Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Cade turned and turned again, only half-sure of the path that led to the engine room. She knew Renna better than she thought. She followed a soft curve, and an open door showed her the engine-heart.

  It burdened the air with an unsteady beat. The surface was hot, almost too hot to touch. An old trick from Cade’s desert days came to her. She thought cool into her fingertips. Fresh-cut ice, hard rain, a sweating glass.

  Mira dropped to her knees.

  “I don’t want Renna to get hurt. I don’t want that.”

  “None of us do,” Cade mumbled, the words automatic. Her heartbeat lived in her fingertips.

  “But it’s my fault,” Mira said, her voice all tremble, and no solid ground. “I had to. She told me I had to—”

  That word again.

  She.

  It was all Cade needed. She saw a woman, unrobed, her hair the red of an open cut. She saw Mira at the woman’s feet.

  “You’re an Unmaker,” Cade said. The words came out hollow. She wondered how she’d never guessed it before. The girl changed in front of Cade’s eyes—her sweetness shed like a wrong-fitting skin. Or maybe she didn’t change. Maybe Cade had layered good traits on Mira, and now they were sliding off.

  “We don’t have names.” That tone. Harsh and honest. Cade should have known. “Like Mira, that’s not mine. I hated the sound of it, but she gave it to me. For the mission.”

  The girl’s face made no sense, and her words made too much of it. Cade shook, and Renna’s heart seized under her hands. Rennik should have sent someone else to keep the ship calm.

  “I was here to learn things,” Mira said. “To collect information. Not to hurt anyone. She told me to watch you, and then she got really interested when I said you were bringing the rest of the humans together.”

  That was why there had been no Unmaker ships since Res Minor, no attempts on Cade’s life. Mira’s orders had been to watch her, not put a knife to her throat. Now that Cade had a clear picture of the girl she’d taken onboard, instead of a watery-pale reflection of herself, Cade was sure Mira would have been able to kill her if it had come down to that. Dark night, cold blood, no guilt to wipe up when she was done.

  But Cade had been too valuable to her enemies; she had done the hard work for them. The entangled girl who’d given up on her other half wanted to be a savior so much that she had gathered the rest of the human race into a nice, kill-able herd.

  Cade got to her knees, propped Mira up, and slapped her hard.

  “You did this,” Cade said, “and now everyone I care about is going to die.”

  Cade fought against the reality that Mira wasn’t the only one to blame. Gathering the fleet was her choice. Not figuring out Unmother’s plan was her fault. Not seeing the spy planted in front of her might be the worst of all.

  This was on Cade, and her one wish in that moment was that the guilt would crush her to death before anyone else had a chance to go first.

  “I didn’t come to hurt you,” Mira said. Her voice broke and changed, as if she was a different person stuffed in the same small body. “Not that it should matter. Not to me. I don’t care if you die. I don’t care.”

  Mira put her face down, and her hands came up coated in wet shine. “What’s happening to me?” She stared down at herself in terror, like she was bleeding out. But she was crying—probably for the first time.

  Cade remembered Mira’s song, that stubborn curl of music growing out of her strange, rough silence.

  If she told the others that Mira was an Unmaker and had led the rest of them here, to the fleet, they would find some way to get rid of her. With no safe planet to dump her on, that meant death. A quick and painless one—Cade’s friends weren’t monsters. But someone who drew a straight line to their downfall had to be dealt with.

  “You know I should kill you.”

  “Yes,” Mira said. She closed her eyes, like a frightened animal, her lids huddled and her body drawn small.

  When Cade blinked, Mira’s song was weak, and shivering, but it was still there.

  She hauled the girl to her feet. “You’re one of us now. You tell me what I need to know, when I need to know it. Then you tell Unmother what I want her to hear.” She pushed Mira, a little too roughly. “If I think for half a breath that you’re still on their side, I’ll feed you to the stars myself.”

  Mira nodded. Cade wanted to slap her again. She wanted to do worse things, and she had to drag Mira out of that room to keep herself from doing them.

  Cade brought Mira to a stop outside the control room. “Until we’re out of this, I don’t want to see your face,” she said.

  It was a reminder of Cade’s own falling-down. Her mission had been to keep everyone she loved safe, and she had failed, because Unmother sent her a little girl with green eyes, a little girl who had no one.

  In the control room, Lee ran to the com and hit the panels, battering them with her forearms. “Dregs, dregs, dregs.” She added a desperate circle-pat when she remembered she was hurting the ship. “Sorry, Renna.”

  Renna wasn’t listening; she was flying for her life. They had shot clear of the battle. The dark arrow was etching a close pattern around them. Lee noticed Cade in the doorway. “It’s on us.”

  Cade walked hard for the starglass and found the sleek-dark ship. “At least we know where it is.”

  As if on cue, the ship became part of the darkness. Cade and Lee spun, frantic.

  “Twenty-five degrees,” Cade said. “I think.”

  “No . . .” Lee said. “I saw it at two-sixty.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Cade looked at Rennik. He’d stopped pacing. All of his fury had moved to his hands, desperate on the controls. Cade wanted orders from him, questions, anything to prove he was in there, that he wouldn’t leave no matter how sour this turned. But he had gone dangerously silent.

  “Dregs,” Lee said. “I lost it.”

  Cade had another way to look for the ship, but it wouldn’t be easy in this madness. She forced her eyes closed and wrenched herself open.

  Cade struggled past the fear-spiked songs of the crew. The space around them was just that. Space. Empty, bare of thought-songs. But when Cade ran over it again, she felt rough spots, like dark circles cut out of dark cloth.

  Like Mira. Pre-song Mira.

  The absence of Unmakers from the human frequency had always felt wrong, and the secret was stupid-simple. Cade couldn’t find the Unmakers’ songs because they had none. A thought-song comes from a person’s nature, and the Unmakers had tried to force-wipe theirs, start over as something other than human.

  They had silenced themselves.

  Cade checked again, to make sure that the darkness she felt was different from the darkness all around it.

  “Two twenty-five,” she said.

  Renna swung hard. Cade opened her eyes and dropped to one knee. Her hand met the shaking floor. “Play it hard and fast, okay?”

  Renna made a wild dash, spending all of her speed at once. She sliced in so many directions that no ship should have been able to follow the steps of her reckless dance. But the dark arrow knew its business. It hit a wide road of light. The crowd in the control room had no choice but to watch it advance with the grace of a well-made machine.

  Cade’s hand went wet and cold and reached for Rennik’s, but he was strangling the controls.

  A spreading float came for Cade’s entire body. At first she thought it was fear. But the sensation hooked in and actually moved her, loosening her bone-to-bone connections, then detaching her feet from the floor.

  Renna had turned off the gravity.

  Rennik held the panels so tight that he didn’t rise with everyone else. Cade grabbed his hand, but he was anchored fast.

  “Rennik,” she said.

  He wouldn’t let go of the panels. He held on, his hands bloodless, his face raked with a terrible calm.

  “Rennik, please.”

  He stared up at Cade’s rising body. His gray-brown eyes wer
e the same color as Renna.

  The dark arrow rushed fast, passing so close that it claimed the entire view in the starglass.

  Lee screamed:

  “No one touch anything!”

  Rennik fought the rising tide of no-grav. He dug in and breathed hard, until the rasp was the only sound in the control room. Cade’s hand slipped out of his. She thought that was it. She had lost him, and she would lose everything.

  But Rennik closed his eyes and let go.

  A pulse rocked the ship. Screamed, fast and blue-veined, through the walls, leaving a fried smell. Cade floated in the thin, charged air.

  Renna was dead.

  Part Two

  Chapter 18

  Cade’s hands were ruined.

  She had played them to tatters, called blisters to the surface, cut raw lines into her fingertips, healed them, and then cut them deeper. Nothing was bringing Moon-White back from the dead.

  She still started the day with a warm-up, pushing sound out of the guitar, notes that cracked grim, like bones. She gripped Moon-White’s dull body, the shine faded. Cade had taken the guitar during the escape, thinking it was the one thing that would keep her connected to her old life, plugged into memories of Renna. But it painted that time in long-ago colors, the days when she had music and friends, when a fight wasn’t pressing down on every minute.

  The thought of all the Unmakers she had to kill today got between Cade’s brain and her fingers. She could feel the sour notes coming, so she set the guitar down, jumped off the top bunk, and grabbed her boots.

  Mira was waiting on the bottom bunk, framed in the endless metal of Everlast. She sat up like it had just occurred to her, not like she’d timed it perfectly to match Cade. Her hair was an explosion of static.

  “It sounds a little better today.”

  Mira was a first-class liar, but she was also the only person Cade had to talk to on a steady basis.

  “So what’s the plan?” Mira asked.

  Cade hated the innocent spread of the girl’s features, the freckle-spatter that reminded her of Lee, the green eyes that so obviously mirrored her own. Even the name, Mira, had probably been assigned to make Lee and Rennik think of Moira, killed all those years ago. Everything about Mira had been chosen with care, and a mind to the mission. Cade would have been happy to let her loose in the fleet and never see her again.

  But Mira was a spy. If Cade wanted to keep her alive, she had to hold the responsibility in a tight fist.

  “The plan for today is to not die,” Cade said, chucking Mira’s shoes on her bunk. “Let’s move.”

  Even the simple act of Mira tugging the laces, fingers weaving fast, got at Cade’s nerves. It would have been easier to deal with the girl if Lee or Rennik or Ayumi were there to balance out her company, but the rest of Renna’s crew was gone, scattered throughout the fleet. She felt the loss of them like fire in her chest, so Cade stopped her breath. Cut off the oxygen. Killed the burn.

  “Anything new today?” she asked as they hit the hall. Everlast was alive at all hours of fake-morning and made-up night, bursting with fleet members on their way to the mess or their posts, detailing the latest battle.

  Mira ran ahead, tossing Good mornings as she went. She turned back to Cade, mid-stride, and shrugged.

  “Nothing.”

  Since her breakdown in Renna’s engine room, Mira had fed Cade lots of information—the location of an attacking ship, a strategy for the day’s defense. Cade used her new ability to feel out Unmakers’ non-songs, predict flight patterns, learn about ship anatomy, and take them down.

  The best-known killer in the fleet was a title Cade had earned fast, and Mira was her good luck charm. Fleet members shook their hands wherever they went. Matteo, June, Zuzu, and Green were already planning the entries for the history books. Mira took it in with a startled smile, but Cade felt no pride in the work. The way she saw it, she and Mira were both to blame for the constant chipping-away of what was left of the human race.

  As they walked, Cade caught the twitch of Mira’s fingers at her side. “What was that?”

  Mira bundled her fingertips in the other hand. Too many beats passed before she said, “Nothing. Nerves. Or . . . I think I’m hungry. Do we have more of that garlicky stew thing? June said there might be leftovers.”

  For the most part, when Mira had inside info, she brought it to Cade, eager and fumbling, desperate to make up for leading the Unmakers to Renna and the fleet. But now she was changing the subject.

  Whatever she knew, it had to be big.

  “Are you worried they’ll come after you?” Cade asked.

  “No,” Mira said, threading her skinny arms over her chest. A few fleet members nodded and cheered as they passed. Cade dropped a hand on Mira’s shoulder. They smiled and put on their best double act.

  Cade leaned down. “You’re afraid the Unmakers will trace the leak back to you?”

  Mira squirmed ahead of her. “No.”

  “So the chip did tell you something.”

  That biochip was the source of Mira’s info. It caused all of the cheek-tapping and finger-twitching that Cade had thought were nervous tics, little personal details that had made her feel like she knew Mira better. The truth was that she’d been wired, the whole time, with tech much more advanced than any tracker. Cade had never seen its equal in her black market days. When Mira wanted to transmit information, she tapped a nerve cluster in her cheek, and the taps amounted to a code. A chip sunk into the back of her neck acted as a controller for one wedged deep in her brain. When the Unmakers sent back information, it announced itself in Mira’s fingertips.

  Every time they flicked, it stabbed a reminder into Cade’s stomach.

  “If you don’t tell me, more people will die,” Cade said. “Some of them will be people you know.”

  Mira turned into a pebble—mouth, shoulders, everything bunched and hard.

  “We’d all be in danger,” Cade said. “Matteo. Zuzu.” She picked the people Mira liked best, skirting the names of her own friends. Her old, non-communicating friends. But they could die just as easily.

  Mira stubbed her feet as she walked, giving a thoughtful tug on the end of a braid June had wound into her thick pale hair.

  “They’re tough,” she said. “They won’t get hurt.”

  “Renna was tough,” Cade reminded her.

  A swallow stuck in Mira’s throat, and she had to redampen it. It was hard work for the girl to hide her new feelings. From what Cade had gathered during the long hours in their cabin, the central point of the Unmaker plan was the stripping of human emotion. Reactions were altered, and whoever couldn’t keep up with the neural reeducation was punished. Spacesicks and failures were tossed to keep them from contaminating the new line.

  “Renna was nice to me,” Mira said, as if that little truth held miracle status in her brain.

  Cade thought of the turned-off gravity, the doors that had crashed wide so no one would be trapped when the electricity slid, unbound, through the walls. “She took care of us, down to the end.”

  Mira cut across the docks and took the stairwell in uneven leaps. “Well, with me, she made a mistake.”

  Mira had never lied to Cade about being an orphan, not knowing her people or where she was from. The Unmakers were bred in labs to cut down on the chances of attachment, but to increase their ranks over the last twenty years, a number of infants had been bought out of their cribs. Mira had been raised Unmaker, and given a mission.

  She was all mission—or she had been until she made friends with Renna, and got close to Cade, and grew a song.

  It filled Cade’s mind now, while she closed her eyes to make a quick decision. Cade cut back from the control room, trailing Mira past the medical sector, all the way to a row of glass sub-rooms. Each one had its own control panel that could only be accessed with top-level code. Cade fired a string of digits into a number pad and entered airlock 7, leaving Mira on the outside.

  “What are we doing?” Mi
ra asked through the glass. She was a creature of routines, plans, schedules, and executions. Anything that disrupted them blew at her like a hard gale.

  “I need to know,” Cade said. She couldn’t launch herself into another day of targeting Unmakers, one ship at a time, if some new and terrible thing was about to burst wide.

  With Mira, the torture that would have been used on another spy was out of the question. Cade was sure that Unmother had figured that into her calculations. There were times when all of the manipulation behind Mira’s presence boiled so hot under Cade’s skin that she almost tortured the girl to spite the Unmakers, to surprise them, to break the patterns they were so sure they knew.

  But this was a little girl, and no matter how much Cade hated her, she couldn’t hurt her, because then she would have to hate herself too.

  She had enough of that toxin in her system.

  “The information that comes to us through that biochip is keeping us alive,” Cade said. “It’s our food. It’s our air.”

  There were moments now when Mira didn’t try to paste over her lack of feeling with a simulation. It was a form of honesty, but it made Cade’s mouth leach dry and bad-tasting, every time.

  “I’m no good to the fleet without that information,” Cade went on. She locked her knees and readied herself. There was no way of knowing how this plan would play out. “You can tell me what came through the biochip, or you can toss me off Everlast. Your choice.”

  Mira looked at the controls sitting in front of her, simple and patient, the green button lording it over the smaller black ones. Anyone could figure out how to work it. You didn’t want to leave room for error when it came to airlocks.

  Mira rested her hands at the edges of the control panel. “What if I don’t want to do either of those things?”

  Cade dumped herself on the glass floor. “We’ll wait.”

  Mira’s breath leaped shallow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Mira’s finger made contact with the green button, and the airlock hissed like a hurt animal as it struggled to separate its locked metal teeth. Cade ran for the door, punching the emergency override into another number pad. She latched on to the door, all of her weight on the frame, as the vacuum snatched her legs, trying to steal them out from their rightful place under Cade as she ran the snug away.