Unravel (44 page)

Whatever had happened to Zee could happen to Lin as well.

Zee had been pushed to the floor, and Ivan had a knee between his shoulder blades, pinning him. But Zee wasn't struggling now. His face, blood-smeared, bits of his hair sticking up in red wet points, was turned toward where Ady lay. His expression was still blank, but in his eyes showed something like a returning tide of consciousness. And as consciousness returned, so—like a black slick of oil, stinking and scalding and poisoned—Elissa could see a rising awareness of agony.

He's coming back. He's coming back, and he's going to see what he did.

Lin backed away farther, hit the wall behind her and stayed there, palms flat against it, fingertips white, as if she were trying to drive her fingers into the wall itself. “I didn't
know
,” she said. “I said I wouldn't hurt you. I didn't
know
.”

Momentarily, instinct drew Elissa toward her—before Zee's insanely shrieking face flashed into her mind's eye. She
stopped dead. How many times had she shared a room with Lin? Sleeping all night, unprotected, unaware of danger? How many times could she have woken to see Lin's face, insane, empty eyed, filling her vision, feeling Lin's hands closing on her throat or raking across her skin?

A shudder took Elissa, so deep it seemed to send tremors along the marrow of her bones. She took a step away, and another, her heart beating in her ears, in her temples. Her sister watched her, fingertips bloodless against the wall. “Go,” Lin said. “Get away from me. Lock yourself in.”

It was only what Elissa herself was thinking, but coming from Lin, the words seemed weighted with threat. As if Lin, like in some awful horror movie, were giving her a chance to run before she came after her.

“Come to my cabin,” said a shaky voice behind her. Sofia. “I have to go, I have to get out of here, but I—oh God, I can't be alone.”

Elissa nodded. Her hand reached down and found Sofia's. The fingers were cold, as Lin's so often were, but the shape of them was wrong, unfamiliar. Something lurched inside Elissa. She couldn't go near Lin—right now she was terrified just being in the same room as her—but all the same, every cell in her body seemed to be clamoring for the comfort she could only get from her twin.

“Come,”
said Sofia, her voice quivering on the edge of total panic. “Come out of here.”

The door whooshed open behind them. Clumsily, not taking her eyes from her twin's face, Elissa backed through it. Lin was watching her, motionless, her face set. She didn't move a hand to gesture good-bye, didn't smile, didn't mouth words. She just watched, unblinking, while the door contracted shut.

Once in Sofia and El's cabin, the door locked behind them, Sofia slid down onto the lower bunk as if her legs had forgotten how to stay upright. Tears swam into her eyes and clogged her voice. “I
know
her. I know her. She couldn't possibly do that to me. It's not—it makes no sense, it's not
possible
.”

Elissa's knees too wanted to fold beneath her, but she couldn't let them. She'd left Lin behind, shocked and terrified, and Cadan dealing with what felt like the aftermath of a massacre. And like Sofia said, it made no
sense
.

Except that they had been warned about it. Warned about it too late, but warned about it all the same. Which meant that to someone, on Philomel or elsewhere, it did make sense.

She couldn't let herself collapse. She had to think.

She braced herself with one hand on the edge of the cabin's little nutri-machine. “Zee and Ady didn't have a link,” she said.

Sofia's eyes came up to hers, bright with an unthinking hope that, in the circumstances, seemed so selfish that Elissa wanted to slap her. “You mean that might be why? The rest of us—we might be safe?”

Ady's dead and Zee's waking up to horror beyond horror, and it'll be okay as long as the rest of us are safe?

Elissa gritted her teeth, forcing herself not to reply the way she wanted to. Sofia wasn't being selfish. Not really. It wasn't fair to think it—of
course
she was scared for herself, just as Elissa was. Just as—probably—all the twins were.

“The warning came for all of us,” Elissa said. “Not just those of us without a link. But maybe, if not having the link means your mind is more damaged than someone who does have the link, maybe that's . . .” She rubbed her hands up over her face. “Okay. Zee
was
more damaged. He was used in
a hyperdrive. He was way more traumatized than the other Spares. Maybe that's why that—whatever it was—happened to him first. And he'd been having those fugue states—”

“What?” said Sofia.

Elissa explained, forcing herself not to flinch when she said the words Ady had used to explain it to her.

“And you
knew
?” Sofia's voice was shrill with accusation. “You and Ady, you knew something was wrong and you didn't
say
?”

“Trust me,” Elissa snapped, “if we'd known this was likely to happen, we would have said.”

“But you knew
something
was wrong—”

“Yeah, we did. And we didn't say. And now I'm sorry and Ady's dead.”

“You could
look
a bit sorrier,” Sofia said disagreeably.

Elissa clenched her hands. Anger was easier than grief. She knew that. It wasn't Sofia's fault.

She met the other girl's eyes. “I'll be sorry my whole life,” she said steadily. “Right now, I don't have time. If that can happen to Zee, it could happen to Lin, or El. We have to try to think how it happened—
why
it happened—or we won't stand a chance of stopping it.”

The door chimed to tell them someone was requesting entry. Sofia jumped a mile, and when she answered, her voice jumped too. “Who's there?”

“Me, Sam. They sent us all to our cabins, but I”—his voice cracked—“I keep seeing his face. And Zee—he's realized now and he's just gone to pieces and he started screaming. . . .”

Elissa touched the doorpad, and the door opened to let Samuel in. His dark skin showed muddy with shock, and the color had gone from his lips.

He squeezed in and sank next to Sofia on the bed. “Wasn't it bad enough?” he said. “What they did, what Jay's having to recover from? Wasn't it
already
bad enough, without this?”

“Zee?” Sofia's voice trailed off even as she asked the question, as if she knew there could be no good answer.

Samuel shook his head. “Meltdown. He started screaming at himself to wake up. Then he started trying to slam his head against the floor. They hauled him off to the med-bay or somewhere.”

“The med-bay? But
Felicia
—”

“No, it's okay. They had to sedate him before they could move him anyway. They'll tie him down or something.”

And when he wakes, he'll have it to face all over again.

What else could anyone do, though? The warning had just been about Spares and their twins, and Zee's attack had been focused on Ady, but he'd hurt Cadan as well—if someone went as insane as that, nobody could count on being safe.

“But the others?” Elissa said. “Lin?”

Samuel's head dropped as if he were too exhausted to hold it upright. “They're just locking them all in other cabins. Keeping them all separate. Greythorn said we'd be at Philomel in a few hours. The IPL officials there obviously know more than we do, so screw them, let them take over the whole freaking mess.”

“Cadan never said that.”

“No.” Samuel looked up at her. “I say it. This shouldn't be our problem—yours or mine or Jay's. They—IPL—screwed us. They should have known better than to reunite us so soon. They should have put protections in place. They should have done”—his voice shook—“oh God, just
better
.”

She couldn't disagree. But again, it came to her:
Anger is
easier than grief.
Knowing who to blame, and damn well
blaming
them, was easier, less painful, than thinking what had led to it, what there might be that could prevent it happening again.

She couldn't think how to say it, though, couldn't think how to express it to two people as shocked and grieving—and frightened—as she was.

She looked at Samuel, and he looked back, his face set in a mask of anger and misery. “Zee's never going to recover from this,” he said. “They're stopping him killing himself, but they'd do better to let him. How the hell do you recover from murdering your twin?”

Elissa opened her mouth to respond, to make an automatic rejection of what he'd said, and couldn't. Thinking of Zee, poor guilt-and-grief-ridden Zee, being driven to kill himself, was awful.

But thinking of him staying alive, knowing, for endless, isolated years, what he'd done to his twin, to Ady . . . That was worse.

Elissa, Sofia, and Samuel spent the night sharing the same cabin. It was cramped—Samuel only just managed to fit on the floor, and every time he turned over he banged against the lower bunk, shaking Elissa out of any half-waking doze she'd managed to fall into—and, because the air-conditioning wasn't set up for more than two occupants, it was also unpleasantly stuffy.

But they weren't likely to sleep much anyway. And, used to being with their Spares, and with Ady's and Zee's faces in their minds, none of them could face the idea of a whole night by themselves in a lonely cabin.

Lying in the dark, in the bed meant for El, Elissa reached her thoughts out along the corridors of the ship, to whichever cabin Lin had been left in.
Are you there? Are you all right?

But it was just as before, when she'd tried to use what she'd thought was her own electrokinetic power and found that, without Lin, it wasn't a power at all. Now she sent her mind reaching out for her sister, picturing the narrow corridors, the cabin she and Lin normally shared, but it was nothing more than an exercise in imagination. Left by herself, without the stimulus of physical contact, she, unlike her twin, couldn't make the telepathic connection between their brains. Without Lin providing her greater mental power, without Lin reaching out for her, the link might as well not have been there at all.

And Lin wasn't reaching out.

As the night dragged on, as Samuel stopped throwing his arms about and settled into sleep, as Sofia gave the occasional muffled cry, in her dreams, Elissa, alone in the dark, tormented herself by wondering why. Did Lin think Elissa blamed her for the danger she had unknowingly become? Had she seen the fear in Elissa's face—or, worse, read it in her mind—and did she now think that Elissa would fear their link as well?

Lin. Are you there? Can you hear me?

But there was nothing but the dark.

Elissa dozed eventually, until the sunrise-effect of the room lights sent gold-colored light seeping through her eyelashes, forcing her to full wakefulness.

It was early morning, Sekoian time. The display on the info-screen showed an announcement that touchdown on Philomel was an hour away—and a message from Cadan, telling them that their Spares were all entirely safe and were
being held in separate cabins until they'd landed.

“ ‘ . . . for both their and your security,' ” Samuel read out loud. “Like he needs to tell us that?”

“People resisted yesterday.” Sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, Elissa bent to fasten her shoes. Aside from worries about Lin, she'd had plenty of time for other thoughts in the night, for what-if after what-if to stack up in her mind. Exhausted and unwary, she gave voice to one. “I wondered . . . maybe that was what tipped Zee over the edge. The panic—everyone feeling trapped. Ady”—she stumbled on the name—“Ady said he was empathic.”

“Oh, so now it's
our
fault?” Sofia gripped the edge of the upper bunk and leaned down to shoot a furious look at Elissa. “If we'd all gone along like good little robots he'd still be okay—Ady would still be alive?”

Elissa bit down on her temper. “I'm not saying that.”

“You're not saying what
you
did either. Or what you
didn't
do.” Sofia turned her head to where Samuel stooped over the tiny corner basin in the shower cubicle. “She knew there was something wrong with Zee, did she say? She and Ady
knew
, and they didn't tell anyone. They didn't say anything.”

Samuel jerked upright, showering water, shock and hurt in his face. “No,” he said to Elissa. “You didn't?”

Elissa stood. “Yeah, I did. And now I'm sorry, and I can't fix it, and I'm
sorry
.” All at once everything seemed too much. She felt as if a flood of tears were rising to drown her. She swallowed, hard, digging her nails into her palms, drawing a breath in through her nose, forcing the tears away. She'd thought other what-ifs in the night, as well. She hadn't been going to say them, but now it came to her that maybe they needed saying. Maybe, if they were true, the twins and Spares
and the people charged with their welfare needed to be aware of what could be going on.