Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  But when their thirty minutes were up, and Cadan pulled her to her feet, tucking the hair that had come loose when he ran his hand into it back behind her ears, when they went back toward the building, still the question nagged at the back of Elissa’s mind.

  If her life hadn’t changed so catastrophically, if she and Cadan hadn’t been basically forced to work together, would they have just continued as they always had, their paths only crossing enough to annoy each other?

  As far as I was concerned, I was in love with him when I was thirteen. Okay, it wasn’t the same as it is now, but it was still something. For him, it never happened till we were thrown together. If it hadn’t been for that, would he ever have looked at me and seen what he does now? Ever? Ever?

  By the door to the building, Cadan paused to look down at Elissa. “You don’t have to come see everyone again. We’ll be sleeping back on the ship anyway. If you want to just go there now, not deal with anything else tonight . . . ?”

  The suggestion brought a wave of relief so intense she felt her shoulders slump. It wasn’t kind, leaving Lin hanging on longer, wretched because Elissa was angry with her, but . . . ugh, I just can’t do any more big conversations. If I can just go get some time by myself, maybe go to bed without having to see her again tonight, I’ll wake up with more patience—I’ll be able to explain it properly.

  It was an excuse. She knew it really, at the back of her mind. It wasn’t about explaining it properly—it was about not having to explain it now.

  She didn’t care. She shut off the thought of Lin’s face the way it had looked when Elissa walked past her at the dining table, the confusion and distress in her twin’s eyes, the knowledge that—as Cadan had said—Lin was in some ways like a child, and a child needed teaching.

  She glanced up at Cadan. “I could do without Ivan’s comments.”

  He gave a wry smile. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” A spark of amusement lit his eyes. “Hey, we should be glad we didn’t start dating back when life was normal. If Ivan is bad, can you imagine what Bruce would have been like?”

  She managed a smile. “Oh please, I don’t want to imagine.” As he turned to walk over to where the Phoenix lay, she was glad he wasn’t watching her expression, glad he didn’t see the hastily manufactured smile fade. It was stupid to feel the words like a careless touch on sore skin, stupid to let them wake the shrill insecurity she’d managed to suppress. He loves me now. What does it matter what would have happened if everything were different?

  She took a step after him, and again the guilt came, the drag back toward where she knew Lin waited, confused and hurt. She pushed it away. It’s not like I’m never going to deal with it. I’m just going to deal with it later.

  Behind her, metal rasped on metal as the door slid open. Lin’s voice sounded from inside the corridor, shaky with tears. “Lissa?”

  Oh. So, after all, she was going to have to deal with it now.

  ELISSA TURNED around. Lin stood just inside the doorway, her toes lined up where the edge of concrete met the sand, as if she couldn’t step outside without Elissa’s invitation. She was shivering, her arms wrapped around herself, her lips bloodless.

  “I’m sorry,” she said before Elissa could speak. “I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry I made you angry, I’m sorry I made you not want to talk to me.” Her words fell over one another, shaking as much as she was shaking. “I don’t know how to make it okay, I don’t know what to do, but if you tell me I’ll do it. I’ll fix it. I’ll make it better. Please stop being angry. Please tell me what I have to do.”

  For a minute they stared at each other. For a minute everything—the hot metallic smell of fuel residue, the gritty breath of the wind, the floodlights that cut the night into harsh-edged shadows—combined to tip Elissa into a sensation of déjà vu so intense it was like flashing back to the moment she’d first met Lin.

  That had been like this too—this beyond-strange feeling of staring into a face that was at once entirely familiar and utterly alien. I know you, but I don’t. I don’t understand what you are, how you think, why you’re here. . . .

  There were tears in Lin’s eyes, unshed, a gleam in the harsh, colorless lights.

  The moment broke. Elissa wasn’t looking at a weirdly alien-familiar face. She was looking at her sister, her twin, someone whom she might not understand, but whom she knew, whom she loved.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and with the words, with the deliberate step away from anger, the remorse she’d been trying not to feel rushed over her. I shouldn’t have left her like that, not understanding why, not knowing if I’d ever speak to her again. A few minutes, while I got myself together, was okay—that was fair. But leaving her for all this time, that was just cruel. And I knew it was. I knew and I wouldn’t listen.

  Lin was shaking her head, all vehemence and panic. “It’s not okay. You’re angry and you won’t talk and I don’t know how to fix it. But I will, Lissa, I will fix it if you tell me—”

  “Lin, it is okay. I’m talking to you. I’m sorry I didn’t before. I know you don’t understand.”

  In the corner of her vision as she spoke, Cadan was moving quietly, tactfully away into the shadows along the building. A few seconds more and a farther door clunked shut.

  “I won’t do it again,” Lin said. “I won’t use my power like that, I won’t make you help me—”

  “Lin, listen. I was going to explain—”

  Lin shook her head again. “You don’t have to explain. I’ll just promise. I’ll just promise not to do it—”

  “Do what? What are you promising not to do?”

  “Any of it. All of it. Anything that makes you angry—”

  “Lin, come on. You can’t promise if you don’t understand exactly what it was.” Elissa caught back a sigh before her sister heard it. This—Lin promising not to do something almost in the same breath as she admitted she didn’t know what she’d done—it would be funny if it weren’t so awful. The thought came, as it had before: No one should matter that much to someone.

  “It was you using the link,” she said. “I don’t blame you for attacking the ships yourself—I’m not angry about that. It was you using the link, making me attack the ships with you, when I’d said I didn’t want to. You need to not do that again. Like, ever.”

  “Okay. Okay. I won’t.” Lin’s words tumbled over the end of Elissa’s sentence. “I won’t do it again.”

  “I don’t know if I can even explain why it matters so much. . . .”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “No, I’m going to, I just can’t think of how right now.”

  Lin shook her head. “You don’t need to. I won’t. I won’t do it again. I didn’t know it would make you so angry. I know now. I won’t do it again.”

  Elissa suppressed another sigh. It would be easier to just leave it at that, to avoid tangling herself up in explanations and analogies that would never quite fit. But she couldn’t. Partly because if Lin didn’t grasp why she shouldn’t, Elissa couldn’t be sure that, under stress, she wouldn’t do exactly the same thing again. Partly . . . oh, it just wasn’t fair to ask Lin to do things if she didn’t know why. It wasn’t fair to get her to obey rules that—to her—seemed arbitrary, out of nothing but fear of making Elissa angry. Lin might sometimes seem like a child, but she wasn’t one, and it wasn’t fair to treat her as if she were.

  Elissa took a breath, thinking of how to get Lin to relate, thinking of the right words. “I want to explain,” she said. “Listen, you know how you feel about being, like, held down—controlled?”

  Every one of Lin’s muscles seemed to tighten. “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s kind of what I feel about you linking us when I said not to.”

  Lin’s head snapped up. “No you don’t. That’s not how it was! You don’t feel that!”

  Anger flashed over Elissa, heating her hands, her face. Don’t you tell me how I feel!

  She set her teeth against showin
g it, forced it down. “I know that’s not how it was. I know what they did to you was so much worse. I’m saying, it’s—kind of—how it felt. To me.”

  Lin’s face was uncomprehending, her eyes confused. “But it can’t have. Those people—I hated them. I would never have let them touch me if I’d had the choice. You—you don’t hate me.” Her voice quavered suddenly.

  Even through the anger she was still fighting not to show, Elissa couldn’t bear to leave Lin unreassured. “Of course I don’t hate you. Lin, I’m not saying you’re like them—”

  “And I’ve linked to you a million times, and it never made you angry before. Not even when it hurt you.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m saying I know it wasn’t the same—you weren’t acting the way they did. But it’s how I felt.”

  “Even though”—Lin shook her head as if trying to shake the words into a pattern that made sense—“it’s so much smaller? Even though it was just once, and it was to help us, and—”

  “Yes.” The anger Elissa was trying to keep back escaped into her voice, giving it a broken-glass edge. “It doesn’t feel so much smaller to me.”

  “Okay.” Lin frowned. Her eyes met Elissa’s. “I don’t get it. I’m sorry. I get that it matters to you, though, and like I said, I don’t want you to be angry. I’ll try.”

  “No. Not you’ll try. That’s like me saying that I’ll try . . . oh, I don’t know . . . that I’ll try to not to drop a nutri-machine on your head.”

  Their eyes met. Lin’s lips curled upward at the corners before she forced them back to a somber expression. Elissa’s own lips twitched.

  “No ‘trying,’ ” she said. “Just no. Just you won’t do it.”

  “I’ll—” Lin broke off, then nodded. “Okay. I won’t do it.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes. Yes. I promise.”

  “Thank you,” said Elissa. Inside, she was still a jumble of residual anger and pain—and a horrible, out-of-control feeling that nothing in her life was quite working how she wanted it to—but, faced now with the need and vulnerability on her twin’s face, the only thing she could do was push it all aside, let it wait for later when she could deal with it. “And Lin, listen, I shouldn’t have—”

  She broke off. Lin wasn’t listening. Or at least she wasn’t listening to Elissa. She’d tilted her face upward, the floodlights slicking the residue of tears on her cheekbones with a pale gleam. “A flyer,” she said.

  Elissa was dragging open the door of the building before she knew she was moving. Not again. They can’t be coming back so soon. Lin just promised . . . but I don’t know, I can’t trust that she won’t crack under that pressure again. . . .

  The door stuck. Elissa dug her heels into the soft sand and wrenched sideways at it, and it came free. Then she was running back down the corridor, Lin at her heels.

  The door to the dining area opened more smoothly, free from drifting grains of sand creeping into its mechanism, and they shot into the room. Faces turned, the sound of conversation died.

  “What is it?” The question came in several different voices, each one charged with urgency, but it was Cadan whom Elissa answered.

  “A flyer.” If they’d been in private, she’d have added Lin says so, but not within earshot of everybody, not without knowing how they’d react to hearing that someone with electrokinesis was among them.

  All over the dining area, people surged to their feet, grabbing up food platters and half-full cups, making for the exits that were marked with green emergency arrows.

  Cadan was halfway across the room. “The ship. Both of you, get to the ship. Felicia, Markus—”

  Lin interrupted. “It’s not attacking.”

  “How do you know?” Although Cadan spoke sharply, he dropped his voice so his words didn’t reach beyond the twins. “Lin, is it armed?”

  “It has firepower, but it’s not . . .” Lin automatically lowered her voice to the level Cadan had used, screwing up her eyes as she tried to explain. “It’s not . . . it’s not active. I don’t know if they use codes like us, but . . . whatever they use, they haven’t.”

  Cadan frowned for a second, making sense of the confused sentence. “You’re saying it’s not a danger to us?”

  “I don’t know that,” said Lin, sounding indignant, forgetting to keep her voice low. “It might be a danger. All I know is—”

  “That it’s not going to be firing on us?” Cadan sounded as if he were fighting with both irritation and amusement. “That’s fine, that’s all I—”

  But now Miguel interrupted him. He’d been one of the people—like those in pilot uniforms, Elissa noticed now—who hadn’t fled the room. He’d pulled a handheld out of his pocket instead, unfolded it to four times its size, and had been scanning it, his head tipped sideways to catch the signals—messages?—coming through the earpiece he wore. But he’d obviously still picked up on what Cadan and Lin were saying.

  “She’s right,” he said. His voice was blank, and as he raised his head from the handheld screen, his gaze rested on Lin with incredulity. “What the SFI were using them for . . . what people have been saying since . . . we knew there must be some kind of psychic energy. But . . . that? Is that what she can do—read electronic information?”

  Cadan’s eyes, full of sudden rueful amusement, met Elissa’s. One of the things she can do. The words hovered, unspoken. “Yes,” Cadan said.

  Miguel gave him a sharp glance. “And the other Spares?”

  “I don’t know.” A pause. Cadan spread his hands. “Genuinely. I don’t.”

  After a moment Miguel nodded, accepting it . . . or choosing to let it go. “Anyway,” he said, “she’s right. It’s okay. They’re sending us their signal. It’s IPL.”

  When Elissa and Lin got outside, the flyer was just coming into view. The cloud cover had cleared since earlier, and the flyer was a dark shape against the stars, tipped with light at the end of its wings, its tail. It described a huge lazy circle overhead, curving down, filling the night with the sound of its engines, and, almost before Elissa had grasped that it had come—that they had come—it had touched neatly down on the landing space at the far end of the base. For a moment it stayed in the position in which it had landed, belly down, wings out, not much different from an airplane in miniature, then its nose lifted and the whole ship tipped up until it was angled toward the sky, ready for instant take off.

  Elissa had seen official IPL craft back on Sanctuary—both the ships built for spaceflight and the flyers for use within planetary atmospheres—but she hadn’t seen that particular mechanism in action before. She glimpsed Markus’s approving, lifted eyebrows, and the appreciative smile curling one corner of Cadan’s mouth.

  She did recognize the sleek, distinctive shape, and the broad white stripe that ran over nose, wings, and tail, reflecting brilliantly in the floodlights that came from the base. IPL’s aircraft had been modeled, so people said, after a type of bird, long extinct, its name forgotten, one of the species that hadn’t survived the emigration from Old Earth. A bird that had, apparently, once served as a symbol of peace.

  The symbol might have had more power, thought Elissa—a random, out-of-nowhere thought—if it weren’t for the guns that edged each side of the ship’s underbelly. But she wasn’t stupid enough to think peace could come without firepower. And in the place Sekoia had become, and with people intent on hurting her and Lin and Cadan and the crew, she couldn’t pretend that the sight of all that weaponry—all that protection—didn’t send relief flooding through her.

  Now the crew of the Phoenix could be absorbed into the larger structure of IPL. They’d share their security, be directed to the places where they could actually help, not just be thrown into reacting as they had today.

  We’re not ready to be solo heroes. At least, I’m not, and Lin can’t be allowed to try.

  Under the wing of the flyer, the edges of a doorway opened in what had looked like an unbroken silver-colored surface. Two
armed officials—their identical white uniforms and close-fitting helmets meant that Elissa couldn’t tell if they were men or women—jumped out and came to attention on either side of the doorway. A smaller—much smaller—figure followed them.

  From behind Elissa, the handheld that Miguel must have brought out with him beeped, a peremptory sound. Elissa turned her head in time to see him tap it in order to accept the call.

  A voice came through, very clear. “IPL flyer Savior, licensed for active duty on Sekoia, calling former SFI property eighteen-forty-twenty-two. Do you read me?”

  “Reading you,” said Miguel. His voice was flat. What must it be like, to have been abandoned out here, fending off harassment and attack, afraid all the time that this might be the one that destroys your power or water sources, and then, the moment we arrive, IPL swoops in?

  The voice repeated a string of letters and numbers that Elissa recognized as having the pattern of a security code. “Do we have a match, eighteen-forty-twenty-two?”

  Miguel took a moment to answer, his gaze moving over the handheld. He raised his head. “All matched up.”

  “Cadan David Greythorn, please take the handheld and step forward until you’re at least three feet clear of all other persons.”

  Cadan obeyed, head up so he could look straight across to where the figures stood by their craft.

  “Please enter the first six digits of your ID number into the handheld.” A pause while Cadan did that, too. “The last six digits of your ID number will now appear briefly on the handheld. Please confirm if they’re correct.”

  “They are correct.” A whine of sudden interference obscured his words, and a series of fuzzy lines chased one another across the screen.

  “Would you repeat that, please?”

  Cadan said the words again.

  “Confirmed. Please step back. Markus Baer, please take the handheld and step forward until you’re at least three feet clear of all other persons.”

  They went through the procedure five more times, for the crew members and for Elissa and Lin. Lin, of course, had no ID number, but instead they requested a thumbprint and that she read a short paragraph that appeared on the screen, and the combination of the two identifiers seemed satisfactory, because as soon as they’d confirmed her identity, the six of them were invited to step across to the flyer.