Unravel (15 page)

On the fifth floor, or maybe the sixth, Mr. Greythorn opened another door with his keycard and directed them along a short, low-ceilinged corridor studded with doors that were clearly entrances to living apartments. The maze of narrow, windowless corridors, the cramped spaces, spoke of low-grade housing, the only sort Central Canyon City's lowest-paid workers could afford.

Behind her, she heard Cadan's voice rise a little in a quiet question, then his father answering. “Yes, exactly. Much safer. IPL were housing all of us in a central block at first, but once the location got out, you might as well have put a beacon on the roof. Dispersed in the normal population—and as long as they're discreet and don't show themselves in pairs—there's nothing to say we're not ordinary refugees. There are enough of those, too, God knows.”

A shiver caught Elissa, a blend of anticipation and apprehension so intense it felt like fear. . . .
as long as they don't show themselves in pairs . . .
The safe house—although it sounded as if it wasn't so much a safe house as a safe apartment—that
they were being taken to wasn't just for SFI families. It was for Spares and their twins.
I'm going to see more Spares. And other people who've gone through what I've gone through. For the first time, people who I won't have to explain anything to. People who can't possibly see Lin as a clone.

“Elissa,” said Mr. Greythorn, “next door down, okay?”

She stopped at the unnumbered door. A small light patch on the gray plastic showed where the number plaque had been removed. Another security thing?

Mr. Greythorn touched his keycard to the sensor, and the door gave a soft chime as it slid open. They went through into a small, low-lit lobby, doors set in the walls around it.

Mr. Greythorn indicated a couple of the doors with a nod of his head. “Those rooms are empty. They each fit three, so there's room for all of you. Go quietly if you can. People will mostly be asleep. We don't have any of the younger Spares here, though—it's all people your age.”

Emily Greythorn moved past Elissa to open a farther door. In the room beyond, lights flicked on. “This is the kitchen. If any of you want drinks, the fresh products have all run dry, but there's a reasonable amount of everything long-life.”

Markus was already making for one of the rooms, but Ivan and Felicia moved toward the kitchen, and Cadan turned to Elissa for the first time since they'd gotten out of the beetle-cars. “It's like being back on the
Phoenix
already. You want a nice long-life drink, Lissa? Lin?”

Irritation spiked through her. What she
wanted
was half a minute to talk to him without a million other people around.
Did you notice your parents' reaction? Have they said anything to you?
She hesitated, wishing there was a way to ask, wishing there was a way to grab even the tiniest amount of privacy.

He smiled at her. “Lis, you look dead on your feet. Go to bed if you want. I'll see you in the morning.”

There was nothing different in his expression, no new reticence that had appeared in the last half hour. Inside her, something cold and tight began to unwind. She returned his smile. “Yeah, I will. Good night.” Then, with a slight effort, “Good night, Mr. Greythorn. Good night, Mrs. Greythorn.”

“Good night, Elissa.” Cadan's mother's voice, and the nod his father gave her, were no different from how they'd been before. But all the same she couldn't shake the impression she'd had earlier. The almost-shock on their faces, and Mrs. Greythorn staring at her with . . . She was sure she hadn't imagined it. It
had
been disappointment.

Well, she definitely couldn't ask them now—if she ever could. Lin following her, she moved away to go toward the room Markus had left free. But as she did, her foot caught in the torn hem of her pants leg and, clumsy with tiredness, she stumbled, putting out a hand to stop herself falling into the wall.

Her hand brushed the door panel next to one of the doors, and it slid open.

The room beyond was lit only by the glow of a screen—one of the cheap multifunction ones—tilting down from a far corner. The dark shapes of two couches and a scatter of beanbag chairs bulked between the screen's light and where Elissa and Lin stood. After a moment while her eyes adjusted, Elissa recognized what was playing on the screen as one of the more popular teen dramas. She'd never watched it much—the impossibly beautiful, confident, and polished actors had only seemed to accentuate the difference between her life and the life normal teenagers could lead.

The volume wasn't on high, but all the same it must have masked the swish of the door sliding open, because it was a few moments before one of the occupants of the chairs looked around.

He was a boy about Elissa's age, so dark skinned that when he smiled his teeth seemed to glow in the dimness. “Hey,” he said, “new bodies!”

Blurs of other faces turned to look.

“Lights up,” said the boy, and Elissa blinked as the room brightened.

Behind her, Cadan's father's voice was simultaneously exasperated and resigned. “
How
late are you people awake?”

The boy grinned, but a second boy, this one maybe a year older, with light skin and longish brown hair, looked a little guilty. “We didn't have the sound on loud.”

“Yeah,” said the first boy. “Ms. Thing
seriously
can't complain this time.”

“But she so will, all the same,” said a pretty blond girl sitting next to him on the couch. “I keep
saying
, she completely thinks we're students. If she
didn't
think we were having wild sex-and-drugs parties, she'd be disappointed.” She wriggled around, rising onto her knees, and smiled at Elissa. “Hi. I'm Sofia. What's your name?”

For a moment Elissa's answer caught, unspoken, in a rush of shyness. Going through her last three years at school as the freak girl with the undiagnosed headaches and blackouts hadn't accustomed her to expect welcome, or even courtesy, from anyone her own age.

“I'm Lissa. This is my sister, Lin.”

For an instant, Sofia stared at her across the back of the couch. And despite the background noise of the onscreen
drama, silence seemed to fall into the room.

Elissa folded her arms, automatically defensive. “What?”

Sofia blinked, her gaze going from Elissa to Lin. “You're twins, aren't you? A Spare and a—”

“Yes, of course.” It must be the most obvious thing about them, surely. Just sisters—even sisters born at the same time, from two fertilized eggs rather than from one—would never look as freakishly identical as Elissa and Lin did.

“You . . .” Sofia was staring at Lin now. “But how did you both get names?”

Oh, so
that
was what was confusing her. Defensiveness melting into relief, Elissa almost broke out laughing. Except it was kind of horrific, too, the reminder that Spares, unlike their human counterparts, had been raised with numbers, not names.

“We made it ourselves,” said Lin. “When we first needed ID cards, we made up a name I liked—”

“Hang on,” the long-haired boy, the one with lighter skin, interrupted. He'd been staring too, but as he spoke it became obvious it was for a whole other reason. “Wait a minute. You said— You're
Elissa
?
Elissa and Lin?
”

“No
way
,” said Sofia. Her voice rose, incredulous, and at least three people automatically said,
“Shh.”

“That's who you are?” said the boy who'd spoken first. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt, bright under the lights. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” Elissa said.

“Wow.” He grinned at her. “We were pretty much expecting new people—but we weren't expecting them to be
you
. You're famous, didn't you know?”

“Famous?”
Elissa's throat closed.

“
Absolutely
famous,” the boy said cheerfully. Then he seemed to pick up the tone in which she'd spoken, and the smile slid from his face. “I mean, kind of. Not, like,
actor
famous—”

“They're
not
famous,” Sofia said, interrupting him. She looked straight across the room at Elissa, her expression suddenly sober. “You are known, though. Not by everybody, but there's enough information out there for people to piece IDs together if they want to. We're not supposed to be able to get online here—all the networks are closed for official use only—but one of the Spares, she can hack into any network. And, I mean, obviously we were kind of invested in learning about the first twins that found each other. She turned up footage of you both, from security data at a mall?”

Her voice rose in a slight question. Elissa nodded, not yet able to speak. The mall that security guards had chased her and Lin through, the mall where they'd emerged onto the roof only to see police flyers screaming down toward them.

“Someone's linked it all up,” said Sofia. “That footage—you're in disguise, but they've cleaned up the images with false-ID software. And they've got it linked to your name, and that's linked to your family connections, and the pilot whose ship you were on, and
his
name . . .”

“Okay,” said Elissa. Her voice only just didn't shake.

Sofia watched her anxiously. “But you must have known that, right? You must have known you couldn't keep your identities secure from everyone?”

“Yes.” She had known that, of course she had. But it was one thing to know it in theory, from a safe place on Sanctuary or on board the
Phoenix
 . . .

“What
kind
of famous?” Lin asked. Her voice didn't sound
as if it were anywhere near shaking. She sounded nothing but fascinated.

The yellow-T-shirted boy's smile returned. “Urban-heroes famous,” he said, getting up to come around the end of the couch. “I mean, seriously, we'd put up a monument if we weren't living in secret. The
minute
we're relocated, though, I
swear
 . . . I'm Samuel, by the way. That's—”

“I'm Ady,” said the long-haired boy. He glanced down toward the end of the couch, where, Elissa saw now, someone else was sitting on the floor, mostly hidden by the couch. As the boy spoke his voice softened, became careful, as if he were speaking to an animal or a child. “Hey, Zee, come meet some heroes.”

Elissa followed his gaze as yet another boy appeared, standing up so they could see him. He was exactly Ady's height, with a build identical to Ady's and the same light skin, brown hair, and thin, bony face. His hair was much shorter, as if it had been cut very close and was growing out, and he moved as if he didn't want to stand up straight, or as if he were continually afraid of being hit, shoulders hunched, head ducked forward.

A Spare. Another Spare. The first one, apart from Lin, whom Elissa had ever met.

“This is my . . . twin,” said Ady, stumbling just the tiniest bit over the word. “We call him Zee.” He stood, putting an arm over his twin's shoulders. It should have been a friendly, companionable movement—Elissa had seen it a million times among boys her age—but with Ady, it came across as a gesture, not of easy companionship, but of protection.

“Isn't Zee a name?” said Lin, speaking across Elissa as she opened her mouth to say hi.

Zee glanced toward her. The light caught the side of his face, and scars sprang into sudden shocking visibility. Not just bruises, like Lin had had when she escaped the facility, like Elissa had become used to seeing on her own face after each nightmare vision. Scars, the sort that might come from knife wounds or burns.
Is that what the later procedures do to them? Is that what would have happened to Lin if she hadn't gotten away in time?

His lip, too, was scarred, mangled-looking, as if it had been repeatedly bitten. “It's a letter,” he said to Lin, his voice husky, deeper than Ady's. “The first letter of my code.”

“Oh.” Lin looked at him, her face interested. “We only had numbers.”

Zee returned her gaze but didn't seem to find it necessary to say anything in return. Elissa realized she was staring at him, then back at Lin. Probably
way
too obviously, but she couldn't make herself look away.

They're so similar.
She hadn't thought to wonder what other Spares would be like—God knew, Lin had been odd enough to get used to. But Zee, just like Lin, seemed to be lacking the social impulses Elissa had always thought came as automatically as breathing. Like responding out loud when someone told you something. Or like speaking in order to prevent a silence from stretching out and out . . .

Her eyes caught Ady's, and he sent her a half grin that suggested he was aware of the very same thing.

“You can meet the rest of us in the morning,” Samuel said.

Elissa nodded. “Is everyone here with their Spares?”

“Well, Ady and Zee, obviously,” said Samuel. “And Sofia, and me. It's been just us since we got here three weeks ago, so when we heard new people were coming we all kind of
wanted to wait up to see, but mine and Sofia's Spares, and Amaryllis—they all got too tired.”

“Amaryllis is a Spare,” added Ady, “but she's the only one here without her twin.” A shadow crossed his face as he said it, and Elissa didn't ask why the lone Spare seemed to have a real name. Or why her twin wasn't with her. That was easy enough to guess. Her own first reaction to Lin had been shock more than anything else, and an instinctive revulsion she was ashamed, now, to remember.

“In the morning sounds like an excellent plan,” said Mr. Greythorn. His voice was deliberately patient, like Cadan's got sometimes. “I understand we're getting a visit from Commander Dacre then as well. I don't imagine she wants to talk to everyone, but those she does talk to could do with an undisturbed night. So let's get to bed, okay?” A second's pause. “That means all of us, Samuel.”