Her stomach turned over. “Yes.”
“You felt the impact when they blasted our air lock?”
“Yes.”
“How soon after that were they at your cabin?”
She didn’t need to think back to remember those frantic moments between the sound of the alarm and the men bursting through the door. “Really quickly.”
“Five minutes?”
“Less.”
“Yes.” He was speaking to Stewart once more. “They were after the passengers, that’s obvious. But they knew exactly where to go to reach them—and more importantly, they knew exactly where to hit the ship, close enough to gain access as fast as possible, but not close enough to risk hitting the girls themselves.” He scrubbed his sleeve across his face again. “I can only think of one explanation.” His voice was heavy, as if he had to drag the words out, force himself to say them. “They’re being fed information about the ship. Stew, we’re going to have to start asking questions of the crew.”
“No.” Stewart’s voice jumped, suddenly loud. “Cay, they’re handpicked, a hundred percent loyal. You can’t—”
Cadan was done with the controls. He turned fully to face Stewart now, his mouth set grimly. “What else can I think? God knows, if I could think of another answer . . .”
“Cadan, this is SFI crew you’re talking about!”
“I know.” For the first time Elissa could hear the strain in Cadan’s words. “Stew, you’re going to have to help me think this through.”
“In front of them?”
Elissa jumped. Sudden, real anger had sprung into Stewart’s voice.
“Where the hell is your loyalty?” he said. “You want us to—”
“My loyalty’s not in question!” Cadan’s voice was raised now as well. “I have everyone’s safety to think about. I can’t afford to be sentimental.”
“Sentimental? That’s what you’re calling it? Fine, if loyalty isn’t enough, you might remember your damn protocol. You seriously want to talk about which of your crew is in league with bounty hunters in front of civilian passengers?”
Cadan, his expression exasperated, on the edge of anger, had been opening his mouth to say something else, but at that he broke off and shut it with a snap. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “You’re right. I apologize. Lis”—he turned in his seat—“I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse us. I . . .” He looked as if he were going to try to sum everything up for her, but in the end he just gave a hopeless, all-encompassing gesture.
His eyes had bags under them, she noticed suddenly, and there was a bruise darkening on his wrist and around the base of his thumb. A long, ragged scrape running up over his jawline and across his cheek showed where a knife had caught him—way too close to his throat and left eye for her to be able to look at it without her whole body clenching against the thought of what could have happened. Because of us. Because of me.
It was worse than the physical marks on him, though. For the first time she could remember, he looked out of his depth, as if his well-trained world had turned on him, growing teeth, snatching him by the scruff of his neck, shaking him while he dangled, helpless and afraid.
There was nothing she could do to help. Nothing except keep out of his way and let him do his job.
She unsnapped the safety harness. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll go.”
“Not to your cabin. The captain’s quarters are just below here. If I give you the override code, can you remember it?” He rattled it off, too long for Elissa to keep track of, but Lin, stepping out of her safety harness, nodded.
“I can remember it.”
Cadan gave Lin a brief smile. “Thanks. Lissa—”
“Yes?”
“I can’t give you any reassurances of safety this time. All I can say is that we’ll do everything possible to keep you and Ms. May out of danger. You have my word on that.”
His eyes were too intent on hers. A sudden unease prickled through her. Part guilt, part embarrassment, part something else—something like the hero worship she’d once felt for him, that she was way too old to feel now. “The captain’s word?” she said, her voice coming out even more flippant than she’d meant it.
Cadan’s face didn’t change. He might as well not have recognized the note of not-quite-intended mockery in her voice.
“No,” he said. “Just mine.”
THE CAPTAIN’S quarters turned out to be a suite of three rooms opening off a narrow slip of an entrance lobby. The bedroom and shower room were only a little bigger than the twins’ cabin, but the suite included a tiny sitting room with a drinks machine, armchairs that unfolded from the wall, and a table that could sink into the floor.
Lin climbed into a chair, bringing her legs close up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She looked beaten and exhausted, the bruise horribly vivid on her cheek.
Elissa dialed them hot chocolate from the machine. Her stomach was churning, her hands clumsy as she bent to set the cups on the table. She seemed to have made a decision—or rather, in that moment when Cadan’s eyes had met hers, a decision had made itself. And now she knew what she had to say, but the words kept sticking on her tongue.
Lin interrupted the tumble of Elissa’s thoughts. “I think something’s wrong with their hyperdrive.”
“Wrong with it? How can you tell?”
Lin shrugged. “When they did those last two hops, I could feel something wrong with the electrical currents. Like they weren’t connecting properly . . . like they kept cutting out. Lissa, we can’t stay on this ship. We have to get them to take us somewhere else. If their hyperdrive dies and those men—bounty hunters—catch up . . .”
Elissa straightened. She couldn’t put it off any longer. “Lin.”
“What?” Lin had picked up her cup. She looked at Elissa over the rim.
“We have to tell him what’s going on.”
“What?” The same word, but everything else—Lin’s expression, the sudden tension in her body, the tone of her voice—had changed.
Elissa folded her arms across her body, holding herself steady. “We have to tell Cadan what’s happening. We have to tell him who’s after us, that they’ve probably got SFI’s help. We have to tell him who you are.”
Lin put the cup down on the table. When she straightened and looked back at Elissa, her eyes were blazing. Elissa couldn’t help flinching. She’d known Lin wouldn’t like it, had known she’d argue, but she hadn’t been quite prepared for a look of such black rage.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “He has to know. All these things are happening and he’s promising to protect us, and it’s not fair—he doesn’t even know why. If we tell him the truth, ask him for help—”
Lin interrupted her. “You never learn.” She spat the words out.
“What? What do you mean?”
“You never learn. You’re doing it again. You make all that fuss about what I have to do to get us out of places, and then you just go and get us back into them!”
Elissa stared at her, bewildered. “What do you mean, I get us back into them?”
Lin’s voice rose. “Calling your father! Telling your parents! I told you not to, I said they wouldn’t help. And you did it anyway.”
“Okay. I understand. But, Lin, listen. It’s not like that this time. I was wrong—completely wrong, I know, and I’m really sorry. But this time—honestly, I’ve thought about it. Cadan’s not like my parents. My mother’s always just wanted me to fit in, and my dad, he never interferes—”
“And Cadan’s the SFI poster boy.” For a moment Elissa frowned at the phrase, recognizing it, then she realized Lin was echoing something she’d said, even mimicking the tone she’d said it in. “You think telling him it’s SFI who’s after us is going to keep us safe? He’ll hand us over, you said so!”
“I don’t think he will. He’s—I think he’s changed from how he used to be. You can see—he’s having to think through stuff. He’s facing really hard decisions—”
“No, he’s not!” Lin’s voice went up to a shriek. “He’s not making any decisions! He’s doing everything by protocol. He said so. You heard him.”
“I know that. But he’s not doing it blindly. God, Lin, you’re not listening to me—”
“I listened last time! I let you call your father, and we ended up nearly getting caught! And then you blamed me—you blamed me for doing what I had to do and getting us out of there. You said you’d hate me if I did it again.”
“That’s not what I said. Lin, that’s not fair.”
But Lin was beyond listening. She was trembling, her fists clenched, a hot flush around her eyes and on her cheekbones. “No, what you keep doing isn’t fair. You don’t know what it’s like to grow up knowing you’re meant to be subhuman, a spare copy of the person who’s real. You just jump into trusting everybody, you think it’s okay to ask them to help you. It’s not. It’s not. You can only do it because everyone knows you’re human—legally, officially human—and you know you’re safe. I can’t do that. I don’t count. You have no idea—”
Heat swept through Elissa. No idea? I have no idea about not being able to trust people? She opened her mouth to snap back—and stopped. In front of Lin on the low table, steam was rising in clouds from the two cups of hot chocolate—more steam than had risen from them when they were fresh out of the machine. As Elissa stared, bewildered, the dark liquid began to bubble, jumping furiously as if it had been placed on direct heat. As if the electrics that folded and unfolded the table had turned into a heating pad, as if someone— Oh. Elissa was suddenly aware that the heat in her veins, in the palms of her hands, was not just anger, hers or Lin’s. It was the building power she’d felt before—the power that belonged not to her but to Lin.
She found that she, like Lin, was shaking. Her teeth chattered in a sudden spasm, and in order to talk she had to bite them together, speak through them. “What are you doing?”
Lin’s eyes, dark and blank with fury, met hers. “Making you pay attention. You’re not to tell him. You’re not to, do you hear me?”
The chocolate bubbled more violently. Scalding liquid leapt over the sides of the cups to splash onto the table. Elissa curled her fingers up into her palms, feeling the bite of her nails. “What if I say I’m going to anyway?”
A spark cracked from the metal corner of the table. “Don’t think I won’t do it, Lissa. Don’t think I won’t use my power to make you listen.”
Their eyes held. Elissa stopped shaking. Something went through her, stiffening her spine, lifting her head upright—something that after a second she recognized as unyielding, ice-cold rage.
“Fine,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Lin’s hands clenched tighter. “I will! I’ll—”
“Electrocute me? Burn me? Like I said, go ahead.”
A new kind of panic shone in Lin’s eyes. “Lissa, you have to listen—”
“Listen to someone who’s threatening me? I don’t think so!”
“Lissa . . .” The furious bubbling of the boiling hot chocolate started to diminish. The steam thinned, moving in languid curls away into the air. “I wasn’t really going to do it. I just— I . . .” Lin’s flush of anger drained away, but her eyes were still shiny with panic.
And Elissa was still frost-cold, furious in a way she would have thought would make her incoherent but that instead made her words come out with an ice-hard emphasis. “You never threaten me,” she said, her gaze holding Lin’s. “Never again, do you hear?”
“I’m sorry. I—you’re not listening, and I’m scared you’re—”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t do that. It’s not how relationships work—you don’t threaten people to get them to do what you want.”
For an instant, anger snapped through the fear and anxiety in Lin’s eyes. “You mean real humans don’t do it.”
Elissa made a noise of contempt. “Please. ‘Real humans’ do it all the time. Terrorists. Dictators. Pirates and bullies and criminals. But we don’t. I don’t, and you don’t either.”
Lin bit her lip. “Okay. All right. I’m sorry. But, Lissa, you have to listen—”
“No. You have to listen to me. All that time we were linked, did you not pay any attention to what was going on in my life?”
“I said, it was only flashes. You never pulled me right in like I did with you.”
“So you really think I jump into trusting everyone?”
“I don’t mean it’s because you’re stupid or anything,” Lin said anxiously. “It’s because you’re legally human—you know you can—”
“No, I don’t.” Within her the icy anger shivered and broke apart, splintering all through her in a shower of tiny points of pain. “I don’t trust anyone. Not since the symptoms started. I haven’t trusted anyone apart from my parents for years.”
“You did trust them, though—”
“And now I don’t! I don’t trust anyone! The symptoms showed me I couldn’t trust my friends, and finding you showed me I couldn’t trust my parents or the doctors or the police of my own planet. I don’t trust anybody, Lin!” She stopped, finding that her hands were trembling again. In her anger she wanted to leave it at that, throwing the words at Lin as if they were weapons, letting her know that because of her, Elissa had lost everything and gained nothing in return. But it wouldn’t be true, and it wasn’t fair to give Lin less than the truth.
She took a breath. “Except you,” she said. “I trust you.”
Lin’s head came up, and her face was furious all over again. “You don’t. You think I didn’t see how you looked at me when I caught up with you in that playground? You think I’ve never been looked at as if people don’t know whether to be scared or disgusted—you think I can’t recognize it when you do the same?”
Shame swept across Elissa. Shame and guilt. I hoped she didn’t know. I hoped she couldn’t tell what I was thinking back then.
Well, I wanted honesty, didn’t I?
“Okay,” she said. “Yes, back then, in that playground, and in the pod-motel, and before, when I came to find you—yes, I was scared. I didn’t know what you wanted, I didn’t know what you were like, and I was scared of you. Now I’m not.”
“But you don’t trust me,” Lin said mulishly. “You don’t. You keep thinking I’m going to hurt someone.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, you keep acting like you’re going to hurt someone!” Lin opened her mouth to reply, but Elissa kept talking, bulldozing over her, determined to make her understand. “You don’t trust yourself not to hurt someone. You said so, back on Sekoia, so don’t go blaming me for thinking the same thing.”
“Then what do you even mean? You keep saying how you don’t trust me, and then you say you do, and it doesn’t make any sense, Lissa! If you hate me and you just want to get rid of me, then just say so! Just say so and I—”
“Oh my God!” All Elissa’s patience slipped, and she heard her voice go loud, out of control. “Will you listen to what I’m trying to say? It’s not that I trust you not to hurt anyone. I trust you not to hurt me!”
Lin stopped dead. They stared at each other across the table, across the no-longer-steaming cups.
Elissa took another breath, forcing her hands to stop shaking. “I knew you weren’t going to use your electrokinesis on me,” she said. “I knew it was just a threat. And that’s why you can’t do it. Well, you can’t do it to anyone, but you especially can’t do it to me. Because you don’t threaten the people who trust you.”
Silence stretched out between them. Silence filled with faint background noises—the quiet hum of machinery, the distant vibration that might be the continuing auto-repair of the damaged ship.
“I—” Lin started, then broke off. “Okay.”
Her face seemed naked, as vulnerable as a child’s. Elissa had to fight the impulse to cross her arms and break eye contact. She wasn’t used to this. For years she’d had to expose so much about herself—all the weird physical and mental
symptoms—to doctors, to her parents. But her feelings—she’d kept them locked away, private beyond private. She’d said that she’d trusted her parents, and it was true. But she’d never shared her feelings with them. Maybe it’s not just Lin who doesn’t have practice in how relationships work.
Elissa cleared her throat. “I won’t hate you,” she said. “Whatever you do, I won’t end up hating you.”
Lin’s eyes snapped wider. “If I— You said if I killed someone—”
“Even then.” The words hung in the air, and suddenly they were too scary not to qualify. “I mean, it’s not okay if you kill someone. And you can’t—and if you do I’ll be really, really upset—and you really can’t.” She couldn’t think of words that expressed the gravity of what she was trying to say. She stopped, frustrated and a little freaked out by what she’d kind of given Lin permission to do, and Lin giggled.
“It’s okay. I understand.” Lin hesitated. “Thank you.”
“Oh—” Elissa waved her hands, dismissing the issue. “It’s not a thank-you thing. I mean, it’s not some decision. I just—I realized—” She checked herself, determined to ignore her out-of-practice-with-all-this-stuff discomfort, determined to say it clearly. “Whatever you do, it doesn’t make any difference.”
The silence stretched out again. Elissa took a breath. There was something else she had to say, something else she had to stick to.
“I have to tell Cadan,” she said. “He’s trying to help us, and his whole crew is in danger, and he’s having to think that there might be a traitor among them. It’s not fair. I have to tell him.”
“I don’t want you to.” Lin’s voice shook.
“I know.” Elissa forced herself to hold her sister’s gaze. “I’m scared too. But, Lin, there’s sixteen other people on this ship. I can put myself in danger for you. But I can’t do it to sixteen other people. At least—God, I’ve already put them in danger, but I have to at least let them know what they’re dealing with.”
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