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

by Mike Essex

  I saw four pairs of rugged boots walk into the room. “We have them,” said one of their owners onto their radio.

  The last pair of shoes was the one that brought fear into my heart. Two orange sneakers. I looked up and saw the face of Tobias Zen. “He’s found me.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Emmie Keyes

  The light stung my eyes as I peered out into the room that was now my prison. It was illuminated by large overhead lights that flooded the room with a crystal clear clarity.

  The room itself was mostly exposed bricks with hard white clay covering up cracks in the walls. This was not a futuristic lab like the ones in TethTech; it seemed more like a crack den in an abandoned building. An anomaly in a city that prided itself on perfection.

  Inside the room was a wheelchair and a few white tables with medical equipment, scalpels, cutting tools, drills and a heart monitor that I was hooked up to. A female doctor, dressed in a white and orange lab coat like the ones at TethTech, stood next to my bed and was looking down at the table of operating tools.

  I felt an intense pain in my stomach. I tried to see what was causing this pain and forced myself to fight through the agony and lift my head up slightly.

  As I looked down at my stomach I saw a metal vice prising the skin apart. There was a hole where my skin had separated and I could see the raw flesh underneath. What horrified me the most was the silver lining that had been applied to the skin around my stomach. It was just like in the video.

  I felt sick and turned my head over the side of the bed to throw up.

  “She’s awake!” shouted a female doctor, turning around to face me.

  She forced my head back onto the bed and jabbed a needle into my neck. Another doctor ran into the room and held down my legs as the drug kicked in.

  I drifted off to sleep unaware of what horrors they were doing to me.

  --<><>--

  Emmie Keyes

  “Wakey wakey,” a hand slapped my face and I awoke to the horrible reality again. “We’ve given you a lot of painkillers so you won’t feel anything for at least a day.”

  The man who was mocking me was Tobias Zen. He finally had me.

  I tried to sit upright and the muscles in my stomach felt weak and torn. My belly had now been stitched up again.

  “You gave us quite a scare there. Next time we’ll give you more drugs to ensure you stay asleep,” said Tobias.

  “Next time?” I feebly replied.

  “Yes. There are a lot of experiments I want to run on you Emmie and I don’t want to risk hurting you so don’t worry we’ll look after you.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re still in Birmingham in a lab we created just for you. It’s not much but we’ve kitted it out with everything we need to keep treating you and allow you to harness your power.”

  “I don’t have a power.”

  “Sure you do,” he replied. “No one has ever survived the death of a twin before. That makes you the greatest find in Science right now and I love finding new things and playing with them.”

  “I am not your pet. Let me go.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere. Just like your friend Grace. Frazier did some serious damage on her spine and she won’t be walking for quite some time. Once we’ve taken care of our traitor and the military man then no one will be able to save you.”

  “The Deck will come,” as much as I was sceptical of them it sounded like The Deck had many more members and if I was important to Gabe and their boss then I hoped they’d send a rescue party. It was the only hope I had.

  “The Deck?” replied Tobias. “Don’t you watch the news? They are all wanted criminals. Their faces have been seen by half of the country. They wouldn’t even make it through the gates into the city and they’ll never find this building. No, Emmie. You are mine now. Any minute now we will catch Gabe and the rest of them.”

  Gabe? I wondered. If Gabe had somehow gotten away from the attack then there was a chance that he’d be able to help The Deck to find me. I just had to hope this place wasn’t guarded with an army. But, if anyone could find an army it was Tobias. “What will you do to me?” I asked.

  “Experiments mostly. There’s a lot we can discover from you. Your DNA is different. Special. Magical. I want to harness that power.”

  “Will I survive these, ‘experiments’?”

  “Your body won’t but your achievement will,” he replied. “You’ll be remembered in history as the girl who changed the world. The girl who helped make every Tether in the world stronger and better.”

  His phone started to buzz. “Excuse me one minute,” he said.

  Tobias left the room and I tried to rise to my feet. My stomach still hurt, despite all of the medication, and I could just about sit up. I was alone in the room but there wasn’t a lot I could do in my current state. I could barely walk and could probably crawl to the wheelchair in the corner of the room but there’s no way I’d get out of the room. There was no secret keycard in a folder this time.

  As I weighed up my options I heard gunfire from outside the room. Over the next few seconds I heard screams as bones were broken and gunshots were fired. In amongst the chaos I heard a familiar voice. “Cover me,” shouted Gabe. I began to wonder if this was the hero Grace had told me he could be.

  Soon the noise fell to silence and the only sound was a “stomp, stomp, stomp,” as feet hit the floor in quick succession while Gabe and his team made his way to my room. Yet it wasn’t Gabe who I saw first, it was the kind eyes of March who opened the door and ran to my side.

  “Are you ok?” he asked. “What did they do to you?”

  I pointed to my stomach and let out a weak “I don’t know.”

  His expression changed to one of anger and it was clear he cared for me. He asked if I could move and I said I wasn’t sure.

  He held out both of his arms and said “It’s ok I’ll be gentle I promise.”

  He scooped his arms under me and lifted me up slowly and carefully. I bit my lip to hide the fact I was in pain but he saw what I was doing and walked even slower to try and help. After walking a few steps he bent down slowly and angled my feet so they touched the floor. He then moved my body down until I was seated in the wheelchair.

  I smiled at March as I felt the softness of the wheelchair and I thanked him for saving me. Gabe entered the room and said “We have to move now!”

  He didn’t once ask if I was ok or make any eye contact with me other than checking that we were following behind him. March wheeled me down the derelict corridors and for a second the sense of decay in the building made me feel like I was back in Smyth West.

  It knew it was a sad thought that a destroyed building and broken rooms reminded me of home but with March by my side I felt safer here than I did in the perfectly clean and orderly streets that were waiting for us outside.

  As we left the building I didn’t see Tobias but we passed a room with five lab staff locked within it. “You didn’t kill anyone did you?” I asked.

  “No,” said March, “and neither did Gabe. We’re not the terrorists you think we are Emmie. Even in self-defence we will try and go for a non-lethal take down. Those doctors will escape later but for now we just have to get you safe.”

  “What about the guards?”

  “This isn’t an official TethTech facility. They just took over an abandoned building so officially this experiment doesn’t exist. There were two guards at the entrance, which we subdued and other than these scientists that was the lot. Whatever Tobias did to you, it seems he didn’t want a lot of people to know about it.”

  The Deck had earned themselves some positive points, I had to admit and I hoped they were not the terrorists the media portrayed them as. We escaped the building and hit the streets.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Unknown

  “I told you not to call me,” said a dark figure who looked out of a window at the city skyline.

  “I know,” said Gabe “but it’s an e
mergency. It’s Emmie. She is hurt and we need safe passage from the city.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “She was attacked and operated on. We need to get her as far away from Tobias as we can and safely back to base.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Myself, Emmie, March and Grace, who also needs medical help.”

  “Are you making a fool of me Gabe? How many casualties will we suffer trying to stop Tobias?”

  “Emmie is fine, alright. I know everyone else is just an acceptable casualty. So can you get us out of the city or not?”

  “It’s a huge risk,” the dark figure paused for a moment. “But yes, I can,” he continued to tell Gabe a meeting point and time.

  Gabe couldn’t wait to get out of this city and didn’t want to ever return. Tobias Zen had already taken so much from him and now Gabe hated his home town as well.

  The dark figure hung up and looked out on the skyline. He admired the other towers and knew one day they would come crashing into the ground.

  The revolution is coming, he mused.

  --<><>--

  Emmie Keyes

  “Ok, let’s go,” said Gabe, as he looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. I could barely walk and wasn’t going anywhere without March pushing me.

  “Wait,” I said. “What about the black box from Faye’s? Wasn’t it at the base?”

  “I grabbed it when I escaped. Once the grenade landed I dropped to the floor and covered my face with my jacket. When I saw you’d dropped the box, I picked it up and dove out of the window. I hung from the window ledge and gently dropped down on the floor.”

  “Thank God Faye only lived on the second floor,” although Gabe admitted he had left me there to die, I was relieved he had the box. He’d saved me in the end so that made up for it, I suppose. “But how did you find me?” I asked.

  “Grace slipped you a drink at your house with a tracking liquid. That’s how she tracked you in the TethTech tower and how I found you now. “ he explained.

  Another deception by Grace.

  March pushed me the whole way back to our earlier location where Grace was waiting with the doctor. I felt tense the entire time and with every street we turned down I was apprehensive that something would happen.

  When we finally arrived I was wheeled next to Grace who was laying on her stretcher.

  “Emmie, what happened?” Grace asked.

  “Tobias found me,” I replied.

  “If they did anything to you, we’ll fix it Emmie,” said March. “We have a great lab set up back at the base and it won’t be long until you’re safely there. You too Grace. We can continue to treat you both there.”

  “I’ve got an escape planned from the city but we need to go now,” said Gabe. “How are you doing?” he asked Grace.

  “Better now you’re here,” they kissed and Gabe was back to the happy person I had seen earlier, unlike the brute he had become when he attacked me. It was like he had two personalities.

  March and Gabe gathered supplies that Bryony had prepared whilst Grace and I talked. For those ten minutes we didn’t talk about terrorist plots or conspiracy theories. We just caught up and chatted like good friends. It was a nice moment of calm amongst the chaos of the day.

  Sadly the moment had to end and we were escorted away by the boys, who now emerged in the same dark green uniforms worn by Ambulance staff. They thanked Bryony for finding the uniforms.

  “That’s nothing,” she said as she pointed to an ambulance parked on the side of the road. “You can thank my doctor friend here for that one,” March pushed my wheelchair and Gabe pushed Grace’s trolley into the back of the ambulance.

  Tobias had already found me once so I wasn’t getting my hopes up for a smooth escape. We drove to the edges of Birmingham and found an abandoned strip of land that had previously been a football club in a town called Wolverhampton. Whatever team they had been, their glory days were behind them. The pitch remained a damaged testament to their past.

  We waited on the edges of the football pitch until a small dot appeared in the sky. “There’s our ride,” said Gabe.

  A helicopter made its descent towards us and I began to feel hope that we’d escape. Once it landed we were loaded onto the chopper and greeted by a pilot called, Saloma. She was wearing a leather pilot’s uniform and had auburn hair which flowed out from under her helmet and spiralled out into thick curls over her shoulders.

  “Everyone be quick,” she said. “This is an uncharted flight on a very windy day and that means we’re going to be in for some serious turbulence,” I hoped she was wrong.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Vlad Givik

  Vlad stomped around his cell impatiently. Where is the signal? he thought. By now that idiot Rex was probably at a hospital all patched up again.

  Vlad didn’t care. He knew he still had control. No matter how many injuries were fixed Rex would spend the rest of his life afraid that Vlad would return. That’s real control, thought Vlad as he felt a tingling sensation in his brain. Now to prove just how far real control can go.

  He grabbed his jacket and tore off one of the sleeves with all his strength. This created a long thick strip that he placed around his eyes and tied behind his head like a blindfold.

  “What are you doing!” shouted the police officer on duty. “Stop that.”

  Vlad knew it couldn’t be stopped now. His eyes turned to orange, hidden by the blindfold, as he gave control over to another force.

  Although he no longer had his knives he had one trick up his sleeve. On the way into the station he had palmed a pen from the desk of an officer. He now held that pen in his hands and rammed it into his own throat.

  Vlad removed the pen and continued to jab it along his throat in different places with no real care for where he stabbed. All that seemed to matter to him was creating the most damage possible.

  A male police officer panicked and dashed into the cell, hoping to retrieve the pen and save this man. His kindness was the end of him. Although Vlad couldn’t see, he could still hear and it was hard to miss the shouts from the officer as he charged into the cell.

  Vlad timed his forward motion perfectly and raised his handcuffed arms over the officer’s head and grabbed him around his neck. He twisted his arms over each other and pushed them outwards. The force broke the officer’s neck and ten miles away the officer’s brother, oblivious to the attack, grabbed for his neck and fell down dead.

  Hearing the officer hit the floor Vlad removed the blindfold and looked over his freshly defeated foe. Vlad searched the man’s clothing and found a pair of sunglasses which he placed over his orange eyes, hiding them from view. Anything that could be traced back to Tobias had to be hidden.

  He took his blindfold and wrapped it around his neck like a cravat to hide his wounds. To passers-by he would look just like another civilian and as long as the Tether held he wouldn’t bleed to death.

  The Smyth West police station was poorly guarded. A common problem in small have-nots towns where resources were scarce.

  A new set of orders was given to him. Emmie was still the target but his immediate concern was getting medical attention and for that he’d have to head back home.

  As he left the station he broke into the evidence locker and retrieved his belt of knives. He spied a few extra knives that had been used by unsavoury characters in Smyth West’s history but he refused to use a blade that he hadn’t made himself.

  After one final stop to the infirmary – which was nothing more than a small drugs cabinet – he patched up his stab wounds and applied an antiseptic gel to stop infection. Even though he couldn’t die, he wasn’t immortal and walking around with holes in his neck was asking for trouble. He wrapped the blindfold around his neck one more time and broke the neck of another officer at the entrance to the station.

  --<><>--

  Tobias Zen

  Tobias Zen sat in a blacked out room at the top of his tower. There were no windows a
nd the only light came from the blinking orange glows of the machines around him.

  As he sat there he smiled at what he had achieved that day. A multi billion pound launch of his stock, a huge PR success, and a meeting with Emmie. That last achievement was the one that thrilled him the most.

  Her brother’s death was unfortunate but it was the only way to test the data. He had spent years trying to find someone who could survive the death of their twin. He had run every data sequence he could think of to pin down a candidate but had come up empty.

  In the end it was Will who had helped him make his breakthrough. He had tasked Will with making a camera that would allow Tether events to be recorded between siblings. Officially the project was designed so the company could understand the link between twins but Tobias had a much darker plan.

  He collected the data daily from the Dualcams and watched every piece of footage he could. Prototypes were given to every member of the TethTech team and Tobias saw the experiences of every one of them. He saw wonderful moments including an employee seeing their first born son and the first dance at a wedding. He also saw the darkest excesses of his employees; he watched violence, abuse and experienced an employee’s suicide.

  Yet Tobias was unfazed by what he had seen; good and bad. He didn’t care about the footage. Which is why when he saw his employee Yun Tao take two bottles of pills, he did nothing. It’s why when he saw Yun start to convulse on the floor as the pills overwhelmed his body, he sat back with his feet up. Even when Yun let out his last breath of life Tobias didn’t notify his family and no one even knew he had died until two weeks later.

  Tobias was far more interested in the data in front of him. He had watched countless videos and had seen a green line maintain a consistent motion over and over again. Yet there was one sequence of videos that stood out for him. Whenever he observed a Tether event between Will and Emmie the green line became erratic. It darted across the screen with a much faster pace.

  The results were consistent and unlike any other videos. The bond between Emmie and Will was different. He couldn’t understand why but he started to become obsessed with it. Like all obsessions of his, the first thing he wanted to do was test it.