Entangled (30 page)

“Hey,” she said, but the word didn't matter, because it could mean whatever she needed it to, as long as she filled it up right.

“Hey,” he said.

She could feel it in the corners of her eyes—a crescendo of itch. Tears came easy this time. Xan smiled with such fullness that it looked like pain. But Cade knew the difference.

“You closed the space,” he said.

Cade put a hand out and touched his. Sturdy fingers, trim nails, the soft dry skin that came from never leaving a spacecraft.

Just a hand. But her whole body sang bright.

Xan reached out and pulled her to him in one clean sweep. Touching someone else—Ayumi, Lee, even Rennik—was a beautiful difficulty. Being this close to Xan felt as simple and right as standing in the sun after the sandstorms passed, after days spent in deep-dwelling darkness.

As soon as Cade returned his smile, Xan's face fell into a new mold. His lips set straight, and crowded—she saw now—with scars.

“This place is filled with spacecadets,” he said. “Let's drain.”

 

 

CHAPTER 21

ANTI-CORRELATED: A relationship defined by opposing behaviors

Xan was out of the bed in one burst. It wasn't long since he'd been beaten to empty-headed blackness, but there was no lag, no learning curve. He crossed the room in a blur, moving as fast as thought.

Or faster. Cade's mind—and her feet—slogged to catch up.

She was with Xan. They were leaving Hades together. He wasn't in league with the Unmakers. Or was he? When she reached out for Xan's thoughts, all she could feel was his need to blaze a perfect line out of that nameless ship and into the freedom of space.

With her.

The hall stood clear, with Rennik and Lee still guarding the door.

“What are they doing here?” Xan asked. Cade was struck with a sudden and absolute appreciation of the fact that Xan had been out cold when she was kissing Rennik. Her heart rate had shot to such heights that the failsafe would have snapped on, no question. The thought of it was enough to swear off kissing for the rest of time.

Cade took that back in the next breath. Now that she'd been brave enough to do it once, she couldn't imagine keeping her distance from people she wanted to kiss. She would have to develop some kind of pulse-slowing technique. She looked from Rennik's open face to Xan's impatient trace of a smile, and practiced it.

“These are my friends,” Cade said, each word slow and deliberate.

“I know,” Xan said. “I've seen them.”
In your head,
he added, with a straight-on look at Cade.

Cade's voice picked up speed without her permission. “So what's the issue?”
You're the one we need to worry about.
She couldn't help transmitting the thought. Xan was a tractor beam for her emotions.

He stepped in, like getting close to her could somehow keep out Rennik and Lee. The space he made by putting his hands on her shoulders circled the two of them into their own little atmosphere.

“You didn't come alone,” he said.

Cade thought of Ayumi, Renna, Gori, even Moon-White, all waiting. She had come anything but alone.

“I didn't know that was part of the deal.”

Cade wondered at how fast she could move from the blissful overtures of first seeing Xan to the dissonance she felt now. He laughed, and it reminded her of sand grating on her ankles.

She remembered what Mr. Niven and the filmstrip had told her, once upon a time. That when two entangled people were in proximity, their moods would match. As in, oppose. It had something to do with their particles—so attuned that a change in either of them would tip the scales. They would keep this up, switching back and forth, as long as they were together. But something made it bearable. Knowing that, in some deeper place, he was the same, that they were bound in sameness. That's what it meant to match—to be perfectly one, to be diametrically different. The word held both meanings. Cade had never thought about that fact until she stared it in the beautiful, irritating face.

Xan stepped out of their little sphere and let Rennik and Lee back into the conversation with a shrug. “It's nothing personal. Just that I have a plan. And it seats two.”

“Then you have a subpar plan,” Lee said.

“Rennik has his own ship,” Cade said, pulling Lee back a step. “They can follow us.”

Nods were tipped all around and the group broke into a loose formation with Xan at the head, steering them in an unknown direction, twisting down sudden halls and sending them through doors that opened into new passages. Cade turned back to Rennik and, not caring if Xan heard, said, “Stick close.”

Rennik cut a look at the back of Xan's head and mouthed the word
Very.

But now that it was Rennik piling the suspicion on thick, Cade wanted to defend Xan, chime out his good points, blacken the eyes of anyone who said different. She wondered if that was a part of entanglement, or just a part of her.

“Come on,” Xan said, half turning as he hurtled down a new stretch of hall. “It's this way.”

What is?
Cade asked.

But Xan was too far to turn around and tell her now.

He slammed into a patrol at the first bend. Any residue of worry about Xan being on the side of the Unmakers was scrubbed clean in one blow. He ran at the first one and laid it flat. Then he attacked three at a time, taking out their plastic bones, cracking their shells. Xan knew just how to send them down, with strikes he must have practiced in his head for weeks. Cade sent him strength, and he sent it back in waves so wild, she had to brace herself with one hand against the wall, and regain her balance, before she dashed into the fight.

Cade's first Unmaker went down easy. With Xan awake, Cade was stronger than any human, and he was, too. It helped that she knew the Unmakers' weaknesses—Xan sent her the secrets he'd gathered, one flash at a time. The crunchable toes. The soggy bit at the back of the knees. The thin lines of flesh where robes met.

She tried it out on the second Unmaker—toes, knees, flesh—and it worked. But another Unmaker was waiting and got in too quickly, too close. An arm shot out and ground her into the nearest wall. A whiff of metal breath reminded Cade of the mechanical voice box. She faked a punch to the throat and, instead, swept her palm up at the last moment and hammered metal into the Unmaker's face. Her fingers rang and reddened. The Unmaker hit the ground.

Lee and Rennik formed a second line of defense, taking care of the few guards who rushed past Cade and Xan. But Cade didn't want her friends to have to fight at all. They had seen enough of the Unmakers for one lifetime. Lee had come with Cade, set and stubborn, all the way from Andana. Now Cade could do something to pay her back. She stationed herself right in front of Lee and took down Unmakers one by one. And because of the strength that came from her entanglement, and all those years lived from scrap to scrap at the Parentless Center and backstage at Club V, Cade was good at it.

Very good.

Fighting was a song—the beat of it breath, the harmonies bone-crack and the dull thud of skin. It wasn't pretty music. But it was electric, it was alive. Cade wouldn't smile through death to please the Unmakers. She was grim-faced, raw-knuckled, terrifying, terrified.

A fourth Unmaker went down. A fifth.

Ten in less than two minutes. And the rest of the patrol around them, sprawled on the ground.

“Not bad,” Xan said. He stepped over a snapped plastic collarbone and kept running.

Now it seemed like they met a patrol every minute, but there was no stopping, no hesitation. There was just the clash, bright as moon-rise, and the horrible mess that came after it. Cade followed Xan, sure that he knew the escape route. He never doubled back or stopped to check his position. She wondered at how well he seemed to know the entire station. But she didn't have time to ask about how he got so sure-footed.

“Almost there,” Xan said.

Lee and Rennik's footsteps fell back, but Cade kept time with him even as he picked up speed. Around another bend, another patrol sprang out. Cade and Xan ran at the Unmakers, steps hitting at the same time. When the blows were struck, she felt her own and she felt Xan's. She saw two fights at the same time, and she was winning both.

“Here,” Xan cried.

Cade landed a punch, looked up, and found that there was no one left to fight.

Xan jammed a button on a mundane-looking control panel. Out of a slab of plain white wall, a hatch swirled out and open. Cade turned to gather Lee and Rennik, but they had peeled off at some point. She remembered asking them not to do that. But they had a ship to get back to. Other people to keep safe.

Cade and Xan were on their own, together.

 

The ship looked like it was designed for one person—a single chair, tilted to face the controls, a rim of open space around it. Cade wouldn't have been comfortable in there with anyone else. The hatch sealed behind Xan.

“So,” he said. “Welcome to the plan.”

Xan got in the pilot's chair and warmed up the controls with a few scalelike taps.

“Have you ever flown before?” she asked, each tap louder in her ears. It seemed like a legitimate question. Xan had been in a coma for most of his life.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I have the course all figured out.” He unrolled a complicated schematic in crabbed handwriting, complete with strikeouts and smudges. “Simple. See?” He smiled up at her.

Cade put her own lack of smile down to the whole entanglement business.

Xan took off with a clunk that would have made Ayumi blush. Cade wrapped her arms around the back of the pilot's chair so she wouldn't crash on the nearest flat surface.

A strip of window ran around the center of the pod like a ribbon. Cade twisted back to look at the Unmaker's station, small as a batch of fingerprints, leaving its mark on Hades. The docks were quiet. No alarms, no explosion of lights, no spitting out of palm-shaped ships.

“You're not being followed,” Cade said, turning back to Xan. “Why aren't you being followed?”

“Cadence,” he said. “I know you're worried that they turned me somehow. But you can search my mind. You have free range in there. Do you think I could hide something that important from you?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But I'll take that as an invitation to find out.”

She planted herself on the wide arm of the pilot's chair and looked down at the contours of Xan's face, carved to deep gullies of concentration. It was distracting, his face. The strong bridge of his nose, the swipes of purple-gray under his eyes. She had come so far, wanting to see him like this. To be this close. Now their bodies were just another space she needed to cross. She needed to push past all of that to his thoughts.

She felt a certain amount of relief streaming through him, like a breeze—had Xan ever felt a real, planetbound breeze? Maybe the blowing of an air vent. And there was excitement, too. Cade had never found that in his head before. It was cool and crisp at the same time—like a patch of shade on a perfect day. He was excited to be with her, excited for whatever came next. But when she tried to see past the feeling to the facts of his plan, she felt—nothing.

No. Not nothing.

Blackness, and then a rush of light.

“I don't think you're hiding something from me,” Cade said, “but there are parts of this I don't understand.”

“We're not mind-readers, Cadence.” Xan kept his eyes on the patch of space in front of them, tore the ship from the encroaching dark of a black hole. “That's not the point of entanglement.”

“And what is?”

Unhappiness hit Cade—from Xan's thoughts, from his scarred face and soured posture. “Please don't expect me to echo the scientists who made us,” he said. “I have ideas of my own.”

Cade hated the scientists who made them, but only most of the time. They had done terrible things. To children. To mothers. But they were also the ones who'd entangled her, and she wouldn't unentangle herself, not even if she could twist time, loop it back on itself, and stop Project QE before it started. Her hate was complicated—a pit inside of her, burning but cold, an ice planet on a far-flung orbit. She could ignore it if she had to, and most of the time she did.

Xan's feelings about Firstbloom were stronger—hot at the core and on the surface.

Cade shifted the subject. “You seem to know so much about the whole process. How entanglement works. And you'd been in a coma for . . .”

She didn't want to number the years.

“The scientists took that as an opportunity to see how much they could stuff into my brain while it was in that state. I remember facts, but not learning them. They float up from a sort of . . . grayness. I'm sure I'm supposed to be grateful.”

“That's how you understand so much about entanglement?”

“I woke up knowing about it, yes. Maybe that helped me figure out the connection faster.” His fingers danced on the buttons. “How to control it. Turn it on, off, up, down.” He smiled at her. “Not that I ever turned you down.”

Cade had wondered why she'd been the slow one, lagging behind him, not understanding so much for so long. But she couldn't bring herself to be jealous, even if their difference did make him smarter and better at being entangled. Cade had a mother somewhere. That made up for a whole universe of troubles.

“Hey.” Xan's focus slid off to one side of the ship. “Aren't those your friends?”

Cade turned and saw little black eyes, each one dull in the lightless reaches of space. Renna blinked at her.

Cade's smile could have lit the black between them.

Xan shrank back in the pilot's chair. The scars on his arms puckered as he reached for the controls, wrapped his hands around them. He flew a few sickly evasive maneuvers—a dip, two clunks to the left, a fumbled dodge. Renna could have outclassed him in her sleep.