The trick I’d always admired—the shot of a character, early on, packing a gun, a knife, a hammer—the one I always forgot about—that’s fated to blow a hole in somebody, slit an artery, bash in a skull midway or near the end of the film. Now the flickering screen revealed, in real time, the blunt, cold instruments of death—the blade flashing, plunging, slashing. Yet the distance, in my own mind, was still being maintained. I could not stop believing it was somebody else’s conceit, somebody’s creation—and that “somebody” was my twin. All the scenes we concocted in the barn—everywhere we went, everything we did. The comfort of the darkened theatre is lost to me forever. Now the audience—prurient voyeurs, ravenous, watching us—rapt, flogging popcorn and candy bars into their slack jaws, swilling soda, tonguing each other, probing with their fingers in a dark, crowded theatre.

“Dick and Bianca were death, Violet. I am life, whatever I have done.”

I recalled how free I felt, for the first time in my life, the day they carried them both out in body bags.

I drugged and slaughtered them.

I defiled their corpses and posed them, slung over the coffee table.

How could I not have known? Because Khalika shielded me from it—mostly anyway. She had a job to do, and she would not be deterred. I realized that, in this, I was happy to be her vehicle.

I hadn’t even noticed that I’d picked up the switchblade again, had flicked it open.

I almost didn’t recognize my own hand holding it, trembling, a dry leaf about to fall from its branch. Khalika eyed me, finally suggested that I close and put the thing down.

Again, I obeyed. Khalika held up her palms to me, told me to do the same. Our palms merged.

“Please, Violet—don’t end our production this way. There will be other Marks, other chores to focus upon. As for me, I’m just getting started.”

It’s like the time I tried acid. My hand merged with a tabletop, went through it to the other side. It was like getting a view into a reality denied to everyone who never took a tab. I never forgot it. Except I’m not coming off this trip.

“See? You, alone, would be incapable of what I have done, wouldn’t have snuffed anybody, with the possible exception of those two. With me, you have been able to strike before being stricken, like a pit viper, but with the stealth and determination of a mythological goddess, a shapeshifter.”

We dropped our hands to our sides, simultaneously.

“I am not evil, Violet, not in any conventional sense. I’ve learned to live with this mysterium tremendum. I cannot do otherwise. You knew enough, were immersed enough in their filth to finally allow you, with my urging, to slay the grifters—they who would have delivered you to your death without remorse. I was only happy to be of service in that dispatchment—in all the others—before and after, if truth be told. You can say I’m a little over-the-top at times, I’ll own that. So there you have it. Although I dislike acting in haste, as Dylan said, the hour’s getting late.”

Only an hour had passed, at least according to the clock. In that time, another world was destroyed and recreated. There was no further argument to be made. No way to deny the reality of what we were, joined together more solidly than any conjoined twins. I laid down on the couch, turned my face into the cushions. No words could encompass my grief, the terrible knowledge that I could never be the sole navigator of my little boat—whether it foundered on the rocks or sailed smoothly to some tropical port.