Unravel (50 page)

The scream Elissa couldn't utter rose inside her head, and a surge of terror that burned like ice.

In this last extremity of panic, something in her head narrowed, focused. She reached out the way she'd never been able to before.
Lin! Lin!

No voice answered, but what did come was a sudden rush of panic on top of her own. And fear that was different from her fear, fear that came from a mind not her own.

Lin! There's a stealth flyer! And Bruce. Bruce—!

Bruce's hands clamped tighter on her mouth and body. The man leaned closer, and the needle slid through Elissa's sleeve and into her arm.

And the world went black.

ELISSA WOKE
as if from nightmare, jerking bolt upright, heart hammering, mouth sand-dry, breath like hot smoke in her chest. Her eyes snapped open on floods of bright white light, her gaze taking in the sight of objects that her brain couldn't make sense of.

The movement of sitting up made her head spin, a feeling as if something inside it had come loose. Then the same sensation hit her stomach. She doubled over and threw up.

The vomit splashed onto a shiny white floor, farther away than it should have been. The smell, warm and vile, came up to Elissa, and she threw up again, tasting a horrible mixture of acidic sweetness, feeling it burning her throat and the inside of her nose.

Someone pushed a steel pan onto her lap, swiped a damp cloth across her mouth, then handed her a plastic beaker of water.

Elissa sipped, gagged, and half vomited again into the steel
pan. She put out her free hand, groping blindly.

A hand whisked the steel pan off her lap and replaced it with a box of tissues. Elissa pulled up a handful and blew her nose, again and again, trying to get rid of the sweet-acid smell, gagging twice while she did it.

“The water will help,” said an unfamiliar voice, very loud above her head. Elissa sipped, spat into the pan, then drank, feeling the cool liquid wash both the burning and the sand-dry feeling out of her throat.

Hands—the same hands? different ones? and did they belong with the voice?—took away the disgusting, used-tissue-filled pan, then came back with another cool, damp cloth and wiped Elissa's face. Then pushed another beaker into her hands.

She drank, suddenly aware that she was so thirsty she wanted to cry, shutting her eyes against the brightness that kept making her head spin, that made her afraid she would be sick again.

“You'll be okay in a few more minutes,” said the voice, from somewhere beyond the dark of Elissa's eyelids. “You had a bad reaction, that's all. Keep sipping the water—not too fast, you don't want to get sick again. I'll be back in a minute to clean up.”

Footsteps—soft-soled footsteps—went away over the floor.

The shiny, superclean floor. The chair she'd been lying in, which had tipped up with her as soon as she moved but was still too far off the floor for her feet to touch it. The readily available steel pan. She must be in a hospital.

But why?

Elissa's eyelids tried to snap open, but she kept them shut. Everything still seemed to spin, in her head, in her stomach, and she
really
didn't want to be sick again.

I'm in a hospital. Why?

There were a million jumbled images in her head, a million images that made no more sense than the bright whiteness she'd opened her eyes on. Faces . . . Lin, Cadan, her parents, Bruce . . .

In a hospital. In a chair. And my arms can move, but my legs . . .

This time she couldn't stop her eyes snapping wide open. Through the swimming of her vision, she looked down at herself, over an expanse of white hospital gown. She hadn't been able to move her legs because they were strapped to the chair. A harness went up over her chest, too, pinning her shoulders to the chair back.

An operating chair. One of the many medical advances that had become standard before she was born. That was why it had tipped with her when she sat up. When the hospital staff chose, it could be moved back down again, opened out to become a full operating table or a recovery bed, tipped back up for when a patient was well enough to sit up and eat.

But why am I in it? Why am I being gotten ready for . . . what? For an operation? For surgery?

Surgery . . .
The word, charged as it was with urgency and the beginnings of panic, rang suddenly familiarly in her mind.
Surgery. Brain surgery.

Oh my God.
It was just as well she'd drunk all the water, because her hand jerked and she dropped the beaker. It landed on the floor, bounced, and rolled in a half circle before it came to a slightly rocking halt.

That's what they were going to do. They were going to perform brain surgery on her. The brain surgery she'd escaped by fleeing Sekoia. Brain surgery that would burn out the part of her brain that connected her to her twin. Brain surgery that would destroy the link.

It hit her like a blow: shock and fear, then a terrible, rising panic. They couldn't. They couldn't do that to her, not now, not after everything she and Lin had gone through. The weeks of getting to know each other, talking and arguing and fighting and learning how to be sisters.

A helpless, despairing sob rose in her throat.
Lin
. Lin, infuriating and dangerous and more precious than anything.
If they take her, if they take her away—

Elissa put her hands to her face, trying to crush down the panic and the rising grief, trying to think.
Bruce. Bruce brought me here. If I explain to him, explain how vital the link is, he has to listen, he has to understand.

Across the room a door slid open. A woman came in, followed by another woman, both dressed in the white uniforms of medical staff. And just behind them, another two figures, one, like the women, in white, the other in a dark color. Elissa tried to see, but her vision was still blurry and the room too bright, and she couldn't make her eyes focus.

“How are you feeling?” said the first woman. From her voice, it had been she who'd been with Elissa when she first woke up.

“How am I
feeling
?” Her voice came out so loud it would have been a shout if it hadn't been shaking so much. “You drugged me! How do you think I'm—”

Then the darker figure moved a little closer, her eyes focused, and she recognized him.

Fury scorched through her, obliterating everything else.
“You,”
she said. “
You
drugged me. You—my God, Bruce, you tricked me and drugged me and
abducted
me! What the hell is
wrong
with you?”

“I can explain.” An uneasy half grin twitched his lips, the
grin he'd worn when he was in trouble at school and was going to try to bluff his way through it. “Seriously, Elissa, if you listen a minute—”

“You can
explain
? You can explain abducting me? What planet do you even
come
from, to think that's okay? To think that's okay to do to your
sister
?”

“Okay,” said Bruce. “Look, it was necessary. Unavoidable.”

“No. It. Wasn't.”
She was too angry to be scared. Too angry to think beyond the outrage of the moment. “What do you think Dad and Mother would say to you? What would they
freaking say
if they knew what you'd—”

Something changed in his face, and she broke off, so appalled that for a moment she couldn't speak.

Would there ever come a time when she would stop being shocked at betrayal?

“They
knew
?” she said. “They knew what you were planning?”

“No, of course not.” But he said it too fast, and his gaze, for a second, slipped away from hers.

She stared at him, stiff with shock.

What had he done? What was he involved with? And her
parents
—what had they . . . colluded with? Turned a blind eye to?

Bruce's eyes came back to her. “Dad doesn't know anything,” he said, as if he were making a reluctant confession. “Ma . . . she didn't know about this, but she . . . well, she hasn't asked, but I'm pretty sure she knows I'm a member of a covert group. I'm not going to freak her out with the details, but she's not stupid—she knows we sometimes have to take action that's a bit . . . controversial.”

Elissa choked over a furious laugh. “
 ‘Controversial' 
? You're what, trashing a hotel room?”

“God,
Lissa
, you never listen. Will you just let me
explain
?”

“Oh, please do! I'd love to hear your ‘explanation' for why it's okay to
abduct your own sister
.”

“Well, if you'd stop
talking
for a goddamn minute—”

“Okay,” said the other man. “Enough pleasantries, yeah? Bruce, give your sister the explanation she's asking for, or I'll have to do it.”

Jeez,
thought Elissa, still furiously sarcastic,
because it makes it so much better to get the explanation of why you've been abducted from the brother who helped with the abduction.

She looked at him through eyes she'd narrowed to slits. “Well? Do what the man says.” A thought struck her. “Oh, but
please
tell me it doesn't include the words, ‘it's for your own good.' ”

Bruce's eyes flickered again.

“Seriously? God, could you be any more of a cliché?”

“Fine,” said Bruce, his voice defensive. “But just because I don't say it doesn't make it any less true. You listen to what I have to say, then
you
decide if it's for your own good to get you away from that freak you're tied to.”

“Don't call her—”

“She's dangerous.” He spoke over her. “They're all dangerous. That's what everyone keeps trying to tell you. How many deaths will it take before you believe it?”

“Lin is my sister. She's as terrified of hurting me as I am! She'd die rather than—”

“But she won't be able to help it.”

And now there was something else in his voice, an added weight—a knowledge.

Elissa's stomach tipped. “What? What do you know?”

“They're all time bombs, Elissa,” said Bruce. “We've—our
group—we've managed to access some top-level SFI data. Details of the Spares program. They—the scientists in charge of it—they built a trip switch into each of the Spares' brains.”

“A
what
? How can you
build something
into a brain?”

Bruce shrugged. “They were—are—geniuses, Lis. Once they had a brain open, to get it wired up to the energy converters, they could have done just about anything they wanted.” A different note had crept into his voice, a suggestion of something she didn't want to hear, something she didn't want to recognize.

He continued, hands in his pockets, voice flat yet still with that undertone to it. “As long as the Spares were secure in the facilities, kept away from their doubles, the bomb would stay defused. The programming is to do with seeing their twins. After a certain number of times—randomly set, it's different with each one—they'll look at their double and it will trip the switch. It'll trigger a psychotic state of extreme aggression—focused primarily against their twin, if he or she is present, against others if not. And when that happens, the trigger won't reset until their twin's dead.”

Zee. That's what had happened with Zee. She'd seen it, seen the programming in his brain kick in, seen the switch trip. Seen the bomb explode.

“They made them into weapons,” she said, and her voice was nothing but a thread of sound. “They took people and
made them into weapons
.”

“No,” said Bruce. “That's not what they were trying to do at all. SFI never
wanted
the Spares to meet their doubles. They wanted them for energy, not for weapons. This was a fail-safe, in case the Spares escaped the facilities—or in case some überliberal party came into government and started
interfering. They didn't want to lose control of them—”

“Oh
God
, so not true!” Her voice still hadn't regained its strength, but there was enough outrage in it to make Bruce break off. “If they only wanted to stop them escaping, they'd have programmed them to—oh, just self-destruct or something. Making them attack other people—making them attack their
twins
—that's not a
fail-safe
, that's sadism!”

“
Lissa
, you're missing the point. They didn't want to
lose
the Spares. They wanted to get them
back
. Even your typical bleeding-heart clones-rights activists wouldn't be so keen on allowing potential psychos into the community. A few deaths—of Sekoian citizens, not just Spares—and our whole world would have been happy to bundle the Spares back into the facilities. Of course, IPL—helped by you, that is—screwed all that up.”