Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Ayumi.

  Cade could hear both of them at the same time. She could move from one to the other, dial in and out. She could get close—but she couldn’t go farther than that. She didn’t have access to them the way she did with Xan. She couldn’t drop into their minds and make herself at home in their bodies. Lee and Ayumi were sealed rooms, and she was listening through their windows.

  Something else trembled at the edge of what she could hear.

  It started with a shiver of sound and then broke wide, symphonic, all the colors of the sky, all the shades of light and dark, night and day, notes streaming through her body like wind.

  Gori.

  Snug. Gori.

  Cade pulled back, but it was too late. He came at her across the room, still puffed out to mountain size. She grabbed the seven-blade knife and waved it around with vague aim. Lee leapt at the Darkrider and took him to the floor, landing them both on pillows. Ayumi stood back, all overwhelmed eyes and alarm, but at the last second she jumped in and twisted one of Gori’s arms. He condensed to his smaller state in two blinks.

  “Now, what do you have to say for yourself?” Lee asked, sitting on his back to keep him down.

  Gori wrenched his neck to look up at Cade, eyes dark as a bitter-cold night without stars.

  “The girl came too close.”

  But Cade hadn’t gone far enough. Her mind hadn’t left the ship. It hadn’t even left the room. She would never find her mother at that rate.

  She backed out of the common area, through the main cabin, into the cargo hold. She wasn’t sure what she was doing there—not being in the common room, for one thing. At some point, Gori was going to stop with the threats and start with the slicing.

  Cade planted herself in the cargo hold and watched as the others drained out one by one. Gori first, up the chute and back to his bunk. Lee crossed the main cabin to the mess, covered in feathers from the explosion of pillows.

  Ayumi headed out last, and Cade followed.

  The inside of the little ship looked the same as Cade remembered it. Bathed in suns, moons, and space. Ayumi crouched on the pilot’s seat with her legs tucked underneath. She looked out the window at the real, streaking-by stars.

  “Hey,” Cade said.

  Ayumi smiled without looking up.

  “Cadence,” she said. “It’s nice of you to visit.”

  “You said, in there, that I have a purpose, that it’s still forming. What did you mean?”

  Ayumi kept her eyes on the dust of a distant nebula.

  “We live according to a purpose. At least, on Rembra we do.” Her eyes warmed with the delights of explanation. “Lee has the Express. Rennik seems to have tasked himself with helping humans.” She scanned Cade up and down as if a purpose was something that could hide in her eyes, or shine out through her skin. “You have one, too. I’m sure of it.”

  Ayumi turned back to the window. A bit of spark went out of her eyes, traded in for glass.

  “Hey,” Cade said. “Look at me.” She turned up the volume. “Ayumi.” Maybe if she blasted her words as loud as her music, Ayumi could be bullied back into herself.

  “Look at me!”

  Ayumi’s hands sat loose on the panels, fingers slack against buttons. Cade’s voice wasn’t enough to snap her out of her infinite space-love and back to the human scale.

  Ayumi had spoken words in the cargo hold that came back to Cade now, clear as the thin window that shielded their skin from space. Words about touch. About the body reminding itself to be human.

  “Dregs,” Cade muttered.

  Since she’d connected to Xan, the idea of touching had gotten an upgrade—from unwanted to complicated. What she did with him felt like touching, and more than touching, and not-enough, all at once. She had started to like the fact of fingers on her skin, but the time between thought and touchdown made her sick, and the sensations lit her up like a hard-dragged match.

  Cade claimed the arm of the navigator’s chair and leaned in, cut the distance in half.

  “Ayumi,” she said, voice dialed all the way down. “Hey.”

  Cade patted her shoulder. She ran her fingers down the grain of Ayumi’s sleeve until it hit softness at the elbow, then trailed down her forearm to the wrist. She fit her other hand to the blank curve of Ayumi’s face.

  She looked up, gasping, face drawn wide with hurt. “What are you doing?”

  Cade had torn her Ayumi away from something she loved—and it showed.

  “Sorry,” Cade muttered. But she wasn’t sorry for keeping Ayumi from her precious void. She wasn’t even sorry for the pain.

  One blink at a time, Ayumi traveled all the way back to herself. But there was still the uncomfortable fact—Cade had promised that she would send the girl home if her spacesick went into overdrive. The moment had come, and Cade paced away from it.

  “So how do I figure out this purpose?”

  Ayumi swung around in her chair so she faced Cade, blocking out the stars. She seemed grateful for the change of subject, pleased to leave the bout of spacesick behind them, untouched.

  “This is how we understand it where I’m from,” she said. “A purpose is three things, in roughly equal parts. What you can do, what you choose to do, and what needs to be done.”

  Ayumi held up her notebooks. They still looked flimsy to Cade, but Ayumi treated them better than treasure. “What I can do is read, and write, and fly. I’ve always liked people, so I chose something that meant people . . . learning about them, being around them.” Cade couldn’t imagine choosing that, not in a thousand blinked-out years. “What Rembra needed was a new Earth keeper. We’ve always had one. Put all of that together, and you have a purpose.”

  Ayumi made it sound natural. Easy. But Cade had too many things to do and no idea if any of them could be done. She ticked the tasks off in her head.

  Rescue Xan. Find her mother. Change the fate of the human race.

  She looked out the scroll of window into the black, and for the first time the untouchable hugeness of it didn’t make her feel small. It only made her itch. Cade couldn’t help feeling that she would lose everything to it, even if she was entangled and—supposedly—strong. Space could keep her apart from Xan for too long. It had claimed her parents. It would claim her friends.

  “I need your ship,” Cade said. “For the mission.”

  This was why she couldn’t send Ayumi home, even though she knew it was the right thing to do. For a while, the splinter of an idea had been working its way deep into Cade’s mind. There was no way she could ask Lee and the others to face the Unmakers again—they had risked too much. But this would be a clean trade. As long as she could keep Ayumi conscious.

  “I thought I told you I couldn’t fly—”

  “Into Hades. I know.”

  Ayumi shifted to inner-battle mode. “I want so much to help, Cadence, but—”

  “I know it’s a lot of black holes. But the boy waiting for us on the other side? You could fill a whole notebook with him.”

  Ayumi clutched the frayed stack to her chest.

  Cade banged on Rennik’s door, then banged again in the pattern of Lee’s so-called secret knock.

  Rennik pulled the door open and smiled when he saw Cade. She remembered when she’d first boarded and was sure he’d never cast one of those smiles anywhere near her.

  “Progress?” she asked.

  He shook his head and shifted to the side so Cade could stop jittering and step into the little room. He must have been able to read her signs better than she could read his.

  She honed in on the circle-glass sitting on the desk. One of its facets was hinged and Rennik had swung it open, making a tiny door. She touched the thin edge like secrets might spring out.

  “How does it work?”

  “The material is threaded in intricate shapes and calcified into crystals, which undergo a chemical change during the playback,” he said. “The pinched sections are stuck, unchangeable. Here,” he said, centering the circl
e-glass on the desk. “If you hold it still and I have both hands to work, things might move along better.”

  Cade nodded and leaned over the desk. Rennik leaned in from another angle, face lowered as he worked. His fingers brushed up against hers over and over in their little motions.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  Rennik snatched his hands back, and Cade lit up with a certain kind of triumph. She’d finally managed to get a rise out of him. But he just pushed his fingertips together and arched his palms. Then he stretched his neck—the stiffness released as a low, hollow crack. He’d been at it for hours.

  “The tech is interesting,” he said. “Renna and I are fascinated.”

  “I meant this,” Cade said. “All of it. Helping me. And Lee. Helping—”

  “Humans?”

  Rennik returned to the desk, but he didn’t touch the circle-glass. He ran a finger along the spines of his books. “Sometimes I feel more human than Hatchum,” he said. “I’ve always been quite . . . different.”

  That fit with what Lee had told Cade when they first boarded the ship. Rennik wasn’t like other Hatchum. Cade could understand that. Different From Your Kind. It was a tune she knew forwards and backwards.

  “Well,” she said. “Thanks.”

  But the ground under Cade’s feet came alive and shuddered with a sort of warning. Cade could read Renna’s signs well enough to know—either Rennik was lying, or he was leaving something out.

  Cade studied Rennik’s face. The soft-molded skin around his eyes. It was hard to imagine him telling a lie. But Cade didn’t think he had a hidden stockpile of secrets, either. There was something he wasn’t telling her because it was easier not to say.

  “Renna thinks there’s more.”

  Rennik lowered his head again, and went back to the minute workings of the circle-glass.

  “Does she.” It wasn’t a question.

  Cade put a hand to the wall for backup. “I agree.”

  Even with his face pointed down, Cade could see that Rennik had gone back to his standard lack-of-expression.

  “Lee told you about Moira.”

  Moira. Cade hadn’t been expecting that name. “I know that she was . . .” Cade stopped herself short of saying killed by the Unmakers. “She was part of the Human Express. I know that you sometimes flew them, Lee and Moira.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but there’s more to that story.”

  Cade held the circle-glass still, the edges sunk into her fingertips.

  “I was different from other Hatchum,” he said. “Always. Only a little, but it was enough that others noticed. My parents were the first to point it out and name it. Do you want to know how they could tell I was different?”

  Cade nodded.

  “I loved them too much.”

  Rennik’s answer was full orbits away from what Cade would have guessed. He suffered from an excess of emotion—at least, in Hatchum terms. So he was the opposite of what Cade had been—moving through most of her life not-getting-too-close as a point, not-getting-too-close because it was what came to her as smooth and obvious as breathing.

  “Hatchum are loyal to the group,” he said. “Always. Creating a bond with one that could be stronger than the bond with any other is treasonous.”

  Cade remembered what Lee had said a long time ago, when they first met, about the ship that blinked its black eyes, rolled out a scratchy pink tongue.

  “But you did make strong bonds,” Cade said. “Renna.”

  “Right.” Rennik lit up at her name. “She kept growing because I paid her more attention, cared for her more than I was supposed to. I talked to her, taught her languages, read her stories at night. But she had to be hidden, so others wouldn’t know.

  “And then Moira came,” he said. “Then there was no hiding it.”

  There were two things now—the story, and the fact that Rennik was touching her as he told it. His hands nudging into hers, without comment, as he worked on the circle-glass. Cade was aware of these things, like two melodies played at the same time. Clashing at one moment, complementing each other the next.

  Either way—distracting.

  “I had taken to flying with Renna,” he said, “at night of course, so we wouldn’t be seen . . . making short runs from Hatch to the nearby planets. I took passengers out of curiosity. We carried Wexians and Highleans, Toths, even Andanans. Lee and Moira were the first humans I took on. Lee had always wanted to see a Hatchum, and I guess I didn’t disappoint.”

  Rennik’s hands canted at a strange angle—Cade spun the circle-glass so he could get to what he needed.

  “Lee was mostly scraped knees when I met her. And Moira . . . Moira was beautiful.” Rennik’s whole body shifted, like the word was a note and he was tuning himself to it. “You hear humans talk about beauty, and it makes no sense. All Hatchum are beautiful, in the sense that they’re well constructed, strong, with fine features. But Moira was less than that, and more at the same time. Imperfect. Fierce. In love with too much.”

  Cade couldn’t see his eyes now; they were turned away. All she could do was hold tight to the circle-glass.

  “You loved her.”

  An echo of a long-gone snatch of gossip.

  Hatchum don’t snug humans.

  Rennik looked straight at Cade. “It would have happened either way. But the fact of being with a human made the whole thing worse.” He redoubled his attack on the circle-glass. “I was sent away from Hatch when my family found out, but they were saving me, in a way. If the Hatch Consortium knew, they wouldn’t have been so kind as to let me keep my freedom, my orbital, and four working limbs.”

  Cade lined her words up with care, still working it out. “A human was important to you once, so you keep humans safe?”

  “Something like that.”

  Renna grumbled under her feet again, but another sound caught Cade’s attention—

  The insides of the circle-glass clicked.

  “Here,” Rennik said. “Cadence, look . . .”

  He grabbed the projection lamp and she grabbed the circle-glass and they landed on the bed at the same time. Cade told herself it was just the best angle for watching a picture on the wall. Rennik fitted the circle-glass to the lamp, but she pulled the whole thing out of his hands, too impatient to wait for him to light it up.

  The voice lurched in first, picking up where it left off.

  “ . . . spacesick. In her life before that, Cadence’s mother was a musician. The effects of music treatment have been studied on spacesicks for over a hundred years but found to be insufficient in curing even the mildest cases on a permanent basis. Still, the fact of Cadence’s entanglement could give us reason to reexamine this connection.”

  The picture caught up—small and grainy, less than a square foot on the wall. The woman in the blue dress was there, but this time in white. A summer dress. Outdoors on some forest planet. This was old footage, not from Firstbloom, spliced in from somewhere else. It was her mother, but she looked young—not Cade’s age, but not much older. Her hair was a wild mess of braids and more of it trailed down, almost kissing the ground when she sat. She had an acoustic guitar in her lap and a harmonica strapped in front of her chin.

  She was going to play.

  Cade watched—her mouth dropped and her heart swollen. The song was sweetness and pain and it meant so many things to Cade that she could only begin to sift through them, sort them out. Her mother had lips just like hers and when they opened, her voice was a signal, a call across a crowded room. There were no words—just notes. It was the sort of song that Cade loved most. Made up on the spot. A song that seemed to wander instead of heading in a straight line, with threads that came back to remind you of the best parts.

  Cade had always thought her music was a knee-jerk reaction to the Noise. But here was her own mother, to tell her she’d been wrong.

  Cade wondered if she should be sharing all of this with Xan. But she couldn’t imagine he’d take comfort in a few
grainy frames of a woman he didn’t know. And the fact that she was Cade’s mother snarled things up even more. Xan didn’t have a mother. If the filmstrip had told the truth this time, he never would. Once Cade shared this, it would open a new tract of space between them.

  The footage died out where the cut would have been. Rennik bent over the projection lamp.

  It wouldn’t be so hard not to tell. Cade had gotten the sense, more than once, that Xan knew or felt more than he was letting on. And if Rennik had proved one thing, it was that he could help the people he wanted to help, even with a secret.

  She reached out for Xan and told him, I’m almost to Hades. She told him, I’m getting close.

  She let her mother go unsaid.

  Cade holed up in the bedroom with Moon-White. She was going to teach herself her mother’s song if it split her fingertips wide open.

  “That’s nice.” Lee’s voice drifted down from the top bunk.

  “It’s more than nice,” Cade said. “It’s the best song I know.”

  “Yeah,” Lee said, her fingers dancing in the air above Cade’s head. “It’s pretty close to perfect.”

  Lee sat up in her bunk and started to dance. She worked her shoulders back and closed her eyes and when a strong note crested, she tossed her head. Lee wasn’t a dancer—she and the beat were passing acquaintances at best.

  But it made Cade miss Club V. Not the wince of strong drinks or the armpit smells or the dressing room after the show. The audience. She thought back to them—their wild arms and their hardworking legs, all moving in their own ways, all moving together. And the spacesicks, always in the front rows, crushed in close. How much they cared about her music. How hard they were fighting to connect to it.

  It all came to her in one downbeat.

  The spacesicks, using her music to connect to something that wasn’t nothingness. The song. Her mother. Music and spacesicks. Raw thought, how much like music it sounded. How much she needed to get to Xan, get to her mother, get to everyone. Reaching and opening at the same time.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled. “Perfect.”

  She kept playing. Lee kept dancing. But now Cade let herself go to that focused place where everything melted to music. She reached out and opened herself to whoever might be listening.