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For as long as Amla and Yasuko Shirogane can remember, the two of them have been the odd ones out among the four Shirogane-Ahluwalia children. Their older sisters, Sonia and Himeko, are the spitting images of their Papa and Tou-Chan; Sonia looks just like Papa, right down to her tall slender build and her beautiful plum-red mouth, and Himeko looks like Tou-chan, with dimples in the middle of her freckled cheeks and a soft, rounded forehead. But Amla and Yasuko, oddly enough, look nothing like either of their parents, and it was the first thing Uncle Keith commented on when he met them in their Papa’s hospital room—because Amla and Yasuko, for better or for worse, only look like each other. The two of them were born together, after all; it makes sense that nobody else is allowed to look like them , even their gentle Papa or their doting Otou-san.
Amla and Yasuko are twins, which Tou-chan says is the name for two babies born at once. There are twins who look like each other, and twins who don’t, but they are very much the first kind; even at four years old, they have the same moles and the same voices and the same love for mischief, so that even Tou-chan finds it hard to tell them apart sometimes. They don’t mind, though—Papa always says that they came into the world holding hands, wrapped so close around each other that they had to be born at the exact same time because the doctors couldn’t pull them apart, and it’s been like that ever since. Where Amla goes, so does Yasuko, and what Yasuko does, so does Amla. They sleep in the same bed and bathe in the same tub, and if they’re ever separated they feel like two broken halves of a person, instead of a whole.
Part of the reason, Papa says, is because they might as well have one mind. Amla always knows what Yasuko thinks, and Yasuko always knows what Amla thinks, but neither of them are actually very good at thinking. (Whoever said two heads were better than one was very, very wrong. Two heads means twice the wildness for the Shirogane twins, and unfortunately for their poor parents, both of them would rather die than think twice about anything.)
Which, of course, is how they ended up in this peculiar situation. The situation part is just the forest behind the farm they live on—they’re not supposed to go into the forest unsupervised, but even Tou-chan knows that Amla and Yasuko are still the most dangerous things inside it—but the peculiar bit is the tiger cub sitting in Amla’s lap, which is obviously both very cute and very unhappy at the prospect of being stuck there.
“It looks upset,” Yasuko observes, feeding the cub with a bit of chicken left from lunch and squealing as it snaps it down. “Maybe we should take it home.”
“Who would take care of it?” wonders Amla. “We can’t. It’s too small, and we’re only small, too.”
“It’s more of a baby than us. Maybe Tou-chan can.”
“Then we’ll bring it back as a present for Tou-chan and Papa,” Amla decides. “Tou-chan’s been making Looks at Papa, anyway. Nee-chan said it means they want another baby, so maybe they won’t mind an orange one.”
“But Papa said he and Tou-chan were never having another baby again,” Yasuko objects. “He said we were more work than a hundred babies, and then he cried because we fell off the barn roof and almost died.”
“We’re always almost dying, though. We almost died last week.”
“And the week before.”
A moment of silence, and then—
“I guess the tiger cub won’t almost die, Yasu-chan. Aunty Pidge’s animal book said tigers are really smart.”
“Maybe it can teach us how to be smart when it gets bigger,” Yasuko suggests. “And then we can set it free.”
“We’ll have to wait a long time for that,” sighs Amla. “Maybe a hundred years. Tigers are really, really big, so it must take them longer to be grown up.”
“But we have Altean magic from Papa, so we can wait a hundred years. Remember?”
“Mm! And he would be a good friend for Sherani,” Amla adds, stroking the tips of the tiger cub’s soft ears. Sherani-begum—or Shere Khan, as Papa calls her when she goes hunting in the evenings—is their Tou-chan’s old black cat, who spends her days lolling by the fireplace and scolding her four small kittens. And the tiger cub is only a very big kitten, after all, so Sherani ought to get along well with it even if it grows up to be the size of a house. Or bigger.
Having reached an accord (as they always do—the twins always agree about everything, and have never fought even once in all their lives) they proceed to bundle the tiger back to the little cottage at the west end of the fruit farm, where the rest of the family is busy with their usual duties for the afternoon. Sonia and Himeko are upstairs doing their homework, and Papa seems to be wrestling a mountain of flatbread dough in the kitchen, and Tou-chan—their go-to parent for hugs and kisses and cuddles, and now their first obstacle in Operation Tiger—is sweeping the floor in the living room, without his glasses on.
Score.
“Amla, Yasuko,” he calls out to them, as they march in through the front door with the morose tiger cub dangling from Amla’s arms like a wet cat. “What have you two got there?”
“It’s a cat,” Yasuko informs him. “A wild one.”
Tou-chan immediately puts down his broom and squints at them, clearly not seeing their new pet well enough to notice the fur or the orange stripes. “Where did you find it?”
“Behind the house.” It wasn’t technically a lie. The woods are behind the house, after all.
“Do you want to keep it?” Tou-chan says warily. “We already have five cats and four babies, meri jaan. We’re full up—why don’t you take your new friend down to your cousins and see if Auntie wants it?”
“No!” Amla cries, clutching the tiger cub closer to her chest. “It loves us! Don’t make us send it away, Tou-chan! See, it hasn’t even meowed this whole time. It’ll be good, I promise.”
“Well, all right,” their Tou-chan says, giving in with the easy complacency of a father who had raised two very well-behaved daughters and had no idea what to do with the two who wouldn’t know good behavior if it hit them in the face. “Take it in to Papa after he’s done with the dough and let him have a look at it, and if it settles in well you can introduce it to Sherani. All right?”
“Yay!” Amla and Yasuko cheer, running up to their bedroom with the tiger cub still blinking in their arms. “Thank you, Tou-chan!”
Operation Tiger: officially complete.
* * *
(two hours later, over dinner)
“Amla, Yasu-chan,” Papa says at the dinner table, sounding deceptively calm as he looks at their new pet. “Please tell me you two didn’t go out into the woods without my permission and bring home a tiger when you were supposed to be practicing your kanji.”
“We didn’t,” the twins chorus. “It’s a tiger cub.”
“It is?” Tou-chan blinks, finally searching through his snow-white hair for his glasses and shoving them onto his nose. “Ah, what do you know. It really is a tiger.”
“This is divine punishment,” mutters Papa, putting a bowl of kitten food in front of the cub and watching as it starts to eat. “Dad always said my children would turn out just like me, and he was right. Oh, God.”