Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “We’re getting the shuttle ready,” she said.

  “It’s Res Minor, isn’t it.” Rennik didn’t sound excited, or disappointed. He didn’t sound anything at all. But Cade knew the signs: the pull of skin at his temples, the overstretched fingers.

  Rennik was nervous.

  Cade had gotten better at reading him, so she should have been able to figure out if the kiss she’d pressed on him in Hades had been more than an impending-doom-fueled mistake.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Definitely Res Minor.”

  “I can’t go down there.” Rennik’s long four-knuckled fingers swirled a pen through the air. “Not in a capacity that will do you any good. The Hatchum have been on poisonous terms with Res Minor for centuries.”

  “So I’ll go alone.”

  Rennik stopped the pen, mid-swirl.

  “Lee and Ayumi have an Express drop, and I’m not asking them to cancel again. And you can correct me if I have this wrong, but I don’t think Gori leaves the ship. At least, not bodily.”

  Rennik took his time and considered. “Do me a favor?” He put the pen down and set his fingertips against the wall. “Don’t put yourself into danger if you can help it.”

  “Unfair,” Cade said. “That’s one thing I can’t promise. I put us all in danger, just by having these particles.” This topic had played out during her recovery—different verses and variations, but it all ended up sounding the same. The Unmakers had been successful in deleting Xan from the universe, and now they wanted the other half of the entangled pair. Cade couldn’t stop them from wanting her. They would find her, like they had found Moira. The girl Rennik used to love.

  Cade needed to stop thinking about Moira. Wondering about Moira. Worrying about whether she was too much like Moira, or not enough. The Unmakers were easier to focus on. They wanted to kill her.

  “We’ve been on the move for seven weeks,” Cade said. “No sign of them.”

  She couldn’t find the Unmakers in the song, either. Their being human meant they were woven in there, somewhere, but no matter how late Cade stayed up, picking at the song like an over-worried knot, she couldn’t tell how many Unmakers there were, or where to find them. For one reason: she didn’t know what they sounded like.

  But Cade knew Rennik. She didn’t have to connect to him on a sub-everything level to know what was bothering him.

  “You think I should stay onboard.”

  The little room pulsed twice, like a tightly held hand. “I think the longer you go without being noticed, the more likely it is the Unmakers will forget this and move on.” Renna pulsed again. She was giving him strength. “At the same time, you’re the only one who can locate your mother on the surface.” Cade would have to follow the song, which left Rennik to sit on the ship and wait up for her.

  “So?” Cade asked.

  She would go down to Res whether he wanted her to or not.

  “Well,” he said.

  She should have been able to leave the room.

  Rennik looked up, and something inside Cade broke apart into music. “I think you should have what you need,” he said.

  She knew that he was talking about her mother, but—

  “What I need.” Cade traced the words with her lips. Tested them.

  She needed what had happened in Hades to happen again. Cade reached for Rennik’s arm, and found more than she’d asked for. He pulled her in with less-than-patient hands, lining her up to him. It felt perfect for a full measure. And then it felt safe. Cade tilted back. Turned her face up to him like sky.

  Their lips fit together, found their own particular way of matching. Cade’s skin was a shade warmer than his, and her breath came faster. She drove the kiss into crests. The universe started to split into sound, pound its needing strains, pour into her. And then—the notes Cade had been searching for sailed into her head, calling and clear.

  “I can hear it,” Cade said, slipping out of Rennik’s hands. “I hear her.”

  He touched her cheek and tried to smile. “The next time we encounter trouble—the smallest potential for trouble—I want us to face it together.”

  “Deal,” Cade said on her way out the door. She called back, “Don’t spend all day worrying about me. I won’t get hurt.”

  Chapter 2

  The little ship broke through cloud after cloud. Cade held tight to her guitar case as Ayumi’s shuttle went down.

  “You sure you need that?” Lee asked.

  “Yeah.” But the pile of reasons in Cade’s head sounded shaky, and she didn’t want to share. She had grabbed Moon-White so she could talk to her mother. If the woman blank-stared at Cade, or didn’t believe the wild story about Cade being her daughter, the guitar might help. It was a language they both spoke.

  “My mother used to play,” Cade said, hoping it was enough.

  “Oh!” Ayumi said. “I wrote that down.” She turned from the work of piloting the shuttle to talk about her real love—scribbling things in her notebooks. “I wrote down everything we know about your mother. The color of her eyes. The instruments she can play.” Ayumi fiddled with a button that was probably best left un-fiddled with. “And. You know. That she’s a—”

  “Don’t you need to focus on the landing?” Cade asked.

  Ayumi clamped her mouth shut. Her cheeks went even rounder than usual.

  Lee twisted in the nav chair. “Never been to this planet,” she said. “But I’ve heard things. Happy-type things.”

  Lee tended to believe the worst about every place she put down. She catalogued the dangers, ticked off all the possible ways to die. It was part of her job. Lee was making a shining-brass effort for Cade, but she didn’t want to know more about Res Minor until her feet hit the dirt.

  Lee and Ayumi focused on navigating, in zero visibility, guided by coordinates that were based on a song in Cade’s head.

  Cade focused on white—a clean, fresh, unmarked planet.

  She let the goodness of that lift her as the milky sky thickened and the ship fell into a dead plummet.

  Ayumi’s shuttle put down in a field. An honest-as-snug field. Grass, even if it wavered thin. Flowers, even if their petals spindled out from dry white centers. Ayumi jumped out of the ship and pressed one between the pages of a notebook before Cade and Lee caught up. They crossed the field on a wind that whipped up grating soil but also stuffed them full of oxygen. Cade breathed deep, air-starved.

  “Don’t ever tell Renna I said this,” Lee warned. “But there’s nothing like a true lungful.”

  The field gave onto neat alleys, and the alleys fed thin streets. Res Minor didn’t boast a large human settlement, but it was well populated. Cade had never tried to shoulder through such a mass. People hurried and kept their heads down.

  Lee and Ayumi sheered off when they hit the market. “Back at the ship before sunset,” Lee said.

  Cade followed her mother’s song alone. But she had plenty of company in her loneliness—a constant swap-and-swirl of humans, their songs so close they crowded out thought. Tempos rushed and spiking. Cade struggled to hold them all, to hear them without losing her mother’s thread.

  She ran in fits and bursts. The effort of listening almost cracked her mind into clean pieces. She cradled her skull as it split along lines that no one else could see. The song flicked down a wide street, around a corner, and then stopped.

  She looked up and found herself within ten steps of a low building in gray stone. Res Minor Home for the Old and Infirm.

  Music bled out of the rectangle.

  Cade rushed the stairs, her steps ringing staccato. She stopped at a desk in a tiled waiting room. The home—if you could call a box that smelled like a century’s worth of urine and cleaning products a home—was staffed by men and women in green suits.

  “And you are?” asked a man with a mild voice and thin fingers of hair that reached up into his cap.

  “Here to see my mother,” Cade said.

  “Name?”

  Cade didn’t know
it. She should have plundered the records on Firstbloom, the lab station where her mother had dropped her as a baby. Too late.

  “My name?” she asked, vamping for time. “Cadence.”

  The man took in the torn hems of Cade’s jeans. The trickled-out ends of her hair. Moon-White’s case.

  “I can smell the atmosphere on you,” he said. “You must have come a long way.” The man stepped close, inserting himself into Cade’s space. No one else seemed to notice. Cade had no real love of fighting, not like Lee did, but if it came down to it, she would sweep the knees of the attendant and run.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll let you in. But you should know, here on Res Minor, we stick around. Take care of our own.”

  Cade didn’t wait for permission. She took off the down the hall, and the man’s thought-song followed. She didn’t like the way it shivered as he watched her walk.

  Now she wanted to sweep his knees just because.

  But that would cause a ruckus, at least a four on Lee’s scale, and her mother’s song was close. Cade stopped outside a door three-quarters of the way down the hall. Here the music burned—a light left on to draw Cade through the dark, and call her home.

  The door pressed open into a small room. Empty shelves, bare floors, a chip of window that showed the last of the afternoon sun-melt.

  A woman in the bed.

  “Mom?”

  Cade slammed into the edge of the mattress. The woman rested on an ancient slab of white, more wrinkle than sheet. Her body screamed out the truth. This was Cade’s mother; she held too many echoes of Cade to be anyone else. The most obvious parts of Cade, the green eyes and the light brown skin, came from her father. But here were Cade’s hands, here was the grain of her hair. Cade’s mother stared, her brown eyes open. Her fingers were dead on the sheets, music drained.

  Maybe Cade was the echo—the left-behind scrap of a beautiful sound that had been made a long time ago.

  Her mother was spacesick.

  Cade knew that. She’d known it for as long as she’d known that her mother might be alive. But when she had forced herself out of the black hole, she had needed it not to be true. Besides. Her mother’s song had been perfect. Thought-songs were still new to Cade, and she had hoped that a clear song meant a clear mind. But spacesick had done its work on Cade’s mother. Cade hadn’t let herself believe it.

  Staring at this voided woman, she still didn’t believe it. The truth hadn’t caught up with what she’d let herself dream.

  A hand shot out and grabbed Cade’s wrist.

  “Mom?”

  Hope rose sharp and fast in Cade’s throat.

  She had to remind herself that her mother’s wild reaching out was part of spacesick, too. She would touch anyone like that, to feel herself doing it. To fight her way back through the fog of her wandered-off mind.

  But Cade’s mother didn’t look far from herself.

  She looked gone.

  Cade worked her arms under her mother’s shoulders and pulled her loose weight up to sitting. With Xan gone, Cade had lost her bonus strength. Her mother was helpless, soft as a baby, and wilted against Cade’s efforts. Cade wouldn’t be able to hold her for two minutes, forget carrying her to the ship.

  “You have to move.”

  But the words were stones hitting a smooth surface. Cade let her mother slump against the sheets and went to work, trashing the room, looking for something that might help save her. Because Cade had to save her—first from this terrible place, then from spacesick. All the room gave her to work with was one pounded-thin mattress, two old sets of clothes, an abandoned bottle of bleach.

  The window showed the first creep of violet. Ayumi’s shuttle was supposed to leave at sunset. This planet had spun away from the sun too fast.

  And then the dark-molded curves of the guitar case reminded Cade that she’d brought what she needed.

  She grabbed Moon-White, flashing on all the moments when she’d held off Ayumi’s spacesick with a bit of music. Of course, Ayumi was ankle-deep in the disease, and her mother’s head was under, but maybe if Cade played well enough, she could earn her mother a few clear-headed minutes. Enough to get her off Res Minor.

  Cade sat at the bottom corner of the bed, near the twin lumps of her mother’s ankles. She propped Moon-White on her thighs and paused her fingers in the still air above the strings. “Listen, Mom,” she said. “Listen.”

  She picked one of the old Earth-songs she’d heard in her mother’s head, hoping for a pinprick of recognition.

  Her mother stared through the ceiling. Pulled in long, even strings of breath.

  “This is a good one,” Cade said.

  She dug into new-old chords, ones she’d never played on Moon-White but knew because her mother had handed them down, in an accidental sort of way.

  “You love this song,” Cade said.

  Her mother’s eyelids sank. Which didn’t have to be a bad sign—lots of people close their eyes. A solid half of Cade’s old club crowds had looked like sleep-dancers, the slight sway in their knees and nodding of heads the only way to know they were with her. Cade watched for signs that her mother was taking in the music. A deepness of breath, the gathering of a whole person around a bright-beating heart of notes.

  “Listen,” Cade said. And then, “Please.”

  Her mother said nothing. The world was Cade’s fingers, shifting on tired strings, until the bombs started to fall.

  Chapter 3

  Cade thought she was coming apart.

  The explosions heated and spread her, sprawled her across the floor of her mother’s cell, and her mother was still on the bed, outlined in the red of dropped bombs and the fires starting outside.

  Within seconds, it became a question of making it to the ship alive. Cade knew one thing: It would be easier to leave her mother. Easier, and impossible at the same time. Cade would have to twist off the faucet of caring.

  But then her mother would die, and that wasn’t allowed. There would be no more almost-but-not-quite-saving for Cade.

  Not after Xan.

  Cade grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her to the unsure ground. Loose tiles chattered under them. The old porcelain heated too fast. The building hadn’t been hit—yet—but fists of red uncurled hot and close and hard.

  Cade slung the guitar case across her back and used both arms to clap her mother to her side, but she couldn’t move an unwilling body, not fast enough to make it to the shuttle and take off safely.

  The hall passed in a fit of slowness. Cade tried not to think about the gone-mothers and fathers, the children and friends behind closed doors. Thought-songs slammed into her. Doubled the pain of each step.

  When she hit the waiting room, she found no one out there to herd patients or shout lifesaving orders.

  So much for taking care of their own.

  Cade stopped on the steps of the building and pulled off her sweat-thickened T-shirt. The undershirt left her shoulders bare to the heat, its touch rising and wrong as the sun went down. Cade ripped fabric, fitted it to her mother’s mouth, and tied a knot at the back of her flagging neck to shut out the worst of the smoke. A deep breath of cindered air would have to be enough to swim Cade safe past the fires. Bombs fell, a few streets away.

  Cade secured her mother and headed into the street, braced against the rush of bodies.

  Hot, close, hard.

  She had to take the blocks as fast as she could to push the tempo. Cade didn’t want to put Lee and Ayumi in even more danger. She had promised Rennik that she would make it back safe.

  But a few minutes had blackened and changed Res Minor so much that Cade couldn’t find her landmarks. The harder she tried to piece the city back together, the harder it fell. The market stalls made a fine bonfire. Windows flung themselves to pieces, giving up without a fight. Cade squinted up to trace the bombs to their source, but the sky had turned into a sheet of smoke.

  Only the pain kept Cade alert and moving. The side where her mother h
ung, almost-dead, flared with life.

  It meant a special kind of torture, but Cade reached and opened herself to the songs. It was the only way to pick Lee and Ayumi out of this mess. She stretched her mind outward in circles and found people moving fast, their songs spiked and threaded with fear. That’s what Cade had been hearing since she landed on Res Minor. Fear. People had felt that something was wrong, but on such a primal level, so shoved-down deep, that they would never be able to name it.

  Cade still didn’t know what it was.

  She forced herself to wonder, even though the thought mingled with the ash in her stomach and made her sick: What if this proved the Unmakers had been following her since the black hole? What if all those weeks had been waiting for the right moment to show she could be had, whenever they wanted her?

  Lee and Ayumi burst into Cade’s mind, their songs tangled but impossible to mistake. More songs clustered around them, pushing at their edges.

  Another fight?

  Cade pounded toward them, dragging her mother by the shoulders, the waist. She told herself that the weight was nothing. That she didn’t need Xan’s strength twined with hers. People rushed by and screamed at her to move, to move, or they would all be dead.

  Res Minor ended in a sputtered-out street. The shuttle waited across the field, past the kicked-up dust.

  “I’m here,” Cade cried. “Don’t leave.”

  Fire and dust laced their fingers and reached down her throat. Cade gagged so hard that she fell, and even then she had to hold her mother up so she wouldn’t choke to death on swallowed dust.

  The little ship roared, ready to leave.

  Res Minor burned.

  Hot, close, hard.

  Across the field, a wall of people climbed one another like stones, tearing each other down to reach the ship. This wasn’t a fight. It was a mob. Cade was supposed to help these people, save them from their scattered fates, and now they would all die together and there was nothing she could do.