Unmade (9 page)

“With what?” Ayumi's attention fluttered from Cade to the notebook pages and back again.

“A song.”

“I'm not, strictly, musical,” Ayumi said with a frown. Then she brightened. “I do have a minor amount of training on the
slyth.
It's a double-reed instrument we use on Rembra, with a flat tone that sort of splits your nerves down the middle—”

“Not like that,” Cade said. “I mean, I don't need you to
play
the song.”

“Oh.” Ayumi's fingers stopped in the middle of their demonstration of the air-
slyth.
“That's probably for the best.”

Cade sat down at the edge of the papers. “I was hoping you had a song I could play on Moon-White.”

“What kind?” Ayumi asked.

“An old one,” Cade said. “My mother loves Earth-songs. Or she used to. So I thought—”

“I have a few,” Ayumi said. “Here. Somewhere. Songs and poems and story-bits . . .” But she was so distracted with her own work that she didn't offer to help. She turned pages, fluttered notebooks.

Cade kneeled, unable to avoid the rustle. “What are you looking for?”

“A planet.” Ayumi's fingers fast-skimmed a margin.

“What kind?” Cade asked.

“One we can live on when the fleet's gathered. We have a plan for how to pull everyone together. We need a sub-plan for what to do with all those people and ships, and I don't sleep so I figured . . .”

She laid one page on top of a slim pile, and threw the others back into the general mess. “We need a location outside of the known systems. Lee and I talked about it, and we can't see nonhumans letting us start new colonies on top of the old ones. Especially not if it means a threat from the Unmakers.”

“So we need something new,” Cade said.

Ayumi nodded. She held up a page from her little pile. “How does this sound?” She put on her most convincing voice and tried to sell it to Cade. “Forty-five degrees cool side, five thousand hot side. Methane issues. Snappish and hungry nonhumans.”

Cade couldn't keep the sourness off her face. Ayumi crumpled the paper and threw it.

“There's got to be something in here,” Cade said. “A song for me. A planet for all of us. Right?”

Ayumi perked up on her knees, brightened her eyes. She was so used to being the source of constant uplift for everyone else, and she looked relieved that someone else had supplied a little bit for her.

Cade sifted through pages looking for an Earth-song, while Ayumi hunted for the vague scent of something habitable.

“Caves?” Ayumi said. “Inhabited, drippy, prone to flooding.”

“Maybe,” Cade said. “Inhabited by what?”

Ayumi squinted. “Doesn't say.”

“Never a good sign.”

“How about this one? Land and water reported, but the planet was never settled due to . . .” Ayumi turned the page and deciphered the back. “Brain infestations by the local empathic bacteria species.”

“Pass.”

Cade went through page after page, and found that most were filled with splinters of information about Earth. The names of ancient countries: Nigeria, Ireland, Venezuela, Japan. Recipes for food that probably hadn't been cooked in a thousand years. Paella. Something called a cheeseburger. A short and mostly crossed-out description of the smell of Earth-grass. Sweet and mild and mixed up with dirt. Bitter-bright when you cut it. The names of wars, the names of battles, the numbers of the dead. Half a poem about the question of being or not being. What the sun looked like when it touched the sea.

Cade was so attuned to the details of a planet she'd never seen that she almost missed a page of what looked like songs. “London Bridge,” and “Ring Around” something called a “Rosy,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

These told Cade nothing about Earth, plucked no deep chords in her. But they were Earth-songs, so maybe her mother knew them. Maybe they would trickle their way in through her cracks.

Cade read “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with more interest than the others. It didn't sound like it had anything to do with real stars, not the way Cade knew them. But she got caught on one line: “Up above the world so high.” It made her think of lying on the ground, on that bittersweet Earth-grass, staring up into a white-freckled night, seeing stars the way humans were meant to see them.

Cade looked up, and found Ayumi watching her with a specific sort of dreaminess on her face.

“It gets in your head fast, doesn't it?”

“What?” Cade asked. “The lyrics?” She scanned them again. “They're catchy. In a boring sort of way.”

“No,” Ayumi said. “Earth.”

Half an hour went by. Cade counted the time in paper cuts. She was supposed to be looking for songs, something that could reach through her mother's disconnect. But Earth kept drawing her in.

Cade found a page that she knew was important before she even started reading it. Something about the careful handwriting, the way the block of words was centered and set on its own page.

“They left before the asteroid hit.
They told their children how blue it was, how green.
”

Cade slammed the notebook shut.

This was an account of Earth's last days, and there was nothing dusty and distant about it. Cade had almost been able to see it—the colors of the planet, ringed in pure space-black. She'd almost been able to feel it—there, and bright. Then gone.

Back to the search. Cade shifted a few pages aside, and underneath them, found another notebook.

“Don't open that one,” Ayumi said, even though it looked like every other one.

“What's in it?” Cade asked.

Ayumi's face welled pink. “Details of spacesick, what it's like to be spacesick, very personal stuff.”

When Cade had first met Ayumi, she'd been so calm about the whole thing, treated it like part of the human condition—a sour fate, but unavoidable. Now she looked like she wanted to find a way to hold spacesick down and punch it in the face.

“You can talk to me about it,” Cade said. “If you want.”

Ayumi shook her head, so sudden-hard that Cade worried she might bash it against the nearest surface.

“I don't want to talk anymore,” Ayumi said. “I want it out, out, out.”

 

Cade told the entire crew to meet in the common room—no exceptions.

She sat down, stuck the little paper with the Earth-songs on top of her knees, and settled Moon-White across her lap. If a guitar could sigh, that's what Moon-White did. The smooth body found its home against Cade's, and the warm-ups hummed through her with a sort of rightness that she hadn't felt since before Res Minor.

“I don't get it,” Mira stage-whispered from where she sat, half-sunk in cushions.

Rennik stood propped against the wall. When he spoke, Cade heard a grace note of pride. “She's a musician.”

“She's the most finger-destroying guitarist in the known systems,” Lee said, not to be outdone. “And, since it's hard to imagine people coming up with guitars in the unknown systems—maybe something
like
guitars, but not the same—I think it's safe to say that she's the best there is.”

Mira stared at Lee, the green of her eyes struck through with stubborn flint.

“Don't worry,” Lee said. “Cade will convince you.”

This was bigger than Cade's reputation. She had to tell the crew the good her music might be able to do. There was no point in bringing the human race together if they celebrated by glassing out.

“Do you remember the footage from Firstbloom?” Cade asked. “When the scientists said music was tested for its effect on spacesickness?”

Lee downshifted from praise to scoffing. “It clearly didn't do the trick, or we would all know about it.”

“What they heard back then wasn't enough,” Cade said. “But they never heard me.”

And she went to work.

Simple chords first, and then more complicated finger-weaving. It was all fine and building until she transitioned to the Earth-songs. Cade started with “London Bridge,” but she couldn't force the words out. They were too ridiculous. She tried “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She “Ringed around the Rosy.”

Cade looked up, and found her mother as gone as ever. Mira frowned with special, intense boredom. Ayumi and Lee traded glances. Rennik's neck corded as he turned his head toward the door, like he could hear more important things happening somewhere else on the ship. He had told Cade once that he didn't feel music the same way she did. Now she was nerve-sick, and she needed to go back a few minutes and un-demand that he come. She didn't want Rennik to see this happening.

Cade never lost her audience.

Even if she did, they had never mattered as much as the music. Cade had been willing to drop the crowds in the club, and if they found their way back to her, brass. If not, she would hit the next song without thinking.

This was what it meant to care—to know that if she lost these people, it mattered. Cade shifted the chords, disrupted her patterns, tried harder, but not with the Earth-songs. There was no space in their simple melodies. Cade let the page drift down from her knees. The song chose what it wanted to be. It led, and Cade followed.

The crew went with her.

And Cade's mother did, too. She wasn't moving, but energy swirled below the surface. Cade couldn't explain it. She felt her mother, a presence in the room where before there had been nothing and no one.

Her mother—

Thrashed out of stillness, and her breath tore the air. Drowning. She looked like she was drowning. She grabbed the nearest solid thing—Mira—and battered her down. Tugged the girl's clothes, anchored fingers in her hair.

Mira loosed a scream, cold as space on bare skin. Cade dropped Moon-White with a hollow bang. She grabbed Mira out of her mother's soft-desperate arms. Mira slammed into Cade's shoulders, and ran. She turned in the door frame and stared at Cade's mother, her features bunched and set, her voice chilled metal.

“Don't touch me.”

The fight had passed out of Cade's mother, but Rennik held her hands behind her back. Cade followed Mira across the main cabin, where she spun, cornered by the harsh realities of space. There was never anywhere far enough to run to.

“No one is allowed to touch me,” Mira said, the small points of her teeth showing.

“That's okay,” Cade said. “That's fine.” She held both hands in the air to prove that she wouldn't try.

 

Rennik carried Cade's mother in the bracket of his strong arms and set her down on his own bed. They stared at her like she was a picture of a woman, taken a long time ago.

Rennik asked his question to a vague patch of air. “Do you ever worry that it might happen to you?”

“No,” Cade said. “I'm entangled.”

She and Rennik kept a tight hold on her mother's arms, pressing her into place.

“You don't ever worry that it will . . . expire?”

Rennik's politeness could act as a balm on the wounds of a torn-open universe. It could also suffocate.

“Do I think that I'm going to glass out now that Xan is dead?” Cade asked.

Rennik winced.

Cade shook open a roll of tightly wound bandages. “No.” She had felt it on the shuttle coming back from Res Minor. Entanglement wasn't done with her. Her muscles might have drained of the extra strength, her mind reshaped all the spaces where Xan's thoughts used to fit. But he was still with her, always with her.

Cade started to wind the bandages around her mother, tying her to the bed, but she couldn't keep her brain on the task. At first she thought it was the leftover feeling from the common room, clouding her.

But this was different.

 

it came

gold and perfect

and pulling her inward, to something even more

perfect, the point

the center of it

all she would have to do was wait

with him stripped

down to particles

there at her side

or closer

and still she couldn't think about him

because even more than the gold

he was the reminder

of what she had left

for this red

for this burning

this life

“What's happening?” Rennik asked.

Cade blinked at him.

She had felt this before, but never in a moment that she shared with someone else. The black hole had clung to the edges of her life, slipped into quiet moments. It hadn't cut in. Until now.

“It only lasted a few seconds,” Rennik said. “But you looked like you were entirely somewhere else.”

Cade set a hand to the wall, like she'd seen Rennik do so many times, for strength. Renna's confusion leached in.

“I was.”

 

The day started with sickness and throat-sting and never let up. Lee found Cade piling comfort food in the mess and lured her out into the main cabin with a chorus of
You owe me'
s.

The rest of the crew was assembled there in a loose knot. The belt at Lee's waist dripped with knives.

“What the snug is this?” Cade asked.

“Fight training!” Lee said, launching herself at Cade. She latched on with her knees at Cade's waist, her arms in a death-hug around her neck. Cade dropped Lee like a sack of grain-mash.

“Not bad,” Lee said, dusting off her shoulders.

Lee had marked the floor, as if she was turning the cabin into some kind of arena.

Lee paced up and down the ragged line of crew members. “I said yes to all this fleet-gathering,” she said. “But there's no way I'm letting anyone take one more step without proper lessons in defense. We have no idea where the next attack will come from: Unmaker, nonhuman, space-bound, planet-side.”