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Max doesn’t get it. He has no idea what I’m trying to tell him. “I liked seeing him in pain.” Tears drip down my cheeks as I force myself to look him in the eye. “What if I am evil?”
My brother runs his fingers through his hair, his hand balling into a fist at the side of his head. “You’ve spent the last year in fight training. You just need to work on Hero ethics and emotion control and everything will be fine.”
“What if it isn’t?”
The KAPOW enters the white tunnels in Central and slows its speed. A few seconds later, the pod stops in front of our home. “It’ll be fine,” Max says more to himself than to me. “Now we just have to survive Dad.”
We hesitate in front of our door, both of us trying to summon the courage to enter what will surely be a war zone. Max’s courage arrives first. His hand palms the door. “I’ll do the talking,” he says. I give him a wary smile, wondering how many times Max will have to save my ass before I get a chance to save his.
We step into an empty house. I’d spent the twelve-minute ride back home imagining all the ways our incredibly pissed off father might greet us when we arrived. This wasn’t one of them. The knots in my stomach untangle themselves in the midst of my temporary reprieve from Dad’s wrath. I’m now aware of how dry my mouth is and how much my fingers hurt from tightening into a ball of nerves. Who knows how much time I have until he gets home, but I’ll try to enjoy every second of it.
The MOD screen flashes red when it senses our presence in the room and Max
rushes to it. I head to the kitchen to grab a drink.
“Dad’s on a mission,” Max says, glancing from the MOD to the BEEPR on his wrist and back again, probably wondering why he wasn’t called to duty as well. “On the north side of the canyon. That’s weird.”
I shrug. “Nothing ever happens up there. Maybe it’s a president thing.”
He taps the glass. “It says mission.”
“Can’t say I’m not happy he’s gone.” I smile. “I hope it’s nothing serious or anything but I really don’t feel like being yelled at any more tonight.”
“This doesn’t sit right with me. I’m going to see what’s up.” Max fumbles with his BEEPR for an unusually long time. His eyebrows draw together. “It’s confidential. They won’t disclose the coordinates to me.”
“Then it’s definitely a president thing.” I drain half the soda from my can. “I’m going to bed before he gets home. If I’m lucky, Dad will save my punishment for the morning.”
Max doesn’t acknowledge me as I walk past him on the way to my room. He just stares out the glass wall, his eyes wide and his thoughts somewhere far away. Maybe if I were a Hero I would care more about this confidential mission. But I’m not. And I don’t.
Dad doesn’t come home all night. The biometrics on his MOD are synchronized to the home MOD and they show him as being alive with no risk of peril, so I’m not too concerned. Being president of the Super race is a demanding job. Max however, is not so Zen about it. He spends hours calling his Hero friends, contacts at Central, and anyone else who could possibly know what kind of secret mission Dad is up to, but to no avail.
I lie on my bed and wonder if I would be more concerned with Dad’s whereabouts if I wasn’t awaiting a verbal lashing when he returns. I still don’t know the answer when I close my eyes. The sound of Max pacing in the living room lulls me to sleep.
I awake several hours later to what my subconscious deciphers as the sound of yelling. When I’m awake enough to open my eyes and sit up in bed, the house is silent. Still, something feels amiss.
I crawl out of bed and stand near the window. It’s a starry night above and total darkness below; exactly the way it always is so I have no reason to feel like something is wrong. A shudder jolts my body. I think about the yelling. The sound of a male voice, desperate and inconsolable—yet it was all just a dream. It had to be. Maybe a walk will clear my head.
I step into flip-flops and then think twice about wearing loud, flappy shoes down our polished granite corridors. The last thing I need is to wake up Dad so he can yell at me some more. Kicking the flip-flops under my bed, I slip on a pair of hot pink toe socks, slowly open my door, and step into the hallway.
The sound of typing and shuffling papers echoes down the hall. As I walk past Max’s closed door, a faint glow comes out of an open door farther down. Dad’s in his office, and working hard by the sound of it. Great. Guess I won’t be sneaking out for a stroll in the KAPOW tunnels at two in the morning.
I make a one-eighty, knocking into one of Dad’s Hero award plaques on the wall. The typing sound stops. “Who’s awake?” Dad calls out. I’m too far away from my room to run back and close the door without him seeing me.
“Uh, it’s me.” I can’t tell him I had a bad dream. Heroes don’t have bad dreams. “I just needed some water.”
“Okay then,” he says and the typing resumes. I wait for it, for the yelling and the grounding me for life and all—but it doesn’t happen. With soft footsteps, I approach the office and peek into his office door.
“They were just babies,” Dad says from behind his computer screen. I lift an eyebrow in confusion. He sighs. “Newborns.”
The word hangs in the air and he still doesn’t look up. But it’s kind of obvious he’s talking to me. “Who?” I ask in a voice as weak and jaded as my dad looks.
“Depowered twins after I took office. Laws weren’t clear back then and some twins made it to sixteen or seventeen before the evil one revealed themselves and were caught for depowering. But by then, they had caused terrible damage and had often taken several innocent lives.”
My mouth opens but no words come out. He knows I know all of this because it’s required reading in school. The history of Super twins was always the most awkward subject for me. I place my hand on the doorframe and watch the lines deepen on his forehead.
“I changed the laws to have twins depowered right after birth, figuring it would save the world from one villain each time twins were born. Because with twins there is always a villain. Yes, the other twin would be handicapped for life, but it’s no different than the pain the good twin suffers upon seeing their best friend turn evil.”
I swallow. “Why are you telling me this?”
