Three weeks earlier…
NEW HAND!
Beck laughed when he saw the message title, and who it was from. He clicked and a new picture filled the screen. It showed a smiling nineteen-year-old Chinese boy who was holding up his right hand. At first glance it looked like any other hand. Anyone who didn’t know Jian wouldn’t have guessed what the big deal was.
Shipwrecked on a deserted island, with no one else around except for Beck and their friend Ju-Long, Jian had got a bad case of blood poisoning from a lizard bite — a Five-Fingered Golden Dragon bite, to be precise — that could have killed him. With Jian unconscious and delirious, and no sign of rescue, Beck and Ju-Long had had no choice. The hand had to be amputated.
Beck read the email quickly and his smile widened.
I can pick up things and yes, it is waterproof so I will soon be sailing again!
Sailing was Jian’s passion, which was how they had ended up on that island in the first place. Beck breathed a sigh of relief that his friend could continue doing what he loved.
I hope you are well back in England. Ju-Long says hello too.
Beck hit ‘reply’ and began to type.
Brilliant to see the new hand. My uncle is keeping me busy this afternoon scanning in old photographs.
It was a job Al had meant to get round to for ages, waiting for a wet Sunday afternoon when there would be nothing else to do. Go through the old albums, scan in the photos worth keeping.
There are a lot of them…
“Next up.” Al interrupted his typing with a very small, slim album.
“Which ones am I scanning from this?” Beck asked casually as he opened it.
“All of them,” Al said, with an unusual softness in his tone.
“All of…?” Beck began, but then he opened it up and saw. “Oh.”
The very first picture was of two babies, lying side by side in an incubator box. Their faces were crinkled and red, and their tiny bodies were dwarfed by their baby-grow suits.
You couldn’t tell just by looking whether either was a girl or a boy, but their names were written below. Dian. Beck.
If Dian was in the same picture as him, Beck knew that meant they were both less than a day old. Beck looked at the picture for a long time, gently tracing it with his finger.
We’ve always stood beside you, Beck. That was what she had said. Mum, Dad, me and many angels.
In China, with Jian and Ju-Long, he had surprised himself by suddenly thinking of Dian. He had hardly ever thought of her before that, though he had always known she had existed. His twin sister.
And soon after that that, he had… what? Dreamt of her? Had a vision? He honestly wasn’t sure. Whatever explanation he came up with, nothing could match the depth of what he felt about it.
Part of it was a feeling of… failure. He had been in many dangerous situations in his life and he had never lost a single friend. But, right at the start, his own sister had slipped away and he had been powerless to do anything about it.
“Why are we in an incubator?” he asked. It was the first question that came out of his mouth.
“It’s usual for twins. They tend to be undersized at first. And you two—”
“Yeah, I know. Difficult birth.” His offhand manner masked the emotion that arose whenever he thought of Dian. He didn’t know the technicalities of what had happened. He did know the birth hadn’t been easy for his mother, and he did know there had been some serious complications. Complications that had caught up with Dian.
“Were we identical?”
Al shook his head.
“No — identical twins are always the same gender. You’d have been fraternal twins — so if Dian had grown up, you’d look similar but obviously be different, like any other brother and sister.”
Beck turned the page. The next two photos were close-ups of him and Dian on their own. Then there was a family shot. Their mother, lying in bed, looking tired and drawn, holding one of them. Their father, sitting beside her and holding the other. They weren’t labelled so he couldn’t tell which baby was which.
On one side of the bed was a woman, a smiling nurse, whom Beck presumed was the midwife. And on the other, a doctor, a tall, lean man. His face was naturally stern, but he was smiling a little — like someone had maybe described to him how smiling was done, and he was doing his best without really believing it. They had been labelled — Sister Lorna Macadam, and Dr Henry Winslow.
He turned the page again. There were no more photos. He was holding in his hand the sole visual evidence that Dian had ever existed. He closed his eyes briefly.
He felt Al’s hand rest gently on his shoulder.
“We’ve both lost a lot, haven’t we?”
Beck blinked and nodded. His parents hadn’t lived for many more years after that — murdered, blown out of the sky by Lumos’s hired assassin.
“I’ll do these ones next,” he said. Al ruffled his hair and went back to the pile of albums.
Beck started from the back of the album, because it was easiest that way. The picture began to preview on the screen. The awkward smile of Dr Henry Winslow was the first thing to appear. Beck felt a surge of gratitude to this man, and the midwife too, for what they had done to help his mother. But he wasn’t one to dwell on the past. It was better to look to the future and what could still be changed. He quickly finished off his email to Jian.
Next week I am off to Sweden…