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“Yes. Right.” Thank God for Reece, who’s a thousand times better than me at pulling together his shit in the middle of a media circus. “We just meant…other friends. It’s, errrmmm, a big night for the city. Everyone’s here tonight! Wow. Did Taylor Swift and Katy Perry both come dressed as the black swan?”

As soon as the pack races each other back toward the step-and-repeat backdrops, he scoops up my hand and sprints up the stairs. I’m right with him, not breaking pace as we get to the main plaza level. The towering Lipchitz sculpture, called “Peace on Earth”—too damn bad I don’t have time to conjure some meme-worthy one-liners at the moment—is at the center of two hundred miniature water jets.

At least it was.

Until the second Reece and I skid to a stop in front of the thing, joined within seconds by our son and the rest of the team.

At once, everyone gasps—except Lux, who couldn’t be more excited—as Reece blankets the water jets beneath a sizzling force field. And then pulls all two hundred of them out of the ground.

And then twists the whole grid until it’s vertical.

And then turns all two hundred of those jets into actual jets. As in, vertical blue cylinders wrapped in sizzling blue electrical currents. As in, two hundred superpowered missiles primed and ready to launch.

Three, two, one…

“Time for the bitch to get bolted.”

Reece growls it before pulsing into an arcing leap…and then hurling the glowing tubes down the walkway that leads to the Center’s other two theaters. Both the Taper and the Ahmanson are dark tonight, meaning there’s only a few landscaping and engineering employees over here.

Along with a woman who looks exactly like me.

Running like hell. Dragging two little girls dressed in tutus.

A freakish experience in its own right, though there’s no time to dwell on it. I’m still focusing on my husband and how he’s started spinning the tubes in midair. Along the way, he twists and turns and manipulates them to “borrow” pieces of the steel furniture and cement buildings that they pass. Heat-molding the extra ingredients—until he’s strengthened the two hundred tubes into just ten large poles.

Just ten poles?

Correction. The columns would make Scottish caber tossers look like toothpick jugglers—though it’s hard to believe they aren’t just toothpicks by how Reece handles them. With more eye-popping strength and grace, my husband twirls the poles around in midair, repositioning them into a vertical circle. As we all watch with stupefied gapes, he lowers them back down to the terrace with deafening whamps…where they’re transformed into a trap for a fleeing madwoman and the girls she’s taken hostage.

Two innocents who, judging from the happy singing we can hear thanks to the breezeway’s acoustics, are still thinking they’re getting to see Swan Lake instead of their new holding cell. Probably not so much now, since their sweet song has been replaced by the pounds of the poles and the sizzles of the electric arcs between them—such a scary contrast, my protective instincts urge me to pulse-vault myself past Reece and then run toward the cage as fast as I can.

I almost stop when realizing every member of the team has followed me, but when Atticus and his guys storm in from the other end of the passage, I’m filled with a new—and likely false—sense of security. Nothing about guys in military-grade gear should be the automatic recipe for breathing easier, but I have a feeling the musketeers are capable of handling the hellfire on this skirmish if that’s what it comes to.

This skirmish.

Dear God.

Have I already doomed us to one just by thinking it? Then again, I’m not the one who stole two children for the purpose of re-enslaving them. Once again turning them into the stress management cans for a pod people army—so every one of them can help out with giving human evolution a not-so-gentle nudge. It’ll be fun, gang. Like art class. If you don’t like the picture, erase it and start over.

Only this lunatic bitch wants to do it to the entire human race.

And she’s started the war by going the wrong way.

By duplicating…me.

I’m still at least ten feet from the cage when she spins around, hands splayed on the girls’ throats, a rabid snarl redefining her face.

My face.

“Oh, holy God.” The exclamation belongs to Trixie, because my convulsing throat can’t manage air, let alone words. The cutoff makes me dizzy until I have to gasp, but even that’s nearly too much. Fresh oxygen means confronting full thoughts—and facing this bizarre reality.

Gaping at myself.

A seething, raging, degraded me. A desperate, driven, beaten me. A me who’s been manifested through the filter of fear instead of the choice of love. Who shows me, with gut-twisting explicitness, the deformity of what I could be—in a world where I haven’t chosen beauty. In a universe where I haven’t trusted in love.

“Mama?”

I snap out of my transfixion, shooting a dazed stare at my airborne son. I’m beyond stressing about whether the paps see him or not. A superhero kid who can fly hardly feels like the big story when a real-life Orphan Black is playing out at ground level. If even one stranger barrels up on this scene and thinks the real me is the one inside the bars…