Dopple Games
Keep your enemies closer.
The family my sister and I never knew… have found us, and they’re a pair of assassins.
Their magic makes them untouchable, and it’s let them terrorize our city to wipe out any clues about the existence of magic. And these brothers think we were born into that mission with them.
Our only chance is to play along. Our own illusions can cover up our secrets better than their killing, if we can convince them what the right deception can do. Playing their game might protect the ones we love, or even work out their own power and use it to stop them. Or it could make us the murderers we’ve always feared we came from.
With them or against them, every move we make will have a price.
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Sample
Don’t make me sleep, doctor… the shadows are watching…
No, why was the Blindspot only watching?
I fought to hold onto that question, through the night as the jolts of pain from my thigh tried to beat back the dulling that seeped through me. Each time my head rolled, I stared around, looking for the small motion that could be an eye or some other trace… some trace of the killer lurking within the surface of the dark-tarred roof, or was that a wall…
But it’s killers. Two Blindspots, like a family. Like us.
Valerie’s hands had wrapped and wrapped the wound in me, and covered me in our illusion magic. But I had more than my sister here—the other hands I felt must be Emma, still helping me, still making herself a target. So much more a target, if I’d heard what I thought they said about Valerie and me.
I had to speak to Emma, tell her what that risk meant to me. Except, moans or mumbles kept leaking out if I opened my mouth. And it would be telling the truth to strangers… I tried clamping my jaw shut.
Just look. Just think.
The sights swam around me, blurring what could be the hints of the Blindspots circling. I held my eyes open, but my vision came and went.
Was this the same place? I hung between their shoulders, carried along a street through the soft-splintered chaos of the people out on this frightened night, so easy to rest in silence within the warmth of my sister’s concealing magic.
Or had we reached a car? Or was I on a rooftop when I was stabbed… can’t be, how’d they get me down the ladder… but the rooftop had been real. The voices swelled to be more loud, more unclear, and I fought to still look around.
Were they watching? We could use every sign about them, every clue about why the Blindspots had killed those cops and still let us live. Underneath the one growing, crushing sense that the answer was Emma—Emma, and her mother too, were just hostages to control us.
Now that the Blindspots had an interest in us…
Was Valerie talking to a shadow, was that one of them? The moment ended before I could hear.
I couldn’t hear if they said they were our family.
I kept trying to stare, to learn, until the doctor brought the mask down over my face, and the gas whispered. I tried to look for Valerie, to make her stay, keep me from saying the illusion words—
Then there was nothing to stare at.
* * *
Our family was death…
No, our family was dead, I hadn’t learned Valerie had survived yet…
No, now I had learned, that was right…
And our parents used to kill, she’d said, if someone came too close to seeing our magic. How many times, how many…
I should ask her. But coming into focus was the hazy bed under me and the hazy sister sitting close beside it, and I must not be fit to talk yet.
The bed that spread under me, I didn’t quite feel that, not like the gnawing ache in my leg. If I were someone else who could be in a real hospital, then I’d have been drugged, dragged, deeper away from this pain. Or locked away by the police.
Something had loomed beside me, an IV. Now it was gone.
Seeing was hard, just to know when Valerie’s illusion had changed, and when I must have grayed out and found she’d left, come back. Emma came in to look at me too, and sometimes glints of pain shone out of her eyes, the kind Valerie would never let slip here. Even Emma’s mother Lydia rolled her chair in once, to give me a look I couldn’t read.
Hostages.
Knowing they were that let me focus. The walls, the soft sounds beyond the room and the building, all that made this Lydia’s house, and her letting us both in here said just how much threat they held over her and Emma.
All around us, some of the traces along those walls, ceiling, floor, couldn’t be shadows, and they weren’t the betraying glimmers of my sister camouflaged against them. No, some of those had to be the assassins and their magic that somehow let them move inside the surfaces, unstoppable.
But the Blindspots knew our father’s name. I held to that as my sight and my head cleared over the passing hours.
When Valerie brought me a bowl of soup, the chemicals in my head dulled the broth’s taste to thickened water but picked out every spice in it. And we couldn’t say much, not with the killers watching, and Emma and Lydia under their gaze too.
Just when I thought I’d been the hostage, the one they’d stabbed and threatened, to make Emma send out those debunking videos. She really set up the whole system, to tell the world about magic and the danger of these killers and us along with them… and she still tricked her mother with a hidden plan to say it was all an empty publicity stunt for some movie.
Emma did all that to lure out the Blindspot, and still protect me. Thinking of that kept some of the coldness away.
I’d given her one of my moonstones, but no time to learn it.
And now the killers knew about her.
Look. Think.
Nobody had to tell me that this room must be somewhere in Lydia’s house. Or that somehow Emma and Lydia, or Valerie, had found someone to sew my wound up but keep me hidden away here—when I couldn’t even guess how they’d gotten me down the roof’s ladder alive.
Valerie kept standing, drifting outside and back again. Her quiet when she sat beside me was a better warning than any words, of how far from safe we were.
Her best comfort was when she took my hand and slipped several of our moonstones into it. She must have taken them away while I was fading out, but now she trusted I was clear-headed enough to control our magic again. So different from how long I’d kept watch over her after that one fall she’d taken, just days ago.
And she had to be keeping the phone, the one with Ingram Knowles’s crystal of seeing.
Every time Valerie stepped outside, it must be looking for keys to the trap the Blindspots had us in. Meanwhile Emma left what had to be an hour between each of her brief visits, as if distance could make our watchers forget how much of a hold she gave them over me.
But the killers were here, watching us all. That made this a few hours they weren’t targeting anyone else, and a chance to watch for every clue about what might stop them, or if we had no other choice against part of our own family.
Once I heard a voice from outside the door:
“They saw too much. You do know how it is?”—the hard, pitiless voice the Blindspot used.
“I know that…” The rest of Valerie’s answer was too low for me to catch.
She was matching wits with murderers, trying to keep them off guard, while Emma was trapped under their gaze and Lydia with her, and I was stuck in a bed with a leg that spasmed when I tried to move it…
Slowly my senses focused. The burning hole in my leg became just another sensation, as my breathing flowed and my eyes memorized the room. The rich wooden walls between the browned-butter drapes, the intricate carpet patterns, became familiar fields to watch for any motion within them. My hearing stretched, wider and wider across the broad house and its stillness, to find the islands of sound around Emma and Lydia or when Valerie moved. The place should have a few staff here, and mother and daughter should be away at work, but no.
I waited, gathered my strength, waiting for the next meal, the next sign of something, anything.
Until…
A car rumbled up the driveway asphalt. A metal door closed, a wooden one opened, new footsteps made their way toward me.
Valerie had let them through, hadn’t she? I let my tactics settle in my head, felt the moonstones in my pocket ready to answer my will.
The door opened.
From the surgery. Before I’d gone under I’d glimpsed a gaunt, pale man with a skeletal look to him, and even with my sight clearer he wasn’t much different now. He carried a great long leathery case, and he laid it down beside the bed. Lydia rolled in behind him.
He told her “One last time, I can’t recommend this so soon—”
“There are reasons.” Her gaze pinned me in place for a moment. “None of us want him stuck here right now.”
“I suppose not. And you, there’s no point asking for something like your name, is there?” and his look at me frayed with compassion. “First of all, show me you can sit up.”
“I think…” I pulled at my weight, but my leg hurt, the bed was soft, and lying still had been easier for tracking the Blindspots.
Then the doctor leaned forward, concern opening his mouth.
My strength came free and I twisted upright. The wave of pain was nothing, just different from before.
Lydia simply nodded, and rolled back to the door and out.
And the doctor closed in.
My nerves twitched in me—I couldn’t remember ever having a doctor this close to me until last night. Now I managed to slide my pants down—new ones, I realized, sweatpants that had a space cut open for the bandages—and let him look at the patched-up wound in my thigh. I held to my role as a patient, and he fell into his own to examine me with short, impersonal touches like nudging at off-kilter books on a shelf. Our simple tasks kept me from thinking about what might come next.
Then he let out a tiny sigh that he might have thought I missed, and the tight skin on his face found the slack to squeeze tighter in a look of sympathy.
“The stitches and the bandages are holding. I’ve never seen an injury healing quite like this, and I thought I knew my knife wounds. But…” He reached down and unlatched the case he’d brought.
He drew out a long, leg-sized brace, jointed in two parts. The steel under the plastic straps gleamed, catching the eye like some of the handcuffs I kept getting caught in… I studied it, trying to see it all as the thing I’d need to get used to.
“Your injury is still too new to walk on, even with this taking the weight.” His eyes locked onto mine. “I don’t know what you think you need to do. But there’s going to be pain.”
“I appreciate the warning. I’ll try not to need this much.” Empty promises, that fooled neither of us. I was not lying here while the Blindspots decided who lived and died.
He reached down and began fastening the brace onto me. The straps were already set to run above and below my wound, and his touch was so light the pain was nothing more than I already had.
I looked out at the closed door, where Lydia had gone. That woman had lost the ability to walk because of us—before I was born—and yet she could force herself to find me a doctor like this.
“Slowly, now,” he said as he stepped back.
The braced leg dragged as I positioned it where I sat. A click locked the hinges to hold my knee straight.
The doctor drew a cane from his case and held it out to me, but I planted my good leg and pushed myself up. A testing hint of my weight settled on the braced knee, a spur of pain but nothing more.
Then I took the metal length of the cane and set it for a step.
The doctor moved out in front of me, a whole ten feet away. “Alright then,” he said. “If you want to impress me, show me how slowly you can walk to me.”
He thinks I’ve got no self-control. The grin never touched my face.
The leg moved less from muscle than by swinging it along with my body, but I shifted it across part of a step and settled its weight on the brace and the cane, then reached my good leg past it. A slow, slow sway brought the braced leg forward again.
These glacial movements didn’t only make them safer—they also stretched each out into a struggle to hold my balance at every moment, without momentum to force it along. The doctor watched me, trying to hide how his body tensed ready to rush forward if I tipped. I edged my way across to him.
“Better, better,” he said. “And whatever else you do, rest, every second you can. Ms. Lynn and her daughter know when to call me.”
“Thank you, so much. I’ll try not to push this.”
He smiled, at last. “We’ll hold you to that.”
So I could still lie after all.