“Look, miss,” she said, as if the word miss meant “slummer” in some other language. “This bay is filled with sick people. So unless you have business here—”
“Cade!” Her name rang out once, and then it came over and over in small dry whispers. A spacesick she knew from his tendency to give himself an endless hug through her sets rushed to the door.
“She’s with me.”
The pretend nurse looked at the man in his hug-stained shirt and then at Cade, and Cade could see her doing some quick math about whether it would be better to let this happen or to purse her lips and make a fuss. But just as she started to gather her mouth into cracks and lines, five more spacesicks rushed up and joined the first.
“She’s with us.”
“We know Cade.”
“This is our old friend Cade. Right, Cade?”
She nodded and shrugged at the pretend nurse, like she just couldn’t help what good old friends she was with all of these nuts.
Hug-stains led her through the hangar, which was lined on both sides with small beds spaced in even rows. Cade couldn’t help thinking of teeth, white, a few of them worn or yellowed, and in some places shoved together. Keeping the spacesicks apart from each other was almost impossible. What they wanted, more than warmth, more than chatter, even more than the rich, filling hum of Cade’s music, was human contact. There were abundant stories of spacesicks who jumped into each other’s beds and did universe-knows-what for universe-knows-how-long only to wake up and stare at each other for hours, not sure what to do with a human when they weren’t touching it.
Maybe that’s what Cade’s issues with the spacesicks cooked down to: touching. Their hands were on her now, as she walked down the center aisle. They prodded at her from all directions, fluttered their palms on her shoulders. Cade had never liked hands unless they were fitted to the coolness of strings and frets. But she needed the spacesicks’ help, so she let them have the warmth of her shoulder, the rough grain of her hair. She wondered if, to them, it would seem like a fair trade. But when they stopped whispering her name, it became clear that they wanted more.
“What are you going to play for us?” Hug-stains asked, gripping her arm.
“Yes, yes,” the girls with the hips said.
“Play!”
Cade had forgotten that she had Cherry-Red. All of a sudden its weight announced itself at the end of her arm. It was a good thing, really. If Cade had left it in the bunker it would be one more left-behind part of her life on Andana.
“Playplayplay,” the spacesicks said, some of them soft, some of them screaming. She hadn’t played since the night in Club V, when her head had emptied out like the bar after the barking of last call. She wasn’t sure what it would be like now, to piece together a song without the Noise that had driven her to do it in the first place.
And there was something sharp-edged and dangerous about playing at the spacesick bay, with no one to keep the fans back if they loved the music a little too much. As much as she hated Mr. Smithjoneswhite, all of his arms did have their uses.
“One question,” Cade said. “Before I play.”
“Of course,” an old man said, like he was damp at the notion that she needed to ask about asking.
“Space,” she said. The bodies around her sucked in breath and hissed it out. “If you wanted to get back there—for some reason, I’m not saying you would—but if you wanted to get back to space, what would you do about it?”
The room ripped apart into too many answers and the moans of the ones who didn’t want to answer at all. At the end of the hangar, the pretend nurse raised her thin, old- before-their-time eyebrows.
“Why?” begged an old woman whose eyes had gone so glassy, they looked almost white. “Why would you ever want to go there?”
“Space is beautiful,” Hug-stains said, “but it doesn’t give a dreg.”
“Stay here with us,” the dark-haired girls cooed.
“Stay here.”
“Yes, stay.”
They put hands on her with abandon now—on her arms, her back, her sides—holding her down like they could keep her planet-bound. Cade turned in a tight circle, but she couldn’t brush them off without blasting through, hurting someone.
“I have to go,” Cade said, but she wasn’t sure if she meant up to space or rocketing out the door.
“Don’t . . . you should stay . . .”
Cade wondered if the spacesicks were right. The scientists had seemed to think she couldn’t come down with spacesick because she was entangled. But how could the scientists know that for sure? Cade had spent two years on Firstbloom, not a lifetime.
More spacesicks moved in close. Cade eyed the door through the cracks in the crowd, but the pretend nurse stood there, ticking her fingers against her crossed arms, looking at Cade like she had earned this.
Bodies blocked Cade’s skin off from the air. Her heartbeat kicked out of time.
And that heartbeat was like a call that Xan answered without a second’s pause. He was with her, in her mind, sending her the focus she needed to face the spacesicks and give them an answer.
“I’m going to save someone,” Cade said, unsticking their hands one by one. “I’m going. So you might as well tell me what you know.”
The spacesicks kept at her, repasted themselves. Xan pressed into her mind again. Cade liked the hesitation she felt, almost like he was asking if it was all right to help—instead of barging in. They’d both had enough of that from the scientists on Firstbloom. When Cade sent back a sort of mental nod, he responded with a crash of comfort. It felt cool, and the raw thought had a pulse to it, too, an underbelly of a beat, and it reminded her of—
—music.
“Look,” she said, holding up the guitar case. “You can have what you want.” Cade slapped the case onto the nearest bed and rushed to connect to the built-in amp, hoping the sand-crusted batteries still carried a charge.
She hurried her fingers into a sweet, simple chord. C. C. C. That sound was milk and cookies. It quieted the spacesicks. A few even sat at her feet.
“That’s nice,” one of the girls said. Cade noticed her for the first time, picked her apart from the knot of other girls who, until that moment, had looked just like her. Now Cade could see that this girl was the smallest, with the roundest face and a bit of softness in her eyes where most of the spacesicks just had glass.
“Thanks,” Cade said, as if it had been an actual compliment.
“Lee,” the girl said. Half of the heads around her nodded. “If I needed to get off-planet about now, I would go to the market and find Lee.”
“Thanks,” Cade said again.
The girl smiled and the smile shifted something in Cade, moved her fingers into formation. She started to play. A lullaby, to lure the spacesicks from their worries and into their teeth-white beds. But they took it the wrong way and started to dance. Their usual dances, with jolted arms and hard-grinding hips. Cade pushed her way through a verse and a chorus and then sped through one more chorus to end it.
“Dance with us, Cade.”
“No, that’s—”
“Dance, it feels good to dance.”
Bodies shivered toward each other, filled in each other’s spaces. But when they touched, nothing changed. It was like they were rubbing up against people-shaped walls. The soft-eyed girl stood apart and moved her feet up and down, just a gentle tapping. She was plugged into the beat. Cade would have played the whole song for her twice.
But there was Xan to think about. She got a hint of him at the edges of her mind. Anxious. Waiting. It was time for Cade to go to the market and find Lee.
She packed up Cherry-Red and walked away. The spacesicks were still dancing, and she knew they would dance for a long time after she left.
The market was busier than the spacesick bay, but it was better, too. At least the people there knew how many inches to leave between their skins and Cade’s. They streamed in long lines through the basement of HumanScape, o
ne of the larger apartment buildings, twelve floors. The market moved all the time. There were arrests made, one or two a month, but only when a merchant’s trade got too big for its human roots and started to suck customers out of the big city markets.
The Voidvil black market didn’t have much, but it made up for that with lots of brass and color. Cade passed booths that sold hand-dyed scarves, oversweetened candies, sand-blasted electronics, candles that smelled like places Cade would never see—Deep Forest, Ocean Wave. She wondered how many times those smells had been handed down, diluted, since someone here last filled their nostrils with the green smell of trees or salt-sweet brine. But that didn’t stop people—including Cade—from sniffing the little stubs of wax.
Cade knew a lot of the merchants; besides candles, she bought bread from them, and fruit. She traded for guitar strings and new old clothes and tear-shaped bottles of nailblack. Cade was a steady customer, and the merchants didn’t have to pretend to like her or care about her life. She browsed, she scowled, she bought, she moved on. Merchants loved it. But a strange thing happened when she stopped stirring her fingers through their wares, looked up with careful, half-bored eyes, and asked about someone named Lee.
“Lee? No.”
“Not a name I remember, and I remember it all.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
Cade felt sure none of the merchants were telling the truth—not the soap man, not the rat-gut seller. But the comment from the baker sealed it. Never heard of her? Lee was a boy’s name, at least some of the time.
The stacks of round loaves at the baker’s booth led into the labyrinth of a clothing stall. Cade spent a few coins on a pair of yellow leatherish gloves she didn’t care about. She should have saved her money, but she had to make it look like she was just another girl in the market crowd. For the enemies of the entangled—the Unmakers, as Cade had started to think of them—the market would be too obvious a place to come looking. After her bunker and Club V, it was the clear choice.
Cade stuffed her guitar case behind a row of old coats and paid the owner a few more coins to make sure it wasn’t sold or stolen. Cade knew he would do the right thing. He was a fan, and a good man besides.
What Cade needed now was a criminal.
Whatever this Lee was getting up to, it was big-time-brass illegal, because what happened in the market was illegal enough. If the merchants didn’t want to be associated with her trouble, it was trouble of the sourest kind.
Cade cut a line across the market, toward the least reputable merchant she knew—an old woman with long strings of dark hair and a too-small set of false teeth. She dealt in the bodies and belongings of the dead. Her booth was lined with strings of teeth, bottled clumps of hair, and the little possessions that people tended to have on them at the end. Bowls of keys. Neat lines of shoes.
“You know someone named Lee?”
“No one by that name here,” the old woman said, pointing to her wares and laughing.
“Lee’s not dead, as far as I know. I was sent here to see her.”
The old woman squinted, and the ancient skin around her eyes rearranged. “Sent to me?”
“No. To the market.” Cade ran her fingers through a bowl of keys. They shifted like water. “I’ve been told Lee can help me get out of here. You know. Out of here and up?”
The old woman hissed, a thin kettle sound. “Better to live and die on the ground, even if it’s barren. You buy some of my product and you’ll see. This all comes from planetbound bodies, not a spacesick in the pile. Space rots a person, body and soul. Empties out, hardens the shell.”
The dirt-and-metal smell of the keys stirred up, thick in the air. “You believe in souls?” Cade asked.
The old woman bent down under the surface of the booth, the curve of her back showing. She came up clattering a tray filled with tiny glass bottles. They were all different shapes, some faintly colored.
“Half off the first one, special for you, space-bound girl.”
Cade felt a wash of sickness at the sight of those bottles, but she wasn’t sure why. She’d never known people well enough to mourn them. Mr. Niven was the closest thing she had to someone from her childhood, and her feelings about him were mixed, at best. Besides, his collapse was less than a death. The echo of a death.
Cade hovered her hand over the bottles. “What if I told you that my soul was tangled up with someone else’s?”
“I’d say you were cursed. I have something for that, too.”
The old woman smiled, showing the gnarl and pucker of her gums. She stooped to find more of her specialties.
The idea of entanglement as a curse, a burden she’d never asked for and that would—in the end—ruin her, worked at Cade, slid under her skin. She reached out for Xan.
Cursed. Do you believe that?
The raw thought trembled, overfilled with Cade’s anger at being left on Andana, and her fears about crossing the universe to find him.
What she got back from Xan was complicated. Flashes of white—the first images that he’d ever sent. Their connection was getting stronger, and with that came more senses. The whiteness was paired with a sterile smell. Firstbloom. And then—a flood of dark feeling and fire, gasoline ignited and charging through Cade’s veins. That was Xan’s take on the scientists and what they’d done.
But then his thoughts turned to something new. Here was a flash even more familiar. The face of a baby girl with light-brown skin, dark green eyes. And with that came the strongest feeling yet, breaking over Cade shiny and hopeful, like the yearned-for chorus of a song.
Even if entanglement was a curse, this was the way Xan felt about her.
It made perfect sense to Cade.
The old woman bobbed up from under her table and started to unload more wares, but Cade put a hand out to stop her.
“Let’s get right to it.”
Cade slid a coin onto the table. A not-kidding-around coin. The old woman waved a hand at her soul tray, inviting Cade to pick one.
“I’ll pass.”
She didn’t need any more souls to worry about. Not when she already had Xan’s on the line.
The old woman picked up the coin, brought it to her lips, but seemed to remember the nature of her teeth at the last second and settled for sniffing it. After a deep nostrilful of copper, she nodded.
“Now,” Cade said. “About Lee.”
“That will take more than coin,” she said. “It’s not the sort of information a person passes out so easy.”
“But I just . . .”
“Proved you were serious, is what you did. But this will require something more . . . personal.”
Cade didn’t have much on her, and what she had, she needed. She leaned over the table, shoulders first, and tried a bit of intimidation, but the old woman raised her knotted eyebrows and stood her ground.
“What do you want?” Cade asked.
“Part of you,” the old woman said. “For the shop.”
Cade leveled a glance at the woman, and stuffed in as much contempt as she could fit. “But I’m not dead.”
“You go there,” the old woman said, pointing up, “you’re as good as.” She leaned in and whispered, voice coated in age like layers of dust. “The customers, all they want is the tragedy. And that’s thick on you, isn’t it?”
Cade’s stomach flashed cold.
“I might have asked for your hair on another day,” the old woman said, with a glance that inspired Cade to gather it up and tuck it behind her shoulders. “Decent locks, nice shine to them, but I’ve got plenty at the moment. So . . .” The old woman rattled around with one hand, not taking her eyes off Cade, until she flourished a pair of pliers. She nodded at Cade’s mouth. “I’ll take one of those.”
“You can’t be . . .”
“Serious? But that’s just what we are, you and I.” She slapped the pliers down on the table.
Cade grabbed them. Made another frantic round of the market, but no one would slip her one w
ord about Lee. So she stopped at the booth that sold splinter-thin vials of moonshine. Bartered for two of them and took her strange armload of items to the nearest bathroom. It had a mirror, which was good. Not because Cade wanted to see what she was about to do—but it would help her be precise. She uncapped the first bottle and poured the white-hot moonshine straight over the chosen tooth, second from the back on the bottom right-hand side. Then she opened the other bottle and rubbed the fire into her gums until she couldn’t feel them. With each slide of her finger, her stomach clenched. The pliers went in cold, and her tongue fought back. But she reached in the prongs, clamped them down.
Cade called out to Xan and concentrated all of her efforts on sending him a picture of herself, staring into a film-blotched bathroom mirror with a pair of metal fingers deep in her mouth. She gave him a chance to tell her to turn back. Not to do it. Not to come for him. She felt the clench of his heart when he saw her, but he didn’t tell her to stop.
She sent him one last flash of the plier-glint, the taste of rust.
You had better be worth this.
She pulled.
Xan couldn’t keep her from feeling the pain, but he could feel it with her. He was there, and it felt like someone holding her hand tight enough to draw her away from the hurt. He couldn’t stop her from slicking one hand with blood or throwing up twice, but he could distract her, shore her up, calm her down—do whatever it took to keep her upright as she stumbled across the market, her fist closed around the chip of bone.
“Back so soon?”
Cade slammed the tooth down.
“Didn’t think you would do it,” the old woman said, picking up the tooth as if it were some milk-white diamond, peering at it from all angles.
“Lee,” Cade said through a mouthful of pain.
The old woman pulled the black felt of the curtains behind her booth and let Cade pass through. She smelled the pungence of shoes that, thankfully, masked the other smells of the old woman’s trade, and felt the swish of the dark fabric against her screaming-tender cheek.
On the other side, Cade faced the emptiness created by the backs of the booths. A sort of enclosed square. A few merchants sat on crates and counted wares or coin. Cade was sure she’d have to ask at least one more person where she could find Lee, and didn’t know how she’d manage with her puffing mouth. But then her eyes settled on a girl at the end of a short line, and Cade knew she could stop the search.
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