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There is a shadow at the end of the bed—again.
You and Hyuna exchange looks. You’re discomfited by Luka’s presence, but you don’t say anything when Hyuna cheerily calls him over.
Luka scampers up onto the bed, nestling alongside her. He gives you an inscrutable smile.
Hyuna turns to you. “Hyun Woo, do you want to sing tonight or should I?”
As one of the few blood-siblings in the Garden, Hyuna had been insistent that you build an ancestry together, like real families did in the old days. Over the years, you’ve both created a library of songs just for the two of you, hidden from the Garden. Every night, you spend hours singing to each other, learning the history you’re both creating.
You pause, eyeing Luka.
“How about I go?” Luka suggests brightly.
You and Hyuna exchange confused looks. “Sure,” you say slowly.
Luka straightens and clears his throat, a smile tugging at his lips.
You’ve known Luka for most of your time at the Garden. When you first met him, he had been small, weak, and breathtakingly beautiful, both in appearance and vocally. Your soft-hearted sister had taken him under her wing almost instantly.
He’s still small, his looks and music even more pleasing, but weak…weak isn’t a word you think applies to him anymore. Not with how his eyes are sharp and sly one moment, then round and angelic the next.
Luka is deceptive in a way you don’t wholly understand, his appearance and performances a cover for something dark lurking beneath. In his presence, you feel that slimy, stomach-turning shiver that you only experience around the aliens. It’s not a fair comparison, and yet…
Luka hums under his breath, then launches into a lilting, delicate melody. You jolt forward, blood going cold, unable to look away from the self-satisfied gleam in his eyes, the delight on Hyuna’s face.
That’s your song. That’s your song, a lullaby you’d written just for Hyuna, scribbled on napkins and scrap paper and smuggled away so that the Garden couldn’t steal it from you during practice.. Luka’s voice is clear and melodious, so sweet that you almost don’t hear the poison underneath. Your favourite composition turns into ash on his lips.
“Did you write that?” Hyuna gushes.
Luka meets your eyes. “I did.”
His face lights up when Hyuna ruffles his hair, but he doesn’t look away from you. There’s a taunt in the lift of his lip.
You squash your feelings and act. “Wow! That was great, Luka. It’s a great lullaby for kids! Kinda silly and fun, right, Hyuna?”
Hyuna laughs. “That’s because his voice hasn’t changed yet,” she teases, pulling at Luka’s cheek.
Luka’s expression shutters. He isn’t fast enough to hide the murder in his eyes. Hyuna distracts him soon enough, but you feel the weight of his gaze up for the rest of the night until the moment he falls asleep.
You stare into the darkness, your stomach a pit.
Luka is dangerous. His music is dangerous—beautiful, but made of falsehood, mimicry, lies, just to get what he wants. And what he wants is your sister.
You reach for Hyuna’s hand and squeeze it.
Whatever he tries to do, you’ll be there to watch and protect Hyuna, just like she protects you. You’re family, and that, at least, is something Luka will never be able to steal.
—
There is nothing more comforting than sitting in the artificial grass of the Garden’s grounds with Mizi curled up against you. It’s one of the few places you can get a modicum of privacy, especially when Ivan manages to drag Till away.
Today the air is warm, tasting faintly like smoke and ash on the back of your tongue. Soon, it will snow.
Mizi loves the snow.
You let out a long, quiet breath.
Your own competition is in two years. Your bodies and those of your friends will join that yearly snowfall, delighting some other little girl with stars in her eyes.
But Mizi won’t be part of it. You will make sure of that.
“Sua?”
The thought digs claws into your chest—just two more years. Two more years until…
And what do you have to show for it?
You breathe out again, measured. Your sister’s voice is a constant, furious part of your mind, and never more so than when you are kind to Mizi.
You coddle her, your sister corrects. Usually, you can ignore her. But today…
“Sua,” Mizi says again. You disguise a flinch. “Did you hear me?”
“Hm?”
“I’m tired,” she sighs. “Can you sing me something?”
She’s asking for a lullaby.
You gaze at her, limbs heavy with dread, fear hammering in your heart. You have tried so hard to make Mizi palatable for the Garden, to ensure her victory through softness and brightness. But what if you’ve been going about this all wrong? What if your sister is right, and Mizi’s naivete—sometimes sweet, sometimes grating—will doom her?
Something takes over you in that moment, grabs hold of your tongue with harsh, forceful hands.
“Alright,” you say.
You open your mouth, and you sing your sister’s lullaby just the way she did.
You sing it with teeth, ugly and commanding and raw. You sing with kindness wrapped in barbed wire, wounding in its attempt to guard. You sing to break bone into a million little cuts, hoping that each healing will bring enough new strength for the pain to be worth it. You sing in the only way your sister knew how to protect you.
You don’t expect the sudden surge of loss that washes over you, softening your words just a little without your intent, just enough for you to notice. You hated your sister, but you also didn’t. Especially not when she sang to you in the way only she could—without pretense, without a facade, without false hope.
When she sang it was beautiful, but most importantly, it was real.
Mizi is almost asleep by the time you finish, her cheek pressed into your stomach. A little frown creases her forehead. “That made me sad,” she says, opening one bleary eye at you. “It was really nice, Sua, but I like happier lullabies.”
You stare at her with wide eyes.
For one hot moment, your sister’s rage becomes your own. You want to shake Mizi until that gleam of ignorant, brilliant joy disappears from her eyes, to scream at her with a voice burned into your memory, look around you, you’re being used, there is no happiness in this world, you stupid little girl, only survival, and you have to survive, so open your eyes, OPEN YOUR EYES—
But when Mizi closes her eyes and nuzzles into you again, the claws in your chest turn into stones. A lump forms in your throat.
“Sometimes, you need a little sadness, don’t you think?” you say instead.
Mizi is already asleep. You swallow the disappointment, the fear. It’s not her fault that she’s so gullible—it’s yours. You’ve done everything in your power to keep her bright, kind, hopeful. It is what you hope will endear her to audiences, what will save her, even if it kills you. It is just a different form of protection.
Wrong, your sister whispers venomously. Weak. Your kindness will kill her. And it will kill you, after all the work I’ve put into saving you. What a waste.
You stare out at the fields of artificial green, Mizi warm and solid in your lap. The staleness of the air burns your throat.
“All of this is a waste anyway,” you whisper back. “What’s so wrong about softness when the world will end no matter what?”
For once, your sister doesn’t answer. No one does.
You sit with the weight of the world on your shoulders, the wind carrying away your tears as softly and quietly as flakes of snow.
***
TIll finds you in your room, dead-eyed and so battered that he is one giant bruise. You take in the new lacerations and bruises and sigh. Pulling out your supplies, you set to the grim, heartrending work of putting him back together.
“You could stop,” you say after a short silence, as you always do.
“I can’t let them win, Ivan,” he says, as he always does.
There is no winning, you want to say, the next verse in this tired song you share on nights like this, but this time, you let it be. He always sounds so fierce, so righteous, but even you can hear the doubt beginning to creep in. You might want him to stop getting himself hurt so often, but you want him to stop fighting even less, not with mere weeks before your competition. Fighting means he has a chance to win.
Not like you. You’re a lost cause—you can admit that. You are worthy only in what you can do for the people you love—Till most of all.
And still…Do you only come to me because you can’t go to Mizi? you want to ask. But you stay quiet. You know the answer, and you don’t have the strength to hear it aloud.
You finish patching him up and store the rapidly-dwindling roll of bandages in the cubby under your bed. Then, you shuffle onto the bed and lean against the wall. Like he has done so many times before—but not enough, you think selfishly, not enough—Till leans into your shoulder exhaustedly, allowing your arm to settle around him.
And you begin to sing.
You could sing beautifully, but the beauty in music has been stolen from the world since you were born, maybe even before, and a performance is not what either of you need. Beauty is for the Garden, not this wounded, raw space between his head and your shoulder, between his hair and your cheek, between the atoms of your hand clenched around his.
The important thing about lullabies: they don’t need to sound beautiful. They only need to sound real.
You rasp the edges of your consonants, close your mouth around the vowels, hover just on the edge of the key, oscillating between too sharp and too flat. You sing a lullaby, one you wrote long ago and keep close to your chest, a song you will never give up to the Garden.
Till is quiet when you finish. You feel his exhausted tears wetting your shirt. This, too, is routine—you say nothing, and neither does he, and all that remains is a silence that will eventually carry you both into uneasy slumber.
But something is different tonight.
“Someone tried to sing to me, once,” Till murmurs. “When I was very small, I think. A child.”
You say nothing.
“I don’t think she was supposed to. But I loved to sing, and I think she wanted to—to…” A knife’s edge of frustration enters Till’s voice as he searches for words to describe something that neither of you really understand. “I think she did it for me. To help me sleep. To make me smile.”
You think of your own childhood, flashes of darkness and loud voices and cold, slimy tendrils wrapped around your throat. You think of the nothingness before that, the void of memory. You think about Till’s past, infinitely worse than yours. You say nothing.
“She wasn’t very good.” Till’s voice is soft, melancholic. “I don’t remember much, but I remember that. She wasn’t very good. But…it was beautiful.”
A world of longing confusion in that word, beautiful.
Beauty hurts. Beauty makes you animals, playthings in the hands of uncaring, lascivious gods. Beauty belongs to the Garden.
But someone wanted to make Till happy. Someone cared enough to sing, once upon a time. And it was beautiful. But it was real.
What bridges that gap between concepts is too sacred for you to understand in this life. But at least Till had it, once.
Till drifts off to sleep, warm against your side. You rub your thumb over his shoulder, allowing your eyes to slip closed.
In the moments before you fall asleep, you make one wish for yourself. You hope that one day, Till will remember your lullabies. You hope that one day, with that same awe in his voice, he will call them beautiful, too.