liked the fact that they had this small difference.
They had been sawing awkwardly away at the tough plastic when
the fight turned ugly. Charles had threatened his brother with the
saw, waving it around furiously as they conducted their argument in
the reflection of a tilted, oval-framed mirror on a floor stand. Benjamin had started screaming, “Use the saw, use it, use it to
saw us apart! Saw us apart!”
Then Benjamin had yanked a hinged arm from Jessie and started
beating Charles with it.
Not their first fight or their last.
But the two of them had always found a way to manage. They
loved each other. What was the alternative? They were stuck together. “We will not mutilate this girl just because she reminds you of
Sadie McLure,” Charles said.
“Look at her,” Benjamin sneered. “She thinks she’s beautiful.
Does she think I’m beautiful?” He glared at Minako. She was handcuffed wrist and ankle to the gurney. He tried to force his face down
close to hers but Charles resisted. They came close to toppling over.
KimKim, who had been lent to them as servant, steadied them with a
timely grab for Charles’s arm. He let go as qui
ckly as he could. Ling,
who had been across the room, glared poisonously at KimKim. “Brother, we cannot make ourselves beautiful by making others
hideous,” Charles pleaded. “You know that this is not the way. We are
here with our people. They love us.”
“They have no choice!” Benjamin raged.
“Just as people have no choice but to fear us,” Charles argued. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it all. Enough. All my life …I want . . .” “What do you want, Ben?” Charles could feel his own heart and
lungs clenching, tightening from his brother’s emotion.
“To no longer be this,” Benjamin cried out. “To be a man and
not a freak. To smile at a girl and not have her run screaming. It’s
pathetic, isn’t it? I should accept my life. Pathetic.”
“We aren’t accepting it,” Charles snapped. “And please stop, we’re
hyperventilating, I can barely breathe! We are accepting nothing. We are changing the world! We are remaking the human race! We’ve begun on this ship, my God, did you hear the cheers and the cries? It
was love, brother.It was love for us.”