Unmade (16 page)

Cade headed down the chute, toward the one person who might be able to help her understand what had happened in the club. Gori was still in his bunk, staring at his toes. The influx of survivors didn't seem to touch him.

Cade poked him in the ribs.

“I need your help,” she said. No niceties, but no begging, either. Gori had a special way of making her feel like a gnat.

“I will do whatever I can to assist,” he said.

“You mean, without leaving the ship or interfering with your busy rapture schedule,” Cade said.

Gori sat up straight, radiating pride from his little bunk. “I will do what I
can.
This word implies parameters.”

Cade sighed and launched into her story. Everything that had happened since Hades, everything about Xan. She told Gori about the lingering connection, the strong flashes that had nudged further and further into her life.

“Xan was in a black hole. And then he was—everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

Cade cupped her elbows with her hands. “Yeah. That's what it felt like.” Xan—or whatever he had broken down to—had just ripped and spread through Cade with such force that she didn't know if she would ever feel whole again.

Gori sat up straighter, but this wasn't another injection of pride. He looked almost excited. “This human. This boy Xan. The particles that were once part of him made it to the center of the black hole.” Cade had more or less put that much together herself, from all of the scraps of feeling, all the flashes. “It was an immediate process for the human boy Xan,” Gori said, “but your experience of the same event unfolded on a much slower time scale.”

“How is that possible?” Cade asked.

Gori looked disappointed in her, almost stung. “All time is one time,” he said. The motto he loved so much had finally come in handy.

“So he made it to the center,” Cade said. “Shouldn't that have been it? Shouldn't I have stopped feeling him?”

Gori got up and paced in front of Cade, his robes sweeping, pebbly lips pursed. The crowd in the main cabin below angled their necks and took notice. It wasn't every day that you saw a Darkrider leaping around.

“The human boy Xan did not simply make it to the center,” Gori said. “He passed
through
the center.”

“Of a black hole?” Cade asked. “What the snug is on the other side?”

“There are many possibilities.” Gori's dark eyes sparked and his fingers pulsed. “It sounds as if, in the case of this specific black hole, the human boy Xan returned to the beginning.”

“The beginning,” Cade repeated. Those words had been part of what happened to her in the club. “The beginning of what?”

“Time.”

Cade sat down on Gori's bunk. It was as simple as that. Gori told her the truth, and she believed it, and her knees stopped existing.

“You're telling me that Xan's particles
time-traveled?
”

“Yes,” Gori said.

“And the thing I felt was . . . ?”

“The universe starting again.”

All of that bursting, spreading, growing—that was what Xan, or at least his particles, had felt. Cade had to feel it, too, because she was still connected to those particles. But there was a catch. She couldn't hold the entire expanding universe inside of her. She had barely been able to handle the black hole.

“So it's a good thing I shut it down,” she said.

“Perhaps it is a necessary thing.” Gori sat next to Cade, spent from his little burst of excitement. He would probably take ten naps in a row to recover. Cade didn't have that sort of time. She had to process the impossible-but-true. She had to keep her mind clear and her eyes on the fleet.

But she had one more question.

“What will happen to him?” Her voice pinched small. “The pieces that used to be him?”

“They will continue their journey,” Gori said. “The same one that they have traveled, and always travel.”

Cade nodded. That made sense. All of it made a very strange sort of sense. Xan would keep doing what he had always done. And Cade would get up from this wrinkled bunk and try to change the fate of the human race.

The ship was clogged with bodies.

With the common room retrofitted as a sleeping area, Rennik's cabin off-limits, and the secret bedroom full, the survivors from Andana were left to wander the main cabin and the common room all day. Maybe the control room, if Rennik didn't polite-stare them down and Lee didn't kick them out.

Cade needed peace and as much quiet as she could manage. It was time to check on the progress of the fleet. She tried the mess and found it full of survivors in various stages of stuffing their faces.

Mira bobbed in behind Cade. Since she'd saved the girl in the basements, it was like Mira had tied herself to Cade with an invisible string. As soon as Cade stopped moving, Mira felt the tug and came running.

“Do you need something to eat?” Mira asked. “Ayumi taught me how to make mash cakes. Oh, and tea!”

“Not hungry,” Cade said, which she figured out was a lie as soon as her stomach twitched a correction. “Well, maybe. But right now I need to find the recipe for everyone leaving me alone.”

Mira perked to her tiptoes and piped in a harsh-honest tone, “Cade doesn't want you in here! Clear out!” She sat at the freshly emptied table and folded her hands. Mira didn't seem to think
alone
had anything to do with her leaving, too.

“All right,” Cade said. “Good enough.”

She sat across the table from Mira and closed her eyes. Mira's chair screeched forward as she leaned in to watch. Cade settled her shoulders and sighed through her irritation. Her audiences usually gave her a little more breathing room.

Cade reached, knowing that the first thing she had to do was get past Mira's rough lack of music. The songs of the crew and survivors came back. She readied herself for pure silence, the reminder of every death, the dark outline of every failure.

Cade didn't have to go far to find the other humans, on their ships, all of them streaming toward a single point. She ran her mind over the songs. So many—but the experience didn't overwhelm her now. These songs were old friends. They had given Cade a small, care-worthy hope after the Unmaker attacks. And they were coming together.

It was real.

The fleet she had dreamed was real.

Once Cade found the right way to listen, to hold them all in her mind, space opened up. Time stopped pushing at her and streamed alongside, like a helping wind. Cade didn't need to rush. She could stay for a minute, linger.

“What does it feel like?” Mira asked.

Cade cast around for the right words. “It's like when you hear a song, and it comes with feelings tacked on, whatever you felt when you first heard it, and the place where you were, that gets twisted up in it too. It's like that, but happening a hundred times. A thousand times.”

The eager scratch of Mira's chair went silent. “I'm not used to songs.”

Cade clamped the rubbery inside of her cheek between her teeth. Of course Mira wasn't used to music. Cade didn't know what sort of life she'd had, but it probably hadn't come with lullabies built in. Maybe that's why Mira didn't have a thought-song.

“You can learn to listen,” Cade said.

She hummed a few notes, and was surprised to find that the same bit of song she'd tried on her mother came back to her now. Even though she couldn't see Mira, Cade could feel her trying. The change in breath, the muscle-focus.

“That's not listening,” Cade said. “That's clenching.”

Mira sighed and gave up. When she spoke again, the words were fainter than far-off stars. “Do you ever wonder if you can be like everyone else?”

So Mira felt it too, their being different from the other humans in the fleet. She felt like she had to give Mira an answer, even if it was fractured and half wrong. Even if she failed.

“Take Lee,” Cade said. “I don't want to be her. I don't even want to be
like
her. But for good or bad, I need her. I need to shove all the closed-up things inside me open enough to let her in.”

Mira sighed again, harder. Cade had definitely failed. And now her mind had been stretched out for too long. It started its normal, automatic reeling-in process. But this time, it stopped short.

This time, Cade heard something new.

And near. And unsure. Like a fingertip trembling strings for the first time. The notes thin and faint, the sort of organic, fascinating mess that comes with being new and eager and needing music to fill certain spaces.

Mira-song.

Cade opened her eyes. Mira was focused on her, breathing hard through her nose. Whatever terrible thing had turned Mira into a song-less girl was being undone while Cade watched.

“You're looking at me with your face all weird,” Mira said.

“I thought you could read people.”

Mira drummed her fingers and ducked her head, taking Cade in from a new angle. “Not this time.”

The feeling was complicated, even to Cade. “I'm happy,” she said. “And scared.” She knew that Mira's song had something to do with her, maybe a lot to do with her. What if she messed it up, or forced it into the wrong shape, or crushed it before it got started?

Mira leaned all the way over the table, drawing Cade in so they met halfway. She whispered, like she had cracked open a secret and if she wasn't careful, it would spill everywhere. “I'm happy-scared, too.”

Cade looked down into the mirror of her green eyes, and when she blinked, Mira's song leaped to meet her.

 

A semicircle of survivors crowded around the dock that led to Ayumi's shuttle. Cade almost passed them, but then she saw Lee coming through with an armful of supplies. Cade cut back, forced an opening in the crowd. “What's this?”

Ayumi stopped in the dock frame, her arms weighted with thick rolls of paper. “We're getting ready.”

“For the fleet?” Cade asked.

“Even better.” Lee popped into the dock frame and slung an arm around Ayumi's waist. Ayumi settled against Lee's side in a comfortable way. It looked like they were done keeping their late-night makeouts to themselves.

“We wanted to surprise you,” Ayumi said.

Lee rubbed her hand from the curve of Ayumi's waist to her stomach, and Cade was envy-bitten because she made it look so easy. “As soon as the ships are gathered and safe, we're going to find a new home,” Lee said.

“A place to live,” Ayumi corrected.   

Earth was the true home of the human race, according to Ayumi and all the Earth-Keepers who'd gone before her. Cade knew she wouldn't hand the title over to a planet that hadn't earned it.

“There's nowhere to take the people who came to this ship looking for refuge,” Ayumi said. The survivors around them shuffled out of their watching-state, and a few tried to cut in with questions. Ayumi plowed on, scattering uncomfortable truths as she went. “We'll have thousands more on our hands soon, a whole fleet on our hands and nowhere to take them. I've been through all of the notes. And not just mine. The Earth-Keeper archives date back generations. I went through every notebook I have. I've extrapolated up, down, and sideways.” She handed Cade a scroll from her hoard. “This is the best we can do.”

Cade unrolled the sheet and found a homemade chart, smudged with planets. A few of them had been circled. Lee and Ayumi tracked Cade's face as she took in their choices. Uninhabited planets with foul conditions, systems and systems away.

Cade's friends needed her to approve, but she couldn't.

“Don't leave yet,” she said. “I'm not done with Moon-White.” Cade pressed a hard look on Ayumi. She knew better than anyone that Cade's music could hold off spacesick. It was a brighter hope than another desert planet, where they could look forward to death by exposure or nasty native species.

Ayumi's whisper drew a small circle around the three of them, cutting out the crowd. “The music is a good thing, Cade,” she said, “but it's not enough.”

That was code—it meant Ayumi was still glassing out. But Cade's nerves took it the wrong way, twisting it into an insult to her music. Music had been Cade's safety once; it had kept her filled up when she went hungry, tethered her to the world when it didn't seem worth wasting another breath on.

Cade tried to twist things another half turn, from insult to challenge.

“Let me play,” Cade said. “A few songs.” She'd never had to beg before—her music had always been enough.

Lee's arm switched from Ayumi's waist to a defensive perch on her shoulder. “You don't like our plan?”

“That's not what I said.”

Cade hadn't brought them all together just to watch Lee and Ayumi vanish into space for months, years. Or worse. She couldn't lose them to the empty promise of a not-quite-home. She needed them here.

Cade held out the map, but Lee wouldn't take it back. Ayumi's eyes were narrowed.

“One song,” Cade said. “You'll feel it.”

 

As soon as Ayumi accepted the map, Cade rushed to the bedroom and grabbed Moon-White. Back in the main cabin, the survivors and crew half-circled and curved so that part of the room became a stage. Renna had changed the lighting so that Cade would be easy for everyone to see.

A show. It looked, for all the universe, like a show. Some of Cade's old fans even swirled through the audience. But Cade was distracted by the new quiet inside herself. By Lee and Ayumi with their heads bent, closing the small space between them. By her mother sitting in the corner.

Still so unreachably far.

Cade had promised the song to end all songs, but she had nowhere to start. She pummeled a standard opening on Moon-White, but the notes had no confidence. They wandered away from the melody. Defied the beat. Cade's mind got in the way, and her worries insisted on coming along for the ride.