“If you don’t want to help, you can drain,” Cade said.
Ayumi leaned over the tables. “Cade, she’s just asking—”
“—a question I don’t have time for.”
Lee didn’t storm out. She left the control room at a slow, sure pace, her eyes dusted with disappointment. Ayumi hovered on her toes, ready to follow.
“Don’t,” Cade said. “I need your help.”
“You needed her, too,” Ayumi said. She didn’t sound mad with Cade. She sounded reasonable, which was even worse. Ayumi settled back on her heels and stuck with the charts, but Cade had the feeling she didn’t deserve it.
“Thanks,” Cade muttered.
She got back to work fast. Reached out, translating songs into smudges on a blank white page.
The plan to deal with the ships came first. Renna would sail in one direction, Everlast in another, hailing as they went. They would spread the message that it was time for the survivors to gather, and give the coordinates where they would meet. A simple, open patch of deep space.
Cade got on the com and explained the plan to Zuzu.
“We’ll have to have someone on hailing at all times,” Zuzu said. Cade heard the nervous clatter of a tongue stud.
“Tell June to put it on the chore rotation,” Cade said. “She’ll love it.”
Cade didn’t mention that they wouldn’t have the same issue on their ship. Renna was more than capable of sending out a hailing code all day and night to act as a beacon.
Ayumi’s pencil flew over the projected paths. “It should take less than a week, if we do it right.”
“All right,” Cade said. “Now planets.”
She described them—location and size, tilt and rotation speed—and Ayumi and Rennik matched them to the charts. Cade started with the biggest planet, the one with the greatest number of songs swarming on it.
“That has to be Cass 12,” Ayumi said.
“We’ll ask Everlast to run the rescue there,” Rennik said. “There are too many survivors for us to pick up.”
The second planet was smaller, much smaller, but with a stubborn clutch of songs, huddled close, flaring bright.
Ayumi did a quick check against the charts. “Rembra.” She choked on the name of her planet. “It’s Rembra. I’m sure of it.” Tears slid down her cheeks, skirting the corners of a smile.
“Do we set a course?” Cade asked.
“There are still too many people,” Rennik said. “We couldn’t pack them in.”
“Of course. Right right right.” Ayumi sniffled against the back of her hand. “We’ll spread the message, and tell them where to meet us. We have our own ships on Rembra. There’ll be a resistance there. A fierce one.”
Cade reached out and pulsed strength into Ayumi’s hand, the way she used to send it to Xan.
“You’ll see your people soon.”
Cade returned to the black to find the last planet. Medium-sized, with a strong tilt, a slow orbit. Songs like a scattered handful of sand. Cade’s memories filled in the rest—a raking wind, the dry stick of a throat that hadn’t felt the touch of water for days. She didn’t need anyone to check this against a chart.
It was Andana.
Chapter 8
“Not so fast,” Lee slurred.
She had waited until the rest of the crew drained and came back to the control room, her feet moving in unbalanced patterns.
The scent around her was so strong that Cade didn’t have to lean in to take stock. Mint, and something stiff and woodlike, and another hint, strong and reaching up like a hand through the other layers. Every night in the bar on Andana piled into Cade’s head at once.
“Peace offering?” Lee pulled a bottle from behind her back. It was filled with burnished green, only a few sips missing. Either Lee had zero-gravity for tolerance, or it was strong. Very strong.
“Where did you get a thing like that?” Cade asked.
Lee waved a vague hand toward the rest of the ship. “Was Moira’s. She kept it in the highest cupboard in the mess, for emergencies. Never used it, not once. Not when I almost got thrown in a torture cell on Tirith. Not when wassisname told me it was time to settle down and stole my pack because I made it clear how many times and in what fashion he could snug himself. Not once!” she roared, like it was a point of pride, and Moira might be taking notes somewhere.
“So why do it now?” Cade asked.
“Dregs.” Lee set the bottle down with a solid glass thump. “Every second of now is an emergency.”
Cade swiped the bottle, and thoughts of Andana drove her lips to the rim. She took a swig so deep it seared her from the throat down.
Lee whooped and put an arm around her.
Maybe if Cade got Lee fuzzed, she could convince her to let up on all of the attack-mongering, and see the good in Cade’s plan. With Lee on her side, she could face anything.
Cade swigged again, and Lee sloshed a smile. “I knew you hadn’t gone over to the wet slummer side.”
It hit Cade a few seconds later. Fire first, and then a warm gut-spread. Much nicer the second time around.
Lee’s hand fluttered on her wrist. “What say we skip stones?”
Cade touched her burning-tender lips to the back of her hand. “Do what?”
“Skip stones!”
Lee clumsily wove her fingers through Cade’s, and led her to the starglass. They took their shoes off and stretched their toes in front of them. Lee pelted the image in front of them with a little paper ball, and it rippled like dark water.
“So,” Lee said. “You and Rennik . . .”
Cade waded through the warmth of her brain and found herself deep in concern. Had Lee rigged this whole situation just to ask her about Rennik? If she asked, would Cade be able to lie? She held her green-heavy breath.
“You and Rennik,” Lee repeated. “Did you chart it?”
Maybe that was some kind of new slang. “What?”
“A course.”
Cade sighed. Lee slung a paper ball, and a far-off galaxy trembled. She started in on another white scrap, molding it small, but her fingers were disconnected from their function. Still, she kept at it, battering the paper into an ever-smaller shape.
“Yeah,” Cade said. “We’re going to Andana.” She hated Andana. If she couldn’t get herself to like her own plan, how much of a chance did she have with Lee?
“What about the Unmakers?” Lee asked.
Cade thought back to her time in Hades, opening up to it even though she didn’t want to. She was back in a small white room with a woman who didn’t think much of the human species.
Her own species.
“They made their big move,” Cade said. “Now they think we’re crushed and done.”
Lee’s voice was quiet, but impossible to ignore. “You don’t know that.”
Cade wondered if Lee was back in her own small room, her own past moment—the one where she’d watched Moira die.
“They might come back,” Lee said.
“Then we’ll be ready!”
Lee stood up and paced sloppily. “If they come for us, they’ll do it on their own terms. If we attack them now—”
“Wait,” Cade said, and the room went sideways.
“What?” Lee asked.
“Did you get me to drink with you so I would change my mind? So you could get all ‘Hey, die’ on the Unmakers?”
“Admit it!” Lee cried. “You wanted me to change my mind too.”
Cade laughed and walked away, slopping each step like she was liquid coming out of a pail. She stood in the starglass. The stars were moving. Or maybe she was moving and the stars were telling her so.
Cade didn’t know how to make it clear that she couldn’t let Lee die. With Xan gone, Lee was the strongest connection Cade had. She should have been able to open her mouth and say that. But all she did was stare, farther than far.
She stared, farther than far. At brightness and dark, the beauty of the two even better when they sat so close
like that. Every good thing was out there, waiting. The universe was wide and wonder-stuffed and Cade wasn’t done with it. Not even close. “But the most important part,” Cade added, like she’d said the rest out loud and was just picking up where she left off, “is that you and I are here together. You know that, right?”
Lee squinted. “We’re missing something,” she said. “Very important. Must right this terrible wrong.” She scrambled for the door. “Don’t. Move.”
“We’re on a spaceship!” Cade cried. “Where am I gonna go?”
Lee ran back with Ayumi, and a smile Cade hadn’t seen in ages.
“She told me there’s something not to be missed,” Ayumi said, tipping back and forth on her toes.
“It’s like she came pre-fuzzed!” Lee said.
Cade raised her eyebrows—and the bottle.
Ayumi happy-sighed and hugged it like a lost cousin. She lofted it high. “To the fleet.”
Cade went still, waiting for Lee to insist on a different toast. Instead, a smile tugged at Lee’s cheeks and snuck into her eyes, without ever forming on her lips.
Ayumi pulled the drink down in remarkable gulps. “Thisisfantasticwheredidyougetit?” she asked. Less than a minute later the green was gone, and it had turned Ayumi into a warm blanket of a girl. “Fantastic,” she said, and hugged Lee so hard, for so long, that it looked like dancing. “We need music!”
“Yes yes yes.” Lee turned to Cade. “Music.”
Cade rushed to get Moon-White. She could almost feel the curve of the guitar against her body.
“No!” Ayumi’s eyes stopped Cade, then stretched serious-wide. “I have something to show you.”
Ayumi led them into her shuttle and sacked the hold for ten minutes. At least, Cade thought it was ten minutes. She couldn’t feel time anymore. Dregs—she couldn’t feel her own face anymore.
“Here it is!” Ayumi shouted. Cade and Lee leaned over her cupped hands.
“What in the name of all things shiny is that?” Lee asked.
Ayumi offered up a fat metal rectangle, stubbed at the corners, with a small glass inset window. Another rectangle, this one of clear plastic, was fitted inside, and housed a thin spool of film strung between two toothy circles.
“One of my artifacts,” Ayumi said. “Electrical, so I can’t bring it onboard. But I’ve been waiting for a reason to share it.” Her finger sought one of the buttons along the top.
“Listen.”
She held up a foam-coated pair of headphones and stretched the old metal so Cade and Lee could each use one. The arc of the headphones drew them in, and they huddled close.
A song crackled into Cade’s left ear. Well, it fit the basic definition of the word song, although it stretched that definition as far as it could without cracking the concept. All she heard was a simple bouncing bass line, the scratch-and-shine of primitive percussion, and a man’s voice, moving over simple lyrics. On the chorus, men’s voices doubled and tripled.
Singing about dancing.
About dancing and moonlight and warm and bright.
Terrible—but also fantastic.
“Thank you!” Cade shouted, and it felt good to shout. She could feel her throat when she pushed the words. And the more she felt, the better everything felt.
Oh, dregs. She really was fuzzed.
“Thank you for what?” Ayumi asked.
Cade knew, but she couldn’t say. The green had locked away her words and set her feelings loose.
Ayumi took the headphones and set them down, pushing the volume all the way up. The music came out small, like a few streams of light on a dark, dark night. Just enough to dance by.
Cade and Lee and Ayumi claimed a small patch at the center of the hold, which only a few days ago had been stuffed with the survivors from Res. Ayumi balled her hands and shook them in the general vicinity of her shoulders. Lee shuffle-jumped through the chorus. Cade dropped back and kept it simple. But the more she moved her hips, the more she felt the lack of certain other hips.
She ran back toward Renna.
“Hey!” she cried. “Wait here.” But Lee and Ayumi didn’t look like there was one place in the universe where they would rather be.
The green was against Cade now. It had wiped the clearness from her head, and crashed her mission to change Lee’s mind. Now it worked in partnership with gravity, making it hard to stand up. But that couldn’t keep her from her course. She threw open the door to Rennik’s room.
“You!”
He looked up from his desk, his fingers light on the barrel of a pen.
“Cadence?”
Looking at Rennik steadied her. She didn’t need the door frame to help her stand, but she held it anyway—just in case. Rennik put the pen down, forgetting to find a proper place for it.
“What are you . . .”
One beat for his mind to catch up. One more for his face to do it. He knew exactly what was going on.
“Well?” Cade asked.
Ink pooled on the desk as she waited for an answer. The look Rennik gave her wasn’t a yes. It wasn’t a no. It was a want, strong and unformed.
So Cade tried to give it a shape. “Do you want to dance?” she asked.
“Do I want to—?”
“Dance,” she said. “With me.”
“. . . Perhaps this isn’t the best moment,” Rennik said.
“But you do!” And then she could tell she was yelling, so she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Want to.”
Cade ran off, feeling triumphant. She loved the drink for letting her say what she meant. Loved Lee for giving it to her. Loved the night for not ending, because she got the burning-green feeling that all that love wasn’t going to last.
When she crashed back onto the shuttle, Ayumi and Lee were still dancing. Cade sat and drummed her hands against the floor, throwing too many glances at Renna, hoping for a last-minute entrance from Rennik. Instead, she found round, dark eyes peering around the corner of the dock.
“Gori?”
He moved into the lighted rectangle.
“All right, all right,” Lee said, treating Gori like a shriveled uncle. “We’ll keep it down.”
He picked at his robes, pinched his gray lips. “May I join you?”
Ayumi kept dancing, but Cade and Lee stopped short.
“Are you sure you want to?” Cade asked.
“What?” Lee said.
“Cade needs a partner!” Ayumi cried.
“Not dancing with him.” Cade snatched her feet underneath her. “He’ll rapture all over my toes.”
“No, no.” Gori waved a hand through the air. “I was referring to the—”
“Libations?” Ayumi asked. Three gulps, and her fancy words came out in force.
“Really, Gori?” Cade was impressed, not so much that he wanted to get fuzzed as that he wanted to do anything close to human.
“Sorry,” Lee said, tipping the bottle. “All out.”
Gori shuffled over the line and crossed into the shuttle. “That won’t be necessary.” He stood near the girls and breathed deep, puffed out.
“Hey!” Lee cried. “You said you would have fun.”
“This is my form of fun,” Gori said. “It is also my form of communion. It is also, as it happens, a fine way to become intoxicated.” He wobbled on his feet.
Lee and Ayumi cheered. Gori sat in a circle with them, rapture-breathing and sinking into his new state in small increments. Lee and Ayumi laughed until their voices thinned and then failed altogether. The silence deepened.
Ayumi leaned her head on Lee’s shoulder, curls spilling everywhere.
And then Cade blinked and Lee and Ayumi were gone.
And Gori was deep in a rapture.
And Cade was alone.
She didn’t remember falling asleep.
She was in a bunk, but it felt distinctly not-hers. The inside of her head fluttered and twisted like a broken compass needle as she tried to get a lock on her new location. Her body sounded out the
lumps.
Not Rennik’s bed. That didn’t have lumps. Not any of the bunks in the hidden bedroom. This was set into the wall, not stacked.
“Really?” Cade whispered. She had fallen asleep in Gori’s bed. “Snug.”
A voice came out of the dark, somewhere near her elbow. “I hope not,” Lee said. “For your sake.”
Cade jumped, and her stomach lurched an echo a full ten seconds later. She looked over and found Lee kneeling at the side of the bed.
“All right,” Lee said with a dimly lit grin.
“All right what?” Cade asked.
“I’ll go along with your plans.”
“You’ll . . .” Cade strained for eloquence. “What?”
Lee pointed a take-this-seriously finger. “I still think it’s a bad move. I want that on the record.”
The mission to change Lee’s mind had died a wretched death around the fourth swig, or so Cade had thought. “What changed?”
Lee clutched Cade’s arm. “I want to tell you. I absolutely can’t tell you. Yet. Okay, here’s what I can tell you. It’s great. The reason. If you piled all the reasons in the universe on top of each other, it would be the best and finest and prettiest one there is.”
“Sounds good,” Cade groaned.
Lee jumped up and left, happiness spilling everywhere.
Chapter 9
When Cade woke up, happiness was a planet, and she had drifted millions of light-years away from it.
Of course, now Rennik came down the chute.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
When Cade opened her mouth to say something scathing, she threw up. She crawled out of Gori’s bed, waving Rennik back, but he followed her to the tucked-in spot inside the control room where she rushed to deal with another foul-rising wave. He stood behind her, lifted her hair off of her neck, and ran his patient fingers through it. This was so far from the closeness Cade wanted with him. She hated her body for soaking it up anyway.
Pride knocked Cade back to standing. And then something else tugged her away from Rennik—a sense that the control room had changed. Not the light, or the layout, or the slight, organic Renna-smell.
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