Aaron pelted toward the trees, trying not to think about the health ramifications of hiding out jacketless in the woods; he’d quickly realized he was far from the lights of the city. He wondered how much time it took in sub-zero weather for a person to contract hypothermia. Not to mention one’s outer extremities—how long could an appendage stay frozen and numb before you had to amputate it?

Fortunately, the pines did not mark the entrance to a dense forest, as he’d imagined, but the edge of a ditch, beyond which lay the highway. The trees stood in a tastefully designed row, blocking the looming facility from sight of the road and sparing travelers the feeling that the large squatting building lay in wait to lean over and crunch them up as they drove past.

As he stopped to tug Derek’s shoes onto his feet, Aaron spied a flash of headlights between the branches. He sprinted for the road, knowing that the longer it took him to find a ride, the more likely he was to catch a lift from collectors who’d been called in to search for him. He had no idea how far he was from home, but had the impression that he might not survive the walk back to the perimeter highway.

Aaron had never liked being outside the city. The countryside was home to all kinds of frightening wild animals, and rural dwellers seemed to have decided that this was a good reason to let their own animals (read: dogs) run around wild as well.

Besides these hazards, small towns and country residences were an obvious hotbed for drug dealers, murderers, and other criminals wanting to hide in anonymity away from the watchful eyes of the law. And what did all these types of crooks have in common—as if their own felonious natures didn’t provide enough defense against the world?

Dogs.

He scrambled through the snowy ditch, soaking any patches of his clothing that weren’t already drenched from the rain. His therapist loudly reminded him that such stressful activities were not beneficial to his mental health, but was fortunately not the type to rip apart his abdomen in protest. He climbed up to the highway and waved frantically at the approaching car, squinting as the high beams powered down and the vehicle slowed. It was sleek, black, and attractive without being conspicuous.

The driver leaned over and opened the passenger-side door, and Aaron was about to gasp out his thanks when he saw that it was none other than his own brother, wearing Aaron’s jacket, undone, with the hood pulled over his hair. Aaron leapt into the car and wrapped Jaymie in a soaking embrace.

It was only a few weeks since he’d been picked up on the side of the road by Stan, narrowly avoiding being locked away and sacrificed by a cult. He was having a very lucky run, that autumn, for desperate highway-side rescues. Or so he thought.

***

“Kick? …Kick drum…? Kick drum, please…”

“Oh, sorry.” Jo thumped on the pedal, generating a lethargic heartbeat for the frustrated sound guy to doctor with his mixing board. She’d already set up and line checked her and Jaymie’s guitars, Rex’s bass, and Jaymie’s synthesizers to the best of her abilities, and now sat behind the drum kit, pawing through Aaron’s stick bag.

“Ok, snare?”

She selected two ragged-looking sticks and struck the drum.

Lucas, who drove a hip, worn-down beater of a car, had taken her to pick up the Brzezinskis’ instruments from their house earlier that evening. Rex had told her that they hadn’t gotten Aaron back yet, but that Jaymie was expecting the “clone office guy” (?!) to contact him at any moment. Perplexed, Jo had no choice but to trust that she’d learn the full story once they were all together again. Rex had seemed as calm as always, but Jo knew them well enough to intuit that they were very worried.

The drums were the only BBBFB instrument she didn’t know how to set up on her own, but fortunately there was kit provided; she’d fitted Aaron’s snare drum onto the stand and placed his cymbals close by so he could install them when he got there. If he got there.

Lucas slouched comfortably at a nearby table, typing in his phone. He looked to the stage and gave an encouraging thumbs up. She returned a tight smile and he went back to his work.

“Floor tom… Floor tom…. Floor to—”

“I hear you!” She gave it a reverberant pounding.

She ran her thumbs over the chipped wood of the sticks and marveled at their smooth, furrowed surface. They felt very light, and she thought to herself that it was no wonder he was always letting go by accident and flinging them around. She tried to imitate his relaxed grip, which always seemed so incongruous compared with everything else about him. She imagined the motion of his wrists eliciting a deep, jungle timbre from the toms, or cocked at just the right angle to slide the stick delicately across the edge of a cymbal and end the set with a warm, golden hiss.

“What?” Jo forced herself back to attention.

“I said, do you know what he likes in his monitor?” The sound tech was either a pro or a saint or both; she knew he must be vexed by her, yet he’d been repeating his instructions with drone-like consistency, never losing patience with her preoccupied drifting, never trying to explain her own setup to her or telling her how incompetent every other sound guy in the city was.

“Some of everything,” she said. “More guitar than keyboard, more backup vocal than lead.” She was surprised she remembered. She rose from the drum stool.

“Ok, and the vocal mic back there?”

“Oh, right. ‘Kay, check. One two. Cheeeeeck. One two three I’m a really shitty singer testing testiiiiing this is what my singing sounds like we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl…”

“Good in the monitor?”

“The same old fears, wish you were—”

“Ok, enough! I mean—that’s good, thanks.”

***

“Am I a clone?” Aaron asked tiredly. “Did you somehow, by some unfathomable method, for some unfathomable reason, create me? Like, earlier this year? —And I don’t want to know how, or what material you used, or what my life expectancy is.”

“Yes. I did that. That’s what happened,” said Jaymie, peering through the rain-spattered windshield and turning them back toward the city. “You’re a clone. Sorry.”

“You know I could’ve got killed in there, right?” he asked, still getting his breath back, letting his brother’s confession sink in.

“That would have been so unlucky and unfortunate! Good thing you didn’t!” said Jaymie. Whatever pain Aaron felt at this response he stored away in the same place he’d stashed his future panic attack. The two agonies could wait there, gossiping together about what a procrastinator he was, until he got around to examining and addressing them.

“It’s freezing. Do you not have the heat on?” Aaron fumbled at the dial with numb, wet hands.

“I’m just learning how to dr—I was so worried about you that I forgot all about the heat,” said Jaymie happily. Aaron sighed and held his hands against one of the vents, waiting until he could breathe normally again. Then he looked around.

“Whose car is this?”

***

Jymmy was starting to have serious second thoughts about this whole twin thing.

First, he’d been awkwardly hugged by the wet, hysterical guy, and exploring the driving skills he’d inherited from Jaymie was hard enough without that kind of distraction. It didn’t bother him that his new twin had very cold skin, because he didn’t really notice that kind of thing, but he minded that Aaron was all wet, because he’d stolen a very nice shirt from Spencer whilst eliminating him, and now it was sticking to his chest.

“Unfortunately, the government is not very happy about me having a clone, so we may have to hide away from everybody for a little while,” he told his new brother.

Aaron (Jymmy was proud that he finally remembered his name) did not look pleased at this prospect. He shuddered and stared into the darkness of the road ahead of them. Jymmy tried again.

“I’m very happy that you didn’t die, because there’s a lot of fun things left for us to do together!”

He received a dull, cynical look.

“For example, the band! We’ll make so much amazing music. Isn’t that great?”

Aaron’s expression told him it was not great.

“Also, there are these exciting new things people can have, and they make the world all fun, even when everything that’s actually going on in reality is boring…” He struggled to explain it the way he’d heard about it. “It’s like having a few drinks, but even more so.”

Aaron’s forehead creased with incredulity. “Are you talking about drugs?” he asked. “Because I’ve put up with your little streaks of not sleeping for three days and trying to get me to record eight drum tracks in a night, but if you’re going any further than that, I’m, fucking—I’m out. If you want to get into coke or designer pills or whatever the fuck else, then I’m taking our sibling and—hang on. Are you on…? It would explain some things…” Aaron leaned closer, looking suspiciously into Jymmy’s pupils, which Jymmy was fairly certain were their usual shape and size and were focused very intently on the challenging task of driving a car in a straight line.

“Ok, but I just heard about this one, it’s called TwiLite—it’s like a hallucinogen but it makes you happy at the same time—”

“Like acid? Shrooms? Come on, Jay, we’ve tried that stuff and we just freaked out for most of the time. The whole time, for me.”

“—Which, I’m happy anyway even without it, to be honest, but people I’ve talked to who took Twi seemed to really like it—”

“Are you out of your fucking mind? That stuff makes you crazy. You’ll fry your brain!” Aaron’s emotions, which were not used to being suppressed very long, were creeping into the bottom tones of his voice and threatening to commandeer his tear glands.

Jymmy had little patience for other people’s emotions, and was fast becoming irritated at his new twin for being such a poor sport about all the nice, light adventures he had planned for them.

TwiLite, incidentally, was anything but “lite.” It was a synthetic substance first concocted in a university chemistry lab in Calgary, hours after the lab should have been locked, by a medical bio-chem grad student who’d just unsuccessfully completed an assignment involving some kind of molecular alteration, an adequate description of which would cause most of the type of people who bought Twi to zone out after the words “molecular alteration.” This particular student was very open minded about his failures. As they say, make lemonade—or rather, party drugs.

It was named not after the depraved Mormon vampire texts, but for the fact that ingesting it in any kind of high-dosage or chronic way would put a person in the twilight phase of their existence in short order. (There may also have been a Twilight Zone connection, in reference to the bizarre mental effects it generated.) It was, admittedly, a very good time.

“Why are we talking about this!” Aaron continued. “I’ve been stuck in a weird playground with a bunch of clones, about to get dismantled—”

“I’m trying to use positive thinking! There’s this other one, DMZ—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you! That stuff can kill you! Or make you stupid! No. You’re not doing that. The only people who do it are teenage crusties who are already perma-fried.” Aaron appeared to wrestle with his hysterics, and then swore and started playing with the radio dials, muttering, “Put some fucking music on… Jesus, you sure haven’t gotten any better at driving, have you?”

Jymmy sulked quietly. Having a sibling was not as exciting as Jaymie had made it out to be. This man not only seemed to be No Fun at All, he also struck Jymmy as being extremely high maintenance.

His initial plan had been to convince Aaron that they needed to hide somewhere, away from the collectors, and then to keep him as a drummer in his own band, which would go on to be much more successful and revered than the Bukowskis. He’d thought about the scheme over the course of that day; it didn’t seem fair that Jaymie should get two siblings and he get none.

But as he drove down the murky highway next to a man who looked very much like himself but skinny and wet and tangly-haired, Jymmy was forced to reassess. It was an odd experience—like looking at his own face in the mirror but with the features somehow distorted. It was much different from seeing Jaymie, which was like looking at his own beloved face in the mirror, period. He felt unsettled. There was something off about Aaron, that was for sure.

Aaron turned away from him, finally failed at suppressing his panic attack, whacked the dashboard in frustration, and curled up against the window to let it run its course.

No, Jymmy thought. This would never do. Having a twin was not for him.

He briefly considered getting rid of Aaron the same way he had Spencer, after the collector had tried to convince him to register his clone (thinking, of course, that he was Jaymie). Spence had even gone so far as to suggest he do it without the clone (meaning him, Jymmy!) knowing about it, so Jymmy could go on living his life without being troubled by the authorities. Actually meaning: he’d no longer be off-grid and anonymous, and wouldn’t even know it until it came back to bite him. What fraudulence! What an insidious display of false friendship! Jymmy did what he had to do.

But leaving another body at the side of the highway seemed risky at the moment, because he’d just noticed his new car had a mirror—to see behind you with—and in the mirror had appeared two distant headlights, growing brighter. He felt reluctant to stop driving in case the headlights were somehow related to him.

Besides, he’d gone to all this trouble; perhaps it was fair to give Aaron a few more minutes to prove he was worth keeping around.

So, he drove on in the night, toward comforting city lights—and toward discreet alleys and dark hidden corners, if it came to that.