Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  “All clear,” said Lin, calm and competent at the controls. Cadan turned his head a little to smile at her, and something stabbed through Elissa. Something she tried to push away before she needed to acknowledge what it was.

  Lin was her sister. Her twin, who over the time since they’d met had become more important than anything, more important than Elissa’s home or family. She might be struggling with jab after nasty jab of insecurity, but she was not going to start feeling jealous of her own sister.

  “And we’re there,” said Cadan.

  Elissa dragged her thoughts back under control as the Phoenix banked again. The straps tightened against her body. They’d been in Sekoia’s atmosphere long enough for the ship’s gravity to switch off; it was Sekoia’s own gravitational field she was feeling now.

  The Phoenix skimmed downward, circling as she lost height, and under them the desert floor swooped and slid away. Then a complex of buildings rose up beneath them: stone-built, squat and utilitarian, connected by steel tunnels.

  “Hang tight for landing,” said Cadan, and, as sand rose in clouds and rocket-fuel smoke billowed up around the ship, enveloping the glass and filling, for a moment, the viewscreens with a blur of yellow-tinged smog, the Phoenix touched down on Sekoian soil.

  Lin turned slightly in her chair. The lit-up look she got whenever she did anything to do with flying the ship had dimmed. She was biting her lip, her face tight, and Elissa instantly forgot all other preoccupations.

  If it was weird for her to return to Sekoia, what must it be like for Lin, being back on the planet where she’d been trapped and tortured?

  Elissa unsnapped her harness, wriggled out from the tangle of straps and leaned forward to put her hand on Lin’s shoulder. Lin reached her own hand up to clasp Elissa’s.

  “They’re gone,” said Elissa. “The facility staff, the people who ordered what they did to you—they’ll be in prison by now.”

  Lin’s head moved a tiny bit. “Not all of them.”

  “Yeah, okay, not all. But most. And any of them who haven’t been arrested yet—they’ll be keeping a completely low profile. They’re not going to want to come near us.”

  Behind them, Ivan the chef, huge and gorilla armed, added, “And they’d be sorry if they did. No one’s going to be touching you girls without your permission, not anymore.”

  Markus laughed, a wordless acknowledgment of what they’d seen Lin do, of what they knew her electrokinesis could accomplish.

  Under Elissa’s hand, Lin’s fingers relaxed a little.

  The sand and smoke cleared. Blue sky and brilliant sun blazed once again through the glass. Cadan ran a quick hand over the controls, turning everything down to maintenance level, a standby setting that would save fuel without shutting the ship down entirely. They’d all learned over the last few weeks not to make any premature assumptions about safety.

  Which was just as well, because when they’d gone through the dilating door that led from the cabin, climbed down the narrow staircase, then through two more safety doors and an external air lock, and emerged into bright, dusty sunlight, they found themselves surrounded by an armed crowd.

  CADAN’S, MARKUS’S, and Felicia’s hands flashed to their own weapons, but the crowd’s leader was quicker. There was a gun in his hand, a real gun, steel-loaded, not the short-range blasters spaceship crews carried. He held it leveled at Cadan’s face.

  “Drop your weapons.”

  The crew obeyed. Next to Elissa, Lin went tense. Elissa didn’t dare make any movement that could be construed as a move for a weapon—like she’d have one—or she’d have stretched out a hand to clasp her twin’s. How did they get here so fast? The crowd must have come from the buildings, of course, but she would never have expected them to move so quickly—or to react like this.

  “We’re not a threat,” said Cadan steadily, straightening from laying his blaster on the sand. “Look at the ship. It’s one of SFI’s. You can see we’re not pirates.”

  The man gave a bark of laughter. “Like pirates are all we’ve got to worry about? Do you even know what planet you’ve landed on?”

  Cadan kept his hands up and open, an unthreatening posture. “I can see it’s not the same planet I left a few weeks ago.”

  “A few weeks? And you’ve chosen to come back now?” The man’s lips curled into what was nearly a smile, although the gun stayed pointed at them. He was about Elissa’s father’s age. He looked rough edged, unshaven and not altogether clean, like she’d always imagined criminals, illegal immigrants, but he couldn’t be either—his accent was that of the upper sections of Sekoian society, and his manner seemed one accustomed to authority. “This must be quite the homecoming.”

  Cadan grinned a little. “You could say that.”

  “Do they know, out there? Do they know anything of what’s going on in our world?” Grim lines drew themselves into his face.

  “They did about a month ago,” said Cadan. “I have no way of knowing what the coverage is like now.”

  A stir, a low-level angry mutter, came from the crowd. Elissa caught scraps of speech. “. . . betting they don’t.” “. . . think that’s all? I’m betting they know and they just don’t care.”

  “So what are you doing here?” the man asked. “Your ship’s SFI, and you’ve got the SFI look so I’m inclined to believe it—what the hell are you doing coming back here?”

  “My family’s here,” said Cadan. It was the truth, but only part of the truth, and he made sure not to look at either of the twins as he said it. Tension hummed within Elissa. These people—they were armed, and pretty hostile so far. If they found out who she and Lin were, that they were the twins who’d precipitated the whole situation, what would their reaction be? Elissa’s family had accepted IPL’s offer of relocation within days of the takeover, getting them out of the reach of possible reprisals from a furious population. And they’d been at risk just for being related to her and Lin. If discovered, she and Lin would be at a whole lot more of a risk.

  They’d talked about it—she and Lin, Cadan and the crew—before they made the final decision to return. If the twins’ names or faces had ever actually appeared on the newcasts that had gone out all over the star system, Elissa wasn’t sure she’d have dared to come back.

  Given the supersensitive nature of the situation, though, as well as Elissa and Lin’s underage status, interplanetary protection agreements had come into effect, agreements that had extended to the whole of the crew. In all the newscasts Elissa had seen before they left Sanctuary, the Phoenix had been referred to only as an “SFI-owned ship,” and Cadan as a “young SFI pilot.” Sometimes, depending on the channel, “a young maverick pilot”—and once, “a young heroic pilot.”

  Elissa knew she couldn’t count on their identities staying secret forever—at some point there was bound to be an information leak—but at least they weren’t returning to Sekoia as instant celebrities. And they’d taken their own precautions. Lin had kept her fake tan and had rebleached her hair, continuing to wear it swinging sleek and straightened around her face, a contrast to Elissa’s tumble of dark waves. It was impossible to conceal all the things that made them identical, but they’d done their best to ensure they didn’t betray themselves by being mirror images.

  “Your family? So you’ve come to get them out?” the man asked Cadan.

  Elissa sensed Cadan stiffen, and as his tension reached her, she saw the Phoenix how this crowd must see it—as an escape route from a world tearing itself apart. If they forced Cadan to take them on board, forced him off the planet, and if in the meantime the authorities shut off airspace over the whole of Sekoia, then they might never get back. They might never find out what was happening to Cadan’s family, they might never be able to help avert their world unraveling into chaos.

  “Not exactly,” said Cadan.

  “Then what? No—forget it.” The man made a gesture so impatient it hovered on the edge of anger. “I’m done playing Twenty Questions. Where�
��s your ID?”

  Cadan hesitated—only for a moment, but the man’s grip shifted very slightly on his gun, a silent message.

  “Inner jacket pocket,” said Cadan. Elissa’s throat tightened. They hadn’t planned on this, hadn’t planned on having to give up their identities to anyone other than the IPL authorities.

  “Fine,” said the man. “Undo your jacket and pull it fully open before you reach in, all right? And don’t think we won’t shoot.”

  “I don’t.” Cadan’s voice was dry as he reached for the zip on his dark blue SFI jacket. It crossed Elissa’s mind to wonder why he still wore his uniform, now that SFI was no more. Was it just for situations like this, to give an immediate indication that he wasn’t a pirate? Or was it because, despite everything, despite what SFI had done, he could not yet let go of them, did not know how to see himself as someone other than an SFI employee? He has to. He can’t hold on to something that was false, wrong; he can’t keep feeling he owes them for his training, for his job—not after what they did to Lin.

  But when you’d defined yourself as part of SFI since you were eleven, how long would it take you to let go?

  Cadan flipped the jacket open.

  The man nodded toward him. “Okay, Bryn. Get his ID.” His eyes focused, unblinking, on Cadan’s. “Try anything and I’ll—”

  “Shoot,” said Cadan with a snap. “Yes, I know.”

  Another man—Bryn—stepped forward, keeping to the side, out of the way of the gun, slid two fingers into Cadan’s pocket and pulled out his ID card, then stepped carefully back.

  The first man took it, flipped it over. His eyebrows shot up. He tilted the card away from himself, then sideways, checking the tiny holograms that appeared at different angles, tokens that the card wasn’t a fake, then held it up, shutting one eye to check the glinting edge of the tissue-thin metal sheet within it.

  He gave a sharp look back at Cadan, eyebrows slanting into a frown. “Seriously? Bright young cadet, with the luck to have sole command of a ship and to be safely off-planet for the whole of this crisis? You decided to come back?”

  Cadan watched him, still tense, wary. “Like I said, my family’s here.”

  “You didn’t have strings to pull to get them out?”

  Cadan’s mouth twisted. “You’ll find that off-planet, SFI strings don’t work as well as they used to.”

  The man gave a short laugh. “You’ll find they don’t work too well on Sekoia, either. We have ex-SFI people here, Captain, taking refuge from a city that used to damn well worship them. Here.” He flipped the card back to Cadan, who caught it. The man holstered his gun and threw a glance toward the crowd. “No danger. He’s SFI, all right. Rising star among the cadets, if you can believe it.”

  There was nothing but some wry amusement in his tone. But the other man, Bryn, jerked his head up, staring at Cadan. “Which rising star?”

  “Greythorn,” the first man said, shrugging.

  “Cadan Greythorn? The pilot who went off-grid forty-five days ago? The information-blackout one?”

  The first man frowned. “Yeah, you’re right, that’s the one, isn’t it? Bryn, what—”

  But Bryn’s eyes had left Cadan and swept straight to Elissa and Lin. Elissa saw the second it happened, the second the realization hit him. His gaze flicked from her to her twin, taking in all the similarities that their different hairstyles and clothes had obscured to start with, then he turned to the other man. “It’s him. He’s that pilot. No wonder SFI wanted a blackout on him! He didn’t just go off-grid, he went to IPL. And those two—Miguel, for God’s sake, no danger?”

  For a moment Miguel stared at him. Then his expression changed too, going from realization to shock, and then to horror. He looked back at Cadan. “Tell me you haven’t,” he said.

  “What?” In contrast to the horror in the faces of the other men, Cadan’s expression remained blank. But Elissa knew it was deliberate, a mask over his own emotions.

  Anyone else, if we’d met anyone else, they’d have had no idea which pilot Cadan was. We had to run into SFI people, people who heard about Cadan taking the ship off-grid, people who’d be able to put two and two together. . . .

  “Tell me you haven’t brought them back to Sekoia,” said Miguel. “That runaway girl and her clone. Tell me you haven’t brought them to my camp.”

  Anger scalded through Elissa, eclipsing—for an instant—everything else. Don’t call her a clone!

  “I did bring them,” said Cadan, his voice flat and calm. “Tell me the problem.”

  That stir came again, a ripple of anger, of tension, running through the crowd.

  “The problem?” Miguel made an exasperated sound almost like a laugh. “God, you have no idea, do you?”

  “Like I said, deep space for about a month.” This time a slight snap came though Cadan’s words. “The last newscasts we got were back on Sanctuary. So tell me. We’ve come back to help—tell me what’s been going on.”

  “Help?” Miguel gave that laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “I’d say we’re pretty much beyond help at this point—and when I say ‘we,’ I mean you as well. The best chance you have is to get back on your ship and get back into space. Unless that one ship is the forerunner of a fully functioning fleet, you don’t have anything to offer that’s going to help anyone.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Cadan said. Apprehension prickled up Elissa’s spine. He was talking about her and Lin. Which made sense—that was why they’d returned, to offer their combined power to Sekoia’s space force, to help stop Sekoia sliding into poverty and chaos. But she’d never expected to be offering it under these circumstances, to someone who seemed so sure that by coming back they’d done everything wrong. And although their combined power had saved them before . . . we still don’t understand it. Not properly. We’ve tried to practice, but we didn’t dare do much on board the ship, and the link still comes and goes—it’s not there all the time, and it doesn’t always seem to work the same way. . . .

  “Surprised? Really? You sure it’s not you who’s going to be surprised?” Miguel jabbed his finger toward Elissa and Lin. “You think you’re going to be able to help us? You don’t get back on your ship, you’ll have enough to do trying to keep those kids alive for the next twenty-four hours.”

  Elissa’s stomach dropped. She reached for Lin’s hand and felt her twin’s fingers close tightly around her own.

  “So tell me,” repeated Cadan. His voice had flattened back to calmness. If Elissa hadn’t heard that note in his voice before, if she hadn’t known it was a deliberate closing off of his emotions, she’d have thought he hadn’t heard what the other man had said. He flicked a look toward Elissa and Lin. “They’re in danger? Who from? Most people don’t have SFI inside knowledge—they’re not going to work out their identity as quickly as you did.”

  “She’s a Spare, isn’t she?” Miguel said. “Who isn’t she in danger from?”

  All over Elissa’s back, her skin tightened.

  “There are at least three groups who’ve made it their stated mission to wipe out all Spares,” Miguel continued. “And if the Spares hadn’t been rushed into safe houses, they’d be well on their way there.”

  Cadan made as if to ask something else, but Elissa was ahead of him. The man hadn’t said specifically that anything had happened to Spares yet, but those words—they’d be well on their way there—clanged, a warning bell, in her head.

  “Have they managed it?” she said. “Have they managed to kill any Spares?”

  Cadan took a step closer to her, and his hand settled, warm and steady, on her back.

  Miguel’s expression flickered, suddenly uncertain, as if he were deciding how—or whether—to answer her. Her throat closed, and for a few long, horrible seconds all she could do was wait, speechless, hoping he’d tell her the truth straight out and she wouldn’t have to argue and demand with this awful weight of dread inside her.

  “Some,” Miguel said.

  “How?” He
r throat was still frozen shut. The question came out as scarcely more than a silent movement of her lips.

  “Some were shot. By snipers, we assume, when the Spares were on their way out of the facility where they’d been kept. And some of the flyers taking them to the safe houses have been attacked. Not all of them went down, but . . .” He lifted a shoulder, a gesture that would have looked careless if it hadn’t been for the grim cast of his mouth.

  Falling, trapped, safety programming and parachutes and defenses all useless, all of them going down with you. For a moment Elissa had to screw her eyes shut, concentrate on just breathing. It didn’t do any good to let herself think about it.

  “In—” She had to stop, swallow, start again. “Here? In this city?”

  Miguel shook his head. “Attacks, yes. No deaths.” Then, heavily, “Not so far.”

  Not so far. Oh God, and I agreed to Lin coming back. I agreed to her coming back here, where there are people who want to kill her. They’d known there could be danger, they’d known it, but there was a difference between knowing it as a possibility and hearing—oh God—that people were dying.

  “Why?” came Lin’s voice from beside her, her voice holding all the calm Elissa had tried for and hadn’t been able to manage. “Why are people killing Spares? And who are they?”

  Still cold with shock, Elissa turned her head to look at her sister. Lin looked straight-backed and alert, as if she’d just asked a question to which there was sure to be an interesting answer. How does she do that? She’s just heard that people like her are being murdered, and you’d think she’d found out only that they’re being—oh, given, like, haircuts.