from glassing out forever? What if she planted Lee face-first into an asteroid when she did? Lee was the sort of person who liked to know the risks. As soon as she did, she'd recalculate and make the right decision.

“What is this little sour-fest about?” Lee asked.

“I'm sorry,” Cade whispered to Ayumi. She never should have promised to keep this secret. It had gotten too big, and she couldn't hold it anymore.

Ayumi shook her head once and ran, leaving Lee and Cade alone. Cheers from the party rose around them like flames.

“Ayumi. She's . . .” Lee tracked Cade with hard eyes. She was taking the whole thing seriously now. “Ayumi's spacesick.”

Lee didn't say anything for a full minute, and Cade wondered if Lee didn't believe her. What if she chose denial, or a lie from Ayumi?

But it was worse than that. Lee pressed her lips to a numb white, and when she finally spoke, the words were double-coated in disappointment and scorn. “You think I don't know that the girl I'm in love with is spacesick?”

“You . . . what?”

“I pay attention, Cade.” This was what freefall must feel like. Heart-loose, nerve-spreading. “
Of course
I know she's spacesick,” Lee muttered as she headed toward the line of the dock. And then she turned back.

“Here's the best part. So am I.”

Cade kept falling.

She stumbled through celebrations, looking for a quiet place to sit, far from the dock where Lee and Ayumi sped through the last of their preparations to leave. They were back to smiling at each other in less than a minute.

Mira flitted in and out of Cade's radius, but Cade brushed her off. When she passed Rennik in the crowd, his happiness looked out of place, like a word in the wrong language. Cade skimmed over his eyes and kept moving. The common room was almost empty, except for Cade's mother, resting on pillows.

Cade shoved a stack of cushions aside and fit herself in a wall panel, where it was quiet and close and she could work out a way to get Lee and Ayumi to stay. And maybe not hate her, as a bonus. But keeping them safe came first.

The sludge of half-formed ideas was so deep that it took Cade a full minute to figure out Renna was shaking. The vibrations knocked Cade to the side, forcing her teeth into a violent chatter.

“What is it?” Cade asked, fitting an absent-minded hand to the wall. It bunched under her fingers.

“Renna?”

And just like that, the ship stopped talking to her.

Cade shifted the panel and crossed the common room to the main cabin. In the space of a few minutes, the room had emptied. Torn bits of off-white confetti littered the floor like chips of bone. The lights flickered, then returned to their normal brightness. Cade called up to the control room.

“Everything all right up there?”

Silence filtered down. Perfect silence-particles.

Cade didn't move as fast as she should have, but the silence worked like amber; it slowed and trapped her. When she hit the control room, it all rushed her at once.   

Cade saw the ships.

The starglass exploded with them. The gentle, trailing movement of the fleet had scattered into bright shards. In the kaleidoscope crash of light and dark, Cade saw the repeated shape of a palm.

An attack.

But that was impossible.

There couldn't be an attack. Before, the Unmakers had known where to find the human race. There had been charts and maps, cities and towns that everyone knew about. Obvious places to hit. This time, Cade had been careful to gather her fleet in a vast nowhere, a nameless tract of space.

This wasn't right.

Cade should have defaulted to the fear of losing her friends, or braced for the sudden end of her own life, but she was distracted by something incredible happening.

The fleet was fighting back.

Everlast
had chipped the rust off their ship-to-ship cannons and was making the most of the missile power. And the newer, smaller ships weren't cowering behind it. They had been rigged to fire from their blast-wipers.

Cade shook her head, like there was something half-buried in her brain. She'd heard these plans before. Her focus settled on Lee, at the control panels, working the com as hard and fast as she could.

“This was you,” Cade said. “You armed the fleet.”

“With help from
Everlast,
” Lee said without looking back at Cade.

The enemy ships flew fast, hissing projectiles, yet whenever the fleet scored a direct hit, they broke apart like toys. The Unmaker defenses were particle-thin. Taking out most of the humans had been as easy as dropping a load of bombs, and now the human fleet had one thing on its side: they were underestimated.

Lee stood at the control panels, the plan to leave on Ayumi's shuttle dropped and forgotten. She rattled directions, and cargo ships and shuttles slid in and out of formations. Ship after Unmaker ship came undone.

Cade should have listened to Lee, should have heeded the words she didn't want crammed in her brain—this will come down to a fight.

“What can I do?” Cade asked.

“Get in the starglass,” Lee said. “Call out the positions of Unmaker ships.”

Cade rushed into the light-streaked blackness and spun, but she couldn't focus with so much exploding around her. Ships crossed Renna's path from all directions. The dramatic spark-and-shadow of the lighting made it even harder to tell what was going on.

“One at thirty-five degrees,” Cade said.

Renna spun, not toward the ship but away, pulling it behind her. The pickup in speed jolted the control room. Renna aimed down a clear path and slammed toward the nearest bit of space-rock, looping a series of complicated ducks and turns. When the Unmaker ship tried to follow, it clipped the side of the rock. Crashed and spun out.

“All right!” Lee cried. “We've got some brass in us yet!” An echo of cheers and shouts rose from the crew.

But Renna, for all of her defenses, didn't have a single weapon to tilt at the Unmakers. “We have to get her out of here,” Rennik said.

Renna roared her disagreement.

“She wants to help,” Lee said.

Mira, who had tucked herself unnoticed into a corner, threw up all over the floor. Renna tried to comfort her, but she couldn't siphon too much energy from the battle. Mira was left to run away from the mess she'd made.

Cade wanted to tell the girl everything would be fine, but that could very well be a lie, so she didn't know if she'd be able to say it and sound any degree of convincing. Then the view in the starglass changed, and grabbed her attention by the throat.

“There's a ship,” she said. It shot around them too fast for her to give a solid location. “It's closing in.”

Lee jumped into the starglass with Cade.

“There,” Cade said.

Lee ran a hand through her wild hair. “I see it,” she said. “What in the name of every hell
is
that?”

It was different from the others—not a palm, but a raised triangle, like a dark arrow. Fear pulsed out of Cade and Lee, slid their heartbeats into the same tight rhythm.

“It's on us,” Cade said.

A waterline of panic rose in Lee's dark eyes. “Go,” she whispered to Renna. “Get clear of this, and don't listen to anyone who tells you different. Including me.”

Cade and Lee shouted out the ship's position, eye-measuring distances. The dark arrow moved in a slick-fast, erratic flight pattern, almost impossible to track. Its black metal rendered it near invisible, and Cade lost it from moment to moment. She had to wait for the rare times when it stole light from a nearby ship or a far-off star.

Renna flew faster than fast, but she had gotten herself tangled in the thick of the fight, and getting out would mean serious flying. She wove an impressive pattern between the human ships, aiming to quit the field and shake the dark arrow at the same time.

Rennik talked to her, low, fast, and constant. He urged her on and tried to keep her anxieties in check. More than Renna, he was the one Cade worried about. He was the one whose calm focused into a hard point.

“There's something about that ship,” Lee said. “I don't see what's coming out of it. No projectiles.”