Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Cade leveled a knife at Unmother. She wasn’t going to use it, but it felt better to be in control of some of the danger in the room.

  Unmother unpeeled her words, letting each have a moment before she moved on the next. “You came to figure out what my plan is. What I want. But I already have everything I want right here.” She smiled at the beds, at the walls, at Cade.

  “Really?” Cade asked, twitching the knife at the door. “You’d rather be here than with your new and improved human race?”

  “We aren’t better humans,” Unmother said—a gentle correction, not even scolding. “We simply aren’t humans.”

  “Really?” Cade asked. “You didn’t reach down deep and change your genetic code.”

  “Change how you act, and you change who you are,” Unmother said, spreading her hands like she was the best illustration of her point. “No names. No connections. None of the things that make humans weak.” She laughed at the worst of her bruises. “The limitations of flesh and blood, in most cases, can be overcome. The real problem is that humans fail to see the larger picture, over and over, because of their small concerns.”

  With Unmother, Cade always felt like she’d come in halfway through a lesson. She had to keep up, play along. It had always been Unmother’s game. Whenever Cade forgot that, it smashed back into her, usually in the form of someone dying.

  “So that’s why you won’t let us start over.”

  “Start over?” Unmother bent and tended to a cut on her ankle, licking a finger, swiping at blood. “Human history is a matter of cycles. You would make the same mistakes. You would hope and you would try and you would fail. We’re saving you from that.”

  “You. Saving us.”

  Cade mind-gripped the irony as hard as she could. But she would never convince Unmother she was wrong—this woman had washed her own brain a long time ago. The only thing left to do, if Cade could, was to loosen Unmother’s hold on the idea of the war, by reminding her that murdering everyone Cade loved didn’t really matter.

  Not in the larger picture.

  “The numbers are in,” Cade said. “If you were aiming for extinction, you won. There’s no way the human race is coming back from this. And I don’t think you want to die, no matter how much you beg for it. I think you want to go off and be the leader of this new nonhuman race.”

  Unmother looked an inch away from impressed. “You’ve actually learned something. How nice.”

  “So go,” Cade said. “I’ll give you a shuttle. I’ll escort you, even. Make sure you get home safe.”

  Unmother sighed. “That’s a dear little proposition. It’s a shame it doesn’t sit flush with the way humans work.” She leaned forward. It must have hurt to push against her new bruises, but she didn’t let it show. “Humans find the cracks, keep alive on gristle and hope. This will never end unless I keep a very close eye on it.”

  “You,” Cade said. An idea prickled through her brain, the first electric strands of lightning.

  Unmother laughed, the rounded laugh of someone who has never been quite so amused. “You want to believe that my people would be lost without my leadership, that if you kill me now this will be over . . .”

  She trailed off, and let Cade fill in the rest. Unmother’s people were designed not to care about her. They had no weakness.

  “No, I’m afraid it’s the other way around,” Unmother said, making the struggle to get to her feet look like a promise, a guarantee that she would return some of the pain. “Your sickly little fleet wouldn’t do very well without you, would they?”

  Cade stepped back.

  “She told me that they rely on you—”

  “Mira?”

  Unmother glared so hard the question fell away. She was concentrated on getting to Cade, one slow, tiny step at a time. “If I killed you right now . . .”

  Unmother couldn’t do it. Cade knew that. She had the knife. She had a voice to scream with, and a crew on the other side of the wall. So she should have been able to breathe, but she couldn’t.

  Cade backed up hard, aiming for the door, to make it look like she had been planning to leave. Unmother had rattled her down to fear-soft bones. She should have taken the victory and let Cade go.

  But the woman’s voice pulled her back like fingers.

  “I told the others it was time to put the endgame in motion. You must be able to guess why.” Unmother dropped the lesson and it felt, for the first time, as if she was talking straight to Cade. It felt—the word slithered up from the past—intimate. “You’re not bright, but you have a sharpened sense of self-importance. You know why this is happening.”

  Cade couldn’t breathe, which meant she couldn’t think.

  “It started when I met you,” Unmother said. “You and that boy.”

  Xan.

  He was an echo now.

  Xan.

  Gone, but everywhere.

  “Entanglement was the first sign that humans would find a way to start over,” Unmother said. “We can’t have that.” She backed Cade into a situation that meant running away, letting Unmother reach her, or having her back hit the wall.

  Cade went with the last of her sour options. A metal seam ran sharp down her back. “You don’t,” she said. “Xan is dead.”

  “The boy was kind enough to pitch himself into a black hole and save us the trouble,” Unmother said. “But you.” Her fingers pulsed, almost on Cade’s throat. “You chose to live, which means all of these other people had to die.”

  Cade left the room, shaking. She didn’t even know it until Rennik’s hand fell on her arm and she could feel the clear, violent difference between shaking and not-shaking. She wedged herself between the wall and the floor and sank.

  Rennik looked down at her. He shouldn’t have been allowed to look at her like that and not touch her, but he did, staring while she shook and shook. It made her feel smaller than Unmother ever could.

  She rubbed at her face with her hands until the worst of the fear came off, like she’d gone at it with fistfuls of sand.

  “All right.” Cade struggled to standing, keeping one shoulder propped on the wall so she wouldn’t fold all over again. “You can go. I’ll relieve you.”

  Rennik rubbed at a crosshatch of cuts along the backs of his hands. “You can’t be serious.”

  A little bit of fight swung back into Cade. “You can’t think I’m leaving you here with someone to murder.”

  Rennik started down the hall, then doubled back, energy spiking out in strange directions. “I went in there because—”

  “You couldn’t help yourself. I know.”

  He banged a fist on the wall, so deep that he left small crescent indents. Cade’s hand ached for him, since he didn’t seem able to feel it. “She was talking about you.” Rennik dropped his arm, rubbing his shoulder. “Mutters, at first, but then the volume built, and the words were . . . She said foul things.”

  Cade trembled on the edge of believing him.

  “Watch the footage,” he said.

  The camera wouldn’t be able to lie, but it also didn’t give Rennik an excuse for going against direct orders. “She was trying to bait me. Or you. It’s manipulation, Rennik, you’re smart enough to know that.”

  Rennik watched the door like he didn’t trust it. “I hope you’re right.” Then he brushed Cade with a look so close to kindness that it almost took her apart.

  “You need to sleep,” she said, her hands hovering a few inches above his, without putting down.

  “Find someone else to stand guard,” Rennik said, “and I’ll go.”

  Cade woke up eight times that night.

  The ninth time, someone was dead.

  “She killed him.” A voice came into focus above her, but Cade couldn’t match it to a face. “He’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  Cade’s mind locked the she in place without effort. But which he?

  Rennik? Matteo? Gori?

  “Who’s dead?”

  It was Mira
standing over her, dim light caught in the waves of her untied braids. She reported the news in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. Grave and grown-up.

  “It’s Green. Someone knocked and told me . . .”

  Cade shook off the waking-lag, and took the halls at a high pace with Mira close behind. They reached Unmother’s cabin in less than a minute, but it didn’t matter.

  Green’s body was pooled on the floor.

  Matteo and Zuzu and everyone who should have been sleeping were there, strung in a long line. Zuzu looked like a smudged version of herself, and Cade guessed she hadn’t taken a shift change in days. Matteo looked even less official in his thick cloth pajamas.

  “She broke out,” Matteo said.

  “Of a triple-locked room?” Zuzu asked. “That tiny woman?”

  “She hit him on the side of the head with something blunt,” Matteo said, crouched next to Green. “Metal, by the looks of it.”

  There was the clang of one person running down the hall—Rennik, reporting back to Matteo. “There’s a shuttle missing.”

  Cade ran for the docks, but it didn’t matter. Her lungs screamed fire, but it didn’t matter. Green was dead. The shuttle sacrificed. Unmother—gone.

  Chapter 23

  The fleet held its breath.

  And the fleet found its heartbeat, pounding in three thousand chests, as everyone waited to see what the Unmakers would do next.

  Everlast’s crew stood in a line facing the control room windows. Zuzu and Matteo talked in strategic circles, working out offenses they wouldn’t use and defenses they hoped they wouldn’t have to. Ships had been sent to track the stolen shuttle, but so far no one had caught the first glint of it.

  Now that Unmother had gotten away, Cade couldn’t pick her out of the fleet. Her non-song would sound like all the others.

  Mira’s biochip stayed silent.

  “There has to be something we can do,” Mira whispered to Cade, at the frayed end of the crew lineup.

  She stared at the far-off mass of Unmaker ships, bunched her shoulders, and in general did not look like someone contemplating her old home. Even Cade glared at Andana with a little more nostalgia.

  “What about the tapes?” Mira asked. “Maybe they can help us figure out what she did to escape.”

  Mira never called the woman Unmother, but she’d started answering to her own fake-name after a few slipped days. Cade remembered asking her if she wanted a new one, something that didn’t have the dust of her mission on it, but Mira had stubbed her lips together, rubber-pink and unmoving. It looked like she’d gotten attached to the name she’d been given.

  Cade had told her it was a very human thing to do.

  “We’ll track her!” Mira said, getting enthusiastic about it now, stabbing her finger in the air. How Unmother had escaped wasn’t as important as what would come next, but Mira had one part right. Anything was better than staring at a cluster of ships.

  Cade pushed through the element of exhaustion that heavied the air, ran back to Unmother’s cabin, and rescued the most recent tape. She fed it to the tech-stack in her little closet, watching as Unmother showed up on the monitor, covered in bruises—so, post-Rennik. But there were hours missing from the playback. Unmother went to sleep. The tape scratched to black.

  The bedroom came back, empty.

  Mira tossed her hands, elbows angled sharp. “Great.”

  Faced with a fast-to-frustrate nature so much like her own, Cade slowed the rhythm and tried to find some reason. “If she cared enough to do this to the tape, there must have been something important on it.”

  “And we’ll never know what!” Mira’s eyes flared like the green at the bottom of a sulfur flame. Cade almost let her feelings catch, almost burned the plan down because it didn’t work in the first fourteen seconds.

  Instead, she pressed her hands onto Mira’s bony shoulders. “Why don’t you go find Zuzu? I think she wanted your help with ammo inventory.”

  Mira heaved a sigh at being handed a concrete task.

  Cade wasn’t done with the tapes. That would be like taking her eyes off of Unmother again.

  Green—the obvious person to help Cade figure out what had happened in those flicker-gone hours—was dead. Cade could have asked Matteo to dig another tech genius out of the fleet, but she told herself there wasn’t enough time. There was someone who’d helped her with this sort of thing before. Cade knew where he slept, because she’d led him there. She lined it up so it all sounded right and reasonable in her head.

  And knocked on Rennik’s door.

  “Who is it?”

  Cade walked in. He would want to send her away, and she would argue, so she saved them the bother.

  Rennik didn’t look ready to thank her for it.

  Cade set herself on the bottom bunk, boots up, arms heavy on her knees. She didn’t need permission. Cade was the one who belonged on Everlast, and Rennik had chosen to leave. He was backstage at her show.

  Cade held out the tape and it rattled, plastic innards against plastic casing. “The fleet needs to recover this. Green’s dead and I thought maybe you could . . .”

  Rennik let the tape hang between them, untouched.

  “Plus,” Cade said, “I wanted to make sure your new room is nice enough.”

  “It’s adequate.”

  She inspected it from corner to corner, but it was just another cabin, like hers. Nothing about it sounded the old Rennik-tones inside of her. She felt the lack of his books, his handmade blankets. He looked wrong against the slick metal instead of Renna’s curved white.

  “You know I visited you on Providence,” Cade said. “And Hazlitt.” She hadn’t meant to bring that up. It had brought itself up, dragged from some deep place.

  Rennik grabbed the tape and busied himself. “I wasn’t talking to anyone at that time.”

  “Just assorted battle cries?” Cade asked.

  “You have a reputation that far outstrips my own,” he said. He butterflied the tape’s casing along a thin, crackable seam.

  “A lot of that is Mira,” Cade said, giving the girl the proper credit for the first time. She’d risked herself, every day, as a double agent.

  Doubt tugged across Rennik’s face.

  “She gave me a lot of help,” Cade said. It was the one corner of the truth she could unfold without putting Mira in trouble. It didn’t matter that Mira’s spy function had been null-and-voided by the recent attack. Rennik would hold the past against her. The past was all he seemed able to hold.

  “Well, at least you’re not alone,” he said, voice dusted with bitterness. “What happened to Lee?”

  “She left too. With Ayumi. Didn’t you hear? After Renna—”

  Rennik’s hands died in midair, and the tape met the floor.

  “Don’t.” Rennik raked his fingernails along his arms, scratching red furrows. “Don’t talk about her.”

  The flimsy insides of the tape gushed and covered the floor. Cade picked them up and stuffed them back into the casing before Rennik grabbed the whole thing from her and sat against the wall. Cade formed a fresh indent on the bed.

  “You’re not invited to sit and watch,” he said.

  “It’s not your ship. I don’t need the invitation.” If Rennik wanted her out, he would have to pick her up and move her. For the space of an eye-flash, she thought he would actually do it.

  Rennik went back to tape-winding. “Why do you care so much about how Unmother escaped? She’s gone. That’s it.”

  Because I hate her.

  “Because she’s important to taking them down,” Cade said. “I’m sure of it.” There was a weakness to Unmother, somewhere, and Cade was going to dig it out, one fingernail at a time if she had to.

  Rennik held up a section of see-through black tape. “This is sliced,” he said. “The tape isn’t salvageable.”

  “So that’s it?” Cade asked.

  Rennik studied the tape and found a reason not to give up, or at least something to obsess over
. He laid the sliced part flat on the floor. “Are there other records?” he asked. “Other parts of the ship that Green taped?”

  Cade winced, evidence that she should have thought of that herself. No one had seen Unmother’s escape, but she wouldn’t have been able to avoid all the security footage, or stop and slice the contents of every hidden camera, one by one. There had to be a record of her somewhere on the ship.

  “Green covered the main halls, the engine rooms, and the control room.”

  “Bring that footage, and a monitor,” Rennik said.

  Cade slipped out, before he could change his mind and tell her not to come back.

  Green’s old room burst with tapes. Everywhere—tapes.

  And a few pictures of his family. He had two daughters with winter-blue eyes. Cade avoided them and kept to the towers of black. Of course, the tapes she wanted were from the night that Green had died, and she couldn’t be sure someone had added them to the piles.

  She started in on the most recent batch and tried not to ruin the system, whatever the system was.

  “What in the name of all things good and healthy are you doing?”

  Lee stood in the open door, a bag in each hand. One was small, puffed out with clothes. She set down the heavier one, and it vomited notebooks.

  “Same question,” Cade said.

  Lee dropped to her knees and tried to contain the notebook spill. “We’re moving in.” Her arms circled around a herd of cardboard covers, but all she got for her effort was a paper cut on the chin. “Ayumi and I heard this room was going to be cleared out and—”

  “You thought you’d move straight into a dead man’s quarters?” Cade wondered how many people had occupied her own cabin back in the nonhuman wars, and how many of those had died. She had a strong urge to reach the sort of future where girls could run around the decks on family trips, poking at dead airlock buttons.

  “I didn’t know this was Green’s room until I got here,” Lee said with such grit that Cade stuffed a week’s worth of tapes between her hands and got ready to make a quick exit. “This wasn’t my idea. Ayumi wanted the transfer.”