Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  They moved away across the concrete landing ground to the shelter Cadan’s mother had pointed out. Elissa eased away from Cadan a little. The approval in his mother’s face had been too welcome for her to be willing to lose it by looking like some kind of clingy-vine girlfriend.

  Wait. Hang on. He did tell them I was his girlfriend, didn’t he? When he talked to them before . . . or when he introduced me just now? She couldn’t remember. The different bits of conversation were blurring together, filming over with exhaustion like the wrecked ships back at the practice base had filmed over with soot and dust.

  As Emily Greythorn had said, there were three beetle-cars waiting behind the shelter, their squat shapes familiar, propeller blades folded away in the shiny domes of their roofs. Clement Greythorn motioned Elissa toward the nearest. “Why don’t you and Lin take that one? And would you like someone else with you?”

  Cadan, thought Elissa, then caught back the selfish thought. His parents hadn’t seen him for over a month, and they must have worried. The beetle-cars would hold only three passengers each—if Cadan should travel with anyone, it should be his parents.

  She shook her head. “We’re okay.”

  “You sure? The drivers are all with IPL, of course, and the safe house is no more than ten minutes away, but if you’d feel more secure with one of us—”

  Felicia stepped forward. “I’ll grab a seat, if that’s okay with both of you.” Her mouth curled up a little. “Secure? As long as they take us somewhere with a bed, that’ll do fine as far as I’m concerned.”

  The glossy green sides of the car had sprung up while they talked. Lin climbed over the folded-down front passenger seat and into the back.

  Cadan’s arm tightened around Elissa, and he bent his head to give her a quick kiss. “I’ll see you at the safe house, okay?”

  She couldn’t help but respond, but even as she smiled up at him, her skin prickled with the awareness that his parents’ eyes were on them. Surely he said I was his girlfriend? At some point?

  As she climbed into the beetle-car after Lin and pulled the front seat back up to make room for Felicia, she slanted a cautious look under the raised side of the car. Cadan and his father were getting into the next vehicle. Cadan was saying something, but his expression was a little self-conscious, as if he was trying to talk through an awkward moment. Elissa caught a glimpse of Clement Greythorn’s face as he bent to climb after Cadan. He was looking taken aback, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown.

  As he folded himself into the seat, Elissa, stomach already knotting itself in apprehension, found her gaze going toward Mrs. Greythorn’s face. Cadan’s mother stood by the car. Her husband and son were out of the way, and she could have moved to get in, but instead she stood still, one hand on the raised side, staring toward the vehicle where Elissa sat. Her face had the same arrested, surprised look as her husband’s, but worse than that—it was filled with disappointment.

  The driver of Elissa’s car touched a button and the sides came down, shutting off Elissa’s view. The car vibrated as its propellers woke, then buzzed up into the air, flying no more than a couple of feet above the ground.

  Felicia and Lin were talking. Felicia’s voice was still alight with relief. In Elissa’s ears, it buzzed like the buzz of the propellers, a background distraction she wanted to shut off. She felt sick.

  When they’d welcomed her, when Cadan’s mother had acted like she was proud of her, they hadn’t known she was Cadan’s girlfriend. They hadn’t known, and now that they did, they weren’t pleased.

  CADAN’S FATHER had been right: The ride to the safe house took scarcely ten minutes. The beetle-cars buzzed along, just clearing the ground of the spaceport plateau rather than rising farther into the air. To avoid contravening the no-fly order? For some other kind of security reason?

  Lin’s side of the conversation with Felicia died away within the first couple of minutes of the journey—when Elissa glanced sideways she saw her sister’s eyelids drooping—and the driver was all business and, beyond his first brief greeting, didn’t speak to them. For Elissa, it was a relief not to have to make polite small talk, not to have to drag her mind away from the questions she had to find answers to.

  They’re not pleased. It can’t be because they have something against me, though—his mother was so nice to me, and his dad, too.

  Was it that they didn’t want Cadan to have any girlfriends? I remember, my mother used to say she was glad Bruce wasn’t entangling himself with girls, wasn’t letting himself get distracted, ’cause he needed to focus on his career. If Cadan’s parents feel the same way . . . But that didn’t make sense. SFI was dead. Cadan’s career with them was over. What would it matter if he got distracted now? He has a whole new potential career with IPL, though. . . . Is it that? Is it that they still don’t want him to be distracted?

  They came to the edge of the plateau, and the beetle-car dropped off the edge, sinking swiftly down past the canyon wall into the darkened city. Even when they reached the first level of the monorails, the driver didn’t steer the car onto them, but continued to pilot it down through the air, keeping close to the canyon side.

  At first Elissa thought it was another security thing—if they were afraid of being attacked, it made sense to stick close to the cover of the cliff side. But then her memory of the dining area back at the practice base—the absence of the familiar hum of machinery—came together with the absence of lights all over the city. Like the auto-settings every building had, that she’d taken for granted her whole life, the monorails had been turned off. In which case the driver must be confined to using only the beetle-car’s built-in solar panels.

  Which would be fine, except that the power for the beetle-cars was only an inexhaustible resource as long as the cells kept working. She couldn’t remember what the typical lifetime of a solar cell was, but she was sure it wasn’t indefinite.

  They dropped farther down into the canyon. More monorails rose past them, then the familiar steel spaghetti of pedestrian slidewalks. This late, the slidewalks would mostly be switched to stationary, anyway, so Elissa couldn’t tell whether they’d been permanently powered down too.

  Was it part of the military law Cadan’s father had mentioned? Had IPL shut down the monorails in order to enforce control on the city’s population?

  It’s not fair. Everyone uses the monorails—the whole city needs them. And we’re not all rioting, we don’t all need to be controlled!

  Felicia’s voice sounded, a sharp echo in her mind. Treating every Sekoian citizen like a criminal whether they are or not? If that’s not a recipe for disaster . . .

  But Felicia’s voice was followed by that of Cadan’s father. . . . this is coming from ordinary citizens. All Sekoia had to do was comply with IPL . . .

  It wasn’t fair. But . . . like Mr. Greythorn said, people were behaving like criminals. No, people were actually being criminals. Ordinary people, people from all through the levels of Sekoian society, people she’d have known, people her parents might have worked with.

  If you couldn’t tell who was going to be a criminal next, or which level of society they were going to come from, then, despite how it might make people feel, it was kind of fair, wasn’t it, to treat the entire population like criminals? To impose military law, curfews . . . whatever else IPL was doing, just in case? Wasn’t that just making things safer for the people who hadn’t become criminals?

  All her life, whenever there’d been a proposal for enhanced surveillance—cameras in private homes, routine tests for women to check they weren’t pregnant with an unlicensed second or illegal third child—the whole human-rights-and-privacy argument had blown up again. But although some people had said Sekoia already used too much surveillance, Elissa remembered other people—plenty of other people—arguing that you only needed to worry about surveillance if you had something to hide. And that if you weren’t ashamed of what you were doing, why would you need to hide it anyway?

  Wasn’t
that something like what IPL was doing now? After all, no one needed to go out at night, and if you weren’t planning on breaking the law, it surely didn’t really matter if that law was imposed by the IPL military.

  It feels wrong, though. It still feels wrong.

  Oh, but what did she know about the measures needed to protect a society in crisis? Questions kept stacking up in her brain, a frustrating list of things she didn’t know the answers to and that everyone else seemed to answer in different ways. And the more she realized she didn’t know, the more insane it seemed that she’d ever thought she had anything to offer the planet that had once been hers. Maybe the only thing she had was the added power she could lend Lin. Maybe, if that was all you had, it was crazy—selfish—to be squeamish about how that power was accessed or what was done with it.

  Cadan’s parents . . . If I sometimes wonder if I’m not good enough for him, I shouldn’t be surprised that they might think that too.

  The beetle-car made a sudden plunge, shooting under a tangle of spiraling stairs joining two sets of old-style, static walkways. It seemed to shake the thoughts loose in Elissa’s head. She straightened in her seat, taking a breath, putting her chin up. She was being dumb. It wasn’t about being “good enough.” He loved her, that was all that mattered. And as to what she could offer her world—she’d never thought she had superpowers, or some amazing understanding of how to rebuild Sekoian society. What she did have, what she and Lin were both offering, was an understanding of Spares and their powers. It wasn’t everything, but it was more than anyone else could offer right now.

  With a whir and rattle of overstrained propellers—the beetle-cars had never been meant for such long flights, only short hops onto the monorails—the car dropped through the space made by two tall buildings and landed in the dimly lit narrow alley that ran between them. There was just space for the sides of the car to flip up.

  The driver had been periodically scanning an instrument fixed to his dashboard ever since they set off, but now he jerked a fast, intent look up and around them before indicating to Elissa that she could get out of the car.

  Skin prickling, she slid out to stand behind it, looking up as he had done, seeing nothing but high, blank walls. She heard Lin climb out after her, moving carefully, as if she, like Elissa, felt that any unwary movement could bring an attack down upon them.

  Their feet scraped on something gritty on the floor of the alley. Sand. Weird. Sand did blow from the surrounding desert into the city, obviously, but there was a citywide automated cleaning program that kept it from ever building up to more than the merest trace. And Elissa was pretty sure it, like the slidewalks, ran on solar power, so why would anyone turn it off?

  Oh, maintenance, of course. She felt silly for not thinking of it immediately. Why would she expect maintenance schedules to be running on time? Keeping the city shiny clean wasn’t exactly going to be a priority right now.

  The other beetle-cars settled into the alley behind the one Elissa, Lin, and Felicia had come in. Doors sprang open and the others climbed out, as quiet and tense as the twins.

  “We okay?” asked Mr. Greythorn.

  The driver of Elissa’s car was leaning out, one foot on the ground, the instrument from the dashboard in his hand. “As far as I can tell. Josh, Hussein, you?”

  “Not picking up anything,” said the driver of the car the Greythorns had ridden in, and behind him, the driver of the third car gave a brief nod, visible through his windscreen.

  Mr. Greythorn already had a keycard in his hand, and now he edged past the cars to an unmarked door farther along the side of one of the buildings and drew the card through the scanner by the side of the door.

  “We’re going in the back,” he said, directing his words at the group as a whole. He hadn’t looked at Elissa since getting out of the car. Which didn’t mean anything—she didn’t think he’d looked at Lin either—and anyway, it didn’t matter, because it was what Cadan thought that mattered. . . .

  The door slid open, and within the passageway behind it, little pale lights glowed awake. Now Cadan’s father did look Elissa’s way, nodding to her to go past him into the building.

  She did so, feeling Lin’s hand slide into hers, the fingers clasping tightly.

  The building was cool, but not chilled. The air-conditioning must be off here, too. And once she was in the passageway, she realized that only every other light had blinked on.

  “It’s fine,” said Mr. Greythorn from behind them. “Go right ahead.”

  The passageway turned left, and then there were stairs stretching up into more half-lit dimness, leading—as they climbed them—around one corner after another. Elissa had used the gym on board the Phoenix, but obviously not enough. Within a few flights her calf muscles were burning, and she was far too glad of the handrail she was using to pull herself up onto the next step.

  It wasn’t that pathetic—it was totally late at night, after all—but she was terribly aware that Cadan and his parents were coming up behind her, with no hesitation at all, or at least none that she could hear.

  They’ll think I’m like one of those people who have their staircases turned on all the time, who use remote or voice-activated everything, who practically forget how to walk.

  Oh, for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter. Cadan doesn’t think that—

  Except then came, like an echo from a previous life, a world away, the memory of how he’d used to talk to her. . . . The star system doesn’t revolve around you, you know, princess. It wouldn’t kill you to work for what you want . . .

  On the fifth floor, or maybe the sixth, Mr. Greythorn opened another door with his keycard and directed them along a short, low-ceilinged corridor studded with doors that were clearly entrances to living apartments. The maze of narrow, windowless corridors, the cramped spaces, spoke of low-grade housing, the only sort Central Canyon City’s lowest-paid workers could afford.

  Behind her, she heard Cadan’s voice rise a little in a quiet question, then his father answering. “Yes, exactly. Much safer. IPL were housing all of us in a central block at first, but once the location got out, you might as well have put a beacon on the roof. Dispersed in the normal population—and as long as they’re discreet and don’t show themselves in pairs—there’s nothing to say we’re not ordinary refugees. There are enough of those, too, God knows.”

  A shiver caught Elissa, a blend of anticipation and apprehension so intense it felt like fear. . . . as long as they don’t show themselves in pairs . . . The safe house—although it sounded as if it wasn’t so much a safe house as a safe apartment—that they were being taken to wasn’t just for SFI families. It was for Spares and their twins. I’m going to see more Spares. And other people who’ve gone through what I’ve gone through. For the first time, people who I won’t have to explain anything to. People who can’t possibly see Lin as a clone.

  “Elissa,” said Mr. Greythorn, “next door down, okay?”

  She stopped at the unnumbered door. A small light patch on the gray plastic showed where the number plaque had been removed. Another security thing?

  Mr. Greythorn touched his keycard to the sensor, and the door gave a soft chime as it slid open. They went through into a small, low-lit lobby, doors set in the walls around it.

  Mr. Greythorn indicated a couple of the doors with a nod of his head. “Those rooms are empty. They each fit three, so there’s room for all of you. Go quietly if you can. People will mostly be asleep. We don’t have any of the younger Spares here, though—it’s all people your age.”

  Emily Greythorn moved past Elissa to open a farther door. In the room beyond, lights flicked on. “This is the kitchen. If any of you want drinks, the fresh products have all run dry, but there’s a reasonable amount of everything long-life.”

  Markus was already making for one of the rooms, but Ivan and Felicia moved toward the kitchen, and Cadan turned to Elissa for the first time since they’d gotten out of the beetle-cars. “It’s like being back on
the Phoenix already. You want a nice long-life drink, Lissa? Lin?”

  Irritation spiked through her. What she wanted was half a minute to talk to him without a million other people around. Did you notice your parents’ reaction? Have they said anything to you? She hesitated, wishing there was a way to ask, wishing there was a way to grab even the tiniest amount of privacy.

  He smiled at her. “Lis, you look dead on your feet. Go to bed if you want. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  There was nothing different in his expression, no new reticence that had appeared in the last half hour. Inside her, something cold and tight began to unwind. She returned his smile. “Yeah, I will. Good night.” Then, with a slight effort, “Good night, Mr. Greythorn. Good night, Mrs. Greythorn.”

  “Good night, Elissa.” Cadan’s mother’s voice, and the nod his father gave her, were no different from how they’d been before. But all the same she couldn’t shake the impression she’d had earlier. The almost-shock on their faces, and Mrs. Greythorn staring at her with . . . She was sure she hadn’t imagined it. It had been disappointment.

  Well, she definitely couldn’t ask them now—if she ever could. Lin following her, she moved away to go toward the room Markus had left free. But as she did, her foot caught in the torn hem of her pants leg and, clumsy with tiredness, she stumbled, putting out a hand to stop herself falling into the wall.

  Her hand brushed the door panel next to one of the doors, and it slid open.

  The room beyond was lit only by the glow of a screen—one of the cheap multifunction ones—tilting down from a far corner. The dark shapes of two couches and a scatter of beanbag chairs bulked between the screen’s light and where Elissa and Lin stood. After a moment while her eyes adjusted, Elissa recognized what was playing on the screen as one of the more popular teen dramas. She’d never watched it much—the impossibly beautiful, confident, and polished actors had only seemed to accentuate the difference between her life and the life normal teenagers could lead.