Unravel (17 page)

For a moment Elissa couldn't speak, and when she did her voice didn't sound like hers. “That's what I am? I'm a
distraction
?”

Alarm flashed across Cadan's face. “God, no, that's not how I meant it to sound. It's not
you
—it's
us
. Our relationship. They—my dad . . .” The next words came out like a quote, and for a moment Elissa could hear his father's voice overlaying his. “He thinks I should have had the sense to hold off until I was in less volatile circumstances.”

“And that's what you want?” Her voice still didn't sound like hers, but now it was because it had gone so flat it sounded as if she were speaking through a machine, as if all emotion had been digitally removed from the words. “You want us to . . . hold off?”

“No,” said Cadan. The word should have been reassuring, but he said it slowly, not looking at her, and she thought she could see doubt in his face. “No, Lissa, I don't. I'm just . . .” He gave half a laugh, and all at once Elissa could have smacked him. He could
laugh
when she was standing here dying of insecurity? “I'm not used to my parents disapproving of me. I'm kind of thrown. And although I
know
what I feel, trying to trace back exactly when and how, when it feels like I've felt like this about you forever . . .”

He looked up. His face had a lost expression, but it wasn't so much doubt as confusion. “But I love you,” he said. “That hasn't changed.”

The tight knot in her chest eased a little. “I'm
sorry
. I just . . . I'm freaked out. I never expected them to mind one way or
the other. I never expected them to
disapprove
.

“And I'm an idiot. I didn't think to tell them in advance. So they weren't even slightly expecting it. I guess . . .” He hesitated, and what might have been the faintest flush crept up into his face. “The thing is, I've never brought a girl home before. Not that this was bringing a girl
home
, exactly, what with the whole lot of us being displaced persons . . .” His eyes met hers again. “I guess I wanted to do it properly, you know? Not on the phone. Not from a whole other planet.”

Where the sunlight streamed in behind him, it caught the edge of his jaw, outlining it in brightness. His eyes were their familiar summer-sky blue, steady where they held hers. But the tiny muscles around them were, just visibly, tight with tension, and he didn't say anything else, standing with hands clenched on the counter behind him, waiting for her to speak.

“Never?”
said Elissa.

“Never.” His eyes flickered for a moment as, incurably honest, he made sure to qualify so she wouldn't misunderstand. “I mean, I'm not going to say there haven't
been
any girls. There were pretty strict rules when we were training, but in the vacations, when we were permitted to socialize . . .” He stopped, met her eyes again. “But, yeah, there was never anyone I wanted to bring home. Just you.” His hands shifted on the counter, a little almost-nervous movement. “Is that . . . okay?”

In this new world, the wreckage of the old one they'd helped bring down, it seemed crazy that little things—like that—still came weighted with meaning. But they did. For some people it wouldn't have been a big deal one way or the other. For Cadan—and so for her—it was.

He'd been at college for years, flying up the ranks, him and Bruce, superstars among the cadets. She'd known he must have dated—and she was pretty sure there'd been plenty of girls to choose from. But now here he was, with her, saying,
never anyone I wanted to bring home. Just you.

Just me. Out of everyone there could have been, just me. And he's asking me if it's okay.
She looked at him across the bright warmth of the kitchen, here at the beginning of a new day. All at once his parents and what they thought seemed a million miles away. She had to fight against the smile that was trying to break out all over her face—she didn't want him to think she was laughing at him. “You really can't have spent
much
time with girls if you're asking me if it's
okay
that I'm special enough to be the first.”

He put his hands up, a
you got me
gesture. The color had edged higher in his face. “Yeah, all right. But . . . look, I just wanted to tell you.” He swallowed. “It doesn't mean . . . it's not like I'm expecting it to be the same for you. I know you're—” He broke off, restarted. “You don't have to be at the same place I am.”

But of course I am!
She was on the verge of saying it, but then those last few sentences got through to her.
I know you're
 . . . what? Too young? Too inexperienced? He could say he wasn't expecting her to feel the same way, but from where Elissa stood, it sounded like he was taking it for granted that she
didn't
.

His parents made him question whether it's real for him, and now he's questioning that it's real for me, too?

The kitchen no longer seemed quite so bright, so filled with warmth. She crossed her arms. “So what place
am
I at?”

The words came out full of insecurity and squashed-down
anger and resentment she didn't want to let herself feel, a mixture that edged them like ground glass, and Cadan's face changed as they struck him. “Isn't that for you to tell me?” He took his hands away from the counter and folded his arms, an all at once forbidding-looking position.

“Well, yeah,
I'd
have thought so,” she said. “But it sounds like you've already assumed you
know
—”

“Lissa, for God's sake!” Real irritation sparked through his voice now. “What's going on with you? I'm not ‘assuming' anything. I was giving you the freedom not to say you felt exactly the same. I mean, call me stupid, but I thought girls, oh I don't know,
liked
their feelings to be respected—”

“And this is respecting my feelings?”

Cadan threw his hands open. “Okay, fine, clearly not! Do I get any credit for
thinking
that's what I was doing, though? Suppose you tell me what I'm supposed to say instead?”

They glared at each other. Behind Cadan, the angle of the sunlight had changed a tiny bit, just enough to make it shine straight into Elissa's eyes, forcing her to squint against the dazzle. Her eyes prickled with a sudden feeling like needles.

A few weeks ago everything had been super simple. He'd said he loved her, and nothing else had mattered. Now, though, with Cadan not being able to imagine them being together before they'd been forced together on the
Phoenix
, and with his parents disapproving, and with him not even knowing how she
felt
about him . . .

“You're supposed to
know
,” she said. The needles had gotten into her voice as well, making it sound thin and scratched.

“Lis . . .” His face was still exasperated, but he spoke gently. “Come on, how can I know? Isn't that exactly what you don't want me to do—assume I know what you're feeling?”
He leaned over, ran a finger down her hairline, over her cheek. “It's okay. Whatever it is, whatever stage you're at—with me, with us—it's okay. I don't even need to know if you don't want to say. Not yet. Not right now.”

She turned her face in to his hand. Her throat was tight.
Can't you tell this is serious for me, too?
She didn't even know why it mattered so much, she just knew it did. Knew she didn't want to have to
tell
him, didn't want to have to spell it out.
I wouldn't be doing this just for fun. Not with you.

“Lis? What is it?” His voice stayed gentle, and all at once she was angry with herself. She didn't
want
to be this sort of girlfriend. Needy and clingy and
if you don't know I'm not going to tell you.
She'd handled things that none of the girls at her school had ever had to deal with—she didn't need to turn into someone weak and whiny just because she had a boyfriend. This was a
grown-up
relationship. Couldn't she, for God's sake, be a grown-up about it?

But she didn't get the chance to find out. The door gave the very faintest of squeaks as it opened, and they jumped apart. Cadan whisked his hand away from her face. Elissa took two quick steps toward the drinks machine, turning her back to the door. And then the room was full of people, and the precious few minutes she'd wanted were gone.

Breakfast was waffles—nutri-machine waffles, made from a nutritionally balanced prepackaged mixture that tasted pretty good when the waffles were still crisp and hot, and like damp cardboard as soon as they started to cool down. The kitchen wouldn't hold everyone, so once people had collected their waffles and dialed their drinks, they moved across the hall into the sitting room Elissa had inadvertently entered the night before.

Cadan was swiftly absorbed into a group consisting of the
Phoenix
crew—Felicia was up now—and his parents, and Elissa found herself and Lin perched on one of the couches at the other end of the sitting room, surrounded by the interested faces of the boys and girls they'd met on their arrival.

Plus others, the three Spares they hadn't met. Sofia's and Samuel's twins were still pretty much nameless: If someone needed to get their attention, they called them “El” and “Jay”—like Zee, using the first letter in the facility codes they'd been allocated.

The lone Spare, a slight girl with espresso-colored hair, introduced herself as Cassiopeia. At which Samuel gave a loud, dramatic groan, flopping backward to a semi-supine position next to Jay on the other end of the couch where Elissa and Lin sat. “Seriously? That's worse than Amaryllis.”

Cassiopeia shrugged. She was very thin, her collarbones a sharp ridge under her T-shirt. “You chose your own name, right?” she said to Lin. “That's what I'm doing too.”

“Except she chooses a new one every day,” said Samuel from the depths of the couch. “And they're always
really long
ones.” His tone was friendly, and there was nothing but mild teasing in the look he gave Cassiopeia, but she just shrugged again and moved to sit on one of the beanbags over by the window.

What did it do to you, Elissa wondered, to grow up as a Spare, to escape—to be rescued—but to
not
end up reunited with your twin? Had Cassiopeia even met her twin? Did she have anything left of the kind of link Elissa and Lin shared, or had it, as it was intended to, died off in her infancy? And if she did have that link, and she'd met her twin, and her twin had rejected her, what would that have done to a psyche already damaged by the years in the facility?

El and Sofia, both tall, slim, and identical in feature, still managed to look as different as Elissa and Lin had when they'd been on the run and in disguise. Sofia's hair was sleekly blond, falling like a pale waterfall down her back. Her skin had the airbrushed sheen Elissa associated with the really well-off girls at school, the product of continual beauty treatments. Her eyelashes were unnaturally long, tipped with gold, and her eyebrows arched in thin, perfect lines over her dark eyes. In contrast, her Spare, El, had hair that stood out in a wild copper flare around her head, her skin was a mass of freckles and her eyebrows straggly and unplucked. It seemed incredible that it would only take time and money and a bunch of specialist grooming products to make her look like her twin.

Well, almost like her twin.

It wasn't just the physical differences that made it clear which was Sofia and which was El. Now that Elissa was, for the first time, seeing Spares other than just Lin, she could see that there was a similarity between them, too—a similarity that, unlike the one between twins and Spares, had nothing to do with similarity of build or feature.

It was maybe something about the way they moved, with small, economical movements, as if they were used to a lot less space than their twins had grown up with. And carefully, too, like . . .
Like bad actors. Not really terrible actors, just ones who you can always tell are acting. Ones who never make you forget they're moving around a movie set, leaning against fake walls and opening fake doors and stirring fake food on stoves that don't work.

Now that Elissa had noticed it, she could see it in Lin, too. Less pronounced, maybe—after all, Lin had spent longer with her twin than the other Spares had—but still there.

None of the Spares spoke much, either—of all of them, Lin was by far the most talkative. And whenever anyone else was talking, each of the Spares focused intently on that person, as though they weren't used to being part of a group, as though they had to pay close attention in order to get every scrap of meaning from the words.

Had they not spent any time together in the facilities? Lin had said they'd been educated normally for their preadolescent years—surely that had included group classes? Had they been split up once the so-called procedures started, then? Kept in some kind of solitary confinement?

Of the four Spares, Zee's injuries, which Elissa had noticed last night, might have shocked her, but at least they were well on the way toward healing. The others were hurt too, and looked a lot worse. El's shoulder seemed to have been dislocated and was cocooned close to her body in a sling. She was sitting a little way away from the others, where the wall curved around below the window to make a seat big enough for one person, with Sofia sitting cross-legged on a beanbag a few feet away. Jay's ribs were strapped up, and a long cut all the way down the side of Cassiopeia's face and neck was covered with quick-heal plasti-strips that didn't match her skin tone.