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southern edge of town, cramped by weeds, painted the color of bandages.
    Cade shuddered at the thought of the spacesicks’ glassed-and-gone eyes, their sweat-pasted skins. Spacesick had noticeable symptoms, and they marched in a predictable order—the glassy look, the utterly detached and voided calm, the absentminded touching. For the ones who hadn’t been in space long, it came in fits and starts. Those who had been exposed longest were completely adrift in their sickness, and didn’t know who they’d been before space claimed their minds—no names, no histories. Cade had never known about her past, so maybe she should have felt a kinship with them.
    But she didn’t.
    She knocked at a small door that had been cut into the larger, craft-sized door. A woman answered it, wearing a brown dress and unfortunate shoes. She couldn’t have been more than five years older than Cade, but she looked as if she’d burrowed deep into each one of those years. She was a nurse, or had appointed herself as one. There was no money to be had in watching spacesicks; it was the work of people who were either pumped full of religion, or fuzzed on enough drugs to know what was worth stealing from the medical supplies. Cade decided not to trust her.
    â€œWho are you here to see?” the woman asked in a voice like the best black-market nail polish—shiny and impossible to chip.
    â€œUmm . . .” Cade didn’t have a specific name. She didn’t know the names of her fans, just that there were hordes of them in that bay. She could describe them by the way they looked, the way they danced. The white-haired teenage boy whose shrugging moves said I’m-Too-Good-For-This-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here. The clatch of girls with hips and hands that kneaded the air. The woman who hooted at the end of every number like a desert owl. The middle-aged men with rubber arms, roaming eyes. Cade knew them all. She couldn’t ignore them, standing in the front row every Saturday night. But she didn’t think that’s what the pretend nurse wanted to hear.
    â€œI need to see a friend.”
    â€œYour friend have a name?” the pretend nurse asked.
    Cade edged in a shoulder and tried to see the inside of the hangar. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing . . .”
    â€œLook,
miss,
” she said, as if the word
miss
meant “slummer” in some other language. “This bay is filled with sick people. So unless you have business here—”
    â€œCade!” Her name rang out once, and then it came over and over in small dry whispers. A spacesick she knew from his tendency to give himself an endless hug through her sets rushed to the door.
    â€œShe’s with me.”
    The pretend nurse looked at the man in his hug-stained shirt and then at Cade, and Cade could see her doing some quick math about whether it would be better to let this happen or to purse her lips and make a fuss. But just as she started to gather her mouth into cracks and lines, five more spacesicks rushed up and joined the first.
    â€œShe’s with us.”
    â€œWe know Cade.”
    â€œThis is our old friend Cade. Right, Cade?”
    She nodded and shrugged at the pretend nurse, like she just couldn’t help what good old friends she was with all of these nuts.
    Hug-stains led her through the hangar, which was lined on both sides with small beds spaced in even rows. Cade couldn’t help thinking of teeth, white, a few of them worn or yellowed, and in some places shoved together. Keeping the spacesicks apart from each other was almost impossible. What they wanted, more than warmth, more than chatter, even more than the rich, filling hum of Cade’s music, was human contact. There were abundant stories of spacesicks who jumped into each other’s beds and did universe-knows-what for universe-knows-how-long only to wake up and stare at each other for hours, not sure what to do with a human