“Sex-and-drugs parties,” interjected Sofia.
“Yeah, that. So they mixed all the parents up and put them in the houses too, as long as they weren’t with their own kids. At least, if they had other kids—other underage kids—they got to take them, too. Which is how we ended up with . . .” He nodded across to where the Greythorns stood. “I guess being his parents puts them as close to the top of the hit list as all of us.”
“Not his sister, though,” said Elissa, thinking aloud.
“He has a sister? Older, right?”
“Yes. She’s married.”
“Yeah, she won’t be major priority, then. Especially if it was her, not her husband, who changed names. I mean, obviously people can connect them, but it makes her less of a target. And, you know, not everyone wants to be swept off into evacuation.”
Sofia leaned forward. “They said—to me, anyway—they were going to move the parents around to put them with their own kids, to meet the Spares, after a bit. But then the threats started, and then the attacks, and they decided they didn’t dare call attention to the safe houses by shipping people back and forth. They were still planning on a whole gradual integration into society, though, once everything sort of settled down.”
Samuel snorted. “Yeah, ’cause that was going to happen.”
“Well, it could’ve, couldn’t it?” Sofia looked back at Elissa and Lin. “Then the attacks got worse. That first terrorist attack, did you hear about it? It was, like, some group called Keep Sekoia Safe or something. People said they were targeting what they thought was a safe house for Spares, although as it happened it wasn’t. I mean, jeez, can you imagine—they ended up killing ordinary Sekoian citizens, exactly the people they said they wanted to protect, which was obviously super clever.”
Elissa blinked. Sofia’s tone was so . . . flippant, as if she were talking about a movie or something that had happened way back in history. As if it weren’t real, as if real people hadn’t been killed. It’s like she’s just enjoying having all the latest gossip or something. I guess, if she didn’t see any of the attacks, if it was just newscasts and stuff . . . it’s not real to her, not yet. When I used to hear about disasters on other planets, human rights abuses, they never seemed totally real to me, either. Not until it was me and Lin they were happening to.
“Anyway,” Sofia continued, “so then they said that we couldn’t be reintegrated into Sekoian society with our Spares, ’cause it’s too obvious what we are if we’re together. And apparently, for some of the Spares, contact with their twins starts to strengthen their psychic abilities, so they start to show more, and that makes them even more obvious. So they were going to relocate just those of us who wanted to stay with our Spares. Moving all the Spares was always going to be a massive operation, they don’t have anywhere near enough personnel to do it easily.”
She shrugged, leaning back, shifting her shoulders to a new position against the wall. “But things just kept escalating, and info kept leaking out about when Spares were going to be moved from one place to another, and the safety of a couple of the safe houses was compromised—they’re being so careful now, it’s completely irritating. So now all the Spares are being relocated, whether they’re with their twins or not.”
She made a face. “And we’re going to end up with a big reunion once we’re off-planet. Fun. I’ve been keeping away from my mother and social events for years. Now there’ll be no escape.”
“So all of you—you did want to meet,” Lin said, the moment Sofia stopped speaking. She leaned forward to look past Elissa, eyes intent on Ady.
Ady’s gaze brushed briefly over Cassiopeia, but she was stirring her coffee, looking all at once as if she’d withdrawn herself from the conversation. “Yeah. All of us who’re here. I mean, I thought I was an only child—my parents weren’t cleared to get a license for a second—and I always thought I’d like a brother. Finding out I had one—well, okay, I was pretty curious as well, so even if I hadn’t wanted a sibling, I’d have wanted to meet him, I guess. But when they told me, when I realized, all this time, I’d had a brother—a brother my age, who I should have grown up with . . .” He looked self-conscious suddenly. “It’s like finding out about something that you didn’t even know was missing, you know?”
Elissa nodded. She did know. “Did you have any idea before?” she asked. “I mean, the link . . .”
“The telepathy? Oh, of course, you have that, don’t you? The news reports—they said that’s how you found each other. Zee and I don’t.”
Elissa blinked at him. “You don’t? Not at all?”
“Nope. Either we never did, or it died off so early I don’t remember. I mean, neither of us remember, do we, Zee?”
As Zee shook his head, Elissa curbed her impulse to look immediately toward the other Spares. Somehow she’d thought, of all the twins in the room, Ady, with his obvious concern for Zee, the way he spoke for him, shielded him, must be one of those for whom the psychic link hadn’t faded with the separation. But if Ady and Zee didn’t have a link, did any of the others?
She and Lin had returned to Sekoia ready to use the combined electrokinetic power of their link to power hyperdrives, but when it came to restoring the whole of Sekoia’s space force, what they had to offer was nothing but the tiniest drop in the ocean. Really restoring it—and, with it, Sekoia’s collapsing economy—would take hundreds of other pairs of Spares and their twins. All the Spares had been chosen because their brains had psychokinetic potential—they were all capable of powering hyperdrives. But it was the telepathic link with their twins that would enable them to do it without unbearable pain—and, eventually, death.
The link had been supposed to die off years ago. She’d known that, for some of them, it would have done so. But surely it couldn’t have died off for all of them?
It must still exist. It stayed for me, despite all the treatments that tried to kill it off. And for my dad. We can’t be the only ones. That wouldn’t make any sense.
She became aware that Zee was watching her. His face was thin, bony, and, unlike his twin’s, curiously static. Without the distraction of changing expressions, his hollow cheeks and the burn marks on his skin were thrown into almost-painful relief.
“They don’t either,” he said, and his gaze shifted toward Sofia and El before returning to Elissa. There was something a little unnerving about that steady regard, and as soon as she could do so without being rude, Elissa looked away.
“We think we used to, though,” Sofia said. “When I met El, it was like meeting someone I’d known years ago. I didn’t remember her, exactly, but it felt like I should remember. And you felt the same, didn’t you, El?”
El nodded.
“And Samuel and Jay—” began Sofia.
“Are freaky,” Ady interrupted.
The word “freaky” made Elissa flinch a little, but when she looked, an anxious reflex action, at Samuel, he was grinning.
“It’s not freaky, it’s superpowered, right?” he said, and Elissa relaxed.
Ady leaned back, arms behind his head, gaze on the ceiling. “There’s really very little superpowered about synchronized eating. I mean, how useful is that going to be in the zombie apocalypse?”
El giggled, sounding, for the first time, like a normal teenage girl rather than someone acting the part of a normal teenage girl.
“Oh God,” said Sofia. “Please not the zombie apocalypse again.” She sent an amused look toward her twin, then a grin across to Elissa and Lin. “Ignore him—he’s going through withdrawal. How many hours a day did you spend plugged into Zombie Uprising, again, Ady? Before all this happened and you had to face the real world?” She put a hand to her mouth, mock-whispering. “Don’t say anything, but I actually think he’s hoping that the government were breeding zombies as another of their little secrets.”
Ady shot upright. “Yeah, yeah. Mock all you want—”
“Oh, we will,” interjected Samuel.
“—but if there is
a zombie apocalypse, your chances of surviving have moved way up just by being in the same building as me. When they rise, you’ll be eating your words—”
“Nah,” said Samuel. “I’ll let myself get bitten just for the pleasure of eating your braaaaiiins.” He bared his teeth, lunged sideways across the couch toward Ady, and knocked a leftover half waffle off Lin’s plate.
“Guys,” said Cadan’s father from across the room.
“Oh my God, Samuel,” said Sofia. “Civilized society, remember? And also need for quiet?” She sent Elissa and Lin another smile as Samuel threw himself back onto the sofa, not looking even a little abashed. “I’m so glad to have more girls, you have no idea. We have not been enjoying being outnumbered. Have we, El?”
The genuine warmth in her expression reached Elissa, and she smiled back. It struck her suddenly, like a fan being switched on, like misty windows clearing to sunlight, that this was not only the first time she’d been with people who were like her sister, it was the first time she’d been with people who were like her.
She still had a million things to worry about, but although they were all still there, some of their weight seemed to evaporate from her brain.
Lin picked up her discarded waffle and dropped it onto her plate. She gave Samuel and Jay a curious look. “So what do you do that’s freaky?”
Which was another good thing about being with people like her—Lin could say something so denuded of social niceties that it was pretty close to being rude, and whoever she was talking to had already met enough other Spares to not even think twice about it.
Samuel shrugged. “Freaky is so totally in the eye of the beholder. We just have this thing—we end up eating at exactly the same rate, and Ady noticed and . . .” He laughed. “Okay, it does look a bit weird. But Ady’s kinda slow at catching up with the whole telepathic link thing—he thinks it’s weird that I knew Jay before I knew about him. Even Sofia and El don’t quite get it, but I . . . I just always had this . . . like this sense in the back of my head, of someone else?” He broke off, a grin lighting his face. “Well, I guess I don’t need to describe it to you guys, do I?”
His smile was infectious. Elissa laughed too, more worry evaporating. Samuel and Jay did have a link. It wasn’t just her and Lin. “Not so much.”
“Well, there you are,” Samuel said. “When it all came out I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what that was!’ ”
Ady cleared his throat ostentatiously. “Ah, full story, please? What I say is freaky is that he thought Jay was his imaginary friend.”
Lin blinked at him. “That’s not freaky. At the facility, they told us that’s what little children do. That’s what was supposed to be happening to our twins—any memories they had of us, they would identify as just memories of having imaginary friends.”
For a moment, the familiar hot, sick rage washed through Elissa. Her stomach and jaw clenched.
“That’s normal, all right,” said Ady. “Sam, though . . .”
“Oh jeez.” Samuel swung a cushion up to throw, saw Cadan’s father was looking over at them, and let it flump onto the ground. “What he means,” he said, “is that I kept my imaginary friend. I got older, and I knew—I thought—he couldn’t be real, but he was so much a part of my life by then that I just couldn’t get out of the habit of talking to him. And I”—his face went suddenly so bleak he looked like a different person—“I didn’t get on well when I tried to block him out, when I stopped talking to him and tried to stop listening as well.”
Next to him, Jay leaned a tiny bit closer. He didn’t say anything, and his arm didn’t quite touch Samuel’s, but all the same Elissa could see the other boy instantly relax. “So I kept him. I didn’t, like, tell anyone, and I thought—privately, you know—that I was probably a bit insane.”
“Didn’t that bother you?” said Elissa.
Samuel’s face warmed again into his usual smile. “Nah. All great artists are insane.”
Ady snorted.
“Are you a great artist?” said Lin.
Samuel lifted a shoulder, deadpan. “I could be.”
“Oh please,” said Ady.
Laughing, Sofia leaned over to shove his arm. “Be nice. He completely could be. He draws, doesn’t he?”
“What about the procedures?” Elissa said, not stopping to think whether it was a horribly tactless question, just wanting to know exactly how much of a link Samuel and Jay had. “If you’re linked that much, what happened when they began?”
Sofia stopped laughing. Silence seemed to drop over them all, despite the sound of conversation from the other side of the room. Elissa’s face burned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not my business—”
“It’s all right,” said Samuel. The bleakness didn’t return to his face, but his expression stiffened a little, and he leaned close enough to his twin that their shoulders touched. And it wasn’t all right. She should never have asked.
“Honestly,” she said, “I’m sorry. I should know better. I don’t like to think about what happened to me—to Lin. I only got it secondhand, but when something hurts like that it’s horrible even just remembering it, I know—”
“Hurts?” said Samuel, frowning.
She broke off and blinked at him. “Yeah. I thought that’s what you were— That’s what I meant—”
“You’re saying it hurt you?”
“Yes. Lin worse, of course, I’m not claiming it was anything like as bad for me—” She stumbled again, confused and kind of embarrassed by the way they were staring at her. “What? What is it?”
“The pain—of the procedures they did on the Spares—it got through to you?” asked Ady.
“Yes.” Frustration prickled over her. “What are you staring at? What about that doesn’t make sense to you?”
Ady spread his hands. “The bit where you felt your sister’s pain? That’s . . . I mean, it’d be out of my experience, anyway, ’cause we don’t have the link. But I never heard about anyone. And Sam . . . you didn’t, did you? Not at all?”
Samuel shook his head. “More to the point,” he said to Elissa, “you did. All the time—all the three years or whatever since it started?”
Elissa nodded, watching the horror dawn in their faces. She didn’t deserve that reaction. It had been Lin, Lin for whom it had been true horror, Lin who, trapped and helpless, had felt the pain firsthand. Unlike Elissa, she hadn’t even had the luxury of thinking it would get better. She’d only survived, only held on to her humanity at all, by reaching out to Elissa, by sharing—although she hadn’t intended it—the pain with her twin. If Jay and El and Zee—and Cassiopeia?—hadn’t had that, how had they survived?
But although the curiosity burned within her, she couldn’t ask that. Couldn’t ask them to go back into those memories.
“It happened to my dad, too,” she said instead.
Sofia stared. “Your father was a twin as well? But . . . his Spare?”
Elissa swallowed. “He died. Like, way back. There’s an operation they did, if the link never burned out, if it was—you know, causing pain, interfering . . . They did the operation on my dad. They were going to do the same—” She broke off. All at once she couldn’t say it. Her hand, almost of its own accord, reached out and found Lin’s.
“What are the odds?” Ady’s voice filled the sudden little silence. “I mean, of having one in each generation like that? And the same . . . strength of the link, I guess, if you felt Lin’s pain, and your dad felt his twin’s?”
“Please, how is that surprising?” Sofia gave Ady a patient look. “Maybe it runs in families. It’s not like freaking SFI was all aboveboard, is it?”
Ady flushed a little. “Oh. Yeah, okay, good point.”
Samuel laughed, buoyant again. It wasn’t like he was impervious to all the bad stuff, thought Elissa. But he seemed super resilient. Was that what it did to you, if you’d deliberately held on to the link with your twin, if you hadn’t even tried to dismiss it, if you’d let it become at lea
st a version of the relationship it would have grown into if the SFI had never interfered?
And growing up with that, with the relationship they should all have had—was that why Samuel, more than any of the rest of them, seemed like someone at ease in his own skin? And why he and Jay seemed so comfortable together? They showed none of the awkward overcaution that marked Ady’s behavior toward Zee, that Elissa knew had characterized the first period of her relationship with Lin.
What Samuel was saying interrupted her thoughts, drew her attention back.
“Wow, you two, you really are like the superheroes among us all, aren’t you? What are you even doing here? We’re all just waiting for the transport to take us off-planet. But you guys got off-planet. Why did you come back?”
Lin grinned, lighting up like she always did when this topic came up. “We’ve come to—”
To help. To save Sekoia. Elissa didn’t know exactly what Lin was going to say, but she interrupted, fast, acting on sudden impulse rather than anything premeditated. “Some of the crew have family still here,” she said. “My family got transferred to Philomel already, but not Cadan’s or Felicia’s. And we have a spaceship—at least, Cadan has a spaceship. We can at least help with transport.” Her hand tightened on Lin’s, trying to send an unspoken message, and it must have gotten through because, although Lin slanted a bewildered look at her, she let whatever she’d been going to say drop, unspoken.
Elissa would have to explain it later, why it had suddenly seemed so important not to go into all the brightly optimistic details of the plans they’d made, and she didn’t even completely know herself. All she knew was that they were here, among real Spares and their twins and, despite all the similarities, they were different from her and Lin, their stories were different, their relationships, even their experiences of what had been done to them. And until she and Lin understood all of that better, they had no business offering what they’d—naively?—felt was their expertise.
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