Six
(Their ebbs and flows are Green.)
Sandy’s dreams are green.
Green like snakes biting their brothers and like daughters falling off cliffs.
Green like the juice Tony drinks to make the black veins stop spreading.
Green like a bargain repeating into Infinity.
(She can always feel the metal Eye wrapped around them and they both hate it.)
Sandy dreams with her eyes open and with her eyes closed and with eyes that aren’t hers.
Eyes that get frozen and broken and frozen again until they become Winter.
Eyes that watch and wait for a bomb with her name on it to go off.
Eyes half shut but always watching.
(They know the taste of their siblings' terror as they die again, their hopelessness.)
Sandy dreams of her brother the most.
Tony as a battery stops and stutters and is restarted countless times in a cave.
Tony as he falls upwards endlessly, cold and alone and terrified in his bravery.
Tony as he raises his hand in defiance and snaps.
(There was another Cassandra, you know; in Greece.)
And Sandy is always dreaming but never sleeping, because the worst dreams come when she’s asleep. She just keeps seeing forward and forward and forward as green drips from countless eyes until she’s drowning. Her eyes close as everyone else’s open and she falls forward and forward and forward through fake car crashes and falling cities and broken hammers.
Her eyes open and she screams.
(No one believed her until it was too late.)