Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  As they climbed the chute, he pointed to the stubby, white-sheeted beds bunked along its sides.

  “She’s not much of a passenger ship, but I do like to keep these here in case we have guests.”

  “Like Lee?” Cade asked.

  He laughed—such a rich sound that Cade could imagine it being something you drank, in mugs. “Lee is like family.” His trademark flatness swapped out for something much more alive, the way it did when he talked about Renna. “Hatchums have big families, you know. I think the closest word for her is . . . cousin.”

  “Don’t have those,” Cade said. All she had was Xan, and there was no word for what he meant to her.

  “She’s the one who turns up twice a year or so, tells you her stories, eats all the rations, and leaves with a smile.”

  It sounded like an accurate picture of Lee. “She’s started in on the stories,” Cade said. “Guess that means I should watch my plate.”

  Rennik stopped in front of a panel just behind a stretch of the chute. He stretched out his four-knuckled fingers, and the white chip of wall slid to one side and revealed an empty space. A short, square tunnel opened up into a little room with four more bunks.

  “I have to ask the human passengers to sleep in here,” Rennik said.

  Cade’s heartbeat scratched, like bad feedback. She had known it was too good to be true—a Hatchum who respected humans.

  “What,” she said, “in case we go spacesick on you?”

  He turned his wide-open-skies look on Cade. “No,” he said. “In case we’re boarded.”

  She slogged the last steps up the chute behind Rennik, wondering how bad she should feel about the misunderstanding. And then the second floor sprang into view, and she was too crammed full of wonder to feel anything else.

  “This is the control room.”

  Cade had never been in a control room, but Rennik didn’t have to tell her what it was. There were dials and knobs and levers on almost every surface. Every surface that wasn’t the glass.

  Straight ahead and looming in front of Cade, a stretch of glass that at first she thought was a window. But as she stepped closer, she could see that it was more—a full picture of space outside the ship. Renna’s little black eyes, all of those compound bits of blinking, drinking-in, fed into this one glass.

  When Cade was close enough that she could reach out and touch it, the black stretched and circled around, swallowing her. She could turn and see planets on all sides—the colored swirls of gas planets and the mean fists of ice planets and past those, stars, and the milk of galaxies.

  “How does it work?” Cade asked, turning and turning.

  “Organic hologram,” Rennik said, looking like he could burst his own skin with pride.

  Cade thought of Mr. Niven for the first time since she left Andana. He had been a hologram, too—a different kind. She clutched the circle-glass where it sat lodged in her pocket.

  She turned again, searching for something out there in space. The snatch-and-hoard of black holes. Hades. Cade wanted to send Xan a picture so he could know, once and for certain, that she would be there soon.

  But Rennik bounded to her side, crashing into her thoughts.

  “You like her?”

  His nonchalance drained, and in the slip of a heartbeat he was in the glass with her, star-freckled, all eagerness and nerves. Cade couldn’t answer his question. The word yes wouldn’t do it—wouldn’t stretch far enough to fit how much she liked Renna.

  Rennik must have been able to see that in Cade’s face, because he broke into a smile—the first one he’d cracked for her.

  “Does she like me, too?” Cade asked.

  Rennik’s smile kept cracking, until it was in pieces.

  “She’ll let us know soon enough.”

  Cade backed up a few steps, out of the panoramic hold of the glass. Rennik bent over a panel of glass-slicked dials with thin, wobbling copper needles. These were nothing like the electronics Cade was used to—the faceless black, the mystery buttons, the harsh lights. But Rennik didn’t look up and tell her about the controls. He didn’t look up at all.

  The tour was over.

  Cade hung around for a few minutes, watching Rennik’s hands work out patterns. Cade tried to come up with a note for each dial, a chord for each movement of his fingers. She tried to turn the ship into a song. One to flood the emptiness in her head, calm the storm in her stomach.

  But Rennik’s fingers were too fast and the dials were too complicated and when Cade looked at the glass again, space was just too big. The wonder she had felt when she first saw the room came rushing back, but this time it pounded her small, flattened her.

  She had to get out.

  Cade headed down the chute, but down turned out to be more difficult than up. Or maybe that was Renna, sending her a little message. Maybe that was how you said drain out in Spaceship. Cade’s eyes were stuck so hard-and-fast on her feet that she smashed into someone sitting at the bottom of the chute.

  The seven-blade knife flew out.

  Cade didn’t meant to unsnap it—this was instinct, carved into her by too many years of Voidvil, too many nights backstage at Club V. She held out the thick, mean, all-purpose blade.

  Cade waited for the creature to stiffen.

  Say something.

  But no.

  Cade walked in a careful, creeping circle around the creature. It was inflated in a way Cade had never seen before, puffed with a gas dense enough that it didn’t float. Its body took up a seriously large part of the main cabin. Cade couldn’t tell if it was male or female, both or neither. It was clothed in simple white and its skin was dishwater gray, which seemed dingy and unimpressive until she caught a look at its face. Boulder-featured, solemn, still. She could have been holding a mountain at knifepoint.

  “Hello?” Cade whispered.

  The creature dragged in a breath. Held it.

  Never seemed to let it out.

  “Hello?” Cade asked again.

  Her politeness didn’t match the knife. Then again, this creature didn’t match the description of any species she knew.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Cade said. “I just want to know who you are. What you’re doing here. If you’re one of the people who wants to kill me. You know. The basics.”

  The mountain dragged in another breath.

  Cade ran to the door of the cargo hold, where Lee was stacking and labeling crates with an old-fashioned stamp.

  “What is that in the cabin?” Cade asked.

  Lee stacked and labeled, labeled and stacked. “I guess Rennik didn’t give you the full tour, did he?”

  “Guess not.”

  Lee glanced up, ink plastered up her arms and dabbed on one side of her face.

  “Work to do.”

  Cade could take a hint. Lee was still mad that Rennik hadn’t taken her around the ship. Cade was on her own. She backed out of the hold and into the main cabin. This time, at least she didn’t stumble into the blank-faced heap of creature.

  She headed up the chute again. Less than an hour and she had no guitar, three people who couldn’t be bothered to talk to her, and a ship that might cough her up at the first chance.

  It made sense to Cade. She was alone—had been since the Parentless Center. She only made it official when she ran off into the desert. No one had bothered to come after her—there were too many parentless and not enough adults to watch them, let alone form search parties. But even before Cade’s bunker, in the shabby classrooms and the dorm bedrooms, she had kept to herself.

  Alone was the note Cade knew best. It was the root of all her chords.

  But when she pressed the panel aside and crawled through the square tunnel into the little room where humans slept, she felt a new sensation. It clawed a space out inside of her, one that needed filling. Cade was alone, but she was something more than that.

  Lonely.

  The white beds were all the same. She picked the one on the bottom left so she could see peo
ple coming in.

  Cade climbed into the tight grip of the sheets and closed her eyes. With no real day or night, she’d have to bully herself into sleeping whenever it made sense. It was a long trip to Hades, and she would need to be as strong as possible when she got there.

  Cade tried to wrangle her breathing. Her mind softened at the edges. In the last slow-drip second before sleep, her mind wrenched open.

  Xan was in trouble.

  Cade sat up and skinned her head against the top bunk. This was the automatic part of her connection to Xan—the one that dictated they would be there for each other at the first rebel heartbeat. Cade hadn’t been on the receiving end of the call before, but she knew it for what it was.

  At the same time, this transmission was something new.

  Cade’s connection to Xan—from the first wisps of feeling to the flash of a few sensations— had built to this. A whole picture, a three-dimensional place, the full range of senses. A moment as he lived it.

  Another room. Smaller, darker.

  The smell of metal, boiled sheets—sterile things.

  The door blew open and a double shadow fell long on the floor. Cade caught a glimpse of space-black robes and the flickers of the shadows as they passed. She couldn’t see more than that, but she didn’t have to.

  She knew it was an Unmaker.

  Cade sent her strength to Xan. She hummed it to him like a bass line. Drummed it in a steadfast beat.

  And he wasn’t afraid.

  Xan got up to close the door. There was no lock. The small rectangle could just barely be called a room, but Xan found a way to pace it. Nothing in that small space but a mirror and a pile of plain dark clothes in one corner of the floor and a bed. Xan hadn’t been tied up or tortured or thrown in a pit.

  Whatever they meant to do to him, it hadn’t started yet.

  Xan’s emotions bum-rushed Cade’s system like a drug. Like an itch in her blood.

  She braced for hatred and fear. But what Xan sent was stronger than that, and it hit Cade twice as hard. He let her feel how much he needed her. A deep-shuddering, full-frame need. It slipped the borders of Cade’s mind and searched out homes all through her body. Sliced up and down her nerves and sank into her softest parts.

  Some small fraction of Cade didn’t want to feel it. She and Xan had been entangled such a long time ago—there were moments when he felt like one more decision that had been made for her.

  What she had was the chance to choose him now, and keep choosing him. To wash away the last of her resistance, and really feel him. It helped that she understood the emotions he sent. Xan was impatient, hopeful, waiting. Cade was those things, too.

  He needed her to come. And she needed to get to him, no matter the distance, no matter the danger. They both felt the same, even with so much space stretched dark and impossible between them.

  Which meant neither one could be lonely.

  CHAPTER 7

  SPEED OF LIGHT: 186,282 miles per second. Exceeded by the connections of the entangled.

  Cade woke up feeling fine. If there’d been sunshine, she would have let it warm her for a minute. If there’d been music, she would have hummed along. But there was just the little white room and Lee.

  “Hey,” Cade said.

  She wasn’t used to radiating cheer. On short notice, hey was the best she could do.

  Lee popped up on the top right bunk, her smile back to fighting strength.

  “These beds are the snugging best, aren’t they? When I’m on other ships, I dream about these beds. Renna knows how to treat a girl right. I thought she was on a run to the Outer Esterlies and I wouldn’t see her for another six months at least. But this . . . well . . . this is the best I could have hoped for, and a little bit more.”

  Lee had a lot more words for a good morning than Cade did. And she whistled—tuneless, drifting notes—as she made the bed.

  Cade wondered what kind of morning it was for Xan. He had paced in that small room for hours until he exhausted himself. Cade reached out now and sent him a feeling left over from last night, a loose strand of worry—a drifting bit of minor-key concern.

  Xan sent her a jolt of reassurance. It was hard to believe his fears of the night before had changed so completely. Cade didn’t think he would be able to lie to her, but it was the first time she wondered if he could send her less than the whole truth.

  Lee tossed a set of clothes down to Cade. They flapped in the air for a second and landed next to the bed. It was the plainest set of rags she’d ever seen—a prehistoric pair of jeans and a wrinkled tan shirt, instead of the layers of skirts she was used to wearing.

  “For Highlea.”

  “Right,” Cade said.

  This was her first day as part of the Human Express.

  She slapped on the clothes and followed Lee out of the tunnel, down the chute, into the clatter of the mess. The air filled with smells that meant breakfast, no matter what planet. Rennik bent over the small gas stove, scrambling eggs into an indecipherable dish.

  “Did you sleep well, ladies?”

  Cade liked the old-fashioned way that Rennik talked. It made her feel like English wasn’t a blotch on the brightness of the universe. It also made her wonder where he’d learned it.

  “Would have been outstanding sleep,” Lee said, cutting a glance at Rennik, “if someone’s flightstyle wasn’t so scrappy.”

  Rennik cracked an egg extra hard, but gave no other sign of being riled.

  Cade looked at the thick walls of the mess. She still wanted Renna to like her—so it was a good thing she didn’t have to lie about how she’d slept. “Best night I’ve snatched since last winter’s sandstorms.”

  Rennik and Lee stared at her like she’d grown back the Saean third eye.

  “When you’re underground, safe, a sandstorm makes the best kind of lullaby.” What Cade didn’t mention was that, in the case of last night, she had been too busy keeping Xan company to fall asleep for hours.

  She took a seat at the long table and bit into her eggs to find that the centers were soft and ran down her chin. She looked around for a napkin to swipe at her face. It was only then that she noticed the other passenger sitting at the far end of the table.

  Gray-skinned, rock-faced, swaddled in white. A male, most like. He could have been the shrunken twin of the creature Cade had seen the day before. Or he could have been the same one, deflated.

  “Cade,” she said, holding out a hand, wanting to make a good impression. She needed to smash all memories he might have of her at the end of a seven-blade knife.

  He nodded his head deep into the folds of his neck, but said nothing. At least his dark, lashless eyes took her in this time.

  “That’s Gori,” Lee said from her spot next to the stove, where she was dictating how her eggs should be cooked. “Saying his actual name takes about a week, so just call him Gori.”

  Gori stared.

  Rennik slid a glass of juice down the table to Cade.

  Gori stared.

  “I think we . . . uh . . . met?” Cade said.

  When Gori spoke, his voice made her think of space: deep and wide, with something like a wind that moved through it.

  “I would have noticed,” he said.

  “Noticing didn’t look like it was on top of your list at the time.”

  “Ohhhhhh.” He drew the word out halfway to the next planet. “I was in a rapture state.”

  Lee plunked herself down, took a slurping bite of egg-dish off Cade’s plate, and talked through it. “Gori is a Darkrider.”

  Cade almost hacked up her juice.

  “A Darkrider?”

  Gori nodded again, so deep she worried his neck would snap.

  She had never seen a Darkrider before. Most people hadn’t. They were a rare, planetless breed. Everything she’d heard about them was probably a rumor, but one thing was for sure—they were the only creatures in the universe that could see dark energy. Cade wanted to reach out and ask Xan if he knew anything a
bout them, but Lee was pulling at her hand.

  “Come on.”

  Cade grabbed whatever on the table would carry—two lump-hard biscuits, an unidentified purple fruit—and stuffed it in the stiff pockets of her jeans.

  “Work,” Lee said to Rennik. “Take us down.”

  Rennik flipped a last egg and turned off the gas. He touched Cade’s arm as she hurried past.

  She looked down at the place where his fingers met her skin. She still wasn’t used to letting people touch her. Cade could see the absence of logic—there was someone prodding at her mind a lot of the time—but skin on skin was a different kind of connection. One that made her insides twist.

  “Your first mission?” Rennik asked.

  Cade reached down the table and nabbed another biscuit. “I’ve worked my whole life.”

  “But you’re new to the Express?”

  Gori still watched from the end of the table, those dark orbs trained on her.

  “It shows all big and obvious, doesn’t it?”

  Rennik laughed. It made Cade hungry.

  “Lee’s a good person—the best—but she’ll stomp on your feet if you don’t keep them moving. And be careful.”

  Cade felt the stick of juice in her throat.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

  She’d been so busy with worries about Xan and the Unmakers that it had slid right out the back door of her brain. Human Express was dangerous in its own right.

  Cade and Lee waited in the main cabin as Rennik set the ship down. There was no way to see the planet as Renna dropped through layers of atmosphere. Cade got her first good glimpse when they settled on something firm, and the walkway uncurled.

  Highlea could have been Andana’s bigger, older, uglier sister.

  Renna sat in an outdoor port. Past a few rows of ships in different stages of falling apart, a strip of dirt and crabgrass gave onto Highlea City. It was ten times as big as Voidvil, at least. Cade couldn’t see the end of it.

  Like an ocean.

  A great big seething sea of human.

  Lee slung a canvas pack over one shoulder and handed another to Cade.