Cade’s universe pinched down to two hopes. One chased the first, like a heartbeat: Live. Keep her mother alive.
She curled on the ground, threw up in the dust.
The door of the shuttle stood open, inhaling as many people as it could. But they were running out of room.
“Lee,” Cade cried. “Lee, I’m here.”
She needed her friends to hear her over the bombs and the screams of the people and the screams of the ship, taking off.
“Don’t leave!”
Cade’s voice was a handful of smoke-shreds. It would never reach.
So she tried music. No guitar needed—she could use herself to broadcast. Lee and Ayumi had heard her do it before. Maybe they were waiting for a sign to help them find her. Cade tried, but the field was littered with broken songs. It was too hard to sweep them out of her smoke-filled head and focus.
She crawled, dragging and pushing her mother in equal parts. Grass matted her hot skin.
“They’re coming,” Cade said, lullaby-soft. “My friends are coming for us.” If she was going to die, she might as well do it believing this.
Cade limped a few notes.
The ship lifted in a churn of dust. People fell from the open door like drops of water. Cade waited for it to close.
It didn’t close.
Lee showed her heat-shining face.
“Cade!” Lee screamed.
The ship swept toward them, heat from near bursts blasting it in one direction, then another. But Ayumi was a first-class pilot and held steady. Lee dropped to the open door and stretched an arm.
It felt wrong to leave when so many people would die, but that didn’t stop her from pushing off the ground with one arm, the other lashed to her mother’s waist. Cade rose with the heat.
She found Lee’s fingers with the last of her strength. And with something more than the last of it, she pulled.
The inside of the ship was dark and moving. People stirring. Low sounds. Charred smells.
Her mother’s pulse, under the fumble of Cade’s fingers.
Once Cade was sure of the basics, she started to deal with the pain. She stretched against the curve of the hold, her muscles pulling apart with ache.
A shape moved next to her—Cade’s mother, stirring out of sleep. Wrinkle-tugged by time and gravity. Hair starting the long slide to gray. Something gentle in the default settings of her face, even if she had left it long ago.
Guilt crawled through Cade. She was supposed to be the hope of the human race, and when it came down to it, all she could do was save her own DNA.
The other survivors didn’t scald her with blaming stares. They were busy making space in the hold, trampling Ayumi’s Earth-artifacts, ripping her posters and maps with their restless backs.
The ship cracked atmosphere.
Cade stood, knees searching out a new balance, and ran the short distance from the hold to the flight cabin. Ayumi and Lee were sunk in their chairs, so fried from exhaustion and staled with sweat that it looked like they’d been strapped in for weeks. Ayumi flew with the automatic ease of someone whose brain has no part in the process.
Lee shook—fingers on the com, voice filling the small room.
“Eighteen.”
She paused.
“Nineteen.”
Ayumi’s and Lee’s eyes passed over each other, caught.
“What are those numbers?” Cade asked, hoping the answer would never reach her. Because in a deep, shoved-down place, she already knew.
“Attacks on at least nineteen planets,” Ayumi said. “Ships that match the Unmaker specs reported in the skies over ten.” Her voice skimmed the surface of the facts. “All of the targets were human cities and towns.”
Nineteen planets.
That pain, repeated nineteen times. Cade forced her mind around the math, but her body was too small to hold it. Still, it pushed its way deeper, lodged shards in each muscle, poisoned her blood, stretched the walls of her heart.
It left so little room for Cade that she fell down and didn’t even feel it. Her face against the dull, boot-dirtied metal was a hollow fact.
Cade had wondered if she’d been followed. Found. But she had never let herself imagine—
“The Unmakers didn’t come for you,” Lee said. “They came for all of us.”
Chapter 4
because it had almost killed her once
she kept the gold of that place inside of her
deep
it was the tide, sometimes low down in her
sometimes rising, but always leaving her
gold-flushed
deeper and closer were the same
beautiful and bursting-wide in pain
the same
When Cade came to, someone had carried her back to the hold. Or maybe she’d carried herself. All she had was the fading of a dream-flash. Her head was a sour mess, and she half expected to see Xan.
But he was gone, like so many other people. Gone, and all she had left was this feeling that rose in her at the strangest—the worst—moments.
At least it had waited for her to get off Res Minor.
The shuttle docked and breathed its passengers into the main cabin. Renna took them in with a confused ache, clenched so hard that Cade lost her footing.
“You have some new people to look after,” Lee said, kneeling to trickle calm fingers on the floor. “Don’t be scared.”
Cade and Ayumi stood in the dock frame, checking everyone’s pockets to make sure nothing electric made it onboard and crashed Renna’s systems. Cade patted her mother’s loose clothes, and wondered why she hadn’t thought to do it before. Maybe they hid something, a bit of information, a flash of insight. But they were empty.
“You made it,” Rennik said.
He stared down from the top of the chute, his face like a blown amp—blasted to silence. Cade hummed with envy. She could have used a thorough numbing of her own. A small dark room where she could wait this out. But there was no room like that left on any planet, and there was no room like that inside of Cade.
“Twenty-three,” Lee called up.
“Twenty-three,” Rennik echoed down.
Almost two dozen planets, hit by the Unmakers. Every major human outpost.
“Meet in the control room,” Cade said. “Ten minutes.”
She didn’t know what she would do with the crew when she got there, but there would have to be a regroup. There would have to be a plan. Otherwise, they would float like space-trash, waiting for the Unmakers to come and clean them up.
Rennik looked over the new passengers. Women clutched children to their legs. A few people stood alone, sending out the first flicker-stares to the other alone ones. A little girl broke from the older girl who held her—a sister or half-known friend—and climbed the chute, running a hand over Renna’s floor.
“Let me give you a tour,” Rennik said, injecting warmth and welcome into his flat voice.
He showed them the cabins, the bathroom, the mess—a mirror of the tour he’d offered Cade when she first boarded. She hadn’t been sure what to make of the living ship then, of the Hatchum in charge.
Now the need to touch Rennik hooked deep in her muscles, almost pulled her across the cabin and into his arms. But Rennik wasn’t the make-a-scene type. Cade had gotten back safe and the best he could do was spare her a glance, one moment torn out of the fake-cheerful tour.
She felt as far away from him as she had on the surface of Res Minor.
Rennik trailed the thin line of men, women, and children, pointing out the features of their new home.
Renna was brave, and didn’t complain.
That came later.
She unsettled the floor as the control room filled with crew members. Cade did her best to keep her mother from toppling. She’d brought her to the meeting, propped her against the wall in the hopes that something could reach her. She had been stuck in that slumming home for who knows how long. Maybe what she needed was stimulation. Good company.
Sharp conversation. A kick-in-the-teeth reminder that they were all about to die.
Cade rode the waves of Renna’s emotions. Ayumi sat on the floor, notebook to her chest, tears dropping fast. She had kept herself in one girl-shaped piece on the shuttle, and now it was her turn to fall apart. Gori lurked so completely against the far wall that Cade could barely pick him out.
Lee installed herself in the captain’s chair. “First, we blaze out of here.”
“That might not be possible,” Rennik said. “Renna’s carrying a lot more than she should be.” The threat of the Unmakers ratcheted up, from a soft throb to an everywhere-pulse, lacing Cade’s skull. But Rennik held steady. “The best we can do right now is regroup and form a plan.”
Lee stood on the seat of the captain’s chair for emphasis. “If that’s the best we can do, then we’re ten shades of dead.”
Cade touched the pucker of skin at her mother’s elbow. Renna had stopped pitching the room, but Cade still needed balance. “I underestimated the Unmakers,” she said. “We all did. We can cling to the mistake or we can get clear.”
When Cade added her voice, Rennik listened. He bent over the controls, muttered to Renna, adjusted dials. She picked up speed. Lumpy speed, but still, it put some distance between them and the white planet.
“So . . .” Ayumi said, her lap full of open notebooks, all turned to blank pages. “What now?”
Cade didn’t think anyone was ready for that question. But Lee stepped from the seat of the chair to the arm and proved her wrong.
“We delete them from the universe.”
Ayumi crawled out of shock just far enough to sound disappointed. “That’s your plan?”
“It’s out of the question,” Rennik said.
“Why?” Lee asked, jumping down so she could prowl the room. “That was a massive bombing on twenty-three fronts. If there was ever a time to attack them, it’s now, before they get their evil back in order.”
“We don’t need a cause to die for,” Ayumi said, staring out at the darkness like it might peel itself back and offer her a bright new solution. “We need to live, and that means cutting out of space as soon as we can.”
Ayumi wanted a new planet. It was what any spacesick with half a brain would want, and she had brains to spare. Not to forget that Ayumi’s old job as Earth-Keeper made her more than a little planet-oriented.
“I don’t think it’s about putting down fast,” Cade said. “We have to find the right place.”
“And what do we do in the hellish meantime?” Lee asked.
The need to have answers got its claws around Cade. Wasn’t she supposed to be the great hope for the human race? Had she let all the promises of entanglement get sucked into a black hole with Xan?
Gori, of all creatures, bought Cade some time. He cleared his throat, and it sounded like the shifting of continents. “On a cosmic scale—”
“You tell me it doesn’t matter,” Lee said, “and I’m going to punch your withered face.”
Ayumi stood up and dusted off her legs, and Cade figured she was about to pull Lee back from yet another ledge. Lee was all ledges. But Ayumi bobbed her chin and said, “I can get behind that.”
“On a cosmic scale,” Gori repeated, “this is as important and unimportant as any other thing.”
The Gori-ism rubbed Cade wrong. “Is that how you felt about your own planet?”
He stutter-blinked, and Cade knew she’d gotten to him. “This is best left to those with a stake in it,” he said.
Rennik stepped forward. “I agree.”
Cade and Lee turned on him together, a united front of What-the-snug.
“I wouldn’t go quite so far,” he said. “But I do think this decision belongs to the humans on the crew.” He pointed a look at Cade. “I’ll do whatever you think is best.” Renna thunderclapped to show her support.
Cade had the ship on her side, and it looked like she had the captain, too. Ayumi would want to believe in Cade’s new plan and Gori wouldn’t care either way. They would all do what she thought best.
Now she just needed to know what that was.
Cade left her mother standing on the wall and entered the starglass. The living hologram rippled and closed around her like dark water. Points of brilliance—planets and suns—swam in loose patterns. One of them could be Earth. Dead, cold, so far from where she stood.
“Cadence?” Rennik asked.
She almost had it. Another moment. Cade held her breath and surfaced with a new sort of truth. Those stars had been packed together once, before the force of dark energy flung them apart. Someday they would draw together again. Scattered once doesn’t mean scattered forever.
The stars spread in front of Cade and the words welled up. “We find the rest of the humans,” she said. “We bring them back together.”
That was her task—always had been. It didn’t change because the Unmakers had attacked. The need only got louder.
“I have to connect all of those people,” Cade said. “I think I can.”
Ayumi’s pencil came alive against the notebook page. “That sounds . . . incredible.”
“We’re decided, then?” Rennik asked. He found new footing as Renna resettled the floor.
Gori shrugged.
“That looks like four in favor,” Ayumi said. “Lee?”
Lee glared at everyone from the depths of the captain’s chair, the only holdout. Cade didn’t need her vote to keep things fair, but she wanted it anyway. She tried to tug Lee over to her side. “We’ll be stronger when we’re all in one place.”
“We’ll be stronger when you admit this is a fight.” Lee hoisted herself up. “Anything else, you’re fooling yourself.”
She slammed past Cade and out of the control room.
Cade ran, and almost heel-nipped Lee down the chute. She needed Lee to go with her plan. She needed Lee alive.
“It’s all right,” Ayumi said with knowing eyes. “She just needs to storm around a bit.”
Cade pushed out a dark sigh.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Ayumi said.
Cade tried to hold on to the good of her idea, but it was slippery. Her hands were too full of the attacks, the Unmakers, the spacesicks. And now Lee’s words. She didn’t have space for good.
But she could fake it if she had to. No matter how grim things got, Cade could always put on a show.
She closed her eyes.
Stretched her mind, cracking through the layers of exhaustion and brain-rust. She hit the songs of the people onboard—the known songs of the crew, the tired songs of survivors—and slid over them.
That was the easy part.
Now it was a matter of finding more thought-songs, and the people attached to them. On Res Minor the crash-and-crowd of human thoughts, the volume of their need, had made her claustrophobic and nosebleedish. Now, the space around her birthed silence.
Silence. Silence.
Cade walked through it like new-fallen dark.
And hated herself for the relief she felt. Washed it down with so much guilt that it sank. That silence meant death—people missing, torn out of their lives by the Unmakers. The weight of this new quiet fell on Cade. She doubled over, fighting to keep her mind clear. To keep looking.
“Are you all right?” Ayumi asked.
Rennik rushed to her side, repeating the question in low tones. “Are you, Cadence?”
She fought all the way to standing, but she had to start over. Crew-songs. Survivor-songs. The silence.
And then—
In clusters of ones and twos, tens and hundreds, islands of melody pricked the surface of a silent-dark sea. Cade stretched her limits to hold more. The highs and the lows of the songs. The unbearable lows, shuddering underneath. Notes wandered on their own paths but found strange ways to weave together.
The human race was a small, broken orchestra.
Cade heard it all.
She reeled her mind back, listening for the humans closest to Renna. If she want
ed to gather everyone, she would have to start with the survivors she could reach fast, and work outward from there.
“I feel something,” Cade said. “A few somethings.” The words were harder than the reaching.
“There’s a . . . ship. I think.”
The songs were clustered. Planet-bound survivors would spread, cover more territory. Cade couldn’t explain it, but this felt like a ship.
“There’s another one,” she said.
It came a good stretch beyond the first and was headed in the same direction. Just a few songs this time, all of them shimmer-faint. And then, a swarm. Four songs danced around one another, moving too fast to be doing it at a human speed.
“And four little ships.”
“Are you certain?” Rennik asked.
Cade didn’t know what to do with that word, certain. It made even less sense than being able to hear songs inside her head.
“I know they’re out there,” she said.
“Incredible.” Ayumi’s voice was tightly packed with wonder. Like she had touched ground for the first time. Tasted water. Felt sunlight.
“It’s not much,” Cade said. “But it’s enough to get started.”
Chapter 5
The first ship came and went in a cheap-metal blur.
It was stolen, no doubt. With a crew a lot like Renna’s, on the surface—black-market traders who’d gotten caught between planets during the bombings.
“You want us to do what now, little miss?” the captain asked the first time Cade tried to explain it.
She had to repeat the message five times, each one slower, ground to a more frustrated edge. The captain almost buried her under a pile of idiotic questions. Cade had to get this across, and hope other captains would bring a few more brain cells to the process. When he had finally absorbed the minimum amount of information, Cade gave the ship a means to keep in touch with Renna and instructed the crew to spread the word. She performed a careful reading of the coordinates where all of the human survivors would meet, as soon as she’d found them. She asked if there was room to pack a few more passengers onboard.
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