“Oh, so now it’s our fault?” Sofia gripped the edge of the upper bunk and leaned down to shoot a furious look at Elissa. “If we’d all gone along like good little robots he’d still be okay—Ady would still be alive?”
Elissa bit down on her temper. “I’m not saying that.”
“You’re not saying what you did either. Or what you didn’t do.” Sofia turned her head to where Samuel stooped over the tiny corner basin in the shower cubicle. “She knew there was something wrong with Zee, did she say? She and Ady knew, and they didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t say anything.”
Samuel jerked upright, showering water, shock and hurt in his face. “No,” he said to Elissa. “You didn’t?”
Elissa stood. “Yeah, I did. And now I’m sorry, and I can’t fix it, and I’m sorry.” All at once everything seemed too much. She felt as if a flood of tears were rising to drown her. She swallowed, hard, digging her nails into her palms, drawing a breath in through her nose, forcing the tears away. She’d thought other what-ifs in the night, as well. She hadn’t been going to say them, but now it came to her that maybe they needed saying. Maybe, if they were true, the twins and Spares and the people charged with their welfare needed to be aware of what could be going on.
“This isn’t just us,” she said. “The warning came from Philomel, where they’ve already got a whole bunch of evacuated Spares. We don’t need to be arguing about which of our faults it was—we need to get to Philomel and find out what it is, and what we need to do to stop it.”
She opened the door and stepped through it, out of the room, away down the corridor, away from them.
The moment Cadan let her onto the bridge, the moment she saw the expression on his and Markus’s faces, she knew something else had happened. She knew there would be no comfort here.
She opened her mouth, then couldn’t bring herself to ask.
But Cadan read the question in her eyes and told her. It turned out that the question of whether Zee should be prevented from killing himself was moot. He had died in the night.
“He came around from the sedation,” Cadan said, his voice bleak, his eyes on the control screens in front of him. “And he started screaming again. He was strapped down, but he screamed so much he broke blood vessels all over his eyes. He tore his throat membranes too—he spat at us, and it was blood. It was like he”—he shook his head, as if trying to shake the image from it—“like he wanted to destroy himself, and we’d strapped him down so he couldn’t, but he was going to find a way to do it anyway. I kept thinking, if we’d only kept him away from Ady for longer, if we’d only held him back until he’d flipped back out of that psychotic state . . .”
He opened up another window on the screen. “When he stopped screaming—God, it was such a relief. For a second I thought he was calming down, that I’d be able to talk to him. Then when I looked, I realized . . .”
He took one hand from the controls for a moment to rub it over his face.
Oh God. Like Samuel had asked, she found herself thinking, Wasn’t it bad enough? Wasn’t it already bad enough?
It could be worse. It could have been Lin. Even the thought of that turned her stomach upside down, swept cold over and through her, but at the same time she hated herself for the selfishness of it. It’s not okay just because you escaped! It’s not okay that it happened to them, not you.
And it wasn’t okay that—maybe—she could have stopped it.
She swallowed, wrapping her arms across herself, a comfort and a protection.
“Cadan?”
“Yes?”
“I—” She had to tell him, but all the same the words stuck in her throat and she had to stop, swallow again, then force herself to carry on. “I knew there was something wrong with Zee, and I didn’t say anything.”
Cadan’s eyes left the screens and came up to hers. There was shock in his face, and concern, but none of the anger—the blame—she’d seen in Sofia’s and Samuel’s. “What sort of wrong?”
She told him, unable to stop her voice shaking, fighting down the tears that wanted to come. Wanted to come partly out of a cowardly instinct to show him that she blamed herself so much that he didn’t need to, that he didn’t need to be angry with her.
Cadan was swinging back to the screens almost before she’d finished, his hand going to the com-unit. “Hang on. Bridge, calling Ivan.”
Ivan’s voice came through, deep and calm, a little gritty with fatigue. “Captain?”
“I need a report on the Spares. You’ll need to ask their carers to help you, and their twins if you can do it without panicking them.” He gave a quick description of what Elissa had told him. She watched him, miserable with guilt. She should have told him this last night. She should have thought that of course it was something he might need to know.
“If anyone’s noticed anything like that,” Cadan finished, “I need you to make a note, that’s all, Ivan. Something to pass to the IPL authorities on Philomel.”
“Got it.” A moment’s pause, then, “Captain, you’re busy, I know, but have you spoken to Lissa? She handles whatever gets thrown at her when she’s got her twin to think about, but now, with them separated, she’s going to be in a pretty bad state—”
“She’s here.”
“Ah.” The relief in Ivan’s voice came clearly through the com-unit. “Signing off, then, Captain. I’ll report back.”
Cadan flicked the unit closed. He looked back at Elissa.
She swallowed, not wanting to meet his eyes but needing to see the expression in them. “I should have told you the minute Ady mentioned it. Or told someone. Or made Ady tell someone. If I had—”
Cadan interrupted her. “No. Don’t go there, Lis. A fugue state—like you thought, it could have been no more than that, a temporary response to shock. If you’d said something, the most anyone would have done was keep an eye on him till we got to Philomel and could have a scan taken. No one was going to anticipate something like . . .” His face tightened, and he didn’t complete the sentence. He turned a little more in his seat and put out his hand to take hers. “And still, it could be a false lead. It could be nothing to do with what happened. The warning came through about all the Spares. Not just Zee.”
Her fingers curled around his. She still wanted to cry, but with relief, a momentary lightened feeling in the midst of the weight of everything else. But now wasn’t the time to cry. She blinked hard, swallowed the tears down.
“Have you gotten any more messages from Philomel?”
Markus laughed, nothing like a happy sound.
“No,” said Cadan. “That debris that Lin said was in the way? There’s bands of the stuff—it’s screwing up all communications. Not to mention playing hell with my navigation.” He rubbed his eyes again. For the first time, Elissa noticed the stack of used coffee cups next to the controls, and when she glanced at the nutri-machine, she could see the last drink setting included both extra caffeine and extra sugar. Cadan hadn’t slept.
“So we still don’t know?” she asked. “What did that to Zee? What’s going on? Anything?”
“Nothing. Trust me, as soon as we land, first thing I’m doing is getting all the explanation they have. I won’t leave you and Lin hanging.”
She tightened her hold on his hand. “I know.” There was no point asking, but all the same: “I guess I can’t go see her?”
“If I thought I could dare to let you . . .”
“Or even just talk to her with one of the com-units? Or write her a note?”
“Lis . . .” He gave her an exhausted look. “All right, this could be me being crazy, but I . . . I’m scared of letting you even do that. They said separate them, and I didn’t, I didn’t do it fast enough, and Ady—” He broke off, then shook his head, visibly regrouping. “I’m scared that if I let you have any communication, it might set off . . . whatever the hell that was, again. And I can’t risk it. I’m sorry, Lis—”
“No, I know. I get it. I know. I . . . have you see
n her? Do you know if she’s okay?”
“My mother went with some of the other carers. She’s”—his mouth twisted wryly—“she’s doing all right, given the circumstances.”
He meant it as reassurance—or as much reassurance as he could give. But over the next few hours, as the Phoenix neared Philomel, as they touched down on the huge natural plateau in the midst of the mountains that held the planet’s main spaceport, as the doors opened and armed IPL guards escorted them through the bright, icy air and into an indoor holding area that was probably normally a waiting room, the words echoed in Elissa’s head. All right, given the circumstances meant that Lin, her sister, her vulnerable, dangerous, precious twin, wasn’t doing all right at all.
Even now, surrounded by a whole bunch of guards with huge guns of a type that Elissa had never seen, or even heard of, the Spares were being kept away from everyone else. Cadan passed the information to their waiting, anxious twins and carers that they’d been taken to a different holding area, but then an IPL official came to summon him away, and he disappeared up a long flight of steps and through some sliding glass doors—and didn’t reappear.
There were the usual drinks machines in the waiting room, and it was set out comfortably, with smooth-covered sofas, low tables, and various music or entertainment channels showing on the screens around the room. And after half an hour, food was delivered: long platters of tiny pastries, vegetable and fruit sticks and sushi. Real sushi, according to the illuminated menu-ticker running along the rim of the platters. Elissa remembered now that Philomel’s oceans, unlike those on Sekoia, supported life. Although she had had real fish, from Sekoia’s carefully farmed lakes, she’d only tasted pseudosushi—made of seafood-flavored white veggie-protein, or insects, of which Sekoia did have an abundance—and she wasn’t a big fan.
Another time she’d have tried some of the genuine stuff, out of curiosity if nothing else, but now, as the minutes trailed by and neither Cadan nor Lin nor any news about anything appeared, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to eat. She ended up standing at the glass wall at the end of the room, holding on to the handrail that ran across it, staring down across the spaceport plateau and to where the mountains rose again at its perimeter, high and sharp edged against the thin blue-white of the sky.
She and Samuel had asked one of the guards if they could at least speak to their twins by phone, or even e-mail, and the guard had said that they—probably—would be able to “at some point.” But he hadn’t been able to tell them when that point might be.
IPL had chosen Philomel as the relocation planet for the Spares and their twins: It must be safe. It couldn’t be that Lin and the others had been shepherded off to be killed or—
She forced herself to switch off the images trying to burn themselves into her brain. Nothing like that could be happening, not on the official relocation planet. And, even if Lin had somehow closed herself off from the link between them, if anything like that happened, she wouldn’t be able to prevent Elissa from knowing. I felt it before, even when I didn’t know she was real. If something were happening now, I’d know. There wouldn’t be a way of keeping it from me.
It didn’t matter that they’d been on Philomel for—she looked at her watch—over an hour, and Cadan still hadn’t come back, and no one had come to tell them anything about what was happening to the Spares. It didn’t matter, because nothing bad was happening. Nothing bad was going to happen. Because if it did—she repeated the words furiously, insistently, to herself—if it did, I’d know.
The doors at the planet-side wall of the room, which had remained shut and guarded since they arrived, slid open. They moved silently, so it was the reflected flicker of that movement in the glass that caught Elissa’s attention.
She turned, her heart jumping with a mix of relief and fright.
The guards at the door were standing down, holstering their weapons. The doors stood wide open, and a crowd of people—all adults around her parents’ age—were coming through them.
Elissa stared at them a moment. They weren’t the Spares who’d traveled on the Phoenix. They weren’t IPL officials. So what were they doing, being let into a guarded room filled with evacuees?
“Mom?” Sofia’s voice was high with shock. She pushed her way out of a little knot of people who’d been standing by the food table, the plate she’d been holding tipping sideways, forgotten, in her hand. A couple of pieces of sushi tumbled off it, scattering rice. “Daddy?”
Then she dropped the plate entirely, more rice scattering in sticky grains across the floor, and was running to them, crying.
She wasn’t the only one. All at once, all over the room, twins were recognizing their parents, hurrying over to them. A wave of noise rose: some sounds of crying, but mostly a growing roar of talk, explanations, a catching up of the last however-many weeks since parents and children had seen each other.
It was a stab of disappointment that Elissa felt first. She couldn’t remember what Sofia had said now, but she’d gotten the impression that Sofia wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing her parents. And, somehow, that had been a scarcely recognized comfort, that she, Elissa, was not the only one for whom a reunion would be an ordeal rather than a relief.
I should have known. People—they complain about their parents, but it takes more than a bit of irritation to make you really not want to see them again. It’s dumb to be surprised at Sofia—it’s obviously me, not her, who’s the unnatural one here.
But they lied to me. And betrayed me, and my mother refused to recognize Lin as her daughter—or even as a person. It’s not my fault that I don’t want to see them, that I wouldn’t be glad if I did—
Her thoughts stopped dead. Her stomach plunged, as if she stood in a plummeting elevator. Across the crowd, a head showed above most of the others. Dark hair, which had been closely cropped in the same style as Cadan’s but was just beginning to grow out. The lines of a familiar face, clean-cut, good-looking enough that Elissa’s friends—back when she’d had friends—had gone silly and giggly every time they came over and he was around. Cadan’s closest friend. Her older brother, Bruce.
And if Bruce was here . . .
Her stomach plunged again. Next to Bruce, the crowd parted a little as more people found who they were looking for and moved over toward them. Shorter, slighter, and with the dark hair Bruce had inherited threaded all through with gray, her father, Edward Ivory, stood next to his son. And next to him, nearly as tall as her husband, her face composed and unreadable, was Laine Ivory. Elissa’s mother.
“WE’RE JUST glad it wasn’t you,” said Elissa’s mother.
They were standing by the drinks machine nearest the window. Mr. and Mrs. Ivory were both holding iced teas, Bruce had a soda, and Elissa was clutching a coffee. She hadn’t wanted a drink, but after the first hugs—too tight on her parents’ parts, stiff with awkwardness on her own—it had seemed suddenly vitally important to have something for her hands to do.
And now, with the news they’d just dumped on her, the kick of the oversugared coffee was very welcome.
“Fourteen?” she said again. “It happened to fourteen other Spares? Today?”
Laine Ivory set her drink down so she could press a hand to her perfectly made-up face. “We’re all still so shocked,” she said. “All these teenagers—and children—to be put in so much danger. It just doesn’t bear thinking of. And for it to happen just when we’d been told you were on your way here, on a ship in the company of your Spare . . .”
Instinctive defensiveness took over Elissa’s awareness of the danger she knew she, too, had probably been in. “Lin wouldn’t ever hurt me!”
Her mother looked at her, and the calm patience in her expression was worse than if she’d snapped back. “Elissa, you can’t possibly know whether that’s the case. None of them appear to intend it. And afterward, when they have that shock to face . . .” She shook her head.
“Why would you care about that?” Elissa said, so stiff wi
th resentment that the words came out sounding sulky. “You don’t even think Spares are human.”
Laine Ivory spread her hands a little. “Well, and doesn’t this bear that out? I know you feel some kind of attachment to your Spare, Lissa—we’ve been getting some advice since we’ve been on Philomel, and apparently that’s entirely natural—but it’s still not human in the way you are. Humans don’t randomly attack one other.”
“Oh, please.” Elissa set her coffee down with a little thump, and it splashed over the edge of the cup. “We were attacked back on Sekoia—three times! By humans.”
Mrs. Ivory lifted an unperturbed shoulder. “I didn’t say humans couldn’t be violent. I said they don’t attack one another randomly.”
“Oh, they so do!” Anger scorched up behind Elissa’s eyes, turning the world into a bright-edged blur. “Like, serial killers are random. And those guys who suddenly go crazy and kill their families—”
Her mother’s eyebrows went up. “And you’re comparing them to your Spare?”
“I’m saying humans can do awful things without them not being human! And Lin hasn’t even done anything awful yet!”
“Yet.”
“Stop it!” Elissa heard her voice shake and couldn’t get it back under control. “You don’t even know her. You don’t get to talk about her like that. She’s in pieces at the thought she might hurt me, she told me to get away from her.”
Laine’s voice rose easily over hers, not because it was louder but because it was so dispassionate that it seemed to flatten out her daughter’s. “Really, Elissa, calm down. As I said, no one is suggesting the Spares intend to hurt their doubles.”
“But they are, all the same.” Beyond greeting Elissa, Bruce hadn’t yet spoken. Now his voice was grim. “You can waste time explaining how your Spare, among all the others, won’t, Lissa, or you can accept that, yeah, actually it probably will, and face that you’re going to have to deal with it.”
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