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“Why would I run away?”

“To prove your innocence. To avenge Pepper. To try to protect me from being depowered. Take your pick.” He slides his hand up my arm, still not letting go. “You’re a runner. I can’t let you go until we have a plan.”

“They just declared me a villain with no actual proof. I have to leave, Evan. I have to go prove my innocence.”

“How?” His entire body trembles in anger. “You think they’re just going to take your word for it? After failing your Hero exam, attacking Aloki, and ruining a villain set up at the south entrance? What are you going to do? Walk into Central and say, ‘It’s cool guys; I’m not evil.’? They have two dead bodies and security camera video of someone who looks a hell of a lot like you.”

My temple flares with pain as my skull threatens to crack open under the pressure of my clenched teeth. I want so badly to disagree with him. But he’s right.

He’s always right.

“I have to do something.”

He nods. “Yes but not until we figure out a plan. Whoever that was on the screen is still out there, and you are safe here. The Heroes will capture them and discover that it isn’t you. We just have to wait it out.”

“Wait it out.” I test the words on my tongue. They don’t feel right at all. I glance at the elevator, and then across the room where my Hero suit has been laundered and placed on a shelf next to a Batgirl statue. My teeth dig into my bottom lip.

“Take a deep breath, Mace.” The nickname catches me off-guard. Only Max calls me Mace. Nicknames are what you call loved ones and friends. I do as he says, taking in a deep breath and slowly exhaling. When I look at him again, it’s with a new perspective. He offers me his hand, and a lopsided smile to go with it. Evan is not my enemy.

Evan is on my side. This is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

“I’ll do it.” I lift my arm but don’t take his hand. “I’ll stay. But you’re doing something for me, too.”

“What’s that?”

I place my elbow in his outstretched hand. “Take my blood. Test me and prove that I’m not evil. Then I get to turn myself in and take the results to Central.”

We could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows. Evan stares at my bare arm in his hand, but doesn’t so much as shake the hair out of his eyes. “Don’t bother playing it cool,” I mutter. “I know you’ve been wanting to.”

“This will hurt,” Evan says. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. He’s holding a syringe with a needle the size of a freaking pencil lead above my arm. He’s taken me down to the fourth floor where all his blood glass slides are, prepped my arm with the world’s coldest cotton ball of alcohol, and prepared a dozen new slides for the addition of my blood.

He isn’t admitting it, but I can tell by the light buzzing of power emanating off him and the way he keeps gnawing on his bottom lip, that he’s psyched out of his mind to test my blood. With all the controversy surrounding my being born into a fifty/fifty chance of turning evil, I guess I can’t blame him.

I know in my heart that I am not evil. I’ve just had a rough time lately and anyone would act the way I acted, were they in the same situations. And now Evan will have scientific proof of my innocence. I’ll take that proof straight back to Central, ending this lockdown and gaining Hero status with one victorious piece of paper. Two birds, one stone. Hello, Hero Maci.

I take a deep breath as Evan ties a rubber tourniquet around my arm and counts to three. The needle plunges into my arm and although it hurts, it doesn’t come close to the pain of cracking your head multiple times on the Grand Canyon. Blood pours into a glass vial. I smile. “That’s not so bad.”

Evan concentrates on his task. “Hurt like hell when I took it from my own arm.”

“That is because you are a wiener.”

He pulls the needle from my arm and instructs me to hold a cotton ball against it as he readies another vial and pulls another syringe from a drawer. This one has a needle the size of a pencil. “Time for a sample of your power,” he says, flourishing what might as well be a turkey baster in front of my face. “Let’s see how long that cocky smile lasts.”

I’m banished to Evan’s bedroom for the next hour. Apparently he gets stage fright analyzing blood samples in front of the person who might be a potential villain. I try playing Xbox, but I only get as far as turning on the machine before I end up lying on the bed, discovering animal-shaped blobs in the ceiling plaster.

When I realize I’ve spent too much time thinking about Evan’s cute smile, I try to focus on something more productive. Like, why does Aurora want to find me? I close my eyes, meditating on the question. But I have nothing. Dad and Max enter my mind but I push them out of it. I cannot deal with those thoughts right now.

It’s two hours later and Evan’s wearing his glasses again. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“I’m sorry, what?” I say, snapping back to reality after mapping out an entire colony of blobs in the ceiling.

“Good news or bad news?”

“Bad,” I reply without hesitation.

He removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. I like him better with the glasses. “The bad news is, well, you have the evil gene.”

I shake my head. “No, you’re wrong. Go on, what’s the good news?”

“You need to take me seriously.”

I straighten my spine, fold my hands in my lap, and tighten my lips together like a strict librarian. “Is this serious enough for you?”

He suppresses an eye roll with so much difficulty, the act of not rolling his eyes makes the exact same point as if he had. “I’m not wrong. The results were there. Your genes match the villain’s.”

I wave my hand. A lump forms in my throat but I swallow it down. “What is the good news?”

“I’m not exactly sure how to explain this.” He meets my eyes. “Your blood is normal. But your power is …”

I roll my hand, signaling for him to get on with it already. His head tilts to the side. “Your power is doubled.”

“Come again?”

“Two strands of power flow through your veins, working together as one. I think it comes from you being a twin.”

I give him a wary look. “Maybe twice the power explains why I’m incredibly fast and strong.”

“And humble!” He sits next to me on the bed and knocks me with his shoulders. “You make a good point. I don’t know what to decipher from it. Of all the power I’ve tested, none of them has looked like this. You literally have twice the power flowing through you than anyone else.”

“That explains why that nurse was so obsessed with my ability to heal myself,” I say, thinking back to that day at the hospital. A knot forms in my stomach at the memory of my dad. “She wanted to take some of my blood and Dad stormed in and forbid it. He was pretty pissed about it.”

Evan stares at my chest, though not in an awkward way. “It has to be a twin thing. I’d bet all twins have that, we just don’t have any other twins to test. On one hand, you definitely have the evil genetic codes. But on the other hand your power is doubled. It has both good and evil in it.”

“So I can utilize the good side.”

“You can also utilize the evil side.”

I give him a sardonic glare. “I am not—”

“Evil, I know.” He shakes stray hair out of his eyes. “The truth is in your power. You can choose to be good every day of your life, but the evil is still there. Central won’t want to hear that. And they never will because I destroyed the lab results.”

He pulls the hair tie out of his ponytail, letting his hair go back into non-research mode. He slips the hair tie back on his wrist.

“I’m still going home,” I say.

“You need to stay until we have a plan.”

I wish I could stay. I wish I could
C’est la vie
to the rest of the world and spend my remaining days on this island with Evan, while everyone else went on without us. The world can apocalypse itself for all I care, as long as I’m with Evan when it happens. But I can’t do that to my family and friends. The world needs saving and I’m the only one who can do it.

But an eternity with Evan sure sounds wonderful.

Evan’s thigh is my pillow. I’m vaguely aware that lying in his lap on the couch is normally considered romantic. Only vaguely. The gentle tapping of his thumbs on the game controller lulls me into a dream-like state. Sleep overtakes me and I welcome it. It’s been a long day.

Ugh. That damned alarm not only ruins my day, it ruins my dreams as well. Desperately, I try to hold on to the last tendrils of the dream I was having, the peaceful serene landscape before me, but my subconscious ruins it by inviting the memories of the lockdown alarm into my mind. I squeeze my eyes, tossing and turning, trying to get my dream back—no, I don’t want to wake up. Please don’t make me wake up. Stop thinking of that stupid alarm!

“Maci!” My eyes fling open at the sound of Evan’s voice. My head is thick, dizzy from sitting up so quickly. Evan grabs my shoulder. Hard.

“Ow,” I groan, slapping at his hand. “Get off me. I’m awake, god, why do I still hear that alarm?”

“You’re not dreaming.” Weight presses on my shoulder as he uses me to stand. “It’s happening again,” he says. I grab a glass of water from the coffee table since my mouth is so dry I can’t talk.

The next sound sends a chill down my spine. “Are we on the air?” It’s a simple question but it makes my chest collapse as if the weight of the world just fell on me. “Ah, yes. We are on the air. Hello, citizens of King City.” I’d know her voice anywhere. But I raise my eyes to the MOD screen anyway.

Aurora’s face smiles in the center of the screen. “I wish I could say it saddens me to appear before you like this,” she says in a way that could only be described as making love to the camera. “But I have to admit, I love a good show. You were given twenty-four hours to surrender, Maci Might.” She tilts her head and gives a
tisk-tisk
look to the camera. “And you disobeyed!” A wave of laughter fills the air. She dabs at her eyes with a silk scarf and regains composure after another giggle. Her face turns to stone. “So now you will pay.”

She takes a step back and the camera moves with her as she turns around and walks down a dark hallway. I don’t recognize any of it. Her heels click on the marble floors as she continues to talk, sounding sickeningly pleased with herself. “My apprentice has been murdered. Don’t you agree that we should bring his murderer to justice? It is, after all, the fair thing to do.”

“Why would she do this?” Water splashes on my toes and I realize too late that I’ve smashed my glass between my fingers. Dark red blood drips from my palm until the wound stitches itself back together. “What does she want with me?”

Evan tugs at his eyebrow while biting the thumbnail on his other hand. His eyes never leave the MOD screen. Aurora’s heels click across the floor as she steps closer to the camera. “Citizens of King City, you have three—no … two hours to turn in Maci Might, or your president will die.”

With these words I abandon staring at Evan and turn to the screen. My dad slumps against a concrete wall, retriever hooks stabbed into his wrists, neck, and ankles, dried blood caked on his forehead and around his neck. Bile rises in my throat as I notice a magnetic stake sticking out of his stomach. Aurora touches his face. He flops his head to the side to avoid her touch.