“Be nice to me.”
Cade looked down at her hands. “You don’t think you deserve it.”
“It’s more than that.” Mira picked at the hard plastic coating of the chair, teasing it into new shapes. “It was part of the plan. Unmother said to let you take care of me. She said you would want to.”
Cade hated that Unmother had been right about her so many times. “What made her think it would go like that?”
The plastic coating burst under the pressure of Mira’s nail. She hurried to hide the little hole under her palm.
“Nobody ever took care of you.”
The docks beckoned, and so did the need to book a flight to the spacesick bay. A visit to Cade’s mother would mean another round of empty hope, and well-earned disappointment. But it didn’t feel right to log so much time with Ayumi and pretend her mother was out of reach.
Cade figured she would be able to catch a shuttle, spend a quarter of an hour in the bay, and make it back before her next shift in the control room. As she approached the docks, an Everlast guard swept across in a strict line, marking the boards that hung on the wall at the side of each dock.
“All non-essential flights are canceled,” he said. “All non-essential flights.”
Cade ran up to the man, locking her legs into the stance that told him she was someone important in the fleet.
“What’s this about?” Cade asked.
But he didn’t have to answer; Everlast told her instead. The ship wavered under Cade’s feet, then knocked her off them. Groans flickered, irregular and weak, like dying lights. A woman who had landed near Cade’s elbow let out a flaring scream as the ship rocked again.
The guard spoke from his place clinging to the boards.
“It’s starting.”
The control room heaved with the weight and activity of a doubled set of crew members. Zuzu and a few others ran around in sleep clothes and unlaced boots, shaken out of their beds by the constant knuckling of fire on the hull.
“Fill me in,” Cade said, sliding in at the overcrowded control panel between Lee and June.
“Nothing to fill,” Lee said, focused on the blips of yellow and red outside the window. “Just a little unfriendly fire.”
“No word from the Unmakers?” Cade asked. She knew how much Unmother loved to send a message.
“Nothing,” June said, but she tossed all the com switches to open positions to make sure they weren’t missing it.
The panel was a muddle of hands, the floor thick with unsure feet. No matter how well they thought they planned for a crisis, disorder crept in as soon as the bombs hit. Cade ran to Matteo, who circled the room with a calm stride, handing out tasks like cards from an endless stack.
“Did they cross the line?” Cade asked.
“Only a few ships. The serious power is still on their side.” He leaned over the shoulder of a fleet member who had his hands on the controls of a live cannon. “Divert more fire to U4, port side.”
“Their pilots know our setup now,” Lee said, dogging Cade’s heels. “It’s Evasion 101 out there.”
“I am concerned about that,” Matteo said, like it was a problem he’d been studying in a dust-laden book of maneuvers from three hundred years ago. “But I believe that if we change our patterns, we can still catch them by surprise. The real issue is what happens when it comes to a boarding.”
“We used to have the upper hand,” Lee said. “Until that woman slithered through the whole ship and . . .” Lee went so tense that Cade worried she would snap—the sort of break that there was no coming back from.
Zuzu cracked the tension by fluttering a stack of paper over her head. “New defensive protocols for everyone!”
Lee grabbed one and tossed herself into an open chair, pushing her worries into the buttons and dials. Cade followed her lead. She went back to work, her body on an auto-course, until Mira tapped her arm. The strange jitter of her fingertips told Cade an important truth, without Mira having to say it.
She had intel.
Cade pulled her aside. “What is it?”
Mira adjusted Cade to her level and channeled words into her ear. Fast, erratic, uninflected.
“Are you sure?” Cade asked.
Mira dropped into a flat, careful listening mode. “They’re repeating it now, to make sure I got the whole thing.”
Cade nudged Mira to the central point of command, and told her to repeat what she’d heard to the entire control room.
“The Unmakers are on the attack,” Mira said three times, shedding a little bit of shyness with each bump in volume. “Hey!” Heads snapped, attention sharpened. “They’re on the attack, but they’re going to regroup soon. They’ll leave a thin line of defense and collect most of the ships in one place to lure us in. They know we went for the same sort of thing last time. Now they’re using it as bait. The whole thing’s a trap.”
Matteo paused in his rounds. He looked from Mira to Cade, then back again, stubbing his fingers through his gray-touched hair. “What’s the source of this information?”
Cade hunted for a lie, but before she found a half-decent one, Mira hitched herself tall and spoke.
“I was a spy.” The room went numb, the only sounds the click of controls and the patter of fire. “I worked for their side. Then I was a spy for us.” Faces melted with confusion before setting in new molds—shock, disgust, disbelief, a few acute cases of pity. Cade knew that Mira would hate the pity most.
The girl was like a shuttle on her first trip. She had launched into her speech fiery and brave, and now she jerked through the rest, ready to land and be done with it. “Mira isn’t my name, or it wasn’t, but you can keep using it, I don’t mind. I thought about getting something new. Like Emily. That’s a good name, I think.” She tamped her nervous energy into her hands. “But if I got rid of the old name, it would be like pretending the rest of it never happened, like trying to throw it away.” Mira stared at the point where her fingertips met. The biochip twitches had faded. “I can’t do that.”
June approached the girl like she was a loaded gun, safety off. “You were a—”
“Spy.”
Cade slung an arm around Mira. “Anyone who wants to deal with that has to deal with me.”
The crew members looked at one another, trading discomfort. Lee strode up to Mira, arms tight across her chest. Mira took a breath and waited.
“You gave us intel last time, too,” Lee said. “You’re how we caught that woman.”
Catching that woman had led to Ayumi, torn and silent. Catching that woman was the first step in Lee almost losing her—living with that possibility like needles embedded in her skin.
Cade waited for Lee to deck Mira. Her being a little girl would only protect her for so long.
Maybe it had never protected her at all.
Lee untucked a hand, and as Cade moved to snatch it out of its flight path, pin Lee to the ground, and take her out in less than three moves, it became clear that all Lee wanted to do was shake.
“That was something,” Lee said. “Really something. Only the bravest go up against that woman.”
Mira looked like she was about to go nova with happiness. She tossed herself at Lee’s neck, braids flinging. Lee shifted to detach the girl, but Cade caught the moment when she softened a notch and returned the good press of Mira’s hug.
A few people cheered, and Zuzu raised her paper-heavy fist high in the air. June snuck up and patted Mira on the shoulder. During Matteo’s next round of duties, he stopped at her side. “We’ll have to come up with a special commendation,” he said. “For courage when no one can watch or thank you for it, and you have every reason to fear your friends will hold it against you.”
Mira scrunched the rest of her face up around her nose. “Sounds like a lot to squish on a medal.”
Matteo spared a laugh before he moved on, shouting instructions at four different crew members. “Peel topside, hard! Don’t spare the ammunition! Give them a reason to think
twice before they make another pass.”
Cade thought she and Mira were out of the dark, and all they had to worry about now was death by Unmaker. But Rennik had been there the whole time, silent against the wall, clinging to his first and strongest reaction.
Mira ran from Cade’s side and threw herself in with the cannon squad. She was everywhere, wanting to help. Rennik filled in the place she had left. The vibration of his sour feelings sat on Cade’s skin.
“How long?” he asked.
Cade pretended that she was needed at the map table. She leaned low, hoping that it would toss Rennik off, but he wasn’t going to give up, no matter how busy she made herself look.
“How long?”
She inched a tight shrug.
Rennik leaned down and braced his forearms against the map table, his nearness a new sort of torture. Cade wanted to be closer, fitted and moving against him. She wanted Rennik balanced and she wanted him back. But all of that got in the way of his battle, so it had to be kicked aside.
“How long have you known?”
“Since Renna. Right after. Well . . . during.” Cade wasn’t going to apologize. She had saved Mira’s life for more than one good reason. She wondered if that would still count for something when they all died in a few hours.
The anger in Rennik’s face pooled to bitterness. He swallowed and turned hard, and Cade watched his back all the way out the door. She kept losing him, so it shouldn’t have felt like a knife to the throat every snugging time.
“Oh!” Mira said, running a wild curve back to the center of the room. “There’s something else you should know.”
The crew listened to her now, not like a little girl, but one of their own.
“What is it?” Matteo asked.
“The Unmakers think I’ve been turned against them, or at least turned soft,” Mira said. “Unmother must want me to pass along her plan.”
Zuzu hopped onto the edge of the map table and sat cross-legged. “Do you think it’s misinformation?”
Mira looked worry-sick. “I think they’ll set it up like they said.”
“Then why tell us?” Matteo asked.
Cade stepped in with the answer. “Unmother gets some nasty pleasure out of us knowing that we have no good options.”
Mira pointed to the hull. “They’re trying to get us soft now. This isn’t the real strike. They have our specs, so when they make a full pass there will be better targeting on the missiles, and no question they’ll try to board.”
Matteo patted the wall, and it raised a memory of Renna. Cade almost expected the hull to rumble back.
“Well,” Matteo said. “Let’s hope she’s called Everlast for a reason.”
The meeting took nine minutes.
Cade knew that the crew would vote to grab the offensive while they could, and cross the line with everything they had. There would be no polite folding of hands and waiting for death. Cade agreed that an attack was better than the alternative, but she still couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the decision.
June drew up new rotations and ordered Cade to take a nap. An hour later, she came back with unpinned braids and her sternest face to try again. Four hours deep, Cade finally quit the control room, weaving down the halls on heavy feet.
In her cabin, the bed was still rumpled. Unmade. Cade touched the bottom sheet, the only one that hadn’t been stripped, and wondered which wrinkles had been formed by Ayumi’s thrashing. It was such a dark wondering that she had to replace it. She settled on the memory of Ayumi in the same spot, eyes kindled, as she talked about Earth.
Cade rested her head on the floor and fell into a dark pool of sleep. She had no idea how long she’d been there when she woke up, alive with prickles and ache, and noticed the notebook under the bed.
It must have been kicked there when someone cleaned up. There was no question in Cade’s flickering mess of a brain—this was the same one Ayumi had been writing in for months, even in the pre-fleet days. Cade pulled it from its resting place and opened it with care.
What she found was like a map, delineating the twists and turns of Ayumi’s heart. She had written long, winding sentences about falling in love with Lee. There were illustrations, too, pencil sketches of Lee in a take-charge stance and heavy boots, Lee napping against the low curve of a wall in Renna’s common room. Lee at night, her eyes sparking and her hair out of its knots.
Ayumi had peppered the pages with Earth poems, descriptions, bits of history and made-up tales that connected to her own thoughts. And then, in the thick of Ayumi’s words, Cade found her own.
She read them over, following with a finger as she went. The imprint of other lines on the back of the sheet pulled her to turn the page. Written there, in Ayumi’s rushed slant, were the words:
“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
—Unknown Earth poet, early 20th century
Disturb the universe. That’s what Gori said Cade was doing when she sang. Ayumi must have agreed, or at least worried about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have connected the song with this poem.
But Ayumi had wanted Cade to sing it. She’d been the song’s biggest fan. Its only fan.
Cade tucked the notebook under her arm and took it with her on a long walk to medical. She sat in the ring of atmosphere around Ayumi’s bed. A single light burned on Ayumi’s broad cheeks, her newly washed curls. Her cuts had been sewn, and her head bandaged, but no one had fixed the real problem. Ayumi wasn’t Ayumi if she couldn’t turn up at the perfect moment with a moving pen and a half-formed plan.
“What do we do now?” Cade asked.
She read the poem three more times.
Maybe disturbing the universe wasn’t the worst thing Cade could do. Maybe it was what she had to do. The more she thought about it, there was no way to live without disturbing things on some scale. Stirring up particles, connecting to people. Things changed shape wherever they touched. Melodies sprang up in the cracks.
In a minute there is time
Cade ran her fingers over the words, until the ink transferred, picking out the small ridges on her skin. She was disturbing the universe right now. But it was one thing to do it by existing, and it was another thing to dare.
Cade got the feeling that there was more to the poem. More to the song that sat waiting on the flip side of the page.
“We’re playing this all wrong.”
The crew looked up from the somber pushing of controls. Cade swept through the room like a fresh wind.
“We’re doing what Unmother wants,” Cade said. “Again. I did it when I took in Mira, and when I gathered the human race. We all did it when we threw ourselves into this fight. This is what they want. The Unmakers don’t care if they die as long as we’re gone at the end of it and a few of them can make it to a future that they like the looks of.” Cade turned to Mira for backup. “Did I get that right?”
In a few hours, the girl had gone from the fleet mascot to the trusted and official source on all things Unmaker.
“Yeah,” Mira said. “That’s it all right.”
“Unmother wants us to go after her, again and again,” Cade said. “If we act like that’s the only course, they win.”
“So what do you want us to do instead?” Lee asked. The words floated in an answerless void.
“Ayumi had an idea.” Cade held up the notebook like it was an artifact of a better world. “She was working on it when . . .” Cade stopped before she piled more hurt on Lee. There was still hope for Ayumi. For all of them.
“There’s a song I need to play,” Cade said.
She thought she was ready for the blank stares, but they hit her like a wall of feedback. Everlast’s crew didn’t know Cade as a musician. Maybe they’d heard the fistful of rumors that she’d been famous once, for turning the volume up too high, kicking people’s teeth in with sound. But that part of the long
-ago.
Matteo shook his head. “A song?”
Cade produced a guitar pick from her back pocket, twirled it between her fingers, and a bit of the old brass came back.
“You’re going to put on a show?” Lee asked. “Now?” Despite her forehead dent and matching frown, Cade caught excitement in the tug of her lips. Mira looked like she was two seconds away from hopping up and down.
“This is a new kind of show,” Cade said. “One the universe has never seen.”
She stared out at the sleek Unmaker ships, the mismatched human fleet, and the false calm between them.
Once the fleet had gathered, the next step shouldn’t have been a battle with the Unmakers, winner-limp-away-broken. The fight had seemed like their only choice, but they should have thrown their resources at finding the human race a home. A real home. Planet-side and permanent.
“The stage matters,” Cade said. “We have to get there as fast as we can.”
“So we just turn around and leave?” June asked. “Let the Unmakers win? Abandon the fleet?”
“No,” Cade said. “The fleet’s welcome to join us.”
“Where are we going?” Lee asked.
“Earth.”
Chapter 27
Matteo looked at Cade like she was twice as crazy as she felt.
“It’s a dead planet,” he said. “In a dead system.”
But it wasn’t dead, not inside of Cade. Earth had been growing, one particle at a time, gathering mass and swirling into blue-green life ever since she started reading Ayumi’s notebooks. The control room of Everlast was crammed with people who didn’t understand that.
“So to recap,” Zuzu said as she fired another round at an Unmaker ship that wouldn’t stop pestering them, too close to the engine room. “You want to take us to a blinked-out fairy-tale planet because a song told you to?”
Cade stared down the crew’s confusion. When she looked for Rennik to stand with her, she found that he hadn’t returned to the control room. One more thing to worry about, as soon as she could get away. For now, she had to stay focused on Earth. She didn’t offer more explanation, or smatter the room with apologies. She stood back, crossed her arms, and said, “That’s all I can tell you for now.”
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