For most of Malyssa and Daia's childhood, they had lived with less. Other kids at their school had new shoes every time a new school year rolled around. Gleaming dance shoes for the first day that would appear again on photo day, and then never again, and street-style sneakers kept clean and polished for every other day of the year. Not these girls.

Living with an aunt who'd had four children and already sent two flying out of the nest, the twins who came to stay with her always had plenty of hand-me-downs around. Aries's old Reeboks, Elenor's knits and jackets, Tierra's old jeans — because that's how the fits worked out — and the same boy's roadbike that had passed from Tyson, the oldest, to Aries when she needed to get to her part-time job, to Elenor when her school placement was five miles away, to Tierra when she was getting into trouble and a bicycle gang would be safer than the crew Mama caught her hanging around with on the corner.

By the time Malyssa and Daia moved in, Elenor and Tierra were the two still living at home, and Elenor had gotten into City College of San Francisco, a twenty-five minute bus ride to an incredible top of the hill campus in Ingleside, and Tierra had a place at an alternative school a blessed miracle two streets over from home. And so, one hand me down roadbike became available to get one girl to school and save their aunt one person's bus fare.

Grades four, five, six, and seven, the twins alternated days biking to the school they had been placed in, by the city's random lottery, in a neighborhood one hour and two transfers from home. In fact, they fought over Tyson's bike, because the transit route went so far out of the way, all the way south to Daly City Bart Station, to catch the bus straight back north to their school in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, that a direct bike route could get there in only 40 minutes — with no risk of missing a transfer. To avoid being late, whichever sister had to take the Bay Area "Rapid" Transit to Daly City that day would have to leave an hour and a half early to be certain to not miss catching that bus. If she missed it, she would be 39 minutes late after waiting the 19 minutes and the 20-minute bus ride, and certainly earn detention.

And so the first four years they lived with Aunt Sophia, they negotiated and haggled, stored up sick days where the healthy sister could still ride, and considered inflicting mild injuries to prevent the other from being able to. In other words, they scrapped. Threw each other around Sophia's living room (where Auntie slept on a pullout because here two bedrooms slept four children), clawed at each others' faces, pulled each other's hair, and kicked each other's shins.

Their back-to-school present for the eighth grade had been a set of identical, deep purple, sturdy road bikes. The right fit — because Tyson's frame had always been too big. "That old thing still sold for fifty dollars, and this investment is worth it for what I save on Bart fare," Aunt Sophia had notified them.

For the past four years, they biked everywhere. Paying back the investment, they never rode transit.

"Those bikes are evidence," Aunt Sophia said now. "I can't believe you teleported away and left them." The three sat in her cottagey kitchen, cups of tea with mint fresh back from the back garden steaming in front of them on the tablecloth.

The scent was soothing enough while it was still too scalding to take a sip. Sophia took Dian's face in her two hands. The woman was eternally young, her hands softened with coconut-scented lotion, and she hadn't changed a bit in their memory. "Now, no contact is needed for this kind of diagnostic scan," said Sophia, talking them through what she was doing, "but everything comes down to focus. Touching will help focus. Plus, it feels good." Leaning forward in her old hand-made wooden chair, she gazed into her niece's ice blue eyes.

"I'm scanning the forebrain. It'll be important that the frontal lobe be repaired flawlessly as that's the home of humanity's higher-order thinking and problem-solving. I know this kind of visualization has eluded you so far, but remember you don't need to close your eyes to see with your mind's eye — it's like daydreaming with your eyes wide open." Her black eyes were fixed, as if staring into space, but that space was Dian's olive toned cheek.

"One day it will click, like the first time you pedal a bike for the first time. The second you get the wheel moving and the force of gyroscopic motion takes effect, you're off. One second, you had no clue how you were going to keep the bike upright without falling; the next, you push the pedals all the way through, putting consistent pressure on that backward stroke at the bottom of each cycle, as if you knew it all along, and now the bike wouldn't topple for anything in the world." She clicked her tongue and switched topics. "I see no damage, nothing but smooth, healthy brain tissue. I wouldn't have guessed healing would be your talent, but maybe you are just good at everything."

Her eyes were still fixed, out of focus, toward Dian's cheek, but the words were clearly for the healer. Maybe everything she had just said had been for Malyssa's benefit alone. Dian's eyes flashed toward her sister and then away.

Sophia let go and leaned back in her chair. Trusting the tea was the right temperature now, she led the girls in taking a sip. "I see no other way but to get the bikes back. Before they can be fingerprinted — no one has your fingerprints on file, and we want to keep it that way. And before investigators get started searching bike registration indexes. I had your bikes registered in case of theft. Now, it wouldn't take a minute to get the ID numbers off the bike frame, but considering the overwhelm of the police system these days, I'm confident no one will bother for a few hours.

"It would be different if they had discovered you on the scene — if they had you in their clutches, they would be getting excited about locking you away. So on one hand, it's a good thing you teleported. On the other, they might have dismissed this witness as a crazy lady if you hadn't vanished into thin air, leaving a pair of disembodied, top tier, expensive bicycles behind. Did she get a picture of you?"

Malyssa swallowed and then she gasped, sputtering a bit of the excess liquid. "A picture? It was a firearm she had pointed at me, not a camera. How would she think to take a picture?"

Daia could only watch and listen, having been legally brain dead at the time.

"New phones have cameras on them now," said Sophia, staring into space again. Thinking, she was always thinking, her mind divided into two or three.

"Drats," said Malyssa. "If anyone has some newfangled expensive cell phone, it's that lady. I wasn't watching her; just like she said in her report, to heal Daia's head I needed to be in a single-minded trance."

No doubt, Sophia would have been able to perform brain surgery, discuss the Giants game last night, and keep an eye on the white lady with the pistol and the camera phone all at the same time.

"I will handle this," said Sophia. That round, plump face of a woman not a day over thirty-one, though she approached fifty every second the passed, revealed an exhaustion that rarely made it through her energetic features — but now her un-madeup lids were hooded, her perpetual smile dropped.

"Oh sure," said Malyssa. "You be the one to go. Just slip out on your lunch break, break into the Public Safety Building, jail break our bikes, hack into the case files and delete any photos and case notes such as those pesky registration numbers — I'm sure you'll be on time for your second — out of three — shifts today."

Looking shifty, Sophia placed her fingers down on the table with a thoughtful clatter, then drummed a rhythm. "Confession time."

She wiggled in her seat and glanced side to side but not directly into either niece's face. "I don't actually work at the hospital anymore, girls. What started out as a part-time income source has come to be enough for me to leave my job. It's not just lucrative, but the hours are also more flexible . . . and it's about time I gave up the illusion of working all hours as a hospice nurse. Before you judge, remember my children, all four of them, got put all the way through college. I got their tuition paid off before the debt and interest capsized us. I got those bikes for you. Clothes on your back — new ones. Meals on your plate. We're fixing this place up a little — with the add-on in the back we'll get a third bedroom and a little sunroom. When the time comes, you two will both have a ride through college without that debt, without that interest rich families never pay."

"So what is the job?" asked Dianthea.

"That I can't say just yet."

Dianthea's followup showed her higher brain functioning was perfectly intact. "But it's illegal. It needs you to use magic." No questioning inflection.

The answer, "Yes," was drawn to many syllables.

Smashing her hands to the table and scraping her chair back at the same time, Dianthea stood to storm out of the kitchen. "So you're just as stupid as Mom and Dad," she shouted back without looking to see what impact her words would have.

A second after the bomb blast, in the quiet that followed, Malyssa put a hand on Sophia's and noticed for the first time her polished nails. Professionally painted a pearly rose and sealed.

Looking in her aunt's eyes, she said, "This isn't your job. Keeping us out of jail when we did, in fact, break the law. It's not on you. Not when it will just get you arrested too. Your job was to take us in and keep us alive, and you did that."

"It is my job," Sophia said, standing and taking empty mugs to the sink. "I chose it, and it is. That's what all this was for. Not for bikes and manicures and sunroom renovations." It sounded as if she had been eavesdropping on her nieces' thoughts. "I'll take care of it."

Thanks for reading Frost and Fog. There's more of the story coming at you, right now! Please leave a star if you are able to click. It helps fuel my magical worlds.