She couldn’t bear it. She threw a look around just as the man opposite her glanced up from the myGadget in his hand.
Their eyes locked. Elissa couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. He’d been reporting them. The stupid disguises they’d wasted so much time on hadn’t done any good.
He’d recognized her. He was reporting them.
The man gave Elissa a quick, uncomfortable smile, then looked back down at his myGadget. As he tilted it, its screen reflected briefly in the glass wall of the elevator. Game scores. He’d been checking game scores, that was all. Maybe he hadn’t even heard the news alert yet. If he’d only just entered the mall, if he hadn’t been near the newsscreens . . .
Elissa leaned against the handrail, floppy with relief, forgetting to look away, forgetting to carry on talking. In the glass across from her, the reflected display on the man’s myGadget changed. A news ticker scrolled backward across it.
No. Oh, no. Elissa’s stomach dropped as if the elevator had plummeted. Click away. Look at something else. Something else—
Too late. From the little colored, moving reflection, Elissa’s own face looked out at her. She couldn’t see the mirror-text scrolling across it, but she knew what it said. Elissa Laine Ivory, seventeen years old . . .
The man was suddenly very still, the myGadget motionless in his hand. He lifted his head and looked straight at Elissa.
At the same time, the elevator came to a halt. At the seventh floor, not the top, but it didn’t matter.
Elissa was at the opening door in two strides. “Lin. This floor.”
“Wait a moment,” said the man. “Are you that girl? The runaway?”
Elissa shook her head, backing out of the elevator, Lin by her side. “No. No, I’m not.”
“Wait a minute now!” The man took a long step toward them, but they were out of the elevator, hurrying away along the gallery floor.
“Hey, someone!” The man’s voice rose behind them. “Those girls—they were on the news alert! I’m calling the police!”
“Lissa—”
“I know. Run.”
Up on this floor, there weren’t many people around. But all the same, as she and Lin took off down the long gallery, Elissa heard a scatter of concerned voices beginning as other people caught the man’s alarm.
Another man put out a half-unwilling, ineffectual arm to bar their way, and a woman stepped in front of them, but they dodged, not breaking stride, running as if running itself could get them away, keep them safe.
One set of elevators was behind them, and the others were way at the far end of the building. But halfway through the mall moving staircases connected the floors, zigzagging up and down the cliff face. Elissa jerked Lin toward them, avoiding a couple of slow-moving mothers with toddlers and an older couple walking arm in arm.
Then they were on the staircase, racing up past the people who stood on it, who were turning surprised faces to stare. They reached the top of the stairs, the next floor. Elissa flung a glance up as she and Lin swung around the corner and jumped onto the next staircase. Two more floors till the roof, that was all, they could make it—
For an instant she thought the ringing was only in her head, then she realized it was the sound she’d been dreading since the motel—the sound of alarms ringing all over the building. Then the screech and scrape of security grilles cutting off the ground-level exits. Then more raised voices, these ones confident, authoritative. She spared a quick look back. Security guards, two of them, taking the stairs three at a time, gaining on them.
“They’re coming,” Lin said, panting.
Elissa had no breath to agree. They hurtled up the rest of the staircase, pushing past the few people who didn’t move quickly enough out of the way. The girls jumped for a moment onto the static floor of the next landing, and rounded the corner onto the last extra-long staircase. Only a handful of people stood on this one, letting it carry them slowly up to the top floor: a businessman talking on the phone, a young woman with a baby in a sling, an older man with his walking support leaning on the stair above him. If the girls could just get up to the top of this last staircase, just keep running till they made it, just get out—
Oh God. They’ll have locked those doors too. Not every door had one of the expensive high-security grilles, but they could all be shut and locked. And by now they would be. We’ll get up there and it’ll be a dead end, we’ll be trapped.
But she couldn’t do anything but keep running, hoping that somehow they’d be able to get out anyway, hoping that something would happen to save them. They were halfway up the staircase when the guards appeared at the bottom and began to make their fast climb up. One of them shouted something.
Déjà vu caught Elissa, a moment of dizziness like vertigo. She’d been here before, running from men in charge, men commanding her to stop. Running with no hope of escape. Last time an eleventh-hour miracle had saved her, a last-minute stroke of luck that had left a gate unlocked. A miracle like the fire that had gotten her out of her house—Wait.
As if Elissa were running so fast that she’d left her brain behind, her thoughts suddenly caught up. The fire hadn’t been a miracle. It had been Lin. And the gate—the sealed gate, too?
“Can you open the doors?” Elissa gasped, breathless. “The doors at the top, if they’ve locked them?”
Lin cast a wild look at her. “What?”
“The way you did the fire? Electrokinesis? Lin, can you do it?”
Lin stopped dead in the middle of the staircase, so suddenly that Elissa had leapt five more steps before she realized and turned to look down at Lin. A long length below them the guards had overtaken the young mother, were racing up toward where the businessman stood staring, phone call forgotten. The older man moved sideways, ready to get out of their way.
“Lin, don’t stop—”
“Yes.” Lin’s face was flushed and sweaty, but now it took on an extra glow—one of triumph. “Yes, I can do that.” She grinned, a wide flash of teeth. “And more. Hold on tight.”
“What—” But even as Elissa spoke, the staircase shuddered beneath her feet. She grabbed with both hands for the handrail.
The staircase shuddered again, a vibration that went all through it, then stopped dead. The guards, climbing two steps at a time, hands only loosely on the rail, were jerked off their feet. One stumbled, snatching for the rail; the other fell on one knee, hands flung out to break his fall. The businessman’s phone flew from his grasp, and it, too, fell, bouncing from step to step.
“Lin, be careful. Don’t . . .”
Lin wasn’t listening. Her grin spread wider. “Hold on tighter.”
The staircase began to shake.
It went in a wave, down from where Lin stood, each step lifting a little, sending the movement into the one below it. Then again, faster, the steps lifting higher, one wave after another, like ripples running down a length of ribbon.
The guard who’d fallen had been getting back to his feet, but the wave of motion threw his hands off the rail, flung his feet from under him. He gave a cry of pain as he went down, his knee hitting a step. The older man’s hands, sharp-knuckled on the handrail, lost their grip. He fell heavily on his side, grabbing uselessly for his walking support, his face a mask of surprise and panic.
The wave came again, this time strong enough that even Elissa, standing above where it began, felt it shake the steps. And again. On the handrail Lin’s hands were clenched as tightly as the old man’s had been, her feet braced apart, her teeth bared in what might be effort, or what might still be that grin of triumph. And again came a wave, stronger. This time the steps didn’t fall back into place. They crashed and grated, forced out of shape, a heaving avalanche of broken metal.
With each wave the old man was bounced down another section of treacherous broken slabs of sharp-edged metal, his walking support rattling after him, knocking against his hands as he scrabbled for a hold, tumbling helplessly down toward the businessman.
&nbs
p; The guard had given up trying to stand. He’d locked his hands around the rail, his head shielded behind them. Where his knee had hit the step, the metal edge shone wet and red.
Elissa couldn’t look away. Far below a woman screamed, and a baby gave a sudden terrified wail.
“Lin,” she said again, her voice thin with horror. “Lin, please, stop.”
Lin looked up at her. She spoke through clenched teeth, in a voice Elissa hardly recognized. “They’re after us. We have to get away.”
But you’re hurting them! They’re just ordinary people, and you’re hurting them! If she said those words aloud, said them to Lin, would they even register? Would they do anything at all?
“We can get away,” Elissa said instead. “If you can open the top doors, we can get away now. Lin, listen to me, you don’t need to do any more.”
Lin glanced down the still-shaking staircase. The businessman was gripping the heaving rail, one leg braced against it, the other leg braced against the old man to keep him from falling any farther. Below him the guards clung to the rail, the movement vibrating through their arms, through their whole bodies. The pants fabric of the one who’d fallen was bunched up above his knee, clinging to his leg, dark and wet. Farther below, the mother was the only one not holding on to the handrail. She lay, body curled around her baby, each wave jerking her violently up then down, crashing her into the steps, jolting her down onto the next few stairs. She didn’t move, didn’t put out a hand to save herself, her whole body nothing but protection for the baby she held.
On the rail Lin’s hands slowly relaxed. And as they did, the rippling, crashing staircase began to judder, an earthquake coming to an end.
Lin looked back and began to climb up toward Elissa. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
A hundred different thoughts battered in Elissa’s head; a hundred different sentences burned her throat. Lin had looked down, had seen what Elissa had seen, and— Oh God, it’s not registering at all. It’s like she doesn’t even see it. And I asked her to—I asked her to use electrokinesis. Knowing what she did last time, knowing how she doesn’t react like normal people—I panicked and let her do it again.
“Elissa?” Lin’s look of bright triumph faded. Her eyes were dark with worry, her face drawn with sudden fatigue. “Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you?”
She’s not a sociopath. She doesn’t just care about herself. Look. Look—she cares about me, she can’t have anything really wrong with her. And if she hadn’t done something, we wouldn’t have gotten away.
“I’m okay,” Elissa said. She didn’t look back down at the ruined staircase, at the people struggling to their feet. The air still rang with a cacophony of alarm bells, and there were plenty of other security guards in the building, and any minute now law enforcement agents would arrive. Elissa drew in a long shuddering breath through her teeth, turned, and ran, hearing Lin’s feet pounding after her.
The doors to the roof were locked, their translucent silicon edges clamped tight. Elissa and Lin came up to them, panting, and for a moment all Elissa’s other anxieties were drowned in a flood of panic. If they couldn’t get out, if they were trapped here while the enforcement agents caught up with them . . .
“Can you do it? Can you open them?”
Lin put her hand flat against the seal, her forehead crinkling in a frown. “Wait a minute. They’re heavy, and sealed so tight. I could move them, but it’s easier if I find the electrics of the switch . . .” Her voice trailed off. She screwed up her eyes, and her fingertips went white where they rested against the door.
Something seemed to explode in Elissa’s head, a noiseless firework flash, an impossible constellation of sparks. A tickle in the palm of her hand, like a nerve gone suddenly, itchily insane.
The doors sprang open. Heat hit her; hot air and the dazzle of unfiltered sunlight washed over and through her. The weird sensations died before she could try to define them, and they blurred into a memory.
In the sunlight Lin’s face was pale, a sheen of sweat along her hairline, shadows like bruises all around her eyes. Elissa remembered suddenly that less than twelve hours ago Lin had been lying feverish in a ditch. That less than forty-eight hours ago she’d been held prisoner in a government-sanctioned facility. That she had a hole, for God’s sake, in the back of her head.
“Come on.” She took her twin’s arm and pulled her gently out into the blaze of sunlight and heat, out across the wide sweep of the rooftop, paved in frosted glass, between the pots of palm trees and trellis screens of carefully trained scented flowers. At the far end of the roof, the sun glinted on safety rails arching over a walkway at the head of a flight of static stairs. “We just have to get out of here, back down to the slidewalks, and we can disappear again.”
Lin nodded. She looked more than tired. She looked hollowed out, as if she’d used every scrap of energy, of willpower, to get this far. As though, if she had to do anything else, she might not make it.
If we can just get down from here before they send anyone else, Elissa thought. If we can just get a chance to hide for a bit, to rest.
She hoped, but in vain. They’d only just reached the walkway when she heard the flyers coming.
They came surging up from below, appearing over the edge of the mall building, sleek and narrow-bodied, shining silver in the sunlight. They were designed to maneuver in the smallest spaces; they’d have no problem landing on the roof. And once there—
We’ve been running and running. Lin’s already exhausted from what she did back there. We can’t, we can’t do any more.
But as the sound of the flyers’ propellers changed, as they backed in the air, preparing to settle into place on the roof, fresh adrenaline kicked up through Elissa, and new heat ran through her veins.
The girls took off down the walkway, feet echoing on its metal surface. There was a staircase at the end, a spiral of steps that would take them down to the next walkway, then another to take them down to the next, down and down the cliff face to a final wide platform on the level where the slidewalks began.
We can’t make it. Not all the way down. They’ll catch up.
But there was nowhere else to go, no other escape route. Elissa ran, Lin’s feet an echo beside her, Lin’s breathing in her ear, the whine of slowing propellers behind them. She ran into a maze of shining steel stairs and safety rails, of eye-watering bright blue sky, of sunlight bouncing in dazzling bursts of silver fire from steps and bars, and, beginning three stories below them, the snakelike spiral of a staircase that was entirely covered.
They reached the end of the walkway, clattered down the spiral staircase at the end, then along another walkway, then descended another short flight of stairs. Elissa’s hand, wet with sweat, slid on the rail as she swung around onto the next floor. She lurched, nearly falling, then wrenched herself back up as the long curve of the covered staircase came back into view. For a moment her vision blurred with fear and fatigue and the endless dazzle of the sky and sun and steel. The smooth coiling shape of the roof drew her eyes down and down, dizzying, blurring, pulling her gaze to follow its shape all the way down until it spread out in a wide fan, into a roof covering the mechanism at the start of one of the slidewalks. The fan curved up at its farthest edge, a graceful curved lip like the curve at the top of a wave, or the curve at the end of a playground slide.
“Lissa! They’ve landed, they’re coming!”
Elissa cast a split-second look around them. Another flight down would take them to the walkway that joined the covered staircase. But if they just made it to the end of the walkway they were on now, they’d be directly over it.
She spun around. “Lin. Listen. Can you—”
“No.” Lin was shaking her head, her face pale and clammy, her eyes like black holes. “I’m finished. If I hadn’t—the moving stairs—I used so much energy.”
Above them men’s feet pounded along the first walkway. Elissa’s chest was heaving; every breath seemed to tear its way through h
er lungs. “You don’t have anything left?”
“Not enough to do it again.” Her gaze clung to Elissa’s. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If it was just opening another door—but I can’t stop them, not anymore—”
All at once Elissa understood what Lin thought she was asking her to do. “It is! That’s all it is. Quick, quick, this way.”
She pulled Lin along the walkway, hearing the clatter that meant the law enforcement agents were on the spiral staircase above them. If she was wrong, if Lin couldn’t do this or if it didn’t work, all she’d done was trap them like rats in a disposal chute.
They came to a halt at the end of the walkway, directly above the roofed staircase, safety railings all around them. Elissa put her hand up to the railings. “Lin, can you bend them? Enough to get us through?”
“Through?” Lin looked down. Her eyes caught the long spiral of the roof and snapped wide as she understood what Elissa was planning. “That?”
“How else can we get away? Lin, quick, we don’t have time—”
She wouldn’t have thought it was possible for her twin to go even paler, but as Lin closed her hands around the railings and shut her eyes in concentration, every scrap of blood seemed to drain out of her face. Her lips turned blue, and the shadows under her eyes showed so dark, it was as if someone had pressed their thumbs hard into the sockets, leaving bruises behind.
A shudder went through Lin, from her tensed shoulders to her fingers, bone white on the metal. Her teeth clenched, and her face went tight, every feature standing out sharper than before.
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