Unmade (2 page)

“Fine,” Ayumi supplied. She was Lee's partner now, and Cade had to admit, with a minor twinge, that they made as brass a team as Lee and Cade ever had.

Lee uncocked her leg. Sank into a deep crouch.

“It wasn't until we packed up and headed back to the shuttle,” Lee said. “A commotion broke out, I'd say a six on the ruckus scale, and then . . . scraps! All around us! Someone ripped the pack from my hands, and you know I wasn't going to stand for that. I fought my way to the edge of the crowd. The pack was in the dirt, just lying there—”

“It felt wrong,” Ayumi said, shaking hard against the dock frame. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Ayumi's fear hit Cade with the rip-and-ebb of an electric sound wave. All she could offer was awkward comfort of the flutter-pat variety, but she started across the cabin. Lee was already halfway there.

“Hey.” Lee ran her hands down Ayumi's arms, and Ayumi focused. Cade didn't think she noticed Lee dropping blood into the space between them.

“I wouldn't let those slummers hurt you,” Lee said. “You know that, right?”

“I'm strong,” Ayumi blurted.

“Of course you are,” Lee said.

“I'm capable,” Ayumi added, and Cade had to agree. Ayumi hovered in the region of scary-smart, and she knew how to fly. Of course, there was the little matter of her spacesickness, which only Cade knew about. “Today was just—”

“Wrong,” Lee said. Ayumi nodded. “If you say it was, then I believe it was. So it double was.”

Ayumi needed the calming down. She had more than earned it. Cade had no right to shoulder into the moment. But—

“I think I found her.”

Lee broke out of the dock frame and pulled Ayumi. She had one arm around the shaking girl, and she put the other around Cade.

“That's brilliant!”

The words were right and the smiles were warm, but there had been a vastness to Cade's good feeling when she first saw Res Minor. It had swelled her cells to the bursting point. She needed more than smiles.

“So we hit the surface,” Lee said. “Right? I'll prep the ship if you're ready.”

Cade needed a wisp of her mother's song to follow, to make sure they put down in the right spot, but she couldn't sit still and wait for it.

“Right,” she said. “Ready.”

Lee and Ayumi headed for the shuttle, and Lee called back. “Tell Rennik.”

Heat and pressure, everywhere. Cade still hadn't told Lee about what had happened in Hades, with Rennik. But she felt the held-in story through the low curve of her back, climbing hot up her neck.

“Right,” she said.

She crossed the main cabin to his door. Knocking should have been as simple as hitting a downbeat.

Rennik had been there with Cade in the first days after the black hole, always there, looming tall and letting his nerves show through the hardened ice of his patience. He had administered the injections that smashed through Cade's system, leaving her all muscle-scream and blistered with strange fevers. He'd sat with her for hours and told her worn-in stories of when he and Renna first sailed the universe.

Then he had all but disappeared.

But the texture of the time they'd spent together—minutes thickened with long stares—had sunk into Cade. She let it rise now, never thinking that the door would open and she would be caught with Rennik so obviously on her mind.

He turned on a heel and headed back into the room like that had been the plan the whole time.

Maybe he was hoping that Cade would scurry to some safer place on the ship and pretend it had never happened. But she waited him out. Rennik made a show of calm to cover the impulse-burst, shifting papers across his desk.

Cade had seen the rivered muscles of his back close enough to fit her fingertips to them. Now anything else felt far, far, far.

“Hey,” she said, running in—until there was no more room to run and Rennik had to face her.

The features that had been striking-strange the first time Cade saw them formed a well-known map. The sharp rise of his cheekbones, eyebrows, chin. The smoothness of the rest. His gray-brown eyes and hair set against the cool nonhuman tint of his skin. At the center of it were double pupils so dark they should have been another black-hole tumble. But since Rennik was Rennik, she never felt like she was sliding away from herself.

In fact, Cade's personality doubled when faced with Rennik's calm brand of reason, and at the moment that meant twice as much frustration. He gave her one of his best smiles, like he hadn't been avoiding her for weeks.

Like he hadn't just spun a frantic circle at the sight of her.

“Cadence?” he asked.

“Hey,” she said. Again.

Unlike with most people, she knew what she wanted to say to Rennik. She just didn't know if she
should.
Words raced, faster than the eager slide of her blood. Cade told him the smallest thing she could find, because letting out one word more would drag the rest with it.

“We're getting the shuttle ready,” she said.

“It's Res Minor, isn't it.” Rennik didn't sound excited, or disappointed. He didn't sound anything at all. But Cade knew the signs: the pull of skin at his temples, the overstretched fingers.

Rennik was nervous.

Cade had gotten better at reading him, so she should have been able to figure out if the kiss she'd pressed on him in Hades had been more than an impending-doom-fueled mistake.

“Yeah,” she said. “Definitely Res Minor.”

“I can't go down there.” Rennik's long four-knuckled fingers swirled a pen through the air. “Not in a capacity that will do you any good. The Hatchum have been on poisonous terms with Res Minor for centuries.”

“So I'll go alone.”

Rennik stopped the pen, mid-swirl.

“Lee and Ayumi have an Express drop, and I'm not asking them to cancel again. And you can correct me if I have this wrong, but I don't think Gori leaves the ship. At least, not bodily.”

Rennik took his time and considered. “Do me a favor?” He put the pen down and set his fingertips against the wall. “Don't put yourself into danger if you can help it.”

“Unfair,” Cade said. “That's one thing I can't promise. I put us all in danger, just by having these particles.” This topic had played out during her recovery—different verses and variations, but it all ended up sounding the same. The Unmakers had been successful in deleting Xan from the universe, and now they wanted the other half of the entangled pair. Cade couldn't stop them from wanting her. They would find her, like they had found Moira. The girl Rennik used to love.

Cade needed to stop thinking about Moira. Wondering about Moira. Worrying about whether she was too much like Moira, or not enough. The Unmakers were easier to focus on. They wanted to kill her.

“We've been on the move for seven weeks,” Cade said. “No sign of them.”

She couldn't find the Unmakers in the song, either. Their being human meant they were woven in there, somewhere, but no matter how late Cade stayed up, picking at the song like an over-worried knot, she couldn't tell how many Unmakers there were, or where to find them. For one reason: she didn't know what they sounded like.

But Cade knew Rennik. She didn't have to connect to him on a sub-everything level to know what was bothering him.

“You think I should stay onboard.”

The little room pulsed twice, like a tightly held hand. “I think the longer you go without being noticed, the more likely it is the Unmakers will forget this and move on.” Renna pulsed again. She was giving him strength. “At the same time, you're the only one who can locate your mother on the surface.” Cade would have to follow the song, which left Rennik to sit on the ship and wait up for her.

“So?” Cade asked.

She would go down to Res whether he wanted her to or not.

“Well,” he said.

She should have been able to leave the room.

Rennik looked up, and something inside Cade broke apart into music. “I think you should have what you need,” he said.

She knew that he was talking about her mother, but—

“What I need.” Cade traced the words with her lips. Tested them.

She needed what had happened in Hades to happen again. Cade reached for Rennik's arm, and found more than she'd asked for. He pulled her in with less-than-patient hands, lining her up to him. It felt perfect for a full measure. And then it felt safe. Cade tilted back. Turned her face up to him like sky.

Their lips fit together, found their own particular way of matching. Cade's skin was a shade warmer than his, and her breath came faster. She drove the kiss into crests. The universe started to split into sound, pound its needing strains, pour into her. And then—the notes Cade had been searching for sailed into her head, calling and clear.

“I can hear it,” Cade said, slipping out of Rennik's hands. “I hear her.”

He touched her cheek and tried to smile. “The next time we encounter trouble—the smallest potential for trouble—I want us to face it together.”

“Deal,” Cade said on her way out the door. She called back, “Don't spend all day worrying about me. I won't get hurt.”

The little ship broke through cloud after cloud. Cade held tight to her guitar case as Ayumi's shuttle went down.

“You sure you need that?” Lee asked.

“Yeah.” But the pile of reasons in Cade's head sounded shaky, and she didn't want to share. She had grabbed Moon-White so she could talk to her mother. If the woman blank-stared at Cade, or didn't believe the wild story about Cade being her daughter, the guitar might help. It was a language they both spoke.

“My mother used to play,” Cade said, hoping it was enough.

“Oh!” Ayumi said. “I wrote that down.” She turned from the work of piloting the shuttle to talk about her real love—scribbling things in her notebooks. “I wrote down everything we know about your mother. The color of her eyes. The instruments she can play.” Ayumi fiddled with a button that was probably best left un-fiddled with. “And. You know. That she's a—”

“Don't you need to focus on the landing?” Cade asked.

Ayumi clamped her mouth shut. Her cheeks went even rounder than usual.

Lee twisted in the nav chair. “Never been to this planet,” she said. “But I've heard things. Happy-type things.”

Lee tended to believe the worst about every place she put down. She catalogued the dangers, ticked off all the possible ways to die. It was part of her job. Lee was making a shining-brass effort for Cade, but she didn't want to know more about Res Minor until her feet hit the dirt.

Lee and Ayumi focused on navigating, in zero visibility, guided by coordinates that were based on a song in Cade's head.

Cade focused on white—a clean, fresh, unmarked planet.

She let the goodness of that lift her as the milky sky thickened and the ship fell into a dead plummet.

 

Ayumi's shuttle put down in a field. An honest-as-snug
field.
Grass, even if it wavered thin. Flowers, even if their petals spindled out from dry white centers. Ayumi jumped out of the ship and pressed one between the pages of a notebook before Cade and Lee caught up. They crossed the field on a wind that whipped up grating soil but also stuffed them full of oxygen. Cade breathed deep, air-starved.

“Don't ever tell Renna I said this,” Lee warned. “But there's nothing like a true lungful.”

The field gave onto neat alleys, and the alleys fed thin streets. Res Minor didn't boast a large human settlement, but it was well populated. Cade had never tried to shoulder through such a mass. People hurried and kept their heads down.

Lee and Ayumi sheered off when they hit the market. “Back at the ship before sunset,” Lee said.

Cade followed her mother's song alone. But she had plenty of company in her loneliness—a constant swap-and-swirl of humans, their songs so close they crowded out thought. Tempos rushed and spiking. Cade struggled to hold them all, to hear them without losing her mother's thread.

She ran in fits and bursts. The effort of listening almost cracked her mind into clean pieces. She cradled her skull as it split along lines that no one else could see. The song flicked down a wide street, around a corner, and then stopped.

She looked up and found herself within ten steps of a low building in gray stone.
Res Minor Home for the Old and Infirm.

Music bled out of the rectangle.

Cade rushed the stairs, her steps ringing staccato. She stopped at a desk in a tiled waiting room. The home—if you could call a box that smelled like a century's worth of urine and cleaning products a home—was staffed by men and women in green suits.

“And you are?” asked a man with a mild voice and thin fingers of hair that reached up into his cap.

“Here to see my mother,” Cade said.

“Name?”

Cade didn't know it. She should have plundered the records on Firstbloom, the lab station where her mother had dropped her as a baby. Too late.

“My name?” she asked, vamping for time. “Cadence.”

The man took in the torn hems of Cade's jeans. The trickled-out ends of her hair. Moon-White's case.

“I can smell the atmosphere on you,” he said. “You must have come a long way.” The man stepped close, inserting himself into Cade's space. No one else seemed to notice. Cade had no real love of fighting, not like Lee did, but if it came down to it, she would sweep the knees of the attendant and run.

“All right,” he said. “I'll let you in. But you should know, here on Res Minor, we stick around. Take care of our own.”

Cade didn't wait for permission. She took off the down the hall, and the man's thought-song followed. She didn't like the way it shivered as he watched her walk.

Now she wanted to sweep his knees just because.

But that would cause a ruckus, at least a four on Lee's scale, and her mother's song was close. Cade stopped outside a door three-quarters of the way down the hall. Here the music burned—a light left on to draw Cade through the dark, and call her home.