beats per minute (36 page)

She wanted to tell him to forget her, to check on Declan,
but the words would not come. Like a huge eagle taking flight, she felt his
body leave the ground. Suddenly she wasn’t in the middle of an inferno; she was
in Con’s grasp again, flying through the cool night air.

She did not hold onto consciousness long enough to see where
they went.

The sun was just rising over St Paul’s as the helicopter
landed. The sky was that curious shade of cool London
grey,
shot through with early morning hues of mauve, vermillion and rose. Wide
streets, already bustling with men and women in suits, merged into buildings –
some glass-fronted, some with old-fashioned Georgian pillars – that reached up
and up as if trying to compete with the sun’s morning ascent.

The young man and woman looked a bit out of place in their
casual
clothes,
both gripping onto slightly wilted
bunches of flowers rather than a caffeine injection. They also walked more
slowly than the crowd, eliciting a few barely suppressed sighs of irritation as
one suit after another jostled to overtake their snail-like forms.

The city hadn’t changed much in the time that Raegan had
been away. And yet, she reflected, everything looked different.

By some miracle, they made it out of the Labyrinth.
Warwick’s quick thinking saved her life but the smoke inhalation would cause
lasting damage. This did not seem to faze the healers. They simply prepared
some mystical concoction and packaged it in the form of a snappy little
inhaler, instructing her to use it whenever she felt short of breath. She took
a puff now, ruefully noting how slow they were walking. Her lungs felt pretty
useless nowadays. Still, as she glanced down at the pale hands tucking her
inhaler back in her pocket, as strong as ever and without the slightest trace
of even a rope burn, she was overwhelmed with passionate relief. She was
standing upright. Her heart was beating. It was over.

Declan and Sam, however, had been fully submerged in flame
for a good few minutes before Bree managed to get them out.

Any civilian would have died then and there. But even with
the impressive skill of the healers and his own abilities, the trauma had been
too much for Sam. In the end, his unwavering determination to beat Declan had
been his undoing: just before they rolled into the flames, Sam flipped over and
on top of Declan, fixated on regaining the upper hand to the extent of
inadvertently exposing himself to the brunt of the fire. He died before the
night was over.

In those bruised, vulnerable twenty four hours after she
woke up, while the healers continued their fight to save Declan’s life, she
might even have mourned Sam. He still occupied a great deal of her waking
thought.

And so, when the waiting got too much, she found herself
leaving the hospital wing and tracing the steps to where Sam used to live. Some
compulsion dragged her through the doors, up the stairs and down the familiar
corridor. They had not cleaned out his room yet.

She wished she hadn’t come; but once there she could not
leave. It was like staring into the blackness of his soul. The display he had
conjured up for Declan’s room was merely a taster. There was no nausea this
time. There was not even anger.

The fire had gone out.

Instead, she felt sad. Sorry. She even felt sorry for Sam;
as she would feel sorry for anyone so lost and eaten up by hate. For the first
time since waking, tears leaked fatly from her tired eyes. She collapsed onto
the bed.

But soon she was hit by another feeling, one that she had
not expected: discomfort. It was an alien sensation amidst so much emotion.
Sniffling, she felt beneath her rump. It turned out she had landed on something
raised and hard.

A box.

A box, which, as it turned out, was dedicated to her. In it
were the keys she thought she’d lost months ago, a few locks of her hair, some
of her underwear, some disgusting drawings and her hourglass pendant. The
pendant which, it turned
out,
had been designed to
match Declan’s own.

It was the pendant that did it. She didn’t know why, but in
that moment it seemed the perfect symbol of loss; it reminded her of a time
when she had still been happy. He had taken the object but, worse than that, he
had robbed her of that feeling.

She would never spare another kind thought for Samuel Becker
for as long as she lived.

It was in this almost catatonic state that Bree found her,
many hours later, still sitting in that same spot. In careful, soothing tones,
she urged Raegan up, taking her sore, bandaged hands and leading the way out of
the darkness into blazing sunshine. Declan was awake.

He would never be exactly as he was. Bones could be mended
by the healers with little effort but internal injuries were something else.
The right lung, punctured by Sam’s knife, would always be weaker than the left.
The burns were too severe to ever completely fade. Now, in the daylight, she
snuck a look at him; the green eyes were so dazzling in the morning sun that
you might not even notice the ugly, raised redness on the left cheek. Not at
first. Other more serious scars covered his back and shoulders. But he was
alive. He was hers.

The happiness of those first few hours reunited was like
nothing she had ever known. They talked non-stop. A phone call to Bridey and
Con turned into a tearful marathon. The bond blossomed; knitting them together,
filling gaps Raegan never knew existed. The hourglass was whole at last.

The only dark spot was the sight of the small, motionless
figure in the bed at the end of the ward. Raegan could not stop her eyes from
constantly wandering over.
Sukey.

‘She’s in a coma,’ Raegan had explained softly. Her hands
trembled as she drew her messy red hair back into a ponytail. ‘It was how they
found us.’

Eyes still unfocused from the healing, Declan furrowed his
brow. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sukey is Bree’s sister.’ The last thing Raegan wanted to do
was to keep secrets but she knew she had to watch what she said. ‘She has these
–visions. I don’t get quite how it all works, but she’s incredibly psychic. It
leaves her vulnerable. She and Bree can communicate telepathically but they
aren’t supposed to; it can be too much for Sukey. But, that night, when Bree
and the others knew Sam had taken us but didn’t know where, Bree reached out to
her. Sukey found us. And then- this happened.’

‘Is she going to be alright?’

‘They don’t know if she’ll wake up.’

‘Damn.
Poor, poor Bree.’

‘I know,’ Raegan said unsteadily. ‘Now that I’ve found- I
mean, now that we’re... I couldn’t deal with it.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Bree
wouldn’t let me apologise. Said it was her call. Put on a brave face, but I
know how she must feel. She loves her sister more than anything in the world.’

‘Her twin,’ Declan reminded her quietly.

Raegan’s eyes glimmered again. ‘I keep forgetting.’

‘Easy there, waterworks.’ He nudged her to make her laugh.

‘I know, I know!’ In spite of herself, she chuckled. ‘I’m
like Niagara Falls. I keep thinking there aren’t any more tears left, and then,
whoosh. Out they come.’

‘It’s natural after a trauma. Don’t beat yourself up.’

Raegan blew her nose noisily. ‘It is pretty incredible,
though.
The twin thing.’

‘Can’t be a Regent unless you have one.’

Declan relaxed back on the pillows, a shit-eating grin on
his face. Raegan didn’t need a mirror to know that her smile matched his.

It was amazing how the jigsaw pieces fitted together.
Regents were born in pairs. That was why the gift had skipped Con and her
father, despite their Regency lineage; they weren’t part of a set.

Her father.
At last she could say
it. Raegan had finally found someone who would let her talk freely about
Joseph. The one person who could give her the answers she craved. She learned
from Declan that though Joseph had not been a Regent, he worked as a Skipper
and had eventually been inducted into some sort of espionage group working for
the Sentinel. The work was hard and sometimes dangerous, but after seeing what
the Regents were up against on the frontline, Joseph felt relieved that destiny
had missed him off the list. And then his wife Helen gave birth to twins. The
couple were devastated. They did not want that kind of life for their children.
They decided to separate.

‘Couldn’t drag himself away, though,’ Declan’s mouth pulled
down at the edges.
‘Almost left it too late.
Finally plucked up the courage just before our third birthday.
Faked
his own
death.’

She shook her head. It was a crazy story.
‘But
how?
And...
I’ve seen my birth certificate.
Wouldn’t it say if I had a twin?’

‘Yeah.
You’d have a time of birth.
But Joseph faked all that. He had friends in high places. That’s how he forged
us new identities so the Sentinel couldn’t track us down.’

‘But they did.’ Raegan didn’t know how to feel about that.
Part of her was furious that she and Declan had been ripped apart and forced
into ignorance. But then, after the horrors they had recently experienced, not
just in the Labyrinth but also in Carrigaline, another part of her – probably
the biggest part – understood.

‘Well, yeah. Dad wasn’t very good at lying low. He started
working for the Cause again under his new name. Tried to keep his distance; we
were in New York by then so he thought he’d be able to slip under the radar.
But they worked it out, obviously. And thank God they did or when he was taken
I would have had nowhere to go.’

Another blow.
Though her father
hadn’t died all those years ago, he was still lost to Raegan: missing and by
now assumed dead. Working for the Sentinel on some secret operation, his
activities had been noticed by the Fay. One night he didn’t come back.

‘I thought I was going to an orphanage. Didn’t know I was a
Regent until I got to Unit Prime. I was too young to start the training then,
so they just let me hang around. I couldn’t understand what the deal was – why
keep me if I didn’t have a twin? I would be useless to them. Eventually, I
figured out that they were waiting for something.
You.’
He grinned.

‘And what a warm welcome you gave me.’

It came out more sarcastically than Raegan intended. Declan
twitched uncomfortably.

She had to ask. ‘Why were you like that with me?’

‘Like what?’

She glared at him. ‘Don’t play dumb. You were a huge pain from
the start. I get that you weren’t supposed to get close to me, but – don’t you
think you took it a bit far?’

Declan swore under his breath. ‘You’re right. Crap, I’m
sorry. I just- well...’

‘Well?’

‘I was mad at you!’ He blurted, pleating the bedcover in a
way that Raegan found all too familiar. The realisation was touching. She
placed her hand over his.

‘Tell me.’

‘I’d been waiting so long. When they told me you were
coming, even with the secret – damn, I was so excited! That whole day I
remember just walking around in a daze, couldn’t sit still. I was so sure that
even without being told, you’d know who I was. The moment you saw me: you’d
just know. But then when I met you...’ The tops of his ears turned pink. ‘You
barely even noticed me! I was crushed.’

‘No! Oh, Declan, I had no idea...’ Her first instinct was to
apologise. Then it dawned on her. ‘Wait a minute!’ Grabbing a newspaper from
the bedside table, she rolled it up before clonking him on the head.

Making noises of protest, he held up his hands. ‘I’m still
in recovery you know!’

‘I’ll put you back under if you don’t apologise, right now.’
The words were teasing but her eyes told another story. ‘Are you being serious?
I’d only just rocked up, I’d just had this bomb dropped on me – the Regency destiny
– and you were fuming because I didn’t guess right away that you were the twin
I never knew I had?’

Declan shrugged; then, when she raised the paper
threateningly, started to cackle.
The
Times
, crumpled but still
held aloft, hovered perilously for a few moments as his twin wavered between
fury and mirth. Eventually it was turned to pulp, sagging under their combined
weight while they collapsed in laughter. As shared jokes went, it wasn’t even
all that funny.

But it was theirs.

***

The bond between Regency twins was a remarkable thing. Now,
a week after learning the truth, Raegan couldn’t imagine how she had survived
in ignorance for so long – or how deep it ran. What was it the Praetor had told
her shortly after the accident? ‘In him you will find reserves of strength you
never knew existed. You will draw on each other in the bleakest moments.
As you already have.’

Remembering this, Raegan stole another curious glance at her
brother as she led him down a winding footpath. Still staring straight ahead, he
stifled a grin. ‘What.’

‘Nothing.
Oh look!
Ducks.’

Ignoring the tufts of brown fuzz that were crossing the path
to the small pond on the other side, Declan turned to her.

‘The answer to your question,’ he said softly, ‘is yes.’

She gawped.
‘But- but- but-?’

‘You wanted to know if I could hear your thoughts,
right?
In the Labyrinth.
When you told me not to blame myself.’

There was a long pause. Raegan buried her face in the white
lilies she was carrying, absolutely gobsmacked. Finally, spluttering from the
pollen, she gasped, ‘How did you know?’

He
shrugged,
the ghost of a smile
on his face. ‘Just did.’

They were nearing the patch now. When Raegan was here last
the trees had been fittingly bare, weeping their brown, withered leaves over
the individual plots. Bleakness and decay hung in the sky. She could remember
the pain of that day.
The way time had seemed to stand still.

How much she had learned since then about both time and
pain.