Unmade (21 page)

Cade didn't know what losing Renna would do to him. No one did.

When she had gone
to see him in the morning, he looked wrong. Smaller, even though he didn't slouch. Off balance, even though he sat up straight and perfect, the sheet slung tight over his lap. He had stared at Cade with burned-out eyes.

“Please,” Ayumi said, pulling Cade out of her old pain. “Don't deprive Lee of the thing she loves best.”

“You?”

Ayumi cast her eyes to the floor. “Oh. I was going to say hunting Unmakers.”

If the fight was all Lee had to come back for, Cade might have left her in her disconnected state. But Lee had Ayumi, who had slogged through a dangerous patch of space on the off chance that something could be done. Ayumi had risked Lee's wrath, and Cade knew that with Lee, a step like that was a true measure of love.

“All right,” Cade said.

Maybe a fraction of the decision was selfish, too, hoping that her friend would come back to her.

“You'll do it?” Ayumi asked, her brightness back to full blast. Saying yes to her felt better than planet-bound sunshine, better than spring.

But Cade ran into problems right away. She'd promised music and had no way to make it. Lee wasn't going to be dragged from a nasty fit of spacesick with palm-on-nearest-surface percussion. It sounded nice, but it told no story. It had no heart.

“Maybe I can put a call out to the fleet and find something,” Cade said. “I pick up instruments fast. But—”

Time. Ticking.

Ayumi ducked her head as if she was hiding from how stupid or obvious her idea was. “You
are
human,” she said. “You come with an instrument built in.”

Under any other conditions Cade wouldn't sing. She
didn't
sing. But whatever rules she had laid out for herself years ago had already been cracked or discarded, and there was no point in treating the last one standing as sacred.

She dusted off her vocal chords with a cough, and let out a weak-warbled hum. There was nothing pretty about her rough, rusty alto. Cade tried to scrounge the words to a few Earth-songs, but she came up empty-headed.

Cade was one good breath away from telling Ayumi that it wouldn't work.

But something rose to prove her wrong. It swelled when she looked at Ayumi, when she let herself look at Lee.

All she had to do was close her eyes and—

—it was like reaching out a hand, but the hand was music, and what Cade found at the end of her fingertips wasn't Lee. Cade reached past her, into a loose nowhere-place. Cast her wanting into that void. Wished new life into her friend, sewing the connection between mind and self, dragging Lee in from the wild black fields of disconnect.

Calling her home.

From that nowhere-place, something answered the call of her wanting. It matched the intensity, the need of her voice. She pushed and it pushed back, but there was no fear of falling. This was balance. A force working with her, sometimes the same, sometimes in tension, but always with her.

Always.

 

third in line and waiting

for the long slide into dark

ride the curve to day

again, following the

arc

 

Cade's breath wore out.

She didn't know where she'd been. Away. But now she came back to the little ship, unsure, and Lee came with her.

Ayumi plastered the side of Lee's face with kisses. “What . . . what are these for?” Lee asked.

While she was busy blinking her dark-moon eyes and figuring out where the snug she was, Ayumi grabbed one of Cade's hands, turning it over and over like a charm. “What
was
that? It felt different.”

Cade knew the song. It was the one she'd been building, a phrase at a time, before the Unmakers attacked the fleet. But there
had
been something new about it this time. Ayumi had found the right word.

Different.

“What's Cade doing here?” Lee asked. Her face tightened. Cade got ready for it to flick to full-on disapproval mode, but it was like something jammed. “What was that singing about?”

“Singing?”

Cade sounded even more confused than Lee. She couldn't remember choosing words, or putting them in order, but she ran back over her memories and there they were.

Lyrics.

Ayumi let Cade's hand drop and looked into her eyes. “Cadence, there was something about that song . . .”

Cade had felt it too. None of her club creations could rival it. None of her harsh alone-songs came anywhere near its beauty. The lyrics tagged it in Cade's mind as important, but the way she had felt while it poured out of her proved the matter.

Cade's throat begged her to get back to it.

Ayumi shuffled to get out of Cade's way. “We took up plenty of your time. You can get back to—”

“What's happening?” Lee asked, sensing the switch to urgency and hopping down from the nav chair.

“The Unmakers,” Cade said. “We have new intel. It's our first real chance to take them down.”

Lee turned one full, bewildered circle. “Then why are we sitting around here having a sing-along?”

Cade sat at the command table on
Everlast,
Matteo on one side, Mira on the other. She'd worried that she would have to fight to get Mira a seat in the control room, but all she had to do was keep showing up with the girl in her wake.

The crew loved having Mira around. Zuzu snuck her crinkle-wrapped sweets, and June braided her hair into long parallel lines that snapped and swung. Once, Matteo had lifted Mira onto his shoulders and given her a full tour of the ship. Mira seemed to like them too, but Cade had no idea how much of that was real and how much she'd painted on to keep Cade from throwing her out the nearest airlock.

“This new information,” Matteo said, fitting the pad of a thumb to his cheek stubble. “Where did you come by it?”

Between getting swept aside by Ayumi and breaking into song, Cade hadn't had time to think of a lie. She couldn't pretend she'd heard it from another spy in the fleet. When Cade had first arrived, she'd used her knowledge of the Unmakers and their non-songs to feel out traitors. There had been eight.
Eight
Unmaker spies embedded in the fleet. At first, it had made Cade feel like the Unmaker attack was inevitable, that it would have happened Mira or no Mira. But no one else had been that close to critical information. So the spies went into the hard black of space, and none of Cade's guilt went with them.

“Cade intercepted something on the com,” Mira said. Cade's brain stuttered at the ease of Mira's lies. “She didn't mention it sooner because it was double-encrypted. She spent all night cracking it.”

Cade writhed under the pressure of looking like a sudden code genius, but Mira's smile seemed to make up for it.

Even Lee looked impressed.

Convincing the
Everlast
crew to act on good information was the easy part. Now came the rest.

“We have to call a quorum,” June said with a quick shuffle of papers. It would be the first time
Everlast
had called a quorum since the fleet came together.

Lee and Ayumi were invited to stay. Others arrived, one docking at a time—the captains of a dozen ships, and fleet members who had made names for themselves. The doctors who dealt with the sick and wounded. The tech genius from Rembra who had stopped the Unmakers from patching into the coms. Half an hour of precious pre-attack time was spent pulling everyone together, and there was still one open seat at the command table.

Cade couldn't wait on the latecomer.

“I have a two-part plan,” she said. “The first part involves almost all of the small craft in the fleet. If we send one of the warships anywhere near this meeting, the Unmakers will call it off before it even starts. But if we build a swarm of the smallest ships in the right sector—”

“And attack them how?” Zuzu asked. “We ran out of ammo for blast-wiper cannons three weeks ago.”

“Which is part of the plan,” Cade said. “They'll think it's recon, so they won't feel threatened.”

Cade and Mira swapped a look. Mira had fed the Unmakers the info about the drained ammo, at Cade's request. It sounded like good intel, which helped her maintain a cover. It also helped set up a moment like this one.

“We go after the ship with the blast-wipers,” Cade said. Zuzu started another round of objections, but Cade was ready. “
Not
the cannons. Pressurized air. We have to get close for it to work, but the Unmakers won't expect it, and all we have to do is blow through the hull once—as long as we hit the right room. Hard to hold a meeting when all of the attendees have been sucked out into space.”

“Explosive decompression?” Zuzu asked, flicking at her earlobe. “Crude. But hell, I like crude!”

“Ditto,” Lee said.

Ayumi drummed her fingers on the table.

“The other little ships scatter, draw the fire,” Cade said, getting into a rhythm now. She stood up and paced, made a performance of it. The more confident she sounded, the more the crew would believe in the plan. The more
she
would believe in it. “Three of our shuttles are left to dock and send boarding parties. Once the rest of the Unmaker ship locks down, we have to deal with the leftovers. Make a clean sweep.”

Cade knew how close this plan sounded to the Unmakers' original one. Take out the masses, round up the rest, hunt them down. A twinge lodged and spread through her in a sickening way. But Lee stared at Cade like she had never heard anything so brilliant or brass.

“Where'd you come up with that?” she asked.

Cade shrugged.

It was all she thought about. Day. Night. When she wasn't skimming information from Mira, she was planning elaborate deaths. She doubted this was what the scientists had in mind when they entangled her.

“I don't know,” Matteo said. “Without
Everlast
to protect the smaller craft, it seems like a great deal of risk to our pilots.”

They fought it out. Lee took Cade's side, which came as a surprise, and Ayumi watched them both with a worry-coated look. Cade wrapped herself so tight in the arguments that she didn't notice the last member of the meeting arrive. He lingered in the doorway. Too tall. Thinner, now, curves cut so deep they looked harsh.

The last time Cade had seen Rennik, in that faceless room on
Everlast,
his clothes still smelling of crisped meat, he had looked emptied out, done. But then his eyes had lit with a fever-burn.

“You can rest,” Cade had told him. “As long as you need before you feel . . .” She couldn't say
better.
Renna had died and that word had gone with her. “Rest,” Cade repeated, her hands clumsy and useless against the itch of his new blanket.

Rennik forced himself to his feet, clenched against an oncoming lurch. He fought it, like swallowing back vomit. “I won't need rest,” he said. “It would deprive me of the pleasure of killing the Unmakers, one by one.”

He stared at Cade now, and the fever was stronger than on that first night, fed by all of his success.

If Lee and Ayumi were a well-known team of pilots, and Cade and Mira had made a name for themselves taking down Unmaker ships, Rennik had made one by storming the ships and killing, down to the last.

“Cade?” Matteo asked.

She didn't know how much of the conversation she'd missed, but when she looked up, the air was thick with raised hands.

“Cade,” Lee stage-whispered across the table. “You might want to actually, you know, vote for your own plan?”

“Right.” Her hand shot up.

“Rennik,” Green said in a dicey manner that made it clear he was wary, if not outright afraid, of the Hatchum. “Good of you to join us. We'll catch you up on the plan and then you can vote—”

“It doesn't matter,” Rennik said. His tone had been stripped of calm. It was more a pulse than a voice.

It doesn't matter.

Cade wanted that to mean what it used to: that Rennik was on her side, and would back her. But the words had a newer, sharper edge.
It didn't matter
as long as he had plenty of metal-breathers to kill.

“Right, then,” Matteo said. “It's decided.”

Cade forced herself to wait until Rennik drained out before she stood.

Ayumi bolted around the table. She had been a special sort of awkward all through the meeting. “Look,” she said. “About that song.” Cade rushed out of the control room, but Ayumi kept talking.

The trajectory for the dock was set, and nothing Ayumi said could pause it, but a figure waddling down the hall did the job for her. He was short, robed, blinking faster than Cade's counting-down heartbeat.

“Oh, good!” Ayumi said, misinterpreting Cade's stalled feet. “So the next time you sing—”

Gori landed in the middle of the conversation.

“Sing?” Gori asked. Then he muttered to himself, “Yes, of course. A song would explain it.”

“You're awake!” Ayumi said. Her arms flung high and threatened to clasp around his neck, but even with two months' worth of sleep crust in his eyes, Gori managed to warn her back with a glare.

“I had no intention of leaving rapture for several more years, but I was interrupted.” Gori focused on Cade. “This song—”

Cade wanted to get her voice around it again. But she had less than a minute to board, and less than ten before she'd be in the thick of a battle, where she would need all of her nerve endings alive to the danger.

“Look,” she said. “I'm done taking requests.”

“What I have to say is not shaped like a request,” Gori said. “It is a gift of knowledge, a message from the universe:

“You must stop this song.”

 

Cade tried to be patient as Gori adjusted to the hold of Ayumi's shuttle. Mira flitted in a cautious circle around the Darkrider as he stumbled. She looked double-pleased: first, that Gori was there to stare at, and second, that another fleet member was sucking Cade's attention away from her, and she'd been able to dart into the mission without a fight.