Entangled Read Online Free Page B

silence so she could wander into the mists of her head and find the place where she’d dropped his name.
    Xan.
    She clinked in other words, one at a time.
    Cadence.
    Firstbloom.
    Entangled.
    These were tokens of a past that Cade had been cast out of. She didn’t know if she wanted it back, but she did want these words. They belonged to her. There was another one she needed to add, waiting for her on that scrap of paper from Mr. Niven’s pocket. She opened it, and the lines where it had been folded were scars—thick and white and raised.
    The characters sprawled. The first one reminded her of an
s,
but backwards. The middle letter was a
b,
she was sure of it. The last was an
H,
tall and crossed in the middle, one of her ladder rungs. But it was a capital, and came at the end of a word. A capital at the end of a word couldn’t be English—could it? Cade didn’t think so. But her lessons in the Parentless Center hadn’t been easy to sit through.
    Cade was left with two letters, second and fourth. She spun through the alphabet, but she didn’t know these shapes. She wondered if she was looking at the curves and angles of a lost Earth language. It had been half a millennium since the decision was made, by nonhumans, that English would be the one accepted form of speech and writing for all humans living in space. Not because it was the prettiest or the most practical or the easiest to understand. Because it was common, and nonhumans weren’t interested in learning more than one stick-figured, thick-tongued set of words.
    If this note really was written in something other than English, Cade was done. She could try to track down a translator, but she didn’t know what she was translating from. Unless the note wasn’t for her at all. Maybe it was for Xan.
    Cade felt Mr. Niven’s influence on her like fingerprints. She tossed the paper across the room. She wasn’t Firstbloom’s messenger girl. These scientists scrambling her particles didn’t mean she owed them favors—in fact, it was the other way around.
    Cade burrowed as deep as her plastic-foam bed let her. Tried to burrow even deeper, into sleep. She would think about Xan in the morning. About whether she wanted to think about him at all.
    Â 
    Cade woke up and wasn’t even sure of it for five minutes. No more Noise meant there was no static-prickled difference between dreaming and awake.
    The room she slept in didn’t give her much to go on. In the dark, it could have been the slate of a standard nightmare. But one finger of light reached down from a crack in the cover of the bunker, and led Cade to a patch of shine on the other side of the room. The mirror-tip caught her eye and threw back a dim picture.
    Which gave her an idea.
    If Project QE had nonhuman enemies, writing something that could be read backwards, in a mirror, would keep it safe.
    Cade thrashed onto her other side and faced the pocked cement wall. If she was right, it would mean her enemies were real. She tried to convince herself that everything Niven had said was a lie.
    But he was from her white-painted past—her own faded memories and her gut confirmed it. He was real, Xan was real, and entanglement was real. If it wasn’t, the inside of Cade’s head would be just like everyone else’s.
    Maybe the danger was real, too. Maybe the boy who used to be the most important thing in her small universe had been taken.
    Cade got up and scraped the tenderness of her feet on the cement. In the dark, she found the slip of paper and crawled up to the mirror. Refocused her eyes. Reversed the word. It was blocked out in perfect, plain English.
    Hades.
    Â 
    There was a reason Cade didn’t go to Voidvil on Sunday mornings.
    A hundred reasons, really, and Cade could see them running thick and obvious in the streets.
    Voidvil was at its worst after the riot of a Saturday night. Men and women with spacesick had been up for too long