He stared at Cade now, and the fever was stronger than on that first night, fed by all of his success.
If Lee and Ayumi were a well-known team of pilots, and Cade and Mira had made a name for themselves taking down Unmaker ships, Rennik had made one by storming the ships and killing, down to the last.
“Cade?” Matteo asked.
She didn’t know how much of the conversation she’d missed, but when she looked up, the air was thick with raised hands.
“Cade,” Lee stage-whispered across the table. “You might want to actually, you know, vote for your own plan?”
“Right.” Her hand shot up.
“Rennik,” Green said in a dicey manner that made it clear he was wary, if not outright afraid, of the Hatchum. “Good of you to join us. We’ll catch you up on the plan and then you can vote—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rennik said. His tone had been stripped of calm. It was more a pulse than a voice.
It doesn’t matter.
Cade wanted that to mean what it used to: that Rennik was on her side, and would back her. But the words had a newer, sharper edge. It didn’t matter as long as he had plenty of metal-breathers to kill.
“Right, then,” Matteo said. “It’s decided.”
Cade forced herself to wait until Rennik drained out before she stood.
Ayumi bolted around the table. She had been a special sort of awkward all through the meeting. “Look,” she said. “About that song.” Cade rushed out of the control room, but Ayumi kept talking.
The trajectory for the dock was set, and nothing Ayumi said could pause it, but a figure waddling down the hall did the job for her. He was short, robed, blinking faster than Cade’s counting-down heartbeat.
“Oh, good!” Ayumi said, misinterpreting Cade’s stalled feet. “So the next time you sing—”
Gori landed in the middle of the conversation.
“Sing?” Gori asked. Then he muttered to himself, “Yes, of course. A song would explain it.”
“You’re awake!” Ayumi said. Her arms flung high and threatened to clasp around his neck, but even with two months’ worth of sleep crust in his eyes, Gori managed to warn her back with a glare.
“I had no intention of leaving rapture for several more years, but I was interrupted.” Gori focused on Cade. “This song—”
Cade wanted to get her voice around it again. But she had less than a minute to board, and less than ten before she’d be in the thick of a battle, where she would need all of her nerve endings alive to the danger.
“Look,” she said. “I’m done taking requests.”
“What I have to say is not shaped like a request,” Gori said. “It is a gift of knowledge, a message from the universe:
“You must stop this song.”
Cade tried to be patient as Gori adjusted to the hold of Ayumi’s shuttle. Mira flitted in a cautious circle around the Darkrider as he stumbled. She looked double-pleased: first, that Gori was there to stare at, and second, that another fleet member was sucking Cade’s attention away from her, and she’d been able to dart into the mission without a fight.
“I can’t believe you brought him,” Lee said from the nav chair as she strapped in next to Ayumi.
“He’s one of us,” Ayumi said. “Really, if I’m being fair, he’s been one of us for longer than I have.”
But Gori had never been an active member of the universe, let alone a useful addition to the crew. He sat and rested his head on the pucker of robe that covered his knees, and Cade wondered if Gori, with all of his dark energy chasing, could suffer from motion sickness. “I do not understand why we had to leave the great hulking metal-bellied one.”
“Everlast?” Cade asked.
The names of ships didn’t stick to Gori’s brain. Too small and fleeting, on the cosmic scale.
“The metal belly isn’t part of the plan,” Cade said.
She had insisted that it stay in motion, which meant that if Gori wanted to talk to her, he had to tag along as they crossed the dark trench of space that divided the human fleet from the Unmakers.
“Don’t waste time explaining it to him,” Lee called back. “He doesn’t care if we live or die.”
“All things die,” Gori said.
“Ugh. Proof. Thanks.”
But Gori wasn’t done talking or stumbling. He wove a path through the hold, putting his most philosophical hand gestures to use. “I care about matters at the scale of a single life. I also care about them at the scale of the cell, the star. This is not a lack of caring. It is a great burden of caring.”
“Hey,” Lee said, twisting against her straps. “You can help us with the battle!”
“Help?” Gori asked.
“You know,” she said. “Nudge space around so the Unmakers get confused.”
Gori blinked. “No.”
Ayumi tugged Lee’s strap to keep her pointed forward. “Can you sort of curl dark energy into fists and crush their ships?” Lee asked.
Gori blinked again, hard, like it might rearrange Lee’s matter into something nicer. “No.”
Lee flicked a switch with extra force. “What good are you, then?”
Ayumi turned to Lee without interrupting the smooth flow of her hands on the controls. “You know, there are useful skills that have nothing to do with killing Unmakers.”
“Yeah?” Lee asked, all flirt-and-challenge. “Name one.”
Ayumi leaned across the space between the chairs and tugged Lee’s strap again, this time pulling her in. “One,” she said, and kissed her. “Two.” Lee dove in hard. “Three.” Ayumi brushed a line of wayward hair away from the side of Lee’s face, and kissed her again.
“That’s the same as one,” Lee said.
“No,” Ayumi said. “There’s a bit of a difference.” She went over the already covered territory, and Cade pretended to be caught up in the schematics of the ship they were going to board. She didn’t need Lee or Ayumi to notice her bitter-tight face.
Lee surfaced from the kissing with puffed lips and a much more pleasant tone, calling back to Gori, “I still think you should go all Darkrider on them.”
“I did not come out of rapture to disturb the universe for you.” Gori seemed to have an endless supply of harsh stares. When he was finished with Lee, he found one for Cade. “I came to inform you that you must not do it again.”
“Again?” she asked. “How did I manage the first time?”
“I felt it as a series of vibrations,” Gori said, shaking his hands in a sort of crude demonstration. “But when I heard the girl Ayumi describe it as a song, I understood it was the same. A series of vibrations, shaped by a human voice.”
The ship crossed the invisible line between fleet space and enemy blackness. Cade had flown enough to know it, with the same inner ping that used to tell her when she was nearing her bunker in the desert. They were close now, and Cade needed to tack her mind to the intricacies of the mission. But she couldn’t let go of Gori’s words. “It upset the balance of the universe? My singing was that bad?”
Ayumi looked back from the controls, curls flying. “I knew that song was special!”
“Not special,” Gori said. “Dangerous. I have never felt anything like it. Not since that day.”
Cade didn’t need him to specify. If this was serious enough to remind Gori of his gone-planet, it was serious enough for Cade. The last thing she needed was another atrocity on her hands.
“Fine,” she said. “No song.”
It was easier to say that than to mean it. Cade hadn’t really known how much she cared about the song until she wrote it off with a few words and a quick wave of the hand.
“Look,” Cade said to Gori, “you don’t have to nudge anything. But as long as you’re here, you do have to help.” He started to breathe deep, but Cade cut him off. “Rapturing is not an option.”
It wasn’t a nice move on her part, and Cade knew it. She hoped Gori wouldn’t ask why, because the reasons worked down to selfish roots. Ca
de wished she could have spent the last two months listening to sphere music, tuned out, but she had to stay awake to every awful thing that might happen. If Gori wanted his opinions to count, he would have to stay awake, too.
“You can help Ayumi up front, or you can—”
“If I must make myself useful,” Gori said in a dusty tone, “I will fight.”
“You?” Lee asked. “I seem to remember that during training you were about as vicious as a prune.”
“The danger is great now,” Gori said. “I had no use for training.”
Lee scoffed at the idea that he was a seasoned fighter, but there had been a time when she and Ayumi had to sit on Gori to keep him from attacking Cade, and another when Gori introduced Cade’s own knife to the base of her throat. It was comfortable to think of the Darkrider as a peaceful creature, but Cade had a small scar and an old fear that proved otherwise.
“Here,” she said, pulling one of her own knives. “You can borrow this.”
“What sort of combat are you trained in?” Lee asked. “Inhaling your enemies? Robe-strangling?”
“Only the most desperate.” Gori ran the knife-edge through a fold of robe, polishing until it glowed star-white. “I know what it is to be the last of one’s kind.”
Chapter 20
Ayumi flew loose, non-threatening patterns for ten minutes before she started to advance on the line of Unmaker ships, drawing the rest of the attack force behind her like a swirl of comet dust.
Cade had gotten used to fighting the Unmakers, but she hadn’t been this close to killing so many of them, ever. It should have electrified her, but instead it hammer-thudded through her system.
“In formation,” Lee said.
“You can’t be in the boarding party and be my navigator,” Ayumi said.
“I can’t?” Lee asked with a mischief-tugged smile. “I thought you said I was everything to you.”
Ayumi couldn’t disguise the sudden choppiness of her breath. “That’s not relevant. To this particular. Time and place.”
Cade watched from the hold. She’d hoped that bringing Lee out of her spacesick fit would change their loose and spreading constellation, realign them, but nothing seemed to have changed. Lee hadn’t stopped Cade from joining the boarding party, but that wasn’t exactly an invitation to pick up their friendship where it had left off.
“All right,” Ayumi said. “Identify the ship—”
“—and we’ll ask them to dance,” Lee finished.
Mira surveyed the ships, most of which looked identical. She picked a slightly larger one, the palm broader across.
“There,” she said.
“And the target?” Ayumi asked.
Cade closed her eyes. This was where the thought-songs came in—or the Unmakers’ lack of them.
She tossed her mind, net-like, and caught the little scratched-out circles of silence. She found a concentration, a clump, with other silent circles moving all around.
“The low center of the ship,” Cade said. “There’s a gathering. A big one.” She ran her mind over the silences to get an estimated count.
“Hundreds.”
The fleet had been chipping away at the Unmaker force—two, five, ten at a time. Now they could take out hundreds with one well-placed puncture. But it was more than that. Cade had a chance to kill the woman who had ordered the attack on Renna and stolen the rest of her friends from her before they even had the chance to die. It was a real, almost-touchable hope, and it should have swelled through Cade like music. Instead, it sat like old grain-mash in her stomach.
Cade watched Mira, wondering if she was afraid for the people who had raised her or if she actually wanted to help the human fleet. She hit just the right tone with her eagerness most of the time. Her song inched louder and prickled with new growth every day.
But right now her pinched face gave Cade nothing to go on. “We have to move before they notice.”
The little ship rushed forward and down to make a pass beneath the Unmakers. Metal sped at them so fast that it looked certain the shuttle would smash against it. Instinctively, Ayumi leaned in to a last-second curve. Air burst from the blast-wipers, hit the metal, dented the hull. But it didn’t punch through.
“The air might not be strong enough,” Ayumi said as they emerged on the other side of the ship and circled around.
“It has to,” Cade said.
Lee worked the com. Reports came through—other ships were pummeling the target, but the hull stayed intact.
The little ships swarmed back to the human side of the invisible line. “All we did was step on their toes,” Lee said.
“Tell them to re-form for another pass,” Cade said. “We need to hit those spots again. The dents.”
By this time everyone around them had woken up to their plan, and now the Unmakers spat defenses. The black around the shuttle thickened with other ships and the slick float of missiles.
“You can do this,” Lee said, her hands resting lightly on Ayumi’s shoulders. “You are doing it.”
“Take them down,” Mira said, like she meant it. Cade had to remind herself that Mira was an Unmaker, and they had always been good at putting on a show. It might be the one thing they had in common with Cade.
She marched fast to the pilot’s chair. “When you get there, pull around fast. Lead our ships in, but let the rest go for the target. The Unmakers will fly hard after the ship that scores the hit, and we need to board.”
“No one will board if we don’t disrupt this little meeting first,” Lee said, and she got so mad that she made the mistake of looking at Cade like they were friends in the thick of another argument. She tore the glance back.
The com burst on.
“Noble is down,” Zuzu’s voice told them. “I repeat, Noble is down.”
Wreckage ran in thick streams alongside the window. Cade went electric, in all the wrong ways.
“That was one of the boarding ships,” Ayumi whispered.
Which one? Cade thumbed through the last few hours, universe-bent on finding a single piece of information. Was Rennik on that ship? He’d refused to come on the shuttle even though Ayumi was one of the best pilots in the fleet. Cade couldn’t help but believe that it was to get clear of her. And now Noble was down. That made it a one-in-two chance that Rennik was dead, and Cade didn’t have time to hide how much she cared—how much care was clawing its way from her stomach, hot up her throat, scrambling to get out.
She had to land the other boarding party on that ship.
The palm came up again, so close that Cade lost its shape. Its dull metal became everything.
“I trust you,” Mira said, slipping her small hand into Cade’s. She had to act like that trust was real. Like it counted.
“I’m with you,” Ayumi said as she slammed the controls. “Absolutely.”
“What the hell,” Lee said—which wasn’t quite the same.
Ayumi made the pass again. Metal screamed fast at their faces, then the shuttle swerved. The other ships stayed the course, dimpling the Unmaker hull with bursts of air.
Ayumi’s ship rattled, and everyone who wasn’t strapped down in a seat buckled at the knee. At first Cade thought they had taken a hit, but she wasn’t thrown to the ground. She wobbled to standing, and it happened again, and again, until Cade got used to the soft, gentle batter.
Bodies were raining through space.
Their fingers spread like weak imitations of starlight. Their faces, slack. Muscles so far gone after ten space-bound seconds that Cade couldn’t imagine life back into them. They looked like last-stage spacesicks, like Cade’s mother. Except in the eyes. There was no glass there. Nothing that held the light.
Bodies.
Hundreds of them.
“Universe keep them,” Ayumi whispered.
They were Unmakers, enemies, but no one told Ayumi to take it back.
The shuttle pulled up on the far side of the Unmaker ship, and nestled against it. Lee and Gori went to work with
bars, forcing the dock open. “You can’t stay here,” Cade said to Ayumi and Mira. The girl rolled her eyes, but there was no way she was getting on that ship. Her cover and her life would have been at equal risk, and Cade didn’t want either one wasted.
“We’ll clear the rest of the rooms and signal you to come back and pick us up,” Cade said.
Ayumi’s eyes slid to Lee. “I’d rather—”
“This isn’t a time for what you’d rather,” Cade said. “It’s a time for you not getting killed.”
“Thanks,” Lee whispered to Cade. “She acts twice as stubborn when I’m the one in her way.”
Ayumi twisted in her seat, calling to Lee. “You don’t get to leave without kissing me.”
Lee ran and leaned over the arm of the pilot’s chair. The kiss was muddied with fear and ache, and Cade, for all of her jealousy, didn’t want that. Having someone to love in the middle of this meant hundreds of goodbyes, hundreds of deaths. It didn’t matter if all but one turned out to be fake. The dreamed-up ones hurt just as much.
Lee headed through the dock without looking back. Gori followed, knife palmed and ready. Cade walked out last.
Mira called after her. “Come home safe.”
Cade forgot, for the space of a step, that Mira wasn’t her friend and Everlast wasn’t her home.
The boarding party was greeted by Unmakers, two rows deep—robed, armed, unsmiling.
“Well, dregs,” Lee said, and pulled her knife.
Cade didn’t want to get trapped in the dock, so she pushed forward, picking a fight with the nearest Unmaker. There were too many to face without some kind of failure, but that didn’t stop Cade’s muscles from going through the motions. It felt better to slash and hack, half-blind, than to give in.
Gori rushed the entire first row and took them on, three at a time. The knife Cade had given him flashed in clean, spare lines. The body that spent so much time in stillness moved with desperate speed.
Lee stopped in the middle of a knife-clash. “Holy snugging universe.” Even the Unmaker she pushed off couldn’t conceal that he was watching Gori take down the rest of his team. Unmakers fell in rings around him.
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