Unravel

by Imogen Howson

  Caught unaware, Lin looked back. For the first time since they’d gotten off the Phoenix, their eyes met. Elissa looked into her twin’s eyes, and it was like looking into emptiness.

  “You said it to him,” said Lin.

  “What?”

  A spasm passed over Lin’s face. “You said to him—to your brother—that you wanted me out of your head. Like you said back on Sekoia. Like I”—her face quivered again—“like I heard back on Sekoia.”

  No. That’s not how I meant it. That’s not the message you’re supposed to get.

  But the pain and the grief were still drowning her. She couldn’t get her thoughts together, couldn’t form the words she needed to say. She just stared past her father at her sister, trying to make her lips move, knowing she must look as blank as if she had no emotions at all.

  “I—” she managed. “Lin . . .”

  For an endless second longer she looked at her sister’s face, saw the pain rising, a dark tide, in Lin’s eyes. They’d lost so much, but they couldn’t have lost everything. There must be something—there must be something left—

  But she was cold, and numb, and drowning, and whatever was left, she couldn’t find it.

  “At least you got what you wanted,” said Lin. Her eyes left Elissa’s. She turned and climbed, her cuffed hands, despite Mr. Ivory’s help, making her clumsy, up into the shuttlebug.

  “YOU WILL survive this,” said Cadan.

  They were back at the spaceport, in a room in the small spaceport hospital. The moment they’d landed, Lin had been whisked away to secure accommodation. She hadn’t looked at Elissa again, and although Elissa knew she couldn’t just leave it like that, with Lin thinking this was what she wanted, for the moment Elissa had neither the emotional nor mental energy to do anything to help.

  Now, from the couch where she sat, waiting for a doctor to come and inspect her, it seemed to take every last scrap of energy to raise her head to look at Cadan.

  “You will,” he repeated, his voice insistent. “Your dad did.”

  The last scrap of energy bled away. Elissa slumped. “Hardly.”

  “That’s not going to be what it’s like for you. It’s not the same. At least you know what’s happened.”

  It wasn’t just insistence in his voice. It was fear. And if she had any emotion left to spare, she’d be able to feel for him, seeing her like this, beaten and empty . . . faded like her father had always been faded.

  I can’t live like he did. If I could at least see Lin . . . we’re still sisters. The relationship we’ve got wasn’t all built on the link. We must be able to salvage something. . . .

  She didn’t realize she’d said the last sentence aloud until Cadan answered her. “Of course you can. Of course you can.”

  She looked at him. “You think we . . .” But then the loss was on her again, washing everything out of her mind, leaving her with just the blackness. “Oh God, Cadan, they took the link. It was everything—”

  “No it wasn’t.” While she was drowning, blind and lost in the blackness, he’d gotten up, and now, as she resurfaced, he was on one knee in front of her, his hands gripping hers, pulling her back. “Lis, you’re all kinds of shocked right now. And Lin is too. But you’re still you, and she’s still your twin. You’ve lost the link, but you’ve got a thousand other things to build on. Your father’s twin died—he never got the chance to salvage anything. You and Lin can.”

  “How?” Suddenly furious, she tore her hands from his. “How can we build anything, when I can’t even see her? When, if I do, at some point she’s going to try to kill me?”

  All at once Cadan’s eyes blazed into hers, filled with as much fury as she was. “Seriously? You’re going to give up like that?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “For God’s sake, Lis. Think! We don’t even have all the information about the trigger yet! They’ll be scanning Lin’s brain now. They’re collecting more data every minute. There’s going to be a way to block it, or reverse it, or something. Of all the organs in the human body, the brain is the one most able to repair itself—you know that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Well, if you don’t, you should! What did you go to science classes for? People whose speech centers have been destroyed have learned to talk again. The brain repairs itself.”

  But his words had stopped making sense. They fell apart, bright shreds floating on another rising tide of pain. Elissa put her hands to her head, shutting her eyes, feeling, for the first time, slow, hot tears squeeze out from under her eyelids.

  Distantly, she was aware that Cadan had put his arms around her. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice coming from far away, beyond the dark sea drowning her. “I’m just bullying you. It’s too soon. Just hang on, okay? It’ll get better. You’ll recover.”

  Even farther away, the door opened. The doctor, come to inspect her, to check that she wasn’t—physically—hurt any worse than the tiny wound in her skull. Elissa’s skin seemed to shrink. She didn’t want to be touched. Not yet. Not yet.

  Except it wasn’t the doctor. Her father’s voice spoke.

  “Lissa? I thought you’d want to know. They’ve tracked down the terrorist group. They’ve been arrested. They’re in custody, kept at the place they took you. It’s an underground base they managed to set up in a system of caves beneath the mountain range. It was easy to secure—they’re being kept there until they can be moved to one of Philomel’s prisons.”

  Elissa managed to nod. She guessed that was a good thing. In a vague, floating bit of her mind, she wondered if Bruce had also been arrested. Or if his explanations—it was for her own good, it was for her sake—had convinced the IPL authorities the way they hadn’t convinced her, or Ivan, or Cadan.

  “I’m going to let Lin know now,” her father’s voice continued. “Her directions were spot on—IPL forces would never have tracked them, or at least nothing like so fast, if she hadn’t been able to point out your general location on a map.”

  Against the stinging, heavy waves, Elissa opened her eyes. “Lin found me? But I tried—when I was there, at the place they took me—I couldn’t reach her.”

  “She did, all the same,” her father said. “She knew the instant you were taken. She screamed herself hoarse raising the alarm. Then you lost consciousness, and then you were so far away she couldn’t pinpoint your location. But she could say what direction you’d been taken in.” He nodded toward Cadan. “Cadan was in the shuttlebug, ready to join IPL and local forces to make sweeps of the area, when Bruce’s SOS came through.”

  He turned back to the door. “She’ll be glad, I hope, to know your abductors are to face justice, at least.”

  Elissa shut her eyes again. How could he, of all people, not understand that it made no difference who was to face whatever he thought of as justice? The words she’d screamed at Bruce flared once more across her brain. Can they give her back? Can they make the link again? Aside from that, there wasn’t going to be any justice.

  She was vaguely aware of her father lingering, hesitating a moment by the door, as if one of them was supposed to say something else. But she didn’t speak, and nor did Cadan, and after a minute her father went away.

  Shortly afterward the doctor came. He shone a light in her eyes, took a blood test, inspected her head, and told her that a therapist would come to see her later.

  A therapist? Elissa had to bite down on a sudden wave of hysterical laughter. What was a therapist going to do?

  Cadan had been sitting away across the room during the doctor’s visit, but as the door shut behind the doctor, his eyes met Elissa’s.

  “It might be helpful,” he said, but he couldn’t suppress the wry twist to his voice.

  Elissa’s laughter broke out. “Oh for God’s sake,” she managed to say. “How? What experience can a therapist possibly have that’s going to help with this?”

  Cadan shrugged. “Yeah, I know.” He looked at her, and his lips twitched. “Lis, if you do
n’t stop laughing I’m going to start, and then it’s going to look like I actually find it funny. Which I can assure you I really don’t.”

  Elissa waved a hand, almost beyond speech. “It’s fine. I promise I—” The laughter took her again and she had to stop, wiping her eyes. “I promise I won’t get offended. I—” She choked on another burst of laughter. “It’s really not funny, I know, but—”

  The door hushed open, and Elissa’s laughter cut off as suddenly as if someone had slapped a hand across her mouth. Her new visitor was Bruce.

  Cadan was on his feet the moment Bruce stepped into the room. “I don’t think we need you here.”

  “I didn’t come to see you,” Bruce said, looking straight across the room, not even glancing at Cadan. “I came to see Lissa.”

  Although he was looking at her, he wasn’t quite meeting her eyes. She paused a moment to see if he would, but he stayed in the same position, waiting for her to speak.

  “They didn’t put you in prison yet, then,” she said to him.

  Bruce swallowed. “They might yet.” He put his hand out, extending his wrist so his sleeve pulled back and she could see the steel band that had replaced his com-unit. “I’m security-shackled. If I so much as go out on the balcony, it’ll set off alarms.”

  “Whoa,” said Cadan, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Severe sentence.”

  “It’s not my sentence.” Bruce still didn’t look at him. “It’s to make sure I don’t escape trial. Lissa . . .”

  “What?” She didn’t even try to hold back the hostility in her voice.

  Finally, Bruce met her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was as stupid as Cadan called me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  Anger licked through her. If he was going to try to excuse himself . . . “You really weren’t.”

  “I know. Like I said, I was stupid.”

  “And what? Is that supposed to fix things?”

  “No.” He held her gaze, although it looked like an effort. “I know I can’t fix what—what I’ve done to you.”

  “And Lin.”

  “And Lin. I’m just . . . God, I’m so sorry, Lissa. They—the group—they approached me a week or so after we arrived on Philomel. They said they wanted to learn from SFI’s mistakes, they wanted to restore Sekoia. I did ask some questions, but not enough. I—the thought of doing something, anything . . .”

  He looked miserable, every scrap of arrogance—or even confidence—as absent as if it had been beaten out of him. She’d have felt pity if it hadn’t been for the image in her mind of how Lin had looked. Lin, who hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Lin, who’d just been trying to learn how to live in a world she didn’t understand.

  “Was it really for my sake?” she asked him, her voice cold.

  For a moment Bruce’s eyes dropped, then he forced them back up to hers. “No. I mean, hearing what you said, earlier—that was like the catalyst. But I”—he swallowed—“I was looking for a reason to do it. I . . .” He spread his hands, a helpless gesture. “They said they were going to restore Sekoia. Said they were going to restore our space force.”

  “At what freaking cost?” Cadan interjected. “For God’s sake, Bruce, how SFI powered the hyperdrives isn’t a secret anymore. You must have known what they were planning—how they were going to restore it.”

  For the first time Bruce looked at him. His shoulders were slumped, a gesture as helpless as the way he’d spread his hands. “I thought of them like clones. The Spares. They said they were like clones. That’s how people keep talking about them.” He swallowed. “It’s . . . God, Lissa, look. We had lives on Sekoia, and all of a sudden they’re over. Dad’s career, mine, everything Ma cared about. We can’t even stay on our own planet. And it’s because of these . . . these Spares, that we didn’t even know existed. And then we’re being told we’re not the victims, they are. They’re getting priority—safe houses, expedited evacuation, freaking compensation.”

  Anger flamed up once more behind Elissa’s eyes. “You think you’re more of a victim than they are? Because you lost your career?”

  “Lissa, for God’s sake, I’m trying to explain. That’s not just how Ma and I thought—it’s how everyone’s been thinking. We had a whole world, and then it got taken away from us in order to protect these . . . products of abnormal births, creatures we didn’t even know existed, that people were saying shouldn’t have been allowed to exist. And then we’re being told we’re supposed to feel sorry for them, that we owe them something. It was like—I mean, yeah, human rights and everything, they’re important, we all know that. But this was like human rights gone mad.”

  “Human rights gone mad? Are you even listening to yourself?”

  “I’m explaining to you, Lissa! We weren’t thinking of them as human. None of us. We were thinking of them as . . . things . . . creatures . . . that were just kind of human shaped.”

  “So you’re not sorry! You’re sorry for what it did to me—your nice clean all-human sister. You don’t care what it did to Lin!”

  “I do care.” His eyes came back to hers.

  “Why? Why would you, if you think all she is is”—she bit out the words with furious emphasis—“ ‘kind of human shaped’?”

  “I don’t think that anymore. I—Lis, I know she’s human. I know.”

  “How?”

  “She looks like you,” said Bruce, miserable. “When she came to fetch us, with Cadan and the others, when I saw her . . . She looks just like you.”

  “Yeah, you keep saying. Like a clone.”

  “No. I don’t mean just . . . just physically. Just her features. I . . .” He swallowed again. “Her eyes. The way she looked. It’s your expression, Lis. It’s the way you looked when you were younger, when someone hurt your feelings, when you wanted to cry but you were determined not to.” His mouth twisted a little. “I’m your mean big brother, after all—that’s the sort of expression I recognize.”

  He stopped talking, folding his arms across himself, his shoulders hunching.

  Elissa looked at him. What he’d done to her and Lin—it was worse than a betrayal, it was so beyond horrific she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to forgive him. But seeing him like this, knowing that he, too, was feeling the impact of what he’d done, knowing that he understood how bad it was . . . She might not be able to forgive him, but at least she no longer hated him.

  “Bit late.” There was no forgiveness in Cadan’s voice.

  “I know,” said Bruce. “Lissa, look, if I could do something to fix it, I would.”

  You can’t. She was going to say it, but something caught her back. He couldn’t fix what he’d done to her and Lin. But there were hundreds of Spares. There wasn’t anything Bruce could do to help her and Lin, but was there anything he could do to help the others?

  It was just the germ of an idea in her head. Nothing fully formed, nothing she could say out loud. Not yet. But . . .

  Days ago, just after landing on Sekoia, she’d thought: Calling them clones isn’t just semantics! If everyone keeps calling them clones then everyone keeps seeing them as nonhuman . . . It does matter. It matters what you call them.

  She’d been right. Like so many people, Bruce had called the Spares “clones.” He’d seen them as nonhuman. He, like so many others, had been willing to use them—despite IPL declaring it illegal, despite being told that the procedures caused pain.

  Because he never met any.

  It was like tiny lights snapping on, one after another, all over her brain. Connection after connection being made, things falling into place, thoughts making sense.

  IPL did it wrong. They were trying to protect the Spares, but by keeping them away from ordinary citizens, they made them even more alien than they would have been. Those people on the rescue flyer, back on Sekoia—they were scared of Lin, and angry that she was allowed to talk to them like a normal person. But if they’d gotten a chance to know her . . . Like I have, and Cadan, and Felicia and Iva
n, and like how Cadan’s parents got to know the Spares at the safe house, and how Sofia and Ady got to know their twins, even though there was no link to help them . . .

  And now Bruce. Bruce had changed his mind. Not because of big ethical considerations, like those that Markus or Commander Dacre had. And not even because he’d had a chance to get to know Lin. Just because he’d looked at her and seen, in her face, emotions—human emotions—that he recognized.

  If other people could do the same, those other people who still see Spares as nothing more than full-body clones . . .

  Her mind returned to the people on the rescue flyer. I couldn’t persuade them to see her differently. But then I couldn’t persuade Bruce, either—he saw me as too close, too influenced by her. But if they’d been able to talk to someone like them, someone who’d thought the same thing as they had but who had changed his mind . . .

  “Lissa?” said Cadan. “What is it?”

  She looked up, frowning. What good would it do, even if Bruce could persuade people? How was he ever going to talk to all the people who needed persuading? Then, as the bleakness descended over her once more: What do I even care? It’s too late for me and Lin. Let the other twins worry about their Spares. Let them find solutions. I’m done with trying to save everybody.

  “Lissa?”

  Oh but hell, that wasn’t okay. It was exactly what she’d told Lin wasn’t okay. If you’re human, you have to care about other humans. It wasn’t about whether it was fun, or fair, or whether it hurt you so much you thought you were going to die of it. It was just that you had to.

  She opened her mouth, ready to try to explain an idea that wasn’t even a proper idea yet, that she wasn’t even sure was possible, and that Bruce might refuse to be involved with even if it was possible—

  Then the door sprang open, and Elissa’s mother rushed in, shrieking.

  “That monster!” she was screaming. “That monster hurt your father!”

  Lin, was Elissa’s first thought. And then, Dad? Dad’s hurt?

  Bruce had swung around as his mother entered. “What happened? Ma, what’s going on?”