Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  When Mira had asked to be part of the mission, Cade had almost knee-jerked another no. But if Cade couldn’t see the girl, it would be impossible to keep her safe.

  Gori’s bunk was Cade’s last stop. He sat cross-legged, half-raptured. There was no getting him off the ship, but as long as he was going to stay, he might as well make himself useful.

  “I need you to look after my mother,” Cade said, hoping that it was for an afternoon and not the rest of her life.

  Gori breathed deep and didn’t move.

  Cade marched on, whispering to Renna. “You’ll probably have to take care of both of them.” A reassuring tap sounded on the soles of Cade’s feet.

  As soon as Cade joined the group in the main cabin, Renna opened herself to the elements. Rennik tried to set his pace in time with Cade’s as she headed down the walkway, but she shouldered ahead.

  Heat smacked her in the face. The walkway was the last bit of firmness, and then her feet sloshed into the hot, moving grains that made up ninety-eight percent of Andana’s surface. Sand lashed at Cade’s ankles like it was trying to make up for lost time. She had to remind herself every five seconds that this condition wasn’t permanent.

  This wasn’t her home.

  Mira struggled against the sand. Lee strode hard, one arm wrapped across Ayumi and raised to eye level to keep the coarse wind out of their faces. Rennik cast a glance back at Renna, to make sure she was waiting there, unbothered. Then he turned to Cade. She could see that he wanted to talk, but the sand gave her an excuse. If she tried to speak, it would crust her mouth at the corners.

  Voidvil came into view over a dune, shining and rolling in the heat. If Cade hadn’t spent so much time there—scorching days and loud nights—she wouldn’t know if the city was real or a heat-snugged dream.

  By the time they reached the outskirts, Cade was sweating, with the faint edge of a chill that rose from the depths of certain desert afternoons. The streets were in worse shape than she remembered. Pavement spidered beneath her feet. Shops stood open, wares looted, most ­doors clean off their hinges.

  “Where is everyone?” Ayumi asked.

  Cade knocked on an intact door. Maybe people were hiding, unsure if the crew on the street was there to round them up for a rescue or a quick death.

  Cade wandered into the next apartment and found an empty box—flimsy walls and stale sheets, spoiled food on the counter, as if someone had raided their own kitchen and decided none of the plunder was worth eating.

  “No one’s been here for days.” Cade swung back into the street. “Keep moving.”

  The crew trailed behind her in a loose line, Rennik at her heels, Lee bringing up the rear. Cade chose alleys that cut through dead-asleep sections of the city. She looked for signs that their presence was pricking Voidvil awake. There was no noise, no movement, and the absence kept Cade alert. She felt as though she would have noticed one arm hair ruffled in the wrong direction.

  “Where did everybody go?” Mira asked, a few steps behind Cade.

  “Maybe they pulled back to the center of the city, to make it easier to defend.” Maybe they had barriers. Walls. Knives, guns, explosives. “Be ready,” Cade said.

  “For what?” Ayumi asked.

  Lee pulled her gun. “People in this town might shoot first and check species later.”

  Cade paused at the mouth of the alley. “No one.” The crew spilled onto a wide street.

  A hard shiver in Ayumi’s voice made Cade think of cold, even with the sun pouring heat. “Let’s drain. Can we drain?”

  “No,” Cade said. “I heard people here.” It had been less than an hour since she checked the position of the songs. That wasn’t enough time for an attacking force to hit the city, kill everyone, and leave. Even if they had, there would be signs of a recent strike. Freshly destroyed buildings. Bodies.

  “They’re here,” Cade said. “They have to be here.”

  “Can’t you do the thing where you listen?” Mira asked. “You know.” She pulled her face solemn and closed her eyes. “Listen.”

  “Good call.” Lee patted Mira on the shoulder. Mira’s spark-green eyes blinked up at Lee, confused.

  “What?” Lee asked. “Is me giving a compliment really the wildest thing that’s happened today?”

  It was a good call. Cade fought the useless I-should-have-done-that-sooner itch. She spread herself out, tracing every inch of Voidvil. Her brain pinched, searching for the smallest bit of music.

  Nothing.

  Cade sank to the pavement, but it was too hot. Her shins couldn’t stand it. Her palms boiled against the sticky black. She shot back to standing.

  “What?” Lee asked.

  Cade had been reaching in the wrong direction. She blinked sand and sun out of her eyes and started again. This time, instead of working out in circles, her mind plummeted to her feet and kept moving. There it was. Straight down. A rash of music under silent streets.

  Voidvil had gone underground.

  The city had been built deep as well as high. Most of Cade’s time living there was spent in cavelike rooms—from the black markets to the clubs—tucked under the city’s hot, seething skin. Now the humans of Andana had shed their aboveground presence and burrowed as far as they could into the dark.

  Cade listened to the songs until she found a natural place to start. She led the crew two blocks west, to one of the tallest apartment buildings in Voidvil. This was Humanscape, the last place where Cade had seen the traveling black market.

  “What’s so special about this one?” Mira asked as Cade slid them in through a concrete door that opened onto a flight of urine-soaked stairs.

  “Seems like a good spot for a resistance,” Cade said.

  “It doesn’t hurt that we’re intimate with the ins and outs of the building,” Lee said. “Especially the outs.”

  Their voices dropped down the stairwell like stones. Cade found more signs of a human presence on the staircase landings than she had in the rest of the city. Meat-shreds on bone. Heaps of old clothes, toothbrushes. In one corner, blankets. Still warm.

  Cade turned a tight corner, but she snatched back as soon as she saw a man across the diagonal. She held herself against the wall and waited for him to make a move.

  “Show yourself,” he said, in a voice that rattled like a key in a wrong-fitting lock.

  Rennik’s hand fell on Cade’s upper arm, staying her for a second, but Cade stepped onto the landing and blinked her palms open. She had her crew and an impressive array of weapons behind her. It didn’t make her feel any less exposed.

  “Look,” she said. “We’re here to help. To take you—”

  “Cade?” Her own name sounded through the stairwell. “Is that Cade?”

  She pressed forward another step, and the man’s face took shape in the dark. A squashed nose, one eye thickened to a blind white. The sort of memory-laced smile that Cade had seen on plenty of faces over the last few weeks. The smile of someone who was spending quality time in the past.

  “Do I know you?” Cade asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I went to see you a few times.”

  At the club. This man wasn’t a regular, so Cade didn’t know his face, but he knew hers. She stumbled over the strangeness of the idea. Even after the end of worlds, she still had fans.

  “We’re looking for the market,” Cade said. “Or whatever’s left of it.”

  “Right this way,” he said, and his nostalgic smile morphed into another one, a little too eager.

  Cade motioned the crew to follow, choosing to ignore the concern on all of their faces. She wasn’t in love with this plan either. She had the feeling that back in her club days, this was one of the men who might have knocked too long and loud on her dressing room door, and now she was following him into a cold, twisting dark.

  The market had been moved, and only the ribs of the stands were left. People huddled in corners, creating shells of stink. Cade tried not to cover her nose. She waved at the men and wome
n who stared at her, recognition reshaping some of their faces.

  This was Cade’s planet. These were, in some unshakable way, her people.

  The man, who called himself Till, led Cade and the crew to a small group who seemed a little cleaner than the rest, a little more awake. Cade knew at least one of them—a small man who used to run a secondhand clothing stall in the market. Now it looked like he was wearing all of his wares at once.

  “Look what I found,” Till said, his proud smile showing the dark kernel of a tooth gone bad.

  “Cade,” the small man said, pulling at the fingertips of his non-fitting gloves. “I heard you were gone, long before everyone else.”

  “Well, I’m back.” Cade slapped on her old stage attitude like a quick layer of makeup. “Call it an encore.”

  “We’re here to get you off this sand-heap,” Lee said. She was back to her old ways too, strutting, hands all but glued to her hips, a take-charge gleam in her eyes. Cade hadn’t known how much she’d missed that.

  “You’ll have to take serious care,” the little man said, fiddling at one of his cuffs.

  Cade didn’t need anyone to tell her that. “We have a ship waiting outside the city. Start spreading the word and we’ll meet—”

  Till cut in, stubbing at the ground with a foot. “Some here have it in their minds that it’s best to join up with them.”

  A strong smell wandered over from the nearest clutch of survivors.

  “Them?” Cade asked.

  “The ones that done it,” Till whispered. “Some would rather be on the side of those who wipe us out than be wiped.”

  Cade stared at him like too much time underground had choked his higher brain functions. “And what makes them think the Unmakers will do anything but pitch them out of the nearest airlock?”

  “They must have heard about us,” Till said. “Our situat­ion here, the number of us still living. They sent the ships back. Except this time, there was no killing. Just a woman, looked near to human. She used some pretty words to convince the tired and weak that they could get in on something new.”

  Cade sorted through all the bad things Till had said and found herself staring at two small words.

  A woman.

  “Was she small, with light skin, red hair?” Cade asked. “A little bit of white streaked in?”

  “That’s the one,” the little man said, the stack of hats on his head bobbing as he stepped in. “You two aren’t close personal friends, now, are you?”

  “We shared the same patch of universe for an hour. That’s it.” Cade didn’t add that it had been one of the worst hours of her life, with the woman trying to sell Cade on the idea of throwing herself into a black hole.

  “She doesn’t have a name,” Cade said. “And she doesn’t want to do us any favors.”

  The little man cast his eyes around the open room, the large circles of people, the smaller satellite clusters. “There are those here that might think bringing them a human trophy will win favor.”

  Cade shook her head, swallowing against a new sort of foulness. In a universe thick with enemies, Cade should have known Andana was the one place she’d end up fighting her own kind.

  “We spread out in teams,” Cade said. She included Till, the clothing-stall man, and the others in the group, even though she didn’t know if she could trust them. She didn’t have much choice.

  “Take until nightfall, find everyone you can. Tell them to meet . . .” She needed a place underground, one that wouldn’t draw attention. One that she knew, inch for inch. “Tell them to meet at Club V.”

  “How do we dodge aspiring metal-breathers?” Lee asked.

  “They’re not making a secret of it,” Till said, pushing his tongue against his rotten tooth. “Trying to turn themselves into monsters as we speak.”

  When no one moved, Cade said, “Look for bad actors in big robes.”

  The group cracked into pieces, and Till headed off by himself. He didn’t look like the kind who lived by the buddy system. Lee grabbed Ayumi’s hand and ran, calling back over her shoulder, “Last one to the club’s a fake Unmaker!”

  That left Rennik, Cade, and Mira. Rennik tried to ask something with his eyes, but Cade avoided the question.

  “I know the planet. I’ll take the girl.”

  Mira followed her across the ruinscape of the black market and out of the building. As soon as they were in the open air, her voice tugged at Cade. “Why did you want to get away from the Hatchum?”

  The street under Cade’s feet had split a long time ago, and now it looked like a burst and blackened lip. Cade stumbled to one side of it as Mira walked the center. Her whole face puckered with focus. “I thought you liked him.”

  “I did. I do.” Cade cut for the nearest apartment building. “He’s the one who doesn’t feel things.”

  “Not true,” Mira said. “He steals looks at you all day and his eyes get big and his breath goes weird. Those are signs. I know.”

  Cade had to bite back a laugh. She couldn’t believe she was talking about this with a little girl. She dropped into a new staircase and followed the thought-songs down.

  “Stay behind me,” Cade said.

  Mira stuck like a shadow that was too good at its job. “You like the Hatchum too.” Her words seemed bigger in the dark. “Every time he comes into the room, you make an angry face. Like this.” Mira tapped Cade on the shoulder and treated her to a miniature version of her own scowl.

  “And that’s a sign?” The humor in Cade’s voice was cut with gritty irritation.

  “Yeah, it lets me know you’re having a feeling, a big one, and it doesn’t have anywhere to go, so it turns around and attacks you. So you get angry and you look like you have a stomachache all the time. But you don’t. You’re in love.”

  Cade crouched on the landing and listened for the rustle of people below. “Oh, really?” She almost asked where Mira had gotten her manual on human behavior. “What else do you know about me?”

  Mira paused, out of ready-made answers. “You don’t make sense. None of you do.”

  Cade merged the thought-songs with the sound of footsteps and the soft rub of voices to create a living map. She held it firmly in her head as she led Mira into a slimed honeycomb of basements.

  “Agreed.”

  The people they found there fell into different categories: eager to follow, suspicious of every word, itching to fight. So tired that they could barely lift their heads. So foul that Cade wanted to cut her nose off. Mira had promised to stay behind Cade, but she edged out with her voice, talking to people from behind Cade’s back.

  “Space is a lot nicer than this,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

  “We have lots of grain-mash on the ship, and even sugar to put on it sometimes.”

  “Don’t make me fight you,” she said, which was met with laughter—grimy as old coin, but true underneath.

  Sometimes all Mira had to do was smile and activate her dimples. Cade let her go a short distance in one direction while she took the other, staying close enough to keep a watch on the girl but far enough away that Mira could double the ground they covered. She was so good at reading people that Cade wondered if soon, with the fleet gathered and her strange skill set put to bed, she’d be able to retire.

  The thought was cut off by a long scrape and a cloth-dampened scream.

  Cade ran and found a man dragging Mira into a sub-basement. The smell of turned meat leaked from the entrance. Cade lunged with her knife, but the man was more alert than she’d given him credit for, and when he spun, he caught her across the cheekbone.

  “Give me the girl,” she said. Her voice was a fierce, pulsing thing.

  “What girl?” The man stared at Cade as he gathered up Mira, holding her still and much too close, a long needle at her throat. It was dull at the point, no shine. It could have been a knitting needle in another life. But with enough pressure—

  “Let me have her,” Cade said. “She’s mine.”

&
nbsp; “No idea who you’re referring to.” The man’s eyes were pasted over with madness. But there was a hint of a smile, too, like he dared Cade to argue that Mira was real, when in his mind she was a piece of meat.

  “It’s okay,” Mira said. “You can go. Make it to the club. Gather the fleet. That’s what you’re supposed to do, Cade.” She swallowed hard, and the needle bobbed against her throat. “So do it.”

  Cade shifted her weight, testing the man’s readiness. He read the signs, predicting all of her possible attacks. Cade backed off, each step boiled down to glue, the sticking awfulness of letting Mira believe for even ten seconds that she would be left to die.

  Cade stopped with her back turned. She closed her eyes, and the sounds of dragging scratched at her like fingernails. Cade settled into the wide, balanced stance that she used for playing hardfastloud. Music swept like a strong wind through her mind, gathering fury and force as it went, and she sent it out, out, out.

  The man’s mind wasn’t open to her, but she wrenched it open, and turned to find him on his knees, silent-screaming. Mira wriggled away from his grip and ran clear. Cade moved in and sliced the man’s calf just above the ankle.

  Then she ran.

  She kept Mira in front of her, little heels slapping. As soon as they were up the stairs, Mira turned and looked at Cade with awe.

  “You came back for me.”

  Cade ruffled Mira’s hair, and it was strange how natural the impulse felt. “You know, this isn’t the first time I saved you.”

  “But before, I could have been anyone. This time you came back. For me.”

  The staircase that dropped down into the club felt the same as it always had. The rest of the city around it had changed, but when Cade circled those stairs, she could have been on her way to play Club V on a Saturday night.

  The chairs and tables at the back of the club had been overturned, stripped, broken down for parts. Some of the table legs and curtains from the stage had been thrown together to form what looked like small huts. Leading with her knife, Cade checked them one by one. If there had been buzz-fiends living here, they were gone, leaving rows of empty bottles behind the bar.