Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  I can’t. I can’t kill people. I can’t help her do that.

  Lin shook her hand impatiently toward Elissa. Her face was tight with strain, she couldn’t waste energy speaking, but it was more than obvious what she was asking, what she needed from Elissa.

  She was willing to die to save my life. To save all our lives. I owe her forever. And I love her. There shouldn’t be anything you wouldn’t do for someone you owe your life to, for someone you love.

  “I can’t,” said Elissa, knowing Lin couldn’t hear her, hoping she could read her lips, her gestures. She shook her head, stepping back. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Incredulity swept over Lin’s face. Then a look of such betrayal Elissa felt it go through her like an electrical shock. Lin’s lips moved. You have to.

  Elissa backed farther away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Lin opened her hands, staring at Elissa, a gesture of helplessness and blame. Then her fingers curled into her palms, and she lifted her face back to the fiery slashes of the ships dogfighting above them.

  One of the attacking ships jerked, its flight path disrupted. It dipped, seemed to pull back. Within it, was the pilot fighting to keep hold of it, not knowing why his instruments were going mad, why the controls were no longer responding to his touch? Was the control panel smoking as Lin overloaded the circuits? Was fire licking out from beneath it? Was he already snatching his hands away, terrified, panicking, not knowing what was going on?

  They came to kill us. They don’t deserve mercy.

  It didn’t make any difference. Elissa realized her face was wet; she could taste salt on her lips. At some point in the last few minutes she’d started crying.

  Lin staggered. Her legs shook, and she grabbed at a seat to support herself. When her eyes met Elissa’s, they were bloodshot. Elissa had seen that before: When Lin was at the end of her stamina, when she’d expended too much energy, blood vessels began to burst in her skin, her eyes. If she keeps trying, if I don’t help her, what else will happen to her? What else will I let happen?

  Elissa’s nose was running. She wiped her sleeve across it. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, wretched and helpless, knowing she could take the burden away from her sister but unable to bring herself to do it.

  Lin’s lips moved again, so slightly that it took Elissa a couple of seconds to read what she’d said. So am I.

  What? It made no sense. What was Lin sorry for?

  Then, as Lin made a lunge toward her and grabbed her hand in a death grip, Elissa knew.

  “No! I said no!” She tried to wrench her hand away, but Lin had hold of it with more strength than Elissa would have thought she could spare. She swung around, pulling Elissa with her, to look back up at the sky, to find the ship.

  No. I won’t let it happen. I won’t make the link. I won’t—

  A jerk. Too late. Just like before, the link clicked into place. She was looking through Lin’s eyes, experiencing the world in Lin’s body.

  She was shaking, her legs trembling beneath her, her lungs burning as they tried to pull in more air than they could manage. She was looking at the sky through a haze of red. Her hand—Lin’s hand—clenched tight around her sister’s, grasping it with every last reserve of the strength left in her body. Her thoughts—Lin’s thoughts—burned in her mind as her breath burned in her chest. She has to do this with me. She has to.

  She scanned the sky, then focused on the ship that had nearly—twice—escaped her. Sent her mind along the electrical connections, forcing the power up, up, up, feeling the circuits heat and heat and break like tiny explosions.

  And then another explosion, a huge explosion, like fireworks in her brain, behind her eyes.

  Flames in the sky. Falling metal. Smoke and dust and gouts of liquid fire—the fuel burning as it fell.

  Elissa snapped back to herself, a scream bursting against the inside of her head, her throat throbbing with the silent sound. Once again there were flames and smoke all around the Phoenix. But this time she’d done it. This time she’d felt, not just seen, it happen. Felt, too, that firework burst of triumph. Lin’s emotions, not hers, but it didn’t matter. She’d felt it. Felt triumph, delight, in doing something that had killed someone.

  Lin, white with exhaustion, crumpled to her knees in front of her. Blood was smeared across her face—her nose was bleeding. For the first time Elissa saw her sister looking hurt, vulnerable, and her immediate instinct wasn’t to help or comfort.

  You did that to me. I can’t believe you did that to me.

  She didn’t know if the thoughts showed in her expression, but she could see when Lin’s eyes dropped from her own. Ivan’s face, immobile with shock, turned from one of them to the other.

  Then, as if from far away, only just penetrating through the feeling of cotton wool in her ears, Elissa heard the beep of the com-unit. And Cadan’s voice—alive, unhurt, for that moment the only good thing in the whole world—saying, “Attention, Phoenix. It’s over. Two attackers down, and one in retreat. It’s done. It’s over.”

  “I HAD to,” said Lin.

  They were standing outside the Phoenix, amid a nightmare jumble of blackened, twisted metal, of still-burning fuel puddles. The reek of rocket fuel and smoke and dust coated the inside of Elissa’s nose, bitter at the back of her throat.

  Not far away, metal against metal whined and screeched as the hull of a third downed craft was cut open. It had been hit, and had crashed, but miraculously, unlike the first two, hadn’t burst into flames, so there was a chance the pilot was still alive. Cadan was over there, and Markus. Felicia had joined a small extinguisher-wielding ground crew, and Ivan had disappeared the moment they exited the Phoenix.

  “Lissa, please. Look at me.”

  Elissa turned her head. Something even bitterer than rocket-fuel fumes dried the inside of her mouth, made her throat and chest and stomach tighten as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the dirty air around her.

  “I had to,” said Lin again. “Lissa, please, say you understand.”

  “I don’t.” The words came out in a thread of sound, as if her throat could only open enough to let just that much of her voice out. “I don’t understand.”

  “Lissa . . .”

  Once she’d said those words, she could manage to follow them with more. “I don’t understand how you could do that to me. I said no and you did it anyway. I don’t understand, Lin. You didn’t have to, and I don’t understand.”

  A flush climbed into Lin’s face, dyeing just the skin under her eyes. “Then why was it okay when I did it before?”

  “Before? When before?”

  “When we were being attacked on the Phoenix! Cadan let me, he let me take the controls and fire at the SFI ships! You didn’t give me that look back then. Is it only okay to kill people when he says it is? Am I supposed to have some kind of license in that, too?”

  “I’m not talking about it being okay to kill people!”

  Lin threw her hands out. “Yes you are! That’s the thing you’ve always said, the thing I’m not supposed to do—”

  “No, Lin! Jeez, we were being attacked—”

  “When?”

  “Both times. Of course I don’t blame you—or Cadan, or anyone—for firing back. It’s not that you probably killed people—”

  “Probably?” Lin gave a furious laugh. “Probably, nothing. Didn’t you see what I did to those ships?”

  “Yes, I saw! Yes, I know what you did! It’s not about that, Lin. It’s not about you killing people.” Somewhere, very faint on the screen of her mind, a word flickered, uninvited, unwelcome. Hypocrite. She refused to acknowledge it. She wasn’t being a hypocrite, she wasn’t—

  “Then what?” said Lin.

  “It’s about you making me kill them!” She’d thought she was mostly just angry, but the words came out on a sob, and when she tried to say something else tears choked her and she had to stop.

  “Lissa—”

  Elissa shook her head, putting h
er hands up to her face, trying to get control of herself. She was furious, and beyond furious, but she couldn’t afford to let herself fall to pieces now. The attack was over, but God knew when there’d be another one, and they still needed to get themselves safely—somehow—to the city, to the closest IPL command. But if they couldn’t fly, and couldn’t use the Phoenix, there was no way of getting safely to the city.

  Thinking of all the reasons why she couldn’t fall apart wasn’t exactly helping her not fall apart. She tried to shut them out, tried to just breathe, tried to think of the fact that Cadan was alive and unharmed, that the people in the base hadn’t been killed. . . . But that was it. She’d run, for the moment, out of good thoughts.

  “Lissa . . .”

  Elissa shook her head again, not looking at her sister. “Not now. I can’t talk about it right now.”

  “But I—” Tears thickened Lin’s voice. “Lissa, don’t be angry. I can’t bear it when you’re angry with me.”

  Then stop making me angry!

  The words were on her tongue, but she refused to say them. She wasn’t going to have this conversation. Lin might not be capable of respecting her—oh my God—her right not to kill people, but she could damn well respect her right not to talk if she didn’t want to.

  She didn’t answer Lin. She didn’t look at her. There was, God knew, nowhere she could really go to get away from her. Partly because they were in the middle of the desert and partly because of—oh yeah, the telepathic link that bound them. But she could walk away. And she did. Through the patches of blackened smoking sand, through the twisted lumps of wreckage, out to just beyond the end of the buildings, past where the light reached, into the very edge of the night that had fallen across the world.

  Behind her, metal still screeched, people called to one another, fire extinguishers hissed onto flames. Her hands still tingled with the memory of the power—Lin’s power—rushing through her. But as she stepped out of the light, she felt as if she were stepping away from the noise, too. From the noise, from the memories, and from the awareness of how, in the space of five minutes, everything had changed.

  When the wrecked flyer was cut open, it turned out the pilot wasn’t dead. But judging by the rush of frantic activity going on as she was lifted out, she was badly hurt. Standing at the edge of the light, arms crossed over her chest, Elissa watched as the limp, uniformed figure was stretchered into one of the buildings. She’s not dead. She’s hurt, but they’ll have medical facilities—she could survive, she could. And Cadan’s not even hurt. And I didn’t kill anyone, not really. It was Lin’s mind overriding mine, it was the link. It wasn’t me.

  Which was all true, but somehow didn’t help at all.

  Some half hour later, when the wounded had been taken away for patching up and the burning fuel reduced to smoking, oily inkblots on the sand, Cadan came over to her.

  “Lissa? How’re you doing?”

  Really not good. But something held her lips closed. Loyalty—despite everything—to Lin? Or shame, for what Lin had forced her to do? I’ve gone through this already! It wasn’t me, it’s not my fault. But the thought had no force to it. It felt like a fiction, like an excuse.

  “I’m okay.”

  He smiled at her. “As much as you can be, huh? Miguel’s offered us dinner in the base, and Ivan’s been carting a bunch of our prepacks across to their nutri-machines, so we needn’t feel guilty about sharing their food. They’ve had to institute rationing, of course. But, so Miguel says, that’s no different from the city.”

  “There’s rationing in the city?”

  Cadan had put his arm around her, and now he turned, bringing her with him as he moved toward the buildings. “Yeah. IPL declared official rationing in place two weeks ago.”

  “But that’s crazy. It’s hardly been longer than a month!”

  “Yeah, I’m with you. When I think of the city as it was when we left, I can’t believe they’re anywhere near running out of food yet. I guess it’s like Miguel says, the panic buying got out of control. Apparently, the public nutri-machines all got raided to restock people’s private ones. So IPL instituted rationing, and now people are lining up for the sort of stuff our families used to get auto-delivered. Milk, you know? And dry mixes, and those curly-grain-vitamin things Bruce and I used to kick up such a stink about being made to eat?”

  His tone was light, but Elissa couldn’t get past what he was telling her. Rationing.

  It made sense, sort of, if the panic buying had been really crazy. But all the same, IPL doing that so soon . . . it was like forcing Sekoia fifty years into its past, making people relive the time when faulty terraforming had left their planet on the brink of environmental disaster.

  People don’t panic-buy unless they’re frightened. So they were frightened to start with . . . and then IPL hit them with food rationing. Food rationing, on Sekoia, with our history . . . Hadn’t IPL seen that doing that would make people even more frightened?

  By the time they reached the entrance to the building, most other people, including the crew and—thank God—Lin, had disappeared inside it. Cadan slid open the first door they reached, using the emergency handle to drag the metal panel across rather than passing his hand over the sensor at its side. Elissa blinked at him, surprised, before she realized the tiny light that normally glowed above the sensor panel was dark. The sensor had been turned off.

  As they went in through the door, Elissa instinctively braced herself against the usual blast of air-conditioning, but it didn’t come. They walked into a corridor scarcely cooler than outside, and lit to a gray dimness by low-energy strip lights.

  Cadan pushed through another door and they entered a dining area, all shiny steel and smooth white-surfaced tables. It looked like every dining area in every public-funded facility Elissa had ever seen, but at the same time there was something a little alien about it, as if the drink machines and nutri-machines were props, set dressing rather than part of a real room that people used.

  Here, although the room was nearly as dim as the corridor, and was already filling with people, no electric lights had blinked on. Aren’t their sensors picking up that the room is occupied? A scatter of sand fell from Cadan’s boots and Elissa’s shoes onto the floor, but no quick blast of suction from the vents at the base of the walls vacuumed it hygienically away. The room’s auto-settings—light, hygiene, temperature control—had been turned off.

  And now Elissa caught on to the reason that, even before she’d noticed those things, it hadn’t felt like a real room. The constant low-level hum she’d subconsciously expected to hear wasn’t there. Tiny lights shone steadily from each of the nutri-machines ranged around the room, showing that the power wasn’t off entirely, but the room settings—the settings of the whole building?—had been turned to their most economical. The refugee population was rationing energy as well as food. It made sense, of course, but it seemed so . . . drastic, a decision made in a world Elissa had never lived in and that she didn’t recognize.

  The crew of the Phoenix was sharing a table with Lin, Miguel, and some other people Elissa didn’t know. There were a few places left free—one of them next to Lin. On Sanctuary, and on the flight back to Sekoia, that was something the crew had seemed to do without conscious thought—always leaving a space for Elissa and Lin to sit together. It was an allowance no one seemed to make for Cadan and Elissa, even though the whole crew knew they were dating—just for Elissa and Lin.

  And even though, when she thought about it, it seemed weird that it even mattered, Elissa was usually glad to take the seat next to Lin. Doing so felt . . . right, as if it were somehow making up for the years they’d spent apart, when she hadn’t even known Lin was real.

  Right now, though, Elissa didn’t want to so much as look at her sister. She went toward one of the places at the far end of the table, then realized abruptly she didn’t want to sit at the same table, either. Not yet, not until her vision had stopped blurring with furious hurt at just the a
wareness that Lin was there.

  She should be hungry. The rest of the crew was eating, and Cadan had gone straight to one of the nutri-machines. And when Elissa thought about it, she knew she was kind of hungry, but it was a vague sensation, like hearing a far-off noise. She didn’t want to sit at the table, but nor could she face getting herself anything to eat just yet. She went to the nearest drinks machine instead of the nutri-machine where Cadan stood, and dialed herself a hot chocolate. When it was there, sugary-sweet, curling steam up into her face, she didn’t want that, either. But the heat of the cup felt good in her hands, and at least it gave her something to focus on, something to stop her gaze sliding to where Lin sat. How could you do that to me? How could you do that when I said no?

  Her fingers tightened on the cup. She looked past the table to where Cadan still stood at the nutri-machine, waiting for the dinner he’d dialed. She couldn’t even think about Lin, not yet. And anyway, having gone through those horrible ten minutes of refusing to consider the possibility that Cadan might be dead, she could really do with a few minutes of being close to him instead. Close enough to remind herself he was alive. Safe, and alive, and in love with her.

  She left the drinks machine and went toward him. She had to go past where Lin sat, eating her food—a bowl of long noodles and crispy protein. The scent of soy sauce, chili, and ginger, sticky-salt-and-sweet, came up to Elissa, and she couldn’t help but be aware that as she went behind Lin’s chair, Lin looked around at her, appeal and hurt showing in the way her head moved, the hunch of her shoulders. But Elissa still couldn’t respond. Lin was doing better than she was, for God’s sake. At least she could bring herself to eat.

  Elissa went to stand beside Cadan. He glanced down and put his arm around her.

  The machine hummed, tomato soup pouring into the cup waiting on the dispenser ledge. She leaned against him, smelling dust and burned rocket fuel, and, almost hidden underneath, the scent that was Cadan. When he tipped his head so his cheek brushed the side of her forehead, stubble scraped against her skin.