Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  Until, all at once, far ahead of them, Elissa saw something moving, gray against gray. A glinting speck that became a minuscule arrow, that became, as Cadan dragged the throttle back and they tore, screaming faster and faster through the air, the far-off shape of the shuttlebug.

  CADAN HAD been right. Lin might be able to fly the shuttlebug, but she didn’t fly it well. While Cadan circled, descending, Elissa watched, throat tight, as below them the shuttlebug lurched and bounced, banging down onto the ground, first one side, then another, showering sparks as metal screeched against rock.

  But, poor style or not, Lin did reach the ground first. Cadan was still maneuvering the skybike in its downward spiral when Elissa saw the door of the shuttlebug spring open and the figure of her sister jump down. She must have seen the bike in her viewscreens, must be able to hear its engines now, but she didn’t so much as look up. She ran, cutting a line across to where skylights rose, smoothly gleaming, above the rocks. They must have been kept shuttered and camouflaged before, but now their glass surfaces gleamed, reflecting the sky, betraying the location of the place the terrorists had set up as their base, the place where they were now imprisoned.

  We still have time. We have time. She hasn’t done anything yet—

  Even as Elissa noticed it, she saw her sister reach the nearest skylight. Lin knelt at its edge and leaned forward to spread both hands on the curve of the glass. The skybike’s circling swept Elissa out of the line of sight, and she whipped her head around, trying to see past the bike’s tail that was blocking her view.

  Still have time. We still have time. We’re nearly down. I can stop her.

  But when they circled back around, farther down, suddenly much closer, there was smoke rising from the edges of the skylight.

  Panic swept Elissa’s hands from her death hold on the handgrips. She thumped frantically on Cadan’s back. “Get us down! Get us down now! Look what she’s doing!”

  He couldn’t hear her—even in her panic she knew that—but he couldn’t ignore the thumping on his back. The bike dipped sharply, dropping from its careful circling, a hawk stooping suddenly on prey, and they plunged, in a scream of wind and shrieking engines, so fast that Elissa’s stomach lurched into her throat.

  They landed, as the shuttlebug had, in a spray of sparks and dust and flying broken rock, slewing sideways, Cadan’s booted foot coming out to help steady them, leaving a long streak of black along the ground.

  He swung around as Elissa began to scramble off the bike. “Careful of the engine!” he yelled at her, just as her leg skimmed too close to it and she felt the slash of heat even through her clothes. She snatched her foot back, making a clumsy half fall, half jump off the bike, landing staggering in the burned-smelling dust next to it.

  She turned and ran, hearing the engine die behind her, that burned smell in her nose, her ears buzzing in a way that made her half-deaf.

  There was more smoke rising now, enough to obscure where her sister knelt, and a flicker of sparks jumping, here and there, from the metal into which the skylight was set. Sparks that were nothing to do with the landings of either the shuttlebug or the skybike.

  “Lin!” Elissa shrieked. Her voice came muted through the buzzing in her ears. “Lin! Lin! Stop!”

  Smoke swirled. Lin rose from it like a demon from a horror movie. Her eyes were bloodshot, not just the skin around them but the whites themselves, and there was a smear of blood streaked from under her nose across her cheek. Oh God, look what she’s done to herself. The effort of knocking my dad out, and the security guards, then breaking through the electronics of the shuttlebug. And now . . .

  Lin could explode ships’ engines. And she could set buildings on fire. She’d done it before, twice that Elissa knew of, forcing the electrical currents of the building to run higher and higher, overloading the circuits, jumping the breakers and exploding into flame.

  She’d done it in the facility in order to escape, and in Elissa’s house to help Elissa escape. She hadn’t cared if she hurt people in the process, but at least she hadn’t intended it. But now . . .

  The people in there—they’re imprisoned. They have no way out.

  If Lin burned this down, she was going to burn the occupants as well.

  “Lin, no.” Elissa took a few quick strides toward where Lin stood.

  Sparks leaped in front of her, hissed out on the rock. Sparks, and tiny tongues of flame. Their heat reached Elissa, stung against the already-scorched patch on her leg. She stopped dead.

  “Lin.”

  “You shouldn’t have come,” said her sister.

  Elissa’s eyes stung with smoke and dust. “I had to come. Lin, look, I know what you’re doing, I get why, but you can’t. You can’t just kill people.”

  “These people? Oh, I so can.” Lin’s voice spat like the flames.

  “No. Lin, I keep telling you—”

  “That’s over.” Even through the smoke, Elissa could see Lin’s hands clench, see every muscle in her face stiffen. “I’m done, Lissa. ‘It’s not right,’ and ‘it’s not human,’ and ‘you can’t,’ and you being angry with me—none of that matters anymore. It’s all done. It’s all over. I don’t care.”

  “You don’t have to care.” Cadan’s voice came from behind Elissa. “You just have to stop.”

  Elissa didn’t turn to look at him, but Lin looked, and her eyes narrowed. “You even try to use that whip and I’ll burn it from end to end. And you, maybe.”

  “You’d hurt Cadan?” The horror Elissa heard in her own voice was real, but at the same time she was thinking, She doesn’t mean that. She can’t mean it—not Cadan. If I can just make her think clearly, see what she’s doing, shake her out of this insane state she’s gotten into—

  Pain and fury flashed over Lin’s face. “No, I won’t hurt freaking precious Cadan. Only if he tries to stop me. Are you happy now?”

  “Happy?” Elissa’s voice rose. “When you’re going to burn a base full of people? No I’m not happy! Lin . . . Lin, please listen to me. You can’t really be planning on doing this.”

  Lin’s face twisted. “Yeah, I know, I know,” she said. “I do this and you won’t love me anymore. It’s a bit late for that threat now.”

  Elissa stared at her, blank. “What?”

  “That threat.” Lin’s face twisted again, impatient, furious, despairing. “It’s too late to make me behave by saying you won’t love me anymore. Isn’t it?”

  “I never tried to use that as a threat,” Elissa said, the unfairness of what Lin was saying for a moment overriding everything else. “I never used it. And, anyway, for God’s sake, no, it’s not too late!  ”

  Lin slammed her foot onto the skylight, a sudden violent movement that made Elissa jump. More sparks leaped from the metal, and the smoke billowed up around her. “That’s not true! The link’s gone! The link’s gone and you’re glad!”

  “I’m not glad.”

  “You are! You are! You wanted me out of your head, and now I am! If you’re saying you’re not glad then you’re lying!” She broke off, scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “I don’t even know why you’re here, why you’ve bothered. We don’t have anything anymore, Lissa.” The leaping, fiery fury had gone from her voice. It was flat, as gray as the smoke.

  And for the first time since catching up with her, Elissa was afraid. Lin hadn’t come here because she’d gone psycho. She hadn’t even lost her temper. She was just . . . She doesn’t think she has anything else to try to be human for. She doesn’t think she has anything left. For the first time the realization came, cold, clear, inescapable. I’m going to lose her. This is it—I could lose her. Here, today. Now.

  “We’ll always have something,” she said, but she could hear the despair in her own voice now. It didn’t sound convincing to her; it was never going to convince Lin.

  But at least it sparked a question. “What?” said Lin, staring at her through the smoke, her voice still flat, her face empty.

  “We’r
e twins,” Elissa said.

  “No, we’re not. Not without the link.”

  Elissa swallowed. It was difficult to argue with that. Twins, doubles—it had always been the link that made them that. They might still look alike, but without the link they were just . . .

  “Okay,” she said. “Then we’re sisters. We’re still sisters.”

  Lin stared at her, gray-faced in the smoke. “How are we?”

  “Lin, for God’s sake . . .”

  “Sisters grow up together. Sisters share . . . things. Parents. Lives. We aren’t twins anymore—we aren’t sisters, either. Not real sisters.” Her face went even blanker, as if in saying the words she was cutting herself off from everything Elissa had thought they had, as if she was choosing to let her humanness fall away to burn and shrivel and disappear.

  And as Elissa heard it, those words—not real sisters—anger flamed through her, so bright she could feel it burn behind her eyes, so hot that for a second it stopped her breath in her lungs.

  “Not real sisters?” she said, and as her breath rushed back, burning in her throat, the heat of the flames flared through her voice. She threw up a hand. “What do you call this? Look, my hand’s the same shape as yours. Our hair grows the same way. We walk in the same rhythm. We feel the cold the same. I grew up with Bruce. I knew Bruce my whole life. And if I tried for a million years, I’d never be as much like him as I’m like you!”

  She stopped, chest burning, eyes burning, furious powerless tears rising within her. “I’ve messed things up over and over. I was angry, and frustrated, and I did it wrong, and then I did it wrong again, and I— But God, look, Lin, if you do this, it just makes everything we did right, all the effort we made, mean nothing—”

  Lin’s eyes held hers, but they were too far away, too blurred by the rising smoke, for Elissa to see their expression. “So that is the bribe, then?” she said. “You’re my sister now. You love me now. But if I do this, you won’t love me anymore?”

  This, she called it. This, as if it were something small. But it wasn’t. Lin was planning on trapping at least four—and probably more—people here. Planning on burning them to death.

  For the first time Elissa thought beyond the initial what-ifs: the what will it do to Lin? the what will the authorities do to her? For the first time she thought, If Lin does this, if Lin kills these people, what will it do to me? What will it make me feel about her? And what will it make me not feel? Is she right? If she does it, if she becomes a murderer, will she stop feeling like my sister, my twin? Will I not love her anymore?

  Something like lightning cracked up from the metal around Lin, a blue-white flash.

  And in Elissa’s brain, the answer came as bright, as clear. She didn’t know, now, whether Lin had gone too far to hear her—or to believe her if she did hear. It might not make any difference, whatever she said.

  All the same, she had to say it. Whatever Lin did now, she had to know the truth of what was left to them.

  “See?” said Lin, distant in the smoke. “It only worked when we had the link. When you loved me ’cause you had to.”

  “No,” said Elissa. “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong.”

  “You are. I came here to stop you killing these people. I want you to stop. But whether you stop or not, I’ll still love you.”

  “You won’t!” Lin shouted the words. “You won’t, you won’t, you know you won’t!”

  “I will.”

  The smell of burning metal rose, and somewhere below the ground close to Elissa’s feet she heard a bang like a small explosion. Her mind went to the people trapped down there. She imagined the fire beginning, saw it sweeping through the base, sucking all the oxygen from the air, making them die of suffocation before—oh God please before—the flames reached them. She imagined looking at Lin afterward, knowing she’d done that.

  She looked at Lin now, her face a pale blur in the smoke, her hands clenched, her electrokinetic power making the sparks leap and spit. Hurting and bleeding and willing to kill.

  “I’ll love you forever,” said Elissa. “If you don’t do this, I’ll love you. If you do do it, I’ll still love you. I’ll just—” A sudden sob caught her by the throat. “You’re so stupid! They’ll send you to prison, and then I’ll have to miss you forever.”

  “It’s not true!” Lin’s voice rose.

  “It is.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I’m not lying.”

  “You are! You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying!” Her voice went even higher, so high it broke.

  The lightning leaped again, a circle of it this time, making a sharp crack in the air.

  “Lissa,” said Cadan, urgently behind her. “Get back. She’ll hurt you.”

  Elissa stayed still. The lightning flash had shown her Lin’s face in blue-white clarity. Lin’s chin was shaking, and her eyes were flooded with tears.

  “Lin,” she said, gently. “I don’t lie to you. I never did. You know that.”

  The lightning didn’t leap again. The sparks died. The smoke cleared. Lin stood on a skylight all hazed with soot and crazed with heat at its edges, with blood smeared under her nose and burst blood vessels all around her eyes. She was shaking all over now, her arms wrapped tightly across herself, her fingers white.

  “Lying,” she said again, but her voice was shaking too, and all the conviction had gone from it.

  “You know I’m not.”

  The tears in Lin’s eyes spilled over. They poured down her face, making pale tracks through dirt and blood.

  “I—” she said, before the tears took her voice and left her mute, swallowing, struggling to speak. “I wanted to kill them. I did. I—everything had gone and I—there was nothing else and I—”

  Elissa took the few steps between them, reached her sister. Under her hands, Lin’s arms were cold, as if all her body heat had gone into the smoke and the fire.

  “It was their fault,” said Lin. “Their fault. I couldn’t think past making them hurt too.” She looked down at her hands, and a shudder went through her. “I was going to burn them. Lis, I was going to burn them. If you hadn’t stopped me—” She shuddered again, looking at her hands as if she didn’t recognize them. “I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t, Lissa, I—”

  “You’re not a monster.”

  “But I—I wanted to—I was going to—”

  “I know. But you didn’t. And you’re not a monster. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Lin’s hands came up to grip Elissa’s. “But the link’s gone.” Tears choked her voice. “I don’t know how to be human without it. Without you. All this time, I only knew how to behave because of you. But now—Lissa, without it, what am I? What might I do?”

  Her hands were still cold, but where they touched Elissa’s they’d warmed a little, taking blood heat from Elissa’s body.

  “You still have me,” Elissa said. “The link’s gone, but I’m still here.”

  “But—that thing in my brain—when it goes off, when it—”

  “That’s not you, that’s something that SFI did to you. There’ll be a way to fix it. There will. The brain repairs itself. That’s what it does.”

  “But if I hurt you . . . Lissa, if I hurt you . . .”

  “We won’t let you. They’re working on fixing it, but until they do—Lin, you didn’t give them any time. There’ll be a way of keeping you from hurting me—of keeping any of the Spares from hurting people.”

  “Okay.” Lin’s voice was still wobbly. Her sore-looking, bloodshot gaze clung to Elissa’s. “But, Lissa . . .” She swallowed, started again. “Lissa, the link’s gone. It’s not just being human. It’s . . . all my life, that’s the thing that connected me to you. You said we still had something, that we hadn’t lost everything. You said. But—but—without it, what do we have? What are we going to do?”

  Elissa’s hands tightened on her twin’s, feeling their returning warmth. She looked down at
them, at their shape, identical to her own, knowing that Lin’s fear, too, was like her own—not because they were sharing it through a link, but because she knew Lin, knew her sister, knew what made her afraid, or happy, or angry.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “But we’ll work it out.”

  THE SKY could have been that of any planet.

  From where Elissa sat, she could see neither forest nor mountain nor desert. Just the sky, stretching up and away forever, blue darkening to purple as, somewhere behind her, the sun slid toward the edge of the world.

  There were plenty of other places she could have waited during this hour, but over the last three months this little room, furnished with almost nothing but its window, had become the place that drew her every time she came.

  Against the indigo sky, a speck of light appeared. For a moment it could have been anything—a first star appearing above the Philomelen mountains, a firefly hovering above an ancient forest on Sanctuary, a raindrop lit by the blaze of a sunset on Syris II.

  It was none of those things, and the sky Elissa was watching belonged to none of the places whose images had moved briefly through her memory. She stood, going to the window to see the descending spark more clearly. It was a spaceship, returning to Sekoia. To a planet renewed.

  The ship hurtled toward her, resolving itself from a spark to a flare, a fiery bird of prey, diving in the light of the setting sun toward Central Canyon City, toward the spaceport plateau that Elissa’s window looked out on.

  A scant distance above the roofs of the spaceport buildings, the ship—one of Sekoia’s smaller spacecraft—pulled out of its dive, looping briefly upward before, rockets flaring, it began to descend again, so controlled that it seemed to float for a moment above the landing pad before it settled to the ground, dust boiling up around it.

  Elissa grinned—nice landing—and wasn’t surprised when, a few minutes later, the door at the base of the ship opened, and even at this distance, she recognized her brother in the familiar figure of the exiting pilot.

  The distance was too great for her to see his face, but the buoyancy with which he jumped to the ground made her pretty sure that he, too, was grinning.