Nine two's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Nine two knelt in the wet dirt and drew the same face for the ninth time that day. Round cheeks. A gap where the mouth should go. Two dark eyes she could never make right. She whispered a name into the mud, then another. "Tam. Weller. Sorrow-girl." Her too-big yellow raincoat dragged in the puddle. She did not care. Somewhere behind these names lived a face, and she meant to learn whose it was. She had asked everyone. The bread woman. The old man who swept the steps. The children who threw stones at the puddles. None of them knew a Tam. None knew a Weller. Without one living person to say "yes, I remember that face," the drawing stayed a stranger. That was the wall she kept hitting. She had names and no owners. A cold light slid across the dirt. Nine two looked up. A rabbit made of shadow crouched beside her drawing. Its edges smoked like blown-out candles. One eye glowed purple. It did not breathe. It did not weigh on the mud at all. She had seen it twice before, always at the corners of rooms, always gone when she turned. This time it stayed. It hopped once, weightless, toward a slab of glass leaning against a wall she had never noticed. Moss furred the frame. The mirror was cracked into a hundred pieces, each shard holding its own bit of gray sky. Nine two crawled to it. The shadow rabbit sat by her knee. In the broken glass she saw herself split into pieces. But in the center shard, where the cracks made a small web, another face looked back. Not hers. Round cheeks. Dark eyes. The mouth she could never draw. Her breath stopped. "You," she whispered. She pressed the name up from her chest. "Tam?" The face in the shard moved its lips with hers. Behind the glass, more faces gathered, pale and dim, crowding to look out. The rabbit's purple eye brightened. Then, small and clear, a voice came through the crack. It was not the bread woman's. It was not any living voice she had asked. "My name is Wren," the face said. "Not Tam. You keep drawing me wrong." Nine two's hands shook in the mud. All this time she had chased the wrong names among the living. The witness she needed was not a person on the street. It was here, waiting in the glass, willing to speak. "Then show me," she said. "Show me who you were." The faces in the mirror pressed closer. The cracks widened with a soft sound, like ice on a pond. The rabbit rose and slipped into the glass. Cold air breathed out from the shards and touched Nine two's wet cheek. The mirror was not just showing her the face now. It was opening.