Unmade

by Amy Rose Capetta

  eyes

  come back and know the shape

  of things

  come back and find

  the face you left

  behind

  The last note spread into silence.

  The light changed from a wash of white to a gentle blue-green. Even before Cade turned, she felt it, the way a person always does. Deep, and sure, and rooted.

  An unshakable sense of home.

  The planet outside the window had changed. It was the crisp blue of Ayumi’s drawing, the green of Mira’s eyes. White curls of cloud pricked the colors bright, making them stand out. The surface drew Cade in. This was the right Earth, the real Earth, and they were about to slam into it.

  Cade jolted as Everlast cracked atmosphere. “Everyone hold on!” she cried.

  “Hold on to what?” Mira asked.

  They had picked the bay for its openness, the lack of obstruction. Cade’s eyes circled the room. “Whatever you can find.”

  All they had was each other.

  One of Rennik’s arms found Cade’s waist and the other hooked around Lee, who had a firm hold on Ayumi. Cade tucked Mira against her chest.

  She kept her eyes open as they all fell.

  Chapter 32

  Sand.

  That was the first thing Cade felt when she staggered from the ruined shell of Everlast.

  Sand under her feet, smoke in her face.

  But the sand was fine, not sticking-gritty. And the smoke was starting to clear. And when Cade looked up from her feet—water.

  This was the ocean.

  Cade turned back to Everlast and found it framed in green. Trees rose twice as high as the wreckage, turning the air thick and perfect. Cade’s lungs were in love. She wanted to run to the water, wash the crust of blood from her cuts. She wanted to walk into the forest, let the sun reach for her through the leaves. This was the place her song had promised, and Cade wanted to learn every stroke of it.

  But not alone.

  “Rennik! Lee!” Cade ran back toward the ship. Survivors leaked onto the beach in thin streams.

  The ship was destroyed, metal bent at strange angles. Cade had walked out of a hole scraped in the hull, which tipped up, almost facing the sky. The shuttles docked on the far side had been crunched like paper by the uneven landing. There would be no return trip to June and the fleet.

  But that worry disappeared, like stars drowned in daylight. Right now Cade needed to find Rennik, Lee, Ayumi, Mira. She didn’t know how she’d been thrown clear of them during the landing. All she remembered was opening her eyes and wandering out of Everlast, onto the beach.

  She climbed the face of the ship, the metal hot with held-in sun. The hole was a door that had been torn off during the crash. Cade kneeled over it and looked down at the slide of the hall toward the bay. There was Lee, one arm around Ayumi.

  Struggling up. Hair knots still intact.

  A smile cracked her face as soon as she caught sight of Cade. She threw a hand out and they made a chain, Cade pulling Lee, Lee pulling Ayumi. They perched on the face of the ship.

  “So this is Earth,” Lee said, taking it in. The blue, the green, the goodness of the sun that would paint her skin with freckles.

  Ayumi tapped Lee on the shoulder. “It’s real? Really?” she whispered. “What does it look like?”

  Lee settled her face on Ayumi’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

  “Perfect.”

  Then Rennik emerged from the hole in the ship, and something that had been knotted in Cade let go.

  He stood looking at the distant point where the water became the sky. Rennik never knew how to deal with new or strange, so Cade decided to help him. She threw herself into his space and waited for his arms to close around her.

  “Hello, Cadence,” he said, and he didn’t sound surprised at all.

  As more survivors spilled out, Cade scrambled back to the torn-off door. She caught sight of Zuzu headed for the waterline, Gori shaking sand from his robes. But there was someone Cade didn’t have wind of yet.

  She dropped down into the metal innards of Everlast.

  “Cadence?” Rennik called. “That’s not—” Before he could say “safe,” she was halfway down the hall.

  She skidded toward the bay. People were headed in the other direction, and a few asked where she could possibly be going. She crossed the bay and found it almost empty expect for a few people pressing to their feet and a thin layer of bodies on the floor. Cade found Mira on the makeshift stage. She’d taken a hard fall and twisted her arm in a bad direction. Cade lifted it with care.

  Mira was folded around the guitar. In the moments before Earth, she had saved Moon-White.

  “Hey!” Mira’s eyes flared even greener than usual. She pointed to the guitar with her working hand.

  “Good job,” Cade said.

  She stood the girl up and tested her arm to make sure it wasn’t broken. For some reason the tears for her own mother chose this moment to fall. Taking care of Mira didn’t remind Cade of an emptiness anymore. It gave her the warmth of her mother’s side, the last of her faded smiles. Cade had never learned her name, and now she was gone, a final gone, one that couldn’t be undone.

  Mira brushed a handful of wetness from Cade’s face, curious and concerned. “This isn’t happy,” Mira said. “I was expecting happy.”

  Cade angled Mira under one arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll get around to it.”

  Together they helped the last of the survivors out of the ship. There were dead on both sides, mostly Unmakers. Cade got the feeling that a few of the people who climbed out of the ship, in dark pants and white shirts, had been on the other side of the fight a few minutes ago. But if there was anything to convince them to come back and give being human a real chance, it was this place. If they wanted to put down their robes and their knives and start over, Cade wasn’t going to stop them.

  By the time she cleared the ship, it already looked like a part of the beach. Like the metal bones of an ancient creature that had washed ashore. With the wildness of the trees and vines and undergrowth, she figured it would be crossed and coated with dark green in a few months.

  The survivors sent teams back to Everlast to gather food, blankets, and the last of the medical supplies. Lee and Zuzu took charge, and Ayumi and Mira sorted through what they found. Cade was given a pass. People seemed to think she’d done enough for the day. But she couldn’t rest with the planet awake, alive, all around her.

  Gori stood down by the water, a wrinkle-blot against the beauty of the red and peach sunset. Cade joined him as fast as her burned-out muscles would let her.

  “You felt it,” she said. “Didn’t you? Before the rest of us.”

  That’s why Gori had tried to call to her across the battle.

  “I felt the disturbance of the song each time it was happening,” Gori said. “But I did not know what it meant. The explanation became clear to me while you were busy making vibrations.”

  “You mean singing,” Cade said.

  She walked in the water up to her ankles. Closed her eyes and breathed. This wasn’t the kind of thing that she could take apart, piece by piece. It was too big.

  “The disturbance I felt was not a planet being destroyed, but created,” Gori said. “The energies are similar.”

  “That’s why it confused you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if the song did this before, why was the planet white and dead when we got here?” Cade asked.

  Gori let his toes linger in the wet sand long enough for the water to break. He snatched them back. “The song did not hold. It was not strong enough to call forth a true change in the universe.”

  That explained why the spacesicks had blinked clear when Cade sang before, but hadn’t stayed that way. Part of the song’s strength came from Cade’s belief in Earth. She had needed to see the planet for herself.

  “So it really did change things,” Cade said. “And this time the change stuck.” She braced against the
cold and the salt and sank into the water to her shoulders. Gori stayed at the thin line between land and ocean, watching as she pedaled her feet.

  This was the part where she kept getting blocked. “How?”

  “The boy Xan,” Gori said. “When his particles returned to the beginning of time, they should have been content to move along their path, as they had before, but something disrupted them.”

  “I did,” Cade said, before she could stop herself. “I’m still entangled.”

  “Yes. And so you can affect his particles. Vibration is one way to do this.”

  Music.

  The song was a question. A need. An ache for a home that the spacesicks would die without. Home had been the deepest absence in Cade, in her spacesick mother, in all the people she wanted to save. So Xan’s particles, which were meant to keep Cade’s in balance, had done what they could to fill the need. They had found a way to change the universe. This—all of this—had happened because Cade had dared to hope for it.

  The strangeness was almost too much. But Cade didn’t want to shake it off. She wanted to hold it.

  “Does that mean Xan is here? He didn’t catch up to us, did he? His time-traveling particles?”

  “That is not in the realm of possibility,” Gori said. “His particles can’t move past the point in time when he traveled through the black hole. That was the end of his circle. He also could not alter this planet at a moment when it would affect his own birth, not without dark consequences. But Earth has been dead, emptied of humans for a thousand years. Xan’s particles found the right moment to tip the balance of the planet toward life again, and the change has reached us now.”

  Cade needed a moment to take that in. She held her breath and slipped under the skin of the water. And there, in the suspended dark, it almost made sense. Gori’s explanation was something she could feel, and believe in a deep place, even if she’d never be able to repeat it word for word.

  She came up, spitting salt.

  It looked like Gori wasn’t quite done. “And this happened,” he said, “because—”

  Cade finished his favorite motto for him. “All time is one time.”

  She pushed out of the water, shivering, and wrapped her wet arms around Gori. He didn’t pull away. He kept his round, dark eyes on the far distance, and pretended to be unmoved by the whole thing.

  Cade almost let him get away with it.

  “You told me that you lived all those years so you could warn me,” she said. “But maybe you lived them so you could be here. With us.”

  Gori pursed his raisin lips. “The universe is strange and stretches in many directions. I have never claimed to see them all, let alone understand.”

  Cade tried, and failed, to stop a laugh.

  She left Gori staring at his new patch of universe, and headed down the beach. Cade was in love with every snugging thing she saw. More than love. It felt like it was a part of her, or she was part of it. The colors of the melting sun and the touch of wind on her arms. The soft curve of the beach and the people dotting it in a broken line, spreading into the evening. The water that reached for her over and over.

  She didn’t make it far before she ran into Lee and Ayumi, sitting in the sand. Cade had expected to find Lee halfway up a tree, or swimming toward the horizon, just to see how far she could go. But she was there with her toes in the lace-white, Ayumi’s hip nestled close, a notebook open on her knees, a pencil twirling between her restless fingers.

  “And there’s this orange crusting over the red in the sun-set—” Lee said.

  “What color red? Crimson? Or brighter? Vermillion?”

  Lee sighed and bunched her face. “Between the red of a bloody nose and the color of bad crabfruit.”

  Ayumi scribbled without pretending to look at the pages. “At least that’s descriptive. What about the water? And the trees? Are there bats? I heard Earth had these animals called bats. You should check the sky and—”

  “Don’t worry,” Lee said, her hands slipping over Ayumi’s. “I’m going to tell you every inch of it.”

  She moved on from the sunset to the water to the shoreline, picking out details that Ayumi would love. There were too many. They would run out of daylight and there would still be so much to name.

  Night slid in dark blue, and the stars added just enough silver to dream by. There was still more work before everyone could rest. Cade and Lee built a fire. Mira ran at their heels, learning how to find kindling, how to vent the flame, how to add the right pieces to feed it.

  Rennik returned from Everlast with the final supply-rescue party. He sat down and his arms fell around Cade, as easy as the dark. “I made a decision,” he said. “I’ll hold on to Moon-White for the moment, but only if you promise to play.”

  Cade said yes. Or kissed him. It felt like the same thing.

  The night was difficult on Earth, shadowed and deep. Cade’s back faced the woods, and she felt the weight of unknown things behind her. She played comforting songs, ones she knew better than the back alleys of Voidvil. She played fast to keep her fingertips from getting cold. The sound drew survivors from up and down the beach, and they fed the fire and kept it going. Cade played for them. She played for the people who should have been there.

  And the ones who might still come.

  Cade wouldn’t be able to get back to the fleet. What she had was the possibility, shimmering and faint, that she could send a message. The range of her abilities was impossible to guess, but if a song could reach through time and space to find Xan, she figured that with practice, she could get one to cross twenty systems. It might take months, or years. So every night, Cade would sit with Moon-White. Let the notes and her voice tangle with the rising sparks from the fire, and the good thick air.

  She would have Rennik and Lee and Ayumi and Mira, even Gori, sit with her. Cade would be one song, shining against the dark. One song, waiting, for anyone who wanted to hear it and come home.

  Acknowledgments

  My editor, Kate O’Sullivan, made this story better in so many ways, and supported it from her first read-through to the final edits. Thank you for sitting in the nav chair and pointing in all the smartest directions.

  My agent, Sara Crowe, found the perfect spot in the universe for Cade and her crew.

  HMH Kids has given me so many reasons to be happy. Rachel Wasdyke showed me the ropes, and Scott Magoon created two shiny-amazing covers. Huge thanks to the entire team.

  Vermont College of Fine Arts helped me with every aspect of this story. I may not have seen the entire planet, but I am certain VCFA is one of the best things on it.

  The Austin kidlit community opened its arms to me, as always. Special thanks to Sara Kocek, Varian Johnson, Cynthia and Greg Leitich-Smith, Bethany Hegedus, and Sean Petrie, who wouldn’t let me fall down. (No, seriously. I almost fell down. It’s hot in Austin.)

  Anna Drury was there for lots of Skyping, and one epic car ride when the entire book changed. Vanessa Lee shared her home with me at deadline time, yet again. Tirzah Price gave me constant reminders that reading and writing are my favorites. Maverick brought new levels of adorable to my life, and the best kind of breaks when I needed to look up from outer space.

  Cori McCarthy did more for this novel than I could ever fit on an acknowledgments page. Notably, she helped with my poetry, got everyone on my spaceship drunk, and brought Ayumi back from the dead. Lee and I have the rest of our lives to thank her for it.

  Julia Blau, with her magical notecards and boundless enthusiasm, showed me that I could, in fact, make the second half work. None of my stories would exist without her.

  My sisters, Christine and Allyson, and brother-in-law, Joe, made me feel like a real author every time they asked, “How’s the book going?” Love to my whole big supportive family, especially Grams.

  My parents, Julie and John Capetta, taught me to love books, and told me I could write them. I do not know two better gifts.

  CHAPTER 1

  PURE STATE: A
quantum system that cannot be described as a mixture of any others

  Saturday night, and Cade was headed to the one place on Andana that she didn’t hate. The one place where she could be around other humans and almost stand it.

  First she put on the right armor: black skirt, black gloves. Spiked her lashes with a bit of black-market mascara, checked the effect in a broken-tipped triangle of mirror. Added two matching oil slicks of eyeliner. Grabbed her guitar.

  Slapped and echoed up the metal ladder, out of her glorified cement bunker, into the empty-stomach rattle of the desert.

  Her footprints crumbled in the sand as soon as she shifted her weight. Each breath was dust and dust and air, in that order. Each breath made her lungs curl into fists, ready to fight their way back to some blinked-out mother planet—a place she would never see because it didn’t exist.

  Cade swung her guitar case over the line that meant the end of the Andanan deserts and the beginning of Voidvil. It was a real line—dunes on one side, and, on the other, buildings that shot like dark fingers out of the sand.

  Cade didn’t love the deserts of Andana. But she wanted to peel off her own skin and give it a firm shake when she thought about living in Voidvil. It was a human town—really a human trap—a place where people piled on top of each other deep and high in apartment towers crusted with the black of fire escapes.

  On the bubbled-tar sidewalks at the edge of town, men and women stared at Cade and her guitar case. Smiles crawled onto their faces. The closer she got to the center of town, the louder the voices grew, the closer skins got to each other, got to her, sweating to close the in-between inch. The lips here smiled too, but the eyes were empty, glassed-and-gone with spacesick.

  Cade didn’t have spacesick.

  She had something worse than that.

  Her destination sat deep in the ground, a blister under nine stories of pressing, smelling, never-stopping human. Cade dropped down a corkscrew of stairs into the wet-stone smell of Club V.

  The room wasn’t much when she looked at it. A small stage, set back and painted the shiny black of an insect shell. The space was good for a crowd, but half-crammed with a glass bar that Cade wasn’t old enough to drink at. Four laws governed the humans on Andana and this, of course, was one of them. Not that she cared. She wasn’t there to fuzz herself. Or fade out. Or meet people, even.