Linked by Imogen Howson

Author:Imogen Howson [Howson, Imogen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9781442446564
Google: JS5trEBV8iQC
Amazon: 1442446560
Goodreads: 14999965
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

WHEN ELISSA had said it, it had felt like the obvious answer, the obvious escape. But early that evening at the edge of the spaceport, as she approached the Space Flight Initiative student accommodation tower block, the certainty came to her that it was not an escape—it was nothing but another dead end.

She tipped the peak of her cap farther down over her face as she left the fading golden sunlight for the cool shadows of the main lobby, with its banks of lockers around every side and its staircase rising above her. She and toward lilgh Bruce hadn’t been particularly close growing up, and since she’d gotten sick and he’d gone off to SFI, what closeness there was between them had dwindled further. And if her dad hadn’t been able to help her—

She cut the thought off, crossing the lobby floor to reach the foot of the stairs. Her dad hadn’t been able to help her because she’d phoned him, and his phone had had a trace on it. They could have done the same to Bruce’s phone too, which was why she hadn’t tried calling him first. Of course, coming in person to where he lived wasn’t the safest thing to do either, but she was pretty sure they wouldn’t have bugged his bedroom. There were cameras, obviously, but . . . Climbing up the flight of stairs to the first landing, Elissa caught sight of herself in the shiny doors of the lockers on the far side of the lobby, and despite everything, she had to bite back a grin. Her own parents would have a hard time recognizing her right now. If the low-security student accommodation cameras picked up her true identity, then they were a hell of a lot better than everyone said they were.

Her copper curls were gone. Her hair, stripped back to its normal dark brown, was bundled up into her cap. She’d wiped all her makeup off, apart from the camouflage cream that concealed the fading bruises on her jawline and neck, and in the shadow of the cap—GO TEAM something-or-other, it said—her face looked thin and pale. She was wearing boys’ pants, baggy enough to conceal the treacherous girl-curves of her bottom and thighs, and a too-big jacket hanging open over an equally baggy T-shirt. She wasn’t sure she looked exactly like a boy, but she was pretty sure that whatever she looked like, at least she wasn’t easily recognizable as Bruce’s little sister.

She didn’t have a cover story to tell him. She’d thought and thought about it, but she hadn’t come up with anything more compelling than the real story—that their sister had been taken away at birth, imprisoned for seventeen years and tortured for three, and that Bruce was her only hope of escape.

The only thing Elissa wasn’t planning on sharing with Bruce was that she had to get Lin away not just for Lin’s sake but for the sake of everyone she might come into contact with—the agents tracking her, and the innocent bystanders with whom she might collide.

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