Unmade (3 page)

The door pressed open into a small room. Empty shelves, bare floors, a chip of window that showed the last of the afternoon sun-melt.

A woman in the bed.

“Mom?”

Cade slammed into the edge of the mattress. The woman rested on an ancient slab of white, more wrinkle than sheet. Her body screamed out the truth. This was Cade's mother; she held too many echoes of Cade to be anyone else. The most obvious parts of Cade, the green eyes and the light brown skin, came from her father. But here were Cade's hands, here was the grain of her hair. Cade's mother stared, her brown eyes open. Her fingers were dead on the sheets, music drained.

Maybe Cade was the echo—the left-behind scrap of a beautiful sound that had been made a long time ago.

Her mother was spacesick.

Cade knew that. She'd known it for as long as she'd known that her mother might be alive. But when she had forced herself out of the black hole, she had needed it not to be true. Besides. Her mother's song had been perfect. Thought-songs were still new to Cade, and she had hoped that a clear song meant a clear mind. But spacesick had done its work on Cade's mother. Cade hadn't let herself believe it.

Staring at this voided woman, she
still
didn't believe it. The truth hadn't caught up with what she'd let herself dream.

A hand shot out and grabbed Cade's wrist.

“Mom?”

Hope rose sharp and fast in Cade's throat.

She had to remind herself that her mother's wild reaching out was part of spacesick, too. She would touch anyone like that, to feel herself doing it. To fight her way back through the fog of her wandered-off mind.

But Cade's mother didn't look far from herself.

She looked gone.

 

Cade worked her arms under her mother's shoulders and pulled her loose weight up to sitting. With Xan gone, Cade had lost her bonus strength. Her mother was helpless, soft as a baby, and wilted against Cade's efforts. Cade wouldn't be able to hold her for two minutes, forget carrying her to the ship.

“You have to move.”

But the words were stones hitting a smooth surface. Cade let her mother slump against the sheets and went to work, trashing the room, looking for something that might help save her. Because Cade
had
to save her—first from this terrible place, then from spacesick. All the room gave her to work with was one pounded-thin mattress, two old sets of clothes, an abandoned bottle of bleach.

The window showed the first creep of violet. Ayumi's shuttle was supposed to leave at sunset. This planet had spun away from the sun too fast.

And then the dark-molded curves of the guitar case reminded Cade that she'd brought what she needed.

She grabbed Moon-White, flashing on all the moments when she'd held off Ayumi's spacesick with a bit of music. Of course, Ayumi was ankle-deep in the disease, and her mother's head was under, but maybe if Cade played well enough, she could earn her mother a few clear-headed minutes. Enough to get her off Res Minor.

Cade sat at the bottom corner of the bed, near the twin lumps of her mother's ankles. She propped Moon-White on her thighs and paused her fingers in the still air above the strings. “Listen, Mom,” she said. “Listen.”

She picked one of the old Earth-songs she'd heard in her mother's head, hoping for a pinprick of recognition.

Her mother stared through the ceiling. Pulled in long, even strings of breath.

“This is a good one,” Cade said.

She dug into new-old chords, ones she'd never played on Moon-White but knew because her mother had handed them down, in an accidental sort of way.

“You love this song,” Cade said.

Her mother's eyelids sank. Which didn't have to be a bad sign—lots of people close their eyes. A solid half of Cade's old club crowds had looked like sleep-dancers, the slight sway in their knees and nodding of heads the only way to know they were with her. Cade watched for signs that her mother was taking in the music. A deepness of breath, the gathering of a whole person around a bright-beating heart of notes.

“Listen,” Cade said. And then, “Please.”   

Her mother said nothing. The world was Cade's fingers, shifting on tired strings, until the bombs started to fall.

Cade thought she was coming apart.

The explosions heated and spread her, sprawled her across the floor of her mother's cell, and her mother was still on the bed, outlined in the red of dropped bombs and the fires starting outside.

Within seconds, it became a question of making it to the ship alive. Cade knew one thing: It would be easier to leave her mother. Easier, and impossible at the same time. Cade would have to twist off the faucet of caring.

But then her mother would die, and that wasn't allowed. There would be no more almost-but-not-quite-saving for Cade.

Not after Xan.

Cade grabbed her mother's hand and pulled her to the unsure ground. Loose tiles chattered under them. The old porcelain heated too fast. The building hadn't been hit—yet—but fists of red uncurled hot and close and hard.

Cade slung the guitar case across her back and used both arms to clap her mother to her side, but she couldn't move an unwilling body, not fast enough to make it to the shuttle and take off safely.

The hall passed in a fit of slowness. Cade tried not to think about the gone-mothers and fathers, the children and friends behind closed doors. Thought-songs slammed into her. Doubled the pain of each step.

When she hit the waiting room, she found no one out there to herd patients or shout lifesaving orders.

So much for taking care of their own.

Cade stopped on the steps of the building and pulled off her sweat-thickened T-shirt. The undershirt left her shoulders bare to the heat, its touch rising and wrong as the sun went down. Cade ripped fabric, fitted it to her mother's mouth, and tied a knot at the back of her flagging neck to shut out the worst of the smoke. A deep breath of cindered air would have to be enough to swim Cade safe past the fires. Bombs fell, a few streets away.

Cade secured her mother and headed into the street, braced against the rush of bodies.

Hot, close, hard.

She had to take the blocks as fast as she could to push the tempo. Cade didn't want to put Lee and Ayumi in even more danger. She had promised Rennik that she would make it back safe.

But a few minutes had blackened and changed Res Minor so much that Cade couldn't find her landmarks. The harder she tried to piece the city back together, the harder it fell. The market stalls made a fine bonfire. Windows flung themselves to pieces, giving up without a fight. Cade squinted up to trace the bombs to their source, but the sky had turned into a sheet of smoke.

Only the pain kept Cade alert and moving. The side where her mother hung, almost-dead, flared with life.

It meant a special kind of torture, but Cade reached and opened herself to the songs. It was the only way to pick Lee and Ayumi out of this mess. She stretched her mind outward in circles and found people moving fast, their songs spiked and threaded with fear. That's what Cade had been hearing since she landed on Res Minor. Fear. People had felt that something was wrong, but on such a primal level, so shoved-down deep, that they would never be able to name it.

Cade still didn't know what
it
was.

She forced herself to wonder, even though the thought mingled with the ash in her stomach and made her sick: What if this proved the Unmakers had been following her since the black hole? What if all those weeks had been waiting for the right moment to show she could be had, whenever they wanted her?

Lee and Ayumi burst into Cade's mind, their songs tangled but impossible to mistake. More songs clustered around them, pushing at their edges.

Another fight?

Cade pounded toward them, dragging her mother by the shoulders, the waist. She told herself that the weight was nothing. That she didn't need Xan's strength twined with hers. People rushed by and screamed at her to move, to move, or they would all be dead.

Res Minor ended in a sputtered-out street. The shuttle waited across the field, past the kicked-up dust.

“I'm here,” Cade cried. “Don't leave.”

Fire and dust laced their fingers and reached down her throat. Cade gagged so hard that she fell, and even then she had to hold her mother up so she wouldn't choke to death on swallowed dust.

The little ship roared, ready to leave.

Res Minor burned.

Hot, close, hard.

Across the field, a wall of people climbed one another like stones, tearing each other down to reach the ship. This wasn't a fight. It was a mob. Cade was supposed to help these people, save them from their scattered fates, and now they would all die together and there was nothing she could do.

Cade's universe pinched down to two hopes. One chased the first, like a heartbeat: Live. Keep her mother alive.

She curled on the ground, threw up in the dust.

The door of the shuttle stood open, inhaling as many people as it could. But they were running out of room.

“Lee,” Cade cried. “Lee, I'm here.”

She needed her friends to hear her over the bombs and the screams of the people and the screams of the ship, taking off.

“Don't leave!”

Cade's voice was a handful of smoke-shreds. It would never reach.

So she tried music. No guitar needed—she could use herself to broadcast. Lee and Ayumi had heard her do it before. Maybe they were waiting for a sign to help them find her. Cade tried, but the field was littered with broken songs. It was too hard to sweep them out of her smoke-filled head and focus.

She crawled, dragging and pushing her mother in equal parts. Grass matted her hot skin.

“They're coming,” Cade said, lullaby-soft. “My friends are coming for us.” If she was going to die, she might as well do it believing this.

Cade limped a few notes.

The ship lifted in a churn of dust. People fell from the open door like drops of water. Cade waited for it to close.

It didn't close.

Lee showed her heat-shining face.

“Cade!” Lee screamed.

The ship swept toward them, heat from near bursts blasting it in one direction, then another. But Ayumi was a first-class pilot and held steady. Lee dropped to the open door and stretched an arm.

It felt wrong to leave when so many people would die, but that didn't stop her from pushing off the ground with one arm, the other lashed to her mother's waist. Cade rose with the heat.

She found Lee's fingers with the last of her strength. And with something more than the last of it, she pulled.

 

The inside of the ship was dark and moving. People stirring. Low sounds. Charred smells.

Her mother's pulse, under the fumble of Cade's fingers.

Once Cade was sure of the basics, she started to deal with the pain. She stretched against the curve of the hold, her muscles pulling apart with ache.

A shape moved next to her—Cade's mother, stirring out of sleep. Wrinkle-tugged by time and gravity. Hair starting the long slide to gray. Something gentle in the default settings of her face, even if she had left it long ago.

Guilt crawled through Cade. She was supposed to be the hope of the human race, and when it came down to it, all she could do was save her own DNA.

The other survivors didn't scald her with blaming stares. They were busy making space in the hold, trampling Ayumi's Earth-artifacts, ripping her posters and maps with their restless backs.

The ship cracked atmosphere.

Cade stood, knees searching out a new balance, and ran the short distance from the hold to the flight cabin. Ayumi and Lee were sunk in their chairs, so fried from exhaustion and staled with sweat that it looked like they'd been strapped in for weeks. Ayumi flew with the automatic ease of someone whose brain has no part in the process.

Lee shook—fingers on the com, voice filling the small room.

“Eighteen.”

She paused.

“Nineteen.”

Ayumi's and Lee's eyes passed over each other, caught.

“What are those numbers?” Cade asked, hoping the answer would never reach her. Because in a deep, shoved-down place, she already knew.

“Attacks on at least nineteen planets,” Ayumi said. “Ships that match the Unmaker specs reported in the skies over ten.” Her voice skimmed the surface of the facts. “All of the targets were human cities and towns.”

Nineteen planets.

That pain, repeated nineteen times. Cade forced her mind around the math, but her body was too small to hold it. Still, it pushed its way deeper, lodged shards in each muscle, poisoned her blood, stretched the walls of her heart.

It left so little room for Cade that she fell down and didn't even feel it. Her face against the dull, boot-dirtied metal was a hollow fact.

Cade had wondered if she'd been followed. Found. But she had never let herself imagine—

“The Unmakers didn't come for you,” Lee said. “They came for all of us.”

 

because it had almost killed her once

she kept the gold of that place inside of her

deep

 

it was the tide, sometimes low down in her

sometimes rising, but always leaving her

gold-flushed

 

deeper and closer were the same

beautiful and bursting-wide in pain

the same

 

When Cade came to, someone had carried her back to the hold. Or maybe she'd carried herself. All she had was the fading of a dream-flash. Her head was a sour mess, and she half expected to see Xan.

But he was gone, like so many other people. Gone, and all she had left was this feeling that rose in her at the strangest—the worst—moments.

At least it had waited for her to get off Res Minor.