Page 6 of The Evil Twin
Nikolai caught us and narrowed his eyes. “What’s this, then?” he asked, waving a hand between the two of us. “Did you…” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, which we took as our cue to ignore him.
Hannah sighed and flopped down in the seat beside me. “It’s so easy to forget you didn’t grow up with all this. You never even learned the basics.”
“Basics?”
“Well, you know that magic is energy, right?”
I nodded, but it hurt my head, so I stopped.
Hannah furrowed her brow and chewed on her thumbnail, obviously trying to find a way to explain it to a dunce like me.
“It’s like feedback,” she said, finally.
“Feedback?” I said. “Like ‘nice paper, Lucy, but don’t forget your friend, the semi-colon – A-’?”
Hannah laughed. “No, like when Assistant Head Noel tries to use the microphone for morning assembly, and it makes that squealing noise. Or classic rock guitars.”
I nodded. “I get it. Kinda.”
“So, you and the other-you have the same energy signature, right? Which means you shouldn’t exist in the same place, but because you do, when you touched her, it caused this kind of magical feedback.”
I sighed. It made sense.
“But surely I touched her when I was in her world…” But when I thought back, I couldn’t think of a time when I had.
Hannah shrugged. “Even if you had, your actual body remained here, asleep. Whatever projection of you appeared in that world probably didn’t have the exact same energy signature.”
I shifted the ice pack on my head. The condensation was making my hair wet, and some trickled down my neck.
“So, I just won’t touch her again.”
“If we ever catch her,” said Sam glumly.
Hannah exchanged a look with Nikolai and Tennyson.
“It might be more complicated than that,” Hannah said. “The two of you simply aren’t meant to co-exist in the same universe. It’s against all the laws of nature and magic. She can’t stay here indefinitely.”
“So, what will happen if we don’t get rid of her?”
Hannah wouldn’t meet my eye. “Nothing good,” she said.
“It’s not exactly a common occurrence,” said Tennyson. “Everything written on the topic is pure speculation.”
I raised an eyebrow. Had he known this was on the cards? Was this yet another thing he’d been keeping from me?
He must’ve sensed what I was thinking because he shook his head. “It came up a few times when you were in that place and we were researching how to get you back, but because there was no reaction between the two of you, or any of us and our counterparts, I just assumed it was only speculation.”
“This is literally the last thing we need right now,” I said.
“We need to find her,” said Sam. “Before she hurts someone.”
He had a point. We couldn’t let her run around willy-nilly. Especially not with her wearing my face. But in the end, she wasn’t hard to find.
She was holding court in the dining hall. She sat at the table with Milo and Fatima, but they were surrounded by half our class, all hanging onto every word from Other-me’s mouth.
At our entrance, they all glanced over but then turned their attention straight back to her. Even though I was standing between Tennyson and Nikolai, who the lot of them normally fawned all over, they were still more interested in Other-me. Had she cast a spell on them? What was the deal with her?
She’d been stuck in a dungeon for days, and yet she looked immaculate. Glowing, even.
