Elena feels it when her brother dies. She knows it in her bones before the phone rings. She sits for an unknown time, staring at her hands. At the floor beyond. At nothing. Max is dead and there is nothing she can do to change it. Nothing she could have done. She is powerless and pointless and empty and torn in half.
It is the first time she’s experienced loss. Even in the depths of her grief, even as her every thought drowns in the ocean of her pain, she understands that it won’t be the last.
Everything dies, after all.
She says pretty words at Max’s funeral. About how he was her twin, her other half. About how he still chased after butterflies and never bothered to tie his shoes and insisted that puns were clever. People laugh and cry, and her voice quavers but doesn’t break.
But when it’s her turn to pour dirt into the hole, onto his coffin, to cover him and say goodbye forever, she crumples. She falls onto her knees and clutches the dirt to her chest and weeps.
She doesn’t remember how she gets home, after. She comes back to herself curled on her bedspread, still in her muddy black dress, one shoe on, one in the doorway, wedging the door open.
She wonders if this is what going crazy feels like.
Then Max sits next to her on the bed.
“It’s not so bad,” he says. His voice sounds just like it always has. “Being dead, that is.”
Elena just blinks at him, rubs her eyes, blinks again. He’s a little translucent, a little fuzzy at the edges.
“You need to pull yourself together,” Max says. “Mom and Dad are taking it pretty hard too, you know? You can’t just break down. They need a functioning kid.”
“You’re dead.”
“I know.”
“No. I felt Max die. I felt him… go. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not my brother.”
Max’s form shimmers, then settles, like wind ruffling the surface of a pond. “Well, that’s disappointing,” he says. He still looks like Max, but everything else about him is different. His posture, his expression, the way he sits in her room like he’s never been there before. “I thought that I’d be able to fool you. I suppose I should have known better.”
“What are you?”
Not-Max shrugs. “You’ll see me as your enemy, I suppose. I killed your brother. Ate him from the inside out. Consumed his memories and shape. His mind. His attachments.” He sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you all of this, but I have all of Max’s memories. It’s like I’m used to telling you everything.” He sighs again, this time rubbing his forehead in an achingly familiar gesture. “They told us that the attachments are the worst part, but I wasn’t prepared. Loving someone is quite painful, you know. Especially if you’ve never done it before.” He pats her hand. His skin is dry and cold. “I’m going to go talk to our parents. I hope I can fool them.”
“I’ll tell them you’re a fake.”
He smiles Max’s crooked smile, but his eyes are smug and condescending. “You’re a little unstable at the moment. Having a rough time. They won’t believe you.”
“Of course they will. You’re impossible.”
“How can I be impossible? I’m standing right here. They’ll want to believe me. So they will. It’s the only feasible way forward.”
Her mother makes pancakes for dinner, since they were Max’s favorite. There are four places set at the table. Elena can’t believe that they’re just accepting this. “That’s not Max. It’s some kind of replicant or something. It told me so itself.”
“You’re right,” Not-Max says, his voice pitched low. “She does seem overwrought.”
“Don’t be absurd, Elena,” her father says. “I’d know my son anywhere. It’s a miracle. And Max isn’t the only one who’s back! It’s all over the news. They’re calling them shadows.”
“That isn’t Max! It’s the thing that killed Max!”
“Honey, stop it. I thought you’d be happy to have your brother back. Now, sit down and eat.”
Not-Max sits in Max’s chair. Elena storms back to her room and slams the door.
No one comes after her.
More and more people fall sick. But it’s not a problem anymore, because their shadows will just take their places. And of course their shadows are still them–they have all of their original’s memories, know things that only the original person would know. People test them, and they perform perfectly.
And if only people who die of this specific illness get shadows, well, that’s part of the miracle. Accidents still happen, after all. It’s not like death is over.
There are others who see the truth, of course. But they are dismissed as deluded, as fearmongers, as selfish girls who want to wallow in the misery of losing a twin instead of accepting that he’s still right here.
Not-Max is more and more solid every day. Less translucent. He doesn’t need to look like a ghost, so he doesn’t bother. Elena’s parents seem happy to just forget the months of sickness, the funeral, the fear and pain. Elena ignores him. Ignores her parents’ disappointment at her attitude, ignores his sad, pleading eyes.
“I miss you,” he says, over and over, increasingly frantic. “Please, tell me what I can do.”
She ignores him and walks away.
It’s curiosity that eventually cracks her. “When will we get sick?” Elena asks one night, while Not-Max is brushing his teeth. “When will one of your brethren replace Mom or Dad or me?” It’s the first thing she’s said to him since that first night. Maybe the first thing she’s said in his presence at all.
He drops his toothbrush, and it clatters in the sink. For a moment, he just stares at her in the mirror, looking shocked and happy. Then he spins and grabs her shoulders. His hands are so, so cold. “That won’t happen. I’d never let them hurt you, Elena.”
“Why not? Isn’t it your goal to replace everyone?”
“That’s their plan. But not mine. Not anymore. I love you. Even though I’m not really your Max, when I consumed him, I consumed his love for you. For our parents. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true, and I swear, I won’t ever let anything bad happen to you ever again.”
He looks so sincere, so desperate for her to believe him. So desperate to be her brother.
“How was their plan ever going to work if you’re all so vulnerable to attachments?”
“We were told that the feelings we’d consume weren’t real, that we should just ignore them. And I’m sure some of us are doing that. Are following orders. We’ve done this before, have conquered planets just like this. But Max’s feelings–my feelings–they’re real. I know they are, and I can’t pretend they aren’t.”
“Let’s say that you want to protect me. Can you actually do it? Can you stop one of your people if they come for me?”
His brow furrows. “They know you’re important to me.”
“Why do you think that will be enough?”
He opens his mouth, closes it again. His image wavers back to translucence for a long moment.
Then he pulls her into his arms. “Oh god, what if it isn’t?” he whispers, his breath cold against her neck.
She wants to push him away, to yell and storm off. Every inch of her body knows that this is not her brother. Instead, she lets him hold her and rubs his back in tiny circles.
It isn’t forgiveness, she reminds herself. It isn’t complicity. She is using the tools she has at her disposal, and she shouldn’t feel guilty.
Her father gets sick. Her mother pretends that everything is fine, but sometimes Elena hears her crying in the kitchen. Not-Max vanishes for two days, then comes back transparent and unstable. He flickers when he moves. He’s limping.
Elena finds him with her father, talking in low voices, their hands clasped together, their foreheads touching.
“What was that about?” she asks, when Not-Max leaves the room and pulls the door closed behind him.
His eyes are red, and he flickers before he answers. “Choices.”
She goes in and takes her father’s hand. His skin is dry and hot, his breaths ragged. She remembers Max like this.
It won’t be long, now.
“You were right,” her father says. “About Max. But also maybe wrong.”
“Yeah,” Elena says. “I hope so.”
When her father dies, no shadow takes his place.
She and her mother and Not-Max all stand together in the hospital, arms wrapped around each other.
“He’s not coming back, is he?” her mother whispers, her voice thick with tears.
Not-Max shakes his head.
Her mother doesn’t ask anything else.
After the funeral–it’s a much smaller, quieter affair than the last one, and it’s her mother who breaks down and needs to be guided back home–Not-Max gives Elena a tiny orange pill. “Take this,” he says. “It’ll keep any of my kind from being able to infect you.”
“Why didn’t you give this to Dad?”
“It was too late. It doesn’t work after the infection starts. I’m trying to get another one for Mom, but they’re difficult to get ahold of. Please. Please, take it. I can’t lose you, Elena.”
She prods the pill, rolling it across the lines on her palm. “How will I know if it’s worked?”
He shrugs. “You’ll feel terrible for a couple of days. But after that, you’ll be immune.”
She trusts him, or she doesn’t.
He loves her, or he doesn’t.
She takes the pill.
While Elena is curled up on her bed, feverish and dizzy, a shadow dies. Her name is Madison, and she steps into traffic and is hit by a car. No one knows if it is an accident or suicide.
The government performs an autopsy. They don’t publish the results, but the official story begins to shift.
“What are the shadows, really?” the headlines ask.
“How can something already dead die again?”
“Where did they come from, and what do they want?”
Her mother bursts into her room and starts shoving things into boxes. “We’re moving,” she says. “We have to go somewhere where people won’t know that Max is a shadow. He’s not safe here.”
Elena blinks at her. Her eyelids feel like sandpaper.
Her mother freezes, drops the shirt she was balling up, puts her hand on Elena’s forehead.
She flinches away from the heat. “You’re sick,” she whispers. Tears spill down her cheeks. “You’re sick.”
“I’ll be okay,”
“No one’s okay.”
“I will be. Max says so.”
It’s the first time she’s called him Max.
Her mother wipes her tears away and gets back to packing.
Her fever breaks in the back seat of their car. Her head is in Max’s lap, his icy fingers combing through her hair. Her mother shoved pillows and blankets and crackers and ginger ale into the back seat with them. The rest of their belongings are stuffed haphazardly in a trailer, towed awkwardly behind them.
As they pull away, her mother glances in the rear-view mirror over and over again, like she’s afraid of being followed.
“I think she knows that I’m not real, now,” Max says. “She saw the news, and she’s not stupid. But we’re moving anyway. To protect me. Why?”
Elena sighs and sips her ginger ale and closes her eyes. “Why do you think, Max?”
She uses his name deliberately, and he notices. His hands still for a heartbeat, then move again. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t understand. You should both hate me.”
He’s crying, and Elena reaches up and wipes his tears away. “You did something horrible, and I did hate you for it. But you didn’t know any better. And now you’re trying to fix it. So I can forgive you. I can love you. You’ll protect us, we’ll protect you, and we’ll be a family. It’s the only feasible way forward.”
“You kids okay back there?” their mother calls, checking the her mirrors again.
“Yeah, Mom,” Max says, getting Elena another ginger ale. “We’re fine.”
Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cats. She’s had over 160 short stories published in places like Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Apex Magazine. She has a novella and two short story collections available from Air and Nothingness Press. In addition to writing, she spends her time reading, playing tabletop RPGs, baking, and hiking. You can find her online at www.jamielackey.com.