Unravel (53 page)

“I'm explaining, the group I'm with found it necessary—”

Cadan's voice lashed out like a whip.
“What happened to her?”

“They burned out her link with her Spare,” said Bruce.

Elissa felt the shock of the words go through Cadan's body. Where he held her, his arms went rigid. “They did what?”

“They burned out the link.” There was defiance in Bruce's
voice now. “She told me about it, Cadan. The Spare—she's been taking over Lissa's mind. It's no good for her. All it does is put her in danger. The group, we agreed, it would be better if she lost it, if she could go back to being normal—”

“We? This group—you're with them?”

“The boy's a
freedom fighter
, Cadan,” Ivan said. He gave a dry twist to the words. “He was telling us a minute ago. He didn't quite get as far as saying freedom from what, or who he's fighting.” There was contempt in his voice, and Bruce flushed.

“
You
let them do this to her?” said Cadan. “You
let
them?”

“He
helped
them.” Ivan's voice was still dry. “However they got hold of her, they wouldn't have managed it without her big brother's help.”

“Cadan, will you listen to me, for God's sake!” Bruce was angry now, his voice rising in frustration.

“Listen to you?” Gently, Cadan let go of Elissa's arms. He turned toward her brother, every movement tightly controlled. “
Listen
to you? Do you have any idea what you did? We thought she was dead!”

“What?” Bruce took half a step back. “Why—”

“Because I thought she was.”

Elissa hadn't heard the footsteps on the moss-covered rock, hadn't seen the fourth and fifth figures get out of the shuttlebug. But the voice was as familiar as her own.

Lin.

She spun around. Six feet away, Lin stood as rigid as the rock beneath their feet, her face chalky, her hands behind her back. At her shoulder, Edward Ivory waited. There was a gray look to his face. If Lin had thought Elissa was dead, then he must have thought it too.

But right now Elissa had no room to spare for anyone but her sister.
“Lin.”

“Don't come near me.” Lin's lips, nearly as pale as her face, hardly moved. Her voice was flat, and she kept her gaze on the ground. “I thought you were dead. I—”

“You felt the link die.”

“Yes.”

“Oh God, Lin . . .” She hadn't even thought. Blinded by her own anguish, falling through the abyss, it hadn't even crossed her mind that the loss of their link would have hit Lin, too. And, unlike Elissa, her sister would have had no warning.

“Don't come near me!” Lin's voice stabbed like lightning, and Elissa realized that, without thinking, without meaning to, she'd started to move toward her twin. Still, Lin wasn't looking at her. She was looking past Elissa, into the distance. “I'm not safe. Not for you. I had to come, I
had
to, once they said a message was coming in, once they tracked it to him”—her eyes flicked in Bruce's direction—“but that's all. Once we're back, I—” Her voice cracked. She squeezed her eyes shut as if she could only continue talking if she could shut out the world. “I have to go away. I can't see you anymore.”

Oh God. Oh God, of course that's true.
It was the only way to keep either of them safe—Elissa from being killed, Lin from becoming her killer.
But we can't . . . We've already lost the link, we can't be totally separated as well!

It was too much to comprehend, too much, all at once, to even begin to face. Elissa put her hands over her own eyes, shutting it all out, trying to shut out even her thoughts.

“Dad,” said Bruce, somewhere, the sound of his voice grating on every one of her exposed nerves. “Cadan . . . Look,
I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean it to turn out like this. But listen, I did it for her sake. She's been tied to this—this
psycho
for weeks. God, for longer than that! She can't think for herself anymore, she's damaged. She said herself, she wants her out of her head! Okay, drastic measures, yeah, but it's
for her sake
—”

“You stupid bastard, will you shut the hell up?” Elissa had never heard Cadan sound like that before. And when she took her hands down and looked at him, she thought she would scarcely have recognized his face, either.

Behind Lin, Mr. Ivory said, “Cadan, there's no need for—”

Bruce took half a step back. “
Hey
. I don't—”

Mr. Ivory might as well not have spoken. Cadan's eyes, full of contempt, stayed fixed on Bruce. “I said
shut up.
” The whiplash cracked again through his voice. “You have no idea what you've done. Carry on explaining yourself to the authorities back at the spaceport. And anyone else you want. No one here has the slightest interest in hearing anything else you have to say.”

He turned away from Bruce and put an arm around Elissa. She could feel the suppressed anger like an electric current going through him, but his touch was gentle, as was his voice. “Let's get back, okay?”

Elissa looked toward her sister. “Lin. Someone has to—”

“Someone is.” Ivan's voice was as gentle as Cadan's had been.

Edward Ivory put his arm around Lin's shoulders, turning her in the direction of the shuttlebug. It was the way he'd touched Elissa when, as an eight-year-old, she'd gone through a spell of walking in her sleep, every night waking to sobbing panic in different places all over the house. Each time, her father had steered her back to bed like that, his
arm around her shoulders, his hand a reassuring clasp on her upper arm.

For an instant, seeing him like that with Lin brought a fleeting comfort. Then, as Lin turned, Elissa saw why she'd kept her hands behind her back.

Lin's wrists were handcuffed together.

She came because she was afraid I was dead. They all came, all the people who love me. And yet, out of all of them, Lin could only come if she was wearing handcuffs. Because otherwise just being near me puts us in too much danger.

I should go to her. Comfort her. Tell her . . .

But there was nothing
to
tell her. No comfort Elissa could offer. And every time Lin looked at her, every time their eyes met, it might be the last time, it might be the trigger that would get Elissa killed. And God knew who else.

Bruce called it a fail-safe. And it might have been meant that way. But that's not what it's done to Lin. It's turned her into a weapon.

At the entrance of the shuttlebug, as Lin moved to climb in, Mr. Ivory's hand under her elbow to support her, Elissa caught a glimpse of her sister's face. Grief and pain rushed over her all over again, choking her, drowning her.

“Lin.”

Caught unaware, Lin looked back. For the first time since they'd gotten off the
Phoenix
, their eyes met. Elissa looked into her twin's eyes, and it was like looking into emptiness.

“You said it to him,” said Lin.

“What?”

A spasm passed over Lin's face. “You said to him—to your brother—that you wanted me out of your head. Like you said back on Sekoia. Like I”—her face quivered again—“like I
heard
back on Sekoia.”

No. That's not how I meant it. That's not the message you're supposed to get.

But the pain and the grief were still drowning her. She couldn't get her thoughts together, couldn't form the words she needed to say. She just stared past her father at her sister, trying to make her lips move, knowing she must look as blank as if she had no emotions at all.

“I—” she managed. “Lin . . .”

For an endless second longer she looked at her sister's face, saw the pain rising, a dark tide, in Lin's eyes. They'd lost so much, but they couldn't have lost everything. There must be something—there must be
something
left—

But she was cold, and numb, and drowning, and whatever was left, she couldn't find it.

“At least you got what you wanted,” said Lin. Her eyes left Elissa's. She turned and climbed, her cuffed hands, despite Mr. Ivory's help, making her clumsy, up into the shuttlebug.

“YOU WILL
survive this,” said Cadan.

They were back at the spaceport, in a room in the small spaceport hospital. The moment they'd landed, Lin had been whisked away to secure accommodation. She hadn't looked at Elissa again, and although Elissa knew she couldn't just leave it like that, with Lin thinking this was what she wanted, for the moment Elissa had neither the emotional nor mental energy to do anything to help.

Now, from the couch where she sat, waiting for a doctor to come and inspect her, it seemed to take every last scrap of energy to raise her head to look at Cadan.

“You will,” he repeated, his voice insistent. “Your dad did.”

The last scrap of energy bled away. Elissa slumped. “Hardly.”

“That's not going to be what it's like for you. It's not the same. At least you know what's happened.”

It wasn't just insistence in his voice. It was fear. And if
she had any emotion left to spare, she'd be able to feel for him, seeing her like this, beaten and empty . . . faded like her father had always been faded.

I can't live like he did. If I could at least see Lin . . . we're still sisters. The relationship we've got wasn't all built on the link. We must be able to salvage something. . . .

She didn't realize she'd said the last sentence aloud until Cadan answered her. “Of course you can. Of
course
you can.”

She looked at him. “You think we . . .” But then the loss was on her again, washing everything out of her mind, leaving her with just the blackness. “Oh God, Cadan, they took the link. It was everything—”

“No it wasn't.” While she was drowning, blind and lost in the blackness, he'd gotten up, and now, as she resurfaced, he was on one knee in front of her, his hands gripping hers, pulling her back. “Lis, you're all kinds of shocked right now. And Lin is too. But you're still you, and she's still your twin. You've lost the link, but you've got a thousand other things to build on. Your father's twin
died
—he never got the chance to salvage anything. You and Lin can.”

“How?”
Suddenly furious, she tore her hands from his. “How can we build
anything
, when I can't even see her? When, if I do, at some point she's going to try to kill me?”

All at once Cadan's eyes blazed into hers, filled with as much fury as she was. “Seriously? You're going to give up like that?”

“What choice do I have?”

“For God's sake, Lis. Think! We don't even have all the information about the trigger yet! They'll be scanning Lin's brain now. They're collecting more data every minute. There's going to be a way to block it, or reverse it, or
something
. Of all
the organs in the human body, the brain is the one
most
able to repair itself—you
know
that.”

“Do I?”

“Well, if you don't, you should! What did you go to science classes for? People whose
speech centers
have been destroyed have learned to talk again. The brain
repairs itself
.”

But his words had stopped making sense. They fell apart, bright shreds floating on another rising tide of pain. Elissa put her hands to her head, shutting her eyes, feeling, for the first time, slow, hot tears squeeze out from under her eyelids.

Distantly, she was aware that Cadan had put his arms around her. “I'm sorry,” he said, his voice coming from far away, beyond the dark sea drowning her. “I'm just bullying you. It's too soon. Just hang on, okay? It'll get better. You'll recover.”

Even farther away, the door opened. The doctor, come to inspect her, to check that she wasn't—physically—hurt any worse than the tiny wound in her skull. Elissa's skin seemed to shrink. She didn't want to be touched. Not yet. Not yet.

Except it wasn't the doctor. Her father's voice spoke.

“Lissa? I thought you'd want to know. They've tracked down the terrorist group. They've been arrested. They're in custody, kept at the place they took you. It's an underground base they managed to set up in a system of caves beneath the mountain range. It was easy to secure—they're being kept there until they can be moved to one of Philomel's prisons.”

Elissa managed to nod. She guessed that was a good thing. In a vague, floating bit of her mind, she wondered if Bruce had also been arrested. Or if his explanations—
it was for her own good, it was for her sake
—had convinced the IPL authorities the way they hadn't convinced her, or Ivan, or Cadan.