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The first dream is a kind one.
There is a boy, a girl. Taller, a bit filled out, the flush of healthy muscle and flesh on their once fragile bones. Adults, but not. They can’t be adults, not with their faces beautiful, their nails clean, ghostlike in their perfection.
In this dream, they live in a cabin in the heart of the woods. The cabin used to mean something else. Boredom, imprisonment, terror. But the Hunter is dead now, his kingdom conquered. So the girl burned the stuffed cadavers, the boy axed down the house, and they rebuilt it to their own tastes, log by log and stone by stone.
Now it’s the place the boy returns to at sundown with a sack of fresh produce in his arms and a fallen boar lain across his shoulders. It’s the place the girl knots together nets and builds animal traps, carves little nesting dolls and weaves rugs from dyed thread.
Now it’s home.
The boy steps through the doorway with his fresh haul, letting the door rattle loudly and letting his shoes plod down like stones. He’s learned not to be too quiet. It startles the girl when he soundlessly stalks through the cabin like a shade of death. It makes her reach for her favorite knife with one hand, and the restored shotgun with the other. He has a scar in his shoulder to prove it.
Instead, he tromps in with little care, setting down the slain boar on the prep table in the main room. He picks a carrot from the sack and steps into the kitchen where the girl stands at the counter, skinning a pair of rabbits for stew. He extends the root to the girl, who smiles and accepts his offering. Her knife slides easily across the carrot, leaving cleanly diced cubes. And she hums. Just three notes, over and over, cresting like an ocean wave just before it breaks onto shore, haunting and mysterious and beautiful every time.
The boy loves to hear her sing. He links his hands around her waist and rests his chin on that comfortable nook between her shoulder and her neck. She’s warm and smells of lilies.
Hey, he says softly, and his voice is—dry, a bit brittle. But happy. So happy.
The girl laughs lightly and presses her head against his shoulder. They are both tall, but he is always taller. He is so tall and thin that his paper bag nearly hits the ceiling.
Hey, she says, and always her voice sings to him, melodies intertwining with sunlight, with courage, with the color yellow.
He turns to the cutting board. Vegetables, he notes, and smiles. I’m proud.
She nudges him with her shoulder. Don’t be. They’re yours.
Try just one, my lady? You’ll like it.
I already have, my lord, and I don’t.
He tips his head and kisses her cheek, then draws away. He’s reluctant, but the woods call. There’s game to be hunted and a field to harvest.
Just one thing left to do.
He reaches out and swipes a finger through the band that holds her ebony hair in a messy bun. Her locks fall and tangle into her eyes, just like when she was a child.
She turns on him wrathfully. Mono! she accuses, lily-pink blooming over her cheeks, and the note sings in his head.
The boy laughs, grabs his long, long overcoat, and flees into the woods.
(The dream dissolves to static. The channel changes.)
☂
The second dream is a cruel one.
There is a boy, a girl. The boy dangles over a precipice. The girl barely holds him in the realm of the living, her scrawny, birdswing fingers tightly wrapped in his.
He braces himself, because he knows how it ends.
But this time, the girl is not expressionless as she releases his hand, leaves him to plummet, to drown. She leaves no mysteries in her face and no enigma in her fading steps.
This time, she laughs, clear and high and still, still beautifully musical. Three blind mice, she sings. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how you run.
The three-note lullaby follows the boy as he falls without end.
(The dream shatters like glass. The channel changes.)
☂
The third dream is a lingering one.
There is a boy, a girl. There is rain. The boy sits on a bench at an abandoned bus stop, his paper bag sopping wet from the downpour. The girl is next to him, perched on top of an empty suit jacket and pants lain out like laundry. It’s a very curious scene looking from the outside, but the boy is not curious. He’s not looking from the outside; he is looking from the bench.
The girl sits quietly next to him. She doesn’t ask questions. She never asks questions, never makes accusations; only waits and follows, and sometimes, copies. She carries something when he does. Hides when he does. Runs when he does.
He wonders how far the copying might go.
So he tests it, tunes it like a broadcast. He pushes up his paper bag, stoops in quick, and presses a cold pair of lips to her colder cheek for one flittering heartbeat. Then he’s back, sitting on the bench beneath the rain, staring out into nothing.
An empty second passes, then two.
Then he feels a quick pressure against his paper bag where his cheek would have been, soft and cold as a raindrop.
Beneath the bag, the boy smiles wide.
(The dream dissolves beneath water. The channel changes.)
☂
Mono wakes slowly.
There is a boy. He is alone. Walls of flesh shudder beneath brick and concrete. There is no music to tell the passing of time here, no melody to break the monotony. He can only sit quietly. Alone.
Mono does not like waking. Waking reminds him of suffocating confinement, of stale rot, of questions. Why, why, why. Why not save him. Why not say anything. He could have waited if he had been given a reason. Any reason. You must defeat this, I’ll be back, I hate you. Anything.
Instead, he is not even given the opportunity to wait. There is nothing for which to wait. He can only linger here. A fading shade. A frozen glitch.
He curls up in the chair and drifts off once more.
☂
The fourth dream is a mysterious one.
There is a boy, a girl. They are grown again, tall and powerful, yet warped, disfigured, the weight of the Signal stretching their faces and their bodies thin.
They meet on the shore of a sea that glitters like a thousand tears. The boy stands on the pearly sand, thin and wavering like a transmission, and the girl is perched on a boarding ramp just before him. She is masked and perfumed, hiding the stench of death set in her nails. The boy can see it anyway. He sees all. Signals watch without prejudice.
He tips his hat and speaks, dry and crackling. Bon voyage, my dear.
She bows shallowly, speaks sweetly. Wouldn’t you care to join us, my darling?
His mouth crooks up beneath his hat, bent like his visage. A complimentary cruise upon the sailing slaughterhouse, he drawls mockingly. What an honor, my dear.
Her mask smiles back. Only the best for my guests, darling.
And in she sweeps, one toe breaching the boarding ramp and peeking into the sand. She leans up and whispers. She smells of sweet sugar and burning sulfur.
I shall treat you well, she croons. You shall live like a king before your passing.
He chuckles derisively. His hand snaps out for her neck. A force stops him, wrangles his wrist backwards, bends his arm over itself.
The girl’s mask smiles knowingly at him.
He shows no dismay. He only leans in, lets his spine fold to place his mouth by her ear.
I have sat upon a throne for far too long, he murmurs. A crown means nothing with the kingdom so wretched.
There is a brief pause. A chink in the armor. A core vulnerability. The boy feels it. He knows the emptiness swallowing her soul, covered with a mâché of broken mirrors, a pathetic shell of vanity and hedonism.
He strikes.
His hand breaches her collarbone and his nails just manage to pierce her neck when she snaps to attention. A wave of her hand, and his arm warps back to his side, frozen as if in a straitjacket. No matter. It was worth it, seeing a trail of weeping red down her throat.
The girl shows no anger as she leans in. Tread carefully, darling, she whispers. Even a ruined crown is better than nothing at all.
Humming, she drifts back into the ship, a wraith, a wisp, a hint of vapor. Those fatal three notes echo against the waves.
(The dream sinks below the horizon. The channel changes.)
☂
The fifth dream is an impossible one.
There is a boy, a girl. They run through the empty, littered grounds of an old amusement park, jumping on creaky platforms, poking at rusty wheels, pounding at the shattered buttons of a photo booth. The boy grabs a broken pipe and smashes a glass window, and they dive into a sea of moth-eaten plushies, giggling faintly.
They are winners in this park, kings and queens in a land of plenty.
A slew of playful accessories dangle from a row of ramshackle booths on the parade street. The girl claims a pale, painted mask; the boy, a dapper grey hat.
My lady, he says dramatically, and bows.
My lord, she responds, and also bows. Neither of them have ever seen a curtsy.
The boy reaches out and takes her hand, and they walk beneath the gaze of silver moonlight, curling in beds of plushies under a silent ferris wheel. For once, they can sleep in warmth, their bellies full.
(The dream bursts like a firework. The channel changes.)
☂
The sixth dream—
—splits apart, and Mono is thrust into the waking world, shuddering and gasping.
Noise. There was noise in the deafening, impervious silence, and it jostled him awake. Not the low, hypnotic lull of the Tower. Not the rugged gristle of listless static. Something sharp and clear and broken, piercing the tedium like a knife.
Mono braces his hands on his chair.
The door rips open, violently, unapologetically. It never gave way for him, never budged an inch no matter how much he pounded and cried and clawed at the edges. But it flies off its hinges now, crumpling to dust, consumed by a hungry black mist that swirls into the room.
And a figure emerges, haloed in sharp yellow, feet sickly thin and bare.
Six.
She is just as he remembered, just as he dreamed. Small and feral and swallowed by a yellow raincoat, tattered hair hanging over her eyes in a dreary curtain. He sees her and remembers jangling piano keys, a broken see-saw, an endless fall.
Six grabs his hand. Her skin is hollow, ice cold, but beneath it thrums a heartbeat, vivid and terrifyingly strong.
She whispers one word.
Run.
☂
And they do.
In their tracks, the Pale City crumbles. The Tower burbles into a wave of dead flesh as it falls, the essence of its life sucked away, eyes forever shut—an evil put to rest, a dark hunger fully sated.
The city creaks, topples, and sinks beneath the sea.
☂
There is a boy, a girl. They sit huddled on a rotting door, adrift on the ocean once more. Broken dolls, the both of them, their humanity left in bare scraps; one with the power to warp signal and mind, and the other with the power to consume life. Monsters, in the eyes of some. But together.
Mono stares down at their hands, which are laced together. Six has never taken his hand. Not once. He was always the one to take her hand, to guide, to attach. But now she clings, refusing to let go.
Why hadn’t she done that last time?
Mono thinks himself in circles without answers. He can wrench his hand in a certain angle, he knows, and it will dislocate her arm. He can fling her overboard and watch her drown. He can push her down and sit on her stomach and squeeze the life out of her neck. He is bigger, he is stronger—
—he does not want to hurt her.
He thought he would. He thought he would want her to feel her heart plummet to her feet and her gut pound in her throat. To feel the despair of a turning back. To watch the last light in her world wink out like a dead candle.
But her arms are so thin, her fingers are so small, and she is not letting go of his hand.
Mono wants to make his demands—why did you make me fall, why did you leave me, why did you come back—but there are too many questions and they swirl together in his mind, vivid colors mixing into muddy paint. So he struggles to make out just one word, the most important one.
Why? he blurts.
It’s harsher than he intended. A growling command. Perhaps the Signal has twisted him darker than he thought.
Six does not startle, but she presses her lips together, thin and wan. I was hungry, she says. She pauses, then adds like an afterthought: I’m not anymore.
Mono wonders what it’s like, gripping a warm, meaty hand that has meant comfort and direction, then drowning in a raw, terrible hunger, a need to CONSUME, FEED, NOW—
—and knowing that the being on the other side of that hand is the closest thing he has to a friend.
It’s a sad thought. A dangerous thought. A terribly lonely thought.
Mono manages one more question. Did you do it to protect me?
Six’s hand squeezes his tighter, a deathgrip. No. She is not a verbose child, but she forces out the next word. Myself.
And just like that, it’s enough.
To know that she would have been crushed by guilt to feed on his corpse. To know that she would care enough to feel guilt. That he wouldn’t just be another limb to break, another cremation fire to warm the hands. That he meant something to her, even if it wasn’t what she meant to him.
Six does not apologize, so Mono does not forgive her. But he does not need to. He is not one to hold grudges. He is one to accept a mission, and one to fulfill it singlemindedly, come hell or high water.
And that mission has returned. A room to escape. A direction to go.
A girl to look after.
Maybe one day, if they rebuild log by log and stone by stone, a friend to cherish.
Mono lies down on the floating door and watches the darkening, cloudless sky. Six tucks into his side like a blanket, a comfortable coat, a missing piece of a puzzle. He closes his eyes and presses his face into the thick yellow of her raincoat.
They drift off into dreams, together.