Unmade (30 page)

Cade waited for Lee to deck Mira. Her being a little girl would only protect her for so long.

Maybe it had never protected her at all.

Lee untucked a hand, and as Cade moved to snatch it out of its flight path, pin Lee to the ground, and take her out in less than three moves, it became clear that all Lee wanted to do was shake.

“That was something,” Lee said. “Really something. Only the bravest go up against that woman.”

Mira looked like she was about to go nova with happiness. She tossed herself at Lee's neck, braids flinging. Lee shifted to detach the girl, but Cade caught the moment when she softened a notch and returned the good press of Mira's hug.

A few people cheered, and Zuzu raised her paper-heavy fist high in the air. June snuck up and patted Mira on the shoulder. During Matteo's next round of duties, he stopped at her side. “We'll have to come up with a special commendation,” he said. “For courage when no one can watch or thank you for it, and you have every reason to fear your friends will hold it against you.”

Mira scrunched the rest of her face up around her nose. “Sounds like a lot to squish on a medal.”

Matteo spared a laugh before he moved on, shouting instructions at four different crew members. “Peel topside, hard! Don't spare the ammunition! Give them a reason to think twice before they make another pass.”

Cade thought she and Mira were out of the dark, and all they had to worry about now was death by Unmaker. But Rennik had been there the whole time, silent against the wall, clinging to his first and strongest reaction.

Mira ran from Cade's side and threw herself in with the cannon squad. She was everywhere, wanting to help. Rennik filled in the place she had left. The vibration of his sour feelings sat on Cade's skin.

“How long?” he asked.

Cade pretended that she was needed at the map table. She leaned low, hoping that it would toss Rennik off, but he wasn't going to give up, no matter how busy she made herself look.

“How long?”

She inched a tight shrug.

Rennik leaned down and braced his forearms against the map table, his nearness a new sort of torture. Cade wanted to be closer, fitted and moving against him. She wanted Rennik balanced and she wanted him back. But all of that got in the way of his battle, so it had to be kicked aside.

“
How long have you known?
”

“Since Renna. Right after. Well . . . during.” Cade wasn't going to apologize. She had saved Mira's life for more than one good reason. She wondered if that would still count for something when they all died in a few hours.

The anger in Rennik's face pooled to bitterness. He swallowed and turned hard, and Cade watched his back all the way out the door. She kept losing him, so it shouldn't have felt like a knife to the throat every snugging time.

“Oh!” Mira said, running a wild curve back to the center of the room. “There's something else you should know.”

The crew listened to her now, not like a little girl, but one of their own.

“What is it?” Matteo asked.

“The Unmakers think I've been turned against them, or at least turned soft,” Mira said. “Unmother must
want
me to pass along her plan.”

Zuzu hopped onto the edge of the map table and sat cross-legged. “Do you think it's misinformation?”

Mira looked worry-sick. “I think they'll set it up like they said.”   

“Then why tell us?” Matteo asked.

Cade stepped in with the answer. “Unmother gets some nasty pleasure out of us knowing that we have no good options.”

Mira pointed to the hull. “They're trying to get us soft now. This isn't the real strike. They have our specs, so when they make a full pass there will be better targeting on the missiles, and no question they'll try to board.”

Matteo patted the wall, and it raised a memory of Renna. Cade almost expected the hull to rumble back.

“Well,” Matteo said. “Let's hope she's called
Everlast
for a reason.”

 

The meeting took nine minutes.

Cade knew that the crew would vote to grab the offensive while they could, and cross the line with everything they had. There would be no polite folding of hands and waiting for death. Cade agreed that an attack was better than the alternative, but she still couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the decision.

June drew up new rotations and ordered Cade to take a nap. An hour later, she came back with unpinned braids and her sternest face to try again. Four hours deep, Cade finally quit the control room, weaving down the halls on heavy feet.

In her cabin, the bed was still rumpled. Unmade. Cade touched the bottom sheet, the only one that hadn't been stripped, and wondered which wrinkles had been formed by Ayumi's thrashing. It was such a dark wondering that she had to replace it. She settled on the memory of Ayumi in the same spot, eyes kindled, as she talked about Earth.

Cade rested her head on the floor and fell into a dark pool of sleep. She had no idea how long she'd been there when she woke up, alive with prickles and ache, and noticed the notebook under the bed.

It must have been kicked there when someone cleaned up. There was no question in Cade's flickering mess of a brain—this was the same one Ayumi had been writing in for months, even in the pre-fleet days. Cade pulled it from its resting place and opened it with care.

What she found was like a map, delineating the twists and turns of Ayumi's heart. She had written long, winding sentences about falling in love with Lee. There were illustrations, too, pencil sketches of Lee in a take-charge stance and heavy boots, Lee napping against the low curve of a wall in Renna's common room. Lee at night, her eyes sparking and her hair out of its knots.

Ayumi had peppered the pages with Earth poems, descriptions, bits of history and made-up tales that connected to her own thoughts. And then, in the thick of Ayumi's words, Cade found her own.

She read them over, following with a finger as she went. The imprint of other lines on the back of the sheet pulled her to turn the page. Written there, in Ayumi's rushed slant, were the words:

 

“Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

      —Unknown Earth poet, early 20th century

 

Disturb the universe. That's what Gori said Cade was doing when she sang. Ayumi must have agreed, or at least worried about it, otherwise she wouldn't have connected the song with this poem.

But Ayumi had
wanted
Cade to sing it. She'd been the song's biggest fan. Its only fan.

Cade tucked the notebook under her arm and took it with her on a long walk to medical. She sat in the ring of atmosphere around Ayumi's bed. A single light burned on Ayumi's broad cheeks, her newly washed curls. Her cuts had been sewn, and her head bandaged, but no one had fixed the real problem. Ayumi wasn't Ayumi if she couldn't turn up at the perfect moment with a moving pen and a half-formed plan.

“What do we do now?” Cade asked.

She read the poem three more times.

Maybe disturbing the universe wasn't the worst thing Cade could do. Maybe it was what she
had
to do. The more she thought about it, there was no way to live without disturbing things on some scale. Stirring up particles, connecting to people. Things changed shape wherever they touched. Melodies sprang up in the cracks.

In a minute there is time

Cade ran her fingers over the words, until the ink transferred, picking out the small ridges on her skin. She was disturbing the universe
right now.
But it was one thing to do it by existing, and it was another thing to dare.

Cade got the feeling that there was more to the poem. More to the song that sat waiting on the flip side of the page.

 

“We're playing this all wrong.”

The crew looked up from the somber pushing of controls. Cade swept through the room like a fresh wind.

“We're doing what Unmother wants,” Cade said. “Again. I did it when I took in Mira, and when I gathered the human race. We all did it when we threw ourselves into this fight. This is what
they
want. The Unmakers don't care if they die as long as we're gone at the end of it and a few of them can make it to a future that they like the looks of.” Cade turned to Mira for backup. “Did I get that right?”

In a few hours, the girl had gone from the fleet mascot to the trusted and official source on all things Unmaker.

“Yeah,” Mira said. “That's it all right.”

“Unmother wants us to go after her, again and again,” Cade said. “If we act like that's the only course, they win.”

“So what do you want us to do instead?” Lee asked. The words floated in an answerless void.

“Ayumi had an idea.” Cade held up the notebook like it was an artifact of a better world. “She was working on it when . . .” Cade stopped before she piled more hurt on Lee. There was still hope for Ayumi. For all of them.

“There's a song I need to play,” Cade said.

She thought she was ready for the blank stares, but they hit her like a wall of feedback.
Everlast
's crew didn't know Cade as a musician. Maybe they'd heard the fistful of rumors that she'd been famous once, for turning the volume up too high, kicking people's teeth in with sound. But that part of the long-ago.

Matteo shook his head. “A song?”

Cade produced a guitar pick from her back pocket, twirled it between her fingers, and a bit of the old brass came back.

“You're going to put on a show?” Lee asked. “Now?” Despite her forehead dent and matching frown, Cade caught excitement in the tug of her lips. Mira looked like she was two seconds away from hopping up and down.

“This is a new kind of show,” Cade said. “One the universe has never seen.”

She stared out at the sleek Unmaker ships, the mismatched human fleet, and the false calm between them.

Once the fleet had gathered, the next step shouldn't have been a battle with the Unmakers, winner-limp-away-broken. The fight had seemed like their only choice, but they should have thrown their resources at finding the human race a home. A real home. Planet-side and permanent.

“The stage matters,” Cade said. “We have to get there as fast as we can.”

“So we just turn around and leave?” June asked. “Let the Unmakers win? Abandon the fleet?”

“No,” Cade said. “The fleet's welcome to join us.”

“Where are we going?” Lee asked.

“Earth.”

Matteo looked at Cade like she was twice as crazy as she felt.

“It's a dead planet,” he said. “In a dead system.”

But it wasn't dead, not inside of Cade. Earth had been growing, one particle at a time, gathering mass and swirling into blue-green life ever since she started reading Ayumi's notebooks. The control room of
Everlast
was crammed with people who didn't understand that.

“So to recap,” Zuzu said as she fired another round at an Unmaker ship that wouldn't stop pestering them
,
too close to the engine room. “You want to take us to a blinked-out fairy-tale planet because a song told you to?”

Cade stared down the crew's confusion. When she looked for Rennik to stand with her, she found that he hadn't returned to the control room. One more thing to worry about, as soon as she could get away. For now, she had to stay focused on Earth. She didn't offer more explanation, or smatter the room with apologies. She stood back, crossed her arms, and said, “That's all I can tell you for now.”

Matteo stepped in again. “We can't alter the plan—”

“I'm not asking you to. Everyone has to make their own choice. I can't tell you the risks are worth it.”

Cade's short-lived stint as a savior ended here. She was a musician, and she had gotten away from everything that mattered. On the edge of the black hole she had promised Xan—promised
herself
—that she would do more than survive.

Cade pointed at the fleet members working the inter-ship com. “The one thing I do need is answers. Who wants to come with me, and who stays behind?”

“You're not just asking us to get to Earth,” Lee said. “You're asking us to get there or die trying. Earth is twenty systems away. No one bothers to sail out in that direction anymore. It's a wasteland.”

“Maybe,” Cade said. “But it's ours.”

 

The votes came in so fast they clogged the com. They had to be sorted and marked down, so naturally, June took charge.

Cade was surprised that anyone said yes.

“They like you,” Mira said.

“Or maybe they're tired of fighting,” June said. “And waiting to go spacesick, and then fighting some more.”

“Maybe it's just the word,” Zuzu said, rolling it around in her mouth like a blue-green marble. “Earth. Earth. Earth.”

Cade focused on the votes, tick marks consuming the paper down to a thin margin of white. More
no
than
yes,
but Cade still had hundreds of people to bring with her. They trusted her, or they wanted something more than fleet-life. Either way, the burden of proof was on Cade. It winched her chest tight and made anything other than a shallow breath feel like a dream.

She did a quick check of both lists. Rennik's name still didn't grace either side, so Cade forged it. Maybe she couldn't bring him out of his broken state, but she was never going to leave him behind.

Cade spun a half circle and found Gori shuffling in the door. He never shuffled anywhere these days, so it had to be important.

“Are you coming with us?” Cade asked.