Spring came slowly that year.
The twins learned the rhythms of the orphanage the way all children do: through repetition, through sound, through the faces that appeared above their cribs.
Marcus had a way of looking at things.
Marcus stared like he was cataloguing.
Lucia noticed this first.
She was changing his blanket one afternoon when she felt his eyes on her, dark and deep, tracking her movements with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
"You're going to be trouble," she whispered to him. "I can tell."
Marcus blinked. His tiny mouth twitched, not quite a smile. Just a movement, really. But for a moment, Ingrid could have sworn he was looking right through her.
Yes, the expression seemed to say. But not the kind you're thinking.
Darwin was different.
He was loud. He cried when he was hungry, great wailing sobs that echoed through the halls. He cried when he was wet. He cried when he was bored, which happened frequently, because Darwin seemed to want everything at once.
But he calmed instantly when held against a chest.
Lucia discovered this by accident. Darwin was in the middle of one of his screaming fits, the third that hour, when she picked him up in frustration and pressed him against her shoulder.
Silence.
His small body went still. His breathing evened. His fists, which had been clenched and waving, relaxed against her collar.
"Opposites," Mrs. Hale observed one morning, watching Lucia feed them. "One thinks too much, one feels too much. Mark my words, they'll drive each other mad before they're five."
Lucia looked at the twins, Marcus watching silently from his basket, Darwin clutching her finger with fierce determination.
"Or they'll save each other," she said quietly.
Mrs. Hale snorted and went back to kneading bread.
----
The smell of yeast and honey drifted through the house.
In the kitchen, Lucia sat on a low stool with Darwin on her lap. He had discovered her braid and was attempting to eat it. Marcus lay in a basket at her feet, his dark eyes tracking movement.
One of the younger boys tugged at Lucia's sleeve. He had eyes too large for his face and a smear of jam on his chin that he hadn't noticed yet.
"Tell the story again. The one about the prince who became a tree."
Lucia shifted Darwin to her other hip—he protested briefly—and began to sing:
"There once was a prince who loved the sun, But the sun loved only the sky. So the prince became roots and leaves and bark, And he learned to love where he stood..."
The children joined in, their voices thin but earnest.
Marcus's eyes never left Lucia's face. He didn't make a sound. Just watched, so still, so quiet, that sometimes she forgot he was there at all. And then she would look down and find those dark eyes on her, and a chill would run down her spine that she couldn't explain.
Darwin's fists finally unclenched, his breathing slowing as the song wrapped around him. His eyes drifted closed.
In the doorway, unseen, Ingrid watched.
Sometimes I forget she is only twelve, she thought.
She stood there longer than she meant to. The song ended and Lucia started it again, softer this time, and the boy with the jam on his chin curled against her side and closed his eyes. Darwin's fist found Marcus's blanket across the gap between baskets, reaching without looking, the way he always reached for his brother, and held on.
Ingrid's hand found the doorframe. Her fingers pressed into the wood the way they pressed into things when she was deciding something. The candle in the hallway behind her flickered, and for a moment her shadow stretched across the kitchen floor, long and thin and reaching toward the baskets.
She turned away before anyone saw her.
That night, after the children were asleep, she sat at her desk and pulled a blank journal from the bottom drawer. She wrote by the light of a single candle, her handwriting small and precise, filling the first page before the candle burned halfway down. When she finished, she lifted a loose floorboard beneath her chair and slid the journal into the gap.
She wrote: Week 3. The marks appeared again.
The thunderstorm came again tonight. I sat with them through it. When the lightning flashed, both marks glowed silver, not bright enough to wake them, but bright enough for me to see. They didn't cry. They didn't even stir. Most babies scream during storms. These two slept like the thunder was a lullaby.
What kind of children find peace in chaos?
She wrote: Week 5. Found Lucia asleep in the nursery chair.
Lucia fell asleep beside them again. Third time this week. When I woke her, she seemed confused, said she "forgot how to leave." Her eyes were strange. Glassy. She doesn't remember coming to the nursery at all.
I should be worried. I am worried. But when I look at her with them, she seems... right. Like she belongs there. Like they chose her.
She wrote: Week 9. They breathe in unison.
I tested it tonight. I took Darwin to the kitchen. Lucia had Marcus in the nursery. Two rooms apart, closed doors between them. I counted their breaths.
Exactly synchronized. Inhale. Exhale. The same rhythm, at the same moment, as if they shared a single set of lungs.
How? How is this possible?
What are they?
----
As the weeks settled,
Lucia claimed the nights. She learned to catch the milk bottles before they went cold. She learned the specific, sharp inhale that meant Darwin was hungry, and the heavy, watchful silence that meant Marcus was awake.
But when the hours stretched too long and her chin finally dropped to her chest, the nursery door would creak.
Leo didn't ask. He simply appeared from the hallway shadows.
He waited for her to stumble toward her own bed, then took the empty chair beside the cribs. He sat there for hours, a silent shape in the darkness, watching the room so she didn't have to.
"Go sleep," he would say. "I've got them."
She never argued. She was too tired to argue.
Leo would perch on the old rocking chair, telling the twins stories in a voice barely above a whisper.
"...and then the knight realized the dragon wasn't trying to burn the village. It was trying to warn them. About something worse. Something coming from underground."
The twins watched him with their eyes. Marcus, as always, seemed to be listening. Darwin seemed to be deciding whether Leo was worth grabbing.
One night, reaching toward Marcus to adjust his blanket, Leo's hand stopped mid-air.
Something was off.
Not wrong, exactly. Just... different. A feeling like standing too close to a fire that wasn't giving off heat. A pressure in his chest. A hum in his teeth.
The marks on both babies' foreheads flickered. Silver light, there and gone.
Leo pulled his hand back slowly. His heart was pounding.
The twins stared at him.
He didn't do anything. He just sat there, very still, until his heartbeat returned to normal.
But he didn't tell anyone. Not Lucia. Not Miss Ingrid. He filed it away in the back of his mind.