Unravel (11 page)

From behind Elissa, the handheld that Miguel must have brought out with him beeped, a peremptory sound. Elissa turned her head in time to see him tap it in order to accept the call.

A voice came through, very clear. “IPL flyer
Savior
, licensed for active duty on Sekoia, calling former SFI property eighteen-forty-twenty-two. Do you read me?”

“Reading you,” said Miguel. His voice was flat.
What must it be like, to have been abandoned out here, fending off harassment and attack, afraid all the time that this might be the one that destroys your power or water sources, and then, the moment we arrive, IPL swoops in?

The voice repeated a string of letters and numbers that Elissa recognized as having the pattern of a security code. “Do we have a match, eighteen-forty-twenty-two?”

Miguel took a moment to answer, his gaze moving over the handheld. He raised his head. “All matched up.”

“Cadan David Greythorn, please take the handheld and step forward until you're at least three feet clear of all other persons.”

Cadan obeyed, head up so he could look straight across to where the figures stood by their craft.

“Please enter the first six digits of your ID number into the handheld.” A pause while Cadan did that, too. “The last six digits of your ID number will now appear briefly on the handheld. Please confirm if they're correct.”

“They are correct.” A whine of sudden interference obscured his words, and a series of fuzzy lines chased one another across the screen.

“Would you repeat that, please?”

Cadan said the words again.

“Confirmed. Please step back. Markus Baer, please take the handheld and step forward until you're at least three feet clear of all other persons.”

They went through the procedure five more times, for the crew members and for Elissa and Lin. Lin, of course, had no ID number, but instead they requested a thumbprint and that she read a short paragraph that appeared on the screen, and the combination of the two identifiers seemed satisfactory, because as soon as they'd confirmed her identity, the six of them were invited to step across to the flyer.

Despite the two-way security checks—their ID details were no longer available to anyone but approved IPL officials, and as far as Elissa could remember, IPL security had
never
been hacked—tension climbed her spine to settle between her shoulder blades as they walked the short distance across the desert.

She had to brush past a broken sheet of metal waiting
for more thorough cleanup tomorrow, and its jagged edge caught the hem of her pants leg, making her trip as the material first caught, then tore.

Lin stopped, and Cadan put a hand out as she regained her balance. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Her face heated in embarrassment at her clumsiness. She bent and tucked the trailing edge up inside the hem of the pants. When she stood, Cadan was waiting. His eyes crinkled infinitesimally in a tiny smile meant just for her before he turned to catch up with Ivan and Felicia, who were walking ahead.

After a couple of seconds, Elissa realized something she hadn't noticed before: She and Lin were walking in time, legs moving in the same synchronized stride.
Well, it makes sense—our legs are exactly the same length, after all.
But it didn't feel as if that were all it was. It felt more as if Lin were connected to her by something invisible. As if, if she were to stumble again, Lin would stumble too.

Felicia stepped sideways to skirt a patch of slickly shining fuel, and Lin had to slow down for a moment so as not to collide with her. The rhythm broke. They weren't two weird halves of a single entity; they were just identical twin sisters with the same length legs and the same pelvic-bone shape and the same length stride.

But all the same, when they came under the shadow of the
Savior
, and Elissa heard Lin's breath catch in a little nervous sound, she automatically put out her hand and, without needing to look, took Lin's.

The three officials were waiting by the still-open door.

Now that Elissa was near enough, she could see that the two who'd gotten out first were both men. The smallest figure
was a woman, a very slight woman, several years older than Elissa's parents, with gray hair cropped so short it was nearly hidden by her helmet. When she spoke, Elissa recognized the voice that had come through the handheld—and realized with a slight shock that the command in it had taken all her attention, leaving her, until this moment, not even registering the gender of the person speaking.

The voice had been cool, and the woman's eyes were cool too, her jaw a little set.

“Captain Greythorn?” She held out a hand. “IPL Commander Dacre.”

As Cadan shook her hand, her gaze flicked past his shoulder, took in the crew—and stopped at Elissa and Lin. Cadan was starting to say something, but she spoke over him.

“I thought we'd find out we were mistaken.”

Cadan broke off. “Mistaken?” He followed her gaze, and as he realized who she was looking at, his face went a little stiff. “Commander—”

She didn't let him finish. “Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I
hoped
we'd find out we were mistaken. But no, the case is exactly what, when we picked up your ship entering the atmosphere, we hoped it would not be. You have returned to Sekoia with one of the former Spares we're fighting to relocate—with the one, moreover, who precipitated the whole situation.”

From where Elissa stood, her hand clamped in Lin's, she could see Cadan's back stiffen. “Commander Dacre, Lin has been given full human status. This is her home planet—she's free to—”

“Free to return? Yes, thank you, Captain, I'm aware of the legal situation.” The commander's eyes flicked over Lin again. “She's also
free to visit any number of planets that do not adhere to the Interplanetary Charter, that have no laws on human rights or where slavery and forced prostitution are legal and unchecked. She would, however, be well advised not to take her life in her hands by doing so.” The commander looked back at Cadan. “As she—and her sister—have done by coming here. And as you have permitted by bringing them.”

Next to Elissa, Lin gave an indignant quiver. Elissa dug her nails into her twin's hand—
Lin, don't, you'll just make it worse
—but she'd reacted too late.

“He didn't
permit
us!” Lin said. “We
chose
to come.”

The commander glanced at her. “Unless you can fly a spaceship, he most assuredly did permit you.”

Lin let go of Elissa's hand and folded her arms, defiance in every angle of her body. “Well, I
nearly
can. If he hadn't taken us, I'd have just had to wait a bit longer till I learned myself—”

“Lin,” said Cadan, his voice exasperated, “for the hundredth
time
—”

But the commander's attention had already snapped back to him. “You've been
teaching her to fly your ship
?”

There was a world of condemnation in her tone. Cadan flushed. “Yes. Commander, she's preternaturally fast at picking up that kind of thing. And I've been strictly supervising her—it hasn't been a risk to the safety of the crew at all—”

“Good God.” Commander Dacre sounded as if she hadn't heard him, as if she were speaking to herself. “And to think we were given to believe that SFI pilots were well trained.”

Cadan's flush deepened. He didn't say anything else.

Sympathy, and outrage at how the commander was treating him, prickled all over Elissa's body. She'd thought anyone
with IPL would be . . . respectful, kind, in the way the officials back on Sanctuary had been when she and Lin turned up, exhausted fugitives from their own planet's authorities.

“Are you aware that they're being killed here?” The commander directed the question to Cadan. “Spares and their twins?”

Elissa's back stiffened. Her chin went up.
She's trying to scare us—or trying to make Cadan feel bad. And, yeah, she's succeeding, but she doesn't need to know that she is.
“Yes,” she said before Cadan could. “We heard about the attacks.”

The commander eyed her, her expression chilly. “Did you also hear about the abduction attempts?”

Abduction attempts?
For a second the world stopped turning. There was nothing except those words hanging in the air.

“What?” Elissa said.

What might have been a glimmer of satisfaction showed in the commander's eyes. “Not all the citizens of your planet want Spares to be relocated or wiped out. Some of them appear to feel that Sekoia's space force was the only thing standing between Sekoia and chaos. So, declared-legal humans or not, Spares are a resource they can't afford not to”—a tiny hesitation before she said the word—“use.”

A blaze of shock and fury like fire shook Elissa from her knees to the top of her head. “
Use?
What the hell does that mean? What do they mean,
use
?”

The commander met her eyes. “You've lost your space force. What do you think they mean?”

“It's been ruled
illegal
! Doing that—what SFI did—it's what's made IPL take over the government! They can't be trying to do it all over again!”

“It has been ruled illegal, yes. But according to our sources, there's
at least one group who'd like to challenge that ruling.”

Cold swept over Elissa, as swift as the fire. Her knees went weak, and she took a step back as if the ground had given way beneath her. “No,” she said, and all the strength was gone from her voice. “No. They said it was
illegal
. They said she'd be safe. We have
compensation money
.”

Next to her, Lin had gone rigid.
“No,”
Elissa said again, speaking this time to her sister. “They can't change it, Lin. They gave you refugee status. They said you were human. They
can't
—”

“Lissa.” Cadan's voice was steady, and it seemed to hold her, as if it were keeping her from falling apart. “People challenge rulings all the time. It doesn't mean anything. It won't get them anywhere.”

She looked up at him, aware she was having to force herself to move, as if every cell in her body had frozen with shock. “But how
can
they? How can anyone know what SFI did to the Spares and think it's okay? How can they think about doing it again? And if they're abducting them . . .”
If they're trying to do that now, and I brought Lin back here . . .
She reached out without looking, without needing to look, and her hand met Lin's, cold fingers against cold fingers.

“
Trying
to abduct them,” said Cadan. “Abduction
attempts
, that's all. They haven't succeeded. And people who've formed a pressure group are very different from people who are willing to act so far outside the law that they're making abduction attempts. It doesn't mean they're all working with the same agenda, Lis.”

His eyes were as steady as his voice.

“You're making a bit of an assumption there, Captain,” said Commander Dacre.

Cadan turned his head to meet her eyes. “So, it seems, is IPL.”

For a second, silence hung between them, then the commander moved away, back toward her ship. “You'll need to come to the nearest IPL command center so we can do what we can to sort this out.”

“Look, Commander”—although Cadan's voice remained steady, Elissa could hear an undercurrent that meant he was having to make an effort to keep it so—“this base, it's full of refugees. It's been attacked seven times already. I know IPL has a list of priorities, but these people are still in danger—”

The commander gave him the briefest of looks over her shoulder. “Thank you, Captain, I'm well aware of the situation. How fast can you prepare one of your shuttlecraft to follow us to the city?”

For a moment Elissa thought Cadan would try arguing further, but he said only, “It can be ready in ten minutes.”

“And your ship can be left secure?”

“Yes.”

“Go and do it, then. I'll send you the flight coordinates. You'll be required to follow them precisely so you can shadow us from takeoff to landing.” She stepped into the ship, using a grab handle to pull herself briskly up into the doorway.

Her voice had assumed automatic compliance; she didn't even look around to check that Cadan was moving to obey.

He cleared his throat. “Commander, the
Phoenix
—my ship—it's a lot more useful than the shuttlebug. If it's possible to bring that instead—”

Now she did look around, her face coldly disapproving. “Captain Greythorn, I'd like nothing more than to send you
and
your ship immediately off-planet. However, I'm
constrained by strict IPL policy. You've brought two underage passengers with you—one of them a Spare—and whatever
you
intend to do with them, right now they have to come to the nearest command center. Which is in Central Canyon City. You may have noticed there's a citywide no-fly order, from which only IPL craft are exempt. Your shuttlecraft is small enough that I can get clearance for it as long as it accompanies the
Savior
. If you don't use that and come with me now, you don't get there.”

She turned away, again not waiting to see whether they were obeying her.