The Hidden Twin Read Online Free Page A

Usually.” Her voice softens. “I do appreciate your helping him.”
    I turn to go, but when I place my hand on the door handle, Nara is behind me.
    â€œTake this,” she says, handing me a small card: NARA BLAKE, EDITOR . Startled, I look up and am transfixed by her fierce, clear eyes. “In case you need anything else.”
    I step into the street, stumbling a little, and slide into an alley. As I hurry home, I flick the corner of Nara Blake’s business card with my forefinger.
    ARE REDWINGS REAL? The Bulletin sings its sensational print in my mind over and over. Am I an insidious threat, as the Onyx Staff says? The fact that I do not exist has always kept me a little safer. Or maybe it has kept others a little safer from me. But just now, those priests in the alleyway, the fire I called forth—
    Today is the day I became real.

 
    two
    The sky through the glass walls of my high room is the bright white-gray of the fog that drifts down from Mol, the great volcano. It’s the clean, pale color of the steam that hisses from the copper release valves of the pipes curling through the streets of Caldaras City. It’s washed-out clouds, about as close to blue as this sky ever gets. Raptor birds roost in this rooftop garden with me, coming and going as they please on dark feathered wings that cut the city mist like razors through silk. In here, hidden from the world, I am a connoisseur of books, green life, and ash-sky.
    I lean back in my chair at my pockmarked metal desk as my father rustles leaves and taps little irrigation pipes behind me.
    â€œToad-hat shrub’s looking a bit dry,” he says. I hear the tinny creak of metal tweaking metal. “That might do it. Keep an eye.”
    â€œThanks,” I say. In this city of brick and stone and copper, things that grow green are my joy. The haphazard collection of flowers and vegetables in the Dome has fallen mainly to my care, and even through the settled ash and gray days, my garden flourishes.
    My father shuffles over to my desk, his stiff metal leg scraping the wood floor. “They’re all doing well. But keep an eye.” He means the plants. Sometimes I think he means something else, too, when he talks about plants, but I’m never quite sure.
    I want to talk to him about the bonescorch orchis and the priests who almost got me. But I know he’d immediately scoop us up and take us away to keep me safe, leaving his prestigious position as a master gardener on Roet Island. He’d lop off this city like a dead branch, and I can’t do that to him. Not again.
    But he’s clumping his round-shouldered way toward the trapdoor that leads to the rest of the house, and there’s something that wants to burst out of me as strongly as that jet of flame this morning. “Papa,” I start, without knowing what comes next.
    He turns, woolly eyebrows raised. “What is it?”
    â€œI…” I stop. Breathe. “Did you know I have fire inside me?”
    His eyes are half moons as he smiles. “I have always known that.” And then the trapdoor is open and he is clambering down, shoe to metal, metal to metal, thud-clink-thud-clink, until the top of his bushy head is gone, and I’m unsure if he really knows what I asked or if I really know what he replied.
    *   *   *
    The next day I rise in the dim predawn to take a brief, life-giving amble to the mailbox at the end of our little walkway. Anyone awake this early would see only the vague figure of the person they believe to be their neighbor’s only daughter through the fog. This is my favorite part of the day.
    This morning our street is as quiet as can be, the merchants just rising, the shift workers at the boilers not yet trading places, the well-to-do still enjoying a long sleep. I flip open the mailbox at the end of our tiny front lawn and find a single letter addressed to Occupant, 162 Saltball Street. Probably a