Linked

by Imogen Howson

  Like me and Lin. In this whole place we’re just two more teenagers. Until it’s schooltime, no one’s going to pay us any attention, notice us any more than they’re noticing all the other girls like us.

  She looked up and caught Lin’s eye. “It’s okay,” she said, not loudly but not particularly quietly either. “No one’s noticing us. We’re just blending in.”

  Lin gave a quick breath, and the almost-tangible shiver of tension in the air faded, died away. “Let’s change into the new clothes now, though.”

  Elissa sent her a little grin. “Oh, completely. I feel like I’ve been living in this outfit my whole life.” She caught herself too late, and a flush burned up into her face. Could I sound more overprivileged? Saying that? To her?

  But Lin’s lips just curled in a smile. “Yes. And think how I feel.”

  “Gah. I’m sorry.”

  Lin shrugged, dismissing it. “Let’s get changed.”

  Elissa had bought clothes that were cute and fashionable enough to transform both girls into yet another pair of teenagers on a quick mall fix before school. Three-quarter-length jeans and a long floaty white top for her, loose exercise pants and a close-fitting sleeveless tee for Lin. And new sweatshirts with deep hoods.

  She rolled up their old clothes in the carrier and stuffed it into one of the trash cans in the washroom they’d ducked into to get changed. As she straightened, she caught sight of one of the mirrors and almost jumped, thinking for an instant that a stranger was watching her. But it wasn’t a stranger. It was her own reflection.

  It was obviously her, once she looked closer. But for that one instant she’d seen herself and thought it was someone else. And the girl standing close by, with sleek blond hair and the graceful, clinging lines of dark pants and T-shirt—she looked nothing like the desperate, dirty runaway of less than a day ago.

  Once, when Elissa was six, she’d been playing hide-and-seek at a friend’s party. Running in a panic while another girl counted, she’d found a hiding place behind the one-way glass of the shower cubicle in the friend’s parents’ bathroom. She’d stood silently, hardly noticing the moisture seeping through the soles of her socks. She’d been dizzy with the triumphant knowledge that she was invisible and the others weren’t. Even if they looked straight at where she stood, she would see them and they would never see her.

  The seeker had given up in the end, and the friend’s mother had gently reminded them all that the grown-ups’ bathroom was out-of-bounds, and the game had continued with Elissa feeling chastened. But now, seeing her and Lin’s eyes looking out of unfamiliar faces, under unfamiliar hair, she remembered what it had been like, seeing but not being seen, as safe from scrutiny, discovery, as if she’d turned truly invisible.

  Her shoulders relaxed as a knot she hadn’t even realized was there untied itself and slipped away.

  “Where do we go now?” said Lin from behind her.

  Elissa turned. “We can pick up colored contacts from a machine—we’ll do that first. Then we’ll go to one of the parks, where there aren’t many cameras, and plan our next step. I was thinking it would be a good idea to leave the city.”

  But even as she spoke, other thoughts flowed up into her mind, washing through what she was saying. The first thoughts, it seemed, since she’d run from her home in the early hours of the morning, that weren’t frantic, charged with panic. Thoughts she wouldn’t have been able to have until she’d reached this new calmness.

  We can leave the city. There are high-speed trains leaving all the time, and the morph-cards will pay for any tickets we like. But I don’t need to do anything that drastic just yet. Not just yet. Dad helped me escape. He went along with Mother, but it must have been just to calm her down. He can’t have meant to force me into an operation I don’t need anymore.

  And Mother—she was just overreacting. She was freaked out because she thought I was running away. I’ve been gone for hours now. If I’m gone for another night, she’ll start to realize how crazy she was. I can call them. We can talk sensibly.

  Then, a thought came that shot relief through her so fast, it nearly made her dizzy: I can talk to him now.

  Earlier she’d wondered what her father would do if she called him. But now it seemed dumb to have even wondered. He’d helped her escape, hadn’t he? Of course he’d help her now. Tell her where she should go, how long she needed to wait till her mother had calmed down. Think of other ways of helping Lin.

  “Lissa?” Lin’s voice was a little sharp, anxious.

  Elissa looked at her. “I’m going to call my dad.”

  Lin’s face froze, her eyes suddenly huge. “What?”

  “I’m going to call him. He gave me the cards, remember? He’s on our side.”

  But Lin was shaking her head. “No, no, don’t. They’ll find us. Lissa, you can’t.”

  “He’ll help us.”

  “You thought they’d both help us, and they locked you up—”

  “That was because of my mother! My dad helped.”

  “No. No. It doesn’t mean he’ll help us now. He did what your mother said, he locked you in. He only gave you the cards when you were already going to escape. He’s not going to do anything else, Lissa.”

  A wave of heat rose behind Elissa’s eyes. She remembered to keep her voice low, but all the same the words snapped like a crack of electricity. “Don’t you tell me what my dad’s like!”

  Lin’s face went still. She opened her mouth once, then shut it again. Her shoulders hunched. “Okay.”

  “Look. I don’t know what to do at this point. My dad will help us figure it out. It’s not like we have a lot of options.”

  There was a little frozen moment, then Elissa picked up her bag and went out of the washroom. Silently Lin came behind her.

  If you don’t like what I’m doing, you don’t have to come. Go sort things out for yourself; go do something else.

  Except even in her anger—who the hell does she think she is, telling me about my dad?—she knew it wasn’t true. Lin did have to come. She was dependent on Elissa to help her. And she has nowhere else to go. She came to find me. That was all.

  It was awful to matter so much to someone.

  She led the way to the nearest phone booths. They were soundproofed, which was just as well, because they stood next to a courtyard filled with chairs and coffee tables and dominated by a large newsscreen.

  Elissa looked up at the screen as she went past, her stomach tightening a little, but the stories were all more or less the same as earlier that morning, and although the shelf fire was referred to again—the earlier facility fire seemed to have passed its current-news date and wasn’t mentioned at all—there were no additional details.

  The tightness stayed with her, though, as she fed two of her last few coins into the slot next to the phone screen, looking at the stylized vines of the WELCOME display. She could use the morph-card for this, too, but it made her edgy, and after all, she didn’t need to while she still had some cash.

  She tapped in her father’s name, scrolled through the short list of other Ivorys that replaced the vines display, and clicked on the familiar name.

  The connecting icon, a single vine stalk, drew itself across the screen, curling out in long spirals and little tendril twists—first just dark green, then other colors as the leaves and drooping, graceful flowers began to color themselves in, outer edges first, bleeding color toward their centers.

  The edge of the screen was smooth, and hard enough to push dents up into Elissa’s fingertips where they pressed against it.

  Her father had gone along with her mother, but only to start with. Just like he’d agreed to the painful braces Elissa had worn when she was thirteen, braces that the orthodontist had said were scarcely necessary but that her mother had insisted she wear. Like he’d agreed to the summer school her mother had sent her to when she was ten, where she’d been homesick for two weeks before they’d come to take her home. He hadn’t interfered; he’d agreed that
both were for Elissa’s own good.

  But when the braces had given her a toothache that had woken her in the middle of the night, he’d brought her painkillers and taken her back to the orthodontist to check that the braces had been fitted correctly. And when she’d called home from the summer school, sobbing, for the third time in two days, he’d persuaded her mother she should come home early.

  I know him. Not Lin. I know he’ll help me.

  The connection chime sounded, the vine blew away off the screen as if a silent wind had turned it to dust, and her father’s face appeared. He was in his office—thank God, I thought he would be—and he only looked up as the phone connected. His eyes met Elissa’s, and his whole face seemed to jerk in shock.

  After a split second, when his face was so still it might have been no more than his photograph, his lips moved, silently, very slightly. No.

  Suddenly Elissa was near tears. She’d been coping okay: She’d gotten them fed and washed and disguised, was on the edge of making plans for what to do next. But she wasn’t supposed to be doing all this. This was something that adults were supposed to do.

  “Daddy, I need help.” Her voice wavered.

  “No.” This time he said it out loud. “Cut the call. Get out.”

  “Daddy . . .” Tears stung the inside of her nose. Her chin shook. “I really need help. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Her father’s eyes met hers in a long, agonizing stare. She waited for him to say something, waited for him to save her, help her, tell her what to do.

  Lis. He didn’t speak out loud, just formed her name with his lips. Then he mouthed something else she couldn’t quite pick up . . . . help you . . . out of the city. And then one final word, a word he’d said to her in the gray dawn of that morning, standing outside the blaze of their burning house, pushing an illegal form of ID into her sweaty palm. Run.

  Then his face blinked out and the WELCOME screen returned.

  For a moment she couldn’t believe he’d cut her off, couldn’t believe that was it. Her hand went to the screen as if she could summon him back, but all that happened was that the familiar menu of choices appeared. Would you like to make another call? Would you like information on current special offers? Would you like to end this session now?

  Numbly she touched yes to end the session, and her leftover coins chinked into the tray below. She scooped them up, feeling their smooth coolness between her fingers, the way they slid together with a tiny scraping sound.

  “Elissa.”

  Elissa swallowed. “He told us to run. I said I needed help and he wouldn’t. He didn’t help me.”

  Lin stepped close to her, taking her arm in a grip that was nearly painful. “He helped as much as he could.” She shook Elissa’s arm. “We have to go. We have to do what he said. They must be scanning the phones, and your dad knew.”

  Elissa’s hand froze around the coins. “He—what? They’re doing what?”

  Lin shook her again. “Lissa! Snap out of it! You thought he’d swoop in and save you because he’s your father? Like you thought your parents would help me—an illegally escaped nonhuman—just because you asked them to? Listen to me. They can’t help with this. Even if they wanted to—and for all I know, your dad does want to—they couldn’t. They don’t have the power to. Either we help ourselves or—” She stopped, her eyes fixed above Elissa’s head. “Lissa, we have to get out now. Now. What’s the best way out of this place?”

  “What is it? What are you—” But the next second she didn’t need to ask. Above her, her own name blared out from the speakers next to the newsscreen. She turned, cold all over, her gaze moving to the screen as if pulled against her will. Her own image, dark-haired, dark-eyed, hugely magnified, stared out at her.

  “Residents of Central Canyon City are asked to be aware of a teenage runaway who may be at acute risk. Elissa Laine Ivory, seventeen years old, disappeared from her home last night. She is believed to be in the company of another girl of her own age, who may be holding Elissa against her will.”

  No. Oh, no. She’d thought they wouldn’t be able to put out an alert for Lin—Lin, who was supposed not to exist. But of course they could do this, mention an unnamed girl, say that Elissa was at risk from her. They must have prepared the whole statement beforehand, had it ready for as soon as they located her. A statement full of cleverly judged phrases that would make a city full of law-abiding citizens feel personally responsible for looking out for her, for the vulnerable teenage runaway she was supposed to be.

  And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, as if to drive home that calling her dad had been the worst possible thing she could have done: “The last confirmed sighting of Elissa was five minutes ago, at the Sand Springs Mall. Citizens at the mall are asked to be particularly alert, and to call authorities should they believe they’ve spotted the runaway.”

  ELISSA was frozen no longer. Heat and adrenaline raced through every vein in her body. In a quick, reflexive movement she jerked her hood up over her hair, pushing the wild spirals of copper curls forward to shadow and conceal her face. At the same time she was mapping out routes in her head, not just the quickest ways out of the mall but also the routes where they’d meet the fewest people. The fewest kind, concerned, all-too-watchful people.

  Next to her, Lin was shivering. She’d pulled her hood up too, and in its shadow her face was gray. She held her morph-card in fingers that had gone so pale, they looked bloodless. “It’s okay,” Lin said, although she spoke so low and her voice was shaking so much that Elissa could hardly pick up the words. “You don’t have to—you’ve already done so much. I—” She swallowed. “Thank you for helping me. Thank you for the card.”

  Elissa’s hand shot out to grab her arm as she moved away. “What? What are you doing?”

  Lin’s lips were as bloodless as her fingers. “If I go now, you can just go back. To—to your normal life. They’re after us, and if you keep running, you’ll end up being a criminal too. And I never meant that. I never meant this for you, Lissa.”

  “You’re going to go?”

  Lin nodded, pale lips pressed together, face set. She was going to do just that. After finding the sister she’d known about all her life, the sister whose link had kept her alive through fear and torture, she was going to leave so that same sister could go back to her nice, normal life. So she could have the link burned out of her brain, so she could forget.

  Elissa’s hand tightened on her twin’s arm. “You’re not. We’re staying together. I know I was a complete bitch to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to leave.”

  “I— Lissa, it’s not because of that.”

  “I know.” She moved her hand, twitched out the creases she’d left in Lin’s sleeve. “Okay, listen, we’re going to the top floor. There’s a whole kind of roof garden—it gets completely crowded later on, but right now it’ll be okay. Then there’s like a back route out down to the slidewalks—it’s all old-style stuff, just bridges and walkways, so it hardly gets used.” She continued talking, not particularly quietly, as she led the way to the elevators at the end of the gallery, sparing a scrap of attention to be amazed at how relaxed her voice sounded.

  Inside she was all coiled and burning tension, hyperaware of the tone of voice of anyone who passed her and Lin, of every gaze that touched them and then moved away. They were just the same as before, a pair of teenage girls, familiar, unremarkable. But now Elissa was aware that everyone they passed gave them a second, sometimes a third, glance, paid them just a little more attention than before.

  They’d had to come here, they’d had to get clothes, but—oh, hell, it was the worst place possible to have an alert put out for them, a place full of lazily browsing, slow-moving people with time and attention to spare for news broadcasts, for noticing the unusual. And here Elissa was, hiding beneath the merest skin of a disguise, going around with a girl who, despite all their efforts, was still the same height, had the same face shape, the same hands, moved
in the same freaking way as her.

  Run, said her father in her head.

  Oh, Daddy, it’s too late for that. Their only chance was to get out of the mall as smoothly as she could manage it and then disappear in the anonymity of the city outside.

  Except now that the alert was out, was there anywhere they could go where they’d be anonymous? Two teenage girls, traveling together without parents or grown-ups anywhere nearby, in a city made famously low-crime by an intricate network of security, cameras, alarms, and ID checks, a city that was ultrasafe for anyone who stayed within the law—and terrifying for anyone outside it.

  There were two people waiting for the elevator, and the door opened as Elissa and Lin joined them.

  They slipped inside, moving instinctively, without discussion, to stand by the far wall, their backs to the other occupants.

  The elevator was built at the far end of the mall gallery, against the glass wall of the building. As the elevator slid upward, the glass of the mall and, farther down, the rock wall of the canyon fell away beneath them.

  We’ll get up to the roof, out to the walkways. Get back down into the city.

  If only they could get out without being spotted.

  “What class have we got first?” Elissa said, grabbing at random for something that would sound normal, would make her and Lin seem like two ordinary girls leaving the mall on their way to school.

  Lin hesitated too long before replying. “I—languages?”

  Elissa bit back a flare of irritation. I’m having to think of everything, having to do everything, and you can’t even sound as if you know what you’re talking about?

  But if I hadn’t insisted on calling my dad . . .

  She spoke through the wave of cold, drenching guilt. “Oh no, it’s okay, I remember. It’s health and hygiene. Listen, you know that party this weekend, I’m going to wear my red dress, okay? As long as you don’t want to wear your blue one, ’cause they’re way too much alike and everyone will be all . . .” She talked on, an endless rattling of words that didn’t mean anything, as if she were running some resurrected program from a life she hadn’t had for years. It sounded horribly fake to her own ears, and although she kept talking, kept churning out meaningless phrases, the skin at the back of her neck began to prickle with an awareness of being watched. Those other people who’d gotten into the elevator, were they looking at her? Were they already taking out their phones to call the police, the mall security guards?