Unravel (27 page)

It was, to be honest, a little scary. But she wasn't going to say that to Lin, not now.

“It's completely okay.” She kept her voice firm. “We
saved
everyone, Lin. That's not just okay, it's
amazing
.”

Lin looked up, a smile lighting her face. “Really?”

“Really.”

Far above them, the sky darkened. Elissa's muscles tightened—
the flyer!—
and she shot a look upward. But it was only a half-invisible skein of cloud, passing across the sky, briefly filtering the sunlight.

She looked away, dabbing up the last bits of chocolate from the wrapper of the second bar, but now her muscles wouldn't relax, and she found herself tipping her head back up toward the empty blueness, scanning the edges of the rooftops, aware of danger all over again. Beside her, Lin, too, watched the sky. And Cassiopeia. Only Felicia, gun in hand, kept her gaze moving from place to place.

It struck Elissa that despite her earlier euphoria at what their shared power could do, despite the fact that, as she'd said to Lin, they'd effected an escape for everyone, here they were,
again
, running away.

Even after the two bars, her stomach still felt empty, and now fatigue dragged at her limbs, together with a sudden feeling like despair. If this was what life on Sekoia was going to be like, it wasn't any wonder that IPL's answer was to move people like her and Lin off-planet.

Should we just give up and do what we're told? Give up and go?

No.
She set her jaw, straightening her shoulders and trying to relax her spine.
Not when we've just forced the commander to accept what we can do. Not when we've just saved not only ourselves, but seven other Spares and twins—and probably Cadan's parents, too.

She might listen to us now. I don't know how to fix Sekoia, but I
do
know that IPL's getting it wrong. I know—

Something arced through the air. Something that glinted dull gray in the sunlight, curving up from where it had come, from one of the alleyways, down toward the center of the square.

“Get down!” Felicia's voice, rising on a shout so urgent that it bypassed Elissa's conscious mind, throwing her flat on the ground as if Felicia had physically pushed her there.

The glinting object hit the ground near the center of the square, just past the playground. It exploded in a burst of fire.

The noise seemed to split Elissa's head apart. A sound like a thunderclap, like the sky tearing open.

The shock raced through the ground, through the building behind Elissa, into every bone of her spine. Her eardrums went as numb as if someone had slammed giant hands over them.

The people at the playground—children and adults—were thrown to the ground by the blast. The plastic slide gave a shudder, and Elissa saw the topmost part of it slip sideways, its edges dripping where something hot had sheared through the plastic, melting it on impact.

She couldn't hear anything beyond a massive rumble that seemed to go beyond sound and into sensation.

“What was that?”
Cassiopeia shrieked. She was lying close to Elissa, but again, Elissa couldn't hear her; she could only see the wide vowel shapes Cassiopeia's mouth made as she screamed. Then she realized that members of the commander's group were screaming too, silent mouths opening, silent lips stretched in ugly terror.

With an odd little fragment of her mind, she realized that she didn't want to scream. Once you'd heard that kind of explosion when you were on a
spaceship
, when it could mean the hull itself had been torn open and you were going to be sucked out into airless space, it wasn't quite so terrifying anywhere else. She
really
didn't want it to come again, though—

But it did come again. Another of the glinting gray objects sailed up from somewhere within one of the alleys. Flat on her belly, Elissa raised her head just enough to follow it, unable to pull her gaze away, feeling her eyes stretching so
wide they felt as if they'd never shut again.
A bomb? A grenade? And if they've found us, if these are the people we're running from, why aren't they coming out in the square?

The explosion was just as huge this time, although now Elissa's ears were so numb it couldn't numb them further. In the playground, parents had been struggling to their feet, clutching for their children. The explosion threw them flat once more.

Around Elissa, people grabbed onto one another or lay frozen, arms over their heads. Only the commander, Felicia, and Mr. Greythorn moved, rising to crouches, weapons drawn, each of them turning to scan the square, the entrances to the alleys.

Farther down the square, the sunlight blazed suddenly from Cadan's hair, jumped in glints from the gun he held. He wasn't out of the alley he'd come through. His arm blocked his group from coming farther; his whole body was tense, poised for action.

The commander moved, her gaze swinging past Cadan, past Mr. Greythorn, then halting, suddenly intent, on the alley behind Felicia's group, past where Elissa lay.
“Down! Keep down! Take cover!”
For all Elissa could hear, the commander might as well have been mouthing the words, but her lips moved clearly, and they—and still more, the frantic look on her face—got the message across. Elissa threw her arms across her head, pressing her face to the ground, knowing that beside her Lin and Cassiopeia were doing the same.

This time the explosion seemed to shake the world. A hundred darts of pain scattered across Elissa's bare hands and arms, pinged less painfully over her hoodie-covered shoulders. Her mouth opened in a gasp she felt but couldn't hear,
and she huddled tighter to the ground, clasping her arms over her head.
Cadan
. Was he okay? He'd been standing there, almost out in the open, when the commander shouted at them to get down. With terror that went through her like a knife, she thought,
It hit him. It hit him and he's dead.

She was shaking when she raised her head to peer over the shield of her arms.
Cadan? Oh God, Cadan, please don't be dead, please don't be—

The first thing she saw was blood.

THERE WAS
debris, too, broken bits of the off-white plaster of the buildings, pale jagged chunks of the pavement where something had hit it, splintering it all across to show the dark-ocher-colored earth beneath.

But it was the blood that filled Elissa's vision. The blood that drew her eyes, demanded her attention so exclusively that for an endless minute she couldn't see past it to anything else at all.

It was splashed across the ground in front of her, lipstick bright, lipstick shiny. Too red to be real.
Too much
of it to be real. That much—it was horror-movie blood. Not real life. You didn't see that much blood in real life. You
never
saw that much blood in real life. Not unless—Not unless someone—

Her heart stopped, her breath, even her own blood in her veins. She couldn't look past that splash of red, couldn't look farther to see where—
who
—it had come from.
Cadan was there. If he ran toward me as it happened—if he was running when the blast
came . . . And Lin was next to me, right next to me. It's one of them. The blood—it's one of them. I have to look to find out who.

She couldn't. She stayed flat, hands pressed on the ground without being able to feel the roughness beneath her palms, knowing she had to drag her gaze up from the blood, knowing she had to find out who she'd lost, which hole in her life she was going to have to face. Knowing, and yet not able to do it.

Then she looked up, and it wasn't Cadan or Lin.

Lin lay next to her, hands over her head, and Cadan was yards away still, just getting up from where the blast had knocked him over. The blood was coming from Felicia.

She wasn't dead. She was lying on her back, one leg crumpled under her, and as Elissa raised her head she saw Felicia's chest rise and fall in one long, labored movement. The blood came from her shoulder, wet and red where her sleeve had been ripped to shreds and skin showed around the deep wound, shiny-dark on the material all around it. It pulsed, a steady rhythm, flowing out and out. And—mercifully mostly hidden by the blood—the flesh of the wound lay open, like raw meat.

For a moment Elissa's whole body went into a spasm, like a giant hand clenching over her stomach, her bowels, her lungs and chest and throat. Sickness heaved through her in one huge wave, as if she were going to vomit up every scrap of everything she'd eaten for the last week.

She's going to die.

The next thought came, very cold and clear, as if from somewhere disassociated from the reeling nausea that had taken over Elissa's mind.
If I don't do something she's going to die.

And with that thought, the nausea receded.

Then I have to do
something! This is Felicia! This is Felicia, and she's going to bleed to death while I watch!

Elissa scrambled to her feet. Pain woke, stinging, all over her hands and arms, and when she looked down she realized she was bleeding too, in dozens of tiny cuts all over her unprotected skin. It looked like the way she remembered her knees and the heels of her hands looking when, as a child, she'd been taken to Reservoir View Park and had fallen on one of the paths. Unlike most of the city parks, Reservoir View had gritted paths to help with the draining of rainwater into the reservoir. The seven-year-old Elissa hadn't come across such paths before, hadn't thought to be careful. She could still remember how the grit had jabbed through her skin in hundreds of little sharp points, how each pinprick of blood had swelled into a shining bead.

The stuff that hit me—was it shrapnel? From the bomb? Is that what hit Felicia, too?
For the first time, then, she consciously saw the debris, the crumbs and shards of stone pavement and concrete building blocks, that lay all around her.
Not just shrapnel. Something exploded in the square—a bomb? Grenades? It—they—hit the pavement and exploded. If they'd hit Felicia direct, if they'd hit any of us . . .

The thoughts rattled through her head, an unhelpful distraction as she hurried across to where Felicia lay.

I have to help, but I don't know what to do. She's going to die, and I don't know what to do to stop it.

Felicia looked up at her, her face gray, her eyes murky. Her lips moved, and Elissa didn't know whether she was actually speaking or whether it was just that Elissa still couldn't hear.
“Pressure.”

Apply pressure. Apply pressure to the wound.
Elissa could have
smacked herself. She
knew
that. They'd been taught basic first aid at school—she
did
know what to do.

She dragged off her hoodie. Her hands stung, and the fabric stuck in little points of prickling-cold pain along her shoulders. Then she folded it, over and over, fingers fumbling with haste, trying to resist the desire to just crumple the whole thing into an ineffective ball and cram it over that horrible pulsing gash in Felicia's shoulder.

Lin was next to her, clammy fingers touching Elissa's arm to get her attention. As she looked up, she saw that Lin's lips were moving but she hadn't heard her, and realized that she was still deaf from the blast. Lin was stripping off her own hoodie, folding it in imitation of Elissa.

Elissa turned back to Felicia, aware vaguely that there were other people around them now, that Cadan was coming to one knee beside her. Her stomach lurched as she pressed the folded garment onto Felicia's shoulder. Felicia's body jerked and for an instant—
oh God oh God I'm hurting her!—
Elissa wanted to snatch the hoodie away.

She just managed not to do it, and then, warm and steady, Cadan's hand came down over hers, pressing her palm to the pad. His arm was equally warm and steady against her shoulder, and he wasn't dead, he wasn't even hurt, and he wasn't going to let Felicia die.

There was a high sound in her ears, continuous and shrill, not a ringing but close. Like the flood of panicked, confused thoughts, it was a distraction, something she had to push aside as she pushed down on the pad over Felicia's shoulder, feeling wet warmth begin to come up through it, knowing it was Felicia's blood, knowing that unless it stopped Felicia would bleed to death, and it was up to her
to stop it and she wasn't going to be able to . . .

Her thoughts were spiraling into panic again. She dragged in a long breath that shuddered in her chest, clenched her jaw, and continued to press down onto the pad. It was soaked all the way through now, Felicia's life pumping up through it, up onto Elissa's hands. . . .

“Lin,” she said, and couldn't hear her own voice. Either because she only thought she was talking, or because her ears still didn't work.
And if my ears don't work—
God, every thought apart from the panicked ones was coming so slowly, as if her brain were trying to run too many programs at once—
if my ears don't work, then Lin's ears probably don't work either, and even if I am talking she won't be able to hear me.