Entangled (3 page)

“Xan,” she said, and the name clinked inside her head again. “Why don't I know anything about him? I've never seen him. Never heard his name.”

“Xan was not as strong as you were,” Mr. Niven said. “The entanglement process is complicated, difficult. Xan has been asleep for fifteen years.”

“You mean . . . in a coma?” A rare word on Andana. Most of those who lost consciousness were left to die.

“Yes.”

Cade tried to dial the picture of baby Xan forward, and came up with a pale, soft-faced teenager with water-blue eyes and loops of brown hair. She thought of him waking up on Firstbloom. Into the white of it, the nonsmell of it, the blank but friendly rooms. Hearing the voices of the scientists who had dreamed him up—blurred, at first, but then gaining edges. Welcoming him to the world with noise.

And then Cade understood something.

The Noise. It had blinked off, but only because this boy, somewhere else in the universe, had woken up. Xan had been in a coma—blank, static-filled, stuck between stations, for fifteen years.

Cade had been tuned into him.

There was only one thing she could understand now, only one thing that made sense. “So,” she said, smoothing down the threads of her skirt, patting the nests in her hair, doing a spit-sour job of grooming herself. “When do I meet him?”

“Xan is gone.”

The word made no sense.
“Gone?”

“Firstbloom was raided two days after he first showed signs of consciousness.”

The flicker.

The flicker while Cade was onstage last week. It
had
been real. Xan had woken up for just a second as she hammered out notes, and now he was up for good.

“He wakes up for the first time since he was a drooling baby,” Cade said, “and you let the place get
raided?
”

“Xan was taken.” Mr. Niven didn't seem too worked up about it. He recited the words with the same thin-soup nonthrill that he said everything else.

Cade curled that last knuckle.

“Humans will be much stronger if entanglement proves possible,” Mr. Niven said. “Not every species in the universe would like to see that. Project QE has enemies, Cadence. You have enemies.”

She got the distinct feeling that Mr. Niven wasn't going to help her fight those enemies. It made her want to get up in his wrinkle-scaped face. Tear his lab coat into a thousand white pieces.

“So I'm supposed to sit around waiting for some hostile nonhumans to swarm all over me?
Attack?
”

Mr. Niven reached into his pocket. “No,” he said. “You are not supposed to fight. You are supposed to find Xan.”

“What!”

She rushed him now, and his hand flew out of his pocket, arms high and sudden-white as solar flares.

“No contact,” he said. “No contact. No contact.”

He bleated it until she backed off.

“You weren't here to tell me what I should be doing for the last fifteen years,” Cade said. “Isn't this in your job description? You bred us and raised us and entangled us—aren't you the ones who keep us safe?”

“The scientists of Firstbloom would like nothing more than to recover Xan and run Project QE to completion.”

“You'd like nothing more than to make me do it
for
you. Why should I do that?” Cade kicked a fallen chair, and the echo of the metal shivered up her leg. “Here's another question, while we're at it. Why wasn't
I
recovered? I've been on this boiling excuse for a planet, and this whole time Xan was on Firstbloom . . .”

“It was never our intention to keep the entangled on Firstbloom.” Mr. Niven kept up the pace of the excuses, but his voice thinned out even more, like a tape at the end of its loop. “We needed to see how you would fare in a natural environment. We've kept a close watch all these years, Cadence. How do you think I located you?” He put his hand to the left of his undone buttons, over his heart. “You are our most treasured experiment. We would never let harm come to you.”

The pride Cade had felt at being a good little entangled girl was gone, washed off on a stomach-sick tide.

“Your most treasured experiment?”

Cade pointed a harsh finger at Niven. “I don't owe you.” Her voice trembled like a shadow on a hot day. “Find him yourself. And when you do, you can reunite us. No . . . better . . . you sweep me off this sand-nugget and get us both back to Firstbloom, or a planet where humans are cleared for work. You scientist types must have some intense clearance. I mean, look at what you're getting away with. Running experiments on babies.”

Cade picked up Cherry-Red. It was time to drain out. “You let me know when you find him,” she said. “When you do, bring him to me. I want to meet this Xan.”

Mr. Niven stood firm in front of the door. It looked like he would take his encore, whether she applauded or not.

“That's impossible,” he said with one of his too-rare blinks. “The scientists cannot find Xan. The scientists were killed in the raid.”

“You're standing right in front of me. So at least one of you made it.”

“No,” Mr. Niven said. “I was not so fortunate.”

The wrinkles on his face trembled and then—vanished. Mr. Niven was thin, then thinner, transparent. He flickered, same as the light from a distant star. Then he snuffed out.

 

 

CHAPTER 3

PRINCIPLE OF LOCALITY: A once universal notion that an object can be influenced only by its immediate surroundings. An idea that is defied by quantum mechanics.

Cade stirred through the pile of Mr. Niven on the floor.

Her fingers crept and retreated—like practice. Playing scales. They would go so far, find nothing, come back. Go so far, find nothing, come back. Cade took all of the anger and confusion over what Mr. Niven had told her and crushed it down, kept herself to the repetition of these simple movements, to see if Mr. Niven's remains could tell her more of the story.

Cade wasn't afraid of dead bodies. But this was something else—a faceless, skinless, organless heap. A not-body. Mr. Niven was mostly lab coat and the clunk of brown shoes. A few white spokes that at first Cade avoided on the theory that she would be touching bone, but on second inspection turned out to be plastic struts.

Something had been filling out the struts and the clothes and it had seemed so clearly, frustratingly human that Cade had convinced herself she was looking at a human. But now she thought about Mr. Niven's speech (stiff), his responses (limited), and his wrinkles (blinking).

He wasn't just a projector—he was a projection.

And he'd stopped the playback much too soon. Not that Cade longed for the company of the old spacecadet, but he'd barely dented her list of questions—and those were splitting into more questions, sub-questions, each one demanding an answer. Who had decided to dump her on Andana? Why hadn't she been kept safe, if Xan had? Who—or what—were these enemies of hers? And why should she face them to rescue a boy she hadn't seen since they were both test-subject babies?

Cade worked her way around the not-body, backed into her guitar case, and almost knocked it to the ground. She saved it with scrambling hands. Placed it down, smoothed the cheap locks flat. Cade had always thought it was her music and the Noise that marked her as different. But it turned out she'd been made that way by scientists who didn't care if she knew what she was—until they needed her help.

She thrust her fingers back into the wreckage of Mr. Niven. Another question rose. Why shouldn't she throw what was left of him out with the night's empty bottles, torn ticket stubs, smeared cocktail napkins, and forget the whole thing?

The heap of struts and old clothes declined to answer.

“Just so you know,” she whispered to the pile, “I don't like you any better now.”

In the thin fold of Mr. Niven's shirt pocket, Cade's hand caught on a new surface, with smooth facets and a dicey edge. The circle of dark glass. So that was real, at least. She pocketed it as her due and kept moving, hands sure and fast now. But she only found one more thing worth her precious pocket-space.

A scrap of paper swimming tight with letters that she couldn't quite make out. Cade could read, but it wasn't like she got a daily helping of the printed word. She stuffed it in her pocket with the circle-glass. She would sound it out later.

For now, she had a bathroom line to slink past and fans to disappoint.

She left the mess for Mr. Smithjoneswhite.

 

With the quiet in Cade's head, the desert sang a different tune, all sand-scratch and hollow-boned wind.

She pulled up the metal door to her bunker. Clinked down the metal steps and landed in her square of cement. The desert was scattered with squares like this one, meant for travelers caught in the sudden bite of a sandstorm. Cade's must have fallen off the maps. It had been empty—no visitors—for years.

But now Cade wasn't alone. Not quite. She had the pieces of Mr. Niven in her pocket. And, in her head, a picture of the boy. The cloud-skinned boy. The one she was entangled with.

She sat down on the piece of scavenged plastic foam she used as a bed. It squealed at her, but Cade bore down and squished it into silence. She needed silence so she could wander into the mists of her head and find the place where she'd dropped his name.

Xan.

She clinked in other words, one at a time.

Cadence.

Firstbloom.

Entangled.

These were tokens of a past that Cade had been cast out of. She didn't know if she wanted it back, but she did want these words. They belonged to her. There was another one she needed to add, waiting for her on that scrap of paper from Mr. Niven's pocket. She opened it, and the lines where it had been folded were scars—thick and white and raised.

The characters sprawled. The first one reminded her of an
s,
but backwards. The middle letter was a
b,
she was sure of it. The last was an
H,
tall and crossed in the middle, one of her ladder rungs. But it was a capital, and came at the end of a word. A capital at the end of a word couldn't be English—could it? Cade didn't think so. But her lessons in the Parentless Center hadn't been easy to sit through.

Cade was left with two letters, second and fourth. She spun through the alphabet, but she didn't know these shapes. She wondered if she was looking at the curves and angles of a lost Earth language. It had been half a millennium since the decision was made, by nonhumans, that English would be the one accepted form of speech and writing for all humans living in space. Not because it was the prettiest or the most practical or the easiest to understand. Because it was common, and nonhumans weren't interested in learning more than one stick-figured, thick-tongued set of words.

If this note really was written in something other than English, Cade was done. She could try to track down a translator, but she didn't know what she was translating from. Unless the note wasn't for her at all. Maybe it was for Xan.

Cade felt Mr. Niven's influence on her like fingerprints. She tossed the paper across the room. She wasn't Firstbloom's messenger girl. These scientists scrambling her particles didn't mean she owed them favors—in fact, it was the other way around.

Cade burrowed as deep as her plastic-foam bed let her. Tried to burrow even deeper, into sleep. She would think about Xan in the morning. About whether she wanted to think about him at all.

 

Cade woke up and wasn't even sure of it for five minutes. No more Noise meant there was no static-prickled difference between dreaming and awake.

The room she slept in didn't give her much to go on. In the dark, it could have been the slate of a standard nightmare. But one finger of light reached down from a crack in the cover of the bunker, and led Cade to a patch of shine on the other side of the room. The mirror-tip caught her eye and threw back a dim picture.

Which gave her an idea.

If Project QE had nonhuman enemies, writing something that could be read backwards, in a mirror, would keep it safe.

Cade thrashed onto her other side and faced the pocked cement wall. If she was right, it would mean her enemies were real. She tried to convince herself that everything Niven had said was a lie.

But he was from her white-painted past—her own faded memories and her gut confirmed it. He was real, Xan was real, and entanglement was real. If it wasn't, the inside of Cade's head would be just like everyone else's.

Maybe the danger was real, too. Maybe the boy who used to be the most important thing in her small universe had been taken.

Cade got up and scraped the tenderness of her feet on the cement. In the dark, she found the slip of paper and crawled up to the mirror. Refocused her eyes. Reversed the word. It was blocked out in perfect, plain English.

Hades.

 

There was a reason Cade didn't go to Voidvil on Sunday mornings.

A hundred reasons, really, and Cade could see them running thick and obvious in the streets.

Voidvil was at its worst after the riot of a Saturday night. Men and women with spacesick had been up for too long without sleep. The needing smiles of the night before were traded in for burst-vessel skin and slitted frowns. A few tents were propped in the crust of alleys or slung across empty lots, offering forgiveness for whatever-you-did-last-night, only a few coins. Nobody bought it.

Cade scanned the buildings. She'd seen the word
Hades
before, splashed in neon over a gape-mouthed door. It was the name of a club on the near side of town. She would find out what the word meant, and maybe that would tell her how much trouble Xan was in.

Not that she cared. She cared about being able to go right back to not-caring.

The staircase to Hades put the one at Club V to shame. It twisted down, a spiral with pegs and spikes set in at random. Cade climbed, listening to her steps as they tested, sounded, called the all-clear.