Linked

by Imogen Howson

  Oh God, this was all too weird. Elissa straightened, pushing the thoughts away, then went to the open window at the far side of her bed. Her bedroom looked out over the end of the shelf. She leaned out and dropped her bag to land neatly between two flowering bushes. It thumped as it hit the ground, and she jumped to attention, listening for her parents’ voices, but it must have sounded louder to her than to anyone else, because the rest of the house stayed quiet and unalarmed.

  Okay.

  Behind her, her bedroom door gave a gentle buzz as it slid open. She spun around, her skin prickling with guilt.

  Mr. Ivory stood in the doorway. The overhead light bleached the color from his face, showing every line. “Lissa, are you all right? I . . . wanted to check on you.”

  She stared at him, blank, hardly understanding what he’d said.

  “Lissa?” He came into the room. “What’s wrong? Is it the operation?”

  For a moment she almost opened her mouth to tell him, then rationality swept in. What she was planning to do—it was crazy. If she said anything, if she said she thought she had some kind of link to a real person—they’d freak out, both of her parents, think she’d gone completely insane.

  She bit back all the words she wanted to say. “I guess. It’s kind of scary.”

  “Yes.” For a moment he looked as if he were about to say something else. The lines in his face drew themselves deeper. She’d never thought of her dad as old—he wasn’t yet fifty, nowhere near middle-aged, even—but suddenly, staring across the room at him, she saw how he would look when he was.

  The words didn’t need biting back anymore. They fizzled away, dissolving as if they’d never been.

  It wasn’t just that her parents would stop her from going. It was something else as well. For three years, as the drugs and the sleep meds and the hypnosis were prescribed and didn’t work, as the doctors stopped giving time frames for when she’d get better, she’d seen the worry grow in their faces.

  Everyone—everyone in her family, that was—accepted that it had been three years of hell for her. Now, as Elissa looked at those new lines on her father’s face, she remembered, despite time after time of resenting that he and her mother could at least get out of the house and away from it, that it hadn’t been much easier for them.

  And now, on the brink of the cure they’d been hoping for all this time, if she said anything that would make them think her condition was getting so suddenly worse, that she could no longer even distinguish between hallucination and reality . . . She was scared enough. She couldn’t do that to them as well.

  “But I’m okay,” she said, meeting his eyes, deliberately lying to him for the first time she could remember. “I’m nervous, but I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  For an instant her father’s face stayed still, the lines harsh in the unforgiving light, and Elissa’s thoughts wavered, momentarily confused. I thought he’d look relieved. Why does he look like that? As if he’s . . . he’s . . . She couldn’t think of the right word, and then her father smiled at her, his face relaxing into a normal expression. It was all right. She’d convinced him, and he wasn’t worrying about her anymore.

  “Good girl,” he said, the words he’d been using all her life, from when she was tiny and she’d remembered to close the storybook he’d been reading her, to when she got top grades in her logic class her first semester of high school.

  If she hugged him—especially right now, with awful secrets in her head and a bag hidden in the bushes outside—she’d start crying. So she didn’t. She smiled at him instead, as if, as far as she was concerned, they’d finished talking and she was just waiting for him to go. After a moment he stepped back outside the room.

  “Good night, then, Lissa.”

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  It was only after the door had slid shut behind him that the word she hadn’t been able to think of came to her. The expression that had shown for that fleeting moment on his face . . . it had been grief.

  She waited, sitting cross-legged on her bed, while his footsteps went away across the landing, while her mother’s voice came from the staircase as she went upstairs, as water ran in her parents’ bathroom. Her heart rushed blood through her eardrums, and she had to deliberately relax her hands to stop her nails from digging grooves into her palms.

  Outside her window the sky slowly darkened to full night, lit from below by the haze of city lights, the languid streaks of spaceships rising against the darkness.

  The house settled into silence.

  Elissa drew in a breath that shuddered between her teeth, and slid off her bed. The pants she was wearing, loose and comfortable, were okay to go out in, but she took off her bathrobe and replaced it with a dark hooded top. She slipped on a pair of shoes, then went softly out onto the landing.

  Her parents’ door was shut, and no sound of voices came from behind it.

  Elissa went down the stairs, stepping as lightly as she could, one hand on the rail, as if that would help her tread less heavily.

  In the entrance hall she opened the control panel and deactivated the door-chime before she went out.

  The night was even warmer than it had felt in her bedroom. Low down, only a little way above the plateau, clouds had begun to gather, milky gray in the lights they reflected from the city far below, seeming to concentrate the heat and sweat of the night as if under a blanket.

  Her bag was around the side of the house, behind a tumble of flowering creeper that she had to more or less wade through, fighting the tendrils that wound like wire around her legs. The scent of the petals was sweet and heavy in the darkness. She hooked the bag’s strap over her shoulder and checked that her ID card was in her hoodie pocket. Out this late, if she met law officers, they’d be completely likely to ask her for ID, and although they could scan her and match her up with their database, she’d get by a lot quicker if she could just wave her card at them.

  Back at the front of the row of houses, she touched the dip in the wall that indicated the concealed sensor, and a section of the wall slid open to let her out onto the slow-moving slidewalk as it slid past alongside the shelf, over emptiness.

  It took her past the end of the shelf to where she could step onto the fast section that spiraled her up toward the spaceport plateau.

  As the slidewalk reached the edge of the plateau, it leveled out, sliding into the groove set for it in the ground. The safety fields switched off.

  Elissa stepped off the slidewalk and was left standing in an odd landscape, a leftover mixture of undeveloped grassland and the shiny, high-tech slithers of other slidewalks. Ahead of her she could see the dart of fire where another ship took off into the dim gray sky.

  Away over to her left a chain of lights briefly glittered then blinked out, showing where a high-speed train had just torn up from the city and disappeared over the horizon. Its thunder rumbled through Elissa’s imagination. The sound of trains going over a bridge. The hot shiver and ache of fever. The feeling of giving up, of failure . . .

  She’d thought, somehow, stupidly, that all she needed to do was come up here and look. She’d forgotten how big the plateau was. The spaceport itself was a far-off bulk against the sky. The grassland dwindled gray into the distance. And now that she was thinking properly, she knew there were far more than a handful of the huge metal roads that sped the long-distance trains away to other cities across the whole of the continent.

  For a moment she stood still, her stomach tightening, her skin hot and sweaty. This is no use. I’ll never find her. I’ll wander and wander around here, risking getting picked up by security . . .

  No. Think. She dragged her hoodie around her, for comfort rather than for the warmth she no longer needed.

  She had wondered, a disturbing idea, if the visions were getting clearer because the girl was coming closer. She’d go with that, try the nearest road first.

  If I never find her, I’ll never know. I’ll wonder always if it was real, if I could have done so
mething.

  She stepped onto another slidewalk and let it take her through the patchwork of light and dimness, past areas of grass that grew waist high, combed through by the scouring breath of the hot wind, past the dark slices of the drainage ditches that crisscrossed the plateau, insurance against the sudden drenching rains that would come in the autumn. She slid from shadow into the glare of tall lights, so bright that they bleached all color from their surroundings, turning her into a grayish girl traveling over grayish grass. Then she slid back into the shadow that made her almost invisible.

  The slidewalk curved, and almost before she knew it, she was sliding alongside the buttresslike supports of one of the roads. She jumped off, stumbling slightly on the tangles of grass. It’s not the right place. She was farther down, out of sight. She can’t be here.

  The road towered up above her, a dull gleam in the dark where she stood, flashing bright higher up where the light from one of the tall lamps fell on it. Its supports stood solid in the grass in front of her, but others dwindled into the dark . . .

  Into the dark of the drainage ditch just feet away from her.

  If Elissa hadn’t known the girl was there, she’d have thought the huddled shape, darkness against darkness, was nothing but a pile of garbage collected into a corner by the wind. As it was, she could see it was a person, worryingly still, curled in the crook between the grass and the side of the road support.

  The side of the ditch fell away, precipitously steep, the grass on it long and dried glass-smooth by the sun and wind. Elissa’s descent was a slide, scarcely controlled at all, made faster by the weight of the bag on her back, the grass slithering through her fingers rather than providing handholds to slow her down. She reached the bottom to find blood streaking her palms where the grass had made tiny shallow wounds like paper cuts.

  The girl hadn’t moved. Refusing to listen to the alarm suddenly thrumming in her head—she’s dead, it’s too late—Elissa got to her feet and made her way along to where the figure lay.

  The girl was still breathing, a tremor that showed in her huddled shoulders. She had her head buried in her arm so that hardly anything showed except a dark head, the hair damp and straggling all over it. She was wearing a black, baggy hooded top covered in frayed holes. Just the back of one hand showed, pale and grubby, on the grass.

  Elissa knelt and spoke gently. “I’m here.”

  Is she even conscious? If she’s in a coma or something, what am I going to do?

  The girl shifted and put her hand out, bracing it against the grass. With an effort that made her arm shake, she lifted her head.

  Elissa’s breath stopped.

  She knew the girl’s face. She’d seen it before, more times than she could count. In mirrors, shop windows, drowned and wavering in swimming pools, indistinct in the night-darkened windows of her house. She’d felt its contours under her fingers every time she’d applied moisturizer or sunblock, every time she’d gotten washed, every time she’d put her hands up to try to ride through a violent headache.

  This girl, this strange girl under the road, who’d been tortured and had escaped, the girl so sick she might not recover—she had Elissa’s face.

  IT WASN’T just a similarity, not just a likeness of dark hair, dark eyes, pointed chin, and high forehead. The girl had the tiny crooked bump at the bridge of Elissa’s nose; the exact shape of her mouth, the bottom lip fuller than the top so that, unless she tried not to, she would always look slightly sulky; the splotches of freckles over her cheeks; the few stray hairs at the end of each eyebrow that Elissa, for the last five years, had made sure to pluck out as soon as they grew. The girl’s hair was cut shorter than Elissa’s, and her face was thinner, the cheekbones sharper, but all the same . . .

  She’s me. She looks just like me.

  After a long moment where Elissa couldn’t gather any thoughts beyond that sentence repeating over and over, she realized the girl wasn’t staring back at her. Her head was still up, but she clearly wasn’t fully conscious. Her eyes were shiny with the glaze of fever, her hair sticking to the sides of her face. She put her hands out, a fumbling, clumsy movement.

  Elissa’s own hands flew back, an instinct-driven reaction she made before she knew she was moving.

  Jumping from blankness into hyperactivity, her mind had suddenly thrown up a million weird terrifying ideas from horror movies. Cosmetic surgery. Identity theft. Clones—not just the partial clones routinely used for life-saving procedures, but full-body clones—somehow spontaneously developing self-awareness. The girl looked exactly like her. Was her thumbprint the same as well? Her DNA? If she, Elissa, disappeared now, in this minimum-security wilderness, her parents not even knowing she was out of the house, could this girl take her identity, take over her life, and no one would ever know?

  Elissa set her teeth, biting down the thoughts before they flooded her whole body with panic, before the instinct to run took over completely. All the time she’d been growing up, she’d had glimpses into this girl’s mind. Whoever she was, whatever she wanted, Elissa had never caught a hint of anything that indicated the other girl was dangerous.

  Elissa put her hands out deliberately, keeping them steady, fighting back the panic, and clasped the other girl’s hands.

  They were the same as hers. Which shouldn’t have been a shock—the girl had the same nose as her, for goodness’ sake—but was, nevertheless. She suppressed a wave of something more akin to revulsion than fear—this was wrong, it just felt wrong—and as she got it under control, she registered the second thing, that the girl’s skin was damp, and radiating heat like a glow that seeped out into the air around her.

  The girl’s fingers curled around hers, clung. She blinked, focusing on Elissa’s face, and the girl’s face stilled suddenly. Something swept into it, a wave of something more than relief, more than recognition, something Elissa couldn’t name. The girl opened her mouth. Her voice was ragged, scratchy and sore-sounding. “Lissa?”

  She knows me. She knows my name. Elissa’s stomach turned upside down. For the first time she realized what she should have thought of before, that the window she’d had into this girl’s brain hadn’t been just one-way. It was one thing to get glimpses of someone else’s life; it was something else entirely to think someone else had had glimpses of yours.

  The girl’s hands tightened. “Please—don’t be scared. I swear . . . I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “You know my name.” Elissa’s own voice sounded unsteady, not just frightened but completely off-balance.

  The girl wasn’t listening. “I just wanted to see you. Just . . .” Her head dipped, but she brought it up with a jerk, her face tight with effort. “I haven’t come to ruin your life. I know you have parents. I know I can’t—I know I’m not legal. I just wanted . . .” Her voice faltered, her head sagging again. Her hands were all at once even hotter where they clutched Elissa’s, and a flush burned in her cheeks.

  She’s really sick. She needs a doctor. But I can’t just call one. I don’t know who she is, or who the people are she escaped from. I can’t do anything that might let them know where she is.

  Elissa bit her lip. She’d thought she’d felt helpless and out of control before, but that was nothing compared to how she felt now.

  Okay. This is why I brought medicine. I can at least sort out the infection, get the fever down.

  She slid her hands from the other girl’s, slipped her bag off her shoulder, and dug through it for the meds and the half bottle of water left over from her day at school. She shook two of the antifever tablets into her palm. “Here, take these.”

  The girl’s eyes opened again, focused on the tablets—and she jerked back, so violently that the tablets flew out of Elissa’s hand and disappeared in the grass. The water slopped out over Elissa’s hand.

  “What are you doing—” She broke off. The girl’s pupils had contracted to pinpoints; her whole body was stiff, her mouth clamped shut. With a sudden shock of cold, Elissa noticed
the bruises that extended along her jawline, down onto her neck. Bruises that were an exact match to Elissa’s.

  Elissa took a long breath, then spoke gently. “It’s all right. They’re just for the fever.”

  “Sorry.” It was a whisper.

  “It’s okay.” She shook out two more pills. “Can I give these ones to you? I brought some water to help you swallow them.”

  The girl nodded. She took the tablets and gulped most of the drink down in one huge, gasping swallow after another.

  Elissa watched her. She hadn’t brought enough water. And the meds she had brought—were they even strong enough? She didn’t know who the girl was, was completely freaked at her eruption into her life, but if she died because Elissa should have called an ambulance and didn’t . . .

  “I’m just going to spray some medicine on your arm too, okay? It’ll feel cold, that’s all.”

  The girl flinched when the spray hit her swollen arm, but she didn’t make a sound. She was obviously trying to drink the last bit of water slowly, but she looked as if she were having to make an effort not to gulp it down as she had the rest. Elissa found herself chewing the side of her thumbnail sore, trying not to look worried, watching for the signs the meds were working. They were supposed to work within minutes, but the girl seemed so sick . . .

  And what am I going to do with her? Even if these meds do work, if she gets completely better, what do I do with her then? I don’t know who did this to her, or how to keep her safe. I don’t even know where to begin—

  When the thought came, it was like a light switching on in her brain. How stupid was she? She hadn’t wanted to tell her parents about going out to find the girl because she hadn’t wanted them to think she was even sicker than they’d realized. But now . . . She’s here, she’s real. It’s not me going mad. All along the doctors got it wrong. The abnormality in my brain, the thing they want to operate on to remove—it’s not what they said. It’s a link. A telepathic link with a real person.

  All at once she was floating with relief. Whatever awful organization had been keeping this girl, however crazy it seemed that anything like this could happen nowadays on a high-security, low-crime planet, it didn’t matter now. Her parents could fix it. Her dad would know who to call to keep the girl safe, to get the organization raided and shut down. Her mother hadn’t worked in a hospital since Elissa was born, but she’d still know better than Elissa what the girl needed. They might not even have to take her to a hospital—her mother could make her better at home, where she was safe and private.