‘So how do we break them out? Chester said. ‘There isn’t time to drag them through the Music one by one …’
Susannah hesitated. She exchanged a glance with Sam then looked down at her feet. It wasn’t just her voice strung into a tight sort of coil, now: there was an odd tenseness to her body language, too. It looked and sounded as though she was about to face a moment she’d been dreading. Chester thought suddenly of Sam’s words before they’d stepped into the Hush: Chester, there’s something else we gotta tell …
Sam hadn’t been able to finish the sentence, but Chester could guess what word had been coming: you. They were keeping something else from him. Another risk. Another secret.
‘Chester.’ Susannah’s voice was so quiet that he had to strain to hear it. ‘We had another plan, to start with. When we were looking for an unlicensed Songshaper, we wanted you for something else, more than just the audition. But …’
She took a rickety breath. ‘But I don’t want to do it that way anymore. We’re not going to do it that way anymore. Not now … now that I know you. Now that we know you. It means we’ve got to find another way, without you going into the cage, but I haven’t quite come up with another plan –’
Travis grabbed her shoulder. ‘What do you mean? You never said anything about this – I thought we’d just pick the lock!’
‘Pick the lock?’ Susannah gasped out a raspy laugh, although it was stained more with hysteria than amusement. ‘Pick the lock? You really thought it’d be that easy?’
There was a muffled shout from the darkness behind them. Chester winced and sensed the indrawn breaths around him as the others did the same. The Songshapers were coming. They were running out of time. He swallowed the roar of wild emotion that was churning in his throat.
‘My father’s in there! Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it!’
Susannah clenched her fists, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, they glistened with moisture in the light of her hideaway lamp. She ran a hand through her curls then shook her head. ‘I saved some of the charges; I thought we could try blasting open the cage –’
‘It won’t work, Captain,’ Dot said. ‘The charges only work on physical targets, like the dome. You can’t blow up a melody.’
‘But your extinguishers worked on the flame wall …’
Dot shook her head. ‘They can quash external manifestations of Music, things like flame or heat. But this is a wall of pure melody, conjured by the best Songshapers in the country. Nothing I’ve built could erase it.’
‘All right,’ Susannah said, sounding desperate. ‘All right, so we’ll just have to trick the Songshapers into unlocking the cage. Quick, hide! I’m going to grab their attention and … and …’
She faltered, one hand half-raised, as though the darkness itself might drop a solution into her palm.
Chester stared at her for a long moment. Then it hit him. What had she said? We’ve got to find another way, without you going into the cage. Did that mean the cage could be opened from the inside? So there was something in there that could break the Music, something in there that could set the prisoners free …
And he alone could reach the key.
Chester knew how to connect to a piece of Music. He could cross the threshold between the bars and enter the cage. Only he could do it. Not Travis, who didn’t have a musical bone in his body. Not Susannah or Sam, who were impaired by their status as Silencers – and who had never been Songshapers anyway. Not Dot, whose tattooed hands prevented her from crossing Musical thresholds.
It had to be him.
And if Susannah’s plan required someone to go into the cage, he’d damn well do it. He hadn’t come this far and survived this much to walk away and leave his father in a world of silent screams.
Behind him, he heard a charge of footsteps as the Songshapers drew near. He heard the shouts, the bangs, the wild firing of pistols.
Before the others could stop him, Chester lunged to touch the cage. The air gave a violent surge, clearly designed to repel him, but he could feel its melody now; it surged through his veins like water and he breathed it in, every muscle shifting in time with its tune.
He could taste it. And he could defy it. There was a single, deliberate flaw in the rhythm – a choke between Musical bars when the melody faltered and a person connected to its tune could force their body through …
With a breath like fire, Chester plunged between the bars.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
She was a moment too late.
The noise had distracted her – the bangs, the shouts from the dark, the snarls of Songshapers as they hunted their prey. Susannah had whipped her head around to seek out their hunters, but in that moment, she felt the brush of fabric against her arm. She felt the rush of breeze as Chester’s body shifted – as it moved from inhabiting the space beside her own, to vanishing. When she whirled back – grasping around her, desperate to pull him back – he was already gone.
Susannah screamed.
She threw herself against the bars and tried to smash her own body through the gap, but it was like trying to float through a solid wall. The space between the bars thrust her backwards like an almighty slap and she fell to the ground. Staggering to her feet, she tried again, but again the cage repelled her.
‘Come back! Chester, come back! We’ll find another way!’
She beat her fists against the bars, again and again, but the Music shoved her violently backwards. With every useless punch she swore a litany of curses against her own mistake. Why had she told him? Why had she let the original plan slip from her lips? She had promised herself that they would find another way. They could break down the bars with one of Dot’s inventions, perhaps. Or they could trick the Songshapers into opening the bars for them. Something. Anything …
Anything but this.
Because Susannah knew what it took to escape from the cage. It wasn’t just a matter of climbing up the bars and out of the top – that had been a lie, a desperate lie. It had taken a death for her to break free. And once Chester realised what needed to be done …
She glanced from Travis to Dot and for a single moment she hated them. She hated them both for their innocence, for their ignorance. All along, she had fed them a sanitised version of the plan. She hadn’t told them the true reason she wanted an unlicensed Songshaper on the team. She hadn’t told them that Chester’s original role was to sacrifice himself. They had waltzed through the preparation for this job with clean hands and they would walk away with clean consciences.
Not her, though. She and Sam had planned it all.
Inside the cage, the Silencers writhed. They clawed at each other, fighting to reach the bars, their futile hope of escape. Did they guess that a real chance of freedom was coming?
‘Chester, come back! Ches–’
Someone thrust her aside. Her head crashed against the floor and the world swam. There was blackness, and shouting, and the sting of shame and horror and –
Susannah took a shuddering breath and raised herself onto her elbows. She blinked, struggling to get a grip on her vision. The world slowly drifted back into focus, looking like a broken shadow-puppet show. Her eyes fixed on her companions. Travis. Dot.
Sam. Where was Sam? She spun around, the movement sending a new surge of dizziness through her veins. She saw him. He gave her one last look. One last glint of pale blue. And then he was gone, following Chester into the maelstrom of bodies behind the bars.
‘Sam! Sam, come back!’
But her voice was choked now, strained with disbelief. He was a Silencer, like her. He shouldn’t be able to slip between the bars. He shouldn’t be able to …
‘He can hear the Music,’ whispered Dot. Her face was paler than ever and her eyes were red with shocked tears. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. They messed up his transformation – that’s why he’s so affected by Music, why it changes his emotions.’ She stared into the dark of the cage. ‘He
’s not a proper Silencer. He’s … something else.’
And suddenly, Susannah thought of Sam’s words in the driver’s cabin. The memory jolted back, so sharp that it hurt. Sam’s fingers on the wheel as he plunged the Cavatina into the dark. The pain in his eyes. The resolution in his voice.
It’s getting worse … Every day it hurts a bit more … I can still feel it in my head. All the time. Just the Music, running over and over and over … I’m gonna be the one who takes ’em down … Whatever it takes.
‘Something else?’ Susannah knew she sounded hysterical but she couldn’t hold back the surge of words. They clattered against the back of her teeth, fighting for release like the souls in the cage. ‘I don’t care what he is – we’ve got to get him back! We’ve got to get both of them back!’
Travis grabbed her arm. ‘Captain!’
She didn’t want to see what he was looking at. Didn’t want to know. All she could think was that Sam was going to die. He was going to throw his life away, to quash the living hell of Music playing in his brain …
But the rest of her gang needed her, and she was still their captain. She wouldn’t let them down. So she turned her gaze away from the cage – hating herself with every jolting breath – until her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. On the Songshapers – and their pistols – at the edge of their circle of light.
‘Well, well, well,’ said their leader. ‘What a fine place to meet old friends.’
It was Nathaniel Glaucon.
Chester staggered into the dark. The space between the bars had seemed tight at the time, a cold scrape of metal along his back and his chest. But now, compared to the crush of the crowd, it seemed like nothing. Here, he could barely breathe.
There were bodies everywhere. They pressed around him, hot and heaving and bloody. They scratched at each other, crazed in their desperation to escape the cage. Once they saw him they pushed harder, shoving, shouting silent whispers into each other’s ears.
Could they hear each other? Could they hear their comrades’ silent screams? All Chester heard was the weight of the silence and the rush of his own panicked breath as he pushed into the fray.
Shoulders battered him; elbows knocked him down. Chester almost fell to his knees but he forced himself – with every inch of strength in his limbs – to stay upright. To fall down here would be to never rise again. He would be trampled, a fallen calf in a buffalo stampede, and he would be a bloodied mess before he died.
He pushed on.
Every step was torture. A hand swiped dangerously close to his eyes. A woman gouged a bloody gash into his side and he swore at her, shoving her aside – but there were too many bodies to push her more than a few inches away. For a second he thought she was going to lash out again, to retaliate with another swipe of her gore-flecked fingernails, but then the crowd washed to one side and she was carried away in a tide of flesh.
Was his father here? Was Penelope here? Chester felt a burn of terror in his chest, worse than anything he’d felt since the night of his father’s vanishing. He hadn’t known it would be like this. He’d thought the cage would be filled with weary prisoners: broken bodies, souls in need of rescuing. Not this. Not this writhing, desperate, animal mass of bodies.
And somewhere in the mass, his father. Would he be cowering on the floor, trampled and broken by the viciousness of his peers? Or would he be one of those clawing and fighting and shouting silent screams?
Chester didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted a clear space, a space to breathe, to open up his arms, to feel as though every inch of world wasn’t pressing in to smother him.
But Susannah had planned for him to enter this cage. Which meant that here, somewhere, was his key to setting the prisoners free. As Chester staggered forwards, his bubble of Hush-light travelled with him. He had lost his hideaway lamp in the crowd – trampled and shattered underfoot, no doubt – and so his only light was the natural sphere of vision that always travelled with him in the Hush. All that he held was his fiddle case, which he clutched desperately against his chest.
Chester pushed onward and something new crept into sight. Something that wasn’t floor, that wasn’t marble in the real world. Something that rippled. Water. A pool of water, black as coal in the darkness.
As he approached, the crowd thinned until Chester staggered out into a haze of empty shadow. He drew a shaky breath, startled by this sudden rush of personal space. Even the Silencers, in their state of writhing desperation, were sane enough to avoid the water.
Chester stopped. He didn’t dare allow his own reflection to fall upon its surface. He remembered the night that Sam had taken him to join the others on the Cavatina. The way the water’s reflection had caught the ship in its grip and how it had tried to drag the vessel down into its mirrored depths …
Sam’s words came back to him.
Can’t trust water in the Hush … The ripples, the gurgles, the way it sloshes on the shore – all of that’s making a tune … It grabs you … It drags you down …
Chester looked up from the water, his gaze rising to the space above it. High above, at the very edge of his vision, he saw the roof of the cage. Glinting dark silver bars crossing the blackness. Right in the centre, above the pool of water, the bars met in an arch of joining lines.
Why was the pond here? And why wasn’t it pulling down the bars?
In an instant, Chester knew.
They were counterweights. Opposites. Opposing forces, pushing against one to keep the other in check. It was an ingenious design. The pond and the cage worked like magnets, north poles turned towards each other, strengthening each other with their mutual repulsion. It was how the cage’s Music kept running, day after day, month after month, year after year. It pushed against the pond and the pond pushed back, and that clashing energy travelled in an invisible wall between the bars to keep the prisoners in place …
But if the water was disturbed …
Chester knew what he had to do. He had to touch the water. He had to hear its melody, feel it, sense the ripple of its song and the rhythm of its tune. He had to touch it so that he could reverse it.
But, if he touched it, it would consume him.
Chester tightened his grip around his fiddle case. It was hard and sleek and dug into the flesh above his ribs. Goldenleaf lay tucked inside, waiting to be summoned. Once he touched the pond and sensed its tune, he could play it backwards. Unravel the power of its Music, like unravelling an Echo. He could break its connection to the cage’s walls and the prisoners could claw their way between the bars …
He inched forwards. How long would he have, once he touched the water? Would it suck him down right away or would he have time to belt out a few repetitions of its melody as he sank? Once Chester – thrashing and gasping – stopped playing, the water would return to its earlier state of calm and the cage’s Musical shield would be reinstated, trapping any remaining prisoners inside its shell.
How long could he give them? How long would it take him to drown? Would playing underwater work? Could he still keep playing underwater, while the last breaths in his lungs eddied out into black and bubbles …?
Chester felt sick. He shut down the train of thought and forced himself to take several long, slow breaths. He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t brave enough. The thought of slowly drowning in that pool, unable to fight the pull of water as it sucked him down into the dark …
He wanted to run. He wanted to run and run and never look back.
But there were hundreds of souls in this cage. His father. Penelope. They were here somewhere, caught in a silent scream and a tangle of desperate limbs. They were scratching and clawing – perhaps being driven mad – and Chester was the only one who could save them. He imagined Dot ladling soup into Penelope’s lips. He imagined Susannah helping to care for his father, nursing him back to health …
Susannah. The thought hit him hard, like a kick to the gut. She had planned this all along. She had recruited him then she had
tested him. She had known all along that his role would be to die.
Chester felt almost numb, now, as if a heavy blanket of wool had been wrapped around his heart and squeezed. It felt hot and itchy and tight and sore. Susannah had planned for him to die, and she was right. There was no one else who could take his place, no one else who could make it through the bars of the cage, no one else who could reach this pond.
There was no time for goodbyes. No time for emotion. The alarm had been triggered and the Songshapers would surely be closing in on them by now.
Chester crept forwards. His limbs were trembling. He pulled Goldenleaf from its case, and pressed the chinrest into his shoulder. He raised his bow. He took a deep breath.
And he lifted his foot, ready to touch the water.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Nathaniel Glaucon smiled. It wasn’t a cold smile or a vicious smile. In a way, that made it more chilling. It was benign. So quiet. So … pleased.
‘What are you doing here?’ Susannah’s tongue felt like dust. ‘You were supposed to report us to the Head Songshaper –’
‘Oh, I did.’ Nathaniel took a step forwards. The other Songshapers stood behind him, all with dark-cloaked smirks. ‘I did. And he set off the alarm, like you wanted.’
His eyes were bright now, alight with a joke he was yet to reveal. ‘And then he sent for the head of the Hush Initiative. He sent for the man who really plans this nation’s future. The man behind the curtain. The man who pulls the puppet strings.’
Silence.
‘Me.’
Susannah stared at him. She watched the word roll off his tongue but it didn’t make sense. Nathaniel Glaucon, head of the Hush Initiative?
‘It can’t be you!’ she said. ‘I mean, you don’t even live in Weser City! You live in Hamelin, of all places!’
The Hush Page 30