Elissa cried out. Mrs. Greythorn’s hands bit into her arm. Cadan! People got killed like that—she’d seen it happen. Cadan, oh God—
Cadan blinked. He was alive. But his hands had slackened on Zee’s wrist. Just for a moment, but it was enough.
Zee tore himself free from all the pairs of restraining hands. Arms bound behind him, head down, looking as if every second his legs would go from under him and he would crash to the ground, he charged across the room in a staggering rush.
When Cadan had told him to, Ady had backed a little farther away. But not far enough. He was still standing near the viewing panel. He’d taken his hands down from the scratched-up mess of his face, and he was crying, tears streaking the bright blood to pale, soaking it all down into the collar of his T-shirt.
Zee lunged into him with all the force of someone no longer held back by considerations of their own safety or their own pain. Ady flew backward, hands coming up in a futile attempt at defense, and crashed into the side of the viewing panel. The back of his head banged against it.
“Zee—” he said.
Zee had only just remained on his feet. He took one step back now, his balance off, swaying, and for a moment his eyes locked on his twin’s face.
“Zee,” said Ady. The word was a plea, but there was love there too. Love, and pain at having to watch what Zee was doing to himself.
Zee’s hands clenched in the restraints. He braced his feet, and drove forward with his head. It struck Ady in the face as it had struck Cadan’s, but this time the splash of blood was instant. Ady’s head crashed back against the viewing panel, and, as if the impact had shaken all consciousness from him, his eyes went as blank as Zee’s.
Elissa screamed. Across the room, Mr. Greythorn and Cadan both lunged toward Zee. Nearer, a pair of twin girls grabbed for him, their eyes wild with fear and a sudden terrified determination.
Zee reared his head back, then crashed it again into Ady’s face. Something crunched, a horrible sound that the human body shouldn’t ever make, and more blood splashed, onto Zee’s face, onto the panel behind Ady. Through it, the distant stars showed suddenly red, a thousand warning lights, a thousand signs shrieking danger, danger, danger.
Cadan was shouting, and other voices, a cacophony with no power to help. “Zee! Zee!”
Zee drove his head once more into the bloody ruin of his twin’s face, and Ady crumpled, falling backward against the panel. For an instant it held him in a half-standing position. His eyes were open. Elissa caught a glimpse of something that might have been expression in them—or might have been just a glint of reflected light. Light that reflected nothing but red, like the shrieking warning lights of the stars, like the blood.
I will talk to Clement, he’d said to her. . . . not this evening . . . But tomorrow . . .
She should have said, No, not tomorrow. Should have said they didn’t know what the stresses Zee had been under had done to his mind, should have said that the fugue states might be a warning of danger, a red light they shouldn’t ignore, that tomorrow might be too late. Should have told him that Mr. Greythorn had to be told right away. Should have said, Don’t wait. Tell him now. Tell him before anything can go wrong.
She hadn’t said that. Hadn’t said any of it. She’d laughed, and nodded, and agreed.
Zee lunged again at his twin, but as he did Ady’s body slid, a slow collapse, down the viewing panel. He landed at the bottom, on the little lip where you could stand and feel you were flying through endless space, a crumpled huddle, smaller than he’d looked when he was standing up, when he was moving, smiling, taking care of his brother.
And he lay still.
There was sobbing in Elissa’s ears. And someone screaming again, but this time in broken, half-choked screams that sounded as if they were running out of breath.
Maybe they would run out of breath. Maybe then they’d be quiet and everyone would be quiet and there wouldn’t be so much noise in her ears, in her head, stopping her thinking, stopping her making sense of what had just happened. Because what she thought she’d seen, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t make any sense, so it couldn’t be real. Not really. It couldn’t be that Ady was dead. It couldn’t be that Zee had killed him.
Her eyes were shut. She didn’t remember shutting them, but at least in the darkness she could make things make sense, she wouldn’t have to look at images that didn’t make sense, images she couldn’t let herself believe.
Lissa.
But now there was a voice in her head as well as her ears. The one voice she couldn’t ignore.
I can’t. I can’t—
She didn’t know what she was saying she couldn’t do. Open her eyes? Let herself think? Listen to what her sister wanted?
Lissa. Please. I’m so frightened.
Elissa opened her eyes. But as if they were still obeying another of her brain’s commands, as if they were still trying not to let her see, they showed her a world gone blurry. A haze of moving shapes, a far-off reddish glittering mist.
“Lissa.”
Lin was blurry too, but that didn’t matter, because Elissa could tell where she was. Could tell by the tremor in her voice that even if it wasn’t true, even if what she’d seen wasn’t real—and it can’t be, it can’t—something had left Lin shocked and frightened.
Elissa put her hands out—and the shape that was Lin jerked away.
Don’t! “Don’t come near me!”
Elissa caught the thought before the words, and they overlapped weirdly, making an echo in her mind. Something else that made no sense.
“Lin? What—”
“The warning,” said Lin. “The warning to separate us. That’s why. If they’d separated—” She choked on the next word, tried again, couldn’t say it. But Elissa knew what it was. The knowledge came relentlessly, inexorably, a swelling tide of unwanted memory. If they’d separated them, that wouldn’t have happened. If they’d known in time. If they’d . . .
If they’d separated Ady and Zee.
The merciful blur resolved itself into unmerciful clarity. The stars were red because she was seeing them through the blood splashed up the inside of the viewing panel. Ady was a crumpled heap because he was dead. Because his brother had killed him.
People were crying. Cassiopeia was still screaming. Cadan, as white as death, knelt over the body.
And Lin was backing away from Elissa because that was what the message from Philomel had been warning them about. It had been warning them about all the Spares. Warning them to separate the Spares from their twins. Because whatever had happened to Zee, whatever insane meltdown had driven him to kill his twin, it could happen to them.
Whatever had happened to Zee could happen to Lin as well.
Zee had been pushed to the floor, and Ivan had a knee between his shoulder blades, pinning him. But Zee wasn’t struggling now. His face, blood-smeared, bits of his hair sticking up in red wet points, was turned toward where Ady lay. His expression was still blank, but in his eyes showed something like a returning tide of consciousness. And as consciousness returned, so—like a black slick of oil, stinking and scalding and poisoned—Elissa could see a rising awareness of agony.
He’s coming back. He’s coming back, and he’s going to see what he did.
Lin backed away farther, hit the wall behind her and stayed there, palms flat against it, fingertips white, as if she were trying to drive her fingers into the wall itself. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I said I wouldn’t hurt you. I didn’t know.”
Momentarily, instinct drew Elissa toward her—before Zee’s insanely shrieking face flashed into her mind’s eye. She stopped dead. How many times had she shared a room with Lin? Sleeping all night, unprotected, unaware of danger? How many times could she have woken to see Lin’s face, insane, empty eyed, filling her vision, feeling Lin’s hands closing on her throat or raking across her skin?
A shudder took Elissa, so deep it seemed to send tremors along the marrow of her bones. She took a step
away, and another, her heart beating in her ears, in her temples. Her sister watched her, fingertips bloodless against the wall. “Go,” Lin said. “Get away from me. Lock yourself in.”
It was only what Elissa herself was thinking, but coming from Lin, the words seemed weighted with threat. As if Lin, like in some awful horror movie, were giving her a chance to run before she came after her.
“Come to my cabin,” said a shaky voice behind her. Sofia. “I have to go, I have to get out of here, but I—oh God, I can’t be alone.”
Elissa nodded. Her hand reached down and found Sofia’s. The fingers were cold, as Lin’s so often were, but the shape of them was wrong, unfamiliar. Something lurched inside Elissa. She couldn’t go near Lin—right now she was terrified just being in the same room as her—but all the same, every cell in her body seemed to be clamoring for the comfort she could only get from her twin.
“Come,” said Sofia, her voice quivering on the edge of total panic. “Come out of here.”
The door whooshed open behind them. Clumsily, not taking her eyes from her twin’s face, Elissa backed through it. Lin was watching her, motionless, her face set. She didn’t move a hand to gesture good-bye, didn’t smile, didn’t mouth words. She just watched, unblinking, while the door contracted shut.
Once in Sofia and El’s cabin, the door locked behind them, Sofia slid down onto the lower bunk as if her legs had forgotten how to stay upright. Tears swam into her eyes and clogged her voice. “I know her. I know her. She couldn’t possibly do that to me. It’s not—it makes no sense, it’s not possible.”
Elissa’s knees too wanted to fold beneath her, but she couldn’t let them. She’d left Lin behind, shocked and terrified, and Cadan dealing with what felt like the aftermath of a massacre. And like Sofia said, it made no sense.
Except that they had been warned about it. Warned about it too late, but warned about it all the same. Which meant that to someone, on Philomel or elsewhere, it did make sense.
She couldn’t let herself collapse. She had to think.
She braced herself with one hand on the edge of the cabin’s little nutri-machine. “Zee and Ady didn’t have a link,” she said.
Sofia’s eyes came up to hers, bright with an unthinking hope that, in the circumstances, seemed so selfish that Elissa wanted to slap her. “You mean that might be why? The rest of us—we might be safe?”
Ady’s dead and Zee’s waking up to horror beyond horror, and it’ll be okay as long as the rest of us are safe?
Elissa gritted her teeth, forcing herself not to reply the way she wanted to. Sofia wasn’t being selfish. Not really. It wasn’t fair to think it—of course she was scared for herself, just as Elissa was. Just as—probably—all the twins were.
“The warning came for all of us,” Elissa said. “Not just those of us without a link. But maybe, if not having the link means your mind is more damaged than someone who does have the link, maybe that’s . . .” She rubbed her hands up over her face. “Okay. Zee was more damaged. He was used in a hyperdrive. He was way more traumatized than the other Spares. Maybe that’s why that—whatever it was—happened to him first. And he’d been having those fugue states—”
“What?” said Sofia.
Elissa explained, forcing herself not to flinch when she said the words Ady had used to explain it to her.
“And you knew?” Sofia’s voice was shrill with accusation. “You and Ady, you knew something was wrong and you didn’t say?”
“Trust me,” Elissa snapped, “if we’d known this was likely to happen, we would have said.”
“But you knew something was wrong—”
“Yeah, we did. And we didn’t say. And now I’m sorry and Ady’s dead.”
“You could look a bit sorrier,” Sofia said disagreeably.
Elissa clenched her hands. Anger was easier than grief. She knew that. It wasn’t Sofia’s fault.
She met the other girl’s eyes. “I’ll be sorry my whole life,” she said steadily. “Right now, I don’t have time. If that can happen to Zee, it could happen to Lin, or El. We have to try to think how it happened—why it happened—or we won’t stand a chance of stopping it.”
The door chimed to tell them someone was requesting entry. Sofia jumped a mile, and when she answered, her voice jumped too. “Who’s there?”
“Me, Sam. They sent us all to our cabins, but I”—his voice cracked—“I keep seeing his face. And Zee—he’s realized now and he’s just gone to pieces and he started screaming. . . .”
Elissa touched the doorpad, and the door opened to let Samuel in. His dark skin showed muddy with shock, and the color had gone from his lips.
He squeezed in and sank next to Sofia on the bed. “Wasn’t it bad enough?” he said. “What they did, what Jay’s having to recover from? Wasn’t it already bad enough, without this?”
“Zee?” Sofia’s voice trailed off even as she asked the question, as if she knew there could be no good answer.
Samuel shook his head. “Meltdown. He started screaming at himself to wake up. Then he started trying to slam his head against the floor. They hauled him off to the med-bay or somewhere.”
“The med-bay? But Felicia—”
“No, it’s okay. They had to sedate him before they could move him anyway. They’ll tie him down or something.”
And when he wakes, he’ll have it to face all over again.
What else could anyone do, though? The warning had just been about Spares and their twins, and Zee’s attack had been focused on Ady, but he’d hurt Cadan as well—if someone went as insane as that, nobody could count on being safe.
“But the others?” Elissa said. “Lin?”
Samuel’s head dropped as if he were too exhausted to hold it upright. “They’re just locking them all in other cabins. Keeping them all separate. Greythorn said we’d be at Philomel in a few hours. The IPL officials there obviously know more than we do, so screw them, let them take over the whole freaking mess.”
“Cadan never said that.”
“No.” Samuel looked up at her. “I say it. This shouldn’t be our problem—yours or mine or Jay’s. They—IPL—screwed us. They should have known better than to reunite us so soon. They should have put protections in place. They should have done”—his voice shook—“oh God, just better.”
She couldn’t disagree. But again, it came to her: Anger is easier than grief. Knowing who to blame, and damn well blaming them, was easier, less painful, than thinking what had led to it, what there might be that could prevent it happening again.
She couldn’t think how to say it, though, couldn’t think how to express it to two people as shocked and grieving—and frightened—as she was.
She looked at Samuel, and he looked back, his face set in a mask of anger and misery. “Zee’s never going to recover from this,” he said. “They’re stopping him killing himself, but they’d do better to let him. How the hell do you recover from murdering your twin?”
Elissa opened her mouth to respond, to make an automatic rejection of what he’d said, and couldn’t. Thinking of Zee, poor guilt-and-grief-ridden Zee, being driven to kill himself, was awful.
But thinking of him staying alive, knowing, for endless, isolated years, what he’d done to his twin, to Ady . . . That was worse.
Elissa, Sofia, and Samuel spent the night sharing the same cabin. It was cramped—Samuel only just managed to fit on the floor, and every time he turned over he banged against the lower bunk, shaking Elissa out of any half-waking doze she’d managed to fall into—and, because the air-conditioning wasn’t set up for more than two occupants, it was also unpleasantly stuffy.
But they weren’t likely to sleep much anyway. And, used to being with their Spares, and with Ady’s and Zee’s faces in their minds, none of them could face the idea of a whole night by themselves in a lonely cabin.
Lying in the dark, in the bed meant for El, Elissa reached her thoughts out along the corridors of the ship, to whichever cabin Lin had been left in.
Are you there? Are you all right?
But it was just as before, when she’d tried to use what she’d thought was her own electrokinetic power and found that, without Lin, it wasn’t a power at all. Now she sent her mind reaching out for her sister, picturing the narrow corridors, the cabin she and Lin normally shared, but it was nothing more than an exercise in imagination. Left by herself, without the stimulus of physical contact, she, unlike her twin, couldn’t make the telepathic connection between their brains. Without Lin providing her greater mental power, without Lin reaching out for her, the link might as well not have been there at all.
And Lin wasn’t reaching out.
As the night dragged on, as Samuel stopped throwing his arms about and settled into sleep, as Sofia gave the occasional muffled cry, in her dreams, Elissa, alone in the dark, tormented herself by wondering why. Did Lin think Elissa blamed her for the danger she had unknowingly become? Had she seen the fear in Elissa’s face—or, worse, read it in her mind—and did she now think that Elissa would fear their link as well?
Lin. Are you there? Can you hear me?
But there was nothing but the dark.
Elissa dozed eventually, until the sunrise-effect of the room lights sent gold-colored light seeping through her eyelashes, forcing her to full wakefulness.
It was early morning, Sekoian time. The display on the info-screen showed an announcement that touchdown on Philomel was an hour away—and a message from Cadan, telling them that their Spares were all entirely safe and were being held in separate cabins until they’d landed.
“ ‘ . . . for both their and your security,’ ” Samuel read out loud. “Like he needs to tell us that?”
“People resisted yesterday.” Sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, Elissa bent to fasten her shoes. Aside from worries about Lin, she’d had plenty of time for other thoughts in the night, for what-if after what-if to stack up in her mind. Exhausted and unwary, she gave voice to one. “I wondered . . . maybe that was what tipped Zee over the edge. The panic—everyone feeling trapped. Ady”—she stumbled on the name—“Ady said he was empathic.”
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