Cade slapped her palms on the stage, pulling herself up by her arms. By the time she rose to standing, she was drenched in memory. All of those Saturdays, all of those songs. Everything strong—the stage lights, the crowd-stares, the drinks.
Cade hadn’t picked this place so she could swim around in old times, but they came back anyway. The brass, and under it, the loneliness. And then, the one good part: the pure rush of music.
Cade had been a guitar-slinger once, not a savior. But even in those old days, she’d been different from other people. Cade and Xan were already entangled, and he’d needed a kick start to the brain to wake him up from a coma. Cade had provided that with the loudest, hardest, best song she’d ever played.
It was while she stood here, on this stage, in this spot, that it had all started.
Cade shook off the memory and it broke and left her, like a shattering of droplets. But some of them clung, seeping into her as she set up the microphones, found the booth, and brought the stage lights back to life.
Rennik led in a group of survivors, and the club started to look like it always had on show night, thick with bodies and excitement.
“Have you done a sweep of the backstage areas?” Rennik asked.
Cade shook her head.
“I can do it!” Mira cried, running for the black-painted hall.
“Better let me,” Rennik said. A few long strides and he passed Mira with a pat on the shoulder.
Cade tried not to think about him in the dressing room, every turn of him reflected in her mirror. Now she was the one who wanted to knock on the door, impatient, press him back against the wall.
Putting her wants away was easier work than usual. Cade couldn’t change what had happened, but at least she could promise herself not to make the same naïve stumble twice.
Lee and Ayumi thundered down the stairs with a set of survivors. Till and the man from the clothing stall and the others followed with their own groups, until there were fifty people, maybe seventy-five.
A full house. Cade slitted her eyes against the stage lights, really looking at her audience for the first time. The survivors. The spacesicks. The exhaustion that sat on people as clear as grime-layers. Cade’s crew lined the room, looking triumphant in the case of Lee and tense in the case of everyone else.
Cade rushed to set the rescue in motion.
“If you’re here,” she said, “it’s because you want off this planet as much as I do.”
Cade had it all planned, the brass speech, the quick flight to the outskirts of the city.
But the floor had other ideas. It wavered under her feet.
back where
things begin
packed infinities
trembling, like a word on the tongue
to grow
into the shape of itself
careen out—
be the air and fill it
waiting
to wild-expand
to
become
Cade held the stage as this streamed through her.
She managed not to fall to her knees, and that felt like a victory. She cleared her throat and got ready to move on to the rest of the speech.
But then a ruckus—a full ten on the scale—broke wide at the back of the club. People dressed in robes rushed in and spilled forward, swirling the crowd like dark paint. The figures came first, and then the sounds. Grunts, knives, skin.
And everything inside of Cade exploded.
Chapter 14
She felt like she was being torn in thousands of directions, from the center outward. Every time she closed her eyes, she was in a strange world of violent expansion.
When she opened them again, she was in the middle of a bar fight. The fake Unmakers hadn’t reached the stage yet, but Cade didn’t have long. Robed figures crashed through the crowd, which was armed for the most part, thanks to the constant death threats.
Cade had just enough time to get clear. She had to. But she couldn’t move. The wrenching apart of her particles was too much, too strong and painful. It flashed and strobed through her. Tore time into pieces.
and inside things were moving
out fast white-hot
wild and spreading
everywhere
and she couldn’t
Stop it. She had to stop it.
The fight, the inner explosion, everything.
Cade opened her eyes. Knives flashed at her feet. All it would take was a few steps and she would be backstage, but she couldn’t do it.
She fell to the floor, and crashed. Inside. Outside. Everywhere.
the beginning,
all over again
the same as before
the same always
she could feel it
this time, she could feel
Everything.
Beauty, pain, all of the things she hadn’t been able to feel when she lived on Andana, when her life was loneliness and the scratch of sand.
Lee caught her eye across the room.
“What’s happening?” Lee mouthed, clear as noon. She shoved a robed man off and put a knee to his stomach.
What’s happening?
Cade didn’t know. Something with Xan. Something with her particles. Something with the universe.
Exploding.
Cade tried to shrug, but her shoulders were made of parts that were moving away from each other too fast to act like a shoulder.
None of this made any snugging sense, and Cade had just enough of her brain functioning to know that. But it was real. It was happening. She tried not to blink, but that just dried her eyes out and didn’t stop it.
forcing her open,
and open,
and more open
Focus.
Cade would have to smash herself back together. Fast.
She tried to follow the fight, find its rhythms, so she could throw herself back into it. She watched Till take down three fake Unmakers, only to get slashed in the gut. Ayumi and Mira stood behind the bar, smashing bottles and handing them to people who needed weapons.
Rennik had his double blades out and swinging, but he kept interrupting himself to toss concerned looks at Cade. They all did. Her inner disruption was throwing them off, holding them back from winning this fight.
Cade had to get it together.
She pulled out her knife, jumped off the stage, and was fighting before she hit the floor.
A fake Unmaker grabbed Cade by the shoulder. She hit him and sent him down. Easy. The hard part wasn’t being strong. The hard part was keeping herself in her body. The hard part was staying in one piece when her connection to Xan was splitting her apart.
farther and farther and father and
Cade had to stop him.
but this was part of her
how could she contain it,
how could she ask it to end when it was all starting
“Stop, stop, stop,” Cade muttered.
Rennik fought his way over to her.
“Are you all right?”
He planted himself in front of her, between the stage and the robes and the clash that wouldn’t stop.
“Are you all right?” he asked, louder.
“I will be,” Cade said.
she let it stream and have her,
be part of her,
all of her
And then she turned it off.
Dark, silent, done. It was as simple as telling Xan that he wasn’t welcome anymore, which was something Cade hadn’t been willing to do. Not after everything that had happened. But she couldn’t hold this anymore.
And then—
Cade came up kicking, biting, swinging with all of her force. She fought with a cold intensity she had never felt before. She would get them out of this club, off this planet, away from here, forever.
Cade fought shoulder to shoulder with Lee. She nodded at Rennik to let him know that she was all right. Better than all right. She was back to herself—a Xan-less self, but she would
deal with the loss later.
The fake Unmakers put up a fight. Still, under their robes, they were cowards, the kind who would turn on their own species to keep their skins intact. Faced with a serious brawl, they ran up the stairs.
Once the crowd was back to its original composition, Cade breathed out so hard she almost sank, but she braced her knees and kept it together. She decided to skip to the end of her speech.
“Let’s get the snug out of here.”
Lee fired her gun into the air and let out an open-throated sound, a pure rallying cry. Cade ran up the circle of steps into the warm night. Over the last stretches of sand, back to Renna, trailing all of the people who wanted to live as much as she needed to save them.
Survivors crammed every inch of the ship. They dimpled the wall with their elbows as Renna cracked atmosphere.
Lee and Rennik set the course to meet the rest of the fleet, but Rennik was distracted. His eyes stuttered over the crowded control room. Cade could almost see the worry expanding inside of him.
“It’s just for a little while,” Cade said. She patted the panels so Renna knew the comfort was meant for her, not her frustrating counterpart. “We’ll get them onto Everlast as soon as we join the rest of the fleet.”
It was one more stretch of black now, one good haul away. Cade needed to check and make sure the ships were all coming together the way that they’d planned. But first, she needed to find a minute for herself, curl her fingers around a little bit of time. She figured she had earned it.
Cade headed down the chute, toward the one person who might be able to help her understand what had happened in the club. Gori was still in his bunk, staring at his toes. The influx of survivors didn’t seem to touch him.
Cade poked him in the ribs.
“I need your help,” she said. No niceties, but no begging, either. Gori had a special way of making her feel like a gnat.
“I will do whatever I can to assist,” he said.
“You mean, without leaving the ship or interfering with your busy rapture schedule,” Cade said.
Gori sat up straight, radiating pride from his little bunk. “I will do what I can. This word implies parameters.”
Cade sighed and launched into her story. Everything that had happened since Hades, everything about Xan. She told Gori about the lingering connection, the strong flashes that had nudged further and further into her life.
“Xan was in a black hole. And then he was—everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
Cade cupped her elbows with her hands. “Yeah. That’s what it felt like.” Xan—or whatever he had broken down to—had just ripped and spread through Cade with such force that she didn’t know if she would ever feel whole again.
Gori sat up straighter, but this wasn’t another injection of pride. He looked almost excited. “This human. This boy Xan. The particles that were once part of him made it to the center of the black hole.” Cade had more or less put that much together herself, from all of the scraps of feeling, all the flashes. “It was an immediate process for the human boy Xan,” Gori said, “but your experience of the same event unfolded on a much slower time scale.”
“How is that possible?” Cade asked.
Gori looked disappointed in her, almost stung. “All time is one time,” he said. The motto he loved so much had finally come in handy.
“So he made it to the center,” Cade said. “Shouldn’t that have been it? Shouldn’t I have stopped feeling him?”
Gori got up and paced in front of Cade, his robes sweeping, pebbly lips pursed. The crowd in the main cabin below angled their necks and took notice. It wasn’t every day that you saw a Darkrider leaping around.
“The human boy Xan did not simply make it to the center,” Gori said. “He passed through the center.”
“Of a black hole?” Cade asked. “What the snug is on the other side?”
“There are many possibilities.” Gori’s dark eyes sparked and his fingers pulsed. “It sounds as if, in the case of this specific black hole, the human boy Xan returned to the beginning.”
“The beginning,” Cade repeated. Those words had been part of what happened to her in the club. “The beginning of what?”
“Time.”
Cade sat down on Gori’s bunk. It was as simple as that. Gori told her the truth, and she believed it, and her knees stopped existing.
“You’re telling me that Xan’s particles time-traveled?”
“Yes,” Gori said.
“And the thing I felt was . . . ?”
“The universe starting again.”
All of that bursting, spreading, growing—that was what Xan, or at least his particles, had felt. Cade had to feel it, too, because she was still connected to those particles. But there was a catch. She couldn’t hold the entire expanding universe inside of her. She had barely been able to handle the black hole.
“So it’s a good thing I shut it down,” she said.
“Perhaps it is a necessary thing.” Gori sat next to Cade, spent from his little burst of excitement. He would probably take ten naps in a row to recover. Cade didn’t have that sort of time. She had to process the impossible-but-true. She had to keep her mind clear and her eyes on the fleet.
But she had one more question.
“What will happen to him?” Her voice pinched small. “The pieces that used to be him?”
“They will continue their journey,” Gori said. “The same one that they have traveled, and always travel.”
Cade nodded. That made sense. All of it made a very strange sort of sense. Xan would keep doing what he had always done. And Cade would get up from this wrinkled bunk and try to change the fate of the human race.
Chapter 15
The ship was clogged with bodies.
With the common room retrofitted as a sleeping area, Rennik’s cabin off-limits, and the secret bedroom full, the survivors from Andana were left to wander the main cabin and the common room all day. Maybe the control room, if Rennik didn’t polite-stare them down and Lee didn’t kick them out.
Cade needed peace and as much quiet as she could manage. It was time to check on the progress of the fleet. She tried the mess and found it full of survivors in various stages of stuffing their faces.
Mira bobbed in behind Cade. Since she’d saved the girl in the basements, it was like Mira had tied herself to Cade with an invisible string. As soon as Cade stopped moving, Mira felt the tug and came running.
“Do you need something to eat?” Mira asked. “Ayumi taught me how to make mash cakes. Oh, and tea!”
“Not hungry,” Cade said, which she figured out was a lie as soon as her stomach twitched a correction. “Well, maybe. But right now I need to find the recipe for everyone leaving me alone.”
Mira perked to her tiptoes and piped in a harsh-honest tone, “Cade doesn’t want you in here! Clear out!” She sat at the freshly emptied table and folded her hands. Mira didn’t seem to think alone had anything to do with her leaving, too.
“All right,” Cade said. “Good enough.”
She sat across the table from Mira and closed her eyes. Mira’s chair screeched forward as she leaned in to watch. Cade settled her shoulders and sighed through her irritation. Her audiences usually gave her a little more breathing room.
Cade reached, knowing that the first thing she had to do was get past Mira’s rough lack of music. The songs of the crew and survivors came back. She readied herself for pure silence, the reminder of every death, the dark outline of every failure.
Cade didn’t have to go far to find the other humans, on their ships, all of them streaming toward a single point. She ran her mind over the songs. So many—but the experience didn’t overwhelm her now. These songs were old friends. They had given Cade a small, care-worthy hope after the Unmaker attacks. And they were coming together.
It was real.
The fleet she had dreamed was real.
Once Cade found the right way to listen, to hold them all in her mind,
space opened up. Time stopped pushing at her and streamed alongside, like a helping wind. Cade didn’t need to rush. She could stay for a minute, linger.
“What does it feel like?” Mira asked.
Cade cast around for the right words. “It’s like when you hear a song, and it comes with feelings tacked on, whatever you felt when you first heard it, and the place where you were, that gets twisted up in it too. It’s like that, but happening a hundred times. A thousand times.”
The eager scratch of Mira’s chair went silent. “I’m not used to songs.”
Cade clamped the rubbery inside of her cheek between her teeth. Of course Mira wasn’t used to music. Cade didn’t know what sort of life she’d had, but it probably hadn’t come with lullabies built in. Maybe that’s why Mira didn’t have a thought-song.
“You can learn to listen,” Cade said.
She hummed a few notes, and was surprised to find that the same bit of song she’d tried on her mother came back to her now. Even though she couldn’t see Mira, Cade could feel her trying. The change in breath, the muscle-focus.
“That’s not listening,” Cade said. “That’s clenching.”
Mira sighed and gave up. When she spoke again, the words were fainter than far-off stars. “Do you ever wonder if you can be like everyone else?”
So Mira felt it too, their being different from the other humans in the fleet. She felt like she had to give Mira an answer, even if it was fractured and half wrong. Even if she failed.
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