Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  The commander’s gun jumped from her hand, flew across the room, and hit the far wall. It bounced off and fell to the floor.

  Make her stop!

  Elissa’s hands prickled, every nerve humming, a sensation like superstrong pins and needles. The fingers of her free hand curled. There was a feeling of weight in them, a feeling of grasping something. . . .

  The commander staggered against the side of the doorway as suddenly as if she’d been pushed. She made a half-choked sound, something that might have been a cry if it hadn’t been strangled by the shock Elissa could see in her face.

  Lin giggled, and at the sound some of the haze cleared from Elissa’s brain.

  We’re not going to hurt her! Lin, we can’t hurt her!

  Jeez, I know. Elissa wasn’t looking at her twin, couldn’t see her expression, but all the same she knew she was rolling her eyes.

  “Okay,” said Lin. “We’re going to the roof. You”—she pointed at the commander, as imperious as the conductor of a full symphony orchestra—“can come too if you want, but you have to walk behind everyone else. And if you try to interfere we’ll move you all the way back here.” Her voice was calm and strict—the voice of a teacher or a law officer—but underneath it, like an undertone only Elissa could hear, there was amusement. Far too much amusement.

  Elissa was unexpectedly reminded of an early memory, so early she scarcely had the words to frame it, of going into Bruce’s room and finding him leaning out of his window with a magnifying glass, systematically frying the bewildered trickle of ants that had been threading their way up the side of the house. She’d screamed and cried, and her mother had come in and scolded Bruce for being cruel, for taking advantage of being so much bigger and stronger than the ants.

  Horrified denial swooped through her. That was nothing like Lin was doing. Lin wasn’t even hurting anyone. And using force on the commander, in this emergency, it was so beyond justified it was insane that Elissa was even thinking about it. She pushed the thoughts into oblivion, and when Lin glanced at her she smiled at her twin and squeezed the hand she was still holding.

  They went through the corridor into the sitting room, then out into the entrance corridor. Cadan, Felicia, Markus, and Mr. Greythorn, all with their weapons out, then Elissa and Lin, hands clasped tight, then the others, a huddle of the Spares shepherded by Mrs. Greythorn and Ivan. Then, finally, Commander Dacre.

  Cadan hit the front door panel, and it sprang open to let them through. They went back through the corridor they’d come through last night, out to where they could climb the staircase. Elissa hardly felt the stairs beneath her feet, was hardly aware of when they rounded the first corner, then the second, climbing from floor to floor. She was aware of Lin’s hand in hers, of a feeling like static electricity on her skin, like a buzzing she felt rather than heard.

  A few more seconds, and she realized that she and Lin, as they’d done once before—or maybe more than once, and she hadn’t noticed—were walking in perfect time, as if joined by invisible rods. Another few seconds went past and she realized something else.

  “Oh!”

  Cadan didn’t slow his pace or look back, but his voice was sharp. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just—Lin, back there, we were talking to each other.”

  “I know.” There was a smile running all the way through Lin’s voice. “Useful, huh?”

  Unexpectedly, Elissa found herself laughing. Her head was spinning, but in a good way, a kind of post-adrenaline euphoric rush. A trickle of an underneath thought came: Maybe it wasn’t even amusement in Lin’s voice back there. Maybe it was just this—this light-headedness that comes from using our power.

  “What are you talking about?” said Felicia, ahead of them. “If you mean you were communicating telepathically, what’s new about that? Isn’t that what you’ve done your whole lives?”

  “No.” They said it simultaneously, which made Lin giggle and Elissa choke back a burst of wild laughter. It was insane: They were in so much danger and the world was falling apart—again—around them, and yet somehow, right now, this discovery she and Lin had just made was the only thing that mattered.

  “No,” said Lin again. “We could read each other before—pick up stuff, kind of hop into each other’s minds. We never managed to consciously talk before, though.”

  Elissa laughed again, knowing she sounded a little drunk, not caring. “Even when it would have been so useful.”

  A door rose before them. They’d reached the top of the stairs.

  The euphoria dropped away. Elissa’s heart was all at once thumping in her ears, high in her chest.

  External fire doors were usually low tech, in case a fire knocked out all the electricity in a building. Cadan leaned hard on the bar across it, and the door swung smoothly open. Sunlight poured in on them, bright and hot, golden as syrup.

  “Wait,” said Cadan, and went out first, gun in hand, scanning the roof from behind the partial shelter of the open door. He should have a real gun. The others—the people coming after the Spares—they’ll have real guns and all he has is a blaster that’s okay on the ship but it’s not enough out here. . . .

  Then, as he glanced over his shoulder, gestured them to follow him, she saw the weapon in his hand and realized she’d been wrong. Either his dad had given it to him, or he’d had it before and just hadn’t been able to use it on the ship, but either way, the weapon he was holding wasn’t a short-range blaster—it was a real gun.

  They came out onto the roof. It stretched out before them, flat and gray, striped with sharp black shadows from the shoulder-high railings around its edge. Tall poles, topped with solar panels that rotated and tilted to follow the progress of the sun across the sky, stood at each corner, and halfway along one side of the roof, the railings’ shadow-stripes were sliced into curves and crescents by the shadow of the spiral fire escape where it jutted up just beyond them. It ended in a caged platform, from which a short flight of metal steps led back down to the roof.

  Cadan pointed. “That building’s the closest. Can you do it?”

  “Please.” Lin’s gaze skimmed the roof. “It’s easy.” Where the skin of her palm touched Elissa’s, static electricity built again under Elissa’s fingernails, running hot through the veins in her wrist. The fire escape quivered, filling the air with a low metallic sound. “Lissa . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “I can do it myself. If you don’t want—I mean, I didn’t ask . . .”

  Elissa shot her a smile. “No way. I want to help.”

  Her smile was reflected back at her from her sister’s face, as bright as the sunlight. Another quiver ran along the fire escape. Elissa felt it run through her hands, too, as if she were physically holding the handrail that followed the spiral of its steps, as if the smooth metal were actually touching her skin.

  Then, with a shock she felt all the way up her arms into her shoulders, the platform snapped away from the steps that led to the roof. The brackets securing it pinged loose.

  The fire escape bent away from the railings, away from the roof, curving out over the empty space between their building and the next. The caged platform clanged against the railings on the far roof. Elissa felt it bounce, vibrating up through her hands. Except she wasn’t feeling it through her hands, she was nowhere near it, she was just standing in the middle of the roof with Lin’s hand in hers.

  She’d linked with Lin before, to fix the Phoenix after it was damaged, and later, to make those hyperspeed jumps. But now, for the first time she was doing it fully consciously, not out of blind instinct, not just reaching out as if to steady her twin but giving her whole self to the effort. And for the first time she realized how hard it was, how physical it felt.

  With the only bit of her mind she had to spare, she thought, Lin did this sort of thing over and over when we were escaping. She was exhausted and terrified, and she just kept doing it.

  Then she had no bits to spare at all.
Another instant of focused effort, moisture breaking out on her forehead, between her shoulder blades, and the bars of the cage tore away from the platform. More brackets came loose, screws clinking as they scattered over the metal surface of the platform, then rolled to fall off the edge.

  Are you okay? The question came half like her own thought, half as if she were hearing Lin’s voice out loud.

  Yes. It wasn’t totally true—the sweat was trickling down her back, and her hands were aching as if she really were moving the metal with them—but she was okay enough. And it was worth the discomfort. She was being useful . . . being superpowered.

  As she refocused on what they were doing, as she willed herself to be okay, to finish the job, an image flashed up in her mind. The next thing they had to do. She clenched her teeth—and, somewhere in the distance, her hands—then she and Lin bent the broken edges of the railings that had enclosed the platform, curling them around the bars of the farther fire escape, weaving metal with metal, making the bridge steady, making sure it wouldn’t come loose.

  The last thing was to flatten the spiral of the fire escape they’d bent across the gap. A feeling like squashing an empty can between her hands—but an empty can that fought her, that tried to spring back into shape under her sweating palms.

  As they finally managed it, as the fire escape flattened into a surface that could be safely walked on, the connection between them fell apart. Elissa’s hand, slippery with sweat, slid from her sister’s. An instant of nausea swept over her. The sun didn’t feel hot any longer, and the air seemed icy on her skin.

  “Lissa?”

  “Elissa?”

  “Lis? Lis?”

  For a moment the voices swirled around her, unconnected to anyone. Then the nausea withdrew. The sun was suddenly boiling hot again, and the sweat on her skin warm rather than cold.

  “I’m fine.” She looked up, seeing black shadows on a gray roof, and bright sunlight bouncing off the bridge—the bridge she and Lin had made—lying waiting for them to cross. “Oh God, we have to go. We have to get across. That took way too much time—”

  Cadan threw a quick, amused look at her. “You’re joking, right? It took less than a minute. But yeah, you’re right, we do have to get across.” He looked at his father and Felicia. “You can lead, right? I’ll bring up the rear. Guys”—his gaze swung to the rest of them—“go quickly, okay, but carefully. Lissa and Lin got us a few minutes’ grace—we don’t need to risk our necks.”

  As Felicia took the first step onto the steel of the fire-escape bridge, Elissa had a moment of throat-closing conviction that she and Lin had missed something, that it would collapse and fall beneath Felicia’s weight, that she’d go plummeting into emptiness—

  It didn’t. Her feet, then Mr. Greythorn’s, then Sofia’s and El’s, clanged, echoing, as they started across.

  “More like half a minute,” said Ady, behind Elissa and Lin as they followed Sofia and El onto it. “Can I just say? Seriously impressed.”

  “Honestly?” said Elissa. “Half a minute?”

  Lin shook her head. “I don’t know. It felt longer to me, too.” She shot a shining grin over her shoulder to Ady. “Seriously impressed, did you just say?”

  Another wave of nausea hit Elissa. She concentrated on walking, trying to ignore it. Sweat sprang out again on her back, tiny points of prickling ice. She’d blacked out one of the first times she and Lin had linked like that, when, driven by terror for her sister, she’d linked with her to make that first hyperspeed jump, but afterward, she’d never felt so . . .

  The sky spun, a tornado spout of blue, far too bright. Beneath her feet, the bridge tipped and slid.

  “Lissa!”

  Cadan’s shout hit her at the same moment as Lin’s hands closed on her arm. The world stopped orbiting around her.

  Ady came up on her other side, and she felt Zee press close behind her.

  “You’re just hungry,” said Lin. “Remember Cadan said electrokinesis uses up energy?”

  Nausea clutched again at Elissa’s throat. I don’t have time to be hungry. Prickling all over with irritated frustration, she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, step after step, concentrated on not snapping at her sister. Or at Zee, who was crowding so close he was pretty much breathing on her.

  Her next step hit concrete, rougher than the steel, wonderfully solid beneath her shoe, and then she and the others were hurrying across the roof toward the beginning of the fire escape that spiraled down the outside of this tower block.

  “Captain.” It was Commander Dacre’s voice.

  Elissa was waiting her turn to start down the fire escape, trying to control the nausea, the black spots swimming across her vision, the insane impulse that kept telling her to push through the others blocking her way, to get down the steps, to get out of the way of their pursuers now, now, now. But the note in the commander’s voice pulled her head around to look at where she stood at the back of the group.

  “I’ve told Control we’ll be at the nearest communal square,” the commander said to Cadan. There might have been a slight betraying note—compunction? guilt?—in her voice, but her face was as clear-cut, as expressionless, as it had been when they first met her. “There’s space there for the rescue flyer—and no slidewalks to get in the way.”

  “How long?” said Cadan.

  “Fifteen minutes.” For a second the muscles crinkled, a movement like a flinch, at the corners of her eyes. “We hope.”

  “Let’s hope it’ll do, then,” said Cadan.

  There was space now for Elissa to follow Sofia down onto the fire escape. The first turn around the spiral brought her back to face the roof, and she caught another glimpse of the commander’s face.

  An unwilling admiration woke within her. The commander was keeping herself together under a whole bunch of stresses. And it wasn’t like what Lin and I did really helped with that, although we were right to go and she was wrong to try to stop us. But we gave her a whole other thing to deal with, something she wasn’t prepared for, and she did deal with it. And now here she is, back trying to save everyone’s lives all over again. She’s . . . kind of—the thought came as reluctantly as the admiration—like Cadan.

  They made their way down the stairs, into the shadow between the buildings, feet echoing on the steps, all of them moving with a hurried quietness that every moment seemed to threaten to break into panicked running. The feeling of urgency, of the need to speed up, to run, to get down the stairs, far away from the building, boiled inside Elissa’s veins, prickled her nerve endings. Any fire escape to one of these endlessly high tower blocks would take a long time to get down, but this one felt a hundred times longer than it really was. Elissa’s ears kept straining for noises that would tell her that people—the would-be attackers—had gotten up to the roof, were crossing the bridge.

  We should have pulled it down. Not left it there for them to use. But—this as she went around another spiral and her knees went weak beneath her—ugh, I don’t think I could have.

  Finally, they reached the ground. Cadan was speaking, clearly but not loudly, before he’d stepped off the fire escape. “Guys, listen. We’re getting to the nearest communal square for the rescue flyer to pick us up. Commander Dacre has the route, so we’re following her. When we reach the square, we’re splitting into four groups. Felicia, you’re taking Lissa and Lin and Cassiopeia. Dad . . .”

  He divided the others quickly, naming Felicia, Mr. Greythorn, himself, and Commander Dacre as the four leaders. “At the square, stay in your group, at your side, using its cover, until you get the sign from the flyer itself—not from me, not from anyone else on the ground—that it’s safe to cross the square. Is that clear?”

  Elissa found herself jostled close to Cassiopeia, and gave her a smile that tried to be reassuring, but that she knew probably wasn’t. Cassiopeia’s face was pale, a little blank. How many times, now, had she been hurried from place to place, without any say in when or where
?

  “Lis,” said Cadan, as everyone divided into the designated groups. He was, just for a moment, standing close enough to speak to her alone. His lips moved, shaping the words rather than saying them out loud. “You okay?”

  She bit the inside of her cheek hard as she looked up at him, keeping her eyes steady, refusing to let her mouth tremble. He’d seen her cope with worse than this; she wasn’t going to fall to pieces now. “I’m fine,” she said, low.

  “Doesn’t surprise me at all.” Just the tiniest smile crept into his eyes, and his hand brushed once, lightly, across her elbow, but it was enough. She was glad she hadn’t let her fear show. Maybe I can get through everything without letting him see how scared I am. Then what he’ll take away from all this is what Lin and I did up there. That’ll be his image of me—someone powerful, in control. Grown up—grown up enough that he won’t have to doubt that what’s between us is going to last.

  “Okay,” said Commander Dacre, quietly, and Elissa left Cadan behind her as she followed Felicia out into the alley between the building they’d just climbed down and its nearest neighbor. She hunched automatically, aware of the presence of danger stories above her head but not daring to look up. There are people with guns—up there somewhere, looking for us. If they’d already reached the roof, all they’d have to do was come to the edge, aim, and fire. The alley was narrow, no room to dodge—and even if the shooters missed first time around, the bullets would ricochet, turning the alley into a death trap, a slaughter house.

  Who are they? she thought for the first time. And: What do they want? Were they one of the groups who wanted to abduct Spares, or did they just want to kill them? The idea that they might want to abduct Lin was almost too horrific to think about, but at least it made an obscene kind of sense. Wanting to kill her and the other Spares . . . even in the minds of people who blamed the Spares for the state Sekoia was in, what would that accomplish? What was the point?