Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  Despite the two-way security checks—their ID details were no longer available to anyone but approved IPL officials, and as far as Elissa could remember, IPL security had never been hacked—tension climbed her spine to settle between her shoulder blades as they walked the short distance across the desert.

  She had to brush past a broken sheet of metal waiting for more thorough cleanup tomorrow, and its jagged edge caught the hem of her pants leg, making her trip as the material first caught, then tore.

  Lin stopped, and Cadan put a hand out as she regained her balance. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Her face heated in embarrassment at her clumsiness. She bent and tucked the trailing edge up inside the hem of the pants. When she stood, Cadan was waiting. His eyes crinkled infinitesimally in a tiny smile meant just for her before he turned to catch up with Ivan and Felicia, who were walking ahead.

  After a couple of seconds, Elissa realized something she hadn’t noticed before: She and Lin were walking in time, legs moving in the same synchronized stride. Well, it makes sense—our legs are exactly the same length, after all. But it didn’t feel as if that were all it was. It felt more as if Lin were connected to her by something invisible. As if, if she were to stumble again, Lin would stumble too.

  Felicia stepped sideways to skirt a patch of slickly shining fuel, and Lin had to slow down for a moment so as not to collide with her. The rhythm broke. They weren’t two weird halves of a single entity; they were just identical twin sisters with the same length legs and the same pelvic-bone shape and the same length stride.

  But all the same, when they came under the shadow of the Savior, and Elissa heard Lin’s breath catch in a little nervous sound, she automatically put out her hand and, without needing to look, took Lin’s.

  The three officials were waiting by the still-open door.

  Now that Elissa was near enough, she could see that the two who’d gotten out first were both men. The smallest figure was a woman, a very slight woman, several years older than Elissa’s parents, with gray hair cropped so short it was nearly hidden by her helmet. When she spoke, Elissa recognized the voice that had come through the handheld—and realized with a slight shock that the command in it had taken all her attention, leaving her, until this moment, not even registering the gender of the person speaking.

  The voice had been cool, and the woman’s eyes were cool too, her jaw a little set.

  “Captain Greythorn?” She held out a hand. “IPL Commander Dacre.”

  As Cadan shook her hand, her gaze flicked past his shoulder, took in the crew—and stopped at Elissa and Lin. Cadan was starting to say something, but she spoke over him.

  “I thought we’d find out we were mistaken.”

  Cadan broke off. “Mistaken?” He followed her gaze, and as he realized who she was looking at, his face went a little stiff. “Commander—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I hoped we’d find out we were mistaken. But no, the case is exactly what, when we picked up your ship entering the atmosphere, we hoped it would not be. You have returned to Sekoia with one of the former Spares we’re fighting to relocate—with the one, moreover, who precipitated the whole situation.”

  From where Elissa stood, her hand clamped in Lin’s, she could see Cadan’s back stiffen. “Commander Dacre, Lin has been given full human status. This is her home planet—she’s free to—”

  “Free to return? Yes, thank you, Captain, I’m aware of the legal situation.” The commander’s eyes flicked over Lin again. “She’s also free to visit any number of planets that do not adhere to the Interplanetary Charter, that have no laws on human rights or where slavery and forced prostitution are legal and unchecked. She would, however, be well advised not to take her life in her hands by doing so.” The commander looked back at Cadan. “As she—and her sister—have done by coming here. And as you have permitted by bringing them.”

  Next to Elissa, Lin gave an indignant quiver. Elissa dug her nails into her twin’s hand—Lin, don’t, you’ll just make it worse—but she’d reacted too late.

  “He didn’t permit us!” Lin said. “We chose to come.”

  The commander glanced at her. “Unless you can fly a spaceship, he most assuredly did permit you.”

  Lin let go of Elissa’s hand and folded her arms, defiance in every angle of her body. “Well, I nearly can. If he hadn’t taken us, I’d have just had to wait a bit longer till I learned myself—”

  “Lin,” said Cadan, his voice exasperated, “for the hundredth time—”

  But the commander’s attention had already snapped back to him. “You’ve been teaching her to fly your ship?”

  There was a world of condemnation in her tone. Cadan flushed. “Yes. Commander, she’s preternaturally fast at picking up that kind of thing. And I’ve been strictly supervising her—it hasn’t been a risk to the safety of the crew at all—”

  “Good God.” Commander Dacre sounded as if she hadn’t heard him, as if she were speaking to herself. “And to think we were given to believe that SFI pilots were well trained.”

  Cadan’s flush deepened. He didn’t say anything else.

  Sympathy, and outrage at how the commander was treating him, prickled all over Elissa’s body. She’d thought anyone with IPL would be . . . respectful, kind, in the way the officials back on Sanctuary had been when she and Lin turned up, exhausted fugitives from their own planet’s authorities.

  “Are you aware that they’re being killed here?” The commander directed the question to Cadan. “Spares and their twins?”

  Elissa’s back stiffened. Her chin went up. She’s trying to scare us—or trying to make Cadan feel bad. And, yeah, she’s succeeding, but she doesn’t need to know that she is. “Yes,” she said before Cadan could. “We heard about the attacks.”

  The commander eyed her, her expression chilly. “Did you also hear about the abduction attempts?”

  Abduction attempts? For a second the world stopped turning. There was nothing except those words hanging in the air.

  “What?” Elissa said.

  What might have been a glimmer of satisfaction showed in the commander’s eyes. “Not all the citizens of your planet want Spares to be relocated or wiped out. Some of them appear to feel that Sekoia’s space force was the only thing standing between Sekoia and chaos. So, declared-legal humans or not, Spares are a resource they can’t afford not to”—a tiny hesitation before she said the word—“use.”

  A blaze of shock and fury like fire shook Elissa from her knees to the top of her head. “Use? What the hell does that mean? What do they mean, use?”

  The commander met her eyes. “You’ve lost your space force. What do you think they mean?”

  “It’s been ruled illegal! Doing that—what SFI did—it’s what’s made IPL take over the government! They can’t be trying to do it all over again!”

  “It has been ruled illegal, yes. But according to our sources, there’s at least one group who’d like to challenge that ruling.”

  Cold swept over Elissa, as swift as the fire. Her knees went weak, and she took a step back as if the ground had given way beneath her. “No,” she said, and all the strength was gone from her voice. “No. They said it was illegal. They said she’d be safe. We have compensation money.”

  Next to her, Lin had gone rigid. “No,” Elissa said again, speaking this time to her sister. “They can’t change it, Lin. They gave you refugee status. They said you were human. They can’t—”

  “Lissa.” Cadan’s voice was steady, and it seemed to hold her, as if it were keeping her from falling apart. “People challenge rulings all the time. It doesn’t mean anything. It won’t get them anywhere.”

  She looked up at him, aware she was having to force herself to move, as if every cell in her body had frozen with shock. “But how can they? How can anyone know what SFI did to the Spares and think it’s okay? How can they think about doing it again? And if they’re abducting them . . .” If th
ey’re trying to do that now, and I brought Lin back here . . . She reached out without looking, without needing to look, and her hand met Lin’s, cold fingers against cold fingers.

  “Trying to abduct them,” said Cadan. “Abduction attempts, that’s all. They haven’t succeeded. And people who’ve formed a pressure group are very different from people who are willing to act so far outside the law that they’re making abduction attempts. It doesn’t mean they’re all working with the same agenda, Lis.”

  His eyes were as steady as his voice.

  “You’re making a bit of an assumption there, Captain,” said Commander Dacre.

  Cadan turned his head to meet her eyes. “So, it seems, is IPL.”

  For a second, silence hung between them, then the commander moved away, back toward her ship. “You’ll need to come to the nearest IPL command center so we can do what we can to sort this out.”

  “Look, Commander”—although Cadan’s voice remained steady, Elissa could hear an undercurrent that meant he was having to make an effort to keep it so—“this base, it’s full of refugees. It’s been attacked seven times already. I know IPL has a list of priorities, but these people are still in danger—”

  The commander gave him the briefest of looks over her shoulder. “Thank you, Captain, I’m well aware of the situation. How fast can you prepare one of your shuttlecraft to follow us to the city?”

  For a moment Elissa thought Cadan would try arguing further, but he said only, “It can be ready in ten minutes.”

  “And your ship can be left secure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go and do it, then. I’ll send you the flight coordinates. You’ll be required to follow them precisely so you can shadow us from takeoff to landing.” She stepped into the ship, using a grab handle to pull herself briskly up into the doorway.

  Her voice had assumed automatic compliance; she didn’t even look around to check that Cadan was moving to obey.

  He cleared his throat. “Commander, the Phoenix—my ship—it’s a lot more useful than the shuttlebug. If it’s possible to bring that instead—”

  Now she did look around, her face coldly disapproving. “Captain Greythorn, I’d like nothing more than to send you and your ship immediately off-planet. However, I’m constrained by strict IPL policy. You’ve brought two underage passengers with you—one of them a Spare—and whatever you intend to do with them, right now they have to come to the nearest command center. Which is in Central Canyon City. You may have noticed there’s a citywide no-fly order, from which only IPL craft are exempt. Your shuttlecraft is small enough that I can get clearance for it as long as it accompanies the Savior. If you don’t use that and come with me now, you don’t get there.”

  She turned away, again not waiting to see whether they were obeying her.

  THEY WENT on board the Phoenix and made their way to the dock where Shuttlebug Two waited.

  In Elissa’s hand, Lin’s was still like ice. And there seemed to be ice throughout Elissa’s body, too. Hearing that Spares were being attacked, killed, had been bad enough, but knowing that someone, some awful, conscienceless group, wanted to put them back to being used was so horrific she didn’t even know how to think about it.

  I never thought of that. I knew we’d be coming back to danger, but not that kind of danger. I was so stupid.

  Given this new threat, it seemed like a terrible mistake to be leaving the Phoenix behind. The reason for doing it made sense—they’d come here to work with IPL, they wouldn’t gain anything from refusing to cooperate with how they wanted them to travel around the planet. But the Phoenix had become her and Lin’s home. In this crazy new Sekoia, where people did things that showed their previous behavior had been nothing but a facade of civilization, the ship seemed like the only place of real safety, the only thing that represented—if necessary—escape.

  Cadan tapped in the unlock codes at the shuttlebug dock entrance, and the doors slid back with a hush of displaced air. They filed through two independently operating air locks, then into the low-ceilinged shuttlebug. Leaving Felicia and Markus to seal the air lock that belonged to the shuttlebug itself—the Phoenix’s air lock was set to seal itself a certain time after it had been used—Cadan went straight up the narrow center aisle to the pilot’s seat and began to activate the controls.

  Elissa eased her hand from Lin’s and fastened herself into one of the twenty passenger seats that stood either side of the aisle, cold hands fumbling at the straps. Next to her, Lin, as she always did, was managing better, although from the look on her face, she was operating on autopilot.

  Elissa reached out to her as soon as she’d strapped herself in. “Lin, it’s okay. We’re with IPL now. We’re safe.”

  Lin’s face, shocked, blank, turned to hers. “We’re not safe anywhere.” Her voice was a whisper. “People are trying to take us back to the facilities.”

  “Not necessarily. Like Cadan said—”

  Lin gave a little, helpless shrug. “How does Cadan know?”

  “Lin . . .” But there was nothing she could say. She closed her hand tightly around her sister’s, willing Lin’s fingers to warm through, to relax. They’d been through much worse than this, had gotten through danger far more immediate. And now they were under IPL’s protection, being taken to one of IPL’s command centers, probably as safe as it was possible to be anywhere on the planet.

  Oh God, though, it’s not enough. We both chose to come back, we both wanted to, but was I completely wrong to agree?

  The shuttlebug’s engines woke with a low roar that vibrated up through the floor, tickling the soles of Elissa’s feet. The shutters across the windscreen slid back onto the dark desert and the star-pierced sky, the bulk of the Phoenix blocking out all but an edge of the light coming from the base.

  From a small com-screen at Cadan’s elbow, numbers flickered, tiny sparks of bright gold. Cadan double-tapped them and they stopped flickering, freezing in place. He moved his hand to his main screen, tapped with three fingers, and the numbers appeared there, to blink red for a second before they cycled through orange, amber, gold, finally turning a steady green. Elissa couldn’t read them from where she sat—she was pretty sure they’d been designed too small for anyone aside from the person in the pilot’s seat to be able to decipher—but she assumed they were the coordinates the commander had said she’d send. Because we can only get to the city—our own city—by shadowing her flyer. Resentment flared within her. Which was silly—like Cadan had said, they risked getting shot out of the sky if they went unauthorized into a no-fly zone. But all the same: It’s our city, not hers. We came here to try to help it, and we can’t even enter it without her permission.

  Metal scraped and clanged against metal as Cadan disengaged the clamps that held the shuttlebug locked close in its dock. The floor lurched a little. Then, one hand on the steering panel, Cadan eased the throttle forward. The floor took on a sudden slant toward the nose of the shuttlebug, and despite the five-point harness holding her securely in place, Elissa grabbed for the sides of her seat, needing to hold on to something as the floor tipped beneath her.

  If she’d thought about it, she’d have known Cadan wouldn’t turn on the shuttle’s gravity drive, not flying within the planet’s own gravity, flat over the desert to the city. She’d once been used to this kind of sensation. She’d grown up on an overcrowded planet, in a city where, had traffic not made use of the full three dimensions, it would have come to a standstill long ago. She was entirely used to traveling by flyer, beetle-car, fast-moving slidewalk.

  But the weeks of being on no vehicle but the Phoenix, with its steady, continuous gravity drive, had unacclimatized her.

  The floor tipped more. For a moment, harness or not, death grip on the seat or not, it felt as if she would come out of her seat and fall helplessly toward the dark-filled windscreen.

  But instead it was the shuttlebug that fell, in one smooth drop, swooping down and away from the side of the Phoenix.

&nb
sp; The shuttlebug hovered for a moment, engines growling, then from overhead came the roar of the IPL flyer. Cadan took the shuttlebug up to follow it, so fast that Elissa’s stomach dropped like a plummeting elevator. Her ears crackled, almost painful. They were way up in the darkness within seconds, the base a splodge of light below them, the stars suddenly extraordinarily bright.

  The flyer tipped, Elissa’s stomach lurched again, and then they were roaring through the night, high over the desert floor, back toward where a very distant glow was the only sign of the city in which Elissa had grown up.

  The commander had left the com-channel between the two craft open. Miles before they neared the city, she initiated communication with the forces there, rattling off what was presumably a security code, a warning of their approach. It’s not a total no-fly zone. And if they can get authorization for the shuttlebug, why not for the Phoenix?

  They descended in a narrowing spiral, down toward the glow of the spaceport. The rest of the city seemed very dark in contrast. Elissa was used to seeing it laid out like a glittering spiderweb: the silver lines of the pedestrian slidewalks and the brilliant cobalt monorails the beetle-cars ran on, the lights strung sparkling from building to building, the softer amber bloom of lamps down on the city floor. But now it was as if the spiderweb had been broken, as if all but a few strands had been swept away, as if the blooms had been trampled and crushed out of existence. It was a darkened city that stretched out beneath them. Little squares of light all over the city floor and dotted up the canyon sides spoke of lit windows in houses and apartments, but it was a world away from the nighttime blaze Elissa was used to.

  Why is so much of the power out? The slidewalks and streetlamps are all run on solar power—no one’s taken that away!