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when they weren’t touching it.
    Maybe that’s what Cade’s issues with the spacesicks cooked down to: touching. Their hands were on her now, as she walked down the center aisle. They prodded at her from all directions, fluttered their palms on her shoulders. Cade had never liked hands unless they were fitted to the coolness of strings and frets. But she needed the spacesicks’ help, so she let them have the warmth of her shoulder, the rough grain of her hair. She wondered if, to them, it would seem like a fair trade. But when they stopped whispering her name, it became clear that they wanted more.
    â€œWhat are you going to play for us?” Hug-stains asked, gripping her arm.
    â€œYes, yes,” the girls with the hips said.
    â€œPlay!”
    Cade had forgotten that she had Cherry-Red. All of a sudden its weight announced itself at the end of her arm. It was a good thing, really. If Cade had left it in the bunker it would be one more left-behind part of her life on Andana.
    â€œPlayplayplay,” the spacesicks said, some of them soft, some of them screaming. She hadn’t played since the night in Club V, when her head had emptied out like the bar after the barking of last call. She wasn’t sure what it would be like now, to piece together a song without the Noise that had driven her to do it in the first place.
    And there was something sharp-edged and dangerous about playing at the spacesick bay, with no one to keep the fans back if they loved the music a little too much. As much as she hated Mr. Smithjoneswhite, all of his arms did have their uses.
    â€œOne question,” Cade said. “Before I play.”
    â€œOf course,” an old man said, like he was damp at the notion that she needed to ask about asking.
    â€œSpace,” she said. The bodies around her sucked in breath and hissed it out. “If you wanted to get back there—for some reason, I’m not saying you would—but if you wanted to get back to space, what would you do about it?”
    The room ripped apart into too many answers and the moans of the ones who didn’t want to answer at all. At the end of the hangar, the pretend nurse raised her thin, old- before-their-time eyebrows.
    â€œWhy?” begged an old woman whose eyes had gone so glassy, they looked almost white. “Why would you ever want to go there?”
    â€œSpace is beautiful,” Hug-stains said, “but it doesn’t give a dreg.”
    â€œStay here with us,” the dark-haired girls cooed.
    â€œStay here.”
    â€œYes, stay.”
    They put hands on her with abandon now—on her arms, her back, her sides—holding her down like they could keep her planet-bound. Cade turned in a tight circle, but she couldn’t brush them off without blasting through, hurting someone.
    â€œI have to go,” Cade said, but she wasn’t sure if she meant up to space or rocketing out the door.
    â€œDon’t . . . you should stay . . .”
    Cade wondered if the spacesicks were right. The scientists had seemed to think she couldn’t come down with spacesick because she was entangled. But how could the scientists know that for sure? Cade had spent two years on Firstbloom, not a lifetime.
    More spacesicks moved in close. Cade eyed the door through the cracks in the crowd, but the pretend nurse stood there, ticking her fingers against her crossed arms, looking at Cade like she had earned this.
    Bodies blocked Cade’s skin off from the air. Her heartbeat kicked out of time.
    And that heartbeat was like a call that Xan answered without a second’s pause. He was with her, in her mind, sending her the focus she needed to face the spacesicks and give them an answer.
    â€œI’m going to save someone,” Cade said, unsticking their hands one by one. “I’m going. So you might as well tell me what you know.”
    The spacesicks kept at her, repasted themselves. Xan pressed into