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But you’re hurting them! They’re just ordinary people, and you’re hurting them!
If she said those words aloud, said them to Lin, would they even register? Would they do anything at all?

“We
can
get away,” Elissa said instead. “If you can open the top doors, we can get away now. Lin,
listen
to me, you don’t need to do any more.”

Lin glanced down the still-shaking staircase. The businessman was gripping the heavin0">

On the rail Lin’s hands slowly relaxed. And as they did, the rippling, crashing staircase began to judder, an earthquake coming to an end.

Lin looked back and began to climb up toward Elissa. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

A hundred different thoughts battered in Elissa’s head; a hundred different sentences burned her throat. Lin had looked down, had seen what Elissa had seen, and—
Oh God,
it’s not registering at all. It’s like she doesn’t even see it. And I asked her to
—
I asked her to use electrokinesis. Knowing what she did last time,
knowing
how she doesn’t react like normal people
—
I panicked and let her do it again.

“Elissa?” Lin’s look of bright triumph faded. Her eyes were dark with worry, her face drawn with sudden fatigue. “Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you?”

She’s
not
a sociopath. She
doesn’t
just care about herself. Look.
Look
—
she cares about me, she can’t have anything really wrong with her. And if she hadn’t done something, we wouldn’t have gotten away.

“I’m okay,” Elissa said. She didn’t look back down at the ruined staircase, at the people struggling to their feet. The air still rang with a cacophony of alarm bells, and there were plenty of other security guards in the building, and any minute now law enforcement agents would arrive. Elissa drew in a long shuddering breath through her teeth, turned, and ran, hearing Lin’s feet pounding after her.

The doors to the roof were locked, their translucent silicon edges clamped tight. Elissa and Lin came up to them, panting, and for a moment all Elissa’s other anxieties were drowned in a flood of panic. If they couldn’t get out, if they were trapped here while the enforcement agents caught up with them . . .

“Can you do it? Can you open them?”

Lin put her hand flat against the seal, her forehead crinkling in a frown. “Wait a minute. They’re heavy, and sealed so tight. I could move them, but it’s easier if I find the electrics of the switch . . .” Her voice trailed off. She screwed up her eyes, and her fingertips went white where they rested against the door.

Something seemed to explode in Elissa’s head, a noiseless firework flash, an impossible constellation of sparks. A tickle in the palm of her hand, like a nerve gone suddenly, itchily insane.

The doors sprang open. Heat hit her; hot air and the dazzlem;
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Arte of unfiltered sunlight washed over and through her. The weird sensations died before she could try to define them, and they blurred into a memory.

In the sunlight Lin’s face was pale, a sheen of sweat along her hairline, shadows like bruises all around her eyes. Elissa remembered suddenly that less than twelve hours ago Lin had been lying feverish in a ditch. That less than forty-eight hours ago she’d been held prisoner in a government-sanctioned facility. That she had a
hole
, for God’s sake, in the back of her head.

“Come on.” She took her twin’s arm and pulled her gently out into the blaze of sunlight and heat, out across the wide sweep of the rooftop, paved in frosted glass, between the pots of palm trees and trellis screens of carefully trained scented flowers. At the far end of the roof, the sun glinted on safety rails arching over a walkway at the head of a flight of static stairs. “We just have to get out of here, back down to the slidewalks, and we can disappear again.”

Lin nodded. She looked more than tired. She looked hollowed out, as if she’d used every scrap of energy, of willpower, to get this far. As though, if she had to do anything else, she might not make it.

If we can just get down from here before they send anyone else,
Elissa thought.
If we can just get a chance to hide for a bit, to rest
.

She hoped, but in vain. They’d only just reached the walkway when she heard the flyers coming.

They came surging up from below, appearing over the edge of the mall building, sleek and narrow-bodied, shining silver in the sunlight. They were designed to maneuver in the smallest spaces; they’d have no problem landing on the roof. And once there—

We’ve been running and running. Lin’s already exhausted from what she did back there. We
can’t,
we can’t do any more
.

But as the sound of the flyers’ propellers changed, as they backed in the air, preparing to settle into place on the roof, fresh adrenaline kicked up through Elissa, and new heat ran through her veins.

The girls took off down the walkway, feet echoing on its metal surface. There was a staircase at the end, a spiral of steps that would take them down to the next walkway, then another to take them down to the next, down and down the cliff face to a final wide platform on the level where the slidewalks began.

We can’t make it. Not all the way down. They’ll catch up
.

But there was nowhere else to go, no other escape route. Elissa ran, Lin’s feet an echo beside her, Lin’s breathing in her ear, the whine of slowing propellers behind them. She ran into a maze of shining steel stairs and safety rails, of eye-watering bright blue sky, of sunlight bouncing in dazzling bursts of silver fire from steps and bars, and, beginning three stories below them, the snakelike spiral of a staircase that was entirely covered.

They reached the end of the walkway, clattered down the spiral staircase at the end, then along another walkway, then descended another short flight of stairs. Elissa’s hand, wet with sweat, slid on the rail as she swung around onto the next floor. She lurched, nearly falling, then wrenched herself
back up as the long curve of the covered staircase came back into view. For a moment her vision blurred with fear and fatigue and the. She was looking through Lin, c endless dazzle of the sky and sun and steel. The smooth coiling shape of the roof drew her eyes down and down, dizzying, blurring, pulling her gaze to follow its shape all the way down until it spread out in a wide fan, into a roof covering the mechanism at the start of one of the slidewalks. The fan curved up at its farthest edge, a graceful curved lip like the curve at the top of a wave, or the curve at the end of a playground slide.

“
Lissa!
They’ve landed, they’re coming!”

Elissa cast a split-second look around them. Another flight down would take them to the walkway that joined the covered staircase. But if they just made it to the end of the walkway they were on now, they’d be directly over it.

She spun around. “Lin. Listen. Can you—”

“No.” Lin was shaking her head, her face pale and clammy, her eyes like black holes. “I’m finished. If I hadn’t—the moving stairs—I used so much energy.”

Above them men’s feet pounded along the first walkway. Elissa’s chest was heaving; every breath seemed to tear its way through her lungs. “You don’t have
anything
left?”

“Not enough to do it again.” Her gaze clung to Elissa’s. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If it was just opening another door—but I can’t stop them, not anymore—”

All at once Elissa understood what Lin thought she was asking her to do. “It is! That’s all it is. Quick, quick, this way.”

She pulled Lin along the walkway, hearing the clatter that meant the law enforcement agents were on the spiral staircase above them. If she was wrong, if Lin couldn’t do this or
if it didn’t work, all she’d done was trap them like rats in a disposal chute.

They came to a halt at the end of the walkway, directly above the roofed staircase, safety railings all around them. Elissa put her hand up to the railings. “Lin, can you bend them? Enough to get us through?”

“Through?” Lin looked down. Her eyes caught the long spiral of the roof and snapped wide as she understood what Elissa was planning.
“That?”

“How else can we get away? Lin, quick, we don’t have time—”

She wouldn’t have thought it was possible for her twin to go even paler, but as Lin closed her hands around the railings and shut her eyes in concentration, every scrap of blood seemed to drain out of her face. Her lips turned blue, and the shadows under her eyes showed so dark, it was as if someone had pressed their thumbs hard into the sockets, leaving bruises behind.

A shudder went through Lin, from her tensed shoulders to her fingers, bone white on the metal. Her teeth clenched, and her face went tight, every feature standing out sharper than before.

Above them, the thump of feet.

Oh God, Lin, you have to do it. If we’ve gotten this far and can’t
—

The bars shuddered as Lin had shuddered. Wavered as if Elissa were seeing them through a heat wave, then bent slowly, fluidly apart. There was just enough space for a teenage girl to slip through, then to get her balance for a moment and drop onto the wide silver stripe of roofing below and begin to slide.

They’d be miles . She was looking through Lin, caway from the law enforcement agents
within seconds. They’d buy themselves time to hide and rest and plan. It would be easy—fantastically, ridiculously easy.

And, looking at the roof for the first time without the safety railings in the way, Elissa knew she couldn’t do it. The twisting staircase seemed to swirl and swoop below her, sending spirals of nausea up behind her eyes, into her stomach. She must have been crazy to ever consider it. They were so high up, so
high
, and there were no safety fields, no bars, no glass walls to catch them if they slipped too far, slid helplessly off the roof to fall and fall and fall . . .

“We have to,” said Lin, white-faced, hand on one of the warped rails.

“I can’t. I can’t do it.” Cold sweat broke out all over Elissa’s back. “I’m sorry. I should never— We’ll just have to keep running.”

“Lissa, we don’t have
time.
”

Elissa looked again at the narrow ledge they’d need to climb onto, the drop, the roof spiraling down and down and down. The nausea twisted, tight and cold inside her, making her start to shake. “I
can’t
. I just can’t.”

Lin dropped her hand. “Okay. Then I’ll have to fix it myself.”

“What?”

“I’m not going back there. They’re not getting me. I can start fires, remember? Interfere with electric currents?” Lin glanced up through the crisscrossing metal above them, up to where the flyers had landed. Her face was not just set but merciless, her eyes like ice. “I can reach their fuel tanks,” she said. “I can send them up like fireballs.”

She raised her hands, palms open.

“Oh God,
no
.” Elissa grabbed her twin’s hands and dragged them down. “They’ll have pilots in them!”

Lin jerked away. “Then what am I supposed to do? Stand here and wait for them to take me?”

“No.
No
. Oh God. Oh God, you just can’t. You
can’t
.”

“What choice have I got? What choice are you giving me?” Lin wrenched her hands free, turned that blank, merciless face upward.

In a split second of horror so intense it was like precognition, like a vision unfolding in the air in front of her, Elissa saw what would happen, saw what Lin could do. She saw the flames burst from the flyers’ engines, saw their propellers go crazy, spinning out of control. She saw the machines flare up, death traps spewing flames, coffins for the still-living men inside them.

Elissa’s heart was pounding so hard, every inch of skin seemed to feel it. Her mouth was so dry, she couldn’t swallow, and her hands were cold and clumsy. But she had no choice. She grabbed the railing and swung herself up onto the ledge. “Stop,” she said. “I’m going. We’re going to get away. I’m going now.”

And she dropped from the ledge.

An instant of falling, of terror exploding all over her body, of her vision blinking out. No time for thoughts, just wordless, white-hot fear.

She landed. On her sid—””rte, with a jolt that knocked the breath out of her, and before she could even gasp, before she could even register that she’d landed on the roof, that she was okay, she hadn’t missed it and gone plummeting through miles of empty air—before she could even register the clang that meant Lin must have landed as well—she
was sliding. Down and down over cold smooth metal, no handholds, no friction, completely out of control, down and down and around and around, the sky and the sun and the silver flashes of steel spiraling with her, faster and faster, around and around and down and down. Every moment she expected to go flying off the edge, flung out into the empty air.

Head whirling, vision completely screwed, for an instant she left the ground and found herself suspended in midair, stabbed through with terror like ice and fire. Then she hit something and was flung back, to fetch up against another hard, smooth surface, this time with a jolt that seemed to grab and shake her as if she were nothing but a spindly bundle of bones.

She tried to gasp for breath, but her lungs wouldn’t work, and all she could do was make a thin crowing sound.

Then Lin crashed into her, and any tiny bit of breath left in her body was punched out of it all over again.

Somewhere law enforcement agents were still after them, with weapons and flyers and tracking devices. Somewhere were her parents, who couldn’t help her. Somewhere there were doctors and police she couldn’t trust.

None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she was no longer running, sliding, falling. She was lying still, in a world of pulsing black spots and stabbing spears of light. And, gasping and wheezing, dragging the air in as if it were fighting against her, she was starting to breathe again.

The black spots cleared. The world returned. The stabs of light resolved themselves into sunlight on steel. She and Lin were lying on the fan-shaped slab of roof at the bottom of the structure they’d slid down. They’d slid so fast, they’d
actually left the surface of the roof for a moment—the thing she’d hit, the thing that had flung her back, was the lip at its edge. Hundreds of feet above them the law enforcement agents were tiny dark figures. The flyers hadn’t taken off yet, but any second now they would.