He didn’t speak, just moved his hand to the controls, taking the ship back up to speed. Lin leaned on the rail behind him, watching the numbers climb. Her face held none of the strain that Elissa knew showed in her own expression. It was as if knowing that they were, for the moment, safe had wiped the terror of the previous hours out of her head.
Elissa sat carefully out of the way, watching Cadan’s hands on the controls, watching the side of his face that she could see. His face was as calm as Lin’s, but calm as if, in his case, the strain had been not wiped away but deliberately pushed down until he had leisure to deal with it.
She’d learned to do something similar over the last three years, pushing away hurt she wasn’t yet ready to look at. But she’d only managed it by shutting off completely, like the button-snails on the cliffs near her house that could draw themselves up smaller and smaller until they fit into the smooth flat shells that looked like buttons stuck to the cliff face. She’d never managed to withdraw and still remain as calmly competent, as focused, as Cadan was now.
If his last few years—all his time training—had come as smoothly, as easily as I’d thought they had, how did he learn to do that?
He’d set their course for the closest habitable body—not a planet but a moon, Syris II. The planet it orbited was not eligible to be terraformed, nor was its larger moon, but Syris II was in the second stage of the process, meaning that it would be bleak and inhospitable, but with breathable air and no immediate danger to human life.
They had to get somewhere they could repair the ship as quickly as possible, Elissa knew that. But going to the very closest place, the place Stewart must know they’d be making for . . .
“Cadan?”
“Yes?”
“Stewart—he’ll know where we’re going.”
“I know,” Cadan said shortly.
“Won’t he . . . tell someone?”
Cadan’s jaw clenched, and his fingers moved, suddenly jerky, on the controls. “I’m sure he will.”
Elissa swallowed. “Then shouldn’t we go to a different place?”
Cadan swung around on her. “For God’s sake, Lissa, will you stop talking and let me do my job?”
“I’m just saying—”
“There is no other place! The ship’s running at over five percent damage. I’ve got a whole sector shut down. If I don’t get her patched up so we can use the hyperdrive, we’re no better than floating wreckage waiting to be picked up. Whoever it is who’s after you can track the ship. Our only chance is in not staying still long enough for them to catch up with us.” He shut his teeth hard on the last word, took a deep breath. “Now, please, either stay quiet or go away.”
They touched down on the surface of the moon two hours later. Cadan told Elissa and Lin to strap themselves in even before he brought the Phoenix into orbit, and entering the atmosphere was a stomach-dropping ride, with Cadan fighting to keep the ship stable. They landed with a last sideways lurch that kicked Elissa’s heart up into her throat.
She’d known the Phoenix was damaged, but after that landing she couldn’t help but wonder if the ship would even make it back into space.
If the repairs didn’t take too long—if they could be made at all—the ship could stay ahead of their pursuers. If not . . . We’re no better than floating wreckage waiting to be picked up.
Cadan stood, clipping his earpiece over his ear, checking the reading on his wrist unit. “There are padded jackets in that cupboard,” he said, pointing. “The atmosphere is thin enough to be pretty cold, but you might as well save the ship’s oxygen by breathing what’s outside.” His voice was curt, and his gaze skated over Elissa. He had the right to be angry, she knew that, but all the same, resentment crept up inside her. She’d apologized for what she’d done, and it wasn’t her fault Stewart had turned out to be such an ass.
They came down the ramp of the cargo hold onto gray sand so fine, it was like ash. It puffed up around their feet as they stepped onto it. A thin breeze licked an icy damp tongue over Elissa’s face, and she pulled the jacket hood around her head and shoved her hands into the deep pockets.
Cadan strode away from the ship, then turned so he could get a clear view of the damage. His face tightened.
When Elissa caught up with him and looked, even she could see that it was bad. A mangled scar ran across the Phoenix’s smooth silver hull.
Markus had followed Cadan and the twins. He was no longer taut with anger; his face showed nothing but focused attention on the problem at hand. “At least the auto-repair worked.”
Cadan rubbed a hand across his face. “All too well. It’s going to be a hell of a job pulling the metal back out.”
“What’s wrong?” Lin asked Elissa, her voice low. “I thought the auto-repair was a good thing?”
“It is. But it’s, like, just an emergency fix. The metal clamps tight, seals it all off, but then, if you want to get it back to how it was, you have to peel the metal back up and fix it back in its original place so it can cope with hyperspeed. They have these massive machines that do it at home.”
“We have the equipment to do it here,” said Markus, overhearing. “Or a good enough job, anyway. It’s getting the equipment up there that’s the problem.”
“Can’t you reach it from inside?” said Lin, her face interested and curious.
“We can,” said Cadan. “But it’d mean breaching the work of the auto-repair, and if we can’t get that back, we’ll be stuck not being able to fly at all, let alone making hyperspeed.” He rubbed his face again and squinted up at the ship’s side. “If I can maneuver Shuttlebug Two close enough . . .”
Markus nodded. “We can rig up a platform for Felicia and me to work from.”
“That’s a lot riskier than I like to ask of you, Markus. I’d do it myself—”
“But we need you to keep the shuttlebug steady while we work. It’s okay, Captain.”
It didn’t sound okay. It sounded completely dangerous. But Elissa couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t do anything to help, she didn’t have any advice, and Cadan had already made it pretty clear he didn’t appreciate her interfering.
“What do you need to do?” said Lin.
Cadan gave her a distracted, irritated look. “Not now, please. We’re trying to work out how to fix it. I don’t have time to explain the process.”
Elissa felt Lin bristle next to her. When she spoke again, her voice was determined. “Yes you do. It’ll take you about half a minute.”
The next look Cadan gave her was no longer distracted—but it was a lot more irritated. “Do I look as if I want to spend even half a minute being your teacher? We’re working hard to keep you safe here—”
Lin glared at him. “And I’m offering to help.”
“Help? How?”
Lin didn’t answer immediately. Instead she just dropped her gaze to the front of Cadan’s jacket. He looked disconcerted, following her eyes down to where they’d focused on the little silver pilot’s bar. “What are you—”
The bar twitched. Cadan’s head jerked back, surprised bewilderment flashing across his face. “What the hell?”
Lin frowned. One of her fingers moved. The bar gave another twitch, then slid sideways, its pin coming free from Cadan’s jacket, and fell onto the ground. A tiny cloud of dust billowed up around it.
Markus took a big step back. “Whoa.”
Lin grinned at him, then at Cadan. “Come on. I know Lissa told you I’m electrokinetic.”
“Yes. She did.” He blinked. “I just . . . forgot.” He bent to pick up the bar. “The clasp’s undone. You . . . can actually do that?”
Lin’s grin spread until it was almost smug. “Among other things.”
Cadan cleared his throat. “But that’s just a clasp. What we need for the ship is a hell of a lot more challenging.”
Lin rolled her eyes, just a little. “So tell me.”
For the first time since before the last pirate attack, a glint of amusement crep
t into Cadan’s eyes. “All right, then. We need each of those sheets of metal pulled away from the ship. We need them beaten out flat, and we need them reattached so their curvature matches the curvature of the ship’s side. It doesn’t look like too much from here, but the metal is extremely heavy. It’ll take all Markus’s and Felicia’s strength to do it, and only then with the help of lifting equipment. Do you really think you can do it?”
“Yes. Well . . .” She made a face. “I’ve never done anything quite like it before. But”—she flexed her fingers, and once more Elissa felt that prickle of electricity in the palms of her own hands—“I can try.”
Cadan frowned. “Is it dangerous? If you expend too much energy?”
“How would I know?”
“Ah, look . . . I don’t like it. Letting you do something that could be dangerous—”
Lin shrugged. “I can stop if it’s getting too hard, can’t I? Anyway”—she grinned again—“it’s nowhere near as dangerous as having Markus and Felicia balancing on a platform built on a shuttlebug.”
She looked back at the ship, eyes narrowing in concentration, and the prickle began to build again in Elissa’s hands. But for a moment she hardly noticed. She’d thought Lin was offering to help with the ship just because they—she and Lin—needed it. But with Lin’s last words, a new thought dawned in her mind. Maybe Lin was offering to help solely for her own and Elissa’s benefit. It made sense: If she could get the job done faster, she could leave Markus and Felicia free to do whatever other tasks needed seeing to. But on the other hand, was she actually doing it for their benefit? For Markus’s and Felicia’s sakes, to save them from undertaking a dangerous procedure?
And if so, if Lin, for the first time, was thinking about people other than herself and Elissa, people who were full, declared-legal humans, people whom she’d once described as meaning nothing to her . . . what was going on in her head? What had changed? Was it because they—Cadan and Markus and the others—were helping protect them?
Then the prickle climbed up into Elissa’s wrists, a feeling like pins and needles making her fingers twitch, and the thought dissolved under more immediate preoccupations.
Lin stood still, face tilted up toward the damaged area, eyes crinkled in concentration, hands in front of her. It wasn’t possible that she’d be able to do anything—the piece she was supposed to fix was so far up, the metal pressed in on itself in tight inflexible folds, as if it had been pinched by giant fingers. And before, back on Sekoia—okay, she’d controlled the mechanism in a moving staircase, but that had been in an extremity of fear and fury. And wouldn’t just shaking something be easier than uncrumpling a bunch of massive sheets of metal?
Now, if she tried and tried and couldn’t, would it damage her? Is she going to get hurt?
Elissa bit the edge of her thumbnail. Lin looked so normal, so small, standing there, hair scraped back, face set in concentration. The task was way too big for her, she’d never be able to—
Above them metal screeched.
Elissa shot a look upward. A section of the damaged area was bellying slowly outward, as if it were being blown from the inside, pulling away from the other metal with a grating, slithering sound that set her teeth on edge. Markus drew in a sharp breath.
Lin shifted her feet a little, but other than that she didn’t move. The metal sheet swelled farther, lining itself up with the curve of the undamaged section next to it, then froze in place with a definite clang.
“Will that do?” she asked.
Cadan nodded. “That will absolutely do.”
Lin grinned a tiny bit, clearly registering the approval in his voice, and something seemed to stab through Elissa, unexpected and so fast she didn’t quite recognize it.
Lin screwed her eyes up again, curled one hand into a fist. Her other hand made an infinitesimal twitching movement, and another piece of metal began to unroll itself from the ship.
The whole process seemed to take forever. The metal uncrumpled so smoothly, without all the normal paraphernalia of machinery and power tools, that once Elissa had gotten over her first incredulity, it seemed as though Lin were unrolling nothing but foil, paper thin. At points, when she hesitated, when a corner of metal hung just outside the right position, Elissa’s own fingers itched to reach out and press it lightly into place. A couple of times she had to stop herself from offering Lin advice—just a bit to the right; if you stretch it out farther it’ll be easier to fit in place . . . It looked so easy, something that anyone, if they could reach, could do as easily with their hands as Lin was doing with her mind.
But after half an hour Elissa noticed Lin’s fingers. They’d been moving in tiny twitches as if she were touching the metal, as if it were real, physical work. And now they were trembling, and the skin of her forehead, half-hidden by her hair, looked clammy. She was approaching what seemed—even from Elissa’s position of ignorance—like the hardest part of all.
The spider robots had not salvaged all the metal. Some had been blown to dust in the blast, and some had been torn into shreds and thrown far from the Phoenix to float in emptiness. Cadan and Markus had brought a new sheet out and it now lay on the ground, gathering dust in a gray film on its shining surface.
Lin’s job was to lift it—way up, three stories above their heads—and slide it into position over the remaining space, then rivet it with the lightweight rivet gun Cadan held ready to pass to her. The new sheet, like the rest of the Phoenix’s outer shell, was smart-metal. The moment the ship hit the outer atmosphere of the moon, the smart-metal would bond to the other sheets as if they’d never been anything other than whole.
Lin relaxed her hands for a moment and rolled her shoulders back, stretching. Elissa opened her mouth to suggest she take a break—she couldn’t possibly do this, Cadan was crazy to let her—but it was too late. The muscles along Lin’s jaw tightened as she clenched her teeth, and in front of them the sheet of metal shivered, making a noise that would have been almost musical had it not been so harsh. Then the sheet rose into the air.
This time it was Lin who gasped, a quick indrawn breath that sounded as if she were in pain.
“Lin,” said Elissa. “It’s too hard, you’ll hurt yourself—”
But she wasn’t being listened to. Lin gritted her teeth—actually gritted them, Elissa heard them grate together—and the sheet rose higher, wavering, making wobbly, metallic noises, and then it clanged against the side of the ship.
Then slowly scraping along, metal on metal, with a squeaky sound that set Elissa’s teeth on edge, the sheet inched up the bulk of the ship.
Elissa looked at Lin. It didn’t seem easy anymore. Her sister was sweating, moisture forming under her hairline, running down the sides of her face. Red pinpricks appeared beneath her eyebrows, tiny bursting blood vessels.
“Lin. You need to take a break.”
Lin gave the smallest sideways jerk of her head, not speaking, keeping her mouth tightly shut. Above them the metal quivered, hesitated, and continued to slide up toward the damaged area.
“Lin.” This time Cadan spoke. “You don’t have to finish it now. Lissa’s right. Take a break.”
She didn’t even make a gesture of reply this time. Her face was set and stubborn, and suddenly Elissa knew that she wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t give up till it was done.
But what’s it going to do to her? It must be using up so much energy. What if it’s too much? What if she hurts—really hurts—herself?
She didn’t dare try to force Lin’s attention away from the sheet—if she let it fall now, it would crash down on both of them—but she slid her hand over her sister’s, feeling the quiver that seemed to come right through Lin’s bones. Elissa reached out, trying to silently let Lin know that it was fine to give up, that she could continue later, that she wouldn’t let anyone down by taking a break.
Pain rushed up Elissa’s arms. Her shoulders suddenly ached and trembled with fatigue so intense, it hurt. She was looking through Lin’s eyes, thi
nking Lin’s thoughts. They need to leave me alone. Stop distracting me, and I can do it. I can do it.
Her fingers, so cramped and sore, flexed suddenly. She felt as if she’d slammed both hands onto the metal sheet, pushed hard and felt it slide. Above her the reluctant scraping became a sudden metallic rush of noise.
The sheet slid exactly into place.
She dragged in a breath, mentally leaning against the sheet to keep it steady—so much easier than pushing it farther and farther up the side of the ship—and held out her hand for the rivet gun.
After the metal sheet, the gun seemed almost ridiculously easy to maneuver. She sent it floating up around the edges of the sheet, punching in the rivets.
As the last rivet went in, disorientation swooped through Elissa, then she found herself looking again through her own eyes, her fingers going slack on Lin’s hand. Next to her, Lin staggered. The rivet gun, floating halfway down the side of the ship, turned over and fell. It thudded onto the ground, sending up a puff of gray dust.
For a moment Elissa thought the dust had gotten into her eyes: Everything went dim, blurry. She dropped Lin’s hand and wiped her eyes, and after a moment the blur cleared.
Lin was staring at her. “I felt you.” She put a hand up to her head. “You . . . linked to me.”
“I didn’t mean to, it just . . . happened. I was scared you were going to hurt yourself.”
“I was hurting myself. But you . . . You’ve never done that before. It was always me. I didn’t know you even could.” She glanced up at the mended ship. “And you just helped me. You helped me move it. But you don’t have electrokinesis—at all. Do you?”
“No.” If she had, wouldn’t she have discovered it earlier, like Lin had? Wouldn’t it have been yet another freaky-weird thing about her for the doctors to try to get rid of?
Lin was watching her, and now Cadan and Markus were too. Elissa found herself hunching her shoulders, an automatically defensive move. If I did have a power anything like Lin’s . . . God, I wouldn’t want everyone analyzing it. She shook her head vehemently. “I don’t. I don’t have anything like that. I’ve only ever felt it when I’m linked to Lin. It’s not me.”
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