Unmade (13 page)

Lee and Ayumi had stayed up late for fight training. Ayumi needed it if she was going to be part of the rescue party, which could use all the hands it could get. Cade's mother had been moved to the common room and was strapped down on a semi-permanent basis, in case she went on another grabbing rampage.   

So it was just Cade in the little room.

And then, when Cade couldn't stand it anymore, she left too.

Renna had dimmed the main cabin, and Cade crossed it on bare feet. She didn't knock on Rennik's door, because that would have announced what she was doing to the rest of the ship. She slid into Rennik's room, and the door found its home in the frame. A soft darkness soaked into Cade. After the eye-smarting black of space, this felt like a place where she could rest.

But her skin would not be quiet.

Her heart had no such plans.

Rennik slept on his back, arms set in clean parallels on top of the blanket. He bunked in a small bed, not designed to be shared, but he had found room once, for Moira. Cade wondered if Rennik remembered her in those pre-sleep moments. She wanted to know. Not just the surface of him, but every deep thing.

“Cade?” Rennik asked, his voice sleepy but certain. He must have known the sound of her footsteps.

“It's me,” she said, like she hadn't taken a wild leap by coming here, with no invitation, in the middle of the night. She moved across the small room, until she stood so close to the bed that Rennik could touch her.

All of Cade's words were there, waiting for him.

A kiss and a half is not enough.
We almost died. Again. We're going to die. Soon.
Too many choices, and Cade hated them all.

Rennik shifted against the sheets, propped himself on an arm and studied her. No shirt, just darkness on the canvas of his skin. Cade thought of his little stunt that afternoon, how he'd shed his clothes in front of her, like it was something they were free to do. Before she could change her mind, Cade lifted her shirt. Edged her pants down, until their thin weight pulled them the rest of the way.

Rennik looked at her like she was impossible. That's how Cade knew that she hadn't made a mistake coming to his room. When she'd dreamed this, in none of the variations had Rennik ever looked at her like that. Even with all of her night-sneaking and clothes-shedding, there were things she wasn't brave enough to hope for.

“Cadence, we can't,” Rennik said.

That was how fast he shut the whole thing down.

He sat up, his arms slack at his sides.

Cade stood there. Naked.

“I thought . . .”

He reached for her wrist. Not a weighted, wanting reach. Slow and careful. An apology.

Cade snatched her hand back. “I thought you . . .”

She wanted to stop talking. She wanted to stop
existing.

Rennik stared in the direction of his knees. He couldn't look at her anymore, and she didn't know if that was a good thing, or a very bad one. “I know what I want,” he said, and her knees almost gave. “But . . .”

The cold hit her skin all at once. She needed her clothes.

“But the end of the world. But you're still in love with Moira. It's a simple enough tune, Rennik. I catch on fast.”

She folded in a shape that hid as much of herself as possible.

Rennik's words lumbered out, tired. “Let me explain.”

Cade wasn't there for a lecture on all the reasons they couldn't. She grabbed at her clothes—all puddles of same-looking fabric. She fought each one and still ended up with the shirt inside out, scratching at her skin.

The walk back to her bedroom was short, and Cade's clothes hadn't caught up to her. She still felt naked. She clamped the shirt to her skin like it didn't count unless she could feel it covering every inch.

Cade slid through the tunnel into the little room, and she hadn't hit the floor before she could feel that she had company.

On the top bunk—the spreading-ink shape of two girls kissing, breaking apart, and coming together to kiss again. Ayumi's legs wrapped over Lee's hips, ankles knotted behind her back. Lee's head was a bare inch from the ceiling. She leaned in, her hands traveling well-known routes over Ayumi's body, sure even in the dark. Lee's smile was the brightest thing in the room. Ayumi's rose, sleepy-warm, to match it.

Cade didn't mean to watch them, but she couldn't
not
watch them. The beauty of what was happening collapsed her. It was one thing to run from bombs, to be sanded down by constant threats.

This was worse. This rattled a deep and empty part of Cade.

She tried to back out. One knee hit the tunnel at the same moment in which Lee sprang straight up and bashed her head.

“Dregs! Ugh. Hi, Cade.” She fitted a hand to her skull and refocused. “Hi! Cade!”

Ayumi dove for all the sheets within grabbing distance. Lee dropped from the bunk to the floor, cutting the ladder out of the equation. She took Cade's shoulders in her hands, pinned her with serious eyes.

“Talk?”

Cade nodded, but she didn't really want to talk. She didn't know what they had to talk about, except kissing, and that would be like peeling her skin off one strip at a time.

As soon as they were out of the tunnel and in the main cabin, Serious Lee swapped out for the giddiest version Cade had ever seen. “I'm so glad you walked in,” she said. “I mean, not glad in the sense that you probably didn't need to see that, but now we can
talk about it,
which is a neat workaround, since I wasn't supposed to bring it up.”

Cade's head fumbled to keep up. “But I thought . . . Rennik . . .”

“Rennik?”

“I thought you had. You know. A thing.”

“For him?” Lee asked, trapped between confusion and laughter. “When I was
twelve.
I had a big, dumb, twelve-year-old thing.”

“But you're always fighting with him,” Cade said.

“I'm always fighting with everyone. All you and I do is fight! I must really be wild about you.” Lee cut off her own laugh, hung her head, and twisted her fingers. Cade had never seen her like this. Shy. “It's different with Ayumi.”

Even with it barreling at her face, Cade hadn't seen this coming, and now she had one more aftermath to deal with. She rubbed circles at the corners of her eyes, but they clung to their stubborn ache. “Different how?”

“She lost her family too. Friends. A whole planet.” With each word out, more softness seeped in. “But she's still so lovely, you know? Sweet. I grew up on the Express. I'm used to a lot of things. Sweetness is not one of them.”

Cade understood in ways she didn't want to. Ways she wanted to cut out of her, precisely and surgically. The awfulness of the timing dug in all over again. “If you wanted to tell me, why didn't you—”

“This is
not
a secret,” Lee said. “It's a good thing, but it's set in the middle of all of these bad things. Ayumi thought we should wait to tell people so it could be ours for a while before we let the rest of the universe in.” Lee's voice shimmered, like the moon caught on water. “It sounded good, but most things do when you have skin contact and you can't breathe straight.”

“Right,” Cade said. Not because she knew, but because someone needed to stop Lee. She was killing Cade in small, happy increments.

 

There was no going back to the little bedroom that night.

Cade wandered the ship and ended up in the common room with her mother. Her cushion bed had sprawled, and she looked small at the center of it. The light that fell on her face was a dim, unshakable gray.

Cade held her mother's hand, squeezed her fingers. Squeezed them harder, hoping that it would hurt. She wanted some wincing sign that her mother was still in there.

Out of habit, Cade hummed a song, and she liked the sound as it formed—it made her think of the soft upward swell of hills, dipping back to hard and reliable ground, or the rubbing back-and-forth of water. Cade added another verse, and another. But habit wouldn't bring her mother back from the place where she hung, not-dead, barely alive.

Cade and her mother sat, each wrapped in her own form of quiet.

 

An hour until they cracked atmosphere.

Andana loomed in the starglass, every shade of brown and beige and reddish-tan. Cade sat in the pilot's chair studying the planet's surface, pocked with sand-craters that might have held oceans once.

She was alone with her old planet until the hailing light came on, green and blinking. Cade hurried to the panels.

Green's voice came through. “Renna? Is this Renna?”

“You have us,
Everlast.
”

“Good.” Green sounded like he'd been running up flights of stairs for hours. “Another twenty ships have been hailed.”

“And told to meet at the coordinates?”

Cade felt the constant pull of those coordinates, the need to reach them and claim the safe harbor of space, away from the attacks, the constant hovering threat of more. What she really wanted was to skip this whole Andana business and gather the fleet.

“The other ships went ahead while we completed the mission on Cass 12,” Green said.

Cade kept one hand on the com and braced the other against the panel. Renna ran cool, pulling the itch out of Cade's sweating palm. “What happened there?”

“We got almost everyone off planet,” Green said.

Cade felt the hollows, the hidden pain—all of the people who didn't fit inside of that
almost.

“Not as many people in the town as we thought there would be,” Green said. “You estimated eight hundred, but we only found four. Someone came back before we got there.”

“Nonhumans or Unmakers?” Cade asked.

“Couldn't say. Attackers unloaded firepower and ran. But they left messages, scrawls saying they'd come back and deal with anyone who was left. We found people holding scissors, posts they'd torn off their beds. Little kids with kitchen knives. They were waiting.”

Cade let herself breathe. Let herself believe that all of the work so far had amounted to one good thing.

“Did anyone leave the city?” she asked, thinking of the people
Everlast
might have missed.

“Unlikely,” Green said. “There's water on three sides of it, and the roads on the fourth are always watched. It's how the Cassians controlled the human population.”

“All right. Thanks,
Everlast.
”

The com switched to static, the light went dead, and Cade's finger let up on the button. She hadn't really wanted to thank Green for adding thickness and weight to her fears about Andana, but it wasn't his fault.

Cade turned and found Ayumi in the door at the back of the control room.

“Did you hear that?” Cade asked.

“Most of it.” Ayumi pursed her lips at Andana, like she was sizing up an opponent. But when she talked, it was in a soft voice, to Cade.

“How are you?”

Those words were like the opening chords of an almost-forgotten song. Not the gut-pluck of “Who's Kissing Who Now.” Not the harsh scramble of “We Need to Save Everyone
.
” This was the sound of caring.

Slow, building, soft, sure.

Cade went looking for the right place to start, but when she opened her mouth, there was too much. The floor rushed away, ripped from her, and she wondered if this was what tides felt like as she fell.

 

down

there in the place where she kept him

because he had to be kept

secret

because he couldn't be told to a moving-on universe

a needing universe

one that had fallen

down

 

and just when she started to pick it up

dust off its knees and tell it a new story

now he fell

and the dark center

that had been

down

there

waiting

wasn't waiting anymore

 

it was here

it was time

or it had always been time and she just hadn't known it yet

time to go

down and down and down

into that last dark

 

When Cade came to, she was on her knees, with a sense that she'd struggled to keep her balance and won the last few inches.

Ayumi stared from a safe distance, worry trapped in the amber of her eyes. “What just happened?”

Double bruises formed on Cade's knees, large and somehow comforting. At least the bruises made sense.

“It's Xan,” Cade said.

“Xan?” Ayumi edged forward, helping Cade to her feet. “I thought he left us back at the black hole.”

Cade brushed Ayumi off, and tried to pretend it was a matter of smoothing the wrinkles from her sleeves. “He's not alive,” she said. “But something lingered.”

“Your entanglement?”

This kept happening. And it was getting stronger. Closer. Harder to ignore.

“Maybe,” Cade said.

She turned back to the starglass, the red-brown hurtling close, and all she could feel was Andana.

Sand scattered in every direction as Renna put down on Cade's old bunker. The spaceport in Andana was too far, and run by nonhumans, and there were no landing fields near Voidvil. So Cade had offered the one place she could think of—but as soon as Renna rocked to a stop, Cade regretted it.

The starglass showed sand, just as endless as space, just as everywhere. Renna tried to cheer Cade up with ripples under her feet as she left the control room. Cade pretended it was working, but nothing could shift her into feeling good about all of that sand.

The rescue party had gathered in the main cabin, where the walkway would uncurl. Rennik stood at the head of the group. No Hatchum ceremonial robes, but the double swords hung at his belt. Lee made herself busy cleaning her gun. Ayumi clasped a knife in one hand and a notebook in the other. Mira stood off to one side, drawing circles with a foot. Her fingers were stretched out and twitching.