Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Cade almost walked straight into the captain’s chair before she figured out that her mother was sitting in it.

  Her arms had molded to the strict lines, and her head lolled back so her neck couldn’t hold it up.

  “What is she doing?” Rennik asked. With a nervous smile, he added, “Not trying to fly the ship, one would assume?”

  Cade clipped a half-smile. “That would be brass.” A bold way to come back to life and announce what she needed. But her mother was too far gone for that. She faced the wide black of the starglass, barely breathing.

  “She’s in love with that,” Cade said, waving at a smear of space.

  “Bewildering,” Rennik said. “Space is good for getting from one place to another. It’s nothing, in itself.”

  Cade squinted until her eyebrows hurt. She’d kept the idea of spacesick at a safe distance for as long as she could. But it made sense, under the skin of things. “My mother’s brain cracked itself on nothingness. Whatever was in there before ran out, and nothingness worked its way in.”

  Cade stepped toward the starglass, and the white rushed her, more stars than all the notes she could play in a lifetime. “Can you imagine letting in something that huge, and then trying to shut it out again?”

  “Yes.” The word brushed low and quick, and by the time Cade turned to Rennik, he’d cleared his throat and tripled his politeness. “Shall we find a better place for her to rest?”

  Rennik and Cade lugged her mother to the common room, their hands shifting and swapping her weight. When they almost touched, Cade’s nerve endings sang like they had.

  Cade installed her mother in the middle of a small universe of cushions.

  “Better,” she said.

  She didn’t tell Rennik the one good possibility that sat like a pit at the center of her feelings. Cade had to be sure before she would let it grow into something like hope.

  She asked every member of the crew, down to Mira, but no one had moved her mother. She must have walked, on her own steam, from the bedroom to the control room.

  Something in Cade’s mother was waking up. Cade had to grab it while she could, and drag it into the light.

  She found Ayumi in the hold, surrounded by notebook pages spread thin and everywhere. Ayumi hopped from one blank floor space to another, crouching over pools of her handwriting, taking notes on her own notes.

  “We need this,” she muttered. “We need this now.”

  Cade stared down at the scribbles, but she couldn’t figure out what this was. She made a small nonverbal sound and caught Ayumi’s attention.

  “I thought you might be able to help me,” Cade said.

  “With what?” Ayumi’s attention fluttered from Cade to the notebook pages and back again.

  “A song.”

  “I’m not, strictly, musical,” Ayumi said with a frown. Then she brightened. “I do have a minor amount of training on the slyth. It’s a double-reed instrument we use on Rembra, with a flat tone that sort of splits your nerves down the middle—”

  “Not like that,” Cade said. “I mean, I don’t need you to play the song.”

  “Oh.” Ayumi’s fingers stopped in the middle of their demonstration of the air-slyth. “That’s probably for the best.”

  Cade sat down at the edge of the papers. “I was hoping you had a song I could play on Moon-White.”

  “What kind?” Ayumi asked.

  “An old one,” Cade said. “My mother loves Earth-songs. Or she used to. So I thought—”

  “I have a few,” Ayumi said. “Here. Somewhere. Songs and poems and story-bits . . .” But she was so distracted with her own work that she didn’t offer to help. She turned pages, fluttered notebooks.

  Cade kneeled, unable to avoid the rustle. “What are you looking for?”

  “A planet.” Ayumi’s fingers fast-skimmed a margin.

  “What kind?” Cade asked.

  “One we can live on when the fleet’s gathered. We have a plan for how to pull everyone together. We need a sub-plan for what to do with all those people and ships, and I don’t sleep so I figured . . .”

  She laid one page on top of a slim pile, and threw the others back into the general mess. “We need a location outside of the known systems. Lee and I talked about it, and we can’t see nonhumans letting us start new colonies on top of the old ones. Especially not if it means a threat from the Unmakers.”

  “So we need something new,” Cade said.

  Ayumi nodded. She held up a page from her little pile. “How does this sound?” She put on her most convincing voice and tried to sell it to Cade. “Forty-five degrees cool side, five thousand hot side. Methane issues. Snappish and hungry nonhumans.”

  Cade couldn’t keep the sourness off her face. Ayumi crumpled the paper and threw it.

  “There’s got to be something in here,” Cade said. “A song for me. A planet for all of us. Right?”

  Ayumi perked up on her knees, brightened her eyes. She was so used to being the source of constant uplift for everyone else, and she looked relieved that someone else had supplied a little bit for her.

  Cade sifted through pages looking for an Earth-song, while Ayumi hunted for the vague scent of something habitable.

  “Caves?” Ayumi said. “Inhabited, drippy, prone to flooding.”

  “Maybe,” Cade said. “Inhabited by what?”

  Ayumi squinted. “Doesn’t say.”

  “Never a good sign.”

  “How about this one? Land and water reported, but the planet was never settled due to . . .” Ayumi turned the page and deciphered the back. “Brain infestations by the local empathic bacteria species.”

  “Pass.”

  Cade went through page after page, and found that most were filled with splinters of information about Earth. The names of ancient countries: Nigeria, Ireland, Venezuela, Japan. Recipes for food that probably hadn’t been cooked in a thousand years. Paella. Something called a cheeseburger. A short and mostly crossed-out description of the smell of Earth-grass. Sweet and mild and mixed up with dirt. Bitter-bright when you cut it. The names of wars, the names of battles, the numbers of the dead. Half a poem about the question of being or not being. What the sun looked like when it touched the sea.

  Cade was so attuned to the details of a planet she’d never seen that she almost missed a page of what looked like songs. “London Bridge,” and “Ring Around” something called a “Rosy,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  These told Cade nothing about Earth, plucked no deep chords in her. But they were Earth-songs, so maybe her mother knew them. Maybe they would trickle their way in through her cracks.

  Cade read “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with more interest than the others. It didn’t sound like it had anything to do with real stars, not the way Cade knew them. But she got caught on one line: “Up above the world so high.” It made her think of lying on the ground, on that bittersweet Earth-grass, staring up into a white-freckled night, seeing stars the way humans were meant to see them.

  Cade looked up, and found Ayumi watching her with a specific sort of dreaminess on her face.

  “It gets in your head fast, doesn’t it?”

  “What?” Cade asked. “The lyrics?” She scanned them again. “They’re catchy. In a boring sort of way.”

  “No,” Ayumi said. “Earth.”

  Half an hour went by. Cade counted the time in paper cuts. She was supposed to be looking for songs, something that could reach through her mother’s disconnect. But Earth kept drawing her in.

  Cade found a page that she knew was important before she even started reading it. Something about the careful handwriting, the way the block of words was centered and set on its own page.

  “They left before the asteroid hit. They told their children how blue it was, how green.”

  Cade slammed the notebook shut.

  This was an account of Earth’s last days, and there was nothing dusty and distant about it. Cade had almost been able to see it—the c
olors of the planet, ringed in pure space-black. She’d almost been able to feel it—there, and bright. Then gone.

  Back to the search. Cade shifted a few pages aside, and underneath them, found another notebook.

  “Don’t open that one,” Ayumi said, even though it looked like every other one.

  “What’s in it?” Cade asked.

  Ayumi’s face welled pink. “Details of spacesick, what it’s like to be spacesick, very personal stuff.”

  When Cade had first met Ayumi, she’d been so calm about the whole thing, treated it like part of the human condition—a sour fate, but unavoidable. Now she looked like she wanted to find a way to hold spacesick down and punch it in the face.

  “You can talk to me about it,” Cade said. “If you want.”

  Ayumi shook her head, so sudden-hard that Cade worried she might bash it against the nearest surface.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore,” Ayumi said. “I want it out, out, out.”

  Cade told the entire crew to meet in the common room—no exceptions.

  She sat down, stuck the little paper with the Earth-songs on top of her knees, and settled Moon-White across her lap. If a guitar could sigh, that’s what Moon-White did. The smooth body found its home against Cade’s, and the warm-ups hummed through her with a sort of rightness that she hadn’t felt since before Res Minor.

  “I don’t get it,” Mira stage-whispered from where she sat, half-sunk in cushions.

  Rennik stood propped against the wall. When he spoke, Cade heard a grace note of pride. “She’s a musician.”

  “She’s the most finger-destroying guitarist in the known systems,” Lee said, not to be outdone. “And, since it’s hard to imagine people coming up with guitars in the unknown systems—maybe something like guitars, but not the same—I think it’s safe to say that she’s the best there is.”

  Mira stared at Lee, the green of her eyes struck through with stubborn flint.

  “Don’t worry,” Lee said. “Cade will convince you.”

  This was bigger than Cade’s reputation. She had to tell the crew the good her music might be able to do. There was no point in bringing the human race together if they celebrated by glassing out.

  “Do you remember the footage from Firstbloom?” Cade asked. “When the scientists said music was tested for its effect on spacesickness?”

  Lee downshifted from praise to scoffing. “It clearly didn’t do the trick, or we would all know about it.”

  “What they heard back then wasn’t enough,” Cade said. “But they never heard me.”

  And she went to work.

  Simple chords first, and then more complicated finger-weaving. It was all fine and building until she transitioned to the Earth-songs. Cade started with “London Bridge,” but she couldn’t force the words out. They were too ridiculous. She tried “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She “Ringed around the Rosy.”

  Cade looked up, and found her mother as gone as ever. Mira frowned with special, intense boredom. Ayumi and Lee traded glances. Rennik’s neck corded as he turned his head toward the door, like he could hear more important things happening somewhere else on the ship. He had told Cade once that he didn’t feel music the same way she did. Now she was nerve-sick, and she needed to go back a few minutes and un-demand that he come. She didn’t want Rennik to see this happening.

  Cade never lost her audience.

  Even if she did, they had never mattered as much as the music. Cade had been willing to drop the crowds in the club, and if they found their way back to her, brass. If not, she would hit the next song without thinking.

  This was what it meant to care—to know that if she lost these people, it mattered. Cade shifted the chords, disrupted her patterns, tried harder, but not with the Earth-songs. There was no space in their simple melodies. Cade let the page drift down from her knees. The song chose what it wanted to be. It led, and Cade followed.

  The crew went with her.

  And Cade’s mother did, too. She wasn’t moving, but energy swirled below the surface. Cade couldn’t explain it. She felt her mother, a presence in the room where before there had been nothing and no one.

  Her mother—

  Thrashed out of stillness, and her breath tore the air. Drowning. She looked like she was drowning. She grabbed the nearest solid thing—Mira—and battered her down. Tugged the girl’s clothes, anchored fingers in her hair.

  Mira loosed a scream, cold as space on bare skin. Cade dropped Moon-White with a hollow bang. She grabbed Mira out of her mother’s soft-desperate arms. Mira slammed into Cade’s shoulders, and ran. She turned in the door frame and stared at Cade’s mother, her features bunched and set, her voice chilled metal.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  The fight had passed out of Cade’s mother, but Rennik held her hands behind her back. Cade followed Mira across the main cabin, where she spun, cornered by the harsh realities of space. There was never anywhere far enough to run to.

  “No one is allowed to touch me,” Mira said, the small points of her teeth showing.

  “That’s okay,” Cade said. “That’s fine.” She held both hands in the air to prove that she wouldn’t try.

  Rennik carried Cade’s mother in the bracket of his strong arms and set her down on his own bed. They stared at her like she was a picture of a woman, taken a long time ago.

  Rennik asked his question to a vague patch of air. “Do you ever worry that it might happen to you?”

  “No,” Cade said. “I’m entangled.”

  She and Rennik kept a tight hold on her mother’s arms, pressing her into place.

  “You don’t ever worry that it will . . . expire?”

  Rennik’s politeness could act as a balm on the wounds of a torn-open universe. It could also suffocate.

  “Do I think that I’m going to glass out now that Xan is dead?” Cade asked.

  Rennik winced.

  Cade shook open a roll of tightly wound bandages. “No.” She had felt it on the shuttle coming back from Res Minor. Entanglement wasn’t done with her. Her muscles might have drained of the extra strength, her mind reshaped all the spaces where Xan’s thoughts used to fit. But he was still with her, always with her.

  Cade started to wind the bandages around her mother, tying her to the bed, but she couldn’t keep her brain on the task. At first she thought it was the leftover feeling from the common room, clouding her.

  But this was different.

  it came

  gold and perfect

  and pulling her inward, to something even more

  perfect, the point

  the center of it

  all she would have to do was wait

  with him stripped

  down to particles

  there at her side

  or closer

  and still she couldn’t think about him

  because even more than the gold

  he was the reminder

  of what she had left

  for this red

  for this burning

  this life

  Chapter 10

  “What’s happening?” Rennik asked.

  Cade blinked at him.

  She had felt this before, but never in a moment that she shared with someone else. The black hole had clung to the edges of her life, slipped into quiet moments. It hadn’t cut in. Until now.

  “It only lasted a few seconds,” Rennik said. “But you looked like you were entirely somewhere else.”

  Cade set a hand to the wall, like she’d seen Rennik do so many times, for strength. Renna’s confusion leached in.

  “I was.”

  The day started with sickness and throat-sting and never let up. Lee found Cade piling comfort food in the mess and lured her out into the main cabin with a chorus of You owe me’s.

  The rest of the crew was assembled there in a loose knot. The belt at Lee’s waist dripped with knives.

  “What the snug is this?” Cade asked.

  “Fight trainin
g!” Lee said, launching herself at Cade. She latched on with her knees at Cade’s waist, her arms in a death-hug around her neck. Cade dropped Lee like a sack of grain-mash.

  “Not bad,” Lee said, dusting off her shoulders.

  Lee had marked the floor, as if she was turning the cabin into some kind of arena.

  Lee paced up and down the ragged line of crew members. “I said yes to all this fleet-gathering,” she said. “But there’s no way I’m letting anyone take one more step without proper lessons in defense. We have no idea where the next attack will come from: Unmaker, nonhuman, space-bound, planet-side.”

  Ayumi shivered. “That’s a happy little speech.”

  “You know what I mean,” Lee said. “We have to be ready for anything.” She slapped her palms together. “But Andana first.” Cade’s desert home came to her in all of its awfulness. She could feel the memory of the sun on her cheeks, sweat pushing down her arms.

  “It’s a slummer-filled planet.” Lee flicked a glance at Cade. “Sorry if that sounds harsh.”

  “I think you’re giving it too much credit.”

  If Cade was really going down to Andana, she needed the warm-up. She still knew how to fight, technically, but she hadn’t done it since before the black hole. Cade had all these people to save, and she wouldn’t do them any good if she got sliced clean through.

  “Today, we’ll train for a planet-side fight,” Lee said. “Starting with hand-to-hand, and knife work.”

  For the first matchup, Lee paired herself with Rennik.

  Cade tried to shake the feeling that it was more than an easy way to get started. She couldn’t count all the times she’d seen the two of them together, Lee boiling with fake anger and a very real blush.

  Rennik and Lee met in the center of the cabin, shook hands, and circled. Slowly at first, then with a swell of momentum. Lee came at him, all spitfire, hard-slamming kicks and sharp angles. Rennik stepped around her in patterns, graceful. He made fighting look like some kind of elaborate dance. They had known each other so long that there was a simple harmony to the two of them together. In skill, they were well matched—until Lee stepped out of it, panting.