Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Matteo stepped in again. “We can’t alter the plan—”

  “I’m not asking you to. Everyone has to make their own choice. I can’t tell you the risks are worth it.”

  Cade’s short-lived stint as a savior ended here. She was a musician, and she had gotten away from everything that mattered. On the edge of the black hole she had promised Xan—promised herself—that she would do more than survive.

  Cade pointed at the fleet members working the inter-ship com. “The one thing I do need is answers. Who wants to come with me, and who stays behind?”

  “You’re not just asking us to get to Earth,” Lee said. “You’re asking us to get there or die trying. Earth is twenty systems away. No one bothers to sail out in that direction anymore. It’s a wasteland.”

  “Maybe,” Cade said. “But it’s ours.”

  The votes came in so fast they clogged the com. They had to be sorted and marked down, so naturally, June took charge.

  Cade was surprised that anyone said yes.

  “They like you,” Mira said.

  “Or maybe they’re tired of fighting,” June said. “And waiting to go spacesick, and then fighting some more.”

  “Maybe it’s just the word,” Zuzu said, rolling it around in her mouth like a blue-green marble. “Earth. Earth. Earth.”

  Cade focused on the votes, tick marks consuming the paper down to a thin margin of white. More no than yes, but Cade still had hundreds of people to bring with her. They trusted her, or they wanted something more than fleet-life. Either way, the burden of proof was on Cade. It winched her chest tight and made anything other than a shallow breath feel like a dream.

  She did a quick check of both lists. Rennik’s name still didn’t grace either side, so Cade forged it. Maybe she couldn’t bring him out of his broken state, but she was never going to leave him behind.

  Cade spun a half circle and found Gori shuffling in the door. He never shuffled anywhere these days, so it had to be important.

  “Are you coming with us?” Cade asked.

  His weariness was in full effect. “I feel that I must.”

  Cade didn’t love the idea of Gori standing over her, a chaperone sent by the disapproving universe, old as stardust, shaking his head at every note she sang. But she couldn’t tell him to stay behind when everyone he knew was leaving.

  Matteo crossed to Cade, looking even more solemn than Gori.

  “You have to take Everlast,” he said. “With those numbers, you’ll need it.”

  “But—”

  Matteo held up a no-need-to-argue palm. It was puffed and hatched, a reminder that Matteo had lived the longest life of anyone Cade still knew. But he wasn’t old, not properly ancient, not even close.

  “We’re coming with you,” Matteo said. “You’ll need us, too.” Cade knew he was right. She also knew, from the stunted cough at the end of his sentence, that he was getting emotional.

  “I’m going to stay,” June said, capping her enormous decision with a tiny nod. “Someone has to watch things on this end.” June knew how to work the operation like a machine—an imperfect, human-run machine, but still. She had turned from a chore enthusiast into someone who could head a fleet.

  “I’ll berth with the Rembran ships,” she said. “They have a good handle on things. We’ll set up a new command center and keep in touch, as long as we can.” June drained fast, before she could change her mind.

  “We have another issue,” Zuzu said. “There are names missing from that tally.”

  Cade fast-flicked the pages. “What names?”

  “Spacesicks,” Zuzu said. The ones that were too far gone to make the choice.

  “I can speak for my mother,” Cade said. “She’s coming with me.” She wished that she’d been able to get to the bay, to sit with her mother one more time before this new trouble knocked the fleet down. There were other spacesicks, too many others. Cade couldn’t leave them to fight their own quiet battles.

  Lee waved an arm and stole all the attention in the room. It curled around her in the easy way that Cade had never mastered.

  “I can speak for the rest,” Lee said. When Cade’s eyebrows dug in, deep and questioning, Lee whispered, “Ayumi told me what you did for me that one time, with the singing. You didn’t think I would wake up on the wrong ship and let it go without a little investigating, did you?”

  Lee marched up to Matteo. “Whatever crazy thing Cade is doing woke up the worst spacesicks in the fleet. I happen to think that sounds better than sitting in the bay in a state of pre-rot.”

  “Vote?” Zuzu asked.

  Hands scatter-shot the air. An overwhelming vote to send the worst of the spacesicks with Cade.

  Things moved double time after that, driven by the need to get everyone in place before the fleet cracked in half. Everlast lost some crew members, and replaced them with new ones. The wide windows of the control room had the sort of view that couldn’t be turned away from, so everyone was forced to watch when a blue-white ball of fire connected with a small transport ship. No one could escape the moment when it blew apart, to a fine grit of metal and glass.

  Cade kept moving, kept working, pausing long enough to say, “Universe keep them.”

  Matteo shook his head at the glittering-dark spread of wreckage. “Universe keep us all.”

  June came back and threw herself into a round of fierce hugs before she departed for the last shuttle. After years of service on Everlast, she carried away what she could fit in a canvas sack.

  “If this works, I’ll get word back to you,” Cade said.

  June sprang at Cade and held her tight, Cade’s face buried in braids, and then she was gone.

  Lee and Mira took over June’s workstation, collaborating on diagrams for defensive strategies. Lee had a lifetime of keeping ships safe from nonhumans, and Mira’s working knowledge of the other side could finally be put to use. Lee set her chin to her fists and listened as Mira outlined a life of spacesicks thrown out of airlocks, feelings beaten out of children. Matteo and Zuzu took charge of making sure no one else took the kind of hit that the transport ship had. Gori tried to rapture in the corner, but every time he puffed a few inches, Cade elbowed him out of it.

  Rennik was still missing.

  Cade wanted him at her side—but she couldn’t drop her plans and half of the remaining human race to go find him. Besides, she needed his trust, and that might take some time after their last conversation. Cade fought to stay where she was.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s burn black.”

  Everlast peeled away from the rest of the fleet, and a set of three Unmaker ships followed.

  “Perfect,” Cade said.

  She checked to make sure Unmother was with them. The new song was there, even louder in contrast to the rough silence of the non-songs around it. Unmother had lost her footing. She’d walked a tight path of not-caring, but now she was driven by hate for Cade, throbbing with a single human emotion.

  “We’re not inviting them on this little expedition, are we?” Lee asked as the Unmakers scudded close.

  “Hail those ships,” Cade said. “Tell them we’re headed for Earth.”

  “Why?” Zuzu asked.

  The crew waited for Cade to offer a sound, strategic reason, and that’s exactly what she did.

  “It’s going to make her furious.”

  Chapter 28

  Unmaker ships stayed tight on Everlast, and so did their fire.

  “Keep them out of range,” Cade said. When Zuzu tossed up her hands, Cade added, “As much as you can.”

  The map table became the new focus of the room as Cade tried to chart the best road to Earth. It wasn’t one wide, straight black highway through space, but a badly drawn, complicated web.

  Cade lifted a huge sheet of paper by a corner. “Someone thought this was useful?” she asked. “As a map?”

  “It was made as part of a mining operation near Earth,” Matteo said, “but their interests differed from ours. It
was focused on confirming the locations of natural resources, and Earth had none to speak of.”

  “Also, this was four or five hundred years ago,” Zuzu added.

  “We might be able to use the information from Ayumi’s notebooks to pin down the location,” Lee said.

  “Good idea,” Cade said. “Get on it.” She trusted Ayumi more than some four-hundred-year-old miner.

  Zuzu hit the panels. “Our friends are on the move.”

  Cade checked the windows and the scans. The Unmaker ships had pulled wide and shot ahead.

  “Good,” Cade said. “If they’re obsessed with getting there first, they’re not firing at us.”

  Zuzu almost pulled the heavy ball in her eyebrow straight out of her face. “The Unmaker ships have dregs for defense, but they’re lighter and, therefore, fast.” She penciled a few calculations, but Cade knew the outcome.

  “She’s going to beat us to Earth.”

  “This isn’t about who wins the race,” Cade said. “It’s about what happens when we get there.”

  Hours settled into a regular pace, instead of the expand-and-pinch that came with battle. The choreography of the control room tightened. Cade had almost convinced herself they were flying a simple run with no real danger clouding it, until Mira collapsed on the panels.

  Water flew everywhere.

  “She hit the emergency sprinklers,” Lee said, diving across the table to cover the charts.

  Lukewarm bullets hit Cade as she ran. Mira had knocked her forehead to a bright cherry, but she wasn’t bleeding. Her hands looked wretched, though, knotted tight, fingers bloated and red.

  “Crashing,” Mira said. She held up one hand and her fingertips danced a sick, fast series of twitches.

  “The biochip?” Cade’s fingers went to the back of Mira’s neck.

  Mira leaked a whimper-scream. Her back arched without her permission, hands scrabbling at her own scalp. Every time Cade unstuck one hand, Mira’s nails set a new course back to her face, until she was patched with raw skin and sticking blood. It was bad enough to watch from the outside, but Cade ached for whatever Mira was feeling. She wondered if the Unmakers could kill a person this way.

  Mira rocked against Cade as she lifted the girl.

  “Dry off and keep flying,” Cade said.

  Mira’s hands shuddered against the back of her neck. Cade smoothed the girl’s hair, clasped her tighter.

  The walk to medical had never seemed so long before.

  Cade bribed a nurse for the last painkillers in the drawer. She pulled a thin curtain and sat Mira down on a white bed with a paper rustle. Mira’s whimpers had grown longer, more drawn out. Cade took out her knife and swabbed it with al­cohol.

  She tried to talk to Mira through it. Talk herself through it.

  “This is going to hurt,” Cade said, “but probably not as much as having the Unmakers dance on your nervous system all the time.”

  Cade dug into her. Mira kept her head still and her hands tight. She didn’t complain.

  “What is Unmother sending you?” Cade asked.

  Mira winced up at Cade. “She really, really, really doesn’t like you.”

  Cade drew a clean angle around one corner of the chip. “I’ve known that since the night Unmother came after me. She hates me so much that she put her own plan in danger. It’s enough to make a girl feel special.”

  “We don’t believe in special,” Mira said, her breath coming in great, broken chunks. “I mean they. They don’t.”

  Cade teased the chip out and held it up. It was dark, and set in rigid patterns.

  Mira unloaded a sigh and straightened her neck. Her pinched fingers reached for the controller. Cade handed it over, glad to be rid of the thing. “I can’t do much about the one in your brain, but—”

  “This is enough,” Mira said. “If they try to send new intel, it won’t have anywhere to go.” She fastened herself to Cade. “Thank you thank you thank you.” Her words sank into Cade’s shirt. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with warning. “I don’t want you to fight Unmother. She’s too dangerous.”

  The bed paper crinkled under Cade’s legs as she satdown. “I have something to go on this time.” She tried to explain it in her mind first, so she could get it across to Mira. When she had it worked out, she said, “If Unmother thinks emotion can only make a person weak, then it will always make her weak.”

  “You think it makes you strong?” Mira asked.

  “Maybe it can be both things, the way a planet has two faces. One in shadow, one in sun.”

  Mira went stubborn-quiet. She pulled Cade down by the elbow and said, “I worry about love.”

  Cade raised her eyebrows, and went looking for something to patch up Mira’s neck.

  “It seems like the bad link in the whole business,” Mira said, kicking her legs, restless already. “Doesn’t love always go wrong?”

  Cade still couldn’t lie, even when it would make things easier.

  “I don’t know.”

  She let the thoughts of Rennik come—the softness of his eyes, and how they took so long to shade into a new feeling. The way his hands were always working, and his face offset the motion with calm.

  Cade stuck a slab of thick white cotton against Mira’s neck and held it in place with a snippet of white tape. “There’ll be a scar.”

  Mira jumped off the bed and cracked the biochip under her heel. “Worth it.”

  Cade didn’t have long to plan for the most important show of her life. She had most of the lyrics and an idea of the melody.

  There were two more things she needed.

  Cade headed back to her cabin and cut straight for the closet. There wasn’t much in there: a set of clothes so worn and patched and worn again that Cade had tossed them aside, a few pouches of vanilla-flavored protein that she’d pocketed in the mess, and in the farthest corner, half-buried under an old bandage, the glow of a white guitar.

  The second part involved Rennik. She checked his room, the control room, the mess. Panic trailed the thought that he might have ducked onto a shuttle before the fleet split, but when she checked the manifests, she didn’t find his name. The docks stood quiet now, the shuttles either gone for good or put to bed.

  Cade had an idea, and she didn’t overthink it. She let her feet turn the steps and her fingers travel the buttons.

  The dock to Ayumi’s shuttle swirled open.

  Rennik sat on the floor against the mild curve of the hold, his long fingers capping his knees. He didn’t notice Cade at first, and she wondered if he was stuck in a memory. This shuttle had been locked onto Renna up until the day she died. Maybe Rennik could trick himself into thinking that the next time the door opened, she would be on the other side, gleaming and impatient.

  Cade wanted to let him believe it, but she worried that the longer this went on, the more it would hurt when it ended.

  She planted her knees in front of Rennik’s face. “I need to tune this,” she said. “I think you know how.”

  Rennik stared at the guitar with a variation on his all-the-emotions look. Love and pain and a scattering of nerves.

  He touched the high E and grimaced as the guitar released a pitifully thin sound. He brushed the other strings with a thumb, but had to still them when he heard the notes, loose and rotten.

  “It’s part of her,” Cade said. “And so are you. So, I thought maybe . . .”

  Rennik turned his whole body to the task. Cade held the base of the guitar as he sank his attention into the tuning pegs. But Rennik melted from hard work into soft remembering, his gaze far off, and Cade thought he had stranded her alone in the present. She stood up and palm-dusted her knees.

  “Give me a minute,” he said, without taking his eyes off the smooth white. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Right,” Cade said. “Sorry.”

  Rennik put his ear to the hollow. “What do you need the guitar for?”

  “Long explanation, lots of verses, complicated chorus,
” Cade said. “Please trust me.”

  Rennik’s cheeks pinched. “The last time I did that . . .”

  Cade’s back went stiff against the wall. “Do you think you could stop bringing up the attack?”

  It was the wrong thing to say, but she didn’t have reserves of tact anymore. There was too much to worry about, and stepping around Rennik’s feelings had lost its place in line.

  He stood fast, Moon-White banging against his legs. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it.” His pacing filled the hold. “That would be a good way to live, never having to think about it. But Cade, all I can do is think about it.” He sat down, funneling his energy into the guitar. “I know all of this is not your doing. I know that I’m wrong. And I can’t stop.” He gripped Moon-White too hard. “You think I want that to be the case?”

  Cade tried to fill Rennik’s old role and be the reasonable one. But Cade was still Cade. She had things to say and no better time to say them. “I think you live by some code,” she said. “Whoever meant the most to you and died, that’s your lodestar. You did it for Moira, you’re doing it for Renna.” She dropped her voice to a mutter. “You’ll do it for me, as soon as I’m dead.”

  Rennik looked up at her, his hands still working. “That’s not true. I mean . . .” he said. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Cade knelt in front of him. “So prove it.”

  “We—already—”

  Heat slid through Cade at the thought of what they had already done. But one night was a single star, one fleck of brightness against a blotted-out sky. “You have to keep proving it.”

  Rennik went back to fiddling with the tuning pegs. He didn’t make a big production of it. A little this way, a little that. He had never looked so frustrated. Cade couldn’t tell how much was the guitar and how much was her. When he raised Moon-White between them, Cade thought he was giving it back, but he swiped the strings, and surprised her with something better. G major.