“I like to think of myself as impartially ruthless. But I know it isn’t true—I hate the mirror beyond all reason.”—Reina

The scariest factor in the McFarland saga is the fact they came out of nowhere. A group of teenagers was suddenly ruling the world, and no one had previously realized their existence. The day before they might have been sitting in a high school classroom, turning in half-finished homework.

It was no Pearl Harbor or 9/11, where there wasn’t enough information to prevent the horrible surprise. Their rise was a strike from nowhere, and even now there is no information on the before. None.

“In our lives, there is a before and after. The division between them in a series of events so horrific, they twisted us into something not human. For each of us, a different event was the true hammer driving in the nail on the wall blocking before. But it was the same time period…”—Reina

Brushing my heavy black hair from my eyes, I make a face at the young girl sitting on me. The covers around us are yellow, and does nothing for either of our coloring.

“Wake up already.” She snaps, leaning into my face with her breath minty like toothpaste.

“I am awake, Cherry dear. That would be why I’m moving. See,” I snap back, whacking her with a loose wrist. She catches it, twisting hard. It’s just another day in the McFarland household.

My wrist practically broken, she bounds off in search of another victim among our seven ‘siblings’. Or I guess I should refer to it as eight. I never have gotten used to referring to Reese in the plural. He always has been two, but he’s still one. It’s just humans don’t grasp that concept so we had to modify it into monozygotic twins. As if he was like the real twins, Rocky and Mark. I’ll admit Mark and he acted rather similar overall, but Mark didn’t require any special terms. Rocky had acted like the two once upon a time, but then there was Angela.

I understand Mark completely sometimes—relationships are impossible, and hard to keep up. You can’t hurt if you don’t feel. You don’t miss joy because you don’t know desire. You don’t need anyone else if you don’t need yourself. Other times I wonder how he can go through life without touching it. The fire can admire ice, but the two don’t mix.

My reverie broke as a body slammed into me, knocking me back into the bed. The body moans, moving futilely as Cherry approaches. “Wake up when I tell you to!” she growls through clenched teeth, the young goddess of militaristic morning people.

“You didn’t have to throw me!” Meadow whines, struggling to get up as she’s all tangled in my sheets and me. I wince, but she can’t really help the whine. It’s permanent in fourteen year-old girls. She finally gives up, sinking pale flesh into yellow quilting, disappearing all but her hair and face.

“Yeah, yeah…get up,” with a roll of her eyes and a snappy about face, Cherry is out of the room and Meadow has fallen asleep in my lap. With a sigh, I shove out from under her, leaving my baby sister to our eldest sister’s wrath. I don’t feel much pity as this is a regular occurrence, and I’m pretty sure most sentient beings would have wised up by now. The silliness of youth. Not that I’m old or anything.

“Not the purple pandas mommy,” she mumbles in her sleep as I dress. “I wan’ Coun’ Chocula. I’m no’ a Satanist…”

Inexplicable.

And she’s probably the normal one. Too young to know better.

I love all of my siblings, albeit the majority of us couldn’t be less related. But looking at the thin creature tangled in my bedding, it’s easy to realize how little having the same genes matters. I’d bet you our hearts beat in time while we sleep, binding us tighter than an umbilical cord.

“You ready yet?” comes a rough voice from the doorway. No, not Cherry…it’s Mark, our erstwhile elder.

“Almost,” I tell him, pulling a loose purple three-quarters shirt over my turquoise bra. “Think you can wake Meadow, or shall we let her face Cherry’s overzealousness?” I quiz him as I struggle into my old LEIs, mainly stalling for time before he decides to leave for school without me.

“Let her sleep,” Mark shrugs unconcernedly. “Baby sister needs to be learned some responsibility. ‘Sides, she’s Cherry’s favorite. At most our lovely sister will break her ankle. Something minor.”

Sometimes I can fool myself into believing I have a normal life.

This isn’t one of those times. I have friends who go crying to mommy over a papercut. We’re expected to suck up a broken bone as long as it isn’t the spine or weapon hand.

“It’s always darkest in the sudden absence of light.”—Sakori

Let me tell you about those people in the picture…

Those, there, smiling carefree and sitting on the steps as if arranged for a magazine layout, but with faces marked by true emotion. The lavender-eyed boy with his arm around a gorgeous blonde? She dies for him, and he goes nutso. The laughing redhead? She had escaped an abusive relationship, but went back to it. She preferred it to living with the shadows of those happy faces. The black-haired girl beside her was raped by the identical lavender-eyed boy. They’re a psycho and a megalomaniac now. Got a little boy. Not sure how his home life is, but she seems to love him. In the back you’ve got the blue-eyed boys who are otherwise bleached of color and me. I stayed with him for awhile after everything went wrong, but who knows where he is now. Who he is now. What he’s doing to stay sane… And well, I think you know about me. Bitter, teenage mother, total whore and cold killer. Yeah, they’re sweet kids all of them—you can tell they’ve got a great future from the photo.

I hate that picture. We’re insane, fallen, screaming wrecks for the trash. Those people, those utterly happy kids? They don’t exist in this reality.

Before... Cherry’s breath was coming hard, but she worked to slow it. Nothing could appear out of the norm. Not here, not now, when everything was falling apart.

The slumped figure just a few feet in front of her could only be one person, with that waterfall of burgundy hair. Gauze wrapped the delicate arms of the figure, many areas already soaked through with blood. Seeing Cherry standing there, a cop began to approach, but she snapped, “Don’t touch her!”

It was all wrong, them being here now, inside the small county police station. They couldn’t help, no one could now. The tired young woman steeled herself, and crossed those few feet. Creating a limp sort of embrace, she half fell on the unmoving other. “Meadow, baby sister, what happened…?

I was tired of crying but I couldn’t stop…the cuts lining my arms…the stab wound piercing all the way through my left elbow…the pain didn’t compare to the ache of my heart. Nothing had felt like this since my sixth birthday, the day my first family was massacred… “Mark,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and pained, lost from the screams that had wracked my vocal cords not long before.

she stood and screamed a horrible echo of the inhuman sound coming from the house it was a horrible harmony and it didn’t end couldn’t end don’t stop don’t stop had to make it stop but then she’d hear and that was worse

“He…he…I don’t know what you call what he did to Queenie. Rape, I supposed they’d call it, but it wasn’t that, it was something worse and more vile, and oh no oh no how do you do that?”

The policeman behind the my sister and I dropped his coffee. He knew McFarlands could be violent sure, everyone knew that, but he also knew we were intensely loyal and fiercely protective. Loving. Close. When they had found me wandering and hurt, I had been picked up on general principle.

“She screamed Cherry. Over and over. High loud louder, it sounded like death only death ends. Why? Why would he?”

Cherry let her hug grow tight, pulling my cold body close to her soft, warm one. It silenced me, not allowing hysteria to take a solid grip upon my mind. “Mark loves power,” my older sister whispered to me, soothing with her voice, “Who knows, I kinda thought he loved her. Shh baby shh. Nothing you could do, nothing we can do. Shh. I love you. I’m here. But—

‘Let’s not be here?”

Cherry walked her baby sis out, mumbling mindless things. She wished with all her soul that wasn’t there she had been home, and Meadow out. Meadow was too powerless, too inexperienced, but Cherry could have stopped it.

They walked out of the police station, and no one saw them as they were again.

“I have found humanity to be overrated. Why be so, when you can be more?”—Li’alia