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She kneels and grabs the villain’s facemask. If she thinks seeing someone’s face as they writhe in pain is enough to deter me, she’s wrong. Her eyes lock with mine as she peels the mask up to her forehead, stopping when the dried blood makes it too difficult to continue. My grip falters as I look into the eyes of the person I am about to kill. Light brown with flecks of chestnut and gold. Thick eyelashes under unevenly spaced eyebrows. Blood drips down a square jaw. I realize I am looking into a real life mirror. The person I am slowly choking to death looks exactly like me in every way.

My
eyes squint back up at me in a desperate plea.
My
lips struggle to talk over all the blood and swelling. Aurora’s voice is a whisper in my ear. “Your young little mind is reeling,” she says with a smile. “You’re putting all the pieces together.”

My body trembles with a mixture of rage and confusion. This can’t be possible, this isn’t happening.

“Oh, but it is possible, my dear.” Aurora plucks the thought from my mind. Satisfaction pulses from her power, slamming me in the heart with every beat. Slowly, I remove my arm from my sister’s neck, allowing her to breathe again. “That’s right …” Aurora coos. “You know you want to. You just have to see for yourself.”

With a trembling hand, I reach for the black fabric around her forehead, the remaining mask that covers her head. I know what to expect as the fabric screeches from being yanked back over so much dried blood. But knowing it doesn’t make me any less shocked when I rip her mask off, revealing a tangled mess of hair.

Long, platinum-blonde hair.

Surprise and revulsion have me tripping over my own limbs as I jump up, wanting to get away from this clone of me as quickly as possible. With pained movements, my attacker pushes herself into a standing position but only makes it as far as holding her knees with her head sunk between her shoulders. My hand clenches into a fist.

“Stop!” a voice yells just as the lights flicker, distracting me. Two loud snapping sounds come from the gurney as I look over to see my dad burst out of the restraints across his chest. In all my confusion, I hadn’t recognized my own father’s voice. He twists his neck, stretching from side to side. He steps over the metal that was once around his feet and sets his eyes on the fishbowl.

My twin gasps and covers her mouth with her hands, her attention focusing solely on Aurora instead of me. Stupid, amateur move. I’m about to throw her to the ground, but something makes me stop. She isn’t gasping over Dad’s incredible strength in breaking the ropes, or about the gruesome raw gashes across Dad’s skin, or the way the broken metal ropes burn black lines into the floor below.

She’s gasping because she’s in trouble.

I blink and she’s gone. I may be the fastest runner in the world, but I’m no longer alone as the record holder. My twin sprints across the room. Aurora throws something and my twin jumps into the air, twisting three hundred and sixty degrees to catch it before landing on her feet as graceful as a gymnast at the Olympics.

I glance at Aurora and find her watching me, not them. As if reading my thoughts, she holds up her hand and twists the doomsday device she’s still holding, her face giving me a pure look of
neiner neiner, I win, you lose.

Even if I tackle her, she’ll still be able to push the button. This is the worst sort of hostage negotiation ever.

“Do it!” Aurora yells.

My twin flicks her wrist and Dad’s body goes rigid against the gurney once more, this time held in place with two retriever hooks. “Please,” Dad’s voice strains as he looks at her. At
his daughter
. My stomach hurts. “You don’t have to do this.”

Her hands clench into fists at her sides as she stands almost as tall he is. “Yes. I. Do.”

Aurora lowers the fishbowl back toward the ground and Dad rushes through his words to get them out in time. “We can help you. You can come live with me. With your family.”

“Fuck my family,” my twin says. She points at Aurora. “She is my family. She took me in when you left me for dead. She raised me and she told me about the horrible things you did to innocent children. You would have just killed me anyway. Aurora let me live. Why would I ever want to be with you?”

A mix of family pride and hatred for Aurora has me diving across the room to slap my sister across the face. Her mouth falls open. I wonder if she’s as weirded out looking at me as I am looking at her. “He would have killed you too,” she says, grabbing her jaw. “Aurora saved both of our lives. But now you get to die.”

“Aurora ruined our lives, you brainwashed idiot!” I duck the punch she throws my way and counter it with a blow to her head. “Dad wouldn’t have hurt us,” I say through gritted teeth as she fights me back, matching my blows with blows of her own.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying is true, but Dad deserves to keep some dignity in front of all these witnesses. “He would have raised us to both be good. He would have shown us there’s another way to live. He would have loved both of us.”

She rolls her eyes and yanks my hair so hard my neck cracks in three places. I elbow her in the ribs, taking advantage of her shriek of pain to throw her onto the ground and dig my boot so far into her stomach she coughs up blood.

“And in case you haven’t noticed, dumbass,” I hiss, dropping to my knees and grabbing a handful of her hair, digging my fingers into her scalp. “
I’m
the evil one.”

With a burst of power, I stand, taking her body with me—hair first. I twist to the right, planning to rearrange her facial features into the shape of the column next to me, but what happens next makes me drop her straight to the floor.

Aurora kicks the latch on the gurney, sending Dad horizontal again. She talks too quietly for me to hear, telling him things with a smile on her face, as she steps around the gurney and—oh, god no. Her hand presses against the screen on the depowering machine. The lights dim as electricity flows into the massive machine, powering it up as the inside circle illuminates into a blinding white light.

Dad’s body goes rigid, his fingers and toes taunt as they hover in the air, his feet at the entrance of the circle. A gasp comes from my feet and I look down to see my sister watching the scene unfold, lips curled in disgust. Blood everywhere. So much blood.

The overhead lights dim to a soft glow as the depowering machine sucks most of the energy from the power lines, concentrating all the light in the corner of the room. I look behind me, at the frozen Heroes forced to watch an act of terrorism without participating. Crimson’s eyes reflect the bright light in front of us.

Aurora has to yell to be overheard from the machine. “You told me that my sons would feel no pain when they were depowered.” She stares over Dad’s body, one hand up in the air, thumb hovering over the doomsday button in her palm. The other hand motions to the machine in front of us. “It was April nineteenth. My sons were two weeks old. I had just lost my husband to a Retrieving tragedy. You said there would be no more poisonings and no more experiments. You claimed there was a new device—a depowering machine—and you said it would make depowering much easier than the old way of using a scalpel to cut out the power veins.”

I shudder.

Her intense focus on my dad causes me to forget my sister, forget the Heroes around me. I’m captivated by her story, unable to move. She lost her husband and sons in the same month. If that isn’t a good reason to turn evil, I don’t know what is.

“And then I was informed that I wouldn’t get to keep my depowered children. No, I was informed—not by you, Mr. President, but by your secretary—my sons had died. Right here in this machine. They were too young to survive it. Their screams were heard all throughout Central.” Her voice is strong, held taut by a thin string of courage. The pain in her face is impossible to hide. For the smallest minute, I almost empathize with her.

“I knew I would make you die for this,” she says. “I knew that if I were patient, my day of revenge would present itself. And what do you know? Forty years later, your wife gave birth to twins.”

Chills run up my arms and down my spine. My entire life has lead up to this moment; all planned out before I was even born.

“When I destroyed Saint Elizabeth Hospital, my plan was to kill your daughters and call it a day. But the Heroes showed up sooner than expected and I was only able to grab one. When Sophia tried to fight back, I killed her quickly. It wasn’t her fault, after all.”

White-hot rage bursts through my chest. Aurora must feel my power because she turns around and winks at me before placing her hand on my father’s shoulder. “With only one twin in my possession, I devised an even better plan. I raised her for sixteen years to be my personal vendetta machine. She turned out wonderful, didn’t she? As fate would have it, I grabbed the good one.”

She laughs. “Guess you were wrong about nature versus nurture. Both of your brats turned out evil.”

Aurora places her fingertips over the command plate on the machine. Every hair on my body stands up. Her entire hand is the only thing that will start the machine. Fingertips are just a tease. There’s still time to save him.

“You will pay for this,” Dad manages to say between gasps of pain.

“Do you even love me?” The voice comes from my left where my twin has managed to crawl up from the floor after her bones healed. Aurora gives her a bored look before turning back to my dad.

“Do you?” she repeats.

“Of course not.” Aurora shoots back bitterly. “How could I love someone who isn’t my own blood?”

A soul crushing sound comes from my twin and I’m tempted to reach out and touch her shoulder. But she did just try to kill me so I stay put.

I need a plan. I take a deep breath.
I need a plan, I suck as a Hero and I need a plan.

Tell me where you are and we’ll think of a plan.

It’s as if Evan is standing right next to me. I squeeze my fingers into a fist, reaching out to the only lifeline I have available.
I’m in the Atrium. Aurora has my dad on the depowering machine. All the Heroes are frozen. My sister is alive. Where are you? Hurry ohgodwhatdoidoevan?

“You told me they left me for dead,” my twin says, her power somehow growing weaker as she talks. “You said you took me and raised me because they didn’t want me. Why won’t you look at me?”

Your sister is alive? That explains the dual life forces in your blood.

Enough with the nerd shit, my dad is about to be depowered. Where are you?

“I’m right here.” This time his voice really is over my shoulder. Like the twins that we are, my sister and I twist in unison to find Evan standing between us. He’s looking at me, but he hooks a thumb in her direction. “What the hell is that?”

My twin dawns a look of bitchface, which I think looks absolutely fitting on her. “I’m Nova,” she hisses. Without so much as a glance backward, she sprints across the room, leaving waves of power in her wake. My jaw hits the floor as she slams into Aurora—fist first, knocking her against the side of the machine but most importantly, removing her fingers off the command plate. “I can’t believe—” she grunts, pulling back her fist and punching her again. “—you were going to—”
Punch, kick
. “—let me die!”

Evan grabs my arm. “You need to save your dad. Quick, while she’s distracted.” The seriousness in his eyes startles me.

Three things happen at the same time. But my brain processes them in this order:

Evan kisses me. Full lip-on-lip, his hands in my hair, three-second smooch.

Aurora releases her power, sending Nova rocketing off her feet and crashing into the wall with a fatal-sounding crack.

The depowering machine groans to life as Dad’s body lurches feet first into the bright circle, Aurora smiling as she pants for breath with her hand pressed firmly to the command plate.

“Dad!”
is what I think, but my screams drown out any form of discernible language coming from my mouth. Aurora’s laughter fills the air, followed by my father’s blood-curdling scream. His legs lift off the gurney, convulsing as blood splatters out from his toes, to the arches of his feet, up his ankles, and continues to climb up his legs as the machine moves. Strands of silver pull out of his body, sucking up into the machine at speeds barely noticeable even with my Super vision.

I’m stunned into a paralyzed stupor, but Evan springs into action. He holds up his hands, aiming at Aurora. The old hag flies into the wall exactly as I had when Evan used his juice on me. With a flick of his wrists, he zaps her again and again and again until she is just a bouncing blur in my peripheral vision as my feet finally move. I race to my father.

Dad’s face is frozen in an open-mouthed portrait of agony; there is no point in continuing to yell because his pain is far from over. Blood pours from his calves as his flesh rips open, allowing silvery veins to rip out and suck into the machine.

Jake’s words come back to me as I survey the machine, looking for some kind of button to shut off the power.
Once the machine starts, you can’t stop it until a depowered body comes out the other end.