Hungry.
A red light flashes across Jared, turning one side of his blond locks strawberry. It fills my eyes, making me blink.
“Uh, Jared?” I point. He turns, keeping me firmly behind his back as he searches the vista.
“Some sort of beacon, I think.” He frowns.
I peer out from behind his torso. The red light fades, the afterglow still burning for a moment before it flares out again, filling a small swath of night with a blood-tinged halo.
“That’s Old Town,” I say, pointing down into the gully that separates the bulk of the Upper Circle from the rest of Dominion.
Jared turns and sends me a chilling look as he walks out farther, crouching down at the ledge. Dominion City is a dim and dismal wasteland lit here and there by barrel fires. I catch sight of the tree in Heaven Square, its branches sprouting up like arms reaching for salvation, dwarfing the buildings around it.
If I look to my left I’ll see the vast strip of darkness of the park that stretches across the heart of the city. Nolan Storm’s tower is on the other side of the cliff, not visible from this vantage point.
And this one red light. Just one.
I frown again. “Where’d they get the juice? I thought the northern power plant had been blown up,” I muse out loud. The loud pop of exploding transformers has been indelibly imprinted upon me.
“Great question,” Jared says, turning to give me a piercing look. “You’d make a fine merc.”
“Such compliments, Mr. Price,” I tease. But despite the lightness of my words, I reckon that things have just taken on a whole new level of sinister. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself. Not because I’m cold but because if there’s a beacon, someone—or something—is being called.
As though he’s lifted the thought from my mind, Jared stands abruptly and strides toward me like the hunter he is. “We’ve got to get you back to the apartment. And then I’ve got to talk to Storm.”
8
I find Margot deep in the heart of Doc Raines’s labyrinth laboratory. She’s already dressed in her school uniform, her hair trailing down her back in sleek, shiny waves. She turns as I approach, eyes filled with shadows. I feel her teeth bite down on her lip, see it happening. Not hard enough to draw blood but close enough that I instinctively raise my hand to cup my own lip.
“What’s going on?” I ask, instantly alarmed.
“Nothing,” Margot says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Cat,” I caution.
“Canary,” my twin chirps back, head tilting slightly to the right.
We are not alone.
“Doc,” Margot calls out, “Lucy’s arrived.”
“Oh, good,” a voice calls from several rows back. Frizzy locks bounce toward us, and soon I’m peering into the piercing blue eyes of Doctor Dorian Raines. “Good morning, Lucy,” she says in her no-nonsense voice. This morning the doctor’s slim frame is engulfed in a shiny white lab coat, her corkscrew curls pulled back into a tight ponytail, though the odd wispy curl pops around her narrow face.
“Good morning,” I call back, looking down at the many well plates holding cells and samples, the spinning trays of our coagulating blood. “I hear there’s something you wanted to show us.”
Margot trails a hand over the dust-free counter. She looks up at me quizzically, as though trying to pin down what’s different about me this morning. Her curiosity pushes at me like pins. My cheeks bloom with heat and I duck my head. And for once, for the first time in our lives, I am glad beyond measure that our sensory bond goes only one way.
Doc Raines interrupts us. “Okay, girls, this is going to be our little secret for now.” Her thin white hands hold a long vial, bloodred, before us.
Margot and I exchange a glance. Doc Raines works for Nolan Storm. Whatever secrets are kept in that vial, they are surely dangerous.
Doc Raines clears her throat. “I made you a promise,” she says softly. “I told you I would come to you first with anything I learned. I want you to know that I meant it. And I think this is the kind of information that might change a lot of people’s lives. I want to give you both the chance to think about it very carefully.”
“You’re scaring us, Doc,” Margot says lightly. But she grabs my hand under the counter, squeezing it tight.
“This, Margot, is your blood. Yours and Lucy’s.”
“You put our blood together?” my sister says.
My heart trips in my chest. Suddenly the room seems close and airless. I want to run away, because somehow I know this will be a moment after which there will be no turning back. It’s in the blood.
The doc nods slowly. “I was very confused at first. Two different blood phenotypes from conjoined twins. How would you have survived? That’s when I realized I had been looking at the puzzle the wrong way.”
My legs tremble. I want to sink down on the cold laboratory floor. “Wh-What is the right way?” I force out from my frozen lips. Margot shoots me another sharp glance, wondering what is wrong with me.
But I don’t have the words to tell her, the words that would describe endless dreams of rain, blood dripping from the sky. And somehow, some part of me knows that this is where it starts. This is the moment.
“Conjoined twins help each other survive. It’s their very interdependency that makes them unique.” Her eyebrow flips up as she takes in our clasped hands, our perfectly stoic posture. She joins her hands together on her hip. “Part of the fascination we have for twins, conjoined twins in particular, is that they shouldn’t survive. And yet, here are these two symbiotic creatures. Do you know, throughout history there have been innumerable stories of one conjoined twin not living past his or her twin.”
Margot and I nod. We had heard, of course. We’d made our plans should Plague take one of us. But of course, the good doctor isn’t telling us what we need to hear. What we need to know.
“Can you—can you get to the point, please, Doc Raines?” I say, surprised at my own bluntness. “I don’t think I can bear the suspense any longer.”
Doc Raines eyes me sharply, then nods. “Girls,” she starts, then hesitates again. “I don’t quite know how to say this,” she says, more to the air than us.
“Doc Raines,” Margot implores, “please.”
“I’m sorry.” Dr. Raines lets out a huff of air, lifting a curl off her face. “Right. I’d better just show you.” She turns back to the lab bench. Picking up a vial of sample blood, she uncorks the stopper and pours some onto a well plate. Dr. Raines flicks on a microscope and projects the images onto the screen as it auto-adjusts to her specs.
The blood swims and swirls, large blobs floating on the screen. “This is your blood, Margot,” she says. “As I’ve said before, it has certain markers that tell me I’m not dealing with normal any longer.”
Reaching into a small cooling unit on the lab counter, Doc Raines pulls forth another vial of blood. She removes the sample from the imaging tray, then pipettes a few drops of this new sample into the mix. “Okay,” she murmurs. “Hold on to your hats. Watch this, girls.” The sample is shoved onto the imaging tray and blinks back onto the view screen.
I’m surprised the doc hasn’t mixed the two samples. Instead, she has placed the second sample at the other end of the viewing tray. For a moment we look at two pools of blood, each writhing like little embryos. But a few seconds later, something extraordinary happens.
As though alive and sentient, sensing the presence of family members, the sample on the left inches, caterpillar-like, over to the pool on the right.
Margot squeezes my hand so hard it goes numb. I look over. Her eyebrow lifts so high it looks painful. I forget: She hasn’t seen this before. Hasn’t seen my blood devour everything in its path like the Plague itself.
“What is this?” Margot hisses.
I stare at my twin. “I reckon that’s my blood,” I tell her sadly, “calling to yours.”
“That’s right.” Doc Raines nods. Her eyes are winter ice, freezing us
to the spot, but her words are gentle. She flicks a switch and pulls a drawer open, handing us each a pair of loops. Margot shoots me a bewildered look as she slowly draws down the special glasses.
“Of course, this part isn’t new for Lucy. But this. This is where it gets interesting.” Doc Raines touches a console on the lab bench, and the room dims. She presses another button, and the screen bursts into prismatic lines, like a gorgeous abstract painting. The doc’s voice breaks through my reverie. “I’ve added blue fluorescent marker to this third sample,” she tells us as the two squiggling pools finally join.
Within seconds, it seems, the old structures we were looking at are gone and in their place is a new structure. From this perspective it could be a house, something modern with winding staircases. “After bonding, the first two samples then go on to attract and—I simply don’t know how to say this any other way—remake the DNA around them,” Doc Raines says in a faraway voice.
The light blinks as the doc drops a third sample onto the side of the plate. Almost immediately it begins to slide toward the new DNA structure, which swallows the sample. The new DNA structure forms again, obliterating the blue fluorescent stain that marked the presence of a third substance.
“What we’re left with is a recombinant DNA structure. I’ll have to run a few more tests to know what this particular combination is, and then I’ll run it against our DNA database.”
A shiver of fear works its way up my spine. “Doc Raines.” I pull the loops up. “What was the third sample, the one with the blue stain?”
The doc gives me an odd look. Part of her smile droops, as though she’s told a wry joke to herself.
Her words are so simple, but they drop with the power of the bomb.
“I’d stained for Plague, Lucy.”
My knees buckle and I grab at the lab bench for support. So it was true, then. We are the cure.
…
Through the gnarled thorns of the prick bushes, I can just make out the sky, the color of a dirty bandage, as though the clouds have been smeared with soot and grime. This is one of just a handful of places in Dominion that hasn’t been completely gutted for firewood. The Lasters call this wooded park “sacred space.” Here and there the flash of a blue tarp signals where people reside. The Lasters who’ve claimed this park for their own need the trees for shelter.
Beside me, Jared is restless. He bounces back and forth on his toes, sweeping his eyes sharply across the wooded area to the tips of the crumbling buildings to the east and west. Looking for something. Someone.
“I don’t like this,” Jared grumbles. He plucks at the T-shirt image sitting across his belly. It’s a cartoonish jaguar in mid-scream, fangs exposed, outlined in silver glitter. A particularly twisted joke, given what Jared can turn into—a nightmarish panther man.
“What, that we’re standing out here in the open? Or that he’s coming at all?”
Jared’s pained expression answers that question for me. He’d as soon take me back to Storm’s. That’s not an option, though, and the sooner he accepts that, the better.
Two days have passed since our night on the cliff. I can’t tell whether I’m avoiding him or he’s avoiding me, but the outcome is the same. It’s not even that he avoids eye contact—he’s literally not been in the keep, and when I asked Storm about it I was told Jared had gone on assignment.
That’s one of the things I love about you, he’d said.
I want to be happy about it. I want to dance with joy, preferably with Jared. But I don’t know where the True Born and I stand. Except here, on the path that leads through the park, that stretches up through the belly of the city, slicing east from west, north from south. Parted by crumbling, pocked asphalt and the weight of my secrets.
Margot and I don’t intend to keep Doc Raines’s revelation to ourselves. At least, not forever. But we had asked for a little time, time to figure out what it all means. If we could cure Plague… It seems impossible, like something out of a dream. But Doc Raines had insisted it could happen.
…
“Think of this like a nanotech system,” Doc Raines had said as she turned her back to us.
A second screen flicked on, illuminating the new helix structure. Numbers and letters filtered onto the screen as Doc Raines punched a series of codes into the console.
Margot sucked her lower lip into her mouth, staring quizzically at the screen. “But it’s blood. How can it be nanotech?”
“I’m not saying it is. I’m saying it acts like nanotech. As though it has been programmed to do something very specific.”
“What does mine do?” my sister asked, shooting me an incomprehensible look. But she can’t hide from me. Margot’s horror crashes through me with the weight of a tidal wave.
“Great question, Margot,” Doc Raines replied, “but I think it’s easier if we start with what your sister’s blood does.” I shut my eyes against a sudden bout of dizziness, half Margot’s, half my own. “My hypothesis is that Lucy’s blood carries the accelerator. Hers is the part that acts like the magic bombs. It draws in organic matter. That’s when your blood kicks in. Once activated by something specific to Lucy’s blood, some sort of DNA exchange seems to take place.”
Lit with a sudden clarity, I opened my eyes. “It Splices,” I mused aloud.
Doc Raines turned her cool blue eyes on me. “Yes,” she said, excitement lacing her voice. “I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but that’s exactly what it does. It Splices. Do you know what this means?”
“It means people will try to take us.” Margot’s voice turned bitter. “They will try to control us, or use us, or destroy us.”
“Margot.” Doc Raines shook her head sadly. But what more could she say? It was true and we all knew it. I drew a circle on my sister’s wrist with my index finger. Margot’s heart slowed, accepting my signal to let me ask a difficult question.
It was the old scientist in Resnikov’s labs who led us to believe that we were genetically engineered, seeded for a very specific purpose. He can only complete one part of his project with you, Margot, the scientist had laid out Resnikov’s nefarious plans to me. For the other, he needs your sister, does he not? Lock. And key.
“Doc Raines, when Margot was in Russia they were trying to create some sort of Plague Cure with her blood alone. But the old scientist I talked to said it wouldn’t work.”
Doc Raines’s frizzy mass springs about her face as she shakes her head. “Wouldn’t have been possible. At least, it wouldn’t have been stable.”
“That’s what he said, too. But I didn’t understand what he meant.”
“See here?” Doc Raines traced the bright patterns with her fingers. “This is why. The full DNA expression isn’t switched on unless in the presence of whatever compound is in your blood, Lucy. There is a lot more to learn here, but essentially, I’ve noticed it seems to act like an anchor as well as a switch. They could have gotten some sort of short-term effect if they had amplified the sequences of Margot’s DNA with some sort of growth accelerant, but it would be weak at best, unstable at worst. It breaks down without the other’s input.”
Margot and I stared at each other. It all started to make sense, the pieces clicking together in one gigantic mess of a puzzle. The rumors of the mystery cure in Russia, the stolen eggs. The babies—no, things—we’d seen floating in the jars. Things that haunted both our dreams. It was Margot they’d wanted. Not me.
They didn’t need me as much then because they hadn’t been searching for a real cure, had they? They’d been looking to make snake oil. And that’s exactly what they made.
…
“What direction do you suppose they’ll come from?” I ask now. I need to shake away the restless memories of the morning and concentrate on what’s before me.
Jared narrows his eyes against the bright emptiness of the sky. “Don’t know. Don’t care,” he bites out.
“You are going to have to put your bad attitude someplace else, Jared True Born. They�
�re coming. Get past it.”
Jared’s look is blank as he turns to me. For days, I’ve been hoping and waiting for an opportunity to clear the air, but now that it’s here, a shiver of dread works its way up my spine. His shoes make no noise on the asphalt as he saunters over to me. I can’t help but remember what those lips felt like on mine. How those fingers that could kill and maim a man touched me. And maybe something of my thoughts drifts across my face, because his eyes narrow even further as he steps behind me. His breath rifles through my hair, teases the back of my neck.
“Well, now, Your Highness,” he says as his fingertips skate up the sides of my arms, causing my skin to break out in a riot of gooseflesh. “Are you excited about your old pal coming to visit?”
Two can play this game. “As if I’m going to answer that.” I toss my hair back imperiously.
“Oh, really?” Jared turns to face me. Everywhere his body comes into contact lights up my flesh.
“Really.” I close my eyes and hope the shakiness of my voice doesn’t betray me.
A deep chuckle is enough to tell me, though, that Jared has heard it, too.
“Do you think your little pal is going to mind that you’re not available?”
My eyes fly open. “Not available?” I cock an eyebrow at him.
Jared’s hands circle my waist as he purrs. “Don’t actually think he’s coming here without a purpose, Lu. He’s not coming to do business with Storm. He has a certain twin on his mind.” As he speaks, his fingers glide up my torso, skate my rib cage. My breath hitches, and lights dance behind my eyes as those cruel, talented fingers tangle in my hair. He touches my lips with the slightest pressure. His lips hover at mine, causing a riot of sensations throughout my body. “But you’re not available.”
I push at his chest, hard. He staggers back a step, two, blank-faced.
“One minute you’re telling me we can never be, and the next you’re kissing me senseless and telling me I’m not available. Make up your mind, Jared.”
True Storm Page 8
