Unravel (57 page)

“We're twins,” Elissa said.

“No, we're not. Not without the link.”

Elissa swallowed. It was difficult to argue with that. Twins, doubles—it had always been the link that made them that. They might still look alike, but without the link they were just . . .

“Okay,” she said. “Then we're sisters. We're still sisters.”

Lin stared at her, gray-faced in the smoke. “How are we?”

“Lin, for God's
sake
 . . .”

“Sisters grow up together. Sisters share . . .
things
. Parents. Lives. We aren't twins anymore—we aren't sisters, either. Not real sisters.” Her face went even blanker, as if in saying the words she was cutting herself off from everything Elissa had thought they had, as if she was
choosing
to let her humanness fall away to burn and shrivel and disappear.

And as Elissa heard it, those words—
not real sisters
—anger flamed through her, so bright she could feel it burn behind her eyes, so hot that for a second it stopped her breath in her lungs.

“Not real sisters?” she said, and as her breath rushed back, burning in her throat, the heat of the flames flared through her voice. She threw up a hand. “What do you call this?
Look
, my hand's the same shape as yours. Our hair grows the same way. We walk in the same
rhythm
. We
feel the cold
the same. I grew up with
Bruce
. I knew
Bruce
my whole life. And if I tried for
a million years
, I'd never be as much like him as I'm like you!”

She stopped, chest burning, eyes burning, furious powerless
tears rising within her. “I've messed things up over and over. I was angry, and frustrated, and I did it wrong, and then I did it wrong
again
, and I— But God, look, Lin, if you do this, it just makes everything we did
right
, all the effort we made, mean nothing—”

Lin's eyes held hers, but they were too far away, too blurred by the rising smoke, for Elissa to see their expression. “So that is the bribe, then?” she said. “You're my sister
now
. You love me
now
. But if I do this, you won't love me anymore?”

This
, she called it.
This
, as if it were something small. But it wasn't. Lin was planning on trapping at least four—and probably more—people here. Planning on burning them to death.

For the first time Elissa thought beyond the initial what-ifs: the
what will it do to Lin?
the
what will the authorities do to her?
For the first time she thought,
If Lin does this, if Lin kills these people, what will it do to
me
? What will it make me feel about her? And what will it make me
not
feel? Is she right? If she does it, if she becomes a murderer, will she stop feeling like my sister, my twin? Will I not love her anymore?

Something like lightning cracked up from the metal around Lin, a blue-white flash.

And in Elissa's brain, the answer came as bright, as clear. She didn't know, now, whether Lin had gone too far to hear her—or to believe her if she did hear. It might not make any difference, whatever she said.

All the same, she had to say it. Whatever Lin did now, she had to know the truth of what was left to them.

“See?” said Lin, distant in the smoke. “It only worked when we had the link. When you loved me 'cause you had to.”

“No,” said Elissa. “You're wrong.”

“I'm not wrong.”

“You are. I came here to stop you killing these people. I want you to stop. But whether you stop or not, I'll still love you.”

“You won't!” Lin shouted the words. “You won't, you won't, you know you won't!”

“I will.”

The smell of burning metal rose, and somewhere below the ground close to Elissa's feet she heard a bang like a small explosion. Her mind went to the people trapped down there. She imagined the fire beginning, saw it sweeping through the base, sucking all the oxygen from the air, making them die of suffocation before—
oh God please before
—the flames reached them. She imagined looking at Lin afterward, knowing she'd done that.

She looked at Lin now, her face a pale blur in the smoke, her hands clenched, her electrokinetic power making the sparks leap and spit. Hurting and bleeding and willing to kill.

“I'll love you forever,” said Elissa. “If you
don't
do this, I'll love you. If you
do
do it, I'll still love you. I'll just—” A sudden sob caught her by the throat. “You're so
stupid
! They'll send you to prison, and then I'll have to
miss
you forever.”

“It's not true!” Lin's voice rose.

“It is.”

“You're lying.”

“I'm not. I'm not lying.”

“You are! You're lying, you're
lying
, you're
lying
!” Her voice went even higher, so high it broke.

The lightning leaped again, a circle of it this time, making a sharp crack in the air.

“Lissa,” said Cadan, urgently behind her. “Get back. She'll hurt you.”

Elissa stayed still. The lightning flash had shown her Lin's face in blue-white clarity. Lin's chin was shaking, and her eyes were flooded with tears.

“Lin,” she said, gently. “I don't lie to you. I never did. You know that.”

The lightning didn't leap again. The sparks died. The smoke cleared. Lin stood on a skylight all hazed with soot and crazed with heat at its edges, with blood smeared under her nose and burst blood vessels all around her eyes. She was shaking all over now, her arms wrapped tightly across herself, her fingers white.

“Lying,”
she said again, but her voice was shaking too, and all the conviction had gone from it.

“You know I'm not.”

The tears in Lin's eyes spilled over. They poured down her face, making pale tracks through dirt and blood.

“I—” she said, before the tears took her voice and left her mute, swallowing, struggling to speak. “I wanted to kill them. I did. I—everything had gone and I—there was nothing else and I—”

Elissa took the few steps between them, reached her sister. Under her hands, Lin's arms were cold, as if all her body heat had gone into the smoke and the fire.

“It was their fault,” said Lin. “
Their fault.
I couldn't think past making them hurt too.” She looked down at her hands, and a shudder went through her. “I was going to burn them. Lis, I was going to burn them. If you hadn't stopped me—” She shuddered again, looking at her hands as if she didn't
recognize them. “I don't
want
to be a monster. I don't, Lissa, I—”

“You're not a monster.”

“But I—I wanted to—I was going to—”

“I know. But you didn't. And you're not a monster. It's okay. It's okay.”

Lin's hands came up to grip Elissa's. “But the
link's gone
.” Tears choked her voice. “I don't know how to be human without it. Without you. All this time, I only knew how to behave because of you. But now—Lissa, without it, what am I? What might I do?”

Her hands were still cold, but where they touched Elissa's they'd warmed a little, taking blood heat from Elissa's body.

“You still have me,” Elissa said. “The link's gone, but I'm still here.”

“But—that thing in my brain—when it goes off, when it—”

“That's not you, that's something that SFI
did
to you. There'll be a way to fix it. There
will
. The brain
repairs
itself. That's what it
does
.”

“But if I hurt you . . . Lissa, if I hurt you . . .”

“We won't let you. They're working on fixing it, but until they do—Lin, you didn't give them any
time
. There'll be a way of keeping you from hurting me—of keeping any of the Spares from hurting people.”

“Okay.” Lin's voice was still wobbly. Her sore-looking, bloodshot gaze clung to Elissa's. “But, Lissa . . .” She swallowed, started again. “Lissa, the link's gone. It's not just being human. It's . . . all my life, that's the thing that connected me to you. You said we still had something, that we hadn't lost everything. You
said
. But—but—without it,
what
do we have? What are we going to do?”

Elissa's hands tightened on her twin's, feeling their returning warmth. She looked down at them, at their shape, identical to her own, knowing that Lin's fear, too, was like her own—not because they were sharing it through a link, but because she knew Lin, knew her sister, knew what made her afraid, or happy, or angry.

“I don't know yet,” she said. “But we'll work it out.”

THE SKY
could have been that of any planet.

From where Elissa sat, she could see neither forest nor mountain nor desert. Just the sky, stretching up and away forever, blue darkening to purple as, somewhere behind her, the sun slid toward the edge of the world.

There were plenty of other places she could have waited during this hour, but over the last three months this little room, furnished with almost nothing but its window, had become the place that drew her every time she came.

Against the indigo sky, a speck of light appeared. For a moment it could have been anything—a first star appearing above the Philomelen mountains, a firefly hovering above an ancient forest on Sanctuary, a raindrop lit by the blaze of a sunset on Syris II.

It was none of those things, and the sky Elissa was watching belonged to none of the places whose images had moved briefly through her memory. She stood, going to the window
to see the descending spark more clearly. It was a spaceship, returning to Sekoia. To a planet renewed.

The ship hurtled toward her, resolving itself from a spark to a flare, a fiery bird of prey, diving in the light of the setting sun toward Central Canyon City, toward the spaceport plateau that Elissa's window looked out on.

A scant distance above the roofs of the spaceport buildings, the ship—one of Sekoia's smaller spacecraft—pulled out of its dive, looping briefly upward before, rockets flaring, it began to descend again, so controlled that it seemed to float for a moment above the landing pad before it settled to the ground, dust boiling up around it.

Elissa grinned—
nice landing
—and wasn't surprised when, a few minutes later, the door at the base of the ship opened, and even at this distance, she recognized her brother in the familiar figure of the exiting pilot.

The distance was too great for her to see his face, but the buoyancy with which he jumped to the ground made her pretty sure that he, too, was grinning.

Bruce had faced trial on Philomel, but by the time he did there'd been a million factors the court had been forced to consider—all of them more important than sentencing him according to the usual laws. Those factors had expedited his trial, but by the time it came, a month after the crime he was being tried for, he was already one of the public faces of the recently convened Sekoia Recovery Group.

Even Elissa, who'd guilt-tripped him into that first press interview out of desperation and sudden instinctive conviction, hadn't anticipated its results.

Bruce, tall, good-looking, speaking from the shattered background of a glittering career, talking, with genuine misery in
his eyes, about how he'd realized, too late, what he'd done to his sister—
both
his sisters—because he hadn't been able to see Spares as human, had caught the consciousness—and conscience—of Sekoia's scattered, fractured population.

That first interview had sparked an instant clamor of demands from Sekoian citizens to actually see the Spares—not in distant shots of shell-shocked victims being led out of facilities, but as real people. And
that
had led to Elissa and Lin—plus a bunch of other twins and the
Phoenix
crew and Cadan's parents and what felt like half the psychologists on Philomel—being summoned to a whole flurry of behind-the-scenes discussion in order to find the Spares who had acclimatized the quickest, who would be able to come across in interviews as the most “normal.”

In the end, Jay was one of those chosen. From a room on Philomel, and with Samuel sitting next to him, he'd handled the initial five-minute interview a whole lot better than Elissa would have thought. He and a handful of other Spares had done so well, in fact, that the demand to see them had turned into demands for them to return to Sekoia, to return home.

And as public opinion changed, as Sekoia's attitude toward Spares turned from one of suspicion, revulsion, and fear to one of sympathetic interest, there was less unrest, fewer riots. Sekoian citizens began to step forward to offer volunteer policing, transport, donations of previously hoarded food. IPL forces revoked the curfews and dialed back on the rationing.