Tethered Twins Saga: Complete Trilogy (Twins, Souls and Hearts)

by Mike Essex

  “It’s ok,” I replied. “We’re coming back and I hear Jacobi has a very important job for you two.”

  Rufus joined in. “You know you’ll never stop lover boy here from trying to protect you, me either.”

  “We have no choice. Jacobi won’t let you go and if you went out there without the headsets then the sound wave could kill you.”

  “I don’t care!” said Rex. “We’ve done it for you before and we will do again.”

  “That was different, you were possessed by Tobias and …” my mind struggled to think of more reasons. I felt unease in my stomach and a feeling of losing control. This time the feeling was not from the heat taking me over but from the fears preying on my mind. How could I stop people who were prepared to die for me?

  Grace had the answer. “Are you two saying I can’t protect Emzie? Are you saying I am weak?” she stared at them. “How sexist.”

  “You know that isn’t it,” said Rex. ”The more of us who go, the safer she will be.”

  They started to argue between themselves, drawing the attention of a crowd of citizens. I stepped in and took hold of Rex’s hand. An intense heat started to form in my palm and direct itself towards the centre of my body.

  “If you want to protect me then let me go,” I pleaded with him. “I’ll be safer without you.”

  “But Emmie…” he started to reply.

  “I don’t want you there,” I let go of his hand, where it fell weakly to his side.

  He went to speak but I leaned in and wrapped my arms around him, my mind begging for him to stay safe in the base. He held me tightly in an embrace and I knew that he understood what I was asking him to do.

  I moved my head back to kiss him on the cheek but his head turned and for a brief moment our lips found each other. Instinctively they moved in closer and we kissed, our arms holding each other tightly, neither one of us wanting to let go. Our minds ran away with each other, savouring the moment as I the felt the soft touch of his lips on my own.

  A soothing feeling filled my body, a sensation I had only felt with one other person: March. I backed away from the embrace, thoughts smashing together in my mind. I loved March but had always cared for Rex too. There had always been a feeling in the back of my mind for him that I’d kept locked up. Rex was a friend, a best friend even and a relationship would only confuse things.

  Nothing made sense any more. I wanted to kiss Rex again but my feelings for March left me conflicted. I needed space and time away to regroup my thoughts. I turned away from Rex and ran towards the exit.

  From the darkness I shouted out. “Don’t follow me. I’m sorry.”

  My words hung there like broken promises. If I’d wanted to make a graceful exit then I had failed. Grace caught up with me and we ran through the tunnels taking turns at random, hoping to make our path impossible to follow.

  When I could run no more I rested against the side of a tunnel and caught my breath. I had no idea how far we’d run or what direction we had travelled but I knew I couldn’t outrun my problems. I looked at the tunnels knowing whichever way I turned there was danger.

  On the surface there were soldiers and the purple hooded man, down below there was Jacobi and my feelings for Rex. As for Tom and Chris who knew where they had gone; I was still angry with them for not getting Olive’s medicine, so as far as I was concerned they were the least of my worries. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder just whose side they were on.

  Everything had become so complicated.

  “What have I done?” I asked.

  “Something you should have done a long time ago. That was amazing!” said Grace.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been pushing for you two for a loooong time,” she laughed. “Finally it’s all out in the open.”

  “I’ve ruined everything. What about March?”

  “I love March like a brother,” said Grace, taking my hand, “but Rex has been there for you for a long time and you clearly have feelings for him.”

  “No, it was a mistake. That’s all. March is my boyfriend,” I tried to rationalise it as a silly mistake. A one off. Something I could explain to March quickly and hope for his forgiveness.

  It didn’t convince Grace.

  “You can’t just ignore what happened Emzie. It’s not like you kissed someone random guy. It’s Rex. The guy is practically your soul mate.”

  “Don’t say that. I … I can’t do this right now,” my eyes darted across the different paths trying to figure out which one would solve all of my problems.

  Grace let it go; probably only so she wouldn’t have to chase after me again. “Ok, I’ll give you some time. One problem at once, right?”

  I wanted to call March, confess everything and move on but Jacobi had made that impossible. I had to resolve something and right now the only thing I had the power to work towards was finding Will. As soon as we’d found him we could leave this city and return home.

  “So where to now?” asked Grace, “I wish I still had my GPS tracker.”

  “Me too,” I tried to think back over the path we had travelled and started unravelling our location. The tunnels blocked out the natural light above and their twisting shape made it hard to tell exactly where we had placed ourselves in London.

  “If we can just get to the surface I might be able use the Houses of Parliament as a guide,” I explained, so we started walking through the tunnels searching for an exit.

  By the time we emerged, the sun had risen to the middle of the sky, midday already. From Jacobi’s map I’d remembered two roads on the surface – Pall Mall and the Strand – which would take us directly to the area we needed to explore.

  “There’s the Houses of Parliament,” Grace pointed to the large structure on our right hand side, except it was different to how I had remembered it. We walked towards it to find that the structure was no longer partly destroyed. Its large spires shone brightly in the midday sun and looked freshly polished. No bricks looked out of place, every broken window had been repaired and every smashed structure rebuilt. It almost looked brand new.

  I ran up to one of the walls and touched it, not expecting it to be real. My hand found position on the stone walls which burned with a brutal heat. I pulled my hand away and gasped from the pain. “What the hell?”

  We walked around the building, keeping low to the ground and away from the wall. The outer gardens that had been overgrown with weeds were now filled with beautiful flowers, carefully arranged into detailed spiralling patterns. The blues and purples blended together so elegantly that this was no natural occurrence; someone had revived the garden as well.

  “How is this possible?” I asked quietly, baffled as to how such a change could occur so quickly. “Weren’t we here three days ago?”

  A deep sound came from ahead of us. We ducked behind one of the pillars and heard the noise repeat itself. It continued three more times and we tried to identify the source of the noise. It echoed around us, like the sound of someone hitting a frying pan with a wooden spoon but magnified on a large scale. Two more dings of the bell were heard before we identified the source as Big Ben.

  Six more chimes were heard before the noise stopped. We looked at the clock tower, the broken window we had jumped out of now fixed and the hands of the clock turning. “12 o’clock,” said Grace. “Twelve chimes.”

  “Makes sense,” I replied, although it didn’t really. We’d seen the workings of the clock three days ago. Giant cogs caked in rust and mechanisms stripped of their precious metal by poachers. There was no way anyone could fix the clock in three days, let alone repair the damage we had seen.

  At the base of the clock tower I saw the open walkway that Chris and Tom had escaped from. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried to walk through the doorway. “I’m just checking someth…” my words were cut off midsentence as I felt the intense heat emanating from inside the building.

  A burst of heat with the intensity of fire sprung from the building and I jumped b
ackwards into the courtyard and onto the comfort of the grass. It was far more intense than the heat I had felt outside of the building. Grace attempted to do the same but she also felt the heat, confirming that it wasn’t just me. Whatever they had done to the Houses of Parliament, or were still doing, meant there was no way of entering for now.

  I wondered if the labs beneath the building had survived the change, or even if SO13 had found them and the information they contained. Without a direct link to The Deck I still had no idea what secrets Will had on his computer, what mysteries Jill had unlocked, and I hoped neither did SO13.

  In recreating the building I hoped they had destroyed the labs. No good came from those rooms and the sooner they were lost to the echoes of time the better.

  THIRTY ONE

  The streets where we had been attacked by car crushing drones had also been recreated and it seemed like the process had finished now. I tentatively stepped out on to the freshly tarmacked road expecting to pull my foot back from heat but the road just felt lukewarm.

  “The tube station,” said Grace.

  “Huh?” I replied.

  “It was hotter inside of there than it had any right to be,” she explained. “Perhaps whatever happened here had also happened to the tube station.”

  “It looked brand new as well.”

  “Exactly. However they are regenerating things it must be creating a lot of heat.”

  “So the longer we wait before returning to an area the cooler it will be?” I asked.

  “Seems like it. They must have done this road before the Houses of Parliament, and the tube station before that.”

  “So where are all the soldiers?” I asked.

  “I guess they moved on,” said Grace. “Their job was to remake the city and this area is finished. They’ve probably moved on to another area to flush out more civilians.”

  Freshly painted lines marked the new road and there was no sign of the crushed cars or burnt corpses that had lined the streets. London was quickly becoming a city that wanted to forget its horrors.

  “Remove the dead, rebuild everything broken and remake the city. Then everyone can move on,” I stated.

  “Right,” she replied.

  “I guess. It just feels like one large trap.”

  “That could be fun,” joked Grace. “Certainly more fun than another day hidden underground. Hopefully next time we get captured there will be some natural light.”

  “It’s still London; any sun would be a miracle.”

  Great weather was so rare in Britain that I started to feel that the sun was somehow brighter than usual in this new space. It made me wonder if even the weather was controlled here, that perhaps they were creating a true artificial paradise from the ashes of the old city.

  Next to two beautiful, tropical trees that seemed like they should have been impossible to grow in our climate was a new street sign which read “State of London: Victoria Road”.

  “State?” I mused.

  “I guess they figured ‘City’ was too boring,” said Grace. “Not appealing enough to the haves.”

  “Why live in the City of Birmingham when you could live in the State of London?”

  “Right.”

  Victoria was not one of the roads I’d remembered from Jacobi’s map but it did look like it followed the river closely and travelled away from the Houses of Parliament. The area we needed to explore had been to the North West of our location so it seemed logical that Victoria road could take us in the right direction.

  “This way,” I said to Grace and for a change it was my chance to do the leading. We ran with a brisk pace. The soldiers may have been gone for now but I knew it wouldn’t be long before Jacobi’s colleagues started to comb through the area. This was one of the possible destinations the purple cloaked man had travelled to if my theory was correct.

  There was every chance that the purple cloaked man was watching us now, waiting to strike. I crossed my fingers that he was Will; at least that way if he found us first we’d be safe.

  We walked past a large series of buildings with the words “Ministry of Defence” marked on them.

  “They had their own defence force?” I said.

  “Fat lot of good that did them,” replied Grace.

  “How could they defend against a sound wave?” I asked.

  “For all the time, money and energy invested in ‘defence’ it ultimately meant nothing in the end.”

  “It was all an accident Grace, there’s nothing they could have done.”

  “No. The sound wave was an accident. The way people acted afterwards was no accident. Do you know what happened the day they evacuated the city?”

  I stayed silent.

  “They ran. The army, the politicians, and those in power. Everyone charged with protecting us, abandoned us, and they left this city behind to die,” I could hear the anger in her voice; this was more than just another cause for Grace. It sounded somehow personal.

  I knew that I should have told her that they were trying to save their own lives to ensure that order was maintained around the rest of the UK. Except Grace knew that already; in the history books at school we’d learnt about the courageousness of our armed forces in saving lives during the Siege. Which was why I kept quiet, knowing that nothing I said could really make it ok. No one could make that month ok.

  “Did you know I was born here?” asked Grace.

  I shook my head.

  “The final day before London fell my parents tried to escape the city. I’d been born just a few days before and my mother was still physically weak from the birth and traumatised by the death of my brother in the womb. They felt sure I’d die too but she tried to stay strong and enjoy every moment we had together.”

  Grace had never talked about her family before and I was about to learn why.

  “They had to leave the city but my mother could barely find the energy to move. The nurse who helped deliver me stayed by her side with my father as long as she could but my mother tried to make them both promise to leave to give me the best chance of a life. She didn’t want to lose me to the sound wave. My father refused and said he would save us both, but the fire that ripped through the building had other plans.”

  She continued “I was too young to understand what happened that day but later I found out that looters were the ones who set fire to the hospital. Who does that Emmie? Who sets fire to a hospital?” She repeated the questions but I had no answers. I just looked on, watching her fight back the tears.

  “My father and the nurse tried to help my mother stand but she had given up hope. I think she was ready to die that day in the hope that it would ensure our escape. She begged and begged for him to go and as the smoke from the fire poured into the room he knew he had no other choice. The nurse forced him to leave and take me with him.”

  “That’s horrible,” I replied.

  “The nurse and my father made their way down the stairwell desperate to escape but the stairs gave way and he plummeted downwards. He used the last ounce of his strength to grab hold of the stairs and hand me to the nurse. She tried to save him too but he let go, sacrificing himself so that I would live.”

  “I don’t understand?” I asked. “I’ve met your parents, I know they survived.”

  “You’ve met Tim and Renee.”

  “Yes, your parents,” I replied.

  “No,” she said the word and let out a large exhale of breath. “The nurse escaped from the hospital and tracked down Tim and Renee. She had helped deliver their baby too and knew that they had lost a twin to the Siege, days beforehand. So they adopted me as one of their own.”

  “So that’s why you pretended that Kenan was your brother?”

  “Yes, because in a way he is.”

  “So your parents…”

  “They’re gone. I only know what happened to them from what the nurse told Tim and Renee. There were no coroners’ reports and now no one will ever find their bodies. The hospital that collapsed will be r
emade anew and it will be like they never existed.”

  “You’ll know.”

  “That’ll have to be enough,” Grace sighed. “That nurse was the only person to stay behind; everyone else left my family to die.”

  I could see now why Grace put so little faith in the Government and so much focus on caring for other people. She had experienced first-hand the kindness of strangers and I could think of no kinder gesture than adopting a child and caring for it like your own.

  “Tim and Renee loved you too,” I said.

  “I know. Sometimes I think Renee thought I was her real daughter. I think I was a sense of closure for her, that somehow I made her feel like her daughter had never died. Aside from not being Tethered to Kenan we were pretty much like a normal family.”

  It saddened me to think how many other lives had been ruined by that event. Over a billion dead. How many other stories were there just like Grace’s? How many were a whole lot worse? How many stories could never be told by the ones people had lost?

  The Ministry of Defence’s building was a reminder of a broken promise. A reminder that this had once been a city whose people were left behind to die. When this city reopened and the new citizens flooded in I hoped that the new owners of that building would reclaim that promise and protect the people around them. I hoped they would remember what it meant to be human and show the same compassion as Grace.

  I hoped they would defend the people.

  THIRTY TWO

  We continued to walk down Victoria road watching out for soldiers as we went. In the distance I could hear an announcement coming over a loudspeaker but could not determine what it said.

  After we had passed a tube station with the name “Embankment”, which looked magnificently designed inside, the regeneration efforts seemed to have stopped.

  We walked onto a road called “Embankment”, like the station, another damaged street which had seen its cars and bodies removed but which was lacking the same cosmetic upgrade as the previous street.

  “Soldiers will be here,” said Grace.