Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Lee gasped and hit her head on the ceiling.

  “Cade,” she said. “What did you just . . . ?”

  Lee rubbed her head with one hand and grabbed the edge of the bunk with the other so she could lean over the side.

  Cade stared her down, daring her to believe it.

  There was a knock at the panel. Cade rushed to pull it aside. It was Ayumi, her eyes wide—and so brown that there was no other word to describe them but Earth.

  “Cadence . . . did you just play music inside my head?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think I did.”

  The three of them looked at each other, and Cade heard echoes of the song. Lee touched her temple. Ayumi’s smile cracked so wide, it could have split the room in half.

  “Brass.”

  CHAPTER 16

  MIXED STATE: An ensemble composed of several quantum states

  From that moment, Cade and Moon-White couldn’t be torn apart. One day left until the ship hit Hades, and she planned to spend the whole thing with her guitar strapped on, sending music to anyone who would listen.

  Renna was the first one she added to her audience. After a few more minutes of her mother’s song, Cade sensed a low thrum past Lee’s mind and Ayumi’s mind and all around. It didn’t move to the same beat as the human thoughts. It was lower, steadier, with a tidelike swish and thump.

  Cade modulated down a few keys and tried to play something Renna would like, but it was hard to know what a living, breathing ship would like. Cade did her best, imitating the rhythms of Renna’s flight and sprinkling them with the pulses she sometimes felt in the walls.

  Sudden knocks sharpened the air. Like applause.

  She wondered if that was why Renna had given her the guitar in the first place.

  Cade ran up to the control room with Moon-White, Lee marching behind her, Ayumi following them with a dancelike shuffle.

  Cade found Rennik studying a chart of Hades, as old as dust and about to flutter to pieces. She didn’t wait for him to look up before she launched into her topic of choice.

  “Hey,” she said. “When we first met on Andana. Do you think Renna could have known something about me that I didn’t? Something that I just now figured out?”

  Rennik rolled the chart enough that Cade couldn’t see it. “Renna understands some things that I don’t, and I understand some things she doesn’t. But don’t—”

  “Tell her that,” Cade said. “I know.”

  Rennik finished rolling the chart, stepped away from the control panels. “What did you figure out?”

  Lee ran forward and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen up,” she said. “I mean really snugging listen.”

  Cade focused and found his thoughts—a constant, calming hum, laced with strange rhythms. Fainter than it should have been for someone standing so close.

  She moved her hands fast against the tug of Moon-White’s strings, built up a neat little intro, and—

  —smacked the downbeat. Double-hard.

  Rennik tipped his head down and shook it like he needed to dump water out of his ear.

  “That’s . . . nice.”

  “Nice?” she said. She wanted fantastic, first-class, impossible. She wanted anything but . . . nice.

  “Did you hear it?” Cade asked. “I mean, I know that you heard it. But . . .” she touched his temple. “Here?”

  Rennik nodded and sidestepped down the panels. “Interesting. Very interesting. But I’m not human, remember, Cade? A great deal of what makes music appealing is based on species.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, following him as he drifted.

  “The songs that sound best to you,” he said. “Do you know why you like them?”

  The tough girl showed up for the first time in days, crossing Cade’s arms, pursing Cade’s lips. She didn’t need to know what she liked about music. Wasn’t it enough that she liked something? That there was at least one thing worth liking in the whole senseless universe?

  Cade thought tough girl had settled in for a long stay, but Rennik threw her off when he started to sing. In a well-pitched voice, he hummed a note and then another note above it—a fifth.

  The sound hit Cade in all the right places. She picked it up on Moon-White.

  “That,” Rennik said, “sounds pleasant to you because it mimics the sound humans make when they’re happy. And this”—he hummed two trembling notes, a minor third—“means sadness because it mimics the sound of human grief. Do you know why you like songs that repeat with slight variation? So do your bio-rhythms.”

  “All right, all right,” Cade said. Rennik’s little lesson would have been first-class intolerable if it wasn’t so fascinating.

  Cade thought of the special music she’d played for Renna. Maybe she had to do the same thing for Rennik. So she left her mother’s song behind. This called for a strict time signature, finger-picking. She worked out something that sounded calm, but wasn’t—like the rush of water under a skin of ice.

  Rennik listened politely, but it was clear from the slight lean toward the control panel that he wanted to get back to his charts.

  “I did fine with Renna,” Cade muttered. “Do you even like music?”

  Rennik shrugged. Even his shrug was graceful. “Maybe I don’t.”

  “Yeah,” said Lee, reverting to her ancient tendency to be on Rennik’s side. “Maybe he doesn’t.”

  But the faint, far-off hum of his thoughts told Cade a different story. Maybe Rennik cared for music, and maybe he didn’t. But she could feel one thing for sure. He wasn’t open to it.

  Lee was a good listener, but it was Ayumi who loved the songs most, who sat and tuned in through dinner instead of eating, eyes closed and spoon trailing between her bowl and her mouth. She followed Cade from the mess to the hold and back again. She asked for more as Cade’s fingers flared to match-tips. She asked again long after they’d gone numb.

  It felt so good to be listened to like that; Cade went on for hours. She dropped into the bunk and didn’t reach for Xan before she passed out cold.

  Cade dreamed of mountains. Which didn’t make sense, because for days, for weeks, she’d dreamed of Xan or nothing at all. But now she faced down thick-veined slabs, heart-spiking peaks, and sheer drops.

  She woke to gray all around. Gray walled her into the bed. It took a few seconds of peering through the thin dark to figure out that the walls were Gori, puffed to the extremes of his rapture state.

  Cade tried to slide out of the bunk in three different directions, but Gori’s bulk stopped her every time. Her hands flew to her sides, but her fingers remembered a nanosecond before her mind caught up—she’d dropped the seven-blade knife in a pile of dirty clothes. Cade had gotten comfortable and stopped being smart.

  “Lee.” She couldn’t see the other bunks, but at least she knew she wasn’t alone. “Lee! Ayumi!”

  “The other humans are not here.” Gori’s voice drifted down to her from somewhere near the ceiling. “I informed them of a rare celestial event, and the Ayumi and the human with the knotted head were consumed with the need to see it. I told them you would be along.”

  “You thought of everything, didn’t you,” Cade muttered.

  She blinked—and there he was at the side of the bed. The smaller version of Gori, more negative wrinkle-space than solid matter. He stood between the bunks with his back to her.

  “I needed to speak with you.”

  Cade checked his hands. No weapon. Of course, his robe offered a universe of folds if he wanted to hide one.

  “When you say speak, you mean words, right?” Cade asked. “Not the language of knives or pain or something like that?”

  Gori turned to face her. If his body was a rock-cluster, his eyes had true bottomless-pit qualities. “There is one way that, even with all of your reaching, I might not have to kill you.”

  “And that is?” Cade asked—not wanting to get herself into something worse.

  “In place of a breach
, there is a path. A true, narrow path to be traveled.” Gori drew himself as tall as he could in his current state, and gathered a twist of robe over his chest in a formal gesture. “I invite you.”

  The words reached Cade first, and then a minute later, their meaning screeched into place.

  “You came here, in the middle of the night, to my bedroom, while I was sleeping, to invite me to share your rapture state?”

  “You touched me again,” Gori said. “The need became urgent.”

  Cade almost laughed at the Darkrider’s choice of words, but she didn’t think it would help her chances of survival. “This is not the middle-of-the-night visit most girls dream about,” Cade said. “But I do wonder what goes on in that wrinkle-scaped head of yours.” She pushed to the edge of the bed, lined her knees up to one side of Gori’s, locked on to his dark eyes.

  “Will this path help me find my mother?”

  “It will alter your relationship to the universe.”

  Cade’s breath hammered thin. Leave it to Gori to give her a nonanswer.

  “What do you do when you’re rapturing?”

  “I feel.”

  Cade nodded, but it was a shallow nod. Something inside of her didn’t want to snap the cord and fall into trusting him.

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “To open yourself to everything?” Gori asked. “To let the universe, seen and unseen, known and unknown, reclaim its rightful place inside you, streaming through cells, threatening to burst them? To—”

  “I get it, I get it,” Cade said.

  “No.” Gori closed his eyes. “But soon enough you will.”

  Cade closed her eyes, too, and did a mental tiptoe. When she reached the shores of Gori’s mind, that thin line, as clear and penetrable as water, she kept moving. Didn’t let herself hesitate, because she would have turned back.

  The universe slammed into her with the strength of a thousand songs, carried on a thousand winds that tore her open. And the songs were played with notes Cade didn’t know, in keys she’d never heard. There was light and dark, but this was no day-light and night-dark. This dark was most of the universe, living inside the songs, pulsing them out—it was the air they filled and the wind they flew on, and it crept and shivered through Cade. All beginnings sprang from that dark, and all endings. It could have crushed her, but instead it brought her songs.

  Cade washed up on the shore of the bedroom, full and emptied at the same time. And tired. So tired.

  She tipped onto her back, met the simple cool of the sheets. Gori stood over her like a dark post. “So you just sit around and . . . feel that? All day?”

  “Most days. To bear witness is no small task.” Cade thought Gori was done, he stood there so long without talking. Without moving. Just the faint swirl of his robes in the dark.

  “There were times when I chose to do more.”

  “Tell me about those,” Cade said.

  She thought Gori would duck the question. Scuttle out of the room. Or worse—decide that this was another kind of breach, this asking. But he sat down on the bed across from her and folded his hands into a small pile. “There are Darkriders who believe we should observe the forces and do nothing. That we should cause no changes, large or small, for fear of the terrible consequence.” Earth rose in Cade’s head, in all of its blue-green lushness—and another planet, its shadow-twin. Gori’s home. “There is wisdom in what those Darkriders say. But there is more fear. I don’t find it an acceptable balance.” Gori nodded to the chute, and the rest of the ship. “There is a reason I travel in the company of outlaws.”

  “I thought it was because you were so handy with a knife.”

  He blinked down at Cade. Blinked. Again.

  “Are there rules against Darkriders laughing?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I find your attempts at humor unconvincing.”

  And for some reason—maybe the press of exhaustion—Cade thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. At some point, Gori stood up and left. At some point, Cade’s laughter shaded into sleep.

  The bedroom came to her in a white fog. Lee stood over Cade—the back of her hand too close to Cade’s face to be doing anything but checking for breath.

  “How long was I out?” Cade asked, her voice the guttering of a low string.

  “A full day,” Lee said.

  “And nobody tried to kill me?” It seemed like the longest stretch she’d gone since leaving Andana without a knife pressed to her skin, or a fight on her hands, or a good solid threat.

  Lee shrugged. “I rattled you for snoring once.”

  “Where’s Ayumi?”

  “She strapped herself down in the cargo hold,” Lee said. “I told her it wouldn’t do, so she went back to her ship to bunk down. She has a strange spin on her particles, that girl.”

  Cade almost asked why Ayumi hadn’t claimed one of the two empty beds in the room she shared with Lee. But then she thought of Ayumi’s condition. The girl clearly wasn’t at the stage of spacesick where her hands would invade the nearest patch of skin, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  “What’s the story with our new shipmate, do you think?” Lee asked.

  “I think she’s . . . she’s . . .”

  The secret wasn’t Cade’s to tell. And promises had been made.

  “She’s strange.” The lie came like a fumbled beat, sticking-out and obvious. “You said it yourself.”

  Lee shrugged and leapt off the bed. “Come on,” she said as she hoisted herself into the tunnel. She flashed toothy-white brilliance at Cade before she turned and went to work on the panel. “We’re close.”

  “Close?”

  It seemed impossible. So many light-years, so much black had existed between Cade and Xan when this started. And now she was close.

  Hades.

  Cade could almost feel the hole-suck.

  She scrambled through the tunnel. She hit the main cabin with Lee. Rennik waited at the top of the chute, twisting the circle-glass around in his hands, looking nervous and pleased. Cade couldn’t tell if she was getting better at seeing the flow of emotions underneath the flat surface, or if he was getting better at showing them to her.

  “We’re putting down in ten,” he said.

  Lee nodded as if that wasn’t ridiculous.

  “Putting down?” Cade asked. “Hades isn’t a place to stop and get leisurely.”

  “We’re not in Hades,” Rennik said, a twitch of pride in his voice. “Renna changed the course.”

  “Renna . . . wait . . . what?”

  Cade felt herself stiffen—hands, stomach, throat—until she was locked tight and creaking out words.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She came up with the most fantastic flight plan, Cadence. It takes us back to the brink of Hades in two days.”

  “Back?”

  Lee planted herself in front of Cade and got in her face, set and certain.

  “It all fits together. We needed time to come up with a plan. The Unmakers know you’re coming, and they’ll have their traps set. Do you really think you can sail into Hades without them noticing?”

  Cade looked for an answer to fling at Lee, but all she had was the sketchiest of ideas—bursting into Hades in Ayumi’s little ship and using her entanglement—somehow—to find Xan.

  Ayumi crossed the dock with a canvas sack and a thick stack of notebooks, looking refreshed and sleep-scrubbed and anything but spacesick. Anger thrummed out of Cade so hard, it stopped Ayumi in her tracks.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  When Cade spoke, she had to press down on each word to keep it from exploding. “That’s a very good question.”

  “Firstbloom,” Lee said. “We made it to Firstbloom.”

  Cade felt a floating, and a fear that spread out from the center of it. Like the moment she looked out of the starglass—when up and down and right and left, morning and night, stopped meaning anything.

  “And no one thought to wa
ke me up and . . . tell me about this?”

  Ayumi looked at Lee and then down at the floor. “We were so sure you’d want to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “To figure out what all of this means!” Ayumi burst.

  “Everything we know about entanglement comes from a four-minute filmstrip,” Lee said. “Do you understand how big this could be? No more spacesick? No more scatter? You’re the one hope left for all of us, Cade. Doesn’t that merit a pit stop?”

  “It’s not your call,” Cade said.

  Rennik headed down the chute to meet Cade. He folded his hands over hers and when he pulled them back, she was holding the circle-glass. “There’s one more splice here, Cadence. I can restore it, but not with simple means. It will take the original tech.”

  And the tech was on Firstbloom.

  “The place has been attacked!” Cade said.

  “It still shows up on scans and updated flight maps. Which means it’s still there.”

  “It’s a mobile lab station,” Lee tossed in. “Independent. No one will have come to claim the equipment.”

  “Or the bodies,” Cade muttered.

  “There’s so much we could learn,” Ayumi said, shuffling her notebook stack. “So much that we need.”

  “I see you’ve got it all figured out.” Cade managed one step at a time until she was in Rennik’s face. “This can’t be the course. I need to get to Xan.”

  Lee slid herself into the bare inch of space between Rennik and Cade. “We know he’s in trouble. But so are all the humans who can’t do more than live and die, scattered on horrible planets, treated like spacetrash. I’ve seen more of it than anyone, and I’m telling you, things are getting dire for our kind. If you can do something to change that . . .”

  Cade didn’t know if she would be able to make a difference in a problem as wide as the skies. She didn’t care about it half as much as she cared about rescuing Xan. But Firstbloom held the secrets of entanglement. Cade’s story was one of those secrets.