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“Do it!” Aurora yells.
My twin flicks her wrist and Dad’s body goes rigid against the gurney once more, this time held in place with two retriever hooks. “Please,” Dad’s voice strains as he looks at her. At his daughter. My stomach hurts. “You don’t have to do this.”
Her hands clench into fists at her sides as she stands almost as tall he is. “Yes. I. Do.”
Aurora lowers the fishbowl back toward the ground and Dad rushes through his words to get them out in time. “We can help you. You can come live with me. With your family.”
“Fuck my family,” my twin says. She points at Aurora. “She is my family. She took me in when you left me for dead. She raised me and she told me about the horrible things you did to innocent children. You would have just killed me anyway. Aurora let me live. Why would I ever want to be with you?”
A mix of family pride and hatred for Aurora has me diving across the room to slap my sister across the face. Her mouth falls open. I wonder if she’s as weirded out looking at me as I am looking at her. “He would have killed you too,” she says, grabbing her jaw. “Aurora
saved both of our lives. But now you get to die.”
“Aurora ruined our lives, you brainwashed idiot!” I duck the punch she throws my way and counter it with a blow to her head. “Dad wouldn’t have hurt us,” I say through gritted teeth as she fights me back, matching my blows with blows of her own.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying is true, but Dad deserves to keep some dignity in front of all these witnesses. “He would have raised us to both be good. He would have shown us there’s another way to live. He would have loved both of us.”
She rolls her eyes and yanks my hair so hard my neck cracks in three places. I elbow her in the ribs, taking advantage of her shriek of pain to throw her onto the ground and dig my boot so far into her stomach she coughs up blood.
“And in case you haven’t noticed, dumbass,” I hiss, dropping to my knees and grabbing a handful of her hair, digging my fingers into her scalp. “I’m the evil one.”
With a burst of power, I stand, taking her body with me—hair first. I twist to the right, planning to rearrange her facial features into the shape of the column next to me, but what happens next makes me drop her straight to the floor.
Aurora kicks the latch on the gurney, sending Dad horizontal again. She talks too quietly for me to hear, telling him things with a smile on her face, as she steps around the gurney and—oh, god no. Her hand presses against the screen on the depowering machine. The lights dim as electricity flows into the massive machine, powering it up as the inside circle illuminates into a blinding white light.
Dad’s body goes rigid, his fingers and toes taunt as they hover in the air, his feet at the entrance of the circle. A gasp comes from my feet and I look down to see my sister watching the scene unfold, lips curled in disgust. Blood everywhere. So much blood.
The overhead lights dim to a soft glow as the depowering machine sucks most of the energy from the power lines, concentrating all the light in the corner of the room. I look behind me, at the frozen Heroes forced to watch an act of terrorism without participating. Crimson’s eyes reflect the bright light in front of us.
Aurora has to yell to be overheard from the machine. “You told me that my sons would feel no pain when they were depowered.” She stares over Dad’s body, one hand up in the air, thumb hovering over the doomsday button in her palm. The other hand motions to the machine in front of us. “It was April nineteenth. My sons were two weeks old. I had just lost my husband to a Retrieving tragedy. You said there would be no more poisonings and no more experiments. You claimed there was a new device—a depowering machine—and you said it would make depowering much easier than the old way of using a scalpel to cut out the power veins.”
I shudder.
Her intense focus on my dad causes me to forget my sister, forget the Heroes around me. I’m captivated by her story, unable to move. She lost her husband and sons in the same month. If that isn’t a good reason to turn evil, I don’t know what is.
“And then I was informed that I wouldn’t get to keep my depowered children. No, I was informed—not by you, Mr. President, but by your secretary—my sons had died. Right here in this machine. They were too young to survive it. Their screams were heard all throughout Central.” Her voice is strong, held taut by a thin string of courage. The pain in her face is impossible to hide. For the smallest minute, I almost empathize with her.
“I knew I would make you die for this,” she says. “I knew that if I were patient, my day of revenge would present itself. And what do you know? Forty years later, your wife gave birth to twins.”
Chills run up my arms and down my spine. My entire life has lead up to this moment; all planned out before I was even born.
“When I destroyed Saint Elizabeth Hospital, my plan was to kill your daughters and call it a day. But the Heroes showed up sooner than expected and I was only able to grab one. When Sophia tried to fight back, I killed her quickly. It wasn’t her fault, after all.”
White-hot rage bursts through my chest. Aurora must feel my power because she turns around and winks at me before placing her hand on my father’s shoulder. “With only one twin in my possession, I devised an even better plan. I raised her for sixteen years to be my personal vendetta machine. She turned out wonderful, didn’t she? As fate would have it, I grabbed the good one.”
She laughs. “Guess you were wrong about nature versus nurture. Both of your brats turned out evil.”
Aurora places her fingertips over the command plate on the machine. Every hair on my body stands up. Her entire hand is the only thing that will start the machine. Fingertips are just a tease. There’s still time to save him.
“You will pay for this,” Dad manages to say between gasps of pain.
“Do you even love me?” The voice comes from my left where my twin has managed to crawl up from the floor after her bones healed. Aurora gives her a bored look before turning back to my dad.
“Do you?” she repeats.
“Of course not.” Aurora shoots back bitterly. “How could I love someone who isn’t my own blood?”
A soul crushing sound comes from my twin and I’m tempted to reach out and touch her shoulder. But she did just try to kill me so I stay put.
