Free Kingdom of the Seven by Jon Land Page B

leaving only their mouths partially visible in the dim light.
    The church around them was huge and dark, unseen recessed lights casting their meager glow from the ceiling far above. The wood of each pew was hand-carved, smoothed and darkened from years of experience and wear. The altar before them stood as it had for over two hundred years. The stained-glass windows, scratched and battered and left to the elements, kept the light out and secrets within. In the background a youthful choir could be heard chanting softly in traditional Latin.

    “Ratansky was killed,” the priest continued. His exposed face was long and drawn, worn by fatigue and strain. The deep blue of his eyes had faded. His graying hair hung limply to frame a right ear that angled into a sharp tip and left ear that angled into no tip at all.
    The lobe on that side was missing.
    “We have lost contact with all those forming the chain set up to aid him.” The priest rotated his eyes from one of the figures before him to the other. “The network has been compromised, rendered useless to us.”
    “Are we safe here? ” The voice from the figure on the left was young, masculine; fearful and excited at the same time.
    The priest nodded. “I have kept this place a secret even from our most trusted contacts. Now, beyond these walls, trust no longer exists.” He looked at them both. “Remove your hoods.”
    The robed figures did so in perfect simultaneity, revealing soft faces pale with strain and worry. Each had long, sandy brown hair; the boy’s shoulder length and the girl’s a half foot longer. Their eyes were an identical shade of piercing crystal blue, perhaps too large for the rest of their elegantly chiseled, statuelike faces. Their noses were long and slender, narrow chins centered between angular dimples grooved into both lower cheeks. Too perfect and unmarked, too beautiful to be real, and yet so perfectly matched that anyone seeing them would know instantly they were twins.
    “It is only us,” the priest continued.
    “Then we have lost,” said the boy.
    “No, Jacob!” his twin sister insisted, her voice slightly smoky while Jacob’s rose a bit too high for a male’s. “There are still the three of us!”
    “Yes,” the priest acknowledged, and they both turned his way. “But Ratansky had what we so desperately sought.”
    “Then we must retrieve it,” Rachel said staunchly. “Whatever that takes.”

    The priest shrugged. “That may be the only way to stop them. They have the means; we’ve feared that all along. But I never believed they would be in position so soon to bring it off … .”
    “As I said,” Rachel picked up, “whatever it takes.”
    “But,” the priest started, and stopped just as fast, “I can’t ! … I can’t!” The words stretched a grimace across his tortured features.
    The twins looked at each other.
    “We will do it,” said Rachel, her twin, Jacob, nodding his agreement.
    “If there was any other way,” the priest followed, his voice dry and pained.
    “There isn’t,” Jacob told him. “And there is no place to run to. At least there won’t be. Not in this world.”
    The priest’s face bent in sadness. The haunting melodic chants of the young choir echoed in the background and turned the sadness to grief.
    “Children,” he said softly, “all that remains are children … .”
    “ We are not children,” Rachel insisted.
    The priest looked at them. “You have not yet seen your eighteenth birthdays.”
    “But we have lived this war with you for half of them,” Jacob remained. “And for the last four years we have trained with the other soldiers, who have now abandoned us. Taken the courses over and over again, mastering the skill sets—you said so yourself. And now you know there is no choice, for any of us.”
    “If we are as good as you always said,” put forth Rachel.
    “You are better.”
    “Then we will go to New York. Ratansky must surely have left something .”
    “The