Unravel (43 page)

Cadan was in the room now, pushing through the crowd, snapping commands for them to move back. Then someone lurched into him, knocking him sideways.

A space cleared, and Elissa saw what had caused the screaming.

It was Zee she saw first. Zee, his eyes as blank as a white sky, his teeth bared, and around them, his lips drawn back as far as they would go. His face was empty, but it wasn't just the emptiness—the fugue state—she'd seen on it before. This was the face of someone whose mind had been rinsed of every scrap of sanity.

The next thing she saw was the blood on his hands. On his
fingernails—
under
his fingernails. As if he'd—
oh God, no. That can't be someone else's blood. What can he have done to get someone else's blood under his nails like that?

Even as she stared, Zee's arms were seized from behind, dragged behind his back. One arm had been grabbed by Samuel, the other by Ivan, and even Ivan looked as if it was taking every bit of his strength. Zee was struggling against them—
furiously
, Elissa's mind supplied, but that word didn't even begin to describe the insane energy powering Zee's limbs as he fought to get free. Samuel's wrist was bleeding, and there was a spatter of scarlet across Ivan's chef's shirt collar.
Oh God, it
was
someone else's blood. He attacked them—Ivan and Samuel. But why? Why?

And Ady. Where's Ady? If Zee's freaking out, Ady must be able to do something?

Then, as if her mind was deliberately narrowing her field of vision, forcing her to take in only one horrifying thing at a time, she realized where Ady was. Realized what had happened to him.

Ady was standing by the viewing panel, facing Zee. His hands were to his face, and blood was streaming down between his fingers. Blood was smeared around his eyes, too, from where it had poured from long scratches that raked his forehead, hairline to eyebrow. Long scratches that were the marks of fingernails.

“Zee.”
She spoke out loud without realizing, her voice drowned in the noise of the crowd around her. She disentangled herself from Cassiopeia's clutching hands and went forward, her legs numb beneath her, her gaze fixed as if she were mesmerized on Zee's awful, blank-eyed, snarling face. “Zee. My God, what have you
done
?”

“Don't go near him.” Ady's voice was choked with tears, wavery with shock and pain. “Something's gone wrong. It's my fault. I should have known, I should have spoken to someone sooner. His mind—all the stuff he went through—”

But you? He attacked you?
Elissa's mind was a fog of horror. Somewhere in the distance she heard Cadan's voice and realized vaguely that he'd been speaking for a while, although she hadn't heard anything of what he'd said.

“Restraints,”
he was saying now. “Get me
the goddamn restraints
.” Then: “Lissa, get away from him! Get back, everyone. Ady, get away, for God's sake.”

Elissa backed away, partly in response to the note in Cadan's voice, mostly from an instinctive, panicked impulse to put as much distance as she possibly could between herself and the blood-streaked creature in front of her that was this nightmare version of Zee.

She crashed into someone, and she must have been moving faster than she realized because whoever it was staggered, throwing her off balance. She trod on someone else's foot, flung a hand out to steady herself, missed grabbing anything, and was only stopped from falling by someone's hands coming out to hold her. She threw a look up, and it was Mrs. Greythorn.

“What's happening?” asked Elissa, her voice coming out so thin she could hardly hear it, then rising and cracking, an out-of-control note that scared her all over again. “What's going on?”

Mrs. Greythorn's voice was flat with shock. “I have no idea. We were starting to organize them into separating. El got upset, and a couple of the others, and I went over to them to talk to them. Then”—she shook her head—“I heard
Ady say his brother's name, and I looked back, and Zee had . . . frozen. And then . . .” She shut her eyes, her face going motionless, swallowed, and reopened her eyes. “Just . . . that. He just . . .”

All the time she was talking, Elissa hadn't been able to look away for longer than a second from where Zee was now being wrestled into wrist restraints. He was shrieking now, on an impossibly high note that sounded as if it would tear out the lining of his throat, and it was taking not only Samuel and Ivan but Cadan and Mr. Greythorn to hold him still enough to get the restraints around his wrists.

He can't be that strong, not naturally. And this—it's not just panic. He's actually gone insane. Oh God, Ady and I both knew there was something not right, and we didn't tell anyone. We didn't think . . .

What if it was too late? What if, after everything he'd been through, Zee's mind had cracked beyond fixing? What if, so soon after finding his twin, Ady was going to lose him all over again?

Faces set with effort, shoulders straining, Cadan and Mr. Greythorn had gotten the restraints around one of Zee's wrists. Now they were struggling to pull his other wrist close enough to lock the restraints around that one too. Just as the second restraint snapped shut, Zee gave a high, ululating wail, and all Elissa's skin seemed to shrink closer on her body, part in terror—no one should be able to make that noise—and part in horrified pity.
Are they hurting him? He's gone crazy, but he's still Zee, and such awful things have happened to him—

One more awful thing still to come, as it turned out.

The wail hadn't been a noise of pain, but of defiance. So fast Elissa hardly realized what he was doing, Zee braced
himself and slammed his head back into Cadan's face. Cadan's head snapped backward, his face stunned and blank but seemingly unhurt for a second—until the bright blood began to gush from his nose.

Elissa cried out. Mrs. Greythorn's hands bit into her arm.
Cadan!
People got killed like that—she'd seen it happen.
Cadan, oh God—

Cadan blinked. He was alive. But his hands had slackened on Zee's wrist. Just for a moment, but it was enough.

Zee tore himself free from all the pairs of restraining hands. Arms bound behind him, head down, looking as if every second his legs would go from under him and he would crash to the ground, he charged across the room in a staggering rush.

When Cadan had told him to, Ady had backed a little farther away. But not far enough. He was still standing near the viewing panel. He'd taken his hands down from the scratched-up mess of his face, and he was crying, tears streaking the bright blood to pale, soaking it all down into the collar of his T-shirt.

Zee lunged into him with all the force of someone no longer held back by considerations of their own safety or their own pain. Ady flew backward, hands coming up in a futile attempt at defense, and crashed into the side of the viewing panel. The back of his head banged against it.

“Zee—” he said.

Zee had only just remained on his feet. He took one step back now, his balance off, swaying, and for a moment his eyes locked on his twin's face.

“Zee,” said Ady. The word was a plea, but there was love there too. Love, and pain at having to watch what Zee was doing to himself.

Zee's hands clenched in the restraints. He braced his feet, and drove forward with his head. It struck Ady in the face as it had struck Cadan's, but this time the splash of blood was instant. Ady's head crashed back against the viewing panel, and, as if the impact had shaken all consciousness from him, his eyes went as blank as Zee's.

Elissa screamed. Across the room, Mr. Greythorn and Cadan both lunged toward Zee. Nearer, a pair of twin girls grabbed for him, their eyes wild with fear and a sudden terrified determination.

Zee reared his head back, then crashed it again into Ady's face. Something crunched, a horrible sound that the human body shouldn't ever make, and more blood splashed, onto Zee's face, onto the panel behind Ady. Through it, the distant stars showed suddenly red, a thousand warning lights, a thousand signs shrieking
danger, danger, danger
.

Cadan was shouting, and other voices, a cacophony with no power to help. “Zee!
Zee!
”

Zee drove his head once more into the bloody ruin of his twin's face, and Ady crumpled, falling backward against the panel. For an instant it held him in a half-standing position. His eyes were open. Elissa caught a glimpse of something that might have been expression in them—or might have been just a glint of reflected light. Light that reflected nothing but red, like the shrieking warning lights of the stars, like the blood.

I will talk to Clement,
he'd said to her. . . .
not this evening . . . But tomorrow . . .

She should have said,
No, not tomorrow
. Should have said they didn't know what the stresses Zee had been under had done to his mind, should have said that the fugue states might be a warning of danger, a red light they shouldn't ignore, that
tomorrow might be too late. Should have told him that Mr. Greythorn had to be told right away. Should have said,
Don't wait. Tell him now. Tell him before anything can go wrong.

She hadn't said that. Hadn't said any of it. She'd laughed, and nodded, and agreed.

Zee lunged again at his twin, but as he did Ady's body slid, a slow collapse, down the viewing panel. He landed at the bottom, on the little lip where you could stand and feel you were flying through endless space, a crumpled huddle, smaller than he'd looked when he was standing up, when he was moving, smiling, taking care of his brother.

And he lay still.

There was sobbing in Elissa's ears. And someone screaming again, but this time in broken, half-choked screams that sounded as if they were running out of breath.

Maybe they would run out of breath. Maybe then they'd be quiet and everyone would be quiet and there wouldn't be so much noise in her ears, in her head, stopping her thinking, stopping her making sense of what had just happened. Because what she thought she'd seen, it
didn't
make sense, it didn't make any sense, so it couldn't be real. Not really. It couldn't be that Ady was dead. It couldn't be that Zee had killed him.

Her eyes were shut. She didn't remember shutting them, but at least in the darkness she could make things make sense, she wouldn't have to look at images that didn't make sense, images she couldn't let herself believe.

Lissa.

But now there was a voice in her head as well as her ears. The one voice she couldn't ignore.

I can't. I can't—

She didn't know what she was saying she couldn't do. Open her eyes? Let herself think? Listen to what her sister wanted?

Lissa. Please. I'm so frightened.

Elissa opened her eyes. But as if they were still obeying another of her brain's commands, as if they were still trying not to let her see, they showed her a world gone blurry. A haze of moving shapes, a far-off reddish glittering mist.

“Lissa.”

Lin was blurry too, but that didn't matter, because Elissa could tell where she was. Could tell by the tremor in her voice that even if it
wasn't
true, even if what she'd seen wasn't real—
and it can't be, it can't
—something had left Lin shocked and frightened.

Elissa put her hands out—and the shape that was Lin jerked away.

Don't!
“Don't come near me!”

Elissa caught the thought before the words, and they overlapped weirdly, making an echo in her mind. Something else that made no sense.

“Lin? What—”

“The warning,” said Lin. “The warning to separate us. That's why. If they'd separated—” She choked on the next word, tried again, couldn't say it. But Elissa knew what it was. The knowledge came relentlessly, inexorably, a swelling tide of unwanted memory. If they'd separated them, that wouldn't have happened. If they'd known in time. If they'd . . .

If they'd separated Ady and Zee.

The merciful blur resolved itself into unmerciful clarity.
The stars were red because she was seeing them through the blood splashed up the inside of the viewing panel. Ady was a crumpled heap because he was dead. Because his brother had killed him.

People were crying. Cassiopeia was still screaming. Cadan, as white as death, knelt over the body.

And Lin was backing away from Elissa because that was what the message from Philomel had been warning them about. It had been warning them about all the Spares. Warning them to separate the Spares from their twins. Because whatever had happened to Zee, whatever insane meltdown had driven him to kill his twin, it could happen to them.