Above them, the thump of feet.
Oh God, Lin, you have to do it. If we’ve gotten this far and can’t—
The bars shuddered as Lin had shuddered. Wavered as if Elissa were seeing them through a heat wave, then bent slowly, fluidly apart. There was just enough space for a teenage girl to slip through, then to get her balance for a moment and drop onto the wide silver stripe of roofing below and begin to slide.
They’d be miles away from the law enforcement agents within seconds. They’d buy themselves time to hide and rest and plan. It would be easy—fantastically, ridiculously easy.
And, looking at the roof for the first time without the safety railings in the way, Elissa knew she couldn’t do it. The twisting staircase seemed to swirl and swoop below her, sending spirals of nausea up behind her eyes, into her stomach. She must have been crazy to ever consider it. They were so high up, so high, and there were no safety fields, no bars, no glass walls to catch them if they slipped too far, slid helplessly off the roof to fall and fall and fall . . .
“We have to,” said Lin, white-faced, hand on one of the warped rails.
“I can’t. I can’t do it.” Cold sweat broke out all over Elissa’s back. “I’m sorry. I should never— We’ll just have to keep running.”
“Lissa, we don’t have time.”
Elissa looked again at the narrow ledge they’d need to climb onto, the drop, the roof spiraling down and down and down. The nausea twisted, tight and cold inside her, making her start to shake. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Lin dropped her hand. “Okay. Then I’ll have to fix it myself.”
“What?”
“I’m not going back there. They’re not getting me. I can start fires, remember? Interfere with electric currents?” Lin glanced up through the crisscrossing metal above them, up to where the flyers had landed. Her face was not just set but merciless, her eyes like ice. “I can reach their fuel tanks,” she said. “I can send them up like fireballs.”
She raised her hands, palms open.
“Oh God, no.” Elissa grabbed her twin’s hands and dragged them down. “They’ll have pilots in them!”
Lin jerked away. “Then what am I supposed to do? Stand here and wait for them to take me?”
“No. No. Oh God. Oh God, you just can’t. You can’t.”
“What choice have I got? What choice are you giving me?” Lin wrenched her hands free, turned that blank, merciless face upward.
In a split second of horror so intense it was like precognition, like a vision unfolding in the air in front of her, Elissa saw what would happen, saw what Lin could do. She saw the flames burst from the flyers’ engines, saw their propellers go crazy, spinning out of control. She saw the machines flare up, death traps spewing flames, coffins for the still-living men inside them.
Elissa’s heart was pounding so hard, every inch of skin seemed to feel it. Her mouth was so dry, she couldn’t swallow, and her hands were cold and clumsy. But she had no choice. She grabbed the railing and swung herself up onto the ledge. “Stop,” she said. “I’m going. We’re going to get away. I’m going now.”
And she dropped from the ledge.
An instant of falling, of terror exploding all over her body, of her vision blinking out. No time for thoughts, just wordless, white-hot fear.
She landed. On her side, with a jolt that knocked the breath out of her, and before she could even gasp, before she could even register that she’d landed on the roof, that she was okay, she hadn’t missed it and gone plummeting through miles of empty air—before she could even register the clang that meant Lin must have landed as well—she was sliding. Down and down over cold smooth metal, no handholds, no friction, completely out of control, down and down and around and around, the sky and the sun and the silver flashes of steel spiraling with her, faster and faster, around and around and down and down. Every moment she expected to go flying off the edge, flung out into the empty air.
Head whirling, vision completely screwed, for an instant she left the ground and found herself suspended in midair, stabbed through with terror like ice and fire. Then she hit something and was flung back, to fetch up against another hard, smooth surface, this time with a jolt that seemed to grab and shake her as if she were nothing but a spindly bundle of bones.
She tried to gasp for breath, but her lungs wouldn’t work, and all she could do was make a thin crowing sound.
Then Lin crashed into her, and any tiny bit of breath left in her body was punched out of it all over again.
Somewhere law enforcement agents were still after them, with weapons and flyers and tracking devices. Somewhere were her parents, who couldn’t help her. Somewhere there were doctors and police she couldn’t trust.
None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she was no longer running, sliding, falling. She was lying still, in a world of pulsing black spots and stabbing spears of light. And, gasping and wheezing, dragging the air in as if it were fighting against her, she was starting to breathe again.
The black spots cleared. The world returned. The stabs of light resolved themselves into sunlight on steel. She and Lin were lying on the fan-shaped slab of roof at the bottom of the structure they’d slid down. They’d slid so fast, they’d actually left the surface of the roof for a moment—the thing she’d hit, the thing that had flung her back, was the lip at its edge. Hundreds of feet above them the law enforcement agents were tiny dark figures. The flyers hadn’t taken off yet, but any second now they would.
Elissa pushed herself to her hands and knees, then to her feet. “We have to get moving,” she said to Lin, and as she said the words, horror heaved within her, turning her stomach upside down. What Lin had been going to do to the flyer pilots . . . that was worse than the shelf fire, worse than the moving staircase.
It’s not her fault. What they’ve put her through . . .
But this time the thought, the counterargument she seemed to have been dragging up all day, had no force to it.
As they climbed down off the roof, then hurried across the platform onto the fast-moving slidewalk, the horror lay like a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. Lin’s fault or not, if she was willing to do that, anything like that . . .
It’s inhuman. As soon as she thought the word, she tried to unthink it, delete it from her mind. But it was too late. Oh God. What if they were right, the authorities who’d declared Lin not human? What if she really was lacking some vital part of her brain—what if she really had neither conscience nor empathy?
Then she’s dangerous. Really dangerous. And that alert—was it telling the truth? Am I at risk? Or if I’m not, if I get immunity because I’m her twin, what about everyone else?
They changed slidewalks, taking one down toward the northern edge of the city where a park had been built along the banks of an artificial lake. There was no longer safety in numbers, in losing themselves, two anonymous teens in a larger crowd. And I don’t dare take her among people. Not now that we’re in danger of being caught, of being chased again. If she—if next time she—
Neck prickling, Elissa glanced back to check if they were being followed, and as she did so, she realized Lin was watching her, had been watching her since they’d climbed off the roof.
Lin’s face was still the color of dirty paper, set in tense lines that spoke of fatigue and, as Elissa’s eyes met hers, of something that looked like fear.
“You know I was lying, right?” she said.
“I—about what?”
“About setting the flyers on fire?”
Elissa found she’d crossed her arms over her chest, a comfort . . . or a barrier. “No. I don’t know. You sounded pretty sure to me.”
“No. No. I was lying. I had to get you to jump and I . . .” Her voice trailed off; her eyes fixed anxiously on Elissa’s face. “It was all I could think of.”
The slidewalk doubled back on itself before starting the slow looping descent to the canyon floor. Elissa’s fingers curled around her
arms, into the gap between her upper arms and rib cage, holding herself even tighter, holding herself together. She wanted to believe what Lin was saying, she wanted to, but . . . If I believe her, if I believe she’s not some kind of psycho, and I trust her, and something happens . . .
“Lissa, you believe me, don’t you?”
“I . . .” Elissa’s eyes met Lin’s again. She couldn’t bring herself to lie, but if she said no . . . “I— Look, the staircase, back at the mall—”
“They’d have caught us if I hadn’t done something!”
“Yeah. I know.” Elissa dug her nails into her arms. It was true, what Lin said. And if she could just believe that necessity was all it was, if she hadn’t seen Lin’s face as she watched the people . . . If she hadn’t been smiling . . .
Elissa couldn’t talk about that. Not yet. Not now. She swallowed. “Look, you did start a fire. At my shelf.”
“And you didn’t like it. You said you didn’t like it, so I’m not going to do it again.” Lin’s face was anxious, intent. “Lissa, up there—I couldn’t have, even if I wanted to. You saw me—I could only just do the bars.”
“Oh.” Elissa hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t, she realized now, been thinking clearly at all. Lin was right. “So . . . you really weren’t going to . . .”
“Really.”
The slidewalk dipped down among the first branches of the tallest trees in the park. Leaf shadows rose up around them like a shoal of flickering ethereal fish. Elissa pushed her fingers up into her hair, scraping her nails over her scalp, trying to force herself to think clearly. “Okay. I get it. I believe you.” She hesitated, not wanting to say anything else, wanting to leave it there, but at the same time feeling the edge of worry—of fear—at the back of her mind, like the flicker and blur of vision before the start of a migraine.
“What?”
Elissa looked up at her twin. “If you had been able to, and if they’d caught up with us . . .”
Lin was watching her, the leaf shadows flickering over her face, her eyes steady, a surprisingly adult look in them. “You want to know if I’ll kill people to save us?”
“I . . .” She hadn’t expected Lin to put it as bluntly as that. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.” Elissa swallowed. “I . . . okay.” Okay. She doesn’t know. That’s reasonable. She didn’t say yes, and she’s running for her life—it’s not fair to judge her by normal standards.
“Can I ask you something now?” Lin said.
Elissa looked at her, waiting.
“If I had . . . if I do kill someone—”
Elissa’s careful reasoning fell apart. “God, Lin, please. Don’t talk about it like that—”
“I didn’t say I was going to!” Lin’s face was aggrieved. “I said if!”
Oh, jeez, it’s like speaking a different language. Elissa took a long breath. “Okay. All right. Go on.”
“Will you hate me?” her twin asked.
“Will I hate you? You mean, if you . . .”
“Yes.”
Elissa took another breath. The slidewalk made one last slow curve, lower, lower until it sank a bare half inch below the close-clipped grass. They’d left the tops of the trees far above, and now they drowned in a green twilight. A long way off, from the direction of the spaceport, distant thunder rumbled: a ship taking off.
Elissa stepped off the sluggishly moving slidewalk, onto grass so soft it seemed to bounce beneath her feet. Lin followed her.
“Lissa . . .”
Elissa stopped, turned to face her twin. “Honestly?”
Lin nodded, face tight.
“Okay, then, honestly—I don’t know.” She hesitated, watching Lin’s face. “I’m sorry, okay? You don’t see it like I do, and I can—kind of—understand why you don’t. The fire, the staircase—no one got . . . really . . . hurt. But if you—if you actually kill someone . . . I don’t know if I can . . .”
She stopped. Lin’s face was set so stiff that it had gone expressionless, and her whole body had tightened as if she were bracing herself against pain.
Something caught at Elissa, something that tightened her own chest, made it momentarily hard for her to swallow. There was nothing else she could say, nothing that would make it better.
“Lin, look.”
Lin lifted her chin, met Elissa’s eyes as if with an effort before she spoke. “I’d promise not to if I could. I— I don’t want to make you hate me.” She swallowed, and Elissa saw her throat move as if she, too, found the movement hard to make. As if Lin’s throat too were suddenly tight and dry. “I can’t promise. If they come after me, if I can’t get away and it looks like they’re going to take me back . . .”
She stopped talking, gave a little helpless shrug.
Elissa opened her mouth, then shut it. That’s how it leaves us, then. They’re going to keep coming after us—after her. Wherever we go, out of the city, across the far side of the continent—even if we get on a flight over to the other side of the planet—they can send alerts everywhere. Wherever we go, they’ll catch up. And if she’s desperate, if she’s trapped . . .
Despair swept over her. It’s no use. Whatever I do, wherever we go, there’s nowhere for her to be safe long enough to learn to be fully human. Nowhere on the planet that’s going to be far enough out of reach.
The words echoed inside her head. Like another echo, a long way off rolled the distant thunder of the spaceship. Nowhere on the planet.
There were other planets. Strewn all the way across the star system. Ones that shared laws with Sekoia, had trade agreements, extradition treaties . . . and ones that didn’t.
“That’s where we’ll go,” she said. “We’re not going to stay here. We’re going to go off-planet.”
WHEN ELISSA had said it, it had felt like the obvious answer, the obvious escape. But early that evening at the edge of the spaceport, as she approached the Space Flight Initiative student accommodation tower block, the certainty came to her that it was not an escape—it was nothing but another dead end.
She tipped the peak of her cap farther down over her face as she left the fading golden sunlight for the cool shadows of the main lobby, with its banks of lockers around every side and its staircase rising above her. She and Bruce hadn’t been particularly close growing up, and since she’d gotten sick and he’d gone off to SFI, what closeness there was between them had dwindled further. And if her dad hadn’t been able to help her—
She cut the thought off, crossing the lobby floor to reach the foot of the stairs. Her dad hadn’t been able to help her because she’d phoned him, and his phone had had a trace on it. They could have done the same to Bruce’s phone too, which was why she hadn’t tried calling him first. Of course, coming in person to where he lived wasn’t the safest thing to do either, but she was pretty sure they wouldn’t have bugged his bedroom. There were cameras, obviously, but . . . Climbing up the flight of stairs to the first landing, Elissa caught sight of herself in the shiny doors of the lockers on the far side of the lobby, and despite everything, she had to bite back a grin. Her own parents would have a hard time recognizing her right now. If the low-security student accommodation cameras picked up her true identity, then they were a hell of a lot better than everyone said they were.
Her copper curls were gone. Her hair, stripped back to its normal dark brown, was bundled up into her cap. She’d wiped all her makeup off, apart from the camouflage cream that concealed the fading bruises on her jawline and neck, and in the shadow of the cap—GO TEAM something-or-other, it said—her face looked thin and pale. She was wearing boys’ pants, baggy enough to conceal the treacherous girl-curves of her bottom and thighs, and a too-big jacket hanging open over an equally baggy T-shirt. She wasn’t sure she looked exactly like a boy, but she was pretty sure that whatever she looked like, at least she wasn’t easily recognizable as Bruce’s little sister.
She didn’t have a cover story to tell him. She’d thought and
thought about it, but she hadn’t come up with anything more compelling than the real story—that their sister had been taken away at birth, imprisoned for seventeen years and tortured for three, and that Bruce was her only hope of escape.
The only thing Elissa wasn’t planning on sharing with Bruce was that she had to get Lin away not just for Lin’s sake but for the sake of everyone she might come into contact with—the agents tracking her, and the innocent bystanders with whom she might collide. Again and again, as if set on a closed loop in her brain, Elissa felt the mall staircase shake beneath her feet, saw the blood seeping from the security guard’s knee, heard the terrified wail of the baby clutched too tightly in its mother’s arms. And then she saw what had never happened—the flyers going up in balls of flame, their propellers exploding, flinging shards of hot metal all around them. Lin hadn’t done that—couldn’t have done it, not then. But in the future, if they were trapped again . . .
I have to get her off the planet. I have to get her somewhere she won’t be tracked, won’t be chased, won’t be in danger.
And Bruce, with his pilot’s license and spaceship . . . If he won’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.
Elissa cut off that thought too. She’d climbed to the third landing and was scanning the doors, looking for Bruce’s room number. She’d only visited him twice before, early on in his training, and although she knew the number—seventy-three—it took her a moment to remember which way to turn. He has to help me. He has to. He said they were piloting a goods transport flight soon—it won’t even take him any effort, it won’t be any risk. He can drop us on Mandolin. It doesn’t even matter where, as long as there’s a spaceport so we can catch another ship, lose ourselves somewhere on another planet . . .
She found the door and reached up to press the buzzer next to it. Her finger slipped a little, and she realized that despite all her determined calming thoughts, her hands were damp and her heart was beating, uneven and fluttery, in her throat.
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