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She went heavily down on one knee, then on both. Then she reached out a hand. “Lissa, I’m sorry, I can’t do it by myself.”

ELISSA BECAME
aware that she had both hands held out in front of her, as if to push the sight away, as if to make it not real, not true, not
there
. She’d known they were doing something awful to Lin, the edge of her thumbnail.’ed the
A memory pierced her. “You said others—other Spares—were taken away. It was this. It was for this.”

Lin’s face turned to her, as pale as that of the dead Spare. In the dim room, her eyes were black hollows. Her jaw was slack with shock.

“No,”
said Cadan. “No. It can’t be. This can’t be what they—” He broke off. “Oh, God in heaven, hyperdrives last five to seven years.”

For a moment Elissa didn’t pick up on what he meant.
Then it hit her, a huge fist clenching in her stomach. “
Seven years?
That’s how long he’s been there?”

“No. Not this one. The
Phoenix
is only two years old. This one—something’s been malfunctioning all along. He must—” Cadan choked again. “Ah, God, what have I been doing to him?”

“Two years.” Elissa found her head turning back toward where the Spare floated, limp and helpless. Out there, in all the other spaceships, other Spares were floating in the same way, kept alive by tubes, kept— Oh God, were they conscious the whole time?

As she looked, unable to turn away, other details revealed themselves, details she didn’t want, things she didn’t want to know could happen anywhere,
ever
.

Blood floated in the fluid near the dead Spare’s lips, transparent ribbons of pale scarlet, and the lower lip showed dark bruises, vivid against the bluish color of death. He’d bitten himself.

The Spare’s hair was longish, trailing like seaweed around his head. Except at the back, around the . . . the hole, the socket. There his hair was frizzled, shriveled as if it had been burned.

Unbidden, Elissa’s gaze dragged itself up to the cable itself, to the inner wall of the cylinder. The cable showed signs of corrosion, uneven blackened marks on the smooth surface. The cylinder seemed almost untouched, except at its very edge, where the cable ran through it. There the glass showed the tiny hair-fine crazing that came from excessive heat.

What had happened? Had the connections been overheating? Had the Spare’s brain waves been too much for the cables? Or had the settings been wrong? Had they tried to drag too much energy from the Spare, set off some kind
of feedback that meant that whenever the ship shifted into hyperdrive—
It was us, we did it; we kept using the hyperdrive to get away
—the Spare, trapped, bound, helpless, had been subjected to the sort of pain Elissa had only felt secondhand but that she could hardly bear to remember?

“I don’t know why the hell we’re still standing here,” said Cadan suddenly, violently. Lin jerked as if she’d been slapped, and for the first time her eyes left the sight of the Spare lying in the glass prison that had become his gruesome tomb.

Elissa dragged her last shreds of self-control together, put her arm around her twin. “Let’s get out of here. Cadan’s right, there’s no point staying.”

Lin still didn’t speak. Her hand with Carlie and Marissat mean question came up, ice cold, closing around Elissa’s. Elissa wasn’t sure if the next words in her mind were Lin’s or her own.
I knew it would come. It has. It’s over
.

It can’t be over!
That was definitely her own thought, frantic, on the edge of panic. “Not like this. There must be a way through!”

She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud till Cadan answered her, turning to look at her as they stepped out of the chamber with its hideous, faintly pulsing light.

“Lissa, I’m sorry.” His face was bleak. “We’re done. We’re not going to make it to IPL.”

“Cadan . . .” Her voice came out like a desperate accusation. There had to be
something
. After everything they’d gone through, every narrow escape, it couldn’t all be ending here.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. His eyes met hers, and they were bleak too. “If there was anything I could think of, any bargain I could make . . .”

They climbed the steps to the bridge. Markus snapped around as Cadan opened the barrier. “The shields are going down again. Did you—?” His eyes took in Cadan’s expression and he stopped. “It’s no good?”

Cadan crossed to the controls. “No good.” He gave the shortest explanation possible, the strain of describing what they’d seen—what still lay under the floor they stood on—drawing lines in his face.

Elissa looked away and realized for the first time that Ivan and Felicia had come up to the bridge as well. The thought came, cold and detached:
So we can all die together
.

Lin’s hand stayed icy in Elissa’s. As icy as if she, like the pitiful burned-out corpse below them, were already dead.

Cadan turned to the display screens. “The rate the shields are deteriorating, we’re not going to last longer than an hour.”

An hour. After all they’d gone through, in the end that’s what it came down to? One more hour. Despite everything, despite what had happened to innumerable Spares only a little older than her, it seemed impossible that she, Elissa, was going to die before she’d ever really lived.

Fear had left her. She felt . . . kind of lost, dizzy, as if she stood on the very edge of a cliff, the escape route she’d been supposed to take nothing but a tangle of snapped rope and broken harness before her. It had been for nothing. All that fear, all that effort. Getting away, and getting away
again
, and putting Cadan and his crew in so much danger, and it was all worthless.

She found herself speaking without meaning to, out of that weird, chilly detachment. “If you offer to hand us over . . .”

“No.”

For a moment she assumed it was Cadan who’d answered,
but then, as she took it in, she realized Felicia and Ivan had spoken at once, and Markus was shaking his head.

“Hand you over to those butchers?” said Ivan. “Now that we know exactly what they want you for? I don’t think so.”

Somehow she couldn’t stop herself from answering him. “If you don’t, they with Carlie and Marissaan, c’re going to kill all of us.”

Beside her Lin raised her head. “You could save yourselves. All of you. Lissa, too.”

Her voice was curiously flat. Elissa shot a glance at her but couldn’t catch what she was either thinking or feeling. And before Elissa could form words, Lin spoke again.

“None of you need to die. If you handed just me over, kept Lissa here.”

“Maybe,” said Ivan. “Maybe not. It’s pretty damn likely they’d kill us off as witnesses even if we did hand you over.”

“But maybe they wouldn’t.”

“Even so.” Cadan’s face was as hard as steel. Elissa looked at him, at the crew, and something flickered to life within her, sudden heat in the midst of the cold.

Lin formed her next sentence slowly, as if she were puzzling something out. “You’re willing to die . . . when you don’t need to. When you could get a chance at surviving.” Her eyes moved across them all. “And you’re not doing it just for Lissa. You’re doing it for me.”

The crew was staring at her now. Ivan shrugged. “Why not?”

Lin’s eyes met his. “But I . . . I’m not even really human.”

“Oh, of course you damn well are,” said Ivan. “All that—it’s so much fake legal crap. Anyone can see you’re human.”

“But I . . . my brain’s not . . .”

“Your brain’s as normal as your sister’s,” Ivan said. “And
even if it wasn’t, since when did a bit of difference make someone not human?”

“Just look at Ivan,” interjected Felicia.

Lin blinked at her.

“Well,” said Felicia, “you think arms that length are normal?”

Ivan gave a sudden snort of laughter, and after a second of incomprehension Lin’s face broke into a smile—a smile that was not because of Felicia’s joke but because she finally understood what the crew was trying to tell her.

Inside Elissa the little flicker of heat licked higher. Like Lin, she hadn’t expected this, not of the crew, not at this last extremity of danger. It was one thing for her to die with Lin, and another thing for Cadan, who’d promised her that he’d help them—

Her thoughts broke off. She hadn’t expected it of the crew. But she
had
expected it of Cadan. Not because she thought it was fair that he should die for her and Lin, but because she’d known he’d be willing to. Somehow, in the last horrible few hours, she’d gone from hoping she could trust him to knowing, without question, that she could.

“And,” said Markus, “we can at least go down fighting.”

The flicker became a fire. Elissa’s head came up; her spine straightened. Beside her Lin’s face flushed suddenly bright. No longer dead, but twice as alive as before. “We can fight?”

Cadan’s back had straightened too. When he swung around from the controls, his face was blazing, his eyes like bits of blue glass. “We damn well can. The ship’s stabilized now, and we’ve got no reason to conserve our firep when you were very youngnd cl bower.” A shut-teeth grin flashed across his face. “Lin, you want to come shoot at the bastards?”

Lin was sliding into the seat next to him before he finished speaking. “These switches, right? That’s how you arm the weapons?”

“Yes. That’s right. Now, these are the controls—”

But Lin’s hand was already skimming over them, a practiced, familiar movement. The display screen changed.

“What the hell?” said Cadan. “How are you—how did you ever learn to do that?”

Lin moved her hand again, and a different set of code blinked on the screen. “I can read things. Mechanisms, systems, computers . . . This one’s complicated. It took me a while of watching you before I could work it out.”

Everyone was staring at her now. Even Elissa. The electrokinesis was one thing, the odd ability to use machines and fasten harnesses before anyone had shown her how to. But understanding the controls of a spaceship?

Even if the process itself were as simple as flying a beetle-car, the control panel was deliberately set up to be incomprehensible to anyone untrained. It was a mass of obscure symbols, all the switches at the sides unlabeled and uncoded. She knew it had taken Bruce two months to even remember what they all meant, let alone learn to use them correctly, and here was Lin saying it had taken her “a while” of watching—just
watching
.

“It’s armed,” said Cadan, his voice fascinated.

Lin nodded. Elissa had crossed to where she could see her sister, and she noticed Lin’s eyes had slid a tiny bit out of focus. It was as if whatever she was doing were shortcutting her conscious mind, instinct leaping straight to where her fingers touched the controls.

Cadan was frowning. Then he shrugged—a “what have we got to lose” gesture. “Fire at will.”

Lin fired. Rockets shot across the viewscreens, splintered fire against the shields of the attacking ships. Within seconds came answering blasts like a silent echo, hitting the
Phoenix
’s shields, sending them inching down.

Lin laughed, a glinting, savage sound, and fired again. She was flushed, her eyes fever bright. After the years of being trapped and controlled, here she was, fighting for her own freedom, being given the chance to hit back against the organization who’d imprisoned her, even though she had to know she had no real hope of taking any of the attacking ships down with her.

At least I gave her that much. A few days of it. Terror, and grief, and horror, but freedom, too.

That was worth it, at least.
For Lin, I did it right. I did the right thing
.

But . . .

Elissa’s gaze slid over to Cadan. He was watching the screens, his profile showing in a hard, set line. He’d been around for half her life, but it seemed like it had only been in the last two days she’d come to know him at all. There were things she should say to him—things she
wanted
to say, if she could gather enough courage—but it was too late. After years of thinking of him as a big brother, then a friend, then an antagonist; after years of hero worship a with Carlie and Marissake”rtnd hurt and irritation; now, in the shadow of death, she knew exactly what he was to her. And it was too late. She’d run out of time.

Cadan turned his head, first to glance at Lin, then farther. His eyes met Elissa’s. She felt the look—a blazing look the bright blue of a summer sky—all the way through her, tingling under her skin. She couldn’t look away. It was
too late
. There was no time to find out whether he still saw her just
as his friend’s little sister, or whether he, like she, had found things changing in the last couple of days, like puzzle pieces breaking, shaking down into a new pattern. No time even to tell him . . . tell him
anything
.

Cadan spoke briefly to Markus, who had come to stand at his shoulder. Then Cadan got up and came around the end of the safety rail and over to where Elissa stood.

She looked up at him.

He said nothing, just tipped his head toward the door.