Unmade (29 page)

“My girl . . .”

Lee cradled Ayumi's bashed-in head. “Look,” Cade said, with a hand on Lee's arm. “Get medical, bring them here.” Lee nodded, no questions. All of the hurt she had pointed at Cade was gone. “Don't move her. I'll go and—”

But Cade didn't reach the end of her plan before Lee's eyes melted to glass. She slumped on the bed, into a nest of darkening stains.

There was nothing Cade could do to soothe a spacesick fit now. Music meant she had to summon focus, and every bit of hers reached out past the small cabin, wrapped around the woman who had done this.

Cade checked Ayumi's chest three times to make sure that she was breathing, and ran. The long hall gave her a present in the form of Mira, far off but skipping fast in Cade's direction.

“Can I get back in?” she asked, nodding at the room, “or are you still busy not inviting me?”

Cade grabbed both of Mira's wrists. “
Don't
go in there.”

Mira took in Cade's stain-patched clothes, the cloud of nerves and fear that spread around her. “What happened? Cade?” Mira rattled her hands, and a shock traveled up Cade's arms. “Hey!”

Cade deliberated. Mira was light on her feet. She could reach any spot on the ship faster than Cade. Every second of medical attention gave Ayumi a better chance, so it came down to whether or not she trusted Mira with Ayumi's life.

“Cade?” Mira asked.

“Run to the sick bay,” Cade said. “Now. Get everyone. And I don't mean whoever is on duty or agrees to go with you. Get
everyone.
”

There wasn't even time for Mira to agree before she spun around, and was gone.

Cade headed for the docks. Rennik would have gotten there too early, and anyone else would get there too late. She had to do this part herself.

There were two shuttles missing, besides the ones that had been signed out by fleet members. Unmother must have set the first one loose into deep space before she disappeared back into the walls.

The second one was out there, now.

Cade made it through the hold in less than a breath and dropped into the pilot's seat. Every inch of the shuttle screamed Ayumi, pressing down on Cade's guilt and pain. But she had picked the ship for a reason. It was the only one she'd ever really flown.

She punched the controls forward, and the shuttle left the side of
Everlast
with a flash of speed so fierce that if Cade hadn't been strapped in, she would have sailed through the window. She drove the shuttle harder than she had ever driven a guitar, but her flight skills were amateur at best.

The lights of another ship blinked in front of Cade, sick-yellow, dotting a line toward Unmaker territory.

Catching up wasn't an option, so Cade tried to stop Unmother with sound, attacking her like she had with that slummer on Andana. A mess of notes
spilled out from her head, reminding Cade of the Noise that used to make its home in her brain.

The shuttle in front of Cade slowed, twisting a dizzy curve. Cade had Unmother in her reach—but she couldn't keep producing sound and fly the shuttle at the same time. The controls danced in her hands, and the cabin sputtered.

She had to turn around and get back to
Everlast
before Unmother figured out she had lost control. Cade clunked the ship in a half circle and hit the com. It was easy to hail one of the fleet's ships. Unmother had no choice but to listen.

“You should know you failed,” Cade said with a hard bite. “You should know that I'm alive, and so is my friend.”

The com erupted with the sound of Unmother breathing. Cade wanted to get her hands around that slender throat.

She stole the woman's words and offered them back to her. “We will stay alive. On gristle. And hope.”

Cade closed her eyes tight, to stop herself from shaking. But her mind was open, undefended.

A thought-song slipped in.

It stripped her down to her nerves. It was dissonance and drive, straight-ahead rhythms and ugly notes.

Unmother had a song now, woven thick and tight.

Strands of hate.

Set against the bed in medical, Ayumi looked small and clean and quiet. Her red-soaked clothes had been cut off and she wore a plastic sheet, with plastic tubes crossed over it. The blood in the tubes, the pumping and pulsing, made it seem like Ayumi's life had been lifted out of her body and was suspended above her.

“They think she might wake up,” Lee said. She sat the closest she was allowed, a slice left clear around the bed for the shuffling of a nurse. Cade dragged a chair and sat next to Lee. “They think she might wake up, but they're not sure, and even if she does, it could be . . . well, besides the blood she lost, there was the bashed-in skull. So they don't know what it will be until she wakes up.

“Sorry. If. If.”

Lee snatched Cade's hand and gripped it, bone-tight. Cade hadn't let herself feel how much she'd missed Lee until now. She still wasn't letting herself feel how much she would miss Ayumi.
If.

Lee fired out of the chair, all angles and energy. “I have to get back to the control room.” When Cade shot her a soft question of a look, Lee added, “I got better before anybody showed up.” So the spacesick fit was a secret, and Lee would stay out of the bay, for now.

“I shouldn't have left you there,” Cade said. She hadn't even thought to stay and guard Lee against having her secret found out. There was a whole spectrum of ways to fail people.

“Are you kidding me?” Lee asked, leaping onto her toes like she always did when she had a heroic story to retell. “You went after Unmother on your own, full out. A girl who can't fly to save her own life, smashing through the black! I would have done the same thing. You know. If I could have.”

Lee pressed a soft kiss onto the paper that covered the back of Ayumi's tube-fed hand. She touched the thick screen of cuts on Ayumi's face. No matter how much she healed, she would be different. But when Cade closed her eyes, Ayumi's song was the same, slow and deep, and fully threaded with Lee's.

“You know they'll find someone to cover if you want to stay here,” Cade said.

“I have to get back,” Lee said. “Keep busy. Do something.”

Cade got the feeling that no matter where Lee went, her song would be here.

The nurse needed space, so Cade moved to the small pocket of a waiting room. Mira was sleeping on one of the chairs in a tight ball.

“How long has she been sitting there?” Cade asked a nurse.

The man's smile was tired, but he couldn't keep it from rising, like a heavy sun. Mira had that effect on people. “She delivered the message about your friend, and then we couldn't get her to budge.”

Cade sat. As soon as Mira felt someone land in her space, she rustled herself awake, so efficient that Cade felt sure it had been part of her training.

“You saved Ayumi's life,” Cade said.

Mira shifted back and forth on folded legs. “Maybe.”

She was using the word as a buffer to keep herself from believing, which only showed how much she wanted her own goodness to be true.

Cade put an arm around Mira's shoulder, but she shrugged away. “I don't think I should let you do that anymore,” she said.

“What?” Cade asked.

“Be nice to me.”

Cade looked down at her hands. “You don't think you deserve it.”

“It's more than that.” Mira picked at the hard plastic coating of the chair, teasing it into new shapes. “It was part of the plan. Unmother said to let you take care of me. She said you would want to.”

Cade hated that Unmother had been right about her so many times. “What made her think it would go like that?”

The plastic coating burst under the pressure of Mira's nail. She hurried to hide the little hole under her palm.

“Nobody ever took care of you.”

 

The docks beckoned, and so did the need to book a flight to the spacesick bay. A visit to Cade's mother would mean another round of empty hope, and well-earned disappointment. But it didn't feel right to log so much time with Ayumi and pretend her mother was out of reach.

Cade figured she would be able to catch a shuttle, spend a quarter of an hour in the bay, and make it back before her next shift in the control room. As she approached the docks, an
Everlast
guard swept across in a strict line, marking the boards that hung on the wall at the side of each dock.

“All non-essential flights are canceled,” he said. “
All
non-essential flights.”

Cade ran up to the man, locking her legs into the stance that told him she was someone important in the fleet.

“What's this about?” Cade asked.

But he didn't have to answer;
Everlast
told her instead. The ship wavered under Cade's feet, then knocked her off them. Groans flickered, irregular and weak, like dying lights. A woman who had landed near Cade's elbow let out a flaring scream as the ship rocked again.

The guard spoke from his place clinging to the boards.

“It's starting.”

 

The control room heaved with the weight and activity of a doubled set of crew members. Zuzu and a few others ran around in sleep clothes and unlaced boots, shaken out of their beds by the constant knuckling of fire on the hull.

“Fill me in,” Cade said, sliding in at the overcrowded control panel between Lee and June.

“Nothing to fill,” Lee said, focused on the blips of yellow and red outside the window. “Just a little unfriendly fire.”

“No word from the Unmakers?” Cade asked. She knew how much Unmother loved to send a message.

“Nothing,” June said, but she tossed all the com switches to open positions to make sure they weren't missing it.

The panel was a muddle of hands, the floor thick with unsure feet. No matter how well they thought they planned for a crisis, disorder crept in as soon as the bombs hit. Cade ran to Matteo, who circled the room with a calm stride, handing out tasks like cards from an endless stack.

“Did they cross the line?” Cade asked.

“Only a few ships. The serious power is still on their side.” He leaned over the shoulder of a fleet member who had his hands on the controls of a live cannon. “Divert more fire to U4, port side.”

“Their pilots know our setup now,” Lee said, dogging Cade's heels. “It's Evasion 101 out there.”

“I am concerned about that,” Matteo said, like it was a problem he'd been studying in a dust-laden book of maneuvers from three hundred years ago. “But I believe that if we change our patterns, we can still catch them by surprise. The real issue is what happens when it comes to a boarding.”

“We used to have the upper hand,” Lee said. “Until that woman slithered through the whole ship and . . .” Lee went so tense that Cade worried she would snap—the sort of break that there was no coming back from.

Zuzu cracked the tension by fluttering a stack of paper over her head. “New defensive protocols for everyone!”

Lee grabbed one and tossed herself into an open chair, pushing her worries into the buttons and dials. Cade followed her lead. She went back to work, her body on an auto-course, until Mira tapped her arm. The strange jitter of her fingertips told Cade an important truth, without Mira having to say it.

She had intel.

Cade pulled her aside. “What is it?”

Mira adjusted Cade to her level and channeled words into her ear. Fast, erratic, uninflected.

“Are you sure?” Cade asked.

Mira dropped into a flat, careful listening mode. “They're repeating it now, to make sure I got the whole thing.”

Cade nudged Mira to the central point of command, and told her to repeat what she'd heard to the entire control room.

“The Unmakers are on the attack,” Mira said three times, shedding a little bit of shyness with each bump in volume. “Hey!” Heads snapped, attention sharpened. “They're on the attack, but they're going to regroup soon. They'll leave a thin line of defense and collect most of the ships in one place to lure us in. They know we went for the same sort of thing last time. Now they're using it as bait. The whole thing's a trap.”

Matteo paused in his rounds. He looked from Mira to Cade, then back again, stubbing his fingers through his gray-touched hair. “What's the source of this information?”

Cade hunted for a lie, but before she found a half-decent one, Mira hitched herself tall and spoke.

“I was a spy.” The room went numb, the only sounds the click of controls and the patter of fire. “I worked for their side. Then I was a spy for us.” Faces melted with confusion before setting in new molds—shock, disgust, disbelief, a few acute cases of pity. Cade knew that Mira would hate the pity most.

The girl was like a shuttle on her first trip. She had launched into her speech fiery and brave, and now she jerked through the rest, ready to land and be done with it. “Mira isn't my name, or it wasn't, but you can keep using it, I don't mind. I thought about getting something new. Like Emily. That's a good name, I think.” She tamped her nervous energy into her hands. “But if I got rid of the old name, it would be like pretending the rest of it never happened, like trying to throw it away.” Mira stared at the point where her fingertips met. The biochip twitches had faded. “I can't do that.”

June approached the girl like she was a loaded gun, safety off. “You were a—”

“Spy.”

Cade slung an arm around Mira. “Anyone who wants to deal with that has to deal with me.”

The crew members looked at one another, trading discomfort. Lee strode up to Mira, arms tight across her chest. Mira took a breath and waited.

“You gave us intel last time, too,” Lee said. “You're how we caught that woman.”

Catching that woman had led to Ayumi, torn and silent. Catching that woman was the first step in Lee almost losing her—living with that possibility like needles embedded in her skin.