Unmade (24 page)

Unmother laughed—a sweet laugh, rich with patience—and spelled things out for Mira like she was four years old. “Your cover isn't necessary to the mission, and the mission is the only thing that matters.” She laid a hand over Mira's. In the closet, Cade leaned toward the monitor, hand on her knife. “You did a fine job when you led us to the gathering. If you come back with me, what these people think of you won't matter. Neither will how much you've been compromised.”

There was no mistaking the outline of Mira's body as it tightened.

“You won't feed me to the black?” she asked.

Unmother made space for Mira on the bed, and she sat down beside the woman, as automatic as Cade's hands sliding into place down the neck of a guitar. It didn't matter how long she went without doing that—it would always come back. “You're not that naïve,” Unmother said. “And I wouldn't lie to you. Have I ever done that?”

Mira shook her head. Cade checked the song again.

No change.

“You won't live much longer,” Unmother said, patting Mira's knee. “But this will be a good death.”

Cade's disgust with the Unmakers was complete. It was one thing to find Xan's weaknesses, like bruises, and press on them until he gave. He'd been hurt by the universe, but he'd still had a choice.

This girl had been raised to be disposable.

Cade hit the hard bottom of the kinship she'd always felt with Mira. Beneath the green eyes and the loneliness, they were the same—brought up to be put to a purpose and then tossed aside. No matter what Mira had done in the name of the Unmakers, she could choose to undo it now. Cade would see that she lived to get the chance.

Unmother was already looking at her like a piece of rotted fruit, like a cling of trash around her ankles.

Rennik would run in at the first sign of trouble, but Unmother moved quietly, with a slithering grace. She could wrap a hand over Mira's mouth and the girl would be dead before Rennik heard one wrong breath.

“I don't know if I can get us off
Everlast,
” Mira said.

Unmother wove her fingers through Mira's hair, forcing the girl's head to rest on her shoulder. “There must be some way.”

“If that was true, wouldn't I have gotten back to you by now?”

Unmother's smile was short, like the clipping of a string, and it showed approval. Mira had given the right answer.

“If we can't return, there will be interrogations. I've seen several people outside who'd like a chance at my throat,” said Unmother, stretching back onto the bed. “I'd prefer you kill me,” she said. When Mira didn't move, Unmother strained her neck up without moving the rest of her body. “I assume you have some sort of knife.”

A rough surge of emotion gripped Mira's small body. When Cade blinked, she heard Mira-song, but soured. It filled the room like twisting fingers, like fast-growing weeds.

“Aren't you going to do it?” Unmother asked, sweetly, baring her throat.

Cade shifted in the arms of her seat. Mira knew that Cade wanted Unmother in that bedroom, alive. But to prove that she was still an Unmaker, Mira either had to let her escape or kill her.

The girl fished up her knife, hands working in a broad range, from fumbling to sure. Mira ran the tip down Unmother's throat and stopped at the white pool, shaded where her neck dipped down to her chest.

She walked away.

A soft chuckle rose from Unmother's resting place. She had given Mira a test of her own, and the girl hadn't passed.

As soon as she cleared the room, Rennik checked in on Unmother. She smiled, and Cade noticed that she was as beautiful as the first time they had met. That was the second time Cade wanted her dead. Not just with the switched-on part of her brain that was supposed to want it. With her tensed muscles, with her tired heart. With every ruined part of her.

Mira banged into the closet, letting in too much light from the hall. They were alone, in a little square that had been meant to hold maintenance tools, and not two sweating, exhausted nervebags.

Mira knew Cade had been watching. There was no use in breaking down the scene with Unmother, unless she wanted to point out how wrong it had gone.

“Remember, I left her there like you wanted,” Mira said. “That should count for something, right? So maybe when you do it, you can do it fast.”

She scrunched her face, uncurled her palms. At first Cade had no idea what was happening. It snuck into her like a creeping-cold night. Mira was waiting to be killed. There was no putting a broken cover back together, and that meant no more intel for the fleet. Mira had outlived her usefulness as a spy.

Which meant she could just be Mira.

Cade rushed at her. “What's this?” Mira asked from the muffled center of a hug.

“Happy,” Cade winched Mira tighter, smoothing her hair with one hand. “Just happy.”

Mira disentangled herself and looked Cade over from head to toe. “You don't do happy like other people.”

Cade dropped roughly into her seat with a laugh. “Neither do you.”

Mira nodded at the monitor. “Aren't you going to go in?” Unmother was remaking the bed to suit her taste.

“I want to keep her waiting.” Cade turned down the volume so she didn't have to listen to Unmother's crisp sheets. “If we march in and out of there in a line and demand to hear the full contents of her head, she'll think she's too important. She'll think she's all we have.”

Mira twisted her fingers into a sickly knot. “She already knows that.”

“Well, then, she needs to un-learn it.”

 

Cade ordered Mira to get some rest, and flew across a small pond of space to spend some time with the least important member of the fleet.

Her mother.

A crude rectangle drawn on the floor in light blue chalk marked the spot where she had lived for months. Beds littered the spacesick bay, but they were reserved for the patients who could appreciate them.

As soon as the fleet-appointed spacesick nurses saw who Cade was, they tried to relocate her mother to a nicer part of the bay, with thin strips of window and clean sheets. Cade waved them away.

Ayumi sat across from Cade with the still river of her mother's body between them.

“She looks . . .”

Cade wanted to steal some of the hope from Ayumi's eyes, but there wasn't enough to go around.

“The same,” Cade said. “She looks the same.”

The same
was more than she could say for the rest of Renna's crew, so maybe it could have been worse. The spacesick bay definitely looked worse than the last time Cade had seen it. Fuller, at least.

“How many in here?” Cade asked a passing nurse. It was a question Cade had dodged ever since she dropped off her mother. On that day, twenty or thirty spacesicks had milled, and four or five clear-eyed fleet members had mumbled about what to do with them. Now the bay sagged with the weight of hundreds.

“Two hundred and ninety-four,” the nurse said in a crisp voice, tucked like sheets over whatever she actually felt. Ayumi cast her eyes down, like being spacesick was a form of guilt.

“I'm sorry,” Cade said, seeing all at once what a sour move it was to bring her.

Cade had never gotten cleared to fly by herself. She could have asked any of the pilots on
Everlast
to take her to the bay, but she'd wanted Ayumi, because of all the people Cade knew, Ayumi was the most like her old self. Looking at her felt like holding on to the last string of an unraveling cord.

Ayumi nodded at the nurses. “Should we ask if there's any improvement?”

“I think we'd be able to see it,” Cade said.

She looked down at her mother, needing to compare every real thing about this woman's ugliness to Unmother's rigid beauty. And to see the glass—how different it was from the dull eyes of the dead.

Cade had never thought of glass as a good thing before. She'd taken it as a sign that the spacesicks were walled off from life, and for a long time, Cade's thinking on the subject had stopped there.

Now she had a different idea.

“You told me something about spacesicks once,” Cade said, eager-thumbing through memories.

Ayumi sat up and pushed to the edge of her chair.

“You told me they're fighting off the disconnect,” Cade said.

“It's a grab for life. Getting back to the feeling of the sun, or to the smell of things. Whatever we care about most.” Ayumi's eyes drifted to the thin windows of the bay. “Or who.”

That was why Ayumi's need to find a planet had gone into overdrive. Cade had thought it was all about the fleet, finding a home, holding back the darkness with land and water and sky. But it was more than that.

Ayumi had fallen in love.

Cade studied the lines around her mother's mouth and eyes, faint but sticking. She looked so much older than she should. A side effect of the fight. Cade had been fighting for months, and she could feel the drag of it on her bones, worse than gravity.

Cade's mother had been fighting for seventeen years.

She was there, under all that skin and glass. What she needed was a love big enough to pull her back to her rightful place.

Even as Cade told herself there was nothing she could do, a feeling climbed, until it reached her throat and had to be let out.

 

third in line and waiting

for the long slide into dark

ride the curve to day

again, following the

arc

 

grave fingers, pulling

bring all things down

to a blue-green point of stillness

and still the whole is turning

round

 

Cade could feel it this time, the singing. But she didn't feel it like words. She felt it like streams and forest and sky.

Like the song was a place, and each verse turned her around again, so she could see more of it as she sang. As soon as she held the whole thing in her mind she would be able to stay there. Live there.

Inside of that song.

It called her mother back from the dark where she had been for so many years, and Cade saw her rise out of it, swimming to the surface. Her face blurred with effort. Her lungs held, held, then bursting.

Her eyes wavering—then clear.

Cade knew they were brown, but the color had been trapped under glass for so long that she had no idea
how
brown. They were wet dirt and bark, the sort of brown that promises green. They clutched all the light in the room.

Cade's mother looked up, her face thickened with confusion. She opened her mouth in a few weak trials.

Around them, other spacesicks broke their own glass, gasping. Ayumi watched Cade with desperate eyes. But Cade could only see her mother. She could only hold her hand, and feel the painful stirring of long-silent fingers.

She could only hear the word that her mother found in some old corner, and carried out of her inner dark.

“Cadence?”

Gori's room on
Everlast
smelled like rapture.

When he went into that state and stayed there, it created an odor of rock-piles and stale robes. Ayumi must have noticed it, because her breath ran shallow. But Gori wasn't rapturing now. He waited, dark eyes on the door.

“Cadence.”

“Look, I came to—”

“Speak with me about this song,” Gori said. “Which I have felt,
again,
even though we reached an agreement.”

Her mother's glass had cleared. Only for a minute—a single word and she sank back into her previous state, with no guarantee that she would make a return visit. But if there was even the slightest hope, Cade couldn't honor her pact with Gori.

“This song works against spacesick like nothing else,” Ayumi said. “Maybe it can—”

Cade held up a hand.

It was no good explaining things that way. Gori didn't care about the spacesicks, including her mother. When Cade let herself look at the whole rounded truth, she worried that Lee was right and he didn't care about humans at all.

“From what I remember,” she said, working a new angle, “
you
agreed not to rapture.”

“For a particular moment,” Gori said. “I would not be a Darkrider if I chose not to rapture.”

“And Cade wouldn't be Cade if she never made music,” Ayumi said.

The truth of that vibrated deep. Music had always been part of Cade. Her first love, the one she ran back to when she needed to close the circuit and reconnect to herself. It was the only thing her mother had left her, besides her name. Cade had been away from it too long.

“So you both broke the pact,” Ayumi said. “But it was a ridiculous pact to start out with, which is sort of like a stalemate.”

Gori kept lancing Cade with a dark stare, like she was the one in the wrong.

“I'll write the universe a formal letter of apology later,” Cade said. “I need your help now.” She took Gori's lack of response and ran with it. “There's something about this song. It's powerful.”

Using that word about her own singing made Cade uncomfortable. She felt it every time a note slid flat or pinched sharp or trembled because her breath ran out. But this wasn't about the perfection of the notes. It was about the strength of the meaning.

“You know I'm right,” Cade said. “It was enough to shake you out of a serious cosmic nap.”

Gori's stance softened. “The song is rooted in something I have felt before,” he said. “Your connection to the particles that once formed that boy.”

“That boy,” Cade said. “You mean Xan.”

She thought she had cut that connection when it got to be too much. Filled the holes he left inside of her—even if it was only with new holes. But maybe that wasn't how it worked when someone died. Maybe he was with her.

Always.