Startled, I snapped the volume shut on my own fingers and cringed.

The woman lifted a brow. Chestnut colored hair curled about a patrician face and the smile she bestowed gleamed with teeth. "Dante, is it not?" she asked without inflection, cold voice clipped and uncaring. An accent breathed into the words like a breeze through long grass, there but unintelligible. Some kind of English, maybe? "Odd reading for this...event."

A man stood at her side, stooped and wizened but radiating derision equal to the taller woman's. They weren't like the others in attendance tonight; affluence suited the pair, from the diamonds glittering in the dip of her throat to the black lacquer of his cane, to the hushed muttering of their armed guards standing off to the side. Despite the fine quality of their clothes, both dressed professionally, foregoing a gown or a tuxedo, his tie missing and her jacket open to reveal the silk blouse underneath. She was a vision of careful design, and he...he reeked of wealth too, but also vaguely of rot, small and hunched and yet somehow porcine in proportion. Air from the vent on the wall blew down in a constant flood, so I could smell every person who came by, cheap perfume and sallow cologne providing tonight's fiasco with a foul bouquet, but she smelled of jasmine and red currant. He smelled of tarragon, cedarwood, and that indefinable scent of sweet, sticky decay.

I could smell ash and I didn't know why.

"Er—welcome," I said, forging on with my greeting, ignoring her comments on my reading material as I plucked up one of the pamphlets and held it out. "The presentation starts at eight."

The woman accepted the leaflet, the folded pages seeming so flimsy and impractical between her manicured fingers, like juvenile drawings done with fat crayons being handed to an art critic. For her part, the woman flicked open the cover, smirked, then tossed the pamphlet onto the table between us. "Yes, well," she said. "How lovely," sounding as if she meant anything but. "Though we're not here for that. We're here to speak with Eoul."

Eoul. Gregor Eoul, the CEO of IMOR Advances, the first extension number I had to memorize those scant months ago, a man I exchanged "good mornings" and "good evenings" with and nothing else. "Oh. Um, he should be—."

"No." The woman gestured with one hand and the platinum bracelet on her wrist followed the motion, catching the dim lights as her fingers curled in the universal symbol for rise. She wore a wedding ring. "Stand up. Lead us to Gregor Eoul."

She gave her audacious demand, and although the still, slow waters of my logical mind started and hissed at the strange, blatant disrespect, something more flippant and emotional whispered why not? So I stood, though I couldn't say why, and I moved, though I blinked in confusion at the shuffle of my own feet. Obeying felt intuitive—like leaning toward the warmth of a campfire on a chilly night, or drawing in a breath after rising from a deep dive. I needed a reason to step back into the cold, to leave the ring of firelight or to hold my breath for a moment longer, and I didn't see the point for that discomfort.

What?

I jerked to a halt halfway across the ballroom, caught between two groups of chattering accountants with the woman and the man at my back. An errant thought remarking on their anonymity drifted through my skull and the situation's oddity stirred the sudden, inexplicable silence in my head like a spark hitting a dry stack of kindling. My feet stopped shuffling.

"Who—?"

"Oh." The woman stepped up to my side, tipping her head to bring her eyes closer to mine, and they gleamed black, not violet, black like scorched asphalt under the summer sun. "Interesting."

"I don't have patience for your games tonight, Grace," the elderly man rasped as he folded his hands over the top of his cane.

"I know, Jackson, I know." The woman leaned nearer and hovered on the periphery of polite distance, a breath away from imposing upon my personal space. "This is wasting your time. Lead us to Eoul."

It was wasting my time—though, considering the issue, I found my time a worthless commodity spent behind a crooked table as another player in this ridiculous game of pretenses. To be fair, I couldn't say I lacked my own deceit; mocking my co-workers with their glass jewels and false smiles felt good, but I was right there with them, dressed up in my cheap veneer, thumbing my nose while I sank knee-deep in the mire.

My head throbbed and my legs moved as I thought about glass houses and thrown stones and—why was I moving?

Gregor Eoul stood with a group of his contemporaries, champagne flutes in hand, their heads tilted toward one another as they discussed business in grunted masculine tones. Their conversation cut off as I broke their circle and froze, my mouth open but the words lost somewhere in between. "Uh—Mr. Eoul? This is—."

"Lovely party, Gregor," the woman said as she sidestepped in the group and crooned the CEO's name. Mr. Eoul's brow furrowed, then rose, a subtle tick arresting his loose jowls as he studied the woman, the elderly man, and me in rapid succession.

"Ms. Amoroth, Mr. Klau—this is a, ah, surprise...."

Klau? I wondered, my gaze roving over the stooped man and his cane. Is he the CEO of Klau Incorporated?

"We invited ourselves, Gregor, no need to fret. It seemed an apt time for a conversation...."

I would have lingered to hear more simply out of bored curiosity had the woman—Ms. Amoroth—not leaned closer and said, "You're dismissed."

With a final befuddled glance, I retreated back the way I'd come, stopping only when I stood once more by my empty table with the pamphlet dregs scattered across its covered surface. Unbidden, my hand rose to rub at my temple, soothing the god-awful headache that scrabbled inside like a rodent trapped in a cage. I glanced toward the clutch of CEOs and executives but couldn't see them beyond the milling bodies of my coworkers.

That woman—.

"Sara!"

A voice from the ballroom's entrance cut through the hum of conversation, so I turned—and found myself confronted by my reflection.

No, Tara Gaspard was not the mirror image of myself; rather, my slightly older twin sister represented the infinite realm of possibility, the physical embodiment of assumed potential—a woman who shared my face but none of my failures. She stood among the corporate drones like a slip of sunshine between amassed clouds, ineffably vibrant with her bottle-blond hair and lilac dress, skin tan from summer escapes to the beach, her smile easy and without pretext. A reflection of what I could be if I were less myself.

Where Tara was bright, I...was not. To say I was "dark" implied a sense of drama not inherent in my appearance; rather, I felt rendered in grayscale, with lank black hair and skin left pale and dry because I didn't indulge in face creams or time outdoors, my posture middling and my nails bitten to the quick. I lacked Tara's softness, the energy of her carriage, the glimmer of something more—and yet we could find one another in the cyan color of our eyes, the cynical brows, the quirk of our mouths when we heard a funny but not quite hilarious joke.

Tara managed to break through the crowd and collided with me.

"God, you're like hugging a bag of bones," Tara griped, her embrace tight, unyielding. I grumbled as I hugged her in return and grimaced; she smelled overly perfumed, like walking head-first into a flower display, the astringent tinge of antiseptic clinging to her bare shoulders and the loose curls of her hair. She'd come from the hospital and hadn't showered first.

"What are you doing here?" I asked once she released and I eased back.

"Such a warm welcome, Sara."

"Not that I'm not thrilled to see you," I tacked on. Tara smirked. "I told you I couldn't make it tonight. How did you—?"

Tara looped an arm about my shoulders in a familiar—and restraining—motion, like a doctor taking hold of a jittery patient. "I have my ways," she said with a wag of plucked brows worthy of the most overblown vaudeville villains, and before I could protest she waved over two people migrating through the throng of IMOR employees.

"Rick," I said to the first, a man of generic good looks and average height, his complexion sun-warmed and his lips lifted to reveal white teeth. "I take it you're the one who told her where to find this exciting little party?"

"Exactly right," the man replied as he reached out for Tara. His fiancee went to him and her arm slung itself about his waist instead of my shoulders, Tara's eyes flicking toward his face, then away.

Rick made a living as a salesman of sorts, though he would wrinkle his nose at the pedestrian term. He considered himself a technology purveyor, a middleman marketeer who negotiated trade deals between engineering firms like IMOR Advances or Klau Incorporated and places like hospitals or the military. A launch party such as this was where Rick had met Tara, a resident surgeon at Verweald General.

Next to him stood Mitch, who—as I had assured Tara many times during our evening phone conversations—was not my boyfriend. Rick knew him as he knew most people; through work, a far-flung acquaintance of an acquaintance he dredged up from a virtual Rolodex to satisfy Tara's need to give me companionship. Shorter than Rick, he stood in the lankier man's shadow, stocky and solidly built, sandy hair clipped close to his scalp, his smile easy and his voice softened by a Georgian drawl.

"Hello, darlin'," he said as he extended a hand I took in my own, shaking it once.

"Hey, Mitch."

Tara's eyes followed the platonic interaction and her mouth formed a displeased moue, a slight pinching of the lips that I frequently found the excuse to tell her reminded me of Mother. Tara never did like the comparison.

"Think you can escape long enough to visit the open bar?" With that said, Tara slipped from Rick to me, her arm linked with mine as she urged our group toward the aforementioned bar. Most of the room's occupants congregated there in groups, like schools of well-dressed fish moving about one another in an uncoordinated dance. Tara needed only to flash a pair of older men a charming smile for them to abandon their place at the counter, allowing us to take their spots.

"Tell me if you see my boss, yeah?" I said to her after ordering a beer. Tara asked for an orange juice of all things.

She snorted when the harried bartender delivered our drinks. "Which boss?"

Truly any Imor employee from the various departments held seniority and clout above my own; I filled a role barely equivalent to that of a temp. My gaze sought out Martha, though, and once satisfied she still hung on Mr. Strauss' every word, I forewent the frosted glass set on the bar and drank straight from the bottle like the barbarian I was. Bubbles fizzed in my nose. "Urgh."

"That bad?" Tara leaned an elbow on the bar's brass edge and sipped her juice. Mitch and Rick had gotten drinks of their own, their conversation swallowed by the surrounding babble, Rick nodding every so often to something Mitch said. Tara watched them over her shoulder before straightening herself. "I take it you're not into Mitch."

"Not in the slightest."

Sighing, Tara's lower lip popped out in a pout. "That's a shame."

"Is it?" Another swallow of beer turned my empty stomach and I pressed the amber bottle away. "I'm not a dog, Tara. I don't get lonely shut up in the house on my own."

"I never said you were or that you did." Her words came out measured as she tipped the glass between her hands, turning to face me. "I just get worried, you know? It's been over two years since mamé died, and almost three since papé passed. I think about you alone in their old house and—."

"I'm fine, Tara," I said with more heat than I'd intended. The waspishness earned me an unhappy glance.

"I know you tear me a new one every time I mention this, but have you given any thought to moving back to San Barkett—?"

"No." Even my persistent twin recognized the finality in the denial and let the subject drop. For an instant, silence slid between us like a glass splinter, invisible but no less insidious for all its unspoken aggravation. Neither of us chose to pick at the wound.

I asked her instead about the hospital, about work, and Tara recounted tales of her more memorable patients, sparing the names and identities of those involved, if not their baffling maladies. Evening set fast beyond the paned windows, night subsuming the twilight, merging the more vivid shades into violet and navy tones, though the sky never grew wholly dark above Verweald's streets.

Someone who had already imbibed too much that evening stumbled in their return to the bar and collided with my back, jolting me forward into Tara's arm and her held drink.

"Shit—!"

Cold sluiced down my front. I pulled my dress' bodice away from my chest and grimaced at the sticky cling of pulp and sugar saturating the fabric and my nonexistent cleavage. Great.

"I'm so sorry, Sara, I—."

"It's fine," I sighed, agitated. The skin about my eyes and brows felt tight and hot as the headache that'd abated earlier returned to the fore. "I'm going to go wash this off...."

Expression pinched, Tara set her glass down with a heavy thump and funneled her contrition into anger; she snapped at the drunk half slouched over the bar who'd tripped into me as I sidestepped a puddle of juice and made to leave the room. Mitch, noticing the mess, lifted his gaze to mine—and I held up a hand, aborting what half-thought gesture he might have attempted.

The cooler air outside the ballroom brushed my warm face and I welcomed the touch after the embarrassing trek through the waiting attendees, who stared and slavered for whatever drama—no matter how trivial—they could suss out. The restrooms adjoined the lobby not far from the service corridor Martha had fetched me from, and I entertained ideas of escaping through the service exit, slipping into the city and heading home, though I didn't have the backbone to dare stand up my own sister in such a manner. Tara would have my head.

I found the washroom empty but for the echoing strains of recycled music when I arrived, the ostentatious decor at war with the modern, streamlined updates and the light's spasmodic flickering. Staring at the blocky economic driers on the wall, I cursed the lack of paper towels and retrieved toilet paper from a stall, wadding the flimsy tissue in my hand as I swiped at the pulpy residue. Frustrated, I threw the mess into the trash and forced myself to exhale.

"Stupid," I muttered, bloodless fingers curling over the sink's porcelain rim. My hands shook. I lifted my chin and met my own gaze in the scuffed mirror, the image there wan and peaky, a face rendered hard by anxiety and the light fixture's choked illumination. I wanted to leave. I missed my books, my couch. I missed the familiar smells of home and the comforting stability provided by its walls. The world felt, at once, too small and too big; a contradictory hailstorm bludgeoning my already tired mind and withered sense of self until I could feel my fingertips buzz with numbness.

Another breath tightened my chest and I forced it free. It rattled and curled at the edges like paper torn from a shredder's crunching maw. The next came easier.

"Just get through the night," I told my reflection. I stared into my own eyes, concentrating on the color, the nascent lines, the counter's chilly support. "Take a breath, smile for Tara, get through it."

The light flickered a final time and went out.   

[ORIGINAL DRAFT ONLY]