Unravel (10 page)

ELISSA TURNED
around. Lin stood just inside the doorway, her toes lined up where the edge of concrete met the sand, as if she couldn't step outside without Elissa's invitation. She was shivering, her arms wrapped around herself, her lips bloodless.

“I'm sorry,” she said before Elissa could speak. “I'm sorry for what I did, I'm sorry I made you angry, I'm sorry I made you not want to talk to me.” Her words fell over one another, shaking as much as she was shaking. “I don't know how to make it okay, I don't know what to do, but if you tell me I'll do it. I'll fix it. I'll make it better. Please stop being angry. Please tell me what I have to do.”

For a minute they stared at each other. For a minute everything—the hot metallic smell of fuel residue, the gritty breath of the wind, the floodlights that cut the night into harsh-edged shadows—combined to tip Elissa into a sensation
of déjà vu so intense it was like flashing back to the moment she'd first met Lin.

That had been like this too—this beyond-strange feeling of staring into a face that was at once entirely familiar and utterly alien.
I know you, but I don't. I don't understand what you are, how you think, why you're here. . . .

There were tears in Lin's eyes, unshed, a gleam in the harsh, colorless lights.

The moment broke. Elissa wasn't looking at a weirdly alien-familiar face. She was looking at her sister, her twin, someone whom she might not understand, but whom she knew, whom she loved.

“It's okay,” she said, and with the words, with the deliberate step away from anger, the remorse she'd been trying not to feel rushed over her.
I shouldn't have left her like that, not understanding why, not knowing if I'd ever speak to her again. A few minutes, while I got myself together, was okay—that was fair. But leaving her for all this time, that was just cruel. And I knew it was. I knew and I wouldn't listen.

Lin was shaking her head, all vehemence and panic. “It's not okay. You're angry and you won't talk and I don't know how to fix it. But I will, Lissa, I
will
fix it if you tell me—”

“Lin, it is okay. I'm talking to you. I'm sorry I didn't before. I know you don't understand.”

In the corner of her vision as she spoke, Cadan was moving quietly, tactfully away into the shadows along the building. A few seconds more and a farther door clunked shut.

“I won't do it again,” Lin said. “I won't use my power like that, I won't make you help me—”

“Lin, listen. I was going to explain—”

Lin shook her head again. “You don't have to explain. I'll
just promise. I'll just promise not to do it—”

“Do what? What are you promising not to do?”

“Any of it. All of it. Anything that makes you angry—”

“Lin, come on. You can't promise if you don't understand exactly what it was.” Elissa caught back a sigh before her sister heard it. This—Lin promising not to do something almost in the same breath as she admitted she didn't know what she'd done—it would be funny if it weren't so awful. The thought came, as it had before:
No one should matter that much to someone.

“It was you using the link,” she said. “I don't blame you for attacking the ships yourself—I'm not angry about that. It was you using the link, making me attack the ships with you, when I'd said I didn't want to. You need to not do that again. Like, ever.”

“Okay. Okay. I won't.” Lin's words tumbled over the end of Elissa's sentence. “I won't do it again.”

“I don't know if I can even explain why it matters so much. . . .”

“You don't have to—”

“No, I'm going to, I just can't think of how right now.”

Lin shook her head. “You don't need to. I won't. I won't do it again. I didn't know it would make you so angry. I know now. I won't do it again.”

Elissa suppressed another sigh. It would be easier to just leave it at that, to avoid tangling herself up in explanations and analogies that would never quite fit. But she couldn't. Partly because if Lin didn't grasp
why
she shouldn't, Elissa couldn't be sure that, under stress, she wouldn't do exactly the same thing again. Partly . . . oh, it just wasn't fair to ask Lin to do things if she didn't know why. It wasn't fair to get
her to obey rules that—to her—seemed arbitrary, out of nothing but fear of making Elissa angry. Lin might sometimes seem like a child, but she wasn't one, and it wasn't fair to treat her as if she were.

Elissa took a breath, thinking of how to get Lin to relate, thinking of the right words. “I
want
to explain,” she said. “Listen, you know how you feel about being, like, held down—controlled?”

Every one of Lin's muscles seemed to tighten. “Yes,” she said.

“That's kind of what I feel about you linking us when I said not to.”

Lin's head snapped up. “No you
don't.
That's
not
how it was! You
don't
feel that!”

Anger flashed over Elissa, heating her hands, her face.
Don't you tell me how I feel!

She set her teeth against showing it, forced it down. “I know that's not how it was. I
know
what they did to you was so much worse. I'm saying, it's—
kind of
—how it
felt
. To me.”

Lin's face was uncomprehending, her eyes confused. “But it can't have. Those people—I hated them. I would never have let them touch me if I'd had the choice. You—you don't hate me.” Her voice quavered suddenly.

Even through the anger she was still fighting not to show, Elissa couldn't bear to leave Lin unreassured. “Of course I don't hate you. Lin, I'm not saying you're
like
them—”

“And I've linked to you a million times, and it never made you angry before. Not even when it hurt you.”

“Yeah, I know. That's why I'm saying I know it wasn't the same—you weren't acting the way they did. But it's
how I felt
.”

“Even though”—Lin shook her head as if trying to shake the
words into a pattern that made sense—“it's so much
smaller
? Even though it was just once, and it was to help us, and—”

“Yes.”
The anger Elissa was trying to keep back escaped into her voice, giving it a broken-glass edge. “It doesn't feel so much smaller to me.”

“Okay.” Lin frowned. Her eyes met Elissa's. “I don't get it. I'm sorry. I get that it matters to you, though, and like I said, I don't want you to be angry. I'll try.”

“No. Not
you'll try
. That's like me saying that I'll try . . . oh, I don't know . . . that I'll try to not to drop a nutri-machine on your head.”

Their eyes met. Lin's lips curled upward at the corners before she forced them back to a somber expression. Elissa's own lips twitched.

“No ‘trying,' ” she said. “Just
no
. Just you won't do it.”

“I'll—” Lin broke off, then nodded. “Okay. I won't do it.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. Yes. I promise.”

“Thank you,” said Elissa. Inside, she was still a jumble of residual anger and pain—and a horrible, out-of-control feeling that nothing in her life was quite working how she wanted it to—but, faced now with the need and vulnerability on her twin's face, the only thing she could do was push it all aside, let it wait for later when she could deal with it. “And Lin, listen, I shouldn't have—”

She broke off. Lin wasn't listening. Or at least she wasn't listening to Elissa. She'd tilted her face upward, the floodlights slicking the residue of tears on her cheekbones with a pale gleam. “A flyer,” she said.

Elissa was dragging open the door of the building before she knew she was moving.
Not again. They can't be coming back
so soon. Lin just promised . . . but I don't know, I can't trust that she won't crack under that pressure again. . . .

The door stuck. Elissa dug her heels into the soft sand and wrenched sideways at it, and it came free. Then she was running back down the corridor, Lin at her heels.

The door to the dining area opened more smoothly, free from drifting grains of sand creeping into its mechanism, and they shot into the room. Faces turned, the sound of conversation died.

“What is it?” The question came in several different voices, each one charged with urgency, but it was Cadan whom Elissa answered.

“A flyer.” If they'd been in private, she'd have added
Lin says so
, but not within earshot of everybody, not without knowing how they'd react to hearing that someone with electrokinesis was among them.

All over the dining area, people surged to their feet, grabbing up food platters and half-full cups, making for the exits that were marked with green emergency arrows.

Cadan was halfway across the room. “The ship. Both of you, get to the ship. Felicia, Markus—”

Lin interrupted. “It's not attacking.”

“How do you know?” Although Cadan spoke sharply, he dropped his voice so his words didn't reach beyond the twins. “Lin, is it armed?”

“It has firepower, but it's not . . .” Lin automatically lowered her voice to the level Cadan had used, screwing up her eyes as she tried to explain. “It's not . . . it's not active. I don't know if they use codes like us, but . . . whatever they use, they haven't.”

Cadan frowned for a second, making sense of the confused
sentence. “You're saying it's not a danger to us?”

“I don't know
that
,” said Lin, sounding indignant, forgetting to keep her voice low. “It might be a danger. All I know is—”

“That it's not going to be firing on us?” Cadan sounded as if he were fighting with both irritation and amusement. “That's fine, that's all I—”

But now Miguel interrupted him. He'd been one of the people—like those in pilot uniforms, Elissa noticed now—who hadn't fled the room. He'd pulled a handheld out of his pocket instead, unfolded it to four times its size, and had been scanning it, his head tipped sideways to catch the signals—messages?—coming through the earpiece he wore. But he'd obviously still picked up on what Cadan and Lin were saying.

“She's right,” he said. His voice was blank, and as he raised his head from the handheld screen, his gaze rested on Lin with incredulity. “What the SFI were using them for . . . what people have been saying since . . . we knew there must be some kind of psychic energy. But . . . that? Is
that
what she can do—read electronic information?”

Cadan's eyes, full of sudden rueful amusement, met Elissa's.
One of the things she can do.
The words hovered, unspoken. “Yes,” Cadan said.

Miguel gave him a sharp glance. “And the other Spares?”

“I don't know.” A pause. Cadan spread his hands. “Genuinely. I don't.”

After a moment Miguel nodded, accepting it . . . or choosing to let it go. “Anyway,” he said, “she's right. It's okay. They're sending us their signal. It's IPL.”

When Elissa and Lin got outside, the flyer was just coming into
view. The cloud cover had cleared since earlier, and the flyer was a dark shape against the stars, tipped with light at the end of its wings, its tail. It described a huge lazy circle overhead, curving down, filling the night with the sound of its engines, and, almost before Elissa had grasped that it had come—that
they
had come—it had touched neatly down on the landing space at the far end of the base. For a moment it stayed in the position in which it had landed, belly down, wings out, not much different from an airplane in miniature, then its nose lifted and the whole ship tipped up until it was angled toward the sky, ready for instant take off.

Elissa had seen official IPL craft back on Sanctuary—both the ships built for spaceflight and the flyers for use within planetary atmospheres—but she hadn't seen that particular mechanism in action before. She glimpsed Markus's approving, lifted eyebrows, and the appreciative smile curling one corner of Cadan's mouth.

She did recognize the sleek, distinctive shape, and the broad white stripe that ran over nose, wings, and tail, reflecting brilliantly in the floodlights that came from the base. IPL's aircraft had been modeled, so people said, after a type of bird, long extinct, its name forgotten, one of the species that hadn't survived the emigration from Old Earth. A bird that had, apparently, once served as a symbol of peace.

The symbol might have had more power, thought Elissa—a random, out-of-nowhere thought—if it weren't for the guns that edged each side of the ship's underbelly. But she wasn't stupid enough to think peace could come without firepower. And in the place Sekoia had become, and with people intent on hurting her and Lin and Cadan and the crew, she couldn't pretend that the sight of all that weaponry—all that
protection
—didn't send relief flooding through her.

Now the crew of the
Phoenix
could be absorbed into the larger structure of IPL. They'd share their security, be directed to the places where they could actually
help
, not just be thrown into reacting as they had today.

We're not ready to be solo heroes. At least, I'm not, and Lin can't be allowed to try.

Under the wing of the flyer, the edges of a doorway opened in what had looked like an unbroken silver-colored surface. Two armed officials—their identical white uniforms and close-fitting helmets meant that Elissa couldn't tell if they were men or women—jumped out and came to attention on either side of the doorway. A smaller—much smaller—figure followed them.