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Six scrapes her fingernails over the peels of lead paint on the door they’re riding on. It comes away in checkers, white on that dead grey-brown of old wood – and repeat.
White…gray…white…gray…white…gray…
…Red.
Her eyes follow the streak of blood to its source.
Him, the boy, he looks worse for wear. He’s on his hands and knees beside her, gasping to catch his breath, mottled with cuts and stings and splinters; who knows what he'd been up to before he found her in the cabin. A burn mark chars a stripe on his coat where one of The Hunter’s bullets grazed just above the skin.
After a while, he flips over onto his back and sighs dramatically. Both hands recede under the paper bag obscuring his face. Six can see him rubbing his eyes through the holes.
“Oy,” He murmurs. Now that they are out of the woods and away from immediate danger, apparently, he doesn’t find the situation grievous enough to mutter the accompanying vey. “You ran fast. I thought you were gonna leave me a few times.” The door rocks when he sits up, facing her. “Thank you for not, by the way. I would’ve been completely done for.”
Six watches him through her bangs. This gratitude does not make sense to her, of course she would not leave him. He has proved himself useful. Actually, she is grateful – and surprised – that he didn’t leave her behind in the cabin. That is what she would have done in his place, after all.
Kindness is rare here; the kind ones always end up dead.
“Do you speak?” The boy interrupts her thoughts. “Other than interjections, I mean.”
“I… do.” She hasn’t spoken since The Nest. “Mostly no. but mostly I am without other children."
"You learned with other children?" He sounds almost amazed.
How else would I learn? Six wants to ask. Instead, she nods. "Yes. Used to be others could, but… not like you.”
“Like me?”
“Your words spill out. Kind words. Where did you learn?”
“Oh,” Through the eyeholes she can see a flush at the visible part of his cheeks. “I don’t know, just practice or something. You’ll pick it up if we stick together.” He holds out a hand to her. “I’m Mono, by the way.”
“I am Six.” Six replies, not knowing what to do with the outstretched hand. She figures he’s showing her his wounds as a show of trust, so she traces her finger over a cut on his palm in an attempt to soothe it.
His skin is as cold as death itself. He must be from the city, that’s how they all are there, permanently stripped of all heat and bleached blue-white by years of unending rain. If the sun has ever shown on the Pale City, every remnant of it has been washed away.
“I never met someone else with a name.”
“I have– I think. Maybe not, it’s hard to tell which memories are really mine these days.” His hand twists around and grabs hers, shaking it back and forth.
Six yelps and pulls her hand out of his grasp, but the surprised look on Mono’s face tells her it wasn’t a trap, just some weird ritual. She tentatively takes his hand again, holding his wrist so he doesn't try that shaking trick another time, and continues observing the wounds. “But you cannot take memories from others.”
“They aren’t anyone else's… It’s hard to explain.” Mono says, wiping blood from a scratch at the corner of his eye. “Back when I was in the city, the televisions would show things and… it was this weird Deja vu, as if I’d somehow already seen them hundreds of times, thousands even. They're like my memories now.”
So he had watched the T.Vs.
Six glances back through the eye holes of his paper bag, searching for the hint of deformity that is not there. She’s been in the city once before, briefly, at least, she knows the way people’s faces twist in the prolonged light of the televisions – although being able to look away, to become a human again, is something nobody has ever seen.
Children cannot become viewers, right?
He must only be susceptible to viewership in adulthood. That means, for as long they are together, she must look out for him. “That is how tower tricks people– how it hunts them.”
He nods. “I know, but it felt so personal.”
“Never look again.” The sentence holds more protectiveness than Six has ever felt for anyone else combined. Strange. But, then again, she’s never really met anyone else who's given a good reason to protect them.
“Alright.” The confirmation doesn’t console her.
“Do not lie. The city is dangerous.” She traces his bony knuckles with the tip of her finger. Mono’s palms are only a little bit bigger than hers but his fingers are longer by at least an eye length. “And that is where we are drifting to.”
"You're right." He nods, eyeing the slow waves. “Everything drifts towards the tower.”
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
"We wait for the teacher to scare them away?" Six suggests.
"No, she'd look up here." Mono rubs his thumb to his other palm. "Plus, it could be hours."
They'd left the vent that led them to the pipe they're sitting on a while ago now. By now they're casually looking down and coming up with plans.
They're above a break in the school for an outdoor strip of garden that's separated from the city by two gates. Raised flowerbeds are overgrown with weeds, broken pots litter the ground and although it's empty they can hear, and occasionally see the porcelain bullies through the open door on the other side.
"If we stay up and get attention—"
A viewer drops from a roof outside the gate, startling Mono. He flinches and grabs Six by the wrist.
She gives him a funny look.
"Sorry," He flushes under the paper bag. "Continue."
"We call the bullies up and knock them down as they climb fence to get up to our pipe." She snaps her fingers next to her temple. "They break their porcelain heads."
"How will we knock them off?"
"Tch," Six pulls at a lock of her hair in contemplation. "punch them?"
Mono shakes his head, showing her the bruised and dirtied back of his hands. "The first bully that pounced on me I punched. It’s skull was so—"
“Stop,” Six suddenly interrupts, tugging at his coat. “You hear that?”
“Yeah.” Actually, he doesn’t. Only rain and the tower’s whispered call.
She nods drawing a line in the air in front of them. “We can use as distraction.”
Mono nods, and then, a second later, he sees it. A dog. Some curly half-terrier mutt, light grey with brown spots and a black patch around one eye. It’s thin as a rail and scampers over to the fallen viewer across the fence to eat its faceless–face.
“No, they’ll kill it!” He hisses.
“That or us. Easy choice, yes? It is only animal.”
“It’s a dog.”
Six raises her eyebrows. “Why is dog special?”
“They are in my memories—er–the television a lot. They live in the house too, like kids, but with fur and no words.”
“Touching.”
“I’m serious, they’re even called man’s best friend.”
“No problems, then. I am your best friend.” Six mutters back, creeping forward. She jumps from the pipe drain to the fence and, as quietly as possible, climbs to the ground to unlatch the gate. It’s half-rusted and makes a painful creaking sound.
Mono steals nervous glances towards the classroom door, the bullies don’t hear, apparently. He climbs down after her and watches the dog eat. Occasionally it looks up at them with watery brown eyes.
There’s something unsettling about the animal's patient mein, its canine air of calm endurance.
There’s no plausible excuse to turn on her split–second plan now, although everything he knows about empathy, and about dogs, for that matter, is telling him he should back out before it’s too late for the poor mutt.
Mono looks at Six.
She’s staring at the dog too, when the wind sweeps the hair briefly from her face, her eyes shine with a glint of sadistic curiosity.
He feels a prickling feeling in the back of his brain.
Do not trust her, my child, she is violent, she is cruel.
He gasps and presses a hand to his forehead through the paper bag. What?
Watch, watch her. She will endanger you, no matter how well prepared you are by theory, or how determined you are not to repeat your—
Six shakes his shoulder and the bizarre speaking un–tunes back to its regular buzzing. "Hurt? Hurting?"
Mono realizes he's bent over, gripping his head, trembling violently. He swallows. "Sorry, no I... that was... I don't know what that was." He whispers. “I'm okay, I'm ready. Now, we get their attention.”
Six sighs and grabs him by the arm, tugging him along with her until they’re behind a flower bed. “Now, we get their attention.” She throws an empty flowerpot in the middle of the garden and ducks down with him.
The porcelain bullies run out and immediately see the dog from the open gate.
Mono wishes he couldn't hear it, the laughing, shouting, scraping, crunching; The sound of death, and of cruel joy, both of which he owes his narrow escape.
He looks away and reaches anxiously for Six’s hand.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Six spends most of her nights half asleep, vigilant, dreading the usual dangers of the world.
Tonight is no different, with the slightest touch she jolts awake, heart pounding with the question of whether to fight or flee. Her eyes open to the jarring sight of endless grey above her, walls stretching to an impossible ceiling far beyond view. For a second it feels like she, not the bed, is upside-down — like she’s about to fall into the abyss above. Her heartbeat spikes and her fingers loop into whenever they’re holding.
There is no fall.
After a second she settles and looks around.
“Sorry,” Mono whispers. He’s holding one of her hands in his. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was.”
“Now I’m extra sorry for waking you.” He lets go and clasps his fists by his heart. “I just… you… your hands are warm.”
Six blinks and then nods too faintly for him to notice, let alone in the dark. Then, her fingers reach out and intertwine with his before he can work himself into another apology. “Do you like?”
Mono makes a small, anxious sound, then cradles her hands closer to him. “It’s nice, just not something I’m used to… Nobody here is alive– not like that.”
Six shudders at his words. “We have to get away from here.” She says, unable to raise her voice, though there was no one to hear them, no one to alert or disturb.
“I know, this hospital gives me the shpilkes.”
“Out of this city, I mean.”
“What?” Mono exhales as if shocked by the foreign perfume that hung over the suggestion. “No, we couldn’t. It’s dangerous.”
“You do not know that.” Six doubts his soda-straw legs have ever taken him off the peninsula. “The world does not have energy to be full–evil.”
“The city doesn’t have enough energy to be completely evil either.” He argues. “Lots of it’s vacant and… safe.”
“Televisions are just as dangerous as monsters; You just walk into one when we arrived to this hospital.” She says. “Not safe. Not safe at all.”
Mono’s cold hands fidget against hers. “But the door…”
Not again with the T.V door.
“...It— it’s so familiar. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, it can’t be.” He squeezes her hands as if reassuringly, but she only feels an unease prickling across her neck and shoulders. “The tower’s telling me to open it.”
Six processes his words like a stomach processing poison, the longer she tries to understand them, the less she wants to, the less she can. “The tower does not talk, Mono.”
He does not reply.
She clamps her hands down on his in a way that’s supposed to mean something like explain yourself and repeats, “The tower does not talk.”
Mono takes a shuddered breath. “Not to you — not to strangers.” The tired, plaintive rasp in his voice is almost as unsettling as the words.
Six furrows her eyebrows. “You are not making sense. Be clear.”
“It knows me.” Mono says slowly, carefully, “I don’t know how, but it’s a part of me. Listen.” He slides her hands up to his chest.
Six can feel it faintly, even through his beige button-up, but something inside her reasons that it’s just the product of her trembling fingers or hazy exhaustion. She presses more firmly, searching for any other indication of life behind his ribs.
There is none.
Mono does not have a heartbeat. No. It drones to the rumble of the signal tower, a slow pulsating rhythm, cold and inhuman.
Her breath catches, she shakes her head and pulls back. “What…” She croaks out. “…how…”
He looks startled, then holds his hands out in apology. “I didn’t mean to—”
Six shakes her head, sliding away. “What are you?”
“Nothing, I’m– I’m Mono.” He insists. “I’m just a kid.”
“You are a viewer.” She snaps back. “Worse, they have heartbeats.”
“No, no. That’s not– I don’t…”
Six balls her hands into fists, scowls into his dark silhouette for a second, then grabs the flashlight. “If you are not,” she says. “Then there is no reason to cover your face.”
The flashlight turns on and Mono shields his eyes from the sudden luminescence and exhales a little whimper either from light–induced pain or upset.
“Paper bag must go.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “It—can’t.”
The hair on the back of her neck stands on end and her heart pulses in the hollow of her throat as if someone pressed a thumb to it. “You are, then. You are a viewer.”
“It isn’t the same.”
“You cover your face.”
“That’s not why, I’m just nervous.”
“You lie.” Six growls and lunges at him, pinning him down with one hand and trying to rip the bag off with the other.
Mono swats her away and tries to pull the hood of her raincoat over her eyes to prevent her from seeing.
She bites his hand.
He chokes out a nervous stream of curses which is a gross overreaction since Six knows he’s made far less of a fuss of far worse injuries. It doesn’t even bleed… that much. He balls his bony hand into a fist and sends his iron knuckles into her face.
A luminous retinal rose blooms and withers behind her eye. It hurts, but not as much as Six would have predicted. She’s hurt more emotionally, a feral anger despite knowing the justification, she wants to injure him. Really injure him.
What happens next is half a blur. Twenty seconds pass, maybe thirty.
Mono pulls her into a hug. Not a hug. It’s just his tactic to keep her from hurting him. He’s shaking violently again and the longer Six breathes herself back to her senses, the more aware she is of the fresh blood on his shoulder.
After a long stretch of only his frightened breathing, and soft, almost inhuman whispering to himself, Mono seems to come back to his senses. “Why can’t you trust me?” He mumbles. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”
Keep her safe? Her?
Six pushes him away and stands up on her bed. “Do not bother. You are the one who almost dies.” She says, lowering her voice to a whisper that comes out sounding so sinister and friendless that she suddenly feels ashamed. “I am the one who could go on alone.”
Laying on a bed near him now makes her feel much less safe, not just for her, but for him.
Mono grips his bleeding shoulder wordlessly, staring up at her.
Six deepens her frown and takes a running jump to a rope made out of bed linen a few air–steps away, and climbs up to the bed it’s attached to, demonstratively pulling up the rope so he cannot follow as an act of grudge.
Mono watches her a few moments longer settles into the mattress, sighs once, tucks his arms under his head, and then, as if unplugged, stops moving. He doesn’t toss or fidget for a long time, if Six didn’t know any better she’d assume he’s asleep, and just as soon as she begins to wonder if he really is, her friend speaks. “I’m sorry Six, for dragging you here.”
She huffs and turns away.
“I didn’t want to be alone and this place… but I can’t leave; I’m home like the other monsters here.” Six doesn’t like it when he calls himself a monster as if he’s anything like them, but she’s too mad – or at least too conflicted – to correct him now.
“Maybe you should…” His voice is watery as if he has to cough each word up painfully like blood in the lungs. “...maybe should think about going alone, before the signal gets you too.”
Six feels a sharp tug at her heart. She shouldn’t — she wouldn’t. She isn't soulless, after all. “You are hopeless.” Her voice is as angry as it will permit itself to be. “Too clumsy, too nice, you will die here on your own.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. “You will die here too.”
“Then…” Six swallows. She doesn’t know the word for it, if one exists, for the attachment and protectiveness she has for Mono. It’s partially for his own good but it’s also partially selfish. He’s useful, dependent, and loyal two ways, up and down, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.
Six doesn’t even mind it when he’s staring for hours with his gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams. She doesn't mind the pretend innocence he clings to even though his clothes are clearly streaked and worn like relief maps of vast, unspeakable worlds. Her face feels warm against the cold, dark air of the hospital. Maybe her tolerance of his weird habits and anxieties borders on the line of enjoyment. Maybe.
“Then we will both leave. Together. I can find a way.”
“But—”
“One chance.” She says. “And I make sure you do not have to live in this dead city.”
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Mono collapses in the first house they enter after the hospital. He’s exhausted and he’d inhaled multiple lungfuls of smoke while trapping the doctor. The effects of these, among other injuries, are proving less than generous.
Six nudges him with her foot. “Sleeping?”
“No,” He coughs. “Moving just hurts,”
She makes a face and pulls him back to his feet indignantly. “I will help find a bed – The City is full of them.” She loops his arm over her shoulder and helps him walk. “Laying on a floor only guarantees more pain.”
Mono coughs out a little laugh, leaning on her as they stumble through the halls to an abandoned bedroom.
The bed they find is, like most beds, high enough that he has to stand on his tip-toes to climb up.
Six jumps up after, considerably more swiftly, despite being a hands-length shorter than him. She sits criss-cross, near Mono’s head, while he lays on his back.
They stay there for a while, sometimes chatting, or humming, but mostly listening to the rain outside. Mono drifts in and out of sleep, feeling, for the first time in a long time, safe. Although if he lets his thoughts fall to the signal in the back of his mind, almost easy enough to tune to the point of subconsciousness now, the feeling of safety ebbs away.
Eventually, Six rubs her cheek with a woe–is–me expression, and pokes Mono in the ribs. “I’m hungry.”
“Oh no,” He teases, gripping his throat and pretending to struggle against her. “Spare me!”
“Psh,” She shoves him. “I mean goodbye, do not be stupid like usual. I have to go hunt.”
Mono aims to hide the disappointment in his voice and fails spectacularly. “There are kitchens here.”
“Yuck, no.”
Six’s ideology, as he’s come to know it, is that plants can be toxic, kitchen foods can be toxic, and old meat can be toxic. So the only safe meals are the ones she hunts herself. Plus, she’d developed a taste for fresh meat while in the forest.
Mono sits up and crosses his arms. “Nobody eats rats in my memories.”
Six sticks her tongue out. “Who, in your television memories, is alive?” She asks rhetorically, getting off the bed.
“Point taken.” Mono slips down after her and is glad the paper bag covers the expression of pain that crosses his face, if only for a second.
“Stay,” Six shakes her head. “Do not leave. You are hurt.”
“But—”
She cuts him off. “I will be fast. Unlike you, the universe is not planning to kill me at every turn… more like every other.” Her laugh is quiet and unpracticed.
Mono rolls his eyes and nods. “Fine, if you want to be alone that badly, I guess I’ll just schlep around the building until you get back." He turns away and starts cautiously drawing a mental map of the building to distract from his growing loneliness intolerance.
His bored, slightly pained wandering actually does do some good when he ducks through the hole in a broken bathroom door. A single filmy window allows the city's dim light to illuminate the room. There’s a leaky pipe on the ceiling that lets water drip into the bathtub, drop, by drop, by drop.
Who knows how long it’s been like this; the water is clear, cold, and overflowing. A bar of soap lies untouched at the edge.
Mono sighs with relief, grateful to have some way to clean himself off. He takes off his coat and pants.
The cold air prickles against his skin, goosebumps. It’s alright, he’s used to living without any warmth at all. It’s just a symptom of the city, most monsters have lost their body heat ages ago.
He can’t pull his shirt over his head without taking off the paper bag. It’s silly, really, but a part of him, an ever-present dread, beckons him to keep it on. Especially when someone is there to see.
Hide your face. They will never know what you are if they never see what you are. They want you dead, she will too, in due time, but no, there is only one place for you.
The tower.
Controlling the signal, controlling them. All of them. They will hunt themselves.
Controlling the… signal… Mono shakes his head. He hates the gentle buzz of these intrusive thoughts, the way they grow stronger and more frequent the closer he gets to the tower. A voice, a memory, a feeling. It hurts, it disorients him. He's too anxious to tell Six more about it just yet, not unless he needs to. His shoulder still hurts from the last time.
He takes off the paper bag and rests it on the tiled floor.
Before anything else, Mono washes his clothes and hangs them over the sink so they’ll have the longest time to dry. It’s a little boring but at least his coat doesn’t smell like the dead animals he’d slipped on while running from The Hunter anymore.
And, afterward, his efforts are self-rewarded with a much-deserved soak.
It’s a very exciting thing for a dirty child with only faint – and probably false – memories of bathing to actually get a chance to clean. The water comes up to his nose while sitting.
Mono picks at his scabs, cleans his fingernails enough to bite them away without tasting anything vaguely rotten and rubs enough dirt from his hands to realize most of the discoloration on his knuckles is actually bruise. He also engages – with much delight – in creating suds, or their more impressive cousin, bubbles, by rubbing the bar of soap between his palms.
His hair, which tangles lawlessly, receives special attention. Even with the bag covering his head, his curls had managed to amass an impressive collection of leaves, bugs, porcelain shards, hospital crematorium ash, swamp muck, and – Mono is both horrified and intrigued to find – a dead tadpole.
“What are you doing?” Asks a familiar voice.
He seizes in surprise and splays his hands over his face.
Six is covered in fresh blood. It runs down her mouth and hands, beading like water against her raincoat. She’s holding half a bird but sets it on the floor. “Mono.”
He gives an anxious little “hm?”
“Your face, let me see.” Six leans against the bathtub.
“No, I—I can’t, I told you.”
“I saw. You are not a viewer.” She leans against the edge of the bath and gives the water a confused look. “Only a soup.”
Mono is almost conflicted between continuing to cling to his face and trying to cover up. “Don’t look down, It'll embarrass me.”
“I want to look at your face. So okay.” She stops to tap her chin in contemplation. "Unless looking will make you move your hands."
"Probably not," Mono says. "I have priorities."
Six crinkles up her nose to make an expression that seems to say all–jokes–aside. She grabs his wrists and tries to tug them away from his head.
Mono resists, laughing because on the surface he knows how ridiculous this is. “Stop,” He ducks away. What is this dread? “Six, come on. I’m serious.”
The blood on her hands is smearing over his forearms. “Do not be silly. I thought you were a viewer. This cannot be worse.”
“It is.” He coughs out another self–pitying laugh.
“How?”
"It just– it just is, Six. I don't know." Mono starts to feel tired and feverish. "If you know what I am..." He senses time blur and more and more these two frantic figures wrestling in the shadowy room, their voices echoing in the hollow silence, seemed like apparitions. "All the warnings will be for nothing."
He's looking at himself like a memory; he is displaced in space in time. His dread becomes filled with a burden of despair, pain, and hopelessness he could never completely express.
"Why are you crying?" Six's voice sounds faded into the background.
“Because you’ll never forgive me if you know.” He mumbles dazedly. At first, the words feel like nothing, like false–memories — then he remembers where – when – he is, and feels a wave of mingled shock, grief, and guilt. It occurs to him that she might have found his answer cold and suspicious.
Mono had become, he thinks to himself, so cynical, so quick and harsh in his judgment that he could no longer estimate the degree of forgiveness possible to a practical–minded kid like Six.
And, the question remains, What wouldn’t she forgive him for?
Her grip on his wrists weakens. “I do not understand.”
"You... I..." This is silly. Mono lets his hands drop into the bathtub and offers Six a sorry look despite every strand and dendrite of his soul is telling him to hide his face again. “...Me neither. I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about, really.”
Six doesn’t pay attention to his words, she’s busy observing him.
Her gaze, her unbreaking interest, chills Mono. People have watched him with this expression before, or maybe they haven't yet, he's confused. He cannot shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it is not he, but those he haunts, whose lives are devoid of matter, sense, and future.
Six's warm fingers come up to the screen— through the air, there is no screen between them, and trace the blue arks of exhaustion in the hollows of his eyes. “Hah, I thought they are shadows from the paper bag.” She says. “You look like a corpse.”
There’s nothing to hide the embarrassed flush on Mono’s cheeks now. “Hey,”
“Not an insult.” She clarifies. “Still better than a viewer.”
Mono only scowls in pretend–annoyance but that quickly fades to confusion as Six runs a hand through his hair. “Weird,”
“What? It’s clean.”
“Clean.” She repeats quietly. “This is what happens when hair is clean?” She unfurls a fussed curl on his head and watches it bounce back after letting go.
Mono raises his eyebrows. “No. Haven’t you seen curly hair before... Haven’t you seen clean hair before?”
Six shakes her head, and her own stringy, black locks flick back and forth with it.
Well, that would explain why she thought his bath was soup.
“You get your hair wet and then you use the bar of soap to make it clean.” He says in a voice that is inordinately proud as if the notion didn’t come from his television memories, but the cleverness of his own cells. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Six seems to like the idea. “Me too.” She starts to unclip her raincoat.
“No!” Mono yelps, before clearing his throat in apology and flushing bright red. “Sorry, I mean– I don’t like seeing other people without clothes.”
“Dead people custom you remember from T.V?”
“Yeah.” He scratches the back of his neck. “You can take a bath after me.”
“Silly Mono.” Six says. “I am alive. I want one now.”
“Fine,” He washes the fresh blood from his face and arms, then gives Six a stern look that means close–your–eyes.
She does, he thinks, her bangs obscure them almost completely.
Mono hops out of the bath and walks to the sink. His clothes are dry–ish, but very hard to put back on. “You can go in now,” He finally says while turning away and buttoning up his shirt.
In less than five seconds he hears the splash, then the “Eeah! Cold—Cold—Freezing!” Six must be flailing around a lot because more water pours over the edge and onto the tiles underfoot. “I do not believe you tricked me into thinking this is good feeling!”
Mono sits down and faces the wall with a laugh. “You get used to it.”
“You get used to death,” She quips back.
“Come on it’s not that cold, just… room temperature.”
“Room temperature is cold.” Six argues. “This city is a meat freezer. That is why it suits you.”
“Psh, I'm not frozen meat.”
"No, you are a little boy obsessed with stupid T.V bath memories. Very cold— I bet you were born from a viewer.” She jokes. “And the father is a television!”
“Oh, ha ha.” Mono rolls his eyes. “What are you then? The fur-less runt of two wild animals?”
Six does not laugh but stays silent for a while. When she speaks, it is slowly and with great deliberation. “I do not remember that far.” Her voice is sad. “Happy. What is happy family look like?”
Mono looks up at the old pictures on the walls. “Oh, I... I mean, it looks like lots of things. There are a lot of happy families on television. They’re in the commercials, and news and the shows.” He rests his face in his hands and closes his eyes, trying to connect to the signal, to feel the channels playing in his mind like memories. “They… usually eat together, at a dinner table. Fancy things.” His mild connects to a hazy image of the mid–century household the signal tower likes to lure viewers in with. “The mom is really into cookbooks, that's why they eat so much, or maybe the other way around. Usually, she wears her hair like the teacher.”
“Ew, the teacher?”
“Yeah but, she’s nice. She sings to her children and never kills people— or I'm sure she does kill in self-defense, I don't know how she'd be alive this long if not, but they never show that. They never show any monsters at all, actually." Mono rubs the bridge of his nose in thought. “It’s not all good though, there’s usually some sort of conflict. The dad has professional setbacks, and the kids too. They might lose something important, or fight with each other. But even if they argue, they’ll always end up ready to talk, to riff and spin and sketch out new contours of the world they collectively inhabit. That’s what really makes a family.”
“Oh,” Six says. “We are family.”
Mono opens his eyes, “we… yeah, I guess we are.” He smiles.
They are a family, aren’t they? They’ve only known each other for a few weeks, but all things considered, they’re doing pretty well... even if it’s nothing at all like the lives on television. They're at home together. He just needs Six to understand that home is the Pale City. So who cares if this place might, at any moment—which will probably, given the way things have been going — be destroyed in a massive once in a millennium earthquake, or flash flood, or flash flood that immediately follows an earthquake.
“Eugh!” Six’s shriek interrupts his marveling.
Mono whips around to make sure she’s alright.
Oh. Yeah. She’s okay.
Six is holding the bar of soap, a bite is taken out of it. “Bad. Bad. Badbadbad. Bad.” She spits into the water.
He sighs and walks over to the edge of the tub. “Sorry, I should have clarified; using soap does not mean eating soap.”
“Soap smells good.” She crinkles up her nose. “I want to eat.”
Mono frowns, meeting her eyes. “If you’re still hungry finish your bird.” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder to the gnawed-at crow.
“For you.” She shakes her head.
“No, you look like you need it a little more.” She really does. Her body is frail, emaciated even, but it can't be with illness because her face, though hollow, is really very pretty – he thinks maybe not for the first time.
She has wide-set eyes that waver between heartbreaking and fatal. Her mouth is full and red, partially from the blood stains. The nostrils on her small, flat nose arch like a pair of wings. Her face is so strong and lovely, and her frame so wasted, that it’s almost disturbing to look at her.
And to be completely honest, being within the city is enough to sustain Mono anyway, he feels much better, more nourished than in the forest.
“It is my caring.” Six reaches out of the bath and puts a hand to his cheek, smearing soapy residue. “I do not see you eat.”
Mono smiles, welling up with something close to warmth. “I… thanks, really. I appreciate it.” He rubs the back of his neck. “But I uh… don’t really… eat. I–I mean I’ve tried to, in order to match the television memories, I know that’s with people are supposed to do… and I’ve felt this, sort of, stabbing hunger when I’m too far from the tower, but it doesn’t– I don’t… It’s not the same. It only feels right when I get my energy from the signal.” His cheeks buzz with embarrassment and shame.
Six holds a straight face but her eyes are glittering with a whirlpool of emotions. After a while, she slides her hand down to his shirt, feeling the droning of his heart vibrate faintly through it. “You are protected.” Her voice is barely more than a whisper. “By the thing I hate most.”
Mono looks at the ground. “Six… I—”
“Quiet. I know this is not your fault, it is hurting you too. It is hurting everyone.” She gives him a protective look, her eyes on full display now that her wet bangs are swept back with the rest of her hair. “We will be family and figure this out. Okay?”
Six speaks like she doesn't know what a lie or a promise that can't be kept sounds like. Her mouth is pitched up in a little expression of determination.
Mono has a sudden urge to put the bag back over his head.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Six kicks her legs in the air, slams her fists – only the size of the thin man’s eye – against his cold fingers, and tries to bite at him anywhere she can reach. Nothing works, her heart is hammering in her chest.
He stares at her with unusual disappointment, as if he’d just pulled an ace of spades and was trying to figure out how it would benefit his hand of useless diamonds.
Six growls and spits and screams, trying to prove somehow, that her death would not be worth the effort.
The thin man’s voice is a distorted rasp set into his throat by, probably, his own childhood of growls and spits and screams, but it forms an actual word.
He talks! An adult that talks!
Six grabs the chance to use this instead of marveling. “Let me go! My friend will kill you! We are family now! We have killed many dangers for each other— it is habit, we do not even think!”
The monster stares at her, takes in her words as if they are each crucial bits of information. 
"I do!" Six kicks her legs. “We will rip your heart out!” She tries demonstratively to tear the veins from his wrist with her teeth. It does not work in the slightest. All she can manage is to grip at it with her little hands...
After a second, she can feel it faintly, even through the cuffs of his grey button-up; but something inside her reasons that it’s just the product of her trembling fingers or mind-spinning fear. She presses more violently, searching for any other indication of life behind his skin.
There is none.
The thin man does not have a heartbeat.
No.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Her soul is gone, she can feel it with every bone in her body. But this cruel building is somehow the home to another beacon of light.
The music box.
Six couldn't explain how comforting it was if she tried. As is usually the case, there is no obvious thematic connection between the song and the memory that it somehow comes to preserve, between the iridescent bubble of the music and the air of the past that it randomly traps. It’s simply the magic of an accidental conjunction, a flitting moment, and the resin drop of a song transformed by luck and alchemy into amber.
The slow tune, twinkling and melancholy, is her only connection to what she desperately wants to remember. Maybe, if she listens to it a little longer It'll come back... just a little longer... a little longer...
After a minute or an eternity, a boy stumbles into the room. He is so small, pale, and freckled and his hair is a mess of curls, else cowlicks.
He stares at her with scared gray eyes like she’s a ghost, some figment of recollection, like dust caught in oblique sunbeams. Six recognizes that look.
“Hey.” He finally calls.
Six recognizes that voice. She shuffles closer, gripping her music box.
He calls again.
Mono.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
The signal here is so strong it hurts, like gaining another sense, like seeing another spectrum of colors.
Mono kneels next to his friend, and closes his eyes, trying desperately to tune out the chaos.
You were not supposed to come here.
What?
This room is the perfect grave of the child you see. It is not for you.
Mono furrows his brows. No, no that's not right. She's supposed to leave with me, we're leaving.
She likes it, she's happy. I let her go happily for you. It is humane. Leave her this time, just once. So she will not hurt you again, so you do not spend so many years miserable.
Mono does not understand what this means, only that Six's death would make him miserable anyway, no matter how humane. I can't. I'm sorry, I know you care, but I can't.
Please, my child, forget her. The tower urges. I know it is not in your nature to do so, but you must. You are too fragile and she is too far gone.
She’s my friend.
Forget her, come, you are home.
But...
I am tormented by the idea that her tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. You are at home here… stay, let her die.
Mono feels an inherent truth to it. Home. What a nice concept. He should stay, shouldn’t he?
It would be much, much… much… easier.
The armature of his mind is already beginning to bend and crimp under the sturdy and elegant plan.
Something nudges him on the arm, sending a jolt of pain through his whole dislocated, bitten shoulder. He opens his eyes.
Six is looking at him, With her beautiful, heartbreakingly fatal eyes. They are filled with worry, if only for a moment, when she sees that he's okay, she looks back to her music box.
Mono feels hope well up inside him. She isn’t too far gone. “One chance to get us out of here.” He reminds himself he has to give her that chance. That's all she's ever had for anything, that's all she ever needs.
They will leave, together.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Mono is crumpled next to her, hands tangled into his hair, and grey eyes are slammed shut.
Six eventually recognizes the expression from the hazy memories of their adventures together; the hours of mute concentration he held when trying to focus on the signal, or his television memories. He’d always looked particularly pained while doing so.
Mono hurting himself. Not good.
She nudges him with her elbow and half attempts to form words. It does not work, only low, rumbling screeches erupt from her throat. Her eyes are trained on him until he snaps out of it.
Mono looks up in wonder.
She looks back to the music box.
Mono looks at it too. He mumbles something to himself then holds both his little hands to one finger Six has wrapped around the base of the music box. “This place is gonna kill you, we’ve got to get out of here.”
She half–understands his quiet and distorted speech through the haze of her music, but getting out of here isn’t in any of her plans.
Mono gets agitated by her dismissal. Whenever his plans go wrong — and they always go wrong — he starts talking, rambling, Six doesn’t care to listen.
Eventually, he stops talking, drags a hammer toward her, puts it down, and sits next to it for a while.
Six doesn’t care to understand why.
He talks some more, gives her twisted forearm a hug which she halfheartedly pushes away, and picks the hammer back up.
"I'm sorry."
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
When he hits the music box, the rush of signal blackens his senses harsher than a splash of boiling water. He doesn’t even know if it made contact until he hears, or remembers hearing, a muffled burst and then a clamor of metal. By then he’s falling on his back in some concrete room, flattening himself on the ground.
The light and sound burn like a trail of gasoline touched by a match. Mono tries to understand where he is or how he got here, but there is a cobweb in his head or over his face, and paralysis of regret affects him.
His plan was no plan at all, and now it has gone bad. Mono is going to die in a desolate grey box at the margin of the world. He closes his eyes. He opens them, and the cobweb is denser and sparkling with some kind of dew. A screech of unbridled rage, a crumbling of stone. Mono stumbles to his feet, trying to think through the sparkling strands of whatever is going wrong in his brain.
And then he does the only thing he really, instinctively, knows how. He fights, and he runs.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Six wants to kill him the instant the music box is hit and she regains the power of thought. In the wake of the initial shock, which stopped her heart, she feels a strange sense of relief. Finally, the break of him, the proof of his cruelty. If Mono is nine layers deep, then eight of those layers are pure goodness. Goodness far better than she and anyone else, hard people who had survived and prospered in a hard world, could have engendered from their own flesh without some kind of divine intercession. But the innermost layer is and always had been pure evil, innate and automatic, the bad intentions hidden even from himself behind the good ones.
And his awful, nervous little face. She’s certain that he will end up following in the Thin Man’s footsteps no matter how kind, or careful he had been. It didn’t matter, calm or chaotic, aware of all danger or walking boldly into the dark, Mono is not protected by the thing she hates most because he was chosen by virtue of bad luck.
No.
He is protected by the thing she hates most in this world, because he is a part of it.
She reaches out to grab him with a level of violence she didn't know was possible.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Mono catches hold of Six’s outstretched hand as the length of the bridge falls away behind him.
An instant of strange peace opens up inside him like an umbrella as he hangs at the mercy of his friend's grasp, bloody and bloodied, surrounded by the non–euclidean mess he’d somehow managed to make.
But after a second of Six making no attempt to pull him up, he starts to feel those familiar anxieties again. “Hah, come on Six.”
She stares at him.
“Come on, this isn’t funny.”
Six’s voice is pitched very low. “I know why it protected you.”
“Later— tell me later.” He kicks his legs in the air, trying to gain purchase and help her pull him up.
“Mono.” She shakes her head. Her thumb is digging into his wrist as if to feel his pulse. “He didn’t have a heartbeat.”
If Mono’s heart could stop, it would. He’s known Six long enough to know what sadistic curiosity looks and sounds like. “No,” He gasps out, “No, please, that can’t… I…”
“You are the successor.” Six snarls. “Out there— you are hurting them.” She shakes her head with a small smile, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “They will all be saved if you die.”
And they would if only he would. There is no denying that.
Mono’s hands slip out of her grasp.
┉┈◈◉◈┈┉
Six watches him fall into the mass of crimson flesh. His ivory-blue skin paler, if possible, by shock. His coat flutters in the cold air; white on that dead grey-brown of old cloth.
White…gray…white…gray…white…gray…
…Red.