Archive of Our Own

Six doesn’t like how cold the City is.

It rains, constantly, and even when it isn’t raining, everything is still wet and soppy and misty, curling around her chest and making her breath puff out in front of her like the grey, dark clouds that cover the sky. Even with her raincoat on, the cold pricks at her legs, her hands, her face and her eyes, making her skin sting and freeze over like the frost that use to curl around the edges of the windows in the Nest on the colder, later nights.

But Mono and her, they haven’t actually done much traversing through the City since the Tower spat them out towards the edge of it.

When they had become aware enough to figure out where they were, they had gone to the window of the room they were in and saw only smaller apartment buildings surrounding them, but in the distance, what only looked like a brisk walk away, was the beach. It didn’t seem like the same beach they had landed on when they first arrived from the Wilderness, but it could have been. She was sure all beaches were the same beaches, if you wandered down far enough.

Mono had pointed towards it, the smell of salt burning her nose, and asked, “Should we head that way?”

But the claws of hunger were still lingering in her stomach, her hand still burning from where she had held Mono over the edge. Her body had still felt wrong and stretched out, pulled thin like a tightrope, so she shook her head and said, “No. Here is okay.”

And Mono, Mono without a bag but Mono with weird eyes and soft hair and a kind mouth, nodded and replied back, “Okay.”

So they stayed there, in the building a brisk walk away from the beach, and didn’t look out the window.

They were lucky, with the building they had landed it. They had left the small room with the now-broken television and open windows, and went to the next one over in the hallway. There was no television in this room, and there was more food in the cupboards. It was old food, moldy and gross, but it was food and they could make it last. There were scraps of fabric in the corner of a closet, and they made a nest for themselves underneath the broken couch. They collected rainwater that dripped through the window, and washed themselves in the weird metal tub embedded in the countertop.

But it didn’t stop the cold.

It bites at her like the teeth of an angry wild animal, makes her skin prickle and limbs shiver and teeth chatter. Her raincoat helps, but it’s more designed to help with the weather, not the general chill that the City seems to be permanently stuck. The rain droplets slide off her back and keep her dry, but it does nothing for the wind.

Mono, however, is always at her side, and he helps her like he always does. They’ll cuddle up in their fabric scrap nest when it’s time to rest, and he’ll take off his coat to act as a blanket for the both of them. When it gets too bad, he’ll let her shove her hands underneath his shirt and stick her feet against his ankles, as if to absorb his warmth, even if he’ll yelp at her when her frosty limbs touch his own warm skin.

There’s something … different, though, about Mono that she can’t exactly place.

He has always been warm, running as hot as a furnace like the one in the hospital, but now if she grabs his hand too suddenly it feels like it burns. If she catches him by surprise, he’ll make noises that don’t always sound like they came from his own throat, scratchy in a way that doesn’t just come from disuse. He has always been watchful, alert and ready at a moment’s notice to run or hide, but now that she can see his eyes she can see that he just stares sometimes, at nothing, his pupils going out of focus as he tunes into something she can’t see.

When he sleeps, sometimes the way his breath whistles out sounds too much like the whistle of a television screen trying to get in tune. Sometimes, his chest will fall and won’t rise for a long while afterwards, much too long for his heart to keep beating.

But he is still the same Mono, underneath. He still scavenges for food and gives her the bigger portions, he still offers her his coat when it gets cold even though she has her own now. He still curls up with her to rest, smiles so wide his eyes crinkle up like his paper bag did, holds her hand even when they’re just walking across the room and never, ever leaves her behind.

He’s just been different since the Tower.

So has Six.

Her limbs hurt occasionally, in a dull, achy way that seems to sink deep down into her bones and never leaves. She has scars along her sides now, deep gashes going horizontally just under her ribs, like she had been hugging herself but dug her nails in too deep. Sometimes when Mono speaks, her ears ring like she’s caught in a constant, looping echo that bounces off the walls.

Sometimes when she blinks, all she sees is purple light and a soothing melody.

Whenever that happens, she just whistles, or plays with her lighter. Those are two of things gifted to her by Mono, and she never lets them go. Her lighter is always securely stored in her raincoat pocket, and she brings it out constantly — ever since Mono lost his flashlight, it’s the only source of illumination they have now. She’ll bring it out and flick the cap open-closed and over again, listening to the satisfying click as it snaps shut again and again.

Mono also taught her how to whistle, and showed her the tune that she likes. She had heard him whistle it once and tried to imitate, because she liked the melody and thought it was pretty, in the way her music box tune once was to her. Now she can’t stand thinking of her music box, but she still likes to whistle the song Mono showed her.

A long tone, three in quick succession, then three short going up-down-up. Repeat, but ending with three going down, then a low long note, a high long note, a downward walk and repeat. A low long, two short high ones, long, low-high-low. Long, two high, long, low-high-low, a long one, three in quick succession — and restart.

It is their song, something just for the two of them. She whistles it when her limbs hurt, when she feels the scars, when her ears ring or her vision clouds over. Mono will join in, parroting her notes in a lower register, and fill the room with music. She even whistles it when she feels okay, when she feels content, and Mono will still copy it then, too.

Right now is one of those times. She feels okay, so she whistles. Across the room where he is scavenging for food, Mono joins in immediately, like it’s second nature to him. She is still getting use to hearing his voice in full, not muffled by a paper bag, but she’s gotten use to the sight of his face easily enough. His eyes are just his eyes, his face his just his face. He’s just Mono. Still just Mono.

“Hey.”  She hears his whisper even across the room, and glances over at him from where she’s scavenging from her own pile. “Hey, Six.”

The hallway of rooms they had been scavenging in before were empty; they had moved up a level by jumping across the broken stairwell, hoping to find some food on the upper levels. Mono was looking on the other side of the room, up on the counters and searching in the big, weird-smelling jars with faded letters on them. Six was looking near the chairs, jumping on top to check in the crevices — if any kids had been here before them, that was where they would hide their treasures.

At Mono’s calling, however, she gets back down to the ground by climbing up the arm of the chair, then shimmying down the leg of the small table beside it. Mono gets down from the counter by jumping from open drawer to open drawer that he had pulled to make a staircase, and they meet in the middle of the room.

She thinks maybe he’s found something eat, since it’s been a few days since they’ve found anything good (they might need to find some more options, soon, because the rest of the staircase is broken and the floor underneath their original one is just the ground level), but instead he holds up something she recognizes well.

A paper bag.

And not a normal paper bag, either. There’s two eyeholes cut out from the front, and the edges are torn and curled, and it’s damp from rainwater. But it looks almost exactly like his old one, probably is his old one, in the way her raincoat is simultaneously a new one she found in the City and also an old one, belonging to a different owner.

“Oh.” She mutters, tilting her head. “Are you keeping it?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Won’t wear it around you, though.”

She nods. It’s a good idea; in case they ever run into any other kids (which she doesn’t think they will, at least not in the City — the only indication she’s seen of any other kids being around are their remains, so she doesn’t have high hopes for any of them) he needs to keep his eyes hidden. Other kids that see him will assume the worst, that he’s a monster just like the rest everything else in this world.

( Just like she did.)

So he needs something to protect himself. Anybody else won’t understand.

Besides her, of course.

Mono nods back, and folds it up to slip into his pocket. She catches his wrist before he can, and he freezes, bare face turning to look at her. His eyes, dark and static-filled, widen in surprise, and with the way his hair falls across his foreword she’s struck with the image of a startled animal, like the ones she saw in picture books back in the Nest.

“Why did you take it off in the first place?” She asks, letting go of his wrist to instead rub her fingers along the edge of his coat sleeve, the old plush fabric rough against her skin. She itches between taking the bag from his pocket and grabbing at his face, poking his cheeks to feel the thin criss-cross scars he’s gotten from his numerous falls against the pad of her thumb.

“I didn’t need it anymore.” He replies back after a moment. Then he takes a deep shaky breath, air whistling slightly between his teeth (he is missing a tooth, one of the sharp teeth on the top). “I was — I was fighting him. To get you back.”

His eyes lose their wideness, narrowing at her. Gauging her reaction. He never hides his expressions, but even if he did she would be able to read him anyways. She nods again. “Oh. Okay.”

Mono doesn’t say anything else, just nods back again, but she does see some of the tension ease out of his face. She lets go of his coat and he goes back to scavenging when released, sending a small smile her way before he turns around. She goes back to her own search too, not really wanting to say anything more when she doesn’t have anything to say. She’ll let Mono do the talking, if they need to, which they don’t. They don’t need to talk about it.

They don’t need to talk about fact that the monster that took her had the same eyes as Mono did, the same draw towards television screens and made the same noises that belonged in a speaker system. They’ve apologized to each other already about what happened, and have come to an understanding. Mono might be the Thin Man and the Thin Man might be Mono but they’re not anymore, they got out of there and Mono is not stuck there, in that horrible, terrible place.

Mono is hers. Not the City’s, not the Tower’s, not the Eye’s. Hers.

And she is not the City’s, the Tower’s, the Eye’s, either. She is Mono’s, just like he is hers. They’re together. They don’t need anybody else, when they’re together.

And that’s how it’s going to be, forever until the end.

▩ ▵ ▩

When the kid breaks down the door, Six doesn’t see them coming.

She’s been trapped in the monster’s basement for what feels like ages — time is hard to tell, when she can’t look outside, even though that wouldn’t really help her at all. In her head she calls it the Hunter, because of the gun it carries and the traps she had to avoid in the forest outside. Until the monster caught up to her and brought her here, when she was stupid and tripped down a hill and banged her head.

She expected it to kill her. But instead she woke up here, in this basement. There was some food stacked in the corner for her, a tiny cup filled with water she wonders how the monster knew she would need. She doesn’t think monsters need to eat or drink or anything.

But it also makes her worry about why it wants her alive. But she tries not to think about it.

The throbbing in her head from where she hit it has long since subsided, and she has already paced her room looking for a way out. But there’s no loose floorboards, or holes in the wall. The only window is too high up for her to reach, and she’s already climbed on the table and searched it for anything she could use to break the door down. And there’s nothing.

She’s angry at herself, for getting caught, because if there’s anything she hates more than the monsters trying to kill her it’s the feeling of being trapped. But she’s also tired . She hasn’t had a moment of rest in ages, and it seems like that caught up with her, and made her stupid. It’s seemed like everything has been passing in a long blurry rush. Everything that happened before, before she was trapped here, all seems so … distant, now.

Drifting out onto the ocean. The Nest. The Pretender. The girl in the yellow raincoat, falling into the sea —

She growls and paces the room again. At least it gives her something to do.

But she also knows she’s come too far to give up and die now, so she keeps trying to find a way out. When she gets tired, she curls up under the desk and sleeps, since it’s a pretty secluded spot and if the Hunter comes in while she sleeps it won’t spot her immediately. Not before she can wake up — a habit she developed, since she’s never had anybody to watch her back while she sleeps.

(Except for —)

She drops to her knees and tears at the edge of the rug, needing something to do with her hands and getting a sense of satisfaction when she destroys it. She hasn’t seen the Hunter since the day it captured her, and she has no clue if it ever comes in the room she’s locked in, even though she sometimes hears it walking around upstairs. The food is gross and old, but there’s enough of it to feed her for awhile. Which it probably planned for.

Her stomach turns at the thought.

She scratches on the wall with broken bits of white sticks and dusty rocks she finds discarded in the corners of the room. Just lines at first, to add to all the lines already dotting the walls, but sometimes she likes to add onto the other pictures as well. She was never one for drawing, not like she saw some of the other kids at Nest do whenever the monsters weren’t around, but it’s not like there’s anything else for her to do.

A few days in (she thinks — again, no way to tell time), she jumps up on the only table in the room again and searches the pile of stuff on top for anything useful for her. She ends up finding a weird metal contraption hiding under layers of old fraying cloth, and kicks it down to the floor. Usually she would avoid making loud noise at any costs, but the Hunter still hasn’t come to check on her. Maybe it’s forgotten about her. She hopes it has.

If a monster keeps you alive, it can’t be for anything good.

She jumps down to the floor again and walks over cautiously to the weird metal things. It’s big, about as wide as her chest and as tall as her knee, an old blue-grey in colour. There’s drawings on the side like the ones on the walls, shaky sketches of eyes and dots, and a handle is sprouted from the top of it.

She rightens it. The object seems familiar, but she’s unsure where she’s seen it before, but she finds herself drawn to it all the same. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to do in this room, or maybe it’s because there’s something pinging her gently from the recesses of her mind, but she sits down with the object between her legs, and gently turns the handle.

It screeches, at first, making her ears ring. And then it starts playing music .

Oh , she knows what this is. It’s a music box. She had seen some of these in the Nest, though they were smaller and made worse music. The tune this one plays is simple, but pretty, and after hearing nothing but her own breathing and the creaking of the house around her for so long, it’s the best thing she’s heard in ages. Even if her arm gets tired after turning the handle a few times.

She wonders where this came from. Why it’s in a monsters basement, and who might have used it before — who would have drawn on it, and who would have drawn on the walls.

She wonders what the Hunter is planning on doing to her. She wonders if she can escape before it decides.

As she turns the music box and lets the notes drift into her ears, she finds herself getting calmer than she’s felt in a long time. She’s never heard a melody like this before, or any melody before — the hints she heard in the Nest, from other music boxes or other kids humming to themselves, were never anything like this.

She likes it. It’s pretty. It’s hers .

She’s so enraptured in it, it’s why she doesn’t here the creaking of the stairs outside, or the sound of a young voice grunting as it drags an axe across the floor — until the blade of it swings through the wooden door, of course.

Snapping back to reality, Six lets her survival instincts take over and rushes backwards, hiding in her trusty spot under the table. She leaves the music box discarded in the middle of the room, and has half a thought to go and grab it, but she does value her life over the music any day. This is it, of course. The Hunter’s returned home and it’s come to finally kill her, like monsters always do.

Except when the door is finally broken through, axe dropped and the person behind it stepping through the hole, Six can see who it actually is.

It’s not a monster.

It’s a kid .

Of course, they’re not a normal kid, so maybe her first assessment of a monster isn’t too far off. They wear a long brown trench coat that ends just above their ankles, and they’re barefoot, much like every other kid she’s ever met. But what she’s most drawn to is the thing over their head.

It looks like a paper bag, brown and bulky, with two small eyeholes cut out in the front. It’s worn around the edges, but in pretty good condition overall, even if it reminds her of the mask the Hunter wears too much for her to be comfortable. She can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl or something else underneath, but she doesn’t particularly care either way.

Their dark, empty eyes focus on her, and they shuffle forward, going slowly like they don’t want to spook her. But Six is not a coward, she’s seen other kids before — even if it’s bit a long while, kids populated the Nest like rats until they were all caught — so she crawls out from underneath the table, showing she’s not a wuss.

The kid crouches down in front of her, and whispers, “Hey.” She doesn’t say anything back, and can smell the scent of rainwater and wind and oddly enough smoke , that clings to edge of the coat as they approach. It’s surreal almost, seeing another person after so long, that she can’t do anything but stare and get closer to them.

Her heart beats loudly. It feels like something has wrapped itself tightly around her middle, urging her to draw closer to this new kid, something she can’t refuse.

They offer her their hand, a clear invitation to help her up. And she nearly grabs it, the feeling in her urging her closer just like it urged her to turn the music box handle. but when she spies the open door behind them, that’s all that fills her head. The thing around her chest breaks, so she pushes past them, and runs.

She’s free. She’s free, she’s free, she’s free free free.

She hears the kid exclaim some sort of startled phrase behind her, before they follow her out of the basement and through the rotten hallways of this cabin. She passes by a table filled with stuffed puppets leaking fluff just like the Hunter did, and she’s struck with the horrible thought of what was going to happen to her if it ever came back for her, but she pushes that deep down into her stomach until she doesn’t feel it anymore.

She reaches a roadblock, however, when she can’t reach the pull for the attic. The door outside was locked, she can clearly see, and with no key around the only other place it could be was up above, because that was always how these things work.

Except she can’t jump that high, and when she lands, she finds the paper bag kid from the basement is standing in the doorway she just came from staring at her. They’re so still, and with that mask on she would almost mistake them for a standing corpse.

But it also makes her realize they’re tall. Taller than her, but they don’t look that much heavier than anything she’s lifted before, so if she could just give them a boost to open the attic they could grab the key and she could get out of here.

Would they want to help her, though?

Sure, they broke the door down to her prison, but they could have done that for any number of reasons, and she did push them away in her rush to get out. She doesn’t feel guilty for pushing them — anyone in her position would do so. And she doesn’t really want to work with them, because the bigger your group the more attention you get and the more attention you get means the more likely is monsters will notice you. So only stupid kids ever work together, except in extreme, weird circumstances.

(Like the girl in the yellow, with the red ribbon and the kind eyes, who’s hands were warm when she held hers —)

But as much as it leaves a bad taste in her mouth, she can admit that she needs help with this. And neither of them will get out if they don’t work together, and the other kid seems to realize this too, because they don’t make any further moves to run or come closer. Almost like they’re waiting, unsure of what to do.

She gestures them over. They come. And they manage to open the attic.

After that, they have to climb through the attic to find a crank and then a key. The kid goes scampering off at one point, chasing after something she doesn’t see, and she has to wait impatiently for them to return a few minutes later. When they drop down again, they wander through the rest of the cabin to the forest to another, smaller cabin where the monster lurks, tearing at meat with a horrible ripping sound.

They have to run after that. They have to do a lot of running after that, only stopping to hide or duck away from gunshots, and she has to pick the kid up when they nearly fall to their death as a wooden board gives out underneath them. Then they’re swimming, and running again, and then there’s another, bigger gunshot where she finally gets to show the monster how much she hates being locked up —

And when they’ve both ran enough, ran until her lungs burn with every exhale and her legs feel like they’re about to fall off and she’s cold and wet and shivering from hiding in the swamp and running through the woods, she stops on the edge of the shore. The sand is coarse on her feet, makes her skin itch, and the wind that blows over the water makes her shiver and hug herself to preserve heat.

The new setting does not seem to bother the strange kid, as they only pause for a moment to look over at her. She still can’t see behind their mask, and she wonders if they’re going to say something, but they don’t. Instead, they turn away with a slight dip of their head, and patter closer to the waves.

Six has never liked the ocean, or water in general. The salt burns her nose, the sound of raging waves makes her ears hurt, and it’s cold. Colder than the basement, colder than the Wilderness, colder than where she came before. It makes her freeze. It makes her hurt. But it doesn’t matter what she does or doesn’t like, because the world does not care about that. It cares about making them, her and this strange new kid and all the other kids inhabiting it, suffer.

Speaking of, the paper bag kid is near the waterline now, close enough the waves wash over their ankles. Through the seafoam and gritty sand, Six spies a piece of wood the same time they do, and they lean down to run their hand along the edge of it. Six moves closer to see, and when the water recedes, she can see it’s the edge of a door; half buried in the sand and looking soggy from the water, but still functional. Still stable.

The paper bag kid wastes no time grabbing onto the edge and pulling it back a bit so only half of it is covered by the crashing waves, and then a bit more to free it from the sand. Six guesses what they’re doing before they begin to push it back out towards the water, this time floating gently on top of the waves instead of sinking underneath, and has to wrinkle her nose at it.

It’s a stupid idea. There might not even be anything on the other side of the water, why would they risk travelling across it?

“Where are you going?” She asks, the first words she’s spoken to them that weren’t just hissed oi’s  or chiding shhh’s. Her voice sounds rough, like she hasn’t used it in awhile, and she hasn’t . She hasn’t spoken to another kid since — since the Nest, even then she had been pretty silent.

The kid pauses in their movements, hands still wrapped around the edge of the door, dirty fingers digging into the soggy wood. Their voice is just as quiet, just as scratchy, when they reply, “To find whatever I’m looking for.”

Their voice is deeper than hers, but still youthful in the way all kids’ voices were, which makes her think they might be a boy, but she still doesn’t care all that much. They-he-the other kid pushes at the door again, but it gets stuck in a sand crevice. Six watches for a moment, thinking of her options, as the other kid struggles.

There’s two ways this can go, right now. She can go back into the Wilderness; pass the stuffed corpse of the Hunter, back through the cabin and out towards where she came before. Deal with the rotten food and deadly traps that she had dodged, that she didn’t want to deal with again. But she could also help this kid push the door out onto the sea, and drift off to parts unknown. It would be dangerous, but not anymore dangerous than it had been the first time she had drifted off. Besides, this kid doesn’t seem to be the dead weight she was worried about earlier. She doesn’t think they’ll drown at all.

It might be stupid. But the choice is easy.

She patters over to the kid’s side, the sand gritty on the soles of her feet, and helps push. She does not notice when the kid looks at her from underneath their paper bag with wide, almost shocked eyes, but — but that doesn’t matter either.

▩ ▵ ▩

They have to leave the building soon after.

They can’t find much food on the floor above them, and any efforts to get any higher end with bruised limbs and scraped palms (they tend to each other’s injuries with leftover bandages from earlier injuries, which they’re also running out of), so they leave their nest under the couch and move down to the ground level. They have a bit more luck there, finding crumbs of something hard as rocks but somewhat sweet in jars and weird metal lockers that were filled with paper they slept in for warmth.

She never hears the sound of the chittering monsters with no faces, which Mono says he calls the Viewers — he faced them a lot, in the City, and he says that they only liked to watch things. She can still hear the sound of the beach. Of the ocean. It makes her eyes sting.

“Mono.” She says, one day, as they curl up together under pieces of thick paper with weird writing on them, the ink mottled and spotted until the edges turn rainbow. “Mono, we can’t stay here.”

They’re running out of food, and the survivor in her itches to get moving; it won’t be long until a monster finds their secret hideout, and they have to leave before that happens. Despite the small pocket of peace they’ve seemed to have found here, Six knows it in her heart they need to move soon, even if she doesn’t entirely want to. The smell of the ocean still bothers her, and static crackles in her ears whenever she turns her head.

Mono blinks awake from where he had been dozing softly while she took watch. In the darkness of the small cubby (they closed the door but kept it propped open with a bundle of the papers), Mono’s eyes practically glow, rims of white illuminating his skin. “Huh?”

“We need to leave.” She tells him again. “Tomorrow. When we wake up.”

It’s impossible to tell morning in the City, so whenever they wake up will be morning for them. He only nods sleepily. “Okay.”

He always goes along with her, and he closes his eyes again, but she knows he’s probably forming plans in his head already, just like she is. They should most likely follow the sea line, wander along the beach until they’re out of the City and onto the world beyond. She doesn’t think they should go back to the Wilderness, or any place they’ve been before.

She’s surprised in herself that she doesn’t want to leave. But she knows they have to.

But, her and Mono together, it’ll be okay. She knows it will be.

When Mono awakes and they’ve done one last round of the ground floor to check for supplies, they set off with no further words spoken. Hand-in-hand, they walk out of the broken front doors, minding the glass scattered on the ground, and set off towards the sound of the waves.

They walk for awhile. Time is hard to tell in places like this, and beach seems to stretch on forever. It is surprisingly slightly warmer than in the City, even if it is just as foggy. But it doesn’t rain, and while the sand does itch her feet, she eventually gets used to the feeling. They don’t run into any monsters (as expected, if there were none in the City why would there be any on the beach) even if the wide empty space makes her skin prickle, since there’s no hiding spaces to duck into should the need arise.

Her and Mono stay hand-in-hand the entire time. Never letting go. Never wavering.

“Hey.” Mono stops suddenly, and their joined hands make her stop too. He points through the fog to a weird lump in the distance she can just barley see the outline of, and she squints. “We should stop there.”

She can’t tell what it is, though it’s definitely not a monster. Luckily, Mono noticed her confusion, and says, “It’s … I think it’s driftwood, stuff that floated here from the sea. We can make a shelter out of it and rest. We’ve walked for awhile.”

As much as she wants to leave the City in the distance, get as far away from it as they can, she can admit they have been walking for awhile. Even while in the City they never walked for so long before, but the slightly warmer weather and the lack of any obstacles meant that the walk had seemed much easier. But now that they’re standing still, her breathing evening out, she realizes how much her limbs ache.

She squeezes Mono’s hand once to show her acceptance of the idea, and they keep going the small distance they need to reach the pile.

Like Mono had said, it looks to be just a big clump of wood and gross green leafy stuff that got wrapped together in the ocean, before it landed on the shore. The entire thing is damp and some of the wood on the inside is rotten away, but her and Mono still manage to find a little alcove between the wood pieces and dig a hole in the sand deep enough they can lay down without banging their heads.

It smells like salt and sand and rot. Mono grabs a piece of weird green leaves, and offers it to her.

“It’s seaweed.” He says. “I think you can eat it.”

“I don’t think you can.” She replies back. Shes never heard of ‘seaweed’ before, but Mono always seems to know weird words for things she’s sure he’s just made up, like how he called the burning fire thing in the Hospital a furnace or the weird metal fabric thing in the Hunter’s basement a sewing machine . She has no clue where he gets this stuff from.

“You can. Watch.” He insists, before he tries to take a bite of it. Except as soon as he shoves it in his mouth, his face scrunches up so tightly his eyes go all funny and he spits it back out, making her shriek.

“Gross!” She pushes his face away with her hand, and he sticks his tongue out at her,  before he pulls away to kick some sand over top of the chewed up gross thing. Then he huffs and gestures to it, as if saying, Look, see, it’s gone now! making her hit his shoulder. “Ugh.”

The whole display does make her feel a bit lighter, though, ever since they left the City. She’s slightly grouchy due to the feeling of sand sticking to the back of her legs and bottoms of her feet, but at least her raincoat protects her from getting it in her hair. But at least they seem relatively protected in here, a good place to stop and rest for a bit, which her whole body screams to do.

Mono just grins at her. She finds herself smiling back against her will, mostly because Mono is just so expressive in the way she’s never seen anybody else be. After hiding his face for ages and ages, he’s unused to guarding it without any help, and he ends up showing everything on his face.

It’s stupid. But also endearing, in a weird, stupid way.

Eventually the two of them settle down, Mono offering to take first watch. They cuddle close together in their usual position, Six laying with her head on Mono’s shoulder and his cheek resting against her forehead. He’s always been a bit taller than her, and it comes in handy, in times like this.

She tries to rest. Eventually, sleep comes fitfully, in the way her sleep always does. She dreams of nothing. She dreams of black voids. She dreams of shadows.

She dreams of someone singing.

When she wakes up, however, it’s to Mono shaking her gently. His finger is pressed to his lip so even in her bleary state she knows to stay quiet, and as she rubs at her eyes and comes slowly back into full awareness she tilts her head at him. Questioning.

He inclines his head towards the exit of their hideout, and they both creep forward silently, until they can poke their heads out the door.

Six sees what Mono was warning her off immediately.

There’s a monster, just around the other side of the driftwood, silent as it shuffles around. She can’t get a good look at it, except for its heavy rain boots. It keeps grabbing onto logs and lifting them up, checking underneath before it lets it fall again, and it crouches down to check near the sand, peering underneath for any small holes someone might be hiding in. Her breath catches in her throat, familiar feeling taking over her as soon as she’s in a monster’s presence.

She doesn’t know how they missed it until it was right on top of them — Mono was on watch, but she would have heard a monster that big in her sleep . She doesn’t know why there’s a monster this far out from the City, because if there’s one thing she knows about monsters besides their bloodlust for children is that they don’t tend to wander. They stay in their territory, their homes, and don’t go outside of it.

Maybe they’re far enough from the City they’ve stumbled into another monster’s area without realizing. Maybe with the Thin Man gone the City’s hold on its monsters are waning. Maybe this monster is something else, something different, belonged to somewhere else like how the monsters in the Nest belonged to the Nest as much as they did themselves.

Maybe their luck was always meant to run out. She doesn’t know.

The monster moves, getting closer to their hiding spot, and lifts a log on top of the pile that sends the whole place creaking and groaning. It reminds her too much of the building in the City that collapsed on top of them, and she tenses. They have to get out of here. If it’s looking in the driftwood pile, it knows someone must be hiding, and it’ll no doubt find them. Even if it somehow passes it by, all it’s prodding will cause the place to fall on top of them anyways.

Mono reaches out and grabs her hand, no doubt having the exact same thought, and together the two of them slowly pad out of their hideout and onto the soft sand. She’s glad it masks the sound of their footsteps, and they hurriedly creep away, their eyes peeled for any other hiding spots they could find.

To their left is the ocean. To their front is the beach stretching onwards, and behind them is the monster. To their right is just a foggy distance, but the shore must end eventually, and maybe if they get lost in the fog, the monster will get lost too.

Wood creaks as the monster drops the log it was looking under.

And Six stops.

She doesn’t know why she does. Mono keeps moving forward, hand still tightly clasping hers, but her feet don’t move after him. It’s like her body has a mind of its own, forcing her to stay still instead of doing the smart thing and running. And it’s only for a moment, a small lapse that she immediately snaps out from, but it’s enough.

She thinks she hears static. And the monster turns to them.

When it stares at them, Six gets a better look. It’s face is covered in a weird mask, one that kinda reminds her of the Hunter’s, except it has both eyes, and a floppy brown hat that falls over its head. The leather jacket it wears blows in the wind coming off the sea, and when it looks at them, it doesn’t even make a noise. And that is the most disturbing thing about it.

Monsters are loud — even the Thin Man made noise, an ominous low humming drone that followed him from room to room and staticky noises like a needle scratching against a record, if she even knew what that was. Monsters roar and screech and pant and sniffle and groan, their footsteps rock rooms and send floorboards cracking. It’s how kids survive; they adapt, they learn, and most importantly they listen . They can identify the difference between a monster’s steps and a child’s. Learn the noises that mean it’s far away, searching, or getting closer to their location.

This monster is silent when it takes a step forward on the sand. No wonder neither of them had noticed it until it was too late, it’s silent like a kid would be. The only noise that comes from it is the creaking of its coat blowing in the wind, and Six feels Mono grab her hand in a familiar motion telling her to run .

And she does.

The two of them dash away as quickly as they can, letting go of each other to make sure they don’t stumble while running. Mono is ahead of her slightly, on account of sleeping on the far side away from the monster and thus making it out of their hideout first, but she manages to keep pace with him like she always does as they dodge their way around pieces of driftwood and garbage.

There’s another pile of driftwood in front of them, with the waves crashing onto it on one side and the other spreading out across the beach in the opposite direction, making running around it impossible. Mono makes the same decision as she does and jumps, grabbing onto a piece of wood sticking out of the pile and scrambling to pull himself up to keep climbing. Her breath comes out in worried pants as she clenches her legs, ready to jump and follow him up.

She doesn’t hear the monster behind them. But she can’t spare the time it would take to turn and check, so she tenses, and jumps, hands outstretched to grab onto the same piece of wood Mono did and climb up after him.

Her ankle rolls at the last second.

And she falls.

“Six!” She hears Mono yell her name, hears the wood falling down as he tries to grab for her, but he’s too slow and she’s too fast, and she goes tumbles forward to land on the sandy ground. She lands on her stomach and bangs her chin on the ground, biting her tongue and tasting blood. All the air in her lungs coming out in a rush, her ankle aching from where she had rolled it. She notes, distantly, that is the same ankle that she had been hanging from in the School. That was probably why.

The impact does leave her dazed, but her heart continues to pound in her chest, urging her to get up and run . And she does, the familiar drum in her veins pushing her to her feet, giving her the energy she needs to take her first few steps forward, back towards Mono and back towards safety.

She doesn’t get the chance.

The monster — the stupid silent monster, the one they couldn’t see coming because they were used to the City, hadn’t been in the outside world for so long — grabs her around the middle, and scoops her up into the air.

She screams, a manic screechy thing that she doesn’t even realize came from her at first, but the panic that overtakes her brain is more overwhelming than ever before. When the Hunter grabbed her, she hadn’t even realized, because she had been knocked unconscious by one of its traps and woke up in the basement without any clue how she got there. The Bullies had been her size, and while they had been violent they hadn’t been murderous, she had seen that immediately.

She barley remembers when the Thin Man grabbed her. She barley remembers what came after.

(Except for the sound of static in her ears, purple light behind her eyelids, noises that almost sounded like words being whispered to her by someone who hadn’t spoken in a long time. Flashes of Mono pulling her through a television screen and flashes of Mono holding an axe and saying I’m sorry and flashes of Mono, Mono, Mono —)

“ MONO!” She screams, so loud her throat is sore, wiggling in the monster’s grip so that maybe it’ll get annoyed and drop her instead. “ MONO! ”

“SIX!” He shouts back, just as screechy and just as manic, scrambling up to stand on top of the driftwood pile. His eyes are wide and scared and he stands with his mouth agape, horrified and fearful. “ SIX! ”

The monster doesn’t let her go, though, despite their screaming. It smells like sea water and rotten food and, oddly enough, of straw she used to stumble across in the attics of the Nest. But it’s grip is unwavering, and it still doesn’t make a noise as it holds her in the air, and she feels like she can’t breathe.

This is it. This is it, this is it, this is it. She is going to die and she is going to lose Mono and Mono is going to lose her, they’re going to be separated and she is going to die she is going to die she is going to die —

(She doesn’t remember much from when the Thin Man took her. But she does remember he never wanted to kill her.)

HEY!

It’s Mono’s voice, she knows, but something about it is wrong . It echoes strangely and it crackles with static and it makes her ears ring, and the monster that has her in its grip actually stops . It doesn’t immediately roar and grab for Mono, doesn’t make a move to kill him. It just pauses and looks, and Six can see that even though Mono is standing on the driftwood pile, fists curled and coat blowing in the wind, something about him exceeds power .

Let her go. Or take me with her. Mono tells it, commands it, in that strange unnatural voice that comes from a television speaker. Listen to me. You listen to me .

His voice makes her ears rings, and she winces in the monster’s grip, but can’t take her eyes off her friend. He stands as tall and as proud as the monster that holds her, the fog parting to reveal him in all his glory, self-assured in his own power and confident that nothing can hurt him. He knows he’s dangerous and is using it. But unlike the monsters, Six knows he wouldn’t hurt her; not in the way monsters hurt kids.

The monster looks at Mono. Mono looks back. Now.

The one word seems to have the affect he wants, because the monster — the monster moves.

It scoops Mono up in the same hand it holds Six in, then stretches out its fingers so they lay in it’s flat palm. The two off them stumble forward slightly, no longer caught in the monster’s tight grip, and Mono grabs for her immediately. His hand finds her own, and they hold onto each other so tight Six worries, distantly, they might break each other’s fingers. His other arm he flings out across her chest, a physical wall between her in the monster, and in return she lifts her head up and bares her teeth at it, daring it to come closer to her and her friend. Daring it to try and hurt them, try and kill them.

It won’t, not after what Mono just did. And it doesn’t.

Instead, the monster regards them for a moment; the two small, shaky children sitting in the palm of its hand. She can’t see it’s eyes, and she doesn’t know if that’s better or worse, because sometimes seeing a monster’s eyes just makes it all the more clear how different they are from the rest of them. Their pupils are clouded over, or slitted dangerously, or wide with manic dangerousness. It makes it worse, sometimes.

This monster, with its bag and hat and long coat looking like it’s made for tough weather, stares at them for a long moment.

They both stare back. Unblinking.

Then, with no preambling, they both get unceremoniously dropped into the bag.

▩ ▵ ▩

Six does not like this place.

She thinks it’s a city, and Mono told her it was called the Pale City — or that was just what he called it, she wasn’t sure — but it is much different from any other places she’s been. The Wilderness was creepy, dark, anything possible hiding in the shadows of tall, twisted trees. But at least there she felt somewhat safe, even if the Hunter inhabited the woods. There were places to hide, resources to use. Even when she was stuck there, it wasn’t as dangerous as some other places.

The — the place she was in before, what the other kids called the Nest, was not like the Wilderness at all. It was … colourful. Not exactly bright, since it was still the home of monsters and death, but it seemed like it was putting on a facade. The paintings on the walls, the plants in the garden. The suffocating light that seemed to pour in from places unknown. It looked perfect, to hide the darkness underneath. But it was still bearable. It was still survivable.

This City is different.

It feels more like the Wilderness, in terms of the darkness, but that was where the similarities ended. The buildings — taller and more destroyed than any buildings she’s ever seen — are grey and washed-out, but seem haunting as they leer over the cobblestone streets. It rains all the time, cold and almost painful when it hits her bare skin. Her breath fans out around her like the mist that curls around her ankles, making her shiver even under her cardigan.

And of course, there’s what she thinks is a Tower with the light on top, that she can just barely spy in the sky whenever the clouds move just right. She doesn’t know if it’s actually real, but she doesn’t feel comfortable enough voicing that thought to Mono.

Mono. They haven’t spoken much since they washed ashore, but when she chose to follow him into the City — not like there were many other ways to go, except down the beach or back into the ocean — he didn’t object at all. In fact, he seemed to slow his pace down to walk only a few steps ahead of her, and kept twisting around slightly to look behind at her. He must not have much vision inside of his bag, but he seems to make do with it just fine.

She wonders what he looks like without. Monsters cover their faces sometimes, to hide their imperfections. Maybe he’s hiding something too.

Or maybe he just likes how it looks. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

Some time passes as they travel together, only speaking when needed and helping each other get past tall fences and stuck windows, with the rain constantly coming down on them. It never rained in the Nest and she wasn’t out in the Wilderness long enough to see if it did there, and she hates the feeling of it on her skin and how cold it makes her feel.

She has no clue where Mono is leading them, but he seems to know where he’s going, so she follows. She debates leaving him a few times, slipping down a side-street when his back is turned, but something always stops her. Maybe it’s the way he looks behind at her, like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he takes his eyes off her too long. Maybe it’s the steady way he sets his shoulders, takes his next step forward, tilts his head when figuring out how to get around a roadblock. There’s something about him, she thinks, that always makes her reconsider.

She hasn’t met many kids like Mono before. The only one that had ever been remotely like him was — was the girl —

Six shakes her head to clear those thoughts away, but a shiver racks her frame immediately after, making her teeth clack together painfully. The ratty cardigan she wears over top of her shorts and t-shirt is old, with holes in the seams and frayed threads, but she had found it when she was bobbing out in the sea and it kept her warm in the Wilderness. But now it seems to be failing her, because she keeps shivering and shivering and she doesn’t think she’s ever been this cold in her life .

Maybe following Mono was a mistake.

“Hey.” Speaking of, she looks up when she hears Mono’s quiet whisper. He’s staring at her, fingers twitching, and bag tilted slightly. “Follow me. Find someplace to stop.”

That — that sounds like a good idea.

She nods at him, and follows the other child into another broken building. They’ve stopped before in places like these occasionally, usually just to rest for a few minutes to catch their breaths and wait for the rain to die down, but she doesn’t think the rain is going to let up so easily this time. Besides, her feet ache and her entire body is freezing, so she doesn’t know how much longer she can walk for before her legs give out.

Mono doesn’t seem that affected, but he has that heavy trench coat, so he must be pretty warm. Still, he leads the two of them deeper into the weird building, the one with empty shelves and a tiled floor, to the back where there’s a big, empty cupboard on the ground. The insides are empty, and there’s no doors, but it’s away from the windows and if they crawl into the corners no monsters will be able to find them — they haven’t seen any yet, but there’s always monsters with places this big.

Those thoughts allow her to sit down in the corner of the cupboard, still shivering even though she’s no longer being assaulted by the rain and the wind. Mono is shuffling around nearby, so she closes her eyes and tries to get the shivering in her body to die down. She’s not scared of the cold, even if she knows that it can kill, because she’s never been in a place that gets cold enough to kill.

Except now, maybe. Because she keeps shivering.

The sound of shifting fabric makes her peel her eyes open to see Mono is holding out his trenchcoat towards her, the collar of it wrapped around his fist and the edge of it trailing the ground. He says, “Here. I’ll take watch. You borrow it.”

She lifts her head up to get a better view of him, and notices his button-up shirt and rolled up pants. His clothing looks as thin as hers does underneath her cardigan, and she frowns at him. It’s obvious what he’s doing, but he shouldn’t be doing it.

“Why?” She asks, still frowning deeply.

“Because you’re cold.” He replies, still offering out his coat despite how cold he’ll be in a minute. “I can see you shivering.”

Well. He’s an idiot. But a nice one.

She takes his coat, ignoring how her hands tremble in the air, and wraps it around her shoulders. She doesn’t put her arms through it, instead treating it like a blanket, holding it closed at her chest from the inside. It’s big on her, since Mono is tall, and the heaviness of it immediately grounds her and makes her shivering start to slow down.

She looks over at Mono, and just sees his bag. She can’t tell if he’s staring at her or not, and looks away, before she ends up curling up on her side. Mono drifts away to sit on the edge of the shelf, keeping watch as he said he would. They had done this before, whenever they stopped to rest; one would close their eyes, and the other would keep watch for monsters, before they switched.

At first, she had been nervous about, and insisted on going first. Mono had curled up in the cardboard box they had stopped in, but she didn’t think he had gotten any sleep. Then they had switched, and Six hadn’t slept at all either, and she didn’t think she would sleep again this time. She just … it was hard for her to sleep when she was alone, the threat of monsters or other malicious kids finding her when she was vulnerable, but with Mono around …

She can relax. But she doesn’t know if she can sleep.

Still, she does end up drifting a bit, her eyes slipping close and breathing evening out, before she hears the sound of movement and snaps up. The coat slides off her shoulder and she tenses, ready to run as fast as she can out of this place at the first sign that there’s a monster nearby and not just this old, creaking building playing tricks on her.

That is, until she looks to the edge of the counter and her breath catches.

Mono is gone.

She gets to her feet, shaky as she might still be, and picks his coat up off the ground. She brushes it off, and wraps it around her shoulders again, and tells herself he would have come back for it. He wouldn’t go out in the cold City in just his shirt and pants, because he might be an idiot enough to give her his coat in the first place but not a big enough idiot that he would leave without it.

So, carefully, she steps out of her hiding spot and shuffles her away across the dirty tiled floor, avoiding pieces of wood and dirt and broken glass as she goes. She’s warmer now, as warm as she can be, and with every step she takes her legs get steadier until she rounds the corner and gets shaky again as soon as the wind hits her.

And as soon as she sees Mono.

He’s sitting on the edge of the broken window that they climbed in here through, staring out on the City’s streets. She has no idea how he isn’t shaking from the cold, especially when she notices — when she notices he’s taken off his bag.

From behind, and at a distance, she can’t see much. But still, her heart skips a beat, and she can see dirty brown hair cut jaggedly and unevenly, sticking up every which way as if someone had come through to shake it all up. And he’s just sitting there, with his bag in his lap, staring at nothing. His shoulders don’t even move, and neither does his chest, at least as far as she can see. It’s almost like he’s dead, a corpse standing up, just like he was in the Hunter’s cabin.

If she gets close enough to see his face, if he turns around, she doesn’t know what she would see. But the stillness in his limbs, the lack of cold biting at his skin, it reminds her of — of —

Something unnatural. Something unnerving. Something — something dangerous.

It makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Here he is, not shivering in the cold and as still as a dead body, staring off into the cold, dead City when he was supposed to be taking watch. She tightens the coat around her shoulders, trying to regain some of the warmth she lost … before she remembers whose coat it is.

It’s Mono. Mono, who broke down the basement door, who gave her his coat because she was cold and kept looking over his shoulder like he thought she would disappear. Mono, who offered her his hand, and his name, and a place beside him as he travelled.

Against her will, she remembers the other child who ever offered her that.

The … the girl, back at the Nest, the one who wore a bright yellow raincoat and a red ribbon in her hair. Unlike the rest of the Nest, whose bright colours seemed to be painted over pale ones, the girl seemed actually bright — maybe it was in her clothing, but it was also in the way she smiled until her eyes crinkled in the corners, the way she laughed whenever she stumbled, the way she grabbed Six’s hand to whenever she started to fall behind.

Six had never seen someone smile, or heard them laugh, or had someone offer her a helping hand. All the other kids in the Nest fought each other, prioritized their own survival over anyone else’s, but that girl had been different. She crash landed in a balloon and broke into Six’s life, the only life she had had up until that point, and taught her how to mask her footsteps, how to dress her wounds, how to keep warm when it started to get cold.

Until she went falling into the sea, a monster falling after her, and neither of them came back up except for the yellow raincoat that drifted off just like Six later did.

Six had never even learned her name, because she didn’t think she even had one. She never offered Six to share her raincoat, but she did hold her hand, and the principle was the same.

So when she hears shuffling and snaps back to attention to see Mono has put his bag back on, she quickly ducks away behind the counter and waits for him to patter on back. When he turns the corner, they nearly bump into each other, and she stares wide-eyed at him. She clutches his coat tighter, daring him to take it back, and he tilts his head.

“Are you okay?” He asks, swaying slightly on his feet. She blinks at him.

“I thought you left.” She tells him, because she had for a moment, before she saw him sitting on the ledge.

“Oh.” He mutters, sounding confused, before he says more firmly, “I would never.”

Of course he wouldn’t. He kept looking at her like she was about to disappear. And she thinks of the girl sinking to the bottom of the sea, and replies, “Kids always leave.”

Because the girl left, and it was Six’s fault, because she pushed the rock that made the cliff edge unstable and the girl was cornered by the pretty monster, the Pretender, who wore make up and had her hair all done up to make her seem like she was good when she wasn’t. But the girl in the yellow raincoat still left, and she held her hand just like Mono did, and for a minute she thought Mono had left too.

She shouldn’t think about this like that. She shouldn’t think about the girl, but she does, and she thinks of Mono.

“Kids always leave me, too.” Mono says, and in a moment she understands why he keeps looking behind him, and maybe there’s more behind that bag than she thought.

Turning heel, she jumps back into their hiding spot and sits down on the ledge, taking his place. She nods her head back towards where she had been laying, telling him what to do, and keeps the coat tight around her shoulders. If he’s worried about her leaving, she can stay here now, and if she’s worried about him leaving —

She’s not. She still has his coat, and she’s taking watch now, and he’s not going to disappear into the sea. They’ve always crossed it.

“Stay.” She tells him, when it seems like he was confused. “My turn for watch.”

He stands there for a moment longer, and she’s prepared to drag him over, but he ends up climbing inside without any further argument. He curls up into a ball and looks warm enough without his coat, so she feels content to keep it around her shoulders and stay safe as he rests. She still thinks he’s kinda an idiot, but she also remembers how the girl in the raincoat giggled whenever she broke something in the Nest while saying they won’t miss it , so maybe it’s not so bad.

She told him to stay. So it seems like he’s going to stay, and that gives her more warmth in her chest than the coat around her shoulders does.

▩ ▵ ▩

When Six startles awake, she feels like she needs to run.

It’s not an unnatural feeling — many times she had woken up because she heard the telltale footsteps of a monster, and needed to run before they found her — but a quick look around shows there’s nothing to supply it. She’s alone, in a small, dingy room with walls made out of metal plating and puddles of dark water pooling in the small crevices on the ground. There’s something soft underneath her hands, softer than she’s used to feeling, but there’s no monsters. She’s alone.

Wait — she’s alone .

“Mono?” She calls out, searching for her friend. She doesn’t get an answer, which makes the unease she woke up with spread through her entire body, curling around her shoulders before it settles in her stomach. “Mono!”

There’s still no answer. He always answers her. He always does, unless he’s in danger. So, if he’s not —

Either he can’t hear her. Or he can’t answer her.

She sits up fully, looking around more fully at the place she’s found herself in. The ceiling is high, but not as high as some rooms she seem, like back in the Nest. If she were to fall from it, it would hurt, but not kill her. Shaking pipes cover the wall, and empty cans and pieces of cardboard and paper, long since melded together to form an unidentifiable mass of soggy shreds, are scattered on the wet floor. Through the walls, she hears the hiss of rushing water and steam and what sounds like something big and metallic moving sluggishly, and the entire place smells like rust and dirty water and something rotten, old.

She feels the surface underneath her. Fabric. Clothing. A quick turn around shows she landed in a weird brown box thing with a handle on top, the same ones that had been scattered across the City — though, those ones had been closed. This one is open, and there’s pictures taped to the inside, though the ink is so faded and smudged she can’t identify what might have been in them.

But the most pressing question on her mind is where Mono is, and it fills her with dread that she can’t identify where he might have gone. The last thing she remembered was being stuck in the monster’s bag with him, their heads knocking together as the monster walked down the beach and gotten into something that creaked with every step it took …

She remembers the sound of waves. The smell of the ocean. The distant blare of a what she thought was a foghorn, but she doesn’t quite know what that was, besides the familiarity of it. A boat. The monster had taken them on a boat.

Mono had grabbed her hand and managed to whisper to her, It’s okay, I won’t let it hurt us and she had squeezed his hand back even as they bumped into each other with every tug of the oars. She knew he would, because he already had and she could still hear his voice ringing in her ears, but she didn’t say anything back because she didn’t need to. Mono knew the same went for her. She wouldn’t let the monster hurt him, and he wouldn’t let it hurt her.

But after awhile the boat had stopped, bobbing gently in the water, and the bag had opened. The monster had shoved it’s hand inside, and grabbed the two of them in one full swoop, and held them in its palm like it had before.

Instead it didn’t put them back in the bag. Instead, it plucked Mono from its palm by the back of his coat, and dropped him in one of the weird brown boxes. Six had screamed and kicked and snapped at the monsters fingers with her teeth, and Mono had screamed back at her, his voice starting to echo and the air around him shimmering like water on cobblestones.

The monster snapped the lid shut, muffling Mono before he could do anything. And then it dropped Six into another, and shut the lid on her too.

It had been dark inside, and crowded, and it was hard to breathe as the clothes seemed to suffocate her. She couldn’t move without banging her head, and all her limbs were pinned down by the heavy fabric, and she couldn’t do anything and Mono, she had to get to Mono —

Then the box had moved. And she did bang her head, and she couldn’t actually breathe, so maybe it was a combination of those two things that led to her losing consciousness.

Until now. Where she woke with unease in her shoulders and nausea in her stomach, a face she couldn’t remember haunting her dreams and alone with no Mono at her side.

That had been what woke her up; her dream. She had seen a person with a perfect face, smooth and pale like the porcelain Bullies had been, except lacking the cracks. Dark, empty eyes, and a soothing voice, humming a soothing melody.

She doesn’t want to remember the melody. She doesn’t want to remember that song.

She whistles the first few notes of her and Mono’s song, but expectedly doesn’t get a reply back. Ugly, stupid feelings itching at her chest, Six stands up and places her feet gingerly on the ground. The metal is cold and wet when she sets the soles of her feet down, but it’s not as bad as the City’s.

When she stands up, her right leg twinges. That was the one that she had been suspended from in the School, and sometimes if she runs too much or lands weirdly or it gets too cold it twinges and makes her ankle wobble. She grits her teeth and steps forward, water splashing with every step, and she resolves to ignore it. Standing up makes her feel a bit wobbly, and it takes her a moment to realize that’s because the room is moving .

It rocks back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

It was like she was hanging from the rope again. Her ankle twinges. She ignores it.

Whenever Mono noticed that happened in her leg, he would offer her his hand to hold so she could steady herself. There’s no hand now, no Mono to blink slowly at her and ask if she was okay, and she doesn’t know where she is, where that horrible monster had taken them, but if she ended up here in a box then Mono did too, and she knows that she needs to find him.

She makes her way through this weird place she’s found herself trapped in, moving slower than she wished to simply because she didn’t know what could be lurking in the shadows. She’s used to traversing through the Wilderness or the City streets or the beachside, where you had to keep your eyes open at all times, because it was an open landscape with nothing to keep you covered — but there was also nothing to hide the monsters.

Here, the space is closed, cramped, condensed. She has to patter through small corridors dripping water from the ceiling, and pull open grates to crawl through vents. The rooms keep rocking, and the motion reminds of her when she was on the monster’s boat, and when her and Mono had drifted out to sea on a broken door. She uses her lighter to illuminate the dark spaces, and even lights up a lantern she finds fastened to the ground — she doesn’t know if there are any other kids here, but she knows how bad it is to never have warmth, and she’s sure if Mono was here with her they would pause for a moment to enjoy it.

But Mono isn’t here, so she has to keep going.

At one point, early on, after she left the room she had awoken in, she had gone too fast and startled … something . She didn’t know what it was, only catching a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye before it disappeared again, chittering at her while running away. The noise sounds vaguely familiar, but since the creature doesn’t move to attack her in anyway, she decides it’s better to just move on. She’s seen many creatures during her various travels, and a few of them — the weird pale ones, with the triangle heads, back in the Nest and the Hunter’s cabin — hadn’t even hurt her.

However, when she exits one of the events, she finds the entire place has opened up. In front of her in a large staircase, but it seems to be suspended in the air. When she takes the first step, she finds why.

It crosses over a gaping chasm. On the other side is another platform indented in the wall, forming a odd, artificial canyon. The entire place groans .

She takes a deep breath and puts her lighter away, not needing the light anymore and wanting two hands as she climbs up, but she only makes it about halfway up the stairs before she pauses. She’s not scared of heights, but when she looks down she can’t see the floor, a thin layer of grey mist floating underneath her. A quick glance up shows the ceiling is covered in much the same way, and when she looks side-to-side, she finds she can’t see any walls on her left or right, too.

Her legs wobble, and she crouches down, since only one side has a railing and she doesn’t want to risk toppling overboard. The entire sight takes her breath away, with the size of it all. Sure, everything in this world was bigger than kids — it was made for the monsters, after all — but something about standing on the stairwell, looking at the empty cavern that seems to stretch on for infinity, it makes her skin prickle. It makes her feel small, even smaller than she usually feels, and when she grasps for a hand to hold all she finds is empty air beside her.

It reminds her of standing on the edge of a cliff, the Nest shaking behind her, and a monster and a girl falling beneath her.

It reminds her of how it felt to stand on the rooftop side-by-side with Mono, and stare out at the Tower guarding over them.

It reminds her of the Tower. The Tower, the Signal, the Eyes .

She grumbles and shakes her head, trying to clear her head of those stupid thoughts, and the feeling of smallness is replaced with a bigger feeling, a deeper one. Something that sits in the pit of her stomach, wraps it’s fingers around her heart and sinks it’s claws in, pushing against her ribcage every time her heart beats. Anger. Indignation. Determination. A mix of all three, over this injustice.

Sometime between being dropped in the bag and waking up in this strange metal place, her and Mono had been separated. They had been taken from each other. He had been taken from her.

And now she had to get him back. No matter what.

▩ ▵ ▩

Mono ends up leading her to a building.

There’s lots of building in the City. Six isn’t stupid. But when they sneak through a broken fence and end up in the enclosed, paved area in front of this building, Mono stops and stares at it for awhile, before something else captures his gaze and he goes pattering off to the corner. Six doesn’t care what he does, and seeing as he didn’t even acknowledge her, she decides not to follow him and instead looks around the place they’re in.

The tall lights that offer no illumination are lopsided, tilted in the ground like something tried to pull them out, and the pavement is cracked and old beneath her feet, like dozens of feet have already ran across it. There’s small puddles from the ever-present rain pooling in the cracks, but through the dirt and runoff water she can see there’s odd drawings on the ground, in the same white dusty substance that had been on the cabin’s basement walls. She doesn’t recognize the symbols, though, or what they could have possibly been used for.

There’s weird metal poles with remnants of mesh fabric hanging from the edges, and a wooden board in the middle that goes up and down whenever she puts her weight on either side. She notices when Mono returns from the corner with still shoulders, but she elects to ignore him as she keeps exploring. She thinks about him sitting on the edge of the window sill, the paper bag hiding his face, and presses her lips together.

Sometimes people have things they want to hide. Like the raincoat girl, who wouldn’t say where she came before. Like Six, who won’t say where she was before as well.

She doesn’t know why they don’t just head inside, but the building does look … grand. It’s tall and wraps around the paved area they’re exploring, trapping them in, with a large set of stairs leading towards the doors. Many windows dot the sides, but most are unbroken. It’s less destroyed than any other building they’ve passed by. Almost like it’s in use.

She thinks about the Hunter again, inexplicably, and shivers.

Around the area are weird objects she thinks are toys. She recognizes a few of them, common ones she saw in the Nest, but most are unfamiliar. She does recognize the rubber ball, however, that had rolled all the way to the side of the building to lightly bounce against the wall.

She walks over and grabs it. It’s dirty, gets tiny pebbles and bits of mud on her hands, but it’s still firm meaning it still bounces. To test it out, she throws it against the ground, and catches it again when it flies back up at her.

Maybe this is why Mono wanted to stay for a bit. She’s never had the chance to play with toys like this before, so maybe …

She looks over at her travelling partner, and sees he’s stopped and is staring up at the building again. He doesn’t move or shift at all, hands loose at his sides, his shoulders completely still and his stupid bag blocking her from seeing anything on his face. The rain hits his bag and his shoulders and his hands and he doesn’t even seem to notice. It’s like he was on the windowsill. Like he was when chasing her through the cabin.

It makes her uneasy. She doesn’t like things that make her uneasy. She needs to stop it.

She drops the ball. She hears, very quietly, Mono breathe out a sigh, and his bag moves slightly like he’s looking around, but he still doesn’t move from his spot. He doesn’t spy her, dark hair and dark clothings blending into the dark area as the rain creates a fine mist curling around their feet, so she takes a chance and kicks the ball at him.

It hits his ankle.

Like a spell being broken, Mono jumps into the air and under his bag she hears him make a slight ‘eep!’ sound, before he whips around to stare at the weird object. He tilts his head, his entire bag crackling, then makes the connection and looks up at her.

She plays innocent. He was being weird and she was making him not be weird anymore; he needs to be alert and ready, not acting weird, because she’s not going to let him get them both killed. And isn’t she using the ball for its intended purpose, anyways?

(Well, she’s not sure what it’s actual use is , but she’s gotta be close to it anyways, right?)

She feels his eyes on her flicker away then back again, and the sound of him gently nudging the rubber ball with his foot. She glances at him, sees it’s moved a tiny a bit, but he hasn’t reciprocated yet.

Then she hears the sound of it being kicked, and jumps into action.

She’s not stupid and will let it touch her ankle, so she kicks it back at Mono before it can. He kicks it back and goes off course so he rushes after it and she lets the tiny, tiny bit of laughter threatening to spill out of her float into the air as she watches him scramble after it. He’s kinda funny, when he’s not being weird, unlike so many other kids she met.

All the other kids were rude, and stupid and weak, and were more than willingly to let her die if it meant they got out alive. The only kid that hadn’t been like that was — was the one in the raincoat. But she was different, came from outside in a different way than they did, and proved herself to be different.

Mono is — Mono seems to be like that. He is strong, and he is funny, and even if he’s a little weird he manages to kick the ball back to her without it going sideways this time.

They keep doing this until the rain picks up, kicking it back and forth between them. It’s actually kinda of fun, she admits, to do this with someone — and Mono doesn’t act all weird and still again, and she can even admit she likes him more like this than how he was earlier.

But then the rain gets too heavy, so they have to head inside the big building (Mono calls it a School, but she doesn’t know where he could have gotten that word from) so they don’t get drenched and die of the cold. They walk through the creaking hallways with walls that seem to talk, and as they patter through side-by-side, the uneasy feeling from before returns and overtakes all of her senses.

There’s something weird about this place. Maybe Mono felt it too. Maybe he didn’t. But she feels it now, and it has to do with the chittering in the walls, getting closer and closer —

Wait!

▩ ▵ ▩

Six thinks she must be trapped in a prison.

That’s the only way this makes sense to her. She’s passed through rooms filled with doors that shock her if she gets too close, and she’s seen the Security Eyes that guard the rooms, killing anyone that gets caught in its gaze. It reminds her, a tiny bit, of the Tower.

But thinking about the Tower makes her head hurt, so she rubs at her temples and keeps moving.

She remembers the long-armed monster, hiding under the beds at it searched the room before moving on. The beds which were filled with sleeping children. Six could hear their soft breathing, see their fuzzy outlines in the darkness. There’s other kids here, but they’re not moving or running away from the monsters. They’re not even trying to escape, like they’ve completely given up at survival, and it makes anger rise up in her chest.

Mono is not like those kids. That’s why they get along so well; they’re not weak, either of them. And she needs to find him.

She escapes out of the bed-filled room and crawls through the vents, using her lighter to illuminate her way. When she finds the end of the passage and jumps down, she ends up in a room with wooden floorboards and metal walls, and crates stacked up to the ceiling in the corner. It looks like every single other room in this place, and for a funny moment, she finds herself actually missing the City — at least there, all the buildings had different insides, even if everything was the same washed out grey colour and damp with rain.

But then she goes to take a step, and her stomach twists.

It comes so suddenly she doesn’t even realize what’s happening at first. Except, when her stomach growls loud enough it sounds like a monster to her own ears, she realizes why it feels like her middle is trying to kill her.

Six is no stranger to hunger. In the Nest, food was scarce, and you had to fight for what you wanted. While trapped in the Hunter’s basement, the food had been old and moldy, but it had been food, and she could deal with it even if it sometimes sat like rocks in her belly. And then in the City, of course, when her and Mono had to scavenge for ages to find just a scrap of food barely edible. Even then, Mono would always share his portions with her, never needing to eat as much as she needed.

Six learned very quickly on how to function on an empty stomach, how to function when her belly was empty and sore. Except, of course, this hunger doesn’t feel like that hunger.

This hunger is painful. It claws at her insides, leaving scars all across her body. It makes her cough, trying to dislodge the feeling, but it only makes it worse. Pressing her hands to her stomach and pushing down with all her might, it elevates the feeling a small amount. Enough that she can keep moving, in search of something to quell it.

Wandering deeper into the room, she manages her way up the stairs and into a new hallway. There’s metal bars lining the walls on either side here, but the one to her left has what she thinks are tables inside, some with empty metal trays on top. Mono had described something similar to that to her once, something he had to go through in School. When she turns her head, she can see the vague outlines of shapes, a few dotted around at the tables. Small, solid things. Kids.

There’s kids in there. Other kids in there.

She thinks of Mono again, and growls, both at the thought of him not being here and the twisting in her stomach. The feeling reminds her of how she had felt the moment they both popped out of a television after escaping the Tower, and she remembers how Mono had whispered quietly to her and gotten her food. She wants him here. She wants food. She needs food.

Her stomach twists, and she grunts in pain, falling to her knees when her ankle twinges. She needs to eat, except there’s nothing to eat here. No Mono to find something for her, no garbage bins or apartment rooms to scavenge through. She needs food, but she can’t find any, and it feels like her own stomach is gonna consume her whole if she doesn’t fill it herself.

Something hard hits the floor in front of her.

She looks up, worried that maybe a monster has come out of the darkness to kill her, but all she finds is a … piece of bread? It’s just sitting there, on the floor in front of her. That hadn’t been there before. She would have noticed.

Looking to the side, she finds that between the metal bars, there’s a kid staring back at her. They must have thrown the bread, but as soon as she looks over at them, they jump down from the table they were standing on to reach the bars and scurry off. She notices that they left the metal tray empty on the table, having grabbed the rest of the food before they left. After they shared some of it with her.

Her stomach grumbles again. She doesn’t have time to think about it, and stumbles forward to grab the bread in her dirty hands.

It’s as hard as a rock and tastes like one too when she rips her teeth into it, but upon swallowing it her stomach immediately settles. It no longer feels like she’s about to burst from the inside, or her belly twisting painfully like it’s trying to work its way up her throat to kill her. Her teeth don’t even hurt as she finishes the bread within a few seconds and accidentally nips her own fingertips in her haste, despite the fact it was basically stone.

She looks up and her breath catches.

In the corner of the room, her own self stares back at her. It’s fuzzy around the edges, pitch-black in colour and glitching like a television screen, except as she feels the hunger inside of her settles down the glitching stops, becomes more wispy.

She stares at it. It disappears, smoke in the wind, and it’s like she can breathe again.

The darkness in the corner of her vision recedes, and she slumps forward, feeling completely spent like she just ran from a monster. She knew what that thing was, the shadow that looks like her. Mono said it lead him through the City to her, after they got separated. It had been there when — when she had hunger like that, the first time, after escaping the Tower with Mono in hand.

That wasn’t the first time she had had hunger like that. The unnatural hunger, the one that seems like it’s trying to kill her. But the first time, Mono had been there with her, and gotten her food. This time, if she hadn’t had that bread …

She looks back at the cages, but the kid is long gone now, and she’s alone. Seeing another kid here is weird, after only ever seeing Mono for so long now, but it makes her think about her earlier assessment of this place. This place as a prison .

She’s seen the beds and the kids sleeping in them. She’s seen the stone remains of them, caught in the Security Eye’s gaze, and the monster that seems to watch over them. The cages and the toys and the locks. This place is a prison, and she trapped here, just like the rest of them. And she hates it, and hates the weird effect this place seems to have on her.

Everything seem so much more cloudy and muddled, like she’s wading through dark smoke that clogs her eyes and her mouth and her nose. It has to do with the way the rooms rock side-to-side, she thinks, like it’s trying to lull her into sleep. Or maybe the hiss of steam, the sound of rushing water, white noise that blocks out all other sounds.

It’s like this place is trying to trap her here, lead her into a false sense of security. She wonders if that was how Mono felt in the City, when he breathed in time to it.

That thought reminds her of her purpose, of her real goal here. She needs to find Mono, before something horrible happens to him, and they need to get out of here together.

She takes a deep breathe, squeezes her eyes shut and tries to find her balance again. Her limbs feel like they’re burning, stretched thin past their use, but she’s pushed through worse before so she’ll push through this now. Mono needs her, and she doesn’t have time for this. She just has to believe that it’ll be fine. She’ll be fine, she’s going to find Mono, and they’ll get out of here together. And they’ll be fine .

Maybe if she tells herself that enough times, it’ll quell the sickening feeling in her stomach, and the feeling of watchful eyes on her back. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

▩ ▵ ▩

After the Bullies take her, time passes oddly for Six.

When Mono gets trapped by one of the weird metal bins and the porcelain children take her up and away from him, she ends up finding herself dragged throughout the entire School on the dirty, dusty floor. They take her through wide hallways and ignore loose floorboards and climb through cramped vents and holes in the walls, until they reach a weird, tiled room that makes her nose wrinkle at the smell.

The entire way she spits and fights and claws at them, but it does no damage except breaking a nail and making her teeth ache when she manages to bite one of them on the finger. In fact, all it does is make the stupid children chitter and cackle at her. She’s not scared of them, not in the way she’s scared of the other monsters (because these children, for all they look like children, are definitely monsters), because these monsters are her size and she knows that if it came down to it, she could smash their heads in.

When they get to this new room, grimy and gross to the point she shivers just being on the floor, some hold her in place by digging their nails into her arms and grabbing roughly on her hair, while a few others leave and come back a few minutes later with a rope.

She thinks that maybe, they’re going to tie her up and leave her there, which would be the better option — then she can break the bonds and escape, get out of here without any more damage dealt.

Except that’s not what they do. Because of course it isn’t.

They wrap the rope around her ankle, then take turns trying to throw it onto a hook in the ceiling. Whenever one misses, another would push them away so they fell on the floor and their heads were crack, then try and do it themselves. It reminds her of some of the kids she would see in the Nest, who would push at each other to make sure they got away first. Six always made sure to stay away from them.

When they finally get it strung up on the ceiling, they all let go of her to grab onto the other end. She takes the opportunity to try and stand up, but just as she gets to her feet, they all pull the rope at once and she goes crashing to the floor again with a yelp. She growls at the resulting laughter it pulls from them, and makes a vow that when she gets free, she’s going to bash all their heads in one by one just like they were doing to each other earlier.

Then they keep pulling the rope. And she goes up.

Her stomach swoops as she swings in the air, the monster children laughing all the while at her misfortune, and she keeps going up until she nearly reaches the ceiling. Her hair falls in front of her face and she finds it hard to keep her arms at her sides, so she lets them hang by her head. Every time she moves her stomach lurches, and her head begins to pound after only a few minutes of being suspended in the air. Her ankle that the rope is wrapped around begins to burn, then settles into a manageable twinge.

The children continue to laugh. She wants them to die.

Eventually, her vision begins to blur, and she drifts in and out of consciousness for a bit. Sometimes she wakes up when the monster children come in to throw things at her, books and toys and balls that miss half the time, but sometimes nail her in the shoulder or stomach and knock the breath at of her. Whenever that happens they’ll laugh and cackle and chitter and she gets so, so angry she wants to rip their heads off.

She thinks, oddly enough, of Mono. What he must be doing. What he would call these weird, fake children — he named this place the School, after all, and calls things all sorts of weird words all the time. She thinks maybe the Bullies, since they act like bullies, and the word seems right in her head so she decides it’s good enough. They don’t want to kill her, obviously, just … just torture her, it seems like. The Hunter had been like that, keeping her captured to use for some later purpose, so the idea doesn’t surprise it as much as it did the first time.

She wonders if Mono’s managed to get out, or if he’s trapped too, somewhere nearby but unable to get to her. She assumes he made it out; he seems smart enough to escape on his own, even if the idea of him leaving her behind makes her chest ache a bit, however illogical the idea he would stick around would be. After all, she wouldn’t have.

But then she slip away into unconsciousness again, entire body feeling numbly buzzing, swinging gently back and forth in the air. For awhile, the Bullies leave and it’s almost kinda relaxing, suspended in the air while her vision is blessedly black. It makes it almost bearable, when it’s like this.

And then she falls.

She blinks awake when the rope lurches for the first time, panic shooting up her heart, but the second swing sends her spiralling to the ground. She hits the floor with a CRACK that comes comes from splintering wood. Her head aches and her elbow bangs on the floor and a fire erupts in her ankle, but when she breathes she finds solid ground underneath her and it takes a moment to realize that’s because she’s on the floor . She’s free .

“Six!” She hears footsteps and someone calling her name, and groans. She doesn’t register the sounds until someone places their hand on her shoulder, and the feeling of the Bullies nails and their laughter flood back into her mind and she flinches away, trying to escape them.

She looks up, prepare to bare her teeth and do all the terrible things she swore she would do, as soon as she got free, her body running on pure anger and frightful energy right now.

Until she sees the kid leaning down in front of her is wearing a familiar paper bag, and all of that drops away to be replaced with horrible, cold shock.

“Six?” Mono says, his voice raw. “You’re okay.”

She breathes hard, staring in confusion at him, and tries to shuffle nearer and close the distance she had put between them earlier. However, doing so makes the pain that had momentarily resigned in her ankle flare up again, and she grimaces but makes it through it. Mono still crouches in front of her, paper bag hiding his face, but  actions none the less patient and kind as she comes back into herself. Takes in the situation.

He came to save her. That much was obvious.

Her eyes drift around the room and land on the broken porcelain in the corner, near to where the end of the rope had been tied up. The Bullies remains, of course, a mess of splintered glass and jagged edges, and the hammer discarded next to the broken wood from where someone had smashed it to free the rope. The evidence is all there, clear as day, and everything all comes back to Mono .

She glances back at the strange boy, and gives him a once-over, seeing what changed since the last time they saw each other. She notices his foot is bandaged with what looks like the torn fabric of one of the Bully’s shirts. He breathes raggedly as he crouches there, favouring his other leg. She wonders if he even notices, and wonders why he came all the way here and got hurt just trying to save her.

“You — you came for me.” She manages to find her voice in the midst of her shock, and she must sound completely stupid right now, staring up at him wide-eyed with her mouth agape. “Why did you come for me? Why didn’t you leave? ”

Because that’s really the crux of it all.

Because she would have left. If it had been Mono that was dragged off by the Bullies, she wouldn’t have gone looking for him. If she had stumbled across him on her way out, she would have freed him — to make it even, since he freed her before, and it would always be good to have someone to pull up into windows — but she didn’t think she would have actively sought him out.

But that was what Mono did. And it makes something warm and fuzzy burn in her chest, between her ribs, almost as strongly as the ugly feeling that chews on her heart. She recognizes it.

Guilt.

She would have prioritized herself first, just like the kids in the Nest did, but that wasn’t what — that wasn’t what the girl in the raincoat did, and that wasn’t what Mono did, and the ugly feeling makes her want to puke. She told Mono to stay and he did but she wouldn’t have offered the same courtesy to him.

Mono tilts his head at her, then says, simple as can be, “I told you I would never.”

He offers his hand to her, just like he did in the Hunter’s basement, and she gapes at him. This strange, guarded boy is the weirdest kid she’s ever met. He’s stupid and illogical, baffles her with every action he takes, but even after everything he’s still here, offering her his hand while surrounded by broken porcelain and palms chaffed by the hammer he used to cause it.

He is a complete idiot. But she still grabs his hand.

When he pulls her up and catches her when her leg gives a painful wobble and gives out on her, she decides the next time they get separated, she’s gonna be the one who finds him. At this point, she owes him twice over, and he might be an idiot, but he’s a loyal one, and she thinks of the raincoat girl again.

And she thinks about how Mono never left.

And she promises that if another monster tries to separate them, tries to make him leave, she’s going to bash its head in.

▩ ▵ ▩

The hunger comes back.

And it makes her stupid. And it makes her blind. And it gets her caught.

She ends up in a tall, wide rooms populated by metal cages, stacked one on top of another all the way to the ceiling. Much like the rest of this place, it smells like something gross and is vaguely warm, like steam billowing from hot water, but this room in particular makes her mouth twist up in disgust.

Maybe it’s all the other kids around.

When the monster had tossed her in a cage and dragged her to this room, she had been placed on top of another rusty cage. She thinks the one underneath her is empty, but the other ones surely aren’t — even in the dimness, the layer of blue like ocean waves that act like a mist, she can see the curled forms of other children.

A few are sitting up with their legs crossed, but don’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular, like they’re sleeping with their eyes open. Some are curled up on their sides, facing away from her as their chests slowly rise and fall. A few don’t move at all, but they all look similar — shaggy hair, gaunt skin, and rough, pale clothing that hangs off their frames.

When Six notices them, as soon as the long-armed monster leaves the room, she gets up to her feet in a flash as her breath stutters in her chest. The sight of them unnerves her. She’s so unused to seeing any other kids besides Mono, confronted with so many of them now makes her anger at being captured and the worry over her rumbling stomach subsided momentarily, replaced with shock .

But then she thinks about Mono, and it returns. The two of them, her and Mono of course, never ran into any other children in the City, and back in the Nest, Six avoided the others at all costs — until one in a bright yellow raincoat approached her with a warm hand and open eyes. And everybody in the Nest had been so … so loud, and the girl had been so bright. Even Mono, who wore his washed out browns and greys, glowed through the way his voice lifted and his eyes blinked. These children just seem so … so dull .

It’s not even in the way they’re dressed. It’s the way they stare without looking, lay down and accept defeat. It’s like they’ve given up, and the thought of that makes her stomach churn, but not with hunger.

But she can’t think about that right now. Mono. She needs to get out of here, and she needs to find Mono .

Moving to the far edge of the cage, she tests the strength of the bars but finds they’re fastened in tight to the floor and ceiling, and there’s no way she could slip through the gap without breaking a bone. Growling, she paces around the edge and tries to find any weak spots, but can’t identify any means of escape except for the tight padlock, which looks old — easy to break, then.

The sound of a quiet whine, one that sounds like the squeal of a television as it turns on, startles her from her musings.

Whipping around, she looks around for the source of it, recognizing it immediately. It came from the voice that had been whispering to her for ages, attached to the hand that held hers and the coming through the face that smiled at her. It couldn’t have come from any of the other dull children, because they never had seen a television screen in their life, so that only means —

She sees him.

He’s lying on the floor of the cage beside her, the bottom of a stack with no cages on top of him. His paper bag is on, she notices, so she can’t see the glow of his eyes. He lets out another whine, but it’s so quiet she barely hears it, and that is enough to spur her to the edge of the cage and shove her face against it, trying to squeeze through. Broken bones or not.

“Mono!” She exclaims, quietly but still loud enough he hears her, stirring in his cage. “ Mono! ”

She hisses his name again, tongue pressed against her teeth, and Mono lets out a low groan. His trench coat engulfs him, makes him look all the more smaller in his curled form, so unlike the powerful angry force that had ordered to be brought along. His fist clenches and unclenches weakly against the floor of the cage, and she hears his paper bag crinkle as he shifts. Even if she can’t see his eyes, she knows by the way his bag tilts upwards ever so slightly that he’s looking in her direction, searching for her yellow raincoat.

“Six …?” He mumbles, weakly, barley a breath on the air. She hears him anyways, despite their distance, and she presses herself further against the bars of the cage, feels the imprints left behind on her cheeks.

“Mono.” She tells him. “We need to —“

Before she can finish her sentence, a hand emerges from the darkness. It’s bigger than her own and familiar; it belongs to the monster that trapped her, brought her here. Brought Mono here.

It wraps around the top of Mono’s cage. He doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Mono!” She exclaims, but when she reaches for him, the monster’s already pulled him away in the darkness.

She’s lost him. She’s lost him again .

She wants to scream. She wants to hit something. She wants to run in there and find Mono, bring him back here, with her, back to her side like it’s supposed to be. She wants to find the monster and kill it; shoot it, burn it, smash it’s head in with her bare hands if a hammer won’t suffice. She wants it to die.

She wants to sink her teeth into it until it bleeds.

She wants, she wants, she wants —

“Hey.” Someone whispers, quiet. “Hey. Over here.”

She whips around so fast her hood nearly falls off, because the voice sounds so similar to Mono’s that it makes her heart leap — but it’s not Mono. It’s just another kid, caught in the cage behind her.

She can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl or something else, but she doesn’t particularly care. They stare at her from under their dirty bangs, and around their ankle is a metal chain, broken off but still rubbing at their skin. Their pants are torn at the ends and their blue shirt loose around their wrists, not fitting as well as her raincoat did. Their hands grip the metal bars of the cage tightly so their knuckles turn white, and their breath comes out in desperate pants, and their eyes are wide and a shade of the green that reminds her of the scum in a swamp.

Except for the eyes, they look a lot like Mono.

Mono, who’s gone. Mono, who she was so close to saving, but now —

“Was that your friend?” The kid asks, nodding their head towards where Mono’s cage had just been.

She bares her teeth at them, not impressed. Their eyes widen, their lips pressing into a thin line, before they say, “I’m just — they don’t die in there. The Janitor doesn’t kill kids, they just wrap them up and send them to the Chefs in the Kitchen. That’s where you don’t want to end up.”

She grunts. She doesn’t know this kid, she doesn’t know if they’re trustworthy. Legit. If anything they say is true. It could be, and maybe Mono is okay, and maybe they’re not and maybe he’s about to be killed by a monster and she’s wasting time right now talking to them. If it’s the latter, they’re an idiot. If it’s the former, they’re still an idiot for talking to her.

“How do you know?” She hisses at the kid, nose wrinkling up like she smelt something bad. The other kid shifts, hand drifting to the chain on their ankle, running their thumb against the edge of it.

“I’ve been here awhile. In the Maw, not this cage.” They say. The chain knocks against the side of the cage, not attached to anything, but underneath their skin is scarred. “I know.”

“Is that what this place is called?” She asks. “The Maw?”

The kid nods. She pulls her hood back over her head, submerging her face in shadows once more. It hides the way her chest heaves, the way her throat stings. The way relief floods through her blood so strong it makes her shake, but her hands are steady against the bars of the cage.

She leans close to the edge, close to the kid, and says, “Do you know how to get in there?”

She points to the room where Mono was taken. The kid tilts their head, thinking, before they point at the door the monster — the Janitor, that was what the kid called it — dragged Mono through. No, not at the door. At the bottom of it, where it seems some of the metal plating that makes up the room has lost a screw and peeled away from the frame, leaving a gap just big enough for a particularly skinny child to squeeze for.

“I’ve seen the Nomes run through there sometimes.” The kid tells her. “You might be able to get through. You’re small enough.”

She huffs, but concedes. Compared to some other kids she’s met, she has always been tinier, but it comes in handy for instances like this. But Mono is slightly taller than her, his limbs ganglier, so she’ll have to pull the metal plating more to make the hole bigger. But she can do that. She will do it.

But that’s only one problem. The first problem is getting out of this cage.

“I need you to push me.” She tells the kid. They blink.

“Push you?” They parrot, like an idiot. She huffs. Mono would know what she meant.

“This room rocks.” She points out, though if the kid has been there as long as they claimed they would have noticed it already. “If I push against one side and you push form the other, the cage will fall.”

And hopefully the lock will break. And even if it doesn’t, being on the floor is a much better position than being high up on a stack, and she could probably find something to pick it with. Luckily, the kid seems to catch on, nodding and making their shaggy bangs bob up and down.

“Okay. I get it.” They say, and she nods back. She doesn’t need to say anything else.

The kid gets into position, leaning back to stick their legs out through the gap in the bars and across the short distance between their cages to push on hers. She notices the chain around their right ankle, glinting in the light of the swinging bulb above them, and she spares a distant to thought to how they broke the chain without breaking that actual lock before she ignores it. She needs to focus.

Heading to the opposite side of the cage, she gives the kid a thumbs up, and they start pushing. It barley budges, but when she throws herself against the other side, she jolts as it moves forward, screeching against the cage below it all the while. She hears the kid behind her give a tiny, whooping laugh, before they push again and she throws herself against it again and with the monument of the rocking room working in their favour, she goes falling.

The cage crashes to the ground with a clatter, and while her teeth chatter together at the fall, she’s not hurt beside a sore shoulder from where she had been pushing. Reorienting herself, she sees the gate has popped open, and she restrains the grin that grows across her face as she scrambles out into the open room.

It worked . It worked, and now she’s free, and now she needs to go find Mono and they can —

“Hey.” The kid whispers from above her, hands wrapped around the bars with their face pressed against it, a recreation of how she had been before. “I helped you. Are you gonna help me?”

She looks up at them, thankful for her hood that hides her expression, and glares. She never said she would help them; that was on them, for never trying to negotiate with her. She doesn’t have time for this — she has to go find Mono, before the monster kills him. She has to go and save him, before he dies, and she is all alone.

But as Six looks at the kid, their messy hair falling over wide eyes, she’s hit with a feeling of familiarity. Except now, she’s on the other side of it — Mono, peering at her through the broken door of the cabin. Mono, staring up at her from the dirty school floor. Mono, reaching his hand out to her when they both tumbled out of the television by the seaside, her hunger overwhelming. Mono, Mono, Mono, who she has to save and she has to save now .

She looks around and sees that in the cage she was just in, the broken lock has a piece of thin metal sticking out. She rushes over and wraps her hands around it, pulls with all her might, and it snaps off with a satisfying crack. The force of it nearly sends her tumbling backwards, but she manages to keep her balance, before she patters back over to the kid in the cage and offers it up to them.

“Pick the lock.” She says. The kid stares at her, blinks, then takes it, awkwardly pulling it up into the cage with them.

She doesn’t wait around to see if they do, or to hear their mummered thank you afterwards. Mono is in the next room over, and she can feel his fear as keenly as she feels her heartbeat.

Saving Mono from the Janitor — the name works well enough, and that’s what the other kid called it — isn’t any harder than anything else they’ve faced, even though Mono is groggy and keeps softly calling out her name like he doesn’t believe she’s really there. But she manages to climb on top of the table he’s being wrapped on, pulls away the cloth and drags him after her while the Janitor’s back is turned.

When it realizes he’s gone, though, it pats it’s stupid creepy hands all across the desk and nearly catches them in their hiding spot behind a spool of fabric. The threads of it still cling to Mono’s coat, and one of them tickles her face as they press themselves together, trying their best to be as small as possible as the hands get closer and closer. This close to the monster, she can see it’s eyes seemed cover with bandages of its own (or maybe something else, hiding under its hat, but she doesn’t care enough to know), and it keeps getting closer and closer until …

One of the weird white critters knock something over on the other side of the room. The Janitor goes crying after it. Six pulls Mono away, and despite the way he stumbles, the sight of the monster gives him enough energy that he manages to keep pace with her as they jump down from the table and run back into the prison of cages, not stopping as they hear the monster’s confused roars behind them.

She is only a tiny bit surprised to see that the lock to the cage the kid had been in is broken on the ground, the door swung open, and the kid is gone.

She doesn’t think of them any more than that. Mono’s hand is burning in hers, to match the feeling in her chest, and she’s never letting it leave.

▩ ▵ ▩

Six’s hair has been itching her.

When she had been in the Nest, it had been cut as straight and neat as a doll’s, because that’s what kids were there — they were dolls, literally, if you weren’t lucky like her and managed to escape before the monsters replaced your limbs with wood and smoothed your features out with porcelain. She didn’t mind her being straight, though, since it fell just under her chin and mostly out of her face.

But it has been a long time since the Nest, and her hair is growing out now. It fans across her cheeks and hands long enough it brushes the base of her neck, even underneath her hood. It feels tangled and knotted in so many places, even when she runs her fingers through it, it doesn’t stop the itchy when it falls back against her skin.

(And yes, she has her own coat now, bright yellow and sleek with a large hood that covers her face. It’s not as warm as Mono’s coat, but it keeps the rain off and the chill at bay for at least a little while, and even if it’s bright enough it stands out in the washed-out City she couldn’t bring herself to pass it by.

It looks exactly like — exactly like hers . Six couldn’t pass it by. She wouldn’t let herself do something as stupid as that.)

She huffs again at the feeling, and reaches up to brush a strand of hair from across her eyes, but it falls back into place as soon as she moves her hand. In the misty streets of the City, the rain makes the dark strands plaster against her cheeks and her forehead and her nose, making it all the more grumpy as her and Mono come across a tall fence with no seeable entrance. So they’ll have to climb. Ugh.

“ Hey .” Mono hisses, gesturing to some boxes stacked up against the fence. They’re tall, a bit too tall for them to climb up in the formation they’re in right now, but they look light enough the two of them put together can push them. Besides, there’s already more boxes on the other side for them to jump down onto, and she has to wonder how many kids have been here before them.

They move the boxes together. The material is damp and rough under her palms, made of cardboard with only scraps inside, and she gives Mono a boost so he can jump on top. When he climbs up, he turns around and offers his hand out to her, and she jumps to catch it. Their hands clasp together and Mono luges her up beside him, a move they’ve long since practiced.

Mono jumps down first, and lands without a buckle to his knees. Six gets down next as he straightens up, hating the way her ankle wobbles now, and moves to jump back down to the street, but a barely heard “ Hey .” makes her stop.

She looks back over her shoulder at Mono, and sees he hasn’t moved. She expects him to say something about stopping to rest, or tell her they should find food, but instead he just asks, surprisingly, “Is something bothering you?”

That’s … how did he know?

She turns back around to face him head-on, the back of her neck already itching, but she manages to keep her hands at her sides. She asks, “How?” knowing he’ll understand her even if she doesn’t use many words, and he tilts his head at her. His bag crinkles on his shoulder. It’s easy to tell.

“You keep huffing and touching your face. Is something wrong?” He explains, then repeats his earlier question. He says it likes it’s obvious. She didn’t realize that it was, and she doesn’t know how she feels about it.

Back in the Nest, she always tried to stay impassive towards the other kids, because she knew any one of them could get snatched away and replaced with a dead doppelgänger at a moment’s notice. Until … until the raincoat girl, the one with warm hands and kind eyes that crinkled in the corners, she had never gotten close to anyone. Nobody got close enough to her to read her, even when she did her best to hide it.

It should make her uneasy that Mono understands her, just like it did when the raincoat girl did at first. But it doesn’t.

“My hair. It’s … long.” She tells him, ignoring the feeling of wrongness she has over not feeling wrong, shoving it deep deep down until it’s hidden under the drumming of the rain. “Longer than I’ve had it before.”

She doesn’t like long hair. It gets in the way, and trying to find pieces of string or elastic or ribbon to tie it up it’s too annoying to deal with. Plus, it wouldn’t fit under her hood. It would fall out, whenever she put her hood down. It would fly out behind her whenever she ran. It would float through the sky and on the water and come undone, negating the purpose of the ribbon in the first place.

“I can cut it for you.” Mono offers, snapping her from her thoughts. He’s leaning forward slightly, shifting onto his toes, leaning towards her. “Make it shorter.”

She leans away from him, taken aback. People don’t just … do that for each other, she knows. It involves trust, to let someone so close to your throat and know they won’t try to hurt you. And to offer it to someone, it’s — trusting, too. You have to really like the other person, to offer to stand behind them and hold something to their throat and not use it hurt them, instead. It’s kinda weird, for Mono to offer to do it for her.

It’s an odd suggestion, but Mono is an odd kid.

And she knows he would never hurt her — he had plenty of chances before, and he had taken none of them. It would make no sense for him to flip now, and her hair has been bothering her for ages now.

“Can you … can you make it straighter?” She asks, because that’s what she wants. She wants it straighter, but not as straight as a dolls, but enough it just stops itching.

“Yeah.” Mono replies, simple as can be.

She presses her lips together, thinking, before she nods. She’ll let Mono cut her hair, because it itches and she knows he won’t try and hurt her while he’s doing it, and she doesn’t know if she’ll have another opportunity — she can’t do it herself, and Mono’s deal might be limited. Most kids’ deals are.

“Okay.” She tells him. “But don’t mess it up. Or I’ll bite you.”

Mono makes a funny huffing sound she’s pretty sure is suppose to be a laugh, but she’s never heard him laugh before so she doesn’t know. Then he offers her his hand just like he offered to cut her hair, and agrees, “Okay. Let’s go.” giving her blanket permission to bite him if he messes up. He agreed to it, he can’t stop her.

She still takes his hand and jumps down with him to the street. She doesn’t think she would actually bite him, but she’ll have to see how steady his hand his.

Mono ends up finding a covered alleyway with an overhanging roof to settle down in, free from the rain that’s starting to pick up as Mono leaves her there to search for something sharp in a nearby trash pile by the decaying wall of the building they’re resting near. Six sits down and waits for him, shifting on the uncomfortable ground, and taking her hood off to let her too-long hair flow to her shoulders. She resists the urge to itch at it.

She hears footsteps approaching and startles, whipping around to see what’s coming near her, but settles when she realizes it’s just Mono, holding something in his hand. Still, he freezes as she relaxes, and her face furrows. She doesn’t like not seeing his face, unable to read him easily (though, she is getting there even with the added challenge), but he seems to just be … staring.

“Okay?” She asks, raising her voice slightly over the rain. A pit of worry forms in her stomach. If something’s wrong with Mono, she doesn’t know what she’ll do.

He shakes his head. His bag crinkles. “Yeah. Found something.”

He shows her a shiny piece of a jagged glass, no doubt having washed it off in the rain. It definitely looks sharp, and despite her earlier acceptance she tenses up, a million scenarios flying through her head. She knows none of them will come true, but it still makes her nervous. Maybe he’ll press it to her throat. Maybe he’ll stab her chest. Maybe he’ll cut her hair too straight and she’ll turn into a doll, or maybe he won’t cut it at all and she’ll have to tie it up with ribbon.

He must notice something, in the way he noticed her earlier annoyance like he was watching the City, and says, “I’ll be careful. Promise.”

She knows he isn’t lying. He might be stupid, but he doesn’t lie.

She’s going to be fine.

She gets back into her earlier position, cross-legged on the ground with her raincoat covering her legs, and feels the chill of the City dance along her ears. Mono kneels behind her, and grabs some of her hair between her fingers. She doesn’t know what he’s doing until he runs his fingers through it, pulling out knots, then pulls it tight again before he starts cutting.

She wonders if he’s done this before, cut someone’s hair. His own hair must be short, or else it would get too uncomfortable under his bag, and she wonders if someone ever cut it for him. If he was ever almost made into a doll, or if he ever knew someone who used a ribbon. She wonders why she even wonders that in the first place.

By the time Mono finishes (which takes a bit, as when he tries to do her bangs she can’t stop herself from flinching back, but he doesn’t seem too annoyed by it), the rain drums hard enough she knows they won’t be doing any travelling after this, and resigns herself to having to decide who does watch. Mono runs his fingers through her hair one last time, and leans back. He seems to be examining her, and he shifts, feeling uncomfortable under the scrutiny.

“Done?” She asks, a frown overtaking her lips.

Mono drops the glass on the pavement, and it clatters loudly, even over the rain.“Done. Like it?”

She puffs the bottom of her hair, feeling the weight and length of it, and finds it’s exactly where she wanted it to be — a bit choppy, but it’s good. She tests her bangs next, brushing them over her eyes the way she likes it to, but it doesn’t get in the way and it does irritate her anymore. It feels good. She feels  good.

“Good.” She decades, pulling her hood back up to her face, but something bright and dangerous in the corner of her eye catches her attention and she stops, startled. The glass on the ground, now beginning to be washed off by the rain, is red and worrying which means something cause it to be that way. “Hey!”

Six turns fully and sees what she saw was correct, but Mono makes a confused noise, so it appears he hasn’t noticed himself, like an idiot. She has to show him, then, because he’s an idiot who doesn’t notice when he’s bleeding .

She grabs his hands and flips them over, showing him his palms, displaying small cuts all across his hands. A dark, scarlet red welts of blood that match the ones on the glass on the ground stain his pale ashen skin, and when she reaches out to touch it gently, it stains her fingers a murky-brown colour that reminds her of dirt. However, Mono tears his hands away from hers with a whistling hiss, and she logically knows it must have been because it hurt, but it still makes her chest ache oddly when he pulls himself away from her.

But he’s an idiot. So she’s still going to help him, because her hair no longer itches, and he also lets her borrow his coat when it’s cold, and he smashed any Bullies that tried to hurt her, and he let her drift beside him on a door into places unknown.

“Stay.” She orders, not tells him, orders him so he knows she’s serious about it. “I’ll be back.”

Mono does stay, exactly where she left him, as she patters to where he had found his shard of glass to look for something to clean his scratches with. She finds of a scrap of dirty brown fabric hanging over a dumpster edge, and wets it under the rain then rings it out so it’s damp. She grumbled silently all the while, wondering how Mono couldn’t have noticed he had cut his skin until it bled while she was working he was going to cut her own.

He’s baffling, and a bit infuriating, and she hates the fact that the thought of him in pain makes her nausea.

She returns to him, exactly where she left him, and sits down in front of him again, this time facing him. She gently grabs his hands again, preening a bit at the fact that he doesn’t pull away, and very slowly lifts the cloth up to wipe away the blood. She goes slowly, so he can move if he wants to, but he doesn’t. At the first brush he does since, however, so she stops and looks at him for permission to continue. He nods, and she keeps going.

It takes a few minutes for his skin to be as clean as it once was (which isn’t very clean, given the both of them are always covered in grime), which means next is bandaging. She’s bandaged her own wounds before, and has seen Mono wrap his own as well — back in the School, they’d cut their feet easily on the shards of porcelain from the smashes Bullies, so she knows he has extra cloth in his pockets. So, she doesn’t waste any time reaching forward to search his pockets for it, and finds it in the oversized front left one. She makes a mental note for later.

Makeshift bandages secured, she takes his one hand again and begins wrapping, looping around his thumb and between his fingers then across his palms. When it’s tight enough he should still be able to bend his joints but isn’t loose enough it’ll fall off, she ties it off and moves onto the next one. She does the same as Mono sweet es his hand into a fist, and she’s proud of the fact he seems to be able to move still but doesn’t flinch at all.

He didn’t flinch when cutting her hair. When he got the cuts in the first place.

And he didn’t flinch in the School, dragging his hammer around to smash the Bullies to bits. He didn’t flinch when, earlier, she had to check over his foot injured by the Bully’s glass and inspect his throat from where their sharp fingernails had dug in. He didn’t flinch when staring down the Teacher, or the Hunter on the other end of the shotgun. He never flinched at all.

He’s so, so weird. She doesn’t know why she likes it.

“Why would you keep going?” She asks, unable to contain her bafflement anymore about this strange, strange kid she’s somehow fallen in line with. He confuses her and makes her feel warm in equal regards, and she’s only ever felt that way once before, with a girl who used a ribbon to tie her hair back. “If it hurt you, you should’ve stopped.”

Mono doesn’t say anything for a moment. And then he says a lot, without saying anything. “Because your hair was bothering you. And you were cold.”

She looks up at him, pausing in her bandaging, then huffs. He stupid. He’s so, so stupid, and if anything happened to him, she would smash and bite everything until she got him back.

But she’s not going to tell him that, even if her skin no longer itches, so instead she just says, “Idiot.” and goes back to bandaging her stupid friend’s stupid hands because he’s stupid, and she never wants him to leave, because she never realized she wanted someone to cut her hair until he offered.

Because he’s her friend. Maybe she’s his friend, too.

When she finishes, she lets him test the flexibility again, before he stands up and brushes his coat off from where they were sitting. They’ll need to find shelter, a place to rest for a bit, and her stomach growls at the thought of finding food. Maybe Mono will share with her again. He always does that.

But right now, he extends his bandaged hand out to her, and says, “Thank you.”

Instead of responding, she grabs her hand and lets herself be pulled to her feet, only feeling a slight twinge in her ankle this time. He’s stupid, and he’s her friend, and she says, “Me too.” in reply because that’s all she can think to say, when he cut her hair and shared his food with her.

Maybe one day she can say what she actually means. But if Mono knows her well enough to tell when her hair has gotten too long, he probably knows already.

▩ ▵ ▩

They don’t make it far before her stomach pinches.

Luckily they’re in a relatively safe place — closed off, the Janitor dead behind them — but that’s really the only good thing about this. Letting go of Mono’s hand, she clutches at her stomach and winces, as the hunger bleeds into every bone of her body. It’s worse than the last time, and the time before that, and that makes her uneasy — but she doesn’t have much time to think about that before another rumble has her pushing at her own stomach with her fists so hard her knuckles turn white.

It feels like her insides are trying to strangle each other. Like her entire body is trying to kill her.

“Six, you okay?” Mono’s shaky voices manages to penetrate her thoughts, and she looks up him while panting through her mouth. He looks close to giving out himself, and she wants to laugh and ask him to guess which one of them falls first.

It’s her. She drops to her knees, feeling the gross water staining her skin, and Mono cries out in concern. His hand touches her shoulder, and he’s saying something, but she doesn’t catch more than okay and hungry?

“Yes.” She manages to grit out between her teeth. “It keeps happening and I don’t —“

She cuts herself with a grunt when it curls in her stomach again, making her collapse forward. Mono says something again, something she doesn’t quite pick up, and pushes himself to his feet. He wobbles, and Six wants to tell him to stop being an idiot, to sit back down before he falls over — but she can’t get her mouth open to form the words. When she tries to stand up to follow him, wanting to catch him if she falls, she just ends up stumbling herself and landing on the floor again. Another twist of hunger in her stomach makes her curl up in a ball on the gross floor, pressing her forehead to the ground in a small attempt to stave it off.

The entire room wobbles, rocking back-and-forth. It reminds her of the boat they came here in. She wonders what happened to that monster on the beach.

An aggravating, scrapping sound gives her the strength to look up, and she sees Mono had apparently wandered away and found some a metal trap deeper in the room. It looks like a smaller version of the ones that she had to jump over in the Wilderness, but instead of sitting open, waiting for prey to be captured — there’s a creature, its scraggly body impaled by metal teeth, but still struggling as it lets out pitiful little squeaks.

A rat, her muddled brain recognizes. Something meaty. Something edible. Something alive .

Mono drags the thing over to her, but he hasn’t even set it down before she lets go of her stomach to crawl close towards him. She doesn’t even feel the twinge in her ankle as she desperately tries to push herself to her feet, if only to get close to the meat, the meat, it’s alive and struggling and you can eat it.

Mono sets it down and backs away, and she moves forward before she’s even thinking. When she tears her teeth into it, she doesn’t even taste it.

Much like with the bread the kid in the prison gave her and the mat that got her captured, she eats it in one go and doesn’t even stop to swallow before she’s taking another bite. But as soon as the meat settles in her stomach, the hunger dissipates like her breath on broken glass, and she feels like she can breathe again.

When she looks up, she sees her shadow in the corner of the room, just like it had last time — last time with the bread, last time in the City. Mono is staring at it too, but as soon as he looks it disappears as quickly as her hunger did, and her friend turns back to stare at her instead.

She looks back up at him. Her eyes only meet an unreadable, apathetic paper bag. It’s weird seeing him with it again; she was so use to see his eyes, his mouth, his hair, seeing his unfiltered expressions he never learned to hide because his bag did it for him. She can’t say she likes it, but right now she hates it especially, as she comes back down from her hunger.

She doesn’t say anything, despite the fact she opens her mouth to do so. She can’t, because when her tongue pushes against her teeth, she tastes the rat’s blood and recoils. There’s pieces of stringy flesh and tufts of fur stuck on her sharp ones, and it nearly makes her gag. She can feel — she can feel it dribbling down her chin, and she wipes it away hurriedly, and swallows down the bile forcing its way back up her throat.

She doesn’t look at the remains of the rat in the trap. If she does, she think she might throw up for real.

“Mono?” She manages to rasp out. He doesn’t reply, and fear mixes with the disgust in her stomach to create a feeling that makes her want to tear her insides out.

She wants to scream at him to answer her, wants him to sit down next to her and hold her hand and say something in that stupid kind voice of his, instead of looking at her in an unreadable way. She can’t tell if he’s angry or scared or disgusted with her, and she doesn’t know if she would prefer that over his silence.

He just keeps staring at her, not saying a word.

And then he collapses.

“Mono!” She pushes herself to her feet and stumbles towards him. He groans at the sound of his name, but doesn’t say anything else. Looks like she’s not the only one facing some issues. “Mono, what’s wrong?”

He groans again. He’s acting weird. And not in his usual weird way — the way he was acting before, while escaping the Janitor, all loopy and slow like something was distancing him. Like he was hurt. He’s hurt.

She can’t see any bloodstains anywhere on his coat or pants, so it must be where she can’t see it, under his bag. She moves to remove it, but then catches sight of her hands. Bloody. Dangerous.

Her entire body trembles. She wants to choke. Instead, she says, “Give me a minute.” and stands up. Mono doesn’t even seem to notice.

She finds a steady stream of water leaking from the ceiling in the corner of the room, and washes her hands off first. The rat’s blood turns the water a dirty brown as it swirls down the cracks in the floor towards the corner, slipping between the pieces of metal plating making up the ground. Next she wipes away the blood and spit dribbling down her chin, and rinses out her mouth. The taste of the water makes her want to spit it right back out, but she manages to swish it around it her mouth to clean it out before spitting on the floor.

She licks her teeth. All she tastes is rusty, old water — which is better than anything else she’s tasted, right now.

When she’s all clean and the waters no longer filled with blood, she stands up and pattered back over to Mono. He’s exactly where he left her, hasn’t moved an inch, except to curl himself into an even tighter ball and flinch lightly at her footsteps. But she puts a hand on his shoulder, and he stills.

“Sit.” She tells him, and he does with her help. He groans lightly, and slumps forward so far he’s practically resting his head on the floor, but when she tells him, “Sit up .” he manages to get himself into a position somewhat resembling a normal person.

She kneels down in front of him, remembering the first time she ever sat down in front of him like this, to fix his hands when he cut it on the glass he used to make her hair straight again. Her stupid friend, who didn’t stop even when he hurt himself, and now he was hurt again because of her. Because he wanted to help her.

Her lip curls back, feeling the urge to growl out something — or maybe someone, herself, but not at Mono. Never at Mono.

Shaking herself out, she reaches out and places her hands on either side of Mono’s bag, feeling the coarse paper under her calloused fingertips. Mono doesn’t protest at all, so she takes that as permission to carefully remove his bag, setting it down in Mono’s lap so that he can latch onto it for support. Without the shield, however, she can now see the reason for his groggy state.

Across the left side of his forehead, there’s a gash as long as her palm, stretching from his edge of his hairline to across his eyebrow. It doesn’t look like it’s bleeding, but she was sure it had been at one point, due to the amount to dried blood staining his ashen skin. He’s always been pale, even with the dirt always covering his skin, but now with the way he shakes she is all more aware of the way his eyes stand out against it.

Eyes. That was what she needed to check.

Going slowly so that Mono notices what she’s doing even in his groggy state, she grabs his cheeks to tilt his head up and steady as she leans close enough their noses nearly brush. Mono doesn’t even flinch when she tilts his head side-to-side, staring deeply into his static-filled eyes to assess him. The white dots that seem to act like the thing he actually sees out of, like the black one in her own eyes, look like the size they had always been. That’s good. That means he’s good.

“Your eyes look normal.” She says, before she realizes the irony of that statement and snorts. Mono does too, because under her hands she feels his cheeks scrunch up into a smile.

“Normal?” He parrots.

“The little circles inside of them are normal sized. Not big.” She tells him. It was something she learned back in the Nest, when she banged her head while climbing a ladder.

The girl with the red ribbon, who she had been following through the halls, had stopped their journey to check her head. The girl had said if your head was hurting, you needed someone to look at your eyes; if the middle circle of them were huge,

then that meant you and hurt your head really bad, and needed to stop and rest before it got worse.

Except most of the time kids didn’t have time to stop and rest, so sometimes their heads got really bad and they died. The girl said that she wouldn’t let that happen to Six.

Six won’t let it happen to Mono.

Luckily, his eyes — as odd as they are — do look like their normal size. So she doesn’t think she needs to worry about that. But bleeding wounds are still nothing to scoff about, so she needs to treat it.

“They’re called pupils.” Mono tells her, but he slurs the words, so she waves him off as she stands to go and find something to clean his wounds with. “Wait, where are you going?”

His voice looses his spacey tone as he quickly looks up at her. She just replies, “To get a clean cloth. I’ll be back.”

She taps him on top of the head, and that seems to be enough to placate him, because when she walks away this time he doesn’t protest. She knows Mono gets worried sometimes, that she’ll leave whenever he turns his back, and she doesn’t blame him for it, necessarily — it’s not like she doesn’t worry about the same thing.

When she finds a somewhat clean cloth and wets it in the water pouring from the pipes, she grabs some other cleanish cloths and returns to him. When Mono’s eyes focus on her, he seems a bit less loopy, and when she sits down to start cleaning around his wound — she makes sure not to touch it directly, just wipes away the dried blood staining his dirty skin — he starts talking. This small moment of rest must be doing him good.

“How many times has that hunger happened?” He asks, her out of the blue. She frowns.

“That was the third.” She replies. “I don’t why. How did you bang your head?”

Mono must catch her diversion tactic, but he’s gracious enough not to call her out on it. If it gets worse, they’ll talk about it, but until then — it’ll be fine. She’ll figure out how to get it under control, and they’ll be okay. She’ll make sure of it.

“The suitcase I was in fell open when the monster threw us into the pipes.” Mono tells her, leaning into her touch. She doesn’t recognize the word he uses, suitcase , was that the proper name for the weird box thing? “And I banged my head on the way down. I woke up enough to get my bag on, ‘cus I didn’t know where you were and I didn’t know who else was around, but I don’t — I don’t remember much else. Except for the monster.”

“It got you.” She finishes the story for him. He nods, and she pulls her hand away so he don’t bonk her, before she grabs his chin with her free hand to keep him place so she can finish cleaning.

“It got me.” He repeats. “I — I just remember I tried to stand up, to get away, but it’s arms were so long …”

He trails off, eyes going distant as he thinks, but they snap back over to her when he flinches back as she touches the cut directly with the cloth. The hiss of pain he makes whistles, but it doesn’t sound like the air coming through his tooth gap — it sounds much more high-pitched, and it makes her pause.

“It’s called the Janitor. It just … captures kids. Doesn’t kill them.” She tells him, repeating the word she learned from the kid in the cage. Mono huffs. “And this place is called the Maw.”

“Oh, okay. That makes sense.” He says, and then doesn’t elaborate. She wonders if his head wasn’t so fuzzy, if he would have come up with that on his own — he knows so many weird words that she’s pretty sure he makes up, but his names always seem to fit, so she doesn’t call him out for it.

They don’t say anything to each other for awhile, except when Six whispers to him she’s going to clean his wound directly, to give him some sort of warning. He nods his consent but still flinches when she starts cleaning it, but her whispered it’s okay is enough to make him settle. Her and Mono aren’t the type that need to talk to fill the silence; they’re okay with just letting it linger. Besides, being too chatty means being killed, and she had seen that in the Nest often.

The girl used to want to talk. She would ask questions and make observations and call the monsters mean names while running away from them. Six sometimes wonders if she ever hit her head too hard to make her so stupid, but she hadn’t been stupid, not really. Just vocal.

She also wonders what the girl would say if she was here, sometimes. If she would like Mono. Six thinks she would, and that’s enough for her.

But that also gets her thinking about Mono, and what he told her, and some of it doesn’t add up. He was so adamant about coming with her, and the Mono in the City had never been as sullen as the Mono in front of her is now. And maybe some of that can be allocated to his head wound, but Mono had banged his head plenty of times before and had bled plenty of times before and gotten hurt plenty of times before. They both had, and never stopped them or slowed them down.

Something isn’t right here.

“Why didn’t you do what you did to the other monster? On the beach?” She asks him. He had made it stop, it had listened to him. He could have done that again, and maybe this could have been avoided. “You can make them listen.”

“I — I don’t know how .” Mono replies back, not quite a whine but definitely distressed. “That — that time I was just — I wanted to go with you, and now my head hurts —“

She leans back, still holding the now-bloody cloth. “Mono.”

“I don’t wanna do that again, Six, I don’t .” He barrels on like he didn’t even hear her, and he probably didn’t, his eyes squeezing shut and hands coming up to pull on his hair, tugging and tugging until he starts pulling out strands. “I hated it . I’ll only do it again if I need to, if we can’t get out alive together without it, because otherwise I’m scared that —“

“Okay.” She cuts him off. “Mono, okay.”

He snaps up to look at her, dark eyes wide and worried, and his lips press together into a thin line. His hands fall around his bag again, so at least he’s not pulling at himself still. Luckily, he doesn’t look like he’s going to topple over, so she reaches over to start clearing his gash again. Except he still flinches away when she reaches out, and she pulls back, heart skipping a beat.

“What?” She asks, mouth twisting up into a frown.

“How did you know about the monster? And this place?” He tilts his head at her, hair falling over his wound, sticking to his forehead. She frowns at him, knowing he can see it even in the shadows of her hood. “And why are you so hungry?”

Her heart lurches. “A kid told me, there’s lots of them trapped here. And I don’t know.”

Mono stares at her for a long time, not blinking, and she thinks that maybe he forgets to do so sometimes, after wearing his bag for so long. He actually taps his fingers against the side of it, as he stares at her, and blows out a breath. She feels like a monster is coming after her, with how her heart pounds in her chest, the urge within her to run.

“Okay.” He says, simply. And she wonders what she even had to worry about.

Because Mono gets it, doesn’t he? In the City, the televisions are drawn him, lured him, called him in, and he couldn’t fight it. It wanted to trap him there, keep him there, like it was his friend when all it wanted was to kill him like it killed everybody that entered it. And he couldn’t fight back. Even when it was hurting him. Even when it was hurting them .

He understands. He understands her .

When she reaches out towards him this time, he doesn’t move away, and he lets her clean the rest of his wound with only a few flinches. When she finishes, she uses the pieces of cloth she found earlier and rips them into strips, and ties it around his skull. It makes his hair stick up all funny and she giggles a bit, and he copies the noise, though she isn’t sure he knows why she’s laughing.

“Okay.” She says, leaning back to examine her work. “Better now.”

His hand drifts up to brush against the bandages, before falling back against his bag again. “My head still hurts. I don’t think it’s suppose to do that. Not in this way.”

“You’ll be okay.” She tells him.

“I will be.” He mutters back. “But something’s wrong here. I can feel it.”

Feel it in the way he felt the television screens, or feel it in the way he knows the strange weird words, in the way his eyes glow like the static that fills her ears every time she blinks? Feel it in the way she can feel the room rock back and forth, feel this place’s lungs construct and squeeze them tight, feel the hiss of the steam and rattle of the pipes like a heartbeat?

There’s something wrong here. She can tell too.

Gently, she pries his paper bag from his lap, and flips it right-side up. The empty eyeholes stare listlessly into space, a shield with nothing to guard, protection against so many things he needs protection from — laughing children, searching eyes, the buzz of the television. The something that is wrong, the feeling that made him say to find whatever I’m looking for.

He’s found it, she thinks. But she doesn’t know if it’s ready to let go. But it can’t take him, because he’s hers, and she is his, and they’re in this together together together.

Silently, she lifts his bag up high to place it over his head, and for the first time since she finished cleaning his wound he flinches back, leaning on his arm behind him and lifting the other to block his head. His breath comes out in pants, eyes wide and reflecting her own worry back at her like broken glass in a window frame.

“It’s okay.” She whispers, because it is. She doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like it, but his paper bag will protect him in the way her raincoat protects her. And in this place, this wrong place, they need all the protection they can get.

He pauses, then nods at her, and she slowly lowers his bag back over his head, blocking his eyes and his hair and his face from her vision. He looks just as impassive, mysterious, as he had when they first met. And with it back on she can almost think that they’re back in the City, before the Tower; that they’re back before Mono’s eyes glowed with static and her stomach didn’t hunger for something she didn’t want to give it. Back before things were different, complicated, where she nearly didn’t lose her best friend to her own idiocy.

They aren’t. They aren’t, and they never will be again. As much as Mono wants to hide, as much as it scares him, the Tower changed him, and the Tower changed her. They can’t ignore it. They can’t ignore the way his voice echoes, or the way her limbs ache, or the scars they both share because of it. They can’t ever go back to the way they were before.

But right now, they need to be.

Mono needs to be the kind paper-bag boy who rescued her without wanting anything back, hiding his eyes and his booming words and his own fear of being found. She needs to go back to being the snappy girl in the yellow raincoat, who makes sure he doesn’t die and drags him out when he starts to go spiralling.

He can’t be the monster waiting at the end of the hall. She can’t be the monster that wants to claw its way out of her stomach, as she licks her teeth and still tastes blood.

Because if they become that, they’ll never unbecome it. Something about this place — it’ll sink it’s teeth into them, just like the City did, and never let go. It’ll tear them apart.

And she won’t let that happened. If it does, she doesn’t know what she’ll sink her teeth into next.

▩ ▵ ▩

Whenever they need to rest, Six finds herself drawn to Mono more often than not.

The first few times they rested together, stopping to nap as the other took watch, Six made sure to keep her distance. She would make her own nest to sleep in and curl herself into a tight hall to conserve her body heat, so she didn’t have to worry about waking up with blue fingers and frozen limbs. But Mono, she found, was like the furnace in the hospital. He was always warm, and he was always willing to share his body heat, whenever she wordlessly rested her head on his shoulder or entangled their feet together.

She really started doing it after the School, and Mono never scolded her or told her to let go, so she took that as permission to continue. He even started initiating it himself, opening his arm up so she could curl against his side or silently lifting the edge of his coat up so she could wrap herself up in the fabric.

So it was no surprise to her that when they stop to rest in an abandoned apartment, Mono joins her in the large shoe that they find shoved under the corner of a bare bed frame. Six had found it as they scouted the room for a safe place to sleep, and climbed inside immediately before whistling across the room at Mono on the other side. He pattered over immediately, his paper bag crinkling, and climbed in next to her without even having to ask.

When they finally settle inside, Six ends up shoulder-to-shoulder next to him. She can hear his ruffled breathing under his paper bag, and she wants him to take it off. It’s noisy. Maybe one day he’ll do it in front of her, and she’ll see his real face. Maybe one day, after they … after they get out of this City. After he … after he …

“What are we going to do after this?” She asks him, curling closer so that their feet entangle. His are still warmer than hers, somehow.

He doesn’t answer for a moment, seemingly thinking. His head tilts slightly, almost unnoticeable, but Six notices it because she’s seen him do it many times before. She wonders if he even realizes, or if he thinks the paper bag hides everything about him.

“What’s ‘this’?” He finally asks her. She notices his fist clench in his lap, so she hums at him.

 “When you find whatever you’re looking for.” That was what he said, after all, before they left the Wilderness. He needs to find whatever he was looking for, and it lies somewhere within this City. Six doesn’t know what it is. She’s not sure he does, either, really.

A breath escapes him, she can hear it under his bag, and his hands unravel like he only just realized they had been closed. His bag tips down minutely, barely noticeable, but Six notices it because it’s the only indication that he’s looking at anything. She doesn’t know what he’s staring at, in his hands, but he must find it because he instead hugs himself under his trenchcoat and says. “Dunno. I haven’t thought that far.”

She doesn’t know what to do with that answer, so she doesn’t do anything. In this world, it’s hard to plan for the future, because you don’t know if there is even going to be a future for you. The future is a distant thing, a promise and a hope that everybody tries to catch but most miss. Six has never thought about her own future, because if she focuses on that she’ll miss what’s in front of her, but right now what’s in front of her is Mono and it seems like he doesn’t know, either.

She’s reminded of the Nest, suddenly, and the girl she had found there. The one that helped her out, offered her a hand, the one that said, it’s okay, when we get out of here I can teach you how to do it properly whenever she slipped and fell. The future was always a given for that the girl. She always spoke in absolutes and certainties. When we get out. When we get out.

Mono is not like that. Mono is like her. He doesn’t know, because he’s not naive enough to think it’s certain.

Maybe they can both not know together.

“There’s other places.” She tells him, softly, unsure. He looks at her, and she imagines his brown hair falling over his eyes, obscuring them from her. “Outside the City.”

They could go there, together, in the future. A future they will have, she thinks, because they’ve already survived so much they can survive more together. Mono doesn’t seem to get her though, since he says, “I know. Like the Wilderness”

Idiot. Her idiot friend. “No. Different places. With … with other kids.”

Mono’s head tilts down, and he doesn’t say anything, but his chest hitches like he’s going to cry. Six knows he won’t, because she doesn’t cry and Mono doesn’t either, but she regards him as he does nothing but sit there and breathe. Did he not like her idea? Did he not want that? Well. Too bad for him, then.

“I was with others kids once. In a house.” He finally says to her, voice shaky like he’s shivering, but she knows he’s not because he’s always warm and he always keeps her warm. “They … didn’t like me.”

Oh. That was the issue.

Mono’s never spoken much about where he came from before they met, but she hasn’t either. She wonders if any of the kids he was with before saw his face, if they were like the ones in the Nest, ignoring each other in their own race for survival. She doesn’t understand, though, how they could not like him. He was tough, and he was warm, and he was helpful. He wasn’t a burden, but he was still kind to a baffling degree. He was weird, and stupid, but he was her friend and all those other kids were idiots for not seeing that.

Against her shoulder, she can feel his chest is heaving against her. Like they just ran from a monster instead of sitting in a shoe. She looks up at him, a pant of worry in her chest, and he’s not looking at her. His bag is facing off into the room but he doesn’t even seem to be looking at anything, and his hands grip his sides so tightly he must be hurting himself. She’s seen Mono get like this before, distant and anxious and fretful, but never like this, and she doesn’t like it.

She grabs onto his coat, right above his heart, and pulls at him. He shouldn’t be like this, distant and anxious and fretful. He should be here, with her, tough and warm and helpful. He should not be back there, with the idiot kids who she decides that she hates.

Mono looks down at her so fast his bag crinkles on his shoulders, and she hopes he sees the displeasure on her face. To prove her point, she pushes her hood off her head, and narrows her eyes at him in disapproval. He is acting stupid and he is not stupid. Everybody else is. She needs to show him that.

She tugs on his coat again, chastising, and let’s go.

“Where I came from there were other kids, but we weren’t … together. Nobody helped eachother. We just tried to survive on our own.” She tells him. Her voice is quiet, words only for him to hear. “There was one girl, though. She … she tried to help me. We tried to escape together.”

The other kids in the Nest, they never worked together. They hated each other, fought for resources, ran away when others got close. But the girl in the yellow raincoat, the shiny one that matches her own, she was different. She was naïve and stupid, but she was strong and helpful and when she grabbed Six’s hand her skin was warm like a blanket was. She was stupid in the way Mono is stupid and he needs to know that everybody else was different, worse version of stupid and that he was better than all of them. Him and the raincoat girl.

“She sounds good.” He says. And she was. She was really good, just like he is.

She runs her fingertips of the edge of her sleeves, her skin coming back wet from the rain. “She used to wear a yellow raincoat. Before she died.”

And that was the thing, because the raincoat girl died and Six was alone until Mono came around. Six had watched her fall, with the monster chasing after her, because Six had tried to help but only made the cliff side more shaky and they both went falling. The only thing that came up was the raincoat Six hadn’t mange to grab before the waves took it, and it was the only time in the world she felt like crying.

“She fell into the water with a monster chasing her and didn’t come back up.” She keeps talking, not even realizing the words are still coming out of her. Mono leans close enough that the corner crease of his bag brushes against the top of her head, and she remembers the red ribbon in the girl’s hair flying in the wind as she fell. “Then I drifted off to sea.”

Mono had survived so much, it seemed, before they even met. After they met.

So had Six.

It’s why she thinks they get along so well, actually, because Mono is not an idiot like the other kids. He is like the raincoat girl, and the raincoat girl was like him, except there’s something about Mono that Six can’t name that makes him different. He’s trying to find something but he doesn’t know what it is. He covers his face from her and he’s warm all the time and he still helps her out, whenever she needs. Even when it would make sense to leave her behind. When she would have left him behind.

But she would never do that now. They’re together now, and she’s not leaving. He’s not leaving either.

“The house I was in burned down. With other kids. Because a monster came and everyone ran away and while they were trying to escape they knocked the lamps down.” Mono says. He breathes in, out, in, out. She looks at him, to show she’s listening, because she told him and now he tells her. “I don’t think I want to go to a place with other kids again.”

She knocks her head up against his chin, preening a bit at the resulting crinkle from his bag, and reaches into her pocket for her lighter. She finds that playing with it, flicking it open-and-closed without lighting it, helps her focus. But this time, because she’s cold, she flicks it on and watches the tiny flame dance in her palm. Mono found her this, after she showed discontent for his flashlight, because he wanted her to be warm and he wanted her to have light.

He’s so stupid. He’s the only person she ever wants to be by her side now.

“I don’t think I want to either.” She closes her lighter and puts it back in her pocket, staring intently at him. “But we don’t have to. We can … we can find our own place.”

Their own place, just the two of them. No stupid kids that aren’t like her kid, that aren’t like the raincoat girl with her ribbon and warm hands. No monsters to take them away from each other, and no fires and no seas and no stupid thoughts that make it hard to breathe.

Mono looks at her like she has two heads, and he asks, slowly. “Together? Promise ?”

He offers her his hand, but it’s not to hold. Instead, he stretches out his pinkie, and Six knows what he wants. Her stupid, soft, idiot friend. Of course they’ll be together. There’s no other version where they aren’t.

“Together.” She smiles at him and interlocks their pinkies together, and his paper bag crinkles like he’s smiling right back at her. “Promise.”

They’ll be together, just the two of them, and it’ll be okay. The girl in the yellow raincoat died, but he’s here now, together with her.

She has Mono, and she doesn’t need anybody else.

▩ ▵ ▩

They get away from the Twin Chefs with only a few minor scrapes and bruises.

Mono’s leg is a bit cut up, from where a glass bottle one of the Chefs had thrown managed to nick his leg while they were running. Six has dark, colourful bruises forming over her shoulder from where she had tripped going down the stairs and knocked full-speed into the wall. But they’ve had much worse injuries before, so neither of them let it slow them down as they get out of the Kitchen and move their way up in the Maw.

Mono’s head even seems better, his words no longer slurred and seeming much more focused. She doesn’t have to drag him around anymore, even if occasionally he’ll stumble and stare off into the distance like he can’t quite focus right.

But he’ll be fine. They’ll both be fine, as soon as they get out of here.

They cross over large pipes in empty, cavernous rooms — rooms that make her feel small in a way the City never did, filled with smoke and water as they rock back and forth. She grabs onto Mono’s hand to keep them both steady as they crawl past, through the rooms and up ladders, until she spies a beam of light coming from a window up high on the wall. There’s a ladder leading up to it, and it’s the only way they can go, so she climbs up first and Mono follows after her.

They end up standing on the edge of the window. The sun blinds her for a moment — she thinks, distantly, that she’s never seen the sun this bright —  before her eyes adjust, so used to the darkness, and she sees it.

The ocean. The boat. The monsters.

They walk in a line from the smaller boat to the bigger one, and suddenly everything makes sense in an instance. The water, the rocking rooms, the cages and the hooks. Those monsters — the fat ones, wearing fancy suits and twisted masks, like they’re hiding anything with them — are here to feed, here to consume. Their Guests onboard a twisted ship, ready to feast.

Six has always hated the ocean. She hated it since the Nest, since the City, and now … and now she hates it even more.

Not even the glowing, warming sun on her face can make that feeling go away.

“What is this place?” Mono asks in a horrified whisper. It’s weird seeing him covered in light, so used to seeing him covered in darkness or rain or static, but Six isn’t used to the sun either. This isn’t even the real sun — the shadows are off because of the boats, and it’s blinding, to her. It shouldn’t be.

But she can’t even answer Mono’s question, because she doesn’t have an answer to give him, so she doesn’t response. They need to get moving, anyways.

They climb up the side of the ship, the side of the Maw, and enter through another window. They end up following the Guests as they make their way through the ship, balancing on pipes and wooden boards until they get to what Six thinks it supposed to be the main entrance area. It’s grand, with carvings on the walls and wooden structures decorating the ceiling, but what catches her eye is what is above it all.

It’s the monster from her dreams.

Six feels her breath catch in her throat as she spies her, shrouded in darkness high above the rest of them. She’s standing on a balcony, overlooking the marching Guests, but Six can’t make out anymore details than that. But her heart still goes cold, entire body frozen like she’s back on the beach with Mono again, and she can’t move away.

Mono grabs her hand. It ground her back to reality, and she looks over at him. He seems just as frozen as she is, and if she could see his face right now, she’s sure he would be wide-eyed and worried.

“The Lady.” Mono whispers. His bag’s empty eyes focus on her, and he says, more stern, “We have to go.”

So they do, with the cold feeling still creeping around her chest, but Six allows Mono take the lead this time as they jump over the bumbling Guests and away from the Lady, still standing high above them. Six knows they haven’t been seen, because they would be dead otherwise, but she still feels like something is watching them as they leave the Lady behind. Something is watching her .

But she ends up being distracted from that feeling when they end up lost deeper in the Guest area. Her and Mono watch as the horrible monsters stuff their grimy, fat faces with still-bloody meat, not even cooked all the way through. It dribbles down their chins, stains their clothes, and at her side Mono makes a choking noise. She reaches over to pull his bag off for him if he needs, but he shakes his head, and they keep going.

They crawl under tables and climb up stacked plates and swing from lathers, avoid the grubby hands that grab for them as they run by. She’s seen the way the Guests eat their meat, and she’s not looking to be their next meal anytime soon, so she runs as fast as she can with Mono right at her heels. The Guests don’t tend to grab for him as much as they do for her, though. He probably blends in too well; her yellow stands out here.

But eventually, they manage to escape, swinging side-by-side on a lantern and landing in the next room as the Guests tumble down to their deaths behind them.

Her stomach growls.

Mono snaps over to look at her as she crumbles to the ground, letting out weak coughs as she falls to her knees. Mono, of course, exclaims her name and rushes to her side, placing a hand on her shoulder that just makes her skin burn. But she doesn’t have the strength to push him away as her stomach rumbles once more, her entire insides trying to twist themselves into new shapes, and she whines.

“Hey, Six. Six, Six, Six.” Mono is talking to her, saying her name, grabbing on her arms and hiking her up to her feet. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna find you food, come on, come on. Follow me. Come with me.”

She does, letting Mono lead her through the next few rooms as her vision blackens in the corners. Every time a fit of hunger racks her frame, Mono’s grip on her tightens, and he whispers soft words like you’re okay and we’ll find you some food, don’t worry before leading her on, deeper into the Maw as her entire body screams to consume.

There was meat back there, in the Guests area. Fresh, bloody meat, that she could eat and consume and consume and consume —

“Is that for us?” Mono asks, but it’s not directed at her. No, he’s talking to someone else’s.

She snaps to attention to see that one of the weird, triangle-head creatures from before are watching them. They’re up in the rafters, in the crates, circling them like flies. Mono seems happy to seem then, and it makes her stomach growl loudly. He always likes to hug those little creatures, the softie that he is, even if they sometimes run away from him. They’re called Nomes, her muddled mind supplies her with. Nomes.

On the ground in front of them is what appears to be a fat link of sausage, dripping onto the floorboards. Mono is staring at one of the Nomes hiding on top of one the crates, and he says, “Thank you!” to it. Did it throw that meat down for them? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

“Six, it’s for you.” Mono let’s go of her to go grab the sausage, though he stops with his hand hovering just over top of it, like he doesn’t want to touch it. “You can have it, the Nome —“

His voice turns to mush in her ears. A Nome chitters, catching her attention and breaking through the fog. It standing nearby, just a few steps away, hiding in the shadow of a stack of creates. It’s small, but not any smaller than the sausage, and it has to be juicier. Bloodier. It’s alive, after all, and she remembers the feeling of the rat struggling between her teeth.

Her stomach rumbles, and she stands up, ignoring the sausage entirely. She steps towards the Nome. It chitters again.

“Six?” Mono asks, staring at her, but she pays him no mind as she stalks forward. The Nome in her gaze whines, confused and frightful, and the poor thing has no clue what she’s going to do to it. “Six!”

She lunges for the Nome.

Mono lunges for her.

“ HEY! ” His voice wobbles as they collide in the air, and she lands on her back with Mono on top of her, pinning her to the ground with his heir advantage. The Nome shrieks and skitters off, away from her and back to safety.

Six struggles under Mono’s grip, growling and snapping her teeth, and Mono rolls off her to get to his feet and make a threatening noise back. It doesn’t sound normal, it sounds more — more fit for a television screen. Staticky. A record scratch, like his own version of her snarling.

She blinks at him. Her stomach growls again, and she collapses forward, the pain all the more intense now. Mono makes a startled noise, and before she knows it he’s throwing the sausage at her, and she jumps on it.

It’s not as good as the Nome would have been, she thinks, but it still satiates her hunger just fine. The rumbling, twisting feeling in her stomach settles, and she feels like she can finally breathe, think, move again. She takes a deep breath, and looks up to see all the Nomes have scattered off, and Mono is sitting in front of her with his fists clenched.

“ Six! ” Mono sounds the angriest she’s ever heard him, but he’s still even that angry; more scandalized, than anything. He pushes at her shoulder and makes her sit up, and even with his bag on she can tell his eyes are buzzing. “What — what were you thinking? ”

She clutches at her stomach and doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know . She doesn’t know what’s happening to her, and she doesn’t know how to stop it, she doesn’t know how to fight it.

Mono stares at her for a long moment, before he takes his bag off. She avoids looking at his eyes, but can still tell he’s looking at her in worry, and she hates it. She hates this, she hates what’s happening to her and she hates this place most of all, and how it seems like even with all the progress they’ve made, they’re not any closer to getting out of here.

“It’s gonna be okay.” He tells her. He shuffles close enough their noses brush together, and her eyes flicker up to meet his own, pinched and worried as they are. “We’re gonna get out of here. Okay?”

It sounds like a lie, but she knows Mono well enough now to know that he believes it. So she just nods, he nods back, and leans away to put his bag back on. When he stands up, she doesn’t follow him, until he offers her his hand to pull her up. She takes it, and allows him to keep holding on even when she’s standing on her own, her scarred ankle only twinging slightly at the movement.

“We’re gonna be okay.” He tells her, tilting his head. He squeezes her hand, as much as a lifeline for him as it is for her. “Promise.”

She doesn’t think that’s true, but she wants to believe it so bad, so she doesn’t dismiss him. She just holds Mono’s hand tighter, tries to convince herself that they’ll get out of here, and thinks of the sun.

▩ ▵ ▩

Time passes weirdly in the Tower.

Six doesn’t know what exactly happens after the big, tall monster takes her away. She can remember trying to pull Mono away from the television, screaming for him as he hid under the bed and didn’t reach out back towards her, remember the burning feeling of a monster’s hand around her chest —

And then there was the sound of static, purple light dancing between her eyes. Someone whistling, far off, and an ever-present droning that made her ears bleed. Her hair fans out around her face, cut straight by Mono’s steady hands, and when she closes her eyes she still sees his paper bag staring at her in the dark.

The big tall monster, the one she calls the Thin Man in her head because it sounds like a name Mono would give him, takes her somewhere far away that she doesn’t know. She remembers his eyes, how they bore into her like he was reading everything in her mind and leaving her bare. Dark, horrible eyes; they were filled with static, dark and moving and horrible, horrible, horrible. A monster’s eyes, for a true monster.

He hasn’t killed her yet. But whenever a monster keeps you around instead of killing you, it’s never for anything good.

She remembers the Hunter. She remembers the Teacher. She remembers the Doctor, the Bullies, the Patients and the Viewers. She remembers the Nest, and the monsters that inhabited it, and the girl in the yellow raincoat with the red ribbon in her hair. She remembers everything. She remembers nothing at all.

At one point she thinks she finds Mono, can feel his hands in her own pulling her away from the static, but as soon as it snaps back into place she’s just left with the phantom feeling of his skin on hers. At first she was angry, the feeling burning inside of her chest, at Mono and the monster and everything she’s feeling. But it burnt out quickly, replaced with emptiness, and replaced with anguish, and replaced with hope — hope that Mono will come for her, just like he did before.

She misses him. He got her caught, except he didn’t, he couldn’t control himself, she could tell, and she misses him. She misses him, and her yellow raincoat girl, and she wants both of them here with her right now. But the raincoat girl fell to the bottom of the sea that Six crossed on a piece of driftwood and a broken door, and all that was left was her yellow jacket caught in the wind, the same one that now covers Six instead. Except it’s not the same one, it can’t be, but it is. It’s the same coat and Six misses them and all beaches are the same beaches if you wander down far enough.

She misses them, except Mono isn’t here, but she can still feel his hands and hear his voice, cutting through the static. She can’t make out the words, distorted as they are, but they sound like they’re cooing, longing, worried. She doesn’t think it’s Mono but it has to be, it sounds just like him.

She misses them. She’s missing something. She’s empty, and she hears the music, and she’s not empty anymore.

The notes cut through the fog over her head and she reaches forward it, latches onto it like she’s caught in the ocean’s wave. It soft, crooning, calls and beckons her forward until she can grab onto the source of it; her music box, the same one from when she was captured before (where? Where was that? What happened?), the one that brought her a moment of respite in her horrible, horrible circumstances.

It soothes the ache. The ache in her heart, her chest, her arms and her eyes and her ears. As soon it starts playing, everything else is washed away, until only the music remains and she is happy, safe, content. Everything is okay and nothing is wrong, and she is okay. She is okay, okay, okay.

And —

And —

There’s someone standing in front of her.

It’s a boy. That much she can realize, as soon as he steps forward, close to her music box like he’s going to take it away. She reaches forward and snatches it back, away from the mean rude intruder who wants to hurt her, take her music away from her and steal her peace, her happiness, her soothing melody.

But the boy doesn’t move to do that. He just stares at her, dark eyes wide and uncertain, and she thinks she might recognize him from somewhere but can’t place where. She thinks of a hat and a bag. She thinks of static. She thinks of eyes.

“Hey.” The boy says softly, staring up at her from underneath his tousled hair, the light of the room reflecting all over him and casting funny shadows. His voice is familiar, and it catches her attention immediately. “Six?”

She looks at him. And it hits her. Oh, it’s — it’s Mono!

She knows Mono, he’s her friend! And he’s here, he’s here, he’s here! She was missing him, she remembers, but now he’s here and she doesn’t have to miss him anymore. Oh, this is wonderful . It feels like she hasn’t seen him in forever — she wonders why, distantly, but pushes that thought aside — so seeing him again, after so long, is amazing .

She greets him back, a trilling noise from deep in her throat, and moves closer to him. She holds her music box close to her chest, still a tiny bit worried that someone will take it from her, but she knows Mono — he won’t take it from her, he won’t hurt her. He’s her friend .

He still stares up at her, having to crane his neck back to look at her face (isn’t that funny! He was always supposed to be taller than her!) and lets out a heavy breath, before he takes a few steps closer. Something about his face looks wrong. It should be plainer, she thinks, without all the funny details. Or maybe it’s the worried, sad expression on his face — the one that makes her worried and sad, because Mono is usually so warm and kind.

He saved her, he’s her friend. Is something wrong?

“I’m gonna save you.” He tells her, out-of-the-blue. He holds up his hand, but only one finger extended, like he’s trying to offer her something but she doesn’t know what. “I’m gonna save you, I promise, just hold on a little bit longer.”

Mono! She trills at him, still happy that he’s here but not comprehending his words. Mono! Is something wrong?

She lets her grip loosen on her music box, offering it out to him. He always offered things to her, so if something’s wrong, her music box can make it right. Just like it made her right. It can help him!

He looks at it. He looks at her, and says, “Stay. I’ll be back.”

He rushes past, and she can’t turn around easily to see what he’s doing, so instead she lets him do his thing and focuses back on her music box. The offer will still be here when he needs it, but Mono is independent — much like her — so she can let him do his own thing for a bit, before he comes back over to her. Like it’s supposed to be.

Her music box continues to play softly. It echoes in the room, bouncing between the beams of light, and she lets the gentle melody wash over her body and soothe the ache in her limbs. It’s rare, to find something so good in this monstrous world of theirs. A world that wants them dead, wants to cling to them and never let go. She found her music box, and she found Mono. Two good things. Forever and ever.

She doesn’t notice when Mono finishes whatever he’s doing, but she does notice when he stops and stands in front of her. He’s holding a weird stick thing with a sharp metal bit on the end, and she wants to tell him to be careful but she knows he can handle himself with sharp objects. She greets him with a trill, but notices his lack of greeting back. Mono always greets her back, he’s her friend, that’s what he’s supposed to do — except if there’s danger around, of course, and he needs to stay silent to protect himself.

Danger. There’s something dangerous around, Mono —

“I’m sorry.” He says suddenly, and she whines at him, worried about the danger and worried at his words and worried about him . “I’m so, so sorry.”

His grip tightens on the handle, his shoulders tense, and she doesn’t see it coming until it’s too late.

He swings. He hits her music box.

And everything cracks.

▩ ▵ ▩

When the elevator doors open, Six knows exactly where they ended up.

This area is much different from the rest of the Maw. It’s look a place she would have seen in the City, actually, with wooden floors and fancy paper on the walls, covered in intricate designs that look familiar but she can’t place the name of. There’s rugs covering the floors that are soft on her feet as she walks, one hand stretched out in front of her to illuminate the space with her lighter, and the other holding onto Mono, leading him behind her.

“Six.” He whispers, hurriedly. “Something’s wrong. I don’t think we should be here.”

She doesn’t grace him with a response, only squeezing his hand and dragging him after her. He doesn’t say anything else after that, but she can hear his heavy breathing and the crinkle of his bag, and feels the way his nails dig into her skin. But it doesn’t hurt. Not that much.

Because Six can feel it too, but she wouldn’t describe it as — as wrong . Not in the way the City sometimes felt, when the rain drummed against destroyed buildings a bit too loud or the air felt a bit too still, like the smell the wind got just before a storm started. Not in the way Mono seemed to feel it, breathing in time to the cobblestones and the wind. It didn’t even feel the way the Nest felt, clotting and overwhelming, just one breath away from toppling over the edge.

The Maw feels — it’s feels like it’s moving. Beating. Alive . But here, in this place, it seems to pause for a moment. It’s feels like a small hideout, away from the rest of the world, perfect to stop and rest for a moment.

But she does not need to rest. Not right now.

Because there’s a drumming in her veins, not like the rain but like the sea, that pushes her past the plush chair and large shelves filled with books (she learned that word from Mono in the School, but no book she’s ever found has been legible, the ink always smudged to imperfection) and up the stairs, still dragging Mono behind her even when he stumbles. Her heart beats steadily in her chest, and she never falters.

There’s paintings on the walls, too high up for her to see the full picture, but she can catch glimpses of faces and hands and eyes. Some are covered in blankets, like they’re sleeping, and the stairs creak lightly with every step they take. On the upper landing there’s a tall clock. The mechanism inside swings back and forth, letting out a steady tick-tock that is the only sound filling the space.

Clock is another word she learned from Mono. He told her he can’t stand the ticking.

Speaking of, as she moves to lead them into the next room, Mono suddenly grabs the edge of her sleeve and pulls her back. She doesn’t stumble, but it does make her pause, and when she turns around to look at him he lets go and grabs onto her free hand with both of his. He still has his bag on. She can tell his eyes are glowing all the same.

“Six.” He breathes, worried and frantic, his grip on her hand near-painful. “Six, something’s really wrong. Don’t go in there. We can’t go in there. Please .”

His voice is barely audible, but she catches the manic fear in it anyways. It’s not like the panicked way he screamed her name when the monster on the beach caught her, not the powerful way he used to order it to take him too. It’s the voice of scared, worried little boy hiding behind his paper mask, not wanting to break down the door.

It’s so unlike him that Six pauses, a bit of worry forming in her chest. Mono is her friend, and he is her friend because he is smart and strong is not weak, so if he says that something’s wrong then maybe …

But then she hears the humming.

She snaps towards the sound, all of her earlier thoughts and emotions falling away. It’s the same song she heard in her dreams, haunting her as she traversed through the Maw. It’s not the same one that haunted her in the Tower or in her basement prison, but she still finds that she can’t let it go. It wraps around her chest, and pulls her forward.

She lets go of Mono’s hand and tears herself out of his grip, and puts her lighter back in her pocket. Ignoring Mono’s pleading gasps and grabs for her hand, she slowly pushes the door open and pads into the next room.

There’s not much in here, except for a rug and a cabinet and piles of paper, but she doesn’t even notice all that. No, what she notices is the melody in her ears, getting louder with every step she takes. She has half-a-mind to keep her footsteps quiet as she creeps forward, the same way she would if she was trying to sneak around a monster, as the soft, soothing notes tighten around her chest.

She stops before she enters the next room. And she sees it.

There’s a monster, standing in front of a shelf with a mirror. The same monster that had been watching over as the Guests filed in, the one Mono called the Lady . Her sleek, dark hair is pinned up on her head, but the free strands fall over her shoulder, cut perfectly straight as she brushes down all the loose hairs. Her brown robe falls to the floor, and in the reflection of the mirror, Six can see she wears a clean, white mask — uncracked by bullies, and as perfect as porcelain.

She’s humming. She’s humming the song, the song from Six’s dreams. It’s not Six’s song, not the one from her music box, and it’s not the one that Mono taught her. But it’s still her song, the monster’s, and her entire brain feels muddled .

Behind her, having followed her in, Mono stops behind her and stares as well. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, and she doesn’t care, both of them still going unnoticed by the Lady. He’s silent when he does so, but she feels him reach for her hand, but as soon as his fingers brush hers — she pulls away.

The monster keeps humming.

Her stomach is empty.

And she can’t breathe.

▩ ▵ ▩

It’s second nature for Six to turn around and catch Mono when he jumps over the gap.

They’ve done this move before, done it so many times she barley buckles when she grabs his hand and he goes swinging. Behind him, the remainder of the path they had ran down crumbles into the void, and she can no longer see the Eyes that were chasing them — they must have given up, or simply couldn’t make it across the darkness below. She doesn’t want to know what is waiting down there.

Her entire body is sore. Her mind is numb. She can’t feel anything, except the burn in her arm as she holds Mono in the air, and the pounding of her heart against her ribcage. Even if she can’t see the Eyes, she still feels like she’s being watched, and her stomach feels empty inside like she accidentally left something behind when they ran.

But she — she can’t remember what. Trying to grasp at her memories is like trying to catch mist in her hands. It slips through her fingers, dissipates into nothing, only leaving her with the vague feeling of coldness and the emptiness in her chest. In her hand, Mono’s skin burns against her, and in her ears she can hearing his echoing, booming voice.

She breathes in, breathes out, and prepares to pull her friend over the edge despite how much everything inside of her aches. She looks down below them. There is nothing but darkness, just like the gap where her memories should be, but what her gaze end up focusing on is — of course — Mono.

The first thing she realizes his that he’s not wearing her bag.

The sight shocks her so much it takes a moment to register in her brain, and when it does her grip on his hand tightens. She can see his hair in full detail, the way it falls over his ears and brushes across his forehead, the tips shining purple in the light of the Tower. His skin is, well, dirty. A tiny bit ashen, if she was to choose a colour, pale and washed-out and with a grey tinge to it, like he’s a bit sickly.

Of course, she’s drawn to the features of his face most of all. His nose, covered in dots that blend into his skin. His mouth, lips cracked, and his cheeks, with faint, pale scars from his numerous falls crossing all over his skin. After having never seen his face for so long, the surprise of it makes her freeze. It mixes with something in her chest, something she thinks is excitement, maybe, or even relief, finally seeing her friends face after so long.

But then their eyes meet. And her heart goes cold.

Because, because his eyes are —

His eyes are wrong .

His eyes are not like hers, or any other child’s she’s seen. Instead of being white around the edges, Mono’s are filled with static, looking like they were ripped straight from a television screen. And the only way she can tell that he is looking at her is the white dots that meet her own dark eyes. It’s not normal. He’s not normal.

She remembers all the times he stood silently, still as a dead body. All the times he never shivered in the cold. All the times he took too long between breaths.

She remembers the eyes that stared at her from underneath a wide-brim cap, as the monster held her in his hand and dragged her through the television screen.

They’re the same eyes. It’s the same face.

It’s Mono’s face.

“Six?” He asks, confused why she hasn’t pulled him up yet, but she can’t. She’s frozen in time, unable to move, as she stares into his eyes.

Something is wrong here — and it’s Mono. It’s Mono, Mono, Mono.

▩ ▵ ▩

The final time Six aims the mirror, the Lady lets out an anguished cry, and goes falling back into the darkness.

The force of the flash sends Six stumbling back as well, knocking right into Mono who had trailed her heels the entire time, following her from light beam to light beam. He never got in the way, but everytime the Lady had circled closer, he gasped and clutched at his chest, like something was hurting him. But Six didn’t feel any pain, no panic or fear at all. Only cool, calm collectedness, as she ran from light beam to light beam and shielded her and Mono with the mirror she stole from the monster’s bedroom.

But the final time, when they both go flying, she hears a CRACK as the glass on the mirror shatters. Mono lets out an ‘oof’ when she topples on top of him, and she feels a small bit of guilt since he had already got banged a lot in the short (is it short? She can’t tell the time ) since they got here. To the Maw.

The darkness, the artificial one that the Lady seemed to spawn with her very presence, the one she glided from as smoothly as if she walking, seems to creep in around them as the light beams they had ran to dim. Six pushes herself off Mono and crawls over to grab the mirror again, but only sees her own multiplied reflection in the shattered glass, and she quickly turns away. She doesn’t know why the mirror was the thing that hurt the Lady, but she does know that without it, Six has no power here.

They’re alone now. No defences.

“Six?” Mono pushes himself to his elbows, but winces when he moves too fast. She snaps over to him, and sees that he’s ripped his bag off his head to pant heavily. His skin is pale, the bandage across his forehead starting to come loose and slip off his head. His eyes are wide, pleading with her, and his hand resting on the ground curls into a fist. “Six, we — we need to go. Now .”

His voice is stern on the last word, almost bleeding into static, and Six bares her teeth. That’s the voice that makes her head hurt, and Mono shouldn’t ever use that voice on her, because he’s her — he shouldn’t use on her. He’s not allowed to.

A low, light groan grabs her attention, and Six whips around again to see that the darkness has cleared up enough she can see the monster. Except now, instead of standing regal and proud, overlooking the lesser beings — the Lady is collapsed on the ground, resting on her elbows and breathing heavily. Her mask, cracked down the middle, lays discarded to the side.

Six’s stomach growls.

Pitching forward, she clutches at her middle as another intense bout of hunger overtakes her. It feels like claws ripping at her insides, threatening to swallow her whole if she doesn’t swallow it first, and she falls to her knees in the middle of the room, the broken mirror still mocking her. Empty, empty, empty, she feels empty .

Clenching her teeth, she looks back over at Mono. He had gotten her food before, hadn’t he? That was what he did. He could do it again.

However, when she looks over at him, Mono only makes a pained sound and pulls himself backwards, away from Six and away from the Lady. His bandage has slipped fully off his head, falling to the floor, stained red. Six realizes the cause of his panic a moment later, when she manages to turn her head enough to see that the Lady is reaching out towards them. No, not towards them. Towards Mono .

The monster makes a noise that could almost be described as words, if monsters were able to actually communicate. Whining, high-pitched, almost like she’s hurt . It reminds Six of a monster she saw before, one who spoke like the speaker of a television, but she can’t recall much more than that. The hunger overtakes all her senses, overwhelming her head and making it hard to think except for the ever-present thought of consume.

There’s two things she can eat here, and when the Lady reaches towards Mono again, the choice is easy.

Pushing herself to her feet, she only manages a few steps towards the Lady before Mono realizes what she’s doing and exclaims, “ Six! ” Her hunger has subsided enough that she can walk, now that she has a target, but Mono is still close enough to her that when he reaches out his fingers brush the fabric of her sleek raincoat.

“Six. Six, no —“ Mono moves to stand up and go after her, but his leg twinges and he falls, loudly, to his knees, still reaching out for her. “Six, Six, no no no, Six, please —“

She doesn’t hear him. She glides over to the monster gasping on the ground, footsteps silent as Mono makes a choking sobbing sound, like he’s not even breathing. The monster’s chest moves up-and-down as she pushes herself to her hands, arms still bent to keep her low to the ground, dark hair falling like a wave over her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to have notice Six drawing closer, which is going to be her last mistake.

Her first was thinking she could threaten them.

Six stops a few steps away from her, content that she won’t attack her just yet. The monster, the Lady, looks over at her. Her hair falls away.

Their eyes meet.

“Six! ” Mono says, still collapsed on the ground, not able to move any further. Six still doesn’t hear him, caught in the monster’s gaze.

Their eyes match. Dark, deep pools of darkness; not full of static, normal on first glance. But there’s something underneath, and it makes her stomach growl.

Six snarls, and closes the short distance between them to dig her nails into her exposed shoulder, free of hair and fabric. Her nails leave dark angry marks wherever she slices, and the Lady gasps quietly, her skin now stained red. Another grumble of hunger racks her frame, and Six sees the pale expanse of her neck with the eyes of a monster.

Mono sobs.

“I’m sorry.” He gasps, drowning in his own lack of breath, like he’s soaked in blood and swamp water and rain. “Six, please .”

She digs her teeth into her throat as Mono screams.

▩ ▵ ▩

“Six?” Mono gasps again, his weird unnatural eyes wide and pleading. He still dangles in her hand, his entire life hanging in her palm, and the power of it twists in her gut like claws piercing flesh.

She can drop him, if she wants. And there’s a horrible, ugly, overwhelming part of her that wants to. She wants to let him fall, wants him to feel the pain of betrayal she did when he unleashed the Thin Man on her, she wants him to know.

She thinks that maybe he did it on purpose, letting the Thin Man take her. They have the same eyes, after all, the same voice and the same face. They’re the same. It’s the reason he wanted to come here in the first place, the reason that sometimes his chest would pause between breathes for just a bit too long, the reason he pushed the door into the ocean and let her come along.

He’s a monster. Just like the others.

She should drop him. She even tenses up, ready to do, except —

I’m gonna save you.

Just hold on a little bit longer.

I’m sorry.

None of that is true, is it?

He could have left her in the Hunter’s cabin. He could have left her in the School. He could have left her here, in the Signal Tower, but instead every single time he came back for her. He fought monsters and ran through hallways and never, ever gave up on her. He freed her, he gave her his coat, he kicked the ball back at her and cut her hair with broken glass even when it made his own palms bleed.

And even when the television screens sucked him in, even when they called out to him like her music called out to her, he still came back and saved her. And every time a television called out to him, it was like he couldn’t hear her, couldn’t see her, and she brushed it off at the time —

I’m so, so sorry.

But she knows better now. There’s something about this place. This horrible, twisted place, that wishes to keep them here until they’re sucked dry, nothing more than skeletons to feed on. No — it wants to keep Mono here. Like he was a horrible, twisted monster with no mind of its own and no remorse, a monster that would keep her locked up and dead.

She thinks of the girl in the yellow raincoat.

She thinks of Mono.

He is not a monster. He’s her friend. And this place is not allowed to have him.

So she lets go.

So she pulls him it up.

▩ ▵ ▩

She pulls away from the bloody monster and feels the power coursing through her veins.

She’s no longer hungry, that much is for certain. All the hunger in her body has been replaced with something far more powerful, and far more consuming. She can feel it pump through her body, settling between her ribs and biting at her ankles like mist, like smoke, almost like ash on her tongue. It feels terrible. It feels wonderful.

She looks down at the monster dead at her feet, the Lady of the Maw no longer in power, reign coming to an whimpering close. She was weak, but now she is strong, and nothing is going to stop her now.

She hears the sound of sobbing behind her and turns.

There’s a child behind her. He’s sobbing, soft brown hair falling over his pale forehead, standing shaky on his feet. His trenchcoat blows around him like a shield, but his gaze focused somewhere behind her, in the darkness that now bows it her. For a moment, she thinks she hears the buzz of static and a coldness not belonging to her, but it dissipates so quickly she marks it as unimportant.

What is important his the boy. His eyes focus on her.

His eyes.

His eyes are wrong, but familiar. Dangerous.

“Six?” The boy asks, and she regards him cooly, unsure of what he’s doing here or how to proceed. That’s her name, she knows that, but hearing it from his mouth makes her feel … odd. There’s something about him, something odd, she can see it in the way he swirls and stumbles and vibrates.

It hits her, suddenly. He’s not supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be back there.

She takes a step forward, and he takes a step back. He’s not supposed to be here. Something’s wrong here, very wrong, because she should not be facing any resistant here.

But when he says, “ Six, I’m sorry .” she pauses, because his voice seems familiar and something is wrong here. He’s not supposed to be here but he is, something is wrong, something had gone wrong and she needs to fix it but she doesn’t want to fix it because he’s here and he’s supposed to be here forever, at her side except he’s not and something is wrong here —

He lifts his hand and suddenly, everything is shifting, vibrating, and it makes her ears pop. She snarls, the smoke in her veins getting ready to retaliate, rising up and ready to strike —

She hears the sound of static.

Something snaps back into place.

Six gasps like she just awoke from a bad dream, and stumbles forward, clutching at her chest. She doesn’t know what just happened, but it’s like a fog has been lifted, the pouring rain has stopped. She’s suddenly hyperaware of everything around her; the wood under her feet, the blood on her teeth, the mangled corpse of the Lady behind her and Mono standing in front of her, hand outstretched and still vibrating like a television frequency.

Mono.

She looks at him. Their eyes meet. It hits her all at once.

And she screams.

“Six!” Mono rushes towards her, arms spread out like he wants to grab her, but she scrambles back and ends up tripping over her own feet, still screaming like a banshee. Her voice cracks and her throat hurts and her lungs squeeze out all the air they can hold, and she takes a deep breath and starts screaming again.

She — she just — oh, god, her stomach feels like it’s sick and she’s gonna vomit except she can’t, but she can still taste the blood in her mouth and it’s sticky, wet in her mouth, coating her skin and her teeth and her hair until she’s drowning in it —

SIX!

Mono is screaming back at her. And she doesn’t have to listen, she knows. But she does.

She shuts her mouth and looks at him. He’s crouched away from her, where he had been before, with his hands extended out in front of him. The sight alone is enough to startle her back to the present, if his voice wasn’t enough, and she can see his mouth set firmly and his hand steady in the air, reaching out towards her.

“Hey.” He says, barely more than a whisper. “Over here.”

His hand is pressed against his chest, and the paper bag boy says, “Mono.”

The broken door bobs in the waves. It must be his name, she thinks. Mono. It’s a strange name, but not any stranger than the boy himself, so she’s not going to knock him for it.

Instead, she points to herself, and says, “Six.”

She hasn’t told anyone her name is a long time. It … it feels nice.

“Mono.” She breathes, voice breaking into a choked noise at the very end. He tilts his head at her.

“Over here.” He repeats, I’m right here. I’m over here. I’m listening, can you hear me, I’m over here. Here, here, here.

She crawls over, back to his side, and stops in front of him. She leaves the broken a Lady lost in the darkness, and moves to take his hand outstretched before her, but hesitates at the last second. Her hands are still sticky and coated with blood, and if she touches Mono, she’ll stain him too.

He closes the distance between them, uncaring, and says, “You’re okay.”

She doesn’t believe him, but nods anyways, grateful he’s even still here. He manages to give her a small smile, a quick uptick of his lips, before it falls again and he leans closer to her. She doesn’t lean back, and his eyes — the white part of them, his pupils, she thinks — dart all over her face, before they settle on her eyes. The contact holds for a moment. Her hand burns in his grip.

“Your eyes are different.” Is what he says. “Your pupils. They’re … smoky.”

Confused, she lets go of one of his hands to reach up and touch her face, but only meets the slick feeling of blood staining her cheek. It’s sticky and wet and it makes her breath hitch, before her heart begins beating twice as fast and her breathing starts to match. She digs her nails into both her cheeks, not even hearing her own rapid breathing, she just needs to — she needs to get it off —

“Hey, hey.” Mono grabs her wrists and pulls her hands away, just like she did whenever he pulled at his hair. “Hey. Stay for a minute. I’m gonna go find something, okay? Don’t touch it. Don’t touch your face. Okay?”

His touch and his voice ground her enough to nod, and he nods back before he lets go of her wrists and stands up. She places her hands on the floor and breathes as he patters off, trying to resist the urge to claw at her face again. Or claw at her stomach, or at her sides.

But her vision is blurry. She feels a lot more aware than she has in a long time.

Mono returns a few minutes later with a small damp cloth she has no clue where he found, and he uses it to gently clean her face and her hands. His own hands are clean now, but she remembers the scars on them, and the static that burns on his fingertips. She flinches away when he presses his hand to her cheek, but when he goes to pull away, she grabs onto it tight and doesn’t give him the chance to let go. He doesn’t fight her, and used his other hand to press the cloth against her bloody skin. It ends up stained a dirty brown, reminding her of when she cleaned his head wound, and her eyes drift up to his forehead again.

It’s dark in here still, but without the bandaid on she can see that it’s already starting to scar over. It usually takes a few days to do that, for a wound that big. She frowns, but then Mono pulls on the corner of her lip with the cloth, and that draws her attention away.

He keeps wiping down her face until she’s clean, and then works on her hands. Her face feels damp now, but not sticky, which is a much better feeling.

Her stomach churns. But she doesn’t feel like she’s going to throw up, so — so her body must have settled.

She has no clue why it has.

“What did you do?” She asks in a quiet voice, echoing in the empty room. Where he cleans between her fingers, Mono’s soft strokes doesn’t waver.

“Your shadow.” He replies.

“Huh?”

“In the City I could take them.” He shrugs and keeps his eyes focused on her hands, and his voice gets a heavy quality to it as he continues. “Who says I couldn’t give them back?”

Six doesn’t know what that means — she didn’t know there had been other shadows in the City — but even if she doesn’t understand the words she can hear the tone in which Mono says it. He says it kindly, warmly, without a hint of anger or deceit in his voice. Six used to think that that was a sign of dishonesty, a sign of a coward. If you were going to be angry or deceitful, don’t bother trying to hide it.

But she knows better than to think that of Mono, and she thinks Mono knows better than to think that of her too.

Up until for now, maybe.

“I’m sorry.” She says, because she is. She used to have trouble saying the words, because to say them aloud meant she was guilty of something and being guilty led to weakness, but she knows Mono well enough that he won’t take advantage of that.

“It’s not your fault.” Mono replies back, because he’s lying. It is her fault, she was weak and a coward and gave in. There’s something wrong here and it was her.

She shakes her head, damp hair clinging her neck. “It is .”

“It isn’t.” He says firmly. He finishes washing her hands and drops the cloth to the ground, to instead take her clean hands in his own and squeeze them tight. “Okay, Six? It isn’t . It’s just how it is. It’s what’s supposed to happen. It was supposed to happen to me, back in the City, it was supposed to happen to you here — but we broke it, okay? We’re okay now. It can’t have us anymore.”

She sniffles. He’s her friend, and they’re supposed to always be together, but she might be a monster even if he isn’t. Or maybe they’re both monsters. And maybe that’s okay.

“Please don’t leave.” She never thought herself weak enough to beg, but with the phantom feeling of blood still coating her chin, she feels like she’s splintering.

Mono looks at her like she’s stupid, but she’s not, but she does feel dumbfounded when he says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, “I told you I would never .”

He’s so stupid it makes her want to cry. Instead, she lets the overwhelming feelings take charge of her body and launches herself at him. He catches her immediately, and they cling to each other, pulling the fractured pieces of both their hearts back together. Their chests rise and fall in time to one another, and her hands find purchase in the fabric of his thick coat, as she feels his hands grip onto her raincoat just as tight. It’s so familiar, so warm, it makes her sniffle.

Her face is wet. She can hear Mono sob too.

She doesn’t know how long they stay there, curled together and crying. Every limb in her body is exhausted, heavy, that she feels like she can’t move. But eventually she has to pull back, just to look her friend in his weird, unnatural eyes and feel everything within him — his power, his words, his warmth — reflected back within herself. But even with the heaviness, deep down, she still feels …

Light.

This she knows to be true. The teeth that had sunken into her body pull out, leaving gaping wounds behind, but she knows well enough that wounds can heal. There’s nothing here now, nothing that’s trying to grab onto them, keep them alone and away from each other. Trying to make them grow up. Trying to keep them placated.

They’ve broken free. She pulled him up. He pulled her back. They have no reason to be scared anymore; there’s no alluring call of the Signal, no violent scratching in her stomach. They’re free. They’re free, they’re free, they’re free. Together, together, together.

Togetherness. It’s a promise.

“Let’s go.” Mono says, squeezing her hand against his own scarred ones, lovingly tended to and healed. “Together.”

She squeezes back, warm in her chest and warm in her stomach. “Together.”

Her stomach doesn’t growl, there’s no blood on her face, and she knows in her heart that this time is for real. And so they do.

With their matching eyes, they walk out of there hand-in-hand, and nobody — nobody in this entire, twisted horrible world — is going to be able to stop them.