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her mind again. Cade liked the hesitation she felt, almost like he was asking if it was all right to help—instead of barging in. They’d both had enough of that from the scientists on Firstbloom. When Cade sent back a sort of mental nod, he responded with a crash of comfort. It felt cool, and the raw thought had a pulse to it, too, an underbelly of a beat, and it reminded her of—
    â€”music.
    â€œLook,” she said, holding up the guitar case. “You can have what you want.” Cade slapped the case onto the nearest bed and rushed to connect to the built-in amp, hoping the sand-crusted batteries still carried a charge.
    She hurried her fingers into a sweet, simple chord. C. C. C. That sound was milk and cookies. It quieted the spacesicks. A few even sat at her feet.
    â€œThat’s nice,” one of the girls said. Cade noticed her for the first time, picked her apart from the knot of other girls who, until that moment, had looked just like her. Now Cade could see that this girl was the smallest, with the roundest face and a bit of softness in her eyes where most of the spacesicks just had glass.
    â€œThanks,” Cade said, as if it had been an actual compliment.
    â€œLee,” the girl said. Half of the heads around her nodded. “If I needed to get off-planet about now, I would go to the market and find Lee.”
    â€œThanks,” Cade said again.
    The girl smiled and the smile shifted something in Cade, moved her fingers into formation. She started to play. A lullaby, to lure the spacesicks from their worries and into their teeth-white beds. But they took it the wrong way and started to dance. Their usual dances, with jolted arms and hard-grinding hips. Cade pushed her way through a verse and a chorus and then sped through one more chorus to end it.
    â€œDance with us, Cade.”
    â€œNo, that’s—”
    â€œDance, it feels good to dance.”
    Bodies shivered toward each other, filled in each other’s spaces. But when they touched, nothing changed. It was like they were rubbing up against people-shaped walls. The soft-eyed girl stood apart and moved her feet up and down, just a gentle tapping. She was plugged into the beat. Cade would have played the whole song for her twice.
    But there was Xan to think about. She got a hint of him at the edges of her mind. Anxious. Waiting. It was time for Cade to go to the market and find Lee.
    She packed up Cherry-Red and walked away. The spacesicks were still dancing, and she knew they would dance for a long time after she left.
    Â 
    The market was busier than the spacesick bay, but it was better, too. At least the people there knew how many inches to leave between their skins and Cade’s. They streamed in long lines through the basement of HumanScape, one of the larger apartment buildings, twelve floors. The market moved all the time. There were arrests made, one or two a month, but only when a merchant’s trade got too big for its human roots and started to suck customers out of the big city markets.
    The Voidvil black market didn’t have much, but it made up for that with lots of brass and color. Cade passed booths that sold hand-dyed scarves, oversweetened candies, sand-blasted electronics, candles that smelled like places Cade would never see—Deep Forest, Ocean Wave. She wondered how many times those smells had been handed down, diluted, since someone here last filled their nostrils with the green smell of trees or salt-sweet brine. But that didn’t stop people—including Cade—from sniffing the little stubs of wax.
    Cade knew a lot of the merchants; besides candles, she bought bread from them, and fruit. She traded for guitar strings and new old clothes and tear-shaped bottles of nailblack. Cade was a steady customer, and the merchants didn’t have to pretend to like her or care about her life. She browsed, she scowled, she bought, she moved on. Merchants loved it. But a strange