Unravel (48 page)

He broke off. Cadan had taken a swift step forward, unfolding his arms, and both his hands were clenched into fists.

Bruce barked out an angry, incredulous laugh. “You're going to try beating me up for the way I talk to my sister? Well, hasn't she got you pretty well hooked.” His lip curled. “She always did follow you around like a puppy. I guess now that she's with you, there's not much she won't do for you, is there?” The twist in his tone made it all too clear what he meant, and his disdain, the implication of what he was saying, went through Elissa like an electric shock.

“I think that'll do.” Cadan's voice was tightly controlled, and his hands hadn't relaxed so much as a millimeter.

Bruce laughed again. “You're not going to hit me, then, Mr. Gallant Boyfriend?”

Cadan let out a careful breath, then shrugged, his hands relaxing, bit by deliberate bit. “Unfortunately, my behavior is constrained. I'm on duty here.”

All the laughter drained from Bruce's face. “Yeah, of course.
You
managed to keep your career, didn't you.” It wasn't a question. There was naked fury in the glance he gave them both. “You broke every freaking law you came across.
You
”—he sent a vicious nod Elissa's way—“broke our mother's heart, and Cadan's still ended up with the career, and
you've
ended up with the boyfriend you always wanted.” He took a step away, about to turn on his heel, and Elissa suddenly realized it wasn't just fury in his face, but misery. “You wrecked our world,” he said. “You wrecked lives all over the place, and you don't even care because you got what mattered to you.”

He strode away, back stiff, half a head taller than nearly everyone in the crowd, in his uniform that wasn't a uniform,
and disappeared through the doors he'd come in by.

Oh hell.
Elissa dropped her face into her hands. She'd thought she was done with guilt, but that momentary glimpse into what lay behind Bruce's vicious display of anger had brought it all back, a snarl of tangled feelings like a physical weight dragging at her.

Above her head, Cadan swore. When she looked up at him, his jaw was set hard. He let out a long breath, swallowing anger. Not guilt, just anger. Either he hadn't seen that sudden raw misery in Bruce's eyes, or it hadn't had the impact on him that it had on Elissa.

He was looking at where Bruce had disappeared, slowly unclenching his hands, which had once more tightened into fists. “I'm starting to think there was something pretty freaking wrong with the way SFI trained its cadets,” he said, and his voice was bitter. “Stewart—at least he didn't know the full details. And the situation landed on him so fast he hardly had time to process it. But Bruce—he can't
not
know the full god-awful nightmare, and he's still . . .” He trailed off, then his head jerked around. His eyes met Elissa's. “And God, it's his
sister
involved. Not you, I mean—Lin. I know he doesn't know her and hasn't met her, but you'd think . . . his
own sister
.”

Elissa's lip was becoming sore where her teeth were worrying it. She made herself stop. “It's his career. He . . . SFI was everything to him, from the moment he found he was eligible for the preacademy training.”

“Yeah, him and me both.” Cadan's voice was unforgiving. “There are some things a damn bit more important, though. I mean, God, I
get
how much of a wrench it is, but when you weigh it up next to what SFI was doing to the Spares—”
He shook his head. “You remember you called me arrogant? And yeah, a lot of that's on me—I can't blame anyone else. But all the same, the way they trained us—I look at it now, and think they were training us into
more
arrogance.”

He had a point. But all the same, that look on Bruce's face . . . He and she had never been close, really. And once her link with Lin had thrown her into the whole nightmare of inexplicable symptoms, what closeness they had possessed had dwindled as her world narrowed to nothing but surviving the next attack of phantom pain, and as he started to find the sheer weirdness of it all an embarrassment. But although Bruce had patronized her and made fun of her and put her down, he, unlike Carlie and Marissa, whom she'd thought of as her friends, had never made fun of the symptoms themselves, never made her feel she was a freak or a failure because of
them
.

And once, when she was fifteen—she remembered it now, unwillingly—he'd found out that a boy from school had started up a chatpage called Freak Spot for which the entry requirement was a “sighting of Lissa Ivory acting like a big freak.” He and Cadan had been right in the middle of revising and training for the beyond-intensive second-year exams—it was the only time since joining the training program that she'd seen him look actually stressed, as if, for the first time, it had struck him that he might not make it all the way through—but he'd somehow gotten a two-hour leave of absence and had turned up to meet her as she came out of school.

“Point him out,” he'd said.

“Oh God, Bruce,
don't
. It's not worth it.” She still remembered how she'd shrunk, sure he couldn't do anything,
horrified at the idea of drawing more attention to herself.

Bruce hadn't listened. “Point him out,” he'd said again, and, defeated, she'd complied, then watched as he, taller than all the high school students, strode over and, with one hand on the boy's shoulder, plucked him from among a whole crowd of his friends.

That had been the only physical contact he'd made, and Elissa, cringing over at the other side of the platform outside the school, hadn't been close enough to hear what he said. But she'd seen the boy's expression change so fast he'd looked ludicrous, and when she got home and logged on, not only the chatpage, but every cached snapshot, every mention on the social networking sites the kids from her school used, and every associated link and username had been wiped off the net.

“Lis?” said Cadan now.

She looked up, aware only as she did so that she'd moved on from biting her lip to biting her thumbnail. “I know,” she said. “But . . . I guess at least you got to make the choice yourself? I mean, I know I pretty much forced it on you, and it wasn't a
great
choice, but . . .”

“But Bruce didn't even get that?”

She shrugged, not wanting to diminish how hard Cadan's choice—to protect her and Lin by rebelling against SFI and the Sekoian government—had been.

“Fair point,” said Cadan. His voice was still grim, but his eyes were no longer quite so hard. “I'm damned if I'm going to excuse him talking to you like that, though.”

She couldn't help laughing a little. “Oh Cadan, I grew up with him. He's called me much worse than that.”

“Yeah. I bet he never implied you were doing . . . whatever
I wanted . . . before, though, did he?” But before she could answer, he flung up a hand. “No, okay. It was nothing but a cheap shot—against both of us—because he was angry. I get that.” The hint of a smile crept into his eyes now. “Jeez, our freaking families, huh? What d'you think, should I go talk to him?”

Every cowardly impulse impelled Elissa to say yes. But, with the anger she could see lingering in the rigidity of Cadan's jaw, the still-icy glint in his eyes, it was pretty clear that wouldn't be a good idea.

Anyway, it was her Bruce was angriest with. The accusations he'd flung at them both came back to her.
No wonder she's so freaking pleased with herself. You broke our mother's heart. You wrecked our world, and you don't even care because you got what mattered to you.

Letting Cadan talk to him for her: All that was doing was pushing the problem off onto him. It was her brother, her problem, and she should deal with it.

“It's okay,” she said. “Let me talk to him first. He's had a few minutes, maybe he's calming down a bit.”

“You sure? If he says that stuff to you again—”

Again, laughter caught her. She reached up and brushed a kiss on Cadan's jaw, feeling the tension in the muscles beneath his skin. “Yeah, well, at least he's not likely to hit me.”

As she made her way through the crowd, she noticed the guards again, standing at ease but still present at the doors. How tight was the security now? Had they been given orders not to let any of the former occupants of the
Phoenix
through to the main body of the spaceport?

Clearly not. She guessed it must be only the Spares who
were regarded as too dangerous to allow out into the general population. The guards didn't make a move as she approached the doors, and she slipped through them to emerge into another waiting-room-like area.

This one was more or less empty. There were a few guards, and a scatter of twin-and-family groups who, she assumed, had come out here in search of a quieter place for their reunion.

Bruce was nowhere to be seen. Which might mean he'd left completely, gone back to wherever he and her parents lived now. But across the far side of this waiting room, faint vertical lines in the glass wall showed where doors would slide open onto what looked like a balcony outside. From here she could see only pale, endless sky beyond it, but maybe it overlooked more of the spaceport, giving people a place to watch the ships take off and land. If Bruce hadn't actually gone completely, if he was still somewhere in the spaceport . . .

Elissa walked across the waiting-room carpet, feeling its springiness beneath her feet. She didn't remember much about Philomel, but what she had picked up was that it wasn't thought to be as advanced as Sekoia. Or maybe just not as fast-developing? Sekoia, after all, had moved at light-speed once they'd gotten their spaceflight industry working. As far as spaceports went, though, there didn't seem to be any difference.

She reached the wide expanse of window. Now that she was here, she could see that the balcony jutted out over the edge of a cliff—the end of the spaceport plateau. Beyond it the land fell away into the depths of a valley.

Elissa had grown up in Central Canyon City. She knew about heights—had learned to cope with vertigo while she
was still in kindergarten. But she'd never seen anything like this. Not because of the height of the valley, but because of its unbelievable
greenness
. Even the upper reaches, where a veil of thin white cloud had fallen, were a mist-muted green, and below the mist, the valley sides were a tangle of long-fronded bracken that gave way only to trees.

Elissa moved a little closer and a section of the wall slid back, glass sliding over glass, creating a momentary optical illusion that the air was rippling in a heat haze. But the air that blew in at her was as cold as water poured straight from a refrigerator. And it even
smelled
green, almost like the pine scent she knew from her home's house-environment settings, but somehow thinner, cleaner, the difference between nutri-machine fruit juice and juice that had been freshly squeezed.

She stepped out onto the balcony.

Toward the farthest end of the valley, the distance-blurred trees seemed so thick, so soft, that Elissa felt as if she could take up handfuls of them. Closer, their thickness meant they looked as if they'd been poured, like leaf porridge, down the sides of the valley, to flow all over its floor, so dense they concealed the contours of the valley itself, turned it into a cauldron filled with green.

Elissa remembered now. Philomel was that rare planet that hadn't needed to be terraformed before it could support humans. These forests were thousands of years old, growing from earth made fertile by millennia-old trees, which had died and rotted and become earth themselves.

She'd known about planets like this, of course—had learned about them at school and seen them in documentaries and movies. But nothing had prepared her for what one would look like in real life.

“Sekoia's never going to look like that now.”

Bruce's voice came from farther along the balcony. Elissa looked, the muscles in the back of her neck already tightening, bracing herself. “Sekoia was never going to look like that anyway. Even Sanctuary doesn't look like that.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. You're going to rub your interplanetary travels in my face now too?”

So he hadn't calmed down. Elissa took a breath of the cold, sharp air, the green scent almost making her dizzy. “Look, I'm sorry about how things turned out. Honestly. We went back to Sekoia to try to help—we're only here because they
sent
us here.”

Bruce eyed her with what could have been contempt—or outright dislike. “Help? With what? Your Spare's brainpower is the only thing that would help—or didn't you remember it had been ruled illegal?”

She knew it was sarcasm, but at even a sarcastic suggestion that it would be okay to use Lin as Zee had been used, she was all at once blind with fury. “Of course I freaking remembered. And if it hadn't been made illegal, I'd never have let them do that to her. She can power hyperdrives voluntarily. If she and I link, it doesn't hurt her—”

Bruce's eyebrows went up, and his eyes were sarcastic and disbelieving. “Seriously? You expect me to believe your Spare
volunteered
to help our planet?”

“I don't care whether you believe me or not!” Elissa snapped untruthfully. “But she
did
volunteer. Back on Sanctuary, she said she wanted to come and help. She
wanted
to. We—”

We were going to save the world.

Yeah, that worked out well, didn't it?
Suddenly she had to
fight down tears.
It's all gotten so messed up, and I'm scared to keep accessing the link because of what it's doing to us. And even if I wasn't scared, I don't dare—and I'm not allowed—to be close enough to her to try.