My sleep that night is fitful. I have a dream that I don’t remember when I wake up the next morning. When I do, Bayan is in the room, and he places a pair of shoes on the foot of my bed.

He leaves without a word, and Nua stands up, going over to the bureau where he left our breakfasts. “Ready?”

“Sure.”

We meet Ava and Keol on the staircase, and she brings us through the downstairs living room to the garage. Then we go past the car, and out the door.

“We’re walking?” says Keol with a groan, and Ava nods, lighting a cigarette. “Just to the train station. We’ll be fine.”

“You can’t smoke in the train station,” he mutters, although he doesn’t look too disappointed.

I can smell the salt of the sea and a warm wind wraps around me as we go. After a few minutes I see a thin dirt path on the grass, and then it widens until it becomes paved. It’s alongside a road, but there are hardly any cars going by. I twist my mouth and think about Abigala, and also about Ava.

She walks a little ahead of us, Keol at her side, and Nua falls into step beside me. She has a bag on her shoulder and sunglasses perched on her nose and her dress seem to shimmer with thin threads of gold weaved into the black. She’s talking to Keol again but in the same low inaudible voice she was using the day I found them in the hallway.

Nua sees me watching them and grins slightly. “What a pair, aren’t they.”

“They seem to like each other,” I say in slight disbelief, and he laughs. “They absolutely hate each other, or at least they say they do. But they’re so incredibly attracted to each other that they use their hatred to tear each other apart.”

“Yeah,” I murmur, remembering the night I spent with Ava, and Nua watches me for a moment. “She’s a very interesting wife.”

I agree. “She told me she’s never done anything with you because you never wanted it,” I say quietly, and he snorts. “What, when you slept with her?”

I flush, and he takes it as an answer. “Yeah. No.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs. “I never really attracted her like he did.”

“She could force you.”

“She could,” he agrees. “She doesn’t, though. And why would she, when she has Keol and now you?”

I look away, then back at the ground so I can see where I’m going. “I’ve never heard of a wife actually respecting when a husband doesn’t want to.”

“Yeah,” says Nua slowly. “She even listens to Keol when he says no.”

“Really.”

“Well, he’s only pushed her away once,” he says wryly, “from what I know. And he made it up to her at the next morning, so I don’t think she was too upset. But you didn’t have to sleep with her, if you didn’t want to.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly, not offering any elaboration. Nua raises his eyebrows but looks straight ahead. We’re falling behind, and Ava looks over her shoulder at us. She has her cigarette in between her slender fingers, and smoke comes out of her mouth as she says, “Are you two plotting something back there?”

Keol grins slightly, glancing over his shoulder at us, and Nua and I catch up. We’re all in our own conversations still though, and Nua continues on. “She’s one of the better ones, I think.”

“Easy for you to say,” I mutter.

“Yes, it is,” he agrees. “Because I know what could’ve happened if I got a wife that liked sex and lock and key, but I didn’t.”

“Lock and key? Our rooms don’t lock.”

He glances at me, shaking his head in exasperation, but it’s not at me. “Do you think they don’t have a way of keeping us somewhere if they wanted to?”

“What? How?”

“Never uses them,” he says. “Her mother used to, that’s how I know about them. They can put things on our doors if they want, and keep them closed. And that little room in the foyer, small, but big enough for a person.”

“What? She wouldn’t.”

“She who? Miss Ava, no. Miss Lilly, yes. She even told Ava to do it once, lock Keol in his little bedroom or something. She didn’t want to, though, and so Lilly asked if Ava was just going to let him go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, and she said why not, and that’s how Keol got his limited freedom.”

“Huh,” I say. I’m slightly impressed that she stood up to her mother like that, although she isn’t completely redeemable in my eyes. The beach house prison might be a beach house, but it’s still a prison.

I watch her flick some ashes to the side and Keol says something under his breath that makes her laugh, a real laugh instead of a humorless sarcastic one at one of our expenses. Keol looks at her, grinning, and then she responds in the same tone that makes him roll his eyes away from her. Nua shakes his head at them. “They’re ridiculous.”

I laugh a little. “She’s not…”

Ahead, we finally catch some of Keol’s words as he raises his voice above the car going by. He’s apparently chastising her about the smoking. “It’s a dirty habit, you know.”

She seems to be humoring him. “Mm.”

“Disgusting when you blow smoke at us. And bad for the environment, when you do that with the ashes.”

She flicks some more to the side.

“And it could kill you.”

“Hm. Wonder why you’re not encouraging it, then.”

“Trust me,” says Keol quietly, but with a hint of amusement in his eyes, “I want to be the one to kill you.”

She laughs, unperturbed, and steps in front of him as the path narrows. We go single file, and I let Nua go in front of me.

“She’s not as cruel as she could be,” he quietly completes my thought. “Probably hopes that if she treats her husbands well enough, wherever her brother is he’s being treated the same way.”

“Her brother?” I look at Nua in shock, and he laughs a little bit. “Thought you were the only twin in the house?”

I stop walking and stare at him, and he looks back at me. “Come on.”

“Hurry,” says Ava, glancing over her shoulder. She doesn’t give any impression that she had heard what Nua was telling me, but she smiles slightly. “We’ll miss all the fun.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I’ve never been on a train before. My parents used to tell me about a long time ago when the trains ran underground, because the roads were all full of people driving their own cars. But half a century ago, the government made everyone give up almost all their cars, and put a train system in place. Some people do still have cars, I know that, because Ava and her mother have a car; the trains don’t go to places like big private houses on the beach.

Ava puts her cigarette between her teeth and presses a button on a machine sitting in the sidewalk. It makes a beeping noise at her, and I look around. It’s the middle of the day; there aren’t very many people here waiting for a train. I can see the track in the middle of the road, a thin line of metal running down the center of the pavement, and a rumbling starts after a few moments of standing there. Ava takes one last inhale of her cigarette before dropping it on the ground and stepping on it, snapping her fingers at me and Nua. “Come on.”

And we board a train. A few of the people also at the station get on with us, and Nua and I sit down across from Ava and Keol, who puts his arm around her. There’s music playing in the background, and I watch the buildings go by as we start to move: a bakery, some apartments, a deli, a house, some apartments, a laundromat, apartments, apartments. Probably hopes that if she treats her husbands well enough, wherever her brother is he’s being treated the same way. After a few minutes we slow to stop, and one of the people who got on with us gets off. Ava sighs under Keol’s arm, her bag on the seat next to her.

The buildings grow bigger and more squished together, and we pass a car, way down below us on the road. Nua looks out the window too, but when we start to slow down at another stop we both turn around. Ava looks at us with a slight smile, and when the doors open again, everyone else on the train gets off. Thought you were the only twin in the house?

“Thank god,” says Ava when the doors close again, pulling her cigarettes out of her pocket again. Keol tries to grab them away from her, but she dodges him and then pulls away, standing up to light one.  He shakes his head. “You can’t do that in here.”

“Says who?” she says around the cigarette, and he points to a sign above my and Nua’s heads, showing a cigarette with a red x through it. Ava looks at it too, and shrugs. “Eh.”

The train goes over a slight bump, and Ava wobbles a little bit, holding her hands out to her sides, and then her face lights up and she looks up at the ceiling. “Oh, I love this song.”

She holds her hands out for Keol, who sighs, but stands up too, holding onto the railing above his head. She grabs on, pulling him close to her, and wraps her arm around his waist.

“Like I said,” murmured Nua as she takes the cigarette out of her mouth and rests her head on Keol’s shoulder. He smiles a little, but then she lifts it up and takes another drag and blows it in his face, and he lets go of her hand to wave it away, coughing.

“That can’t be good for him,” I say quietly, and Nua shrugs. “No, probably not.”

Thought you were the only twin in the house?

And then the train slows down again, and Ava looks out the window, and then says, “Oh, we’re here.”

“We’re here?” I repeat, suddenly nervous, and she looks at me and grins. “Yes we are. Welcome to town.”

Town, they called it a town? No, god no. I lived in a town before. This is a city.

The buildings rise high, scraping the sky, and there are giant TVs everywhere, playing ads for things that I didn’t even know existed. Cars screech around us, and everything overwhelms me for a moment. I can’t concentrate, and Nua takes my hand and leads me after Ava so we don’t get lost. Suddenly we’re climbing some stairs, Ava’s pulling out a wallet and flashing something at the man on the stairs, and then we’re inside.

The air conditioning hits me, and she turns around to look at us. She’s got her cigarette in one hand and is holding Keol’s hand with the other, and he raises his eyebrows at me. Ava smiles slightly. “You good?”

“Yeah,” I say faintly. Nua squeezes my fingers, and then lets go.

“Ma’am,” says another woman, peeking her head out from the other set of double-doors at the top of the stairs behind us, “there’s no smoking in here.”

Ava smiles and inhales long on her cigarette, and then says, “Okay.”

Smoke curls out of her mouth with her words, and the lady looks at her. Ava says, “Do you have an ashtray?”

The woman looks lost, and says, “Um,” and Ava says, “Oh, well. I’ll figure it out,” and leads us inside.

I hear Nua’s breath catch as we go through the second set of doors, and Ava grins, and says, “Stay on this floor.”

“There’s more?” says Nua quietly, and she laughs, pulling her laptop out of her bag and dragging Keol over to some tables.

“Holy shit,” I say under my breath. I didn’t even know this many books existed in the world.

This library makes the library at home look like Keol’s room. The ceiling is twenty feet above our heads and the shelves stretch all the way up. There are ladders to get to the tops if you have to. Nua’s eyes are wide, and then he glances at me, and says, “Come on.”

“Come on where?” I say, glancing over my shoulder at Keol and Ava. She’s on her laptop, and suddenly points to the screen for Keol to look at. Nua drags me behind one of the shelves, running his fingertips over the spines of the books, and then says, “We have to find the newspapers.”

I agree. I’m getting distracted by books while my sister is out there somewhere. Nua drags me around the entire place, occasionally getting distracted by gold writing on the spine or cursive letters or an author that he’s seen before, and then I tug on his hand. “Magazines.”

“Nice.”

We go over to them, and Nua grabs one, and then furrows his eyebrows. “These are from weeks ago.”

I look over his shoulder, and then go to the other side of the display, where newspapers sit. When I pick one up, though, it, too, is dated two weeks earlier. I look over it at Nua, and he shrugs at me. “Let’s ask.”

I follow him over to the desk where the lady who tried to tell Ava to stop smoking sits, and she doesn’t look at us until Nua says, “Excuse me.”

“May I see your identification, please,” she says, still not looking up from her computer, and Nua sounds slightly annoyed when he says, “I just have a question.”

She sighs, and says, “Yes?”

“These are old,” he says, showing her the magazine he’s holding. “Do you have any more recent papers?”

“Unless someone else is reading them,” answers the woman, “no.”

I make a face, and finally she looks up at me. “I’m sorry, who are you with?”

But Nua doesn’t have a chance to answer, because a loud noise sounds from outside. I look over my shoulder towards the doors, and then glance at Ava. She’s across the room, but stands, and suddenly Keol runs away from her.

“Keol,” she yells, and then swears and grabs her things and goes. The newspaper falls out of my hand, and Nua throws the magazine in the rude woman’s face and we go towards the doors too. Some of the other people in the library are going towards the windows to see what’s outside. Nua and I, though, go right after Ava outside.

The man who was waiting out there stops us. “Can I see your IDs?”

“She has them, she already went,” says Nua curtly, pushing past him, and I follow. When we’re back down to the street, I can see what’s happening.

There are people in the street. They are not doing anything dangerous; instead, they are drawing huge circles in the middle of the road, where the few cars that happened to be passing by have screeched to a stop. Nua and I watch someone for a moment, and then they look up to the sky and give a thumbs-up.

And then something falls, and splatters.

Nua and I jump back, and I squeeze my eyes shut as the loud noise bangs again. People yell, and I don’t know where Ava is, and I feel something splash over me. When I open my eyes, and look at Nua, I see that he’s covered in bright pink paint, and when I look down at myself, I realize I am too.

I look up to the rooftops. There are people standing up there, their mouths covered just as the people drawing on the road are, to hide their faces. I squint against the sun, and Nua says, “Aber.”

“What?” I say, and he takes a step back. “It’s a protest.”

I don’t respond; I don’t know what to say. People run around us, some covered in different colored paints as well, and I feel it happening again, there’s so much people, so much noise, I don’t know what to do, and I can’t breathe, where is Ava and Keol, where did Nua go? Everyone is lost, just like Abigala, I didn’t find anything out about her, she’s lost and I’m lost, we don’t know where each other is, and I can’t do anything. I don’t know where to look or what to do or how to breathe.

Suddenly a hand slips into mine; bony but strong and I know it’s Ava even before I look to the side to see her. Her other hand is in Nua’s and Keol is so close behind her that she can’t take a step back. She whispers, “Come on.”

Then she pulls on my arm so I stumble a little, and she’s dragging Nua and me away from the commotion, with Keol on her heels. Once we’re a little ways away Nua asks breathlessly, “Where are we going?”

She stops abruptly and Keol avoids crashing into her by crashing into me. She pulls me back close to her side as a long sleek black car halts in front of us, and then she drops Nua’s hand. “I called a car.”

She lets go of me to climb in, and Keol follows. Nua glances over his shoulder, gesturing for me to go, and once I’m in he closes the door behind him.

The seats in the car go around the edge, leaving a big space in the center. Ava’s lounging across the back with her feet on the seat, and Keol’s sitting next to her. Nua and I sit across from him. She leans her head back against the window as we start to move. “Yikes.”

“Yikes,” says Keol under his breath, lying down across the seat as well, and Ava adjusts herself so he can put his head in her lap. She exhales deeply. “We gotta go somewhere.”

“Where?” asks Keol, and she taps his nose. “Never you mind. But we’ll go home afterwards.”

He grumbles a little, but quiets down as we start to move. Cars make me sick and I lean my head back, staring at the ceiling. After a few minutes I feel like we should be home considering how short a walk it was, but the car keeps going, and I don’t have any windows to look out of.

Ava does, though. Her head is leaning against it so she can watch whatever’s outside go by, and her fingers are twisting in Keol’s hair. He has his eyes closed, relaxing into the movement of the car. They look like the perfect picture of husband and wife; at least, prominent and wife, if you didn’t think about the possessiveness that she’s stroking him with, as if he were a pet. Nua next to me is tapping his fingers against his knee, but when I glance at him he grins slightly at me.

When the car slows down, she lifts one of her legs up so quickly that Keol startles awake from his half-sleep, and grumbles more when she grins at him. She opens the door, slides out, and then says, “Stay here,” before slamming it shut, leaving us all alone in the car. Before any of us can react, a click sounds, and when Keol touches the door handle he’s unable to pull it himself.

“Dunno why she told us to stay, then,” he mutters, adjusting himself, and I finally just blurt out my anxiety. “What was that?”

“That protest?” asks Nua. “I dunno. Probably some social movement.”

“There have been a lot of protests lately,” says Keol lazily. “Against people like Lilly and the government.”

“Was it gonna get violent?” I ask, feeling my voice shake a little, and Keol laughs, leaning his head back. “A lot of things in life are violent, Aberworth.”

“Luckily for us, though,” says Nua, “not our wife. So we should just stay out of it.”

“Ava didn’t seem too scared,” I murmur, and Keol closes his eyes, relaxing. “What does she have to be scared of?”

I remember the horror stories my parents used to whisper, hushed in the darkness when they thought Abigala and I were asleep. Boys who escaped their wives, making their way to the shelter with ropes still around their wrists or necks, bruises covering their skin, unable to let anyone touch them without being reminded of what had been done to them. Those were the boys that Miss Lilly took away, the day that I got married.

Ava wrenches open the door again just then, and slides back into the car. As soon as the door closes it starts to move again, and Keol assumes his prominent position on her lap. “Did you find what you need?”

“Did you?” she responds, and he closes his eyes as answer. She glances at me, smiling slightly, but looks out the window again, her thin fingers lazily resuming their run through Keol’s hair. No one speaks much after that.