Valor cleared his throat. Peter’s words hadn’t dulled his arousal any. “Follow my lead.” By now the news media had arrived, and Valor felt the weight of those cameras like a physical presence. The police were directing the crowd out of the way for their own safety. Glass and twisted metal littered the streets and sparking signs threatened fire. “We need to secure them so the police can make the arrests.”

  “Right.” Peter didn’t question, but the entire time they were escorting the henchmen to the police cars, Valor felt Peter’s gaze on him. It was almost as if Peter were judging him and finding Valor wanting.

  “You should have seen him, Socket. If I hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve impaled that poor guy with those fancy magic swords.”

  “First of all, that poor guy is working for Anarky, so he’s hardly innocent in all of this. Second, the swords are highly advanced alien tech, not magic. Lastly…” Socket sat back in his chair, finally taking his hand off of his computer panel and letting the buzz fade from his mind. “What else did you expect? He comes from a universe where he’s had to fight to the death to save his life. I don’t think you can just turn that off.”

  Valor stopped pacing and dropped into his seat. It was the second chair in the control room, but Socket always referred to it in his mind as Valor’s seat, probably because Valor was one of the few people he didn’t mind having around. “It really must suck over there, huh?”

  He needed more coffee for this conversation. Socket had his networked coffee maker start brewing before he even made it across the room to pour a cup. There were some interesting perks to his powers. “Sounds like it. We just have to make sure this universe doesn’t end up the same way. Coffee?”

  “Two sugars please.”

  As if Socket didn’t know exactly how Valor liked his coffee. He hid a smile as he mixed a second mug. Valor had taken his mask off, and he looked absolutely adorable in the black jumpsuit. He really should consider changing the colors of his usual costume.

  “You got any leads on more portals opening?” Valor took his mug—Socket had given him the one with his name written in binary—and gulped it down. Socket never knew him to sip when he could just down the entire cup. Then again, heat never bothered Valor, not even scalding hot liquid.

  “Running out of kittens to rescue?” Socket dropped back in his seat and started running his surveillance footage again. There had to be something he missed.

  “Socket, what the hell is this?” Valor gestured to the feeds showing on all the screens.

  He sighed. “Security footage of Holly Hutton. The reporter who caught up with me outside your apartment. I’m trying to figure out where she’s getting her info. She just seems to spend a lot of time in coffee shops.”

  “That’s not a violation of privacy at all.”

  “She’s the one who started it.” Socket knew he sounded like a little kid. “I have to protect all of us, Val. I need to know where she’s getting her info.”

  “Hey, isn’t that Jimmy?”

  “What?” Socket turned to look at him.

  “Jimmy Wilkes. From your accounting department. I run into him when I take the employee elevator up here.”

  “Son of a bitch. She’s been talking to my people.” Socket slammed his fist on the arm of his chair.

  “Maybe it’s time you started doing the same. You’re always up here. How many of your employees actually know who they’re working for?”

  Valor had no idea what he was talking about. Socket spoke to his employees plenty of times. Well. The ones working on the new projects. He didn’t need to concern himself with the rest of the company as long as the money kept rolling in.

  Chapter 6

  Today, BarTec CEO Peter Barnes unveiled the latest software in their bag of tricks—BarProtect 2012. For the past five years, BarTec has been the name in hacker protection.

  But how did BarTec rise so prominently out of obscurity? Five years ago the company was yet another Internet startup among hundreds. It’s certainly not due to the personality of its CEO, who’s stiff as a board and clearly uncomfortable with the media. There’s no reason for Peter Barnes to have become a multimillionaire so quickly, except for the one simple reason—his product works.

  —Tech News, Hutton News Service

  Socket had been trying to duck babysitting duty, and had in fact been successful in shipping his counterpart off to the other members of The Division for the five days Peter had been with them. However, he was the only one available on the schedule today, so it looked like he was going to have buck up and spend some time with his more athletic twin. He’d rather be confronting his employees about talking with a certain red-headed reporter, but that was going to have to wait. Socket couldn’t very well take Peter downstairs with him.

  “Looks like you’re stuck with me today.” Socket greeted Peter in the kitchen. It was still weird to think of his double as “Peter.” Nobody had called Socket that except for his mother, and she was long gone. Did Peter prefer it, or did he have a nickname he hadn’t shared with the rest of them?

  Peter set down his coffee mug and smiled. That was creepy. It was like looking into a twisted mirror. “Excellent. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Now, that couldn’t be anything good. Socket grabbed his own cup of coffee, pausing long enough to touch his earpiece and check in with the system before sitting down across from Peter at the cozy wooden table.

  “I wanted to ask you about your powers.”

  “Huh.” Socket took a sip. The coffee sparked over his tongue, sharper and richer than usual. Someone was stocking the machine with a higher end brand. It was most likely Valor. He liked his coffee to have flavor, while Socket just wanted the caffeine. “What did you want to know?” More importantly, why did Peter want to know?

  “Valor said you speak with computers?”

  Socket wondered what other tales Valor was telling. “Sort of. There’s no actual talking involved.” He held out his hands and they tingled on cue, anticipating contact with a computer mind. “I can feel what they’re thinking, and I can give them a little push here and there.” Back when he’d first started it had been a whisper in his mind. It had taken him years to get this good, to make the computers answer when he demanded. Once he’d learned to program—to understand how computers thought—it became easy to get machines to do exactly what he wanted.

  “Through touch, correct?”

  “Yeah.” Socket clenched his hands into fists and drew them back. “I’m guessing you don’t have the same ability.”

  “I don’t think powers like this exist in my universe.” Peter scowled. “If I could do what you do…”

  “Hey, not like it would be much help to you. I can’t do it with alien tech. It doesn’t work.” Peter didn’t need to know about the incident with Tiana’s staff. Maybe he should start asking some questions of his own. “What about Valor in your universe? I assume you know his real identity?”

  Peter looked startled at being called out on it. Socket couldn’t imagine not knowing Valor. If Peter was anything like Socket, that mask wasn’t enough to fool him.

  “I do. But the Michaels in my universe doesn’t have the same talents…or personality.”

  Interesting. He knew Valor’s real name, but called him by his last instead of the more familiar “Mitch.” “I think Val in any universe would be right in the thick of things. He can’t not be out there saving people.”

  Peter cradled his coffee mug between his hands, staring down into it. He brought it to his lips and closed his eyes as he took a long drink. “There are lots of differences between our worlds. I can’t imagine running a company or being a millionaire, for example.”

  Socket rolled his eyes. “It’s not like I’m hobnobbing with the rich and famous. The company was an accident, actually.”

  “Some accident!”

  “When you can communicate with computers, it’s easy to get them to do what you want.” Socket shrugged. “And some people will pay a lot of money to keep hackers out of their systems.” It had been Valor’s idea. Socket had just gotten his Associate degree and was in the middle of a fruitless job search. Apparently programmers were a dime a dozen. But his anti-hacking system was absolutely unique. Valor had suggested the patent, and Valor’s dad had found an investor for startup costs. Five years later, Socket had more money than he knew what to do with.

  “I honestly don’t know enough about computers to comment.”

  Socket shook his head at the irony. “Okay, is this as weird for you, too? I mean, you’re me, but you’re not me.”

  “It’s like meeting an identical cousin.”

  Okay, so maybe they both had the same sense of humor. It was still weird. Peter had his face, but he moved differently and had an entirely different life experience in that other world. “The tin can bad guys showed up when you were fifteen. But before that…” Socket wondered how similar their lives were up until then.

  Peter narrowed his eyes. “All right. I’ll bite. Grew up in Weston.”

  “Same.” Socket had to think hard about his life before Valor. Funny, it was like he only came alive once they’d met in high school. “Mom used to take me to the little park with the lake.” Before Dad left and she stopped hiding the bottles.

  “Lakeview Park. Yeah, Mom used to take me and Melanie there too.”

  “Who’s Melanie?”

  Peter sat up straight. “Our sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister.” That brought up another important question. “Does that mean Dad stuck around then?”

  “Until the Overseers killed him.” Peter put the coffee mug down very carefully. He flexed his hands, looking like he wanted to punch something.

  “I’m sorry.” And Socket was. To have Dad around, only to lose him in such a shitty way was the worst kind of horror. The coffee soured in his belly. He’d thought of his double and that other universe in the abstract, as some funky sci-fi movie parody. Now he could think of Peter as a person, who’d lost so much already.

  “Me too.”

  “My mom passed a few years ago.” It didn’t make up for Peter losing his dad in such a horrible manner, but Socket offered it up.

  The awkward pause was saved by Valor swooping into the kitchen with a “Hey guys!” and immediately going for the fridge.

  Socket was grateful for about five seconds before he realized something. “Don’t you have a deadline to make?” Valor’s day job as a sports blogger gave him the ability to write from home—or the base—without having a typical nine to five schedule.

  “Got the last article in this morning.” Valor pulled out a carton of orange juice and sniffed at it. “I figured you needed to get downstairs and take care of things.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  It was only then that Socket noticed that Valor wasn’t wearing his mask. Valor never forgot his mask while on base. “You’re not in uniform.”

  Valor shrugged before talking a gulp out of the carton. “Thought I could take Peter out without all the superhero stuff.”

  “That sounds fun.” Socket didn’t know why he was irked. Something bugged him about Valor coming back to base just to hang out with Peter. It wasn’t that it messed up the whole point of having schedule, although Socket hated having his plans screwed around with.

  Valor was his friend. Peter shouldn’t be able to just take Socket’s place. It didn’t matter how much he resembled Socket, except for the muscles and tattoos and sexy scars. They weren’t really alike at all, that much this conversation had revealed. Yet Valor seemed so eager to spend time with Peter, and Socket couldn’t understand it.

  “I wanted to see some sights that don’t exist in my universe anymore.” Peter smiled over at Valor, his expression no longer so heavy or serious.

  Socket touched his own cheeks, wondering if he looked at Val in the same way. Fuck. This was going to drive him crazy if he stuck around here. “You sure you’re okay with taking my turn?”

  “How long are we even going to bother with this babysitting thing?” Valor finally put the carton back in the fridge.

  “Until he gets a job.” Socket rolled his eyes. “I’m almost done with his new identity. He’s going to be the twin brother I never knew I had.” He already had the information together, but he was putting off giving Peter the paperwork—driver’s license, credit cards, etc. Socket still wanted his double where he could keep an eye on him.

  “I’m sure my skills would be very useful for my future employers.” Peter’s lips twitched.

  Socket pointed a figure at him. “Hey, I’m the only smartass allowed. Get your own schtick.”

  “Socket, go talk to your employees. You’ve put it off long enough. Shoo. We’ll be fine!” Valor actually made a shooing motion with his hands.

  Scowling, Socket left them together. He didn’t like how well Valor and Peter were getting along, not at all.

  Where the hell do you think you’re going? Peter wanted to shout as Socket left the room—ditching him again. At least Peter had managed to pry out some information about their shared history, or lack of one.

  In this world, Melanie didn’t exist. His little sister had never been born. Socket’s mother was dead and his father clearly long out of the picture. It sounded like Socket had absolutely no one.

  That shouldn’t sound freeing. Sometimes when Michaels threatened Mom or Melanie, Peter wanted to shout, just do it, stop holding them over my head to get me to do what you want.

  He’d fought in the arena for them, knowing if he failed they’d have no one left to protect them. And he’d let Michaels take him without protest, though it would be so easy to roll over and pin the other man to the bed. It would be so easy to have his hands locked around Michaels’s throat while Peter choked the air out of him.

  “We should pack a lunch. It’s cheaper than buying from the street vendors.” Valor rummaged through the fridge, pulling out packages of deli meats and a bottle of mustard.

  Peter struggled to come up with a normal sounding reply—not easy when his thoughts were filled with strangling the man who shared Valor’s face. “I thought hot dogs and pretzels were part of the charm of Manhattan.”

  “Well, when you’ve been here long enough, it kinda loses its allure.” Valor went back to the fridge for a pack of cheese slices. “Where did you want to head first?”

  Valor didn’t appreciate the freedom to choose his own damn food. Back home, Peter ate what his trainers gave him, no matter how disgusting. If he didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything else. His meals were part of the program that turned him into a fighting machine.

  He might as well eat all the coffee and donuts he could get his hands on. Once this was over, Peter was going back to processed powders and flat, gelatinous bars. His mouth filled with the memory of the taste, and he had to swallow back bile.

  “I always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty before they modified it.” That was also the truth, one of the bits of carefully parceled out information to gain sympathy. Valor had been eating them up.

  Valor shook the butter knife he’d taken to spreading the mustard with. Yellow drops landed on the counter and all over the floor. “You know I was serious about helping your universe. With enough planning and support, those tin cans wouldn’t know what was coming to them.”

  Peter couldn’t believe two different versions of the same man were both so clueless. Valor thought himself strong enough to save another universe, while Michaels thought himself powerful enough to take over another dimension. Both of them were so certain they knew who Peter was.

  They were both wrong.

  “I don’t think even you can take on an entire planet of Overseers.” It was the kindest thing he could think to say without destroying the carefully seeded friendship that Valor thought they were building. Peter had gotten very good at pretending to like someone.

  It wasn’t like he could ever forget who Valor looked like.

  “I wonder if you going missing threw them for a loop. It’s been downright quiet lately.” Valor started wrapping the sandwiches in foil. “That’s the only reason I’ve actually caught up with my deadlines.”

  “Quiet. Really?”

  “Yeah, we got used to having attacks every two days or so. This is downright weird. I’m not complaining though. We all needed the break.”

  Goddamned Overseers couldn’t even stick to their own patterns. It wasn’t only stupid of Michaels, it was careless. It was sheer luck Valor hadn’t figured out that the Overseers were waiting for Peter’s intel before they made their next move. Luck and the fact that Valor couldn’t imagine that anyone with Socket’s face would betray him.

  Now Peter had to go tell them to order an attack or blow his cover. He’d be the one responsible for hurting countless people. Maybe that had been the entire point.

  “I’ll meet you at the elevators. I, uh, need to hit the head.”

  Valor waved him on, still packing their lunch like some conscientious mother. He was so fucking stupid. He deserved what was coming.

  Socket straightened his tie as he strode through the hallways of the corporate offices of BarTec. He never dressed up to come down here, but then again he was usually checking up on the tech guys in the development department. They were a casual group, which Socket encouraged—letting employees bring their pets, or play video games while their code compiled. But today he had to talk to the big kids: the people who kept the business end of the company running.

  In this suit, he felt like a little boy playing dress up. BarTec had grown so fast—an amazing weed that rose out of the seed of his dream. Back when he was a kid making dinner out of canned soup and stale bread, Socket desperately wanted enough money to escape. Now he had the money, and the responsibility to go with it. He didn’t mind the hard work. He just was never sure if he were going to wake up one morning and find himself still a teen back in his Mom’s apartment in Weston.