Linked - Softcover

Howson, Imogen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442446609 ISBN 13: 9781442446601

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2014

Synopsis

When Elissa learns her telepathic twin is the subject of government experiments, the girls find themselves on the run with secrets worth killing for in this futuristic, romantic thriller.

“Sparked with danger and tinged with romance, Linked is a roller-coaster ride into space that just about everyone should enjoy” (Booklist, starred review).

Elissa used to have it all: looks, popularity, and a bright future. Now, all she has is nightmarish visions and unexplained bruises. Finally, she’s promised a cure, and a surgery is scheduled. But on the eve of the procedure, she discovers the truth behind her visions: She’s seeing the world through another girl’s eyes. A world filled with pain and wires and weird machines. Elissa follows her visions, only to find a battered, broken girl on the run. A girl—Lin—who looks exactly like Elissa, down to the matching bruises. A twin she never knew existed.

Elissa helps Lin evade the government agents who are ruthlessly tracking her down, but they’re struggling to avoid capture, and soon Elissa is forced to turn to the only person who can help: Cadan, her brother’s infuriating, arrogant best friend, and new graduate of the SFI space flight academy. Cadan is their one chance at safety. But Lin is too valuable to let go, and Elissa has knowledge that is too dangerous. The government will stop at nothing to get them back.

“Action-packed and thoroughly engrossing, this novel offers readers a classic sci-fi, space-travel adventure at its best” (BCCB).

About this title

About the Author

Imogen Howson writes science fiction and fantasy for adults and young adults, and is the winner of the 2008 Elizabeth Goudge Award for her romantic fiction. She works as an occasional editor for Samhain Publishing. She lives with her partner and their two teenage daughters near Sherwood Forest in England, where she reads, writes, and drinks too much coffee. Visit her at ImogenHowson.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Linked


AS ELISSA and her mother entered the waiting room, the sky above Central Canyon City was a chill, predawn gray, the spaceport a colorless blaze on the horizon. Lines and points of light pricked up from the canyon floor far below.

Elissa walked to the window, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest and that her palms were damp enough to leave handprints on the glass ledge of the windowsill. As she stared, struggling not to give in to her creeping anxiety, the sky changed. First from gray to a thin twilight green, hazy where it curved down beyond the spaceport, then—as all at once the sun rose high enough for its light to hit the desert floor—to endless blue, a color deep enough to drown in.

The light made Elissa’s eyes water. She blinked and looked away, just as the waiting-room lights went to sleep and a ripple of cold at the back of her neck told her the air-conditioning had come on, preparation against the scorching heat of late springtime in the city.

Elissa shivered. No one ever got the temperature right for her. Four years—a lifetime—ago, Carlie and Marissa used to joke that she was as cold-blooded as the tiny glass-lizards that scrabbled up the sides of the school buildings to lie on the flat, sun-hot roofs.

Pushing the memory away, she turned to pick her sweatshirt up from the chair behind her.

At the far side of the room, her mother sat, straight-backed and exquisitely thin, a bookscreen in her hands. In the adjacent corner amber lights glowed behind a tiny waterfall that ran over a tumble of pebbles into a small pool. In the background, music—chimes and harp strings—trickled quietly from invisible speakers, and the scent of chamomile and lavender hung in the air. Everything was designed to calm, to relax.

Elissa’s hands were still sweaty. She wiped them surreptitiously on the sweatshirt as she pulled it on.

If this guy can’t fix me . . .

No one had said it, but Elissa knew very well this was a last resort. How many times now had she sat in doctors’ offices, waiting for them to tell her how they were going to fix her, how they were going to make her normal? How many treatments had they tried? The sleep medication, the pain medication, the little electronic device designed to interfere with the signals her brain sent to her body. That last one had seemed to work at first, and her hopes had soared, only to crash when, abruptly, the symptoms returned. Then there was the hypnotherapy and the weird white-noise machine they’d fixed up in her room, which had been supposed to help her sleep but had just filled her room with an infuriating sensation, like a buzz she heard not only with her ears but also with the inside of her head.

The background music segued into a slightly different theme, something with more flute and less harp. The muted lighting behind the waterfall changed from amber to gold. Elissa’s mother sighed, flicked a glance up at the clock-shimmer on the cream-colored wall, and brushed her bookscreen to turn a page.

Elissa bit at the ragged edge of her thumbnail.

“Lissa, darling, don’t bite your nails.”

She dropped her hand and turned back to the window, but the tightness in her chest crept now into her stomach, coiling behind her ribs. Every time the doctors had tried a new treatment, from that very first time, when they’d said it was nothing but out-of-balance hormones, they’d promised she’d get better. They’d promised the symptoms wouldn’t last. Promised that the treatment—whichever one it was that time—was only temporary. Give it a week . . . a month . . . four months. . . . You’ll be okay for your best friend’s birthday sleepover . . . for your date . . . the spring break camping trip. You’ll be back to normal, Elissa, I assure you . . .

They weren’t saying that anymore. After this last time—the latest terrifying vision, the pain that had made her scream and scream and scream, the bruises as black as burn marks on her neck—they hadn’t promised anything. They’d just made her an emergency early-morning appointment with a new doctor. A specialist. Specialist in what?

When the chime came, she almost jumped. She looked around to see the inner door slide open and the doctor—the specialist—step into the waiting room. He was a man about her parents’ age, with dark brown skin and a mist-gray suit as elegant as the room.

“Mrs. Ivory? Elissa? I’m Dr. Brien.”

Elissa’s mother was already getting to her feet. Her mouth was a little tight, and her hand bloodless on the bookscreen, but she appeared, as always, entirely in command of the situation. “Call me Laine, please. You’re going to help my daughter. I really don’t feel I should stand on ceremony with you.” This with a slight smile as she took his outstretched hand.

Dr. Brien’s smile included Elissa. “What a wonderful attitude. If that’s your attitude as well, Elissa, I don’t think we need to worry!”

Elissa took his hand in turn. Hope unfurled within her, warm and glowing. This one would help. Probably they should have sent her to him years before. Years that she’d spent trying, helpless, to hold on to everything that made up her life, watching as it all slid through her fingers and disappeared.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter about all that wasted time, if I can just be normal now. If I can just have enough of my life back to build a new one.

“Please, both of you, come in. Now, I’ve been caught up to speed with the problems Elissa has been having, but of course you’ll fill me in if there’s anything else I need to know. It looks as if Elissa’s symptoms haven’t cleared up the way we thought they would . . . .” His voice continued, an effortless, reassuring flow of familiar words, as they followed him into his office and sat, obedient to his gesture, in armchairs that matched the couch in the other room. Elissa’s chair shifted a tiny bit around her as she sat, and then warmth crept through its surface, cocooning comfort around her tense body.

Across the room to her right, a whole wall was a plate-glass window, treated to eliminate reflections, making it look as if there were nothing there but emptiness. The sky stretched into an infinity of blue.

Almost invisible against the brightness, a shining fragment climbed like a rising star. A ship, setting off on its journey across the impossible distances of space. Then two more, tiny sliding glints of reflected sunlight. It seemed incredible that just fifty years ago there’d been no spaceflight industry on Sekoia at all. No Space Flight Initiative. No government-funded training program. What would Bruce have done, with no space career to aim for? Gone all out for sports instead? Followed Dad into the police force?

Dr. Brien waved the door shut, then took a seat opposite Elissa and her mother, next to the big corner desk where his screen stood.

“Now, Elissa.” He smiled at her again, and she smiled back. “I’ve been looking at the results of all your tests. Just let me make sure I’ve got everything straight. There’s a note here about some nightmares when you were very young, and a prescription for sleep medication. Do you remember that?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Except she’d never called them nightmares. They hadn’t been scary, so it wouldn’t have made sense. The only scary thing had been her mother’s reaction when she’d mentioned them. “Sometimes I think I’m a girl who’s not me,” Elissa had said, and her mother had stopped dead in the middle of unwinding a clean floor across the playroom, looking up with a face frozen in shock. When Elissa had said the same thing to the doctor—that first doctor her mother had taken her to—“nightmares” had been how he’d framed them. It hadn’t felt like the right word, but she hadn’t known what else to call them, those pictures that came day and night. She’d gone for “dreams” in the end, even though that hadn’t felt quite like the right word either.

“And the medication, did it work?” asked Dr. Brien.

“Yes.”

It had worked, way back then, but she hadn’t liked how it had made her feel. Slow, almost . . . muffled, as if they’d given her invisible earplugs. So when at the end of the month the medicine ran out and her mother checked—Are you having any more of those funny dreams? You need to tell me, Lissa, if you do—she’d said no. And when the dreams had come back, she just hadn’t said anything else about them.

She taught herself to ignore them instead. She learned to shut the pictures out of her daytime, learned to forget the dreams as soon as morning erased the darkness from the bedroom. As she got older they came less and less often, until it took hardly any effort to forget they’d ever been there at all.

She’d thought, earlier, how that had seemed a lifetime ago. That time before the symptoms.

If I’d known. If I’d only known I was living on borrowed time, I wouldn’t have bothered freaking out about all the tiny things that used to upset me. When I got to high school and Bruce—and freaking Cadan—still kept treating me like a little kid. Not being able to get matching shoes and swimsuit for Marissa’s sweet teen pool party. Not asking for help when I didn’t understand simultaneous equations and being pulled up in front of the whole class. When I was sure Simon was going to ask me to the Newbies Prom and he never did.

She’d had friends—two best friends, and a whole heap of others. She’d been asked to most of the parties that mattered. She hadn’t yet had an official boyfriend, but she’d known, from giggling oh-my-God-don’t-tell-him-I-told-you-what-he-said conversations with Carlie and Marissa, that there were at least three boys working up the courage to ask her out. Her grades were good enough. She’d been promised driving lessons, and her own beetle-car if she passed her test the first time.

She’d had everything, and she hadn’t even realized.

Until . . .

“Until . . . ,” said Dr. Brien, and she nearly jumped, suddenly terrified he was reading her thoughts. But he was looking back at his screen. “Until about a year after you started menstruation, yes?”

Agh. She ought to be used to that sort of question by now, but all the same, heat flooded her face. “Yes.”

He picked up a universal pen and sketched a rough square on his desk. The lines glowed briefly green, then the wood finish cleared to show a note-taking surface, smooth and translucent.

“Why don’t you tell me about the symptoms, the way they began?”

Again. Going through it all over again, with doctor after doctor . . .

But this doctor was going to fix her. She straightened a little in her chair, determined not to leave out anything that might help him figure out what he needed to do. If it works . . . oh God, if it works this time, I might be okay for graduation. I’ve been a freak for half my time at school, but if this works, if they can all see me looking normal when we graduate . . .

“Okay.” She swallowed. “The pictures—they came back.”

For years they’d been nothing but flickers in her mind, fleeting and indistinct, easy to ignore. But when they returned, they were bright, vivid with detail, appearing as if lit by lightning flashes in her brain. And this time they were like nightmares. White-masked people, needles and syringes, huge humming machines she dreamed she was clamped into—and she woke biting down screams.

They brought pain, too. Pain that struck like lightning, white-hot, out of nowhere. She would have been able to hide just the pictures. But even if the pain hadn’t been bad enough to make her cry out or faint or—worst of all—throw up, she wouldn’t have been able to hide it. Because just as with the pictures came pain, with the pain came bruises.

Dark splotches creeping out from the nape of her neck up onto her jawline, or sometimes unexpectedly around her temples, or in thumbprintlike marks on the sides of her neck. Every morning when she looked in her mirror, she’d flinch from the sight of new marks.

Dr. Brien was nodding as she talked, making the occasional note in scrawly writing that shone a dark, wet green, as if he were using real ink.

Elissa told him everything she could think of that he might need to know. She told him how her grades had slid down to almost failing. How she’d kept blacking out at school. How sometimes the pain wrecked her sense of balance and she fell, adding explainable bruises to the mysterious ones.

She didn’t tell him absolutely everything, though. He didn’t need to know about the times she hadn’t been able to get her makeup to cover the bruises, about the times at school when people had whispered about her—not always far enough behind her back. He didn’t need to know that, after one too many no-shows at parties, canceled shopping trips, and sleepovers ruined by screaming fits and late-night emergency calls to her parents to pick her up, even Carlie and Marissa had stopped inviting her anywhere. Or that, after all, each of those three boys had asked other girls out instead.

Nor did she tell him how, to start with, her parents had put their own social lives on hold, but when a year had passed and there was still no sign she was going to get any better, they’d started going out again, leaving her at home with medication, their number to call, and a pillow to scream into. I’m sorry, her mother had said. Really, I am, Lissa. I don’t want you to feel abandoned, and we’re just on the end of the phone. But it’s not like we can even do anything if we stay in with you, and your father’s work contacts . . .

Dr. Brien flipped his pen over, touched the nonwriting end to the surface of his notes, and transferred them to the upright screen, leaving the square blank. “So, hallucinations—‘pictures,’ as you say. And phantom pain and bruising. They all come together?”

“Yes.”

“Every time? You don’t get, say, bruising without the pain first? Or the pictures without any pain at all, like you did when you were very young?” He watched her face, waiting.

Not anymore. “No.” Then a thought struck her.

“Elissa?”

“I . . . I didn’t think before, it was so vague . . .”

He waited, pen blinking its ready signal, a tiny emerald spark at its tip.

“The pain—yes, it normally comes with the pictures. But sometimes, I have just a—well, I guess it’s a hallucination, but I never really thought . . .”

“Why is that?”

“It—they—sometimes they come at night, so it feels more like a dream. If there’s no pain I don’t remember them much. I didn’t think . . .” She looked at him guiltily. If she’d thought of this before, if she’d told someone, would it have helped earlier?

He smiled briefly at her. “Don’t worry, Elissa. So, you have hallucinations without pain that might just be dreams. Such as . . . ?”

Such as waking up crying in the night, shaking with sobs that didn’t seem like hers, bursting with misery and rage . . . feeli...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1442446609
• ISBN 13: 9781442446601
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384