Untold dangers await telepathic twins in this sequel to the futuristic, romantic thriller BCCB called “classic sci-fi, space-travel adventure at its best.” After Elissa and Lin exposed the government’s secret experiments in Linked , which Booklist called “a roller-coaster ride into space that just about everyone should enjoy,” their home planet Sekoia is thrown into chaos. Determined to do their part to help the planet they’ve hurt, they return to Sekoia—only to discover that things are far worse that they imagined. Resources are suddenly scarce, people are scared, and there’s a rising current of anger against the Spares. When Lissa and Lin find themselves among another group of Spares and twins, they feel like they’ve found their kindred spirits at last. But a threat none of them could have expected is lying in wait for Sekoia’s Spares… 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. Unravel IT DIDN’T feel like coming home. The Phoenix broke into the upper atmosphere of Sekoia, flying nose down, and for a moment the desert plateau flashed into view through the glass windscreen of the pilot’s cabin, dizzyingly far below, patched with tan and ocher and the bleached yellow of dead grass. The pull of the ship’s artificial gravity, of what felt like down, didn’t correspond with the actual ground, and Elissa, harnessed into her seat in the front passenger row, just behind the copilot’s seat, had one of the moments she didn’t think she’d ever get used to, when ears and eyes and mind all disagreed, creating the momentary illusion that the ground they were going to land on was rising up like a wall in front of them. The Phoenix’s wings had swung out the moment they breached the atmosphere, and now Cadan adjusted the flight angle so they were flying parallel to the desert plateau. Sunlit sky blazed through the glass above Elissa’s head, a wash of color that seemed, after the darkness of space, impossibly bright. A long way off, a line, a joining of land and sky, of dusty ocher and flawless blue, showed her the horizon. Some hours before they entered Sekoia’s orbit, Cadan had set the Phoenix into what he called amphibious mode, able to go seamlessly from traveling through space to flying within the atmosphere of a planet. The main flight deck and most of the body of the ship had been sealed off, and Cadan was piloting it from a secondary cabin tucked in the side of the ship beneath the flight-deck floor. The first time Elissa had seen the ship, it had looked like a giant silver squid, head pointing toward the sky it would launch itself into, the impression strengthened by the surrounding tentacle-like landing gear. Now she thought that with the ship’s wings out, flying belly-down, it would seem more like a wide-finned fish, the little pilot’s cabin a bulging eye on its smooth silver head. Cadan set them on a course toward the Central Canyon City spaceport while he called ahead to initiate landing protocol. Between the ship and the far-off horizon, the upper levels of the city glinted, the sunlight bouncing off what, much closer, would reveal itself to be an eye-wateringly bright tangle of steel walkways and glass-domed roofs. Elissa had lived there her whole life, traveling the slidewalks, using the beetle-cars, walking under the shining expanse of roofs that kept the city’s precious water from evaporating into the baked-dry desert air. And now she found herself looking at it with alien eyes. It wasn’t like she’d never descended toward the city from the upper atmosphere before; she’d done so twice, once returning from a school outing and once from a family vacation, and both times this view had come with a rush of familiarity, a feeling of being back where she belonged. Not this time. But then, I don’t belong here anymore. She’d known that, really, six weeks ago, standing on this same ship, surrounded by black, endless space, watching Sekoia dwindle to a silvery sphere of cloud and ocean. Back then, though, she’d thought she was leaving for good. That she’d never see it again. Now, descending toward the city where she’d lived her whole life, and yet somehow looking at it as if she’d been away, not for a few weeks, but for a lifetime, she was realizing that, whatever Sekoia was to her, it was no longer home. Elissa gave her head a little shake, refusing to be morbid. Sekoia was a whole different place than it had been some weeks ago, even for the people who still lived there. The Phoenix was Elissa’s home now. And if it was a little weird to think of a spaceship that way, well, what over the last few weeks hadn’t been weird? Finding out three