Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  The thoughts—and not only the thoughts, but the emotions—were so clear, so immediate, that it was several seconds before she realized that they weren’t all hers. She and Lin weren’t touching, there was no crisis to shock them into telepathic connection, neither of them was trying to communicate with the other, and yet, for that instant, she’d heard her twin’s thoughts as clearly as if they were her own.

  The link’s getting stronger. Cold sifted through her, like flakes of crushed ice slipping down through water. She’d thought that earlier today, and had felt—mostly—nothing but awe and triumph. But what they’d done back then—communicating telepathically—it had been deliberate. And she’d known all along which thoughts belonged to whom. This is different.

  The Spares and twins had moved out of the way as the refugees went past. Now, as they moved back, filling the space, Elissa caught sight of Zee.

  Zee’s eyes were fixed on his brother’s face, but not as if he saw him. Not as if he saw anything. His expression was empty. Elissa was suddenly aware of her heart beating in long, slow strokes, as if counting out the time that Zee stood, blank eyed, motionless, his eyes on Ady’s face. Something’s not right. He’s . . . what? Gone into shock? Something like that? Something worse?

  Then Ady moved, turned his head a fraction away, and Zee’s face came immediately awake. Ady glanced at him, said something, and Zee answered, his whole expression entirely normal once more.

  What was that? It can’t have been shock—not real shock, or he’d never have snapped out of it like that.

  The flyer lifted into the air. Suddenly needing to be away, for a moment, from all the Spares, Elissa went to the far end of the flyer, where there were two windows slightly bigger than the narrow, high slits around the rest of the cabin. The flyer was not quite directly above the rooftop now. The refugees were filing onto the fire escape that Elissa could see spiraling down the side of the tower block.

  The crackling whine of a communicator made her jump, then the crackle became words. “Alert. Alert. Come in, Commander Dacre. Come in, Flyer A-Eighty-two.”

  Elissa swung around as, in the cockpit, the flyer pilot put his hand out to the communicator on the dashboard, and as Commander Dacre spoke into her wrist-unit. “Commander Dacre here. You need to call someone else. I’m not equipped to handle any—”

  The voice came through clear and urgent. “No. Danger coming your way. We intercepted an exchange near your sector—one of the terror groups has got hold of details of the nearest safe houses, and you’re near one of them now—”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say it out loud—” Exasperated anger rose into the commander’s voice.

  “No, listen! They think you’re delivering a group there now! They’ve got a ship. You need to get out. Flyer A-Eighty-two, get out now!”

  Beneath Elissa’s feet, the floor tipped as the pilot took the flyer up in a steep climb. She grabbed for a handle, panic fizzing all over her skin. A ship? A ship with weapons? But we’re not armored!

  “Wait,” said Cadan. “If a terrorist group thinks we’ve just dropped off Spares, Commander, it’s not us in the most danger—”

  Elissa jerked back toward the window. The refugees were all on the fire escape now. Between the metal bars were flashes of movement, here-and-there glimpses of the color of a sleeve or pants leg, where the parents and children climbed down toward the ground. Some group—some hate group—thinks they’re Spares. We put them out of the flyer and now someone thinks they’re the Spares, not us—

  Then a shriek cut across every other sound in the world, and the ship came like a lightning bolt out of a clear sky.

  It cut low across the buildings, a silver bullet streaking through the air, and fire rained after it, shattering edges of roofs, sending dust and smoke boiling up in clouds.

  Elissa shrieked herself, hands clamped over her ears, the sound tearing through her brain, terror like ice and fire wiping out every thought. The flyer lurched. She saw Lin’s face, a pale blur in front of her, Lin’s eyes, shocked wide open.

  The flyer lurched again, not climbing this time but ducking below the level of the rooftops. The wall of one of the tower blocks rose before the window she was staring out of.

  Above them, the ship came back in an ear-shattering shriek. But not in pursuit of the flyer. It was focusing its attack on the tower block from which they’d just taken off. The tower block—oh God oh no no no—where they’d left the parents and children.

  And we can’t do anything! The flyer can’t help. It doesn’t have armor or weapons—it can’t do anything.

  She turned, frantic, from the window—but we can’t just leave them like that!—into Cadan’s hands as he reached for her.

  “Cadan,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her over the ship shrieking through the sky somewhere above their heads, over the roar of their own propellers as the flyer’s pilot took them farther down into the shelter between the buildings, knowing he’d have to read her lips to understand her at all.

  His hands closed tightly on her upper arms. “I know.” His lips moved to form the silent words. “I know, Lis. But we have to keep the people on this flyer safe. We can’t help.”

  There was something like despair in his face, but all the same the touch of his hands steadied her, swept away her own horrified despair. We can’t help, he’d said.

  Except we can.

  She twisted out of his hold to look back through the window. It was a storm of dust and smoke out there, rolling down between the flyer and the tower blocks they were moving past. But she could still see the flash of the ship as it made another pass, raining destruction behind it.

  Acting on instinct she hadn’t even realized she’d learned, Elissa screwed her eyes up, focusing on that far-off glint of the attacking ship. Focusing on it both with her eyes and her mind.

  Lin—and I—blew up ships like this one. But we’ve moved things too—we don’t have to destroy. If I can just take hold of it, slow it down, force it away . . . just long enough to give them a chance to escape. We escaped, they can too. . . .

  She reached, focused, feeling her fingers curl up so her nails dug into her palms, reached to take hold of the ship. . . .

  And didn’t. It was like trying to seize a hologram. The fingers of her mind closed on emptiness, went through the image of the ship as if it were made of nothing but air and pixels.

  She tried again, her physical fingers tightening until cramp jabbed through their joints. But this time she couldn’t even reach halfway to the ship. It was like that moment in a bad dream when you realize your legs won’t move, or your hands fumble endlessly over some simple, everyday task.

  But I’ve done this before! I did do it, did it myself. I wasn’t just watching Lin. I was there, I was involved.

  She tried for a third time, and this time her mental image of the ship wavered and flickered, and then disappeared. She hadn’t even been really reaching for it in the first place. Whatever power her mind possessed, she hadn’t been accessing it. Not this time. Not at all. It had been nothing more than her imagination.

  The ship made another air-splitting pass above them. Exploding masonry showered and rattled all across the body of the flyer.

  Eyes still fixed on the spark-netted dust seething outside the window, Elissa reached out a hand. Lin. Lin, help me.

  No answer came. No familiar hand clasped hers.

  Elissa turned. Lin was there, next to Cadan, fingers locked on to a grab handle. She was as white as if all the blood had left her body. Her eyes were huge. She’s shocked. But it’s okay—if she helps me, if we help them, we can fix this, we can make it okay again.

  “Lin,” she said, speaking out loud, knowing that if Lin didn’t manage to read her lips it wouldn’t matter, because she’d still hear the words in her mind. “Help me. I can’t do it by myself. I can’t save them without you.”

  Lin’s eyes met hers, and they weren’t shocked. They weren’t shocked at all. They were as calm as the sk
y had been before the ship had exploded out of it.

  “No,” she said.

  Elissa stared at her, uncomprehending, her hand still stretched out. “Lin, they’re going to die.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Lin. There are people there.” For an instant the words echoed in her mind, sparking the beginning of a memory.

  “I know.” Lin shook her head, still calm. “I’m not helping them.”

  “But they’re people—” She broke off. The memory came clearly now. The memory was from when she’d found out that it had been Lin who’d set the fire that had enabled Elissa to escape the bedroom where her parents had locked her. Once again she heard her own voice, shrill with horror: There are other people in that building. There’s safety measures and all that stuff, but people die in house fires all the time. You could have killed them! Then Lin’s voice, confused, not getting why Elissa was upset: Why should I care about that?

  That had been the first time Elissa thought the word “psychopath.” The first time she’d looked at this strange image of herself she’d just met and found the question appearing in her mind: What if there’s a very good reason they kept her locked up?

  But she’s changed! Elissa thought now. She’s different. She doesn’t see other people—non-Spares—as different from herself.

  “Lin,” she said, helpless, desperate, the world as she thought she knew it cracking to pieces all around her.

  Lin shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lissa.” She held up her hands, and Elissa saw that despite her calm they were shaking. For a moment she thought it was distress, and hope flared through her—she doesn’t mean it the way I thought she did, it’s just that she’s really upset, of course she’s going to help me—before she realized the tremor of her sister’s hands wasn’t distress, but only fatigue.

  “I would do it for you, because you wanted me to,” Lin said, “if it wasn’t going to hurt me when I did. I’ve been saving people all day. I hurt all over. And half of them weren’t even”—for a moment the calm of her expression broke like masonry cracking, and pain like dust, like smoke, clouded her face—“grateful. I’m not going to keep on hurting myself for people who wish I’d stayed in the facility. I’m not hurting myself for them.”

  The ship screeched past again. Although she knew it was impossible, Elissa seemed to hear other shrieks beyond it—human voices, children’s voices, screaming for help. Other sounds followed it, sounds she couldn’t really be hearing but that were no less horrible for being in her imagination only: the grinding of metal as the fire escape broke, as it ripped away from the wall and fell in a clanging tangle, fragile human bodies being carried with it.

  “Lin,” she said again.

  And again her sister shook her head, stepping back, stepping away. “No. No, Lissa. Not this time.”

  A last shriek through the air, a last clattering and shattering of brick and cement, a last cloud of dust that blocked out the sunlight. Then the ship had gone, streaking into the distance, and there was just the roar of propellers as their flyer rose from where it had sheltered, rose from the dust and the smoking buildings, rose away into the sunlight and the clear blue sky.

  Elissa didn’t want to look back. She told herself not to, repeated it furiously to herself, even put a hand up to her eyes as if to try to force them not to see. But her head turned as if of its own accord; her hand dropped down. She looked through the window, back down to the building from which they’d taken off. She couldn’t really have heard the fire escape fall, of course she couldn’t, not over the noise of the ship—but she’d been right all the same. It hung, a ruin of twisted metal, from halfway down the tower block. She could no longer see anyone on it. And now the ground below it was not only obscured by swirling clouds of dust, but hidden under piles of rubble.

  SHE LEFT them to die.

  It was late afternoon, and Elissa was alone for the first time in hours, walking down one of the shiny-white, sterilized-clean corridors of the city spaceport hospital.

  The flyer had gotten them to safety at the spaceport several hours ago, but it wasn’t until now that she’d had the chance to seek out a few minutes alone with Cadan.

  Sofia and Felicia had both been taken to the hospital the moment they arrived at the spaceport. Sofia had been bandaged up, given an antibiotic injection, and was resting, El waiting in a chair next to her bed.

  The rest of the group were in the hospital too, although they were in the waiting rooms, not the treatment wing. Unlike normal hospitals, the spaceport hospital had been built underground, and right now was about the most secure place they could go.

  Felicia’s condition had been a whole lot more serious than Sofia’s, but she, too, was recovering. Her wound was clean and stitched, she’d been given a blood transfusion and pumped full of anti-infection drugs and healing accelerants. The rest of the Phoenix crew had been allowed to see her as she lay pale and tranquil in drug-induced sleep, and everyone had told Elissa how well she—Elissa, not Felicia—had coped. Everyone, too, had told Elissa and Lin how well they’d both done, how amazing they’d been, how fantastic their linked powers were. It was the recognition, the praise Elissa had thought she’d wanted. Now, though, every time anyone said anything about it, she felt as if she were once again breathing in the dirt and dust from back in the square, feeling it sting her eyes, clog her throat, lie bitter on her tongue.

  She left them to die. I asked her to help and she wouldn’t. The thought seemed to burn through her brain. She pushed through a swinging hospital door, letting it flap shut behind her, glancing up at the exit sign on the clean white wall.

  As soon as they knew Felicia would be okay, Cadan had left the hospital. He’d gone in the shuttlebug with Markus and one IPL official, back to the base where they’d left the Phoenix. Commander Dacre had organized clearance, and he’d been going to fly the ship back to the spaceport. That had been several hours ago. He’d sent a message through IPL channels to say he’d gotten back safely, but Elissa hadn’t seen him. He’d stayed aboveground with the Phoenix, overseeing its preparation and refueling for the twenty-four-hour journey to Philomel.

  For our evacuation.

  Well, what did I expect? I should never have let her come back in the first place.

  They’d known it was a risk, known they were returning to danger. But—and now Elissa couldn’t believe she’d ever been so naive—it hadn’t crossed her mind that the risk would be not to Lin’s safety, but to her humanity.

  By returning to Sekoia, she’d brought Lin back to the world that had declared her nonhuman, the world that had treated her like a lab animal, that had wanted her imprisoned—and if not imprisoned, dead. How could Elissa have thought it would end in anything other than disaster?

  She turned a white, featureless corner, into the white, featureless corridor that lay past it.

  I should never have come back either. In the world beyond her home, and then out in the vast reaches of space that lay beyond Sekoia’s atmosphere, she’d become somebody she liked. Somebody she could feel almost . . . proud . . . of being.

  At the time she’d felt as if all she was doing was stumbling from crisis to crisis. Looking back, though, she saw someone who’d managed to make decision after difficult decision, someone who’d coped with fear and pain and danger. She’d not only protected Lin but had helped her to learn how to live in the world outside the facility.

  But now . . . God, the worst mistake she’d made must have been bringing Lin back to Sekoia. Now, when it was too late to change it, it was horribly obvious that it had been too much, too soon, had crushed the empathy—the humanity—Lin had been developing.

  Back when she first found me, I realized then that I had to get her away from Sekoia because I was afraid she was a sociopath. Why didn’t I know better than to bring her back?

  The next door opened on a flight of stairs, as impossibly clean and white as the corridors. The hospital elevators were all shut off, conserving energy here as in the rest
of the city. Elissa started up them. Heaviness dragged at her as she climbed, as if artificial gravity were being used in the hospital as it was on the Phoenix, as if it had been turned up just that uncomfortable fraction too high.

  Well, at least this time I don’t have to figure out how to get Lin off-planet.

  They wouldn’t be able to come back. Given everything that had happened, she didn’t think Lin would even want to. Not now, not anymore.

  They would go to Philomel. She and Lin still had a whole lump of their compensation fund—they could move on where they wanted, go to college like they’d been half planning. Lin can train to be a spaceship pilot if that’s what she wants.

  But whatever they did, wherever they went, they would have to stay away from Sekoia’s shattered society. That was no longer even a question. If they ever came back, if something else happened . . .

  I’ll lose her. If we keep being faced with danger, on this world that did such terrible things to her, if she keeps being pushed and pushed . . . she’s going to end up doing something awful, something so bad I won’t be able to forgive her. Something so bad—Elissa flinched; oh God, even the thought was a betrayal—that I’ll end up wishing they’d left her locked up.

  The stairs led to a little landing. Elissa crossed it and took the next flight of stairs, continuing to climb.

  So they’d go, because they had to, and they wouldn’t return, because they couldn’t. They’d forget that they’d come to Sekoia full of high hopes—of changing things, of giving aid to their world. They’d figure out a life for themselves somewhere else.

  But what about Cadan? Will he do that too? Inside her, something twisted. Cadan had mostly wanted to come back to see if his family was okay. But now he’d seen what was happening to the planet he’d been trained to protect. Once he’d gotten the ship’s load of passengers to safety on Philomel, would he want to return to Sekoia? Would he want to come back to give the aid Elissa and Lin couldn’t?