“All right,” she said. “Show me what you can really do.”
Rennik frowned. “Is that necessary?”
“This is the fight of our lives,” Lee said.
“For our lives,” Ayumi corrected.
Lee circled him again. “Do you really think it’s the best time to hold back?”
Rennik went to his room and returned with two long, leaf-shaped double blades that hung from his hands, the weight making itself obvious. Cade had fought a lot of people, human and non, and she’d never seen anything like them.
Lee homed in on Cade’s interest. “Hatchum ceremonial blades.”
Rennik stood at the center of the cabin, flipping the handles a few times until he found their balance. Then, without any intro, he swung so hard and fast that the blades blurred, more like traveling light than long knives. The work was effortless. A crowd of people standing in his way would have been cut down.
“All right,” Lee said. “That’s enough.”
Rennik let the blades swing to a stop. “I’m glad it meets your approval.”
Lee sailed a playful punch to his shoulder.
She moved down the line and found Gori raptured as big as a pillar. “Really?” she said. “That’s your defense mechanism?” She poked him in the vague area of what were probably his ribs. “Dead. You’d be dead. Moving on.”
Lee slid down the line to Ayumi. “Hit me,” she said.
Ayumi winced, and no one had even thrown a punch. “I can’t . . .”
“All right,” Lee said. “Hit Cade.”
“How is that—” Cade was about to say different, but a fist connected to her face. “Ayumi!”
The Earth-Keeper hid behind one hand and pointed the other at Lee. “She told me to.”
“All right, then.” Cade pushed up her sleeves and drew Ayumi out of the line like a magnet.
As soon as Ayumi lost the element of surprise, she lost the fight. Cade came at her with a series of moves that she’d more or less invented in the Parentless Center and perfected at the clubs. Andana had been a terrible place to live, and a first-class place to fight.
Still, Cade could feel that she wasn’t half as good as she used to be. Her strength needed building up, but it was more than that. There was a relentless pull at her center, and it ruined her balance.
Having a black hole there wasn’t the same as having a boy.
“All right.” Lee waved them apart and set a hand on Ayumi’s arm. “We’ll work on it.” Ayumi nodded like she’d known that all along. She ran back to the line, shaking off nerves and energy.
“You need help too,” Lee said. So she could tell that there was something different about the way Cade fought now. Something less. But Cade couldn’t add one-on-one training to the endless list of things she had to do to save the human race.
“I’ve got this,” Cade said.
Lee gathered all of her doubt in a dimple. “Try it against Mira.” Cade’s eyebrows did a quick you-can’t-be-serious, but Lee stuck to her decision. “You need to practice, and I need to see what she can do.”
“I’m not fighting a little girl.” Cade had all kinds of noble reasons, and they leaked into her stomach, churning together with memories of fighting when she was Mira’s age. For everything. Food, soap, guitar strings. All she’d had to her name was a seven-blade knife and a stubborn unwillingness to die.
It didn’t have to be like that for Mira.
The little girl bounded into the ring. “I’m not scared,” she said with a rubber-band smile—stretched wide, then gone. “Are you?”
Cade would go easy on Mira. Easier than easy.
She shook the girl’s small hand and circled her once, twice. Mira slashed with her arms, drove with her knees. She fought cold and constant. When it became clear that Cade was gaining, and would win no matter what, Mira pushed harder. It was just a practice fight. Maybe she knew she wasn’t going to get hurt. Maybe she could feel Cade’s hesitation, the pull-back when she worried a punch would land too hard.
Cade’s muscles kept up the work but her mind went further, trying to see into Mira and figure her out. People had never been Cade’s strong suit, but now she had a shortcut. Mira’s thought-song would teach her more than a lifetime of small talk. Cade chose her moment, closed her eyes, and cast herself into the space right in front of her shifting feet.
She listened.
But Mira didn’t have a song.
Just silence, a not-song so obvious that when Cade sailed across it she noticed, like hitting a patch of bad atmosphere. It had a shape to it, weight, different shades of silence like all the hues of dark.
The absence smacked into Cade, and now Mira’s arm flew and hit Cade’s nose. Hard.
It ran thick with blood as she blacked out.
Cade’s face throbbed an evil rhythm.
Lee had cleared the rest of the crew out of the main cabin. She stood over Cade, one foot planted on either side and a clutch of cold towels in her hand.
“I told you to fight her, Cade. I didn’t think she would win. What is she, some kind of violent prodigy?”
Cade tamped fingers to her face, and her nose groaned against the pressure. “Worse.” She got up and dragged Lee into the mess, sweeping the area to make sure it was Mira-free. “You were right.”
Lee crossed her arms. “It’s the natural state of things.”
Cade swiped a cloth and set it on the place where the pain bled over into her cheek. “Consider the universe back in order, then.” Mira’s non-song stuck to Cade like sweaty droplets of fog. When Cade told Lee about it, she shivered, and it was only half overacting.
“What does that mean?” Lee asked.
“I don’t have that part worked out,” Cade said. “I was too busy getting punched in the face.” Lee did an impatient shuffle-dance while Cade thought. “The way the thought-songs work . . . every species is like a frequency band. I tune in to the human part of the universe.”
“So she’s non?”
“I don’t know.” The pain in Cade’s nose light-speeded around the rest of her head. “There are exceptions, like if I’m standing close to someone I know. I can hear Rennik’s song.”
“What does he sound like?” Lee asked.
Cade managed a micro-shrug. “Like you think he would.”
“Neat? Precise? All little boxes and well-kept rows?”
“Right.” Cade kept the rest to herself—the chaos she felt under the table of Rennik’s neatness.
Lee squared Cade’s shoulders, as though the next part was very important. “What do I sound like?”
Cade closed her eyes and tapped in to Lee’s song. The wild highs, and the plummets that should have bottomed out into sadness but caught updrafts and flung themselves high all over again.
“You sound like flying.”
Lee’s posture sparked, a sure sign that she loved the answer. For the first time, Cade’s mind ran into the question of what her own song sounded like. Would it be the same now as the day she was born? Had it morphed since she cleared her own personal sand-hell and found Renna and the rest of the crew? What about the black hole? What had that done to her song?
“What does Ayumi sound like?” Lee asked.
“We don’t have time to do this for everyone on the ship,” Cade said. “We have to deal with Mira.”
Lee plunked herself into a chair. “Right as radiation.”
Cade didn’t want to believe that Mira’s non-song had a dark meaning, but she couldn’t ignore the possibility, either. “We need to know if Mira’s a danger.”
“What category of danger?” Lee asked, switching to instant Express mode. “She’s not here to start a fight. Your nose aside, she’s pretty amateur.”
“She could have a tracker,” Cade said.
“The only way to tell, without a specially rigged light, is to do a manual check. An everywhere manual check.”
Protection took a strong hold. Cade knew what it was like not to want strangers puncturing your
space with unwanted hands. “You mean strip-search a girl who told us she hates being touched?”
“I mean get creative.”
“This is not normal,” Mira said, her voice muffled through the wall.
Cade and Lee had stuffed her in one of the tunnels and were crouched on the other side, in the main cabin.
“Don’t worry,” Lee said. “Renna knows what she’s about.”
Like most of the plans Cade and Lee formed together, this was half bold, half unstable. They had built it with the knowledge that Mira liked the ship more than she liked any of the crew.
“Renna will do a full-body scan,” Cade said, “and then you’re official. It’s like having a uniform, but more . . .” She dove for the right word and came up with “unique.”
Cade and Lee had asked for Renna’s help, and after a twitch of hesitation, she’d agreed. Lee had stamped an old dead tracker against the wall so Renna had a basis for comparison.
“How does she scan me?” Mira asked.
“Just sort of roll around,” Cade said.
“Right,” Lee muttered. “Because that sounds official.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Cade whispered. “Because any second before now would have been a nice time to bring it up.”
Lee shrugged. “Desperate times call for weird measures.”
They divvied up Mira’s old clothes, checking for any information about the girl who was drumming her skin against the wall. Cade hoped that Rennik wouldn’t pass by and question them with that amused look of his.
“Both of you have done this?” Mira asked, mid-thump.
“Oh, sure,” Lee said. “Once a year since I sprouted teeth.”
Cade tended to stumble all over herself if she veered too far from the truth, so she kept as close as she could. “I’m newer to the ship than Lee is. Grew up on Andana with no one. It was me and sand and more sand.”
“No parents?” Mira asked.
“No.” Mira’s shirt was neater than Cade would have thought—no niggling-loose threads or chewed hems. It held no clues that could lead Cade to a new understanding of the girl. “No parents, and slummers used to call me nonhuman every chance they got. Not that it would be a sour thing, if it turned out to be true. But people got some kind of sick gossip-thrill out of it.”
Mira’s voice came through the wall like a cold shove. “So?”
Cade closed her eyes and prodded at the non-song. It was still there—or painfully, noticeably not there. Cade needed to know what could do that.
“If someone was nonhuman I wouldn’t care,” she said.
“Me neither,” Lee piped.
“Obviously,” Mira said. “You both look at that Hatchum pilot like he spins the suns.”
That shut Cade up. Lee didn’t seem to care; maybe her feelings were so obvious she had no fear in broadcasting them. Cade wondered what that felt like, and if she would ever get there. With Rennik. With anyone.
Lee finished rummaging through Mira’s clothes and looked at Cade with a shrug. “Clean,” she mouthed.
Cade didn’t know where to go from there. She still had doubts—and Mira stuck behind the wall.
“Hey, did you ever get knocked on the head?” Lee cried. “A solid sort of thump that could really clear it out?”
Cade grimaced at the quality of Lee’s idea. Lee mouthed, “Worth a shot.”
A pierce of sound cut through the wall.
“Renna, stop! Stop!”
Cade ripped the panel aside and found Mira’s arms crossed tight across her chest, fingers stuffed into her armpits.
“She was tickling me,” Mira said.
Cade shook her head and Lee patted the wall. Mira came out a minute later and Lee tossed her a set of clothes. It became clear that they used to belong to Lee when Mira tugged them on. The waist pinched one size too skinny, and the legs trailed three sizes too tall.
“Now you’re officially official,” Lee said.
Renna rippled the wall, cheering.
Cade’s nerves eased down from high alert. She didn’t know how much she’d wanted to be wrong.
“Don’t see why it mattered,” Mira said, rolling the pant legs into cuffs. “Renna has been treating me grand since I got here.”
“She’s the best ship in all the systems,” Lee said. “But don’t worry if she grumbles at you. Her language is grumble-based.”
“I’m not worried,” Mira said with a sharp gloss of pride. “We talk all the time. Renna tells me plenty.”
“Like what?” Cade asked. She couldn’t imagine what Renna would keep from her own crew but confide to the girl.
Mira ticked items off on her fingers. “She hates it when everyone’s asleep and she sees a comet and she wants to wake all of you up but she knows that no one will thank her for it. And she loves foggy atmosphere and rain. And she gets scared, a lot.”
Lee’s face crumpled and her hands hurried to the wall.
“Anything else?” Cade asked.
Mira nodded. “She’s hungry.”
Chapter 11
Renna’s fuel needle wobble-pressed dangerously close to the empty line.
Cade and Lee and Mira watched it in a solemn lineup. Rennik and Ayumi, who’d been hailing nearby ships, hemmed them in.
“Did you know about this?” Cade asked Rennik.
He went a special shade of death-pale.
“How did it happen?” Cade asked. “I thought you had enough fuel for a whole run. What is that? A year’s worth?”
“We did.” Lee patted Renna with an absent hand.
Rennik’s face clenched tight. “Renna isn’t a machine,” he said. “Her fuel is food. She’s usually efficient in the extreme, but all of this fast-and-hard flying puts stress on her systems. Sometimes the only way to compensate is increased intake.”
“So she’s stress eating?” Lee asked.
“Essentially,” Rennik said.
“Fan-snugging-tastic.” Lee broke out of the little group and walked off, possibly to hide the dots of water at the edges of her eyes.
“So we put down,” Cade said. “Refuel.”
“We can’t.” This was no auto-argument. Lee hunched forward, feeling every word in her gut. “The nearest planet with the right supplies is too far. We’d spin out before that.”
“What are the right supplies?” Cade asked.
“Organic matter, vegetable in nature,” Rennik said. The crew—minus Lee, who must have already known—united to stare at him. “Cabbage, if we can find it. Renna loves cabbage.”
“We’re only a day out from Andana,” Cade said. The only thing worse than putting down on her least favorite planet would be putting down to find everyone dead. “There’s no way she can make it?”
Rennik answered her question with a hard stare.
Renna would fly anywhere, at any speed, if that’s what Cade needed. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She knew what it meant to be stretched too far, too thin, all the time.
Lee turned to Rennik, fear swapped out for grim sureness. “You know what we have to do.”
“No.” Whatever Lee was about to propose, Rennik had seen it coming, and he stood firm.
Lee turned to Ayumi, to drum up support. “There’s a trading post—”
Rennik cut in. “A nonhuman trading post—”
“Between here and Andana. It’s almost completely on the way.”
Renna slid the floor a few times, up, then back. Like a shrug. Not a vote of confidence, but at least it wasn’t a doom-laden rumble.
“It’s too risky,” Rennik said.
But Cade couldn’t ignore the change under her feet.
“There’s risky and there’s dead.”
“Stop. Wriggling.”
Lee stood on a chair above Rennik, trying to drop gold tentlike material over his head. Ayumi and Mira waited on the ground to help pull it into place.
“Hatchum don’t wriggle,” Rennik said.
“Well, you’re not much of a Hatchum,” Lee s
aid. “Hence the robes.”
The cloth, instead of a graceful flutter-and-fit, slumped. Stuck in odd places. Ayumi fiddled with the sleeves, which gaped three times too large at the wrist. Apparently, Rennik kept his old ceremonial robes hanging around, in case he needed to add a legitimate air to his diciest missions.
If Cade had ever needed help finding Rennik less want-able, these robes were made to order.
“You look very nonhuman!” Ayumi said, working against the sleeve-droop. Rennik adjusted the robes and ignored the compliment.
Lee jumped off the chair. “Now there’s the question of who goes with him.”
“I do,” Cade said.
“No one,” Rennik said at the same time.
Lee pursed her lips. “See, that’s where I think you’re both wrong. I have a grip on how these trading stations work.”
“I won’t let anyone risk their life,” Rennik said, tugging at his wide collar.
“No one will,” Lee said. “But you’re an outlaw too, and if there’s trouble, it’s not the kind you want to take on with two hands. No matter how good those hands are at swirling blades around.”
Cade rolled her eyes.
“Renna has been risking her life for us every day,” Cade said. “We can give her a few hours.”
“A fine point,” Lee added.
When Cade and Lee pooled their stubbornness, Rennik didn’t stand a chance. He slid a glance between the two of them. “It should be Gori who comes with me. He’s nonhuman. Darkriders are rare, so he might draw some attention, but less than I’d get with a human on my arm.”
“Great plan,” Lee said, “except it involves two impossible things.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Waking Gori up when he doesn’t want to, and getting him to leave the ship, which he never does.”
Rennik’s fancy sleeves crumpled as he put his hands up in surrender.
With that part figured out, Cade and Lee locked eyes, mouths set in harsh lines, wills matched.
“I can disguise myself as nonhuman,” Lee said. “Plus I have the flight skills. And the spaceport experience.”
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