“Sure,” Cade said. But her eyes said, No. Get off. Step back.
“I know things about you.”
He reached out one wrinkle-spurting finger, and Cade crumpled away from it. But he didn’t touch her. He didn’t even try. Just hovered near her temple—a straight line from his cracked old fingernail into her brain.
“The shift,” he said. “It’s different now, Cadence. Can’t you feel it?”
He waited for her to respond, but Cade was stunned to a full stop.
“What did you call me?” she asked.
“Cadence.”
She let the old man in.
He stood in the armpit of shadow just behind the door, facing the sheet of mirror. Cade weighed her options—keep him, waste him, send him on his nerve-shattering way.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I have both a name and a number,” he said. “The number is for paperwork and formalities. You can call me Mr. Niven.”
“How do you know what’s happening to me?” she asked. “No, wait. First of all, how do you know—”
“Your name. Cadence. Born June third, 3112.” He was using the Earth calendar. Definitely human. But the rote way he reported things—feeding them out like strings of facts—felt strange.
“I know your name because I know you,” he said. “I know you because I was there on the night you were born, and for the first eight hundred and twenty-nine days of your life. This period and duration of acquaintance makes us old friends, Cadence.”
“I don’t have friends,” she said. “New, old, or otherwise.”
But she was still hung up on those three letters, tacked to the end of her name. The nudge from bare-bones Cade to the sweet, curving fleshiness of Cadence. There had been times—bottomless nights in the bunker—when she’d been sure she made the name up, just to prettify herself, or pretend she had a past that she didn’t.
But she did. And here it was. Babbling at her.
“You weren’t born on Andana,” Mr. Niven said. “You were born on Firstbloom.”
That was a mobile lab station. One of the few that had been set up—in space, of course, since no planet would host a troop of human scientists. Rotating crews so no one stayed long enough to turn spacesick.
Firstbloom. Cade had heard of it, sure, but it had just been a word. Not the place where she was born.
“No parents,” Mr. Niven said. “You were bred and raised for Project QE.” He kept slinging facts, and Cade took them like punches.
No parents. No parents? But she’d never had parents, so what did it matter if they were just globs of genetic material or flesh and blood? And this way she’d never have to waste one more thought on how they died, or if they had just left her, or if they had loved her. It was better this way. Cade had seen enough tubies to know that they turned out fine, and sometimes much better than their parented counterparts.
When she reached the other half of what Mr. Niven had said, though, it brought her brain up short.
“Project what?”
“Project QE. Shorthand, of course. For Quantum Entanglement.”
Each new unknown was a serious blow to the side of the head. Cade sat down—slumped there, a heap of slit-up clothes and chipped nail polish and toughness melting off her in sheets.
“What is that?” Her words came out small. “What is quantum entanglement?”
“It will be easier if I show you.” Mr. Niven reached for the top button of his shirt without so much as glancing down.
Cade’s hand swerved three times. Once to fish out her knife, twice to unsnap it, three times to deal out the short, flat blade that worked best on humans. She slid the tip of the knife through the stale air of the dressing room toward Mr. Niven’s chin—which didn’t so much as bob. Cade never should have let him in that room. Her wrist itched to undo the mistake.
But Mr. Niven had a few buttons popped now, and what Cade saw against his pale, almost transparent skin stopped her. A hole in the gulch at the center of his collarbone. Or not a hole. It glinted. A dark circle of glass embedded in the skin. He closed his eyes and the hole flooded with light, and the light streamed together, focused itself on the grime-white wall, and burst into a picture.
Mr. Niven was a projector. Cade wondered if it was an upgrade that came standard with being a scientist.
The picture took a minute to set and harden. White walls. White light. A room full of babies.
Cade dropped the knife and didn’t even know it until she heard the clatter.
“Am I one of those . . . ?”
“Shhh,” Mr. Niven said, the sound full of crackle, like it was being heated on a burner. “We are about to begin.”
“Hello,” a voice boomed out of Mr. Niven’s mouth. Not his voice. Hearty, cheerful. It even changed the shape of his lips, stretched them wide around the warm sounds. “Welcome to Project QE.” A few shots of babies crawling at each other, blinking their damp eyes, crabbing their little hands. “You might wonder why you’re looking at a room full of infants.”
Here was the childhood Cade almost-remembered. She didn’t know whether to touch the makeshift screen with soft fingertips or run as fast as she could back to her bunker.
“These children have been split into pairs based on careful breeding and selection,” the voice boomed. “Final tests and preparations are being carried out, and soon this batch of standard human children will undergo the process of quantum entanglement.”
“You’ve said that twice now,” Cade muttered, “but what does it—”
A flash of white, so hot Cade had to throw a hand to her eyes. Something had been spliced out. The picture flicked back on two babies sharing the frame. Swaddled in spotless white diapers. Out of the two, it was simple enough to find herself. A swirl of black hair, light-brown skin, green-black eyes. The other was pale as a cloud and twice as fat, in a soft-folded, babyish way.
“Here we have Cadence and Xan.”
Xan.
The name clinked, like Cade was a metal bank and the name Xan was the first coin she’d ever dropped into it.
Xan.
That name meant something. More than that. It was worth something. But Cade would have to come back to it later to figure out what, because the great big mouthy voice boomed on.
“These two are optimally suited for entanglement. Our greatest hope lies with them.”
Another white-hot flash. Another splice.
The two babies sprawled in a new room, whiter, if possible, than the last one. “Cadence and Xan took well to the process. After a brief period of confusion and rest, the two began to bond at an intense level long thought inaccessible to the human species.”
Cade felt the prickle of something in her chest. Pride. Not that she had earned it. All she had done was be a baby, bred for a certain purpose. It was the same feeling she had to dismiss all the time, when she smashed through a new song or splayed her fingers into an unreachable chord. She wasn’t a good musician. It was just a response to the Noise, a necessary knee jerk. And those babies were just bundles of instinct and genes.
“Cadence and Xan are a wonderful pair,” the not-Niven said. “Perfectly entangled.”
“Entangled?” Cade asked. Again.
“Shhh,” Mr. Niven said, and he was just his old man self for a moment, thin-lipped and scolding.
Cade was one curled knuckle away from sending him to the floor. But Mr. Niven had answers, and Cade was only starting to slam together the questions. So she let him stay on his feet. For now.
The picture on the wall changed to a diagram of bouncing circles, chalk-white on black. “When we entangle two particles on a quantum level, they are no longer bound to the physics that restrict human action.” Two circles flowed together, down a narrow stream, and parted, now picked out in blue to show they were different than the rest.
“Entangled particles react to each other, balance each other, and transmit impulses faster than the speed of light.” One circle spun clockwise. Less than a blink
later, the other circle spun, counter. “Entanglement is an ancient fact, known to humans for over a millennium, but applications have been limited. Certainly, prior to these trials, no one has attempted to entangle two humans on the quantum level.”
Back to babies. They were older now—Cade could tell by the full heads of hair, the sprouting bottom teeth. It hurt to look at that little girl and see how different she was from the mostly grown version. How happy.
Baby Cadence smiled and Xan puckered his face into a frown. Baby Cadence laughed, and Xan shredded the air with a wail.
“Their moods are attuned when in proximity. But they can transmit even more fantastic streams of information. What’s more, they exhibit none of the human tendencies toward spacesick. While the spacesick detach from themselves, the entangled remain grounded in the strength of their connection with each other. The state is permanent, unaffected by cell turnover, due to our unique method of bonding particle interactions with the Higgs Field prior to entanglement.
“We at Firstbloom can now say it is possible to keep the human mind safe from space. We can do more than struggle, more than survive. Our hope is that Cadence and Xan will show us how.”
The picture faded to white, and soon there was only the wall.
Mr. Niven coughed, chasing off the other voice that had been making use of his throat. He didn’t budge from his spot behind the door. It was Cade who made the move, closer, needing to know more.
“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.
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