Linked (11 page)

She reached for the bag she’d put the food and water in, took her ID and a handful of money out of her pocket, and dropped them in on top of the snack bars. She had no way of knowing if the ID would work for her double as it worked for Elissa, but on the chance that the girl’s thumbprint was as identical to Elissa’s as her face was . . .
What I need is one of those morph-cards Dad showed me and Bruce
.

What I
need
is for my parents to take my side
.

She made “look out” gestures, swung the bag over the sill, and let it go. “There’s my ID in it,” she called, as loudly as she dared. “And money. The ID might work for you. You need to get out of the city—”

The other girl spread her hands this time.
What?

Elissa let out a breath of frustration. “Wait,” she called, cringing at how loud her voice seemed, even though she’d hardly raised it above a whisper, then pulled back into the room to grab something to write on. Her book tablet would break if she dropped it from here—damn it, did she not have
any
old-fashioned paper around?

She found some eventually, in the shape of a tiny satin-covered notebook, a gift from some social event her parents
had risked taking her to, and she fumbled with the equally tiny sequined pencil to write down what she’d been trying to tell the other girl. Then she had to find something solid enough to attach it to so that when she dropped it from the window, it wouldn’t flutter or bounce away over the wall. She shoved it next to fall and fall and fall . . .

The bag had gone. And so had the girl.

Elissa strained her eyes into the shadows for a moment—
she was just there, where would she go?
—but the shelf was empty. She straightened, one hand still clutching the pillow, confusion and frustration coiling inside her.

“Hey,”
she called, trying to hiss the word. There was no answer. Panic made her hand slide on the smooth wooden sill. Where had she gone? Was she coming back? “Hey.
Hey!
”

An enormous crack split the air. It seemed to come from all around, filling the world. Outside, the gray flared red, a split-second lightning flash the color of blood, exploding the night into flame.

The wood was suddenly warm beneath Elissa’s hand. She snatched it away. Smoke trickled from under the sill, the plaster beneath crazing from the heat building under it.

She backed away, dropping the pillow, her breath stopping in her chest.

Fire. I said don’t lock me in, and they did, they locked me in. They locked me in
.

She ran for the shower room, grabbed a towel, and flung it under the faucet. Old safety lessons sprang into her mind.
Keep the smoke out. The smoke will kill you before the flames
.
I have to keep down low. I have to
—

From over by the door something went
clunk
, a
mechanical sound like metal bolts springing back.

Oh
. She straightened, the panic dying instantly, leaving her feeling stupid. All her life she’d known about the safety programs that went into effect in the event of fire, bomb threat, or earthquake.

There was no point standing here wondering how a fire could have started just when she needed one. She fled across the room and hit the doorpad.

On the landing, smoke clouded up under the ceiling lights, and a tremble of flames seeped through the wallpaper. Her father loomed suddenly out of the smoke to grab her arm. “Lissa! The house is on fire. Come with me, come with me now. We have to get out.”

I have to get out before you freaking lock me up again
. But she wasn’t going to argue now, with the sound of fire roaring up from below, and all the doors miraculously unlocked, and the girl she had to help waiting somewhere out there on the edge of the shelf.

Elissa hardly felt the treads of the stairs beneath her feet, didn’t need her father to hurry her down them. On the ground floor fire roared from the kitchen at the back of the house. A window cracked with a sharp sound; something else went up in flame, hissing and sizzling. In the breakfast room vines curled, blackening, and flakes of burned leaves blew with the hot breath of the fire into Elissa’s face.

They tumbled out through the front door. Billows of spitting-spark-speckled smoke obscured the whole shelf, but through them Elissa could see other front doors opening, people coming out wrapped in bathrobes.

“Laine! Laine!” There was a frantic note in her father’s voice. “Can you see your mother?”

“No.” The fear in her father’sZed question words clutched at her. She cast a look around.

“She was calling the fire services, she was supposed to be out here already.” Her father looked around again, searching the crowd. His hand had dropped from Elissa’s arm.

Across the grass, in a muddle of people, the exit to the slidewalk stood open. But she couldn’t go. Not like this, not without knowing if her mother was still in the burning building . . .

Fear tied a knot inside her chest.
I have to go find the girl. I have to help her. But my mother
—

“
Laine
. Thank God.” The crowd had parted to show Elissa’s mother, standing near the slidewalk exit, her phone in her hand. As Elissa registered that she was there, that she was safe, she saw her turn, shielding her eyes from the flames to look up at the sky.

Emergency vehicles hovered overhead, flashing blue lights, sleeker and faster than beetle-cars, some spraying foam in huge arcs to smother the flames, some with the trident-caduceus sign of the med-services, some displaying the trident and scales of justice of the police.

And one with a different sign: a trident with a lightning-bolt handle. Not firefighters, medics, or police. Government enforcement agents.

A house fire didn’t require enforcement agents. Her mother hadn’t been just calling people to come and put out the fire, she’d been calling people to come for Elissa.

Elissa didn’t even consider the possibility they might be there for something other than her. They weren’t, she knew it. They were here to make sure she didn’t get away, here to make sure she made it into the operating room, here to make sure she didn’t tell all their secrets.

“Run,” said her father very quietly, and pushed something into her hand.

She threw a frantic, confused look down at what it was. It was two of the morph-cards from the stack he’d shown her earlier, their translucent surfaces reflecting the flames.

Frozen speechless, she jerked her head up to meet her father’s eyes. The fire threw his face into harsh lines of light and shadow. “Run,” he said again.

The first of the emergency vehicles landed on the shelf. Elissa flung a glance at it in time to see two men getting out. Dark clothes, bulletproof vests, guns visible at their waists.

“Now,”
said Edward Ivory, and he pushed her. “Go find her. Go
now
.”

The men were looking around, getting their bearings. Elissa couldn’t afford to wait any longer. She took off, racing across the shelf, making for the exit to the slidewalk.

She had to dive right by her mother, and Mrs. Ivory grabbed at her, caught the flapping edge of her hoodie. “Lissa! Stop right now!”

Elissa pulled away. The zipper caught, then broke, and the hoodie slid off her arms. She was free again, running for the exit, her mother left holding nothing but an empty garment.

She swerved, crashed into someone, pushed free but found the exit blocked by a press of bodies.

“Stop!” An unfamiliar voice, the voice of one of the agents. “Elissa Ivory, you’re ordered to stop!”

She didn’t stop. She flung herself sideways, skidded on the grass, the auto-repair, c recovered, and took off running along the shelf.

Behind her came shouts, her mother’s raised voice, then pounding feet. The agents. Both bigger than she was, fitter, faster. And armed.

All at once she was running flat-out, faster than she’d ever thought she could. If she could get to the next exit, out onto the slidewalk, she could reach the intersection and disappear into its constantly moving tangle.

She threw herself at the next exit, banged her hand down on the sensor. The gate didn’t move. They’d jammed it. The agents—somehow they’d jammed it to block her way down to the main slidewalk system, to block her escape.

She ran again, mind racing ahead of her flying feet, trying to picture what lay ahead of her. Grass, the bland blocks of houses, all the way to the end of the shelf. Nowhere to hide. If she could only get down to the intersection . . . but if they’d blocked one entrance, they could block others.

She lost a precious half second trying the next gate, and she was right, it was blocked as well. She heard their feet behind her and took off again, heart pounding in her ears. If she could reach the last gate before they could jam it, she could still get through and away.

The end of the shelf was coming up fast in front of her. If the gate wouldn’t open, she was trapped. She’d left herself nowhere to go. She kept running, chest hurting, knees weak, hoping against hope that something, some miracle, would intervene before they reached her.

The corner of the last house loomed up at the edge of her vision. She flung herself toward the last exit sensor as if she were flinging herself at the miracle that hadn’t come, that wasn’t coming. It was no use, she was caught—

The gate slid open.

Elissa fell through it, landed on her hands and knees on the slidewalk outside the shelf, the safety fields switching on so suddenly, it felt as if she’d been given an electric shock.
She scrambled up and threw herself onto the track that led away from the shelf, running the way you were never supposed to run on the slidewalks, because if you ran too fast, the safety fields couldn’t hold you—

As she thought it, she felt the tremor on her bare arms, the here-and-gone-again flicker of the safety field failing. Terror flashed through her. She started to slow, then a little way behind her the slidewalk gave another tremble as someone else—two someone elses—jumped down onto it.

A different terror took her. A memory that wasn’t her own, a memory like a spike and flare of lightning all through her brain, a memory of nothing but pain she couldn’t describe, pain so huge it blanked out words.

This time she hardly noticed the tremor of the safety field disappearing. She took off, running the way she hadn’t run since she was little, feet pounding on the slidewalk. She reached the next junction, sidestepped onto the fastest slidewalk, and tore along that one too, down and down and down in a spiral that took her farther and farther from the men chasing her, farther and farther from her shelf, her house, as if she were running from everything screwed up and awful about her whole life.

Two more intersections. She jumped onto the southbound slidewalk, then the northbound one farther down, zigzagging, no longer hearing their feet above her but not sure she’d lost them, not daring to slow down or even look back.

Her heart was thundering in her ears now, each breath tearingZed question at her chest. She had to find somewhere safe so she could stop. She had to think.

She jumped another intersection, her knees wobbly under her, choosing a route that ran directly under another one,
so no one coming from above her could see where she’d gone. She threw a quick look around herself, getting her bearings, trying to picture the nearest place to hide. Once she got down onto the city floor, there’d be cameras everywhere, something that had always made her feel safe before, something she’d always thought only criminals needed to fear.

Am I a criminal now?

She pushed the thought aside, imagining the section of the city she’d end up in if she kept going down. She was still nearest the west side of the canyon. Where could she go? A place without cameras, a place you didn’t need ID to get into . . .

The old playground
. Relief zinged through her, momentarily eclipsing the fatigue. She hopped slidewalks again. The old playground lay at the base of the west side of the canyon. It had been practically camera central years ago, when Elissa was little, but then the antigrav soft-play complex opened farther along the city side, and the playground fell into disuse. Teenagers used it now, traveling there in couples and hiding out in the playhouse and the triangles of shadow cast by slides and climbing frames. The city council had kept the cameras going for a while, but then there’d been some scanded inappropriate behavior from one of the police officers who’d had the job of scanning them, and then a whole human-rights-and-privacy argument, and in the end the city had taken the cameras away and instead put up signs that the playground was no longer a secure place for children to play.

Chest heaving, knees shaky, Elissa stepped sideways off the slidewalk onto the platform two stories above the bottom of the canyon and descended the static stairs that ran down the cliff to the city floor.

This early the playground waal about alleg

EVEN FROM
the position she was in, Elissa jumped, a stupid sort of bunny hop that made her feel like an instant idiot. She snatched up the morph-cards and swept them into her pants pocket. She looked up at the slight, dark figure making its way across the playground, avoiding, as Elissa had done, every patch of light.