Page 23 of The Evil Twin

“What happens if they do?” asked Harper, eagerly leaning in. “Do they explode, or turn inside out, or something?”

Nikolai shrugged. “Nope, he just said it wouldn’t work. And this is a one-off type of deal. If you mess it up, the lodestone loses all its juice.”

“And the world falls into darkness,” Althea added.

“Right,” I said. “Stay on my side of the mirror, got it. Now we just need to get her here and convince her to do it.”

And that might be the hardest part of all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Other-Lucy, come in Other-Lucy. Over.

It’s not a CB radio, I told Tennyson. It was nice to be able to communicate through our bond again, even if it was just to lure in Other-me.

We want to make a deal with you. We will give you access to the lodestone.

It wasn’t a lie. Technically, if I absorbed her, whatever was left of her would have as much lodestone as she could handle.

This is not a trap, he added.

That makes it sound like a trap, I said, but I couldn’t stop smiling. The Tennyson in my head, the Tennyson at the other side of our bond, was the most distilled part of him. Like a Tennyson Wilde essential oil. The Tennyson that the outside world saw was him, of course, but it was filtered through layers of social conditioning and awkwardness.

If you are able to get away, come to this address at midnight on Thursday. He envisioned a page on Google Maps, with a flashing arrow at the right spot, and the geo-coordinates. That is midnight, local time at this location.

He flashed up the details again.

I will transmit this message to you again in one hour, in case you are not in a position to note this information. Please do not share this message with anyone else. Over and out.

He was such a dork.

We were still technically on a break, but after the other night in the common room, it seemed like a much warmer break than it had previously been. Like a break that was bringing us closer instead of further apart.

Tennyson faithfully transmitted his broadcast to Other-me every hour, until it must have driven her half-mad. Or madder. The rest of us prepared for the ritual.

We’d picked the location to meet Other-me completely at random. Nowhere near anyone we knew, or anyone at all, as far as we could tell. It was a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. If Other-me was working with my father and they planned to ambush us, there was nobody they could hurt for miles.

Althea didn’t want me to go to meet with Other-me.

“You don’t know how bad the feedback between the two of you will be,” she said. “What if the worlds fracture and your father is there? It might be the very thing that leads to my vision.”

“Classic self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Nikolai, who was sitting in the corner, slurping cup noodles loudly. “That would be kind of funny, in a way.”

“Yes, when you’re a disembodied spirit floating through an endless void, I won’t be able to stop laughing,” Althea said snappishly. “This isn’t a joke.”

“If I don’t go, how will we convince her to come with us?”

“I’ll go,” said Althea. “I’ll tell her about my visions and show her the mark her experiments left on me. If she thinks she can keep running tests on me, she might be persuaded.”

It was a good idea, except for one thing.

“What’s to stop her from just kidnapping you and taking you back to my father’s creepy compound?” I said. “She’s bad enough, but I don’t even want to imagine what awful things he’d do.”

“Oh, so it’s safe for you but not me?” she said, arching an eyebrow.

I shrugged. “I’d rather risk my life than yours. You’re the brains of the operation, you know.”

“But you’re the key,” she argued. “Without you, everything collapses. Everything. This isn’t me trying to be selfless. We literally can’t lose you.”

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