Linked

by Imogen Howson

  “This one, though, this still works. And it’s a clever one. See, Lissa?”

  It was a credit card, one of the sleek, translucent ones you had to reach a certain income bracket to even be considered for. The numbers across it, though, were all zeroes, and the tiny identipic in its corner showed nothing but an emoticon—a little smiley face.

  Bruce was grinning. “Okay, so what? Tell us, Dad.”

  “It’s the latest scam—well, two scams, put together. It’s a morph-card. We confiscated what must have been a sample batch—hopefully in time to stop them from flooding out into general circulation. Look.” He held it up to his face and spoke very clearly. “Changeling. Chameleon. Camouflage. Edward Ivory. E-D-W-A-R-D space I-V-O-R-Y. One, two, three, four.”

  A ripple of color ran across the card, a haze like vapor on water. All the zeroes changed to a line of different numbers, and the identipic . . . Elissa leaned closer. The emoticon had changed to her father’s picture, and the name stamped across the middle of the card was his.

  “No way.”

  Bruce leaned forward too. “That has to be the coolest thing. Total fake ID?”

  “Fake money, too.”

  “Seriously? But how? The minute you scan it—”

  “The minute I scan it, the payment goes through. That last number I said, that becomes my private ID number, so I can put it in on the keypad.”

  “It actually looks like it goes through?”

  “No, it actually does go through.” Mr. Ivory grinned, pleased with having caught out his son. “I can go shopping with it, and money will change hands—well, change accounts. But at any point I want to, I can erase my ID from the card, and at that point the money will simply evaporate from the shop’s account.”

  Bruce rocked back in his chair. “Evil genius. Can I have a try?”

  Their father shook his head. “It can’t go out of my possession. I’m sorry. It’s—in its way—as dangerous as the field-jammer. It’s no good for access to anything high-security, obviously—they haven’t worked out a way to fake thumbprints, thank the Lord—but as far as we can work out, it has no spending limit. And of course it will get you access to plenty of lower-security places.”

  Bruce shrugged, capitulating. “Okay. How does it work, then?”

  “Ah, now that’s the really interesting thing.” And he was off into a long explanation involving security loopholes and hidden pathologies, leaving Elissa—and, she thought, probably Bruce, too, despite all that nodding and “mm”-ing he was doing—way behind him.

  The front door chimed as Elissa’s parents and brother finished their second cups of coffee, and Bruce got to his feet. “It’ll be Cadan. He said he’d be coming by and that he’d give me a lift back to the base.”

  “Oh, ask him in for coffee,” said Mrs. Ivory.

  Oh please, do we have to?

  “I’m sorry, Ma, he won’t have the time to stop. Curfew’s early tonight—we’ve got some intense exercises tomorrow. I have to get going; no one likes to miss curfew, but Cadan is what you might call hung up on it!”

  Mrs. Ivory smiled. “Well, you can understand that, given the circumstances.”

  “Being the scholarship whiz kid? Well, yeah, sure.” He disappeared out into the entrance hall, and in a moment Elissa heard him greeting Cadan, and Cadan’s voice answering.

  “Come through a minute while I say bye to the family . . .”

  Elissa looked up as they came in, composing her face to politeness. Cadan Greythorn was not quite as tall as Bruce, and a little broader across the shoulders. His dark-blue SFI jacket was fastened up to the neck, and his fair hair, even as short as it was, stuck up at the back where he’d pulled his helmet over it.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Ivory, Mr. Ivory. No, please, don’t get up—I’m literally here just to kidnap your son. Hey, Lissa.”

  Elissa gave him the merest possible smile.

  “You’re on your skycycle tonight?” Mrs. Ivory asked.

  Cadan nodded. “It’s a nice night for it. I was coming back from the east side as well, and it saves me a bit of time.”

  “Visiting your parents?”

  “My sister. She and her husband finally moved into family accommodation—I was visiting their new place.”

  “Oh, that must be a relief for them,” Mrs. Ivory said.

  “Absolutely! They’ll be starting their family any day now.” He glanced at Elissa. “Hey, Lissa, what do you think about Bruce and me getting our first sole-charge flight soon?”

  Bruce had moved to kiss his mother good-bye and shake hands with his father. Her parents’ attention was on him, and for a moment Elissa felt free of the obligation to be as polite as they’d expect. When she was little, she’d hung on every detail of Bruce and Cadan’s flight training, but a lot had changed since then.

  She gave Cadan an indifferent look. “Bruce said that might happen.”

  “Only ‘might’?” Cadan laughed, all superior and confident. “It’s pretty certain now. Watch for a ship taking off at twenty-two-hundred tomorrow night, okay? ’Cause it’ll probably be us.”

  It was too much, seeing him standing there on the brink of his glittering career, hair all coolly messy from his skybike helmet, thinking she had nothing more important to think about than watching the sky for a ship he and Bruce just might be piloting. Like I have headspace to spare for thinking about him when he’s not right here forcing me to!

  She lifted a shoulder. “Sorry. I’m planning on washing my hair.”

  For a moment something like lightning flashed in Cadan’s gaze as it met hers. Then the brief spark of what could have been anger was gone, swallowed up in the untouchable self-belief that was his default mode.

  He looked down at her, eyebrows slightly raised. “Okay. You keep those priorities straight, princess. After all, we wouldn’t want you slipping up and, you know, excelling in any of your classes, would we?”

  Heat flooded Elissa’s face. She stared at him, caught between hitting back with the nastiest thing she could think of—if she could think of it—or defending herself. I’m not lazy! I’m close to failing my classes because I can’t work, not because I won’t.

  But it was too late. Bruce had said his good-byes, and her parents were turning for a last word with Cadan.

  Elissa slid out of her chair and crossed to the window, her insides in knots of anger, waiting for them to finish with the good-byes, waiting for Cadan to get gone.

  “Okay,” said Bruce. “We’re off. Bye, Lis! Take care.”

  She looked around as briefly as she could, avoiding Cadan’s eyes, and lifted a hand in a wave.

  Their boots trod across the entrance hall. Cadan said something, and Bruce, indistinct, replied. Then the door shut out the sound of their voices.

  Elissa realized she’d closed her fingers so tightly around her glass of herbal tea that she was in danger of shattering it. As if the anger had let it in, there was a sudden hollow, falling sensation in her stomach. Four days. Four days and I’m going in for brain surgery.

  “Elissa? Are you all right?”

  Elissa looked around to meet her mother’s eyes. She could say how scared she was, but she didn’t dare. If she said it, if she spoke the words, she might lose all her nerve. And there was no other option. I have to have it. I have to.

  “I’m just completely tired,” she said, momentarily taken aback by how normal her voice sounded. “I guess I’ll go upstairs and shower.”

  She felt, rather than saw, the fractional relaxing of her mother’s posture. “All right, dear. You go up. Come down when you’ve changed if you need another drink. And, Edward, for goodness’ sake, lock those things up before something goes wrong.”

  Elissa left the room to the sound of her father’s quiet answer, and climbed the staircase to the top floor, where her room was. Her stomach was still swooping, and her hands were cold. She was never going to be able to sleep, not yet, but it was easier to be alone than having to keep up a brave face in front of her p
arents.

  I have to have it. I have to.

  Even a hot shower didn’t seem to warm her up; although once she was wrapped in her fleecy red bathrobe, the air-conditioning off and her window open to let in the warm night, she started to feel a bit better. She still wasn’t going to be able to sleep, though.

  She curled up on her bed and told her computer to come on. The mirror-screen woke immediately, angling itself toward where she sat. Welcome, Elissa, scrolled across the screen.

  There were a million distractions she could request: movies, funny videos, games. Even chat rooms she could hang out in—if she’d ever be able to forget that every one of the people in those chat rooms would react to her symptoms exactly the way her real-life friends had. She wasn’t in the mood for any of them.

  Bruce’s words scrolled across her mind. You haven’t been paying attention to the news.

  Freaking Bruce, with his perfect life and his golden-boy copilot. If his world was a nightmare of pain—hallucinatory pain, that her stupid brain was doing to itself—he wouldn’t have the attention to spare for the news channels either.

  “Breaking News,” she said, hearing her voice ring out defiantly in the quiet room.

  Images flowed out across the triple-leafed mirror-screen. Tickers sprang up at the top and bottom, and a little embedded talking face appeared at the side.

  They were broadcasting updates on the stuff Dr. Brien and her mother had been talking about earlier. The quarantining of an entire residential shelf in response to the Elloran superflu outbreak. The sentencing of the parents who’d had the illegal child. After that, a failed ecoterrorist attack at a major spaceport on the other side of the planet. Then the eighteen-year-old nicknamed Lizard Boy who’d had body modifications that gave his whole body scales. That made the woman at her mother’s club seem pretty much normal, thought Elissa, then, Why Lizard Boy? Lizards don’t even have scales.

  Local news scrolled along the top, flickering as the ticker jumped from one section of the screen to another.

  “Electrical fault blamed for last night’s catastrophic fire at the manufacturing plant . . . ,” came the news announcer’s voice.

  And all at once images filled the screen.

  Flames licking up halfway to the pitch-dark sky. People running, screaming. Behind the flames, glimpses of a big building—like a hospital, or a school.

  Images she’d seen before. In her dream, last night.

  “WHAT?” Elissa spoke out loud without meaning to, her mind blank, her body frozen in shock.

  The computer flickered, confused, then flashed up a command box.

  “Dismiss,” said Elissa automatically. She found she’d risen to her knees, hands clasped in front of her, tight under her breastbone. The fire, the fire on the screen, on the news—she’d dreamed about it last night. Not afterward, not because her brain had seized on external data and turned it into a loop in her brain. She’d dreamed it while it was happening.

  But I can’t have. They’re hallucinations. They’re all hallucinations, the doctor said so.

  Her heart was banging. This couldn’t be right. It made no sense. You couldn’t have a hallucination that turned out to be real.

  And as if to prove that nothing made sense, that she was in control of nothing in the whole world or the whole universe or her whole life, with no warning the room blinked out.

  She was elsewhere. In someone else’s body, looking through someone else’s eyes.

  There was the cold, gritty feel of dried mud and grass beneath her curled-up legs, the taste of dust and metal in her mouth. All around, the night pressed against her, thick, hot, and full of noise. Something thundered over the bridge above her head, then faded into the distance; not the quiet rattle of a beetle-car but the rumble belonging to a heavy-goods vehicle.

  She was shivering, in bursts that hurt all over her skin. Her arm ached, the place where she’d torn her skin on the barbed fence throbbing in a pulse that kept rhythm with the pulse of her blood. The cut must have gotten infected. She’d been weak and sweaty since noon today, and now, around the hot red line on her skin, the flesh was hard and swollen, too painful to touch.

  I don’t dare go back into the city; I can’t get into one of those medical centers without ID.

  She’d thought she’d do better than this. Thought she’d been so clever. She was out, but she wasn’t any nearer to freedom than she’d been before she’d escaped.

  She pulled the ragged hoodie closer around her, shivering into it. But it didn’t help. The effort of moving sent another wave of cold through her body, and in her bones an ache began. She put her head down on her knees. If I sleep, maybe I’ll feel better when I wake up.

  Then a last thought, as the hazy darkness of fever-induced slumber took her. And if I don’t wake up, that will be a kind of freedom too . . .

  Elissa came back to herself with a jump, her whole body jerking so that the bed bounced beneath her. On the screen across the room, the images played the voices talked, far too bright, too loud. She put her hand up to mute the computer and found she couldn’t make the signal because her hand was shaking.

  “Mute,” she said, and her voice was shaking too.

  All the pictures, ever since she was tiny, had felt real, but that one . . .

  The picture of the fire was real. It happened. And if that had been real . . .

  What if they were all real? What if the pictures, all along, had been what they felt like, glimpses into someone else’s life? The images of elsewhere, of the rooms and corridors she hadn’t recognized, the—

  Oh God.

  The machines. The injections, the clamps, and the shrieking, awful pain. The bruises—every few days the new bruises, marks of what had been done to her helpless body. What if they weren’t something weird and self-destructive in her mind? What if they were echoes of what had been really happening, to another girl somewhere in the world? A girl who’d finally escaped, running through smoke and fire, tearing her arm on the barbed wire of a fence. A girl who was now lying on wet, filthy grass, fighting an infection that could kill her.

  But who? And how? She didn’t live on some awful third-world planet in the backwater of the outer edge of the star system. This was Sekoia, technologically advanced, civilized, with the lowest crime rate in its entire sector and a whole fleet of laws on human rights. This couldn’t be happening, not here.

  Elissa put both hands to her face, shutting out the world as if she could shut out the thoughts—or at least slow them down, turn them into something that made sense. Okay, the picture had felt real, but it couldn’t be. She must be having some kind of . . . Oh, I don’t know, psychotic break? Something? The doctor said, he said my condition was deteriorating. If this is what he meant, then it does make sense. It does make sense, and all I have to do is go for the surgery like we already planned . . . .

  But the fire. Even if she could dismiss the picture of the girl dying under the bridge, she’d dreamed the fire, too, and the fire had happened.

  Elissa took her hands down. The bridge, the dirty grass, the sense all around her of a place that belonged only to emptiness—she was pretty sure she knew where it was. It was the plateau above their shelf, at the top of the canyon, where the spaceport stood. Heavy-goods vehicles and long-distance trains ran across it, lifted off the ground on steel tracks. And all over it the grass was dirty with fuel residue, both from the wheeled vehicles and from the spaceship launchpads, farther away across the plateau.

  The spaceport itself was tight with security, but not the wilderness between it and the edge of the canyon. Pedestrians didn’t go up there—why would they?—but there was nothing to stop them if they wanted to.

  I could go and look.

  It was dumb, of course. It must be nothing but the worsening of symptoms the doctor had warned her about. But being there, feeling the girl’s fear, the pain in her arm as the infection took hold . . . Elissa couldn’t leave it like that. If for some unknown, beyond-bizarre reason she was p
icking up thoughts from a real person, it had to be because of her illness—the abnormality, whatever it was, in her brain. Come Monday, when they fixed it . . .

  Once I have the surgery, I won’t get the visions anymore. If this girl is real, if she does need help, this is my only chance to find her.

  Elissa slid off the bed and grabbed her school bag from the floor, then went into the shower room to rattle through the medicine cabinet for painkillers, fever-relief tablets, and anti-infection spray. She had a bunch of stuff in there left over from preparations for a camping trip the year before. Will they be strong enough? The painkillers would be, God knew—they’d been prescribed for Elissa just this last month. But what if her fever is as bad as it felt? Will I be able to get stronger stuff at a pharmacy, without authorization?

  It doesn’t matter. I’ll work it out later. And if I get there and there’s no one, at least I’ll know it’s just me being crazy. Then I’ll have the surgery and it will all go away. It’ll be over, finally, forever, and I won’t need to think about it anymore.

  She zipped the bag shut, turned to the door—and stopped, her brain catching up with what she was doing. How stupid was she? She didn’t even know which bridge the girl was under. And how was she going to get out of the house without her parents knowing?

  She paused a moment, forehead furrowed so hard that it began to hurt, fingers tight on the strap of her bag.

  She could at least go and look. There were slidewalks all over the nearer edge of the plateau, put there for emergency use and for the maintenance crews. It wouldn’t take her too long to check the closest roads. And if she didn’t actually go through the house holding her bag, and if they didn’t catch her going out through the front door, if she did run into her parents on the way out, they wouldn’t know she was planning to leave the house.

  The thought came, unexpected. That picture was completely vivid—is it because she’s nearer than she’s ever been before? And then, more disturbing: Is she coming closer to me on purpose? Does she know I can feel her?