Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  “They knew?” she said. “They knew what you were planning?”

  “No, of course not.” But he said it too fast, and his gaze, for a second, slipped away from hers.

  She stared at him, stiff with shock.

  What had he done? What was he involved with? And her parents—what had they . . . colluded with? Turned a blind eye to?

  Bruce’s eyes came back to her. “Dad doesn’t know anything,” he said, as if he were making a reluctant confession. “Ma . . . she didn’t know about this, but she . . . well, she hasn’t asked, but I’m pretty sure she knows I’m a member of a covert group. I’m not going to freak her out with the details, but she’s not stupid—she knows we sometimes have to take action that’s a bit . . . controversial.”

  Elissa choked over a furious laugh. “ ‘Controversial’ ? You’re what, trashing a hotel room?”

  “God, Lissa, you never listen. Will you just let me explain?”

  “Oh, please do! I’d love to hear your ‘explanation’ for why it’s okay to abduct your own sister.”

  “Well, if you’d stop talking for a goddamn minute—”

  “Okay,” said the other man. “Enough pleasantries, yeah? Bruce, give your sister the explanation she’s asking for, or I’ll have to do it.”

  Jeez, thought Elissa, still furiously sarcastic, because it makes it so much better to get the explanation of why you’ve been abducted from the brother who helped with the abduction.

  She looked at him through eyes she’d narrowed to slits. “Well? Do what the man says.” A thought struck her. “Oh, but please tell me it doesn’t include the words, ‘it’s for your own good.’ ”

  Bruce’s eyes flickered again.

  “Seriously? God, could you be any more of a cliché?”

  “Fine,” said Bruce, his voice defensive. “But just because I don’t say it doesn’t make it any less true. You listen to what I have to say, then you decide if it’s for your own good to get you away from that freak you’re tied to.”

  “Don’t call her—”

  “She’s dangerous.” He spoke over her. “They’re all dangerous. That’s what everyone keeps trying to tell you. How many deaths will it take before you believe it?”

  “Lin is my sister. She’s as terrified of hurting me as I am! She’d die rather than—”

  “But she won’t be able to help it.”

  And now there was something else in his voice, an added weight—a knowledge.

  Elissa’s stomach tipped. “What? What do you know?”

  “They’re all time bombs, Elissa,” said Bruce. “We’ve—our group—we’ve managed to access some top-level SFI data. Details of the Spares program. They—the scientists in charge of it—they built a trip switch into each of the Spares’ brains.”

  “A what? How can you build something into a brain?”

  Bruce shrugged. “They were—are—geniuses, Lis. Once they had a brain open, to get it wired up to the energy converters, they could have done just about anything they wanted.” A different note had crept into his voice, a suggestion of something she didn’t want to hear, something she didn’t want to recognize.

  He continued, hands in his pockets, voice flat yet still with that undertone to it. “As long as the Spares were secure in the facilities, kept away from their doubles, the bomb would stay defused. The programming is to do with seeing their twins. After a certain number of times—randomly set, it’s different with each one—they’ll look at their double and it will trip the switch. It’ll trigger a psychotic state of extreme aggression—focused primarily against their twin, if he or she is present, against others if not. And when that happens, the trigger won’t reset until their twin’s dead.”

  Zee. That’s what had happened with Zee. She’d seen it, seen the programming in his brain kick in, seen the switch trip. Seen the bomb explode.

  “They made them into weapons,” she said, and her voice was nothing but a thread of sound. “They took people and made them into weapons.”

  “No,” said Bruce. “That’s not what they were trying to do at all. SFI never wanted the Spares to meet their doubles. They wanted them for energy, not for weapons. This was a fail-safe, in case the Spares escaped the facilities—or in case some überliberal party came into government and started interfering. They didn’t want to lose control of them—”

  “Oh God, so not true!” Her voice still hadn’t regained its strength, but there was enough outrage in it to make Bruce break off. “If they only wanted to stop them escaping, they’d have programmed them to—oh, just self-destruct or something. Making them attack other people—making them attack their twins—that’s not a fail-safe, that’s sadism!”

  “Lissa, you’re missing the point. They didn’t want to lose the Spares. They wanted to get them back. Even your typical bleeding-heart clones-rights activists wouldn’t be so keen on allowing potential psychos into the community. A few deaths—of Sekoian citizens, not just Spares—and our whole world would have been happy to bundle the Spares back into the facilities. Of course, IPL—helped by you, that is—screwed all that up.”

  Elissa’s stomach seemed to tip all the way over, as if she were going to throw up again. What had happened on the Phoenix—Ady’s and Zee’s deaths—it had been meant. It had been designed.

  “And this is who you’re working with now?” she said to Bruce, her voice sounding as nauseated as she felt. “Mad scientists and butchers, who think it’s okay to program people to kill other people just so they can stay in control?”

  Incongruously, Bruce looked as if she’d insulted him. “We’re not working with them. I told you, we’ve accessed some files.”

  “Oh please. You just ‘managed’ to access some top-level SFI files? These people”—she jerked her hand in a brief wave—“they’re not SFI? They’re nothing to do with SFI?”

  “SFI doesn’t exist anymore,” the other man said, his voice bland.

  “Oh, but their secret files are just randomly lying around? And you’re—what are you doing with this information? What’s it got to do with abducting me?”

  “For God’s sake, Elissa, stop saying you’ve been abducted!” Bruce snapped.

  Elissa rolled her eyes at him. “I’m so sorry. Is that completely insensitive to your feelings? Should I say ‘borrowed’ instead?” She swung her gaze back to the other man. “So tell me. What has this got to do with me? Why did you bring me here? You want to turn me into a weapon—oh, sorry again, Bruce—fail-safe, as well?”

  “No!” Bruce’s voice rose to a shout. “I just don’t want you to be tied to one!”

  “It’s a bit freaking late for that!” Elissa shouted back at him. “What the hell is wrong with you? I told you how much she matters to me. And you weren’t even listening! You were just, what, distracting me until you could call your terrorist friends?”

  “I was listening,” said Bruce. His voice dropped again, and an intensity came into his face. “The group—they asked me to arrange access to you when we heard you were coming to Philomel. I wasn’t sure. I . . . you’re my sister, and it might be for the greater good, and it might be unavoidable, but I . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t like this new world you gave me, Lissa. I like a world where I don’t have to think about breaking the law, because the law is fair.”

  “The Sekoian laws weren’t fair—”

  “They were to me!” Their eyes met, and again, in Bruce’s, there was that misery that, despite Elissa’s anger and fear, caught at her, made her unable, for a moment, to snap back at him.

  Bruce swallowed, getting control again. “Then I talked to you. And you—God, Lis, you keep talking about how you love her, and you don’t even know why. She’s taking over your head, and she can control you, and you don’t even like it, and yet you’re still talking like it’s okay, like it’s a real relationship you’ve got with her.”

  “No.” She stared at him, appalled at how her own words were being used against her. “No, Bruce, that’s not how it is�
�”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s you who can’t see it.”

  “No. No. I—you can’t understand what it’s like.” But even as she spoke, she knew there would be no convincing him. All too clearly now, she heard her own words, convicting herself—convicting Lin. She’d been stupid, and she’d relaxed her guard, and she’d reduced all the complicatedness of her bond with her twin to something that Bruce had mistaken for . . . well, like he’d said, parasitic mind control.

  And now . . . I don’t want you to be tied to one, he’d said. Cold slid through her, sponging away the anger.

  “Bruce,” she said, “please, listen. You’ve gotten it wrong. I do love her. I do. It’s real. She matters—I swear, she matters more than anything.”

  “I know,” Bruce said, and for a second relief broke over her. But then she heard the note in his voice, saw the look, unhappy but unyielding, in his face. “That’s what’s not natural, Lis. I promise, we’re going to fix it and then you’ll realize. Then you’ll see things as they are.”

  Elissa’s hands started shaking. “No. Bruce, you can’t be really planning—God, Bruce, please, please don’t say you’re going to do that operation.”

  His eyes met hers. He didn’t answer, but by then she didn’t need him to. By then she already knew.

  Elissa screamed. For the next two minutes she lost all ability to reason, or argue, or plead. She just screamed, and fought, twisting and scratching as they closed around her, tipped her back in the chair and forced straps over her elbows and wrists and across her throat.

  “I thought you said she’d be reasonable once she understood!” one of the women snapped at Bruce as she dragged a strap tight and stepped back, furiously dabbing at a long scratch down her cheek.

  Bruce had helped them pin her down, but he’d backed away now, a white shade to his lips. “I—I thought—God, Lissa, don’t do this. It’ll be okay once it’s over.”

  “When it’s over I’ll be dead!” she shrieked at him, incoherent with grief and rage. “If you take her away—if you take her—I’ll die. I’ll die, do you hear me? Bruce, please, please—”

  Misery rose in his face. Misery, and pity, all the worse because it was pity for the wrong thing, pity he shouldn’t be feeling for her now.

  “It’s not real,” he said as the woman she’d met first swabbed her arm, leaving a patch of cold. “Lis, what you’re feeling—it’s not from you.”

  “It is. It is.” How could he be so blind, so stubborn? “Bruce, don’t let them—”

  The other man wheeled over a stand with tubes dangling from it. At the far end of the room the second woman was washing up to her elbows in a deep sink. The first woman took Elissa’s blood pressure, then tied a tourniquet around her upper arm.

  They were talking to each other, but Elissa’s brain had closed them off. Bruce didn’t want to do this—he’d struggled with it to start with, he was only doing it now because he thought it was for her benefit. If she could get through to him—

  But it was too late. One of the others said something to him, and, his face set in miserable lines, he turned away toward the door.

  Elissa shrieked after him. “Bruce! Listen to me! Listen! ”

  He didn’t look back. He opened the door, went through, and it shut behind him.

  A huge, helpless sob rose in Elissa’s chest, swelling against the straps, making her feel she couldn’t breathe. Lin, she sent out, desperate, as she had before. Lin, I’m sorry. I love you.

  But it was like calling into a void. Either she’d used up all her own telepathic energy earlier, with the frantic cry that hadn’t, after all, brought Lin and Cadan to save her, or the stealth flyer had taken her so far across the planet that she was, for the first time, entirely out of range.

  I thought I wanted her out of my head. I was so stupid. So wrong. Lin. Lin. Oh God . . .

  There was a mask dangling from the stand. A mask with tubes attached. The woman who’d been washing came over now, sliding her hands into thin white surgical gloves, and nodded to the woman who’d been prepping Elissa, who took up the mask and held it ready.

  The gloved woman picked up a syringe, snapped the protective end off the needle, and ran it into Elissa’s arm. Mist fell over everything. Mist that dulled sight and sound and the disinfectant-and-plastic smells of the room.

  Someone tipped Elissa’s head back. She felt the mask descend. And then, for the second time since arriving on Philomel, nothing.

  THIS TIME Elissa woke, not as if from a nightmare, but into one.

  She was lying in a different room, in the same chair, now tipped back to make a bed. She was no longer strapped down, and there was a pillow, soft as a marshmallow, under her head. A table stood beside the bed, with a transparent goblet of water within easy reach on it. The room’s lighting was soft, a gentle, warming amber, and the scent of chamomile and orange blossom floated in the air, overlaying the sharp chemical smell of the hospital.

  A whole bunch of things that had been designed—presumably—to provide comfort.

  They didn’t.

  The moment she came to, the loss struck her.

  She found herself doubled over beneath it, pain so intense that it took every scrap of breath, leaving her gasping, biting down onto her fist as if that smaller pain could take away some of the greater.

  It wiped out everything she’d thought had caused her pain before, reducing it all to pinpricks, gnat bites, stupid stuff that had hurt only her body, hadn’t touched her mind, stuff that, compared to this, wouldn’t even be pain.

  This, this screaming sense of loss that went through and through her, scouring the inside of her skull, flaring black lightning in her thoughts and her brain and along every nerve . . . oh God, if I could swap it all . . .

  Her teeth clenched on her knuckles so hard that an ache stabbed through her jaw, but it didn’t help, it didn’t distract from the pain, it didn’t do anything.

  A snatch of thought came—my father—how did my father ever survive this?—and went. There was no room for anything but the pain, the abyss of whirling empty blackness rising to consume her, starless and airless and forever.

  It wasn’t just that, as before, she couldn’t reach Lin, couldn’t speak to her. It was as if something of herself had been torn away, something that had always been there, that she’d grown so used to she hadn’t even been consciously aware of its existence.

  Like a backdrop to her mind, a sun that cast everything in its light, a sense—like the sense of taste—that you only noticed when it was gone.

  Her whole life, whether she’d known it or not, her sister had been there, sometimes a voice like her own voice, sometimes nothing more than a silent presence in her mind. But always there, only unacknowledged because she was so familiar it would have been like acknowledging part of Elissa’s own body, pointing out one of her senses to herself.

  No wonder she’d come so quickly to love Lin—it hadn’t been like meeting someone new, it had been like opening her eyes to see someone who’d always been there.

  And now, for the first time, she wasn’t there. Not just silent, not just distant. Not there.

  The loss stabbed through her again, jackknifing her body against the bed, and the blackness rose, a screaming cloud that blotted out everything.

  It didn’t recede, it didn’t grow any less, but after a while Elissa managed to force her body to unclench. She took her hand away from her mouth, seeing the marks her teeth had made redden as the blood flowed back beneath the skin.

  She pushed herself up to a sitting position on the bed and, a little shakily, moved her legs so they dangled over the side. No nausea hit her this time—they must have given her something to suppress it, or maybe the anesthetic they’d used hadn’t been so swift acting as the one they’d used to abduct her.

  She had to think. What was going to happen now? Having accomplished what they’d intended, were they really going to take her back? Or had they just been saying that, using it, like they’d used the
warmth and the scents and the soft pillow, to try to keep her calm? Had they been just trying to ensure she didn’t fight?

  For an instant, the thoughts—sensible, rational thoughts, devoid of emotion—formed a barrier, a welcome barrier that she found herself clinging to. Maybe clinging too hard, because all at once it crumbled. Lin. They took Lin away.

  She was staring once more into the abyss. Its darkness spiraled up into her head, making her dizzy.

  And within the darkness, grief was building, the blind pain of loss growing into something more focused, something that said this is forever, this is always, this is what you’re going to have to live with the rest of your life, forever and ever and ever.

  But although she felt it, swelling in her chest, behind her eyes, tightening in her lips, making her hands heavy, no tears came to release it. Something within her wanted to scream, but when she opened her mouth the only sound she made was one like a bitten-down whimper.

  The soft whoosh of a door opening. A voice.

  “Lissa? God, Lis, what’s wrong?”

  Bruce’s voice. Bruce’s stupid, unaware, unrealizing voice. It’s for your own good, he’d said. Your own good, Lissa. And It’ll be okay once it’s over.

  She looked up at him, and anger took her so that for a moment she couldn’t even see. “What’s wrong?”

  “Does it hurt? Your head? The anesthetic—it’s not supposed to leave you in any pain.”

  My head? She hadn’t even thought that that, of course, it was an operation, and operations left physical scars. She raised a heavy hand, patted her fingers over her head—and found a small patch, still numb, where the hair had been shaved off, a tiny seam running through it.

  The pain hit her again, as if a huge hand had descended, thumping all the breath from her body. That’s where they took it from. The link. That’s where they went to burn it out.

  “God, Lissa, it is still hurting, isn’t it?” Bruce’s voice was full of compunction. “I’m sorry, they swore it wouldn’t. I’ll go get someone to give you something—”

  Elissa had been moving through pain and grief as if through deep water, but at this rage fired her, bringing her head up to stare at him. “To give me what? What do you think your band of terrorists has that can help with this?”