Unmade (28 page)

Cade buried herself in the notebook. But a new spark made it impossible to focus on research.

“So you think the song is about spacesick,” Cade said.

“I did. I mean, I do,” Ayumi said. “But . . .”

“But there's more.”

Ayumi inched closer, like she wanted to leap across the room but she was afraid to scare off Cade's words.

“I think it's about a place,” Cade said.

“A place?”

Cade stumbled after an explanation. “When I sing it, I feel like I'm not here. Like the words want me to be somewhere else.”

“Where?” Ayumi asked. Cade shook her head. “Do you know what it looks like? Or sounds like? Even how it smells?”

All Cade had to go on was a feeling. The wonder-cast shape of it. The rightness. “It's familiar, even though I've never been there before.”

There was a moment of stillness, and then Ayumi went into the wildest flurry Cade had ever seen. Eyes and fingers and pages, moving fast. Matching things up. When Ayumi looked at her, the light behind her eyes was nothing less than pure-sun brilliance.

“Cade. I think the song is about Earth.”

Ayumi was the Earth-Keeper.

The last of her kind. She was also the self-appointed champion of finding the fleet a new home. Cade tried to fight the words that blazed into her brain, but they were already out of her mouth.

“
Of course
you want it to be about Earth.”

Ayumi wasn't deterred. “‘The long slide into dark,'” she said, tapping at her page. “I thought that meant spacesick. But ‘third in line'?” She hopped off the bed and hunted down a notebook that looked like the rest, pulling out a sketch of a solar system. Eight planets, with a tiny ice-orb clinging to the far edge. “‘Third in line' could be the third planet from a sun,” she said. “One.” She pointed at a little cratered circle. “Two.” A red-swirled planet. “Three.” A crude, continent-cramped marble. Earth.

“‘Grave fingers,'” Ayumi said, working faster now. “That sounded really dire, not at all a good thing. But when you think about a planet, and you take the word
grave,
and you add the word
pulling
. . .”

Cade slammed into an idea. “Gravity. But even if that's true,” she added, “every planet has gravity.”

Ayumi raced ahead. “Blue, green—”

“Earth colors,” Cade said. She knew that from the painting on the wall of Ayumi's shuttle.

And somewhere else. Cade was the one sniffing out a particular notebook now, hastily flipping pages. “I remember something . . .” A description, handed down from the last generation of humans to live on Earth.

“
They left before the asteroid hit.
” Cade read slowly, letting herself feel the pain in the words as she formed them. “
They told their children how blue it was, how green.
” She reached the point where she had clapped the notebook shut last time. “
Rich and dark, the blue and the green brighter than it had any business being. They never saw colors like those again, except sometimes in an eye. The blue of a sky on some planet might pull memories out of them, but it never quite matched.
”

Ayumi held her breath. The whole snugging universe held its breath.

“
They didn't wait,
” Cade said, “
and once the ship sped up, they didn't look back. They wanted to be gone before the world changed.
”

Cade closed the notebook, held it to her chest. “Maybe it
is
about Earth.”

She didn't know what that meant—a song for the spacesicks, a song about Earth, lyrics that connected her to Xan's time-traveling particles. But for the first time, Cade let herself believe that it could mean something.

Big.

“I need to go tell Rennik.” It felt right to have him as the default person in her life. The one she went to when it was coming together or falling apart.

Ayumi nodded. “I'll get Lee in a minute.”

When Cade left, Ayumi was scribbling as fast as she could, so hard the letters must have left echo-marks three pages deep.

 

As soon as Cade opened Rennik's door, she knew there would be no kissing of the wild and celebratory sort.

He stood off center in a wobbling city of tapes. Their corners stuck out from the towers at all angles, and his eyes had the paste-glaze of someone who hasn't stopped looking at a screen for hours. He looked part distracted, part glad she'd shown up, and part soured that it had taken her so long. “I have to show you something.”

Cade was the one with the news. Strange, enormous news. Holding it back felt like trying to shove the entire universe down to atom-size.

She moved in, trying to ignore the new things her body had to say about being close to Rennik. “Did you figure out what happened with Unmother?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. I might have.”

“I don't have time for all of those answers.” Cade wanted to talk about Earth, not some woman whose one great wish was to make a grand exit from the human species, leaving a trail of dead bodies on her way out. Earth put Unmother back in perspective—turned her into the small, crazed ex-human that she was.

“Please,” Rennik said. It was enough of a throwback to the polite Hatchum she'd met on Andana that it softened Cade's resistance. She took a seat on the floor. But she still couldn't let go of the third planet. The gravity. The blue-green.

“Rennik,” she said. “There's this song I've been singing—”

“Singing?” The word was an empty echo, to show he was listening.

Would Rennik do the same thing if she started talking to him about what had happened last night? If Cade wasn't the subject of this moment's obsession, if she wasn't the focus of all of his feelings, she was nothing.

She turned to leave. Rennik's hand closed a circle around her wrist.

“Look,” he said, nodding at the monitor. “Right there.”

Cade flicked her shoulder and broke his hold. She leaned into the glow of the monitor and found herself looking at the engine room. The twin engines that kept
Everlast
aloft churned quiet, constant patterns. Rennik pointed to a spot near the bottom of the screen. A bit of white flashed, then dark.

“It's a . . . blur,” Cade said.

That's what he wanted to show her, instead of listening to her universe-trembling news? A blur?

“Yes, good. Now look.”

Rennik extracted the tape from the monitor and searched the nearest tower for a different one.

“Where did you get these?” Cade asked, feeling small in the middle of so much recorded past—which was strange, because she never felt that way when she sat in the middle of Ayumi's notebooks. They weren't cold and plastic and official. Cade felt like part of the great human mess of them, one page in a bigger story.

“I had some tapes delivered from Green's room,” Rennik said. “And I redirected the crew to bring the new ones here.”

Rennik slid a tape out of a tower with needle-sure fingers. When he popped it into the monitor, the control room came on the screen. Rennik sped the timeline and people hurried by on fast-ticking legs.

“. . . there.”

The same blur. White, then dark, flashing at the top of the control room wall.

Cade found the blanks and filled them in before Rennik said a thing. Unmother's white pants, her black shirt. Her little trip into the vents of the Unmaker ship. “You think that's how she left without anyone seeing,” Cade said. “She was in the walls.”

A fraction of the tightness in Rennik's shoulders eased. “You saw it too,” he said. “So I'm not insane.”

“No,” Cade said. Unconvincing. Unconvinced.

“There's more,” Rennik said. “I found her in one of the hallways . . .”

He picked up another tape, and Cade snatched it out of its arc toward the monitor. It had numbers printed on it in thick, squat black, clear enough to see halfway across the room.

“Unmother is on this tape?” Cade asked.

Rennik leaned over her to look at the label, and his nearness sparked her to distraction, frustration, anger that she didn't have time to start a fight, because something much worse was happening. “This isn't footage from the night Unmother escaped,” Cade said. “It's from three hours ago.”

Those numbers stamped fear into Cade and drove the words out of her mouth.

“She's still on the ship.”

 

Cade and Rennik moved so fast that it felt as if the halls did the streaming by instead of their bodies. No matter how much ground they covered, every turn felt like a string tossed in the wrong direction.

They had caught Unmother in the control room. The engine room. The most important places on
Everlast.

“She was gathering information,” Cade said. Like Cade had wanted to do when she brought Unmother onboard, only reversed. No wonder the woman had looked so delighted to be stuck on their ship.

It brought Cade back to the root of the failure when she had gathered the fleet. Unmother had used that idea against her, too. She claimed whatever Cade wanted most and made it suit her own ends.

“If she has what she needs, we should be heading for the docks,” Rennik said.

Cade checked the nearest vent. The passages were thin, entrances tiny. Cade's hips might slide through—barely, and only at the right angle—but her shoulders would choke the passage. Unmother must have dislocated one of hers to fit. It would be like cracking a knuckle to anyone else. All Unmother cared about was blinking out the human race. Which meant—

“You check the docks,” Cade said. “I have another idea.”

Rennik and Cade split up, and his footsteps faded. She made it ten steps before she remembered she didn't have her knives. Cade didn't want to be right, but if she
was
right, she didn't want to be unarmed.

She swerved, doubled back a few doors, and knocked, a loud and driving beat, until Lee came out of her new room.

“Can I borrow your gun?”

“Snug,” Lee said, smearing a hand across her face. “It's sort of late.”

“It's urgent.”

Lee pressed a look down the hall in both directions. “Where's Ayumi?”

Cade's stomach slithered cold. “I thought she was with you.”

“She was with
you,
” Lee said. “And a thousand notebooks.”

The ice reached Cade's face and she took off. Lee didn't ask for an explanation. She didn't even slip on shoes. Cade heard the skin-sting of bare feet behind her, and the cold-clicked readiness of the gun.

She pushed her speed and tightened her heart, and hoped she was wrong.

The hall had a just-disturbed feeling, the last trouble of the wind from someone passing. In the moment before Cade turned into her own room, she heard a special sort of nothing.

A perfect lack of breath.

Cade ripped into the room, Lee behind her.

Ayumi must have fallen asleep in Cade's bed, hard at work on her Earth scribbles. Her notebook had fallen to the floor. The blanket that curled along her side hid her face from Cade and Lee. The scene would have looked normal, except for the blood. It had saturated the blanket and was dropping, red-black, from the hems to the floor.

Lee ran and tore the blanket off. Cade waited for the pain-stark gasp that would bring Ayumi back.

Nothing.

The quiet felt like blame. Cade was supposed to be the one red and silent and slipping away from life.

She didn't hear the thud of her own knees as they hit the floor. Lee ran to the bed, sopping sheets with blood in a race to find its source. Ayumi's face and neck were covered in cuts, crossing in two directions. Unmother had tried to X out the face of this wrong girl, this not-Cade. Some of the cuts were deep red channels dug across her face, nothing clean about the edges.
Everlast
and all of its metal had given Unmother her pick of weapons. She'd put the blunt side to use, too. Ayumi's head was cratered on one side, a shallow cupping of bone.

Cade couldn't help but wonder how much worse it would have been if Unmother had gotten her hands on the girl she wanted, instead of a stand-in.

“Ayumi,” Lee said, her voice stretched thin. “Ayumi . . .”

She touched the hollow of Ayumi's neck. A hand went to her face, fingers frantic-tender, searching out breath.

“She's unconscious,” Lee said.

Cade was sickeningly alive with nerves.

Ayumi had been talking twenty minutes ago, about blue and green and hope. Now every bright thing about her might be gone. Cade closed her eyes, racing her mind outward to catch the last of Ayumi's song before the silence claimed her. Lee's melody ran wild and thick with pain, and in the space past it—

—nothing.

Lee folded into Ayumi's side.

“You don't get to leave without kissing me,” she said. “You don't get to leave.”

Cade put her face to the floor.

 

The cold came first. Cade straightened up and found that the circle-touch at her temple was a gun.

Lee had it pointed at her face.

Everything but dead sureness had emptied out of Lee's voice. “That woman wanted you.” Cade sank. Her legs curled under her, and she folded small. “She didn't want my girlfriend,” Lee said. “She came here for you.”

They were both crying, and then Cade did something worse. Air rose in a wave, pushing out of her.

Lee forced the muzzle, and Cade's nerves answered with a throb. “You're
laughing,
” Lee said. “Tell me why. Fast.”

Cade tried to stop, but she couldn't. Laughter rose out of her, warm and wrong, like blood. “Ayumi said that you and I were friends. I believed her.”

Hurt and hesitation hit Lee in a one-two punch. But she didn't stand down.

Then—a breath, wet and terrible, rose from the bed. Cade turned, afraid to take her eyes off Lee, but she clattered the gun across the floor and forgot it in the rush to bring Ayumi back. Lee wiped blood out of Ayumi's mouth with her hands, her sleeves.