Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  That answer came back fast enough.

  “No room.”

  After Cade described the position of the second ship in mind-breaking detail, and Rennik translated the description into a course, and Renna argued with half of the decisions, and Ayumi brokered a peace, the crew dispersed into tired clumps and headed out of the control room. Cade shouldered her mother’s weight.

  Heading down the chute to sleep felt like going home.

  But as soon as Rennik pushed past Cade, she knew the night would be an endless toss-and-turn.

  Cade slid the wall panel that led into the bedroom and hung around, waiting for Ayumi. “Can you set her up on the free bunk?”

  Ayumi acted as though Cade’s mother was made of some heavy, awkward precious metal. “I’ll make sure she rests.” Ayumi climbed into the tunnel and did her gentle best to pull Cade’s mother in behind her.

  The lack of her mother’s body was as obvious as her pressing weight. It felt like Cade had been cold enough to beg for a blanket, and then ripped it off. But she didn’t have time to change her mind, because Rennik walked with purpose. He made his way down the chute toward the main cabin, where the survivors looped in aimless circles. But instead of walking all the way, he pushed aside a wall panel and tucked into the tunnels that laced Renna’s insides.

  Cade followed.

  The tunnels pulsed, slow and regular. Renna’s walls gave a soft-ice glow—Cade’s favorite color, because it reminded her of Moon-White. Here it was bright enough to see by. The shush of Rennik’s steps told Cade where to go.

  She wasn’t going to wait for him to come to her. He’d proven that he could put it off for weeks. With the new state of things, it wouldn’t be hard for lifesaving activities to keep them apart until they were both dead.

  Cade chased the fade of footsteps deeper into the ship. If Renna didn’t want her there, she would tighten the tunnels, flush the walls with heat. Subtle was not in Renna’s vocabulary, and that suited Cade fine. It made it easy for her to know where she stood. She wished she could say the same about Renna’s other half.

  The tunnel opened up into a stooped but sweeping room. It housed one object that took up almost all the space—a pounding, churning, spreading-and-shrinking collection of tubes that fell somewhere between an engine and a heart.

  Rennik looked up, a cut-short glance. Cade figured she would have his attention here, away from the survivors and the crew and the constant worries of what came next, but Rennik was focused on the heart, his hands fitted to its pulsing curve.

  “What are you doing?” Cade asked.

  “The same thing I’ve been doing every night for weeks,” Rennik said, not looking up from his fingers. “It’s a sort of calibration, but more intimate.” The word left traces in the air. Cade’s breath sped to meet them. “Renna is pushing herself past all reasonable limits. I have to do my best to keep her from bursting apart.”

  Cade wasn’t sure if Rennik meant that literally, but he had never been known to tamper with the scale of the truth.

  “Let me help,” Cade said.

  Rennik’s face softened, and all of Cade rushed to do the same.

  “It’s not that simple,” he said. “Renna isn’t just a ship.” He reconfigured his face to neutral. Cade couldn’t tell which was worse—ignoring her because it came easy or because he thought he should.

  “Stop telling me things I already know and let me help,” she said.

  Rennik inched one step to the side and made room.

  “So how do we calibrate?”

  He pressed his palms against the engine-heart, kneading until it went soft as clay. Cade tried to mimic him, fingertip for fingertip, but Renna resisted. “Like this,” he said, hand spread over hers, pressure light.

  Renna trilled her happiness in quick beats. “She thinks very highly of you,” Rennik said.

  Cade quick-shuffled through all the good things she could say about Renna.

  “I love her.”

  It was the first time Cade had said those words, out loud, about anyone.

  She and Rennik worked in silence, circling the heart in opposite directions. Cade wondered at how it worked—the layers of muscle and strategic rushes of blood that somehow kept them all alive. When she met up with Rennik on the far side, he put his hand over Cade’s again, even though she got the feeling she was a natural at Renna-calibrating.

  “Cadence . . .”

  Her fingers paused on the rough-stubbled surface. “Yeah?”

  “I meant it when I said I want to help you. But I don’t know what will happen if Renna has to carry this many people without rest.”

  The walls drew tight, thinning the rim of space around the heart. Cade pressed close enough to feel the in-out, in-out.

  “What happens if we can’t find them a new ride?” Cade asked.

  Renna’s answer was hot-tense-squishy-cold.

  “She’s never done this before,” Rennik said, “so I can’t be sure of the outcome. But I know it isn’t safe.”

  That was how Rennik needed things—safe. Cade’s hate for the Unmakers doubled in that moment. Every one of the bombs that had fallen on Res Minor proved the universe would never be safe.

  Cade’s mother had already made a dent in the bed, and settled her breath into infuriating patterns. Cade was starting to wonder if she would look the same in any room in the universe. But end-of-the-worlds or no end-of-the-worlds, Renna was an improvement on Res Minor. Her mother would know that as soon as she woke up.

  Cade picked up Moon-White. The heat on Res Minor would have warped the wood of any other acoustic, but Renna had made this guitar for her, special. For all of its delicate looks it was the sturdiest one Cade had ever settled her hands on. She couldn’t think of a better instrument for calling a person back to the love of all things human.

  She brushed her thumb against the strings and poured herself out for her mother, one chord at a time.

  She used soft finger-picking, the kind that spells comfort. It came out smooth, like a hand waterfalling down someone’s back. This was different from the music she’d built her name on at the clubs, but she couldn’t rest on old melodies. Cade had to pull out everything she had ever learned or thought of trying. If there was a right song to bring her mother back, Cade would find it.

  Her tiredness was so complete that she didn’t remember setting the guitar down. She fell asleep in a swelling of dark.

  When she woke up, there were spacesicks all around.

  Ayumi had come in at some point and glassed out. Cade’s mother turned to the wall and back in a slow, even rotation. Ayumi’s wrist hung over the edge of the top bunk, her hand curled like a half-dead leaf.

  No Lee in sight.

  Cade reached for Moon-White and played one of Ayumi’s old favorites until she snapped to sitting in her bunk. “Cade.” Her voice sluggish, all underactive tongue. “Is anyone else—?”

  “All clear,” Cade said.

  Ayumi hugged the nearest blanket.

  It was double luck, really, that Cade knew Ayumi’s secret, and could play her back to a connected state.

  Lee crashed through the tunnel that led to the bedroom, a few seconds too late to catch Ayumi’s spacesick act.

  “Night shift?” Ayumi asked.

  “Better,” Lee said through a yawn. “I was seeing if anyone from the Res Minor batch has fight training. A few decent pilots, trained on planet-skimmers. Close to no combat skills—”

  “You didn’t,” Ayumi said.

  Lee kicked off her boots. “What?”

  “You didn’t keep those people up all night. Not after what they’ve been through.”

  “They’re not done going through it,” Lee said, cutting Ayumi a sharp look. “Not even close.”

  Ayumi’s eyes blurred and Cade’s fingers jumped to Moon-White’s strings. But it wasn’t glass this time. Just tears. Ayumi buried herself in a notebook, and talked to the pages because she couldn’t look at Lee.

  “You can stop tr
eating me like some idiot slummer,” Ayumi said. “I’ve lost as much as you have.”

  Lee climbed into the top bunk and put her arm around Ayumi. “I’m sorry.” Lee mumbled into her shoulder. “Sorry.”

  It was a good thing Cade had Moon-White in her lap. She needed something to focus on, since she couldn’t look squarely at Lee and Ayumi. Cade hadn’t lost anyone in the attacks. So many families gone—and Cade, who’d never had one, had found her mother. Friends were dead or impossible to track down, and Cade’s were all safe on one ship.

  But she had friends, for the first time, which meant that she could be split open in the same way as Lee and Ayumi were now. Terrible things could happen to the people Cade cared about, and leave her pounding notes to an empty room.

  The threat of spacesick blared, loud as death. Being entangled was supposed to keep Cade safe from it, but she didn’t know if that held now that Xan was gone. Besides, it wasn’t a single shred of comfort to know that she’d get to wait while the people around her glassed out one by one. Once the Unmakers forced the human race off planets and into the dark fringes, it was only a matter of time before spacesick came. Climbed into their minds and cut them loose.

  Cade’s fingers twitched across the fretboard. “Did you notice any spacesicks down there?”

  “None that I could see,” Lee said, running a hand down Ayumi’s back. “But you can’t always tell.”

  “No.” Cade’s eyes worked hard to keep from sticking to Ayumi. “Not always.”

  The second ship came on fast.

  It had been slammed together from scrap metal and covered in the strange salvage of ten planets. A junk barge out of the Tirith Belt. It looked, for all the universe, like it was limping.

  “Permission to board?” Lee asked.

  A single word strained through the com. “Granted.”

  Renna’s crew pushed down the chute, parted the survivors, and formed a breathless line at the dock, but no one from the junk barge came to meet them. Cade crossed the dock-line first, and found the air so thin that she had to suck ten breaths to dent the need in her lungs. She ran through the hold of the junk barge. Tubes and gears and clusters of wire barnacled the walls.

  The crew had strapped into their chairs and were nodding in and out. That’s why their songs had felt so faint.

  Renna pumped fresh air into the ship, but all it did was remind Cade how much more she needed. Cade fished out a knife and sawed through straps; Lee followed her lead. Rennik and Ayumi hauled survivors back through the hold.

  “We have a girl minus breath over here,” Lee said as she cut a small figure out of a chair. Her pale brown hair tangled in the straps, and Lee had to remove a chunk of it. The girl couldn’t have been more than ten, eleven if she was small for her age—not hard to imagine for the underfed, space-raised daughter of junk traders.

  Cade grabbed the girl from Lee and lowered her to the floor, pressed the center of her chest, bone-deep, forced air into her stubborn lungs.

  Cade needed this girl to live.

  If she did, Cade might start to forgive herself for all the people she’d left on the dust field. The ones she hadn’t gathered before the Unmakers got to them. It wasn’t right, mathwise, but it made sense in that place where scale and meaning slid away from each other. Where one girl mattered.

  Cade’s arms gave out. Her lungs were still smoke-sore from the attacks. Her body and her breath weren’t enough. She hauled the girl, in the grasp of a strange idea. Cade nodded at Lee to help, and together they lumped the girl into Renna’s cabin and set her down.

  “Renna,” Cade said. “She needs air.”

  The walls of the ship bent inward with the effort. Ayumi ran to Cade’s side and dropped to her knees. Rennik set down another survivor without taking his eyes off the fast-unfolding scene. Even Gori peered down from his bunk. Survivors formed a crowd. The silence and the tense lines of sight and the leaning bodies, everything focused on one small girl.

  Air stormed from all parts of the ship into the girl’s rib-laddered, lifting chest.

  She coughed once. Twice. Her eyes, even greener than Cade’s, flickered open.

  Chapter 6

  “Who does she belong to?” Cade asked.

  The wreckage of the junk barge was a day behind them, and the girl still wouldn’t talk. Cade didn’t think she’d slept, either, unless she’d done it on the table in the mess where she sat now, prodding a bowl of grain-mash and swinging her legs. They scraped air, a few inches from the floor.

  Cade rounded up the other survivors from the barge. No one claimed the girl.

  “Were her parents left behind in the attacks?” Cade asked.

  The man who stepped forward had the worst breath and the largest share of confidence. “If she had parents, I never met them. She bartered for passage. Tanaka to wherever the hell wasn’t Tanaka. Didn’t seem to care where the ship was headed, she just wanted to be on it.”

  “She bartered,” Cade said. “With what?” If she got even the smallest pricking sense that the people on that ship had taken advantage of a ten-year-old girl, Cade would bury them alive, under mountains of space.

  The mold-breathing man stirred in his pocket and came up with a small purse. He shook out coins.

  Cade studied the fare, studied the girl. She hadn’t spent time around children since her own days in the Parentless Center on Andana.

  “Where does a girl as small as that on a planet as terrible as Tanaka come up with coin?” she asked.

  Cade hoped the girl had a talent, like Cade did with music, something that people were willing to put up a front for so she could trade on the black market. Maybe she knew a craft—candles, dyework. Maybe she’d been saving the wages from a dreg-bottom job.

  “Took the coin, carried the girl, didn’t ask questions.”

  “You probably skinned her on the fare, too,” Cade said.

  The man shrugged. “Rates go up and down.” Smiles cropped up on his crewmates.

  Cade stepped closer to the man, even though it meant getting friendly with his smell. “And none of you feels like you should—now that the human race is exploding into tiny bits all around us—maybe take care of her?”

  The junk traders looked at each other and pretended to consider it. Cade thought about tossing them into the cold black for the crime of being worthless people who had survived when so many others were dead.

  “Here.” Cade flung the purse back and headed for the mess. “Have fun finding somewhere to spend it.”

  The man lowered his voice to that special pitch that begs to be overheard. “Wouldn’t pay for the privilege of a ride on this beast. Or that piece of girl-filth, either.”

  Cade turned on a heel and drove her knuckles into the man’s throat.

  The girl stood on her chair, pinned to the aftermath—the man clutching for breath, his crewmates scrambling after Cade to start a fight, Renna shaking them to such a pulp that they changed their minds.

  The girl sat down cross-legged. “You know how to throw a punch.”

  “And you can talk,” Cade said. “We’re both full of surprises.”

  “It was even a half-decent punch.”

  Cade rubbed her knuckles and tried to look like she hadn’t enjoyed hitting the mold-breather too much.

  “I know how to defend someone, if it comes down to it,” Cade said. “What’s your name?”

  The girl dropped a beat. “Mira.” Being alone in the universe, she must have have known that acting too free with her name could end in trouble.

  “You’re from Tanaka?” Cade asked.

  The girl plopped grain-mash from spoon to bowl. “Not born there, no.”

  “What happened to your family?”

  Mira worked her pale brown hair into a quick braid so the ends wouldn’t dip into the bowl. “Never had one.” The lack of a torn, missing edge in the girl’s voice made Cade believe her.

  “I didn’t have one, either,” Cade said. Memories of Andana caught in Cade’s throat a
nd swelled there, stuck so they wouldn’t come out. She didn’t tell Mira how she’d slept under a single blanket, feet raw with blood and sand, every night for months before she found her bunker. Didn’t mention how she’d invented a new set of parents every day, only to talk herself out of them at night.

  “Isn’t that your mother?” Mira asked, nodding toward the door in the direction of the main cabin. Ayumi had taken charge of the spacesicks and was trying to engage the sickest one in some kind of talk. She held a cup of tea—her own special grass-flavored recipe—to the woman’s lips. It dribbled in little streams down her soft face.

  Was that woman Cade’s mother?

  “Technically speaking.”

  The girl tapped her cheek, thoughtful. Like a tic.

  “If you need anything—” Cade said.

  “I don’t.”

  Mira got the words out too fast. Cade knew that quickness. It was like tossing a particle-thin sheet over a deep hole. Cade waited. The inner drum that drove her around, all day, all night, slowed to a steady four-four. She wondered if this was what patience felt like.

  “Here.”

  Cade got up, snagged a tin of raw sugar from a cupboard, and pushed it across the table at Mira. It was the only thing that made the endless bowls of grain-mash edible. Mira sprinkled on a few crystals and poked her tongue at a spoonful.

  Two bowls later, she looked up.

  “Could use some quiet,” she said. “These people won’t stop crying.”

  The words should have sounded harsh, especially in Mira’s clear-piped kid register, but Cade understood. The survivors had all gone through the same thing at the same time, and it had glued them together. Mira had lost everything a long time ago, with no one there to listen when she cried.

  Cade led her out of the mess, through the main cabin, halfway up the chute. She pointed out a bunk to the right of Gori’s.

  “This one’s yours.”

  No matter how many survivors packed onboard, no one ever claimed the bunks next to Gori. Cade wondered if he issued specific threats, or just stared at people until they felt the sudden need to drain.