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Xan-fear.
    He needed Cade to come and find him. He was reaching out across millions of light-years and—asking her. Not demanding it. Just needing it.
    Needing
her.
    She wouldn’t go for the scientists on Firstbloom. She wouldn’t even go for herself, firm in the stance that she didn’t need anyone, and Xan was still one of anyone. But she would go for the boy. Maybe because he’d turned off the Noise, and this was the only way to thank him. Maybe because they’d drooled onto the same blankets once. Or because he was like her—lab-altered, experimental, with no one else to count on. It didn’t matter.
    She would find Hades. She would find Xan.
    Cade felt something else, and this time she knew it was hers.
    Happiness.
    For the first time in years, a shock of happiness, knowing that she could help, and that it might even matter.
    There was a new mechanism to her steps now, a coil in her heels that made them lighter. She could have filled the desert with music. She could almost hear it now, the spreading of warm-centered chords.
    Once Cade had it all decided, she wanted to send a message to Xan. Some way of letting him know to hold tight.
    I’ll get there.
    She used the words, but words alone wouldn’t reach. What she needed was simpler than words. Raw thought. Not nuanced, but powerful. When her words reached Xan they would reach him as thought—a shape, an idea.
    Hold on. I’ll get there.
    She sent two feelings with the words—inside the hollowed-out bodies of words—her new happiness, and a twist of courage, paid out like a rope.
    But it didn’t last.
    She cut the rope, it went slack, mind to black, when she saw the smoke behind the dunes.
    Her dunes. The ones that opened onto her bunker.
    Cade flattened and fitted herself to the shadow side of the nearest rise. Crawled under a thin blanket of sand.
    The smoke rose and spread, and with it came sounds. Piercing high, thrumming low, nothing in between.
    Not death sounds. Death would have been a comfort compared to these. Death was a bed—warm, dark, waiting. These were the sounds of what waited
past
death. The sounds of undoing.
    Cade pushed herself up on the heels of her hands, breathed in a mouthful of sand. She crawled to the line at the top of the dune—sharp, but at any second it could crumble or be carried off by wind, and show where she was hiding.
    She raised her head and risked one look.
    A circle of beasts. Not a species Cade knew—too broad, with ridged backs and bent legs. If they were common on Andana, she would have heard of them by now, or seen one in the club. But Cade had never caught wind of these creatures. Taller than the tallest man. Covered in rags of space-black. Moving in a slow, practiced shuffle. Each of them cast two shadows.
    Cade’s body was a chant.
    Heart, muscle, blood.
    No. No. No.
    She couldn’t go back to the bunker. She had the circle-glass and the paper that spelled out
Hades
in her pocket. She had money sewn into her clothes and stuffed into the toe-points of her boots. She had her guitar.
    Cade knew she had to leave, but she sat there behind the crest of the dune, watching.
    These were the enemies Mr. Niven had warned her about, the enemies of the entangled. Cade had only half believed in them but now she could see them, hear them, feel them much too close.
    They had come to unmake her.
    She wondered if, somewhere else in the universe, Xan could smell her fear, like smoke.

 
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    CHAPTER 4
    ELEMENTARY PARTICLES: The building blocks of the universe
    Getting off Andana seemed like a better idea with each sand-filled step. Cade would have to start at the bottom, though, to figure out how to get all the way up to space. She’d have to visit the only people she knew who had ever been there.
    The spacesick bay was one of the largest buildings in Voidvil, a converted hangar from the days when humans had been cleared to pilot low-flying craft. It stood at the