Twins (3 page)

Her weakness and physical exhaustion were beyond her control, but physical force wasn't how Loki did most of his damage. It was mental strength she would need if she wanted to survive this unfortunate tête-à-tête. She had to go on the offensive before Loki found some way to psychologically corner her.

“You're not making any sense” she croaked, clearing her throat to sound less meek and helpless. “If you want to ‘give me my life back,' then call off the firing squad and let me go.”

“Gaia,” Loki began, his voice tinged with rancid sweetness. “You simply don't understand—”

“What's there to understand?” she snapped. A jittery anger was bubbling up from her sternum and taking over. “I understand that any kind of life I had, you've stomped out completely. You killed my mother, you tried to kill my father, and now you've killed Sam. So exactly what part of my life are you planning to
give back?” Her throat was raw and burning. (Maybe it was from straining to raise her voice, or maybe it was just the acid erupting in her stomach and shooting up through her esophagus.)

“Not
me,
Gaia,” her uncle insisted, kneeling before her, eye to eye.
“I'm
not the one who did those things. Loki's got you completely confused—”

“No!” Gaia shouted. It came out far more desperate and defensive than she had planned, but she couldn't possibly endure this game again—the never-ending game of oppositional accusations being hurled back and forth between her father and her uncle. Both had proclaimed their innocence so many times, insisting that the other was the true Loki. She'd begun to feel like a hollow plastic Ping-Pong ball, incessantly bounced, batted, and spiked back and forth between them. But her uncle didn't seem to understand that the game was over. It had ended in his loft hours earlier.

“I know now,” she said, trying valiantly to stare him down, hoping she might somehow be able to spit some of that stomach acid directly into his face. “You may have drugged me, but do you think I've totally forgotten all of last night?”

“What are you talking about?” He stared wide-eyed at Gaia as if
she
were somehow the crazy one in the room.

“God, don't you ever stop?” She groaned. “We were
all in the same room,
Loki.
I watched you aim a gun at my father's face and tell him you wanted him dead. I watched you fire a bullet through Josh Kendall's head. And somehow Josh isn't dead. Maybe you want to explain that, too—”

“You're so wrong. That boy wasn't talking to me; he was talking to your father. He worked for your father. And that boy had a gun, Gaia—he was pulling another gun from behind his back. He was going to kill you. I had to shoot him before he shot you. I had no choice.”

“Stop it,” Gaia insisted, finding the strength in her legs to rise from her chair. She wobbled away from her uncle's eerily convincing eyes and steadied herself by the window. “I know the truth now. I know it for myself, not from any of the bull the two of you have hurled at me. I know, Loki.”

“Please don't call me by that hideous name,” he snapped. He rose to his feet and glared at her. “You don't know anything.”

He looked so offended and emotionally wounded, his expression bordered on angry. Gaia turned to the window, shielding her eyes from the harsh sunlight. But she was starting to feel more like herself. Her strength was returning in minuscule increments. Maybe she could at least place herself geographically. Maybe there was a deep enough ledge to climb onto or a fire escape. Maybe they were only a few stories up.

The sun-blurred landscape shifted into view. She stifled a sigh of disappointment. Not only was there no ledge or fire escape, but she was high above the vast downtown skyline. This room, this apartment or whatever it was, must be at least twenty stories up.

“I meant every word I said to your father” her uncle continued from behind her as he closed in. “I did want him dead. That is true. Because he's killed or mangled everything I love. He lives for no other reason than to damage and destroy people. And then he places the blame on
me.
Can you imagine the kind of anger that has bred in me? Can you imagine the depths of resentment—”

“Can you imagine how much I want you to shut up?” she interrupted as she dropped her forehead against the hot windowpane.

Oliver slammed his hand on the window, sending a wicked vibration through her skull and down her spine. She probably would have jumped from the shock of it if shock were part of her emotional lexicon. He clamped his hand on her shoulder and turned her toward him so that they were face-to-face—practically nose-to-nose.

“Don't belittle this,” he snapped. “Don't belittle what he's done to me. And to your mother, and to Sam Moon. Don't belittle what he's done to you.”

For the slightest millisecond Gaia felt a wave of belief rush over her like a bolt of electricity. His eyes
were so unquestionably sincere. But there was no way. There was no way he was telling the truth. She was through listening to either one of them. She reminded herself of that ten times over.
You're half awake. You're trapped, and you're at rock bottom here. Close your ears. Ward him off. Keep him away.

“Move back,” she ordered, staring into his eyes with cold defiance. He seemed confounded by her warning, so she clarified it for him. “Take … a step … back.”

He stared at her for two full seconds and then honored her request.

“I know what you're doing,” she said. “I've seen the CD already. I mean, for chrissake, I can see we're in a medical lab. This must be part two of Clofaze, right?”

His eyes gave nothing away. His expression was compassionate but blank. Gaia went on, anyway.

“I know all about your plan,” she said. “Clofaze. My father gave me a copy of the disk. So the way I see it, part one was to capture me. Well, congratulations, you've done that brilliantly. So what's part two? I'm not up on the latest advances in cloning. That's where your dementia comes in.”

He gazed at her in silence. A hint of sadness revealed itself in the corners of his eyes.

“I want to show you something,” he said, walking away from her to the large mahogany desk by the adjacent window. He took a set of small silver keys from
his shirt pocket, selecting one and unlocking the roll-top cover of the desk. He pulled out a thick, weathered black binder and flipped it open. “Come here.”

Gaia stood her ground at the window.

“Gaia”—he beckoned—“this
Clofaze
is a total fiction concocted by your father. Now, I could stand here and try to refute all his nonsense and give you the real story, but I know you're sick to death of hearing us try to convince you what's true and what's not. If you want to know the truth, the
real
truth—it's right here. In this book. You can stop listening to either one of us, and you can see it for yourself.”

Gaia glanced at the black binder.

The book was surely filled with more lies. But she couldn't fight her curiosity. Of course she wanted to see what was in that binder. Who on this planet wouldn't? And she realized something, too. The moment he'd opened it, some part of her already believed that whatever was inside it was true.

All at once Gaia found herself standing next to her uncle at the desk, staring down hungrily at the aging color photos inside. No matter how much she yearned to live in the present moment and focus on the future, she was still far too obsessed with all the unanswered questions from her past. She couldn't begin to count the number of hours she'd spent staring at that one photograph hanging by the stairs of George Niven's
town house—the picture of her family standing in front of their house in the Berkshires, before her mother had been killed. Before her father had abandoned her. Before her life had turned into … well,
this.

Gaia had stared at that picture so many times, searching the faces of its subjects deeper and deeper until all she could see were the individual grains of the photo. Her photographic memory could recall facts and figures and images impeccably, but feelings? Intentions? Relationships? Those were what she'd always searched for in the picture. Why had her father held her and not her mother? Why did her father's face seem so kind but somehow—somewhere around the eyes and the forehead—troubled? And why did Gaia seem so oblivious to all those questions, just sitting there, draped in her father's arms, flashing that oversized, clueless grin?

“Do you recognize him?” Oliver asked, pointing his finger at the young man's face in the picture on the right-hand page. “He's not me, Gaia. I know you know that.”

It was true. She might have trouble telling them apart now, but this picture was from a very long time ago, and her childhood memories of her father's face were perfect and indelible. She'd gazed at him adoringly way too many times to ever mistake him for anyone else. The man in the picture was her father.

He was standing with three other far too serious-looking men in white coats, the four of them posed uncomfortably for a picture that appeared to be solely for the purpose of documentation. Gaia became so fascinated with her father's youthful features, she neglected at first to look farther down on the photo. The four men weren't alone. They were all hovering over a metal rolling table draped with a large white sterile pad. And curled up on that table, taking up barely a foot and a half of space, was a small baby—no older than six months. Gaia looked at the bottom of the photo, where there were a few words stamped in red ink.

F
ILE
#74-JL37 P
ROJECT
I
NTREPID
1983

Then written by hand in the bottom corner, it read:

S
UBJECT AT
F
IVE
M
ONTHS,
T
WENTY
D
AYS

“No one in the Agency was supposed to have access to this file,” Oliver said, flipping slowly through the pages and shaking his head with righteous disapproval. “This was a covert operation—cloaked from all the other agents. When I got hold of it and found out what Tom was doing to you … that was my last day at the Agency. I was disillusioned and disgusted. Certainly with the Agency, but most of all with my brother. It was the first time I realized what was happening to him.”

Gaia could feel a toxic dread building inside her as she flipped quickly through the documents and photos. The first photo might have been of her father, but every other photo was of her—practicing martial arts from her earliest years all the way through her most recent street fights in Washington Square Park. She was too tense and frazzled to focus well on the details of the seemingly endless documents, but the same phrase kept appearing in bold letters within the extensive observations. Again and again she would read it.

0% F
EAR
F
ACTOR—
S
ERUM
E
FFECTIVE

The last photo was a picture of her fighting off Josh and his thugs. It had obviously been taken through the window of Sam's dorm room. There was a handwritten subtitle at the bottom:

S
UBJECT AT
S
EVENTEEN
Y
EARS,
S
IX
M
ONTHS,
T
EN
D
AYS

“My source has been sending me the additions to the file for seventeen years,” Oliver said. “Your whole life.”

Gaia turned back to the group photo with her father. “What is this?” she murmured, mostly to herself.

Oliver stared at the binder. “This …,” he uttered, staring regretfully at the binder. “This is what your father has done to you.”

HE WAS STILL SO GODDAMN SEXY.

Even after everything they'd been through, after all of it was over and done with, Heather still found herself hesitating at the door to MacGregor's class and watching Ed Fargo through the window.

Apparently they'd both arrived at school a full fifteen minutes before first period.

She traced the lines of his shadowed profile set against the shaft of sunlight pouring through the classroom window. There was still something about the contrast of his chin and his scruffy dark brown hair … all the force of a man, mixed with the freedom of a teenage boy….

Wait a second.

Heather leaned closer to the door's window to confirm what she thought she saw. And yes, she was right. That was a tear streaming slowly from his left eye as he stared blankly out the window. She snapped out of her pointless, voyeuristic gaze and stepped into the otherwise empty classroom.

“Ed?” she whispered gently. “Are you okay?”

Ed jumped. He threw her a crooked fake smile. “Hey. What's up?”

“Nothing,” Heather answered, dragging another chair next to his and leaning toward him. She examined his face further in the awkward silence. She could
think of no tactful way to ask the question, so she just came out with it. “Were you crying?”

“No,” Ed replied quickly. He twisted his head back toward the window.

Heather knew why there was so much pain in his eyes. She was just avoiding the obvious.
Gaia Moore.
Only Gaia could elicit that kind of raw emotion from Ed at this point, and that fact left Heather with a muddle of conflicting thoughts too complicated to dissect.

She knew that Gaia was knee-deep in some kind of crisis, although she didn't totally understand the situation. Something to do with Gaia's father and Sam. That was about as much as she knew. But nonetheless, just the day before, Heather had decided to help Gaia with her crisis—to reach out to her in spite of all the prior hatred.

Someone was apparently stalking Gaia, and as insane as it might have been, Heather had agreed to help her carry out a little antistalker plan. Heather, along with all of her friends, had actually found the courage to dress up like Gaia Moore and scurry out into the street just to confuse whoever was watching her, baiting him into a full-blown wild-goose chase. They'd all pretty much done it just as a lark, but deep down Heather knew better than that. Nothing involving Gaia was ever just a lark. Some part of Heather had known that it was probably the bravest, most heroic thing she had ever done. And for a girl who was supposedly her sworn enemy, no less.