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Cadan was white, his mouth set as hard as she’d ever seen it. “Lin,” he said through the door, “you’re making a mistake. You do this, and the shock could kill Lissa as well as you.”

Lin’s face settled into stubbornness. “Not if you give her a sedative like I just told you.”

“You’re telling me to drug her without her consent? Lin, I told you, this is a mistake. Unlock the door. We’ll work out something else.”

For a moment Elissa thought they’d won, because Lin’s face changed and her hand made a quick movement. Then she straightened, her body set in lines as stubborn as the expression on her face.

“No. There is nothing else. There’s no time. Cadan”—her eyes locked on his—“I know you’ll drug her. I know you won’t let it hurt her, too.” She turned her back on them.

Elissa opened her mouth to scream at her, and couldn’t. Her breath seemed to have stopped, her heart, all the blood in her veins. Her sister, her twin . . .

If she dies, I’ll never be whole again
. Like a lightning flash, agonizingly clear, she knew it. Knew, too, what would have happened to her if she’d let the doctors burn the link out of her brain back on Sekoia. She’d have been a half-person, always, not knowing what she’d lost, just knowing
something
had gone, something she’d never been meant to live without.

For an instant, weird and out of time, the lightning flash showed her father’s face, gray and tired and detached the way it had been her whole life.
Oh my God. My dad
—
did he
—

Then her mind snapped back to the present. Beyond the glass, Lin had knelt next to the energy cell and gathered up the hideous two-pronged plug.

She turned a little as she settled herself, looking up toward the bridge. Her face was wavering now, tears slipping down it, her mouth trembling around where she’d set her teeth into her lower lip. The light of the energy cell pulsed weakly.

“Lissa.” It was Cadan’s voice.

Elissa looked up at him. He looked beaten, hopeless, and she knew what he was asking.

“No.”

“She’s doing it anyway. Look at her. I can’t stop it. Do I have to watch what it could do to you as well?”

Fear flared into fury. “You’re giving up just like that? You have to be able to stop her! You have to be able to do
something
.”

“You don’t think I would if I could? Lissa, you know I can’t drug you without your consent, but look at her, she’s set on this, she’s trying to save the rest of us. If she does, and you die too—”

“No.
No. Lin!
” Panic swept back up through her, blanking out thought. She beat on with Carlie and Marissake”rt the glass. “Lin! Lin, don’t, don’t!”

Cadan took hold of her arm. “Lissa, come away.”

“To be drugged? No. No,
no
.”

“Not to be drugged!” Panic and anger leapt into his voice, tightened his hand so it bit into her arm. “Just come away. If you’re standing here when she does it, if you’re this close and she does die, you could die too.”

Elissa wrenched away. “She’s not
going
to do it. Not if she knows it could hurt me.”

“She’s relying on me to get you away. Lissa, damn it—”

Lin put a hand under her hair and swept it up off the nape of her neck. She didn’t look up, didn’t even give Elissa one last glance. She took the plug, positioned it above her neck, and with one swift, steady movement, punched it home.

Inside the cell, the fluid glowed, brightness seeping through it. The thin, building whine of the hyperdrive reached Elissa’s ears.

“Lissa.” Cadan dragged at her, both his hands biting into her flesh now, trying to make her go, trying to make her leave her sister. She fought him, clawing at his hands, pushing away. She no longer had breath with which to scream, but she couldn’t give up, not yet, not yet. She reached out with the only thing she had left, the link, tenuous and incalculable, that she’d never really known how to use, that only Lin had mastered. If Elissa could just reach her sister now, reach her for long enough to distract her—

The energy cell flared bright white, bleaching the color out of Lin’s face, silvering the loose ends of her hair . . .

. . . shining straight into Elissa’s eyes. The energy cell lay in front of her, the hyperdrive beside it. She was here. She’d made the link. She was looking through Lin’s eyes, feeling Lin’s tears on her face, feeling . . .

. . . the whine turned into a shriek, filling the air around her . . .

. . . feeling nothing.

For a minute Elissa didn’t even know where she was. Her vision had gone black. She was numb, couldn’t tell whether she sat or stood or lay. Couldn’t tell whether she was still in Lin’s head or back in her own.

I’m not dead, at least
.

With the thought came consciousness, just a single thread of it creeping through the black, like a shutter opening on daylight. She opened her eyes and found herself slumped at the bottom of the bridge’s barrier, Cadan’s arm around her, his hand against where her pulse beat in the side of her neck.

“Lissa. Lissa.
God
.” He put his head down to hers. “I thought—”

“Lin?”
She scrambled up on unsteady legs.

Down on the flight deck Lin raised her head. She dragged the plug out from under her hair. “Lissa?”

The locked symbol flicked off and the door to the bridge slid open. Elissa was down the steps and across the flight deck in four strides, shaky legs or not. She slammed with Carlie and Marissaan, c her hands down onto Lin’s shoulders, her face inches from her sister’s. “Never do that again! Never, do you hear me? You don’t get to make that kind of choice for me, do you understand?”

“Lissa—”

“Shut up!” She was shaking so hard, she could hardly speak. “You don’t
do
that! You think I did all this stuff for fun? You think it doesn’t matter to me if you get yourself killed?”

“Elissa.”

“What?”

“We did it. Look.” Lin waved a hand around them, at the glass sides of the flight deck, and after a blank moment of staring, Elissa understood. The other spaceships were gone. Nothing showed but the far-off stars.

“We made the hop,” said Lin. “We made hyperspace.”

“But . . .” Elissa put her hands up to her head. “I hardly felt it. And that—the boy who was powering it before, it hurt him terribly. It killed him.”

“You linked.” Cadan had come up behind her. “Just before, you linked with your sister, didn&#;. . 

AT ITS INCEPTION
the Interplanetary League had been granted land on Sanctuary, one of the first terraformed planets in the whole star system. Over the decades of IPL’s existence, the buildings of its headquarters had spread and been extended, until it formed a kind of sprawling village all over the southern slope of the hill where it had first been built.

The window of the room Elissa and Lin had been allocated, in a building halfway up the hill, looked out over a view that could not have existed on any of the more recently colonized planets: a forest of trees that were thousands of years old, with leaf shapes Elissa didn’t recognize and names she had not yet learned.

“Wa"indent" aid="G6PI7">Now, on an evening a week after Cadan had landed the
Phoenix
in the spaceport fifty miles away, she leaned on the railing of the tiny balcony outside their room, watching dustlike seeds and specks of insects drifting in and out of the
golden sunlight and long shadows of early evening.

Behind Elissa, in the bedroom, Lin lay on her bed, feet waving in the air, skimming through college brochures on a handheld screen. She was humming to herself, a tuneless, wordless sound of contentment. Lin was a legal human now. The whole “nonhuman human-sourced entity” thing had been judged universally unlawful two days after they’d landed on Sanctuary, by an emergency summit of IPL officials. Both Lin and Elissa were due to receive compensation. The notification of exactly how much that compensation was going to be had come earlier that day, and Elissa was still kind of reeling from how much they were going to get.

Lin’s was more than hers—the information that had accompanied the notifications had included the formula the authorities used for working it out:
Loss of freedom plus trauma (physical) plus trauma (emotional) multiplied by years affected (directly and indirectly), etc., etc., etc.

Nothing would ever be enough to make up for what the Sekoian government had done to Lin, but this amount . . .

For a moment Elissa’s fingers relaxed where they’d been gripping the balcony railing. Okay, this amount—it was
nearly
enough.

But the moment of calm was gone almost as soon as she’d felt it, washed away by a prickling wave of returning tension. Her hands tightened again.

She was standing here, in this golden sunset light, waiting for an interplanetary call to come through. From Sekoia. From her parents.

Sekoia had been all over the news for the last week, scrolling across every newsscreen, being narrated by every newscaster, beginning just hours after the
Phoenix
had landed on Sanctuary.

Interplanetary League takeover of Sekoian government_nk minutes . . . Space Flight Initiative disbanded . . . Thirty secret facilities uncovered . . . Warning, this broadcast contains material some viewers may find disturbing . . .

Then the images. Rooms and machines like the ones Elissa had seen in her long-ago visions. Children and teenagers being ushered out of huge buildings, some alert, some blank-faced, sleepwalking out into daylight, the bruises showing starkly on their faces and necks. Worse bruises—and burn marks—on the pale skin of corpses being rapidly zipped into body-bag stretchers.

Entire Sekoian government deposed and under arrest for contravention of interplanetary law under the Humane Treatment Act . . .

A takeover. There hadn’t been a whole-planet takeover in her lifetime, but she remembered covering them in history at school. A planet’s economy could survive them, but it was never easy, and it took generations to recover. And unlike most first-grade planets, Sekoia’s economy had only been stable for the last twenty years.

In the last week there’d already been reports of rapidly rising crime, of growing social disorder—both of which the newscasters were attributing to the catastrophic double loss of both Sekoia’s autonomy and its spaceflight industry. There’d been riots, too, and, as panic buying took hold, projected food shortages.

This was Elissa’s family’s home. These were the conditions she’d left her family living in.

Even though she’d been jittering, on edge, for the last hour, expecting the call, when the electronic voice sounded from the com-screen in the room behind her, every cell in Elissa’s body seemed to jump.

She hurried into the room as Lin sat up on the bed; heart
pounding, hands suddenly damp, she touched the screen to accept the call.

Even with the most modern tech available, interplanetary calls were neither easy nor reliable. It took several seconds for the operator to get them connected, and when the connection was finally achieved, the screen filled with white static, raining sideways from edge to edge. The speakers hissed and spat, as if the static were real rain, falling across the space between the planets.

Then the static cleared, all but a few unsteady lines of interference, and there they were in front of her.

“Lissa?”
Her mother’s voice shook, rising over Edward Ivory’s quieter greeting, and even behind the interference lines her face seemed to waver. “Lissa, is that really you? My God, are you safe?”

Elissa’s throat tightened. Back on Sekoia, once she’d known they weren’t going to help her, she’d had to push away all thoughts of her parents, deliberately put them into her past, focus on nothing more than herself, on Lin, on the future they were going to have to build for themselves. But now, seeing her mother’s face looking, for the first time, almost old, marked with lines of anxiety . . .

“I’m fine,” she said, and her voice shook too.

“Lissa, my God, this has been such a nightmare. You
ran away
, we had no idea where you were. We thought you were in the most dreadful danger. And then it turned out you were with
Cadan
!”