Unravel (18 page)

Elissa didn't want to ask—the injuries looked
awful
, and it
so
wasn't her business—and tried not to look, either, but after having to force her gaze away yet again, she inadvertently met Ady's eyes.

For a moment his gaze held hers. Heat climbed into Elissa's face. She felt obscurely ashamed to have been caught staring.

Ady's eyebrows came together in a frown—not an angry one, but one that looked as if he were debating something with himself.

Then he said, “Their flyer was attacked. When they were being brought here.”

Lin, unperturbed and curious, flicked a glance from where Ady and Zee sat on a second couch, to Sofia, then sideways to Samuel. “You others weren't on it as well?”

Zee's face froze for an instant, an expression that was brief but so blank, so bleak that it struck Elissa with cold. Then Ady was speaking again, leaning a little forward as if to shield Zee from anyone's gaze, drawing attention back to himself. “Most of us were here already. IPL officials came to our houses and asked us if we gave consent to meeting our Spares. Then they asked if our
parents
gave consent—not that that made any difference, it turned out, it was just to log who was opposed. If any of the twins, or any of the Spares, didn't want to meet, then that was it, no one was going to try to make them. So
then
, for those of us who
did
want, they brought us here so we could meet in a ‘secure, neutral environment.' ” Ady shifted, resting his elbows on his knees. “They didn't want our parents with us to start with—the psych people told them it should be just us. But”—he rolled his eyes—“they didn't want to set up houses full of teenagers with no adult supervision, either.”

“Sex-and-drugs parties,” interjected Sofia.

“Yeah, that. So they mixed all the parents up and put them in the houses too, as long as they weren't with their own kids. At least, if they had other kids—other underage kids—they got to take them, too. Which is how we ended up with . . .” He nodded across to where the Greythorns stood. “I guess being
his
parents puts them as close to the top of the hit list as all of us.”

“Not his sister, though,” said Elissa, thinking aloud.

“He has a sister? Older, right?”

“Yes. She's married.”

“Yeah, she won't be major priority, then. Especially if it was her, not her husband, who changed names. I mean, obviously people
can
connect them, but it makes her less of a target. And, you know, not everyone
wants
to be swept off into evacuation.”

Sofia leaned forward. “They said—to me, anyway—they were going to move the parents around to put them with their own kids, to meet the Spares, after a bit. But then the threats started, and then the attacks, and they decided they didn't dare call attention to the safe houses by shipping people back and forth. They were still planning on a whole gradual integration into society, though, once everything sort of settled down.”

Samuel snorted. “Yeah, 'cause
that
was going to happen.”

“Well, it could've, couldn't it?” Sofia looked back at Elissa and Lin. “Then the attacks got worse. That first terrorist attack, did you hear about it? It was, like, some group called Keep Sekoia Safe or something. People said they were targeting what they thought was a safe house for Spares, although as it happened it wasn't. I mean, jeez, can you imagine—they ended up killing ordinary Sekoian citizens, exactly the people they said they wanted to protect, which was
obviously
super clever.”

Elissa blinked. Sofia's tone was so . . . flippant, as if she were talking about a movie or something that had happened way back in history. As if it weren't real, as if real people hadn't been killed.
It's like she's just enjoying having all the latest gossip or something. I guess, if she didn't see any of the attacks, if it was just newscasts and stuff . . . it's
not
real to her, not yet. When I
used to hear about disasters on other planets, human rights abuses, they never seemed totally real to me, either. Not until it was me and Lin they were happening to.

“Anyway,” Sofia continued, “so
then
they said that we couldn't be reintegrated into Sekoian society with our Spares, 'cause it's too obvious what we are if we're together. And apparently, for some of the Spares, contact with their twins starts to strengthen their psychic abilities, so they start to show more, and that makes them even
more
obvious. So they were going to relocate just those of us who wanted to stay with our Spares. Moving all the Spares was always going to be a
massive
operation, they don't have anywhere near enough personnel to do it easily.”

She shrugged, leaning back, shifting her shoulders to a new position against the wall. “But things just kept escalating, and info kept leaking out about when Spares were going to be moved from one place to another, and the safety of a couple of the safe houses was compromised—they're being
so
careful now, it's completely irritating. So now all the Spares are being relocated, whether they're with their twins or not.”

She made a face. “And we're going to end up with a big reunion once we're off-planet. Fun. I've been keeping away from my mother and social events for years. Now there'll be no escape.”

“So all of you—you did
want
to meet,” Lin said, the moment Sofia stopped speaking. She leaned forward to look past Elissa, eyes intent on Ady.

Ady's gaze brushed briefly over Cassiopeia, but she was stirring her coffee, looking all at once as if she'd withdrawn herself from the conversation. “Yeah. All of us who're here. I mean, I thought I was an only child—my parents weren't
cleared to get a license for a second—and I always thought I'd like a brother. Finding out I
had
one—well, okay, I was pretty curious as well, so even if I hadn't wanted a sibling, I'd have wanted to
meet
him, I guess. But when they told me, when I realized, all this time, I'd had a brother—a brother
my age
, who I should have grown up with . . .” He looked self-conscious suddenly. “It's like finding out about something that you didn't even know was missing, you know?”

Elissa nodded. She did know. “Did you have any idea before?” she asked. “I mean, the link . . .”

“The telepathy? Oh, of course, you have that, don't you? The news reports—they said that's how you found each other. Zee and I don't.”

Elissa blinked at him. “You don't? Not at all?”

“Nope. Either we never did, or it died off so early I don't remember. I mean, neither of us remember, do we, Zee?”

As Zee shook his head, Elissa curbed her impulse to look immediately toward the other Spares. Somehow she'd thought, of all the twins in the room, Ady, with his obvious concern for Zee, the way he spoke for him, shielded him, must be one of those for whom the psychic link hadn't faded with the separation. But if Ady and Zee didn't have a link, did any of the others?

She and Lin had returned to Sekoia ready to use the combined electrokinetic power of their link to power hyperdrives, but when it came to restoring the whole of Sekoia's space force, what they had to offer was nothing but the tiniest drop in the ocean.
Really
restoring it—and, with it, Sekoia's collapsing economy—would take hundreds of other pairs of Spares and their twins. All the Spares had been chosen because their brains had psychokinetic potential—they were all capable
of powering hyperdrives. But it was the telepathic link with their twins that would enable them to do it without unbearable pain—and, eventually, death.

The link had been supposed to die off years ago. She'd known that, for some of them, it would have done so. But surely it couldn't have died off for
all
of them?

It must still exist. It stayed for me, despite all the treatments that tried to kill it off. And for my dad. We can't be the only ones. That wouldn't make any sense.

She became aware that Zee was watching her. His face was thin, bony, and, unlike his twin's, curiously static. Without the distraction of changing expressions, his hollow cheeks and the burn marks on his skin were thrown into almost-painful relief.

“They don't either,” he said, and his gaze shifted toward Sofia and El before returning to Elissa. There was something a little unnerving about that steady regard, and as soon as she could do so without being rude, Elissa looked away.

“We think we used to, though,” Sofia said. “When I met El, it was like meeting someone I'd known years ago. I didn't
remember
her, exactly, but it felt like I should remember. And you felt the same, didn't you, El?”

El nodded.

“And Samuel and Jay—” began Sofia.

“Are
freaky
,” Ady interrupted.

The word “freaky” made Elissa flinch a little, but when she looked, an anxious reflex action, at Samuel, he was grinning.

“It's not freaky, it's
superpowered
, right?” he said, and Elissa relaxed.

Ady leaned back, arms behind his head, gaze on the ceiling. “There's really
very little
superpowered about
synchronized
eating
. I mean, how useful is that going to be in the zombie apocalypse?”

El giggled, sounding, for the first time, like a normal teenage girl rather than someone acting the part of a normal teenage girl.

“Oh God,” said Sofia. “Please not the zombie apocalypse again.” She sent an amused look toward her twin, then a grin across to Elissa and Lin. “Ignore him—he's going through withdrawal. How many hours a day did you spend plugged into Zombie Uprising, again, Ady? Before all this happened and you had to face the real world?” She put a hand to her mouth, mock-whispering. “Don't say anything, but I actually think he's hoping that the government were breeding zombies as another of their little secrets.”

Ady shot upright. “Yeah, yeah. Mock all you want—”

“Oh, we will,” interjected Samuel.

“—but if there is a zombie apocalypse, your chances of surviving have moved
way
up just by being in the same building as me. When they rise, you'll be eating your words—”

“Nah,” said Samuel. “I'll let myself get bitten just for the pleasure of eating your braaaaiiins.” He bared his teeth, lunged sideways across the couch toward Ady, and knocked a leftover half waffle off Lin's plate.

“Guys,” said Cadan's father from across the room.

“Oh my God, Samuel,” said Sofia. “Civilized society, remember? And also
need for quiet
?” She sent Elissa and Lin another smile as Samuel threw himself back onto the sofa, not looking even a little abashed. “I'm so glad to have more girls, you have no idea. We have
not
been enjoying being outnumbered. Have we, El?”

The genuine warmth in her expression reached Elissa,
and she smiled back. It struck her suddenly, like a fan being switched on, like misty windows clearing to sunlight, that this was not only the first time she'd been with people who were like her sister, it was the first time she'd been with people who were like
her
.

She still had a million things to worry about, but although they were all still there, some of their weight seemed to evaporate from her brain.

Lin picked up her discarded waffle and dropped it onto her plate. She gave Samuel and Jay a curious look. “So what do you do that's freaky?”

Which was another good thing about being with people like her—Lin could say something so denuded of social niceties that it was pretty close to being rude, and whoever she was talking to had already met enough other Spares to not even think twice about it.

Samuel shrugged. “Freaky is so totally in the eye of the beholder. We just have this thing—we end up eating at exactly the same rate, and Ady noticed and . . .” He laughed. “Okay, it
does
look a bit weird. But Ady's kinda slow at catching up with the whole telepathic link thing—he thinks it's weird that I knew Jay before I knew about him. Even Sofia and El don't quite get it, but I . . . I just always had this . . . like this sense in the back of my head, of someone else?” He broke off, a grin lighting his face. “Well, I guess I don't need to describe it to you guys, do I?”

His smile was infectious. Elissa laughed too, more worry evaporating. Samuel and Jay
did
have a link. It
wasn't
just her and Lin. “Not so much.”

“Well, there you are,” Samuel said. “When it all came out I was like, ‘Oh,
that's
what that was!' ”

Ady cleared his throat ostentatiously. “Ah, full story, please? What
I
say is freaky is that he thought Jay was his imaginary friend.”

Lin blinked at him. “That's not freaky. At the facility, they told us that's what little children do. That's what was supposed to be happening to our twins—any memories they had of us, they would identify as just memories of having imaginary friends.”

For a moment, the familiar hot, sick rage washed through Elissa. Her stomach and jaw clenched.

“
That's
normal, all right,” said Ady. “Sam, though . . .”

“Oh jeez.” Samuel swung a cushion up to throw, saw Cadan's father was looking over at them, and let it flump onto the ground. “What he means,” he said, “is that I kept my imaginary friend. I got older, and I knew—I thought—he couldn't be real, but he was so much a part of my life by then that I just couldn't get out of the habit of talking to him. And I”—his face went suddenly so bleak he looked like a different person—“I didn't get on well when I tried to block him out, when I stopped talking to him and tried to stop listening as well.”