Unravel (19 page)

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 least 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.

As well, they might have gotten the whole thing wrong. If most of the twins didn't have a link with their Spares—and if even Samuel and Jay's link was so much weaker than hers and Lin's—then maybe there was no use even thinking about them voluntarily powering hyperdrives.

She'd spoken so quickly, so unthinkingly, though, that she hadn't considered her own words carefully enough, and the next moment she realized that.

“An SFI spaceship?” said Sofia. “The one you escaped on in the first place? But what use is that? It was on the newscasts—the hyperdrive—the Spare—” She hugged herself, suppressing a shudder.

“It's still a working ship,” said Samuel.

Sofia lifted a shoulder. “Yeah, but Sekoia's got a million
working
ships. Remember, that IPL guy explained? They could pack us all onto ships if they just wanted to get us
off-planet, but without hyperspeed they'd be making us even more vulnerable than we are here. So they're having to do it all slow and stealthily so we're not supereasy to track.” She looked at Elissa and Lin. “I get why you'd want to come back to get people from your crew's families. But I don't get why
you're
here. I mean, your family's safe already. And why would you think your ship is going to help with transport?”

But we do have hyperspeed. When Lin and I link, we can power the hyperdrive.
But she didn't want to say that yet. It was too soon, all these Spares and their twins were too different.
And I don't know how to say it in a way that's not horrifying. They know what they were intended for, what they've been saved from—I don't know how to say we want anybody to try doing it voluntarily.

“It's still a working ship,” she said, borrowing Samuel's words in the absence of a better explanation, hoping they'd do.

“Okay.” Sofia leaned back against the wall, the movement conveying flat disappointment. She'd been hoping for something more, Elissa realized, and like an echo she heard Ady's words:
Hey, Zee, come meet some heroes.
It had been said jokingly, but maybe it hadn't been just a joke.
Maybe they really were hoping for heroes.

Oh God, and even with what we
can
do, we're not that. We're not heroes.
She looked away, feeling horribly inadequate, and once again caught Zee watching her.

His eyes were such a light gray they looked colorless, like a sky so filled with high white clouds it seems to have been bleached into nonexistence.

“That's not true, is it?” he said.

Guilt, both hot and cold, flared in Elissa's chest. “What?”

“Zee!” said Sofia. “You can't
say
that to people—”

Zee's eyes didn't move from Elissa's. “I'm right, though. What she's saying—it's not true. There's something else.”

The impact of that colorless stare, the guilt burning inside her, fused into a flash of defensive anger. “I don't know what you mean,” Elissa said, her voice coming out high and indignant. “I—”

“Not
true
.” Something sparked in Zee's gaze, something familiar. The heat in Elissa's chest fell away, leaving only the cold. She'd seen that spark before, in Lin's eyes. In her memory, metal shrieked, balls of fire exploded against a dark sky.

“Spares are taken for their psychic potential,” Zee said, his eyes still on her. “You know that—we all know that. But did you know there are different types of psychic power—Spares don't all develop the same way?”

Elissa swallowed. “I . . . I could have guessed it, I suppose. But I don't see—”

“Shut
up
. Shut
up
with the lying!”

“Zee!”
said Sofia, at the same moment as Lin, fury leaping into her voice, said, “No,
you
shut up,” and as Samuel said, “Zee, chill, okay?” and as behind Elissa, the conversation across the room stopped dead.

But Ady's face was suddenly as rigid as Zee's. “He's right,” he said. “Our link—our telepathy—died off. But his psychic abilities didn't. He's empathic. He told me. Aren't you, Zee? Go on, tell us, what is it?”

When Zee spoke, his voice was starting to quiver. “I don't know. I don't know what it is. I just know she's lying, she's
lying
, and it's something bad, it's something she doesn't want to say because it's bad, it's bad, it's bad—” The quiver became a shake, and his voice rose at the same time, shaking so badly it seemed as if he were shaking too, as if he would break apart.
There were tears in his eyes, a shine over their colorlessness, not falling only because he hadn't blinked all the time he'd been talking. He was just staring at Elissa, poised right on the edge of panic, sensing everything she hadn't said, everything she'd wanted to keep for a better time, for a time when they knew her well enough to not freak out at what she was going to suggest.

It was too late for that. Whatever the reaction of the Spares and their twins would be, she couldn't control that now. She had to tell them the truth before Zee's panic caught them all.
Four Spares, all with psychic powers I don't know about, freaking out about something I'm not telling them . . .

She leaned forward, looking into Zee's face, and spoke as clearly as she could. “I was lying. I'm sorry. I'll tell you the truth. I'm sorry.”

With a leftover edge of her attention, she was aware that Sofia's and Samuel's eyes had widened in a look of hurt and betrayal.
Oh God, I've done this all so badly. I thought they were going to be my friends, and I've screwed it up. . . .

“We can make the hyperdrive on the ship work,” she said to Zee, her eyes steady on his. “Lin's electrokinetic power—when she and I link up, she can plug into the hyperdrive. It doesn't hurt her. It doesn't. So we thought . . . some of the other Spares and their twins, if they still have their links . . . the other spaceships . . . we thought—”

She didn't get to finish. Cutting across, drowning out even the faintest sound of the last word she'd said, Zee began to scream.