by Jodi Meadows
“They are hungry,” said Fayden. “But you saw the scratches. The mangy looks. And I told you: the pack is smaller now. I’ll give you one guess as to why.”
I wanted to be sick as we continued to the concert hall. Maybe they’d find something else to eat. Then again, maybe it would have been kinder to kill them quickly, like Fayden had wanted. They wouldn’t bring much meat or money, but they wouldn’t suffer any longer, either.
I didn’t know anymore. There were too many things I just didn’t know.
4
MY CHEST FELT weird and heavy as we continued through the old city. I couldn’t stop thinking of those dogs, that sad hunger in their eyes, and what Fayden had said about the pack growing smaller. And why.
I guided the others through the wreckage of the old city, down the only paths of this place that were familiar to me. This part of the old city had been devastated during the Cataclysm. Buildings toppled over. Vehicles had piled atop one another, creating walls of crumpled metal and shattered glass. Shredded rubber dripped from the wheels of overturned vehicles.
“How did I never know this was here?” Fayden said as we rounded a corner, and a white edge of the building shone in the sunlight.
I gestured at all the rubble surrounding the building. “So much of this part of the city is gone. It’s a miracle this place survived. There’s no reason it should have.”
Not only that, but there was a park next to the concert hall, which had mostly overgrown and concealed the building from outside view. The trees and brush were brown with summer and drought now, but I had sharp memories of coming here as a child, when everything had been covered in a hundred shades of green.
Though I knew that nature was simply reclaiming the land, it had seemed to me, when I was very young, that even the trees and earth wanted to protect this sanctuary of music.
“This way.” I guided Stef and Fayden through the maze of junk. Metal poles with busted lightbulbs watched like blind sentinels. A dry fountain crumbled beneath the onslaught of nature and heat. Ancient sculptures of men riding winged horses rested on the ground, vines creeping around legs and outstretched arms.
Once, this place had been loved. Honored. Now, it was a decaying secret, one I was going to expose to people I wasn’t sure I could trust. My injured shoulder throbbed as I heaved open one of the doors, its hinges shrieking, and we stepped into the cool darkness of the lobby.
“What is this?” Fayden asked.
“It’s where Mother took me every time she said we were going foraging.”
I hadn’t come here since she died, and it felt like betrayal, bringing a stranger and my brother here now. The concert hall had meant so much to me over the years.
But I took them through the entry hall, past the collection of art and statues, which Mother and I hadn’t dared touch, lest we break something. Somehow, the portraits and murals and crystal lamps always looked clean, as though someone else came here for reflection or learning, and cared for the artifacts during their stay. Like Mother had taught me to care for the instruments, as well as play them.
“Some of this stuff could be useful,” muttered Stef. He turned his eyes up to the old lamps and faces carved into the marble.
“Or sold.” Fayden shook his head. “I can’t believe how well preserved everything is.”
“Leave it.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “That isn’t why I brought you here.”
Fayden and Stef exchanged wry smiles. “Testy,” Stef said.
“You should have seen him as a child. He wouldn’t eat meat for a whole year because he realized it was animals.”
Great. Now they were friends and could spend all their time coming up with new ways to mock me.
My footfalls were silent as we moved through the lobby. Unconscious reverence, Mother had said when she noticed it, and now I stepped quietly for her memory, and all the things about her that I missed. Her warmth, understanding, and love: I missed those the most.
Now I was going to assist in the destruction of something we both loved: the glass curtain that stood on the back of the stage, miraculously spared from the violent earthquakes and rivers of flowing lava.
The auditorium looked as it always did, quiet and sagging, and heavy with the weight of centuries. And there on the stage, covered against dust and moisture, stood the piano before the glass curtain.
“I need you to promise me something.” I kept my voice low as I faced my brother, my back to the stage. “If you have any love for Mother, don’t scavenge this place. Don’t gut it like you do other buildings.”
Fayden just stared beyond me, his eyes filled with the glass.
“She kept it secret for a reason,” I said. “She’d want us to use the glass to save lives, but the rest of it needs to stay.”
“You don’t get to say what Mother would have wanted.” Fayden tore his gaze from the glass, and focused on me. His growl was low and menacing. “Not now.”
“You two can fight later.” Stef pushed his way through the hall, awe filling his voice as he approached the immense glass wall. “How did this survive?”
“I don’t know. Mother’s mother brought her here to teach her about music. Grandmother was a pianist before the Cataclysm. It happened during a performance, I guess.” I turned from my brother to face the shimmering brown-and-blue-and-green landscape depicted by the curtain. It showed the volcano south of here, though it was pre-Cataclysm and the crater looked different now. “It folds up, but I have no idea how.” I couldn’t imagine how heavy it was. “Grandmother and her friends must have left it for future generations.”
“Will it work for what you need?” Fayden asked.
“Yes, but it seems wrong to destroy it now.” Stef glanced at me. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
It wasn’t my curtain. I had no right to make that decision. But what did I want more? The glass curtain and the continued sanctity of the only safe place I’d ever known, or to protect others from my mother’s fate?
If sacrificing a piece of something I loved so much would help save lives . . . “Let’s do it.”
“It won’t be easy getting the glass out.” Stef climbed onto the stage and walked by the covered piano without even noticing it. “The glass is in there really well.”
“I might be able to help,” said Fayden. “If Sam doesn’t mind.”
It wasn’t as though he’d listen to anything I said anyway. “Do you need my help for anything?” I asked Stef. “I’m not sure if there are tools for that, but you might be able to find something if you look around and don’t mind improvising.” The only tools I knew about were the ones for repairing and tuning instruments.
My eyes strayed toward the piano.
“No,” Stef said. “I don’t need you right now. Fayden and I can figure this out.”
I winced—still useless—but let myself be secretly relieved. I didn’t know how to dismantle the curtain, nor did I want to know.
When Stef and Fayden left the room in search of tools, I pulled off the piano cover, leaving it in a puddle of gray cloth on the stage, and sat on the piano bench. I dragged my fingers over the keys, not pressing any just yet. With my eyes closed and the heavy silence around me, I could almost pretend nothing had changed since the last time I’d been here.
This room was refreshingly quiet, as though the outside world didn’t exist. No mangy dogs roaming the streets. No drought slowly killing the land. No plague sweeping through the Community.
No trolls. No Janan with impossible quests. No Father.
When I sat on this bench, it was just Mother and me. With music.
“What is that?” Stef asked from a doorway on the side of the stage. He carried a small toolbox as he approached.
“A piano.”
“Is it useful?” He dropped the toolbox with a thunk, scratching the stage and ignoring my flinch.
“It isn’t.” Fayden came in from the other side of the stage. “It just makes noise. I’ve seen others in the city.”
Stef glanced at me and raised an eyebrow, but I just shook my head. Fayden wasn’t wrong. What use had music been against a troll? Or hunger? Or Father’s blows?
“Show us,” Stef said. “I want to hear.”
Play something? For them? They didn’t know anything about music. They didn’t care. And they wouldn’t understand why I did—why it meant everything to me. I didn’t know Stef well enough to predict his reaction, but Fayden would just mock me. Or worse: he’d tell Father and I’d somehow end up on Janan’s quest in spite of my absence today.
“Go on.” Fayden knelt and searched through the toolbox. “If you’re not going to help us figure out how to take this apart, you might as well give us something to listen to.”
I couldn’t come all the way here and not play. Even if it was just a little while. For people who couldn’t understand.
“Fine.” I opened the lid, then warmed up with a few scales. Fayden rolled his eyes at their simplicity, but I ignored that, and a few notes that sounded off. There wasn’t much I could do about it; though Mother and I—and her mother before her—had been caring for and tuning the piano as best we could over the years, the fluctuating temperature and humidity had taken a toll.
It was better than nothing, though.
While I ran through scales, Stef wandered over to watch the hammers and levers inside. “Interesting,” he muttered as I found the music I’d been working to learn the last time I came here.
First I played a simple phrase, a slow and thoughtful sound. A few measures later, a rolling chord joined the melody, lifting it. The music inhaled, exhaled, and the deeper chords shivered into my bones. With no more hesitation, the sound poured across the stage, rolled up the glass curtain, and fell in glorious showers along the marble walls and balconies. Music filled the theater like smoke, like water, like a mysterious force that held me in its thrall. I lost myself, swaying to the beat, hardly aware of the pages of music in front of me. The keys were extensions of my fingers, the piano another part of my body, and I was soaring.
I felt weightless, relieved of all my burdens. I felt right. Whole. Like I’d been starving ever since Mother—
My hands fell still on the keys, dead things.
“What happened?” Stef jerked up from where he’d been inspecting the piano’s inner workings. Fayden hadn’t moved from his place by the curtain, and he looked . . . surprised.
I slipped off the bench and stepped away. “Nothing.” Everything.
Fayden’s mouth pressed in a line as he studied me, studied the piano. “That was good,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know anything about music, but—I liked it.”
He liked it? Really?
My voice abandoned me.
“How long have you been practicing?” Stef asked.
“Years.” I glanced at the piano. “It’s not enough. I feel like I’ve improved enough to start seeing just how much work I need. But the piano needs repairs, I couldn’t always get here, and Mother was afraid someone would follow us and find it.”
“Did she teach you?” Fayden asked. She’d been his mother longer than she’d been mine, and there were things he was just now learning about her. “Did she know how to play, too?”
I nodded. “She knew. Her mother taught her. She had learned before the Cataclysm. Grandmother knew just enough about other instruments to pass that knowledge along, too, but what she really knew was the piano.”
Since the Cataclysm had happened during a performance, instruments that wouldn’t normally be here had been abandoned by their owners. Flutes. Clarinets. Violins. I wanted nothing more than to live long enough to learn to play them all, though it seemed unlikely they’d work anymore.
“So the piano was what Mother knew, too.” Fayden stared at the piano for a few long moments, while Stef hung back with his arms crossed. Wind howled outside, and sunlight slanted through the skylight. My brother shifted his weight to one hip. “I won’t tell Father about this. And I won’t tell other scavengers about the building. Your secret goes no further than the three of us.”
My heart pounded with relief. “Thank you.”
He shrugged away my gratitude. “You can thank me by playing something else.”
5
FATHER WASN’T HAPPY when I came home, realizing I hadn’t obeyed him by going to join Janan’s warriors, but amazingly, Fayden covered for me, saying we’d been out scavenging together, and that he and I would be working together from now on.
It was sort of true.
And it meant Father wasn’t going to kick me out for being completely useless—at least not right away.
Summer wore on, with ever-increasing heat that refused to break. The flies grew worse, and the Council, worried that disease would spread, moved plague victims out of the Community altogether. Now, they were quarantined in the old city, trapped in some forgotten building.
Every day Stef, Fayden, and I ventured into the old city to remove plates of glass from the curtain at the back of the theater. Rather, they worked, and I sat at the piano and played, my fingers dancing over the black and white keys.
One day, Fayden dropped a pile of folders and slim books on top of the piano.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Music. I think.” He flicked the pages I’d left sitting on the piano before. “They looked like those.”
I studied the sheets of fading music he’d brought; after so much practice, reading music was like reading words. Some of them were pieces for other instruments, but many of them were marked “piano.”
“Thanks.” I glanced up at him. “I don’t think I’ve seen these pieces before. They’ll be fun to play.”
“I just wanted to hear something new.” Fayden shrugged. “There are a few more places I know where there’s more of this. I can get it for you, if you want. None of the other scavengers want it except for burning in the winter.”
My jaw dropped. “Burning music?”
“It’s a legitimate fuel source.”
I shook my head. “Please rescue it, if you can.”
“Sure.” He patted the piano’s lid. “Just keep playing. It’s . . . nice to listen to.”
I didn’t know what to say.
We’d been so distant since we were children, but now, he asked me to play specific pieces over others, showed me how to duck into the house without encountering Father, and taught me how to cook—sort of. There wasn’t much to cook, and he wasn’t particularly skilled at it himself. But we made do.
And a couple of times, Stef halted my playing to make repairs to the piano. I’d taught him what I knew about its inner workings, and how to tune it, and he’d picked up on the skills with alarming speed and understanding. He refelted some of the hammers where the felt had worn thin. He helped retune the piano, making adjustments while I listened and guided him to hit the right pitch. Soon, the piano sounded better than ever.
The improvements allowed me to play a wider range of music than before, without worrying so much about which keys needed to be avoided.
In the weeks immediately following Mother’s death, I hadn’t imagined I’d ever enjoy life again. But with Stef and Fayden working together, their mocking and encouragement, and the way our grins became easier around one another, it seemed, for the first time in what felt like ages, that I might actually be happy.
After hours of dismantling the glass curtain and organizing the bits of glass by color, we carried the blue shards in boxes into the woods, where Stef’s trap waited. The other colors would sit in the theater until we had a need for them.
Fayden and I sat at the base of an avocado tree, watching Stef shimmy up and down the tree, judging various pieces of glass against the surrounding foliage, hunting for just the angle to imitate the glimmer of sunlight on water.
Fayden cut an avocado in half, tossed the pit, and handed one side to me. Flies swarmed as if from nowhere; we swatted them away.
“Thanks.” The fruit had very little taste, thanks to the drought, b
ut any food was a blessing. We’d all lost weight over the summer. Hunger was a constant low-grade sensation, something we were used to and didn’t even complain about anymore.
“How does it look up there?” Fayden called, startling a few nearby birds into silence.
Stef peered down from the browning leaves and grinned. “Cloudy.”
I scrambled to my feet. “Really?”
“What kind of clouds?” Fayden stood, too, and turned his face to the sky.
Only clear blue shone between the trees here, but Stef had a better view. “The kind that make rain. And they’re coming this way.”
“The trap—”
“Will have to wait.” Stef climbed down several branches, and jumped the last bit. “The glass that’s up there will stay through the storm—I think—but I won’t be able to do the rest of this in the rain.”
“But your meeting with the Council is this afternoon. What will you show them?”
Stef laughed and lifted his face as a cool wind pushed through the forest. “Nothing. I’ll tell them what I have so far, explain how it will work, show the diagrams—but there won’t be anything to see today.”
I glanced at the trees, the invisible trap hidden somewhere in the high boughs.
Stef sobered and bumped my arm. “Don’t worry. The trap is functional. If a troll comes through in the rain, it’s dead. And then we have an even better demonstration for the Council.”
“Oh, good.” Relieved, I helped pack away the bits of glass, placing them carefully between tattered shirts and strips of cloth.
Wind picked up as we hefted the boxes and headed back toward the Community, bringing an ominous hush to the woods. “We can stop by our house on the way to the Center and drop off the glass.” Father would still be out for the day, working to build up homes and shops with better walls or more level floors; most of the Community lived in sad accommodations.
Wind whipped the trees, and shrieks and shouts came from the Community ahead.
Our homes were but a large collection of hovels surrounding the far more useful building that was the Center. Once, the Center had been a domed field, meant for observing games of some kind. But legend was that the Center had been open only a month when the Cataclysm struck. It had been full, and thousands—maybe millions—of people were trapped inside. The Center had survived, and when the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes were over and the people came out to find their city in ruins, they sorted themselves by skills and began building the Community around the place that had saved their lives. Gradually, others found their way to the Community, too, like Grandmother.