Unravel (12 page)

THEY WENT
on board the
Phoenix
and made their way to the dock where
Shuttlebug Two
waited.

In Elissa's hand, Lin's was still like ice. And there seemed to be ice throughout Elissa's body, too. Hearing that Spares were being attacked, killed, had been bad enough, but knowing that someone, some awful, conscienceless group, wanted to put them back to being
used
was so horrific she didn't even know how to think about it.

I never thought of that. I knew we'd be coming back to danger, but not that kind of danger. I was so stupid.

Given this new threat, it seemed like a terrible mistake to be leaving the
Phoenix
behind. The reason for doing it made sense—they'd come here to work with IPL, they wouldn't gain anything from refusing to cooperate with how they wanted them to travel around the planet. But the
Phoenix
had become her and Lin's home. In this crazy new Sekoia, where people did things that showed their previous behavior had
been nothing but a facade of civilization, the ship seemed like the only place of real safety, the only thing that represented—if necessary—escape.

Cadan tapped in the unlock codes at the shuttlebug dock entrance, and the doors slid back with a hush of displaced air. They filed through two independently operating air locks, then into the low-ceilinged shuttlebug. Leaving Felicia and Markus to seal the air lock that belonged to the shuttlebug itself—the
Phoenix
's air lock was set to seal itself a certain time after it had been used—Cadan went straight up the narrow center aisle to the pilot's seat and began to activate the controls.

Elissa eased her hand from Lin's and fastened herself into one of the twenty passenger seats that stood either side of the aisle, cold hands fumbling at the straps. Next to her, Lin, as she always did, was managing better, although from the look on her face, she was operating on autopilot.

Elissa reached out to her as soon as she'd strapped herself in. “Lin, it's okay. We're with IPL now. We're safe.”

Lin's face, shocked, blank, turned to hers. “We're not safe anywhere.” Her voice was a whisper. “People are trying to take us back to the facilities.”

“Not necessarily. Like Cadan said—”

Lin gave a little, helpless shrug. “How does Cadan know?”

“Lin . . .” But there was nothing she could say. She closed her hand tightly around her sister's, willing Lin's fingers to warm through, to relax. They'd been through much worse than this, had gotten through danger far more immediate. And now they were under IPL's protection, being taken to one of IPL's command centers, probably as safe as it was possible to be anywhere on the planet.

Oh God, though, it's not enough. We both chose to come back, we
both wanted to, but was I completely wrong to agree?

The shuttlebug's engines woke with a low roar that vibrated up through the floor, tickling the soles of Elissa's feet. The shutters across the windscreen slid back onto the dark desert and the star-pierced sky, the bulk of the
Phoenix
blocking out all but an edge of the light coming from the base.

From a small com-screen at Cadan's elbow, numbers flickered, tiny sparks of bright gold. Cadan double-tapped them and they stopped flickering, freezing in place. He moved his hand to his main screen, tapped with three fingers, and the numbers appeared there, to blink red for a second before they cycled through orange, amber, gold, finally turning a steady green. Elissa couldn't read them from where she sat—she was pretty sure they'd been designed too small for anyone aside from the person in the pilot's seat to be able to decipher—but she assumed they were the coordinates the commander had said she'd send.
Because we can only get to the city—our own city—by shadowing her flyer.
Resentment flared within her. Which was silly—like Cadan had said, they risked getting shot out of the sky if they went unauthorized into a no-fly zone. But all the same:
It's our city, not hers. We came here to try to help it, and we can't even enter it without her permission.

Metal scraped and clanged against metal as Cadan disengaged the clamps that held the shuttlebug locked close in its dock. The floor lurched a little. Then, one hand on the steering panel, Cadan eased the throttle forward. The floor took on a sudden slant toward the nose of the shuttlebug, and despite the five-point harness holding her securely in place, Elissa grabbed for the sides of her seat, needing to hold on to something as the floor tipped beneath her.

If she'd thought about it, she'd have known Cadan
wouldn't turn on the shuttle's gravity drive, not flying within the planet's own gravity, flat over the desert to the city. She'd once been used to this kind of sensation. She'd grown up on an overcrowded planet, in a city where, had traffic not made use of the full three dimensions, it would have come to a standstill long ago. She was entirely used to traveling by flyer, beetle-car, fast-moving slidewalk.

But the weeks of being on no vehicle but the
Phoenix
, with its steady, continuous gravity drive, had unacclimatized her.

The floor tipped more. For a moment, harness or not, death grip on the seat or not, it felt as if she would come out of her seat and fall helplessly toward the dark-filled windscreen.

But instead it was the shuttlebug that fell, in one smooth drop, swooping down and away from the side of the
Phoenix
.

The shuttlebug hovered for a moment, engines growling, then from overhead came the roar of the IPL flyer. Cadan took the shuttlebug up to follow it, so fast that Elissa's stomach dropped like a plummeting elevator. Her ears crackled, almost painful. They were way up in the darkness within seconds, the base a splodge of light below them, the stars suddenly extraordinarily bright.

The flyer tipped, Elissa's stomach lurched again, and then they were roaring through the night, high over the desert floor, back toward where a very distant glow was the only sign of the city in which Elissa had grown up.

The commander had left the com-channel between the two craft open. Miles before they neared the city, she initiated communication with the forces there, rattling off what was presumably a security code, a warning of their approach.
It's not a total no-fly zone. And if they can get authorization for the shuttlebug, why not for the
Phoenix
?

They descended in a narrowing spiral, down toward the glow of the spaceport. The rest of the city seemed very dark in contrast. Elissa was used to seeing it laid out like a glittering spiderweb: the silver lines of the pedestrian slidewalks and the brilliant cobalt monorails the beetle-cars ran on, the lights strung sparkling from building to building, the softer amber bloom of lamps down on the city floor. But now it was as if the spiderweb had been broken, as if all but a few strands had been swept away, as if the blooms had been trampled and crushed out of existence. It was a darkened city that stretched out beneath them. Little squares of light all over the city floor and dotted up the canyon sides spoke of lit windows in houses and apartments, but it was a world away from the nighttime blaze Elissa was used to.

Why is so much of the power out? The slidewalks and streetlamps are all run on solar power—no one's taken
that
away!

“So that's what curfew looks like,” said Ivan, behind her.

Felicia's response held a sharp note of surprise. “That's what it is? Who said?”

“Bryn mentioned it. You didn't hear?”

“I didn't. Seriously, Ivan, a
curfew
? They don't have the personnel to get those refugees to safety, but they have enough to enforce a curfew?”

“It's a whole-planet takeover,” Ivan said. “Pretty sure a curfew's standard IPL protocol. If they get resistance, that is. Riots, terrorism . . . you can see why they'd want to clamp down.”

“I can see, yes. It doesn't mean I think it's the right idea. Treating every Sekoian citizen like a criminal whether they are or not?”

“Oh, I'm with you. I know. But what're you gonna do? It's
a takeover. That's how they do it—how they've always done it before. And, you know, I don't suppose the populations of Endymion and . . . which were the others . . . ?”

“Galapagos and—”

“—Rin, yeah, I remember now. I don't suppose they liked it any more than Sekoia, but they did accept it.”

“Well, if you were an Endymion citizen, anything must have seemed better! They were living with the systematic disenfranchisement of transgender people, for God's sake. And Rin was on the verge of global famine. They'd probably have accepted imprisonment if it meant they could get a guaranteed half a meal a day. Sekoia, though—Ivan, I've lived here since I was nearly as young as the twins, and if I could sum up what the average Sekoian citizen believes, it would be ‘As long as I don't break the law, I'll have nothing to worry about.' I swear, most Sekoians think everyone's divided into two groups: decent people and criminals. And now IPL's treating them like they're
all
criminals? If that's not a recipe for disaster—”

Sudden pain jabbed through Elissa's eardrums, jerking her attention from the conversation. Lin flinched, putting her hands up to her ears.

“Swallow,” said Elissa, remembering long-past information Bruce and Cadan had given her. “It's the air pressure. It doesn't happen in spaceships, 'cause they adjust it for you. If you keep swallowing, it won't hurt so much.”

Lin screwed her eyes up, swallowing, swallowing again, fingers pressing just in front of her ears.

Elissa did the same, cupping her hands over her ears, swallowing against the pain, feeling her ears crackle as the air pressure shifted.

Then the spaceport lights rose around them, a bright, colorless ocean. The shuttlebug touched down. The pain in Elissa's ears dissipated, leaving no more than a faint ache that made her want to keep rubbing them.

Cadan touched the com-screen. “
Phoenix
to
Savior
. Permission to disembark, Commander?”

“Feel free to disembark, Captain,” came the commander's oddly inflectionless voice. Now that it was once again unconnected to a physically present person, Elissa found the voice difficult to hear as something that belonged to either a female or male.

Cadan unsnapped his seat belt and got to his feet.

Made clumsy by hurry, Elissa fumbled to undo her seat belt as Cadan went to the door at the back of the shuttlebug. She and Lin joined the rest of the crew as they gathered behind him.

If things went wrong, how were they ever going to get back to the
Phoenix
? They'd given up so much control already—it seemed suddenly terribly important to stay close together, to make sure they couldn't get separated. Then, a sudden, unnerving thought:
Why are we at the spaceport? Are they just going to push us onto a ship and off-planet? And if that's what they want to do, how are we going to stop them? How will we get back?

A little bit of her couldn't help feeling relief at the thought of being away from Sekoia, away from the people who wanted to hurt—or use—Lin. But she was kind of surprised at how strongly the rest of her rejected it. Despite the terror of finding out what was happening on Sekoia, what could happen to Lin, she didn't like the idea of running away. If it wasn't okay for Lin to be in danger, it wasn't okay for
any
Spare to be in danger.
We came back to help. If helping means
saving other Spares, then we're going to save other Spares. Even if it puts us at risk.

Cadan unsealed the air lock and went through into the small chamber, then tapped in the codes that would open the exit. Lights blinked from red to amber to green. Then the shuttlebug doors whooshed open, letting in a flood of light and a rush of hot air, full of dust and the scent of rocket fuel.

Cadan paused in the doorway, a silhouette against a wash of brightness. He was braced, not quite tense, but alert, his hand close to his hip, ready to go for his blaster—or, Elissa realized, the whip she'd seen him use with such devastating effect.

Then he froze. Clearly outlined in the spaceport floodlights, the hand near his hip clenched. Every cell in Elissa's body jumped, before she realized he hadn't gone for a weapon. Whatever he'd seen out there, it wasn't a threat.

“Cadan?” said Felicia, at his shoulder. “What—?”

Like an echo from outside the flyer, another voice came. A man's voice, one that seemed familiar but that Elissa couldn't immediately place. “Cadan?”

Cadan's hand dropped. He swung out of the doorway, and two strides took him from Elissa's sight.

“Who is it?” said Lin. Sudden interest seemed to have shaken her out of her shock. “Someone who knows Cadan?
Ivan
, I can't see
past
you!”

“Moving. Moving.” Ivan gave her a tolerant look over his shoulder as Felicia and Markus followed Cadan, then stepped down after them out of the shuttlebug.

Elissa hurried after him, suppressing the urge to push past.

She got down the steps and landed on concrete, which was warm enough that the heat came through the soles of her
shoes. For a moment the full impact of the floodlights blinded her, and she blinked, trying to see through a dazzle of tears. The crew were dark shapes in front of her, and beyond them was a confusion of more dark shapes.

She blinked again, and the shapes resolved themselves. Cadan had his arm around a tall woman who looked thirty or so years older than him, his free hand on the arm of a man who looked a similar age. They were both wearing the sort of protective jackets Elissa had seen Cadan wear to ride his skybike, and the woman's short fair hair was ruffled. Cadan was grinning, his whole face alight, more relaxed—
more at home
—than Elissa remembered seeing him.