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Don't just stand there.

“Calm down,” I told the clones. “Okay? It’s safe now.”

They tried to catch their breaths, gasping in-out-in-out with a rhythm like a tag-team beatbox, scared eyes huge in their weedy little faces. Their funhouse-mirror-weird appearances were the side effect of the accelerated growth hormones they’d been on since they came out of the gestation vat two years ago. Mom and Dad cloned me with high hopes that their “raising kids without identities” experiment would make them famous, but everyone just ended up calling the twins One and Two.

The numbing shock was wearing off me now. I looked around in a rising panic. One hideous creature sprawled in a pool of congealing blood; the other jutted up from the ground like an ugly tree stump. “Oh, no.” I looked from one corpse to the other. “This is not good.”

The twins skulked up behind me and grabbed at me with clammy fingers, whining that they didn’t want to go home alone. “Good,” I snapped, “help me get rid of these bodies. Stephen’s going to be here any second.”

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