‘You’re real!’ Adam wanted to say, but he choked on the words. His chest tightened, making it hard to breathe.

  The assumption he’d tried so hard to believe—that his doppelg?nger was just a product of his imagination—crumbled like a house of cards, and his knees nearly followed suit.

  There stood his twin in the flesh, poised in the threshold between the elevator and the hallway, solid as a stern bellhop awaiting a guest’s arrival. This bellhop, however, wore a military uniform in olive green, with a scruffy reddish beard that hardened his already grim expression, and close-cropped hair that accentuated his piercing amber eyes.

  “Who-Who are you?” Adam stammered.

  The stranger didn’t answer; he grabbed Adam by the arm and pulled him out of the elevator, dragging him toward the door at the end of the hall—his loft.

  The woman followed close behind, her expression as stone-faced as her partner’s. Her high heels clicked with every step, setting a rhythm as they walked.

  Adam shook off his twin’s grip—by now, there was no doubt the resemblance was no coincidence—but, wary of provoking a violent reaction, he didn’t try to run and simply went along.

  With anxiety twisting his gut and a strange lightness in his legs, he looked his mysterious double up and down as they walked.

  The soldier carried an old canvas backpack slung over his shoulder, and his uniform—a buttoned-up combat jacket with the collar open, fingerless tactical gloves, a wide belt, cargo pants, a thigh holster, knee pads, and black boots—showed signs of wear and flecks of dried mud here and there, much like the woman’s muddy jeans and high-heeled boots. Maybe they’d just come from some wilderness on a mission.

  Adam remembered the cargo ship seized by soldiers on the far side of the Pannotian Sea. Could this guy be part of the Imperial Markabian Army?

  No, that was impossible. Or was it?

  He had no idea what a Markabian soldier was supposed to look like, but he knew their emblem—a Pegasus with wings spread, rearing up on its hind legs atop a laurel wreath—and as far as he could tell, this soldier wasn’t wearing anything like that. Actually, he wasn’t wearing any insignia at all. Maybe he was part of a guerrilla group or a paramilitary squad.

  The shock of the encounter slowly faded with each step, and a spark of hope flickered in his heart. Maybe this person—who could be none other than his twin brother—had the answers he’d been searching for all his life, answers about his origins, about who his parents had been, answers that had always eluded him.

  “Who are you?” he asked his double again. “Where did you come from?” Again, no answer. “What do you want with me? How did you get into this building? Who let you in?”

  He remembered what had happened to Little John, the bouncer at B-Crush. The same thing could have happened here, with Rubén or another tenant.

  The soldier nodded toward the apartment door.

  “Open it,” he ordered.

  Adam noticed the stranger’s voice was nearly identical to his own, though it carried the same accent as the girl’s. Inserting the code into the electronic lock, he opened the door and let them in with a grunt.

  “We’re friends, dear,” she assured him, but Adam felt like he’d just become the hostage of a bitter version of himself, and nothing she said now would change his mood.

  His double walked in first; the girl followed, ushering Adam inside before closing the door behind her.

  Adam switched on the lights.

  “A glass of wine, maybe some coffee?” he offered sarcastically. He was shaking, but he wasn’t going to stay silent.

  The strangers glanced up at the large photo hanging on the wall: Adam walking in his underwear along the rocks by the sea. She covered her mouth to hide a smile; the soldier pressed his lips to stifle a snort.

  “What can I say?” Adam shrugged. “Some of us were just born to be stars.”

  His doppelg?nger and the woman continued, doing a sweep of the loft, almost like ‘police checking a fugitive’s hideout,’ or worse: ‘fugitives making sure their hideout was safe.’

  They circled the dining table and then split up after the living area, moving past the couches. He crossed through the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the loft bedroom platform, just high enough to get a full view, then came back down and checked the bathroom. Meanwhile, she peeked into the laundry room and the other bathroom, off the kitchen. Judging by how coordinated and quick they were, Adam guessed she was a soldier, too, or a guerrilla fighter despite her jeans and knee-high boots instead of a uniform.

  “Would you mind telling me what you’re looking for?” he asked from the corner.

  The soldier turned off the lights Adam had just switched on, leaving only the one over the living area table. The whole loft dimmed, and a surge of fear clenched Adam’s nerves.

  “What are you going to do with me?” he pressed again, but no answer came. Anxiety clutched at his chest, and helplessness boiled in his head.

  “They haven’t come through here… not yet,” the girl said to her partner, joining him in the living room.

  In front of them, Adam stood stiff with tension. He didn’t like what was happening—nor what he was hearing now.

  “Who hasn’t come?” He stared at them, demanding an answer. “Hey, who hasn’t come? Who are you talking about?”

  But the two of them ignored him again.

  “All right, that’s enough!” he snapped. “Who the hell are you two?”

  Shaking, he pointed at his doppelg?nger. “Who the hell are you?”

  The uniformed man stepped up to him, and Adam held back; his attempt to hide his fear was obvious, almost laughably so.

  “I’m your twin brother,” his double finally said.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “That…” Adam cleared his throat, trying to loosen the knot of nerves choking him. “That’s kind of obvious… but at least it’s an answer.”

  “My name is Juzo Romita,” the soldier introduced himself.

  “Romita? Does that name come from our…?”

  “I don’t know our parents,” Juzo cut in, bluntly. “I was a foundling too—left in a hospital as a baby and brought up in an orphanage, just like you.”

  Adam nodded, a bit calmer now. “I see… Identical twins with identical origin stories,” he said. “I guess you don’t know if we’ve got any other siblings out there, do you?”

  The soldier shook his head.

  “Well, that saves me a bunch of questions.”

  “You?” Juzo asked. “Any clue where you’re from?”

  “Are you kidding? If you weren’t here, I’d still swear I was born out of a cabbage patch.”

  “I see. Have you ever looked into it?”

  “A couple of times, yeah,” Adam admitted. “But my intake records at the orphanage were so empty they might as well have been blank, so it was hard to find anything. Just knowing I was abandoned was enough to suspect I wasn’t exactly a wanted child.”

  Juzo and the girl exchanged a look, maybe cross-checking information? Adam caught it and turned to her.

  “You, blue-eyed girl, what’s your name?”

  She smiled, though there was no real warmth in that bronze face.

  “Vicky. Vicky Viveka,” she replied.

  “Alright… Juzo, Vicky, now that we’re all best friends, how about you tell me what the hell you want, or I call the cops?”

  Juzo Romita dropped his backpack onto the living area table. Something metallic clanked inside. Under the single light that was on, he opened the bag with a swift motion, reaching in to reveal its contents.

  Guns! He’s pulling out a gun! Adam panicked.

  But they weren’t guns. Juzo pulled out two pairs of sleek black wrist cuffs, gleaming like chrome, along with two hefty chargers about the size of a forearm. He found a nearby outlet and plugged them in. With a beep and a flash, the cuffs began to charge. The table light dimmed, the bulb crackling like it was about to burst at any second.

  Adam, who worked for a top tech firm, had never seen devices draw so much power so fast. “What kind of cuffs are those?”

  “They’re called Aurigas,” Vicky clarified, reaching into Juzo’s bag to pull something else out.

  When Adam tried to see what was going on, his brother stepped in and pulled out one of the chairs from the table.

  “Sit down.”

  Adam had no choice but to obey. Above him, the lamp hung overhead, and around him, those two.

  “If you stick a toothpick in your mouth, I’ll let you start the interrogation,” he said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he tried to see what Vicky was doing, but a sharp sound pulled his attention back: Juzo had just tossed a file folder onto the table. He tried to sneak a look, but his brother stopped him by placing a hand on the file.

  “Alright then, forget playing interrogation; let’s play guess the contents. Let me think: Bureaucratic institutions are the only ones still printing things, so I’ve already got a pretty good idea of where this is headed. Military research involving Homam Enterprises? Something about the freighter detained by the Markabian Empire? Or maybe something from my modeling days? My ex-boss’s family has a lot of political clout… Wouldn’t be shocking if there were shady financial deals happening under the table while I was strutting around in underwear. Is that it?”

  Vicky scoffed. “And you said I was the talkative one?” she muttered to her partner.

  Juzo cleared his throat. “White O22, listen…”

  “Adam is fine,” Adam said.

  “All right, Adam. Look, I never knew I had a brother out there until I got access to this.” Juzo fumbled through the files. “They contain records of a scientific project we were part of since conception, the Binary Atavistic Project. We were separated a few months after birth as part of the experiment.”

  Now, Adam wasn’t sure if he should laugh or be more worried. This was getting more surreal by the second.

  “Experiment on what, exactly?” he asked. “Twin telepathy or something? If that’s the case, I’d say the project was a bust.”

  Juzo hesitated, as if weighing whether to answer.

  “To achieve superhuman abilities,” he finally said.

  “Ah, right… If it’s not twin telepathy, it’s gotta be superpowers,” Adam replied, nodding at Juzo’s uniform. “Let me guess: some kind of super-soldier program, right? Gotta hand it to the scientists back in the day; they sure loved wasting resources on that stuff!”

  “It was more than that.” Juzo opened one of the files.

  The documents’ fresh, clean paper compared to the faded copies inside suggested they were recently printed from older archives.

  Juzo pulled out some copies of old, faded photographs.

  Adam’s curiosity was piqued again. He took the photos and held them up to the light to see them better.

  The first showed him as a young boy, smiling with his coppery hair glinting like a helmet. He looked happy in front of a birthday cake with lit candles, surrounded by other children. That was his tenth birthday. The next photo showed him as a teenager, wearing his soccer team jersey and posing with his orphanage’s team. That was his last Proxima Inter-Orphanage Championship, fifteen years ago.

  “And this is supposed to illustrate the project?” Adam threw the photos back on the table. “All this proves is someone had way too much time to hack into my orphanage’s photo archives.”

  Then, he caught a glimpse of some graph paper with printed electrocardiograms peeking out from between the documents, along with others showing numbers and test results. ‘Glucose levels,’ one read; ‘Red blood cells,’ said another. And then it hit him. Of course! Now everything was starting to make sense.

  “You need a transplant, don’t you?” he accused. “You’re trying to use me as a donor, you piece of garbage!” He grabbed the files and shook them. “These are your medical records, aren’t they? That’s why you’ve been researching me, to make sure my organs are compatible!”

  Vicky rolled her eyes, trying to suppress a disbelieving laugh.

  Armed with patience, Juzo opened another folder, this one packed with pages and pages of reports—most of them covered in long blacked-out sections—and copies of newly attached photos.

  The pictures showed two babies, each asleep in a glass container resembling an incubator, covered in thousands of tiny needles in what looked like some horrid acupuncture session.

  Adam picked up one of the photographs.

  “And these? Besides being morbid, what do they bring to the table?”

  “Those babies are us.”

  “Uh-huh,” Adam replied, unsurprised.

  The earliest photo of himself on record was taken when he was found abandoned at a hospital. According to the attending physician’s report, he had been about a year old at the time. Sure, he couldn’t deny the striking resemblance between himself and either of the two babies in the pictures. But then again, plenty of babies looked alike. Adding fuel to his skepticism was the very real possibility that these were doctored images.

  “Let’s say I buy into the idea that these two are us,” Adam said, then paused. The truth was, he was torn between believing it or not. He stared at the little ones covered in needles and handed the photo back in disgust. “Man… What kind of sick person does something like this with a couple of babies?”

  “Not just a couple,” Vicky interjected. “You weren’t the only ones.”

  Adam folded his arms. “So what’s the story? These people trafficked babies, turned them into lab rats, and then dumped them at orphanages, hoping one would grow up with super strength or something?”

  Juzo nodded. “Something like that.”

  Adam shrugged. “Well, whether it’s you and me together or not is irrelevant. If this project ever existed, we can agree it was a flop. My only superpower is my smile and a little money, and you’re lacking in at least one of those departments. No offense, man, but I have to say it: I’m as far from being a super soldier as you are from being a librarian. So, what’s your plan with these documents? You want me to help you sue the people behind it? Because I know some good lawyers.”

  Vicky smirked in disbelief. “You really never stop talking, do you?”

  “I don’t know who the scientists involved were,” Juzo said. “For all I know, they could be dead. The project’s been shut down for years.”

  Adam looked more puzzled than ever. “So, what’s the point then?”

  Juzo didn’t answer. Neither did Vicky.

  Adam gave the copies of the photographs one last glance. “Listen, I’m glad to know I’ve got a brother,” he said. “But if this was just about getting my attention… I don’t know, man; a few beers would’ve worked better than trying to scare me with outdated secret projects. Let’s talk another time, okay? For now, I think it’s best you leave my house. I’m serious.”

  Juzo took off his gloves, tossed them aside, and stepped up to Adam, turning his hand into a fist.

  Wait—was this arrogant jerk about to punch him? Adam braced himself, ready for a fight.

  But then Juzo opened his hand in front of him, as if about to reveal something hidden—though there was nothing there.

  “What now, a magic trick?” Adam sneered.

  Juzo curled his fingers into a claw, flexing them twice. A sudden spark of electricity erupted in his palm, and threads of blue light danced between his fingers before merging into a single, crackling mass of blue flames.