Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

She’d thought the hope of knowing who she was had come and gone with Mr. Niven, crumpled on the ground in the pile of his old-man clothes. She’d thought that Xan was the one thing she’d ever know about herself—the single, about-to-be-snapped connection to her past.

  But the circle-glass had proven her wrong. Her mother had been pinched down to nothing, almost lost.

  What else was there to find?

  Cade needed to know, for herself—and for Lee, who wanted to be part of the mission, who believed in it even when Cade didn’t. For Rennik, who helped Cade over and over when other nonhumans would have showed her the airlock. For Ayumi, who tried to hide a soft flinch in her stare—who focused on what happened to Cade, even as she fought her own battle against all of space.

  Since the moment she left Andana, Cade had put Xan first. She had tucked her own cares into his, lied to her shipmates, cared less about them because there wasn’t room for it as long as Xan needed her so much. Now, to turn her back on Firstbloom, she would have to put him in front of herself, her friends, and the rest of the human race. Again.

  She reached out to Xan and told him where she was headed.

  White, clean, sharp as a seven-blade knife.

  Firstbloom.

  Xan’s adrenaline hit her even before his thoughts, and those thoughts were simple. He would be glad to help her punch the guts, blacken the eyes, and sour the organs of everyone on that ship until she had it turned around and pointed at Hades.

  Cade didn’t want to hurt anyone. What’s more, she didn’t want to turn around. Renna and the others had been right. It was time to know more about what it actually meant to be entangled.

  Xan disagreed.

  Violently.

  He kept sending her signals to take all of them down. Kept flooding her with help she didn’t want. There were no blows, no knives, but this hurt more than the other fights she’d gotten into, because it felt like Cade was fighting herself. Shredding her insides. Bashing her thoughts back. She threw herself to the ground, so she wouldn’t collapse.

  Cade curled into a ball, holding her muscles in perfect tension. “Two days,” she muttered. “Just two days.”

  Hoping Xan could hear it. Hoping he would understand.

  Cade caught Firstbloom in the starglass as it swam up at the edge of an asteroid field. It was shinier than the dull chunks of space-rock around it—a group of three irregular orbs connected by thin tubes that Cade guessed were bridges. The whole thing looked like a colony of little moons with no planet.

  Cade’s floating homeland.

  Landing would be difficult, because they already had Ayumi’s ship on the main dock and there was no one to answer their call and open Firstbloom’s hatch. Rennik did the whole thing manually, including a spacewalk in a pressure suit to force the hatch open.

  Cade waited at the secondary dock off the cargo hold, with Lee on one side and Ayumi on the other, and Renna sending them regular pulses to let them know Rennik was all right.

  The hatch hissed open. The towering door of the dock slid up. Cade stepped through a short spur of walkway and into the lab.

  The stillness was the first thing. It was thick and all around, and had settled over the surfaces—the long white tables, the scattered white coats, the hulking white machines—like sheets. The overhead lights were on, content to glare into the distant future, but one in the far corner had given in to a flicker that would sooner or later end in the blink-out. It thrashed in its little glass case.

  Lee crowded in, close behind Cade. Ayumi rushed ahead, running her fingertips all over the silent scene.

  “It’s a graveyard,” Ayumi whispered.

  “Then where are the . . . you know . . . dead people?” Lee asked.

  Cade and Lee pressed farther into the low-ceilinged, open lab space. Their steps fell soft on the white, stonelike floor.

  “You don’t see the dead,” Ayumi said. “That’s not how it works.”

  Graveyards were an old notion, an Earth notion. Humans on Andana were cremated or given sand burials. There was so little good land there, not be wasted on humans. So Cade couldn’t be sure if Ayumi was right about the lab.

  She swept a look over the hush of it. No bodies. But the machines were like graves, rising white and metallic and humming Everyone Is Gone songs.

  Cade and Lee fanned out to look for the tech that would restore the circle-glass. Ayumi filled her canvas sack with anything that might tell her more about the humans who had worked there, or, reaching back, about Earth. They worked out from the center of the room, overlapping each other’s circles as they went, doubling each other’s steps, making sure.

  Cade stopped at the first bridge.

  A little pane of plastic sat in the white door. A hollow tube connected the lab to another node about a quarter of a mile in the distance. The doors on both ends had been closed.

  Between them, men and women were lined up in a neat row, slumped and strange. There was almost no blood. It could have been some kind of institutional naptime, but eve-ryone’s eyes were open. That made it easier for Cade to notice a certain old man, nondescript except for the wrinkles.

  Mr. Niven.

  Cade ripped in a breath, turned away. Her heart could have been to the expanding edges of space and back in a minute. Xan connected within seconds—she could feel his presence, but he sent nothing. Maybe he was still damp at the fact that she wouldn’t fight her friends to get to him faster. Maybe he was silent at the sight of Firstbloom.

  Cade decided his measured quiet was better than a brawl inside of her own body.

  She stopped searching for the tech for a minute, and scoured the lab for something to offer Xan. She knew she was the one who owed him, this time. She should have been on Hades’ doorstep by now. There was nothing she could send that would fill the betrayal-shaped space that had opened up between them.

  Cade traced her steps back until she stood in front of a bank of cribs. She knew these from the filmstrip. She knew them from before that. Her memories steered her to a little rectangle on the far side of the grid.

  She touched a thin plastic railing, tiny pillows, crisp white sheets. Cade didn’t hold back the confused tumble in her chest. She sent it to Xan, along with a flash of the crib, and two words.

  Welcome home.

  CHAPTER 17

  SUPERPOSITION: The tendency of a quantum system to exist in all possible theoretical states, until observed

  The crib creaked.

  Or Cade thought it did. But then the sound came again, and Cade placed it behind her.

  She had the seven-blade knife out and unsnapped by the time she turned. But it was just Rennik, clunking in his pressure suit, the helmet off and the rest of it shrugged around his body. He looked out of place in the lab—too tall for the low ceilings, too curved for the sharp corners. Sometimes Cade forgot that he wasn’t human. But here, in a place where everything was human-made, he stood out like a smashed thumb.

  “Anything yet?” he asked.

  Cade shook her head. She hadn’t expected answers about entanglement to leap out from behind corners. But so far there was equipment and cribs, dust and silence.

  “I found something,” Ayumi called from across the lab. “I mean. Someone.”

  Cade ran over to where Ayumi had stopped in front of a long desk. A little placard that read INFORMATION sat on top of it, undisturbed. Behind it, flickers of light gathered, sparking into something larger and shaped like a person. Arms and a torso pulled themselves together. The head came last, flickering in and out before it snapped into a smile. This projection didn’t have a proper body, something elaborate and costumed like Mr. Niven—it was a thin scrap of color and light. At the same time, it was human.

  A woman. Middle-aged, with thick dark hair wrapped around her head, a white coat over her patterned dress, and a little brass pin with her name on it.

  Andrea.

  Cade fought the urge to say hello.

  Andrea smiled so thin and tight that at first Cade wo
rried she was about to go spacecadet right in front of them. But no. Andrea leaned forward and folded her transparent hands on the surface of the desk and started to speak in a pleasant, well-modulated tone.

  “Hello, and welcome to Firstbloom. We’re so glad you came. Firstbloom is the only mobile lab station dedicated to the study of human possibility. Please disregard the current state of our labs. If you are here to consider an investment or conduct an experiment in our research facilities, we invite you to have a look around.” Her face wavered—and it wasn’t just the light. Andrea was fighting to sink reassurance into each syllable of each word, but she was losing. “And remember. No matter the setbacks, Firstbloom will continue to . . . press forward into the . . . bright human future.”

  She pushed the edges of her smile out into new, painful territory. Cade heard a scream—not Andrea’s—and then she blinked out.

  “She made a projection,” Cade said. “Just like Niven. Right before the Unmakers raided.”

  Cade couldn’t believe what she had just seen. A woman saying a polite sorry for the fact that she was about to be killed, and asking future visitors to gloss over it so they could focus on research.

  Lee stared at Cade. She had no idea what to say.

  But Ayumi had a word for it.

  “Ghosts.”

  Another old Earth notion. Suddenly Lee and Rennik didn’t seem as in love with their little plan to explore Firstbloom. Rennik started to wander the enormous lab, looking for the tech to repair the circle-glass.

  Lee suckered her fingers onto Cade’s arm. “Let’s find that machine and get the damp hell out of here.”

  But the more they looked, the more ghostlike projections they found. It was like tripping a wire—one of them would step over a patch of air that hadn’t been troubled since the raid, and another memory of a person would appear.

  The bald man who explained his work with such calm and precision that Cade would have guessed he made the recording on a particularly boring Tuesday.

  The girl—not a day older than Cade—who did her best to look chipper as she pointed out the various parts of the lab.

  The woman who screamed and screamed as she watched whatever was coming through the door.

  Cade noticed that not a single one of these people said goodbye to mothers or fathers, children or best friends, wives, husbands, lovers. They didn’t even try to sneak the words in around their other, more official, messages. Cade hadn’t given a lot of thought to her last moments, but she hoped there was more to them than a recital of mess modules or a blank-faced declaration of fear.

  “Look,” Lee said, tugging Cade to a machine that sat in one of the far corners, behind a plastic door.

  As soon as Lee’s foot slid over the threshold, a woman with a head of wild red curls flickered into false life in front of them. Cade couldn’t help but notice she’d been beautiful. Couldn’t help but see the nimbleness of the woman’s eyes, the breakable nature of her small hands. Couldn’t help but wonder what the woman’s singing voice had sounded like.

  But when it came to last words, hers were even less inspired than the others.

  “This is the editing room . . . This is the editing room . . . This is the editing room . . .” on a forever-loop.

  Cade passed the woman and let her voice fade to a single, ringing bell in the background. She waved Rennik over to the monstrous beige machine that took up most of the room.

  “It’s this, I think.”

  Rennik looked it over once and nodded. Cade ran the flat blade of her knife along a seam in the metal until she found a spot to dig in. The cover pried off in one sheet. The machine spat dust, clearly angry that Cade wanted to wake it up from its elaborate plans to not do anything for the rest of time.

  The inner workings were spare and dark. Cade noticed a small emptiness, about the size and shape of the circle-glass. She tamped it down and the whole machine lit up.

  “I think that means we’re getting to the heart of it,” Rennik said.

  “Or at least we turned it on,” Lee muttered.

  The room flared with sudden light and crisp color, and the projection leapt to life, plumping the air with babies.

  “Welcome to Project QE.”

  The words were almost a comfort to Cade at this point. She settled in to watch one more time—to fill in her blanks.

  “You might wonder why you’re looking at a room full of infants.”

  But Cade wasn’t looking at infants, or anything else.

  Her head went blank. To black.

  The words of the filmstrip became a nightmare soundtrack, pounding underneath what came next. Cade landed in Xan’s little room, the failsafe connection snapped on to full strength. She didn’t have time to orient herself to Xan’s feelings. A rush of sensations hit her first. The Unmakers pulled Xan out of the room by his shoulders, his feet, his hair, whatever they could get their hands on as he struggled. Cade felt some of the pain, but it was a shadow-pain—quick to fade.

  The Unmakers dragged him down a stripped-bare hallway with doors lining both sides. Cade tried to help Xan, send him some of her fight, but all he could manage were a few loose slaps. He felt sluggish, like his limbs had been hollowed out and filled with sand. Xan had been drugged.

  The room the Unmakers shoved him into was small, a cell with an unfinished floor—Cade felt the grit on her cheek when Xan hit. She tried to send him strength, to wake him up, but he was slow and fogged as the Unmakers tied him up with lengths of strong rubber cord.

  Then they started to torture him.

  Cuts, shocks, small but adding up to a great, swallowing pain. The impulses shot into Cade and lodged themselves, even though her skin went untouched. Xan’s head rolled forward. He almost blacked out. Blinked hard, back into the cell. Almost blacked out again.

  Cade sent him strength, strength, strength.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  They were hurting him and there was nothing Cade could do to stop it. A-touch-more-than-human wasn’t the same as invincible. Cade remembered that with each little slice.

  “Now?” one of the Unmakers asked, his fingers crushed against Xan’s throat. Cade smelled dust and metal and ached to breathe.

  “No,” another one said. “Let him feel it.”

  The fingers eased an inch. Cade’s throat limped to catch up to the desperate pull of her lungs.

  “One more day,” the first Unmaker said.

  And the others agreed.

  “One more day.”

  Cade snapped back to Firstbloom.

  She was on the floor, Lee and Ayumi crouched over her, Rennik farther away, hovering over them.

  “What happened?” Lee asked. Cade rubbed her arms, her face, nursing the phantom cuts.

  “She must have heard what was hidden by the splice,” Lee said, “and reacted.”

  Ayumi fluttered her hands over various pulse points. Neck to wrists and back again. When she leaned down to check Cade’s pupils, Cade scanned Ayumi’s eyes for glass and gave her own all-clear. She wanted to wave Ayumi off, on the grounds that a girl with spacesick shouldn’t be in charge of health and safety.

  Rennik leaned down and the others made room. “Cade, did you see the footage?” Cade shook her head.

  “What did you see?”

  “Xan,” she said. “I heard . . . they’re going to kill him.”

  Cade’s decision to turn her back on Hades for two days clamped down, tightened each breath. She’d made the wrong call, and Xan had paid for it. Unless she could get to him in a single day, he would die for it.

  “We have to turn back.”

  Rennik nodded, but there was hesitation in it.

  “What?” Cade asked.

  “Do you want to go back and watch again?”

  “No.” Now that Cade knew it was happening, that Xan was being tortured, her head kept pounding two words.

  No time, no time.

  “Just tell me, please.”

  Rennik put out a hand in the air betwe
en them. Didn’t touch her. Just let his hand wait there, in case she needed it.

  “The rest of the children,” Rennik said. “The ones in the other pairs.” Cade felt the sick at the back of her throat, the hot acid pulse she’d been holding down. “They didn’t take to quantum entanglement. When the experiment narrowed down from a full room to just two . . . the others weren’t sent home. Or raised in the lab or even sent planetside to grow up.

  “They died, Cadence.”

  For the first time, she liked the flatness of Rennik’s voice. How it anchored the wild pitch of what she felt.

  “Take it back.” The words came out whispered, then shouted. “That’s not what you saw.”

  The crawling babies. Every one that hadn’t been Cade or Xan. A room full of life. Perfect, soft, still forming.

  Gone.

  “We’re the last two,” Cade said.

  Her feet touched down onboard Renna. Whatever happened between the floor of Firstbloom and the dock was lost. Cade looked backwards for it, but her mind acted like the pinched film inside the circle-glass—skipped over what it didn’t want her to see. This must have been her body protecting itself. She was marooned with a rage so enormous that even to trouble the edges of it felt dangerous. If she’d had to look at the smooth glass instruments of Firstbloom, the smug white walls, the abandoned crib, she would have bashed the whole lab to pieces.

  “We’re the last two,” Cade said, “and I left him in Hades. I left him to die.”

  Lee and Rennik held out arms to steady her as she headed up the chute. Ayumi disappeared for a minute, then chased behind them with a steaming green mug of tea. Renna rippled the surface of the chute underneath them in a soothing motion.

  But being surrounded by good people who wanted to help her only made Cade feel worse.

  Xan was alone. He was alone because Cade had left him. And to do what? Learn that the scientists who had entangled them were even worse than she had imagined?

  She stormed the control room and planted herself in the pilot’s chair. Lee, Rennik, and Ayumi stood back and watched as she clutched the armrests and set her teeth and chose her words.