TRUE STORM

TRUE STORM - CHAPTER 2

Pearly midmorning light breaks through the slatted blinds of the lab by the time I find Margot. Her long auburn hair is squashed in a ponytail, then squashed again by the elastic of the safety goggles she wears. Her arms are lost in the long white lab coat Doc Raines forces us to wear when running experiments.

She doesn't hear me approach, nor when I call her name. There's been a lot of that lately. Since we returned from Russia, Margot has become all but unreachable. For the hundredth time I find myself wondering what it was like—being held like a science experiment in Resnikov's factory.

While she was away I spent a lot of time worrying over this. The bond I have relied upon my whole life to tell me what Margot is thinking and feeling had stretched, thin and silent, until it was all but obliterated. It was the loneliest feeling in the world. 

When we were born, my sister and I, we shared one skin—but that is only the beginning of our puzzle. Although we came into the world connected, stitched together at our big toes, we are not as similar as identical twins should be. Like the marks we bear on our toes, where they tore us apart—Margot's in the shape of a long, thin skeleton key and my own the perfect pear shape of a lock—we are mysteries of flesh and bone.

In Russia I'd met an old scientist who claimed he had helped bring us into the world. Test-tubers, he'd called us: babies born of laboratory cocktails and Molotov gene Splicing. But whatever they Spliced into us, Margot and I bear the traces of its magic. Whatever Margot experiences, I feel.

I've been left with other, even more dubious gifts: Like with Nash, I can tell who next will be gobbled by the diamond-toothed Plague. And sometimes my dreams walk into waking life.

Margot's talents have always been more useful. She'll charm birds out of the sky and men out of their mansions. She has but to walk into a room and it's lit with some indefinable incandescence. Our parents loved this about her. They've put her talents to use in the slippery wet world of Dominion politics. But then its tide carried her away.

Margot gives me broad strokes but won't really tell me what happened. All I know is that she is not the same. Sure as anything, she was betrayed: first by attendants of the Splicer Clinic, who stole the eggs from her body like foxes in the henhouse. Then by our parents, who sold her to the mysterious Russian count Leo Resnikov—sold us both. Margot was betrayed again by Resnikov, who transformed those stolen eggs into pale, lifeless bodies floating in long glass tubes, whose jobs were to pump the next generation of Margot's DNA into oily pills that could be fed to dupes by the millions.

He was making a cure of sorts. A cure for the ravages of the Plague. Bred from the blood and marrow of my sister's DNA. It was what we were born for—or so we are being led to believe. Though according to Resnikov himself, this cure would only last a little while.

"Margot," I say again, tugging on her loose ponytail. The elastic slips, and she turns to frown at me.

"Cut it out," she says crossly.

"Well, I reckon your attention was elsewhere now, wasn't it?"

Margot's frown lengthens. "What's wrong?"

"Why does anything have to be wrong for me to want to see you?"

Margot snorts. "Don't be daft. Have you forgotten who I am, little sister?"