Entangled by Amy Rose Capetta Read Free Book Online

thing happened when she stopped stirring her fingers through their wares, looked up with careful, half-bored eyes, and asked about someone named Lee.
    â€œLee? No.”
    â€œNot a name I remember, and I remember it all.”
    â€œI’ve never heard of her.”
    Cade felt sure none of the merchants were telling the truth—not the soap man, not the rat-gut seller. But the comment from the baker sealed it.
Never heard of her?
Lee was a boy’s name, at least some of the time.
    The stacks of round loaves at the baker’s booth led into the labyrinth of a clothing stall. Cade spent a few coins on a pair of yellow leatherish gloves she didn’t care about. She should have saved her money, but she had to make it look like she was just another girl in the market crowd. For the enemies of the entangled—the Unmakers, as Cade had started to think of them—the market would be too obvious a place to come looking. After her bunker and Club V, it was the clear choice.
    Cade stuffed her guitar case behind a row of old coats and paid the owner a few more coins to make sure it wasn’t sold or stolen. Cade knew he would do the right thing. He was a fan, and a good man besides.
    What Cade needed now was a criminal.
    Whatever this Lee was getting up to, it was big-time-brass illegal, because what happened in the market was illegal enough. If the merchants didn’t want to be associated with her trouble, it was trouble of the sourest kind.
    Cade cut a line across the market, toward the least reputable merchant she knew—an old woman with long strings of dark hair and a too-small set of false teeth. She dealt in the bodies and belongings of the dead. Her booth was lined with strings of teeth, bottled clumps of hair, and the little possessions that people tended to have on them at the end. Bowls of keys. Neat lines of shoes.
    â€œYou know someone named Lee?”
    â€œNo one by that name here,” the old woman said, pointing to her wares and laughing.
    â€œLee’s not dead, as far as I know. I was sent here to see her.”
    The old woman squinted, and the ancient skin around her eyes rearranged. “Sent to me?”
    â€œNo. To the market.” Cade ran her fingers through a bowl of keys. They shifted like water. “I’ve been told Lee can help me get out of here. You know. Out of here and up?”
    The old woman hissed, a thin kettle sound. “Better to live and die on the ground, even if it’s barren. You buy some of my product and you’ll see. This all comes from planetbound bodies, not a spacesick in the pile. Space rots a person, body and soul. Empties out, hardens the shell.”
    The dirt-and-metal smell of the keys stirred up, thick in the air. “You believe in souls?” Cade asked.
    The old woman bent down under the surface of the booth, the curve of her back showing. She came up clattering a tray filled with tiny glass bottles. They were all different shapes, some faintly colored.
    â€œHalf off the first one, special for you, space-bound girl.”
    Cade felt a wash of sickness at the sight of those bottles, but she wasn’t sure why. She’d never known people well enough to mourn them. Mr. Niven was the closest thing she had to someone from her childhood, and her feelings about him were mixed, at best. Besides, his collapse was less than a death. The echo of a death.
    Cade hovered her hand over the bottles. “What if I told you that my soul was tangled up with someone else’s?”
    â€œI’d say you were cursed. I have something for that, too.”
    The old woman smiled, showing the gnarl and pucker of her gums. She stooped to find more of her specialties.
    The idea of entanglement as a curse, a burden she’d never asked for and that would—in the end—ruin her, worked at Cade, slid under her skin. She reached out for Xan.
    Cursed. Do you believe that?
    The raw thought trembled, overfilled with Cade’s