Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  A warm, perfect chord. It struck her like sunshine.

  “What do you think?” Rennik asked.

  He looked natural with the guitar on his lap, almost relaxed. “I think you should keep Moon-White after the show.”

  He shook his head. “Renna made it for you.”

  “But only because you asked her to.” It was a truth Cade had always guessed at but neither of them had ever spoken.

  “You miss Renna,” Cade said, “and you have every right to. She’s gone.” Cade touched the guitar, because she didn’t know what would happen if she touched him. “I miss you and you’re right here.”

  She set her hand along the line of his cheek.

  Rennik put Moon-White aside.

  He kissed Cade like he was learning her all over again. Like she was an instrument he’d given up a long time ago and was coming back to, with a needing-ache in his hands and the fear he’d get it wrong. But he touched her as if he had the time—the days, the years—to get it right. And that was enough to put the shine back. That was enough to pull it out of Cade, trembling at the surface of her skin.

  Cade woke up in a little bunk, her hips at unlikely angles, her arms vined around Rennik’s.

  She nudged closer to him and fell into a soft sleep.

  The days pushed on, full of charts and look-alike tracts of darkness.

  Cade spent most of her time reading Ayumi’s notebooks. Before, they had been searching for evidence of a new planet, one that would be everything the human race needed. They had chased the possibility, page after page. But what they’d needed was right there.

  This time, Cade read for Earth.

  She wanted the details, the stories, the memory-shreds. They flooded and filled cracks inside of Cade that she hadn’t known were there.

  Nights she spent with Rennik, talking and making the sorts of plans that people make when they have a future. Neither of them brought up the too-possible ending, the short version where one or both of them died in a few days. But it was always there, like a note pitched too low to hear, the vibrations sneaking in.

  Early mornings, Cade walked the sludge-gray halls, less than half-awake, and visited her mother in the new spacesick bay. The room had been designed for all-crew meetings and religious services, back in the days when people could find things to pray about. No one had a bed, but the spacesicks didn’t seem to care.

  Cade held her mother’s hands.

  Since the fleet had gathered, it had gotten easier to put her mother aside. But one broken-through moment had changed things. Cade would always have her mother like that now, real and striving. And she would have that word.

  Cadence.

  Her mother’s voice had reinvented it.

  The presence of Cade’s mother and her glass had its normal effect on the song, stirring it up, but Cade didn’t let it out. She kept the notes down when they wanted to rise. This wasn’t the normal case of practice and warm-ups. If the song really was about Earth, Cade needed to finish it in the right place.

  There were words that a person always had inside of her, and words she had to travel a long way to find.

  Cade learned what she could by studying the song in her mind, turning it around, learning the melodic phrase and testing variations. She didn’t even hum out loud, but she swore that spacesicks leaned in, bent around the burning of a secret sun.

  Cade pulled aside a passing nurse. “Did any of the spacesicks who had the choice stay behind?”

  “Not one.”

  The spacesicks knew the real fight. They’d known it all along.

  And then the black outside the windows showed new signs.

  A tiny ice-orb. Gas planets, one banded by rings. Everlast dodged and ducked its way across a thick asteroid belt.

  Cade didn’t leave the control room anymore. She leaned against the panels, eyes tacked to the space-black. When she ripped them away, she found that Rennik had claimed the chair on one side of her and Lee had claimed the other. Mira stood behind them, watching over Cade’s shoulder.

  Close, now.

  And then there were no planets left. Cade had counted inward from the edge of the system, and the next one that rose out of the black should be—

  Earth.

  As white and gray as a dead skin-flake.

  As gone as a spacesick’s eye.

  “Did we . . . make it?” Mira asked.

  “Yes,” Lee said. “You might want to work on sounding less anticlimactic.”

  Mira tried again. “We made it!”

  So had the Unmakers. Any dreams that the enemy ships had fallen back or slammed into an asteroid were forgotten. The crew faced the truth—three ships hanging between Everlast and Earth’s atmosphere.

  That should have added up inside Cade and crashed her hopes. But she smiled, and the delight wasn’t an act. Cade had never felt such a swelling rightness. This was the longed-for moment, the needed place.

  Her fingertips itched for strings.

  Chapter 29

  The new spacesick bay made a fine stage.

  High windows curved at both ends, like cupped palms that rose, touching fingertips at the highest point. The window across from Cade showed where they’d been—the stretches of black, dotted with planets, iced with pale moons. The window behind Cade showed Earth. Not the Earth of Cade’s song, or the Earth of Ayumi’s notebooks.

  But still.

  “It’s perfect,” Cade said as she slung Moon-White across her chest.

  “Are we looking at the same planet?” Lee asked.

  She and Rennik shifted microphones into place, stacking the equipment that would broadcast Cade’s music through the ship. Cade had tried to explain to Zuzu that she wouldn’t strictly need the help, that when she played the song it would go straight into the head of any human onboard. But Zuzu insisted.

  To be fair, Cade didn’t fight her too hard. It would be brass to batter Everlast with all of that sound.

  The bay reflooded with people as Cade tuned up. Whatever Rennik had done to Moon-White had worked, and the sound rushed out pure and clean. Cade remembered all of the time Rennik had spent with Renna. The careful calibrations. How much he adored her, talked to her.

  Cade hung her head low over the guitar’s neck and whispered, “You can do this.”

  Zuzu flicked a panel of switches from the side of the stage. “What do you think?”

  The only option for stage light was the buzzing white overheads, but Cade couldn’t have everything. This was a war-battered spaceship, not a club, and she had the one thing that mattered most: a first-class crowd.

  Rennik stood in the front row, with Lee beside him. Against all odds, Gori snuck in and stationed himself against the back wall. Cade’s mother was seated at the center of the room with the rest of the spacesicks.

  Mira hung at the edge of the stage until Zuzu waved her over and showed her how to push at the balance and fade controls on the sound board. She nudged them with excited fingers. Cade made a silent promise to scour the girl’s eardrums, call an awkward shuffle out of her feet, and make her fall in love. Not with a person, but with a song. Cade knew from experience—it was a good place to start.

  The crowd did its sigh-and-settle.

  Cade thought about tacking on some words in front of her playing, some kind of fumble-sore message of hope. But for the first time in too long, she could let the music be her voice.

  She hit the strings, and they spoke.

  In stutters first, in long-winded sentences that started with fine intentions and faded to garble. Cade begged the guitar with her strumming, told it tenderly with each kiss of her fingers on the strings.

  You can do this.

  Cade pinched harmonics, letting the overtones find one another and huddle close. She pulled out every trick she knew, but the listeners furrowed their brows and didn’t follow. Cade was trying too hard to win them. This wasn’t about winning. It was about going somewhere, and taking all of these people with her.

  She was knock
ed from the path by a disturbance near the back of the room. The crowd spread like it was taking a breath. Heads shuffled and reordered themselves, until the cause of the commotion broke through the front row.

  Ayumi’s face was a thicket of half-healed cuts. She looked unsure about each step, as if she were walking through deep woods. She followed the music out of the crowd, into the open space that no one ever breached during a show. Cade switched to simple chord progressions, because her brain couldn’t handle anything else. Ayumi stopped right in front of Cade, her face vague, and then she smiled.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I was trying to sleep, and then I heard something, sort of like the rattle of a bug in my ear.”

  “I’m just getting warmed up,” Cade said.

  Lee elbowed her way out of the crowd, but it wasn’t until her arms went around Ayumi’s waist and her feet left the ground that they both started laughing and crying at the same time.

  “So what do you think?” Lee asked as she finally set Ayumi down.

  “About what?” Ayumi asked.

  Lee spread her arms to take in the room, the crowd, the planet like a white ball that could fit in her palm.

  Ayumi squinted, then squinted harder until it looked like it hurt. She lowered her voice so that only Lee and Cade could hear. “I followed the sound to get here.”

  That quickly, the set of Ayumi’s face made sense. Her eyes had lost their focus. Head trauma, Cade remembered from her time in medical. It could cause all kinds of damage, including blindness. Cade was worried she might have to break the news to Lee, but then she remembered how well Lee and Ayumi understood each other.

  Lee was nodding, and crying, and staring at Ayumi like she couldn’t be more perfect. “Earth,” Lee said, gathering Ayumi’s face in her hands. “We made it to Earth.”

  The static of doubt filled Ayumi’s expression. “This is the absolute wrong time to play a trick on me.”

  “It’s not exactly a welcoming planet,” Lee said. “But it’s one hundred percent real and very much—”

  Ayumi cut her off by laughing. She leaned in and pressed a hand over Lee’s heart, eclipsing every hard truth with a kiss. Lee didn’t look eager to stop kissing, ever, but eventually she put an arm around Ayumi’s back and led her off the stage so Cade could get on with the show.

  Her head was filled with Ayumi’s and Lee’s tight-woven songs, so loud that she didn’t even have to close her eyes to hear them. It should have thrown Cade off, but instead she decided to use it. She borrowed notes from Lee and Ayumi, then from Rennik, Mira, Cade’s mother, and the remembered bits of Renna. The music of the fleet members in the crowd washed over Cade, so she used that, too, twisting it into a melody of her own design. Something simple. This was no time for showoff moves. Her song had to be carved from pure, clean heart.

  Cade knew that it was working when people’s hands flew to their temples. Fleet members turned to whoever stood next to them, gaping, confused.

  Cade vamped—not for time, but for the right feeling. She needed to be in the center of the flow of it. To be a question rushing toward an answer that she couldn’t see. She filled every note with reaching, aching, wanting-to-arrive.

  When it ran out of her fingertips like water, she started to sing.

  third in line and waiting

  for the long slide into dark

  ride the curve to day

  again, following the

  arc

  grave fingers, pulling

  drag all things down

  to a blue-green point of stillness

  and still the whole is turning

  round

  Cade reached the place where the song had cut off before, and it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, her toes scraping the edge. One part of her clung and wobbled back, while the other strained ahead, almost out of her skin. What she needed was laid out beyond her—simple to see, impossible to reach.

  She took a deep breath and the lights blinked off.

  The planet behind her bloomed in the dark, white and gray and much brighter than she would have expected.

  “Now that’s a good stage light,” Zuzu said.

  Cade didn’t have time to admire it, because she was too busy keeping the song from breaking apart. The music didn’t hold against the urgent question of what was going on. Lights shutting down like that could not be a good sign.

  The plan was for Matteo to contact them on the intercom if anything went wrong, but there was no word from the control room, so Cade forced herself to believe that everything was fine. Just a power-flicker. The overheads would be back in a few beats.

  “Everyone stay where you are,” Cade said.

  She closed her eyes and tried to leap in the direction of the missing words, but fear blocked her, every time.

  “What’s happening?” someone asked, breaking the understood rule of silence.

  Everlast rocked, hard. Metal winced, and left its shattering sound deep in Cade’s ear.

  “The Unmakers must have forced a boarding,” Lee said. She ran to Cade, bringing Ayumi with her. Rennik followed, double blades in motion. The stage wasn’t a stage anymore. It was part of a battle that was taking shape around them.

  “What’s going on?” fleet members asked, voice after voice piling.

  Cade had an idea. She reached for the thought-songs to make sure. There should have been human songs in a ring around the bay, and a cluster in the control room. Cade felt only a few of them, faint. The rest was silence.

  “Unmakers have control of the ship,” Cade said.

  “But there was no attack,” Lee said. “No bombs, no ruckus. Why did they go straight for the boarding?”

  Cade pulled her knives out. “It looks like Unmother wants to do this part herself.”

  The doors at the back of the room flung wide, and Unmakers poured in. Mira stood in a pocket of safety behind Zuzu.

  “Keep the spacesicks to the center!” Lee shouted.

  Moon-White swung loose and banged at Cade like a heartbeat outside of her chest. Rennik coaxed the knives out of Cade’s hands. He caught Moon-White and pressed it back at her.

  “Keep playing,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  Unmaker forces were biting at the edges of the crowd, and Rennik’s double blades swung restless circles. “We’ll cover you, Cadence. You wanted a chance to play, and this might be the best one left.”

  Rennik trusted Cade to finish the song, and now she couldn’t. How could it ever be enough for her to play her guitar and sing while people died? She had to fight. She had to save them all. She had to—

  “Play!” Lee cried.

  Ayumi held fast to Lee’s side and nodded.

  Cade strummed at the center of a living circle. Lee and Rennik and Zuzu made up the outer skin. Ayumi and Mira and Cade’s mother were sealed in, protected. Gori fought his way toward them from the back of the crowd.

  Through the first eddies of battle, Cade caught a hint of red hair.

  Chapter 30

  She held tight to the thread of the song, but when Unmother struck down a fleet member, and then another, Cade’s hands mumbled on the strings.

  She broke out of the circle. Rennik’s hand caught her shoulder, and Lee tried to angle in front of her and keep fighting. “I can’t let anyone else get hurt for me,” Cade said, pressing Moon-White into the nearest empty hands, Mira’s. “She wants me.”

  “I thought we didn’t give a snug what she wants,” Lee said.

  Unmother turned and ran out of the bay, and Cade followed, splitting the crowd like too-ripe fruit. She knew that she was giving Unmother what she wanted. At least this would be the last time.

  “Cade!” Lee cried. “Get back here!”

  But Cade was already gone, through the great doors of the bay, thudding fast down the halls. When she wasn’t sure where to go, she closed her eyes for an extra-long blink, and found Unmother’s song. It was the ugliest thing Cade had ever heard, and it had grown more elabo
rate now, barbed and catching.

  This woman’s music had teeth.

  It also lacked a sense of direction. At first, Cade thought Unmother was headed for the control room, but then she would stop, wander in a small loop, and find her way back. By the time she righted the course, Cade had convinced herself that Unmother was wounded.

  Cade almost stumbled over bodies outside the control room—the shift that had volunteered to fly Everlast while Cade put on the show. She closed her eyes and scanned for songs, knowing it would be faster than a pulse check.

  Cade sank into the sick-certain feeling that they were all dead. When she felt a song, it hit her hard. Cade opened her eyes and found Matteo, streaked with blood that had seen its bright-red days, and deepened to brown. Each breath sounded like the ripping of a knife from muscle.

  Cade crouched over Matteo. “You’re okay,” she said, low and rhythmic. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Then she saw the series of stab wounds in his stomach, and stopped lying to him.

  “That . . . woman . . .” Matteo tore another breath and pointed at the control room.

  Even though Cade knew Matteo couldn’t be saved, she didn’t want to leave him. Someone should be there to bottle his last moments and preserve them in memory. But Unmother was in the control room, and she had to be stopped, so Cade ripped away, leaving a small piece of herself with Matteo.

  That was how it always went. Pieces of her—everywhere.

  The control room was empty except for the woman hunched over the panels. She had her head cradled in her hands, fingers bored in at the temples.

  “What did you do to me?”

  It took Cade a second to figure out what she meant. Unmother could hear the music in her head now, like any other human, and it was doing more harm than the blows she shook off, the cuts that she calmly ignored.

  “That’s what you get for hating me so much,” Cade said.