The Touch of Twilight

18

I remained locked in the panic room for most of the night, knowing-sensing-Hunter on the other side of the door, my mind flitting unbidden to the warmth that’d seeped from his body into mine before I’d pushed away. Again. After refocusing on the reams of maps for what must’ve been the hundredth time, I finally recognized that Warren’s tight handwriting wasn’t going to reveal any additional secrets to me just because I was the targeted double.

Yet there was an additional key located to the left of the map, where yellow, red, and green dots spelled out suspected activity, but this was in Hunter’s slanted script, probably marking for Warren his suspicions about how and where the doppelgänger would cross into our terrestrial plane next. The known entrances were yellow, and seemed to be mapped down to the square foot. The red dots represented places Hunter believed were most susceptible to the doppelgänger’s future breaches, and the fewest dots, represented by green, were a mystery entirely. No matter how long I stared at them I couldn’t decipher their meaning, and after the way we’d parted, I couldn’t exactly go out and ask Hunter.

I followed the green dots once more with my finger, tracing them in what appeared to be a written chronological order, then gave up and left the room long enough to brew a pot of coffee, to make a call to the hospital to check on the mortal woman, and take another from Warren-whom Hunter had phoned after our nonargument-before returning with a high stool to sit while I tried to predict where the doppelgänger might pop up next. The red dots ran right through the center of town, one right in the middle of Valhalla itself, which I thought was poetically ironic.

I finally found a secondary key to overlay the primary map. It contained all the suspected locations of Shadow entry into our alternate reality, though why Warren wanted that studied was beyond me. I pored over the maps so long my eyes blurred, and eventually even the insistent throb from the injury to my thigh couldn’t keep me awake.

Hunter’s predawn rap on the door had me jolting from my slumped position before I even knew I’d fallen asleep. He’d given the steel door an extra hard knock and I cursed him as I wiped drool from the map, then gathered up my things. I collected the copies I’d made and rolled them to fit in my bag along with my mask and manual-feeling a sharp pang of loss that I wasn’t also carrying my conduit-then put the originals back in place before whipping open the door.

Hunter’s eyes only grazed mine before he wordlessly whirled toward the south bay. I followed him into a cool predawn glow punctuated with the city’s fading lights. He waited as I buckled up, eyes hidden behind mirrored lenses, thoughts and emotions equally veiled. We found Gregor, and crossed realities in a hard, cold silence.

Yet we didn’t part ways once inside the sanctuary, instead heading straight to the lab. Chandra was already there, partitioned off from the rest of the room and bent over her baby, an ornamental rock garden composed of the same porous sandstone that gave the nearby Red Rock Canyon its name. She was dressed in sweats, her hair haphazard at best, as she measured from three pails of grit, sand, and peat for layering among the sandstone crevices. A steaming cup of joe was perched on a rocky red outcrop, but I could tell it hadn’t hit her yet. She even snapped at Hunter before he explained about Regan, the compound, and the tracking device, though he left out the details of my run-in with her the previous night, which had me softening toward him all over again.

Toying absently with the ornamental grass fountaining from the terraced slope, Chandra confirmed it was indeed possible to bury a tracking device in a synthetic blend of tinted putty, and though expensive and time-consuming to design, the technology had been around for some time. At least among the supernaturals.

“Get undressed,” Chandra told me, switching shoes as she jerked her head toward the sterile half of the lab, and regarding me like I was the biggest ass she’d ever met. It was hard to argue. “We have to be sure it’s entirely gone.”

Hunter left without another word and I disrobed again, though unlike his examination the night before, Chandra’s clinical stare left me cold. She wore gloves as she scraped my skin, and said nothing more. As chagrined as I was that she knew I’d been played by Regan once again, I was still relieved to know the cause of Regan’s near-constant presence. A tracking device I could understand. I could even respect the balls it’d taken to trick me into accepting it. It was certainly preferable to thinking she’d developed some sort of ability to be omnipresent in my life.

“I attributed the itching to the doppelgänger,” I told Chandra, speaking aloud while I worked it out for myself. “She scratched my chest, and that’s where I first felt the tingling.”

“Because you applied more makeup there than anywhere else.” She paused, fingers light on my arm, before continuing without meeting my eye. “It makes sense you’d be focused on that instead of your arm or leg.”

I caught myself before I drew back in surprise, but Chandra felt my muscles tense beneath her touch. She kept her eyes on her work, double-checking my arm as I continued to stare. Had she just stood up for me?

She cleared her throat. “Where were you when you felt the device go live?”

Everywhere, I thought, glancing around the sterile room. Other than the bright rock garden behind the glass partition, it was all white and chrome and flat, open spaces. “I’ll have to think about it. I’ve been wearing it for two weeks.”

“Write it all down. We’ll triangulate your locations. Maybe Regan has positioned herself, or at least the equipment used to find you, square in the middle.”

In the middle of the city. In the middle of my life. I sighed, not caring Chandra was close enough to scent my fatigue. Regan had attacked my body and tricked me into doing the same to an innocent. Hunter had all but obliterated me emotionally…it was nice to be somewhere safe and let someone else make the decisions for a moment. I closed my eyes and listened to the soft scrape of the blade, knowing even though she didn’t like me, Chandra wouldn’t hurt me. Not right now, anyway.

In fact, she was being unusually gentle. “Turn left. Into the lamplight.”

My thoughts blared in the deep silence, and they weren’t even proper thoughts, but fragments and images warring for space in my mind. I needed some real sleep to push them all away, but I’d settle for something to beat against. My eyes slitted open and I regarded Chandra coolly. She smelled like linen, as sterile and lifeless as the room, and with no emotional peg to hang my hat on. I’d make do.

“So, what?” I said, clearing my throat, setting the bait. “No lecture on how wrong and screwed up and impulsive I am?”

The tweezers faltered, her lips thinned as she fought the retort that wanted to come, but she swallowed it down. “You did talk to me about a compound for the injured changeling, and you even mentioned Regan had made you think of it. You didn’t know about this technology, but I did, and I should have put two and two together. Here, you moved again. Back to the left.”

Okay, I thought, my frown falling into an open mouth, someone had obviously spiked Chandra’s coffee with a passive pill. Because she never, ever conceded shit to me. And while she hadn’t come right out and apologized, it wasn’t far off.

So maybe if Chandra was going to take baby steps toward reconciling our partnership-or at least try being civil-I could too.

“Can you still do it? Duplicate the sample, I mean?”

I explained about Li, and how she’d looked the day before at Master Comics. That led to her questioning what I’d been doing there to begin with, which led to the revelation that Dylan and Kade had suggested I kill Jasmine…and if I’d started off well, the tightening of her jaw as I continued to speak let me know she was beginning to rethink her open-mindedness. But full disclosure-or as near as I could come-was needed if I was going to convince her to help. Besides, as soon as the manuals of Light started appearing again, she’d find out anyway. If I held back now, it’d be worse when she did.

But the roundup didn’t sound so good. And I hadn’t even included my agreement to work with the Tulpa, my latest run-in with Regan, or how I’d nearly killed an innocent.

“Look, before you can say it, I know I screwed up with Jasmine. I’m trying to figure out what I did wrong so I can fix Li and bring the manuals back to their original state, but in the meantime I could use some help on this. You didn’t see her, Chandra. That little girl was falling apart before my eyes. Like the Tulpa’s touch had infected her and the poison was spreading. It was awful, and she’s just a baby.”

Chandra watched me, saying nothing, and I looked down at my linked hands, finally allowing myself to feel the guilt coiled up in my gut as well. I swallowed hard so my voice could be heard. “I’d switch places with her if I could, take it all on myself. I’d die if it meant this little girl could have her life back, but I don’t know how to do any of those things.”

She drew back, her hair still fucked up, but her eyes less blurry, and her expression nonplussed. “You would, wouldn’t you? Even with all…this.” She motioned down the length of my body, indicating the glossy package.

I laughed wryly. She was talking appearance. I was talking life. “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. If I were given the chance.”

And so the invisible elephant in the room reared its head. We met each other’s eyes, acknowledging it from across the vast expanse of our separate experiences. My existence had usurped her place in the Zodiac, and nothing short of my death would alleviate that.

“The redness will remain for a while,” Chandra finally said, turning away. “For now, we’ll just take away the sting.”

She turned back to the partitioned room with its greenhouse lighting and drip system, a little bit of life sprouting in a concrete underground. I had time to think how nice it was…before my eyes grew wide. Chandra waved her hand over a bald spot among the pink sandstone, and seconds later the stiff rosette of an aloe plant appeared. My mouth dropped open as she pulled a straight-edged knife from her pocket and sliced a spiny leaf. Sensing my awe as she returned, she shot me a satisfied smile as she sheared open the fleshy middle and scooped thick aloe like honey into her palm. “Another lesson on vibrational acuity, though smaller in scope than what the doppelgänger’s been providing. Duplicate it in front of Tekla and you might get extra credit. Vibration is matter, and, after all, matter is all that matters.”

I ignored that for the time being. “But how did you-?”

“Do something we all can do? Well, that the Light can do, anyway. Shadows can’t create life…even their offspring are born half dead. On the other hand, we can’t create man-sized black holes the way the Tulpa did. That skill requires a lack of Light. After all, a black hole is the opposite of light, right? Nothing living can exist in such absolute darkness.” She waved her hand in the air, and behind the glass the succulent again disappeared among the rocks. Show-off. “I may not be a hereditary star sign, but I know how to maximize my gifts.”

She was applying the pure aloe to my chest and arm as she spoke, and when she was done she stepped back and wiped her hands on a nearby towel. I was looking at the rock garden with renewed interest, but if Chandra noted it she said nothing. It made sense, of course. I could create walls out of nothing other than my mind, but for some reason I’d never thought my mental powers extended to living things.

So did they also extend to black holes? The question hung there, unvoiced by both Chandra and me.

“You wear this well,” she finally broke the silence, motioning down the length of my powder-soft body, from the bright blond locks to the French-manicured toenails. “This body. Your sex-kitten image. I fell for it at first.”

“I know. You called me names.” She’d called me a cream puff, a bimbo. A life-sized Barbie.

“You called me names back,” she said flatly.

“Only the ones I knew would piss you off.” I’d long ago learned that every criticism said more about the critic than their subject. She’d attacked my looks, which was how I’d known what her sore spot was, and where to push in return.

“But you’re not what you seem,” she said hurriedly, like she was a cliff diver and might lose her nerve if she thought about it too much. “I know that now. And you’re not…petty.”

That statement confused me, but I shrugged it away, flush with her implied apology. This was acceptance from a quarter I’d never expected. Tension drained so that I actually slumped a bit, but as I opened my mouth to thank her, she shook her head.

“Look, there’s something you need to know.” Chandra hesitated, and I felt the tension return as I suddenly realized I was on the receiving side of a confession. And from her body language, I gathered I wasn’t going to like it any better than she did. “It’s about the animist’s mask, and what you see. You don’t have bad chi, or if you do it’s not like…a head cold.”

A head cold? “What?”

She sighed, her usual self-assurance gone as she cleaned off her instruments without looking at me. “What I mean is, it’s not catching. Kimber lied about seeing her own destruction in the mask. She didn’t see anything. I thought it was a joke when she told me, she said she was just playing a bit…”

I fell stone-still. So that’s what she meant about being petty.

“But you let them all believe…?” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. After all the effort and trouble I had fitting into this place, all the time and energy spent convincing these people they could trust me, that despite my Shadow side I belonged in this troop…

Holding her hands up in front of her, Chandra did look at me now. “I just found out, I swear. I thought about telling Warren, but he didn’t seem too concerned to begin with, so instead I decided you might want to take care of it yourself. I know how you are when someone-”

“-is petty?” I asked bitterly.

She nodded, biting her lip as she looked at her fingers again, at the floor. Anywhere but at me.

“You’re starting to know me well.”

She did look up now that my voice had gone flat. “Just don’t go overboard-”

“Wow, you are starting to know me well.”

She winced. “She was just having some fun…in her way. It wouldn’t have come to anything. The danger to you from the doppelgänger is still real, so I mean, it changes nothing, right?”

She was already regretting telling me, and I put a hand on her arm-comforting, not threatening-so she wouldn’t have to second-guess me, so she knew exactly what was coming. “No, Chandra,” I said, very clearly. “It changes everything.”

Chandra was wrong about something else as well. I could be petty, and had metaphorically tweaked her nose enough times that she knew it. She was hoping I’d take the high road here, but there was a difference between a joke and a malicious rumor, and Kimber had crossed that line without even knowing me. I didn’t know if her assumptions matched Chandra’s original impression of me, if this glossy exterior had her convinced that nothing of import or use lay inside, but she’d clearly decided taking the Kairos down a few notches would be a good way to establish a foothold in the troop. My troop.

One thing I’d learned in my short time as a Zodiac member was that while we were all capable, we were also all proud, and since we had the same essential hierarchy as a pack of wolves, the internal battle for position was as bloody and fierce as our wild counterparts’. When a combatant threw down, the issue wasn’t resolved until one agent had clearly, if figuratively, pinned and submitted the other.

And that’s what I planned to do to Kimber now as I snatched up the animist’s mask from its wall peg in the astrolab, and headed to Saturn’s Orchard, where I knew Kimber spent every morning honing her kata.

She was still warming up when I entered, sitting lotus-style on the mat in the middle of the pyramid-shaped room, using meditation to bring her mind in balance before she engaged her body. Her image was reflected back on itself in the mirrored walls, and I had a moment to consider how serene she looked sitting there, almost like a monk with her hands splayed over her knees. Then the door slammed shut, her eyes winged open to find me, and the peaceful image was ruined.

Her upper lip curled in a sneer and she shut her eyes dismissively, though her countenance held a stiffness it hadn’t before. Her spine straightened, her awareness of me making her self-conscious when what she really needed to be was wary. Ah well, I thought, turning my shoulders. Live and learn.

I unfurled the mask, whipping it like a skipping stone so it clattered across the floor and struck her thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. She yelped, eyes flying open as I began my slow stalk, keeping to the perimeter of the room. To her credit, she stayed where she was even though my heart rate was up and my fury scented the air. I kept my stride even.

“You want what?” she said, still dismissive, pale dreads standing out like long corn husks against her loose black clothing.

“Some quality time with my newest, bestest girlfriend,” I said in Olivia’s highest dulcet tone, throwing in a breathy sigh to punctuate the difference between my soft words and my aggressive actions. An invisible wall soared high and solid in my wake. I could feel it like it was tethered around my waist, beginning to take on drag. My goal was to make it around the entire room before Kimber realized what I was doing. My voice, my words, my looks-all the things she’d underestimated-helped. “After all, you’re the only one who understands what it’s like for me under that mask. You’re the only one in this big ol’ world who shares my ill chi.”

All right, so it was a bit of overkill, but she’d fall for it a little longer. I cut my fourth wall short, reinforced them all with a quick pulse of my thoughts, then cut a direct path to Kimber, where I hovered too close, too long, before lowering myself into a mirrored cross-legged position. Our knees touched. I smiled sweetly. Kimber scowled, pushed back fractionally, and handed me the mask.

“I don’t think so.”

“Just put it on. Just once. I want to know what you see. Is there ash raining on the city as it goes up in a conflagration? Is there mutiny among the remaining citizens? Wait, I bet it’s the way they’ve turned to cannibalism, right? You look like you’ve seen the absolute worst of it.”

Her serene expression had been blighted, and her lips had thinned into nonexistence. “I said no.”

I thrust out my bottom lip. “Please?”

She cursed under her breath, stood smoothly, and tossed the mask onto my lap. “Begging,” she said as she turned toward the door. “You’re fucking pitiful.”

By the time she hit my first wall, my pitiful self was standing as well. She reared back-confused, shocked, pained-and turned to me holding her nose.

“Come,” I said, motioning her way, all the pleading drained from my voice.

“No.” Her voice was strained now; she was trying to push down her panic, still holding on to her low estimation of me. “I’m not going to-”

“I’m not talking to you.” I cut her off, still motioning, still concentrating. The wall behind her struck her backside first as it continued its slow glide my way. I hadn’t learned to control the speed yet, but I could erect them, I could move them, and I could shrink the space inside them so thoroughly they could crack a nut. I smiled, and the other three walls shimmered as they began to close in.

“What are you doing?” She was panicked now, pushing back with her weight, heels stuttering as the wall continued inching forward.

“Don’t be afraid. We’re in the sanctuary, after all. Someone will be along to help you…shortly.” Chandra hadn’t tried to stop me, but she knew when I left the lab I hadn’t intended to make nice with Kimber. “Maybe I’ll even let them.”

She was fighting it fully now, all that arrogant Zen master bullshit absent under the realization I could do something she could not. What can I say? Surviving something like walls materializing to trap you inside them, which I had, made the mastery of the skill a priority. I stopped all four walls when we were only feet apart, where they vibrated with an intensity that raised the hairs on my arms.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” I said, voice breathless again as I admired my work, my bald appreciation causing them to materialize, though they still flitted in and out of view like a cell phone gaining and losing reception. “But of course they’re more than they seem. Their outward beauty belies their strength. Geez, that reminds me of something else, actually.” I tapped my chin, like I was thinking about it, then snapped my fingers. “Oh, I know what it is…me.”

My voice dropped, my chin lowered, and I took three quick steps forward. Kimber’s arms went up, but she struck out too soon, and I kept coming. I thought her shock might give me a greater advantage, but she had good instincts, and didn’t roll readily. Her forward kick to my solar plexus landed squarely, but as I flew backward the wall behind me absorbed my impact, bending with my weight like a cushion, and I was bounced forward again to return the favor with twice the force. The wall behind Kimber didn’t bend, bow, or break, and the impact rolled through her body with a force that caused her heart to momentarily stutter.

It would’ve been enough-she was pinned and practically submitted-but I wasn’t feeling merciful. Yanking on her conveniently swinging dreads, I clamped the mask over her face with my other hand, muffling her protests.

“Tell me what you see when you look at me now, Kimber. Because I’m not begging, and I’m certainly not pitiful.” She shook her head, pushing against me, then tried to shake it faster when I stilled it, hand on her chin. “Tell me!”

The sound of the world rupturing came on the heels of the impact that knocked me down. Cowering on my knees, I wrapped my arms over my head, the pain inside so great, my gray matter must have swelled in seconds. As vessels throbbed against my skull, and the ripples of vibrational impact ate my scream, I thought of death, wished for it, because nothing could hurt as much as being caught in the lengthening furrows of destroyed sound.

Concussion after concussion beat at me, each stronger than the last, but relief never came. It was at the precise moment that I gave up, blind with pain, deaf and mute and numb all over, that silence crashed over me. I must have been screaming the whole time because my vocal cords were sore, but nothing came out now but a guttural squeak.

A voice sounded next to me, sweetly. “She can only speak if she puts the mask on willingly.”

I jolted on the ground, whirled despite my body’s protest, but when I saw the doppelgänger, my empty hands fell limply to my side, and my mouth dropped open.

“Force it upon someone and they can’t speak or reason,” she said, froth spewing to the ground as she took a step toward me, her mouth moving to imitate mine and speak at the same time. The grotesque and smooth mutation would have been fascinating if not so worrying. She had, I realized, begun to look like me. The me beneath Olivia. “Or breathe.”

But I wasn’t listening to the words. In fact, I’d forgotten Kimber entirely.

“How did you get in here?” I whispered…barely.

The doppelgänger smiled with her razored teeth, motioning to my walls. “You left an opening. I walked through it.”

She certainly had. And she sealed the opening behind her. Whatever it was making her my ethereal twin also allowed her to manipulate my thought matter. I swallowed hard.

Not, I thought as she took another step forward, a comforting thought.