Cade couldn’t help but wonder at the fantastic spread of nonhumans. She hoped she wouldn’t run into a Lilin, who could taste other people’s emotions. It would be able to tell how scared Cade was of going into space. A dark and bitter taste, no doubt, that lingered on the tongue.
Dock forty-two was one of the smallest in the spaceport, tucked away behind two workships, great and hulking, bottle-shaped and silver. The ship behind them was nothing so brass. It was a perfect sphere, but its beauty ended there. Fine, downy fur covered it—half gray, half brown.
“Great,” Cade muttered. “A hairball that travels to space.”
Standing on the scratchy pink walkway, a Hatchum stared out at the middle distance of the spaceport, eyes calm but quick. Cade couldn’t help but snatch in a breath. She’d never seen a Hatchum before. They were rare on Andana. This one looked young—older than Lee and Cade, but still young—and almost human, but taller and thinner, with every angle a bit sharper, every curve more intense.
He looked up, and his gray-brown eyes skittered over Cade. He was waiting for something.
She went straight up to him and slung the pack forward so it dangled between them. The Hatchum looked down at her with a mild questioning in his mild-colored eyes. Cade wondered what he saw.
Lee must have thrown a wild kick, because the imprint of a shoe came through the canvas.
“I. Um. Have something for you,” Cade said.
The Hatchum arched his eyebrows at her. That was it. No hello or what-the-snug-are-you-talking-about. Cade found herself reaching for more of a reaction.
“You’ll want to see this.”
She beckoned the Hatchum over to a spot behind the curve of the ship. He moved light on his feet, and kept a careful distance. Cade held the sack with one hand and tugged at the string with the other.
Lee was folded as close to in-half as a human can get, her chest doubled to her legs. Cade and Lee had tossed all of the nonessential items out of the pack, and the rest were stuffed into their clothes—so it was just Lee down there, smiling up at the Hatchum. She could have lit all of Dana City in a blackout.
“Rennik!” she cried. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
He didn’t even double-blink. “And I was expecting you, an hour ago, not stuffed into a bag.”
Lee’s laughter shook the pack, and Cade felt it travel up into her shoulders.
“Fair enough.”
Rennik shook his head, like maybe this was something that had happened before. Or happened all the time.
“Is there a place I can put this down?” Cade asked. She was somewhat more than human, but it didn’t change certain realities. “My arms do get tired at some point.”
“In the hold,” Rennik said, pointing one of his long, four-knuckled fingers up the walkway. “All cargo in the hold.”
“Who is he calling cargo?” Lee cried, muffled by the canvas.
Cade started walking, but Rennik grabbed her guitar case and set it on the ground. Cade picked it up. Rennik grabbed it again. Set it on the ground.
He was so tall that Cade had to arch to see more than his chin. She stared him full in the face, and there was nothing mild about it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, with all the charm of an instructions manual, “but I can’t let you take this onboard.”
“But it’s my guitar,” Cade said. “I know there’s not a lot of room but . . . it’s the only thing I own.”
“It’s not an issue of room. It’s the nature of the beast.”
Cade clapped Cherry-Red to her stomach, held her close. “Don’t call my guitar a—”
“I’m talking about the ship,” he said. “My Renna.” At the mention of its name, the ship gave a little jump. “She’s sensitive to electricity. This is electric?” Rennik asked, touching the case with one of those odd, fine-carved fingers.
“Yes. What do you mean, sensitive? And what do you mean, she?”
“Renna is a girl-ship.” Rennik’s voice had been flat, but it took on peaks and valleys when he talked about Renna. “She’s very much alive. And she gets sick. You know, she’s, what’s the word . . . allergic to electricity.”
“She’s . . . what?”
Rennik put a hand to the curve of the ship. “Renna is my orbital.”
Every Hatchum had an orbital. They could sail through any atmosphere, cut through space to carry messages and small items for their Hatchum. But Cade had never heard of one growing to a size where it could take passengers or cargo. There was no arguing with it, though—this was a spaceship, and she was alive. Now that Cade really looked, she could see the blink of little black eyes all over the surface. And the scratchy pink walkway had definite tonguelike qualities.
“What if I keep the guitar unplugged?” Cade asked.
“It’s much too dangerous.” Rennik ran his hand in a soothing manner over a fine-haired patch of ship. “I would tell you what happened the time we made an exception for a battery-operated flashlight, but you wouldn’t sleep soundly for a week.”
There was another kick from inside the canvas pack. Cade knew that Lee was telling her to hurry it up.
Cade looked down at Cherry-Red. “When is blastoff?”
“Renna doesn’t blast,” the Hatchum said. “She lifts with delight and ease.”
“All right,” Cade said. “When do things get delightful?”
“Two minutes.”
Rennik’s calm inched Cade to anger. “I have two minutes to decide what to do with the one thing in the universe I care about?”
Rennik looked her over—and Cade looked him over right back. He should have been easy to interpret. Dramatic, handsome, almost-human. But it all fell apart when she reached his face. It was one thing to take note of his sharp-ridged cheekbones, how they sucked in underneath like craters. But Cade wasn’t a dreg-brained club girl. She needed a hint of how this Hatchum felt about taking her onboard.
And she couldn’t find one.
“If Lee said you were coming, I’ll carry you,” Rennik said. “I owe her several hundred favors. But we’re leaving in two minutes, so both of you have to go. Strap in.”
Cade should have been grateful, but the Hatchum wasn’t making it easy. Still, this was her ride. She stowed the guitar case behind the walkway to buy some time, and hurried onto the ship.
She found the cargo hold off the central chamber and put the pack down, doing her best not to thump Lee against the floor. With two minutes draining fast, she ran back down the walkway, grabbed her case, and snapped it open.
Cade ran her fingers across the frets and over the strings. Tightened a peg. Touched the hollow body.
Parting with Cherry-Red would be the worst thing Cade had to do since she decided to leave Andana. It would be harder than making nice with the spacesicks. It would hurt more than pulling her own teeth. That guitar was the one thing that had kept her from losing herself in the wilds of the Noise. If she wanted to find Xan, she had to leave it behind.
Far above her head, a chip of the spaceport’s glass dome opened up into the dark. The ship—Renna—blinked all of her little black eyes open.
Cade snapped the case shut. Opened it again. Took in that deep red like a drink. No. Like a blood transfusion.
A scream reached across the spaceport and found Cade. The sort of wild scream that went straight past the higher functions of her brain and buried itself in the ancient parts.
Had the Unmakers caught up? Would they attack her? Here?
Cade’s body was a chant.
Heart, muscle, blood.
No, no, no.
And she started transmitting to Xan without meaning to. It was the second time that had happened. When her emotions ramped up and her heart ran fast and tight, the connection snapped on—like a built-in failsafe. Cade sent everything she was feeling, thinking, seeing, straight to him.
She ran up the walkway. The scream died down and she was a step from the door, thinking the sound had been some mistake, thinking she had made it.
A hand clamped tight over her mouth, and another slid around her waist. Three more arms on her, in different places. Over a shoulder, around a thigh. Then she heard the voice, thick and slurping.
“You can’t leave, girlie. You’d miss me too much.”
CHAPTER 6
ENTANGLED QUANTUM SYSTEMS: Cannot be fully described without considering both systems
Cade put an elbow to Mr. Smithjoneswhite’s soft middle. A few of his hands trickled off like dirty water, but he stuffed a set of fingers into her mouth just as she was about to call for Lee. Pain shot from the root of Cade’s gone-tooth and came out as the crudest form of sound. Mr. Smithjoneswhite’s hand soaked up the screams.
“This is a nice skin,” he said, breathing warm down the neck of her Saea outfit. “You look almost like a woman. Doesn’t matter to me what flavor so long as it’s not human.” More fingers on her. More breath. “Too bad I know the truth. One scream from you and everyone in the spaceport will know it, too.”
Cade bit his hand and when he snatched it back, her teeth went into her own lip—puffed it up with the bright taste of blood.
“You won’t do that,” Cade said. “Get me arrested. You want me to come back to the club.” She’d figured it out by this point. He must have put a tracer on her, or had one of the bouncers do it, or the bartender.
“It’s cute, girlie, watching you try to figure me out. Maybe I just want to see you pinned for breach of contract.”
Cade scrabbled back against Mr. Smithjoneswhite, pressed her heels down, but got no purchase. “It’s not Saturday. I never missed a show.”
“But I have you booked,” he said. “Every Saturday for the rest of your life.”
Cade’s voice rose against the spaceport’s din. “You wrote that contract and signed it for me.”
“Yes.” Mr. Smithjoneswhite let out a low, blurry chuckle. “And if I remember right, you thanked me.”
Renna started to shiver, then shake. She rose an inch above the ground and blinked one eye, right in front of Cade. The ship was waiting to take off. The gap in the glass dome wouldn’t be open for long.
Now that Cade knew Xan needed her, she couldn’t get stuck on Andana. Mattering to someone was like having a favorite song. If you’d never heard it, you wouldn’t be able to miss it. But once you knew it was out there, there was no distance you wouldn’t travel to hear it again.
“Let me go,” she whispered.
Fingers tightened on her neck, ridged her arms, pressed their prints white and all over.
“You don’t want me to.”
Cade felt a rush coming from the edges of her mind to the center; from the warm underside of her skin, flooding in. She’d always been strong, but now she had another person’s strength, too, underlining her arms, crashing down her legs, pumping through her heart and double-beating.
She stomped back on Mr. Smithjoneswhite’s feet, and spun around to crack a fist into his face. As he staggered, Cade grabbed the guitar case and clamped her other hand, one nail-blacked finger at a time, around his neck.
Xan sent more strength, enough to wring and knock out Mr. Smithjoneswhite. Cade sent a flash of her view—the Andanan at the end of her arm, his skin hurtling past deep red to purple—to let Xan know she had the situation under control.
“You think I care about the club? You think I need you? Cute,” Cade said. “Watching you try to figure me out.”
She raised the case over her head and tossed it. The fake brass latch clattered open in the air and the guitar did Einstein proud, stretching its two-second dive into forever.
Mr. Smithjoneswhite looked back at Cherry-Red and its sickly snapped neck, long enough for Cade to pound the walkway as it curled and tucked itself, pink and scratchy, into the mouth of the ship.
And then Cade was up. Gone. The guitar and Mr. Smithjoneswhite and the spaceport smeared into one bright memory.
The world shook and then Cade remembered it wasn’t the world, it was Renna. Gaining speed.
Cade ran for the cargo hold, the upward pull confusing her forward-moving feet.
I’m coming, Xan. I’m coming, Xan. I’m coming . . .
Cade chanted it soft, under her breath and in her head, over and over. She told herself that Xan needed to know, but she also had to remind herself why she was onboard an enormous floating burr, headed for the unknown of space.
I’m coming, Xan. I’m coming, Xan. I’m coming . . .
Cade made it to the cargo hold just in time for Lee to toss her a thick cloth strap to latch on to—otherwise, she might have smacked into the floor and spent the rest of liftoff unpasting herself.
Cade didn’t want to spend too much time nursing the quease in her stomach, so instead she watched Lee. She had her hand wrapped expertly around a strap and she modulated her breath to match the thinning-out of the atmosphere. Nothing to indicate that she was worried about bursting off Andana. But her freckles leached pale.
“You all right?” Lee asked.
Cade knew that however bad Lee looked, she must have looked ten times worse.
“Sure.”
She remembered the facts from the filmstrip. She was entangled. She was supposed to prance around in space like it was her job. A sloppy minute or two at liftoff was one thing. She would snap into the beat of it soon.
Cade pitched forward and almost cracked foreheads with Lee as the ship lurched out of the atmosphere.
“So this is what delight and ease feels like . . .” Cade muttered. She tilted her face so she was looking at Lee’s forehead instead of the ground. “I’ve never heard of a cargo-ready orbital.”
“Well, you’ve never met Rennik,” Lee said. “He’s not the average Hatchum.”
“What does that have to do with Renna being a spaceship?”
Lee’s voice drummed tight—defensive.
“Everything.”
Cade hung there, motionless at the end of the strap, her nose at a sharp angle to the floor, as they hit the smooth emptiness of space. The change of pressure in the tender inner shell of Cade’s ear reminded her of her old friend the Noise.
“Hey,” she said, laboring to stand. “You think I can get another guitar on . . . what’s the planet that comes after this?”
“Highlea.”
“Right. Highlea. Do they have guitars there?”
“Guitars?” Lee said, perking up noticeably. “There are planets that don’t even have music. On Mann, the nonhumans are deaf and communicate using this intricate form of sonar. They think music is a form of chaos and use it as an actual weapon. On Wex 9, it’s a snugging crime to create music. Sound waves are a class of being, and each death is mourned. Back before music was outlawed, the Wexians didn’t get much done, they were too busy sobbing over dead melodies.”
Cade thought all of that was interesting. “But . . .”
“Your guitar,” Lee said. “Right. Your mind just runs on one track and explodes when it meets something coming from another direction, doesn’t it?” Cade didn’t answer. She was too busy thinking about guitars.
“You might find something on Highlea. Not an exact replica of that model you had, but the Highleans do make music. Then again, if it runs electric, you won’t be able to stash it onboard. And you did give me most of your money. And exchange rates are terrible right now.”
“Perfect,” Cade muttered.
The smile snuck back onto Lee’s face. “You’ll figure something out. Humans get first-class creative when they have to.”
Cade nodded. The film of the Saea costume shifted against the back of her neck. She tested to make sure that she could stand and then detached from the takeoff strap, shook off the costume, and grabbed her old clothes from the pack. She was just pulling down her shirt when Rennik swung into the cargo hold. He swept the room once with his gray-brown eyes, taking in the crates, the packages, Lee and Cade.
“I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said.
His voice was flatter than a day-old sandcake. He didn’t seem the
least bit surprised to find out she was human.
“Since you’re new, how about a tour?” Rennik asked. It sounded like some kind of welcome, until he added, “Renna doesn’t like passengers who aren’t . . . familiar.”
Cade nodded. The last thing she needed was a hostile, furry ship that didn’t want her onboard.
As she unwound her hand from the cloth strap, she saw that she’d mangled a hatch of raw lines into her skin. It would make a nice set with the bruises that had sprouted in all the places Mr. Smithjoneswhite had grabbed her. Cade rubbed her arms and tried to look tough. When that failed, she tried to look entangled.
Strong. Stable. At home in her enhanced skin.
“Cade, if your stomach needs to do the gravity ballet, there’s a bucket I can show you,” Lee said.
Rennik held out his hand, not that it could have reached Cade where she was. Not that she would have taken it if she could. His offer of a tour seemed halfhearted—and Cade was being generous with her fractions.
She picked her way around the crates, Lee close behind.
“Not you,” Rennik said to Lee with a smile curved so deep and cool, it made Cade think of water. Maybe he was never going to smile at her, but it was nice to know he could manage it.
He waved Lee back. “You’re not new.”
“Hey, I’m as new as she is! I just got here! I’m as mint as a new coin!”
Rennik led Cade into the main cabin. Lee was still shouting at them from the cargo hold.
“There’s the mess,” he said, pointing at one of the rooms that spoked out from the round space, “and a common area. I have a small cabin down here, too.”
Cade was well past curious about the Hatchum’s cabin—all she could imagine for him were neat-cornered sheets and bare walls. She lingered outside the door, but he kept moving.
At the center of the main cabin a chute twisted up to another floor. It slanted at just the right angle so that Rennik and Cade could walk without slipping. But every step reminded Cade that she was planting her feet on someone else’s innards. It was a slippery sort of feeling.
“Renna has a knack for false gravity,” Rennik said. He lowered his voice and leaned in. “Some people tell me it’s like taking a long walk in deep pudding. But don’t repeat that. It will make her sad and we’ll drift for days.”
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