Unravel (5 page)

“Got you, Captain. Lin, you coming?”

Elissa was at the door, a step behind Markus, before she realized Lin hadn't followed her.

She turned. Lin wasn't moving. She stood still, arms folded, eyes fixed on Cadan.

“Lin,” said Elissa, “we have to go.”

Lin didn't glance at her. “What am
I
supposed to be doing?” she said to Cadan. “You know I can be useful. You know I can do stuff. You don't mean for me to go sit in the
Phoenix
as well?”

“Lin, there's nothing for you to do out here. Go in the
Phoenix
, get the shields up—”

“Markus can do that. You already said so. I could do a million better things.”

“No.” Cadan's voice had a no-argument tone in it. But Lin had never been good at picking up that sort of cue.

“Why
not
? We came back to help, didn't we? You know what I can do. I can fly ships too—”

“Not by yourself. Not safely. Not yet. Lin, no one has time for this. Get on board.”

“I don't need to do it by myself! I can come as your copilot. You know I can do that! You
know
I can.”

“Lin.”
The word came out with a snap like the crack of a whip. “I'm not using a copilot. I don't need you.” Lin opened her mouth and he cut across her, not letting her get a word in. “And I don't want you. You're not up to this kind of fight, if that's what it comes to, and I don't need the distraction. What I need”—she started to speak and he raised his voice, speaking over her—“
what I need
is for you to keep out of the way and keep your sister safe. Now go and do it instead of delaying me and keeping her here in danger.”

Lin shut her mouth, then marched over to where Elissa
waited. Her face was flushed, her eyes glinting and narrowed. When she unfolded her arms to shove her hands into her pockets, Elissa saw her hands were balled into fists.

But at least she wasn't resisting, or arguing. She followed Elissa through the door and into the coolness of the air lock in silence, then up the stairs and into the flight cabin.

ELISSA FLICKERED
a look at Lin as the door snapped shut behind them. Her twin's face was still flushed, her jaw set. Despite the terror flaring in her mind whenever she thought of Lin being caught, hurt . . . imprisoned again, impatience prickled at Elissa.
Oh, for God's sake. All those people we're leaving in danger, and you're angry because you want to be in danger too? It's not like we came back to Sekoia to fight off attacks—that's not the help we wanted to offer.

Was that what it was, just Lin wanting to be involved, or was there something else going on? Elissa's shoulders slumped. Just as there were so many finer points of normal social interaction that Lin didn't get, there were probably a whole bunch of things about
Lin
that Elissa didn't get. Sometimes you got tired of trying to work them out.

“Lin,” said Markus, in the pilot's seat, flipping up switches one after another. “We're getting the shields up, okay?”

Lin marched across to the front seats. “You don't need me for that. You can do it yourself.”

Lights sprang awake along the control panel. Screens woke, flashing code. Markus's voice remained steady. “I can, but I'm not as conversant with the code as the captain is. If you double-check it for me—”

Lin flung herself into the seat next to him. “You don't need to call him the captain when he's not even here.”

Elissa's chest clenched. That wasn't just anger in Lin's voice, it sounded like . . . but no, it couldn't be hatred, not for
Cadan
.

“You're right.” Markus tapped out a sequence on the keyboard, hesitated, backspaced, then tapped out the rest. He nodded toward one of the screens. “Check that for me, would you?” Then, in the same steady tone, “I don't need to call him that. But nonetheless, we do.”

Lin scrolled through the code. “It's fine. First shield ready.” The words were bland, but her voice was still dark with anger. “I don't see
why
. It was one thing when he was in charge, when you were all being paid to do what he said. . . .”

“Second sequence coming through. He's still in charge. The SFI going down—it doesn't affect anything. This is his ship.”

“Oh it's so
not
. He was only put in charge of it temporarily—”

“It is. He was given charge of it. That makes it his. That's not a pleasant fiction to make the pilots feel good, Lin, it's legal fact. It was meant to be a fixed-term ownership, sure, but now SFI's gone, and it's only IPL who has the authority to terminate his ownership. If they do . . . well, they do. But unless—and until—that happens, it's Cadan's word that
matters on board the
Phoenix
. And the crew—either we obey his orders or we resign.” He nodded at the screen again. “And that's why he gets called
captain
whether he's present or not.”

“Code's fine.” Now Lin's voice sounded more sulky than anything. “Second shield ready.”

“Third sequence.”

“I just . . .” She shot a sideways look at Markus. “He's been teaching me how to be his copilot. He
knows
I can do more than this, and he's all rules and ‘you're not up to it' and ‘look after your sister.' Like I need
him
to tell me to look after Lissa!”

“There's more to being a pilot than flying,” Markus said mildly. “Lin? Are you checking that code for me?”

“
Yes.
It's
fine
.”

Markus's eyes went to the screen. He waited. After a second Lin followed the direction of his gaze. “What are you doing? I—
Oh.
”

From where Elissa stood she couldn't see which bit they were looking at, nor could she understand the code that Lin had picked up so easily, but the arrested tone in Lin's voice told her all she needed to know.

Markus tapped out a correction. Lin scrolled through it, slowly, then back. “It's fine,” she said again, her voice filled with resentment.

“Thank you.” Markus activated the sequences, and around them the
Phoenix
seemed to come alive, humming awake as the shields—the enhanced force fields that, in space, protected them from meteorites and other space debris as well as from attack—built themselves around the ship.

Markus leaned away from the controls, angling screens to get the best view of outside. His voice kept exactly the same
quiet tone as he said, “And that's why you're not ready to fly a ship.”

Elissa saw Lin's head snap back as if he'd hit her. “That's not fair. You did that on purpose—”

“And
you
didn't pick it up. Because you were angry, and you let it distract you.”

“Yeah, well, it's not like
Cadan
never gets angry.” There was that tone in her voice again, an edge like the edge of an electro-whip. Not just anger, but something more like resentment.

“But he doesn't let it interfere with how he flies the
Phoenix
.”

Lin didn't answer. She got up with an irritated, jerky movement and went over to grab a chocograin bar from the little nutri-machine set on the back wall of the cabin. Markus turned enough in his seat to meet Elissa's eyes. He gave her the merest flicker of a smile.

She was smiling back before she knew it, grateful that he'd had the argument with Lin so Elissa didn't have to. Then guilt needled her.
It's not fair. She only wants to help—and she has so much ability, so much power, it must be driving her crazy not being able to do anything with it.

Outside the
Phoenix
, it had felt like they were on the very brink of being attacked. Even now that they were safe, tension seemed to hang, buzzing in the air, and Elissa, all nerves, chewed the edge of her thumbnail until it was sore. But when the first twenty minutes had passed and nothing happened, the atmosphere relaxed a little.

Over the next twenty minutes, outside the ship, the sun dropped lower, sinking toward the horizon, staining the sand red. Inside the ship, they waited.

There was no reason, really, why at least some of them couldn't leave the cabin to go find something to do in another part of the ship, but, as if none of them wanted to leave the view of the base afforded by the cabin windscreen, no one made a move.

Lin ate a second chocograin bar leaning against the wall next to the windscreen, looking up and out at the empty sky. At the controls, Ivan, sitting sideways on the copilot's seat, told Markus the best ways to thicken soup, and Markus at least appeared to listen, and Felicia lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the floor and reached both arms over her head in what Elissa recognized as the start of one of her many yoga routines.

Elissa sat still, clasping her knees, her gaze on the darkening sky. She'd taken her thumbnail away from her mouth and tucked her thumb safely inside her folded hand, but her insides remained knotted. Her thoughts knotted too. Back on Sanctuary, everything had seemed so clear. But now, within hours of landing on Sekoia, she was swamped with anxieties and fears.

People were
still
referring to Spares as clones. Oh, she could see why. Before Spares had become public knowledge, most people on Sekoia hadn't known it was even possible for them to exist. The birth of identical babies, born from a single fertilized egg, had ceased thousands of years ago—even the term
twin
, an archaic word meaning “double,” had fallen out of existence. She remembered Lin explaining it to her, saying that some kind of spontaneous mutation had caused the phenomenon to re-emerge forty or so years ago.

That's impossible,
Elissa had said at the time. She'd known, of course, that sometimes a pregnancy produced two babies—it
was the only way couples ended up with a second child without applying for a license—but she'd known, or thought she'd known, that it only happened when
two
eggs were simultaneously fertilized, and that the babies might be alike, in the way siblings often were, but they wouldn't be identical.

When she'd first met Lin, one of the first things she'd thought of was cloning; she couldn't blame other people for initially thinking the same, even though science had not yet developed a full-body clone.
But they've been
told
now. They know what she is, they know she's her own person, not just a copy of me. If they still keep insisting that she's a clone, how are they ever going to let her fit into society, lead a normal life?

Except—everything Miguel had told them came back into her mind, overwhelming her—was life on Sekoia ever going to be normal again? And was Lin—
oh God please no
—going to get killed before they even had a chance to find out?

And now Cadan's out there, putting himself in danger. And it's selfish to even be thinking it, but I'm still scared he thinks more of Lin than he does of me. And our identity isn't anywhere near as safe as we thought it was going to be. And . . .

Elissa let her forehead drop onto her knees.

Lin pushed away from the windscreen. “Nothing's
happening
. There isn't any attack. We don't even need to
be
here. We could be at the city already, actually doing something useful.”

“Cool your jets, would you?” Ivan interrupted what he was saying about bread crumbs and glanced over at her. “You'll get there. Dig deep. Find some patience.”

“But why can't we go there
now
? We have room for lots of those people. It would only take a few trips to take them to somewhere else on Sekoia. There must be other places they
could use. And then we could stop worrying about the base being attacked, and we could stop hanging around here.”

Felicia had finished her exercises. Now she lay, stretched and supine, on the floor, her eyes shut and her breathing relaxed.

“Where would you take them?” she said. “This is their home—the only home left to them. If they don't defend it, what will they end up with?”

Lin narrowed her eyes at Felicia. “We took
weeks
just getting back to Sekoia. I want to
do
something—”

She broke off. Her eyes went suddenly blank, as if she were looking at something not physically in front of her. “There are engines,” she said. “Two . . . three . . . coming really fast.”

Elissa jerked her head up to scan the sky she could see through the windscreen. Empty. She couldn't hear anything either. Aside from the gentle hum of the instruments on the control panel, the far-off buzz of the shields, the world seemed to lie silent, waiting.

“Lin, are you sure?” Lin's ability to understand the ship's controls was one of the most impressive things Elissa had ever seen, and before, she'd seemed to pick up when the hyperdrive was malfunctioning. But Elissa had thought that was mostly to do with sensing the imprisoned Spare powering it—did Lin really sense electronics? And had her abilities developed to such a point that she could pick up approaching aircraft?