Unmade (33 page)

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.

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 elaborate 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.

“Hate is a small matter,” Unmother said, gritting more than her teeth. She gritted her whole body. “It's human. Weak.”

“I agree,” Cade said. “And I can hear it leaking out of you.”

Cade was braced for another speech about how superior the Unmakers were, but if Unmother still had plans to educate Cade, she dropped them, and launched herself across the room.

Unmother's knees and nails landed, extracting air, shredding skin. Cade pushed against her, but the woman moved so fast that it was impossible to get a good hold. She was wire and force, focus and speed.

Cade could summon hate too. She thought about Xan, and Renna. Matteo dying on the floor outside. Lee and Rennik and Ayumi, who had lost too much of themselves. Mira, who had to fight to
find
a self. The people whose names she'd never learn because the Unmakers got to them first. Hate was easy.

Cade used it against Unmother, and it was better than leverage, more intense than strength. She pushed and kicked her way up from the floor, pinning the woman under her. But when she got there, hate was knocked out of place.

Cade fought to save the people she loved.

“Is there anyone you want to say goodbye to?” she asked, working to pin Unmother's lashing arms.

“I don't care,” Unmother said as she swiped at Cade's eyes.

Lee ran into the control room alone, frantic, and looked surprised to find Cade alive. Cade got an idea that she knew would make Unmother writhe. “Hey, Lee. Since she's human now, what do you think her name should be?”

“Something really terrible,” Lee said. “Like Roberta.”

Unmother turned on Lee with a look that could have drowned a lesser girl. Lee pulled her gun and aimed it dead on.

“I know it's unfair to bring a gun to a fistfight,” Lee said. “But it was also unfair when you attacked my girlfriend in her sleep.” Lee waved Unmother up from the floor and Cade cuffed Unmother's wrists with her hands.

Unmother slapped Cade with a cold look. “You're going to die.”

“Someday,” Lee said. “But today is about starting over. A shiny new world. No you in it.”

Lee cocked the gun.

“Please. Go ahead,” Unmother said with one of her most infuriating smiles.

Cade flung an arm out. “Wait.”

Unmother's smile hardened in place.

Cade's hands went to work, searching. She ran her hands over Unmother's wire arms, down her strongly molded legs. She got the feeling that if Lee fired, she would be giving Unmother exactly what she wanted. Again.

Cade stopped at a slight bulge against Unmother's shirt, and when she ripped the material to the waist, she found plastic packed to Unmother's skin—a thin band of high-quality explosives.

Lee's hand nodded, tipping the gun before she shored it up. A mask of sweat clapped onto Cade's forehead.

“Are you serious?” Lee asked.

“It's connected to a heartbeat monitor,” Unmother said with a slight giddiness, a new set of dimples breaking the surface of her pale face. Her happiness was the ugliest thing Cade had ever seen. “If the monitor stops, or someone tampers with it, well, you both have imaginations. You can guess what will happen.”

The explosion wouldn't just take out Cade and Lee and Matteo. It would grab a section of the hull when it went, breaching the integrity of
Everlast.

They would all go down.

Cade gave Unmother's arm a fresh twist, and pushed the small of her back to force a march. If she could get the woman to the airlocks, maybe she could flush her into space, clear her out before the explosives detonated.

Matteo's breath unraveled as Cade passed him, and it reminded Cade of the people in the bay who might be dying. It was a good thing Unmother couldn't see her face. Lee was doing her best to look like a badass while walking backwards and keeping the gun trained. It was a long way to the airlocks.

Cade mouthed over Unmother's shoulder.
“Get her talking.”

“Uh, so, what do you think the future should look like?” Lee asked. “If you know so much about it?”

“Well, there will be none of the defect that you suffer from, the one you call
attitude.
”

Lee mouthed back at Cade.

“
Can I shoot her?”

Unmother kept on about future glories, laying out the bricks for Cade and Lee. No weakness. No sickness. No imperfections, or personalities, or any of the things that make life interesting enough to live in the first place.

Around the time that Unmother described her ideas for altering all thumbprints to look the same, and body odors to not smell so offensively
personal,
Cade steered her to the hall outside the airlocks and manuevered toward number one—because it was close to the door and she knew it was working.

Lee kept backing up, and Cade wedged Unmother so she stood in the doorway to the airlock. Cade pushed the sharp knob of Unmother's shoulder. “Go ahead.”

“Or you'll do what? Shoot?” Unmother scratched her way out of Cade's grip. “You see, it was an illusion that you had any control. Best to give up on it.” She touched Cade's wrist, tender now. “This can be a good death.”

“I don't believe in those,” Cade said.

She opened her mind, sweeping music from the corners to the center, gathering force. It barreled at Unmother.

Unmother bore down under the mental weight, tightening until Cade wouldn't have been surprised to hear teeth crack. When Cade tried to knock her backwards, Unmother's arms locked and her balance held.

“It's a nice trick,” Unmother said, “but you can't expect it to work every time. People build up defenses, Cadence. At least, intelligent people do.” She pushed Cade off and brushed at her clothes, as if human nature might have left a stain.

Cade sounded the bottom of her plans and came up clutching the last one, hoping it would convince Unmother to let the rest of these people survive.

As Unmother moved, Lee bobbed the gun, but her arms were slung low at the elbow, tired. Cade turned to her, and the almost-tears that snuck into her eyes were like warnings not to make this harder.

“I'm going with her,” Cade said.

It was Lee's job to make life bigger and better, not easy. “No. No. No you're snugging
not.
”

This wouldn't be a good death. The thought opened up like a black hole with torn edges and no bright center. But if Cade had to leave, at least she wouldn't be doing it for selfish reasons, like Xan. She had people worth living for, worth dying for.

She closed her eyes and gathered her breath. In that dark space, she heard something, so pure and strong that she couldn't ignore it. Music stitched out of old Earth-songs. The same music that Cade had followed across the universe, and it was moving in her direction.

This had to be some kind of before-death hallucination. Her mother was in the spacesick bay, glassed-and-gone.

Cade reached out and took Unmother's hand. Neither of them was stupid enough to go first. They crossed the threshold and entered the airlock together.

Lee tapped the glass with her gun to get Cade's attention. “If you think I'm going to push that button,” she cried, “you're insane! Every single flavor of insane.”

“Do what you have to do, Lee.”

When Cade blinked, the music she'd heard before was back, louder. She opened her eyes and found her mother in the door of the hall that lined the airlocks, gripping the frame with loose-skinned hands.

Unmother took hold of that second and bashed Cade's side with all of her strength. Cade slammed onto the floor, and took in the scene from a low, strange angle.

“Cadence?”

Her mother's voice settled on the folds of the name, soft, but when she turned to Unmother, her face snarled as hard as a thorn. Cade had never seen that look anywhere, but she had felt it on her own face in the Andana days.

Cade's mother ran into the airlock and crashed into the other woman. They hurled backwards. Cade struggled to get up. On the other side of the glass, Lee looked trapped, not sure whether to intervene.