Linked

by Imogen Howson

  Elissa hesitated, then put her hand out to lay it on the twin’s back. She didn’t have anything to say, couldn’t think of anything to help.

  Under her hand the twin’s body relaxed a tiny bit. She eased her hands off her head, let them fall by her sides. “Some of us—in there, some of the other Spares . . . they burned out. The procedures were too much, and their brains couldn’t handle it.”

  Elissa’s stomach clenched. If the twin was going to talk about what had happened to her, if she was going to give details . . . If she had to go through it, I should be able to hear about it. And I can’t tell her not to tell me. But I don’t know if I can listen. I don’t know if I can bear to hear.

  “And other Spares. They just . . . went.”

  Elissa swallowed. “Died?”

  “No. Went. Became . . . not there. Like they were still alive, but they weren’t.” Her hands moved to twist together in front of her. “None of us were people, we were told that, but when that happened to those Spares . . . before, they’d at least seemed like people. Afterward there was nothing there at all.”

  Elissa tried to keep her hand open, comforting, on the twin’s back, but she couldn’t help the not-quite-suppressed shudder that went through her from shoulders to fingertips. “I . . . God, I’m sorry.”

  “I was scared it would happen to me. I was scared. When the procedures started. But I . . . If I reached out, you were there, and I . . .” Her head dipped, her shoulders hunching. “I didn’t think about it hurting you as well. I don’t know if my reaching out is what hurt you—I don’t know if the pain would have gotten through anyway.” She was speaking fast now, as if trying to get all the words out in one big rush. “And when I did think about that, I tried to stop, but the link was too strong, I couldn’t do it. I think my reaching out to you like that—I think I made the link stronger again. I know, after the first couple of times, I started getting flashes of your memories the way I hadn’t for years. I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to wreck your life, but I think, if it hadn’t been for that, I’d have burned out—or gone—too.”

  “It’s okay.” Elissa spoke automatically, but as she did, she realized it was true. The twin might have sent the pain through to Elissa, might have reestablished a connection that was on its way to dying off completely, but suddenly it didn’t seem to matter whether she had or not. What mattered was that she’d reached out to Elissa, and it had helped. I never mattered like that to anyone before. I never helped anyone—not like that, not so much that it might have been me who saved her life.

  She put her other arm around the twin, feeling how stiff the other girl was, how tightly her hands were clenched around each other. For the first time it wasn’t an effort, touching the strange-familiar body, close enough that she caught the clean scent of the other girl’s hair, felt the tension in the thin shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said again. “It was them, not you. And we’re going to fix it so you don’t ever go back.”

  In her embrace the twin’s body relaxed a little. “You don’t need to hear about it. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey.” Elissa shook her a little. “You don’t need to keep saying sorry. Jeez, the whole freaking world should be apologizing to you!”

  The twin gave a breath of laughter. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” Elissa let her go, stepped away. It didn’t exactly seem like the right time to ask, but none of the other times had seemed like the right ones either. She realized she was chewing her lower lip and deliberately released it. “Do you have a name?”

  The twin shook her head. “We had numbers.”

  After everything else Elissa knew about what her double had gone through, that shouldn’t have been a shock. But it was, all the same. Numbers.

  “Well, you have to have a name now.” Her voice came out with an edge to it, an edge she instantly tried to soften. “At least you get to choose your own!”

  “I . . .” The twin wound another piece of hair around the brush, pulled it out straight. “I already did . . .”

  “Oh?”

  “I can’t use it. I know I can’t. I . . . In there, once they told us what we were, I only managed to believe I was a real person because I knew you were a real person. I took your name.”

  “You—oh.” Elissa didn’t know what to do with that. Her instinct was to say, No. You’re not doing that. I’m already sharing my face with you—I’m not sharing my name. But she had no right. Their whole lives, she’d had everything and the other girl had had nothing. “Um . . . so you want to be called Elissa?”

  “No. No, that’s not what I meant. I thought of you as Lissa—that’s the name everyone calls you, that’s the name you have in my head. And I”—she hesitated, head dipping lower, not looking at Elissa—“I thought of myself as Lissa’s twin.”

  After a moment Elissa put her hand out, touched the girl’s arm. “That’s okay.”

  “I know I shouldn’t have. But I never thought I’d actually see you, and I—”

  “I said it’s okay.” Elissa paused a moment, hand staying reassuringly on the girl’s—my twin’s—arm. “But it’s no good for the morph-cards. We need to think of something. Something that still means the same thing, but that sounds like a real name for the cards.” She chewed on her thumbnail, thinking out loud. “Lissa’s twin. Lissatwin. Letwin. Etwin. Satwin. Satin? Satin’s a real name. It’s kind of dumb, but it’s real.”

  “Okay.” But the muscles around her twin’s eyes had tightened. It wasn’t okay. She’d been told she was nothing but a number, a human-sourced nonhuman, and she’d fought back by choosing her own name. It wasn’t just a name—it was the thing that had kept her human. Kept her alive.

  “Oh! How about Lin? That could be short for Lissa’s twin, and it starts with the same letter. And also, for if we need to keep changing our IDs, we could change it just a tiny bit, to Lynette or Linda. Or, um, Linnet, or Lindsey . . .” She trailed off, watching her twin’s face.

  “Lin. Lynette.” The other girl said the words slowly, as if feeling the shape they made. “Lin.”

  “I mean, you don’t have to have that. We can think of something else.”

  Her twin smiled, a sudden bright flash of . . . Elissa couldn’t think of the right word. It was more than happiness, more than pleasure. It’s—oh. It was a flash of what looked, for the first time, like joy.

  “Yes. I’ll be Lin.”

  Elissa found herself grinning back at her twin, her own smile so wide, it hurt. We’re doing it. We’re getting her away from those people and what they did to her. We’re declaring that she’s as human as I am. Her own person.

  “All right,” she said. “Now let’s finish up so we can do the morph-cards.”

  Twenty minutes later the cards showed Rissa White and Lynette May, one a milk-pale curly haired redhead, one a blonde whose sleek hair brushed cheeks that glowed with a faint golden tan.

  Thank God they were done. Now they could grab some colored contacts and different clothes, check into another pod-motel, and think about where to go next.

  Elissa shoveled all the debris of their disguises—empty tubes and sachets, disposable hairbrushes—into the disposal and recycling chutes, checked around for anything they might have left or that might be useful, then zipped shut the bag she had brought from home.

  As she did so, a phrase from the screen, only half-heard, caught her attention. “ . . . say the residential fire was caused by an electrical fault . . .”

  She looked up, and the shelf where her house stood was showing on the screen. The grass outside it had been trampled into the ground, squashed and muddy, and the glass fronts of the houses nearby were opaque, not because of privacy settings but because of the blackened scorch marks streaked all over them.

  She leaned over and turned the volume up.

  “Despite the extensive damage caused, fortunately no lives were lost in the fire that last night raged through eleven houses of a residential shelf in Sector Seven-West.” The news presenter, as news presenters
did, was repeating more or less the same information over and over, a soundtrack to the images flashing on the screen. “The firefighters who were on the scene within minutes have suggested that the blaze may have been caused by an electrical circuit overheating in the house where the fire began, number twelve. Extensive damage has been caused, and all residents were forced to evacuate . . . .”

  Elissa glanced over at Lin, who was sitting on the edge of the lower bunk. “That fire—look, they’re saying it started in my house. It was completely the weirdest thing. You must have seen it. It started so fast. And it was the only thing that could have gotten me out of the house. I’d almost forgotten about it, but jeez, talk about miracles!”

  The corners of Lin’s mouth curled up a tiny bit. “It wasn’t a miracle. It was me.”

  “What? What do you mean? How could it be you?”

  “You don’t know? You couldn’t tell—through the link?”

  “Tell what?”

  “It’s one of the things about my brain that’s different. I’m electrokinetic.”

  “Electrokinetic?”

  “I can control electrical currents.”

  “You started that fire?”

  Lin’s face froze, as if Elissa’s tone had shocked her. “Yes.”

  “And that—oh my God, is that how you escaped? The fire the other night—you did that, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they didn’t know? They didn’t know you could do that kind of thing? They didn’t have safety precautions?”

  Lin shrugged a shoulder. “They knew several of us had a level of psychokinesis from when we were quite young. They kept track of how it matured. But mine, it kept developing, even after the procedures started, and by that time—” Lin’s face went hard, acquired a shut-in look. “I knew not to let them know how strong it was. I kept practicing, and I got good enough, finally, to push up the current supplying the whole complex. I got it to leap the fuses, and it set the place on fire.” She grinned, a flash of triumph. “So then, when you said you were locked in your room—all these doors, they have the same safety thing built into them.”

  There was an awful feeling in Elissa’s stomach. “You started a fire. In a housing complex.”

  Lin frowned. “Yes.”

  “But”—Elissa took a breath—“it was people’s houses. They were sleeping in them—it was the middle of the night. And you— It was a massive fire, it went up like an explosion.”

  “I know. Like the one in the facility.”

  Elissa swallowed. “You could have killed someone.”

  Her twin stared at her. “I knew the sensors would pick it up before it got anywhere near you.”

  “I don’t mean me! Other people! There are other people in that building. There’s safety measures and all that stuff, but people die in house fires all the time. You could have killed them!”

  Her heart was thumping as she looked at Lin, waiting for her to register what she’d done, waiting for her to look as stricken with guilt as Elissa felt. She’d put all those people in danger—people who had nothing to do with what was happening to them, people who hadn’t even known Elissa was locked up.

  Lin did look distressed now, biting her lip, her eyes fixed on Elissa’s. But her words weren’t anything like the ones Elissa wanted her to say.

  “Why should I care about that?” she said. “Why are you upset? No one’s dead. The fire services were on their way when you escaped.”

  “Because you could have—” Elissa broke off. “I can’t explain. If you can’t see why there’s a problem, I can’t make you understand.”

  “Lissa . . .”

  “Stop it! I can’t— If you don’t see how awful it is to put all those people in danger and not even think about it, not even care, I can’t talk to you. I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “Don’t. Lissa, don’t, don’t.” Even under the fake tan Lin’s face showed white. “Don’t not talk to me. Tell me. I don’t understand. I was saving you. I don’t know any of those people. I only know you. Why are you saying I should care about them?”

  Despite Elissa’s horror, Lin’s distress caught at her. Elissa frowned, staring at her, feeling as if they were speaking two different languages. “You . . . ,” she spoke slowly, feeling her way. “You weren’t trying—you didn’t actually want to kill them?”

  “I didn’t want to, no.”

  “Okay. Maybe it’s me who’s not understanding. You didn’t want to kill them, but you didn’t care if you did?”

  Lin opened her hands in front of her and stared down at the palms. “I guess. I mean, I wouldn’t have enjoyed killing them, but . . . them dying or not, it’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t know any of them. You’re my twin, but they’re just . . . nobody.”

  “But why? I don’t get why that makes a difference. They’re other people.”

  Lin flicked a glance upward, her hands still open on her lap. She looked suddenly exposed. “Not to me.”

  “Not— Oh.” Right. Lin had been raised like a lab animal in a facility, intended to be used for the benefit of legally declared humans, creatures different from her. Maybe Elissa couldn’t expect her to have Elissa’s own automatic connection with the species that was biologically hers. To the rest of the world, Lin was nothing more than property. So, to Lin, what were they? What were other people to her? Not the ones who’d held her prisoner, but others, outside the facility, neutral and uninvolved?

  After a hesitant moment Elissa asked the question out loud. She’d expected Lin to fumble for an answer, but she didn’t. “They’re not anything.”

  “None of them?”

  Lin tugged at an end of her hair. “Well, not you.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “All the rest. Yes. I saw some of them, when I was coming through the city to find you. I saw people who were looking after their children, and people who thought I was one of them, and they smiled at me.” She looked at the screen, where the news presenter had moved on to an earthquake over at the other side of the continent. “But every single one of them, if they knew what I was . . .”

  “They’d want you sent back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know that . . .” But Lin looked at her, her face blank, and Elissa’s words trailed away.

  She’s not a psychopath. She’s not. She cares about what I think. Psychopaths—sociopaths?—they don’t care about other people’s feelings.

  But Elissa’s stomach was churning, her chest as tight as if there were a weight on it. Inside her head, flames roared, the impossible, out-of-control flames that had torn through her family’s house just a few hours ago. Lin could have killed so many people. She was doing it to save me, I know why she did it, but to not even care what might have happened . . .

  As Elissa turned off the screen, and then as they went out of the room and down in the elevator, the arguments beat at her. Lin had sounded beyond callous, but it wasn’t her fault. There was no reason she should care about any of the people in the whole city, on the whole planet. Look what we—our government—did to her. She’s entitled not to care about any of us.

  But what if that’s it? What if what they did, what if it’s broken something inside her? What if I’ve run away with—what if I’m protecting—someone who really is a sociopath—a dangerous, electro-kinetic sociopath?

  What if there’s a very good reason they kept her locked up?

  They stepped out of the motel into a glare of sunlight. It was early still, the city lying half-drowsing in the pre–rush hour calm, but the sun was already hot, promising a boiling day to come.

  “Where are we going first?” said Lin.

  The sunlight showed her clothes to be even shabbier, even dirtier, than they’d looked under artificial lights, her bare feet peeking out under the hems of her pants. The sleek blond hair, the flawless sheen to her face, made her look quite unlike the girl of yesterday. But she didn’t look as if she belonged in Elissa’s world either. Elissa’s clo
thes weren’t exactly shiny and clean, and they smelled of sweat, but they still looked a lot more expensive and cared for than Lin’s. She hitched the bag farther up onto her shoulder.

  “Clothes and shoes first,” she said.

  She led the way onto a slidewalk, heading toward the nearest twenty-four-hour mall. Lin followed her obediently, the unquestioning trust in her face making her look like a little girl. She’s not a sociopath. She’s damaged, that’s all.

  Elissa shook her hair back, hitched the bag up again. And anyway, I can’t think about that now. Right now we just have to think about disguise.

  The mall was made up of glass-fronted galleries built one on top of another within the cliff. As Elissa paid for their new clothes with her reprogrammed morph-card, tension pulled all her muscles tight, made her clumsy so that she fumbled with the card as she slid it through the scanner, and had to press cancel and do it a second time.

  Phantom alarms rang in her ears, and when for a split second she met the shop assistant’s eyes, she had to force herself not to jerk her gaze guiltily away.

  Lin stood quietly next to her, blond wings of hair hiding her face. The same tension held her too—an invisible aura that seemed to vibrate across the space between them.

  The assistant shook the pants and tops into practiced folds, slid them into a carrier, and dropped the shoes in on top of them. “Take your card, please. D’you want a hard-copy receipt?”

  “No, thanks.”

  The assistant’s gaze met Elissa’s for a further moment, then moved incuriously away. “Thank you. Have a nice day.”

  Elissa left the counter, new clothes safe in the carrier in her hand, Lin close behind her. The assistant had hardly seen them, hardly registered them as individuals. They’d been customers, that was all, yet more customers in a day full of them. She won’t even remember us. If people ask, if they track us here and go around asking for sightings . . .

  They were back out in the main area of the mall, bathed in the muted sunlight coming through the glass. People wandered past them, adjusting their direction without properly looking up from phones, myGadgets, or from conversations with their companions. There were other teenage girls here and there, girls walking in twos or threes, often wearing clothes not dissimilar to Elissa’s and Lin’s, some laughing, some talking quietly, heads together.