Unravel (46 page)

Her thoughts stopped dead. Her stomach plunged, as if she stood in a plummeting elevator. Across the crowd, a head showed above most of the others. Dark hair, which had been closely cropped in the same style as Cadan's but was just beginning to grow out. The lines of a familiar face, clean-cut, good-looking enough that Elissa's friends—back when she'd
had
friends—had gone silly and giggly every time they came over and he was around. Cadan's closest friend. Her older brother, Bruce.

And if Bruce was here . . .

Her stomach plunged again. Next to Bruce, the crowd parted a little as more people found who they were looking for and moved over toward them. Shorter, slighter, and with the dark hair Bruce had inherited threaded all through with gray, her father, Edward Ivory, stood next to his son. And next to him, nearly as tall as her husband, her face composed and unreadable, was Laine Ivory. Elissa's mother.

“WE'RE JUST
glad it wasn't you,” said Elissa's mother.

They were standing by the drinks machine nearest the window. Mr. and Mrs. Ivory were both holding iced teas, Bruce had a soda, and Elissa was clutching a coffee. She hadn't wanted a drink, but after the first hugs—too tight on her parents' parts, stiff with awkwardness on her own—it had seemed suddenly vitally important to have something for her hands to do.

And now, with the news they'd just dumped on her, the kick of the oversugared coffee was very welcome.

“Fourteen?”
she said again. “It happened to
fourteen
other Spares?
Today?
”

Laine Ivory set her drink down so she could press a hand to her perfectly made-up face. “We're all still so shocked,” she said. “All these teenagers—and children—to be put in so much danger. It just doesn't bear thinking of. And for it to happen
just when we'd been told you were on your way here, on a ship in the company of
your
Spare . . .”

Instinctive defensiveness took over Elissa's awareness of the danger she knew she, too, had probably been in. “
Lin
wouldn't ever hurt me!”

Her mother looked at her, and the calm patience in her expression was worse than if she'd snapped back. “Elissa, you can't possibly know whether that's the case. None of them appear to
intend
it. And afterward, when they have that shock to face . . .” She shook her head.

“Why would you care about that?” Elissa said, so stiff with resentment that the words came out sounding sulky. “You don't even think Spares are human.”

Laine Ivory spread her hands a little. “Well, and doesn't this bear that out? I know you feel some kind of attachment to your Spare, Lissa—we've been getting some advice since we've been on Philomel, and apparently that's entirely natural—but it's still not human in the way you are. Humans don't randomly attack one other.”

“Oh,
please
.” Elissa set her coffee down with a little thump, and it splashed over the edge of the cup. “We were attacked back on Sekoia—three times! By
humans
.”

Mrs. Ivory lifted an unperturbed shoulder. “I didn't say humans couldn't be violent. I said they don't attack one another randomly.”

“Oh, they so do!” Anger scorched up behind Elissa's eyes, turning the world into a bright-edged blur. “Like,
serial killers
are random. And those guys who suddenly go crazy and kill their families—”

Her mother's eyebrows went up. “And you're comparing them to your Spare?”

“I'm saying humans can do awful things without them not being human! And Lin hasn't even
done
anything awful yet!”

“Yet.”

“Stop it!” Elissa heard her voice shake and couldn't get it back under control. “You don't even know her. You don't get to talk about her like that. She's in pieces at the thought she might hurt me,
she
told me to get away from her.”

Laine's voice rose easily over hers, not because it was louder but because it was so dispassionate that it seemed to flatten out her daughter's. “Really, Elissa, calm down. As I said, no one is suggesting the Spares
intend
to hurt their doubles.”

“But they are, all the same.” Beyond greeting Elissa, Bruce hadn't yet spoken. Now his voice was grim. “You can waste time explaining how
your
Spare, among all the others, won't, Lissa, or you can accept that, yeah, actually it probably will, and face that you're going to have to deal with it.”

“What do you mean,
deal
with it?” She was shivering now, in impotent anger. Her mother and Bruce had been back in her life for less than ten minutes, and already they were stamping all over her and telling her that everything she was doing was wrong. “What am I supposed to do? If Lin
is
going to hurt me, I can't stop her any more than she's already been stopped. We've been separated, what else am I supposed to do?”

“Jeez,”
Bruce was beginning impatiently, when his father interrupted.

“All right, Bruce, that's enough.” He turned to Elissa. All her life he'd looked tired—although not as worn thin as he did now—but now that she knew what had happened to him, she could see that behind the look of fatigue, of distance, lay the grief he'd borne most of his life, ever since the link
between him and his Spare had been severed.

She bit down on the furious responses she wanted to give, and listened.

“Lissa, these fourteen—fifteen, now—incidents, they've only occurred between Spares and their twins. Anyone else who's been hurt, they've only been hurt incidentally.”

A picture of Zee's head slamming back into Cadan's face came to her. The blood pouring from Cadan's nose. The moment when she'd thought Zee might have killed him.

“Officials—scientists, medical staff—they're at a loss to understand exactly what's going on,” her father continued. “But what they are clear about is that this . . . response . . . is triggered by the presence of a Spare's twin. And it appears to happen only after a threshold of at least sixteen days after the Spare and twin have been reunited. It's as if, in this case, familiarity doesn't so much breed contempt as . . . pathological aggression.” His expression altered slightly. He was still looking grim—and tired—but for the first time Elissa saw him slide into what she thought of as his lecture-room manner, saw a trace of satisfaction edge his expression as he coined an appropriate term for something he'd been talking about.

She bit down on a surge of anger and disappointment.
It's not some freaking academic theory we're talking about here! This is me, and my sister—your daughter!

Except this customary detachment was probably some kind of coping strategy that he'd evolved in order to deal with the loss of his own Spare. Elissa breathed in, carefully, then out. It wasn't fair to be so angry with him.

“Yes, okay. But what's that got to do with me?”

He looked at her, sympathy showing in his eyes, waiting for her to catch up as he had so many times when she was
small, when he'd explained something to her. And now she saw the expectancy in her mother's face, the look of familiar impatience—
come on, Lissa, get with the program
—in Bruce's.

“Where do they want us to go?” she said, stiff lipped.

“Not you,” said her father. “The Spares. There's an island in the southern hemisphere of the planet. It could be made secure—”

She took a step back. “No.
No
.”

Her mother blew out an exasperated breath. “It wouldn't be forever. Just until the officials have gotten to the bottom of whatever's causing this. Your Spare could be in the best place, kept secure, with people observing who know what they're doing. We have an apartment not far away. You can come home with us—”

Home? A home without Lin? “No.
No way
am I leaving Lin! You have no idea what you're saying—you have no idea what that would do to her!”

“Oh, for God's sake, Lissa!” All patience had vanished from Mrs. Ivory's voice. “Think! If it kills you—”

For a moment Elissa heard only the words her mother had used, not the sense behind them.
“She,”
she said. “
She!
Not
it
.”

“Fine. She. If
she
kills you, what's it going to do to her?”

Lin's face flashed up in Elissa's mind. Lin's face, but overlaid by Zee's. By that awful blankness in his expression. By the dawning horror as he came out of his fugue state, as he realized what he'd done. Lin, after everything she'd gone through, left without her twin, left with nothing but the knowledge that she'd killed Elissa.

If anyone else had said it, she might have given way to the horror the image filled her with, might have at least considered complying. But her
mother
saying it—she was only doing
it to manipulate Elissa into doing what she wanted, what she'd wanted all along.

“You don't
care
what it does to her,” she said, cornered, furious. “You don't
care
!”

“That's right,” Elissa's mother snapped. “I
don't
care what happens to your Spare. I care what happens to you.”

“We all care,” added her father, quietly. “Lissa, we're really concerned for your safety here.”

The quiet appeal in his voice caught at her. He'd called Lin his daughter a few weeks ago, when they'd spoken on the interplanetary phone from Sanctuary. He didn't see her the way Elissa's mother did; he
did
see her as a person.

But
no
. No, it was no good. He was still here with her mother, on the same side, arguing against Elissa, not for her.

She took another step away, crossing her arms over herself, feeling her face freeze into defiance. “No,” she said again. “You don't get to play the concerned card. You lied to me. You tried to make me have an operation I didn't want.” She looked at her mother, and of their own accord, her teeth gritted against one another. “You called the
police
on me.”

“
Elissa
, you know very well that was for your own good—”

“I don't care! I don't
care
. It was
wrong
! You don't get to tell me what to do anymore. I'm not doing
anything
before I talk to Lin. I'm not making any decisions without her.”

Mrs. Ivory flung her hands up, an exasperated gesture. “How can you be so unreasonable? You can talk to that Spare of yours from a secure place. You can phone, you can e-mail—”

“I'm not talking to her about this in
e-mail
! I have to
see
her. When Cadan gets back, he'll let me—all of us—know what's going on.”

“Cadan.” Laine Ivory shook her head. “I cannot
believe
he's going along with this. You'd think he'd remember he owes it to Bruce, at least, to keep an eye on your safety.” She turned to her son, putting a hand on his arm. “When he does get back, maybe
you
should talk to him. He must know he should never have taken Elissa back to Sekoia—I still don't know what you thought you were
doing
there, Elissa—he obviously should have brought her here.”

Bruce shrugged. “I'll be glad to talk to him, Ma. He was kind of landed with her, though, you know? If he had to go to help with the evacuation, and if there wasn't time to make a stop-off here?”

Despite everything, laughter rose within Elissa. Cadan had been
landed
with her, had he?
Yeah, you wait, big brother. He's not just yours anymore.

The insecurity she'd felt yesterday had evaporated—and remained that way, like a far-off haze of water droplets. If she didn't actually need to worry about his mother's influence, she wasn't going to start worrying about
Bruce's
.

Her mother looked back at her. “Very well,” she said. “We'll wait to see what information Cadan has. But you're going to have to make some sort of decision, Lissa. You can't just be waiting around indefinitely. Quite apart from anything else, the Philomel authorities are allowing us to
resettle
here—they're not putting us up as guests. Your father's working, Bruce is on a waiting list for possible jobs. You're going to have to do something with your life as well.”

She was right, but everything about what she was saying grated, raw, against Elissa's skin.
It's not us who's waiting. It's me. And whatever I have to do, it's not you who gets to tell me what it is.

“I know that,” she said, her voice mulish.

Mrs. Ivory's eyes sparked with anger. She looked as if she were about to say something, but then a stir across the room caught their attention. Cadan was coming back down the staircase.