“It wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought it would be. The hard part was realizing how good I was at it. That scared me. It’s never really stopped scaring me.” Barnaby was the only one she’d confessed this to. He’d told her not to worry; she was just one of those people who were good at anything they tried. An overachiever.

Alex cleared the sudden lump out of her throat. “But I got results. I saved a lot of lives. And I never killed anyone – not while I was working for the government.” Now she stared out into the darkness, too. She didn’t want to see his reaction. “I’ve always wondered if that was enough to make me less than a monster.”

She was fairly certain, though, that the answer was no.

“Hmmm…” It was just a low, lingering sound in the back of his throat.

She kept staring at the dark nothing in front of her. She’d never tried to explain this choice – the line of dominoes that had made her what she was – to another human being. She didn’t think she’d done a very good job.

And then he quietly chuckled.

Now she turned to stare up at him in disbelief.

His lips were puckered in an unwilling half smile. “I was braced for something really disturbing, but that all sounded a lot more reasonable than I expected.”

Her brows pulled together. He found her story reasonable?

His stomach growled. He laughed again, and the tension of the moment seemed to vanish with the sound.

“Did Kevin not feed you?” she asked. “This is a help-yourself kind of place, I guess.”

“I could use some food,” he agreed.

She led him to the freezer, trying to hide her surprise that he seemed to be treating her no differently than before. It had felt dangerous, speaking all of that out loud. But then, she supposed he already knew the worst of it, having learned it in the cruelest way possible. Her explanation was really nothing after that.

Hungry Daniel might have been, but he wasn’t too thrilled by the available supplies. He unenthusiastically chose a pizza, as she had, grumbling about Kevin’s deficiencies in the kitchen, which seemed to be long-standing, from what she heard. The conversation rolled easily, like she was just an ordinary person to him.

“I don’t know where he gets all that manic energy,” Daniel said. “Eating nothing but this.”

“Arnie can’t be much of a cook, either. Where’d he go, anyway?”

“He hit the sack before Kev left. Early riser, I infer. I think his room is back that way.” Daniel gestured in the opposite direction from the stairs.

“Does he seem a little strange to you?”

“What, with the mute thing? I figure that’s just the glue in his relationship with Kevin. You have to be able to stomach listening to someone else talk nonstop if you’re going to be friends with Kev. No room for your own words.”

She snorted.

“There was ice cream under the pizza. You want some?” he asked.

She did, so the search began for silverware and bowls. Daniel did locate an ice cream scooper and soupspoons, but they had to put the ice cream into coffee mugs. As she watched him ladle the ice cream out of the carton, something occurred to her.

“Are you left-handed?”

“Er, yes.”

“Oh. I thought Kevin was right-handed, but if you’re identical twins, doesn’t that mean —”

“Usually,” Daniel said, passing her the first mug. The ice cream was plain vanilla, not her first choice, but she was happy to have any kind of sugar right now. “We’re a special case, actually. We’re called mirror-image twins. About twenty percent of identical twins – the ones where the egg splits late, they think – develop as opposites. So our faces aren’t exactly the same unless you look at one as a reflection. It doesn’t mean much, for Kevin especially.” He savored his first bite of ice cream, then smiled. “I, on the other hand, will run into a problem if I ever need an organ transplant. All of my insides are reversed, so it’s very complicated to replace certain things unless they find an organ from another reversed twin who also just happens to be a genetic match. In other words, I better hope I never need a new liver.” He took another bite.

“It would make a lot more sense to me if it was Kevin who had everything backward.”

They laughed together, but it was much gentler than it had been earlier in the day. Apparently they’d gotten the hysteria out of their systems.

“What does the paper say – the one with the command for the dog?”

Daniel pulled the card from his jeans pocket, glanced at it, and then handed it to her.

It read, in all caps, ESCAPE PROTOCOL.

“Do you think something bad happens if we say it out loud?” she wondered.

“I suppose it’s possible. I’ll believe anything after seeing his secret lair.”

“Kevin really needs to hire someone to come up with better names for his commands. He’s not very good at that part.”

“I guess that could be my job now.” Daniel sighed. “I do like dogs. It might be fun.”

“It’s still kind of teaching, right?”

“If Kev lets me do any.” Daniel scowled. “I wonder if he sees me just mucking out stalls? I wouldn’t put it past him.” And then he sighed again. “At least the students all appear to be pretty bright. Do you think I could teach them to play volleyball?”

“Well… actually, yeah. They don’t seem to have many limitations.”