Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Mira nodded at the monitor. “Aren’t you going to go in?” Unmother was remaking the bed to suit her taste.

  “I want to keep her waiting.” Cade turned down the volume so she didn’t have to listen to Unmother’s crisp sheets. “If we march in and out of there in a line and demand to hear the full contents of her head, she’ll think she’s too important. She’ll think she’s all we have.”

  Mira twisted her fingers into a sickly knot. “She already knows that.”

  “Well, then, she needs to un-learn it.”

  Cade ordered Mira to get some rest, and flew across a small pond of space to spend some time with the least important member of the fleet.

  Her mother.

  A crude rectangle drawn on the floor in light blue chalk marked the spot where she had lived for months. Beds littered the spacesick bay, but they were reserved for the patients who could appreciate them.

  As soon as the fleet-appointed spacesick nurses saw who Cade was, they tried to relocate her mother to a nicer part of the bay, with thin strips of window and clean sheets. Cade waved them away.

  Ayumi sat across from Cade with the still river of her mother’s body between them.

  “She looks . . .”

  Cade wanted to steal some of the hope from Ayumi’s eyes, but there wasn’t enough to go around.

  “The same,” Cade said. “She looks the same.”

  The same was more than she could say for the rest of Renna’s crew, so maybe it could have been worse. The spacesick bay definitely looked worse than the last time Cade had seen it. Fuller, at least.

  “How many in here?” Cade asked a passing nurse. It was a question Cade had dodged ever since she dropped off her mother. On that day, twenty or thirty spacesicks had milled, and four or five clear-eyed fleet members had mumbled about what to do with them. Now the bay sagged with the weight of hundreds.

  “Two hundred and ninety-four,” the nurse said in a crisp voice, tucked like sheets over whatever she actually felt. Ayumi cast her eyes down, like being spacesick was a form of guilt.

  “I’m sorry,” Cade said, seeing all at once what a sour move it was to bring her.

  Cade had never gotten cleared to fly by herself. She could have asked any of the pilots on Everlast to take her to the bay, but she’d wanted Ayumi, because of all the people Cade knew, Ayumi was the most like her old self. Looking at her felt like holding on to the last string of an unraveling cord.

  Ayumi nodded at the nurses. “Should we ask if there’s any improvement?”

  “I think we’d be able to see it,” Cade said.

  She looked down at her mother, needing to compare every real thing about this woman’s ugliness to Unmother’s rigid beauty. And to see the glass—how different it was from the dull eyes of the dead.

  Cade had never thought of glass as a good thing before. She’d taken it as a sign that the spacesicks were walled off from life, and for a long time, Cade’s thinking on the subject had stopped there.

  Now she had a different idea.

  “You told me something about spacesicks once,” Cade said, eager-thumbing through memories.

  Ayumi sat up and pushed to the edge of her chair.

  “You told me they’re fighting off the disconnect,” Cade said.

  “It’s a grab for life. Getting back to the feeling of the sun, or to the smell of things. Whatever we care about most.” Ayumi’s eyes drifted to the thin windows of the bay. “Or who.”

  That was why Ayumi’s need to find a planet had gone into overdrive. Cade had thought it was all about the fleet, finding a home, holding back the darkness with land and water and sky. But it was more than that.

  Ayumi had fallen in love.

  Cade studied the lines around her mother’s mouth and eyes, faint but sticking. She looked so much older than she should. A side effect of the fight. Cade had been fighting for months, and she could feel the drag of it on her bones, worse than gravity.

  Cade’s mother had been fighting for seventeen years.

  She was there, under all that skin and glass. What she needed was a love big enough to pull her back to her rightful place.

  Even as Cade told herself there was nothing she could do, a feeling climbed, until it reached her throat and had to be let out.

  third in line and waiting

  for the long slide into dark

  ride the curve to day

  again, following the

  arc

  grave fingers, pulling

  bring all things down

  to a blue-green point of stillness

  and still the whole is turning

  round

  Cade could feel it this time, the singing. But she didn’t feel it like words. She felt it like streams and forest and sky.

  Like the song was a place, and each verse turned her around again, so she could see more of it as she sang. As soon as she held the whole thing in her mind she would be able to stay there. Live there.

  Inside of that song.

  It called her mother back from the dark where she had been for so many years, and Cade saw her rise out of it, swimming to the surface. Her face blurred with effort. Her lungs held, held, then bursting.

  Her eyes wavering—then clear.

  Cade knew they were brown, but the color had been trapped under glass for so long that she had no idea how brown. They were wet dirt and bark, the sort of brown that promises green. They clutched all the light in the room.

  Cade’s mother looked up, her face thickened with confusion. She opened her mouth in a few weak trials.

  Around them, other spacesicks broke their own glass, gasping. Ayumi watched Cade with desperate eyes. But Cade could only see her mother. She could only hold her hand, and feel the painful stirring of long-silent fingers.

  She could only hear the word that her mother found in some old corner, and carried out of her inner dark.

  “Cadence?”

  Chapter 22

  Gori’s room on Everlast smelled like rapture.

  When he went into that state and stayed there, it created an odor of rock-piles and stale robes. Ayumi must have noticed it, because her breath ran shallow. But Gori wasn’t rapturing now. He waited, dark eyes on the door.

  “Cadence.”

  “Look, I came to—”

  “Speak with me about this song,” Gori said. “Which I have felt, again, even though we reached an agreement.”

  Her mother’s glass had cleared. Only for a minute—a single word and she sank back into her previous state, with no guarantee that she would make a return visit. But if there was even the slightest hope, Cade couldn’t honor her pact with Gori.

  “This song works against spacesick like nothing else,” Ayumi said. “Maybe it can—”

  Cade held up a hand.

  It was no good explaining things that way. Gori didn’t care about the spacesicks, including her mother. When Cade let herself look at the whole rounded truth, she worried that Lee was right and he didn’t care about humans at all.

  “From what I remember,” she said, working a new angle, “you agreed not to rapture.”

  “For a particular moment,” Gori said. “I would not be a Darkrider if I chose not to rapture.”

  “And Cade wouldn’t be Cade if she never made music,” Ayumi said.

  The truth of that vibrated deep. Music had always been part of Cade. Her first love, the one she ran back to when she needed to close the circuit and reconnect to herself. It was the only thing her mother had left her, besides her name. Cade had been away from it too long.

  “So you both broke the pact,” Ayumi said. “But it was a ridiculous pact to start out with, which is sort of like a stalemate.”

  Gori kept lancing Cade with a dark stare, like she was the one in the wrong.

  “I’ll write the universe a formal letter of apology later,” Cade said. “I need your help now.” She took Gori’s lack of response and ran with it. “There’s something about this song. It’s powerful.”

&nb
sp; Using that word about her own singing made Cade uncomfortable. She felt it every time a note slid flat or pinched sharp or trembled because her breath ran out. But this wasn’t about the perfection of the notes. It was about the strength of the meaning.

  “You know I’m right,” Cade said. “It was enough to shake you out of a serious cosmic nap.”

  Gori’s stance softened. “The song is rooted in something I have felt before,” he said. “Your connection to the particles that once formed that boy.”

  “That boy,” Cade said. “You mean Xan.”

  She thought she had cut that connection when it got to be too much. Filled the holes he left inside of her—even if it was only with new holes. But maybe that wasn’t how it worked when someone died. Maybe he was with her.

  Always.

  Still, the flashes from his time-loop didn’t flood her days and overwhelm her nights anymore. What if Cade hadn’t turned the connection off permanently—what if she could plug into it at will?

  What if she was in control of it now?

  Cade fumbled with the implications, while Ayumi raced ahead.

  “Do you think entanglement could double the strength of the song?” she asked. “That’s what it did with muscle power when Xan was alive. Maybe it’s the same music Cade has always been playing, but connecting it to Xan somehow makes it more.”

  That could be right. It sounded reasonable. But there was one problem. This song wasn’t the same.

  It had words. It had a shape. It had weight and color and—

  —life.

  Gori sat on his bunk, crumpled into a tired shape. Cade had never seen him look exhausted, even though his skin was a collection of sags.

  Ayumi tried again. “Do you think—”

  “You know what I think.” Gori’s voice cracked. “This song is a threat to the universe, and we will say no more about it.”

  Cade got the feeling that this all came back to Gori’s past and the long shadow of his lost home.

  The story of what had happened always lingered behind him, and Cade felt like she was casting unwanted light. Maybe de­­­manding honesty was a form of torture, but what Cade wanted was to soothe Gori. It was the strangest feeling, like wanting to hug a sharp rock. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell it like a story. One that happened to the universe, not to you.”

  His voice cracked again. “And we will say no more about it?”

  Cade kneeled at the edge of the bed.

  “Not a word.”

  Gori closed his eyes, but he didn’t deep-breathe into the universe. He kept to the boundaries of his own head this time.

  “The first Darkriders believed they were meant to master dark energy, use it to shape and grow and change the universe. A small group of those who had the ability did not listen to the voices of others and pushed on, even when warned to stop. They hoarded dark energy, when it is an untamable substance. What they did not understand is that gravity feeds on it, and will find it. The great store at the heart of my planet called out to gravity, and it came, crushing everything in its path. My planet. Coranna.” Cade heard the music in that name, the sad swell of it. “Everyone I loved died on that day.”

  Ayumi knelt down with Cade and laid a hand over one of Gori’s.

  He pulled it back. Cade expected him to say that the universe didn’t allow Ayumi to touch him. That she couldn’t comfort a Darkrider, on pain of death.

  He said, “You would not touch me if you knew.”

  Ayumi gathered up his fingers and held them tight.

  “I was one of the first Darkriders. A guard, watching over the hoard. It was a lowly job. I was there on the day . . . I felt the disturbance, and understood before others did. I escaped, though I should not have.”

  A new understanding of Gori skimmed at Cade, like a bullet-glance. His two-month rapture after Renna’s death made perfect sense. The real surprise was that he hadn’t gone into one the minute after his planet blinked out, and stayed there. But he kept living, kept putting on robes every day, kept caring—in his limited, Gori-like way.

  Cade kept her promise. She stood, dusted her knees, and said no more about Gori’s home. But she couldn’t give up on the song.

  “My connection with Xan is particle-based,” she said. “Entanglement has nothing to do with dark energy.”

  “Yes,” Gori said, nudging more wrinkles into his forehead. “It is different. But it reminds me of that day.”

  Cade shifted her weight, but she couldn’t get comfortable. Gori’s words plucked all the wrong strings.

  “So this isn’t the universe telling me to stop,” she said. “It’s you.”

  Gori shook his head, and the look of the dangerous, self-appointed guardian of the universe dropped away. He was just another fleet member who had lost everything.

  “I have wondered why I lived so long,” he said. “Maybe I am the form the universe took to deliver this message. Maybe it is why I have lived all this time, walked through these many years and trials. So I might warn you.”

  Cade and Ayumi wound back through the halls of Everlast in silence.

  “Maybe . . .” Ayumi said.

  She flipped notebook pages.

  “Maybe . . .”

  Cade could tell that she still wanted to talk about the song, but Gori had deflated them. He’d done more than that—he’d taken all of the air out of the ship, or reminded Cade how thin it was in the first place.

  “Maybe . . .”

  The word bounced down the metal hall, stubborn and hollow.

  There was nowhere left to go but the little cabin.

  Cade approached Unmother’s room with three knives crowding her pockets. When she got to the hall outside, Rennik was gone, and a new fleet member stood guard. He was solid, dull-eyed, bored.

  His hand sat on Cade’s shoulder like a slab of wet bread. “I wouldn’t go in there.”

  Cade brushed him off with a little more muscle than was needed. “So don’t.”

  The guard grabbed for her waist, but Cade blocked the move, swiping his fingers in a crushing hold. She added pressure in small increments. “You know that I have clearance, right?”

  The guard’s smile was as hard as the stubs of his fingertips. “Just saying you might want to wait. He’ll be busy for a good long while.”

  Cade wondered what Rennik had given the guard to keep her out of that cabin. Or maybe the man had volunteered, knowing what Rennik would do, wanting some thin form of justice for whatever had been done to him.

  As Cade ran in, Rennik smashed his hand across Unmother’s face, tattooing a kick to her shin. To the beat of some terrible inner drum, Rennik hurt the woman, until she flecked dark with blood.

  Cade braced herself, both hands on the backs of Rennik’s arms. She could hold him in place for a few seconds, but when he got loose he hit Unmother twice as hard to make up for lost time. She collapsed around her center, like a dying star.

  The guard watched from the doorway as if he was being given a good show for the first time in years.

  Cade launched herself at Rennik again, battering at his back and sides with her fists. The punches glanced with the frantic rebound of hard rain. If Cade wanted to stop Rennik, she would have to hurt him.

  Unmother didn’t fight back, but Rennik didn’t give a dreg about fighting fair. There was no standing back to wait a reasonable amount of time between strikes. Rennik didn’t care about torturing Unmother for information.

  This was about pain.

  He bashed his fist against Unmother’s perfect-molded cheekbone. The attacks built, and her screams built—edged with pain, but hollow inside, instead of filling with anger or fear. This wasn’t hurting Unmother past the skin.

  “Stop, stop, stop.”

  Cade pulled her knife and held it to Rennik’s side, but he pushed himself into it, to show how little he cared. His blood spread onto her hand, warm. Memories of him, warm, moved through her. Cade tossed the blade like it stung; the guard made his first smart m
ove and gathered it up.

  Cade threw herself around Rennik’s neck, lodging a choke hold against the inner wires of his throat. She held herself there even as his breathing changed. Her weight dragged him to the floor.

  “What the damp hell are you doing?” cried the guard.

  Cade needed to connect with the parts of Rennik that were about more than revenge. There had been so much to him before Renna died—so many complicated, beautiful, frustrating, interlocking pieces.

  “I know you,” Cade said. Her arms slid into an old con­figuration. She held him the way she had once, just once, her arms soft and strong in equal parts.

  Cade couldn’t let it go for long. A show of how much she cared could be used against her. And that made her hate more than the milk-faced guard and the patient, evil woman on the bed. It made her hate the whole broken universe.

  “Stop what you’re doing,” Cade said, “or I’ll have the fleet keep you out of the fighting.” Rennik’s face was close, and anger scratched bright red across his cheeks. Cade watched him weigh more torture now against the delights of killing Unmakers in the future.

  He slackened. Cade pulled him farther across the room, but when she caught the calm, following tick of Unmother’s eyes, she dragged Rennik the whole way out. Now she had to have this conversation in front of the guard, who smirked like he’d known she would give all along.

  “I still haven’t gotten anything out of her,” Cade whispered. “That is what she’s here for.”

  Rennik held an absent hand to his throat, the way he always did when he got hurt and barely noticed. “And when you do?”

  “Someone can kill her.” Cade looked the eager guard up and down. “I don’t care who.”

  She turned hard and went back into the bedroom, blasting the door shut behind her. Unmother was patting the worst of the blood, soaking it with the hem of her shirt, like she’d spilled a glass of water.

  She tested her muscles and sat up.

  “You can leave now and save yourself the time.” Unmother skimmed a glance over Cade’s sweating body. “And effort.”