They’d both had major nightmares afterward, Elissa remembered. Of all the multihorrors the film genre was named for, the one that had bothered her the most was when the parasitically mind-controlled diner owner had fished up a giant worm from the sewers, chopped it into sections, and turned them into ring doughnuts to serve to an unsuspecting diner full of glossily beautiful teenagers. Shortly afterward the mind-controlling parasite had gotten the diner owner to climb into the whirling blades of his own mega-blender, and the resultant screaming, splattered gore, and severed limbs should have eclipsed the doughnut scene, but in Elissa’s mind, somehow the horror of thinking you were eating doughnut when actually you were eating sewer worm had been the thing that had lingered.
Bruce had had his own nightmares too, although he’d always refused to tell her which of the assorted horrors had invaded his dreams, but somehow their parents had never found out the reason—even when both Bruce’s and Elissa’s vocabularies suddenly began to include the term “parasite mind control.” And when Elissa went off eating doughnuts for a year.
“No,” she said now. “Completely not parasite mind control! Jeez, Bruce.”
The corner of his mouth turned up in something like a grin. “Okay. Look, don’t go crazy, but, Lis, it doesn’t sound a hundred percent different.”
Elissa opened her mouth, then shut it, and turned to lean on the side of the balcony, feeling the cold roughness of the concrete beneath her elbows and, as she leaned out farther, the slight tickle of the safety field along the hair on her forearms.
It felt disloyal to say anything about Lin to Bruce—Bruce, who’d said Lin wasn’t human. Especially anything that associated her, no matter how slightly, with the monsters from a low-plot, high-gore horror movie. But Bruce’s words had brought some of her own thoughts back into her mind. It’s like trying to get through to an alien, she’d thought just yesterday, staring at her sister. Like trying to talk to someone who’s not even human.
“You keep fighting for her.” Bruce had moved to lean on the side of the balcony too. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him looking at her. “You met her, what, six weeks ago? Has she really gotten that important so fast?”
A laugh caught at Elissa’s throat. “She was that important, like, two days after I met her. She’s . . . some of it must be that we were linked for so long, even though I didn’t really know it. But”—she lifted a shoulder, shy about sharing so much—“I love her. I know it doesn’t sound likely, and if it hadn’t happened to me I don’t think I’d believe it could happen to anyone. But I just . . . she feels like part of me. She matters more than anything. Even when she does something awful, or when I feel like she’s taking over, or when I just want her out of my head . . .”
She leaned out a little more, into the buzz of the safety field as it caught her, stopped her leaning farther. Bruce hadn’t said anything, and now that she wasn’t looking directly at him it was easier to talk, easier to be honest.
“You know how people say love—like, all love—is unconditional and everything?” she said. “It’s really not. You can love someone, but if they do something really bad . . . they can . . . kill it off, eventually. But with Lin . . . I don’t think she could. Kill it off, I mean. I’ve been so furious with her, and scared of her, sometimes, but it always comes back. Like something you can’t escape from. Something that’s always there whether you want it or not.”
“Really,” said Bruce. His voice had changed again. Now it held a note she didn’t recognize, but that made her glance sideways at him. Something new showed in his face, too. A stiffness, like shock, or anger held under such tight control it hardly showed as anger at all.
All at once she felt foolish, exposed. She shrugged. “Yeah. It’s completely difficult to explain, though.”
“No. You explained it pretty well.” But he seemed distracted. He’d tipped his wrist to check the watch he wore on his right hand, and now he was fiddling with it, running his thumb over the watch face. Elissa wondered, vaguely, with a fraction of her mind, whether his watch, like hers, was still set on Sekoian time, or whether he’d changed it over to match this time zone on Philomel.
Elissa straightened, turning so her side was to the balcony wall, hugging her arms to her chest. “If you meet her, though . . . I mean, I wouldn’t expect you to feel like I do, but she’s your sister too—and if you met her, you’d see she was human. I swear—”
She stopped short. It wasn’t just a watch on Bruce’s wrist. She should have recognized it before now: It was the mini-communicator he’d worn when he was training. They could be worn as casually as if they were nothing but watches, without worries about SFI channels being compromised, because of the built-in security. They could be activated only by the thumbprint of the owner.
And now, here was Bruce with one. And he’d just run his thumb across it. He’d just activated it.
Fear shot through her. Fear that, even as her body felt it, her mind told her was irrational. There was nothing out here that screamed danger. But the fear came all the same, riding on a wave of instinct, a fight-or-flight impulse that came from nowhere.
As her senses sprang alert, she became aware that she and Bruce were the only people on the balcony, that the nearest guards were way across the other side of the room she’d walked through to get here, and that during the time she and Bruce had been talking she’d moved, somehow, much farther from the doors than she’d realized.
There was no reason why any of that mattered, there was nothing sinister about Bruce fiddling with his mini-com—without the SFI network it probably didn’t even work—but all the same, unreasoning instinct pushed Elissa back toward the entrance to the spaceport.
She moved carefully, not wanting—again, for no reason!—Bruce to notice what she was doing.
“You think I should meet her, then?” As Bruce spoke he, too, stepped away from the balcony wall.
Elissa moved a few more cautious inches. “Yeah,” she said, almost at random, concentrating on keeping her voice casual rather than on what she was saying. It was crazy, she was just talking to her brother, for goodness’ sake, but all the same she knew she’d feel 100 percent better once she was back in the shelter of the spaceport.
Bruce laughed. “Lis, what are you doing? You keep shuffling backward. You look like you did when we were playing chase when we were kids!”
“Oh, I thought we should maybe start going back inside?” Her voice came out overbright, and she felt her lips stretch into a forced smile. The reference to their shared childhood added another layer of reluctance to the voice in her head telling her she was being crazy, that this was her brother, who she’d grown up with. But at the same time, the way he’d laughed . . . there was something off about it, something that seemed as unnatural as her smile.
Bruce moved toward her again, and this time every one of her muscles felt as if they jumped, jerking her away from him.
“Lis, for God’s sake—”
He took the last few steps fast, grabbed her arm, and the unease growing within her woke into full-blown panic.
“Let go. Let go.”
“Jeez, Lis, we were talking. You can’t just walk off.”
She pulled back against his hold. “Bruce, let go of me!” With the panic, memory flared too, screenshot-vivid. She’d been here before, struggling against a family member, someone she should be able to trust but that she couldn’t, someone who was acting on instructions she didn’t know about, instructions someone else had given them.
Normal conventions had trapped her before—the conventions that said you shouldn’t run away from home, you shouldn’t push your mother away even if she grabbed hold of you, that you could trust your family, you could trust the government. She was damned if she was going to let them trap her again.
She opened her mouth to scream—and Bruce’s free hand came down hard over it, crushing the scream as it formed, cutting off half her breath.
No. No! Not again! She jerked backward, dragging
him with her, and as he lunged after her, off balance, she kicked out, catching his shin. He staggered, and although he kept his grip on her arm, his hand slipped from her mouth.
She tried to scream, but she hadn’t drawn in enough breath and it wasn’t anywhere near loud enough. And, of course, the doors had slid shut behind her, and this was a spaceport—the glass would be soundproof so even if she could scream loud enough no one inside was going to be able to hear her.
I should have listened to my instincts. I should have run away the minute I got scared. I shouldn’t have come out here with him—
It was all true, and it was all too late. As Bruce grabbed her again, pulled her against him, his hand back over her mouth, his arm like a steel bar across her body, over the edge of the balcony, a flyer rose—a slender, bullet-shaped thing, so black, so unreflecting, that it seemed like a hole in the sky. It made almost no sound—just the thinnest whine at the very edge of her hearing. She’d never seen one in real life before. She shouldn’t have seen one at all, shouldn’t even know what it was, but way back when Bruce had joined SFI, and before he’d been trained to confidentiality, he’d shown her a picture on his shiny new SFI bookscreen—a picture that later, as the training on need-for-secrecy kicked in, he ordered her, in a panic, to forget she’d ever seen.
This flyer didn’t belong on Philomel. It shouldn’t have been brought here, must have been smuggled onto the planet in the cargo hold of a spaceship. It was one of a type that was almost silent, unbelievably fast, permanently shielded so it was impossible to track or trace. It was an SFI stealth vehicle.
As it turned, effortless in the air, one narrow black fin passed over the edge of the balcony. Blue sparks spattered as the safety field disintegrated. A slim opening appeared in the side of the flyer. A man, in a close-fitting flying suit and helmet whose seamless blackness matched the flyer itself, stood in it, one hand on a grab handle.
What the—?
Panic wiped most of the coherent thoughts from Elissa’s head. She fought like crazy, kicking Bruce’s legs, curling her fingers around to claw at his arms, trying to bite the hand that crushed her lips against her teeth.
It didn’t do any good. His hold didn’t falter; he pulled her to the edge of the balcony. To get her into the flyer, though, he was going to have to lift her up, and to do so he’d have to let go of her mouth, slacken his hold on her. Elissa stilled for a moment, trying to drag in as much breath as she could through her nose, through the cracks in between his fingers. As soon as he shifted his hold, as soon as he gave her the slightest opening—
The man in the flyer leaned out. There was something in his hand, something that glinted bright in the sunlight.
The scream Elissa couldn’t utter rose inside her head, and a surge of terror that burned like ice.
In this last extremity of panic, something in her head narrowed, focused. She reached out the way she’d never been able to before. Lin! Lin!
No voice answered, but what did come was a sudden rush of panic on top of her own. And fear that was different from her fear, fear that came from a mind not her own.
Lin! There’s a stealth flyer! And Bruce. Bruce—!
Bruce’s hands clamped tighter on her mouth and body. The man leaned closer, and the needle slid through Elissa’s sleeve and into her arm.
And the world went black.
ELISSA WOKE as if from nightmare, jerking bolt upright, heart hammering, mouth sand-dry, breath like hot smoke in her chest. Her eyes snapped open on floods of bright white light, her gaze taking in the sight of objects that her brain couldn’t make sense of.
The movement of sitting up made her head spin, a feeling as if something inside it had come loose. Then the same sensation hit her stomach. She doubled over and threw up.
The vomit splashed onto a shiny white floor, farther away than it should have been. The smell, warm and vile, came up to Elissa, and she threw up again, tasting a horrible mixture of acidic sweetness, feeling it burning her throat and the inside of her nose.
Someone pushed a steel pan onto her lap, swiped a damp cloth across her mouth, then handed her a plastic beaker of water.
Elissa sipped, gagged, and half vomited again into the steel pan. She put out her free hand, groping blindly.
A hand whisked the steel pan off her lap and replaced it with a box of tissues. Elissa pulled up a handful and blew her nose, again and again, trying to get rid of the sweet-acid smell, gagging twice while she did it.
“The water will help,” said an unfamiliar voice, very loud above her head. Elissa sipped, spat into the pan, then drank, feeling the cool liquid wash both the burning and the sand-dry feeling out of her throat.
Hands—the same hands? different ones? and did they belong with the voice?—took away the disgusting, used-tissue-filled pan, then came back with another cool, damp cloth and wiped Elissa’s face. Then pushed another beaker into her hands.
She drank, suddenly aware that she was so thirsty she wanted to cry, shutting her eyes against the brightness that kept making her head spin, that made her afraid she would be sick again.
“You’ll be okay in a few more minutes,” said the voice, from somewhere beyond the dark of Elissa’s eyelids. “You had a bad reaction, that’s all. Keep sipping the water—not too fast, you don’t want to get sick again. I’ll be back in a minute to clean up.”
Footsteps—soft-soled footsteps—went away over the floor.
The shiny, superclean floor. The chair she’d been lying in, which had tipped up with her as soon as she moved but was still too far off the floor for her feet to touch it. The readily available steel pan. She must be in a hospital.
But why?
Elissa’s eyelids tried to snap open, but she kept them shut. Everything still seemed to spin, in her head, in her stomach, and she really didn’t want to be sick again.
I’m in a hospital. Why?
There were a million jumbled images in her head, a million images that made no more sense than the bright whiteness she’d opened her eyes on. Faces . . . Lin, Cadan, her parents, Bruce . . .
In a hospital. In a chair. And my arms can move, but my legs . . .
This time she couldn’t stop her eyes snapping wide open. Through the swimming of her vision, she looked down at herself, over an expanse of white hospital gown. She hadn’t been able to move her legs because they were strapped to the chair. A harness went up over her chest, too, pinning her shoulders to the chair back.
An operating chair. One of the many medical advances that had become standard before she was born. That was why it had tipped with her when she sat up. When the hospital staff chose, it could be moved back down again, opened out to become a full operating table or a recovery bed, tipped back up for when a patient was well enough to sit up and eat.
But why am I in it? Why am I being gotten ready for . . . what? For an operation? For surgery?
Surgery . . . The word, charged as it was with urgency and the beginnings of panic, rang suddenly familiarly in her mind. Surgery. Brain surgery.
Oh my God. It was just as well she’d drunk all the water, because her hand jerked and she dropped the beaker. It landed on the floor, bounced, and rolled in a half circle before it came to a slightly rocking halt.
That’s what they were going to do. They were going to perform brain surgery on her. The brain surgery she’d escaped by fleeing Sekoia. Brain surgery that would burn out the part of her brain that connected her to her twin. Brain surgery that would destroy the link.
It hit her like a blow: shock and fear, then a terrible, rising panic. They couldn’t. They couldn’t do that to her, not now, not after everything she and Lin had gone through. The weeks of getting to know each other, talking and arguing and fighting and learning how to be sisters.
A helpless, despairing sob rose in her throat. Lin. Lin, infuriating and dangerous and more precious than anything. If they take her, if they take her away—
Elissa put her hands to her face, trying to crush down the panic
and the rising grief, trying to think. Bruce. Bruce brought me here. If I explain to him, explain how vital the link is, he has to listen, he has to understand.
Across the room a door slid open. A woman came in, followed by another woman, both dressed in the white uniforms of medical staff. And just behind them, another two figures, one, like the women, in white, the other in a dark color. Elissa tried to see, but her vision was still blurry and the room too bright, and she couldn’t make her eyes focus.
“How are you feeling?” said the first woman. From her voice, it had been she who’d been with Elissa when she first woke up.
“How am I feeling?” Her voice came out so loud it would have been a shout if it hadn’t been shaking so much. “You drugged me! How do you think I’m—”
Then the darker figure moved a little closer, her eyes focused, and she recognized him.
Fury scorched through her, obliterating everything else. “You,” she said. “You drugged me. You—my God, Bruce, you tricked me and drugged me and abducted me! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I can explain.” An uneasy half grin twitched his lips, the grin he’d worn when he was in trouble at school and was going to try to bluff his way through it. “Seriously, Elissa, if you listen a minute—”
“You can explain? You can explain abducting me? What planet do you even come from, to think that’s okay? To think that’s okay to do to your sister?”
“Okay,” said Bruce. “Look, it was necessary. Unavoidable.”
“No. It. Wasn’t.” She was too angry to be scared. Too angry to think beyond the outrage of the moment. “What do you think Dad and Mother would say to you? What would they freaking say if they knew what you’d—”
Something changed in his face, and she broke off, so appalled that for a moment she couldn’t speak.
Would there ever come a time when she would stop being shocked at betrayal?
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