You’re real, Adam wanted to say, but his voice choked up after pronouncing the Y. His mouth had ceased to respond, and the air got stuck in his chest. The assumption he had tried so hard to impose, that his doppelgänger had been a figment of his imagination, crumbled like a house of cards—and his knees were about to suffer the same fate.
There was his twin in person, standing in the doorway between the elevator and the corridor, steady as a grim bellboy awaiting the guest’s arrival. However, this bellboy was wearing an olive-green military uniform; and of course, his expression was far from friendly. That brown beard, although not bushy, had already surpassed the status of stubble, and that hair, cut short on the sides, but a little misaligned on top, only highlighted the hardness of those green eyes.
“Who-Who are you?” Adam stammered.
The stranger didn’t answer but grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the elevator, then dragged him towards the door at the end of the hall: the one to his loft.
The girl followed them with the same lapidary expression as her partner. The sound of her heels set the pace for the walk.
Adam wriggled out of his twin brother—yes, by now, there was no doubt that the resemblance was more than coincidental—but fearing a violent reaction from one of them, didn’t attempt to escape. And with nerves twisting his insides, a feeling of lightness in his legs, and with no other choice but to follow them, he took advantage of those feet they had to walk together to watch that enigma in uniform.
The man was carrying a dusty old cloth backpack on his back, his uniform was tattered, and his boots were dirty, just like hers, with a bit of dried mud. Actually, he gave the impression of being a member of a paramilitary squad than an army officer. What force did he belong to? Perhaps he was coming from a mission in some wild part of the world, that strange accent was…
Adam remembered the incident with the freighter stranded in the Pannotian sea, on the other side of the ocean, thanks to the military that ruled that island continent. Was this…? No, no. That was impossible. There was no way this man belonged to that army, right?
The appearance of a soldier of the Markabian Empire was not something that Adam was very aware of, the fashion of a fascist regime was not something that interested him much. What he did remember was the Markabian emblem, a horse with wings made of laurel leaves, and as far as he could tell, this person wasn’t carrying one like that. Well, neither that nor any other badge to be exact.
Of course, beyond these doubts, the real question was, who the hell was this guy so identical to him, and how the hell did this guy know him, while he had no idea who he was?
Adam had wondered many times about the identity of his parents; but it was enough for him to know that he’d been abandoned in a hospital as a baby and that no one had claimed him, to suspect that he’d been an unwanted child. He couldn’t investigate his origins either, his orphanage admission record was so empty of data that it might as well have been a blank form.
Now, facing a person who could not be anything other than his twin brother, his curiosity awoke. Did this scowling-faced soldier know why his parents had abandoned him? Did he have any other siblings besides this one?
“Who are you?” he asked his double again. “Where you come from?” No answer this time either. “What do you guys want from me?” Silence. “How did you two get into this building? Who let you in?” He remembered what happened with Little John. The same scenario could have been repeated here but with Ruben or a tenant.
The soldier nodded pointing at the apartment door.
“Open it,” he ordered, and with those words, Adam detected that the stranger not only carried the same accent as the girl but shared the same tone of voice with him; something that disturbed him even more than he already was.
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“Great. I just became a hostage to a bitter version of myself,” he muttered and inserted the key numbers into the electronic lock.
“We are friends,” the girl assured him.
Adam didn’t bother to look back at her; he just opened the door, and with a mock bow, invited them in.
“Make yourselves at home,” he told them. His twin entered first, then the blonde ushered him in and closed the door behind her.
Adam switched on the loft spotlights. His mouth and hands were trembling, and his head was full of warnings and mixed emotions. What were those two going to do with him?
“A glass of wine? A coffee?” he offered them, sarcastically, but his doppelgänger took him to a corner and didn’t need to warn him not to move for him to do so; with that look, no words were needed.
Also, no words were needed to express what crossed the minds of these two intruders when they saw the huge picture that hung on the wall. When they saw the photograph of Adam walking in his underwear among the rocks of a cliff by the sea, the blonde covered her mouth to hide a smile, and his double tightened his lips to perhaps halt a snort of disapproval.
“And what do you want me to say? Some of us were born to be stars,” Adam said. He wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut.
The strangers then went on and conducted what Adam assumed was a reconnaissance of the house, à la fugitives making sure the raided site was a safe hiding place or cops in a full inspection of a fugitive raided site.
The two of them circled the dining table and parted after the living room area, passing by the couches and some decorations and framed pictures of Adam. The soldier crossed through the kitchen and continued up the staircase to the bedroom platform, went up the first few steps, enough to have a general view of up there, and then went down to check that no one was in the bathroom. Meanwhile, she snooped around the laundry room and the other bathroom behind the kitchen area. Judging by her movements, so coordinated and fast, Adam guessed that she was also a soldier, or a member of a guerrilla even though she was wearing jeans and knee-high boots and not a uniform.
“Can you tell me what you’re looking for?” he asked from the corner.
The soldier turned off the spotlights that Adam had turned on, leaving only the lamp that hung over the living room table. The entire loft was in shadows.
Fear stabbed Adam. “What are you gonna do with me?”
“They haven’t come this way… Yet,” said the girl.
Adam pursed his lips. Nervousness rose in his throat and burned in his head. He was about to burst.
“Who hasn’t come? Who are you talking about?”
The two ignored him again.
“All right, that’s it! Who are you two?!” He went toward his double. “Who the hell are you?!”
The man in uniform faced him, and Adam’s attempt to hide his distress and not take a step back was notorious.
“Your twin brother,” said the stranger.
An unexpected rush of emotions managed to lower Adam’s anger a few degrees.
“Well…” he murmured. “That’s pretty obvious.”
“I’m Juzo Romita.”
“Romita? That doesn’t sound like the color of a Proxima area. You are not from here, or are you—?”
“I was also a foundling,” Juzo interrupted, “raised in an orphanage as a baby, just like you. And no, I never knew who our parents were.”
With a sigh, Adam shrugged.
“Well, that saves me a lot of questions. And you, blonde, what’s your name?”
She smiled, although there was no real joy in that gesture, rather melancholy and even some concern.
“Malin Viveka,” she responded.
“Well, Juzo, Malin, you’re gonna tell me what the hell you’re looking for and who you are, or I’ll call the freaking police.”
Under the only light on, Juzo Romita took off his backpack and put it on the living room table. Something metallic rattled inside the bag; he yanked it open and reached in to reveal what he was carrying.
A nervous itch invaded Adam from the nape of his neck to the tip of his heel. Guns! He’s gonna pull out a gun!
Juzo withdrew two pairs of black bracelets, gleaming like chrome. He pulled out two rather bulky, forearm-sized chargers, found a nearby outlet, and plugged them in. The bracelets beeped and an intermittent flash flickered across their surface, indicating they had begun charging remotely. The power of the light over the table plummeted, and the spotlight crackled as if it were going to burst at any moment. Adam, who worked for one of the leaders in the market for new technologies, had never seen devices like those that sucked electricity with such voracity.
“What kind of bracelets are those?”
“They’re called Auriga,” Malin clarified, and reaching into Juzo’s bag, she pulled out something else.
When Adam wanted to see what it was about, his brother got in the way.
“Sit down,” he told him, and pushed one of the chairs back from the table.
Adam had no choice but to obey.