Tethered Twins

Chapter Fifteen

Emmie Keyes

Not one person stopped Tobias. Even as the General let out his last gasp for life nobody helped. Is this his plan? To see if we are all uncaring enough to do anything about it?  I wondered.

 Tobias asked for anyone in the audience who was a doctor and a man sheepishly walked onto the stage. He was dressed in casual clothes and his nervousness made me assume he wasn’t an actor. He took the General’s pulse and confirmed there was none. Another doctor came up to do the same and it was the same story. A man had died here today, that much was true.

“It’s a trick, it can’t be real,” said one of the crowd.

“He wouldn’t kill someone,” said another.

“My friends, I can assure you he is dead. But he is not gone. Imagine if this was your son or daughter at war and the enemy had killed them. Before today that would be the end but for soldiers fitted with TethTech it is only the beginning. Colonel Kull. How are you feeling?”

The crowd had forgotten about the General’s twin. They focussed their attention on the monitor. They had assumed he would die too but he seemed fine. “Never better,” he replied to gasps from the audience. He seemed unworried by his brother’s death. Clearly he knew something we did not.

“Ok, let’s make things interesting,” The camera moved in closer to the Colonel and that’s when I saw it.

He had orange eyes.

This was a different man to the one who attacked my brother but his eyes had the same unearthly glow. The crowd noticed the eyes too, with one of them screaming “What has happened to his eyes?”

One woman rather hysterically shouted “Demon!”

“The orange eyes are a bug we are working to fix,” explained Tobias. “They are caused by the psychic link we are tapping in to. They even come in pairs,” he swooped his arm around and removed the orange handkerchief from the dead General’s face. A cameraman moved in close to show his face on the monitor and he revealed another set of orange eyes but that wasn’t the most alarming thing. The man’s face seemed as fresh as before he had died. The heart rate monitor continued to show a reading of zero.

“As you can see the General has yet to show any visible signs of death,” said Tobias. “A Tether has been made between him and his twin, which is keeping him alive. That means we can do this…”

The Colonel in the dark room started to move his arms like a puppeteer. He wore gloves that had the same double helix of orange that Tobias wore on his suit. As he moved his arms his brother began to move.

Moments ago we had seen a man die and this was his reincarnation. The General rose to his feet and started to move across the stage. He looked at the crowd, who looked like they didn’t know whether to be happy or scared.

Tobias grabbed the juggling balls again and tossed them to the General. He caught all three of them perfectly. He then tossed the balls into the air and started to juggle them from one hand to the other. This seemed remarkably easy for him, given the difficulty he had minutes ago and that he had died.

In the background the General’s twin moved his arms in a juggling motion that was a perfect mirror image. “Let’s make this interesting,” said Tobias, who emerged on the stage with two long white poles that had pieces of fabric wrapped around them. From the fabric a thick translucent liquid dripped across the stage. The General placed the juggling balls down and took the poles; he held them out in front of him. Tobias then took out a lighter and set the poles on fire.

A burst of flame shot upwards from the poles as they ignited. Despite the intense heat no sweat formed on the General’s head and yet in the background you could see his twin staring to sweat, it seemed like he was feeling the heat instead.