Unmade (20 page)

The best-known killer in the fleet was a title Cade had earned fast, and Mira was her good luck charm. Fleet members shook their hands wherever they went. Matteo, June, Zuzu, and Green were already planning the entries for the history books. Mira took it in with a startled smile, but Cade felt no pride in the work. The way she saw it, she and Mira were both to blame for the constant chipping-away of what was left of the human race.

As they walked, Cade caught the twitch of Mira's fingers at her side. “What was that?”

Mira bundled her fingertips in the other hand. Too many beats passed before she said, “Nothing. Nerves. Or . . . I think I'm hungry. Do we have more of that garlicky stew thing? June said there might be leftovers.”

For the most part, when Mira had inside info, she brought it to Cade, eager and fumbling, desperate to make up for leading the Unmakers to Renna and the fleet. But now she was changing the subject.

Whatever she knew, it had to be big.

“Are you worried they'll come after you?” Cade asked.

“No,” Mira said, threading her skinny arms over her chest. A few fleet members nodded and cheered as they passed. Cade dropped a hand on Mira's shoulder. They smiled and put on their best double act.

Cade leaned down. “You're afraid the Unmakers will trace the leak back to you?”

Mira squirmed ahead of her. “No.”

“So the chip
did
tell you something.”

That biochip was the source of Mira's info. It caused all of the cheek-tapping and finger-twitching that Cade had thought were nervous tics, little personal details that had made her feel like she knew Mira better. The truth was that she'd been wired, the whole time, with tech much more advanced than any tracker. Cade had never seen its equal in her black market days. When Mira wanted to transmit information, she tapped a nerve cluster in her cheek, and the taps amounted to a code. A chip sunk into the back of her neck acted as a controller for one wedged deep in her brain. When the Unmakers sent back information, it announced itself in Mira's fingertips.

Every time they flicked, it stabbed a reminder into Cade's stomach.

“If you don't tell me, more people will die,” Cade said. “Some of them will be people you know.”

Mira turned into a pebble—mouth, shoulders, everything bunched and hard.

“We'd all be in danger,” Cade said. “Matteo. Zuzu.” She picked the people Mira liked best, skirting the names of her own friends. Her old, non-communicating friends. But they could die just as easily.

Mira stubbed her feet as she walked, giving a thoughtful tug on the end of a braid June had wound into her thick pale hair.

“They're tough,” she said. “They won't get hurt.”

“Renna was tough,” Cade reminded her.

A swallow stuck in Mira's throat, and she had to redampen it. It was hard work for the girl to hide her new feelings. From what Cade had gathered during the long hours in their cabin, the central point of the Unmaker plan was the stripping of human emotion. Reactions were altered, and whoever couldn't keep up with the neural reeducation was punished. Spacesicks and failures were tossed to keep them from contaminating the new line.

“Renna was nice to me,” Mira said, as if that little truth held miracle status in her brain.

Cade thought of the turned-off gravity, the doors that had crashed wide so no one would be trapped when the electricity slid, unbound, through the walls. “She took care of us, down to the end.”

Mira cut across the docks and took the stairwell in uneven leaps. “Well, with me, she made a mistake.”

Mira had never lied to Cade about being an orphan, not knowing her people or where she was from. The Unmakers were bred in labs to cut down on the chances of attachment, but to increase their ranks over the last twenty years, a number of infants had been bought out of their cribs. Mira had been raised Unmaker, and given a mission.

She was
all
mission—or she had been until she made friends with Renna, and got close to Cade, and grew a song.

It filled Cade's mind now, while she closed her eyes to make a quick decision. Cade cut back from the control room, trailing Mira past the medical sector, all the way to a row of glass sub-rooms. Each one had its own control panel that could only be accessed with top-level code. Cade fired a string of digits into a number pad and entered airlock 7, leaving Mira on the outside.

“What are we doing?” Mira asked through the glass. She was a creature of routines, plans, schedules, and executions. Anything that disrupted them blew at her like a hard gale.

“I need to know,” Cade said. She couldn't launch herself into another day of targeting Unmakers, one ship at a time, if some new and terrible thing was about to burst wide.

With Mira, the torture that would have been used on another spy was out of the question. Cade was sure that Unmother had figured that into her calculations. There were times when all of the manipulation behind Mira's presence boiled so hot under Cade's skin that she almost tortured the girl to spite the Unmakers, to surprise them, to break the patterns they were so sure they knew.

But this was a little girl, and no matter how much Cade hated her, she couldn't hurt her, because then she would have to hate herself too.

She had enough of that toxin in her system.

“The information that comes to us through that biochip is keeping us alive,” Cade said. “It's our food. It's our air.”

There were moments now when Mira didn't try to paste over her lack of feeling with a simulation. It was a form of honesty, but it made Cade's mouth leach dry and bad-tasting, every time.

“I'm no good to the fleet without that information,” Cade went on. She locked her knees and readied herself. There was no way of knowing how this plan would play out. “You can tell me what came through the biochip, or you can toss me off
Everlast.
Your choice.”

Mira looked at the controls sitting in front of her, simple and patient, the green button lording it over the smaller black ones. Anyone could figure out how to work it. You didn't want to leave room for error when it came to airlocks.

Mira rested her hands at the edges of the control panel. “What if I don't want to do either of those things?”

Cade dumped herself on the glass floor. “We'll wait.”

Mira's breath leaped shallow. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Mira's finger made contact with the green button, and the airlock hissed like a hurt animal as it struggled to separate its locked metal teeth. Cade ran for the door, punching the emergency override into another number pad. She latched on to the door, all of her weight on the frame, as the vacuum snatched her legs, trying to steal them out from their rightful place under Cade as she ran the snug away.

Cade hit the button that closed the door. The glass became the only thing keeping her separate from the salted black.

Mira threw herself at Cade, arms shrink-wrapping to fit her neck. “You're still alive!” Air-gulps shook the girl, top to bottom. This wasn't the sort of behavior Cade expected from someone who'd tried to kill her.   

Airlock 7 had been broken for a week, and the engineers were too busy repairing busted engines and downed electrical systems to get to it. Still, one of them could have put it on the repair list without Cade noticing. She hadn't really expected to test the theory with her life.

“Remind me to keep you away from buttons,” Cade said.

She breathed back to calm as Mira spilled words. “I didn't know which one was worse. If I didn't tell you, you died! If I did tell you, you would launch an attack, and a lot of other people would die. Matteo, Zuzu, other people. You said so yourself! What did you want me to do?”

Cade sighed. She was so tired that she couldn't tell exhaustion apart from pain. “Tell me,” she said. “That's all I want.”

“There's going to be a meeting,” Mira said. “Of the highest-ranking officers.”

She named the ship, the coordinates, the time. Cade's heart started up a strict, urgent ticking. Less than five hours. There was only one question important enough that she could spare the time to ask it. “Will
she
be there?”

Mira nodded.

Cade's feet pounded glass.

 

Everlast
rocked as Cade ran flat out for the control room, and at first she thought they had been attacked. But this was gentle, a cradle-rock.

A ship docking.

Maybe supplies, maybe fleet members from another ship. Cade didn't have time to stop and learn the details. She had to drill this information through the right thick skulls, so they could act on it.

Four steps from the control room, a hand caught on Cade's back. She spun, sure that it was Mira catching up, but she found herself inches from honey-summer skin and searching brown eyes.

Cade hadn't seen Ayumi since the night after Renna died, when she had dropped the survivors on
Everlast,
stayed the night, and dissolved in the hectic course of the next morning. Her shuttle was gone, and for days Cade had no idea if she was running the planet-finding mission or hiding somewhere else in the fleet. Or dead—that was always a possibility. Then Ayumi had radioed once, a brief and staticky message, fake-bright with news, to let Cade know that she was joining the Rembran ships in the fleet. She was safe, and they would see each other in some vague but wonderful future.

Lee had gone with her. No goodbye.

“Hi,” Ayumi said with a little wave.

Cade let the truth slip. “It's good to see you.”

Ayumi clutched at Cade's arm, a big reach, like she was drowning in water that Cade couldn't see.

“I need your help.”

The control room tugged at Cade. Mira's intel was going stale. “It'll have to be someone else.”

“No,” Ayumi said. “It has to be you, and if you can't see why, you've gone tone-deaf on top of everything else.”

Tone-deaf?
Ayumi must have been glassing out and she'd come to Cade for a quick hit of sound to keep the spacesick at arm's length.

After Cade joined the fleet, she'd spent a full night wondering if she should tell people about her music, and what it might be able to do for the spacesicks. But it hadn't brought her mother back, not all the way. It hadn't been enough to keep Lee and Ayumi close. With the Unmakers on top of the fleet, taking down ships did more good for the human race than plucking songs and playing nurse to the spacesick.

Besides. Ayumi looked fine. Slightly dimmed, nervous-fingered, but fine.

“Look,” Cade said. “I don't have a guitar. We scoured the fleet and didn't find one.” She dropped her voice. “So if you need help with certain symptoms—”

“It's not for me,” Ayumi said.

 

Lee stared out of Ayumi's nav chair at the shifting metal of the fleet, but there was no way she could see it through those blank, glassy eyes.

“She flew for such a long time on the Express,” Ayumi said, perched on the arm of Lee's chair. “I thought it couldn't touch her, that she was invincible. Like you.”

Cade swallowed a laugh. It sat, radiating bitterness in her stomach.

Not getting spacesick just meant that Cade had to watch everyone else do it. And she couldn't even shut off how much she cared, because that was what kept her human. Cade had to give herself to the pain, and then pinch it down to a point. Solid. Bright. Always-there.

“I'm not invincible.”

“As it turns out, neither is Lee,” Ayumi said.

Cade couldn't look out the window, because it reminded her of the pressing attack plans she was supposed to be making. Instead she focused on the walls, covered in Ayumi's sprawl-and-splatter interpretations of the universe. Earth glared down at Cade, the paint dried-out and shiny, heading toward cracked.

“How long has she been like this?” Cade asked.

She didn't want to look at Lee, either, and see her fallen so far from her spitting, swearing, wild grace. Cade had learned to deal with glass from her mother, and she expected it from Ayumi. But Lee was Cade's definition of human. Watching her hollow out meant too much.

“We cover for each other, so we can keep working for the fleet.” Ayumi ducked her head, cheeks sparking pink. “She covers for me, mostly. It's a good system, and it keeps us out of the spacesick bay. But she's been out for half a day now. I can't keep this quiet much longer.”

“Why did you wait?” Cade asked. She could have dealt with a spacesick Lee earlier this morning. Yesterday, maybe.

“If she knew I brought her here, in this state . . .”

Cade knew that she was light-years out of Lee's favor. She had told Ayumi's secret, ignored Lee's condition. Lee had every right to blame Cade for not arming the fleet, and she could even stretch that into blame for Renna's death. But Cade still felt like she was missing something.

“Like I said.” Cade spread her hands. “No guitar.”

For one weighted moment, Cade let herself remember the good of a working instrument in her hands; the perfect feel and the beautiful blare of sound.

“I can't help her without Moon-White.”

Maybe it was better this way. Lee would be safe in the spacesick bay, as safe as she could be. Cade knew, because she had deposited her mother there before the first week was out. There was no way to keep an eye on her with the fleet swirling, Unmakers closing in. Gori was just as unreachable: Two days in he'd chosen to go into a serious rapture, expanding to the size of an entire cabin on
Everlast.
The stunt had attracted crowds at first, children who came to poke at the real-life Darkrider. Cade had thought she'd be able to wake him at some point, but so far, he was as wakeable as a stone.

And then there was Rennik.

Cade thought of him on that first night—or the last, depending on which end you looked from. He had let himself be herded into the shuttle, led to a room on
Everlast,
and assigned a new bed.