Entangled by Amy Rose Capetta Read Free Book Online Page B

called out to Xan and concentrated all of her efforts on sending him a picture of herself, staring into a film-blotched bathroom mirror with a pair of metal fingers deep in her mouth. She gave him a chance to tell her to turn back. Not to do it. Not to come for him. She felt the clench of his heart when he saw her, but he didn’t tell her to stop.
    She sent him one last flash of the plier-glint, the taste of rust.
    You had better be worth this.
    She pulled.
    Xan couldn’t keep her from feeling the pain, but he could feel it with her. He was there, and it felt like someone holding her hand tight enough to draw her away from the hurt. He couldn’t stop her from slicking one hand with blood or throwing up twice, but he could distract her, shore her up, calm her down—do whatever it took to keep her upright as she stumbled across the market, her fist closed around the chip of bone.
    â€œBack so soon?”
    Cade slammed the tooth down.
    â€œDidn’t think you would do it,” the old woman said, picking up the tooth as if it were some milk-white diamond, peering at it from all angles.
    â€œLee,” Cade said through a mouthful of pain.
    The old woman pulled the black felt of the curtains behind her booth and let Cade pass through. She smelled the pungence of shoes that, thankfully, masked the other smells of the old woman’s trade, and felt the swish of the dark fabric against her screaming-tender cheek.
    On the other side, Cade faced the emptiness created by the backs of the booths. A sort of enclosed square. A few merchants sat on crates and counted wares or coin. Cade was sure she’d have to ask at least one more person where she could find Lee, and didn’t know how she’d manage with her puffing mouth. But then her eyes settled on a girl at the end of a short line, and Cade knew she could stop the search.
    People waited patiently to see the girl, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, just a little older than Cade. She had wild sand-colored hair, pulled up into a complicated series of knots. She didn’t have a booth set up, just the line, and from the looks of it, people would be waiting for a while.
    She was in the middle of kissing a man, long and hard and studiously. She pulled away every once in a while to write something in a small black notebook.
    Cade tacked herself onto the end of the line. The kissing went on and on. Cade wanted to stop watching, but it took her mind off the splintered ache in her mouth.
    â€œAll right,” Lee called out. “Who’s next?”

 
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    CHAPTER 5
    CONSTRAINT VARIABLE: The boundaries of a system within which any process must work
    Cade had to watch a few people come and go to figure it out—what Lee was doing, and why the line to see her was filled with feet-tapping, quick-breathing nervebags. It didn’t help that Cade had to think through the pain of her voided tooth.
    Lee finished with the first man, and a woman stepped forward—she could only be described as a mother, her clothes wrinkled and her face ironed flat with worry. In the black notebook, Lee took down the recipe for a certain kind of cake, crammed with black-market sugar. Cade couldn’t see the connection between the kiss and the cake—but more than that she couldn’t figure out how this girl was supposed to get her up to space.
    Then an old man with square-framed glasses taught Lee a song. His voice shivered like skin at nightfall, but the pitch was true. Cade basked in the distraction of it—at least, until Lee started to sing. She repeated the old man’s words, but the rhythm dissolved and the notes weren’t right. Cade wanted to nudge them up, out of their flatness.
    Lee tried again.
    â€œCome unto these yellow sands, and then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d the wild waves whist, Foot it featly here and there; And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”
    The words were strange and wild and