Entangled

by Amy Rose Capetta

  He didn’t have a chance to tell her, because a two-man patrol appeared along the far curve of the hall.

  Cade didn’t wait for the rush. She was the rush, streaming her voice behind her like a banner.

  Before the Unmakers knew how to handle her, she had unarmed the first guard and tested the knees of the second. By the time Rennik caught up, Cade had them fighting hand-to-hand. The little gloves of the Unmakers were slippery where they landed, and glanced off her skin. Stitches in the leather printed themselves to her cheekbone. She reached up with her right hand to check the damage, and the Unmaker snatched her fingers.

  Cade lashed out with the mirror shard in her left hand, starting in on the Unmaker’s robes. A thump to one side let her know that Rennik had put his guard down. With another well-aimed blow, hers went down, too.

  The Unmakers blended into one black stain on the ground. This time it was Rennik who hurried off. Cade stopped to check the swelling of her cheek, to push down the wildness of her heart.

  And then she ran.

  She took a blind curve at top speed, arms out, and almost slammed Lee to the ground. Cade caught their combined balance and slung them both into the wall instead.

  Lee pushed Cade back, holding her at arm’s length.

  “You snugging spacecadet!”

  “That’s one way to say thank you,” Rennik said as he caught up.

  Lee’s laugh was so big, she could barely fit in the words. “You’re right.” She flew at Cade on purpose this time, arms flung over-wide, pretending to knock her down, but catching her up in a hug at the last second.

  “First-class rescue.”

  “Come on.” Cade pulled Lee’s hand, tapped Rennik on the shoulder as she passed him, and they were off.

  Onto a new length of hall and another batch of doors, staring at Cade white as rolled-back eyes.

  If she had her up-and-functioning entanglement instead of the Noise, Cade would have been able to follow her own body to Xan, like the dreamwalk that happens when a person is pointed toward home. The turns that spin themselves before memory can catch up and garble the directions. The magnetic on-and-on, the weighted pull of it, the need.

  “Hey, Cade, Renna’s back the other way,” Lee said.

  “Where are we going?” Rennik asked. No uptick in his steps, no hitch in his voice. But Cade could see past the shallows of his calm now, to the depths of feeling. He would worry until she told him where they were headed. Unfortunately, Cade had to do more than inspect the identical doors to know that.

  She needed to connect to Xan. And that meant kicking the Noise out of her head.

  Cade thought back to Andana, back to Club V, and the night when her head went silent. She started with the show—labcoat in the crowd, spacesicks throbbing at the edge of the stage, lights setting their brand on Cade’s skin. She had never examined that night, turned it around like a stone, looked at its underside. Now Cade blasted down the white halls, Rennik and Lee close behind, and remembered.

  She followed her old self through the set, then backstage. She met Mr. Niven again. Distrusted him again. Cade fast-forwarded through the filmstrip—she’d had enough of that white-spliced lie. When she got past it, she slowed down. Stuck on the part where the idea of entanglement took hold.

  Cade had assumed that it was Xan coming out of his coma that had defeated the Noise. But Mr. Niven had never told her that. Maybe she’d put the idea together backwards. It could make all the difference. Play a line of music forwards, it was pure meaning. Play the same line backwards, it was whine and drone. Useless.

  Maybe Xan hadn’t turned off the Noise at all.

  Maybe Cade had woken him up.

  And if she had done that once, she could do it again. The music had made it happen that time. But Cade didn’t have Moon-White. Besides, making sounds of the loud-enough-to-scare-off-the-static variety would bring a pack of Unmakers so fast that Cade didn’t count it as an option. But there was another possibility. She had sent music—real music—to Ayumi’s mind, without making a sound.

  She would have to do that. But first she needed to reach out, open up, and overwhelm the Noise.

  The attempt came out rusty at first, all sharp notes and stabbing rhythms. She fiddled with it while Rennik took the lead, kept her moving, eyes slanted back at her even as he rushed.

  The Noise needed structure to cancel it out. Well-built, intentional, intricate music. But it demanded surprise, too, or else it would beat her to whatever punch she wanted to pull. Cade swelled over it, smothered it, ordered it to sit down and play dead.

  But she couldn’t quite kill it.

  She tried to remember the song she’d played at Club V, remake it in miniature in her head. Verse-chorus-verse. Comfort food.

  And then the bridge. Cade hit it, and for the first time, she could see where she was headed, the spot on the other bank where she wanted to land. It had been an unformed place for too long. Now it was a few steps in the right direction—a certain, small white room.

  Cade was close to overcoming the Noise. She could feel it. All she had to do was insist. And that meant getting loud. So she turned the volume up, cranked it higher, until she thought her head would split down the center and pour out music in loud colors. The coma static slipped into the background. When it gave out, she stopped.

  Dead in front of a door, the same as all the other doors.

  But this one she tapped open.

  “Cadence?”

  His voice filled the space that the Noise had scraped out. It rang through her like bells.

  Less than ten steps across the room to Xan, but they were the longest, strangest steps of Cade’s life.

  She saw him and he wasn’t in her head, and she wasn’t in his. He wasn’t a symphony of feelings that she could slip into. He was a boy, in a too-small room, waking up. Paler than clouds. Brighter than the nearest sun.

  “Hey,” she said, but the word didn’t matter, because it could mean whatever she needed it to, as long as she filled it up right.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She could feel it in the corners of her eyes—a crescendo of itch. Tears came easy this time. Xan smiled with such fullness that it looked like pain. But Cade knew the difference.

  “You closed the space,” he said.

  Cade put a hand out and touched his. Sturdy fingers, trim nails, the soft dry skin that came from never leaving a spacecraft.

  Just a hand. But her whole body sang bright.

  Xan reached out and pulled her to him in one clean sweep. Touching someone else—Ayumi, Lee, even Rennik—was a beautiful difficulty. Being this close to Xan felt as simple and right as standing in the sun after the sandstorms passed, after days spent in deep-dwelling darkness.

  As soon as Cade returned his smile, Xan’s face fell into a new mold. His lips set straight, and crowded—she saw now—with scars.

  “This place is filled with spacecadets,” he said. “Let’s drain.”

  CHAPTER 21

  ANTI-CORRELATED: A relationship defined by opposing behaviors

  Xan was out of the bed in one burst. It wasn’t long since he’d been beaten to empty-headed blackness, but there was no lag, no learning curve. He crossed the room in a blur, moving as fast as thought.

  Or faster. Cade’s mind—and her feet—slogged to catch up.

  She was with Xan. They were leaving Hades together. He wasn’t in league with the Unmakers. Or was he? When she reached out for Xan’s thoughts, all she could feel was his need to blaze a perfect line out of that nameless ship and into the freedom of space.

  With her.

  The hall stood clear, with Rennik and Lee still guarding the door.

  “What are they doing here?” Xan asked. Cade was struck with a sudden and absolute appreciation of the fact that Xan had been out cold when she was kissing Rennik. Her heart rate had shot to such heights that the failsafe would have snapped on, no question. The thought of it was enough to swear off kissing for the rest of time.

&
nbsp; Cade took that back in the next breath. Now that she’d been brave enough to do it once, she couldn’t imagine keeping her distance from people she wanted to kiss. She would have to develop some kind of pulse-slowing technique. She looked from Rennik’s open face to Xan’s impatient trace of a smile, and practiced it.

  “These are my friends,” Cade said, each word slow and deliberate.

  “I know,” Xan said. “I’ve seen them.” In your head, he added, with a straight-on look at Cade.

  Cade’s voice picked up speed without her permission. “So what’s the issue?” You’re the one we need to worry about. She couldn’t help transmitting the thought. Xan was a tractor beam for her emotions.

  He stepped in, like getting close to her could somehow keep out Rennik and Lee. The space he made by putting his hands on her shoulders circled the two of them into their own little atmosphere.

  “You didn’t come alone,” he said.

  Cade thought of Ayumi, Renna, Gori, even Moon-White, all waiting. She had come anything but alone.

  “I didn’t know that was part of the deal.”

  Cade wondered at how fast she could move from the blissful overtures of first seeing Xan to the dissonance she felt now. He laughed, and it reminded her of sand grating on her ankles.

  She remembered what Mr. Niven and the filmstrip had told her, once upon a time. That when two entangled people were in proximity, their moods would match. As in, oppose. It had something to do with their particles—so attuned that a change in either of them would tip the scales. They would keep this up, switching back and forth, as long as they were together. But something made it bearable. Knowing that, in some deeper place, he was the same, that they were bound in sameness. That’s what it meant to match—to be perfectly one, to be diametrically different. The word held both meanings. Cade had never thought about that fact until she stared it in the beautiful, irritating face.

  Xan stepped out of their little sphere and let Rennik and Lee back into the conversation with a shrug. “It’s nothing personal. Just that I have a plan. And it seats two.”

  “Then you have a subpar plan,” Lee said.

  “Rennik has his own ship,” Cade said, pulling Lee back a step. “They can follow us.”

  Nods were tipped all around and the group broke into a loose formation with Xan at the head, steering them in an unknown direction, twisting down sudden halls and sending them through doors that opened into new passages. Cade turned back to Rennik and, not caring if Xan heard, said, “Stick close.”

  Rennik cut a look at the back of Xan’s head and mouthed the word Very.

  But now that it was Rennik piling the suspicion on thick, Cade wanted to defend Xan, chime out his good points, blacken the eyes of anyone who said different. She wondered if that was a part of entanglement, or just a part of her.

  “Come on,” Xan said, half turning as he hurtled down a new stretch of hall. “It’s this way.”

  What is? Cade asked.

  But Xan was too far to turn around and tell her now.

  He slammed into a patrol at the first bend. Any residue of worry about Xan being on the side of the Unmakers was scrubbed clean in one blow. He ran at the first one and laid it flat. Then he attacked three at a time, taking out their plastic bones, cracking their shells. Xan knew just how to send them down, with strikes he must have practiced in his head for weeks. Cade sent him strength, and he sent it back in waves so wild, she had to brace herself with one hand against the wall, and regain her balance, before she dashed into the fight.

  Cade’s first Unmaker went down easy. With Xan awake, Cade was stronger than any human, and he was, too. It helped that she knew the Unmakers’ weaknesses—Xan sent her the secrets he’d gathered, one flash at a time. The crunchable toes. The soggy bit at the back of the knees. The thin lines of flesh where robes met.

  She tried it out on the second Unmaker—toes, knees, flesh—and it worked. But another Unmaker was waiting and got in too quickly, too close. An arm shot out and ground her into the nearest wall. A whiff of metal breath reminded Cade of the mechanical voice box. She faked a punch to the throat and, instead, swept her palm up at the last moment and hammered metal into the Unmaker’s face. Her fingers rang and reddened. The Unmaker hit the ground.

  Lee and Rennik formed a second line of defense, taking care of the few guards who rushed past Cade and Xan. But Cade didn’t want her friends to have to fight at all. They had seen enough of the Unmakers for one lifetime. Lee had come with Cade, set and stubborn, all the way from Andana. Now Cade could do something to pay her back. She stationed herself right in front of Lee and took down Unmakers one by one. And because of the strength that came from her entanglement, and all those years lived from scrap to scrap at the Parentless Center and backstage at Club V, Cade was good at it.

  Very good.

  Fighting was a song—the beat of it breath, the harmonies bone-crack and the dull thud of skin. It wasn’t pretty music. But it was electric, it was alive. Cade wouldn’t smile through death to please the Unmakers. She was grim-faced, raw-knuckled, terrifying, terrified.

  A fourth Unmaker went down. A fifth.

  Ten in less than two minutes. And the rest of the patrol around them, sprawled on the ground.

  “Not bad,” Xan said. He stepped over a snapped plastic collarbone and kept running.

  Now it seemed like they met a patrol every minute, but there was no stopping, no hesitation. There was just the clash, bright as moon-rise, and the horrible mess that came after it. Cade followed Xan, sure that he knew the escape route. He never doubled back or stopped to check his position. She wondered at how well he seemed to know the entire station. But she didn’t have time to ask about how he got so sure-footed.

  “Almost there,” Xan said.

  Lee and Rennik’s footsteps fell back, but Cade kept time with him even as he picked up speed. Around another bend, another patrol sprang out. Cade and Xan ran at the Unmakers, steps hitting at the same time. When the blows were struck, she felt her own and she felt Xan’s. She saw two fights at the same time, and she was winning both.

  “Here,” Xan cried.

  Cade landed a punch, looked up, and found that there was no one left to fight.

  Xan jammed a button on a mundane-looking control panel. Out of a slab of plain white wall, a hatch swirled out and open. Cade turned to gather Lee and Rennik, but they had peeled off at some point. She remembered asking them not to do that. But they had a ship to get back to. Other people to keep safe.

  Cade and Xan were on their own, together.

  The ship looked like it was designed for one person—a single chair, tilted to face the controls, a rim of open space around it. Cade wouldn’t have been comfortable in there with anyone else. The hatch sealed behind Xan.

  “So,” he said. “Welcome to the plan.”

  Xan got in the pilot’s chair and warmed up the controls with a few scalelike taps.

  “Have you ever flown before?” she asked, each tap louder in her ears. It seemed like a legitimate question. Xan had been in a coma for most of his life.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have the course all figured out.” He unrolled a complicated schematic in crabbed handwriting, complete with strikeouts and smudges. “Simple. See?” He smiled up at her.

  Cade put her own lack of smile down to the whole entanglement business.

  Xan took off with a clunk that would have made Ayumi blush. Cade wrapped her arms around the back of the pilot’s chair so she wouldn’t crash on the nearest flat surface.

  A strip of window ran around the center of the pod like a ribbon. Cade twisted back to look at the Unmaker’s station, small as a batch of fingerprints, leaving its mark on Hades. The docks were quiet. No alarms, no explosion of lights, no spitting out of palm-shaped ships.

  “You’re not being followed,” Cade said, turning back to Xan. “Why aren’t you being followed?”

  “Cadence,” he said. “I know you’re worried that they turned me somehow. Bu
t you can search my mind. You have free range in there. Do you think I could hide something that important from you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ll take that as an invitation to find out.”

  She planted herself on the wide arm of the pilot’s chair and looked down at the contours of Xan’s face, carved to deep gullies of concentration. It was distracting, his face. The strong bridge of his nose, the swipes of purple-gray under his eyes. She had come so far, wanting to see him like this. To be this close. Now their bodies were just another space she needed to cross. She needed to push past all of that to his thoughts.

  She felt a certain amount of relief streaming through him, like a breeze—had Xan ever felt a real, planetbound breeze? Maybe the blowing of an air vent. And there was excitement, too. Cade had never found that in his head before. It was cool and crisp at the same time—like a patch of shade on a perfect day. He was excited to be with her, excited for whatever came next. But when she tried to see past the feeling to the facts of his plan, she felt—nothing.

  No. Not nothing.

  Blackness, and then a rush of light.

  “I don’t think you’re hiding something from me,” Cade said, “but there are parts of this I don’t understand.”

  “We’re not mind-readers, Cadence.” Xan kept his eyes on the patch of space in front of them, tore the ship from the encroaching dark of a black hole. “That’s not the point of entanglement.”

  “And what is?”

  Unhappiness hit Cade—from Xan’s thoughts, from his scarred face and soured posture. “Please don’t expect me to echo the scientists who made us,” he said. “I have ideas of my own.”

  Cade hated the scientists who made them, but only most of the time. They had done terrible things. To children. To mothers. But they were also the ones who’d entangled her, and she wouldn’t unentangle herself, not even if she could twist time, loop it back on itself, and stop Project QE before it started. Her hate was complicated—a pit inside of her, burning but cold, an ice planet on a far-flung orbit. She could ignore it if she had to, and most of the time she did.