by Mike Essex
On the nights that followed my father opened up to me about what had happened twenty one years ago. About the guilt he felt for hurting Tobias and the blame he placed on himself for my mother’s death. He had done a truly horrible thing in the past, there was no doubt but he had put things right today and I hoped that would ease his conscience. He was a good man and I was prepared to try and trust him again, he was all the family I had left.
March had also earned my trust. He had saved me so many times and I was thankful he had operated on me all those months ago. I dreaded to think what would have happen if he hadn’t removed Tobias’ device. The love I felt for him had only grown stronger and I longed to be with him again when I recovered. March suggested I rest for at least a month to help my brain recover from the ‘mental trauma’ as he put it, so I decided to obey Doctors orders for once but only as they came from him.
It was Rex and Rufus I felt the biggest debt to. They hadn’t deserved a part in any of this. Everyone else had joined The Deck in order to fight but they were innocent. After we’d moved Tobias to The Deck I returned home with R&R and Grace who promised to help me recover. We spent the next few weeks catching up and laughing more than we had done for years.
Life slowly began to return to normal. Well as normal as things could be in our world of haves and have-nots.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Emmie Keyes
I felt everything.
I awoke with a jolt and could feel beads of sweat all over me. I ran to the bathroom and tried to cool down but felt a hard thud at the back of my head. It was followed by a sharp pain in my stomach that caused me to gag over the sink.
My body felt cold and I started to shiver. It was a cold that started in my stomach and spread over me quickly. I’d never had a fever like it and I let out a blood curdling scream from the sudden pain.
When the cold reached my head I could feel pressure building in my brain and I passed out, hitting my head on the sink as I went down.
--<><>--
Emmie Keyes
“Emmie? Emmie?” a voice came from outside my door. “Are you ok?” It grew louder.
“I’m … ok…” I said weakly.
I slowly stood up and put on a dressing gown. I opened the door and saw Rex.
“Oh my God. What happened to you?” he asked. “You’re bleeding.”
He walked me to my living room and sat me down. “I’ll get you a bandage.”
As Rex walked away I felt dizzy and could feel the room spinning. Suddenly there was a flash of light that darted across my eyes. When the light had gone my vision had changed.
My apartment was gone, replaced by a brightly lit room covered in white padding. It felt familiar and as I tried to think back to where I had seen it I could feel a sharp pain in my head.
I tried to look around for more clues but couldn’t move. Whose body is this? I wondered.
My eyes began to adjust to the light and I could see the padding on the walls much clearer now. I had seen this place before. It was identical to the room where Tobias had been tortured.
As I tried to understand the body I was trapped in and who was being subjected to such torture a door in front of the room opened and a tall man entered.
It was a man covered in facial scars with a large deep cut across his neck. A man I had never wanted to see again. A man called Vlad.
Vlad entered the room with a knife in each hand, which he scraped across each other, sparks flying outwards. He took one look at the body I was trapped in and said four words that changed everything.
“Are you ready Will?”
Tethered Souls
Copyright Mike Essex 2014
Dedicated to the tethers in my life who keep me strong.
PART ONE
ONE
“Will?”
My mind tried to take in the impact of those four little letters but couldn’t comprehend what it had just heard. Could it really be that my brother had survived? If that was possible why had I experienced the agony of his death? Why was he no longer Tethered to me?
Those questions bubbled up inside of me whilst I remained trapped inside this new form. I knew two things to be true: One, the man in front of me I would recognise anywhere – his enormous frame, the brutal scarring on his face and the frayed leather jacket meant I could identify him as the man I knew only as ‘Vlad’.
Since the time I had last seen him he’d managed to gain a new scar across his neck which was covered with grey, sharp looking bits of metal, that were haphazardly strewn together to stop a cut from opening again. This was an injury he had sustained in a fight with my best friend Grace. A fight in which she told me she had left him for dead.
Dead, yet somehow clinging to the fabric of life, I had my own theory as to how he survived. The orange glow in his eyes made me suspect he was likely nothing more than a puppet for an unseen force. I’d seen enough of those orange eyes to last a lifetime and they always meant someone was being controlled by a third party; unable to act for themselves.
Whether Vlad still contained any life within him was irrelevant, all that mattered for now was the two sharp knives he held in his hands. He glared menacingly as he sliced them into each other, sending little shards onto the floor.
The other thing I knew with certainty was the way I felt right now; the mixture of feelings inside of me felt exactly the same as it had done in the moments before Will had died. Confusion, fear, sadness and anger circled around me, those four familiar pillars doing their best to hold up the foundations of my shattered mind.
On top of the pure emotion was another element that tied them together. This was no mere feeling but rather a primal instinct. Before Vlad had spoken my brother’s name I had already known I was in the presence of Will. A twin always knows what it feels like to be Tethered to their brother or sister and there was no denying it, the body I now occupied was Will’s.
Yes, it was impossible. Yes, I had felt Will die. Yes, I had lost the connection to him I had felt since the day we were born. None of that seemed to matter now. Will was alive and I prayed he was well. If there was a way we could be connected fully again, to regain that Tethered feeling, then I would embrace it with all I had.
Despite all the emotions I felt and the desire to see my brother again, I was nothing more than a passenger in his mind. Whatever Tether event had caused me to see through his eyes again was playing out right in front of me and until it ended I could do nothing more than watch.
And watch I did, trying to take in as much detail as possible, vowing that as soon as the Tether event ended I would make my way to Will and hope that he hadn’t travelled far. I needed to believe that he could somehow explain how we had both cheated fate and why we were no longer Tethered together day by day.
I repeated the details of the room over and over hoping they would stay with me when I was back in my own body – white padded walls, steel lockers, bright strobe lighting, grey machines transporting an orange fluid, a maniac standing at the doorway sharpening knives…
Vlad put the knives down on a metal tray where they scraped against it and I could feel the adrenaline rushing around Will’s body. I knew this was it; Vlad was back for a second attempt on Will’s life and I hoped my brother could make his miraculous escape again.
Except there was no escape.
Instead of reaching for another weapon Vlad threw Will a blue towel which he grabbed in the air. “Cover yourself up,” said Vlad.
Will stepped over a knee high ledge and rubbed himself down with the towel. He was covered in what initially appeared to be water but with a darker colouring and a thicker consistency. He looked behind him at a large grey tube from which he had emerged and I could feel his lips form into a smile. “You are the last person I expected to see,” he said.
Hearing his voice was further confirmation that it really was Will. There was no denying it and as he looked at himself in the reflection of the tube I could see the face of the brother I thought I had lost.
<
br /> Whenever Will and I had shared a Tether event before we had always been aware of the other’s presence. Yet if Will knew I was looking through his eyes and experiencing his senses he certainly didn’t mention it to Vlad.
“Our mutual friend thought it would be a fitting punishment for me to be the one who woke you,” replied Vlad.
When Will had finished drying himself he walked over to a grey steel locker and retrieved a large piece of folded purple fabric which he placed on the floor. He then put on a pair of brown boots with woolly insides, black jeans and a dark grey T-shirt with blue swirls on it. On his hand he wore a silver ring to signify his engagement to Faye, which made me wonder if he knew what had happened to her.
Not that I had any idea what I would tell him. “Sorry Will your fiancé was trapped in a coma by a team of assassins who were sent to capture me after I pissed off one of the most powerful men in the world”.
I felt guilt at my part, although not enough to alleviate the knowledge that it was Faye’s fault that we were in this mess to begin with. She was the one who had allowed Will to be tortured, kicking off the entire chain of events that led to me feeling this guilt.
As I thought about the image of Faye and Yuna huddled around each other, trapped in a coma together, Will had finished getting dressed and Vlad offered him a knife. “It’s for your protection” he said.
“That’s what I have you for,” replied Will as he handed Vlad the large folded piece of fabric.
Could Vlad really be working for my brother now, and who was their mutual friend? The orange pools that reflected in Vlad’s eyes certainly indicated that he was being controlled by another force and with Tobias gone it certainly wasn’t him.
Using the medical machines in the room Vlad subjected Will to a series of tests for his heart rate, blood pressure and mental activity. However long Will had been stored in that tube it certainly hadn’t affected him or his general health. He seemed faster and stronger now, no longer like the bookworm I had known him to be.
When Will had passed the tests they called a grey lift which had a royal seal on it – a yellow tiger on the left, a fierce red dragon on the right and a single crown resting atop a red and blue coat of arms. I’d seen the seal before on the very same lift and it further hinted at Will’s location – The Houses of Parliament; the same place where Tobias had been operated on and where Vlad had been left for dead.
As they got into the elevator the floor number was presented on a digital display as ‘U8’ despite that number not existing on any keypad in the lift.
He had been hiding in plain sight this whole time, located on a secret floor. Whilst I had taken the offence, going after Tobias and seeking answers, Will had chosen defence by hiding himself away.
I couldn’t blame him. If I’d been the one attacked I would have also fled, it was only because of my anger over his supposed death that I chased after such a deadly man.
Vlad unfolded the fabric, revealing it to be a large flowing coat which he handed to my brother. The coat was made of a dark purple velvet with yellow and red interlocking circles in various sizes. It had a large hood and ran all the way down to his shins.
“I assume there was only one reason you woke me?” said Will.
“Yes,” replied Vlad, “Tobias is dead.”
“And….” asked Will, flipping the hood of the robe over his head.
“The capstone is ready.”
“Emmie?”
The final voice shocked me, for it was not a part of their conversation, it emerged from a third party and echoed until it was all I could hear. “Emmie! Emmie!” my name began to sound clearer and I could hear the distress in their voice.
I felt myself being pulled away from the images in Will’s eyes. As I watched their lift open into the darkness of the library, I lost contact with Will and my world went black.
TWO
I felt myself drift in and out of consciousness, alternating between visions of Rex and Rufus trying to help me and Will saying the word “capstone” over and over.
I badly wanted to wake up and see Will again, or at least see the world through his eyes but Rufus was the first sight I saw when I finally awoke.
“Was it real?” was all I could ask.
“What honey?” asked Rufus.
Rex rushed over, seeing that I was awake. He lent down next to me and delicately placed his hand on top of my own, presumably to show that he cared but that he didn’t want to risk hurting me. “Thank God you’re ok,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked, starting to feel a pounding in my head.
“You fell and hit your head on the sink,” explained Rex. “The next thing we knew you were passed out mumbling about Vlad and your brother.”
I instinctively reached my hand out to the source of the pain in my forehead and felt the lump that had started to form. Rex handed me some painkillers and a glass of water to take them with.
“I saw them” I said. “It was Will and Vlad.”
“They’re alive?” asked Rex, not doubting the absurdity of my statement. He had seen so much in the last few months that I doubted he would believe anything was impossible any more.
“Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” asked Rufus, who had not lost his sense of scepticism despite all that had happened.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I felt connected to Will in the same way I had done before he died,” I interrupted myself, realising that those words no longer made sense. I had become so used to saying he had died that the thought he could be alive clashed with the prior truth in my mind.
This was amplified by knowing that I no longer felt connected to him, even now. Whatever connection had been rekindled was now gone. If Will was alive then the Tether we had once shared still remained severed.
I knew what I was saying sounded crazy and that perhaps it had just been a dream bought on by the likely concussion of my injury but I wasn’t prepared to let it go. From the look in their eyes Rex and Rufus - or R&R as I liked to call them - understood that too.
Rex put on his coat and handed me some clothes. “So where do we find him?”
As I rode my motorcycle to London with R&R trailing behind in a duocycle I called my father to explain what I had seen. He was shocked that Will could still be alive but I could hear from his voice that he was ecstatic at the thought of seeing his son again. It was in stark contrast to how disconnected he had seemed when he abandoned us years ago.
My father couldn’t explain why Vlad was alive again, nor why his eyes were still orange when they had dismantled Tobias’ machine, which had previously allowed Vlad to live on even when he should have died. Whoever was controlling Vlad now it certainly wasn’t The Deck or Tobias; there was another player in this game that I had yet to meet. Vlad and Will’s mutual friend.
Although my father urged me to travel to The Deck’s base so he could check I was ok, I refused, knowing that every second they spent performing tests would be further time for Will to slip away from me. As a compromise it was agreed that Chris, Grace and a small support team would meet me on the outskirts of London. When I tried to argue that even meeting up with them would add time to the journey my father insisted that without them I’d never get into London alive.
It certainly was a fair assessment. London had changed in the months since I had last been there. In fact, the whole world had. With almost every single person sharing a Tether event that almost killed them it wasn’t something that could be easily covered up.
Whilst the World waited for the British Government to explain what had happened there were many theories that emerged; everything from alien contact to the coming of God’s rapture were offered up as explanations. The press liked the latter idea so much that they dubbed that day “The Rapture” and it was a name that stuck.
The theory that most people believed was, not that of The Rapture, but of a return of the 20 Day Siege – the sound wave experiment that had wiped out a billion people in an effort to find a way for twins to s
urvive after their sibling died.
The repercussions of that original event were still felt all over the globe and the British Government had assured everyone that it couldn’t happen again. They had built giant towers around major cities to block out the sound wave and put limits on all scientific experiments that tried to break the link between twins.
Over twenty years had passed since that event but people never forgot and even for those children like me who had not been alive before the Siege it was a story that we were constantly reminded of. Every year marches took place around the world, including my home town of Smyth West, as a sign of respect for those who had died.
The Siege had left a lasting impression on the world. On top of the devastating human loss, the Siege had been responsible for the failing of the World’s economy, the abandonment of the royal family and the division of power between the rich (who we called the haves) and the poor (known as the have-nots).
I had grown up in an unstable World and now the latest series of events had further broken down society and the trust the people had in their Governments to protect them.
Desperately searching for a scapegoat and a way to stop the public’s bloodlust for those responsible, The Rapture was quickly blamed on TethTech and their CEO, Tobias Zen, mainly thanks to a series of blueprints forwarded on by Jill, the best hacker at The Deck. A worldwide manhunt commenced for Tobias and although The Deck thought about turning over his body, the Government quickly found someone who bore a striking resemblance to Tobias and he was publicly executed by lethal injection.
We were unsure if they honestly believed the man was Tobias, or if they simply found someone who was close enough in looks but either way it was enough to blindside the media who portrayed it as a huge victory. TethTech’s assets were auctioned off and Tobias’ legacy was destroyed.
Despite their continual and widely publicised fight against Tobias, The Deck didn’t get the keys to the city or any recognition. They still operated on the outside of society; the Government refused to acknowledge that a team of rebels had done what they could not. We suspected this was because they wanted to seem in control and didn’t want to encourage any type of freedom fighters to emerge.