Entangled (25 page)

“Hello, and welcome to Firstbloom. We're so glad you came. Firstbloom is the only mobile lab station dedicated to the study of human possibility. Please disregard the current state of our labs. If you are here to consider an investment or conduct an experiment in our research facilities, we invite you to have a look around.” Her face wavered—and it wasn't just the light. Andrea was fighting to sink reassurance into each syllable of each word, but she was losing. “And remember. No matter the setbacks, Firstbloom will continue to . . . press forward into the . . . bright human future.”

She pushed the edges of her smile out into new, painful territory. Cade heard a scream—not Andrea's—and then she blinked out.

“She made a projection,” Cade said. “Just like Niven. Right before the Unmakers raided.”

Cade couldn't believe what she had just seen. A woman saying a polite
sorry
for the fact that she was about to be killed, and asking future visitors to gloss over it so they could focus on research.

Lee stared at Cade. She had no idea what to say.

But Ayumi had a word for it.

“Ghosts.”

Another old Earth notion. Suddenly Lee and Rennik didn't seem as in love with their little plan to explore Firstbloom. Rennik started to wander the enormous lab, looking for the tech to repair the circle-glass.

Lee suckered her fingers onto Cade's arm. “Let's find that machine and get the damp hell out of here.”

But the more they looked, the more ghostlike projections they found. It was like tripping a wire—one of them would step over a patch of air that hadn't been troubled since the raid, and another memory of a person would appear.

The bald man who explained his work with such calm and precision that Cade would have guessed he made the recording on a particularly boring Tuesday.

The girl—not a day older than Cade—who did her best to look chipper as she pointed out the various parts of the lab.

The woman who screamed and screamed as she watched whatever was coming through the door.

Cade noticed that not a single one of these people said goodbye to mothers or fathers, children or best friends, wives, husbands, lovers. They didn't even try to sneak the words in around their other, more official, messages. Cade hadn't given a lot of thought to her last moments, but she hoped there was more to them than a recital of mess modules or a blank-faced declaration of fear.

“Look,” Lee said, tugging Cade to a machine that sat in one of the far corners, behind a plastic door.

As soon as Lee's foot slid over the threshold, a woman with a head of wild red curls flickered into false life in front of them. Cade couldn't help but notice she'd been beautiful. Couldn't help but see the nimbleness of the woman's eyes, the breakable nature of her small hands. Couldn't help but wonder what the woman's singing voice had sounded like.

But when it came to last words, hers were even less inspired than the others.

“This is the editing room . . . This is the editing room . . . This is the editing room . . .” on a forever-loop.

Cade passed the woman and let her voice fade to a single, ringing bell in the background. She waved Rennik over to the monstrous beige machine that took up most of the room.

“It's this, I think.”

Rennik looked it over once and nodded. Cade ran the flat blade of her knife along a seam in the metal until she found a spot to dig in. The cover pried off in one sheet. The machine spat dust, clearly angry that Cade wanted to wake it up from its elaborate plans to not do anything for the rest of time.

The inner workings were spare and dark. Cade noticed a small emptiness, about the size and shape of the circle-glass. She tamped it down and the whole machine lit up.

“I think that means we're getting to the heart of it,” Rennik said.

“Or at least we turned it on,” Lee muttered.

The room flared with sudden light and crisp color, and the projection leapt to life, plumping the air with babies.

“Welcome to Project QE.”

The words were almost a comfort to Cade at this point. She settled in to watch one more time—to fill in her blanks.

“You might wonder why you're looking at a room full of infants.”

But Cade wasn't looking at infants, or anything else.

Her head went blank. To black.

The words of the filmstrip became a nightmare soundtrack, pounding underneath what came next. Cade landed in Xan's little room, the failsafe connection snapped on to full strength. She didn't have time to orient herself to Xan's feelings. A rush of sensations hit her first. The Unmakers pulled Xan out of the room by his shoulders, his feet, his hair, whatever they could get their hands on as he struggled. Cade felt some of the pain, but it was a shadow-pain—quick to fade.

The Unmakers dragged him down a stripped-bare hallway with doors lining both sides. Cade tried to help Xan, send him some of her fight, but all he could manage were a few loose slaps. He felt sluggish, like his limbs had been hollowed out and filled with sand. Xan had been drugged.

The room the Unmakers shoved him into was small, a cell with an unfinished floor—Cade felt the grit on her cheek when Xan hit. She tried to send him strength, to wake him up, but he was slow and fogged as the Unmakers tied him up with lengths of strong rubber cord.

Then they started to torture him.

Cuts, shocks, small but adding up to a great, swallowing pain. The impulses shot into Cade and lodged themselves, even though her skin went untouched. Xan's head rolled forward. He almost blacked out. Blinked hard, back into the cell. Almost blacked out again.

Cade sent him strength, strength, strength.

But it wasn't enough.

They were hurting him and there was nothing Cade could do to stop it. A-touch-more-than-human wasn't the same as invincible. Cade remembered that with each little slice.

“Now?” one of the Unmakers asked, his fingers crushed against Xan's throat. Cade smelled dust and metal and ached to breathe.

“No,” another one said. “Let him feel it.”

The fingers eased an inch. Cade's throat limped to catch up to the desperate pull of her lungs.

“One more day,” the first Unmaker said.

And the others agreed.

“One more day.”

Cade snapped back to Firstbloom.

She was on the floor, Lee and Ayumi crouched over her, Rennik farther away, hovering over them.

“What happened?” Lee asked. Cade rubbed her arms, her face, nursing the phantom cuts.

“She must have heard what was hidden by the splice,” Lee said, “and reacted.”

Ayumi fluttered her hands over various pulse points. Neck to wrists and back again. When she leaned down to check Cade's pupils, Cade scanned Ayumi's eyes for glass and gave her own all-clear. She wanted to wave Ayumi off, on the grounds that a girl with spacesick shouldn't be in charge of health and safety.

Rennik leaned down and the others made room. “Cade, did you see the footage?”   Cade shook her head.

“What did you see?”

“Xan,” she said. “I heard . . . they're going to kill him.”

Cade's decision to turn her back on Hades for two days clamped down, tightened each breath. She'd made the wrong call, and Xan had paid for it. Unless she could get to him in a single day, he would die for it.

“We have to turn back.”

Rennik nodded, but there was hesitation in it.

“What?” Cade asked.

“Do you want to go back and watch again?”

“No.” Now that Cade knew it was happening, that Xan was being tortured, her head kept pounding two words.

No time, no time.

“Just tell me, please.”

Rennik put out a hand in the air between them. Didn't touch her. Just let his hand wait there, in case she needed it.

“The rest of the children,” Rennik said. “The ones in the other pairs.” Cade felt the sick at the back of her throat, the hot acid pulse she'd been holding down. “They didn't take to quantum entanglement. When the experiment narrowed down from a full room to just two . . . the others weren't sent home. Or raised in the lab or even sent planetside to grow up.

“They died, Cadence.”

For the first time, she liked the flatness of Rennik's voice. How it anchored the wild pitch of what she felt.

“Take it back.” The words came out whispered, then shouted. “That's not what you saw.”

The crawling babies. Every one that hadn't been Cade or Xan. A room full of life. Perfect, soft, still forming.

Gone.

 

“We're the last two,” Cade said.

Her feet touched down onboard Renna. Whatever happened between the floor of Firstbloom and the dock was lost. Cade looked backwards for it, but her mind acted like the pinched film inside the circle-glass—skipped over what it didn't want her to see. This must have been her body protecting itself. She was marooned with a rage so enormous that even to trouble the edges of it felt dangerous. If she'd had to look at the smooth glass instruments of Firstbloom, the smug white walls, the abandoned crib, she would have bashed the whole lab to pieces.

“We're the last two,” Cade said, “and I left him in Hades. I left him to die.”

Lee and Rennik held out arms to steady her as she headed up the chute. Ayumi disappeared for a minute, then chased behind them with a steaming green mug of tea. Renna rippled the surface of the chute underneath them in a soothing motion.

But being surrounded by good people who wanted to help her only made Cade feel worse.

Xan was alone. He was alone because Cade had left him. And to do what? Learn that the scientists who had entangled them were even worse than she had imagined?

She stormed the control room and planted herself in the pilot's chair. Lee, Rennik, and Ayumi stood back and watched as she clutched the armrests and set her teeth and chose her words.

“Renna,” she said. “I know the course to Hades takes two days. We need to be there in one.”

The ship broke into a consuming roar as Renna threw herself into new drive states. She shot forward at such a speed that the white points in the starglass flew up to meet them.

Rennik ran to the control panels, his hands on the dials, his body twisted back toward Cade. “This is Renna's maximum flightspeed,” he said. “She can't operate for a full day at this speed.”

“That's for her to decide,” Lee said—taking someone else's side against Rennik for what was probably the first time in her life.

Renna roared even louder.

“She would do this for you,” Cade said. “There are people you would have done it for, too.”

She didn't use Moira's name. Judging by the sudden tightness of Rennik's skin, and the visible force of the emotions rushing under it, she didn't have to.

“There's still no plan,” Rennik said. “You can't go into Hades without one. They'll be waiting.”

The Unmakers. That was why Rennik and Lee cared so much about Cade having a plan—they didn't want to lose another member of their crew to the Unmakers. But Cade didn't have the option of caring. Even if it was a trap—which it had to be—she would fly straight into it and snatch Xan out.

Lee marched over. “We're not going to let them have her.”   She pushed her hair back and stared up into Rennik's freshly iced-over features.

“You say that as though we'll have a choice. We hardly kept them back on our own ship . . . If they have the advantage . . .”

Cade broke away from Rennik and Lee's standoff and their talk of plans that, in the end, only mattered if they got her to Xan. “I need to do this,” she said. “It will never be smart, and you still have to let me.”

Rennik stepped back.

Cade smoothed her hands across the panels and shouted to Renna over the new din.

“Hold the course.”

 

Cade sat in the pilot's chair, pretended to eat the food Lee brought for her, tried—and failed—to sleep. Blame streamed through her mind, as constant as the stars. Blame for the Unmakers, the Firstbloom scientists, herself.

As if that wasn't enough, Cade dropped back into Xan's head for another round of pain.

The automatic connection snapped on and Cade found herself in Xan's cell. She suffocated inside of his head, his thoughts wrapped in a warm fog—one part drugs, two parts ache.

He wasn't being tortured this time, just nursing his wounds. Bruised to a rainbow of colors, not just black. Rot-purple and yellow, the green shine of meat gone bad.

Everything hurt.

Cade held on to the fact—true, but dissonant—that hurt meant hope. Hurt meant he was still alive.

 

Hours later, and the control room sat empty except for Cade and the roar of Renna's speed. Ayumi tiptoed in with Moon-White, looking small and pale, which was strange because she wasn't really either. Maybe it was just the sheen from the starglass caught on her skin. She held the guitar out—it claimed the icy light and turned it into brilliance. But Cade had no interest in strings or frets.

“I thought you might want to . . .”

Ayumi pushed Moon-White so close that chords started calling out to Cade's fingers.

“I didn't think tea would do the trick this time,” Ayumi said. “But this . . . I suspected it was the only thing in the universe that would make you feel better.”

Cade didn't deserve to feel better. Until she reached Hades, all she deserved was her share of Xan's pain.

“No,” Cade said. “Thanks.”

Ayumi turned to leave, Moon-White a little too loose in her grip. Her steps lilted in a way that Cade didn't like.

“Wait.”

Ayumi's black curls flashed a circle as she turned, eyes clear and stuck fast on Cade.

“Would it make
you
feel better?” Cade asked.

Her shoulders pressed up in a small shrug. But Cade remembered now—how hard Ayumi had fallen for Moon-White's music. Once Cade started to play, not one speck of glass had snuck into her eyes. Her arms and legs hadn't wandered, disjointed.