Unmade (6 page)

“I know how to defend someone, if it comes down to it,” Cade said. “What's your name?”

The girl dropped a beat. “Mira.” Being alone in the universe, she must have have known that acting too free with her name could end in trouble.

“You're from Tanaka?” Cade asked.

The girl plopped grain-mash from spoon to bowl. “Not born there, no.”

“What happened to your family?”

Mira worked her pale brown hair into a quick braid so the ends wouldn't dip into the bowl. “Never had one.” The lack of a torn, missing edge in the girl's voice made Cade believe her.

“I didn't have one, either,” Cade said. Memories of Andana caught in Cade's throat and swelled there, stuck so they wouldn't come out. She didn't tell Mira how she'd slept under a single blanket, feet raw with blood and sand, every night for months before she found her bunker. Didn't mention how she'd invented a new set of parents every day, only to talk herself out of them at night.

“Isn't that your mother?” Mira asked, nodding toward the door in the direction of the main cabin. Ayumi had taken charge of the spacesicks and was trying to engage the sickest one in some kind of talk. She held a cup of tea—her own special grass-flavored recipe—to the woman's lips. It dribbled in little streams down her soft face.

Was that woman Cade's mother?

“Technically speaking.”

The girl tapped her cheek, thoughtful. Like a tic.

“If you need anything—” Cade said.

“I don't.”

Mira got the words out too fast. Cade knew that quickness. It was like tossing a particle-thin sheet over a deep hole. Cade waited. The inner drum that drove her around, all day, all night, slowed to a steady four-four. She wondered if this was what patience felt like.

“Here.”

Cade got up, snagged a tin of raw sugar from a cupboard, and pushed it across the table at Mira. It was the only thing that made the endless bowls of grain-mash edible. Mira sprinkled on a few crystals and poked her tongue at a spoonful.

Two bowls later, she looked up.

“Could use some quiet,” she said. “These people won't stop crying.”

The words should have sounded harsh, especially in Mira's clear-piped kid register, but Cade understood. The survivors had all gone through the same thing at the same time, and it had glued them together. Mira had lost everything a long time ago, with no one there to listen when she cried.

Cade led her out of the mess, through the main cabin, halfway up the chute. She pointed out a bunk to the right of Gori's.

“This one's yours.”

No matter how many survivors packed onboard, no one ever claimed the bunks next to Gori. Cade wondered if he issued specific threats, or just stared at people until they felt the sudden need to drain.

Cade pulled Mira to the edge of his bunk.

“This is Gori. He doesn't say much. Well, he says the same things over and over, and you don't have to pretend they make sense.” Cade inspected his dark-orb eyes. “If he knows how to cry, I've never seen it.”

“Darkriders do not—”

“—cry, on pain of death, I'm sure,” Cade said.

“Darkriders do not form bonds with children,” he said, looking Mira over with disinterest. “Childhood is the shortest phase in a Darkrider's life.”

“How long does it last?” Cade asked.

“Seven days.”

“Never seen one of these,” Mira said, prodding at Gori's midsection.

Gori flashed murder-eyes at Mira, but she didn't notice. She was too busy stubbing a finger at his raisinlike feet. Cade leaned in and whispered, “He's boring for the most part, but if you keep touching him, he might kill you.”

Mira's eyes went wide and a little bit gleeful. She experimented with how close she could hover at the foot of Gori's bunk, while Cade headed down the chute.

She ran into Lee at the bottom.

“Making new friends?” Lee asked.

“No,” Cade said. “The ones I have are enough trouble.” Lee perched her fists on her waist, clearly taking it as a compliment.

Cade wanted to get back to her mother and try a few more songs out before they ran into the last set of ships, but Lee didn't budge. She was staring at Mira, her eyes cranked narrow. “There's something odd about that one.”

A prickle spidered up Cade's back. “She's a little girl.”

“Right,” Lee said. “A severely odd little girl.”

“She doesn't have to scream normal to
you,
” Cade said. “You grew up with things she didn't. Family. Friends. Regular meals.”

“Right, the glamorous life of a Human Express kid. Feet in your face every morning, the desperate hopes of humanity resting on you by mid-afternoon. And don't even talk to me about the slop we ate at night. It made grain-mash look like steak cooked in butter and dry-rubbed with gold.”

Cade watched as Mira climbed into her new bunk, folded small. “So you're saying she's lucky?”

Lee shook her head. “I'm saying none of us are.”

“Mira will be fine,” Cade said. “We'll all be fine.” But she heard her own doubtful undertones. The raw pitch of what she wanted to believe.

 

Cade had barely gathered her mother and Moon-White and found a place to sit when Renna clenched. Cade thought she was sending a warning and then remembered—this was the signal. She set the guitar down with care.

Cade corkscrewed up the chute. By the time she made it to the top, her guts were twisted, palms slicked.

Rennik, Lee, and Ayumi stood in the starglass. The entire view was filled with old, gray, crusted metal.

A ship. So big that it took Cade a full minute to understand what she was looking at.

“Is that . . . ?”

“It's human-made,” Ayumi said. “Normal human. Not Unmaker human.”

Cade let out her panic in shallow gulps. “Next time? Mention that part first.”

“I got so caught up in looking at it,” Ayumi said, putting up a hand to the image of the ship. It was spotted with lookout towers, cannons pointed like fingers in every possible direction. “It's so—”

“Brilliant,” Lee finished.

“Impossible,” Cade added. “That's not what I heard. I heard four tiny ships.”

Or at least she'd
thought
she heard four tiny ships. Maybe what she'd actually heard were four people, spread out and moving all over one huge vessel. Still, even if that was true, “Humans don't make ships that big,” she said.

“Not for centuries,” Ayumi said. “But they did. During the nonhuman wars, when they still had big hopes for curing spacesick. My father . . .” She chased the coarse note out of her voice. “My father took me to see one of them when I was little. There were only two . . . or maybe three left in the whole universe. The
Persephone
was the one I saw. And there was the
Greystone,
and the
Everlast.
”

A word slid into view along the bottom of the ship. The paint had thinned in a few places, but the letters were unmistakable.

“You're telling me we're looking at a warship?” Cade asked. “An honest-to-universe warship?”

“One that hasn't been used in over three centuries,” Ayumi said, “but—”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “We are.”

Cade ran for the com, but she didn't take her eyes off the starglass. Her dream of gathering the rest of the human race had a shape, and a name stamped in white letters on time-eaten metal.

Everlast.

 

Cade and the rest of the crew ran for the dock and pulled themselves together, although Cade had to admit that after weeks of running at top speed, and a bare minimum of showers, they looked dreg-poor.

The dock swirled open. The woman who greeted them on the other side wore an official-looking flight suit and braided twists of light red hair. “We're so glad you found us,” she said, pressing hearty handshakes on all of them. She even hugged Cade. “I'm June.”

She led them across the dock, into the body of the massive ship, where so much metal curved around them that Cade felt like she'd been swallowed.

“You must be knee-deep in the battle,” Lee said.

“Oh, not me,” June said. “I'm in charge of tasks and organization. I keep things in
ship
shape.” She pressed hard on the pun. When it was met with silence, she added, “Mostly I maintain a chore roster.”

“But this is a warship!” Lee cried. “A beautiful, cannon-bristly warship!”

June scrunched her forehead and kept walking, leading them down long metal halls crossed with structural beams. Lee touched everything she could reach. Ayumi drank in the details, then poured them out into a notebook.

June's voice bounced around the near-empty ship and came back without losing a bit of chipper shine. “
Everlast
has four levels—engine, operations, crew, and flight. With a protective sounding-hollow above to absorb blasts, and a triple-thick hull. All of the glass on the ship was made from sands of the Wex system, which are known for their . . .”

June went on about the building materials and their near-magical properties. Cade grabbed Rennik's arm and pointed out empty bedroom after empty bedroom. There were even fresh sheets on the bunks.

Perfect for unloading passengers.

June pounded the stairs from the crew level to the flight level. A man met them at the entrance to the control room with more handshakes. He had dark skin, easy-to-meet eyes, and the first rumblings of a stomach. Gray hair clung in stubborn tufts to his scalp. He looked a little old to be captain of the
Everlast,
but maybe that meant he had lots of years of captaining behind him. Maybe that was a good thing.

“I can't tell you how glad I am to see some life out here,” he said. “You're the first people we've run into since those hellish attacks. Sorry, introductions first. Difficulties later. Matteo Campbell. Head of the
Everlast
Preservation Society.”

Lee almost choked on her own spit. “You're
historians?
”

“I'm afraid so,” Matteo said.

Lee hadn't been the only one hoping for a fully armed, defense-ready
Everlast.
But a floating museum of a warship was better than no warship at all.

Cade sat June and Matteo down, and laid out her plan to gather the rest of the human race. She didn't go into the details of the ex-quantum-entangled side effects that made it possible. But she sketched them. Lightly.

“We can't get to all of the survivors ourselves,” she said. “Not with one ship. We need to spread the word, establish com patterns.” She saved the most dangerous part for last. “There are some planet-side rescues to run.” Matteo raised his peppery eyebrows. “Short version? We need your help.”

Matteo nodded. “
Everlast
will give you everything she can.”

Cade sighed, and even returned June's hug. It might have worked out in Cade's favor that these were historians instead of crust-hardened, military types. Lee, on the other hand, was still looking them up and down like she might have to throw a neat little coup and install herself as captain.

“This is your entire crew?” Lee asked.

“There are two more,” Cade said. She'd heard four thought-songs.

“Right,” Matteo said. “Four in each team. We rotate with other teams . . . or we used to . . . to keep the chances of spacesick low. And the ship sits in planet-dock for half the year so people can climb around on it, see what life was like on one of these old monsters during the wars.” Matteo patted Cade's shoulder and leaned in. “I'll admit, I was never too eager to find that part out myself.”

The survivors had ten minutes to gather their things and say their goodbyes—not that many had gotten attached to living on a ship that was also alive. The children loved Renna, especially Mira, who Cade caught running up the chute like a cut-loose animal. But the rest seemed itchy to leave for the known comforts of metal walls that don't talk back.

Besides, there was plenty of room, near-endless supplies, and a good welcome on
Everlast.
Cade decided not to mention that it was crewed by soft-in-the-stomach historians.

Matteo stood with Cade and her crew at the dock and watched the survivors pour in. June kept a list of names scribbled on her chore rotations.

“It's not too many, right?” Cade asked.

“Are you kidding?” June said. “The ship is outfitted to carry seven hundred into deep space and keep them alive for years.” She consulted a list on an old-fashioned wooden clipboard. Everything Cade had seen served as proof of the ship's age. “This is going to help so much with the mess shifts. And oh! Window cleaning.” June scribbled harder.

Another rush of survivors pulsed across the dock. Cade sorted them to make sure her mother hadn't gotten mixed into the crowd.

But what if she did? What if Cade's mother disappeared into the clean, waiting rooms of
Everlast
? Cade had impossible amounts of work to do, and she could collect her mother when the fleet came together. Rennik would see the reason in her choice. Gori couldn't get his shriveled brain around the idea of “mother” in the first place. Renna needed a bare minimum of passengers to keep flying. But Cade worried that a new wince would crowd Ayumi's light brown eyes. She was the only one who knew that Cade's music might be able to cure spacesick. And Lee—would she wonder what all that searching was for if Cade gave up on her mother so easily?

Two new people in flight suits rattled the nearest stairs and came to meet them—a thirty-something man with beige skin and a blaring bald spot, and a girl with short white-blond hair and metal in every pierceable sector of skin.

Matteo waved them over.

“This is Green, our specialist on tech both ancient and modern. And Zuzu. She's in charge of weapons.”