Her hair, once a drab color of dishwater blonde, was now white tinged with the slightest hint of yellow, as though she had bleached it. Her eyelashes had yet to grow back.
Iris didn’t care. School started in a week, and she just didn’t care. Maybe she wouldn’t even go. It wasn’t like her mom would make her. Come to think of it, Iris hadn’t even seen Anita Banik in a few days. Her mom went on occasional benders like this. She’d be gone for three days or a week. In truth, Iris preferred her mom out on a drunken bender to being drunk at home. It was simpler that way, and Iris had exhausted her ability to worry about her mom a long time ago. Anita always turned up eventually, whether the twins wanted her to or not.
At first, after Iris was struck, Ivan worried over her. He tried to talk her into going to a doctor. Iris ignored him. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually. She had more energy than she used to. She felt stronger. She hardly needed to sleep anymore. She lay awake at night and turned her black cloud on and off, letting it rain on her for just a moment, and then commanding it to stop. She directed it around the room, and it always did as she instructed, hovering here, then there. Changing shape for her. Splitting into two and then merging back together.
But sometimes Iris touched the place on her thigh where her scar used to be, and she felt a crippling pang of loss. She wondered if there was anything she could do to repair things with Ivan. To make them like they used to be.
Someone was at the door. Knocking instead of ringing the bell. Iris couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come to their house. Maybe Anita had lost her key.
But when Iris opened the door, she found not her mom, but a man. A man with long white hair and clouded eyes, dressed from head to toe in white. His face was smooth and tan, and he smiled at Iris, though she doubted he could actually see her through his heavy cataracts.
He held out a hand and Iris saw, on his palm, a veiny red marking. A Lichtenberg figure like the one etched on her scalp.
“Iris Banik,” the man said in a voice made for radio, it was so fluid and polished. The voice of someone who’d spent most of his life speaking, and had perfected the art. “May I beg a moment of your time? I have traveled a long way to meet you.”
Iris shook her head, confused. “Why?”
“Because you’re unique, and I have need of you. We have great work ahead of us.”
Her instinct should have been to slam the door in the stranger’s face. Instead, she gave him her hand and shook, and the second her skin touched his, she felt a jolt of energy surge through her and wind its way up her arm.
When he spoke again, his lips did not move, but his voice, like a radio broadcast, was in her head, static and all.
It is time to leave this life you’ve known. A new life awaits you. A new family.
A new family?
Iris waited for her scar to tingle at the idea of leaving her twin behind. But then she remembered that her scar was gone. She was no longer half of a whole. She was alone.
Instead of the tingling along her now nonexistent scar, Iris felt a sort of humming pressure inside her mind. The man in white fixed her with his filmy eyes.
I can give you what you desire. I can forge a new bond between you and your twin. A bond that can never be broken.
Iris opened the door wider and allowed the man inside. When they were alone and the door was closed, he put his hands on the top of her head, and the humming pressure returned. He made everything turn white. He made everything make sense.
After that, Iris understood what needed to be done. The man in white would help her do it.
“There’s a storm headed this way,” the man in white told her before he left. “You know what to do.”
“Put him in the path of the lightning,” Iris said, her own voice sounding dreamy and disconnected from her body. She didn’t feel like herself anymore. The man in white had done something to her, she realized, but not something bad. At least, she didn’t think so. He had simply made her feel calm, and cleansed, and certain of the course of action she must take.
But a worm of doubt wriggled beneath this layer of certainty. “What if the lightning doesn’t want him?” she asked.
“It will,” the man in white said. “God told me it would be so, just as He told me where to find you. You and your brother belong with me and mine.”
“What about our mother?” Iris asked. “She might not want to let us go.”
The man in white smiled and answered without speaking.
She has been dealt with. You will not see her again.
Iris knew she should have cared about this, but she didn’t. All she cared about now was doing what the man in white told her to do, because that would give her what she wanted.
It would give her Ivan back.