beats per minute

by Alex Mae

  In those bruised, vulnerable twenty four hours after she woke up, while the healers continued their fight to save Declan’s life, she might even have mourned Sam. He still occupied a great deal of her waking thought.

  And so, when the waiting got too much, she found herself leaving the hospital wing and tracing the steps to where Sam used to live. Some compulsion dragged her through the doors, up the stairs and down the familiar corridor. They had not cleaned out his room yet.

  She wished she hadn’t come; but once there she could not leave. It was like staring into the blackness of his soul. The display he had conjured up for Declan’s room was merely a taster. There was no nausea this time. There was not even anger.

  The fire had gone out.

  Instead, she felt sad. Sorry. She even felt sorry for Sam; as she would feel sorry for anyone so lost and eaten up by hate. For the first time since waking, tears leaked fatly from her tired eyes. She collapsed onto the bed.

  But soon she was hit by another feeling, one that she had not expected: discomfort. It was an alien sensation amidst so much emotion. Sniffling, she felt beneath her rump. It turned out she had landed on something raised and hard.

  A box.

  A box, which, as it turned out, was dedicated to her. In it were the keys she thought she’d lost months ago, a few locks of her hair, some of her underwear, some disgusting drawings and her hourglass pendant. The pendant which, it turned out, had been designed to match Declan’s own.

  It was the pendant that did it. She didn’t know why, but in that moment it seemed the perfect symbol of loss; it reminded her of a time when she had still been happy. He had taken the object but, worse than that, he had robbed her of that feeling.

  She would never spare another kind thought for Samuel Becker for as long as she lived.

  It was in this almost catatonic state that Bree found her, many hours later, still sitting in that same spot. In careful, soothing tones, she urged Raegan up, taking her sore, bandaged hands and leading the way out of the darkness into blazing sunshine. Declan was awake.

  He would never be exactly as he was. Bones could be mended by the healers with little effort but internal injuries were something else. The right lung, punctured by Sam’s knife, would always be weaker than the left. The burns were too severe to ever completely fade. Now, in the daylight, she snuck a look at him; the green eyes were so dazzling in the morning sun that you might not even notice the ugly, raised redness on the left cheek. Not at first. Other more serious scars covered his back and shoulders. But he was alive. He was hers.

  The happiness of those first few hours reunited was like nothing she had ever known. They talked non-stop. A phone call to Bridey and Con turned into a tearful marathon. The bond blossomed; knitting them together, filling gaps Raegan never knew existed. The hourglass was whole at last.

  The only dark spot was the sight of the small, motionless figure in the bed at the end of the ward. Raegan could not stop her eyes from constantly wandering over. Sukey.

  ‘She’s in a coma,’ Raegan had explained softly. Her hands trembled as she drew her messy red hair back into a ponytail. ‘It was how they found us.’

  Eyes still unfocused from the healing, Declan furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sukey is Bree’s sister.’ The last thing Raegan wanted to do was to keep secrets but she knew she had to watch what she said. ‘She has these –visions. I don’t get quite how it all works, but she’s incredibly psychic. It leaves her vulnerable. She and Bree can communicate telepathically but they aren’t supposed to; it can be too much for Sukey. But, that night, when Bree and the others knew Sam had taken us but didn’t know where, Bree reached out to her. Sukey found us. And then- this happened.’

  ‘Is she going to be alright?’

  ‘They don’t know if she’ll wake up.’

  ‘Damn. Poor, poor Bree.’

  ‘I know,’ Raegan said unsteadily. ‘Now that I’ve found- I mean, now that we’re... I couldn’t deal with it.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Bree wouldn’t let me apologise. Said it was her call. Put on a brave face, but I know how she must feel. She loves her sister more than anything in the world.’

  ‘Her twin,’ Declan reminded her quietly.

  Raegan’s eyes glimmered again. ‘I keep forgetting.’

  ‘Easy there, waterworks.’ He nudged her to make her laugh.

  ‘I know, I know!’ In spite of herself, she chuckled. ‘I’m like Niagara Falls. I keep thinking there aren’t any more tears left, and then, whoosh. Out they come.’

  ‘It’s natural after a trauma. Don’t beat yourself up.’

  Raegan blew her nose noisily. ‘It is pretty incredible, though. The twin thing.’

  ‘Can’t be a Regent unless you have one.’

  Declan relaxed back on the pillows, a shit-eating grin on his face. Raegan didn’t need a mirror to know that her smile matched his.

  It was amazing how the jigsaw pieces fitted together. Regents were born in pairs. That was why the gift had skipped Con and her father, despite their Regency lineage; they weren’t part of a set.

  Her father. At last she could say it. Raegan had finally found someone who would let her talk freely about Joseph. The one person who could give her the answers she craved. She learned from Declan that though Joseph had not been a Regent, he worked as a Skipper and had eventually been inducted into some sort of espionage group working for the Sentinel. The work was hard and sometimes dangerous, but after seeing what the Regents were up against on the frontline, Joseph felt relieved that destiny had missed him off the list. And then his wife Helen gave birth to twins. The couple were devastated. They did not want that kind of life for their children. They decided to separate.

  ‘Couldn’t drag himself away, though,’ Declan’s mouth pulled down at the edges. ‘Almost left it too late. Finally plucked up the courage just before our third birthday. Faked his own death.’

  She shook her head. It was a crazy story. ‘But how? And... I’ve seen my birth certificate. Wouldn’t it say if I had a twin?’

  ‘Yeah. You’d have a time of birth. But Joseph faked all that. He had friends in high places. That’s how he forged us new identities so the Sentinel couldn’t track us down.’

  ‘But they did.’ Raegan didn’t know how to feel about that. Part of her was furious that she and Declan had been ripped apart and forced into ignorance. But then, after the horrors they had recently experienced, not just in the Labyrinth but also in Carrigaline, another part of her – probably the biggest part – understood.

  ‘Well, yeah. Dad wasn’t very good at lying low. He started working for the Cause again under his new name. Tried to keep his distance; we were in New York by then so he thought he’d be able to slip under the radar. But they worked it out, obviously. And thank God they did or when he was taken I would have had nowhere to go.’

  Another blow. Though her father hadn’t died all those years ago, he was still lost to Raegan: missing and by now assumed dead. Working for the Sentinel on some secret operation, his activities had been noticed by the Fay. One night he didn’t come back.

  ‘I thought I was going to an orphanage. Didn’t know I was a Regent until I got to Unit Prime. I was too young to start the training then, so they just let me hang around. I couldn’t understand what the deal was – why keep me if I didn’t have a twin? I would be useless to them. Eventually, I figured out that they were waiting for something. You.’ He grinned.

  ‘And what a warm welcome you gave me.’

  It came out more sarcastically than Raegan intended. Declan twitched uncomfortably.

  She had to ask. ‘Why were you like that with me?’

  ‘Like what?’

  She glared at him. ‘Don’t play dumb. You were a huge pain from the start. I get that you weren’t supposed to get close to me, but – don’t you think you took it a bit far?’

  Declan swore under his breath. ‘You’re right. Crap, I’m sorry. I just- well...’

  ‘W
ell?’

  ‘I was mad at you!’ He blurted, pleating the bedcover in a way that Raegan found all too familiar. The realisation was touching. She placed her hand over his.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’d been waiting so long. When they told me you were coming, even with the secret – damn, I was so excited! That whole day I remember just walking around in a daze, couldn’t sit still. I was so sure that even without being told, you’d know who I was. The moment you saw me: you’d just know. But then when I met you...’ The tops of his ears turned pink. ‘You barely even noticed me! I was crushed.’

  ‘No! Oh, Declan, I had no idea...’ Her first instinct was to apologise. Then it dawned on her. ‘Wait a minute!’ Grabbing a newspaper from the bedside table, she rolled it up before clonking him on the head.

  Making noises of protest, he held up his hands. ‘I’m still in recovery you know!’

  ‘I’ll put you back under if you don’t apologise, right now.’ The words were teasing but her eyes told another story. ‘Are you being serious? I’d only just rocked up, I’d just had this bomb dropped on me – the Regency destiny – and you were fuming because I didn’t guess right away that you were the twin I never knew I had?’

  Declan shrugged; then, when she raised the paper threateningly, started to cackle. The Times, crumpled but still held aloft, hovered perilously for a few moments as his twin wavered between fury and mirth. Eventually it was turned to pulp, sagging under their combined weight while they collapsed in laughter. As shared jokes went, it wasn’t even all that funny.

  But it was theirs.

  ***

  The bond between Regency twins was a remarkable thing. Now, a week after learning the truth, Raegan couldn’t imagine how she had survived in ignorance for so long – or how deep it ran. What was it the Praetor had told her shortly after the accident? ‘In him you will find reserves of strength you never knew existed. You will draw on each other in the bleakest moments. As you already have.’

  Remembering this, Raegan stole another curious glance at her brother as she led him down a winding footpath. Still staring straight ahead, he stifled a grin. ‘What.’

  ‘Nothing. Oh look! Ducks.’

  Ignoring the tufts of brown fuzz that were crossing the path to the small pond on the other side, Declan turned to her.

  ‘The answer to your question,’ he said softly, ‘is yes.’

  She gawped. ‘But- but- but-?’

  ‘You wanted to know if I could hear your thoughts, right? In the Labyrinth. When you told me not to blame myself.’

  There was a long pause. Raegan buried her face in the white lilies she was carrying, absolutely gobsmacked. Finally, spluttering from the pollen, she gasped, ‘How did you know?’

  He shrugged, the ghost of a smile on his face. ‘Just did.’

  They were nearing the patch now. When Raegan was here last the trees had been fittingly bare, weeping their brown, withered leaves over the individual plots. Bleakness and decay hung in the sky. She could remember the pain of that day. The way time had seemed to stand still.

  How much she had learned since then about both time and pain.

  Knowledge had not helped the yearning. It was acute now as it ever had been, tugging at her as she came to rest in front of the headstone; curiously white and naked in the lush green of the graveyard. Helen O’Roarke, it read. Beloved mother. 1960-2010.

  She had never missed her more.

  Kneeling, Raegan brushed a stray piece of cherry blossom from the stony top. She placed the lilies carefully at the point where she imagined her mother’s hands to be below, resting atop one another in her closet of cool earth.

  ‘Not just lilies, Mum,’ she whispered, gesturing over her shoulder to Declan. ‘Daffodils too. All your favourites.’ Pressing her fingers to her lips, she touched them lovingly to the ‘H’ of Helen. Then, never moving her eyes from the stone, she beckoned Declan forward. He dropped the daffodils down in a curiously clumsy gesture. Almost immediately, as if the ground were made of hot coals, he tripped back.

  Her hand slipped into his. She could feel his heart beating distantly; slow and steady, despite the grief. It mirrored her own.

  ‘You can speak. I think she hears us.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Declan mumbled.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  With a comforting squeeze of his palm, she spoke the words that were in his heart. ‘You want her to know that you miss her. That you’ve always missed her. That you’re glad you found her.’

  The green eyes were wet and astonished. ‘How did you know?’

  After they had been standing there for a long time, his sister finally replied. The smile was more than a ghost this time round; it was a beam.

  ‘Just did.’

  Alex Mae lives in Cheltenham, writing copy by day and fiction by night. She studied at the University of Cambridge, where she spent most of her time acting and writing creatively when she should have been working toward her English degree. Still, she graduated in one piece and even won a prize from the English Faculty for one of her plays, so it all worked out in the end.

  After training as an actress at the Drama Centre, Alex embarked on a brief – and rather uneventful! – stint of performing professionally, which made her realise that she would rather write stories than be in them.

  beats per minute is her first novel (though she did compose a fairly epic story about the Backstreet Boys in her teenage years).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Where to begin! There are many people that have been generous with their time and various skills during the evolution of bpm; I have been very, very lucky.

  First of all, Catherine Saunders, who worked tirelessly on the manuscript with me while she was at Curtis Brown. Thank you for taking a chance on me and for your diligence, wisdom and insight. If the book is in any kind of shape, it’s because of you. Rebecca Pitt, for your fantastic graphic designs and amazing efficiency – I can’t really believe that something with my writing at its heart could look so beautiful, but that’s definitely a testament to your skill and not mine. Tori, Holly, Bex, Megan, and Flora, who all took the time to read and review, offering invaluable feedback and guidance. Hannah and Will, for endless support and encouragement when I wanted to give up. And everyone else who listened to me bang on about this for the last few years (you know who you are). You are all wonderful friends, thank you so very much.

  There are two special men that I could not have been without. Daniel, my big bro - the title is yours (I’m working on the car). Thank you for always believing in me. And John: I couldn’t have finished the thing without you by my side. You are my rock and I love you.

  Finally, to that powerhouse of a woman who is also known as my mum: as Teddy Roosevelt might have said, you have always kept my eyes on the stars and my feet on the ground. Plus you read the book and you hate fantasy. This one’s for you, Mummy.

  Copyright © Alex Mae 2014

  First published 2014

  The right of Alex Mae to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  For more information on Alex Mae’s books, including new releases and more, please visit:

  www.alexmaebooks.com

 

 

 
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