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Jordan grows up tall and model-pretty, willow-wand thin with flashing blue eyes and soft hair that falls in a gold sheet and does just what she tells it to, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. Sara is more like their mom, still tall, but with broad shoulders even at thirteen and dark hair she wears up in a clip every day of her life. She winces when Jordan turns corners too fast, and their mother sometimes calls her by the wrong name.
Jake can’t even look at her.
Jordan is fourteen when her sister dies, fifteen when she takes her allowance to a cheap hair salon at the furthest end of the bus line and begs them to cut her hair off. She thinks they recognized her, but they did it, tied her hair back into a ponytail and chopped it off until she had barely two inches of it. That was two months ago, and Jordan still strokes her fingers through the short, feathery gold and wonders what Rachel would say.
Rachel’s been dead a whole year, the strangest year in human history, the start of a whole new era. Half of Jordan’s class is so enthralled with the reality of aliens that the war seems to have passed them by completely, and they’re exhausting. The other half have parents or siblings or friends who wear the awkward, flattened affect of someone who doesn’t remember how to control their own bodies, or wear it themselves, and they’re worse. They get quiet when Jordan talks, get tearful over news of trials and alliances, bring flowers to monuments and memorials.
Jordan brings flowers, too, but—at least she’s bringing them for people she knew.
Sometimes Rachel’s memorial has people at it, and Jordan never goes at those times. Her family, Jake’s family, everyone with a claim on the kids who saved the world, they’re the most famous people on Earth. Probably even the Andalites would recognize Jordan, by now, because they know Rachel’s face, and Jordan looks so much like her big sister. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
The man who works security in the cemetery—because it’s a war hero’s grave now, and there’s security—knows Jordan’s face too, but he doesn’t make her talk, he just lets her in without a single question. It’s just, hey, there, Miss Jordan, because he’s a nice Southern boy, or he was before he moved to California and became a security guard and a Controller, in that order.
Jordan likes the security guard, likes him for his quiet nod and Georgia drawl, a weird pairing. He has a scar on his face, triple lines raking up from above his left eyebrow to below his cheekbone, deep enough to nick the bone. His eye still works, but it’s half-hidden by the way the scar tissue pulls his eyelid down, and when people stare at him like he’s been touched by a god, he stares right back until they look away. He ruffled Jordan’s hair, the first time he saw the new cut, and said she looked mighty fine, darling.
Endearments sound strange when someone doesn’t always remember how to make their voice sound like it has emotions in it. Jordan has the class to keep her mouth shut about it.
“Lovely irises, Miss Jordan,” he says tonight, and it must be a good day for him, because he sounds almost like a person. “Did she like them?”
“She had a black thumb,” Jordan says, looking down at the handful of flowers she bought on impulse at a bodega on her way. They’re not as big or flashy as most of the flowers that show up in this graveyard are—they’re wrapped in newspaper, not pretty ribbons, but they’re purple and Jordan likes them. “Couldn’t have grown a cactus if her life depended on it. She took anything green personally.”
Giving this information away to him hurts a little less than it might if he were someone else, if he weren’t someone who wore the war on his face. He paid for the right to know about the people who didn’t kill him, paid for it in blood, and maybe that’s it. Jordan thinks it’s something Rachel would have agreed with.
It helps that he chuckles a little, a smile flashing across his face. It dimples on the right side, pulls at the scars on the left.
“Fair enough. Find me to lock up after you when you go on home, all right?” he asks, just like always.
“Yeah,” Jordan says quietly. “Thanks.”
The cemetery closes at six. It’s barely fall, almost October, so there’s still some light between the end of operating hours and dark, and it’s slow and syrupy gold in the cemetery, long shadows of headstones and monuments lying sprawled on the grass as the sky burns overhead. The cemetery slopes upward toward the crest of the hill, dotted here and there with trees and a handful of tended shrubs. It’s not a bad place for your bits and bones to spend eternity, in Jordan’s opinion, but it’s not very…Rachel.
Then again, she couldn’t be buried at Express, not without upsetting more people than probably even Rachel would be willing to tick off.
The hill is steeper than it looks from the road—they’re not in San Francisco, but Jordan is panting a little by the time she cuts across the grass to reach the marble tower at the top. She half-tosses herself onto the ground, her back to the marble, and looks up at the clouds turning red and bronze in the setting sun. There was a flock of sparrows on the power lines when she started up, and they’re rushing up into the sky now, sweeping away in a black cloud while another bird, big and broad, circles lazily in the fading heat.
The cemetery staff collect all the offerings that get left here at the end of the day, or else Rachel’s monument would be three feet deep in American flags and tearful letters and pictures and wreaths. The letters and pictures get sent to their mom. Sometimes she sends them on to Jake. Jordan’s pretty sure he’s never opened one, ever. But it means that the monument is clear now, an hour after close, and when Jordan has her breath back, she kneels up to set the irises in pride of place, beneath the inscription.
“Brought you some flowers, Rach,” Jordan says, crossing her legs and brushing her jeans off. “I think you’d hate them. But, you know.”
She braces her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, and Jordan sits there in the shadow of her sister’s grave, breathing in the smell of another summer ending. It was summer, high and hot, when the war ended. More than a year, now.
“I, uh. I got asked on a date the day before yesterday,” Jordan tells the marble. She tries to feel like she’s talking to Rachel, when she does this, and sometimes it even feels right, because Rachel, for all her temper and perpetually moving hands and pacing feet, was a good listener. The stone is a good listener, too. “I haven’t told Mom yet. I don’t even know where to start to tell Mom. But, uh. I think I’ll go.”
Jordan flicks at the tuft of hair over her ear. The stone doesn’t answer her, sitting there and cooling in the setting sun, and the weight of it rushes over Jordan again like the tide coming in after a long ebb—the stone doesn’t answer, because Rachel isn’t here.
“I’ve never been on a date before, Rach,” she says, trying not to let her voice crack. Jordan clenches her jaw until her teeth hurt, eyes burning. “I—I don’t know what to do with my hair, and I don’t—I don’t know what to wear. I can’t even put on lipstick, Rach, you were supposed to teach me how to put on lipstick.”
It’s silly and shallow and it makes her throat hurt. Jordan closes her eyes and scrubs away a few renegade tears, swallowing against the lump choking her until she doesn’t feel quite so dangerously close to crying. Out of all the things to cry about, it’s stupid to cry because her big sister isn’t there to do her makeup for her first date.
Her eyes are still closed when she hears a soft, flat voice, saying, “Sorry. I didn’t realize there was anyone here.”
Jordan startles, hard, because she didn’t hear anyone come up. The boy is lingering beside the cluster of trees that opposes Rachel’s monument to the back, his arms crossed over his chest like he doesn’t know what else to do with them. He has rumpled hair, somewhere between blonde and brown, and wide dark eyes that seem to stare straight through Jordan’s skull, into her brain. He’s dressed like half the world, these days—morph-chic, they call it, still wildly popular—but his clothes are plain, a grey t-shirt and black shorts, both fitted to his skin.
He looks like a kid, Jordan thinks blankly. He’s tall, gangly, but he can’t be more than thirteen.
“Cemetery’s closed,” Jordan says, because she can’t think of anything else to say.
The hard, frozen look on his face shifts for a moment, the suggestion of a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “I—I didn’t mean to interrupt. I saw—I thought you would leave. I didn’t realize who you were, figured you’d come for someone else.”
Jordan wants to tell him to fuck off, but she can’t quite make herself, so she pats the grass beside her and says, “You can sit, or whatever.”
The boy eyes her closely, like he’s expecting a trap, but slowly, he takes a few steps and folds himself down beside her. He sits with his arms wrapped around his knees, curled in on himself, and he stares at the monument like he’s dying of thirst and it’s the Fountain of Youth.
“Did you know her?” Jordan asks civilly, because she can be goddamn civil even if she’s trying to have a private moment.
His head snaps around and he cocks his head at her, looking confused. And then he flexes his hands and says, “Right.” He smiles, a little, and it looks forced. “Sorry, Jordan. I, um. I don’t think we’ve actually met, like this. The last year of the war—” He shakes his head, and it’s a quick, reflexive movement. Birdlike.
Jordan tries really, really hard not to let her jaw drop. “Holy shit,” she whispers.
Tobias actually does grin a little, then, shows teeth and everything. It makes his eyes look old and tired, but he’s cute, when he’s being sincere. Jordan has a vague memory of seeing him, once or twice, in passing, but—
“God, you’re a kid,” she blurts out thoughtlessly.
“Ha,” Tobias says flatly.
“I mean—no, shit, I’m sorry, I just—” Jordan presses both hands over her face and shakes her head, palms pressed to her flaming cheeks. “Can I start over?”
“Sure,” Tobias says.
“I guess this is a morph, right?” she asks, peeking through her fingers. “Of you.”
“Yeah. Morphs don’t age, so.” Tobias frees one hand from being locked around his knees and flutters his fingers at himself, an awkward gesture made worse by the way he’s obviously uncomfortable talking to her. “Thirteen, unless I get myself stuck.”
Jordan nods, and slides her hands down so that they’re propping up her chin again. The two of them fall silent, a tense quiet vibrating between them, and Jordan wonders what she’s supposed to say to Tobias. She’s pretty sure her mom met him, at least a few times, but while the three of them were hiding out in the Hork-Bajir valley, Tobias was doing recon about eighteen hours a day, unless they were on a mission, with the other six dedicated almost exclusively to either planning or sleeping. They were all on schedules like that. Jordan barely remembered what Rachel’s face looked like for those months—
She cuts that thought off. It was barely a funny joke then, and it’s not, now.
It’s Tobias who finally breaks the silence. “You cut your hair.”
“Yeah,” Jordan says, putting a hand up automatically. “A couple months ago, I guess.”
“I know,” Tobias says, and when Jordan looks over at him he makes a side-to-side motion with his head, like a bird trying to decide on a perch. “She worried about you guys,” he says, flicking his fingers at the monument. There’s a moment, and his voice is barely a murmur when he speaks again. “Came by your house a lot over the last year.”
Jordan knows that feeling.
“I cut it off because I hated looking like her,” she says, fast, so fast that her tongue trips over itself. “I kept—I kept seeing myself in mirrors and thinking—” She stops, shaking her head until her short hair flutters around her like down. “And then it wasn’t her, and I hated it so much, and I kept crying and crying, so I—” Jordan makes a harsh motion toward her hair when her voice gives out on her, and Tobias nods.
“It suits you,” he says quietly.
“Thanks,” she whispers.
They sit in silence for a while—not too long, Jordan thinks, no more than five minutes, with Tobias resting his cheek on his knees and staring at the foot of the monument. She takes the moment to study him without being seen. He looks somehow both older and younger than he should, those grim brown eyes and the blank set of his face at odds with the stretched, thin look of someone halfway through a growth spurt. Jordan remembers the way Rachel changed, years ago, back when her big sister was thirteen and had just taken the weight of the world. She recognizes that look now, even if she didn’t at the time.
The phrase child soldier is still verboten, when it comes to the saviors of the world. The wounds are too fresh to admit that Earth is alive and free because of half a dozen children too young to drive. For God’s sake, the defense attorneys at every trial in the past year have tried to haul Jake up as a war criminal, have tried to blacken Rachel’s name as a psychopath, like they weren’t kids doing their best in an impossible situation.
Jordan is fifteen years old, and on her next birthday, she will have two months and five days before she’s older than her big sister ever got to be, the oldest of the Animorphs. Jordan thinks about the phrase child soldier a lot.
“You have a date?”
It takes Jordan a moment to realize that Tobias is speaking to her—he doesn’t look back at her, or even really move, and his voice is uninflected. She thinks that he’s probably always like this, as a human, and she doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t remember how to be human, or doesn’t remember how to interact.
“Yeah,” Jordan whispers. “A boy at school—he used to be a Controller. His dad died in the Yeerk Pool.” She’s not sure why she includes that. It’s not really relevant, except that it makes it mean something when Jonah snarls at people for talking shit about her sister. It’s the only time he ever shows emotion on his own, without thinking about it first. His smile is careful and awkward and it makes Jordan smile back, every time.
“Yeah,” Tobias says. There’s no guilt or anger in his voice, it’s just—dead. Maybe he’s a ghost, Jordan thinks a little wistfully. Maybe something terrible happened to him, since the end of the war, and now he’s haunting the love of his short life’s grave. The idea makes her chest hurt a little, longing for something, for a glimpse of her sister walking out of the sunlight toward her.
“I want to go,” Jordan says, still whispering, like she’s sharing a secret. “I just—I don’t really want things to change, either.”
Tobias takes a slow, deep breath, and then he lets it out. He turns his head to look at her, his cheek still propped on his knees, spine curved in an impossibly flexible sweep.
“Things change,” he says. Jordan realizes why he’s been facing away from her—there are tears on his face, beading in his eyelashes and trickling down his cheeks. Without looking, she would never have known. “The war changed the world. She wouldn’t want you to put your life on hold to remember her.”
Jordan nods, swallows. She can feel a fresh surge of tears threatening her and doesn’t really know why. This ghost of the boy her sister loved, sitting here like a child hiding from monsters, telling her to get on with her life—she wants to sob into his shoulder like she cried that first day, when she got the news that Rachel was never coming home and all she could do was clutch Sara to her chest and cry into her hair while Sara wailed. Tobias is tall for thirteen, about her own height, and so thin he looks malnourished, and she wants to hug him and tell him she’s sorry and hear that it’s going to be okay.
Jordan wishes Rachel were here. Rachel would know what to do.
“What if I forget her?”
It’s Jordan’s greatest fear, the one she hasn’t even admitted to her therapist. She’ll talk about how she’s angry with Rachel for leaving, how she and Jake can’t even look at each other, how she got in three fistfights in two weeks after the trial of Visser One, how she sometimes thinks that she doesn’t want to live in a world that killed her sister. Jordan will talk about any old shit.
But she doesn’t want to hear her therapist tell her, soft and sorry, that sooner or later, Rachel’s memory will become blunted with time. It would be the last, worst betrayal, for the people who knew Rachel, really knew her, to forget her.
She’s not sure why she’s asking Tobias. His family situation is semi-common knowledge, these days, and she knows more or less all the details. His father was an Andalite in human morph, although the exact timeline on that is a bit hit-or-miss, and his mother lost her memory, and his aunt and uncle didn’t want him. As far as she knows, he’s never had anyone to remember, not really, not before Rachel.
Maybe she just wants someone to know. Tobias won’t tell anyone. Jordan is pretty sure she’s the first person to have spoken to him in—a long time. He’ll never admit to anyone that Jordan has thought about how much easier her life would be, if she could just cut the grief out of her chest, sister and all, and get on without it.
Tobias thinks about it for a minute, then two, then five. Jordan starts to wonder if he’s forgotten the question, if that blank expression hides that complete a detachment from reality.
Then he stirs, and says, “She—Rachel was unforgettable.” He takes another breath and lets it out, and closes his eyes. “There was this poem she found in English class, just a couple of weeks before—before they left school. She wrote it down so that I could see it. I think maybe she knew—well. None of us really expected to live through it, by the end of it.”
“How can you be so calm?” Jordan demands, and her voice breaks, and then she’s crying, properly crying, great heaving sobs that she muffles with her palms, pressing her hands against her mouth until her teeth mark her skin.
“The hawk takes a lot of it,” Tobias says, like that makes any sense. His eyes are still closed, and he doesn’t make a move to comfort Jordan. She’s glad—she hates being comforted. So did Rachel. “The rest—not sure. Spent three years needing to be calm or die, so I guess I’m in the habit, now.”
He lapses back into silence as Jordan cries, gasping for air and hating herself for breaking down like this. It’s not until he finally raises his head and looks up at the sky, at where the last streaks of sunset color the black, that Jordan is able to talk again.
“Do you—need to go?” she asks, scrubbing at her face. She—she thinks she’ll be sorry to see him leave, she realizes with surprise. This, just sitting with someone else who loved Rachel and won’t fall to pieces at the sight of Jordan’s tears, is the most painful thing she’s done in weeks. It also feels like cleaning out an infected wound, watching the sickly yellow pus drain away until it’s bleeding bright and living red.
“Soon,” Tobias says.
Jordan nods, and sniffles, and then she asks, “What was the poem?”
Tobias smiles a little, faintly, and it looks sincere in a way that his other smiles haven’t—like he’s doing it for himself, not for her.
“‘I am in the morning hush,’” he says, “‘I am in the graceful rush of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am—I am not there. I did not die.’”
It’s the first time his voice has broken since he sat down, and a last sob works its way out of Jordan’s throat.
“Go on your date,” Tobias says, unfolding himself from the ground and standing up. He moves like an old man, Jordan notices, or like someone protecting broken ribs, like there’s something shattered in his chest that he can’t restore. “Live your life. We--” His smile takes on a rictus edge, like a skull showing its teeth. “We fought for it.”
“And died for it,” Jordan finishes quietly. “She was supposed to teach me how to do makeup, you know. Real makeup, not kid’s stuff.”
“Yeah,” Tobias agrees. “She was—she was supposed to do a lot of things.” He crosses his arms again, like he doesn’t know what else to do with them, and nods to her. “I like your haircut,” he says, and walks away.
Jordan watches him go and wonders if she’ll ever see him again. Then she sniffs one final time, wipes at her face, and stands, fixing her shirt and brushing off her jeans so that she doesn’t look too much like she’s spent the past hour and a half in a cemetery. She looks up at Rachel’s monument. There’s an inscription, plain and simple, at eye level—Rachel Berenson, who died to stop the advance of cruelty. Her mother chose it.
“You are not here,” Jordan tells the monument quietly. “You did not die.”
Jordan forces herself to smile at her sister, trembling and watery-eyed, and walks down the hill toward the cemetery gate.