Unravel (55 page)

“Hurt how?” Cadan was saying. “Mrs. Ivory, how did Lin hurt him?”

Laine Ivory turned on him. “He's unconscious! Is that hurt
enough for you? He'd gone to see it—I told him not to and he didn't pay any attention. I told him not to go with it in the flyer, and he didn't pay any attention then, either! They let him through security, said it wasn't a risk, left him—
again!
—in the presence of that psycho, and ten minutes later he's lying on the floor, knocked out, scarcely breathing, and it's gone!”

“Gone?”

“Gone where?”

Cadan and Elissa both spoke at the same time.

Mrs. Ivory flung them a furious look. “Do you think I care? It attacked my husband! I don't know where it went after that!” She drew a breath, her eyes boring into Elissa. “It's a monster. I told you. I said so. Bruce is facing
trial
because he helped you get free of it, and still you and your father won't believe me!”

“She's
not
a monster—”

“My God, Elissa, why won't you
see
—”

“—and if she
is
,” said Elissa, speaking louder, “it's because you've made her one.”

Her mother gaped at her, even more fury rising into her face. “Me? You're blaming me for that—that psychotic aberration?”

“Not just you. Everyone like you. Everyone who treats Spares like they're not human.” She hadn't known what she was going to say until she spoke, but it came clear to her now as she said it. “If you treat them like they're not human, they won't be human. They have to be taught. They have to learn. Back on Sekoia, people treated Lin like she wasn't human, and she stopped trying to
be
human. Bruce treated her like a monster—like an alien parasite I had to be freed from—and now she's
behaving
like a monster.”

Her mother opened her mouth, began to say something,
and somewhere in the background Cadan said,
“Lissa,”
but Elissa kept speaking, speaking across her, across both of them, refusing to listen. “So yes, it's your fault. Yours, and Bruce's, and the people in the facilities, and the people back on Sekoia, and the terrorist groups trying to hurt Spares or kill them or use them. And IPL's fault, because they didn't see that what they were doing was making things worse instead of helping. You're trying to turn Lin into a monster, but I'm not going to let you. She's going to stay human, and she's going to stay my sister, and—”

“Lissa.”

“What?”

“She's left the spaceport,” said Cadan. “That's where she's gone. She's taken the shuttlebug. She's left the spaceport.”

“She's . . .” Elissa stared at him, trying to clear her head. “How do you know?”

Cadan tipped his wrist toward her. On his com-unit, a light was flashing red. “I'm the only authorized pilot. If someone else takes it, I get told.”

“But how do you know it's Lin? There's a planet full of other people—”

Underneath the concern, the tight-lipped tension, in Cadan's face, there was a trace of exasperated amusement. “Who but Lin could override the security that fast? Damn that girl, she's always taking my stuff.”

“But what's she doing? What's the point of—”

Elissa stopped. Her father had gone to talk to Lin. Had gone to tell her that Elissa's abductors had been arrested, that they were being held in the place they'd taken Elissa. Lin hadn't known the exact place, but she had known the general location. And with a shuttlebug, she'd be able to make sweeps
of the area, narrow it down to a specific place. Find the people who'd taken away the most important thing in her life.

Elissa remembered Lin's face, the last time she saw it, bleak with loss.
At least you got what you wanted,
she'd said, and Elissa, numb with shock and pain, hadn't been able to tell her how wrong she was.

She thinks this is what I wanted. She thinks it was nothing but the link that bound us. She thinks I don't care anymore. She thinks she has nothing left to lose.

Elissa became aware that even that slight trace of amusement had gone from Cadan's face. He was watching her, all tension, watching her face change as thought after thought went through her, shock after shock.

“She's gone to kill them,” she said to him. “She's lost everything, and it's their fault. She's gone to kill them.”

Horror swept her again, and she had to put out a hand to steady herself against the wall. “Oh God, Cadan, if she succeeds, if she kills those people—not in self-defense, not in a fight, but like this,
on purpose
 . . . I don't know if she can recover. Doing something like that—it might trigger the thing in her mind, it might make her go completely psycho. And even if it doesn't . . . Cadan, I don't think she'll be able to come back from”—she had to swallow before she could say the word—“from murder.”

Somewhere in the periphery of her awareness, where stuff happened that didn't matter, her mother's voice rose, saying more things about monsters and
no one listens to me
, but Elissa paid no attention. She watched the realization flood into Cadan's face, watched his expression change.

“I don't think she'll be given the chance,” he said, and his voice was grim.

“What?”

“Mass murder? Lissa, whatever the circumstances, whatever the excuse, no authority is going to let her go free if she does that. She'll be in high-security imprisonment the rest of her life.”

“But it's not her fault! Losing the link—she's not in her right mind!”

“Then it'll be somewhere for the criminally insane. Either way, Lis—”

Elissa wasn't listening. She couldn't think beyond the idea of Lin, shut away, having to face what she'd done without the link, without even Elissa's physical presence, without anything to pull her back to sanity.

I lost the link today. I thought—we both thought—it meant I'd lost her, too. I haven't. Not yet. But this—if she kills those people,
that's
when I'll have lost her.

She looked at Cadan. “Help me. You have to help me stop her.”

“God, Lis, I don't know
how
. If we tell security where she's gone—an electrokinetic Spare planning on murdering a base full of people? They won't waste time trying to stop her—they'll kill her.”

“Then we don't tell them. We go after her ourselves. Cadan,
please
. You have the
Phoenix
—”

“Lis, it's not like I'm trying
not
to help! Just let me think. I can't get the
Phoenix
out of the spaceport without fifty people asking me what I'm doing.”

“Other flyers—”

“I'm not authorized. And
I'm
not electrokinetic—I can't break into them without setting off a hundred alarms.”

“Oh God, Cadan, you can fly
anything
. There must be
something
that'll get us there. I can't—I can't just—”

His head came up, and suddenly his eyes were blazing, relief and hope lighting his whole face. “My skybike.”

“Your
skybike
?”

“It's still in the
Phoenix
's cargo hold.”

Elissa stared at him. “But it's a
bike
. Lin took the
shuttlebug
. How can you ever catch up—”

Cadan was already across the room, opening the door. “Your sister learns phenomenally fast, I know, but she's still a beginner. She can fly the shuttlebug, yeah, but no way can she get its best speeds out of it. Whereas the bike”—he grinned at her—“I've been riding it since I was fourteen. Trust me, we'll catch her.”

As if the blaze in his face had reached Elissa, she was suddenly warm, her skin buzzing with relief and hope. “You can take me on it?”

“To stop Lin? Like I'd dare to leave you behind?”

Elissa was halfway through the door when her mother caught her arm, jerked her back. “Elissa, you're
not to do this
! You said yourself, she's dangerous, she's setting out to
murder
these people. Do you realize how much danger you're putting yourself in?”

Elissa dragged her arm away, not looking back. Her mother caught it again. “Lissa,
stop
this. I'm going to call security. They can go after her.”

That did make Elissa look at her mother. Mrs. Ivory's face was set rigid, her mouth a lipless line.

“You're
not
,” said Elissa. “You heard what Cadan said—they'll kill her.”

“Better that than she kills you!”

She's not going to kill me!
The words flashed to Elissa's
lips, but this time she couldn't say them.

“No,” she said instead. “It's not better, and you're not to let it happen.” But now she wasn't talking to her mother. Her gaze lifted, went across the room, and met Bruce's eyes. “You wanted to fix things?” she said. “Don't let her call anyone.”

Bruce came forward, unwillingness in every line of his body. “She's my
mother
. You're not expecting me to—God, physically
restrain
her?”

“I don't care what you do,” said Elissa, exasperated. “Just don't let her screw this up.
Talk
to her.
Explain
. Tell her what you told me. Tell her about Lin. Be persuasive, for God's sake. She'll listen to
you
.
Everyone
listens to you—”

She broke off, the words sounding and resounding in her head.

Everyone listens to Bruce.
And why not? He was tall, good-looking, charismatic. He'd been popular at school, and later at the SFI academy. People liked him. People listened to him, trusted him, believed him.

She looked straight into his eyes. “If we don't come back—”

“God,
Lissa
—”

“Lissa, will you
listen
to yourself?” Her mother's voice was shrill. “You stop this
right now
, or I'm calling security!”

“
Bruce
,” said Elissa, loudly. “Listen to me.
Listen.
If we don't come back, if something goes wrong, you have to fix this. You're going to go on trial. You're going to be
news
. All across this side of the star system, people are going to be following the story. You have to use that—you have to tell people what happened, how you thought one thing, then you changed your mind. You have to persuade people—
all
the people—people on Philomel and back on Sekoia and
everyone
—you have to persuade them that Spares are human.”

For the first time it wasn't just unhappiness in Bruce's face, but anguish. “Lissa, how do you expect me to do that? If you don't come back—if she kills you and Cay—”

“If she does,” said Elissa, knowing it was cruel, saying it anyway, “it'll be you who helped her. It'll be on your shoulders too. It'll be your job to make it right. You can't fix things for me anymore. But you can make sure this doesn't happen to other Spares.”

“Lissa,” said Cadan from the corridor, “if we don't go now, we'll never catch her.”

“Coming.” Elissa stepped out of the room, her eyes not leaving Bruce's. “It's on you,” she said. “You have to fix this for me.”

The door slid shut between them.

She had one frozen instant where everything seemed to stand still, where just one stream of thought looped over and over in her head.
He has to do it. He has to. Even if it's too late for me and Lin, this is the chance we've needed, the chance to make people see Spares differently.

Then urgency fired her, adrenaline shooting like fireworks into every nerve and muscle, and she was racing down the corridor, running as fast as she could but still aware that Cadan was pacing his stride to hers, racing toward the spaceport bay where the
Phoenix
waited.

The door of the cargo bay swung up slowly, slowly, metal grating on metal. Cadan ducked under it the moment there was space enough for him to do so. Elissa scrambled after him into the hold just as the lights auto-blinked awake.

The skybike was packed in solidfoam, strapped against one of the walls of the hold. Cadan was unclicking the catches before Elissa reached him. He nodded toward another
solidfoam crate next to the bike. “Gear's in there. There's two helmets and jackets. Start getting yours on.”

Elissa fumbled at the catches, pulling the straps loose, lifting the top off the solidfoam crate. She was zipping up one of the jackets—close fitting, dark blue, with the rigid feel at elbows, shoulders, and collar that meant it was reinforced against impact—when she heard the skybike roar to life behind her.

It was a sleek, silver thing, like a small-scale, slimmed-down flyer, most of its bulk in the tail fin and wings that stood up behind the tar-black seat. The seat not only looked as if it were made of soft black tar, it felt like it as well. It, as well as the handlebars, footrests, and handgrips, was made of a super-safety material, so high-friction that it seemed to cling to the skin when you touched it.

Cadan stood with his legs braced astride the bike, one hand on the handlebars, flipping switches, checking the fuel gauge. After a moment he killed the engine, holding out his free hand for a jacket. Elissa passed it to him, then felt up under her chin, finding the studs to fasten the collar closely around her neck. Her fingers were suddenly shaky. She'd never gone on a skybike before. Unlike most of the vehicles used in Sekoia's cities, they were built to be used independently of the monorails—superfast, daredevil boys' toys. Elissa's parents had never let Bruce have one, and hadn't even let him ride on Cadan's until he was seventeen. And Cadan had been right, Elissa's mother would never have let her on one.