Cade hit the button that closed the door. The glass became the only thing keeping her separate from the salted black.
Mira threw herself at Cade, arms shrink-wrapping to fit her neck. “You’re still alive!” Air-gulps shook the girl, top to bottom. This wasn’t the sort of behavior Cade expected from someone who’d tried to kill her.
Airlock 7 had been broken for a week, and the engineers were too busy repairing busted engines and downed electrical systems to get to it. Still, one of them could have put it on the repair list without Cade noticing. She hadn’t really expected to test the theory with her life.
“Remind me to keep you away from buttons,” Cade said.
She breathed back to calm as Mira spilled words. “I didn’t know which one was worse. If I didn’t tell you, you died! If I did tell you, you would launch an attack, and a lot of other people would die. Matteo, Zuzu, other people. You said so yourself! What did you want me to do?”
Cade sighed. She was so tired that she couldn’t tell exhaustion apart from pain. “Tell me,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
“There’s going to be a meeting,” Mira said. “Of the highest-ranking officers.”
She named the ship, the coordinates, the time. Cade’s heart started up a strict, urgent ticking. Less than five hours. There was only one question important enough that she could spare the time to ask it. “Will she be there?”
Mira nodded.
Cade’s feet pounded glass.
Everlast rocked as Cade ran flat out for the control room, and at first she thought they had been attacked. But this was gentle, a cradle-rock.
A ship docking.
Maybe supplies, maybe fleet members from another ship. Cade didn’t have time to stop and learn the details. She had to drill this information through the right thick skulls, so they could act on it.
Four steps from the control room, a hand caught on Cade’s back. She spun, sure that it was Mira catching up, but she found herself inches from honey-summer skin and searching brown eyes.
Cade hadn’t seen Ayumi since the night after Renna died, when she had dropped the survivors on Everlast, stayed the night, and dissolved in the hectic course of the next morning. Her shuttle was gone, and for days Cade had no idea if she was running the planet-finding mission or hiding somewhere else in the fleet. Or dead—that was always a possibility. Then Ayumi had radioed once, a brief and staticky message, fake-bright with news, to let Cade know that she was joining the Rembran ships in the fleet. She was safe, and they would see each other in some vague but wonderful future.
Lee had gone with her. No goodbye.
“Hi,” Ayumi said with a little wave.
Cade let the truth slip. “It’s good to see you.”
Ayumi clutched at Cade’s arm, a big reach, like she was drowning in water that Cade couldn’t see.
“I need your help.”
The control room tugged at Cade. Mira’s intel was going stale. “It’ll have to be someone else.”
“No,” Ayumi said. “It has to be you, and if you can’t see why, you’ve gone tone-deaf on top of everything else.”
Tone-deaf? Ayumi must have been glassing out and she’d come to Cade for a quick hit of sound to keep the spacesick at arm’s length.
After Cade joined the fleet, she’d spent a full night wondering if she should tell people about her music, and what it might be able to do for the spacesicks. But it hadn’t brought her mother back, not all the way. It hadn’t been enough to keep Lee and Ayumi close. With the Unmakers on top of the fleet, taking down ships did more good for the human race than plucking songs and playing nurse to the spacesick.
Besides. Ayumi looked fine. Slightly dimmed, nervous-fingered, but fine.
“Look,” Cade said. “I don’t have a guitar. We scoured the fleet and didn’t find one.” She dropped her voice. “So if you need help with certain symptoms—”
“It’s not for me,” Ayumi said.
Lee stared out of Ayumi’s nav chair at the shifting metal of the fleet, but there was no way she could see it through those blank, glassy eyes.
“She flew for such a long time on the Express,” Ayumi said, perched on the arm of Lee’s chair. “I thought it couldn’t touch her, that she was invincible. Like you.”
Cade swallowed a laugh. It sat, radiating bitterness in her stomach.
Not getting spacesick just meant that Cade had to watch everyone else do it. And she couldn’t even shut off how much she cared, because that was what kept her human. Cade had to give herself to the pain, and then pinch it down to a point. Solid. Bright. Always-there.
“I’m not invincible.”
“As it turns out, neither is Lee,” Ayumi said.
Cade couldn’t look out the window, because it reminded her of the pressing attack plans she was supposed to be making. Instead she focused on the walls, covered in Ayumi’s sprawl-and-splatter interpretations of the universe. Earth glared down at Cade, the paint dried-out and shiny, heading toward cracked.
“How long has she been like this?” Cade asked.
She didn’t want to look at Lee, either, and see her fallen so far from her spitting, swearing, wild grace. Cade had learned to deal with glass from her mother, and she expected it from Ayumi. But Lee was Cade’s definition of human. Watching her hollow out meant too much.
“We cover for each other, so we can keep working for the fleet.” Ayumi ducked her head, cheeks sparking pink. “She covers for me, mostly. It’s a good system, and it keeps us out of the spacesick bay. But she’s been out for half a day now. I can’t keep this quiet much longer.”
“Why did you wait?” Cade asked. She could have dealt with a spacesick Lee earlier this morning. Yesterday, maybe.
“If she knew I brought her here, in this state . . .”
Cade knew that she was light-years out of Lee’s favor. She had told Ayumi’s secret, ignored Lee’s condition. Lee had every right to blame Cade for not arming the fleet, and she could even stretch that into blame for Renna’s death. But Cade still felt like she was missing something.
“Like I said.” Cade spread her hands. “No guitar.”
For one weighted moment, Cade let herself remember the good of a working instrument in her hands; the perfect feel and the beautiful blare of sound.
“I can’t help her without Moon-White.”
Maybe it was better this way. Lee would be safe in the spacesick bay, as safe as she could be. Cade knew, because she had deposited her mother there before the first week was out. There was no way to keep an eye on her with the fleet swirling, Unmakers closing in. Gori was just as unreachable: Two days in he’d chosen to go into a serious rapture, expanding to the size of an entire cabin on Everlast. The stunt had attracted crowds at first, children who came to poke at the real-life Darkrider. Cade had thought she’d be able to wake him at some point, but so far, he was as wakeable as a stone.
And then there was Rennik.
Cade thought of him on that first night—or the last, depending on which end you looked from. He had let himself be herded into the shuttle, led to a room on Everlast, and assigned a new bed.
Cade didn’t know what losing Renna would do to him. No one did.
When she had gone to see him in the morning, he looked wrong. Smaller, even though he didn’t slouch. Off balance, even though he sat up straight and perfect, the sheet slung tight over his lap. He had stared at Cade with burned-out eyes.
“Please,” Ayumi said, pulling Cade out of her old pain. “Don’t deprive Lee of the thing she loves best.”
“You?”
Ayumi cast her eyes to the floor. “Oh. I was going to say hunting Unmakers.”
If the fight was all Lee had to come back for, Cade might have left her in her disconnected state. But Lee had Ayumi, who had slogged through a dangerous patch of space on the off chance that something could be done. Ayumi had risked Lee’s wrath, and Cade knew that with Lee, a step like that was a true measure of love.
“All right,
” Cade said.
Maybe a fraction of the decision was selfish, too, hoping that her friend would come back to her.
“You’ll do it?” Ayumi asked, her brightness back to full blast. Saying yes to her felt better than planet-bound sunshine, better than spring.
But Cade ran into problems right away. She’d promised music and had no way to make it. Lee wasn’t going to be dragged from a nasty fit of spacesick with palm-on-nearest-surface percussion. It sounded nice, but it told no story. It had no heart.
“Maybe I can put a call out to the fleet and find something,” Cade said. “I pick up instruments fast. But—”
Time. Ticking.
Ayumi ducked her head as if she was hiding from how stupid or obvious her idea was. “You are human,” she said. “You come with an instrument built in.”
Under any other conditions Cade wouldn’t sing. She didn’t sing. But whatever rules she had laid out for herself years ago had already been cracked or discarded, and there was no point in treating the last one standing as sacred.
She dusted off her vocal chords with a cough, and let out a weak-warbled hum. There was nothing pretty about her rough, rusty alto. Cade tried to scrounge the words to a few Earth-songs, but she came up empty-headed.
Cade was one good breath away from telling Ayumi that it wouldn’t work.
But something rose to prove her wrong. It swelled when she looked at Ayumi, when she let herself look at Lee.
All she had to do was close her eyes and—
—it was like reaching out a hand, but the hand was music, and what Cade found at the end of her fingertips wasn’t Lee. Cade reached past her, into a loose nowhere-place. Cast her wanting into that void. Wished new life into her friend, sewing the connection between mind and self, dragging Lee in from the wild black fields of disconnect.
Calling her home.
From that nowhere-place, something answered the call of her wanting. It matched the intensity, the need of her voice. She pushed and it pushed back, but there was no fear of falling. This was balance. A force working with her, sometimes the same, sometimes in tension, but always with her.
Always.
third in line and waiting
for the long slide into dark
ride the curve to day
again, following the
arc
Cade’s breath wore out.
She didn’t know where she’d been. Away. But now she came back to the little ship, unsure, and Lee came with her.
Ayumi plastered the side of Lee’s face with kisses. “What . . . what are these for?” Lee asked.
While she was busy blinking her dark-moon eyes and figuring out where the snug she was, Ayumi grabbed one of Cade’s hands, turning it over and over like a charm. “What was that? It felt different.”
Cade knew the song. It was the one she’d been building, a phrase at a time, before the Unmakers attacked the fleet. But there had been something new about it this time. Ayumi had found the right word.
Different.
“What’s Cade doing here?” Lee asked. Her face tightened. Cade got ready for it to flick to full-on disapproval mode, but it was like something jammed. “What was that singing about?”
“Singing?”
Cade sounded even more confused than Lee. She couldn’t remember choosing words, or putting them in order, but she ran back over her memories and there they were.
Lyrics.
Ayumi let Cade’s hand drop and looked into her eyes. “Cadence, there was something about that song . . .”
Cade had felt it too. None of her club creations could rival it. None of her harsh alone-songs came anywhere near its beauty. The lyrics tagged it in Cade’s mind as important, but the way she had felt while it poured out of her proved the matter.
Cade’s throat begged her to get back to it.
Ayumi shuffled to get out of Cade’s way. “We took up plenty of your time. You can get back to—”
“What’s happening?” Lee asked, sensing the switch to urgency and hopping down from the nav chair.
“The Unmakers,” Cade said. “We have new intel. It’s our first real chance to take them down.”
Lee turned one full, bewildered circle. “Then why are we sitting around here having a sing-along?”
Chapter 19
Cade sat at the command table on Everlast, Matteo on one side, Mira on the other. She’d worried that she would have to fight to get Mira a seat in the control room, but all she had to do was keep showing up with the girl in her wake.
The crew loved having Mira around. Zuzu snuck her crinkle-wrapped sweets, and June braided her hair into long parallel lines that snapped and swung. Once, Matteo had lifted Mira onto his shoulders and given her a full tour of the ship. Mira seemed to like them too, but Cade had no idea how much of that was real and how much she’d painted on to keep Cade from throwing her out the nearest airlock.
“This new information,” Matteo said, fitting the pad of a thumb to his cheek stubble. “Where did you come by it?”
Between getting swept aside by Ayumi and breaking into song, Cade hadn’t had time to think of a lie. She couldn’t pretend she’d heard it from another spy in the fleet. When Cade had first arrived, she’d used her knowledge of the Unmakers and their non-songs to feel out traitors. There had been eight. Eight Unmaker spies embedded in the fleet. At first, it had made Cade feel like the Unmaker attack was inevitable, that it would have happened Mira or no Mira. But no one else had been that close to critical information. So the spies went into the hard black of space, and none of Cade’s guilt went with them.
“Cade intercepted something on the com,” Mira said. Cade’s brain stuttered at the ease of Mira’s lies. “She didn’t mention it sooner because it was double-encrypted. She spent all night cracking it.”
Cade writhed under the pressure of looking like a sudden code genius, but Mira’s smile seemed to make up for it.
Even Lee looked impressed.
Convincing the Everlast crew to act on good information was the easy part. Now came the rest.
“We have to call a quorum,” June said with a quick shuffle of papers. It would be the first time Everlast had called a quorum since the fleet came together.
Lee and Ayumi were invited to stay. Others arrived, one docking at a time—the captains of a dozen ships, and fleet members who had made names for themselves. The doctors who dealt with the sick and wounded. The tech genius from Rembra who had stopped the Unmakers from patching into the coms. Half an hour of precious pre-attack time was spent pulling everyone together, and there was still one open seat at the command table.
Cade couldn’t wait on the latecomer.
“I have a two-part plan,” she said. “The first part involves almost all of the small craft in the fleet. If we send one of the warships anywhere near this meeting, the Unmakers will call it off before it even starts. But if we build a swarm of the smallest ships in the right sector—”
“And attack them how?” Zuzu asked. “We ran out of ammo for blast-wiper cannons three weeks ago.”
“Which is part of the plan,” Cade said. “They’ll think it’s recon, so they won’t feel threatened.”
Cade and Mira swapped a look. Mira had fed the Unmakers the info about the drained ammo, at Cade’s request. It sounded like good intel, which helped her maintain a cover. It also helped set up a moment like this one.
“We go after the ship with the blast-wipers,” Cade said. Zuzu started another round of objections, but Cade was ready. “Not the cannons. Pressurized air. We have to get close for it to work, but the Unmakers won’t expect it, and all we have to do is blow through the hull once—as long as we hit the right room. Hard to hold a meeting when all of the attendees have been sucked out into space.”
“Explosive decompression?” Zuzu asked, flicking at her earlobe. “Crude. But hell, I like crude!”
“Ditto,” Lee said.
Ayumi drummed her fingers on the table.
“The other lit
tle ships scatter, draw the fire,” Cade said, getting into a rhythm now. She stood up and paced, made a performance of it. The more confident she sounded, the more the crew would believe in the plan. The more she would believe in it. “Three of our shuttles are left to dock and send boarding parties. Once the rest of the Unmaker ship locks down, we have to deal with the leftovers. Make a clean sweep.”
Cade knew how close this plan sounded to the Unmakers’ original one. Take out the masses, round up the rest, hunt them down. A twinge lodged and spread through her in a sickening way. But Lee stared at Cade like she had never heard anything so brilliant or brass.
“Where’d you come up with that?” she asked.
Cade shrugged.
It was all she thought about. Day. Night. When she wasn’t skimming information from Mira, she was planning elaborate deaths. She doubted this was what the scientists had in mind when they entangled her.
“I don’t know,” Matteo said. “Without Everlast to protect the smaller craft, it seems like a great deal of risk to our pilots.”
They fought it out. Lee took Cade’s side, which came as a surprise, and Ayumi watched them both with a worry-coated look. Cade wrapped herself so tight in the arguments that she didn’t notice the last member of the meeting arrive. He lingered in the doorway. Too tall. Thinner, now, curves cut so deep they looked harsh.
The last time Cade had seen Rennik, in that faceless room on Everlast, his clothes still smelling of crisped meat, he had looked emptied out, done. But then his eyes had lit with a fever-burn.
“You can rest,” Cade had told him. “As long as you need before you feel . . .” She couldn’t say better. Renna had died and that word had gone with her. “Rest,” Cade repeated, her hands clumsy and useless against the itch of his new blanket.
Rennik forced himself to his feet, clenched against an oncoming lurch. He fought it, like swallowing back vomit. “I won’t need rest,” he said. “It would deprive me of the pleasure of killing the Unmakers, one by one.”
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