Free Linked by Imogen Howson

were getting clearer because the girl was coming closer. She’d go with that, try the nearest road first.
    If I never find her, I’ll never know. I’ll wonder always if it was real, if I could have done something .
    She stepped onto another slidewalk and let it take her through the patchwork of light and dimness, past areas of grass that grew waist high, combed through by the scouring breath of the hot wind, past the dark slices of the drainageditches that crisscrossed the plateau, insurance against the sudden drenching rains that would come in the autumn. She slid from shadow into the glare of tall lights, so bright that they bleached all color from their surroundings, turning her into a grayish girl traveling over grayish grass. Then she slid back into the shadow that made her almost invisible.
    The slidewalk curved, and almost before she knew it, she was sliding alongside the buttresslike supports of one of the roads. She jumped off, stumbling slightly on the tangles of grass. It’s not the right place. She was farther down, out of sight. She can’t be here .
    The road towered up above her, a dull gleam in the dark where she stood, flashing bright higher up where the light from one of the tall lamps fell on it. Its supports stood solid in the grass in front of her, but others dwindled into the dark . . .
    Into the dark of the drainage ditch just feet away from her.
    If Elissa hadn’t known the girl was there, she’d have thought the huddled shape, darkness against darkness, was nothing but a pile of garbage collected into a corner by the wind. As it was, she could see it was a person, worryingly in the morning.”a thought still, curled in the crook between the grass and the side of the road support.
    The side of the ditch fell away, precipitously steep, the grass on it long and dried glass-smooth by the sun and wind. Elissa’s descent was a slide, scarcely controlled at all, made faster by the weight of the bag on her back, the grass slithering through her fingers rather than providing handholds to slow her down. She reached the bottom to find blood streaking her palms where the grass had made tiny shallow wounds like paper cuts.
    The girl hadn’t moved. Refusing to listen to the alarmsuddenly thrumming in her head— she’s dead, it’s too late —Elissa got to her feet and made her way along to where the figure lay.
    The girl was still breathing, a tremor that showed in her huddled shoulders. She had her head buried in her arm so that hardly anything showed except a dark head, the hair damp and straggling all over it. She was wearing a black, baggy hooded top covered in frayed holes. Just the back of one hand showed, pale and grubby, on the grass.
    Elissa knelt and spoket blamed for l

IT WASN’T just a similarity, not just a likeness of dark hair, dark eyes, pointed chin, and high forehead. The girl had the tiny crooked bump at the bridge of Elissa’s nose; the exact shape of her mouth, the bottom lip fuller than the top so that, unless she tried not to, she would always look slightly sulky; the splotches of freckles over her cheeks; the few stray hairs at the end of each eyebrow that Elissa, for the last five years, had made sure to pluck out as soon as they grew. The girl’s hair was cut shorter than Elissa’s, and her face was thinner, the cheekbones sharper, but all the same . . .
    She’s me. She looks just like me.
    After a long moment where Elissa couldn’t gather any thoughts beyond that sentence repeating over and over, she realized the girl wasn’t staring back at her. Her head was still up, but she clearly wasn’t fully conscious. Her eyes were shiny with the glailence stretched out thoughtWhat are youze of fever, her hair sticking to the sides of her face. She put her hands out, a fumbling, clumsy movement.
    Elissa’s own hands flew back, an instinct-driven reaction she made before she knew she was moving.
    Jumping from blankness into hyperactivity, her mind had suddenly thrown up a