Hailey recoils, stumbling back in shock as she stares at the duplicate in front of her. Then, her face hardens into an angry expression as she snaps out, “It’s a trick. Who are you and how do you know my face?”
Across the field, her doppelganger’s eerie face reflects in the dancing light of the fire. With a bitter smile, she says, “Shoes. We were shopping for shoes that day in the mall, when Malefic attacked and A. J. died.”
“That’s,” Hailey begins to respond before her other self cuts her off.
“Yeah, yeah,” the doppelganger replies with a bored wave of her hand. “Just one shoe. I know. I was there.”
She flickers for a moment, her hand waving as the words echo in Hailey’s ears. “I was there.”
Her flippant expression betrays her for a moment as something akin to a sickness crosses through her eyes. Then, her expression hardens as she adds, “I am you, this will be easier if you accept the truth of it.”
Hailey asks with confusion and uncertainty leaking into her voice, “The truth of what?”
“I’m here to warn you,” her doppelganger says.
The words seem to sit ominously in the flickering light of the fire. Perhaps its only chance, but as she speaks a shadow crosses over her face.
“You need to know. She’s coming back. And this time you won’t have Bel whispering in your ear or Beacon to save you.” The doppelganger raises her red sword as she continues, her voice rising in a swell, “I’m not here to kill you, I’m here to warn you. When she returns, there’s only one way to survive.”
Hailey takes an uncertain step back. Her voice slips out, almost involuntarily, asking before she even realizes she spoke, “How?”
The doppelganger gives a bitter smile, the markings on her skin twisting into an ugly knot as she does. “You know that voice inside your head? Better start listening. He’s the only one who can give you the power you need to win this fight.” Her eyes turn toward the fire as she adds in a haunted voice, “Just make sure you’re willing to pay.”
She flickers, her words echoing as she does. “Willing to pay.”
“I don’t understand,” Hailey says, shaking her head. “None of this makes sense! How are you here, and what do you mean?”
Still staring deep into the flames, her doppelganger replies in a clipped voice, “I’m you from the future, a future." A contrite expression crosses her face. "Or a different dimension, the spell I used didn’t exactly come with detailed instructions.” She turns back to face Hailey. “All I know is what happens next. You can’t win this fight, not without stronger magic. The kind that takes sacrifice.”
"Sacrifice."
Hailey takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for a second, and then opens them. Shaking away the doppelganger's words, she says in as calm and confident voice as she can, “Then I’ll be the one to make that choice. This is my dimension, my timeline, so I make the decisions.” As she speaks, it is as if the final message from Belinda speaks with her. In accord Hailey and Belinda affirm the power of their choices, come what may.
“Then we die,” her double responds with a sneer. “And after us, the rest of Liberty City dies too.”
Suddenly, the evil-Hailey leaps toward Hailey screaming in rage as she brings her broadsword down in a wide arc! Eyes widening in surprise, Hailey barely has time to bring up her dagger before the two weapons collide in a clash of sparks and steel. Thrown to the ground by the force of the attack, Hailey has no chance to stop the follow up blow. With a contemptuous kick, her counterpart shoves Hailey into the dirt and then knocks aside her dagger, sending it spinning a few feet away on the turf.
Bringing her blade up and around, the doppelganger buries it in the ground a couple inches from Hailey’s face. The red-lined blade quivers in the ground as it’s owner drops to her knees, straddling Hailey. Shoving her arms back into the ground, she leans in close and whispers, “Your choice? Your choices get people killed, you arrogant bit-”
She flickers, leaning in again and hissing, “Your choices kill your friends. Bella is dead, because of you. A. J. burned, because of you. Theo is going to die in agony, because of you. Missy tries to help, and get's ripped apart for it. Ginny wants to play heroine, until She peeled her out of her suit and bleeds her to death. Everyone you know, everyone you love, dies.”
The words hit Hailey harder than any dagger ever could. The absolute certainty in her counterpart's face. The sharp confidence that this decision, these words, will result in the death of everyone and everything she loves. From anyone else, the threat would be idle boasting or intimidation. From herself, it is something far worse. It is the reflection of Hailey's worst fears, the thoughts that kept her up at night and out of her suit for the past few months. The fears that prompted her to end her relationship with Theo.
Pale faced and trembling, Hailey stares up at her doppelganger as she flickers, causing her final words to repeat. They echo in her ears, “everyone you love, dies,” condemning her. Fear, doubt, indecision all play across her face as the words sink in.
It strikes Hailey with sudden certainty that this is her. She begins to realize precisely what that fact means, that this girl suffered and that suffering broke her. A feeling of trepanation pooling in her gut, Hailey begins to wonder if she too has the capacity for this kind of cruelty, this ability to cut with her words alone. What then, with this evil twin's blade be like if just her words can do this much damage?
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Above her, the doppelganger reaches down to her stomach and shakes Hailey from her spiraling thoughts by tracing a line across her stomach. She does so above the shining magical material of her suit, but Hailey feels a phantom pain nonetheless. The line is none other than the one Becca left, the scar no amount of mystical or modern medical attention could repair.
“She’s not done with Liberty City,” the doppelganger says in a tight voice. “And She’s not done with you.”
Then she sits back, and lifts the dark material of her own costume, exposing her midriff and her own matching scar. This one, however, doesn’t stop at one line. There are angry, jagged lines running across her stomach in a wild haphazard pastiche of the original cut. All of them shine with red light like rents in her skin. She raises her hands to her scars, letting the light play across her fingers. Then she drags them up to her mouth, tracing the lines there. Up close, Hailey realizes with sudden, horrid, clarity that the lines are not as straight and clean as they initially appeared.
They are bite marks, the uneven ridges of teeth apparent from the light. Marks that are hauntingly familiar.
“That’s right,” her double says with a cruel grin, “Becca will be back.”
“Becca.”
With sudden, horrible, clarity Hailey understand how she might become this twisted reflection of herself. Those uncertain days in the wake of her fight with Becca. The feeling of Becca’s lips, and teeth, on hers. The slide of her knife as it penetrated her stomach. The gasping desperation as she tried and failed to hold her body together after, bleeding and unable to cover the precise gash with her small hands.
Her voice, in another’s mouth, shakes Hailey out of her memories. “Do you understand now?” she asks urgently, “do you see? If you keep chasing around petty criminals like Tango or the Queen of Hearts you won’t be ready. You won't survive. We won't survive.”
The reminder that this is her gives Hailey a burst of strength. Her failures, losing Bella, the death of Belinda, Hailey knows she isn't perfect. And if she isn't, her doppelganger isn't either.
“That’s what this is about?” Hailey cries up, shoving her doppelganger away. “You want me to fight Becca?”
Dragging herself to one knee, the doppelganger’s robe slips revealing ever more of those red bites running across her body. Seeing the mass of them now, from a distance, Hailey realizes they almost seem like cracks. It looks like a broken porcelain doll, clumsily glued back together as best someone could manage. But the cracks stay. The pieces will never fit together quite right again, no matter how hard anyone tries.
Stabbing her sword into the ground, her mirror looks Hailey in the eyes with a weary, bitter, expression. “No.” She shakes her head, some of her hair coming loose from behind her black cowl. “We want to kill Becca.”
Behind her, the bonfire roars up at the sky as if the flames are responding to her words. Wreathed by the halo of orange light coming off the blaze, the doppelganger’s eyes seem possessed by an unholy madness. Hailey feels a chill run down her spine despite the heat. Somehow, she knows that this twisted version of herself will spare no effort, and no one, in her all-consuming quest for revenge. The only question is if that effort will include Hailey, and how many others who may end up as fuel on the pyre of her doppelganger’s revenge.
Right then, dear reader, Hailey makes a choice.
Calmly, she retrieves her discarded dagger and walks to the fallen figure of the Queen of Hearts. “No.” Hailey says it quietly as she passes her doppelganger. “I’m going to take the Queen to a hospital, turn her over to the police, and then go home. Tomorrow I’ll go to school, tell Ginny about all of this madness, and start planning for whatever is about to come. Then I’ll go home and start to train and learn spells, using the library Bel left me.” She looks over and meets her doppelganger’s gaze. “But I won’t help you kill. That’s not why I’m here.”
“Not yet,” her other self hisses back.
Hailey nods, acknowledging the truth of the statement, recognizing that the presence of the doppelganger means exactly this, before hoisting the Queen with a mystic set of restraints and levitating her as she walks out of the stadium and away from the bonfire.
Across town, in a dingy back alley hole in the wall a man in a black metal mask slides a small figurine across a table. “It’s done.”
“How… delicious…” The table’s other occupant gives an animalistic smile, bits of drool dropping from his mouth to the dingy wood. Licking his lips, he slams a hand down on the table and runs his fingernails deep into the surface. “You’re… sure…”
“Yes,” the other figure cuts him off. “The police report suggests someone with strength powers, exactly as stipulated. And the figurine is here. According to our deal, it’s yours.”
“Heh…” the man snaps his teeth together and forcibly swallows back a mass of drool before panting out, “keep it! Heh…! Burn it…! Drown it! I… don’t… care!”
The man in the steel mask pauses. “You paid me quite well to steal something you don’t want?”
At this, the man’s eyes go wide. They almost bulge out of his head as he lets out a high pitched laugh, throwing his head back. Then he snaps back, so quickly it almost seems as if he were never laughing at all.
“Some… heirloom… trash…?” He picks up the figurine and regards it for a moment before tossing it back across the table. “Worthless… garbage…” Then he gives a toothy smile. “But… sending… Coven… message… heh.” His smile morphs into a self-satisfied smirk as he adds, “War… soon. Heh. Fun… fighting.”
Vicious regards the figurine for a moment before sending tendrils of metal out from his fingers to surround it like a cocoon. “Alright,” he says as he tucks the now secure figurine away. “don’t get seller’s remorse. I fulfilled my contract. If you change your mind and want this back, it’ll cost you.” With that, he stands and leaves the dive.
In a different room in yet another corner of town, a livid old lady, Madam, carefully lifts a priceless glass sculpture. Delicate, expensive, and gorgeous, she regards it for a few seconds before hurling it at the wall in front of her. As the piece shatters and the glass shards join the others, she screams, “We,” struggling she contains her rage enough to snarl out, “we are going to tear this city apart!” She turns to regard a group of stony-faced women arranged around the table in front of her. “If it takes literally ripping apart the rocks down to their foundations we will retrieve it! We start tonight. Grab every low-life informant, every mole, and every streetwise kid with an ear on the pavement. Find out what they know, even if it takes tearing it out of their head to get it. Find out who is stupid enough to provoke us. Find out who dares steal Her work! But most of all, save the figurine!
With that, Madam turns and seizes another impeccable, handcrafted, glass sculpture. This time she doesn’t bother to inspect it, she simply hurls it with a scream at the table.
The city is on the brink, dear reader! Enemies circling, plots afoot, and Hailey returning to school, all this and more next time in... "Learning in Darkness!"