Unravel (22 page)

“Oh.” Her cheeks, which had been cooling, flamed again. Here she was explaining herself, explaining something that didn't even
need
explaining, and now it turned out Cadan didn't even think it needed explaining either.

And now he was smiling at her, a smile that, she thought, might be affectionate or might be simply amused. “It's okay, Elissa. It's not like it's my favorite thing, seeing my girlfriend wrapped up in some other guy's arms, but jeez, I don't really have the right to demand you not touch other people, do I?”

Yes. No.
No, of course he didn't. A million teen zines and pop psychology channels would have made sure she knew that, even if she couldn't have worked it out for herself. But all the same . . . Okay, she
didn't
want him to demand anything that extreme, but she wouldn't have minded a bit more of a flash of jealousy.

You said this was serious for you. You said it mattered. Why does it not matter enough for you to get jealous? Especially if you don't know whether I feel the same way?

Was it just that he was—
oh, here it comes again
—older, better
at being self-contained? Then another thought seemed to appear from the blue. Was it that, serious or not, he was assuming that what was between them was already coded with its own expiration date?

Even as the cold dropped into her stomach, she realized the thought
wasn't
from the blue, it wasn't from a clear, storm-free sky. The thunderclouds had been massing before, from the moment he'd said he couldn't imagine them having gotten together during her previous life on Sekoia, gathering thicker when his parents showed they didn't approve.

No.
This was crazy.
She
was being crazy. He'd never wanted a girl to meet his parents before, he'd
said
so. He wouldn't have said that if he was thinking of this as a temporary thing. She needed to hold on to what he'd
actually
said and stop getting in a whole panic about what he hadn't—

“Lissa?” He was watching her, and his expression had changed. “What's wrong?”

But there was no time now. She couldn't ask him about it with Commander Dacre on her way, with everyone waiting in the next room—with Ady and Zee about to come out into the corridor. And—
again
—she didn't want to be
that
girlfriend, the one who was always crying and needing reassurance and being so clingy the guy eventually dumped her out of pure impatience. . . .

“Nothing.” She gave him the best smile she could manage. “It's okay.”

The smile must have been good enough, because he returned it, dropping a kiss on her hair as she went past him to open the door into the sitting room. But despite the little gesture of affection, the cold remained inside her, a weight she couldn't shift.
Is that what it is? Is he not expecting it to last?

WHILE ELISSA
had been gone, someone had moved the various couches and beanbags to the perimeter of the room, creating more of a meeting area than a sitting room. Lin sat, cross-legged, against the far wall, her eyes smudged with fatigue. When she was tired, the only color that remained in her face was the fake tan. She remained a version of Elissa herself, but a version left out to fade in the sun, a version in which the color had been washed out.

With a flash of imagination so vivid it felt like memory, Elissa saw Lin in a hyperdrive cell, wired up and strapped down, lip bleeding beneath her teeth in a grimace of pain, energy being torn from her, as agonizing as if every nerve ending were being set on fire.
Oh God, if I'd found Lin and they'd done that to her . . .

There was a space on the floor next to Lin, and Elissa went quickly to sit next to her, pushing the image from her brain, blocking it out. Lin had escaped. She'd been through a hell
of a lot, but, thank God, it had never been
that
.

Lin flickered a look sideways as Elissa settled next to her. “Zee?”

“I only talked to Ady. He's talking to Zee now, though. I think they'll be here.”

Lin's gaze sharpened. “What's wrong? What did he say to you?”

Oh God.
She hadn't planned on telling Lin about Zee—not yet, not without planning how she could lessen the impact. But if Lin had noticed there was something wrong, she couldn't leave her guessing. And she couldn't lie to her.

She leaned close to her twin's ear, dropping her voice. “He told me that when Zee was rescued, it wasn't from a facility. It was off a ship.”

Lin's face went still. Her eyes widened, the pupils shrinking to shocked pinpricks. As clear as if the image were reflected within them, Elissa could see that Lin, too, was being spun back in time to the
Phoenix
, to when they'd prized open the sealed hyperdrive chamber and found the dead Spare.

Elissa put her hand out, finding Lin's, tightening her fingers around Lin's, noticing how cold they'd gone. “Lin? God, I'm
sorry
, I didn't want to tell you with no warning like that.”

Lin shook her head. “It's okay. But”—a tiny shudder went through her—“how is he still alive?”

“Or still
sane
. God knows. I can't even imagine it.”

A few minutes later Ady and Zee entered.

Now she knew, Elissa couldn't help her eyes going to the healing burn mark on his neck. His hair was just long enough to fall across, obscuring it, but under the hair the mark would stretch around to the back of his neck, to the hole that had been drilled in the back of his skull, the hole
where the hyperdrive plug had fitted. Lin had that too, as did all the Spares; Lin had experienced the agonizing pain of the machines they'd used to test her psychic levels. But she'd never reached the stage of being wired up to a ship's hyperdrive, left trapped and helpless in a world of lightless pain. Zee had.

And for how long? How long had he been there? How long was it until he was rescued? She couldn't ask—she couldn't even ask Ady, let alone Zee, but she was suddenly desperate to know, desperate to know exactly how bad it had been.
Please let it not have been that long. A day, a couple of days . . .
She couldn't conceive of it lasting any more time than that—how long would someone be able to stand it before their mind cracked like a blown egg?

The door slid open, and Commander Dacre came briskly in.
She's not in uniform today?
thought Elissa, then felt silly. Of
course
officials weren't going to visit the safe houses in IPL uniform, advertising their presence to the security cams mounted at every corner of every building—security cams that could, at any point, be relaying information to hostile eyes.

Uniform or not, the commander still had her gun, holstered at her belt within easy reach. And Elissa caught the discreet gleam of a com-unit on her wrist, its earpiece clipped neatly over—no,
through
—the upper lobe of her ear. Someone must have offered her a drink, as if she were a normal guest, because she held a coffee cup in one hand, but nothing else about her demeanor suggested that she was here in anything other than an official capacity.

Her gaze skimmed the room, making only the briefest pause at Lin, then she walked across the no-color carpet to
stand just past the window, a vantage point where she could see outside to the weirdly traffic-free sky.

Her gaze skimmed over them all again. This time it snagged briefly on Zee before moving on. When she spoke, her voice was as colorless as the carpet, as flatly calm as the sky.

“You're being relocated today. All of you. We've arranged clearance for Captain Greythorn's ship—the
Phoenix
—to take you and your families off Sekoia and to Philomel. You'll be leaving this evening.”

Some of the faces in the room lit up so fast it was as if a single wave of smiles had broken across them. Sofia, Ady, Cadan's mother. Others—like Felicia's, El's, Cadan's—became entirely still. And Lin shot upright, vibrating with indignation.

“No,”
she said. “We're not. We're
not
. Cadan already
told
you what we came here for.”

“Be quiet, please,” said Commander Dacre, and Lin closed her mouth with an almost audible snap, looking as if she'd taken herself by surprise. Elissa fought down a ridiculous giggle. No matter how unpleasant the commander had been so far, it was kind of impressive to see
anyone
be able to shut Lin down like that. She managed to suppress the giggle, but then she looked up, caught Ivan's eye and saw exactly the same expression of suppressed amusement on his face, and she had to fight the laughter back down all over again.

The commander's gaze moved from Lin, to Cadan, to Elissa and the rest of the crew. “You appear,” she said, “not to have grasped the full gravity of the situation. Allow me to help you.”

She set her coffee down on the windowsill. “As you'll be aware, Sekoia still has a space force, but it's had to be brought entirely under IPL's control. Nearly all your higher-ranking
officials have been grounded while we investigate to see how much inside knowledge they had about the use of Spares. We've drafted in most of the pilots—and ships—to help our own with the evacuation process. Except without any access to hyperspeed, the process is still painfully slow, which has left us without the flight power for orbital patrols. Which means the planet is at constant risk of pirate attacks.”

Her eyes shifted for a moment to the window. “And this is before the next outbreak of Elloran flu. Which is due at some point over the next six months. And if Sekoia's infrastructure isn't in better shape by then, the consequences could be serious.”

Complete understatement.
Elloran superflu wasn't usually fatal to anyone in normal health, but it was super contagious. And if it spread through a population that had lost the ability to buy in mass stocks of antiviral drugs . . .

Elissa crossed her arms.
If I'd known, right at the start of it all, what this was going to do to my whole world, would I have made the same decisions?
The answer was yes, of course—it
had
to be yes, because of Lin, because of what SFI had been doing to the Spares. But all the same, the thought kept circling back.
If I'd known the consequences, if I'd known it meant people were going to die . . . what would I really have done? How easily would I have made the decision to sacrifice them all?

“What about IPL's own ships?” asked Markus.

The commander looked a little surprised to have been asked anything, but she answered. “We're using them, of course. But IPL forces are needed all across the star system—once the takeover was accomplished, we had no authority to keep them serving Sekoia when other societies stand in greater need.”

She sipped coffee. “We're operating a triage system for the evacuation. The top priority is, of course, Spares and their
families, plus staff from the former SFI facilities.”

Staff from the . . . ?
Elissa was still sticking on that, her brain telling her it couldn't mean what it sounded like, when Lin spoke, her voice sharp with incredulity.

“
Staff?
Staff from the facilities?
They
need relocating? You're
rescuing
them?”

The commander set her coffee down again. “Hardly. They're being taken off-planet in prison ships to await trial—on Philomel, mostly.”

“But they're being moved?” said Lin. “They have the same priority as
Spares
? You're
spending money
on getting them off-planet?”

“Off-planet to prison,” said the commander.

“To safety!”

“If you choose to see it that way.”

“I don't
choose
to see it that way. That's how it is!”

Fury shook her voice. Elissa put out an anxious hand. “Lin . . . Don't freak—”

Lin slewed around to face her. “You think this is
okay
? Taking them off Sekoia before they've even gotten all of
us
out?”

“No.”
The word came out with more emphasis than she'd known she was going to give it. The idea that the people who'd put restraints on Lin, who'd drilled a hole in her head and plugged cables into the back of her skull, who'd put Zee in the bowels of a spaceship, trapping him alone in agony-filled darkness—the idea that
they
were being given priority, that they were being taken from a dangerous planet to a safe one ahead of other people,
innocent
people, like Felicia's family, who hadn't even known about Spares, was like a mockery of the justice IPL had talked about, the justice Lin had been promised.