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“Can we keep her, Nine, pleeeeeease?”
“She’s not a stray kitten, Twelve. And no.”
Twelve frowned, crossing his arms. “We can’t just leave her here.”
“Well, of course not,” Nine replied briskly, pushing up his glasses. “We’ll just drop her off in front of the police station.”
“What if someone takes her?”
“This city’s not that dangerous.”
“Did you see the news last week? I heard there was a girl who –”
“You and I both know that the only thing on the news lately is us.”
Twelve scowled, an uncharacteristically vexed look twisting his features. “We’re gonna take care of her,” he pushed, sliding her limp arm over his shoulders and stepping towards the door.
“We are not,” Nine insisted, slamming his palm against the doorframe, effectively blocking the way.
“We are.”
The two of them faced off, both staring stubbornly into the others’ eyes. Brown met blue, warmth met cold. Twelve took a step closer, shifting Lisa slightly, and Nine’s eyebrows twitched as her lead lolled off to the side.
“Fine,” he snapped, stepping out of the way. Twelve grinned triumphantly and lugged Lisa inside, her feet dragging over the old wooden floors. Sighing, Nine closed and bolted the door, turning to lean against it and watch as Twelve slowly pulled and shimmied Lisa’s limp form onto their old, smelly couch, as he gingerly pulled a blanket over her, tucking in the ends around her shoulders, and something twanged in his chest.
The institution had been cold. Unforgiving. They were only given scant blankets to wrap themselves in, and those had served as both bedding and covering.
After the first few had died of the chills, their curled up, blue, unbelievably small bodies carried out the next morning, Twelve had started making rounds, every night. He made sure every single child was tucked in, every single inch of their body that could touch the cold hard tile floor covered. He always made sure to tuck them in around the shoulders, so their little arms and fingers wouldn’t be thrown askew by nightmares and end up blue by morning.
He tucked the girl in with as much care as he always had, his fingers light and quick, his movements deft. He brushed her hair away from her perspiring forehead and bustled into the kitchen to grab a cold cloth, his stride short and bouncing, as it had always been.
Nine watched from the doorway, still, watching as the girl’s chest rapidly rose and fell.
He could feel a headache coming on.
In short, she was a walking disaster.
She destroyed almost everything she touched, burned everything she cooked, dropped everything she carried. He didn’t know if it was his presence that was doing it, or if she had always been this way.
Twelve tried to compensate for Nine’s coldness by being as warm as possible, always smiling and laughing and cracking jokes. But Nine always caught the glances Twelve threw at him when he thought he wasn’t looking, the exasperated, vexed glances of ‘why can’t you try a little harder.’
But he had tried before.
And failure wasn’t something that he liked to experience.
One day, she made him laugh. They were folding clothes, just the two of them, the house eerily empty without Twelve’s presence. He had insisted on going to the grocery store, since Lisa had turned most of their provisions to ashes. Nine had wanted to go as well, but Twelve had pushed him back inside with a look that meant the topic wasn’t up for debate.
And so they folded, Lisa with fumbling, nervous fingers, Nine with practiced, smooth movements.
She held up a finished shirt for inspection, and the sleeves were sticking out at odd angles, the side seams were in front, the collar twisted. She groaned, pressing the shirt to her face in embarrassment, and Nine couldn’t help but snort.
She jumped, which made him jump, and she looked up at him in astonishment, the crumpled shirt hanging loosely in her hands.
“What?” Nine snapped a little more harshly than intended, but she didn’t even seem fazed. She slowly shook her head, a small grin coming to her face. “I’ve never heard you laugh before.”
He couldn’t help but remark how Twelve-like her expression was, and it twisted something unfamiliar in his gut.
“That wasn’t a laugh,” he replied shortly, returning his attention to folding. He fought down his rising embarrassment. He couldn’t believe this clumsy, helpless girl had made him laugh, of all things.
She merely hummed in response, and when he chanced a glance back up at her, she was still smiling.
What an idiot, he thought irritably.
Twelve had never met anyone with a pale yellow voice.
Every other voice he had ever heard had evoked a myriad of colors, as varied as the shimmering hues of an opal, greens as dark as evergreen and as pale as ocean water, purples as rich as velvet and light as lavender, strong navy blues and calming forget-me-nots, even reds, as striking and stifling as blood, or like the petals of a dying rose.
But never yellow. Not once.
He had never met someone who was like daisies pushing up through spring grass, who was like new dandelion heads popping up out of their green enclosures, whose voice was as soft and feathery as down on a baby chick. It rattled him a bit, to be honest. He had thought, living in the city, that he had heard every color of every voice that could possibly exist, he had thought that he was an expert on the cacophony of colors the human vocal cords could produce in a thousand different mouths.
But he was wrong.
He hoped it wasn’t a recurring event.
God, why had he never told her?
He had known, right from the start, that she automatically assumed that everything was her fault. He had known that it was ground into her very bones, that every single bad thing that happened around her was her fault, because she was incompetent, because she always messed up, because she was fragile.
And he still hadn’t told her.
And now as he huddled in this ferris wheel, his tired fingers desperately trying to defuse all the bombs in time, he was regretting everything, because there were too many, the three minutes 15 seconds blinking on the clock were swimming in front of his eyes, because he had only defused ten of them, and there were more, there were so many more, and he was already imagining the pattern her blood would make on the walls –
“Twelve.”
There it was again, spring, pale yellow flowers, chirping baby birds, a thousand howling rainstorms.
He looked up at her, and saw it in her eyes, she knew, she had known ever since the first package of C4 had taken him a minute and a half. And a lump grew in his throat and something in his chest ripped, something whose existence he had spent years trying to deny.
He had never told her.
He cupped her face in his hands then, and brought his face close to hers, almost uncomfortably close. And she blinked at him, tears sparkling in the corners of her eyes, and for once he was serious, calm, still.
“It’s not your fault, Lisa,” he intoned, the pads of his fingers pressing into her skin. He heard her breath catch in her throat, and his lips twisted. He looked straight up into her eyes, and she was afraid, so afraid, but she was happy. Happier than he had ever seen her. “It was never your fault.”
She started to cry, hot tears slipping down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving, jerking erratically as a life-long weight was abruptly lifted. He brushed them away with the back of his hand and grinned slightly.
He had less than a minute left.
And when the two of them stumbled out of there, Lisa breathless but alive, Twelve suffocating with guilt, Lisa knew, as she clutched Twelve with her small, weak fingers, that as long as they were together, they would be okay.
She was with him by the ocean, as birds cawed over their heads, and the wind scratched at their faces, as Twelve sat on the rocks hugging his knees to his chest, his gaze intent on the water lapping against the stones. She had left to go buy a bottle of water, something to just get him to move, and as she was passing over the yen she heard, it the whispers.
Sphinx has surrendered.
Twelve tensed when she told him, water bottle thudding to the ground at her feet, and when he stood up and asked her if she wanted to go to an amusement park, she wondered if they should be visiting an asylum instead.
They walked among the colorful tents and pavilions as the sky grew stormier and stormier, the black clouds doing nothing to deter the families clamoring for spots in the rollercoaster lines.
When Twelve plopped the stuffed dog in her lap, she gripped it so hard her knuckles turned white, and all she could think about was the cold steel grey of Nine’s eyes, the snort of his laugh.
When Twelve murmured that none of it mattered anymore, that he had betrayed Nine, with his head tilted up towards the grey sky, Lisa called him an idiot so loudly that a few people turned to look. She twisted the stuffed dog in her hands until her knuckles turned white.
Her tears were the first drops to spatter onto the pavement.
He tossed the key into the air, over and over, as the amusement park clock ticked closer and closer to eight.
He caught it one last time, and sighed, shooting her a weary smile.
She stood in the plaza, leaning against a pillar, waiting, as Nine’s voice sounded across the city, telling the entire country that they had only two hours left to live. People began to stream past her, their worried voices and shouts of terror ringing through the air as the authorities tried to maintain order, and she detached herself from the stone, glancing around nervously.
He was supposed to have be here by now. She inched forward a few steps, eyes scanning her surroundings, searching for that telltale mop of brown hair.
He stumbled up to her covered in road rash and soot, and when she called his name he smiled wide, and fell to the ground.
She laid him down on the dewey park grass as the emergency number rang and rang, endless electrical tones that wavered into her eardrums, with never a voice on the other end to ease it. She had laid a wet cloth on his forehead and had two bottles of water ready to go (she had figured the mass murder of an entire country warranted a little stealing from a vendor’s cart), and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders beginning to shake as she begged, in her pale yellow dandelion voice, for him to wake up.
A shuddered breath emerged from his cracked lips, and he turned to look at her, his amber eyes hazy and unfocused, and as he slowly sat up, his hair all mussed, she threw her arms around his neck, her fast-flowing tears soaking into his t-shirt. Her sobs rang through the air, but there was no one else to hear.
“We were raised not knowing our parents in that dark institution. Even after we escaped, we were always alone, just the two of us. He and I . . . neither one of us was ever needed by anyone before. That’s why . . .
“Thank you, Lisa. I’m glad I met you.”
Tears dripped from her chin, and a bomb exploded above them. Orange light cascaded down around them, painting their surroundings in dusky ochre, and as they watched the sky roil and burn, her hand sought his.
Their sweaty, bleeding, soot-stained fingers found each other under the light of that burning sky, as the whole country held its breath.
As everything went dark, the last thing she saw was the glint of Twelve’s smile.
The hum of cicadas intertwined with the dull thud of Nine’s mallet, as he hammered the carved wooden stake amongst its 23 brethren. There was nothing below that stake, he knew, but it did not matter. Five’s ashes were where she had always wanted to be, floating along with the light summer breeze.
Twelve trod up, all sad amber and apologies, and Nine forgave him, in his own way, with his familiar short, clipped words.
Flowers were picked, prayers were said.
A ball was found, as Nine tried to teach Lisa to play soccer, a small smile on his lips as he bounced the ball on his feet as he passed it to Twelve, who bounced it off his chest, his foot, and his spinning heel as he sent it toward Lisa, whose fumbling fingers and waving hands only succeeded in sending it harder into her face. She chased after it, determined, and launched it off of her foot and into an arc over her head. She chased after it amidst the chorus of Twelve’s loud pealing laughs and Nine’s barely controlled snorts.
Nine, somehow, had a phone stashed somewhere, and spent an afternoon sitting atop a water barrel, his eyes closed contentedly. After pacing for a good half hour, Lisa finally mustered up the courage to ask him what he was listening to, and he responded with a small smile, tugging out an earbud and offering it to her. She took it, and they stood there for a while in amiable silence, listening.
Until, of course, a shining blue jet of water crashed down over their heads, its sparkling drops accompanied by Twelve’s laugh, and as Lisa turned to Nine, to apologize for his ruined earbuds, his broad smile caught the light far better than the water ever could.
They sat there, leaning against the school, as the light began to fade, Lisa humming along to Nine’s music as the two of them conversed in soft tones.
Nine and Twelve suddenly rose to their feet, and Lisa tugged the earbuds out to look, the slap of distant footfalls startling her into dropping them.
The grizzled, worn detective, in his white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, pulling out a gun and telling Nine and Twelve they were under arrest, as Twelve asked him to protect her.
Whirring helicopter blades, her hair whipping around her face, a detonator held high in Nine’s hand, another bomb, a nuclear power plant.
A single shot.
Twelve’s blood turning dusky orange in the light of the setting sun, the thud of his body hitting the dirt like the thud of a mallet on a stake.
Static, everything static, Nine’s face going in and out of focus as his cries rang through the air, the helicopter blades fading into the distance, she couldn’t feel the tips of her fingers, but she could feel his, the calloused pad of his thumb swiping comfortingly over the back of her hand, the soot gritty on his skin and the blood oozing slowly from his torn palm sticky against hers.
His eyes, his sparkling amber eyes, that had reflected the colors of the ferris wheel so brilliantly, that had shone in the fading lights of that fateful night, that had always been so direct, so piercing, filled with laughter and light and a future –
Open. Dull. Unseeing.
If she just looked at him, if she just stared into his eyes, they would light up, like they always did, he would smile, say her name in that lilting tone, he would rise from the ground and she would brush his mussed hair out of his eyes and the puddle of blood on the ground would mean nothing, there would be no blood, no pain, no mouth half-open in a gasp that never came.
Nine joined Twelve, and the light of the newly emerged stars glazed over steel and amber alike.
Two more carved stakes joined the garden.
Two more bundles of flowers were picked, two more prayers were said, two and a half inches of hair added to the girl who hadn’t had two words to say in a year.
She met the detective on the bridge, who was looking less grizzled, less worn, with a bouquet of flowers clutched in his hand and a light in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.
The brown brought memories of steel and amber, and she supposed that light had to go somewhere when it faded.
"T hat time, when I asked . . . I asked Nine what he was always listening to. And he said it was music from a cold land . . . from Iceland. And then . . . he said that in Icelandic, V-O-N . . .
“It means hope,” she said, and the detective with steel and amber glinting in his brown eyes looked up to the sky, and smiled.
She walked away from them, the two carved stakes, a light summer breeze tucking her hair away from her face and winding through her fingers, brushing along the back of her hand. She closed her eyes as it kissed her face, and it whispered in her ear, words that she still remembered drifting through the sunset air, even as the imprint of their two bright smiles was beginning to fade from the backs of her eyelids.
Remember us. Remember that we lived.