“What do you mean, deal with it?” She was shivering now, in impotent anger. Her mother and Bruce had been back in her life for less than ten minutes, and already they were stamping all over her and telling her that everything she was doing was wrong. “What am I supposed to do? If Lin is going to hurt me, I can’t stop her any more than she’s already been stopped. We’ve been separated, what else am I supposed to do?”
“Jeez,” Bruce was beginning impatiently, when his father interrupted.
“All right, Bruce, that’s enough.” He turned to Elissa. All her life he’d looked tired—although not as worn thin as he did now—but now that she knew what had happened to him, she could see that behind the look of fatigue, of distance, lay the grief he’d borne most of his life, ever since the link between him and his Spare had been severed.
She bit down on the furious responses she wanted to give, and listened.
“Lissa, these fourteen—fifteen, now—incidents, they’ve only occurred between Spares and their twins. Anyone else who’s been hurt, they’ve only been hurt incidentally.”
A picture of Zee’s head slamming back into Cadan’s face came to her. The blood pouring from Cadan’s nose. The moment when she’d thought Zee might have killed him.
“Officials—scientists, medical staff—they’re at a loss to understand exactly what’s going on,” her father continued. “But what they are clear about is that this . . . response . . . is triggered by the presence of a Spare’s twin. And it appears to happen only after a threshold of at least sixteen days after the Spare and twin have been reunited. It’s as if, in this case, familiarity doesn’t so much breed contempt as . . . pathological aggression.” His expression altered slightly. He was still looking grim—and tired—but for the first time Elissa saw him slide into what she thought of as his lecture-room manner, saw a trace of satisfaction edge his expression as he coined an appropriate term for something he’d been talking about.
She bit down on a surge of anger and disappointment. It’s not some freaking academic theory we’re talking about here! This is me, and my sister—your daughter!
Except this customary detachment was probably some kind of coping strategy that he’d evolved in order to deal with the loss of his own Spare. Elissa breathed in, carefully, then out. It wasn’t fair to be so angry with him.
“Yes, okay. But what’s that got to do with me?”
He looked at her, sympathy showing in his eyes, waiting for her to catch up as he had so many times when she was small, when he’d explained something to her. And now she saw the expectancy in her mother’s face, the look of familiar impatience—come on, Lissa, get with the program—in Bruce’s.
“Where do they want us to go?” she said, stiff lipped.
“Not you,” said her father. “The Spares. There’s an island in the southern hemisphere of the planet. It could be made secure—”
She took a step back. “No. No.”
Her mother blew out an exasperated breath. “It wouldn’t be forever. Just until the officials have gotten to the bottom of whatever’s causing this. Your Spare could be in the best place, kept secure, with people observing who know what they’re doing. We have an apartment not far away. You can come home with us—”
Home? A home without Lin? “No. No way am I leaving Lin! You have no idea what you’re saying—you have no idea what that would do to her!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Lissa!” All patience had vanished from Mrs. Ivory’s voice. “Think! If it kills you—”
For a moment Elissa heard only the words her mother had used, not the sense behind them. “She,” she said. “She! Not it.”
“Fine. She. If she kills you, what’s it going to do to her?”
Lin’s face flashed up in Elissa’s mind. Lin’s face, but overlaid by Zee’s. By that awful blankness in his expression. By the dawning horror as he came out of his fugue state, as he realized what he’d done. Lin, after everything she’d gone through, left without her twin, left with nothing but the knowledge that she’d killed Elissa.
If anyone else had said it, she might have given way to the horror the image filled her with, might have at least considered complying. But her mother saying it—she was only doing it to manipulate Elissa into doing what she wanted, what she’d wanted all along.
“You don’t care what it does to her,” she said, cornered, furious. “You don’t care!”
“That’s right,” Elissa’s mother snapped. “I don’t care what happens to your Spare. I care what happens to you.”
“We all care,” added her father, quietly. “Lissa, we’re really concerned for your safety here.”
The quiet appeal in his voice caught at her. He’d called Lin his daughter a few weeks ago, when they’d spoken on the interplanetary phone from Sanctuary. He didn’t see her the way Elissa’s mother did; he did see her as a person.
But no. No, it was no good. He was still here with her mother, on the same side, arguing against Elissa, not for her.
She took another step away, crossing her arms over herself, feeling her face freeze into defiance. “No,” she said again. “You don’t get to play the concerned card. You lied to me. You tried to make me have an operation I didn’t want.” She looked at her mother, and of their own accord, her teeth gritted against one another. “You called the police on me.”
“Elissa, you know very well that was for your own good—”
“I don’t care! I don’t care. It was wrong! You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. I’m not doing anything before I talk to Lin. I’m not making any decisions without her.”
Mrs. Ivory flung her hands up, an exasperated gesture. “How can you be so unreasonable? You can talk to that Spare of yours from a secure place. You can phone, you can e-mail—”
“I’m not talking to her about this in e-mail! I have to see her. When Cadan gets back, he’ll let me—all of us—know what’s going on.”
“Cadan.” Laine Ivory shook her head. “I cannot believe he’s going along with this. You’d think he’d remember he owes it to Bruce, at least, to keep an eye on your safety.” She turned to her son, putting a hand on his arm. “When he does get back, maybe you should talk to him. He must know he should never have taken Elissa back to Sekoia—I still don’t know what you thought you were doing there, Elissa—he obviously should have brought her here.”
Bruce shrugged. “I’ll be glad to talk to him, Ma. He was kind of landed with her, though, you know? If he had to go to help with the evacuation, and if there wasn’t time to make a stop-off here?”
Despite everything, laughter rose within Elissa. Cadan had been landed with her, had he? Yeah, you wait, big brother. He’s not just yours anymore.
The insecurity she’d felt yesterday had evaporated—and remained that way, like a far-off haze of water droplets. If she didn’t actually need to worry about his mother’s influence, she wasn’t going to start worrying about Bruce’s.
Her mother looked back at her. “Very well,” she said. “We’ll wait to see what information Cadan has. But you’re going to have to make some sort of decision, Lissa. You can’t just be waiting around indefinitely. Quite apart from anything else, the Philomel authorities are allowing us to resettle here—they’re not putting us up as guests. Your father’s working, Bruce is on a waiting list for possible jobs. You’re going to have to do something with your life as well.”
She was right, but everything about what she was saying grated, raw, against Elissa’s skin. It’s not us who’s waiting. It’s me. And whatever I have to do, it’s not you who gets to tell me what it is.
“I know that,” she said, her voice mulish.
Mrs. Ivory’s eyes sparked with anger. She looked as if she were about to say something, but then a stir across the room caught their attention. Cadan was coming back down the staircase.
His eyes swept across the room and found Elissa. Despite the grimness of his expression, a smile crept into them as he looked at her, and for a moment she thought h
e would come straight over to where she waited.
He didn’t, though. He stopped halfway down the staircase and turned on a mike clipped to his collar. As he began to speak, Elissa realized that as captain of the ship that had brought them all here, he’d been given the unpleasant task of explaining the situation with the Spares.
He didn’t have much more information than Elissa had already gathered from her family. Up until the last twenty-four hours, the reunions of Spares and twins had gone fairly smoothly. Not everyone had chosen to be reunited with their double, but those who had, had mostly formed relationships that ranged from a cautious friendship to the intense bond Elissa knew herself, and that she had witnessed with the other Spares and their twins.
Here, under the close supervision IPL officials had provided, other people had picked up on the odd phenomenon that Cadan, like Ady, was referring to as a fugue state: times when a Spare would seem to check out of normal consciousness, flipping back with no apparent awareness that time had passed. As a possible symptom of something more serious, it hadn’t been ignored, but it had been seen as nothing more than an aftereffect of the trauma the Spares had been through, or the psychic shock of being reunited with their twins.
Then, the first of the attacks. A fifteen-year-old girl called Amanda had been strangled by her Spare—in the middle of a board game with two other pairs, and with no warning at all that anything was wrong. The emergency staff were dealing with the fallout from that when the second attack came.
Cadan didn’t go into detail about that attack, or any of the others. All he said was that there’d been twenty-two attacks in all, fifteen of which had resulted in the death of a twin. And of the fifteen Spares who had killed their twins, six had also killed themselves, and the others were in states of catatonia.
Like Zee. Elissa found her mind trying to shy away from the reality of it all, found herself thinking ridiculous things like maybe it didn’t hurt, maybe the dead twins didn’t know what was happening, maybe the catatonia happened before the Spares realized what they’d done. . . .
Cadan’s voice pulled her out of the morass of wishful thinking she knew very well probably wasn’t anything like true.
“IPL doctors and scientists are working on finding an explanation for this,” he said. “So far they’ve identified three common factors. First, all of the pairs to whom this has happened have been at least twelve years old. There have been no attacks with the younger age groups, and as far as officials can tell, no incidences of the fugue state, either. Second, it has happened only to those pairs who were reunited at least sixteen days ago. Third”—and now his eyes met Elissa’s again, and she saw, not only the smile, but the look of relief within them—“it has happened only to those pairs with no current telepathic connection.”
A stir—of relief, confusion, distress—went around the room, but Elissa hardly noticed anyone else’s reaction. Relief bloomed in her chest, and warmth spread to every nerve ending. Lin’s safe. Lin’s safe. I don’t have to let them take her away.
Cadan looked carefully away from Elissa and resumed speaking. “The IPL team working on this wants me to make very clear that none of these factors provide a guarantee of safety for those outside the specified groups. No one yet understands how this has happened, or why, and the data is insufficient to make a full analysis. For this reason, Spares and twins need to continue to be kept separate while the team continues to work on identifying the reasons behind these incidents.”
From all over the room, voices combined in a rising murmur of protest. Cadan held his hand up. “The team understands this is difficult for both Spares and their twins—and for those parents who’ve been hoping to be reunited with their children. IPL officials, aided by Philomelen police, are going to work on providing supervised contact in the very near future. Also, brain scans are being performed on all Spares, again in an attempt to identify the source of the pathology that causes the attacks. As this can be a distressing experience for the Spares, and as they will be fully restrained throughout, IPL medical personnel are inviting their twins to be present during the procedure.”
Lin in a machine. Lin being strapped down into a machine. Elissa looked up at Cadan, sick with horror. You’re calling it nothing but a “distressing experience”? What the hell is wrong with you? You know what she went through. You know what they did to her.
Again, his eyes met hers, a very brief glance. She dragged in a steadying breath. Okay, they weren’t Cadan’s words. But how anyone who knew how the Spares had been treated could minimize what they needed to do to them now as nothing more than “distressing” . . . She curled her fingers up into her palms, drew in another breath. At least she’d get to see Lin. And at least Lin would know she wasn’t likely to kill Elissa.
What is it that’s making the difference? Of all the factors Cadan had mentioned, the fact that it had happened only to the twins with no telepathic link seemed like the most significant. But if the doctors weren’t sure, then how could Elissa work out what lay behind it?
Cadan was talking again, explaining that the team of doctors and scientists was going to be performing the first scans on the Spares who had no link to their twins, trying to isolate any common factor in their brains. Not Lin, then, not yet. She bit at her thumbnail, watching Cadan as he spoke, waiting for him to finish. I have to see her. If I can catch up with him when he’s done here, maybe he can help me see her.
It was selfish, she knew, using her connection with Cadan to jump the line of all the twins who were probably as desperate as she was to see their Spares. She didn’t care. I tried to be unselfish. I tried to think about other people and I tried to get Lin to think about other people, and look where it got us.
Cadan finished talking, and as he came down the rest of the steps he was swamped by a crowd of people, by a jumble of questions and high-pitched anxiety. Elissa waited, every muscle tight.
“Elissa, don’t bite your nails.”
Elissa looked around, whipping her thumbnail away from her mouth, an automatic reaction that came before she could think. She stared at her mother, incredulous, anger rising in a wave. You’re telling me what to do? Still? Now?
Laine Ivory met her eyes. “We did it for your own good,” she said.
Elissa put her hands up, a barrier between herself and her mother’s words. “No. No. It doesn’t matter how many times you keep saying that. It doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t make it better.”
“Oh, it’s very clear you hate us. But you should still admit—”
“I don’t,” Elissa said, exasperated. “I don’t hate you. But I’m not admitting anything. You did it all wrong, and you’re not even trying to see that!” She flung a hand out toward the crowd. “Look. Look what it did, you going along with what SFI was doing. You didn’t challenge them, you didn’t tell them it was evil and immoral and illegal. Look at all these damaged people!”
Fury flashed over her mother’s face. “And now you’re blaming us? We didn’t know what they were doing!”
“You didn’t let yourself know!” She raised her hands farther, blocking out her mother’s view of her face. “I’m not talking about this.”
“Elissa.”
“No.” Her teeth snapped down on the word. She turned, pushing through the people standing behind her, refusing to look back.
She reached where Cadan stood just as he was extricating himself from another group of questioners. His eyes met hers through a gap between them, and after a moment he managed to excuse himself and come toward her.
“Your parents—I just saw them. Are you okay?”
He spoke at the same time as she said, “Can I see her?”
Then she registered that he’d asked her a question too. “Yes. I’m all right. Kind of mad, though . . .”
He grinned a little. “Yeah. Look, about Lin—”
“Cadan, she’s going to be so freaked out.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. But like I said, there’s no guarantee of safety. They w
ouldn’t let me make it part of the announcement, but the brain scans they’ve already done? All of them—all of them performed on the over-twelves, that is—they all show some kind of abnormal activity. It’s more marked in the unlinked Spares, but it’s there for all of them. It sounds like you and Lin should be safer than the twins without a link, but no one’s going to want to risk—” He broke off, frowned. “But wait a minute, why are you asking? The link, the way it’s been developing between the two of you? You don’t need to see her to talk to her.”
Tears pricked unexpectedly in Elissa’s eyes. “She’s shut me out. Or she’s not cooperating. Or something. I can’t get through to her.” Frustration and disappointment and worry combined in her voice, making it tremble. “I’m not the superpowered one, Cadan. Everything I’ve done, I’ve only managed because I’ve been doing it with her. If she shuts me out, I’m just—just me.”
“More than enough,” Cadan said, for her ears only, his eyes smiling into hers.
For a moment all other preoccupations fell away. She slid her hand into his and felt his fingers curl around hers to pull her a little closer. She leaned in, just enough that she could feel the warmth that came off his skin, catch his scent. He smelled of sweat and too much coffee, a smell she wouldn’t have ever thought she’d have liked. But, of course, it was still him underneath.
“I have to go in a minute,” he said. “I’ll talk to someone about you seeing Lin, okay? I’ll do what I can.”
“Okay.”
He bent his head, then caught himself. He wasn’t going to kiss her in this crowd. But he did pull her closer, just enough so the top of her head brushed his cheek, so the feel of his warmth spread all along her body, so that if she shut her eyes it felt, for a moment, as if they were alone. . . .
“Seriously?” said Bruce.
ELISSA JERKED upright, dropping Cadan’s hand. When she turned around, Bruce was standing a couple of feet from them, staring at Cadan.
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