Free Unmade by Amy Rose Capetta Page B

your plans.”
    â€œYou’ll . . .” Cade strained for eloquence. “
What?
”
    Lee pointed a
take-this-seriously
finger. “I still think it’s a bad move. I want that on the record.”
    The mission to change Lee’s mind had died a wretched death around the fourth swig, or so Cade had thought. “What changed?”
    Lee clutched Cade’s arm. “I want to tell you. I absolutely can’t tell you. Yet. Okay, here’s what I can tell you.
It’s great.
The reason. If you piled all the reasons in the universe on top of each other, it would be the best and finest and prettiest one there is.”
    â€œSounds good,” Cade groaned.
    Lee jumped up and left, happiness spilling everywhere.

Chapter 9
    When Cade woke up, happiness was a planet, and she had drifted millions of light-years away from it.
    Of course,
now
Rennik came down the chute.
    â€œHow are you feeling?” he asked.
    When Cade opened her mouth to say something scathing, she threw up. She crawled out of Gori’s bed, waving Rennik back, but he followed her to the tucked-in spot inside the control room where she rushed to deal with another foul-rising wave. He stood behind her, lifted her hair off of her neck, and ran his patient fingers through it. This was so far from the closeness Cade wanted with him. She hated her body for soaking it up anyway.
    Pride knocked Cade back to standing. And then something else tugged her away from Rennik—a sense that the control room had changed. Not the light, or the layout, or the slight, organic Renna-smell.
    Cade almost walked straight into the captain’s chair before she figured out that her mother was sitting in it.
    Her arms had molded to the strict lines, and her head lolled back so her neck couldn’t hold it up.
    â€œWhat is she doing?” Rennik asked. With a nervous smile, he added, “Not trying to fly the ship, one would assume?”
    Cade clipped a half-smile. “That would be brass.” A bold way to come back to life and announce what she needed. But her mother was too far gone for that. She faced the wide black of the starglass, barely breathing.
    â€œShe’s in love with
that,
” Cade said, waving at a smear of space.
    â€œBewildering,” Rennik said. “Space is good for getting from one place to another. It’s nothing, in itself.”
    Cade squinted until her eyebrows hurt. She’d kept the idea of spacesick at a safe distance for as long as she could. But it made sense, under the skin of things. “My mother’s brain cracked itself on nothingness. Whatever was in there before ran out, and nothingness worked its way in.”
    Cade stepped toward the starglass, and the white rushed her, more stars than all the notes she could play in a lifetime. “Can you imagine letting in something that huge, and then trying to shut it out again?”
    â€œYes.” The word brushed low and quick, and by the time Cade turned to Rennik, he’d cleared his throat and tripled his politeness. “Shall we find a better place for her to rest?”
    Rennik and Cade lugged her mother to the common room, their hands shifting and swapping her weight. When they almost touched, Cade’s nerve endings sang like they had.
    Cade installed her mother in the middle of a small universe of cushions.
    â€œBetter,” she said.
    She didn’t tell Rennik the one good possibility that sat like a pit at the center of her feelings. Cade had to be sure before she would let it grow into something like hope.
    She asked every member of the crew, down to Mira, but no one had moved her mother. She must have walked, on her own steam, from the bedroom to the control room.
    Something in Cade’s mother was waking up. Cade had to grab it while she could, and drag it into the light.
    Â 
    She found Ayumi in the hold, surrounded by notebook pages spread thin and everywhere. Ayumi hopped from one blank floor space