Unravel (49 page)

“Kind of screwed now, isn't it? With all the Spares in danger of going psycho?”

She flashed a furious look at him—
you're making fun of me, now?
—before she realized that this time his tone of voice had been neither sarcastic nor disagreeable, but edging toward what sounded like sympathy.

“No,” she said, not wanting to admit to it. “It's . . . tricky. But the scientists and people are working on it. They'll work it out. They'll fix it.”

“They're not human, you know, Lis.”

She'd have flared at him again if his voice hadn't still held that note of sympathy.

“They
are
. You haven't met her, but I swear, she's—”

She'd been going to say
just like you and me
, but suddenly it was as if something had closed on her throat. A stack of images unfolded before her, images she'd been trying to forget.

“She's what?”

Elissa swallowed. “She
is
human. She's just . . . how
couldn't
you be damaged, if what happened to her happened to you? And a lot of it—it's not even her fault. It's the link, with having to use it so often. . . .”

“What's not her fault?” He said it after a pause, but there was still that sympathy in his voice, and oh
God
, it would be such a relief to talk to someone. . . .

“The link keeps getting stronger,” she said. “Our thoughts . . . they're starting to get mixed up. I end up having her thoughts,
and sometimes . . . there was this one time, I was angry, and I—I think she picked up
those
thoughts, and I can't guard what I'm thinking all the time, I just
can't
, it's not possible!”

“You can't, like, switch it off?”

“
She
can. I can't. She's stronger than me, and she—well, she knew she had the link from when she was really young, while I didn't even realize it was something real, so she has a ton more control than I do.”

“Parasite mind control?” said Bruce.

What?
She blinked at him a moment before registering the flicker of amusement in his eyes, and then, unexpectedly, she was laughing too.

When they were nine and thirteen, their mother out at the Skyline Club and their father catching up on some work in his study, they'd managed to hack into the family-friendly settings of their home movie system and reset them for the two hours necessary to watch
Parasite Invasion
, the latest multi-horror movie sensation their parents—and all their friends' parents—had vetoed without any pretense at discussion.

They'd both had
major
nightmares afterward, Elissa remembered. Of all the multihorrors the film genre was named for, the one that had bothered her the most was when the parasitically mind-controlled diner owner had fished up a giant worm from the sewers, chopped it into sections, and turned them into ring doughnuts to serve to an unsuspecting diner full of glossily beautiful teenagers. Shortly afterward the mind-controlling parasite had gotten the diner owner to climb into the whirling blades of his own mega-blender, and the resultant screaming, splattered gore, and severed limbs should have eclipsed the doughnut scene, but in Elissa's mind, somehow the horror of thinking you were eating
doughnut when actually you were eating
sewer worm
had been the thing that had lingered.

Bruce had had his own nightmares too, although he'd always refused to tell her which of the assorted horrors had invaded his dreams, but somehow their parents had never found out the reason—even when both Bruce's and Elissa's vocabularies suddenly began to include the term “parasite mind control.” And when Elissa went off eating doughnuts for a year.

“No,”
she said now. “Completely not parasite mind control! Jeez, Bruce.”

The corner of his mouth turned up in something like a grin. “Okay. Look, don't go crazy, but, Lis, it doesn't sound a
hundred
percent different.”

Elissa opened her mouth, then shut it, and turned to lean on the side of the balcony, feeling the cold roughness of the concrete beneath her elbows and, as she leaned out farther, the slight tickle of the safety field along the hair on her forearms.

It felt disloyal to say anything about Lin to
Bruce
—Bruce, who'd said Lin wasn't human. Especially anything that associated her, no matter how slightly, with the monsters from a low-plot, high-gore horror movie. But Bruce's words had brought some of her own thoughts back into her mind.
It's like trying to get through to an alien
, she'd thought just yesterday, staring at her sister.
Like trying to talk to someone who's not even human.

“You keep fighting for her.” Bruce had moved to lean on the side of the balcony too. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him looking at her. “You met her, what, six weeks ago? Has she really gotten that important so fast?”

A laugh caught at Elissa's throat. “She was that important, like, two days after I met her. She's . . . some of it must be that we were linked for so long, even though I didn't really know it. But”—she lifted a shoulder, shy about sharing so much—“I love her. I know it doesn't sound likely, and if it hadn't happened to me I don't think I'd believe it could happen to anyone. But I just . . . she feels like part of me. She matters more than anything. Even when she does something awful, or when I feel like she's taking over, or when I just want her out of my
head
 . . .”

She leaned out a little more, into the buzz of the safety field as it caught her, stopped her leaning farther. Bruce hadn't said anything, and now that she wasn't looking directly at him it was easier to talk, easier to be honest.

“You know how people say love—like,
all
love—is unconditional and everything?” she said. “It's really not. You can love someone, but if they do something really bad . . . they can . . . kill it off, eventually. But with Lin . . . I don't think she could. Kill it off, I mean. I've been so furious with her, and scared
of
her, sometimes, but it always comes back. Like something you can't escape from. Something that's always there whether you want it or not.”

“Really,” said Bruce. His voice had changed again. Now it held a note she didn't recognize, but that made her glance sideways at him. Something new showed in his face, too. A stiffness, like shock, or anger held under such tight control it hardly showed as anger at all.

All at once she felt foolish, exposed. She shrugged. “Yeah. It's completely difficult to explain, though.”

“No. You explained it pretty well.” But he seemed distracted. He'd tipped his wrist to check the watch he wore on
his right hand, and now he was fiddling with it, running his thumb over the watch face. Elissa wondered, vaguely, with a fraction of her mind, whether his watch, like hers, was still set on Sekoian time, or whether he'd changed it over to match this time zone on Philomel.

Elissa straightened, turning so her side was to the balcony wall, hugging her arms to her chest. “If you meet her, though . . . I mean, I wouldn't expect you to feel like I do, but she's your sister too—and if you met her, you'd see she was human. I swear—”

She stopped short. It wasn't just a watch on Bruce's wrist. She should have recognized it before now: It was the mini-communicator he'd worn when he was training. They could be worn as casually as if they were nothing but watches, without worries about SFI channels being compromised, because of the built-in security. They could be activated only by the thumbprint of the owner.

And now, here was Bruce with one. And he'd just run his thumb across it. He'd just activated it.

Fear shot through her. Fear that, even as her body felt it, her mind told her was irrational. There was nothing out here that screamed danger. But the fear came all the same, riding on a wave of instinct, a fight-or-flight impulse that came from nowhere.

As her senses sprang alert, she became aware that she and Bruce were the only people on the balcony, that the nearest guards were way across the other side of the room she'd walked through to get here, and that during the time she and Bruce had been talking she'd moved, somehow, much farther from the doors than she'd realized.

There was no
reason
why any of that mattered, there was
nothing sinister about Bruce fiddling with his mini-com—without the SFI network it probably didn't even work—but all the same, unreasoning instinct pushed Elissa back toward the entrance to the spaceport.

She moved carefully, not wanting—
again
, for no reason!—Bruce to notice what she was doing.

“You think I should meet her, then?” As Bruce spoke he, too, stepped away from the balcony wall.

Elissa moved a few more cautious inches. “Yeah,” she said, almost at random, concentrating on keeping her voice casual rather than on what she was saying. It was crazy, she was just talking to her
brother
, for goodness' sake, but all the same she knew she'd feel 100 percent better once she was back in the shelter of the spaceport.

Bruce laughed. “Lis, what are you doing? You keep shuffling backward. You look like you did when we were playing chase when we were kids!”

“Oh, I thought we should maybe start going back inside?” Her voice came out overbright, and she felt her lips stretch into a forced smile. The reference to their shared childhood added another layer of reluctance to the voice in her head telling her she was being crazy, that this was her
brother
, who she'd
grown up
with. But at the same time, the way he'd laughed . . . there was something off about it, something that seemed as unnatural as her smile.

Bruce moved toward her again, and this time every one of her muscles felt as if they jumped, jerking her away from him.

“Lis, for God's sake—”

He took the last few steps fast, grabbed her arm, and the unease growing within her woke into full-blown panic.

“Let go.
Let go.
”

“Jeez, Lis, we were
talking
. You can't just walk off.”

She pulled back against his hold. “Bruce, let
go
of me!” With the panic, memory flared too, screenshot-vivid. She'd been here before, struggling against a family member, someone she should be able to trust but that she couldn't, someone who was acting on instructions she didn't know about, instructions someone else had given them.

Normal conventions had trapped her before—the conventions that said you shouldn't run away from home, you shouldn't push your mother away even if she grabbed hold of you, that you could trust your family, you could trust the government. She was
damned
if she was going to let them trap her again.

She opened her mouth to scream—and Bruce's free hand came down hard over it, crushing the scream as it formed, cutting off half her breath.

No. No! Not again!
She jerked backward, dragging him with her, and as he lunged after her, off balance, she kicked out, catching his shin. He staggered, and although he kept his grip on her arm, his hand slipped from her mouth.

She tried to scream, but she hadn't drawn in enough breath and it wasn't anywhere near loud enough. And, of course, the doors had slid shut behind her, and this was a spaceport—the glass would be soundproof so even if she could scream loud enough no one inside was going to be able to hear her.

I should have listened to my instincts. I should have run away the minute I got scared. I shouldn't have come out here with him—

It was all true, and it was all too late. As Bruce grabbed her again, pulled her against him, his hand back over her mouth, his arm like a steel bar across her body, over the edge of the
balcony, a flyer rose—a slender, bullet-shaped thing, so black, so unreflecting, that it seemed like a hole in the sky. It made almost no sound—just the thinnest whine at the very edge of her hearing. She'd never seen one in real life before. She shouldn't have seen one at all, shouldn't even know what it was, but way back when Bruce had joined SFI, and before he'd been trained to confidentiality, he'd shown her a picture on his shiny new SFI bookscreen—a picture that later, as the training on need-for-secrecy kicked in, he ordered her, in a panic, to forget she'd ever seen.

This flyer didn't belong on Philomel. It shouldn't have been brought here, must have been smuggled onto the planet in the cargo hold of a spaceship. It was one of a type that was almost silent, unbelievably fast, permanently shielded so it was impossible to track or trace. It was an SFI stealth vehicle.

As it turned, effortless in the air, one narrow black fin passed over the edge of the balcony. Blue sparks spattered as the safety field disintegrated. A slim opening appeared in the side of the flyer. A man, in a close-fitting flying suit and helmet whose seamless blackness matched the flyer itself, stood in it, one hand on a grab handle.

What the—?

Panic wiped most of the coherent thoughts from Elissa's head. She fought like crazy, kicking Bruce's legs, curling her fingers around to claw at his arms, trying to bite the hand that crushed her lips against her teeth.

It didn't do any good. His hold didn't falter; he pulled her to the edge of the balcony. To get her into the flyer, though, he was going to have to lift her up, and to do so he'd have to let go of her mouth, slacken his hold on her. Elissa stilled for a moment, trying to drag in as much breath as she could
through her nose, through the cracks in between his fingers. As soon as he shifted his hold, as soon as he gave her the slightest opening—

The man in the flyer leaned out. There was something in his hand, something that glinted bright in the sunlight.