Entangled (19 page)

She sent the good news to Xan—and tried to leave out the one sour note that kept coming back to trouble her.

If trust was a dangerous thing, they were all in it, deep.

 

 

CHAPTER 14

ECONICHE: The unique subset of the environment for which evolution has prepared a particular species

Wherever Cade went the next day, it seemed like Ayumi was always there, waiting with a notebook and a comet-bright smile.

“I hope you don't mind . . .” she said. “Just a
few
questions.”

After Cade had slept and washed up and eaten twice, after she consulted Rennik and Lee on the course, after she un-stiffened her fingers on some scales and tested the timbre of Moon-White's strings, she said, “All right, all right.”

They sat in the control room—or really, Cade sat in the pilot's chair and Ayumi hovered, her pen flashing wide arcs before Cade even started talking. She thought Ayumi would start with entanglement, but she wanted everything.

“It's a history,” Ayumi said. “For the sake of current and future generations, don't leave out a single detail.”

Cade stammered through a few sentences about her bunker on Andana, about the sandstorms that had kept her company. Ayumi sifted through Cade's memories, asking about one detail or another, always wanting more. She was worse than the fans who stumbled backstage, uninvited.

“There's nothing good to tell,” Cade said.

“Then give me the nongood,” Ayumi said. “I don't need sunshine and miracles, Cadence.”

Ayumi's notebook, with its cracked cover and flimsy pages, didn't look like much of a home for the history of humankind.

But maybe she was right. Maybe it did matter.

Cade sent herself back through the space-black, to her best-forgotten planet, and hit a memory.

An old, stale night at Club V. Sweat, the batter of crowds, a drink she wasn't supposed to have burning a hot trail down her throat. It had been handed to her by some asteroid of a man who was clearly hoping for a full-body thank-you. She shoved him away from the edge of the stage and took her place at the center. Hung her head over the fretboard and fitted her finger-grooves to the strings. The lights shone hot on her back. The spacesicks at the front of the stage reached for her feet, lapped at her like waves. She pounded out chords for them and felt nothing. She pounded harder and felt less.

“Right,” Ayumi said, scribbling and scribbling, “but you had a life before the club. What about that?”

“The Parentless Center? Basic home for sand-brats. Parents all dead, run-off, or spacesick.” Cade studied Ayumi's reaction to the word—or rather, the smoothness where her reaction should have been. “You don't want to know about that.”

Ayumi shook her head like Cade was a small child and didn't understand the rules of the game they were playing.

So Cade told all of it. She told the rotten food and the everywhere-smell of piss. She told the fights with the other sand-brats, the drained eyes of the adults. And after all of that, she unearthed one good memory.

The first time she'd seen a guitar. She was nine years old, and an older boy had smuggled it in. A tatty old acoustic, but when the boy put his fingers to those strings and played one of the two chords he knew, Cade could hear that this was a sound to beat back the Noise.

She wanted to stay in that moment a while—wait for the slide of the wood under her hands, the glue-and-sawdust smell, the first press of the strings, the buzz and stumble of notes, the smile of the boy.

But Ayumi pressed in close with her notebook. “What about before that?”

“I don't know,” Cade said. “It's the Firstbloom scientists you want to ask. But they're dead.” She thought of the Niven-pile on the floor of the dressing room. “Of course, sometimes that doesn't stop them.”

Ayumi nodded and started to wander the room. Cade wondered if she was being given up on. Without someone standing so close, she had time and space to think herself back, and back, farther than she'd ever thought before.

It came to her in white shards, mostly—the edge of a crib, the egg-bright glare of overhead lights. The sharp coats of the scientists. Faces came in different variations, but all of the features were the same—mouths firm and muscles set, eyes the grimmest Cade had ever seen. She even caught a glimpse of a much-younger Niven, proving that he'd been a person before he was a projection.

Firstbloom. Cade didn't even know she
had
memories of Firstbloom.

She made out the forms of other babies, crawling or clapping their little hands or crying. The more Cade flipped through moments, the more the babies seemed to be crying.

In one small chip of memory, she saw a woman in a pale blue dress with white flowers on it, standing in a corner. She was crying, too.

Then came Xan.

He stared out at Cade with those steady gray eyes, and things made sense. Things felt right. Some of them even felt easier. No wonder the Noise had been so unwelcome in her head. It had a lot to measure up to.

“Hey, Ayumi,” Cade said. “I think I found . . .”

Cade turned and caught her in the false deeps of the starglass.

“ . . . what you were looking for.”

Ayumi was swathed in space and suns and planets, her fingers spread and pulsing, her eyes thick with shine.

“Isn't it this wild, perfect thing?” she asked, looking out. “Don't you want it to . . . just . . . swallow you?”

Cade grabbed Ayumi's wrist and tugged. “Come on.” But the girl was pasted to the stars. “Come on. We need to go.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere we can be alone. No galaxies. No nebulae. No endless, meaningless black. Just the two of us.”

Ayumi's arm went limp. She let herself be led out of the control room, but she kept her eyes trained on the starglass until it was out of sight.

Cade hurried Ayumi down the chute, and dropped her on the first crate in the cargo hold.

“Now I need to ask
you
some questions.” Cade grabbed Ayumi's notebook and held her hand out for the pen. Ayumi winced but handed it over—she knew the rules of the game, and she played along.

“How long have you been spacesick?” Cade asked.

Ayumi twisted her fingers. “A little less than a year,” she whispered.

“But you keep flying.”

“That's not, technically, a question—”

“Why do you keep flying, when you know it could get you killed?” Cade left out the part about getting other people killed.

“What I'm doing, the information I'm gathering, it holds such importance,” Ayumi said. “I can't stop because there are risks.”

Cade had snatched Ayumi's notebook for show, but she found herself writing those words in her harsh, slow lettering.

I can't stop because there are risks.

If Ayumi had gambled on Cade understanding the concept, it worked.

“There's more to it, though,” Ayumi said. “Earth has been my life for as long as I can remember. Space was just the way to get what I needed at first. It was dark and it was necessary. But the more I flew, the more I . . . loved it. I can't explain this if it's something you've never felt. But I love it.”

Cade sat down on a crate across from Ayumi and inspected her, from the tips of her dark curls to the curves of her feet. Her eyes were lit up, warm. She was one of the most alive people Cade had ever met. Ayumi
couldn't
be spacesick. But, of course, any human could—that was the point. The number-one reason the human race was still strung out across a hundred planets in thirty different systems, a thousand years after the Scattering.

“Isn't spacesick what happens when you can't stand it?” Cade asked. “When your mind and body check themselves out and never come back?”

“That's the very common, very wrong explanation,” Ayumi said. “The truth is easier to see if you know a little more about the origins of spacesick. About Earth.”

A flick of nerves set off a chain reaction up Cade's spine. “So what am I missing?”

“Space euphoria.”

“Is that more sick babble or—”

“No!” Ayumi's face pulled tight, so pained and
there
that Cade was relieved. “Space euphoria is ancient. The name for one of the first stages of spacesick . . . although people on Earth didn't know it at the time. It started when Earth pilots, not even space pilots, just atmosphere muckers, punched through enough layers to feel the disconnect. They were flooded with a strange delight. The same one”—she closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose like she was inhaling half the universe—“the same one I feel with liftoff.

“The normal bonds . . . to people, to planets . . . all of it breaks.”

Cade could see that becoming a problem, fast.

Words from the spacesick bay floated across blackness and time. “Space is beautiful,” Cade said, “but it doesn't give a dreg.”

Ayumi's smile disappeared. She raked her fingers on the surface of her crate. “There's no way to face it forever as this flawed little speck. There's no right perspective, now that we don't have our planet. So people give in to it. Lose all traces of themselves. Some of them . . .”

Cade could fill in the blanks on this one. “Suicide?”

“Sacrifice,” Ayumi corrected. “But only in space. They go back to the birthplace of all things.”

“But the planetbound I met didn't love space at all. When I asked them how to leave Andana, they
hissed.
”

“They're fighting it,” Ayumi said, and the flinch in her eyes let Cade know that the fight was real, and it hurt, and it was probably happening inside Ayumi at that moment. “It's easier to keep it back when you can't see the flash and perfection of the stars, don't have constant reminders of how small, how
nothing
you are in the face of it. We're all fighting it, Cadence. It helps that I have these facts about Earth. I've even dreamt about Earth.” She smiled, and sailed off into that beautiful thought—then came crashing back. “It's not enough. That's where the touching comes in.”

The mention of it electrified Cade's skin. She felt it against her clothes, the crates, the air.

“You must think it's some depraved act,” Ayumi said. “But that touching is the body's last effort to feel human.”

Cade shifted back, recalibrated her breath. Ayumi stared off into the distance, unchanged.

“You're so calm about all of this,” Cade said. “Like you don't care if it happens to you.”

“It's
in
me,” Ayumi said. “It's in all of us.”

Cade wasn't sure why, but she needed Ayumi to be wrong. Ayumi
was
wrong. Cade was the proof.

“But what about me? I'm entangled and—”

“And you're one of how many?”

Cade couldn't give her a number, but she knew it was a small one. How many of those babies from the filmstrip had made it as far as she and Xan had? How many had been hunted down by the Unmakers? How many pairs were alive, and awake, and together?

Cade's thoughts dead-ended when Ayumi's hand met her knee. But this wasn't a sudden, empty spacesick touch. It was urgent.

“I have to ask, you, Cadence . . . I've found the Express, and the idea of entanglement, all of it at once. There's so much here I need to know. Please don't tell the others about me. Lee . . .” Ayumi blushed, and full-eclipsed her face with her hands. “Lee would want me to leave, I know she would.”

Cade had seen that scenario acted out. It would be useless to argue.

It would do no good to have a spacesick onboard, and it would do even less to have a secret spacesick that no one else knew about. It would mean keeping one eye on Ayumi at all times, constant worries and glass-checks. But when Cade opened her mouth to say
drain out,
the words didn't come.

She knew what it meant to be banished from the ship, and she couldn't do that to Ayumi, send her back to a drifting alone-state.

“We'll be in Hades soon,” Cade said. “It's a rough place. If this gets worse, you have to go home.”

Ayumi put out her hand to shake.

“That's fair,” she said. “But, you know . . . you use that word,
home,
incorrectly. Earth was home. We lost the one place we were made for, Cadence. And space wants us back.”

 

Cade left Ayumi in the hold, up to her elbows in Human Express cargo, safe from the siren wail of space. Cade couldn't talk about all that emptiness anymore. She needed to feel something.

She stopped in the mess and stuffed herself with whatever Rennik had been planning to transform into dinner. Sheets of crackers and heels of bread and ropes of salty dried meat. She went at the shelves with abandon and stepped back, so overfull she lurched in the false-grav. But the food didn't make a dent in what she was not-feeling. She headed up the chute again, through the square tunnel, and into the furtive little bedroom.

Moon-White was just where Cade had left her.

She picked up the guitar and struck it without thinking, without planning, big careless sounds that spread into a song. The notes were so close to perfect that Cade could have pushed them to it, but it didn't seem to matter. She had gotten too used to an audience. Even when she thought she didn't want them at Club V they had been there, caring when she couldn't.

She tossed the guitar on the bed and curled herself around it. She pulled the sheets up and tucked in close to the wall.

Then she remembered Renna.

She put one hand on the wall and plucked an open chord. Renna found the beat and gave it back to her in little bursts. Cade strummed and strummed until her fingertips blistered.

It was the best conversation she'd had all day.

 

Cade couldn't get herself out of the pale desert between asleep and awake. Her arms hung loose around Moon-White, but she hadn't played in hours. Lee twitched and snored in the top bunk.