Ayumi held her breath. The whole snugging universe held its breath.
“They didn’t wait,” Cade said, “and once the ship sped up, they didn’t look back. They wanted to be gone before the world changed.”
Cade closed the notebook, held it to her chest. “Maybe it is about Earth.”
She didn’t know what that meant—a song for the spacesicks, a song about Earth, lyrics that connected her to Xan’s time-traveling particles. But for the first time, Cade let herself believe that it could mean something.
Big.
“I need to go tell Rennik.” It felt right to have him as the default person in her life. The one she went to when it was coming together or falling apart.
Ayumi nodded. “I’ll get Lee in a minute.”
When Cade left, Ayumi was scribbling as fast as she could, so hard the letters must have left echo-marks three pages deep.
As soon as Cade opened Rennik’s door, she knew there would be no kissing of the wild and celebratory sort.
He stood off center in a wobbling city of tapes. Their corners stuck out from the towers at all angles, and his eyes had the paste-glaze of someone who hasn’t stopped looking at a screen for hours. He looked part distracted, part glad she’d shown up, and part soured that it had taken her so long. “I have to show you something.”
Cade was the one with the news. Strange, enormous news. Holding it back felt like trying to shove the entire universe down to atom-size.
She moved in, trying to ignore the new things her body had to say about being close to Rennik. “Did you figure out what happened with Unmother?”
“Yes,” he said. “No. I might have.”
“I don’t have time for all of those answers.” Cade wanted to talk about Earth, not some woman whose one great wish was to make a grand exit from the human species, leaving a trail of dead bodies on her way out. Earth put Unmother back in perspective—turned her into the small, crazed ex-human that she was.
“Please,” Rennik said. It was enough of a throwback to the polite Hatchum she’d met on Andana that it softened Cade’s resistance. She took a seat on the floor. But she still couldn’t let go of the third planet. The gravity. The blue-green.
“Rennik,” she said. “There’s this song I’ve been singing—”
“Singing?” The word was an empty echo, to show he was listening.
Would Rennik do the same thing if she started talking to him about what had happened last night? If Cade wasn’t the subject of this moment’s obsession, if she wasn’t the focus of all of his feelings, she was nothing.
She turned to leave. Rennik’s hand closed a circle around her wrist.
“Look,” he said, nodding at the monitor. “Right there.”
Cade flicked her shoulder and broke his hold. She leaned into the glow of the monitor and found herself looking at the engine room. The twin engines that kept Everlast aloft churned quiet, constant patterns. Rennik pointed to a spot near the bottom of the screen. A bit of white flashed, then dark.
“It’s a . . . blur,” Cade said.
That’s what he wanted to show her, instead of listening to her universe-trembling news? A blur?
“Yes, good. Now look.”
Rennik extracted the tape from the monitor and searched the nearest tower for a different one.
“Where did you get these?” Cade asked, feeling small in the middle of so much recorded past—which was strange, because she never felt that way when she sat in the middle of Ayumi’s notebooks. They weren’t cold and plastic and official. Cade felt like part of the great human mess of them, one page in a bigger story.
“I had some tapes delivered from Green’s room,” Rennik said. “And I redirected the crew to bring the new ones here.”
Rennik slid a tape out of a tower with needle-sure fingers. When he popped it into the monitor, the control room came on the screen. Rennik sped the timeline and people hurried by on fast-ticking legs.
“. . . there.”
The same blur. White, then dark, flashing at the top of the control room wall.
Cade found the blanks and filled them in before Rennik said a thing. Unmother’s white pants, her black shirt. Her little trip into the vents of the Unmaker ship. “You think that’s how she left without anyone seeing,” Cade said. “She was in the walls.”
A fraction of the tightness in Rennik’s shoulders eased. “You saw it too,” he said. “So I’m not insane.”
“No,” Cade said. Unconvincing. Unconvinced.
“There’s more,” Rennik said. “I found her in one of the hallways . . .”
He picked up another tape, and Cade snatched it out of its arc toward the monitor. It had numbers printed on it in thick, squat black, clear enough to see halfway across the room.
“Unmother is on this tape?” Cade asked.
Rennik leaned over her to look at the label, and his nearness sparked her to distraction, frustration, anger that she didn’t have time to start a fight, because something much worse was happening. “This isn’t footage from the night Unmother escaped,” Cade said. “It’s from three hours ago.”
Those numbers stamped fear into Cade and drove the words out of her mouth.
“She’s still on the ship.”
Cade and Rennik moved so fast that it felt as if the halls did the streaming by instead of their bodies. No matter how much ground they covered, every turn felt like a string tossed in the wrong direction.
They had caught Unmother in the control room. The engine room. The most important places on Everlast.
“She was gathering information,” Cade said. Like Cade had wanted to do when she brought Unmother onboard, only reversed. No wonder the woman had looked so delighted to be stuck on their ship.
It brought Cade back to the root of the failure when she had gathered the fleet. Unmother had used that idea against her, too. She claimed whatever Cade wanted most and made it suit her own ends.
“If she has what she needs, we should be heading for the docks,” Rennik said.
Cade checked the nearest vent. The passages were thin, entrances tiny. Cade’s hips might slide through—barely, and only at the right angle—but her shoulders would choke the passage. Unmother must have dislocated one of hers to fit. It would be like cracking a knuckle to anyone else. All Unmother cared about was blinking out the human race. Which meant—
“You check the docks,” Cade said. “I have another idea.”
Rennik and Cade split up, and his footsteps faded. She made it ten steps before she remembered she didn’t have her knives. Cade didn’t want to be right, but if she was right, she didn’t want to be unarmed.
She swerved, doubled back a few doors, and knocked, a loud and driving beat, until Lee came out of her new room.
“Can I borrow your gun?”
“Snug,” Lee said, smearing a hand across her face. “It’s sort of late.”
“It’s urgent.”
Lee pressed a look down the hall in both directions. “Where’s Ayumi?”
Cade’s stomach slithered cold. “I thought she was with you.”
“She was with you,” Lee said. “And a thousand notebooks.”
The ice reached Cade’s face and she took off. Lee didn’t ask for an explanation. She didn’t even slip on shoes. Cade heard the skin-sting of bare feet behind her, and the cold-clicked readiness of the gun.
She pushed her speed and tightened her heart, and hoped she was wrong.
The hall had a just-disturbed feeling, the last trouble of the wind from someone passing. In the moment before Cade turned into her own room, she heard a special sort of nothing.
A perfect lack of breath.
Cade ripped into the room, Lee behind her.
Ayumi must have fallen asleep in Cade’s bed, hard at work on her Earth scribbles. Her notebook had fallen to the floor. The blanket that curled along her side hid her face from Cade and Lee. The scene would have looked normal, except for the blood. It had saturated the blanket and was dropping, re
d-black, from the hems to the floor.
Lee ran and tore the blanket off. Cade waited for the pain-stark gasp that would bring Ayumi back.
Nothing.
The quiet felt like blame. Cade was supposed to be the one red and silent and slipping away from life.
She didn’t hear the thud of her own knees as they hit the floor. Lee ran to the bed, sopping sheets with blood in a race to find its source. Ayumi’s face and neck were covered in cuts, crossing in two directions. Unmother had tried to X out the face of this wrong girl, this not-Cade. Some of the cuts were deep red channels dug across her face, nothing clean about the edges. Everlast and all of its metal had given Unmother her pick of weapons. She’d put the blunt side to use, too. Ayumi’s head was cratered on one side, a shallow cupping of bone.
Cade couldn’t help but wonder how much worse it would have been if Unmother had gotten her hands on the girl she wanted, instead of a stand-in.
“Ayumi,” Lee said, her voice stretched thin. “Ayumi . . .”
She touched the hollow of Ayumi’s neck. A hand went to her face, fingers frantic-tender, searching out breath.
“She’s unconscious,” Lee said.
Cade was sickeningly alive with nerves.
Ayumi had been talking twenty minutes ago, about blue and green and hope. Now every bright thing about her might be gone. Cade closed her eyes, racing her mind outward to catch the last of Ayumi’s song before the silence claimed her. Lee’s melody ran wild and thick with pain, and in the space past it—
—nothing.
Lee folded into Ayumi’s side.
“You don’t get to leave without kissing me,” she said. “You don’t get to leave.”
Cade put her face to the floor.
The cold came first. Cade straightened up and found that the circle-touch at her temple was a gun.
Lee had it pointed at her face.
Everything but dead sureness had emptied out of Lee’s voice. “That woman wanted you.” Cade sank. Her legs curled under her, and she folded small. “She didn’t want my girlfriend,” Lee said. “She came here for you.”
They were both crying, and then Cade did something worse. Air rose in a wave, pushing out of her.
Lee forced the muzzle, and Cade’s nerves answered with a throb. “You’re laughing,” Lee said. “Tell me why. Fast.”
Cade tried to stop, but she couldn’t. Laughter rose out of her, warm and wrong, like blood. “Ayumi said that you and I were friends. I believed her.”
Hurt and hesitation hit Lee in a one-two punch. But she didn’t stand down.
Then—a breath, wet and terrible, rose from the bed. Cade turned, afraid to take her eyes off Lee, but she clattered the gun across the floor and forgot it in the rush to bring Ayumi back. Lee wiped blood out of Ayumi’s mouth with her hands, her sleeves.
“My girl . . .”
Lee cradled Ayumi’s bashed-in head. “Look,” Cade said, with a hand on Lee’s arm. “Get medical, bring them here.” Lee nodded, no questions. All of the hurt she had pointed at Cade was gone. “Don’t move her. I’ll go and—”
But Cade didn’t reach the end of her plan before Lee’s eyes melted to glass. She slumped on the bed, into a nest of darkening stains.
There was nothing Cade could do to soothe a spacesick fit now. Music meant she had to summon focus, and every bit of hers reached out past the small cabin, wrapped around the woman who had done this.
Cade checked Ayumi’s chest three times to make sure that she was breathing, and ran. The long hall gave her a present in the form of Mira, far off but skipping fast in Cade’s direction.
“Can I get back in?” she asked, nodding at the room, “or are you still busy not inviting me?”
Cade grabbed both of Mira’s wrists. “Don’t go in there.”
Mira took in Cade’s stain-patched clothes, the cloud of nerves and fear that spread around her. “What happened? Cade?” Mira rattled her hands, and a shock traveled up Cade’s arms. “Hey!”
Cade deliberated. Mira was light on her feet. She could reach any spot on the ship faster than Cade. Every second of medical attention gave Ayumi a better chance, so it came down to whether or not she trusted Mira with Ayumi’s life.
“Cade?” Mira asked.
“Run to the sick bay,” Cade said. “Now. Get everyone. And I don’t mean whoever is on duty or agrees to go with you. Get everyone.”
There wasn’t even time for Mira to agree before she spun around, and was gone.
Cade headed for the docks. Rennik would have gotten there too early, and anyone else would get there too late. She had to do this part herself.
There were two shuttles missing, besides the ones that had been signed out by fleet members. Unmother must have set the first one loose into deep space before she disappeared back into the walls.
The second one was out there, now.
Cade made it through the hold in less than a breath and dropped into the pilot’s seat. Every inch of the shuttle screamed Ayumi, pressing down on Cade’s guilt and pain. But she had picked the ship for a reason. It was the only one she’d ever really flown.
She punched the controls forward, and the shuttle left the side of Everlast with a flash of speed so fierce that if Cade hadn’t been strapped in, she would have sailed through the window. She drove the shuttle harder than she had ever driven a guitar, but her flight skills were amateur at best.
The lights of another ship blinked in front of Cade, sick-yellow, dotting a line toward Unmaker territory.
Catching up wasn’t an option, so Cade tried to stop Unmother with sound, attacking her like she had with that slummer on Andana. A mess of notes spilled out from her head, reminding Cade of the Noise that used to make its home in her brain.
The shuttle in front of Cade slowed, twisting a dizzy curve. Cade had Unmother in her reach—but she couldn’t keep producing sound and fly the shuttle at the same time. The controls danced in her hands, and the cabin sputtered.
She had to turn around and get back to Everlast before Unmother figured out she had lost control. Cade clunked the ship in a half circle and hit the com. It was easy to hail one of the fleet’s ships. Unmother had no choice but to listen.
“You should know you failed,” Cade said with a hard bite. “You should know that I’m alive, and so is my friend.”
The com erupted with the sound of Unmother breathing. Cade wanted to get her hands around that slender throat.
She stole the woman’s words and offered them back to her. “We will stay alive. On gristle. And hope.”
Cade closed her eyes tight, to stop herself from shaking. But her mind was open, undefended.
A thought-song slipped in.
It stripped her down to her nerves. It was dissonance and drive, straight-ahead rhythms and ugly notes.
Unmother had a song now, woven thick and tight.
Strands of hate.
Chapter 26
Set against the bed in medical, Ayumi looked small and clean and quiet. Her red-soaked clothes had been cut off and she wore a plastic sheet, with plastic tubes crossed over it. The blood in the tubes, the pumping and pulsing, made it seem like Ayumi’s life had been lifted out of her body and was suspended above her.
“They think she might wake up,” Lee said. She sat the closest she was allowed, a slice left clear around the bed for the shuffling of a nurse. Cade dragged a chair and sat next to Lee. “They think she might wake up, but they’re not sure, and even if she does, it could be . . . well, besides the blood she lost, there was the bashed-in skull. So they don’t know what it will be until she wakes up.
“Sorry. If. If.”
Lee snatched Cade’s hand and gripped it, bone-tight. Cade hadn’t let herself feel how much she’d missed Lee until now. She still wasn’t letting herself feel how much she would miss Ayumi. If.
Lee fired out of the chair, all angles and energy. “I have to get back to the control room.” When Cade shot her a soft question of a look, Lee added, “I got bette
r before anybody showed up.” So the spacesick fit was a secret, and Lee would stay out of the bay, for now.
“I shouldn’t have left you there,” Cade said. She hadn’t even thought to stay and guard Lee against having her secret found out. There was a whole spectrum of ways to fail people.
“Are you kidding me?” Lee asked, leaping onto her toes like she always did when she had a heroic story to retell. “You went after Unmother on your own, full out. A girl who can’t fly to save her own life, smashing through the black! I would have done the same thing. You know. If I could have.”
Lee pressed a soft kiss onto the paper that covered the back of Ayumi’s tube-fed hand. She touched the thick screen of cuts on Ayumi’s face. No matter how much she healed, she would be different. But when Cade closed her eyes, Ayumi’s song was the same, slow and deep, and fully threaded with Lee’s.
“You know they’ll find someone to cover if you want to stay here,” Cade said.
“I have to get back,” Lee said. “Keep busy. Do something.”
Cade got the feeling that no matter where Lee went, her song would be here.
The nurse needed space, so Cade moved to the small pocket of a waiting room. Mira was sleeping on one of the chairs in a tight ball.
“How long has she been sitting there?” Cade asked a nurse.
The man’s smile was tired, but he couldn’t keep it from rising, like a heavy sun. Mira had that effect on people. “She delivered the message about your friend, and then we couldn’t get her to budge.”
Cade sat. As soon as Mira felt someone land in her space, she rustled herself awake, so efficient that Cade felt sure it had been part of her training.
“You saved Ayumi’s life,” Cade said.
Mira shifted back and forth on folded legs. “Maybe.”
She was using the word as a buffer to keep herself from believing, which only showed how much she wanted her own goodness to be true.
Cade put an arm around Mira’s shoulder, but she shrugged away. “I don’t think I should let you do that anymore,” she said.
“What?” Cade asked.
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