Fifteen

Grayson Landon Taylor

With nothing better to do on a Saturday at seven in the morning. I was sitting in my little sister's bed, both of us scrolling through our phones so we didn't have to deal with the outside world just yet.

I nudged her. "Are you okay?"

She breaks out of her deep thought and subconsciously puts on the mask she always seems to wear, even though I doubt she even realises she does it anymore.

"Yeah. I'm fine. I was up late doing something, so I'm pretty tired." I had heard her typing last night at like one in the morning. Our bedrooms were next to each other, and the walls were thin when I had been trying to sleep. All I could hear were the consistent taps of her keys that were moving at an inhumane.

"Oh about that, how the heck do you type so fast? When I was in bed, I could hear you typing and I swear you just kept getting faster and faster."

"Have you seen how much I use my computers?" Leigh asks rhetorically, and I guess she was right. When we weren't doing something, she always had her eyes trained on some sort of device. She was on one right now.

"Haven't you heard that staring at a screen too much damages your eyes?"

"And that is why I wear contacts." She retorts, and I look at her, lifting up her chin so I can look in her eyes. I couldn't even see traces of something in her eyes. They looked clear, the blue if them looking exactly like mine, with the expedition of the navy blue ring around them that I hadn't noticed before.

"Wait, watch." She touched something on her smart watch and a red ring circled around her eye before disappearing.

"What?" I was baffled.

"It's something Nate and I designed, maybe two years ago." She excitedly tells me. "Have you seen those shows where they wear glasses that have a screen in the lenses?"

"Yeah, they have it in the new Spiderman. And in MacGyver." I say the first two shows that come to mind.

"Yeah, I think that in contact lens form, they block out negative effects screens have on my eyes, like negative and negative make a positive I guess. It doesn't get picked up by security, and no one can tell I'm wearing them. They also do so much like facial recognition. I can see messages being sent to me, I can also look at any Ambivalent device, and I can see what's on their screen from as far as a kilometre away." She tells me excitedly.

"And you built it?" I ask in awe, why did Leigh get all the good genes? It totally isn't fair.

"Yup. We only made two though, one for me and one for Lex." My face falls a little, I was hoping I could convince her to let me try one. "It's because I only told you the basics. If the wrong person got a hold of these, it wouldn't end well for the world. They could get control over most of Ambivalent, even if it's only for a couple minutes, it could be really bad."

She was right, my sister had made a company that was taking over the world. Everyone wanted Ambivalent things, they were incredible, their designs were sleek, they were fast and they were unhackable. They had tons of storage and an even better battery life, and were just overall the best product on the market.

I didn't even want to know all the information my sister had access to. On top of having all the data from the devices her company had, I had also discovered she was a crazy good hacker, she could get through anything, and it was mesmerising to watch her work. I sat with her some night, just watching her do her thing while I did some school or read.

We had fallen into an easy routine. I went through the day, we didn't interact too much at school, first because we were in different grades, second because we had different friends, but on the afternoons when she didn't have ballet or track we played basketball together. She taught me a couple tricks that she knew having grown up with a future NBA player, and then we worked together in the evenings, just chatting and learning new facts about one another.

It was crazy how my life has done a one-eighty in a matter of weeks. I no longer snuck out looking for companionship. I was on track to becoming best-friends with the little sister I had promised to not let myself get close to.

That plan was doomed from the start, there was no way anyone could ever be immune to the charm of Leigh, mom and dad acted like they weren't impacted, but I often caught the soft, longing looks they sent her way when Ezra made her laugh or when she and Eli were chatting passionately about something that they didn't even realise how loud they had gotten.

Mom and dad were pushing her away, because when they looked at her all they could think about was the heartache they endured for the last fourteen years.

The heartache that had made them emotionally unavailable for me and my brothers.

But Leigh had been right when she said it wasn't her fault, she was the victim too, and sure I dealt with neglect but she had it so much worse. I acted oblivious to how I sometimes hear her call out in her sleep, how she sometimes rubs the scars on her arms when she zones out. We all saw the faint scars she has littering her body. They aren't very noticeable but they are there and she doesn't hide them.

"Hello, is anyone home?" I pushed away Leigh's hand that had been flicking my forehead.

"Stop it." I whined but it was childish and not because she was really annoying me. It was nice to be so close to a sibling that they willingly chose to sit next to you when they could pick anyone else. It was nice to be someone's first choice for something.

She's my sibling. Like Crew had Nolan, Em had Gabe and Eli had Ezra. She's my best friend.

"Look." She shows me her phone screen, this is connected to the contact lenses and it is showing what I see." She showed me and I could see everything from Leigh's point of view. "And if a message comes up I see it like this." She shows me the alert that pops up in front of her eyes. "And then if I set it to scan, it scans people, their body language, their emotions. It gives me a background check on them as well."

"That is kind of creepy, but cooler than anything." I offer, she was really passionate about this, and even though I didn't understand half the technical terms she was rambling on about I was happy to just listen to her talk. Her eyes were alight with the passion she had for the subject. "So what does Nate do in your company? It seems like you do all the hacking and coding."

"Yeah, I do. Lex does the exterior of things, He draws up all of the hardware. He made the designs for our phone exteriors, if we make robots and stuff he would do all the wiring while I write the code.

"So you work on different things but they go into the same thing." Leigh nods, that was the definition of like couple goals. "What got you into computers and all this type of thing, how did you build a company so young?"

Leigh's lips pursed, she looked like she was trying to come up with the right words to explain. "Where we were taken to we were given a ton of training on a list of things, they wanted us to become soldiers. We were given the opportunity to learn a lot of things, more than a toddler should have known but computers was one of them. I grasped onto that so easily. One day on our way back from training, it was one of the rare times we weren't escorted to our room when we found an old laptop. It didn't work but luckily for us the charger was there so with what we knew we were able to figure out how to fix it. After we got it working I took all the books I could get my hand son to improve my coding, soon enough I had figured out how to hack into the funds of the place that had taken us and I had taken only a couple thousand out, not enough that anyone would notice but I made an investment portfolio for us and honestly I had got pretty good at it. We made money and I used that to make even more. We replaced what we had taken but our money kept growing and growing."

My eyes widened, this was before she was adopted so she had to be between like five and seven. I can't remember doing anything useful with my life at that age besides playing like little league sports that I think I got distracted by dandelions half of the time.

"The night of the raid by the agency we were saved by Nate and I were going to run away, we had money and skills no seven and eight year olds should have known. We knew other languages and how to fight, we would have been fine. And then we met two wonderful men who saved us, took us and gave us a home. The money we had saved is what started Ambivalent."

"You didn't use your family money?"

"You underestimate how good we were at investing. We had at least a couple million dollars by the time we wanted to start. The A.T officially opened when I was twelve but it had been in the works since I was eight. We had built so many prototypes and devices that by the time we opened we had such a variety of things. Honestly half the stuff we started with and were going to release in next launches are still sitting in our old lab untouched back home. Everything evolved so fast."

"Did it just take off instantly?"

"You know we just wanted a couple people to use the things we made, we weren't planning on opening a full company. But a couple people took notice and saw that we actually were quite good at this, then more and more people and then we got employees and a building. Then we needed something bigger so Xander drew something so much bigger than we would ever need and we started building it with the hope that one day we would need that much space. We didn't think it would happen in a year, that the next year we would expand to France and Italy. In the next few years we would have headquarters in every single continent. Then we would make our first billion after two years of being open and we've quadrupled that by now."

The numbers whizzed in my head, I knew Ambivalent was big but I was just getting the sense of how much money my sister was worth. And she had other companies. No one knew the face of the world's biggest tech companies, in fact most of the biggest ceo's we hidden from the world. All people knew were names, if people knew who Everleigh or Auriella actually was, then the world would go crazy.

"And how did you start your fashion line?"

"That was easy, because I already had my name in the world. Opening a second and third company was super easy since we had the credibility. I had a lot of designs and an aesthetic I wanted to stick to. My grandmother also helped a lot, honestly I wouldn't have been able to do it without her. Since A.T was already running on it's own money at that point and we had earned back all the capital we inverted in lex an I split the money and opened up a company each with our new passions. Tech and computers had always been something we knew, loved and used to survive but architecture for Xander and fashion for me became one of our new ways of escaping once we were let back into the world."

"And whose company does better." Leigh gives me a look. "Oh, come on, don't give me that. I have seen first hand how competitive the two of you are."

"Are you trying to destroy my relationship?" She deadpans. "That is one thing we have never done or will never do. We have not seen each other's numbers or orders or the statistics for the other company. And since they aren't even close to being in the same category business so we have never compared and will never compare them. I do not know what is done at Optimum and will not know until maybe one day when we are sorting out the paperwork to hand over the companies to our children."

"When do you want to have kids?"

"When I'm twenty-five, I want to have time before just to be an adult but I don't want to be too old, especially knowing that the kids will be half of me, if I want to keep up with them then I have to be fairly young. I also think I'm going to adopt in the future, but not anytime soon"

"So are you waiting to get married as well."

"No, that is happening while I'm eighteen, the kid part is just waiting a bit until we sort out or life a bit."

"You're financially stable and have everything you need to look after a child, and besides you and Nate would be great parents."

"We know that, but you haven't seen how our lives are back home. We work such long days. We wake up at like five and have to go to the gym for training. Some mornings I have horse riding at seven to eight thirty the other mornings I have ballet. I go to school from nine to one. Then I have a quick lunch before rushing to Ètinceler until three then I have to go to Ambivalent where I work until seven. Have dinner and then I head to the agency where I have a mission a couple times a week, then I get to bed at ten or eleven only to wake up at five to repeat that all over again. I don't even have time for myself let alone a child."

I look at her confused. "How the heck are you still alive? You know the human body shouldn't be working that much."

"I've been in this cycle since I was twelve, I think I'm used to it by now. But I'm working on it. We've been trying to make our companies more self-reliant, we have trusted employees and an even better tech system running them that half the things are done automatically. When we take down NITE we are going to cut back at the agency and will only be called in for big things and won't deal with small-time drug dealers and stuff like that. When all this is done I'm going to spend time with Xander with less responsibility. We will be able to travel all the time and spend time with our friends. And then when we are rested then we can talk to kids."

"Does Nate want kids?"

Leigh laughs. "Do you know how many times I've had to remind that idiot that I'm still sixteen and he's seventeen?"

"It doesn't feel like that sometimes." The two of them are more mature than most people you would meet in their thirties or forties.

"No." She agrees. "No, it doesn't."

<><><>

"Ezra Sullivan Taylor and Everleigh Sapphire Taylor." I chide, annoyed at the two. As much as I was getting used to Leigh's new name she was still Everleigh to me so I knew I wouldn't reveal it by accident.

The two of them were racing carts on the inside of the store chucking in everything that looked semi-appealing to them for the family movie night the four of us had spontaneously planned.

I take back what I say about Leigh being mature. Right now, she was matching Ezra's level of maternity and he was as mature as a six year old.

"Who is going to pay for all that?" Elijah asks, staring down at the two full trolleys.

"I will." Leigh offers, making her way to the check-out. The cashier's eyes widened when he took in the masses of junk food but started scanning them anyway. By the time he had finished the bill was well into three digits but Leigh wasn't fazed at the number, she just handed over a sleek black card which went through without a problem.

It took all four of us holding multiple bags to take the things back to the car. We had taken Leigh's car since it was the nicest. Now I knew about her tech company and all of that I took more notice of small things, like how her car turned on when she placed her hands on the steering wheel, and how it had a blue light to scan her fingerprints. And how the car unlocked just when she got closer, like the key was just an accessory to make it look like she had a normal car. I sat in the passenger seat while Ezra and Eli sat at the back. Leigh and Ezra sang songs at the top of their lungs the whole way home, and Eli and I couldn't resist, singing along to the nostalgic songs from 2013 that Ezra loved so much.

I was happy, happier than I had been in a long time.

And there was only one person to thank.

So I have drama coming next chapter, I posted a TikTok about it a while ago but I am finally getting around to writing it. Sneak peak it's about Emmeline and Ella putting her in her place.

Next chapter was going to be a date chapter with Ella and Xander but I've put that on hold a bit since I feel I haven't written anything interesting in a while. Hopefully I can get that out soon, school has been taking all my time recently so I have no idea when it'll be done but hopefully soon.

Have a great weekend and I will see you next chapter.

Ara <3