Linked

by Imogen Howson

The beetle-car lifted off the ground, the buzz of its propeller sending a vibration like a shiver through the seat and into Elissa’s back, then dropped away from the edge of the shelf into clear airspace.

  “Mother . . .” The question hovered: What if I don’t have the operation?

  “What is it, Lissa?”

  She couldn’t say it. The doctor’s voice echoed in her head. Your condition is deteriorating. We don’t want to leave this even as long as another week.

  “I’m just . . . It’s scary.”

  Without taking her gaze off the glinting spiderweb of the intersection approaching beneath them, her mother reached over and put a hand on Elissa’s arm. “I know, sweetie. If any of the other treatments had worked . . . But this is it. We have to take this one. You can’t live the rest of your life this way.”

  The beetle-car connected with the intersection, locking on to the monorail. From the corner of her eye, Elissa saw the shadow of the propeller disappear as it folded itself into the upper dome of the car. Then they were down in the steel spaghetti of the upper levels of the city, other beetle-cars and skycycles clattering past them, pedestrian slidewalks sliding by underneath.

  “I’ll drop you off on the roof, okay? I thought we’d miss rush hour, but looking at this traffic . . . I’m not spending half an hour on ground level.”

  “Okay.” Elissa pulled her bag up from the passenger-side footwell. If she hugged it to her, she could—sort of—calm the churning in her stomach. Just a bit earlier, when she’d first met the doctor, the surgery had seemed like the answer to everything. But now . . . My condition’s deteriorating. I’m having brain surgery in four days.

  The yellow reflective lines marking the landing spaces seemed to rise up toward them.

  And now—oh God—school.

  ELISSA PRESSED her thumb to the thumb pad next to the students’ entrance, and the doors slid open on a rush of chilled air that, despite all the purifiers, still managed to smell of sweaty shoes and bubble gum. She pulled the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her hands.

  The doors slid shut behind her, cutting out all the dusty blaze of the spring day, closing her in with refrigerated air and the anemic, heatless sunlight that filtered through the antiglare windows.

  She had only forty seconds after entering before the truancy system would kick in to send auto-messages to her parents. Otherwise she’d have gone to the bathroom, tried killing a little time there until she was too late to do anything more than sit in on the next lesson. Instead, she pulled her bag up over her shoulder, fingers tight on the strap, and made her way along the network of corridors to the girls’ changing room. Second period. Phys ed.

  The changing room was already a buzz of voices as she opened the door—a buzz that, just for a moment, dropped as she entered. Under the makeup she’d applied along her jawline, up behind her ears, the bruises she couldn’t quite hide throbbed, responding to the sudden attention of twenty pairs of eyes, as if the combined gazes had an actual weight to them.

  Elissa reached up to open her locker and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts, not looking up, not letting her face register anything. Behind her, after the space of a few heartbeats, the buzz started up again.

  She tried to change quickly, but her fingers were clumsy—even after three years, she’d never gotten used to those breaths of silence when she came into a room, never gotten used to being the subject of so many stares—and she was almost the last to be ready, left fastening her shoes as the changing room cleared.

  “Hey. Lissa?”

  She looked up, aware of her face tightening as she did so, unable to keep it completely expressionless. Marissa stood in front of her, sleek and tawny blond, her long legs bare between her close-fitting black shorts and her black gym shoes, tanned a perfectly even shade of brown.

  “Are you okay?”

  Elissa stared at her. “What?”

  Marissa shifted, tucking her thumbs into her back waistband. “I just . . .” Her eyes met Elissa’s for a moment, then she looked away, a sudden irritated movement. “Jeez, whatever. It’s not like you’re hiding those bruises from anyone, you know?”

  Elissa stood. A million years ago there’d been the three of them, Carlie and Rissa and Lissa—and yes, it had sounded dumb when you said their names like that, but they hadn’t cared. Best friends forever. They’d all said it, before they came up to high school. They would make new friends, sure, but they wouldn’t forget each other. They’d stand up for each other against anyone who tried to bully them. They’d meet up every weekend, just like they had since they were eight years old.

  A million years ago.

  “Is that what you want to know about?” The memories made her voice cold. “Who are you finding out for this time?”

  Marissa rolled her eyes. It had been two years, but she knew very well what Elissa was talking about. Back then, Elissa had thought they were still friends. She’d made the mistake of telling Marissa the reason for her latest absence. And the next day she’d come into school to be met with not just the familiar whispers but outright laughter—and echoed phrases that she knew could only have reached them via Marissa.

  That was when she’d gone past a group in the corridor, felt them turn to watch her, and heard, for the first time, the murmured comments. Attention-seeking. Sad.

  “I’m asking, that’s all,” Marissa said now. “This is, like, the tenth time you’ve been absent since the semester started—”

  She’d counted? For a moment Elissa almost opened her mouth to say . . . she didn’t know what, exactly. But oh God, if she only had someone else to talk to . . .

  She caught herself just in time. She and Marissa hadn’t been friends for years, but their parents still saw each other—at the Skyline Club, at parent-teacher evenings.

  “That’s what your mother told you, didn’t she? Did she tell you to talk to me too?”

  The guilty color rushed into Marissa’s face again. “Look—”

  “No thanks.” Elissa pushed her locker door shut. “I’m really not that interested in being the topic of the day at your lunch table. I’m late. I had a doctor’s appointment. That’s all.”

  “God, Marissa, didn’t I tell you not to bother?” The voice at the door was as cold as Elissa’s. She looked over to see Carlie, dark and curvy, with silver-spiked hair, the standard black gym outfit making her look like a cartoon assassin. “It’s Elissa’s choice. She’ll get help when she’s ready to.”

  Get help? Fury fizzed up into Elissa’s face. Her vision blurred. What did Carlie think all the freaking doctors’ appointments were for? She clenched her hands, opened her mouth—

  “Girls. What are you doing in here?” Ms. Frey came up behind Carlie, looking irritated. “Carline, I told you to check to see who was left, not stand here chatting.” Then her gaze went beyond the doorway, into the room. “Oh, Elissa! I didn’t realize you were back. Now—girls, come on, out of here—Elissa, are you up to joining in this morning? No headaches? No dizziness?”

  Obedient to her impatient gesturing, they were out of the changing room now and in the gym, so the teacher’s question was asked in front of the whole class. Again, Elissa felt the weight of twenty stares, heard the merest whisper of laughter. She’d thrown up in this class before—not just once but three times.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Well, if you feel unwell, make sure you tell me, all right? Anything—dizzy, blurry vision . . .”

  “ . . . like you’re going to throw up . . .” The whisper—then the giggles—came from behind Elissa. Ms. Frey didn’t react.

  The teachers never whispered or laughed, obviously. Ever since her symptoms started, the whole school staff had been scrupulously considerate about letting her out of class, sending her to lie down, signing permission slips without even asking what they were for. If they, too, thought she was attention-seeking, they didn’t say so.

  Sometimes Elissa thought it might have been better if they’d been less tolerant, if they�
�d sometimes shown impatience about late homework or made her stay in at break time.

  As the two team leaders chose their teams—every girl being picked in turn, the waiting group dwindling around Elissa, the single constant—she clenched herself against the tears she wouldn’t let prickle her eyes.

  Four days. This time, although the thought still came with an icy fist closing on her stomach, she didn’t find herself wanting to shut it out. She found herself repeating it like a charm. Four days, and someone will tell them I’m absent not because of some weird mental thing that no one can understand and that I might have made up and that I could be doing to myself, but because I’m having surgery. Real, genuine, get-well-soon-Elissa surgery. And when I come back, there’ll be no more blackouts, no more bruises I can’t cover up. It’s way too late to ever be popular again, but I don’t have to be the class freak anymore. I can be just ordinary.

  Four days, and they’ll make everything better.

  After school Elissa walked out of the ground-floor students’ entrance into sunlight crisscrossed into wedges and stripes by the network of rails and slidewalks rising all around the school building, and into heat that enveloped her, as tangible as a freshly dried towel.

  In the mass of other students pouring out of the school—thinking of not much beyond logging on to get the messages they weren’t allowed to check at school, or making their way to the recreation sections of the city, or getting home and turning on their favorite of a billion TV shows—she was all at once anonymous, completely uninteresting.

  She let her bag drop down from her shoulder long enough to pull off her sweatshirt, feeling the sunlight pour over her bare arms like hot water from a shower, the knot of tension at the back of her neck dissolving.

  A whole day and no hallucinations, no pain. After four days, when I’ve had the op, that’s what every day is going to be like. The thought of the process, the actual surgery, tried to edge into her mind, like an itch starting to develop. She pushed it away. She wasn’t going to think about what the doctors were going to do to her. She was just going to think about the result.

  She pulled her bag back up onto her shoulder, joined one of the lines of students filing their way off the platform outside the school, and stepped onto the slidewalk that would take her home. As she stepped onto its rubberized central strip, safety fields quivered against her body, raising the hairs on the crown of her head, on the exposed skin of her arms. When she’d been little, she’d always been scared the fields would suddenly switch off, leaving her wobbling, miles up in the air, and even now, if she looked down for too long, the sickening swoop of vertigo would begin in her stomach.

  She’d always preferred the old-style stationary walkways, built during the colonization of the canyon, where you were protected by permanent railings that curved over your head; sometimes there were even solid roofs in order to protect pedestrians from any falling debris. There were fewer of those walkways now, though, as the ubiquitous solar-powered slidewalks gradually took over.

  The slidewalk Elissa stood on rose in a deceptively slow helix, curling around and around through the crowded lower levels to join the first intersection. Elissa changed to the higher-speed slidewalk signed SPACEPORT, feeling the vibration of the separate safety fields briefly merging as she hopped from one slidewalk to the other, then she was swooping fast toward the west side of the city.

  As the wall of the canyon side loomed before her, the slidewalk divided, the high-speed section zigzagging farther up to the very top of the canyon where the spaceport spread out all along the plateau. Elissa sidestepped onto the slow-walk. It spiraled up, then leveled out to take her along the side of the shelf where her house stood.

  A semitransparent wall ran along the edge of the shelf. As Elissa glided past it, sensors picked up her ID, and concealed gates slid open. She stepped through the sixth gate onto the cool grass of the narrow communal garden that separated the row of houses and the edge of the shelf.

  A tiny stream, protected from evaporating into the hot, dry air by an invisible shell of a force field, wriggled in between the circular paving stones that led from house to house. Above the flat roofs of the homes, dusty green leaves on the cliffside plants rattled against each other like tiny paper quills, each curled in on itself to conserve moisture.

  Elissa’s house stood at the end of the shelf, a narrow shrub-filled gap between it and the far wall. The middle panel of its front wall was glass, and at this time of day her mother hadn’t switched on the privacy setting, so Elissa looked straight through into the tiled entrance hall at the central staircase that rose through all four floors.

  The front door recognized her and withdrew into the walls, glass disappearing into glass so seamlessly, it looked the way ice looks when it dissolves under warm water. Cool, cedar-scented air drifted out around her.

  “Lissa?” Her mother’s voice came from the kitchen at the back of the house.

  “It’s me.” She went in, dropping her bag next to the door as it slid back into place behind her. She pulled on her sweatshirt as goose bumps sprang up on her arms.

  Mrs. Ivory was standing by the countertop at the far end of the kitchen, dropping mixed lettuce leaves, cucumber, and red onion into the separate chutes of the salad maker. In the wall oven next to her, a chicken turned, roasting, its smell sealed away with all the heat and spitting golden fat. A box of lemon-meringue pie mix stood next to the multimixer.

  “How was your day?” As always, the question was edged with anxiety, an anxiety that was never there when she asked the same question of Elissa’s father, or when Bruce called home.

  “It was fine.”

  “No . . . ?”

  “No hallucinations. No anything.” Elissa touched the button of the drinks dispenser and watched as sparkling herb tea poured, fizzing, into the waiting frosted glass. When the pains had begun, her doctor had recommended she cut out caffeine, and although it hadn’t seemed to do much—anything—she’d gotten into the habit of avoiding it and had somehow never gone back.

  Mrs. Ivory shut the salad maker. The water sprays switched on, hissing against the inside of the transparent lid. “We’re eating early this evening. Did you remember Bruce is coming home for dinner?”

  Elissa took a gulp of ice-cold tea and shook her head. “What time is he coming?”

  “Six. If he can get away in time. He said they had flight maneuvers all day . . .” She sounded a little distracted, stepping back from the oven so she could see in through its door, but her tone still changed when she said the words.

  Bruce had been in the Space Flight Initiative training program for four years now, and whenever his mother referred to him, especially when she used one of the terms he’d only started using once he’d joined—“flight maneuvers,” “sim exercises,” “firepower”—pride colored her voice.

  Generations back, when the first settlers had come to Sekoia, the planet had seemed to be pure potential. Mineral-rich, it had promised a lucrative export industry. The terraforming process to transform the deserts at the center of each continent into habitable environments was already taking place. With the prospect of fast progression to first-grade-planet status in mind, the government at the time had thrown the process into high gear. And the population—as the populations of recently settled planets always did—had expanded quickly, willing to put up with a few years’ overcrowding in return for their eventual Eden.

  Except the terraforming process had gone wrong. The high-speed techniques—which, shortly afterward, were banned—had backfired. The deserts had become not just uninhabitable but toxic, even to the native species. Animals and plants had died, leaving Sekoia hovering on the brink of complete environmental crisis.

  The government—a new, hastily voted-in government—had had no choice other than to direct every available resource into stabilizing the planet. They’d instituted food and energy rationing and strict population-control laws, and had gone deep into debt to the consortium of first-grade planets wit
h whom they’d hoped to trade on an equal basis.

  They’d managed to halt, although not reverse, the faulty terraforming. They’d gotten the population under control before it had reached starvation levels. They’d saved Sekoia.

  But when it was done, they were left a long way from Eden: heavily in debt to the consortium, and with an outdated spaceflight industry the rest of the star system had left behind years before. With no way to match the high speeds of the new generation of spacecraft, Sekoia’s hoped-for export industry had been left dependent on hired transport. Which meant that any profit they made from exporting their native—and valuable—minerals was more or less swallowed up by the costs of exporting them in the first place.

  Amid controversy and the resignation of several senior ministers, which Elissa had learned all about in history classes, the government had taken the dangerous step of borrowing again—and at a terrifying rate of interest—from the consortium. They’d gathered further funds from the emergency “Recovery Tax” they’d imposed on a furious and panicking population.

  And the government had poured every scrap of that money into setting up the Space Flight Initiative, recruiting people willing to work in it, and developing their own spaceflight technology.

  Thirty years ago SFI-sponsored scientists had broken through, perfecting the top secret superfuel that powered their ships into hyperspeed. Now Sekoia was out of debt, and finally competing on an interplanetary scale, running their thriving export industry and providing high-speed transport for goods and people across the star system. Working for SFI in any capacity—cleaner, food tech, anything—was pretty prestigious. But the most prestigious career path on the whole planet was to be an SFI pilot—or to be in training as one.

  Like Bruce.

  I don’t care. It doesn’t matter that I can’t be high-flying, test-acing Bruce. I don’t want to be, not anymore. If I can just be ordinary . . .

  As Elissa’s mother picked up the box of pie mix, shaking it to settle the contents away from the top, her voice changed again, to something more conscious. “Did you see Marissa at school today?”