Linked

by Imogen Howson

  “I’m . . . not sure.” The girl rubbed the side of her hand on her cheek, bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I . . . Meeting you, maybe, for real? The link between us? I just knew where you were this time. I couldn’t do it before.”

  Okay. That made sense. The sickness settled into a knot of unease in Elissa’s belly. It hadn’t gone, but she was no longer taut all over, poised on the edge of fight-or-flight.

  The girl unhooked the bag and dropped it to the ground, then knelt beside it. Her chest was heaving even more than Elissa’s had been, and in the faintly growing light her face showed colorless, smudged with marks like shadows where dirt had mixed with sweat. But she was kneeling upright, her shoulders straight, her eyes clear.

  “You’re not so sick now,” Elissa said.

  “That medicine was amazing. I slept for a while. Then I read the package and took some more—two doses—before I came to find you. The swelling on my arm has gone down.” She looked straight across at Elissa. “I know you don’t trust me. I . . . That’s okay. I get how you wouldn’t.”

  “I—yeah.” It made it better, somehow, that the girl had said it. “I just . . . A few hours ago I still thought you were a hallucination.”

  The corners of the girl’s mouth turned up a tiny bit. “It’s easier for me. I always knew you were real.”

  Elissa had her breath back now, and she knew she had to use this place of respite, of safety, to think. They had to go somewhere even safer, where they’d be even less likely to be pursued. But vital though that was, she had to ask the girl another question first.

  “What is all this? Who’s doing it? And what for? And who are you?” Okay, so that was another four questions. But she couldn’t stand this not knowing any longer—if she didn’t get some information, she’d go absolutely freaking crazy.

  The girl took another breath, settling her shoulders back in a way Elissa recognized as bracing herself for something unpleasant. She’d done it herself, before a doctor’s appointment, before walking into school . . .

  “I’m a Spare,” the girl said.

  “A what?”

  “You don’t know about us? Not at all?”

  “No. I don’t have a clue.” She swallowed down the frustration spilling into her voice. “What’s a spare?”

  “A nonhuman human-sourced entity? You haven’t heard of that?”

  The answer was even more no than it had been before, but Elissa didn’t say it. “Nonhuman?” Her voice went shrill, hovering on the edge of control. “You’re nonhuman?”

  Over thousands of years of colonizing the known universe, no one had ever found Alien sapiens, life-forms with anything closer to human intelligence than Old Earth’s apes. Was that what this girl was saying she was, an alien life-form who looked like a human?

  “Human-sourced nonhuman. I’m, um . . .” The girl bit her lip again, pulling it into her mouth, an anxious movement. “I’m your Spare. I’m genetically identical to you. I . . . come from you.”

  The idea had crossed Elissa’s mind before, part of the horror-movie stuff she’d tried not to think about. But she hadn’t really expected the girl to say it. She had to force the word out. “Cloning?”

  “Not exactly . . .” The girl’s voice trailed off. Her eyes fixed, wide and anxious, on Elissa’s face, but Elissa was out of patience.

  “Just freaking tell me. I’m trying to help you here, and you’re making me play guessing games!”

  The girl flinched. Everything she’d gone through, and a raised voice could make her look as if she’d been hit? Elissa stared at her for an irritated, bewildered moment before the thought—unexpected and unwelcome—struck her. Not just a raised voice. My raised voice.

  “I’m your double,” the girl said. “There’s this rare abnormality, sometimes, in pregnancies. The egg, it splits into two embryos, develops into two identical fetuses.”

  “What? No way—that’s impossible. Sometimes people have two babies, but they’re not from one egg, they’re not identical.”

  The girl shook her head. “No, really. It was a lot more common thousands of years ago. They had a whole name for them. They called them ‘twins’—it means doubles. It died out for—oh, just forever—until there was some kind of spontaneous mutation thirty or forty years ago. But the second fetus, it’s not human. It’s”—her eyelids flickered—“I’m . . . just a replica.”

  Elissa’s head was swimming. “But you—what’s different about you? You look the same, you feel pain. How do they decide?”

  The girl lifted a shoulder. Her face was very set, Elissa noticed suddenly, held still as if it were clamped down over pain or grief. “Our brains are different. The link, between you and me? That’s one of the differences. For you, it should have died way back, when you were still small. After the birth, once they separate the twins, it doesn’t normally last beyond the first few years—”

  “Wait. Wait.” There was too much to take in. Elissa was only managing to grasp a tiny bit at a time, as if the normal connections in her brain were on a go-slow of information overload. But one thing suddenly got through to her in all its meaning.

  “You were born with me? You’re my parents’ child? My . . .” Her whole brain locked up for an instant, as if it were threatening to send her a stack of error messages. “You’re my sister?”

  The girl looked at her, her lip looking almost bruised where she’d bitten it, and a slow flush rose into her face. “I’m your Spare. I’m—I’m not legally defined as anything else. I . . .” She swallowed, the flush rising all around her eyes. “I’ve always felt you were my sister. Back when I was really young, I used to see into your life lots of the time. I knew what was happening to you, what you were feeling, who you were. But you—you didn’t even know I was real. You don’t feel the same way, and I’m not asking you to. I’m—really, I’m not asking you for anything.”

  Elissa couldn’t speak. Something had caught in her throat.

  The girl swallowed again. There were no tears in her eyes, but her mouth trembled when she tried to speak, and when she’d gathered herself and begun again, her voice quivered. “I just . . . I just wanted to see you, to see your world, and then . . .” She trailed off. She looked very tired suddenly, and years younger.

  I’m supposed to believe she’s not human? Elissa’s hands had clenched themselves in her lap. She’s gotten all the way over here, and she’s frightened, and still recovering, and she wants me to know she’s not asking for anything from me?

  There were a million things Elissa still didn’t understand, some of which the girl might be able to explain, some of which she probably wouldn’t. Right now none of them mattered.

  There were security cameras all over the city. And even where there weren’t, the girl—the twin—looked exactly like Elissa. Anyone, anywhere, would notice there was something odd about them. Something wrong. They had to fix that first of all, before they could even use the morph-cards.

  Where can we go? Just for an hour or so, long enough to change how we look so we’re not so easy to track?

  Once more Elissa dragged her thoughts together, summoned memories of the section of the city around them.

  Of course. They were almost on the edge of the business district; it was two intersections away. Business travelers came through it every hour of the twenty-four, staying for a few hours or days in the pod-motels, one- or two-person self-service rooms. If you stayed longer than a night, there’d be ID checks, and alarms if you didn’t complete them. But for just a couple of hours . . .

  She pulled the bag over and rummaged inside it for the money she’d dropped in earlier that morning. There wasn’t much, but what there was would stretch to a two-person room for a night. After that . . .

  The morph-cards seemed to tingle in her pocket, and her father’s voice came to her. Changeling. Chameleon. Camouflage. She did remember how to use them. And she damn well would.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’ve seen a lousy bit of my world so far. This isn�
�t going to be a whole lot better, but it’ll have food and a hot shower. And then we’ll think what to do.”

  The girl blinked at her. “You’re—not going back home?”

  For a moment it was like a mini earthquake rocking the ground beneath Elissa’s feet. Not going home. Is that what I’m doing? Not just tonight, but ever?

  She looked the other girl in the eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I—right now I can’t think beyond getting somewhere where we can get ourselves to look different. But after that I’m not going anywhere till I’ve worked out how to keep you safe.”

  “You don’t have to. I didn’t—” The girl swallowed again. “I didn’t plan this. Your life—it’s so perfect, and I . . . I don’t want to wreck it for you.”

  “Perfect?” Elissa could almost have laughed. “Not even close.”

  “But that’s my fault, isn’t it? It’s the link, sending you echoes of . . .” The girl trailed off again, shrugged. “You know. But they’re going to do that operation, and you won’t feel it anymore. You can just go back to being normal.”

  “What?” Elissa’s voice went up, incredulous and horrified. “You think I’m still going to go through with it? Now? When I know what it’s for, when I know what they’re burning out of me? No way am I letting them do that!”

  “But you . . .” The girl stopped, swallowed. “Look, I get your thoughts, okay? Not all of them, but flashes. Enough for me to know you want to be normal. Having me turning up like this, I know it’s . . . I don’t want to ruin things for you.”

  Elissa got to her feet and picked up the bag. “My life is nowhere near perfect. My parents—they’ve lied and lied and let me think there was something wrong with me, when all the time . . .” Her teeth gritted against one another. Her parents must have known at some point what was really going on. If the link was supposed to die off like some sort of weird psychic umbilical cord, then presumably that was what they’d been hoping for. Presumably, too, at least some of those stupid, ineffectual treatments had been meant to help kill it off. That white-noise machine—was it some kind of psychic damper? The drugs, too? But for three years, three years, they’d let her struggle with misery and loneliness and attacks of pain like lightning strikes, losing her friends, losing any kind of normal life . . . and they’d let her think it was her fault, that something was wrong with her.

  “You’re not ruining anything. All you’ve done is show me how fake my whole life has been.” Her hands had closed into fists again. She forced them to relax, drew in a breath. “It wasn’t perfect even when I thought it was. You haven’t wrecked anything, and I’m not leaving you till I’ve got you somewhere safe.”

  And either the words, or her voice, or something in her face got the message across, because her double said nothing else.

  The pod-motels were built around the sides of a building shaped like a giant, upright cylinder, the streetlights catching their curved windows with a smooth plastic gleam. Elissa fed money into the interface by the sealed-shut entrance, keyed in two persons for five hours—the minimum time you could stay—and waited when the display told her to, her heart suddenly thumping, hand hovering over the little tray where their room keys would be dispensed.

  She was using physical money, not credit, but all the same, nightmare ideas of being traced came into her mind. You couldn’t avoid all the cameras around here. She’d told the other girl to keep her head down, and they were both wearing their hair trailing around their faces, but if an alert had gone out, if a camera picked them up and an operative was on the ball . . .

  The keys, narrow slips of plastic coded to the room number on the display, slid into the tray. The pod-motel entrance sprang open.

  Elissa scooped the keys up. “Come on.”

  A staircase spiraled from the center of the ground-floor lobby all the way up the height of the tower, but it was only for emergency use. Elissa slid her key into the slot next to one of the elevators that stood around the outer edge of the room. “We’re floor twenty-six,” she said to the other girl, keeping her voice low. She’d never heard that there were security microphones in the pod-motels, but security had been getting tighter and tighter over the whole city—the whole planet—in the last few years.

  Sekoia had almost none of the terrorism you heard about on other planets, but what it did have were completely strict immigration controls. Like everyone kept saying, an already-overcrowded planet couldn’t afford to let even a few illegals slip through.

  The elevator door slid open. Elissa led her double in, dipping her head, checking that the other girl copied her, so the security camera in the ceiling corner wouldn’t get a clear scan of their faces. Would the pod-motels be a good place for illegals to stay for the one night they could get away with before they had to give ID? Or did they go somewhere else, somewhere completely low-security, way off the radar?

  The elevator shot them upward with a stomach-dropping rush. Elissa ran the keys through her fingers, staring at the numbers on the wall display as they changed—zero to sixseveneightnineten in as many seconds. She wasn’t only thinking about illegal immigrants. She wasn’t, really, thinking about immigrants at all. Is there anywhere totally safe from cameras and mics? If there is, dare I go there? Dare I take us both into some kind of . . . criminal underworld? She grimaced. Jeez, she didn’t even know what to call it. She was so not cut out for this.

  The pod-motel was everything it was supposed to be: surgically clean, equipped with beds, nutri-machine, shower cubicle, and toilet, and so tiny there was only just room for them both to stand on the floor at the same time.

  Elissa dropped the bag on the floor, scrubbed her hands across her face, and dialed two coffees from the machine. The night before, it had seemed like the worst thing in the world to go to sleep instead of staying awake to think of a way out. But now . . . Thank God I did. If they’ve tracked us, if they know we’re here, they’ll be here in half an hour. Even if we needed to, we wouldn’t dare sleep now.

  Another thought came, clamping a steel grip around her throat. If they do come, I’ve trapped us. In this little room with one exit and one way down.

  Elissa took another gulp of coffee, feeling the unfamiliar caffeine buzz through her brain. She hadn’t had a choice. They had to get changed before they could use the morph-cards, and they had to have privacy to do it.

  The other girl was perched on the edge of the lower bunk. Against the fat white quilt and pillow, she looked even grubbier, shabbier, than she had before. And in the close quarters of the podroom, she smelled. Unwashed and sweaty, sharp with a scent Elissa identified with illness and anxiety—the smell of sickrooms and exam rooms and her own bed when she woke from a nightmare. Oh, wait. As Elissa moved, she caught a gust of scent from her own body. It’s me who smells.

  She flushed, hoping that however the link between them worked, it hadn’t picked up those thoughts. But then, she’d never picked up that type of inconsequential thought from the girl, only flashes of emotions that came through stronger: pain, terror, rage. “You probably need some food, don’t you?”

  “I found some in the bag when you dropped it out?” The girl’s voice went up as if the sentence were a question, as if she were asking permission to have eaten a couple of snack bars. Once again something caught in Elissa’s throat. She didn’t feel like the girl was her sister. Despite the link with her she’d had all her life, Elissa still didn’t feel she knew her, didn’t feel the connection with her she’d once felt with Carlie and Marissa. But all the same . . .

  “No, I mean real food.”

  “I . . . yes. But didn’t you use all your money to pay for the room?”

  “Not quite, no. And anyway, food is covered in the price. Do you know what you want—” She broke off. “No, it’s okay, ignore me. I’ll get you a standard meal.” She dialed the nutri-balanced option. The girl looked beyond thinking about what she wanted. Let the machine do the thinking for her—at least she’d get the right balance to help her recover.
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  A familiar covered tray slid out of the bottom of the machine. Elissa peeled the lid back and handed the tray to the girl, looking over her head out the window, alert for flashing blue lights. They’d been in the room five minutes. Twenty-five more and I’ll believe we’re okay. For now at least.

  She dialed another coffee and a pot of cereal for herself. She wasn’t hungry, but like she’d said, food was included in the price of the room. And if they did have to run again, she could at least get some extra calories to keep her going.

  The girl was eating hungrily, scooping up the basic curly grain salad and protein dressing as if Elissa had discovered some kind of secret gourmet function on the machine. Elissa squeezed herself down to sit cross-legged on the floor, eating her cereal, watching the girl for a minute.

  For an instant, sitting there, she was rocked by the weirdness of it. Here in this tiny room she was on the run from her own planet’s police, with a girl who was her mirror image, her literal double, her—what had she called it?—twin, whom she hadn’t even known existed before today.

  Then the girl—twin—looked up and caught Elissa’s eyes, and the weirdness vanished under the weight of a million things she had to think about.

  She fished the morph-cards out of her pocket and handed one over. “We have to program these, okay? They’ll give us ID, and we won’t get anywhere without ID. And more money, too.”

  The twin turned the card over in her hand. It gleamed a little in the glow of the room, the dot-eyes of its emoticon catching the light unevenly so that it looked as if it were winking. “It’s fake, right?”

  “Completely fake.” A little ripple of triumph crept through Elissa’s fatigue. “It’s the one bit of good luck we’ve had, don’t you think?”

  The twin’s eyes came back up to hers. “Where did you get it?”

  Memory crashed over Elissa. Her father, his face in the light of the fire that had driven them from their house. The urgency in his voice, in his hand as he pushed the morph-cards into hers.