The delivering doctor, a deeply Catholic obstetrician at the Cancún hospital where their mother had been rushed following a collapse at a Christmas party at one of the bigger resorts, saw the mark at the moment when the delivery nurse announced the official delivery time. Twelve-oh-one on Christmas morning.
“Milagro!” the doctor had declared, and crossed himself. A miracle.
The story made the papers worldwide. Twins, albinos with shocking blue eyes, born at the stroke of midnight as Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. The first birth of the holiday, and each child was marked with a star like the Star of Bethlehem. The story, nonsensical as it might be, was picked up by wire services around the world. The death of their mother and the coincidence of her name-Mary-fueled the story into one of beauty from tragedy. Before the Jakoby Twins were a minute old they were already legends.
Hecate touched her scar with one hand and with the fingers of the other traced the smooth and unmarked valley between the sleeping girl’s breasts. What would it be like to be ordinary? Hecate mused. Not for the first time.
Even deep in her sleep the girl felt the touch and moaned again. Hecate bent and kissed the smooth place between the girl’s breasts, paused, and then licked the skin, tasting the olio of sweat, perfume, and natural musk. Hecate wondered what her flesh would truly taste like if she could ever work up the nerve to bite. She wondered how blood would change the taste.
“Good God,” said Paris as he came over with the drinks, “are you never satisfied?”
Hecate raised her head and smiled. Her brother never quite understood her, and that was okay. There were plenty of things about her she didn’t want understood. She accepted the martini and sipped it.
“Mmm, perfect.”
Paris sipped his drink, set the glass down on the deck beside the bed, and began pulling on his clothes. He put on black slacks, a charcoal shirt, and loafers without socks, his clothing choice conservative to suit the occasion. This was the second of their twice-monthly visits to their father’s laboratory in Arizona. It was really a prison, but they’d sold their father a line of propaganda stating that he needed a safe haven to protect him from the mud people and the government-or at least those parts of the government that weren’t sucking on the Jakoby tit. Cyrus appeared to be convinced of the necessity for a hidden base and they’d coddled him by allowing him to design it according to his “vision.” The base he created was in the shape of a dodecahedron-which Cyrus said was a crucial form in sacred geometry-and became familiarly known as the Deck. The Twins had built hundreds of security and surveillance devices into it, some of which they let Cyrus know about-they were sure he didn’t know about the others.
“I wish to hell we’d built his lab somewhere closer,” Paris complained. “Fucking Arizona? In August? Besides, it lacks style.”
“Style?”
“C’mon,” he said, “it’s a secret lab with an actual mad scientist. We missed an opportunity to be cool.”
“Secret lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes are so five minutes ago.” Hecate sniffed. “Besides, Dad’s hardly Dr. No.”
“He’s smarter. And eviler. Is that a word?”
“No. But it’s true, Daddy certainly puts the ‘mad’ back in ‘mad scientist.’ ” She and Paris laughed and clinked glasses.
“What have you heard from him lately?” asked Hecate, sipping her martini and continuing to stare at the woman she had shared with her brother for the last three hours. She could still smell the woman, still taste her, despite the vodka. The girl had tasted like summer and freedom.
“His man Otto’s called me a dozen times in the last week. Hmm… I wonder if Otto qualifies as an evil assistant or henchman?”
“Evil assistant, definitely,” decided Hecate.
“I suppose. Anyway, he said that Dad wants the new generation gene sequencer, the Swedish one that was on the cover of Biotech Times.”
“So? Let him have it,” said Hecate.
“He wants two of them, and I think he wants them just because they were on the cover.”
“Who cares? Buy him a roomful.”
“He already has a roomful of Four Fifty-four Life Sciences sequencers,” complained Paris. “He says they’re garbage and his attendants had to restrain him from having a go at them with a fire axe.”
Hecate shrugged. “Why are you making an issue of this? If Alpha wants twenty new computers then let him have them. We can debit his allowance for it. God knows he’s been enough of a cash cow lately to allow him some toys. What’s it to you?”
Paris sneered at his sister’s use of “Alpha.” Dad had started calling himself that a month ago and insisted that his children only address him by that name. Their father’s staff had to address him as Lord Alpha the Most High. For two years before that he’d only answered when addressed as the Orange, which was a vague reference to some alien race whose origins and nature seem to be in some dispute among UFOlogists. Paris was grudgingly indulgent; he had a vein in his forehead that started pulsing every time he had to shape his lips around one of those names. The only one of his father’s names Paris had ever liked was Merlin, which Cyrus had used for most of their teenage years.
Hecate raised one delicate eyebrow.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Paris snapped. “I’m not being cheap or, god help us, ‘thrifty’… it’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between necessary requests and his go-nowhere whims. Like the swimming pool filled with mercury.”
Hecate finished her martini and stood up. She was exactly as tall as Paris-six feet on the dot-and had legs that been commented upon everywhere from Vogue to Maxim. The most common phrase in the magazines was “legs like alabaster.” Crap like that, which Hecate had found flattering when she was in her teens but now found trite. Her silver-white pubic hair was shaved to a tiny vee, and when she raised her leg to step into her panties the cabin lights sparkled on the golden rings in her labia. Her nipple rings were platinum. For her twenty-seventh birthday she was considering having her eyebrows pierced, though she was absolutely certain it would give Dad a coronary. As far as he knew, the Twins were completely without marks except for the starburst scars. He told them over and over again that purity was important, though none of his explanations as to why it was important made any rational sense. Something about keeping the channel open for the celestial god force that was supposed to flow through them.
She pulled on a short pale green skirt and a white satin blouse that caught stray flickers of light when she moved. She sat down, snugged back into the deep cushions in one corner of the Lear, legs crossed, dangling a sandal from her big toe.
The reference to the mercury pool was fair enough; it had been absurdly expensive-$5.35 per hundred grams-and yet startlingly beautiful. Ten thousand gallons of swirling liquid metal. The purchase of it through various companies they owned had caused a brief stock market run on the metal, and there was still speculation in some of the science trade journals that someone somewhere was developing something new that would wow the world.