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

by Mike Essex

  I ran to the gap where the building had once been and looked down at the crater that had been created. The foundations of the building had been torn from the ground leaving nothing but a large gap where it had existed. If we had picked that building to hide in instead of the garage then who knows what would have become of us.

  As the realisation set in I gasped, “We have to get out of this area.”

  We ran past the red carpet and out on to the main road all the way to the barriers around the Thames. In the sky we could see that the pink light stopped directly over the river.

  “Do we jump?” I asked.

  The words came weakly from Grace. “No use. No scoodos,” I knew she was right, without anything to propel us forward in the water and with Grace so weak I doubted we’d last very long. I looked down the road and could see what looked like a gap in the pink light on the horizon.

  “This way,” I shouted and we walked as quickly as we could towards the gap, past the sandbags and supplies the soldiers had left behind. They must have been packing up to leave before the regeneration started, when we arrived and interrupted them. I thought about stopping to raid their supplies but Grace looked so weak from the heat that I knew every second counted.

  We found a split in the road and before we could reach it a barrier appeared from nowhere sending me tripping over and onto the floor, landing on my left arm. My arm scraped against the floor, reopening old wounds from the fire and causing me to let go of Grace.

  I looked around and saw that her body now lay on top of the barrier, several feet in the sky. Her face began to glow a light shade of red that pulsed under her skin and I could see that the regeneration efforts were starting to get to her. I needed to touch her again, to pass on the cool sensation so she wouldn’t burn to death.

  I jumped up to my feet and reached out for her hand. Before I could reach her the barrier rose up again and turned into a large brick wall that expanded to form a wall. Grace lay on the top of the wall suspended in the air and out of reach.

  The wall continued to be built up and form a perfectly shaped circle around me and a nearby building. Based on the path it was taking I tried to determine where it would come to an end. With Grace in too high a position for me to reach now, I knew I’d only have one shot at this.

  I ran to where to wall had started and began to run counter clockwise around the building. As I turned a corner I could see the wall starting to rise up from the floor ahead of me. I jumped upwards and caught the tip of one of the bricks as a new section made its way upwards. It jolted me into the air and I lost my footing, momentarily suspended by nothingness in a sea of pink light.

  THIRTY FIVE

  I landed on my hands and desperately clung tightly onto the wall. It reached the height of its ascent and I gripped at the bricks in a panic as it came to a stop. I looked over to Grace and could see the redness rushing across her face choking the life from her. I tried to crawl forward but it didn’t feel fast enough so I rose up and started to tiptoe across the perilous surface.

  In my mind I imagined reaching out mentally to Grace and providing her with the cooling effects. In the same way I’d attacked Jacobi’s colleagues I hoped there would be a way to transfer my powers to Grace. It was an unfruitful effort so I steadied my footing and continued forwards.

  “Stay with me,” I shouted across to Grace. She didn’t reply.

  As I reached her body I held out my hands not wanting to waste a second in helping her. My skin touched hers and a loud hiss could be heard as the coldness of my body met the intense heat of hers. She closed her eyes in relief.

  When Grace had some energy back I jumped down from the wall and encouraged her to roll down, catching her as she fell. I helped get Grace to the soldiers’ temporary base and on arrival looked on in horror at the two dead bodies of the soldiers we had killed; their heads ruptured by the bullets we had fired, their skulls exposed and bloodied. Unable to look at their cold dead eyes I kicked their bodies over so they were facing away from us. I couldn’t take the judgement in their eyes.

  Without the soldiers to judge us we huddled down by the sandbags hoping that the regeneration efforts would finish. As long as I could keep the heat at bay then we’d be able to survive.

  Seeing their faces again was a reminder that something was not right here. They were the spitting image of those soldiers who had chased after us. I was sure they had to be their twins. Not that it made a difference now.

  I tried my best to smile. “We’re going to make it.”

  I could feel the heat fighting with my body trying to win out over the cold sensation. As the cold surges pulsed through my body I knew I was relying on a finite resource, that eventually it would run out and then I’d no longer be able to protect Grace or myself.

  Around us we watched as the nearby streets continued to change. Giant spires formed from the streets creating new towers that propelled themselves high into the air. Old buildings were either destroyed entirely or reformed into new structures each one more magnificent than the last. The excesses of Birmingham paled in comparison to the new Utopia that was being created.

  Every building looked brand new, not a brick out of place, nor an opportunity for excess ignored – diamonds, giant mirrors, sleek blacks and reds formed the bulk of the colours in this part of the city. Everything felt like it had been designed to complement each other. The red maple trees, the black street lamps, the grey facades of the buildings, they all blended together to create a district that seemed to evoke the feeling of spending money.

  In amongst the chaos of this change, the sandbags and the soldiers’ remaining supplies stayed in place. Whilst the rays hung overhead the bags didn’t change nor did the black sheeting that had been laid down under them. The roads approaching our structure had been reformed yet for whatever reason this area remained safe.

  “Looks like we have a Guardian angel,” I said to Grace as I looked up in the sky at the pink light. I rubbed my eyes and realised that I could now see perfectly in the sandbagged area. Whilst the world outside of this little oasis was a glowing pink something had cleared around us and normal light had returned to the space.

  Grace grabbed my hand with her own and although she still felt warm it was no longer an intense heat. I felt her head and could feel that some of the heat had subsided and that her body was already hard at work restoring balance.

  Around us the city continued to change, the pink light not yet finished. Although we were free from its grasp it had clearly not finished with this segment of the city, which made our freedom even stranger.

  Seizing the opportunity I searched through the items left behind by the soldiers. There was plenty of rifle ammunition but no rifles to use it on so instead I grabbed a couple of grenades from their supplies, their grey colour reminding me that they were smoke grenades and not explosives.

  “Get. Find. Kill,” a faint voice emerged from near to our location and I grabbed my gun in fear. I looked over the sandbags but couldn’t see anyone in amongst the pink light. I could hear the sound from behind me now so I hunched down and ran to the other side of our temporary fortress. From there the origin of the sound remained a mystery.

  I heard more sounds coming from behind me, unclear voices blurred against one another. It felt like we were surrounded and no matter where I stood the voices were always coming from behind me, never in front. It dawned on me that there was one place yet to check and I placed my hands on the floor rummaging through the dirt hoping to find the answer.

  Leaning down to the floor I placed my ear to the ground and could hear the sound clearer now. It wasn’t coming from around us but was below our position. I was right. With new found vigour I pushed away at the dirt, moving it into one corner to keep track of where I had searched.

  I could hear the voice clearer now. “Regen. Dead. Have-nots” It must have been the SO13 soldiers, the ones who had left us behind to die. The same ones whose comrades’ broken skulls lay in front of me.

&n
bsp; With trembling hands I crawled towards the dead soldiers knowing what needed to be done but wondering how much more damage I would do. I reached out my hand to the blue eyed soldier’s head and turned it towards me again. His vacant face was even more shocking the second time around. Moving his head twice had forced loose some of his brain matter which hung from the front of his skull.

  I backed away knowing that I’d caused this man’s death. I’d shot him in cold blood even though he hadn’t fired a single bullet at me. I knew he wasn’t really innocent, that he’d have killed us in a heartbeat and yet seeing his lifeless body was a reminder that I didn’t want to be a killer. If I killed countless people to find Will then what had I achieved? Was Will’s life more valuable than this soldier’s? Was mine?

  “You did the right thing,” Grace was on her hands and knees beside me and she knew instantly what I was feeling. “None of us want to kill but he would have taken us down. It was kill or be killed.”

  Emotions raced through my mind. “But, it came so easily,” In my police training I knew one day I’d have to kill someone, that it would be ‘kill or be killed’, as Grace had put it, but it didn’t really prepare me for the reality. This may not have been my first kill, Tobias had seen to that but it was the first one where I’d made a conscious effort to pull the trigger. “Yes, it was self-defence but we had a choice. We could have found another way.”

  “They wouldn’t have found another way if they had seen us first. You saw what they did to the people who were hiding in the Houses of Parliament.”

  Grace was right, of course, she was always right. I knew she’d killed a lot more people than I had so justifying her actions must have been something she’d come to terms with a long time ago. So here I was again, rummaging through the dead, hoping for supplies that would save us, only this time with their blood truly on my hands.

  “I can search them if you want,” said Grace, her skin now returned to its normal hues. Her eyes were bright red from the tears she had cried in agony and her face looked flustered but she seemed fine to carry on.

  “It’s ok,” I told her, “this is what we need.”

  I pointed to an earpiece that had slipped from the soldier’s ear and lay on the floor under his head. Grace searched the other soldier but found his earpiece had been broken when he was shot. She discovered another one in amongst the supplies and we could instantly hear a broadcast on them.

  Grace held a finger to her lips to indicate for me to be quiet. If we could hear them then there was every chance they could hear us.

  It was hard to pick out a single voice from the mixture of sounds coming from the headset. At times it sounded like nothing more than a sequence of beeps and hums occasionally branching out into human voices that overlapped and were nothing more than single words, often repeated including ‘Get. Find. Kill. Have-nots. Regen. Dead.’ I couldn’t understand how anyone could make sense of the noise and confusion emanating from the earpiece.

  I wondered if my earpiece was broken but after switching with Grace hers sounded exactly the same. We turned the earpiece volume up so we could hear them without having them in place and put them on the floor. As we sat we ate the remnants of food the soldiers had left behind.

  The noises continued, occasionally starling me with chants of “Kill, Kill, Kill, Have-nots” that quickly descended back into spiralled voices and broken sentences. As I tucked into a can of corned-broth one voice became clear amongst the others and quickly became louder until it drowned out everything else.

  “Emmie? Emmie? Are you there? Emmie?”

  It was a voice I longed to hear. “March?”

  THIRTY SIX

  Hearing March’s voice usually made me feel like everything was going to be ok; he always had a way of making me feel relaxed and allaying my fears. Except this time that feeling was twisted with knowing I had kissed Rex and betrayed him.

  I thought about blurting everything out there and then but it didn’t seem like the right time or place. I’d barely had a second to process how I felt about Rex, let alone why the kiss had happened. Not to mention the regeneration happening around us. I decided to keep quiet about the kiss but swore to myself I’d tell him everything when we got back to the base. For now survival was the most important thing.

  “Are either of you hurt?” he asked.

  “I’m ok,” I replied. “Grace was burning up but I found a way to cool her down.”

  “We saw, don’t worry though, we’ve hacked their regen machine so it won’t target your location. Another one of Jill’s excellent hacks.”

  I could hear Jill give herself a round of applause in the background. “Don’t forget the earpiece,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s why you can hear us right now. Jill was able to hack into the comms units you found and broadcast this message.”

  “Can the soldiers hear us?” I asked.

  “Nope. We’re pinging directly to your earpiece and Grace’s. They shouldn’t hear a thing from either of us when we speak. What happened to you both? We’ve been hacking every camera that is still operational trying to find you but since we lost signal from your comms units it’s been like you disappeared from the surface of the Earth.”

  “You could say that,” I joked, whilst March was oblivious to what was so funny. “What do you know about Q-Whitehall?”

  Jill jumped in on the conversation. “Q-Whitehall? It’s real? No way.”

  “Yep,” I replied, “a secret royal facility, directly under the city of London.”

  “Tom must be thrilled! He’s got a bit of an obsession with asking me to hack Government and royal logs to find out every secret they have. Q-Whitehall was one of the few mysteries we’d yet to uncover.”

  “A puzzle even you couldn’t crack? I thought you knew everything Jill?”

  “Hmm, almost everything,” she replied. “Everything except the activities of the royals. It’s like they ceased to exist after the 20 Day Siege. Every single member of the royal family disappeared over the course of those days, not once appearing on a news broadcast.”

  “At school they told us they had been killed by the signal. That no one was safe from the attack, not even political figures,” I thought about the people who left Grace’s parents to die and knew that it was likely only the fastest and most cowardly officials were those who survived the attack.

  “I think there are secrets left to tell. There always is. When you get back you have to promise to tell me everything about Q-Whitehall. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Good, because I have some information for you,” said Jill. “I’ve been looking into the ‘capstone’ for you; the one that was referenced on Will’s computer.”

  My emotions spiked on hearing his name again.

  “I cross referenced the name with the TethTech files we seized and I think we have something,” she explained. “It looks like the capstone was designed to be used with Tobias’ machine as a sensonomic regulator.”

  Jill paused for a moment waiting for a sign of acknowledgement. I looked at Grace and we both shrugged. Spotting that we hadn’t replied March explained. “A sensonomic regulator is designed to control the strength of a Tether event by limiting the input of senses on the recipient.”

  “Why would you need that?” I asked.

  “Some twins are born with a stronger link than others which means a dominant twin is born who lives a full life whilst the other twin is nothing more than an observer living one long Tether event. They’re effectively unable to act for themselves.”

  It sounded like such a sad waste of life for the weaker twin, only ever living their life through another, only being kept alive so the other twin wouldn’t die.

  March continued his explanation. “A sensonomic regulator can help limit the signal they receive so both twins can experience Tether events and live normal lives. TethTech saw similar effects when soldiers were trapped in a coma, in that their twins would no longer be able to live their own life. They developed
their own technology to allow the twins of those who were injured in the field to live normal lives and not also be stuck in a coma.”

  “So why was Will researching it?” I asked.

  “Well the technology was never finished; it was just a concept in one small lab at TethTech. The developer working on the technology never shipped a final product, despite the deadline passing. You can probably guess who the developer was.”

  “Will?”

  “Exactly and here’s the really curious thing. The blueprints for Tobias’ machine indicate that the capstone was designed to be an integral part. It would stop Tobias getting overloaded by all of the bodies he took over. In the end it could be the lack of a capstone that killed him.”

  “So by not finishing the technology Will saved everyone?”

  “It’s possible. Or if he knew Tobias was coming after him he could have provided a faulty piece of technology. Either way we can’t find any records of a working capstone at TethTech or in the files we got from Will’s computer.”

  I knew Will was a hero really. He had saved everyone. There was no way he could be the purple hooded man now, no way he could have kidnapped those people. I’d know it if someone so close to me was a killer. I hoped.

  A new voice crackled onto the line. “Emmie,” it was my father, “you have to protect your brother at all costs. If the capstone was important enough for Will to hide himself away from the world then he needs to be protected. Find him and get out of the city. Stay safe.”

  His motivational speech ended there and he crackled off the line. I hadn’t heard him speak so bluntly in a long time, not since before he had abandoned Will and me. His message was clear. He didn’t care about the city or Q-Whitehall, as far as he was concerned family was everything.

  “I’m sorry we don’t have any more information on Will’s location,” said Jill. “Have you found anything?”