Unmade (32 page)

“Long explanation, lots of verses, complicated chorus,” Cade said. “Please trust me.”

Rennik's cheeks pinched. “The last time I did that . . .”

Cade's back went stiff against the wall. “Do you think you could stop bringing up the attack?”

It was the wrong thing to say, but she didn't have reserves of tact anymore. There was too much to worry about, and stepping around Rennik's feelings had lost its place in line.

He stood fast, Moon-White banging against his legs. “That would be nice, wouldn't it.” His pacing filled the hold. “That would be a good way to live, never having to think about it. But Cade, all I can
do
is think about it.” He sat down, funneling his energy into the guitar. “I know all of this is not your doing. I
know
that I'm wrong. And I can't stop.” He gripped Moon-White too hard. “You think I want that to be the case?”

Cade tried to fill Rennik's old role and be the reasonable one. But Cade was still Cade. She had things to say and no better time to say them. “I think you live by some code,” she said. “Whoever meant the most to you and died, that's your lodestar. You did it for Moira, you're doing it for Renna.” She dropped her voice to a mutter. “You'll do it for me, as soon as I'm dead.”

Rennik looked up at her, his hands still working. “That's not true. I mean . . .” he said. “It doesn't have to be that way.”

Cade knelt in front of him. “So prove it.”

“We—already—”

Heat slid through Cade at the thought of what they had
already
done. But one night was a single star, one fleck of brightness against a blotted-out sky. “You have to
keep
proving it.”

Rennik went back to fiddling with the tuning pegs. He didn't make a big production of it. A little this way, a little that. He had never looked so frustrated. Cade couldn't tell how much was the guitar and how much was her. When he raised Moon-White between them, Cade thought he was giving it back, but he swiped the strings, and surprised her with something better. G major.

A warm, perfect chord. It struck her like sunshine.

“What do you think?” Rennik asked.

He looked natural with the guitar on his lap, almost relaxed. “I think you should keep Moon-White after the show.”

He shook his head. “Renna made it for you.”

“But only because you asked her to.” It was a truth Cade had always guessed at but neither of them had ever spoken.

“You miss Renna,” Cade said, “and you have every right to. She's gone.” Cade touched the guitar, because she didn't know what would happen if she touched him. “I miss you and you're right here.”

She set her hand along the line of his cheek.

Rennik put Moon-White aside.

He kissed Cade like he was learning her all over again. Like she was an instrument he'd given up a long time ago and was coming back to, with a needing-ache in his hands and the fear he'd get it wrong. But he touched her as if he had the time—the days, the years—to get it right. And that was enough to put the shine back. That was enough to pull it out of Cade, trembling at the surface of her skin.

 

Cade woke up in a little bunk, her hips at unlikely angles, her arms vined around Rennik's.

She nudged closer to him and fell into a soft sleep.

 

The days pushed on, full of charts and look-alike tracts of darkness.

Cade spent most of her time reading Ayumi's notebooks. Before, they had been searching for evidence of a new planet, one that would be everything the human race needed. They had chased the possibility, page after page. But what they'd needed was right there.

This time, Cade read for Earth.

She wanted the details, the stories, the memory-shreds. They flooded and filled cracks inside of Cade that she hadn't known were there.

Nights she spent with Rennik, talking and making the sorts of plans that people make when they have a future. Neither of them brought up the too-possible ending, the short version where one or both of them died in a few days. But it was always there, like a note pitched too low to hear, the vibrations sneaking in.

Early mornings, Cade walked the sludge-gray halls, less than half-awake, and visited her mother in the new spacesick bay. The room had been designed for all-crew meetings and religious services, back in the days when people could find things to pray about. No one had a bed, but the spacesicks didn't seem to care.

Cade held her mother's hands.

Since the fleet had gathered, it had gotten easier to put her mother aside. But one broken-through moment had changed things. Cade would always have her mother like that now, real and striving. And she would have that word.

Cadence.

Her mother's voice had reinvented it.

The presence of Cade's mother and her glass had its normal effect on the song, stirring it up, but Cade didn't let it out. She kept the notes down when they wanted to rise. This wasn't the normal case of practice and warm-ups. If the song really was about Earth, Cade needed to finish it in the right place.

There were words that a person always had inside of her, and words she had to travel a long way to find.

Cade learned what she could by studying the song in her mind, turning it around, learning the melodic phrase and testing variations. She didn't even hum out loud, but she swore that spacesicks leaned in, bent around the burning of a secret sun.

Cade pulled aside a passing nurse. “Did any of the spacesicks who had the choice stay behind?”

“Not one.”

The spacesicks knew the real fight. They'd known it all along.

 

And then the black outside the windows showed new signs.

A tiny ice-orb. Gas planets, one banded by rings.
Everlast
dodged and ducked its way across a thick asteroid belt.

Cade didn't leave the control room anymore. She leaned against the panels, eyes tacked to the space-black. When she ripped them away, she found that Rennik had claimed the chair on one side of her and Lee had claimed the other. Mira stood behind them, watching over Cade's shoulder.

Close, now.

And then there were no planets left. Cade had counted inward from the edge of the system, and the next one that rose out of the black should be—

Earth.

As white and gray as a dead skin-flake.

As gone as a spacesick's eye.

“Did we . . . make it?” Mira asked.

“Yes,” Lee said. “You might want to work on sounding less anticlimactic.”

Mira tried again. “We made it!”

So had the Unmakers. Any dreams that the enemy ships had fallen back or slammed into an asteroid were forgotten. The crew faced the truth—three ships hanging between
Everlast
and Earth's atmosphere.

That should have added up inside Cade and crashed her hopes. But she smiled, and the delight wasn't an act. Cade had never felt such a swelling rightness. This was the longed-for moment, the needed place.

Her fingertips itched for strings.

The new spacesick bay made a fine stage.

High windows curved at both ends, like cupped palms that rose, touching fingertips at the highest point. The window across from Cade showed where they'd been—the stretches of black, dotted with planets, iced with pale moons. The window behind Cade showed Earth. Not the Earth of Cade's song, or the Earth of Ayumi's notebooks.

But still.

“It's perfect,” Cade said as she slung Moon-White across her chest.

“Are we looking at the same planet?” Lee asked.

She and Rennik shifted microphones into place, stacking the equipment that would broadcast Cade's music through the ship. Cade had tried to explain to Zuzu that she wouldn't strictly need the help, that when she played the song it would go straight into the head of any human onboard. But Zuzu insisted.

To be fair, Cade didn't fight her too hard. It would be brass to batter
Everlast
with all of that sound.

The bay reflooded with people as Cade tuned up. Whatever Rennik had done to Moon-White had worked, and the sound rushed out pure and clean. Cade remembered all of the time Rennik had spent with Renna. The careful calibrations. How much he adored her, talked to her.

Cade hung her head low over the guitar's neck and whispered, “You can do this.”

Zuzu flicked a panel of switches from the side of the stage. “What do you think?”

The only option for stage light was the buzzing white overheads, but Cade couldn't have everything. This was a war-battered spaceship, not a club, and she had the one thing that mattered most: a first-class crowd.

Rennik stood in the front row, with Lee beside him. Against all odds, Gori snuck in and stationed himself against the back wall. Cade's mother was seated at the center of the room with the rest of the spacesicks.

Mira hung at the edge of the stage until Zuzu waved her over and showed her how to push at the balance and fade controls on the sound board. She nudged them with excited fingers. Cade made a silent promise to scour the girl's eardrums, call an awkward shuffle out of her feet, and make her fall in love. Not with a person, but with a song. Cade knew from experience—it was a good place to start.

The crowd did its sigh-and-settle.

Cade thought about tacking on some words in front of her playing, some kind of fumble-sore message of hope. But for the first time in too long, she could let the music be her voice.

She hit the strings, and they spoke.

In stutters first, in long-winded sentences that started with fine intentions and faded to garble. Cade begged the guitar with her strumming, told it tenderly with each kiss of her fingers on the strings.

You can do this.

Cade pinched harmonics, letting the overtones find one another and huddle close. She pulled out every trick she knew, but the listeners furrowed their brows and didn't follow. Cade was trying too hard to win them. This wasn't about winning. It was about going somewhere, and taking all of these people with her.

She was knocked from the path by a disturbance near the back of the room. The crowd spread like it was taking a breath. Heads shuffled and reordered themselves, until the cause of the commotion broke through the front row.

Ayumi's face was a thicket of half-healed cuts. She looked unsure about each step, as if she were walking through deep woods. She followed the music out of the crowd, into the open space that no one ever breached during a show. Cade switched to simple chord progressions, because her brain couldn't handle anything else. Ayumi stopped right in front of Cade, her face vague, and then she smiled.

“It's funny,” she said. “I was trying to sleep, and then I heard something, sort of like the rattle of a bug in my ear.”

“I'm just getting warmed up,” Cade said.

Lee elbowed her way out of the crowd, but it wasn't until her arms went around Ayumi's waist and her feet left the ground that they both started laughing and crying at the same time.

“So what do you think?” Lee asked as she finally set Ayumi down.

“About what?” Ayumi asked.

Lee spread her arms to take in the room, the crowd, the planet like a white ball that could fit in her palm.

Ayumi squinted, then squinted harder until it looked like it hurt. She lowered her voice so that only Lee and Cade could hear. “I followed the sound to get here.”

That quickly, the set of Ayumi's face made sense. Her eyes had lost their focus.
Head trauma,
Cade remembered from her time in medical. It could cause all kinds of damage, including blindness. Cade was worried she might have to break the news to Lee, but then she remembered how well Lee and Ayumi understood each other.

Lee was nodding, and crying, and staring at Ayumi like she couldn't be more perfect. “Earth,” Lee said, gathering Ayumi's face in her hands. “We made it to Earth.”

The static of doubt filled Ayumi's expression. “This is the absolute wrong time to play a trick on me.”

“It's not exactly a
welcoming
planet,” Lee said. “But it's one hundred percent real and very much—”

Ayumi cut her off by laughing. She leaned in and pressed a hand over Lee's heart, eclipsing every hard truth with a kiss. Lee didn't look eager to stop kissing, ever, but eventually she put an arm around Ayumi's back and led her off the stage so Cade could get on with the show.

Her head was filled with Ayumi's and Lee's tight-woven songs, so loud that she didn't even have to close her eyes to hear them. It should have thrown Cade off, but instead she decided to use it. She borrowed notes from Lee and Ayumi, then from Rennik, Mira, Cade's mother, and the remembered bits of Renna. The music of the fleet members in the crowd washed over Cade, so she used that, too, twisting it into a melody of her own design. Something simple. This was no time for showoff moves. Her song had to be carved from pure, clean heart.

Cade knew that it was working when people's hands flew to their temples. Fleet members turned to whoever stood next to them, gaping, confused.

Cade vamped—not for time, but for the right feeling. She needed to be in the center of the flow of it. To be a question rushing toward an answer that she couldn't see. She filled every note with reaching, aching, wanting-to-arrive.

When it ran out of her fingertips like water, she started to sing.

 

third in line and waiting

for the long slide into dark

ride the curve to day

again, following the

arc

 

grave fingers, pulling

drag all things down

to a blue-green point of stillness

and still the whole is turning

round

 

Cade reached the place where the song had cut off before, and it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, her toes scraping the edge. One part of her clung and wobbled back, while the other strained ahead, almost out of her skin. What she needed was laid out beyond her—simple to see, impossible to reach.