Chapter 22

Dear Hien,

Thank you for hosting us for Christmas and New Year in Zürich. We’re still buzzing from the trip—and so excited for you to visit us in turn. We’ve already booked the guest quarters in the city for all four of us, so we can do every one of the sights! Though you must also come back to the den with us often. Everyone wants to meet my famous engineer sister!

And of course, we’ll take our newest siblings out and spoil them so badly that Mom and Dad will pull out their hair. Seeing Otto and Grady settle into the family, begin to smile and act like cubs their age should, it makes my heart grow a size each time I see them.

Amidst all this joy, I do worry about what I hear coming out of the Net. It appears that there was a major shift in the tone of the response to the questionnaire this time around from the last time it was sent out.

It’s clear that the recent spate of serial murders across multiple continents and cities has pushed people to the edge. But that isn’t the right reason to make a decision this big. It’s a decision that could impact generations and it should be made with thought and care.

And yet I know I’m prejudiced in my thoughts, that I resist the idea so much because I know that should the new Silence come into being, it would alter everything, perhaps even destroy the bond between us.

I want our children to grow up together, to become lifelong friends as we are. I want Marian and me to adventure together with you and Kanoa to our silver-haired years. It would shatter my heart to have you distance yourself from me, Hien—and this is what I see in the specter of Silence: a future without my little sister.

Your big brother always,

D.

—Letter from Déwei Nguyen to Hien Nguyen (17 January 1974)

EVEN AS THEO tried to make sense of suddenly seeing double, the other Yakov scowled an identical scowl. “Hey, we booked it first!” he protested. “Seriously? Again?”

Groaning in concert, the two—almost simultaneously—said, “I’m going to pretend you’re not here.”

Laughter from the silver-eyed Psy in a sharp suit of a blue so dark it was almost black, who stood beside the other man. Dramatic cheekbones, olive skin, perfect jawline paired with eyes tilted sharply upward and hair of silky black, he was as close to physical perfection as a man could get.

Yet nothing in Theo reacted to him as she did to Yakov.

Neither did she react to the man who was a carbon copy of Yakov, complete with the dimples.

“You’re hangry, my darling Pasha,” the Psy man said. “Let’s go eat.” He waved at Yakov, then shot Theo a penetrating look before nudging his date to the back of the small restaurant, as far as possible from both Yakov and Theo as well as the courting couple.

“Your brother,” she said to Yakov, her voice husky.

“Pasha.” He made a face in his brother’s direction and, from the glint in his eye, received an equally sour look in return. “Officially Pavel Pain in the Ass Stepyrev.”

“Twins.” Her heart thundered. “You didn’t say.”

“What?” A frown. “No, I guess not. It’s not something to say unless it comes up.”

Of course, he was right. People didn’t go around randomly announcing they were a twin. “I’m a twin,” she blurted out. “It’s not in the records, but I’m a twin. The older twin by two minutes.” It was suddenly so important that he believe her.

“I’m the younger by one minute,” he murmured. “And I knew that—about you and Pax.”

“Oh.” It shocked her, that the world was starting to pick up on a fact the family had gone to such great lengths to hide for near to the entirety of her existence. “You must’ve been surprised at the differential in our power levels.” Inside, the small girl she’d once been braced herself for what was to come.

But Yakov just shrugged. “Twins aren’t the same people.” Nodding over at where his twin sat with the extremely handsome man in the suit, the bear sprawled out in his chair while the Psy in the suit sat with perfect posture, he said, “Pasha’s my best friend, but he’s a totally different person from me.

“Our mother said she never had trouble telling us apart even when we were babies. Apparently, we laughed different, kicked our baby feet in different ways, and fell asleep to different lullabies.

“As adults,” he added, “I love peppers, while he can’t stand them. His desk in his workroom is chaos tinged with the aftermath of a hurricane, while I color-code my physical files, then head into numerical codes when it comes to the documents themselves.” A grin. “He thinks I’m an over-organized lunatic. I think he’s a chaos monster.”

That was when Theo realized that this was the first time in her adult life that she’d spoken to someone who’d also been born a twin. She’d been forced to hide that part of herself for so long that the opportunity had just never come up. “Yet you’re best friends?” she asked with a desperate hunger.

“Always.” Simple. Absolute.

“Did your parents ever compare you to each other?”

“Oh, they’re not perfect,” he said. “I’m sure they screwed up a few times over the years. They tell us they did—but what I remember are parents who loved us both. I never felt less than or more than Pasha, and he’s told me the same. We were just their cubs and they loved us.”

His words kicked her deep in the heart. “You were lucky,” she found herself saying, revealing a tightly hidden corner of her ruined soul. “My parents were beyond disappointed when I began to show signs of being a low Gradient. They expected another child in Pax’s power range.”

Yakov scowled. “That’s shit parenting. A cub is a cub. End of.”

“Perhaps that’ll change with the fall of Silence, though I can’t see it.” Still, it was nice to imagine that any future Theo would grow up beloved. “My race has worshipped power for too long.”

“Can’t argue with that. What about the harmony thing you mentioned?” He took a sip of the beer he’d ordered, the liquid an inviting golden hue. “You said it influenced your parents’ decision to separate you.”

“Grandfather had the final say.” Marshall Hyde was the architect of Theo’s life. “Harmony pairs aren’t always twins, but it shows up more in twins. Two abilities that effectively merge to become something extraordinary—the first time around, we saved a dying bird. The second time around, we woke a man out of a yearslong coma.” As for the third, that was Pax’s secret to tell.

Yakov whistled. “What’s the downside? Because I don’t see it.”

“It flatlines our powers,” Theo said. “Every single time. No one much cared with me, but nobody wanted a 9 to flame out and be useless to the family for up to a day or more. I was considered the instigator, the one responsible for the decision to Harmonize.”

“Must’ve messed up your relationship with your twin. The dissimilar treatment.”

“It hurt us both.” She’d always understood that, always felt the guilt that gnawed at Pax. By exiling her and making Pax helpless to protect her, Marshall had broken a part of Pax that nothing might ever heal. “Before they separated us, we were best friends, too. I think . . . I think we’re on our way back to that.”

Some people might say she was fooling herself, that Pax was just using her and their bond to mitigate the effects of Scarab Syndrome, but she could feel her twin inside her, in the same spot where he’d been since they were born. He’d never left her. Not once. More, she knew her brother blamed himself for everything, and that he was doing all in his power to protect her should the treatments fail, should he die.

Her hand clenched on the cloth napkin.

Poor Pax.

He had no idea of the creature she’d become, the creature her grandfather had made of her. She was the one who should be under a death sentence.

YAKOV didn’t push Theo to talk when she went quiet after that revelation about her and her twin. He wondered if she even realized that she got a fiercely protective tone in her voice when she spoke about her brother.

Interesting, when—per Silver—Pax Marshall was considered a serious power player in the Net.

But to Theo, he was just her brother. Her twin.

Yakov got it.

As he got her edginess when they finished up and headed out to the car. Not wanting her to feel cornered, he didn’t immediately bring up the subject on which they intended to talk. Instead, he backed the car out of the parking spot, then drove to park on an overlook with a glittering view of Moscow.

The lights of the city fell onto the black ribbon of the Moskva, making the river ripple with infinite shades of color.

“The wild is far more home to me than the city,” he said, leaning forward with his arms around the steering wheel, “but I do love its beauty at night.”

Theo said nothing. Not for a long time. When she did speak, what she said made his bear’s heart break.

“When Pax first came to me as an adult, I reacted with anger.” Her voice was . . . toneless and gray, as if she’d retreated behind a mile-high wall. “He thinks that it’s because I blame him for keeping his distance during the time when our grandfather was in charge—the truth is, I responded with anger because I didn’t want him tainted by my ugliness.”

Yakov’s chest rumbled. “Theo.” It was a warning. “You don’t get to talk about yourself that way.”

No flashing eyes in response to the possessive edge he hadn’t been able to hide, no prickly retort. She kept on going in that voice monotonous and without emotion. “I knew he had his own scars, had survived his own hell. Imagine, if something horrible happened to your twin while you believed him safe. Perhaps not in the best situation, but safe at least?”

The question hit hard. “It would destroy me.”

“So you see why I could never let Pax know what happened to me. After we were separated at seven years of age, he tried so hard to protect me, even though he was a child himself.”

Yakov’s chest ached; whatever he’d expected to hear, it hadn’t been that. Pax Marshall wasn’t supposed to be a good brother; Pax Marshall certainly wasn’t supposed to be a twin who loved his sister enough that to know of his failure to keep her from harm would destroy him.

Theo, her eyes on the lights of Moscow glittering in the distance, rubbed hard at her bracelet. “The family chose that age to split us up because all the psychological data says that separating twins any younger could cause catastrophic damage. When I say separated, I mean that they cut us off from each other on the telepathic plane as well.”

Yakov muttered a harsh curse. “Nothing? No contact?”

“Not as far as they knew. The truth was their attempts were ninety-eight percent effective—but they couldn’t cut off the connection with which we’d been born. A connection so deep that I don’t think there is any way to cut it off. It will exist as long as both of us are alive.”

He was glad for her, that she’d had that at least.

“I was never good at Silence,” she added. “Later, once Pax was able to get around some of the psychic blocks, he shielded me so that people wouldn’t guess at the depth of my lack of Silence. So for the later years of my childhood, I was considered stable. The same can’t be said of my earlier years.”

Yakov was starting to get a very bad feeling that he knew where this was going. “Did your fucking grandfather take you to that place to be rehabilitated?” He spit out the last word, so angry that he had to remove his hands from the steering wheel lest he rip it off its mounting.

“I think so,” Theo said. “The first flashback was jumbled, but it jarred other things loose. As if my mind has opened a door and now there’s no stopping the return of memory. I don’t see it all . . . but I see enough.”

Her fingers moved even harder on the bracelet. Rubbing. Rubbing. “I see eyes dead of any hint of personhood. I see fear. I see—” Breathing short and sharp, her next words a taut whisper. “There was a chair. With straps.”