Twins (7 page)

“Gaia, can you hear me?” he asked again.

“The oven,” she whispered. “Please. Turn off the goddamn oven.”

“I think she's delirious,” the other face said. It spoke with the most beautiful Russian accent Gaia had heard since she was a child.

Or was it the same accent she'd heard as a child? That wasn't possible. Unless Gaia was dead and this hot and muddy desert cake world was heaven …

“Gaia,” the man said with an angelic smile, “it's your father. I'm here now. You're safe from Loki. Can you hear me, sweetheart? There's someone here who wants to meet you….”

His grin doubled in size as he turned up to the woman's face and gazed at her adoringly. Gaia turned with him, trying desperately to
make out the face, trying to see if the face matched the unforgettable voice—the soothing voice that Gaia had wanted to hear ten times a day for the last five years. But it couldn't be who she thought it was. Could it? Maybe they were all dead now. All three of them. Was that possible?

Gaia raced from feature to feature, filling in every detail of this golden white apparition's face. Her red velvet lips, her elegant sharp cheekbones and creamy skin.
Maybe she never died? Maybe that was just a bad dream.
The last five years, just a bad dream. Her brown eyes flecked with orange, the dark glossy hair … She had to touch her to be sure. She couldn't just trust her vision. Not while she was in this miserable state of being cooked alive.

She reached out for the ghost. But she couldn't be a ghost because she took Gaia's hand. If she was just an apparition, then how could she be so real to the touch? Real flesh, gripping tightly to Gaia's hand. Blood pumping through the fingers and giving the cheeks a healthy red flush. She
was.
She was alive.

Gaia's mother was alive.

She was flesh and blood, and she was holding Gaia's hand in bed, just as she'd always done when Gaia was sick.

“I knew you weren't dead,” Gaia whispered. A rush of tears began to flow from her glassy eyes and pour down her sweltering face. “I knew it.”

“No, Gaia,” her mother said, flashing her smile. “You don't understand, darling.” Her mother laid her hand on Gaia's face and then turned worriedly to her father. “Oh God, Tom, she is burning.”

“I know,” he agreed, matching her mother's worried expression and looking down at Gaia.

“I am,” Gaia uttered. “I am burning. Can we turn off the oven, Mom? Please?”

“What is she talking about?” a troubled voice chimed in from behind her mother. The question had been asked in Russian, but the voice was so incredibly familiar. A young woman's voice, somehow even more familiar than her mother's.

“English,”
her mother said, turning behind her. “We speak English now.”

“Does she even know where she is?” the girl asked in a thick Russian accent.

“That voice …,” Gaia moaned, staring up at the ceiling. “Why do I know that voice?” She raised her throbbing head as much as she could, trying to see the young woman's face in the shadows. “I can't see you. Let me see you.”

The girl finally stepped out from the shadows, and when she appeared in the light, Gaia felt all the blood drain from her body. The long blond hair, the excessively muscular frame, the permanent frown of muted bitterness in the lips. Gaia had stared at this ugly face a million times. She'd been disappointed by it,
cursed it, ignored it, but it never went away. Of course the voice was familiar. It was familiar because it was her own.

Gaia was staring at herself. She watched as her mirror image placed a hand on her mother's shoulder and stared down at her with a particularly cold scowl—even by Gaia's standards.

“What's the matter?” Gaia begged of her mirror image. “Why are you so angry at me?”

“Don't you know?” she spat back bitterly, staring into Gaia's eyes. “We're
dying,
Gaia.” The anger began to drop away as tears fell from her eyes as well. “Don't you see what you've done? You've killed us. Now our whole family is dead.”

“Shut up!” Gaia screamed, writhing in pain as she tried to climb out of the bed. “I'm not dead. You don't know what you're talking about.” Gaia turned to her mother and grabbed at her arms. “Tell her, Mom! Tell her I'm not dead!”

Gaia's mother backed away and looked helplessly to her father for answers.

“Gaia, stop it!” her father shouted. He clamped his hands on her shoulders and struggled to push her back down on the bed. “Sweetheart, relax—you're delirious.”

She raised herself far enough out of bed to take a swipe at her mirror image, but the apparition backed away before Gaia could get a good punch in. “You shut
your goddamn mouth!” Gaia howled. “I won't die if someone will just turn off this oven!”

Her father held tight to her shoulders and pressed her back down on the bed. He shook her gently, lightly slapping his hand against her boiling face. “Gaia, listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me. Loki gave you something. We don't know what it is, but it's given you a very high fever and you're hallucinating, do you understand me? You need to calm down. You need to relax.”

Stitches of memory floated faintly through Gaia's mind as her father shook her: her uncle's satisfied grin, the syringe filled with yellowish liquid shooting deep into her vein, a warning from Dr. Kessler. “Possibly drowsiness, disorientation,” he'd said. “You may have a high fever….”

Her body felt like Jell-O spiked with steel coils. Her father's grip had shaken everything into a blur. The light slaps to her face were far more painful than they should have been. But as the vibrations began to subside, her surroundings started to come more clearly into focus. The shaking had actually done her some good. She was breaking from her feverish delirium and slowly returning to reality.

Yes. She was lying in a bed soaked through with sweat, in a room she had never seen before.

She turned to her mother. But this woman wasn't her mother at all. There was actually only the slightest
resemblance. This woman's nose was much shorter, much less defined, without the long, perfect elegance of her mother's. And the shape of her face was completely different. Turning her head slightly, Gaia then saw that the girl she had seen as herself had even less of a resemblance. With the exception of long blond hair and an age range similar to Gaia's, she and Gaia really had very little physically in common.
She doesn't look like me at all. No, she's graceful and beautiful. Whoever she is.

“I think she's coming out of it,” Gaia's father said. The older woman flashed Gaia a warm smile. But the beautiful girl continued to stare at her, cold and distrustful, from the end of the bed. She took a step back into the shadow of the room.

“You see, Gaia?” the woman said in her thick but refined Russian accent. “You were right. You are not dead.”

“Who are you?” Gaia croaked. She wiped the thick film of sweat from around her mouth. “Where are we?” Her vision was still blurry, and sound was still popping in and out. Continuous reality checks were a necessity.

The woman turned to Gaia's father as if it wasn't her place to answer Gaia's questions. He laid his sizable hand over Gaia's forehead and smoothed the moist hairs back from her face.

“Well, this is an awkward time for introductions,” he said with a smile, “but there's nothing we can do
about that now. Gaia, this is Natasha. Natasha is going to take care of you for a while, just while I'm away.” He turned to the end of the bed, referencing the graceful girl hidden in the shadows. “This is Tatiana, her daughter. She'll be living with you as well.”

Gaia felt like she was in some hellish reworking of the
Wizard of Oz.
Everything seemed otherworldly and tentative, and she felt much more like a child than she should have. She'd only been truly awake for a moment or so, and she still had very little faith in her ability to separate reality from dreams. “What are you talking about?” she asked, drowning in confusion. “Where are we?”

“We're home,” he said. “On East Seventy-second Street.” He smiled at that Natasha woman again. “This is going to be your new home for a while. When you feel ready to stand up, you can take a look around. It's really a beautiful apartment, Gaia. Natasha and Tatiana helped me pick it out. As a matter of fact, they are actually very distant relations of your mother's, going back a few generations on your grandmother's side. So I'd like it if you'd think of them as family.”

Was this all a hallucination as well? What the hell was he talking about? East Seventy-second Street? Natasha and who? Did he say something about family …?

The room was officially spinning again, which only brought Gaia back to the last conscious moment she could remember. Her uncle's makeshift lab spinning
around her ceaselessly. Being torn apart by all those black-hooded soldiers.

“There were so many of them,” she thought aloud, aware that she was tangled up in non sequiturs at this point. “They were clutching me so hard. They wanted to kill me. What happened?”

Gaia's father turned away for a moment, almost as if he were ashamed. When he looked back at Gaia, all the joy and ease had been stripped from his expression, leaving only feeble humiliation in the furrowed corners of his mouth. “I think I'll always be apologizing to you, Gaia,” he said timidly. “And here I am doing it again. It took us so long to find you. I'm sorry,” he confessed with a catch in his voice. “But you're safe now, and you are alive. Believe me, Gaia. You
are
alive.”

“But why?” Gaia asked. “Why didn't they kill me? They were shooting everything in sight. Everyone.”

“They weren't there to kill you,” he said. “They were there to
save
you. And they did their job. You'll be safe as long as you stay here, I promise you that.”

“I don't understand,” Gaia muttered, feeling her exhaustion winning out. “I don't understand anything you're saying.”

The edges were all disappearing again, the entire room turning into nothing but floating objects free of gravity or shape. Her father's face was fading away.

“We'll explain it all when you're feeling better,” he said. “I promise. I just need to catch up with Loki
while the trail is still hot. He's done enough damage as it is.”

Gaia's eyes were closing on her, the heat enveloping her body once again. But one last burst of memory sent a surge of anger through her chest—up into her swollen face, forcing her eyes back open. She grabbed her father's wrist, digging her nails into his skin, speaking with what little strength she had left.

“Was I your experiment?”

She glared at him, confused and unforgiving. Her father stared back at her, raising a deeply puzzled eyebrow.

“Just tell me the truth,” Gaia insisted. “I don't care anymore—I just want to know the truth.”

“What is she talking about?” Natasha asked.

“I think she's still delirious,” her father replied, looking deeper into Gaia's eyes. “Gaia, what
are
you talking about?”

“Just tell me,” she uttered as her voice became faint.

That burst of raw coherent energy had been her last. It was an aberration, and once again Gaia found herself unsure of where she was and whether or not she was awake. A feverish sleep began to swallow her up again.

“Gaia?”

“Tell me …,” she muttered, mostly to herself at this point. Even if he'd answered, Gaia wouldn't have known it.

“TOM, JUST HEAR ME OUT—”

“George,
please,”
Tom interrupted, rising from George's couch for another cup of coffee. “This is not a subject for debate.”

“But how well do you know the woman?”

Tom stepped into the kitchen and dumped another splash of black coffee into his mug, but that would be his last. He'd stopped at George's town house for one final briefing, but it had already become far less brief than he'd intended. It was foolish to leave Loki even an hour of leeway, let alone the half day Tom had already spent making arrangements. George couldn't have picked a worse moment to introduce antagonism into their friendship.

“I
told
you.” Tom groaned. “Natasha's record is impeccable. She's one of the top ten agents in the Eastern sector. She's got more successful ops under her belt than seventy-five percent of the Agency. And she's part of Katia's
family,
George. I don't care how distantly they're related. Family in Russia means loyalty and that makes me more secure than any statistic possibly could.”

“But leaving Gaia with total strangers,” George mumbled as he stepped into the kitchen.

“Natasha and her daughter are not strangers, George. They're family—”

“They're strangers to
her,
Tom,” George interrupted. He locked eyes with Tom, placing himself in the way of the kitchen door. His plea for Tom's compassion felt more like a demand than a request.

Tom knew how much he was asking of Gaia, to make another adjustment to another foster situation, but he could see no way around it at this point. Not if he wanted to protect her. Not if putting Loki out of commission was going to get his full attention. He had to believe that Gaia's resilience would get her through the initial shock of boarding with a new family. Natasha and Tatiana would earn her trust. He might not know them that well, but he certainly knew them well enough to see their honesty and their kindness and their strength—all qualities Gaia was sure to appreciate.

But looking into George's eyes, so saturated with apprehension and caring, Tom realized just how far he'd regressed into tunnel vision the last few months. All this time George had been backing Tom up, taking the reins as Gaia's guardian at the drop of a hat, Tom really hadn't stopped to consider what Gaia had come to mean to George. He was a great friend and a deeply committed agent, but that couldn't account for all the enormous sacrifices he'd made. After all these years how could George not have developed a deep personal stake in Gaia's life? It was only human. Tom had never seen that as much as he did right now in George's eyes.