Father’s title as the head of the Texas Family Planning Division requires him to supervise and administer all public healthcare, but his most difficult and important task is to uphold the country’s one child law. He is responsible for ensuring no couple has illegal multiple children in the State of Texas. If it were revealed that the Division Director himself, a member of the inner circle, has been hiding an illegal twin daughter for almost two decades, Governor Roth would be humiliated. His entire political career would be threatened.
There’s a secret place—somewhere in the darkest part of me—that has been waiting for this moment all my life. The moment Mira and I are caught and separated, taken away screaming to our reckoning.
I glance anxiously out the living room window and see the captain hand-launch a surveillance drone before getting into the driver’s seat of the governor’s black luxury car and pulling away, two military vehicles following behind. A few brave neighbors observe the scene from their lawns, and I wonder fleetingly if they stand there out of concern or for the show.
The tablet gives a high-pitched ping. All clear.
Intent, Father moves up the staircase, and I instantly follow him like he’s my lifeline. Again he sends out the wave of light in the hall. Ping. All clear.
I linger in the doorway and take in our ransacked bedroom. This space is just for show, merely a piece in the game. Our true selves do not adorn these four walls—that is reserved for the basement we share. But it doesn’t prevent the heat that suddenly surfaces when I see our raided room.
The covers are a twisted mess on the floor, the mattress flipped over and cut. The dresser is hurled onto its side, the drawers tossed open, piles of our panties thrown across the ground. A quiet rage burns through me. Rage that the soldier touched our personal things without my permission. Rage at how vulnerable it makes me feel. How powerless.
“Father, where is she?” I ask again.
“Pack the essentials. We must be ready by the time she comes back,” he answers.
I hug my trembling body, on the verge of outright panic. It’s all happening too fast. “But they left. We can stay, Father! They found nothing . . . There’s no proof!”
He seizes me by the shoulders, forcing me to focus on his face. “Ava, listen. My division hasn’t found a case of hidden multiples in sixty years. The very idea of eighteen-year-old twins is inconceivable. But someone reported us. Someone knows.”
I shake my head, disbelieving.
“The governor will return, and he will be relentless in his attempts to find the truth. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“We will be more careful. I’ll finish out the semester, and Mira will just stay hidden,” I insist.
“They won’t stop until they discover our secret, Ava. We don’t know who tipped them off, how many eyes could be watching us. And after failing tonight, the governor will certainly add many more to that number. We have to leave.”
Father grabs a knife from his pocket and places it into my hands. “Wait for me downstairs. I’ll need to cut out your microchip. They’ll be tracking you now.”
The National Security Agency would not usually waste resources monitoring the college-age daughter of a prominent government official. There are millions of high-risk targets more pressing than a seemingly average young girl, so unless you give them a reason to flag you, they will not track you. Father could access the system to know for sure if I’ve been flagged, but his refusal to listen to my pleas tells me we are beyond that now.
The weight of the heavy blade rests in my open palm and it’s like he’s just handed me the key to a forbidden room. I know I will open the door to a dark, cavernous space, and I will have to walk through it blindly. I lock eyes with my father.
I must have courage. “No. I’ll do it myself.”
With a stiff nod, he moves out the door to continue his search. Another ping rings through the air. All clear.
But nothing seems clear at all.
MIRA
I crouch, patient and still, poised to run.
Pressed against a neighbor’s fence, I scan the streets once more. I’ve verified numerous times that no Guards or agents remain in the area. All spectators have gone inside; all lights are out. Yet I remain rooted to my hiding place.
I spare a quick glance at my tablet. 2:50 a.m. You can’t hide from our fate. Move. I take one step and then another, choosing my path carefully but swiftly behind the row of quiet houses, using the darkness as my cloak.
My right ankle throbs with each slap of my naked feet against the hard concrete, but I keep moving. Our two-story home comes into view, and the pain of what waits for me inside that dark and silent house outweighs any physical pain. Did the Guard take them?
Oh God.
I hear the constant hum of a small surveillance drone overhead, patrolling the neighborhood from the sky. As it moves to circle our house once more, I hug the line of shadows that edge the fence and race toward the back of the greenhouse.
I smuggle myself into the community garden positioned just outside the glass complex, sticking to the path I know is blind to the cameras—two rows down, six up—and stop in the very back corner. I collapse to my knees in front of the raised bed of newly ripened eggplants and dig my hands into the soil, my fingers yanking the lobed leaves of the fruit in my haste.
The letter X, so microscopic one would have to know it’s there to see it, appears beneath the mulch and manure. I place my index finger over the symbol and listen for the subtle click of the latch unlocking. The X radiates a blue light under my fingerprint, and a small shoulder-width door appears in the dirt.
Lifting the handle, I slip into the opening and shut the hatch softly above me. I slide down the ladder, hobble through the emergency tunnel, enter our basement, and climb the stairs to the empty wall.
With two knocks I push into the passageway. Please let them be on the other side. Two more knocks and I stagger across the living room, and find myself in the kitchen.
My body freezes when I see her.
Ava sits alone at the dinner table under the dim glow of a small work light, two stuffed rucksacks on the bench beside her. She must not have heard me enter, because she doesn’t look up.
She makes a clean incision in her inner right wrist. Gasping in pain, she glides the tip of a blade into the open cut, and with a steady hand and a brutal flick, the microchip lands casually beside her, slick with red. We both stare transfixed at the metal capsule, unmoving.
“Are we running?” I say.
Ava jumps at the sight of me, her eyes somber and afraid. The cold, numb wall of strength I built up comes melting down, pouring out through burning tears. Forgive me.
She presses a bandage to her wound and moves to embrace me, hard. “Where were you?” she whispers. I don’t answer. She doesn’t care where I was. Just that I’m here now.
I feel Father before I see him. I keep my chin buried in Ava’s shoulder and lift my swollen eyes to find him watching us from the staircase.
“We have to hurry,” he says, steady and calm. His expression holds no anger. No blame.
“It was Halton,” I confess. Tears fall freely down my cheeks, washing me clean. “He grabbed my wrist in the greenhouse and somehow knew my chip is an imitation.”
Ava lets go of me and stands back. “Why didn’t you tell me?”