Entangled Read Online Free PDF Page A

without sleep. The needing smiles of the night before were traded in for burst-vessel skin and slitted frowns. A few tents were propped in the crust of alleys or slung across empty lots, offering forgiveness for whatever-you-did-last-night, only a few coins. Nobody bought it.
    Cade scanned the buildings. She’d seen the word
Hades
before, splashed in neon over a gape-mouthed door. It was the name of a club on the near side of town. She would find out what the word meant, and maybe that would tell her how much trouble Xan was in.
    Not that she cared. She cared about being able to go right back to not-caring.
    The staircase to Hades put the one at Club V to shame. It twisted down, a spiral with pegs and spikes set in at random. Cade climbed, listening to her steps as they tested, sounded, called the all-clear.
    Club Hades was a circle of sand-brick, with a sand-brick stage set inside of it like a ripple. A single person worked around the rim of the stage, broom in hand.
    She was nonhuman—and therefore the owner or the bartender. But she wasn’t a native of Andana like Mr. Smithjoneswhite. She stood tall and slender and had a much more reasonable number of limbs. She was one of the Matalan—a species of women who had some of the qualities of plants. They could photosynthesize and wore clothes spun with threads of sunlight over birch-pale, paper skin. This one rustled as she swept the floor. She grew purple flowers in her hair.
    â€œNo drinks,” she said. “Noon.” Her English was clear and her voice bent with ease, like it was giving in to a wind Cade couldn’t feel.
    Cade walked up to the bar and set her guitar case on a stool. She was sure that the word on Mr. Niven’s paper had something to do with the enemies of Project QE. She needed her cool, and she needed a cover.
    â€œI play at Club V,” she said. “Saturday nights. I go on last.” That meant she was the best act the club had.
    â€œDregs,” she said. “You’re Cade?”
    â€œNo dregs. I am.”
    The Matalan dropped a few petals on the floor, bloomed new ones. It was like blushing.
    â€œAnd you want to play here?”
    â€œNo,” Cade said. “I want to look around. On the condition that none of this makes its way back to the too-many-fingers owner of a certain other club.”
    The Matalan’s eyes were swirled dark, like wood knots, and she narrowed them at Cade. She knew that Cade was scoping the club—or at least, that’s what Cade wanted her to think. The cover was working, but it didn’t come without a risk. If the Matalan didn’t trust Cade or didn’t want to deal with the possible mess of Mr. Smithjoneswhite, she might kick Cade back up the stairs, or make a discreet call to the bouncer and—wait. Cade had heard of musicians whose hands had been mangled and guitars smashed to atoms for less. She tightened her clutch on Cherry-Red’s case.
    â€œSure.” The Matalan tipped her chin out at the club. “Take a look.”
    Cade walked away, but she couldn’t keep herself from watching the Matalan. All the woman did was sweep—skitter and gather, dust and air. But she was so beautiful, it could have been a dance. Loveliness didn’t shift through her and leave, like the passing of a season. It was part of her, sewed up in her skin. Even when she shed her coat and went winter-stark, she would be beautiful. This was how she could live in the void. Humans had nothing that touched the fringe of this grace.
    Cade walked the stage, the back rooms, the bathrooms, the dusty-bottled strip behind the bar. Nothing made her think of Mr. Niven or Xan or Project QE. She circled back to the Matalan. Watched for a minute as she tipped at the waist, tapped dust into a bin.
    â€œNice place.”
    Cade tried to imagine for a second that the Matalan was one of her enemies. But the fight would have started bubbling under the skin of their conversation by