Unravel (36 page)

All at once, everything about what he was saying—his tone of voice, the way he refused to see why she might have a problem with confiding in his parents, the fact that, just as his mother had, he seemed determined to emphasize exactly how temporary their relationship was—was more than she could bear to listen to.

She shot to her feet. “You're right,” she said. “You don't.”

She turned on her heel and marched across the lobby to the internal doors. Cadan said nothing. He didn't try to call her back, and she didn't look around. She slammed her hand on the doorpad, the doors sprang open, and she walked through them without even glancing back.

The corridor walls were so shiny white that Elissa's reflection, a shadowy shimmer in the slight curve of each wall, kept pace with her as she marched down flight after flight of stairs, down one corridor after another.

The fury stayed with her, a heat behind her eyes, a burning in her hands, all-encompassing. It left no room for anything more than just a suggestion of coldness sinking through her stomach, the merest hint that there were emotions much worse than anger waiting to envelop her.

Cadan had
asked
her who she'd like to talk to. He'd
asked
her, for goodness' sake! Elissa stuffed her hands in her pockets, a swift, jerky motion. The stupid irony of it all was that it was he who'd have been her first choice even as short a time ago as this morning. And the
other
stupid irony was that she'd
wanted
him to be jealous, had wanted the reassurance that he cared that much.

But not when I need him not to be!

Elissa shoved her hands farther into her pockets, not caring if she wrecked the seams.
Fine
, so she wasn't being totally rational here. Who would be? After this day from hell, and then getting all that patronizing advice from Cadan's mother—
no one
would be rational after that.

If you'd told Cadan, if he knew what his mom had said to you, he'd never have suggested you talk to her.

And great, so now a bit of her mind
was
being rational—and apparently determined to be fair to Cadan, too. Because it was true. She might be furious with him right now, but she knew that he wouldn't have suggested she talk to his mother if he'd had any idea of the talk they'd already had.
And if I'd told him, he'd have understood why I was so upset.

Struggling with contradictory thoughts, and with the nasty feeling that as well as being angry with Cadan and his mother, she might need to be angry with herself, Elissa kept walking, shoulders hunched, head down.

She was most of the way along the last corridor and nearly at the double doors leading to the main waiting area, before she realized someone was standing outside them. Her brain registered who it was while she was still lifting her head to look.

No. Not now. Really not now.
She said it out loud, feeling the need to speak the words whether it was actually necessary or not. “Not now, Lin.”

She hadn't yet looked up fully when Lin spoke. “
Yes
now.”

Elissa met her sister's eyes, surprise jolting through her at Lin's tone. If she'd expected anything, it would have been the tears and remorse of the previous day. But there were no tears in Lin's eyes. And no remorse, either. Instead they were blank and blazing with rage.

Oh for goodness' sake, what's
she
got to be angry about?

But Elissa didn't get any more time than that to wonder.

“You're not to talk about me to him!” Lin's voice shook. Again, not with distress, but with absolute, consuming anger.

Elissa put up a hand. “Lin, I don't want to
talk
—”

“Then don't! Don't talk to him! Don't tell him about me!”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Elissa snapped. “You mean Cadan?”

“Of course I mean Cadan!”

“And I'm not supposed to
talk
to him?” Elissa pulled her hands out of her pockets so she could fold her arms, a wave of fresh irritation sweeping over her. God knew she didn't
want
to talk to Cadan right now, but it wasn't Lin's business either way.

“Not about me!” Lin's voice quivered on the edge of a shriek. “I don't want to be shared! I'm your twin, not his! You're allowed to be angry and upset with me—he's not. He's not
allowed
!”

Elissa gave an exasperated sigh. She was so seriously out of patience with having to handle Lin's emotions.
If it's not bad enough I've got to deal with my own . . .

“Jeez, Lin,” she said, “talking to him about you doesn't mean you're his—” She stopped.

Just now, she
had
been talking to Cadan about Lin. About being angry with her, about being upset—God, more than
upset
. But how did Lin know? It wasn't the first time Elissa had gone off to be alone with Cadan. How did Lin know that this time it had been to talk about her?

A fresh rush of anger rose inside her. “You were
listening
? You were listening to
me and Cadan
?”

There wasn't the slightest bit of compunction in Lin's expression. “How else am I meant to know if you're talking about me?”

The one last thing that might have tempered Elissa's anger—the possibility that Lin's listening in had been inadvertent—evaporated. Blind fury rose through her like sheets of flame. When she looked at Lin, her eyes were so blurred she could no longer see her sister's face. “You did it
deliberately
?”

Lin shrugged. “Like I said, how else am I meant to know—”

“You're
not
meant to! You're
not meant to know
! When people are alone they're supposed to be private, what they're
talking
about is meant to be private. That's the
whole point
! If I'm talking to someone and you're not there, you don't listen in! You don't spy on me!”

Now Lin's voice rose all the way to a shriek. “But you were talking about
me
! You're not supposed to talk to him about me!”

Elissa threw her hands out, so furious she felt she'd explode if she couldn't express it in movement as well as words. And now she was shouting too. “I'm not the problem here! It's not
me
. It's
you
. You're not meant to know
what
I'm talking about!”

For a moment they both stared at each other, locked in an equal outraged lack of understanding.
It's like trying to get through to an alien.
The thought rose through Elissa's brain, as thick and black as the smoke from burning rocket fuel.
Like trying to talk to someone . . . God, someone who's not even human.

“What?” said Lin.

Her gaze clashed with Elissa's, furious and outraged. And now, as well as anger, there was hurt there too. Hurt as deep as if Elissa had stabbed her.

Oh, so now
she's
hurt? She drags me into killing the people she wants to kill. She refuses to help me save the people I want to save. She listens in to my private conversations with my boyfriend—and
into my Private. Freaking. Thoughts—and then it's
her
feelings that get hurt by finding out what she wasn't even meant to know in the first place?

She didn't try to hide what she was thinking, didn't try to soften the impact of what Lin had just read—was still reading—in her mind.

“You heard me,” she said.

For a long moment everything stilled. Hurt rose like a slow tide in Lin's face. All the blood seemed to drop from under her skin. Elissa watched the pain pour into her sister's eyes and didn't care, didn't
care
, it was only fair that Lin should get hurt as well—

Then all at once it was as if the pain had bled far enough to reach Elissa, too. She was still angry, but this was
Lin
, her sister, her twin. She swallowed as much as she could of her anger, managed to reach a hand out toward her. “Lin, look, I'm sorry—”

Lin flinched. Actually flinched, as if the touch of Elissa's hand would bring further pain. Her face was blank with hurt. She didn't say anything. She shook her head, backing away, then turned and walked off down the corridor, the way Elissa had come. She moved clumsily, as if her feet, her whole body, had gone numb.

“Lin,” said Elissa, but her sister didn't turn around. Her feet stuttered once on the shiny-clean floor, as if, whether she willed it or not, she couldn't help but respond to Elissa's voice, but she continued walking, down the corridor and around the corner at the far end.

Elissa took a step back, found the wall behind her, and slumped against it, dragged down by a weight of misery so strong it felt like exhaustion.

It'll be okay,
she told herself.
I'll sort things out with Lin, I'll make it better. She has to forgive me, she always has to forgive me, just like I always have to forgive her. And once we're off-planet . . .

As it had once before, the idea seemed like the only bright light in wastes of darkness. Getting off-planet. Getting onto the
Phoenix
, breaking out of Sekoia's atmosphere into the cold, clean, safe emptiness of space.

Here, on Sekoia, she and Lin were being continually forced to use their link. And every time they did, every time one of them reached out to the other, to communicate, to tap into Lin's electrokinesis, the telepathy that had drawn them together wound itself still tighter. Like the strangle-grass that grew in patches on the desert outside Central Canyon City, that you had to burn to the roots if a patch of it seeded itself in your garden or window boxes or even in an edge of dirt collected in a crack between wall and window . . .

Once we've left, once we're not dealing with crisis after crisis, we'll stop reading each other's minds like this. We'll stop passing emotions back and forth. If the link was meant to die off with distance and disuse, it must be that it's getting stronger just because we have to keep using it.

The image of burning a patch of strangle-grass came to her. It was a native Sekoian plant, back from before the planet had been terraformed. If you touched a lighter to the tips of its lethal, spikelike blades, it would burn down to the ground, but it was super resistant—even fire would leave its root cluster unharmed, and within days it would be growing again. To kill it off entirely you had to run a narrow, sharp-ended tube beneath the base of the plant and pour a capful of acid into the funnel at the top of the tube so it would soak, smoking, into the ground and destroy the plant from the roots upward.
It was a legal obligation to do it, and there were strict penalties if you let a patch go, but the process was easy enough, and you could order the kit online—tube, funnel, acid, protective disposable gloves and goggles.

And it was a relief, knowing you'd done it right, knowing the plant wouldn't grow again.

Elissa moved her head sharply, shaking free of the image.
That's not what I'm thinking about, though. I'm not thinking about destroying the link. I wouldn't think about doing that, not ever. But this—what's been happening since we landed on Sekoia—this has to stop. I can't handle it anymore. I need my mind to be just my own again.

Having an identical twin was one thing. She'd been shocked to start with, but she'd gotten used to it, she'd adapted. This, though, was a whole other nightmare. She was starting to feel . . .
Ugh, what do I mean? What do I feel like?

What she meant came to her all at once, in frightening clarity.
This connection between us: It doesn't feel like just a link, something that can be made and unmade, something that's in the control of both of us—and of neither. It feels like it's hers. It feels like she's taking me over.

AS ELISSA
stepped out of the spaceport passenger shelter to cross to where the
Phoenix
waited on the flight pad IPL had cleared for Cadan's use, hot wind, gritty with sand and full of the scent of rocket fuel, swept across the plateau and into her face, dashing dust in her eyes, edging her tongue with an acrid taste. Although now the sun was sliding, a white-hot coin, down the fathomless blue of the sky, the plateau had been soaking up its heat all day, and every gust of wind was like the breath from a dragon's throat.

She screwed her eyes up, raising a hand to protect them, and at the corner of her vision saw Lin, like a mirror image, perform exactly the same gesture.

A hand made a pretty ineffectual shield. The dust blew past Elissa's fingers, crept under her eyelashes. Her eyes began to water, and she had to force herself to let the tears come, force herself not to instinctively scrub at her eyes, to let the liquid wash the dust away.