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Elissa pushed herself to her hands and knees, then to her feet. “We have to get moving,” she said to Lin, and as she said the words, horror heaved within her, turning her stomach upside down. What Lin had been going to do to the flyer pilots . . . that was worse than the shelf fire, worse than the moving staircase.

It’s not her fault. What they’ve put her through . . .

But this time the thought, the counterargument she seemed to have been dragging up all day, had no force to it.

As they climbed down off the roof, then hurried across the platform onto the fast-moving slidewalk, the horror lay like a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. Lin’s fault or not, if she was willing to do that,
anything
like that . . .

It’s inhuman
. As soon as she thought the word, she tried to unthink it, delete it from her mind. But it was too late.
Oh God
. What if they were right, the authorities who’d declared Lin not human? What if she really was lacking some vital part of her brain—what if she really had neither conscience nor empathy?. She was looking through Lin, c

Then she’s dangerous. Really dangerous. And that alert
—
was it telling the truth? Am I at risk? Or if I’m not, if I get immunity because I’m her twin, what about everyone else?

They changed slidewalks, taking one down toward the northern edge of the city where a park had been built along the banks of an artificial lake. There was no longer safety in numbers, in losing themselves, two anonymous teens in a
larger crowd.
And I don’t dare take her among people. Not now that we’re in danger of being caught, of being chased again. If she
—
if next time she
—

Neck prickling, Elissa glanced back to check if they were being followed, and as she did so, she realized Lin was watching her, had been watching her since they’d climbed off the roof.

Lin’s face was still the color of dirty paper, set in tense lines that spoke of fatigue and, as Elissa’s eyes met hers, of something that looked like fear.

“You know I was lying, right?” she said.

“I—about what?”

“About setting the flyers on fire?”

Elissa found she’d crossed her arms over her chest, a comfort . . . or a barrier. “No. I don’t know. You sounded pretty sure to me.”

“No. No. I was lying. I had to get you to jump and I . . .” Her voice trailed off; her eyes fixed anxiously on Elissa’s face. “It was all I could think of.”

The slidewalk doubled back on itself before starting the slow looping descent to the canyon floor. Elissa’s fingers curled around her arms, into the gap between her upper arms and rib cage, holding herself even tighter, holding herself together. She wanted to believe what Lin was saying, she
wanted
to, but . . .
If I believe her, if I believe she’s not some kind of psycho, and I trust her, and something happens . . .

“Lissa, you believe me, don’t you?”

“I . . .” Elissa’s eyes met Lin’s again. She couldn’t bring herself to lie, but if she said no . . . “I— Look, the staircase, back at the mall—”

“They’d have caught us if I hadn’t done something!”

“Yeah. I
know
.” Elissa dug her nails into her arms. It was true, what Lin said. And if she could just believe that necessity was all it was, if she hadn’t seen Lin’s face as she watched the people . . .
If she hadn’t been smiling
 . . .

Elissa couldn’t talk about that. Not yet. Not now. She swallowed. “Look, you did start a fire. At my shelf.”

“And you didn’t like it. You said you didn’t like it, so I’m not going to do it again.” Lin’s face was anxious, intent. “Lissa, up there—I couldn’t have, even if I wanted to. You saw me—I could only just do the bars.”

“Oh.” Elissa hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t, she realized now, been thinking clearly at all. Lin was0">

“Really.”

The slidewalk dipped down among the first branches of the tallest trees in the park. Leaf shadows rose up around them like a shoal of flickering ethereal fish. Elissa pushed her fingers up into her hair, scraping her nails over her scalp, trying to force herself to think clearly. “Okay. I get it. I believe you.” She hesitated, not wanting to say anything else, wanting to leave it there, but at the same time feeling the edge of worry—of fear—at the back of her mind, like the flicker and blur of vision before the start of a migraine.

“What?”

Elissa looked up at her twin. “If you
had
been able to, and if they’d caught up with us . . .”

Lin was watching her, the leaf shadows flickering over her face, her eyes steady, a surprisingly adult look in them. “You want to know if I’ll kill people to save us?”

“I . . .” She hadn’t expected Lin to put it as bluntly as that. “Yeah, I guess.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.” Elissa swallowed. “I . . . okay.”
Okay. She doesn’t know. That’s reasonable. She didn’t say yes, and she’s running for her life
—
it’s not fair to judge her by normal standards.

“Can I ask you something now?” Lin said.

Elissa looked at her, waiting.

“If I had . . . if I do kill someone—”

Elissa’s careful reasoning fell apart. “God, Lin,
please
. Don’t
talk
about it like that—”

“I didn’t say I was
going
to!” Lin’s face was aggrieved. “I said
if
!”

Oh, jeez, it’s like speaking a different language
. Elissa took a long breath. “Okay. All right. Go on.”

“Will you hate me?” her twin asked.

“Will I hate you? You mean, if you . . .”

“Yes.”

Elissa took another breath. The slidewalk made one last slow curve, lower, lower until it sank a bare half inch below the close-clipped grass. They’d left the tops of the trees far above, and now they drowned in a green twilight. A long way off, from the direction of the spaceport, distant thunder rumbled: a ship taking off.

Elissa stepped off the sluggishly moving slidewalk, onto grass so soft it seemed to bounce beneath her feet. Lin followed her.

“Lissa . . .”

Elissa stopped, turned t

WHEN ELISSA
had said it, it had felt like the obvious answer, the obvious escape. But early that evening at the edge of the spaceport, as she approached the Space Flight Initiative student accommodation tower block, the certainty came to her that it was not an escape—it was nothing but another dead end.

She tipped the peak of her cap farther down over her face as she left the fading golden sunlight for the cool shadows of the main lobby, with its banks of lockers around every side and its staircase rising above her. She and toward lilgh Bruce hadn’t been particularly close growing up, and since she’d gotten sick and he’d gone off to SFI, what closeness there was between them had dwindled further. And if her
dad
hadn’t been able to help her—

She cut the thought off, crossing the lobby floor to reach the foot of the stairs. Her dad hadn’t been able to help her because she’d phoned him, and his phone had had a trace
on it. They could have done the same to Bruce’s phone too, which was why she hadn’t tried calling him first. Of course, coming in person to where he lived wasn’t the safest thing to do either, but she was pretty sure they wouldn’t have bugged his
bedroom
. There were cameras, obviously, but . . . Climbing up the flight of stairs to the first landing, Elissa caught sight of herself in the shiny doors of the lockers on the far side of the lobby, and despite everything, she had to bite back a grin. Her own
parents
would have a hard time recognizing her right now. If the low-security student accommodation cameras picked up her true identity, then they were a hell of a lot better than everyone said they were.

Her copper curls were gone. Her hair, stripped back to its normal dark brown, was bundled up into her cap. She’d wiped all her makeup off, apart from the camouflage cream that concealed the fading bruises on her jawline and neck, and in the shadow of the cap—
GO TEAM
something-or-other, it said—her face looked thin and pale. She was wearing boys’ pants, baggy enough to conceal the treacherous girl-curves of her bottom and thighs, and a too-big jacket hanging open over an equally baggy T-shirt. She wasn’t sure she looked exactly like a boy, but she was pretty sure that
whatever
she looked like, at least she wasn’t easily recognizable as Bruce’s little sister.

She didn’t have a cover story to tell him. She’d thought and thought about it, but she hadn’t come up with anything more compelling than the real story—that their sister had been taken away at birth, imprisoned for seventeen years and tortured for three, and that Bruce was her only hope of escape.

The only thing Elissa wasn’t planning on sharing with
Bruce was that she had to get Lin away not just for Lin’s sake but for the sake of everyone she might come into contact with—the agents tracking her, and the innocent bystanders with whom she might collide. Again and again, as if set on a closed loop in her brain, Elissa felt the mall staircase shake beneath her feet, saw the blood seeping from the security guard’s knee, heard the terrified wail of the baby clutched too tightly in its mother’s arms. And then she saw what had never happened—the flyers going up in balls of flame, their propellers exploding, flinging shards of hot metal all around them. Lin hadn’t done that—
couldn’t
have done it, not then. But in the future, if they were trapped again . . .

I have to get her off the planet. I have to get her somewhere she won’t be tracked, won’t be chased, won’t be in danger
.

And Bruce, with his pilot’s license and spaceship . . .
If he won’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Elissa cut off that thought too. She’d climbed to the third landing and was scanning the doors, looking for Bruce’s room number. She toward w thought’d only visited him twice before, early on in his training, and although she knew the number—seventy-three—it took her a moment to remember which way to turn.
He has to help me. He has to. He said they were piloting a goods transport flight soon
—
it won’t even take him any effort, it won’t be any risk. He can drop us on Mandolin. It doesn’t even matter where, as long as there’s a spaceport so we can catch another ship, lose ourselves somewhere on another planet . . .

She found the door and reached up to press the buzzer next to it. Her finger slipped a little, and she realized that despite all her determined calming thoughts, her hands were damp and her heart was beating, uneven and fluttery, in her throat.

The echo of the buzzer reached her faintly through the door, but no other noise followed it. No footsteps of Bruce coming across his room, no sound of the door being unlocked.

Elissa checked her watch again. He
must
be there. She’d chosen the time specially—training would have finished for the day, but it wasn’t quite the time when he and the other trainees would go across to the main building for dinner. If he was going home for dinner then he might have left by now, but he’d been home just the night before—no way would they give him evening leave again so soon.

She pressed the buzzer again, harder, as if the action alone would force a response.

Still nothing.

Again. Nothing. This time the echo seemed to sound in Elissa’s head, buzzing up inside her skull, making the edges of her thoughts go fuzzy. He had to be here. He was—
oh God, he’s my last resort. I thought of him
—
and his spaceship
—
and was so relieved that I didn’t think about a backup plan
.

Ten minutes away, in the small, sterile-clean room of another pod-motel, Lin was waiting. She’d been scared—white-faced, trembly-lipped scared—of Elissa leaving her. Elissa had had to pretty much bully her into staying where she was.
I’m so much less obvious by myself,
she’d said, overriding Lin’s protest.
If you come with me, all you’ll do is put us both at risk. And if Bruce sees you before I’ve explained, you’ll just completely freak him out. You have to stay here. You have to.

So Lin had stayed, sitting cross-legged on one of the narrow beds, her back against the wall, fingers wound tightly in her lap. And Elissa had come without her, promising that it was the only way to get her to safety, promising that when
she returned, it would be with—well, not a spaceship, but at least the promise of one.

And here she was in disguise, in horrible baggy pants and a cap with some dumb slogan on it, and Bruce couldn’t even be in his
own freaking bedroom
—

With a soft hush of displaced air, the door next to her slid open. “Can I help you?” said a familiar voice.

Elissa snapped her head up. In the doorway of the next-door room stood a tall, fair young man in the dark blue SFI uniform. He stepped out onto the landing as if he owned the whole building, and Elissa’s heart sank. Of all the people to run into, it had to be him. Cadan Greythorn.