a wig of long, stiff, honey-colored hair. The other, identical except for

the wig, which was pert, dark, and short. The boys named these new

creatures Jessie and Betty.

Jessie and Betty were made part of the schoolroom tableau, along with the teacher, Mrs. Munson, and the four students in desks, Tina,

Tony, Terrell, and Ty.

Jessie and Betty were to be the school nurse and the new music

teacher.

Betty, the dark-haired one, was the music teacher. She had a saxophone draped over one shoulder. Her eyes were blue and never looked

at you, always looked, by virtue of some artist’s design or simple error,

away.

Benjamin was the first to suggest that the two new mannequins

might be made into the equivalent of Charles and Benjamin. “We would just need a saw,” he’d said. “A saw, some glue, some

clamps.”

This had not started the fight. The fight had started because

Charles had felt they should have identical hair, but Benjamin had

liked the fact that they had this small difference.

They had been sawing awkwardly away at the tough plastic when

the fight turned ugly. Charles had threatened his brother with the

saw, waving it around furiously as they conducted their argument in

the reflection of a tilted, oval-framed mirror on a floor stand. Benjamin had started screaming, “Use the saw, use it, use it to

saw us apart! Saw us apart!”

Then Benjamin had yanked a hinged arm from Jessie and started

beating Charles with it.

Not their first fight or their last.

But the two of them had always found a way to manage. They

loved each other. What was the alternative? They were stuck together. “We will not mutilate this girl just because she reminds you of

Sadie McLure,” Charles said.

“Look at her,” Benjamin sneered. “She thinks she’s beautiful.

Does she think I’m beautiful?” He glared at Minako. She was handcuffed wrist and ankle to the gurney. He tried to force his face down

close to hers but Charles resisted. They came close to toppling over.

KimKim, who had been lent to them as servant, steadied them with a

timely grab for Charles’s arm. He let go as quickly as he could. Ling,

who had been across the room, glared poisonously at KimKim. “Brother, we cannot make ourselves beautiful by making others

hideous,” Charles pleaded. “You know that this is not the way. We are

here with our people. They love us.”

“They have no choice!” Benjamin raged.

“Just as people have no choice but to fear us,” Charles argued. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it all. Enough. All my life …I want . . .” “What do you want, Ben?” Charles could feel his own heart and

lungs clenching, tightening from his brother’s emotion.

“To no longer be this,” Benjamin cried out. “To be a man and

not a freak. To smile at a girl and not have her run screaming. It’s

pathetic, isn’t it? I should accept my life. Pathetic.”

“We aren’t accepting it,” Charles snapped. “And please stop, we’re

hyperventilating, I can barely breathe! We are accepting nothing. We are changing the world! We are remaking the human race! We’ve begun on this ship, my God, did you hear the cheers and the cries? It

was love, brother.It was love for us.”

Benjamin said nothing, just stared at the terrified girl with the

sprinkling of freckles. At long last, in a dreamy voice, Benjamin said,

“I’ve thought of having Burnofsky wire me.”

“What?”

“But it wouldn’t work, would it. Do you know, Charles? Because

when you wire a brain, you can only connect those things that are

already there. What is there in my brain, in my memory, that could be

tapped for happiness? For joy? When that evil girl, that spawn of Grey

McLure, was in my brain, what was she wiring together? Old hates

and new. Old pain and new pain. Emptiness, brother, you know it’s

true, emptiness. That’s what she made me face. That’s what I couldn’t

pretend away. Wherever she stuck a pin she hit sadness and rage and

pain. And nowhere happiness.”

“There were good times,” Charles said weakly.

Benjamin made a small laugh. “Do you know what memory she

tapped into? Certainly not what she had hoped, but there it was, the

memory of that day, that morning, when Sylvie and Sophie Morgenstein awoke.”

Charles bit his lip and closed his eyes, remembering now as

well.

“How they screamed,” Benjamin said. “Not because they saw us, but because we had made them into us. Pretty twins sewn together. They saw the horror of the rest of their lives stretching out before

them. They saw the horror of being us.”

“They were in pain,” Charles said. “They were startled.” “I was never so happy again as at that moment,” Benjamin said. Charles remained silent. How could he argue? The memory was

clear to him as well. The feeling of …what? Revenge? Yes, revenge.

Not just on the Morgenstein twins, but on everyone who had ever

sneered or mocked or shrieked.

Revenge.

The word must have filtered into Benjamin’s brain because now

he took it up. “Revenge on all of them. On our father and mother. On

life. On God.”