Life Light Read Free

trying to sleep, but we can at least close our eyes for a little bit. We’re leaving in four hours. You need sleep, too, you’ve got school in the morning. So... This is goodbye,” I say, pulling away. “I’ll call you, okay?”
    “Okay,” he says, reaching up and touching the metal rose hanging from my neck. It shifts, changing into his super symbol. I can’t help but roll my eyes. “What? Can’t have the supers up in the Arctic thinking you’re free,” he says.
    “Oh, please, Jack,” I drawl, “I don’t need to be branded--I’ll be faithful, regardless.”
    “It’s not you I don’t trust,” he says. “Just think of me when you see it, okay?” He reaches up and pushes my hair behind my ear, leaning down and kissing me again.
    “I prefer the rose,” I tell him.
    “Okay, we’ll compromise,” he says, touching the necklace again. A rose appears above a much smaller version of his symbol.
    “I can accept that,” I say, amused. I give him one more hug before grabbing Emily and Ditto. “Enough teasing your boyfriend, we need to go,” I tell them as they let out a laugh.
    “Bye Trent!” Ditto says, waving happily as I drag them off.
    “Bye,” Emily says, looking a bit sadder than her doppelganger. “If you get lonely, we’ll send Repeat, okay?”
    “Please don’t,” Trent says dryly. Repeat is Emily’s second doppelganger, but she’s a bit harder to get along with than Ditto is. “Send Ditto, instead.”
    “Love you, too, Trent!” Ditto says, grinning from ear to ear. We go into our apartment, heading for our rooms to lie down.
     
    ***
     
    It feels like my alarm clock goes off the moment I close my eyes. I crawl out of my bed, heading to the bathroom to get cleaned up and dressed. We don’t bother with food as we grab our stuff and head out the door in close to perfect silence. Only Liz looks awake. Taurus meets us at the door, his gigantic thing of luggage already on his back. He takes our stuff without being asked, and we head down the stairs. A limo waits for us in the parking lot.
    “Um, Taurus?” I ask, finally speaking, “did you tell your dad about this?”
    “How’d you guess?” he drawls with amusement. “He wanted to send the helicopter.”
    “I think I should have gotten a different wig,” Liz says, messing with the mop of brown hair she’s wearing. It’s one we all picked out for her, but she doesn’t look happy. It’s rather hard not to be noticed, though, when you’ve got white hair and look about twenty. She’s not, she’s thirty, but super genes mean you live a very long time and look young the entire time.
    “I prefer your real hair,” Taurus says as the driver gets out and holds the door open for us. We slip in and he puts our bags in the trunk. Taurus and Liz are across from each other, leaving Emily sitting next to Liz and me sitting by Taurus.
    “I prefer my own hair, too,” she says, scratching her head. “This one feels scratchy. Are we sure I can’t get away with a baseball hat?”
    “No,” Emily and I say. I get on my knees on the chair and reach up, undoing the pony tail that’s holding Taurus’s hair up. “And you have to keep your hair down,” I tell him. “It’s too obvious in a pony tail.” He lets me do whatever I want, looking amused. I pull back and look at him, and then say honestly, “You still look like a professional football player or something.”
    “Can’t really change that,” he admits. “If people ask, we’ll tell them I play on the weekends, or something.”
    “Or you could play college football!” Emily offers.
    “He has an established cover story,” Liz says, taking the wig off and looking inside, “he’s a contractual construction worker. We all have covers like that.”
    “What’s yours, Liz?” Emily asks.
    “I’m an electrician,” she says, grinning at Emily. “It helps that we’re ‘working’ in fields that we understand. The problem is when someone actually gets our ‘work’ phone