Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “Why?” Cade asked.

  Cade knew Lee well enough to know she was considering a lie. She swirled it around in her mouth, swishing her lips to both sides. In the end, she dropped it and told the distasteful truth. “To be near you.”

  But Cade had failed with the song. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh, I agree in the strongest possible terms,” Lee said. She kicked onto the bed, avoiding all things that had belonged to Green like they had death-germs.

  Cade, on the other hand, was done with tiptoeing. “So you’re still mad,” she said.

  Lee filled the cabin with the kind of silence that made screaming seem like a nice, civilized alternative.

  “Why did you come back?” Cade asked.

  “I told you, Ayumi—”

  “Why did you come back?”

  Lee stacked the notebooks into new piles without looking up. “I go where she goes.”

  Cade brought the tapes and food for Rennik, and set it in a pile on the floor—tapes on the bottom, bread and some greenish lamp-grown vegetables on top. He didn’t look up from the splice. Cade wondered how long he could go without eating, without sleep. He wasn’t human, but with the way he acted these days, emotions writhing strong, it was easy to forget.

  Cade left again and made a monitor-lugging trip.

  “Can I help?” Zuzu asked as Cade shifted the metal box across the control room, knee to knee, trying to hug all of its corners at once.

  “I’ve got it,” Cade said.

  It wasn’t harder to carry than her old speakers. Cade told herself that waving Zuzu back had nothing to do with wanting a few minutes with Rennik. She must have been getting better at the business of lying.

  She almost believed herself.

  Cade did a quick check of the control room windows.

  “If they have Unmother back, and she knows our best ship inside and out, why don’t they . . .”

  Attack now? Kill us all?

  Zuzu tapped her piercings one at a time, in a predictable order. Eyebrow, nose, septum, chin. “They want to make us wonder. Make us wait.”

  The Unmakers were playing on human emotion, again—on fear, and all the things Unmother said made them weak.

  “It’s getting stale out there,” Zuzu said, shaking her blond spikes. “Stale, stale, stale. No move from their side.” The fleet wouldn’t make a move without Cade, but her stream of spy-extracted information had dried up, and she needed new ideas. Fast.

  She reconstructed the monitor in one corner of Rennik’s cabin.

  They looped hours of tape from twelve different locations. Halls, engine room, control room, more halls.

  No Unmother, anywhere.

  Rennik’s fingers parted his hair in deep-scratched rows. “She should show up on these. Some of them, at least.”

  Rennik nudged over and made space for Cade on the floor. She sat down, as aware of that space as if it were alive.

  “We’ll find her,” Cade said.

  She didn’t add the word together, but it was there, obvious and sitting between them.

  “Cadence.”

  The whisper came, and then the lifting.

  Rennik was carrying her.

  “I think you’re the one who needs some rest,” he said, settling her in.

  To bed. His bed.

  Her hands stayed around his neck longer than they strictly needed to. He pulled the sheets up. Cade curled against his pillow—the same flat-as-snug pillow that they had in every other cabin in the fleet, but somehow it felt rounder and cooler on her skin here. Somehow it felt better.

  “Cadence.”

  She blinked awake. Rennik stood over her, with his all-the-emotions-at-once look.

  “Did you figure something out?” Cade asked. She tried to pretend it was just sleep clinging to her voice, making it hoarse.

  “Yes,” Rennik said. “But it’s not about the tape.”

  Cade opened her mouth to tell him to sit down, and then they were kissing. He was pushing her backwards across the bed in waves, like an ocean that they had to cross fast, or drown.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breaking for breath. “I’m sorry.”

  Her fingers reached out and touched his face before she could tell them otherwise. “Not for kissing me, right?”

  “No,” Rennik said. “Not for that.”

  And he kissed her again, and pressed into her, the politeness gone. He drove his pain and sadness and it found her softest places. But Cade didn’t let it go at that. She gathered her own pain and pushed back. Hips, arms, her heartbeat fighting his.

  He slipped in words between kisses. “I didn’t feel as much. Before I met you. And then Renna . . .”

  It was the first time he’d said her name since she died. Cade followed an urge to bite his lip, to taste this moment, make it linger. She wanted Rennik to be this honest with her, even when it wasn’t easy. The act of bravery cried out to be repaid. Cade opened even more to his kissing, found new places to touch. Stopped trying to hide what she wanted.

  Rennik slid Cade under him. It had happened fast, but any patience Cade had was gone.

  His hands rose into her hips like a question.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Cade waited in the shifting dark, and then there was a sunburst behind her eyes and all through her body.

  It was light and dark, the sound of him and the music inside of her. She let it be as beautiful as it was, and she let it hurt, too. Then she opened her eyes because she had to remind herself that this was real.

  This was Rennik.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Only now he had tears on his cheeks, round and stubborn, fighting not to fall.

  “Why?” Cade asked. She held herself still, and waited to understand.

  “This isn’t how I wanted it to be.”

  Things came together. Rennik had been afraid that what he couldn’t stop himself from feeling would bleed into what he felt for Cade. The missing-ache and the anger, and sadness like a row of closed doors.

  Cade caught Rennik’s tears on her skin. They ran into her mouth, and she swallowed them like water.

  She moved. He moved with her.

  Cade asked Renna to forgive her. This wasn’t perfect.

  But it was right.

  Chapter 24

  Cade fell quiet inside.

  Not a soft, easy quiet. The waiting quiet of a long drop through the dark.

  She had slept through almost to morning. Rennik was gone from her side, sitting on the floor. Cade could have reached one hand off the edge of the bed and touched him.

  But he was already far off, tuned to a tape and its endless, boring-blank footage. The light from the monitor hit his face and formed craters of shadow on his cheeks, his neck. He watched with the same intensity with which he’d touched Cade. He rewound the tape and watched again.

  He didn’t even notice that she was awake.

  Now it was Cade’s turn to feel everything at once. The grate of disappointment, the rough knocking of need. And sadness. For herself. For Rennik. For everyone who was gone and everyone who was left.

  Cade slid off the end of the bed and out of Rennik’s cabin on muted feet. As soon as she was out the door, the night spread to its proper loudness and beauty inside of her. Cade needed to keep this one good thing.

  She turned a sharp corner and cut across a stairwell that led down to other levels. Clatter and breakfast-flavored steam rose from the mess. Cade’s stomach made a stab in that direction, but she kept moving. There were decisions to be made about what to do with the Unmakers, as soon as she had fresh clothes on.

  At the end of Cade’s hall, right in front of her door, she caught sight of Ayumi, looking excited even from a distance. Who knew how early she had dragged herself out of bed. Cade got the feeling that Lee and Ayumi found ways to cram into that small rectangle—found unlikely angles for their hips, vined their arms. She felt certain that they never slept alone. So why would Ayumi get up early, leave that tangled-up warmth
, to come find Cade?

  Ayumi must have seen fear edge into Cade’s eyes, or noticed the pickup in her step.

  “It’s nothing!” she said before Cade even got close. “I mean, it’s not nothing. But it’s not the fleet exploding or someone exploding or even glassing out. I promise.” Ayumi held up a battered black notebook.

  “I have some ideas about your song.”

  Cade ushered Ayumi into her small cabin, and kicked Mira out.

  “What’s this about?” Mira asked, the backs of her hands like magnets to her light-sensitive eyes.

  “It’s a meeting,” Cade said.

  “So get a meeting room.” Mira tried to pull the covers over her head, but Cade slung them off.

  She knew that Ayumi was fourteen seconds away from telling Mira she could stay—her niceness dictated it. But this song was causing enough problems, and Cade didn’t need anyone else attaching to it, especially Mira.

  The girl beat a path around the room, plucking semi-clean clothes from the floor as she grumbled, “Think you can come marching in here after being out all night, no shift to speak of, and act like the empress of the cabin and hey, where were you all night?” Mira stopped rummaging. A sock hung on her arm like a tongue peeking from an open mouth.

  Cade’s body sang with the memories of where she’d been. It clung to the warmth and the salt skin-taste of who she’d been with. Mira and Ayumi both stopped, watching her.

  “So?” Mira asked. “What did you do last night, Empress Cade?”

  Cade used Mira’s own tactic against her. Lies that weren’t lies at all. “Inter-fleet relations.”

  “What does that m—”

  “Go find Matteo.” Cade thumped Mira lightly on the shoulder. “I think he has something for you to do.”

  Mira puckered her lips at the dubious order, but she followed it. Ayumi took Mira’s place on the lower bunk, then tucked her legs under and scribbled until the moment the door clicked shut.

  Cade still had trace amounts of her night with Rennik in her bloodstream, heating her, swelling her with good feeling and shyness and a hundred other things that she wasn’t used to. Ayumi cocked her head, studying Cade’s oddness. She increased the rate of her scribbling.

  “What are you writing?” Cade tried a snatch for the notebook, knowing she would fail. There weren’t many things in the universe that Ayumi was fierce about, but her notebooks were high on the list.

  “Is there anything you don’t write down?” Cade asked.

  “It’s an old habit, and one I don’t intend to give up,” Ayumi said. “We’ll be old ladies someday, and I’ll keep records of every cup of tea you drink. You should be glad.” She presented another page, this one with words running down it in uneven blocks along the margin.

  “Your song.”

  Ayumi tore the page out, and Cade matched the paper-sharp sound with a gasp. She’d never seen Ayumi do that.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I copied it out.”

  She handed the page over and Cade touched the words, ran her fingers over them. Seeing them like this—small, stark, without their music—made them look like tiny parts of Cade that had been torn 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

  “The words don’t mean anything,” Cade said, but before the sentence had ended, she was rushing to correct it. “I don’t know what they mean, but I know how to find them.”

  “When you’re looking at spacesicks, you mean?” Ayumi asked.

  “Not just any spacesicks,” Cade said. “I mean, you’re a spacesick but you’re not—”

  “Glassed out?”

  “Right.”

  Ayumi’s hands danced around her forehead. Her confusion was as enthusiastic as everything else about her. “Why do you think all of this connects you to Xan? He wasn’t a spacesick. He couldn’t even get spacesick.”

  “I know,” Cade said. She looked at the lyrics again, and they were just a tangle of useless lines.

  Ayumi fitted a hand over Cade’s, and it held her in place better than any command. Better than a knife pointed at her face. “We can figure this out. Then we’ll be able to prove the song isn’t dangerous.”

  “And Gori won’t be able to angry-blink at us?” Cade asked.

  “Exactly.” Ayumi smiled, creasing her notebook up the spine.

  “‘Third in line and waiting . . .’” she mumbled.

  They ran over and over the lyrics. They tried looking at them backwards, cutting up the lines and stringing them together in different orders. At one point, they even scrambled the letters to see if Cade’s brain had buried a secret code.

  “Wait,” Ayumi said.

  She disappeared for a minute and came back with an armful of notebooks, and behind her—Lee, and more notebooks. Lee lumped hers onto the bed, while Ayumi spread the rest around the floor.

  “I thought we could use some resources.”

  Cade hadn’t seen the notebooks laid out like this since Ayumi had tried to find them a new planet.

  Ayumi caught Lee in the door and tugged her waist. “You should stay.”

  “Matteo asked me to help with shuttle patterns for defense.”

  “Oh,” Ayumi said. “In that case!” She proud-glowed so hard that Cade worried she might hurt herself. “You don’t get to leave without kissing me,” she added.

  Lee knocked an unsure glance at Cade, but as soon as Ayumi’s lips made contact, the rest of the room un-mattered. They kissed like they were the only people. Not just in the room. Ever.

  Cade knew that feeling from the inside now, but a sting rose at the center. She didn’t know if and when she’d get to feel it again.

  Lee called to Cade on the way out. “See you in the control room.”

  Cade grabbed a notebook and buried her face near the spine, so close that the paper smell rose and edged out the slight, constant prickle of metal. “Is it just me or did Lee sound almost, on the verge of . . . nice?”

  “Of course she did,” Ayumi said, shuffling her notebooks. “You’re friends.”

  “Lee hates me,” Cade said.

  Ayumi tilted her head and flicked her eyes up, like she’d switched to mental notebook pages. “Maybe, for about twelve seconds.” She threw in a you-know-how-Lee-is shrug. “That’s not why she wanted to leave. You’re the best friend she ever had, and the one human in the universe who can’t get spacesick. Lee’s pride is the size of the tallest mountain on pre-blinked Earth. She got sick, and, well. Don’t tell her I told you this, but she didn’t want you to see her look weak.”

  Cade buried herself in the notebook. But a new spark made it impossible to focus on research.

  “So you think the song is about spacesick,” Cade said.

  “I did. I mean, I do,” Ayumi said. “But . . .”

  “But there’s more.”

  Ayumi inched closer, like she wanted to leap across the room but she was afraid to scare off Cade’s words.

  “I think it’s about a place,” Cade said.

  “A place?”

  Cade stumbled after an explanation. “When I sing it, I feel like I’m not here. Like the words want me to be somewhere else.”

  “Where?” Ayumi asked. Cade shook her head. “Do you know what it looks like? Or sounds like? Even how it smells?”

  All Cade had to go on was a feeling. The wonder-cast shape of it. The rightness. “It’s familiar, even though I’ve never been there before.”

  There was a moment of stillness, and then Ayumi went into the wildest flurry Cade had ever seen. Eyes and fingers and pages, moving fast. Matching things up. When Ayumi looked at her, the light behind her eyes was nothing less than pure-sun brilliance.

&nb
sp; “Cade. I think the song is about Earth.”

  Chapter 25

  Ayumi was the Earth-Keeper.

  The last of her kind. She was also the self-appointed champion of finding the fleet a new home. Cade tried to fight the words that blazed into her brain, but they were already out of her mouth.

  “Of course you want it to be about Earth.”

  Ayumi wasn’t deterred. “‘The long slide into dark,’” she said, tapping at her page. “I thought that meant spacesick. But ‘third in line’?” She hopped off the bed and hunted down a notebook that looked like the rest, pulling out a sketch of a solar system. Eight planets, with a tiny ice-orb clinging to the far edge. “‘Third in line’ could be the third planet from a sun,” she said. “One.” She pointed at a little cratered circle. “Two.” A red-swirled planet. “Three.” A crude, continent-cramped marble. Earth.

  “‘Grave fingers,’” Ayumi said, working faster now. “That sounded really dire, not at all a good thing. But when you think about a planet, and you take the word grave, and you add the word pulling . . .”

  Cade slammed into an idea. “Gravity. But even if that’s true,” she added, “every planet has gravity.”

  Ayumi raced ahead. “Blue, green—”

  “Earth colors,” Cade said. She knew that from the painting on the wall of Ayumi’s shuttle.

  And somewhere else. Cade was the one sniffing out a particular notebook now, hastily flipping pages. “I remember something . . .” A description, handed down from the last generation of humans to live on Earth.

  “They left before the asteroid hit.” Cade read slowly, letting herself feel the pain in the words as she formed them. “They told their children how blue it was, how green.” She reached the point where she had clapped the notebook shut last time. “Rich and dark, the blue and the green brighter than it had any business being. They never saw colors like those again, except sometimes in an eye. The blue of a sky on some planet might pull memories out of them, but it never quite matched.”