TO PHILIPPA,
who was the very first cheerleader for this book, all the way back when it was called Telepathic Twins in Space, but who was too intelligent to let that stay as its title, so thought up the current one instead.
Flowers, chocolate, and Twitter shout-outs are due to the following people:
My agent, Mandy Hubbard, who saw the potential in this book when it didn’t really have much beyond potential, and whose insight changed it into something immeasurably better.
Everyone involved in its production at Simon & Schuster, especially my editor, Navah Wolfe, whose editing made it immeasurably better all over again; Lizzy Bromley, who designed the drop-dead-awesome cover; managing editor Kaitlin Severini; and production manager Chava Wolin; and copy editor Christina Bryza and proofreader Bara MacNeill, who saved me from a great deal of continuity-related embarrassment.
The Lucky 13s, who kept me company in the months leading up to publication in the way only other debut young adult authors can.
Michelle and Dayna, who have supported me since we were all unpublished authors, and who kept me from biting my fingernails off during the days this book was out on submission.
Jossy, who was the first audience for my stories, and who has been an excellent sister ever since.
Finally, thank you to Philippa and Elinor, most awesome, entertaining, and beautiful daughters ever, for putting up with being manuscript orphans and for still being excited when I sell another book.
And to Phil, for everything.
AS ELISSA and her mother entered the waiting room, the sky above Central Canyon City was a chill, predawn gray, the spaceport a colorless blaze on the horizon. Lines and points of light pricked up from the canyon floor far below.
Elissa walked to the window, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest and that her palms were damp enough to leave handprints on the glass ledge of the windowsill. As she stared, struggling not to give in to her creeping anxiety, the sky changed. First from gray to a thin twilight green, hazy where it curved down beyond the spaceport, then—as all at once the sun rose high enough for its light to hit the desert floor—to endless blue, a color deep enough to drown in.
The light made Elissa’s eyes water. She blinked and looked away, just as the waiting-room lights went to sleep and a ripple of cold at the back of her neck told her the air-conditioning had come on, preparation against the scorching heat of late springtime in the city.
Elissa shivered. No one ever got the temperature right for her. Four years—a lifetime—ago, Carlie and Marissa used to joke that she was as cold-blooded as the tiny glass-lizards that scrabbled up the sides of the school buildings to lie on the flat, sun-hot roofs.
Pushing the memory away, she turned to pick her sweatshirt up from the chair behind her.
At the far side of the room, her mother sat, straight-backed and exquisitely thin, a bookscreen in her hands. In the adjacent corner amber lights glowed behind a tiny waterfall that ran over a tumble of pebbles into a small pool. In the background, music—chimes and harp strings—trickled quietly from invisible speakers, and the scent of chamomile and lavender hung in the air. Everything was designed to calm, to relax.
Elissa’s hands were still sweaty. She wiped them surreptitiously on the sweatshirt as she pulled it on.
If this guy can’t fix me . . .
No one had said it, but Elissa knew very well this was a last resort. How many times now had she sat in doctors’ offices, waiting for them to tell her how they were going to fix her, how they were going to make her normal? How many treatments had they tried? The sleep medication, the pain medication, the little electronic device designed to interfere with the signals her brain sent to her body. That last one had seemed to work at first, and her hopes had soared, only to crash when, abruptly, the symptoms returned. Then there was the hypnotherapy and the weird white-noise machine they’d fixed up in her room, which had been supposed to help her sleep but had just filled her room with an infuriating sensation, like a buzz she heard not only with her ears but also with the inside of her head.
The background music segued into a slightly different theme, something with more flute and less harp. The muted lighting behind the waterfall changed from amber to gold. Elissa’s mother sighed, flicked a glance up at the clock-shimmer on the cream-colored wall, and brushed her bookscreen to turn a page.
Elissa bit at the ragged edge of her thumbnail.
“Lissa, darling, don’t bite your nails.”
She dropped her hand and turned back to the window, but the tightness in her chest crept now into her stomach, coiling behind her ribs. Every time the doctors had tried a new treatment, from that very first time, when they’d said it was nothing but out-of-balance hormones, they’d promised she’d get better. They’d promised the symptoms wouldn’t last. Promised that the treatment—whichever one it was that time—was only temporary. Give it a week . . . a month . . . four months. . . . You’ll be okay for your best friend’s birthday sleepover . . . for your date . . . the spring break camping trip. You’ll be back to normal, Elissa, I assure you . . .
They weren’t saying that anymore. After this last time—the latest terrifying vision, the pain that had made her scream and scream and scream, the bruises as black as burn marks on her neck—they hadn’t promised anything. They’d just made her an emergency early-morning appointment with a new doctor. A specialist. Specialist in what?
When the chime came, she almost jumped. She looked around to see the inner door slide open and the doctor—the specialist—step into the waiting room. He was a man about her parents’ age, with dark brown skin and a mist-gray suit as elegant as the room.
“Mrs. Ivory? Elissa? I’m Dr. Brien.”
Elissa’s mother was already getting to her feet. Her mouth was a little tight, and her hand bloodless on the bookscreen, but she appeared, as always, entirely in command of the situation. “Call me Laine, please. You’re going to help my daughter. I really don’t feel I should stand on ceremony with you.” This with a slight smile as she took his outstretched hand.
Dr. Brien’s smile included Elissa. “What a wonderful attitude. If that’s your attitude as well, Elissa, I don’t think we need to worry!”
Elissa took his hand in turn. Hope unfurled within her, warm and glowing. This one would help. Probably they should have sent her to him years before. Years that she’d spent trying, helpless, to hold on to everything that made up her life, watching as it all slid through her fingers and disappeared.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter about all that wasted time, if I can just be normal now. If I can just have enough of my life back to build a new one.
“Please, both of you, come in. Now, I’ve been caught up to speed with the problems Elissa has been having, but of course you’ll fill me in if there’s anything else I need to know. It looks as if Elissa’s symptoms haven’t cleared up the way we thought they would . . . .” His voice continued, an effortless, reassuring flow of familiar words, as they followed him into his office and sat, obedient to his gesture, in armchairs that matched the couch in the other room. Elissa’s chair shifted a tiny bit around her as she sat, and then warmth crept through its surface, cocooning comfort around her tense body.
Across the room to her right, a whole wall was a plate-glass window, treated to eliminate reflections, making it look as if there were nothing there but emptiness. The sky stretched into an infinity of blue.
Almost invisible against the brightness, a shining fragment climbed like a rising star. A ship, setting off on its journey across the impossible distances of space. Then two more, tiny sliding glints of reflected sunlight. It seemed incredible that just fifty years ago there’d been no spaceflight industry on Sekoia at all. No Space Flight Initiative. No government-funded training p
rogram. What would Bruce have done, with no space career to aim for? Gone all out for sports instead? Followed Dad into the police force?
Dr. Brien waved the door shut, then took a seat opposite Elissa and her mother, next to the big corner desk where his screen stood.
“Now, Elissa.” He smiled at her again, and she smiled back. “I’ve been looking at the results of all your tests. Just let me make sure I’ve got everything straight. There’s a note here about some nightmares when you were very young, and a prescription for sleep medication. Do you remember that?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Except she’d never called them nightmares. They hadn’t been scary, so it wouldn’t have made sense. The only scary thing had been her mother’s reaction when she’d mentioned them. “Sometimes I think I’m a girl who’s not me,” Elissa had said, and her mother had stopped dead in the middle of unwinding a clean floor across the playroom, looking up with a face frozen in shock. When Elissa had said the same thing to the doctor—that first doctor her mother had taken her to—“nightmares” had been how he’d framed them. It hadn’t felt like the right word, but she hadn’t known what else to call them, those pictures that came day and night. She’d gone for “dreams” in the end, even though that hadn’t felt quite like the right word either.
“And the medication, did it work?” asked Dr. Brien.
“Yes.”
It had worked, way back then, but she hadn’t liked how it had made her feel. Slow, almost . . . muffled, as if they’d given her invisible earplugs. So when at the end of the month the medicine ran out and her mother checked—Are you having any more of those funny dreams? You need to tell me, Lissa, if you do—she’d said no. And when the dreams had come back, she just hadn’t said anything else about them.
She taught herself to ignore them instead. She learned to shut the pictures out of her daytime, learned to forget the dreams as soon as morning erased the darkness from the bedroom. As she got older they came less and less often, until it took hardly any effort to forget they’d ever been there at all.
She’d thought, earlier, how that had seemed a lifetime ago. That time before the symptoms.
If I’d known. If I’d only known I was living on borrowed time, I wouldn’t have bothered freaking out about all the tiny things that used to upset me. When I got to high school and Bruce—and freaking Cadan—still kept treating me like a little kid. Not being able to get matching shoes and swimsuit for Marissa’s sweet teen pool party. Not asking for help when I didn’t understand simultaneous equations and being pulled up in front of the whole class. When I was sure Simon was going to ask me to the Newbies Prom and he never did.
She’d had friends—two best friends, and a whole heap of others. She’d been asked to most of the parties that mattered. She hadn’t yet had an official boyfriend, but she’d known, from giggling oh-my-God-don’t-tell-him-I-told-you-what-he-said conversations with Carlie and Marissa, that there were at least three boys working up the courage to ask her out. Her grades were good enough. She’d been promised driving lessons, and her own beetle-car if she passed her test the first time.
She’d had everything, and she hadn’t even realized.
Until . . .
“Until . . . ,” said Dr. Brien, and she nearly jumped, suddenly terrified he was reading her thoughts. But he was looking back at his screen. “Until about a year after you started menstruation, yes?”
Agh. She ought to be used to that sort of question by now, but all the same, heat flooded her face. “Yes.”
He picked up a universal pen and sketched a rough square on his desk. The lines glowed briefly green, then the wood finish cleared to show a note-taking surface, smooth and translucent.
“Why don’t you tell me about the symptoms, the way they began?”
Again. Going through it all over again, with doctor after doctor . . .
But this doctor was going to fix her. She straightened a little in her chair, determined not to leave out anything that might help him figure out what he needed to do. If it works . . . oh God, if it works this time, I might be okay for graduation. I’ve been a freak for half my time at school, but if this works, if they can all see me looking normal when we graduate . . .
“Okay.” She swallowed. “The pictures—they came back.”
For years they’d been nothing but flickers in her mind, fleeting and indistinct, easy to ignore. But when they returned, they were bright, vivid with detail, appearing as if lit by lightning flashes in her brain. And this time they were like nightmares. White-masked people, needles and syringes, huge humming machines she dreamed she was clamped into—and she woke biting down screams.
They brought pain, too. Pain that struck like lightning, white-hot, out of nowhere. She would have been able to hide just the pictures. But even if the pain hadn’t been bad enough to make her cry out or faint or—worst of all—throw up, she wouldn’t have been able to hide it. Because just as with the pictures came pain, with the pain came bruises.
Dark splotches creeping out from the nape of her neck up onto her jawline, or sometimes unexpectedly around her temples, or in thumbprintlike marks on the sides of her neck. Every morning when she looked in her mirror, she’d flinch from the sight of new marks.
Dr. Brien was nodding as she talked, making the occasional note in scrawly writing that shone a dark, wet green, as if he were using real ink.
Elissa told him everything she could think of that he might need to know. She told him how her grades had slid down to almost failing. How she’d kept blacking out at school. How sometimes the pain wrecked her sense of balance and she fell, adding explainable bruises to the mysterious ones.
She didn’t tell him absolutely everything, though. He didn’t need to know about the times she hadn’t been able to get her makeup to cover the bruises, about the times at school when people had whispered about her—not always far enough behind her back. He didn’t need to know that, after one too many no-shows at parties, canceled shopping trips, and sleepovers ruined by screaming fits and late-night emergency calls to her parents to pick her up, even Carlie and Marissa had stopped inviting her anywhere. Or that, after all, each of those three boys had asked other girls out instead.
Nor did she tell him how, to start with, her parents had put their own social lives on hold, but when a year had passed and there was still no sign she was going to get any better, they’d started going out again, leaving her at home with medication, their number to call, and a pillow to scream into. I’m sorry, her mother had said. Really, I am, Lissa. I don’t want you to feel abandoned, and we’re just on the end of the phone. But it’s not like we can even do anything if we stay in with you, and your father’s work contacts . . .
Dr. Brien flipped his pen over, touched the nonwriting end to the surface of his notes, and transferred them to the upright screen, leaving the square blank. “So, hallucinations—‘pictures,’ as you say. And phantom pain and bruising. They all come together?”
“Yes.”
“Every time? You don’t get, say, bruising without the pain first? Or the pictures without any pain at all, like you did when you were very young?” He watched her face, waiting.
Not anymore. “No.” Then a thought struck her.
“Elissa?”
“I . . . I didn’t think before, it was so vague . . .”
He waited, pen blinking its ready signal, a tiny emerald spark at its tip.
“The pain—yes, it normally comes with the pictures. But sometimes, I have just a—well, I guess it’s a hallucination, but I never really thought . . .”
“Why is that?”
“It—they—sometimes they come at night, so it feels more like a dream. If there’s no pain I don’t remember them much. I didn’t think . . .” She looked at him guiltily. If she’d thought of this before, if she’d told someone, would it have helped earlier?
He smiled briefly at her. “Don’t worry, Elissa. So, you have hallucinations without pain that might just be dreams.
Such as . . . ?”
Such as waking up crying in the night, shaking with sobs that didn’t seem like hers, bursting with misery and rage . . . feelings that didn’t seem like hers either, and that faded almost immediately, leaving nothing but bewilderment behind, and a fatigue that dragged her back down into the depths of sleep.
She’d been looking down at her hands, twisted in her lap—it was easier to talk if she didn’t have to watch him listen—but now she glanced up. Dr. Brien had laid his pen down, and was tapping out his notes on the upright screen instead. He’d tilted it away from where Elissa and her mother sat, so she couldn’t see what he was writing.
“These particular hallucinations, Elissa. Are they just feelings—emotions? Is that all?”
She blinked. “I . . . Like I said, they don’t have any pain with them . . .”
“I mean, do you see anything? Are you aware of your surroundings? When you have your ‘pictures,’ they’re associated with images of people in white masks—scientists, presumably. In these night pictures, in these dreams, is it the same thing?”
“No. I don’t think I really see anything. I guess . . . I’m just in bed.”
“Your own bed?”
She stared at him, confused. They were freaking hallucinations. What did the furniture matter? “I don’t know. A bed. It’s dark.”
“All right.” He smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Elissa. You’re doing great. I’m just collecting as much information as I can. Anything that happens in your brain draws on all sorts of other data—movies you’ve seen, music you’ve listened to, conversations you didn’t even know you’d heard. And sometimes the type of data it’s drawing on helps us make a more accurate diagnosis. Now, if that’s all you can remember, let’s move on to your latest recurrence of the symptoms.” He pulled down the corners of his mouth. “It sounds like a nasty one, from what I’ve been sent. Suppose you tell me about it.”
As she obeyed, her stomach cramped. Ever since it had happened, late yesterday afternoon, she’d been sick with fear that it was going to come again. The pain had been . . . oh God, just awful. She’d been at home, thank goodness, and it had come so suddenly, so violently it had taken her feet from under her. She’d fallen, halfway up the stairs to her bedroom, dropping the orange juice she’d been holding, doubling over, retching bile onto the pale carpet.
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