At age six Kate Belarhens was kidnapped and nearly drowned. At age eight she was attacked and left in a Bronx alley. At age ten she witnessed the murders of her best friend and her brother. When she was eleven, her parents prevented nuclear Armageddon. At age thirteen Kate Belarhens ceased to exist.

Without a death certificate, without her breath stopping, she vanished. It was as though she had never lived in the first place.

In a different country, different province, different city, different home, with a different name, different nationality, different parents, different school, she reappeared

Local newspapers were all over the story, but it wasn’t the story of the persecuted daughter of the White House NSA and an undersecretary in the State Department. They were covering the story of a different girl, her distant cousin, who looked almost exactly like her.

At age thirteen Canadian citizen Kaylee Breckhouse was in a car accident that nearly took her life. The tragedy shook the small town in which she lived. Kaylee was a local hero overnight. Newspapers reported her to be in a coma. Her school Pep Club held round-the-clock vigils outside the hospital. Everyone wondered if she would ever recover.

When the hospital doors opened and the bruised and battered teenager was rolled from out of the hospital, she seemed to be a different person. Her injuries were so severe, and the experience so traumatic that after her release, no one could recognize or understand her, not even her own parents. She wasn’t the same, wasn’t the Kaylee that she was before. It was as though a non-existent twin had come to reside in her body, in her home. As though the real Kaylee was still in the hospital, and this clone had come to live in her place. Unable to adjust to this new Kaylee, everyone, all of Kaylee’s friends, faded away.

On any normal day, Kaylee would have come home to a locked, empty house, locked herself in her room, put on her favorite metal band’s CD, and blocked out the world. But that new kid, pimply face with those ridiculous orange sunglasses that made him look like an absolute geek, had to bump into her and dump the red dye they used in chemistry all over her.

If she had been someone who cared, she would have been mortified. As it was, she had walked around for the rest of the day looking like the victim of some crazed serial killer. People had said as much. They didn’t know how close to the truth they actually were.

Red water sloshed off of her and drained down the black hole that was the bottom of the shower. The lyrics to a song by an American band she didn’t know were playing loudly and obnoxiously in her head. That stupid kid had been singing it right before he had dumped dye all over her. She’d asked him who it was by, and his only response had been MCR, as though that was supposed to mean something to her. Mental. Who in their right mind would go around singing, “They found you on the bathroom floor,” during chemistry class?

Loud bangs and crashes were normal afternoon sounds coming from the Breckhouse home, but normally they were produced by a disk that Kaylee put in her stereo. They didn’t typically come while she was in the shower. The sound of shattering glass and a heavy thud echoed through the house, resounding above the noise of her shower.

Kaylee turned off the water.

The only sound was the steady drip, drip of the faucet, echoing through the blue tiled bathroom.

She got out of the shower. Her reaching hand found the black turtleneck and black jeans sitting on the top of the toilet.

Something in her pocket crackled, and she sighed, pulling a ripped and torn sheet of battered yellow paper out of her pocket. The words on it had been written in Romanian, translated into French, sent through five different satellites in six different codes, translated back into Romanian, and finally sent to her. This is what she had to do to ask them how they were doing.

The letter was short and to the point, so short and to the point it was almost curt.

Kaylee,

We are fine, mostly safe, and staying in Norway. Job is going as normal. Scenery is lovely, mountains are majestic. We wish you the best. Be very careful, there are people called the RCM terrorists who are after us. You are in danger. Have fun in school.

Your loving parents,

Richard and Maria Belarhens

Kaylee smiled sadly, tracing the blackout boxes with her finger. She had received this letter a week ago, and she had read it countless times since then. It was truly sad when your family couldn’t send you a letter without a fourth of it being blacked out for security reasons. This fifty-five word letter had probably been fed through four different agency computers, three agencies for sensitive information and one agency that looked after her safety.

Shaking her head to clear it, she stuffed the letter back into her pocket and threw her clothes on noiselessly, her ears listening intently to the rest of the house.

Nothing.

She opened the door, stepping into the main hallway of the one story house. Nothing seemed amiss. Same burgundy carpet, same dark paneled walls. The door to the front room was ajar.

Padding softly, dripping water from her curly red hair, she walked up to the door. Hadn’t she left it like this?

She pulled it all the way open and stepped into the room. It was painted a bright, cheery yellow that always reminded her of the color of those marshmallow Peeps. The furniture was the same burgundy that was used in the hallway in the carpet. Nothing seemed out of place.

Except for the TV cabinet lying toppled on the floor. And the rock, wrapped in orange paper, lying next to it.

She tilted her head to the side, brown eyes narrowed. Rocks that came through windows were usually not wrapped in paper, yet alone orange paper. Bending down, her fingers closed around the rock. She almost let go. Rock wasn’t supposed to be slightly squishy.

Peeling carefully, she ripped back the paper, only to find there was another layer under it. The sheet clutched in her hand had writing on it, written in red marker.

The words, “I Never Told You What I Do for a Living,” were scrawled on the top of the page, with messy writing underneath saying, “My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.” On the bottom of the page was written, in a different but no neater handwriting, “And they found you on the bathroom floor, Cemetery Drive, My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.”

She peeled back the other sheet of paper. Red dye, the same dye she had been drenched in during chemistry, oozed over her fingers and dripped down onto the floor. She watched it drip, watched it until there was nothing left to drip from the rock down onto the floor.

“I know you’re here, Aster,” she said, still looking down at the puddle of red dye on the floor. “And Jace, you’re here too. Why don’t we stop this little charade and show our faces like normal people.”

A figure stepped out from around behind the bookcase, his dark green eyes sparkling. Like her, he dressed all in black, except for a pair of orange glasses.

“You would know all about charades, wouldn’t you?” he asked casually, leaning against the wall.

“Jace.”

“You didn’t recognize me earlier. I’m hurt.”

“I haven’t seen you in seven years, and the last time I had the joyful experience of seeing your face, you were chasing me with a knife and dripping blood. Excuse me if I didn’t come running to give you a bear hug when I saw your profile.”

“Even now, you’re joking,” he said, a touch of incredulity in his voice.

She smirked at him, never breaking eye contact, never letting her guard down. “What’s the use of doing anything else? Your message was clear enough.”

There was no spark of childhood friendship in his eyes now as he walked slowly towards her. “It’s taken us seven years to hunt you down, Kate Belarhens.”

“And I’m supposed to be wowed by the fact that Aster is standing right behind me ready to put a knife to my throat?”

“You’ll sing a different tune soon, Kate,” a new voice hissed in her ear from behind her head. “And so will everyone else when they find your look-alike comatose cousin.”

“You found out about that?” she couldn’t keep the shock from her voice.

“We did.”

Kate forced back the urge to punch the figure behind her. She knew these two, Aster and Jace, and she knew how they worked. They weren’t civil, they weren’t merciful, and they held grudges. She had been a fool to trust them seven years ago, but there was nothing she could do to change the past. Ten-year-olds were easy for people like them to manipulate.

“So…what now? Are we going on a safari to some exclusive resort on the Maine coast?” Kate asked in a fake cheerful voice.

“Do you think we would tell you?” Aster sneered.

Kate raised an eyebrow. “I’m bait. I don’t need to be kept alive after I get to wherever we will be going.”

“Clever of you, to deduce that, but our orders are to keep you alive.”

“What are you after? Nuclear weapons? World domination? A starring spot on Star Trek? ‘Because you know this is never going to work.”

It was Jace’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “And why, oh, supreme wise one, will it not work?”

“You are fighting the United States of America,” she said flatly. “And Americans don’t lose.” Kate managed a small smirk as Aster fastened a blindfold over her eyes. “America has the best minds in the world at its disposal; you’re kidnapping teenage girls. And you’re following the lyrics to some stupid song by an American rock band.”

“Your national pride is touching, but you will soon learn to respect your superiors,” Aster hissed.

“The day I respect my superiors is the day you two develop decent taste in music,” Kate replied.

There was an angry grunt, a sharp pain in her head, and she faded slowly into the dark world of unconsciousness.