“I’m glad you’re not dead,” she said.
She felt him smile. “Trust me, me too.” He took the full cup of soup from the dispenser and set it on top of the machine. The display blinked to let him know its next item was on its way: Baked Potato Cheese Meal. “Lissa?”
Even with her nose trying to close itself off from the burned scent that clung to him, there was a ton of comfort just being here with his arm around her. “Mm?”
“Thanks for not freaking out when I sent you all back to the ship. If you’d made a scene . . .”
“You’d have been completely distracted. And you might have ended up dead.”
He laughed a little, quietly, into her hair. “I do most sincerely hope I’d have avoided being quite that distracted. But yeah, pretty much.”
The platter containing Baked Potato Cheese Meal—a steaming, bland white mound that probably, Elissa thought, didn’t retain even a cellular memory of being a real potato—slid out of the machine. Cadan disengaged his arm from Elissa and was digging a fork through it almost before he’d taken it off the tray. She had a sudden memory of him and Bruce as constantly starving fourteen-year-olds, hacking into the programming of the stove in her mother’s kitchen so they could get it to produce unlimited amounts of pancakes. She hadn’t seen Cadan eat like that since he’d finished growing a couple of years ago, but she guessed a high-stress fight like the one he’d just gone through burned a whole lot of extra calories, in fear and adrenaline if not actual physical work.
“Lis? You having anything?”
She screwed up her face. “I’m not trying to, like, diet or something. I just . . .” she reached over to scroll up and down the menu, her throat sticking at the idea of actually eating any of the options on it. “I keep thinking I’ll be sick if I try. Although I guess, like you said once, electrokinesis does use up energy fast, so I really need to . . .”
Cadan swallowed a mouthful of potato so big Elissa had been vaguely surprised he could fit it on the fork. “That was you, then? Both of you?”
She scrolled back to the top of the menu before speaking. She’d assumed he knew. Somehow, having to tell him, having to admit to it, was worse than if he’d already guessed. “Yes.”
“Okay.” His voice didn’t betray anything. He picked up his soup with his free hand, blew on it, and took a gulp.
Her insides cramped. She hadn’t looked up at him and couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice. But if he were feeling the same horror at what she’d done as she was . . . If Lin has made Cadan look at me differently I will never forgive her, never, never, never. . . . “You didn’t know?”
“Well, I wasn’t certain. It made sense, sure, but I’ve seen Lin do some pretty impressive things by herself, too. And . . . I guess . . . it seemed more like her style than yours?”
Elissa opened her mouth to reply, and realized that she was right on the edge of tears. She clamped her mouth shut, clenching her teeth so hard her jaw twitched. Hell. Hell and hell and hell. She had to get control of herself or she was going to cry. And she was damned if she was going to cry in front of everyone—in front of Lin, who’d done this to her. She lifted her cup to take a sip, needing to do something to distract herself, but her hand was shaking enough that a little of the hot liquid slopped over the edge, sploshing onto the floor.
“Lissa.” Cadan put down his own cup and plate, and both his arms came around her, one hand steadying hers. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t . . . ,” she said, her voice a whisper, a thread holding back the tears. “I can’t talk . . . not here . . .”
“That’s no problem,” said Cadan, and then somehow he’d gathered up her drink and his own food and, arm still around her, he was turning her away from the table, turning her so they wouldn’t get a glimpse at her face, steering her toward the nearest door. “Markus,” he threw over his shoulder, “Lissa and I need some fresh air. We’ll be back in thirty minutes, okay?”
Over at the other side of the table, Ivan chuckled. “Fresh air is what you kids call it nowadays, is it?”
Cadan laughed, as if everything were normal, as if the worst thing going on was Ivan trying to embarrass him. “Keep your comments to yourself, would you? You’ve surely seen me go get some fresh air before Lissa came along?”
“Actually, Captain, that’s something I’m glad I always managed to avoid,” said Ivan, a world of suggestion in his tone, and Elissa heard several people break into laughter too as she and Cadan reached the door and he let go of her to slide it open.
“Jeez,” he said, as it snapped shut behind them, and now there was embarrassment in his voice, “I should have known I was opening myself up to that one, huh?”
They went along another of the dim corridors, then out of the building to where floodlights poured over the sand, colorless, and so bright that Elissa’s eyes stung momentarily.
Cadan set their sort-of meal down on the sand and dropped to sit beside it, picking his fork up from where it had been standing upright in his potato plate. He patted the ground beside him, and Elissa sat. She picked up her cup, then put it back on the sand and hugged her knees to her chest.
“Tell me,” Cadan said.
Where she’d moved the cup, the edge of spilled chocolate on the bottom of it had left a semicircle of damp stickiness in the sand. She ran her finger along it, pushing the sand up to cover the sticky line. “It was both of us,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t want to. Lin”—she spread her hand, digging each fingertip under the sand, still warm from the heat of the day—“Lin made me.”
She heard hesitation in Cadan’s voice. “You mean, like when they were doing the procedures on her and she dragged you into going through them with her?”
“No.” What Cadan was talking about—that had happened, and it had caused the pain and blackouts that had wrecked three years of Elissa’s life. But she’d never blamed Lin for it—it had been involuntary, a terrified, automatic reaction to pain that the human body wasn’t meant to bear.
“No, not like that. She . . .” Elissa swallowed. It should feel like a relief to be telling someone, but it didn’t. It felt like revealing an awful, shameful secret. “She exploded that first ship herself, and then she was trying to do the same with the next one. But she couldn’t, she was running out of strength. She asked me to help her. I mean, no, she didn’t really ask, she put her hand out—I knew what she needed me to do.”
She stopped, turned the cup around and around, screwing it into the sand. “I said no. I couldn’t. I know they were attacking us, and I know it was pretty much self-defense, but I—I just . . .”
“It’s okay,” came Cadan’s voice above her bent head. “It’s not a little thing, to kill someone, even if it is self-defense.”
She hadn’t known if he’d understand. Tears burned in her eyes and she blinked them away. “So I couldn’t. I said no. I said sorry. And she”—all at once, it was as if a huge fist closed on her insides, making her belly burn and tighten—“she said she was sorry too. And then she grabbed me, she wouldn’t let me go. She forced the link, and then she used me to help her explode the second ship.” Within her, everything cramped, the huge fist clenching tight. “I felt it happen. I felt what she was feeling—the triumph. And now—”
She rose to her knees, shaking all over, her voice cracking. “Now it’s in my freaking memory! Now I know what it’s like to kill someone! Even though I wasn’t the one who intended it, I wasn’t the one who did it. I don’t want that memory in my head!”
“No,” said Cadan, a single syllable, very calm.
Now that the words had come, they wouldn’t stop. Elissa knelt in front of him, still shaking, words falling over one another and tangling together, gesturing with wide jerky movements, punctuation to words that by themselves would never be enough to convey what she needed him to understand.
“It’s not like she doesn’t know! I said, way back, I’m not okay with killing people.
I get, I get how if it’s self-defense, that sometimes someone might have to do it. But I said no. I told her I couldn’t. It wasn’t like she panicked and didn’t realize—it wasn’t like how she used to reach out to me when she was in tons of pain and she was too desperate to know what she was doing. I said no. I said no, and she knew I was saying it, she knew. She said sorry and then she did it anyway!”
She threw her hands out, fury pouring through every nerve, so fiercely that it felt as if her fingers would throw sparks as she moved. “That’s not sorry! It’s not sorry if you do it anyway! It doesn’t freaking count!”
“I know.”
“And what if she does it again? If I can’t trust her, if she—” She broke off. She dropped her hands to her lap, fingers winding tight around one another. “I don’t want to be scared of her, Cadan. I was, to begin with, but I haven’t been for ages. I got so I was sure I could trust her—I knew she wouldn’t hurt me on purpose. But this time . . . she did hurt me. On purpose. And I . . .” This time her voice trailed off before she got herself together and carried on.
“I went through everything to keep her as my sister. When I thought she was going to die, when she was going to put the Phoenix into hyperspeed by herself—I knew what it would be like to lose her, I knew if she died it would . . . like, leave me hollow. I knew I wouldn’t be a whole person ever again. But, oh God, if this is the sort of thing she’s going to do . . . how can I live with it?”
She ran out of words, finally, and as if it had been just their energy holding her up, she felt herself fold, her head dropping so her ponytail flopped forward, brushing past the side of her face to hang into her lap.
Cadan didn’t speak.
After a minute Elissa slanted a look up at him. “Say something helpful.”
A smile touched his mouth. “Lis . . . God, like I have a clue how to manage this kind of thing? She . . . Lin doesn’t react like ordinary people, you know that.”
“Yeah. But this—it’s so beyond the usual ‘not ordinary’ you have to get used to with her. This is my mind, and she just . . .”
“Reached into it. I get you.” Cadan laid the fork carefully along the middle of the scraped-clean plate, then began to roll the plate up around it, activating the process that made the cellular structure of both plate and fork collapse, pushing the air out from between each cell so that it became a pencilslim cylinder, ready for disposal.
“Do you think she sees it like that, though? Like your mind and hers, totally separate?” He glanced down at the quill of compressed material in his hand. “I mean, if she sees it as one structure, and you see it as still a plate and a fork, all separate . . .”
His eyes met hers, and a trace of self-consciousness slid over his expression. “Okay, so that’s not the neatest analogy.”
“It makes sense, though. Kind of. But she did know it was wrong—she said sorry.”
“Well, it’s not like I think she didn’t know it would piss you off. But, you know, if you and I were living in a halfway normal world, if we were dating like normal people, I’d say sorry if I knew I was going to break a date. But it wouldn’t be the same sort of sorry I’d say if I was—” He broke off. “Okay, this is definitely not a good analogy. I was going to say if I was going to cheat on you, but I wouldn’t cheat on you, so I wouldn’t need to say sorry in the first place.” A flush spread across his face. “Yeah, I’m saying this all wrong. I think I’ll stop.”
Elissa’s stomach did a little flip. It wasn’t often that Cadan looked vulnerable—he was pretty good at being Mr. Calm-and-in-Charge whatever the situation. “I get your point,” she said, the corners of her mouth curling upward as her eyes met his.
“Jeez, well, I’m glad you do.”
The sand was becoming cold as the heat of the day withdrew from it. Elissa shifted position, moving to her knees, pulling her hoodie around her so she could zip it up. “So, to Lin, doing that might have been breaking-a-date sorry, but to me it was saying sorry and then . . .”
She dragged the hoodie closer still, tugged the zipper right up to her neck. “And all the same . . . Cadan, it’s still kind of terrifying. If she really thinks of us—me and her—as, like, one mind that’s just sort of split into two halves . . . it gives her the right to do anything—”
“She’s like a child, though, isn’t she? In some ways, at least. She has to be taught things. I mean”—he laughed—“don’t think I haven’t noticed you teaching her just plain good manners.”
Elissa found herself laughing too, leaning against him as he moved so he could put his arm around her again. Whereas her skin was cold, his was still warm, and under his sleeve his arm was warm too.
She’s like a child. . . . If all Lin’s abilities had made Cadan value her more than he did Elissa, he wouldn’t talk about her like that, would he? Okay, so it was petty to even be thinking about that now, with so many bigger issues to worry about, but all the same . . .
“Yeah, I do do that,” she said. “I mean, I feel like I’m nagging her or something, but I just think, if you’re going to live on this planet—or on any planet where that kind of thing matters—you have to learn, right? Otherwise you’re always going to stand out as the weird one. And if some people struggle with even seeing you as human . . .”
“No, I’m with you. I get it.”
The crook of his neck, where his collar ended, before the roughness of evening stubble began, was warm and smooth—and didn’t smell of burned fuel. Elissa turned her face into it, breathing him in. “You think it’s just another thing she needs to learn—another thing she will learn, if I explain it to her?”
“I do. You’re too important to her for her not to learn.”
“Okay.” For the first time in hours her chest relaxed, her hands naturally unclenched themselves. Thinking of it as Lin deliberately stamping all over Elissa’s rights and feelings was so much worse than thinking of it as Lin genuinely not getting why it mattered.
“I guess we should go back,” she said. “You said thirty minutes. . . .”
“And they’re not up yet.” She felt his cheek move as he smiled. “And see how romantic it is out here with the carcasses of flyers lying all over the place.”
“Oh, completely romantic.” She thought back to what he’d said, his messed-up analogy of a few minutes ago. “Cadan, if we had started dating when everything was normal, where would we have gone out to? Like, for our first date?”
“Hm.” He shifted, his arm loosening where he held her, then tightening again. “On the base, the guys with girlfriends . . . well, the ones without inherited membership of the Skyline Club, ’cause obviously if they had that, they went there . . . there was an entertainment complex a few minutes away. Cinemas . . . that underwater restaurant . . . oh, and those gardens that only open at night, the Starlit Park?”
“Oh, I’ve heard of it.” She leaned against him, shutting her eyes, enjoying the idea of what they could have had, if they hadn’t gotten their wires crossed a million times, if he hadn’t thought she was spoiled and she hadn’t thought he was arrogant. . . .
She hadn’t really dated at school. The pain and visions had taken over her life, making her popularity dwindle, marking her as weird. But if Cadan had known what was going on, he would have understood. She’d been a whole lot weirder when she’d come on board the Phoenix, after all—running from the police, desperate to rescue the Spare sister neither of them had known she had. And if that hadn’t put him off . . .
“Would you have taken me on your skybike?” she asked. “Or would we have borrowed one of our parents’ beetle-cars?”
Cadan laughed. “Would you have gone on my skybike?”
“I might have.”
“Oh, come on.” He was still laughing, bending his head to drop a kiss on her hair. “I just can’t stretch that far. Your mother would never have let you.”
The alternate world taking shape in her mind fell apart, too insubstantial to cope with the touch of reality.
; She felt her shoulders hunch, drawing her into herself, away from him. Had he really needed to say that? Couldn’t he have let them spin out the fantasy a little longer?
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry. The thing is . . . I can’t even really imagine us starting to date back then. And trying to picture the specifics . . . my brain just won’t let me leap that far.”
Something tightened inside Elissa. She swallowed. “You’re saying . . . if it wasn’t for everything that’s happened, we’d never have—never gotten together at all?”
“No. I guess . . . I’m just saying I don’t know. It’s difficult to imagine how we would, don’t you think?”
“No,” she said, hearing a mulish note in the word that reminded her suddenly of Lin. “When we spent any real time together, when we got to know each other, it took hardly any time—why couldn’t it have done the same back then?”
Reticence threaded through Cadan’s voice. “Well, that’s why, isn’t it? We weren’t spending any real time together. It wasn’t until we saw each other out of context that we were able to get to know each other. How would we have done that with me training and you dealing with—with everything you were dealing with?”
“Okay, what if I hadn’t been dealing with that? What if I’d never got the visions and stuff?”
“Lis . . .” He pulled her around enough so he could look into her face. “Come on. That’s a whole alternate universe you’re asking about. How do I know? And why does it matter? Like you said, the minute I did get to know you, I fell.” A little smile curled the corner of his mouth, crept into his eyes. “So hard it took my breath away. Isn’t that enough?”
Elissa flushed all over, a sudden shiver like electricity dissolving the tightness within her. “Yes,” she said.
Cadan bent his head to hers, that little smile still warming his eyes. When he kissed her, she lost her own breath. And it didn’t matter what would have happened in an alternate universe, or even in a universe with a slightly different order to events. What mattered was that he’d fallen for her now.
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