Read Online The Hidden Twin by Adi Rule - Free Book Online

riding in on some kind of magnificent beast, no doubt—maybe a flying stritch with flaming wings, why not? Bet-Nef was tossed into the lake, his terrible armies were driven from Caldaras forever, and Dal Roet himself gave each evil redwing one thousand lashes. From that day forward, one of the ways you could supposedly tell a redwing from a human was by the thousand red scars on his back. Is the story true? I don’t know. But the scars are real.
    Born with scars. Isn’t that a kick in the pantaloons, as Jey would say.
    I stare, transfixed by my own ugliness. My scars don’t hurt, but lately they are intensifying, their color becoming more vibrant. Is it because I am getting older? Or because the Deep Dark is approaching? There is no one I can ask.
    I don’t think there are actually a thousand scars there, but my neck is stiff from angling to look in the mirror. Once again, I give up before I can count them all.
    The face of the handsome lawn-cutter, Zahi, flashes through my mind. A human girl could have let him know with her uncovered eyes that she liked his uncombed hair and rust-colored waistcoat, could have smiled, flirted.
    But who am I trying to fool? I was unsupervised in the city for only two days, and on the first I almost killed two men. Two priests. Priests!
    â€œSoup, soup, soup, soup!” comes an off-key song from below. It pulls me out of my daydreams, and I descend to find Jey attacking some horrible tomatoes with a kitchen knife and singing all the while. The tomatoes from our house garden stare up at me from their basket like the tiny heads of sick old people, grumpy and brownish.
    She looks up, her knife clattering to the floor. “I think I’m getting the hang of cutting tomatoes!”
    â€œExcellent.” I retrieve the knife and rinse it off in the sink.
    The door opens and Papa stumps in, carrying the scent of the gardens with him. “Mmm. Soup!” Jey beams. Papa looks at me. “And how was your day, my girl?” He places his work boots on the grass mat by the door.
    â€œFine,” I say, avoiding his eyes. He is already shuffling by me to change into his evening clothes, his metal leg clacking across the floor. On the way, he pats my head with a big warm hand.
    I open the spice cupboard and pull out a few precious glass jars, then examine the little pots of herbs on the windowsill.
    â€œDoes this look right?” Jey holds up her dripping knife. Liquid of a suspicious color glints in the slanted light that pokes through our lace curtains. She tips the cutting board, and bits of tomato ooze into a big pot.
    â€œThey’re … different,” I say.
    â€œThey’re a little icky.” She sighs. “It’s the poison air. It gets in the soil.” And she’s right, of course. It is much more difficult to raise plants in the open air of Caldaras City than in a greenhouse. “What we ought to do,” she says, “is throw out the whole bunch of them.”
    Papa shuffles back into the kitchen in his comfortable old linen shirt, its smooth fibers a last remnant of the farm Jey and I don’t remember. “Throw out what? What are we throwing out?”
    We both know it’s hopeless. Not because we can’t afford to waste a few disgusting vegetables now and again, but because—
    â€œThe salt miners in Drush would love to have those tomatoes, pretty or not,” Papa says, crossing his arms. “Whole families living on half a pound of salt a day.”
    A ludicrous story. Anyone on that diet would meet their bloated death far too quickly to be much use as a miner. But that’s the end of it, and we cook the soup anyway, Jey singing tunelessly and Papa trying with all his might not to offer too much advice. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what expression his tangled beard is hiding, but his eyes usually smile.
    Now the three of us sit at the table, trying to consume our creation as quickly as possible