Unmade (25 page)

Still, the flashes from his time-loop didn't flood her days and overwhelm her nights anymore. What if Cade hadn't turned the connection off permanently—what if she could plug into it at will?

What if
she
was in control of it now?

Cade fumbled with the implications, while Ayumi raced ahead.

“Do you think entanglement could double the strength of the song?” she asked. “That's what it did with muscle power when Xan was alive. Maybe it's the same music Cade has always been playing, but connecting it to Xan somehow makes it
more.
”

That could be right. It sounded reasonable. But there was one problem. This song
wasn't
the same.

It had words. It had a shape. It had weight and color and—

—life.

Gori sat on his bunk, crumpled into a tired shape. Cade had never seen him look exhausted, even though his skin was a collection of sags.   

Ayumi tried again. “Do you think—”

“You
know
what I think.” Gori's voice cracked. “This song is a threat to the universe, and we will say no more about it.”

Cade got the feeling that this all came back to Gori's past and the long shadow of his lost home.

The story of what had happened always lingered behind him, and Cade felt like she was casting unwanted light. Maybe de­­­manding honesty was a form of torture, but what Cade wanted was to soothe Gori. It was the strangest feeling, like wanting to hug a sharp rock. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell it like a story. One that happened to the universe, not to you.”

His voice cracked again. “And we will say no more about it?”

Cade kneeled at the edge of the bed.

“Not a word.”

Gori closed his eyes, but he didn't deep-breathe into the universe. He kept to the boundaries of his own head this time.

“The first Darkriders believed they were meant to master dark energy, use it to shape and grow and change the universe. A small group of those who had the ability did not listen to the voices of others and pushed on, even when warned to stop. They hoarded dark energy, when it is an untamable substance. What they did not understand is that gravity feeds on it, and will find it. The great store at the heart of my planet called out to gravity, and it came, crushing everything in its path. My planet. Coranna.” Cade heard the music in that name, the sad swell of it. “Everyone I loved died on that day.”

Ayumi knelt down with Cade and laid a hand over one of Gori's.

He pulled it back. Cade expected him to say that the universe didn't allow Ayumi to touch him. That she couldn't comfort a Darkrider, on pain of death.   

He said, “You would not touch me if you knew.”

Ayumi gathered up his fingers and held them tight.

“I was one of the first Darkriders. A guard, watching over the hoard. It was a lowly job. I was there on the day . . . I felt the disturbance, and understood before others did. I escaped, though I should not have.”

A new understanding of Gori skimmed at Cade, like a bullet-glance. His two-month rapture after Renna's death made perfect sense. The real surprise was that he hadn't gone into one the minute after his planet blinked out, and stayed there. But he kept living, kept putting on robes every day, kept caring—in his limited, Gori-like way.

Cade kept her promise. She stood, dusted her knees, and said no more about Gori's home. But she couldn't give up on the song.

“My connection with Xan is particle-based,” she said. “Entanglement has nothing to do with dark energy.”

“Yes,” Gori said, nudging more wrinkles into his forehead. “It is different. But it reminds me of that day.”

Cade shifted her weight, but she couldn't get comfortable. Gori's words plucked all the wrong strings.

“So this isn't the universe telling me to stop,” she said. “It's you.”

Gori shook his head, and the look of the dangerous, self-appointed guardian of the universe dropped away. He was just another fleet member who had lost everything.

“I have wondered why I lived so long,” he said. “Maybe I am the form the universe took to deliver this message. Maybe it is why I have lived all this time, walked through these many years and trials. So I might warn you.”

 

Cade and Ayumi wound back through the halls of
Everlast
in silence.

“Maybe . . .” Ayumi said.

She flipped notebook pages.

“Maybe . . .”

Cade could tell that she still wanted to talk about the song, but Gori had deflated them. He'd done more than that—he'd taken all of the air out of the ship, or reminded Cade how thin it was in the first place.

“Maybe . . .”

The word bounced down the metal hall, stubborn and hollow.

 

There was nowhere left to go but the little cabin.

Cade approached Unmother's room with three knives crowding her pockets. When she got to the hall outside, Rennik was gone, and a new fleet member stood guard. He was solid, dull-eyed, bored.

His hand sat on Cade's shoulder like a slab of wet bread. “I wouldn't go in there.”

Cade brushed him off with a little more muscle than was needed. “So don't.”

The guard grabbed for her waist, but Cade blocked the move, swiping his fingers in a crushing hold. She added pressure in small increments. “You know that I have clearance, right?”

The guard's smile was as hard as the stubs of his fingertips. “Just saying you might want to wait. He'll be busy for a good long while.”

Cade wondered what Rennik had given the guard to keep her out of that cabin. Or maybe the man had volunteered, knowing what Rennik would do, wanting some thin form of justice for whatever had been done to him.

As Cade ran in, Rennik smashed his hand across Unmother's face, tattooing a kick to her shin. To the beat of some terrible inner drum, Rennik hurt the woman, until she flecked dark with blood.

Cade braced herself, both hands on the backs of Rennik's arms. She could hold him in place for a few seconds, but when he got loose he hit Unmother twice as hard to make up for lost time. She collapsed around her center, like a dying star.

The guard watched from the doorway as if he was being given a good show for the first time in years.

Cade launched herself at Rennik again, battering at his back and sides with her fists. The punches glanced with the frantic rebound of hard rain. If Cade wanted to stop Rennik, she would have to hurt him.

Unmother didn't fight back, but Rennik didn't give a dreg about fighting fair. There was no standing back to wait a reasonable amount of time between strikes. Rennik didn't care about torturing Unmother for information.

This was about pain.

He bashed his fist against Unmother's perfect-molded cheekbone. The attacks built, and her screams built—edged with pain, but hollow inside, instead of filling with anger or fear. This wasn't hurting Unmother past the skin.   

“Stop, stop, stop.”

Cade pulled her knife and held it to Rennik's side, but he pushed himself into it, to show how little he cared. His blood spread onto her hand, warm. Memories of him, warm, moved through her. Cade tossed the blade like it stung; the guard made his first smart move and gathered it up.

Cade threw herself around Rennik's neck, lodging a choke hold against the inner wires of his throat. She held herself there even as his breathing changed. Her weight dragged him to the floor.

“What the damp hell are you doing?” cried the guard.

Cade needed to connect with the parts of Rennik that were about more than revenge. There had been so much to him before Renna died—so many complicated, beautiful, frustrating, interlocking pieces.

“I know you,” Cade said. Her arms slid into an old con­figuration. She held him the way she had once, just once, her arms soft and strong in equal parts.

Cade couldn't let it go for long. A show of how much she cared could be used against her. And that made her hate more than the milk-faced guard and the patient, evil woman on the bed. It made her hate the whole broken universe.

“Stop what you're doing,” Cade said, “or I'll have the fleet keep you out of the fighting.” Rennik's face was close, and anger scratched bright red across his cheeks. Cade watched him weigh more torture now against the delights of killing Unmakers in the future.

He slackened. Cade pulled him farther across the room, but when she caught the calm, following tick of Unmother's eyes, she dragged Rennik the whole way out. Now she had to have this conversation in front of the guard, who smirked like he'd known she would give all along.

“I still haven't gotten anything out of her,” Cade whispered. “That
is
what she's here for.”

Rennik held an absent hand to his throat, the way he always did when he got hurt and barely noticed. “And when you do?”

“Someone can kill her.” Cade looked the eager guard up and down. “I don't care who.”

She turned hard and went back into the bedroom, blasting the door shut behind her. Unmother was patting the worst of the blood, soaking it with the hem of her shirt, like she'd spilled a glass of water.

She tested her muscles and sat up.

“You can leave now and save yourself the time.” Unmother skimmed a glance over Cade's sweating body. “And effort.”

Cade leveled a knife at Unmother. She wasn't going to use it, but it felt better to be in control of some of the danger in the room.

Unmother unpeeled her words, letting each have a moment before she moved on the next. “You came to figure out what my plan is. What I want. But I already have everything I want right here.” She smiled at the beds, at the walls, at Cade.

“Really?” Cade asked, twitching the knife at the door. “You'd rather be here than with your new and improved human race?”

“We aren't better humans,” Unmother said—a gentle correction, not even scolding. “We simply
aren't
humans.”

“Really?” Cade asked. “You didn't reach down deep and change your genetic code.”

“Change how you act, and you change who you are,” Unmother said, spreading her hands like she was the best illustration of her point. “No names. No connections. None of the things that make humans weak.” She laughed at the worst of her bruises. “The limitations of flesh and blood, in most cases, can be overcome. The real problem is that humans fail to see the larger picture, over and over, because of their small concerns.”

With Unmother, Cade always felt like she'd come in halfway through a lesson. She had to keep up, play along. It had always been Unmother's game. Whenever Cade forgot that, it smashed back into her, usually in the form of someone dying.

“So that's why you won't let us start over.”

“Start over?” Unmother bent and tended to a cut on her ankle, licking a finger, swiping at blood. “Human history is a matter of cycles. You would make the same mistakes. You would hope and you would try and you would fail. We're saving you from that.”

“You. Saving
us.
”

Cade mind-gripped the irony as hard as she could. But she would never convince Unmother she was wrong—this woman had washed her own brain a long time ago. The only thing left to do, if Cade could, was to loosen Unmother's hold on the idea of the war, by reminding her that murdering everyone Cade loved didn't really matter.

Not in the
larger picture.

“The numbers are in,” Cade said. “If you were aiming for extinction, you won. There's no way the human race is coming back from this. And I don't think you want to die, no matter how much you beg for it. I think you want to go off and be the leader of this new
nonhuman
race.”

Unmother looked an inch away from impressed. “You've actually learned something. How nice.”

“So go,” Cade said. “I'll give you a shuttle. I'll escort you, even. Make sure you get home safe.”

Unmother sighed. “That's a dear little proposition. It's a shame it doesn't sit flush with the way humans work.” She leaned forward. It must have hurt to push against her new bruises, but she didn't let it show. “Humans find the cracks, keep alive on gristle and hope. This will never end unless I keep a very close eye on it.”

“You,” Cade said. An idea prickled through her brain, the first electric strands of lightning.

Unmother laughed, the rounded laugh of someone who has never been quite so amused. “You want to believe that my people would be lost without my leadership, that if you kill me now this will be over . . .”

She trailed off, and let Cade fill in the rest. Unmother's people were designed not to care about her. They had no weakness.

“No, I'm afraid it's the other way around,” Unmother said, making the struggle to get to her feet look like a promise, a guarantee that she would return some of the pain. “Your sickly little fleet wouldn't do very well without you, would they?”

Cade stepped back.

“She told me that they rely on you—”

“Mira?”

Unmother glared so hard the question fell away. She was concentrated on getting to Cade, one slow, tiny step at a time. “If I killed you right now . . .”

Unmother couldn't do it. Cade knew that. She had the knife. She had a voice to scream with, and a crew on the other side of the wall. So she should have been able to breathe, but she couldn't.

Cade backed up hard, aiming for the door, to make it look like she had been planning to leave. Unmother had rattled her down to fear-soft bones. She should have taken the victory and let Cade go.

But the woman's voice pulled her back like fingers.

“I told the others it was time to put the endgame in motion. You must be able to guess why.” Unmother dropped the lesson and it felt, for the first time, as if she was talking straight to Cade. It felt—the word slithered up from the past—
intimate.
“You're not bright, but you have a sharpened sense of self-importance. You know why this is happening.”