Even though she’d been jittering, on edge, for the last hour, expecting the call, when the electronic voice sounded from the com-screen in the room behind her, every cell in Elissa’s body seemed to jump.
She hurried into the room as Lin sat up on the bed; heart pounding, hands suddenly damp, she touched the screen to accept the call.
Even with the most modern tech available, interplanetary calls were neither easy nor reliable. It took several seconds for the operator to get them connected, and when the connection was finally achieved, the screen filled with white static, raining sideways from edge to edge. The speakers hissed and spat, as if the static were real rain, falling across the space between the planets.
Then the static cleared, all but a few unsteady lines of interference, and there they were in front of her.
“Lissa?” Her mother’s voice shook, rising over Edward Ivory’s quieter greeting, and even behind the interference lines her face seemed to waver. “Lissa, is that really you? My God, are you safe?”
Elissa’s throat tightened. Back on Sekoia, once she’d known they weren’t going to help her, she’d had to push away all thoughts of her parents, deliberately put them into her past, focus on nothing more than herself, on Lin, on the future they were going to have to build for themselves. But now, seeing her mother’s face looking, for the first time, almost old, marked with lines of anxiety . . .
“I’m fine,” she said, and her voice shook too.
“Lissa, my God, this has been such a nightmare. You ran away, we had no idea where you were. We thought you were in the most dreadful danger. And then it turned out you were with Cadan!”
Elissa bit her lip hard. Her voice would be distorted enough without letting herself cry. I’ve been through a million things in the last two weeks—it’s crazy to hear my mother’s voice and want to burst into tears.
And her dad. Had he always looked this . . . gray, not just tired but drained, or had she done that to him too?
“I didn’t want to run away like that,” she said to both of them. “I just had to save Lin—I mean, my twin—”
Static buzzed briefly, and she wasn’t sure they’d heard, because her mother spoke across her.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. We all made mistakes. The pressure from the government, law enforcement at the house . . . People can’t be held accountable for what they do under that sort of stress. We had people questioning us, your father and I, can you believe it? But of course we can’t be blamed—it was our own government. And oh, everything that’s happening here . . .” She put a hand to her head. “You know your brother’s career is over.”
“I—I guessed, when they said SFI had been dissolved. I . . .” Guilt enveloped her, but she couldn’t say sorry. She couldn’t. Surely—surely?—they didn’t expect her to?
“God knows what he’s going to do now. It’s so unfair. This will be the ruin of Sekoia. The planet’s never going to recover. It was the government who acted illegally. All the decent people just doing their jobs, they’re innocent victims of this, they shouldn’t be made to suffer for it. And Bruce—he’s worked so hard, and he was so close to graduating . . .”
Hang on a minute. Elissa snapped out of the cloud of confused guilt, out of the compulsion to apologize. Innocent victims? Her mother had watched the news, seen the uncovering of the secret facilities where Spares had been imprisoned, heard where they’d gone after that, known it had been happening to her own daughter—and she was talking about Bruce as an innocent victim?
Her mother was still talking. “Lissa, we spoke to IPL officials. They said you’ll be receiving your compensation money soon, and you’re free to settle where you like?”
Elissa nodded, not sure where this was going, still distracted by what her mother had been saying, by her whole manner. Elissa had been expecting anger, blame—had been expecting to have to explain and explain and justify herself—and it hadn’t come. But all the same, this whole conversation . . . Her mother wasn’t saying any of the angry things she’d expected, but she wasn’t saying anything Elissa wanted to hear either.
“We’re being offered relocation. As one of the affected families. We’re being offered a place on Philomel.” Her mouth tightened. “It won’t be anything like we’re used to, but we can’t stay here. The situation . . . it’s just getting more and more unstable. You can fly straight to Philomel from Sanctuary, Lissa. We can put all this behind us.”
Put all this behind us? For a moment Elissa could only stare at her parents’ faces on the screen. She can’t mean that. She can’t think—
Static flickered again, blurring their expressions, making her mother’s lips look as if they’d dragged down at the corners. “Lissa? Did you hear me? This connection is terrible.”
“I heard you. I—” She hesitated, but then it burst out. “What about my twin?”
This time it wasn’t the static. Her mother’s lips did tighten briefly before she spoke again. “Lissa, we understand you did what you believed you had to do. You helped uncover an illegal operation. You’ve done what you felt was your duty. Now you can come home, forget the whole thing.”
Elissa’s gaze had moved to her father’s face, looking for his answer, but at those words she snapped back to look at her mother. “Forget the whole thing? How can I? I’ve found my twin. I— Look.” She took Lin by the arm, drew her over so both their faces would appear on-screen. “This is Lin. She’s your other daughter.”
Even in the tiny screen, through the static, she saw her mother’s whole face stiffen, saw her upper lip lift slightly as if in disgust. “What are you suggesting, Elissa?”
“Suggesting? I’m not— Mother, look. This is your other daughter.”
“It’s my other nothing.” That was disgust in her mother’s face. And a sudden white blaze of anger. “It’s a Spare. Nothing but a Spare. I donated it years ago, it’s not even human.”
Beside Elissa, Lin didn’t make any sound, any movement, but Elissa flinched as if her mother had hit her. “Don’t say that about her.”
“There is no her. My God, Elissa, isn’t this enough? You ran away from home to liberate your Spare. And enough people are saying it was a noble act that I—well, I suppose I have to concede. I acknowledge that you were brave, and selfless, and I’m”—she hesitated almost imperceptibly on the words—“of course we’re proud of you, Elissa. But that’s enough. You’ve done what you set out to do. You’re done. You can come home.”
“No. I can’t come home. I don’t want to. Not without my sister.”
“She’s not—”
“She is. She’s my sister. She’s my twin.”
Elissa met her mother’s eyes and knew it was no use. She was never going to make her mother understand. Not because Mrs. Ivory lacked the imagination but because . . . In a flash of insight Elissa realized the truth. In Laine Ivory’s world she was always right. She might make small mistakes, but only small mistakes, ones she could take back, ones she could say she hadn’t meant, that she could smooth over and fix. She would never admit to making an unfixable mistake. She would never admit to the mistake she’d made with Lin.
“Elissa.”
“No.” Elissa held her mother’s eyes, knowing it could be for the last time. “I’m sorry. I’m not leaving Lin. If she’s not your daughter, neither am I.”
Sheer fury flashed into her mother’s face, obliterating the pain and grief that had—very briefly—flickered in her eyes. “Very well!” she said, and her hand went up to—presumably—cut the connection.
But Elissa’s father’s hand came up too, just as quickly, catching his wife’s fingers before they could get there. “Just a minute,” he said.
“What?”
“Just a minute. We’ve got a little longer. I’d like to talk to my daughter.”
Elissa’s mother snatched her hand down. “Very well. Go ahead. Good luck getting through to her!”
Her face vanished from the screen.
Elissa’s eyes filled
with sudden tears. She blinked them back angrily, determined not to cry.
“Lissa.”
“What?” She snapped the word, afraid of breaking down, furious all over again that he hadn’t interfered, that he’d let her mother say all those things, awful things, and in front of Lin.
“Lissa, would you introduce me to my other daughter?”
Elissa’s head came up. Beside her a quiver ran through Lin’s body.
“I— Dad?”
His face was still tired, as tired as it had been for as long as she could remember, but there was a slight smile on his lips. “My other daughter, Lissa.” His eyes went to Lin. “Your name’s Lin?”
Lin nodded, a tiny jerk of her head, and her voice came out as a whisper. “That’s the name we chose—Lissa and me.”
“I’m very glad to meet you, Lin.” Edward Ivory smiled again. The static shivered across his eyes, making them blur. “And I’m glad—gladder than you can imagine—that you’ve found each other.” For a moment his smile disappeared, and at the look on his face Elissa’s stomach lurched as if she’d stepped out over emptiness. In her head, pieces began to click together.
“You helped us,” she said. “As much as you dared to.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why, when you knew, as well as she did—”
She stopped. Her eyes came slowly back to her father’s face. The face that for as long as she could remember had been gray with fatigue rather than gray with age, distant . . . lacking.
“It happened to you, didn’t it?” she said. “You had the operation they wanted to do to me.”
“Yes.”
It felt like an invasion to ask, but she had to. “Did you know? Did you know what it was doing to you?”
Her father gave a slight shrug, not one of indifference but one of helpless loss. “I thought it was hallucinations. I didn’t find out until later.”
“Dad . . .”
Her father shrugged again. “It’s all right, Lissa. It had to happen. They tried a lot of other things first. Not everything they tried with you, but then those methods weren’t all available. They exhausted all the options they had at the time. And the surgery—it stopped the pain. Enabled me to live a normal life. Work, get married.”
But you never had a normal life. They took away your twin, and you’ve been living nothing but a half-life ever since. She couldn’t say it. Either he knew it himself or he’d managed to deny it the way her mother had managed to deny she’d ever done anything wrong. Either way, saying it to him would do no good.
Was that what he’d thought he was giving her? A normal life, without the pain of the link with her twin? Had he really thought that would be better for her? Or had it just been fear? Fear of their government, fear of what her mother would say if he interfered with the normal life she had planned out for their daughter?
But whatever it had been, she couldn’t resent him for it anymore. He’d lost his twin, allowed them to burn out the link that Elissa could no longer imagine living without. He’d been surviving as half a person ever since.
“You found out?” she said. “About your twin? You found out afterward?”
“Yes. I . . .” He gave another hopeless movement. “When your mother was pregnant with you, she had too much information for them to just take the Sp—the baby. They had to tell her—us—and get her official consent.” His mouth twisted a little. “They said it was for humane medical research, and we were well compensated. But . . . yes, that was when I found out.”
And you had to mourn something—someone—you hadn’t known you’d lost. By yourself, with no one even acknowledging he’d been a person at all.
Her father’s eyes had come back up to hers. There was shame in them, and in that moment she knew he was aware of how he’d failed her.
“You helped us,” she said. “You helped us escape.”
He sent her his familiar faint smile. “I did do that,” he said. “Tell me, Lissa, Lin, was it the right thing to do?”
“Yes.” They spoke at once, their voices blending into one, and their father smiled at them both, across miles of space, across a distance they might never bridge again.
“Then I’m glad,” he said. “Take care of each other.”
The static quivered across the screen, blurring his eyes again, sending a shimmer into them that, at the last minute, Elissa thought might not have to do with the static at all.
Then there was nothing but static, filling the screen with white rain, filling her ears with the sound of it, and Edward Ivory was gone.
Later that evening Cadan came to find Elissa. She was sitting in the little courtyard outside the rooms they’d been given, her back against the trunk of an impossibly ancient tree whose branches stretched over half the courtyard. She’d brought a handheld out with her—she, like Lin, needed to look at college courses—but she’d left it lying on her knee so long that the screen had switched itself off.
“Lissa?”
She looked up. He stood, a dark silhouette against the lights mounted around the walls of the courtyard, holding out a cup that steamed slightly in the cool air.
“Lin said you’d be out here. I brought you a hot chocolate.”
She came back to the here and now as if surfacing from immersion in deep, cold water, and smiled at him. “Thank you. How were the interviews?”
He laughed, sitting next to her. “We were always told SFI was renowned all over the known universe. Turns out the government might have been a set of freaking vicious criminals, but they told us the truth. I need to train for another year—IPL craft aren’t set up the same as SFI ships—but after that there’ll be a place for me in the IPL spacefleet, if I want it.”
Relief swamped her, as warm as sunlight. “I didn’t get you killed or wreck your career?”
He stopped her from lifting the cup to her lips so he could lean in and kiss her, a spark of amusement in his eyes. “That’s right. You didn’t.”
“And Markus—the crew?”
“Markus is in the same kind of position as me. Felicia and Ivan—their skills are entirely transferable, and they’ve got years of experience. They’ll have no problem finding work. So you didn’t wreck their careers either.” There was laughter in his voice, but this time she couldn’t respond. The momentary warmth had gone. She was suddenly back looking at her mother’s face, hearing her voice. You know your brother’s career is over.
“That’s good,” she said, because the silence had gone on a breath too long and she had to say something. “Lin and I—we’re still looking at what colleges we can go to. I never thought of going off Sekoia, and there are so many . . .”
“Lissa, Lin told me about your parents.”
Elissa didn’t say anything. If she said anything, she was scared she’d start to cry.
Cadan put his arm around her. He was warm, and his jacket smelled of coffee, and the bark of the tree they were leaning against, and him. “You know,” he said conversationally, “I don’t much like your mother.”
Elissa gave a splutter of laughter that was almost a sob. “Oh, what she said about Lin. And that SFI employees are the innocent victims! After what she knows was happening.”
Cadan’s arm tightened around her.
Elissa gave another almost-sob. “I want to just say screw it, forget about it all. I had to leave. It’s not my fault. But my dad, knowing what they did to him . . . And Bruce, losing his career . . . And I can’t do anything, I can’t help. And—oh God, did you see the news this evening?”
“I did.” His voice was grim.
As the IPL military police had clamped down, as the fear of food shortages rose, as different political factions formed, the first terrorist act had taken place.
A bomb. A real bomb, small and primitive, nothing like the sophisticated nonlethal devices the ecoterrorists had been using for years. Twenty people had been killed immediately, with more fatally injured. The newscasters had been repeating the figures during every update, on ev
ery channel.
Sekoia was falling into chaos.
“I didn’t think I cared,” Elissa said. “I thought as long as I could get Lin to safety, nothing else mattered. But seeing what’s happening, seeing our planet—our safe, civilized planet—going insane . . .”
“It’s your world,” said Cadan. “Of course you care.”
She took a long breath, determined not to be a brat. “I know it’s worse for you. At least my family’s being relocated.”
“Yes.”
Something in his voice caught at her. “Cadan? What is it?”
“I . . . nothing, really. I haven’t heard anything since I spoke to them yesterday. But with what’s happening . . . I’m afraid of reprisals. Against them—against anyone associated with SFI.” His breath ruffled her hair. “Like you, if I could do anything . . . But even if there were any public flights to or from Sekoia, even if they hadn’t shut down transport, even if I could get there, what would I do that’d be any use?”
Elissa spoke quietly, not looking at him. “If you could go, though . . .”
“Yeah. I would.” He hesitated. “God knows I don’t want to leave you, but knowing my family’s stuck there . . .”
“No, I know. I . . .” She was edging closer to the elephant in the room, the thing they both knew they weren’t talking about. She didn’t want to—if you couldn’t do anything about it, wasn’t it better to go on pretending it wasn’t there? But somehow, with every sentence, she got closer and closer to the time when there’d be nothing left for her to do but point it out.
“I’d go with you,” she said in a rush.
His arm stiffened where it touched her. “You’ve thought about it?”
“I keep thinking about it. My compensation money—I could refuel the Phoenix. Even with the hyperdrive not working, it’d get us back to Sekoia eventually. Airspace isn’t closed off yet. We could get your family out at least. I mean, the Phoenix is still technically yours, right—you’re still the captain?”
“Technically, yes. SFI isn’t in any state to try reclaiming it, and IPL’s not going to stop me from taking a ship that doesn’t even belong to them. Lissa, I didn’t realize you’d thought about it that much.” But his voice didn’t lift in relief. He knew as well as she did why it might have been better not to talk about this at all.
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