Unravel (7 page)

What?
It made no sense. What was Lin sorry for?

Then, as Lin made a lunge toward her and grabbed her hand in a death grip, Elissa knew.

“No! I said
no
!” She tried to wrench her hand away, but Lin had hold of it with more strength than Elissa would have thought she could spare. She swung around, pulling Elissa with her, to look back up at the sky, to find the ship.

No. I won't let it happen. I won't make the link. I won't—

A jerk. Too late. Just like before, the link clicked into place. She was looking through Lin's eyes, experiencing the world in Lin's body.

She was shaking, her legs trembling beneath her, her lungs burning as they tried to pull in more air than they could manage. She was looking at the sky through a haze of red. Her hand—
Lin's hand
—clenched tight around her sister's, grasping it with every last reserve of the strength left in her body. Her thoughts—
Lin's thoughts
—burned in her mind as her breath burned in her chest.
She has to do this with me. She has to.

She scanned the sky, then focused on the ship that had nearly—twice—escaped her. Sent her mind along the electrical connections, forcing the power up, up, up, feeling the circuits heat and heat and break like tiny explosions.

And then another explosion, a huge explosion, like fireworks in her brain, behind her eyes.

Flames in the sky. Falling metal. Smoke and dust and gouts of liquid fire—the fuel burning as it fell.

Elissa snapped back to herself, a scream bursting against the inside of her head, her throat throbbing with the silent sound. Once again there were flames and smoke all around the
Phoenix
. But this time
she'd
done it. This time she'd
felt
, not just seen, it happen. Felt, too, that firework burst of triumph. Lin's emotions, not hers, but it didn't matter. She'd
felt
it. Felt triumph, delight, in doing something that had killed someone.

Lin, white with exhaustion, crumpled to her knees in front of her. Blood was smeared across her face—her nose was bleeding. For the first time Elissa saw her sister looking hurt, vulnerable, and her immediate instinct wasn't to help or comfort.

You did that to me. I can't believe you did that to me.

She didn't know if the thoughts showed in her expression, but she could see when Lin's eyes dropped from her own.
Ivan's face, immobile with shock, turned from one of them to the other.

Then, as if from far away, only just penetrating through the feeling of cotton wool in her ears, Elissa heard the beep of the com-unit. And Cadan's voice—alive, unhurt, for that moment the only good thing in the whole world—saying, “Attention,
Phoenix
. It's over. Two attackers down, and one in retreat. It's done. It's over.”

“I HAD
to,” said Lin.

They were standing outside the
Phoenix
, amid a nightmare jumble of blackened, twisted metal, of still-burning fuel puddles. The reek of rocket fuel and smoke and dust coated the inside of Elissa's nose, bitter at the back of her throat.

Not far away, metal against metal whined and screeched as the hull of a third downed craft was cut open. It had been hit, and had crashed, but miraculously, unlike the first two, hadn't burst into flames, so there was a chance the pilot was still alive. Cadan was over there, and Markus. Felicia had joined a small extinguisher-wielding ground crew, and Ivan had disappeared the moment they exited the
Phoenix
.

“Lissa, please. Look at me.”

Elissa turned her head. Something even bitterer than rocket-fuel fumes dried the inside of her mouth, made her throat and chest and stomach tighten as if there weren't enough oxygen in the dirty air around her.

“I
had
to,” said Lin again. “Lissa, please, say you understand.”

“I don't.” The words came out in a thread of sound, as if her throat could only open enough to let just that much of her voice out. “I don't understand.”

“Lissa . . .”

Once she'd said those words, she could manage to follow them with more. “I don't understand how you could do that to me. I said
no
and you did it anyway. I don't understand, Lin. You
didn't
have to, and I
don't
understand.”

A flush climbed into Lin's face, dyeing just the skin under her eyes. “Then why was it okay when I did it before?”

“Before?
When
before?”

“When we were being attacked on the
Phoenix
! Cadan let me, he let me take the controls and fire at the SFI ships! You didn't give me that look back then. Is it only okay to kill people when
he
says it is? Am I supposed to have some kind of license in that, too?”

“I'm not talking about it being okay to kill people!”

Lin threw her hands out. “Yes you are! That's the thing you've always said, the thing I'm not supposed to do—”

“
No
, Lin! Jeez, we were being attacked—”

“When?”

“
Both
times. Of course I don't blame you—or Cadan, or anyone—for firing back. It's not that you probably killed people—”

“Probably?”
Lin gave a furious laugh. “Probably,
nothing
. Didn't you see what I did to those ships?”

“
Yes
, I saw! Yes, I know what you did! It's not
about
that, Lin. It's not about
you
killing people.” Somewhere, very faint on the screen of her mind, a word flickered, uninvited,
unwelcome.
Hypocrite.
She refused to acknowledge it. She wasn't being a hypocrite, she
wasn't
—

“Then
what
?” said Lin.

“It's about you making
me
kill them!” She'd thought she was mostly just angry, but the words came out on a sob, and when she tried to say something else tears choked her and she had to stop.

“Lissa—”

Elissa shook her head, putting her hands up to her face, trying to get control of herself. She was furious, and beyond furious, but she couldn't afford to let herself fall to pieces now. The attack was over, but God knew when there'd be another one, and they still needed to get themselves safely—somehow—to the city, to the closest IPL command. But if they couldn't fly, and couldn't use the
Phoenix
, there was no way of
getting
safely to the city.

Thinking of all the reasons why she couldn't fall apart wasn't exactly helping her
not
fall apart. She tried to shut them out, tried to just breathe, tried to think of the fact that Cadan was alive and unharmed, that the people in the base hadn't been killed. . . . But that was it. She'd run, for the moment, out of good thoughts.

“Lissa . . .”

Elissa shook her head again, not looking at her sister. “Not now. I can't talk about it right now.”

“But I—” Tears thickened Lin's voice. “Lissa, don't be angry. I can't bear it when you're angry with me.”

Then stop making me angry!

The words were on her tongue, but she refused to say them. She wasn't going to
have
this conversation. Lin might not be capable of respecting her—oh my
God
—her right not
to
kill
people, but she could damn well respect her right not to talk if she didn't want to.

She didn't answer Lin. She didn't look at her. There was, God knew, nowhere she could really go to get away from her. Partly because they were in the middle of the desert and partly because of—
oh yeah
, the telepathic link that bound them. But she could walk away. And she did. Through the patches of blackened smoking sand, through the twisted lumps of wreckage, out to just beyond the end of the buildings, past where the light reached, into the very edge of the night that had fallen across the world.

Behind her, metal still screeched, people called to one another, fire extinguishers hissed onto flames. Her hands still tingled with the memory of the power—Lin's power—rushing through her. But as she stepped out of the light, she felt as if she were stepping away from the noise, too. From the noise, from the memories, and from the awareness of how, in the space of five minutes, everything had changed.

When the wrecked flyer was cut open, it turned out the pilot wasn't dead. But judging by the rush of frantic activity going on as she was lifted out, she was badly hurt. Standing at the edge of the light, arms crossed over her chest, Elissa watched as the limp, uniformed figure was stretchered into one of the buildings.
She's not dead. She's hurt, but they'll have medical facilities—she could survive, she could. And Cadan's not even hurt. And I
didn't
kill anyone, not really. It was Lin's mind overriding mine, it was the link. It wasn't me.

Which was all true, but somehow didn't help at all.

Some half hour later, when the wounded had been taken away for patching up and the burning fuel reduced to
smoking, oily inkblots on the sand, Cadan came over to her.

“Lissa? How're you doing?”

Really not good.
But something held her lips closed. Loyalty—despite everything—to Lin? Or shame, for what Lin had forced her to do?
I've gone through this already! It wasn't me, it's not my fault.
But the thought had no force to it. It felt like a fiction, like an excuse.

“I'm okay.”

He smiled at her. “As much as you can be, huh? Miguel's offered us dinner in the base, and Ivan's been carting a bunch of our prepacks across to their nutri-machines, so we needn't feel guilty about sharing their food. They've had to institute rationing, of course. But, so Miguel says, that's no different from the city.”

“There's rationing in the
city
?”

Cadan had put his arm around her, and now he turned, bringing her with him as he moved toward the buildings. “Yeah. IPL declared official rationing in place two weeks ago.”

“But that's
crazy
. It's hardly been longer than a month!”

“Yeah, I'm with you. When I think of the city as it was when we left, I can't believe they're anywhere near running out of food yet. I guess it's like Miguel says, the panic buying got out of control. Apparently, the public nutri-machines all got raided to restock people's private ones. So IPL instituted rationing, and now people are lining up for the sort of stuff our families used to get auto-delivered. Milk, you know? And dry mixes, and those curly-grain-vitamin things Bruce and I used to kick up such a stink about being made to eat?”

His tone was light, but Elissa couldn't get past what he was telling her.
Rationing.

It made sense, sort of, if the panic buying had been really
crazy. But all the same, IPL doing that so soon . . . it was like forcing Sekoia fifty years into its past, making people relive the time when faulty terraforming had left their planet on the brink of environmental disaster.

People don't panic-buy unless they're frightened. So they were frightened to start with . . . and then IPL hit them with food rationing.
Food
rationing, on Sekoia, with our history . . .
Hadn't IPL seen that doing that would make people even
more
frightened?

By the time they reached the entrance to the building, most other people, including the crew and—thank God—Lin, had disappeared inside it. Cadan slid open the first door they reached, using the emergency handle to drag the metal panel across rather than passing his hand over the sensor at its side. Elissa blinked at him, surprised, before she realized the tiny light that normally glowed above the sensor panel was dark. The sensor had been turned off.