Linked

by Imogen Howson

  “No!” It came out as a shriek. “Lin, don’t even think about it!”

  Lin shook her head. “Ssh. It’s just stupid, us all dying when we don’t need to. And no one else can do anything.”

  Elissa fought to make her voice come out quietly, trying to get through to her sister. “Lin, you can’t. You know how it hurt you before, you know what that thing does. And that one doesn’t even work properly—”

  “It worked properly for years before it went wrong.”

  Elissa felt another shriek pressing against the sides of her throat. Lin just kept talking so calmly, as if she actually thought she was talking about something reasonable, something that made sense.

  “It didn’t just go wrong. It killed that boy! It doesn’t work. It’ll kill you, too.”

  Just a shiver of emotion ran over Lin’s face before it tightened again. “Probably not right away, though.”

  “Lin.” Oh God, it was no good trying to control her voice. She was crying too now, much more messily than the slow slide of tears down Lin’s face. She had to force the words out through sobs. “Lin, the pain, it’s too much. It killed him. It’ll kill you.”

  “Maybe not.” Her eyes met Elissa’s. “And if it does, it still makes more sense than all of us dying.”

  “How does that make sense? It doesn’t make sense! It doesn’t.”

  Behind Elissa, Ivan spoke. “What . . . ? Cadan, what’s going on?”

  Elissa snatched a look back. He and Felicia were sitting up, and Markus was straightening in his seat, hand to his head. Whatever Lin had done to them, it had been precisely timed. She hadn’t intended to make them unconscious for any longer than it took her to get Cadan and Elissa here, to shut them up so they couldn’t stop this awful, insane plan. How did she even do it? If I’d known she could do that . . . But oh God, all this worrying about what she might do to other people—I never thought to worry about what she might do to herself.

  Frantic, Elissa turned to Cadan. “You talk to her! Make her listen!”

  “No,” said Lin, speaking to Cadan as well. “You listen to me instead. You need to give Elissa something—a sedative or a painkiller or something. When I use the hyperdrive, it’s going to hurt her if she’s not drugged.”

  How long had she been thinking about this? It had to have been since they’d discovered the Spare. If Elissa had never left her, if Elissa had stayed, Lin wouldn’t have gotten the chance to knock out the crew. And oh, to think she’d wanted Lin to develop empathy, to care about other people. If I’d known, I’d never have made her feel bad about what she’d done, I’d never have tried to get her to be different. Oh God, Lin . . .

  With a shock Elissa suddenly realized Cadan was no longer looking at Lin, but down at her. She didn’t need a telepathic link to know what he was thinking.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare even think about drugging me. You have to get the door open. You have to find a way to stop her!”

  Cadan was white, his mouth set as hard as she’d ever seen it. “Lin,” he said through the door, “you’re making a mistake. You do this, and the shock could kill Lissa as well as you.”

  Lin’s face settled into stubbornness. “Not if you give her a sedative like I just told you.”

  “You’re telling me to drug her without her consent? Lin, I told you, this is a mistake. Unlock the door. We’ll work out something else.”

  For a moment Elissa thought they’d won, because Lin’s face changed and her hand made a quick movement. Then she straightened, her body set in lines as stubborn as the expression on her face.

  “No. There is nothing else. There’s no time. Cadan”—her eyes locked on his—“I know you’ll drug her. I know you won’t let it hurt her, too.” She turned her back on them.

  Elissa opened her mouth to scream at her, and couldn’t. Her breath seemed to have stopped, her heart, all the blood in her veins. Her sister, her twin . . .

  If she dies, I’ll never be whole again. Like a lightning flash, agonizingly clear, she knew it. Knew, too, what would have happened to her if she’d let the doctors burn the link out of her brain back on Sekoia. She’d have been a half-person, always, not knowing what she’d lost, just knowing something had gone, something she’d never been meant to live without.

  For an instant, weird and out of time, the lightning flash showed her father’s face, gray and tired and detached the way it had been her whole life. Oh my God. My dad—did he—

  Then her mind snapped back to the present. Beyond the glass, Lin had knelt next to the energy cell and gathered up the hideous two-pronged plug.

  She turned a little as she settled herself, looking up toward the bridge. Her face was wavering now, tears slipping down it, her mouth trembling around where she’d set her teeth into her lower lip. The light of the energy cell pulsed weakly.

  “Lissa.” It was Cadan’s voice.

  Elissa looked up at him. He looked beaten, hopeless, and she knew what he was asking.

  “No.”

  “She’s doing it anyway. Look at her. I can’t stop it. Do I have to watch what it could do to you as well?”

  Fear flared into fury. “You’re giving up just like that? You have to be able to stop her! You have to be able to do something.”

  “You don’t think I would if I could? Lissa, you know I can’t drug you without your consent, but look at her, she’s set on this, she’s trying to save the rest of us. If she does, and you die too—”

  “No. No. Lin!” Panic swept back up through her, blanking out thought. She beat on the glass. “Lin! Lin, don’t, don’t!”

  Cadan took hold of her arm. “Lissa, come away.”

  “To be drugged? No. No, no.”

  “Not to be drugged!” Panic and anger leapt into his voice, tightened his hand so it bit into her arm. “Just come away. If you’re standing here when she does it, if you’re this close and she does die, you could die too.”

  Elissa wrenched away. “She’s not going to do it. Not if she knows it could hurt me.”

  “She’s relying on me to get you away. Lissa, damn it—”

  Lin put a hand under her hair and swept it up off the nape of her neck. She didn’t look up, didn’t even give Elissa one last glance. She took the plug, positioned it above her neck, and with one swift, steady movement, punched it home.

  Inside the cell, the fluid glowed, brightness seeping through it. The thin, building whine of the hyperdrive reached Elissa’s ears.

  “Lissa.” Cadan dragged at her, both his hands biting into her flesh now, trying to make her go, trying to make her leave her sister. She fought him, clawing at his hands, pushing away. She no longer had breath with which to scream, but she couldn’t give up, not yet, not yet. She reached out with the only thing she had left, the link, tenuous and incalculable, that she’d never really known how to use, that only Lin had mastered. If Elissa could just reach her sister now, reach her for long enough to distract her—

  The energy cell flared bright white, bleaching the color out of Lin’s face, silvering the loose ends of her hair . . .

  . . . shining straight into Elissa’s eyes. The energy cell lay in front of her, the hyperdrive beside it. She was here. She’d made the link. She was looking through Lin’s eyes, feeling Lin’s tears on her face, feeling . . .

  . . . the whine turned into a shriek, filling the air around her . . .

  . . . feeling nothing.

  For a minute Elissa didn’t even know where she was. Her vision had gone black. She was numb, couldn’t tell whether she sat or stood or lay. Couldn’t tell whether she was still in Lin’s head or back in her own.

  I’m not dead, at least.

  With the thought came consciousness, just a single thread of it creeping through the black, like a shutter opening on daylight. She opened her eyes and found herself slumped at the bottom of the bridge’s barrier, Cadan’s arm around her, his hand against where her pulse beat in the side of her neck.

  “Lissa. Lissa. God.�
�� He put his head down to hers. “I thought—”

  “Lin?” She scrambled up on unsteady legs.

  Down on the flight deck Lin raised her head. She dragged the plug out from under her hair. “Lissa?”

  The locked symbol flicked off and the door to the bridge slid open. Elissa was down the steps and across the flight deck in four strides, shaky legs or not. She slammed her hands down onto Lin’s shoulders, her face inches from her sister’s. “Never do that again! Never, do you hear me? You don’t get to make that kind of choice for me, do you understand?”

  “Lissa—”

  “Shut up!” She was shaking so hard, she could hardly speak. “You don’t do that! You think I did all this stuff for fun? You think it doesn’t matter to me if you get yourself killed?”

  “Elissa.”

  “What?”

  “We did it. Look.” Lin waved a hand around them, at the glass sides of the flight deck, and after a blank moment of staring, Elissa understood. The other spaceships were gone. Nothing showed but the far-off stars.

  “We made the hop,” said Lin. “We made hyperspace.”

  “But . . .” Elissa put her hands up to her head. “I hardly felt it. And that—the boy who was powering it before, it hurt him terribly. It killed him.”

  “You linked.” Cadan had come up behind her. “Just before, you linked with your sister, didn’t you, Lissa? I was holding you, I felt you go.”

  “Yes.” Elissa took her hands down and glared at Lin. “That was the first time I ever had to do it because you were trying to kill yourself, though. Don’t ever—”

  “Wait a minute.” Lin wasn’t paying attention. She looked up at Cadan. “Is that what did it? Both of us, together? Is that how we made it work, without it hurting, without what happened to that boy?”

  “It can’t be that simple,” said Cadan. “They’d have figured it out before.”

  Elissa stared from one face to another, seeing the same light dawning that rose now inside her head, flooding everything, making everything make sense. “But they couldn’t figure it out. They never got further than taking the strongest twin. The way they had it set up, they never got a chance to try their disgusting experiments on both twins. Once they said one of us was human, they couldn’t do anything.”

  “And it worked well enough already.” Lin shrugged. “They got the power they wanted. And it wasn’t like they cared about it hurting.” She jerked her head up to look at Elissa. “Maybe they only think they’re taking the strongest twin. Maybe they’re really taking the least controlled one, the one who’s all . . . splashing around. Maybe that’s why so many of us burn out. Maybe that’s why”—her eyes widened—“maybe that’s why I kept reaching out to you, when they harvested the power from me, when it started to hurt. But it didn’t really work because you didn’t know I was real, you didn’t reach back.”

  “But this time I reached out to you . . .”

  “And it worked.” Lin’s face lit up, blazing with her seeing-the-stars smile. “You saved us. We escaped.”

  “And it didn’t hurt.” Elissa still couldn’t believe it. She was so used to the idea that the link brought pain, stuff she couldn’t control. But that was because it was always Lin doing it. I didn’t think to try controlling it; I just tried to make it stop. All I did was freak out and react. If I’d known . . .

  Cadan stood and started back up to the bridge. Lin scrambled to her feet to follow him. “Where are we? Are the coordinates right?”

  He glanced back, a sudden frown creasing his brow. “How the hell did you even know where to take us?”

  Lin laughed. “I’m not that clever. You set the coordinates already.”

  “Oh. Of course.” He flushed a little, rubbing a hand up over his face, and tenderness caught at Elissa. They’d thrown so much at him, she and Lin, and he’d dealt with it all. And fell in love with me at the same time. But that was a miracle she didn’t have time to dwell on now, something warm and glowing to take out and marvel over later, when they’d reached safety.

  Safety. That seemed like a miracle too—but a miracle she’d had to make happen.

  Cadan slid into the pilot’s seat. Next to him Markus gave Lin a steady look, and she flushed. “I had to.”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Ivan. “Just understand you’re forgiven only because you probably saved our lives.”

  “We can reach Sanctuary in one more hop,” Cadan interrupted them. He swung around in his seat. “Lissa, Lin, this link, it’s not something I understand . . .”

  Lin caught Elissa’s eye, grinning. “You want to know if we can do it again.”

  “Well, yes. If we can get there now, before they catch up again—”

  Elissa jerked a look at the screens. “Will they? This quickly?”

  Cadan gave an exasperated head shake. “Your guess is as good as mine. God alone knows how they did it before. I’d rather not wait around to find out. But if that was a fluke, if doing it again will hurt you, or if it’s left you weak . . .”

  Elissa glanced back toward her twin and found herself smiling too, filled with a sudden confidence that fizzed inside her head like rising bubbles. “Can we do it again?” she asked. “Oh, yes.”

  Back next to the hyperdrive, taking her sister’s hand, ready to make the link again, Elissa watched the smile lighting up Lin’s whole face. She concentrated on that, ignored the still-hideous cable that once again trailed out from under her sister’s hair. If we ever do this again, it needs to be without using that freaking disgusting thing.

  Then she shut her eyes and thought of nothing but Lin, of making the link between their brains that had once been the source of everything wrong in her life, the link that had changed her whole world . . .

  The shriek of the hyperdrive went through her. The energy cell flared bright light against her shut eyelids, dyeing them red. Her nails dug into her hand, and this time the small pain anchored her, kept her from dissolving into the blackness, held her steady until the whine died, the light disappeared, and she heard Cadan speak, triumph in every syllable.

  “We made it. We’re there.”

  AT ITS INCEPTION the Interplanetary League had been granted land on Sanctuary, one of the first terraformed planets in the whole star system. Over the decades of IPL’s existence, the buildings of its headquarters had spread and been extended, until it formed a kind of sprawling village all over the southern slope of the hill where it had first been built.

  The window of the room Elissa and Lin had been allocated, in a building halfway up the hill, looked out over a view that could not have existed on any of the more recently colonized planets: a forest of trees that were thousands of years old, with leaf shapes Elissa didn’t recognize and names she had not yet learned.

  Now, on an evening a week after Cadan had landed the Phoenix in the spaceport fifty miles away, she leaned on the railing of the tiny balcony outside their room, watching dustlike seeds and specks of insects drifting in and out of the golden sunlight and long shadows of early evening.

  Behind Elissa, in the bedroom, Lin lay on her bed, feet waving in the air, skimming through college brochures on a handheld screen. She was humming to herself, a tuneless, wordless sound of contentment. Lin was a legal human now. The whole “nonhuman human-sourced entity” thing had been judged universally unlawful two days after they’d landed on Sanctuary, by an emergency summit of IPL officials. Both Lin and Elissa were due to receive compensation. The notification of exactly how much that compensation was going to be had come earlier that day, and Elissa was still kind of reeling from how much they were going to get.

  Lin’s was more than hers—the information that had accompanied the notifications had included the formula the authorities used for working it out: Loss of freedom plus trauma (physical) plus trauma (emotional) multiplied by years affected (directly and indirectly), etc., etc., etc.

  Nothing would ever be enough to make up for what the Sekoian government had done to Lin, but this amount . . .

>   For a moment Elissa’s fingers relaxed where they’d been gripping the balcony railing. Okay, this amount—it was nearly enough.

  But the moment of calm was gone almost as soon as she’d felt it, washed away by a prickling wave of returning tension. Her hands tightened again.

  She was standing here, in this golden sunset light, waiting for an interplanetary call to come through. From Sekoia. From her parents.

  Sekoia had been all over the news for the last week, scrolling across every newsscreen, being narrated by every newscaster, beginning just hours after the Phoenix had landed on Sanctuary.

  Interplanetary League takeover of Sekoian government . . . Space Flight Initiative disbanded . . . Thirty secret facilities uncovered . . . Warning, this broadcast contains material some viewers may find disturbing . . .

  Then the images. Rooms and machines like the ones Elissa had seen in her long-ago visions. Children and teenagers being ushered out of huge buildings, some alert, some blank-faced, sleepwalking out into daylight, the bruises showing starkly on their faces and necks. Worse bruises—and burn marks—on the pale skin of corpses being rapidly zipped into body-bag stretchers.

  Entire Sekoian government deposed and under arrest for contravention of interplanetary law under the Humane Treatment Act . . .

  A takeover. There hadn’t been a whole-planet takeover in her lifetime, but she remembered covering them in history at school. A planet’s economy could survive them, but it was never easy, and it took generations to recover. And unlike most first-grade planets, Sekoia’s economy had only been stable for the last twenty years.

  In the last week there’d already been reports of rapidly rising crime, of growing social disorder—both of which the newscasters were attributing to the catastrophic double loss of both Sekoia’s autonomy and its spaceflight industry. There’d been riots, too, and, as panic buying took hold, projected food shortages.

  This was Elissa’s family’s home. These were the conditions she’d left her family living in.