by K A Riley
Shostakovich
The reedy bartender glides over again with another round and whispers something into Angel Fire’s ear.
His eyes wide, he presses his palms together as if in prayer and says, “Really?”
The girl nods, and the two of them exchange a happy, slapping high-five before the girl retreats to her bar to dole out more rounds of bubbly pink beer to the patrons.
I’ve been in battle before. I’ve fought on my own and with a small team or two. But I’ve never been part of an entire, city-sized army. Is this what it’s like before a war? Shopping. Laughing. Drinking. Joking. Happy high-fives?
“We’ve got a treat for you,” Angel Fire announces, breaking my train of thought. “A classical music concert.”
Wait—is the Army of the Unsettled getting weirder or more normal right before our eyes?
Adjusting his tie and squaring his shoulders under his oversized blazer, Angel Fire directs our attention to the far end of the trailer, past the drinking and chattering kids, to where a barefoot boy, dressed all in black, is setting up four steel-framed folding chairs in a semi-circle on top of a low wooden platform.
A series of long glass tubes embedded in the trailer floor flash white and metallic blue. The crowd settles down, and then the entire trailer falls into a muted, almost impossible silence. The constant ping of pebbles and dirt, the dinosaur-thunder of truck tires, the gravelly blast of dirt-bikes, the chatter and busyness of all the people we’ve encountered so far…it all fades, leaving only the rhythmic thrum of the vehicle’s magnetic propulsion system.
Across from me, Angel Fire sounds modest, almost to the point of being embarrassed, when he tells us, “Only eight percent of the fleet has been retrofitted with the Mag-Catalyst Conversion System. We used dry milled corn ethanol for years…until the last of the crops disappeared. Biofuels are hard to come by without a biosphere, right? So we rely on our harvested stores. I’d show you the big silo trucks, but they’re on the far side of the fleet.” He brightens up when he adds, “Oh, and we’re working on radiothermal generation and thorium as potential energy sources.”
I’m about to ask him more about their power sources and fuel consumption (not as a spy this time, but more out of genuine curiosity), but he puts a finger to his lips and directs our attention back to the small stage.
Out of the surprising stillness, four teenagers emerge from between the panels of an inky black curtain hanging behind the wooden platform.
I jump a little when the Unsettled around us, Angel Fire included, burst into a hearty round of loud, spontaneous applause. Although we don’t know what they’re clapping about, my Asylum and I join in, hoisting our glasses in the air and laughing when the pink liquid sloshes from everyone’s mugs.
On the stage, the four teens take a little bow and ease down into the padded metal-framed chairs.
The two boys in the quartet are each sporting an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket over a starched white shirt (complete with ruffles running down the middle), a crisp black bow tie, and a ribbed, red cummerbund slung snugly around their waists. Instead of matching black pants or highly polished shoes, though, they’re wearing faded, powder-blue jean shorts with frayed edges and grungy leather sandals on their feet.
The two girls, slick-haired and with their swarthy skin glistening with a sheen of sweat, are each decked out in a sleeveless black cocktail dress with an apple-red bandana tied around their necks and bright yellow, hole-filled stockings covering their legs. Their feet are enveloped in mismatched, dusty hiking boots with the laces dragging in loose coils on the floor.
They’re an oddly dressed bunch. Wealthies on top. Beggars on the bottom.
Isn’t that always the way?
At the Academy, we have a standard kit, uniforms that are color-coded according to which Cohort you belong to. I know from history class that armies throughout time have relied on strict uniform codes. This is to inspire camaraderie, encourage team spirit, and to differentiate your army from the enemy. Even the Cult of the Devoted draw on their patriotic palette of reds, whites, and blues.
Sitting here in our matching black tactical cargo pants, black military boots, and our white compression tops with the blue Academy shield on the upper chest, my friends and I must look like a squad of leftover Patriot Army special agent operatives.
Other than my trademark red leather jacket (and our accumulating layers of blood, sweat, and dirt), we’re a fairly coordinated bunch.
But the Army of the Unsettled…well, let’s just say that the apocalypse didn’t only wipe out cities and huge swaths of the human population. Here, it seems to have wiped out any sense of style or uniformity along the way.
And I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
“We’re lucky,” Angel Fire beams. He plants one hand on Libra’s shoulder and the other on Ignacio’s and gives them each a little shake. “We got here just in time. They’re scheduled to play one of my favorites: Shostakovich’s Quartet Number Three in F Major, Opus 73.”
We all stare at him for a second, but he’s too buried in glee to notice.
His eyes on the four musicians up at the front of the trailer, he mumbles, more to himself than to us, “For this piece, Dmitri Shostakovich originally titled the five movements but retracted the titles after 1946 for some reason.”
Too startled to offer up any brilliant commentary, I say, “Oh,” and leave it at that.
Up on the low stage, one of the boys, tall but lanky nearly to the point of being malnourished, has a cello clamped between his bony, dirt-creased knees. Looking like it’s been attacked by a mountain lion, the hourglass-shaped instrument is pockmarked and scarred, with deep, dark trenches dragged through its surface. Whatever luster it once had has long since faded, ravaged no doubt by its exposure to desert dust-storms and to the wind and the scorching sun searing over the open plains and barren prairies out here in the American West.
The two boys and two girls break into a random flurry of dragging their bows across the strings, which they pluck while they reach over to fiddle with the rows of little white tuning pegs.
“This is classical music?” Ignacio asks, his palms pressed to his ears. “It sounds like an alien howler monkey massaging a crying baby with a carrot-peeler.”
“They’re warming up, Dummy,” Arlo says, with an elbow to Ignacio’s arm and accompanied by a swooping eyeroll.
“Oh.”
“I’m glad Ignacio said it,” I confess to Matholook from behind my hand. “I was thinking the same thing.”
The lack of access to music is one of the things we all have in common. My parents used to talk about music all the time: Jazz. Rock and Roll. Classical. Postmodern Fusion. Neuro-Algorithmic Arrangement. I’ve seen pictures of various instruments, and I know about music, of course, but I never actually heard any of it. Libra, Arlo, Ignacio, Sara, and Mattea grew up in a Processor. Their lives were a series of experiments, tests, and tortures. The Cult of the Devoted are all about history, politics, and the art of war. Kress and our other teachers are tunnel-visioned about training us to save the world. So…not a lot of extra time for music, dance, or any of the arts.
So now, sitting here while the musicians warm up and Angel Fire glows in anticipation, I’m brain-deep in an inexplicable flood of regret. I’ve always thought of our mission as being all about saving people. Maybe even saving structures and institutions. I never thought about us saving the Arts. I was never exposed to any of that directly. And now, two minutes into a discordant warmup, I feel a protective surge of urgency about needing to save it.
Is it possible to miss something you never had?
After a moment of silence, the four teens lock eyes and then break into an overlapping round of rapid-fire notes. The music—a dizzying spectrum of volumes, pitches, and tones—multiplies, overlaps, thunders forward, sneaks back, and loops around and around. I follow the refrain, but then I lose it, and it’s like the four instruments are teasing me, goading me on, and then forgetting about me
altogether before finding me again and calling out for me to follow them. It sounds right goofy to say, but the music makes me feel wanted, like life has meaning.
Not my life, necessarily. Just life in general.
Matholook’s arm is still around my waist with his hand curved over my hip. I tuck my hand over his and pretend that something caught my eye on the other side of the room.
I don’t want him to see me cry.
I always figured—with how I grew up, who I am, and with all the things I’ve seen, done, experienced, and survived—I’d know pretty much every feeling, sensation, and emotion there is. But this is a surprise. It’s been five minutes, and I feel like I’m hearing, seeing, and feeling for the first time.
The boy behind the cello works feverishly, his nearly shoulder-length mop of half-dreadlocked, sun-bleached hair flopping up and down with the sway of his body and left and right with the humming, still slightly uneven wobble of the trailer.
Next to the cellist, the other boy has a violin clamped under his jaw. Unlike the cellist, his body is rigid as a rock. But the fingers on his left hand are a blur over the tapered neck of his little instrument, and his right hand is a dynamic piston as he skips the bow over the fluttering strings.
The girl on the other violin—her scraggly hair cut in a bob, her unlaced boots twitching and kicking hard enough to make her shoelaces dance—plays with the stern ferocity of someone out for revenge. As if carved in stone, her face is tense, furious, and stern.
The other girl has what looks like a larger violin, which Angel Fire tells us is a viola. I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never seen one in real life. This girl is a composed figure of spectacular beauty. Bare-armed, dark-haired, and fair-skinned, she leans into her instrument like someone playing a frenzied game of tug-of-war with their small dog. Her body dances in a push-pull rhythm, and she seems to be sitting in place in her chair and moving in five different directions at the same time.
When one of the violinists starts plucking at the strings, I think maybe she’s upset and trying to snap them, but Angel Fire leans over the table and tells us what she’s doing is called “Pizzicato.”
“It’s an Italian term,” he explains in as much of a whisper as he can manage. “It means ‘to pinch.’”
It’s a proper good sound but sort of chilling, too, since it reminds me of the sound of stay bullets plinking into fields of desert sand and stone.
At each brief pause in the performance, Angel Fire leans over and whispers to our huddled group.
“That was the Allegretto. Very playful. The original title was ‘Blithe Ignorance of the Future Cataclysm.”
“Gloomy title,” Matholook says.
“But true,” I add.
In class at the Academy, Brohn once told us there are three ingredients in evil: fear, ignorance, and insecurity. “Every injustice you see in the world stems from one or more of those.”
I wonder if this Shostakovich bloke knew about the horrific power of “blithe ignorance.” I wonder if he knew the world was going to look like this nearly a hundred-and-fifty years after his birth.
After a heartbeat of a pause, the quartet launches into the next movement, which Angel Fire informs us is called “The Moderato con Moto.”
“It was originally entitled, ‘Forces of War Unleashed,” he adds.
He closes his eyes, and his finger does a little conductor’s wag above the table. “Listen to the skipping rhythm of the waltz as it strains to be allowed to cut loose. There’s potential energy behind the notes. Like they’re being held back but are ready to explode.”
With that index finger of his bopping in the air in time with the beat, he’s a boy-warlord with a connoisseur’s passion for classical music, and I’m impressed with his combination of knowledge and keen affection.
Matholook drums his fingers in light taps against my hip, and I glance over at him to see that he has his eyes closed. He nods and says, “I can feel it.”
Feel what? The music? My heart telling me how nice it is to be nestled up against you? Or my brain, shouting at me to run like hell?
I try to listen harder to hear what he’s hearing, but I’m having trouble concentrating. The music is fast and complex. But that’s not what’s throwing me off. It’s the arm around my waist, the fingers curved over my hip, and the tapping of Matholook’s foot I can feel against my own. It’s like he’s in sync with the music, and I’m in sync with him. Which I should not be allowing to happen.
Bugger-all, Branwynne. The Unsettled said it themselves: He’s a potential traitor, spy, and enemy combatant!
But he’s also modest, painfully good-looking, and he always says the right things to make me feel the right ways…plus, his eyes are like Arctic Ocean water, and I’m feeling the impulsive urge to join the polar bear club.
Angel Fire must sense that I’m losing focus, because he locks his eyes onto mine before flicking them back to the quartet. “That was the Allegro non troppo. Also known as ‘Rumblings of Unrest and Anticipation.’”
Story of my life.
After a few minutes, he whispers around the table, “That’s the Adagio. ‘In Memory of the Dead.’ Listen for the resonance of the cello and the lamentation of the viola.”
Across from me, Libra is smiling and crying at the same time. On either side of her, Ignacio and Arlo put their arms around her, and I know—I knew the second Angel Fire said the words, “Memory of the Dead”—we all have exactly one word, one thought, one person, and one memory on our minds:
Mattea.
It’s a painful but fleeting feeling that evaporates almost as quickly as it formed.
She just died. So why the mental fog? Why am I having so much trouble remembering? Is it because I don’t want that image in my head ever again? I feel like someone slipped a filter in my brain, and it’s weeding out memories, desires, my connection with Haida, and my thoughts of Mattea.
After a brief pause in the music, Angel Fire tells us “The composer’s final command is morendo. It’s where the sound slowly dies away.”
“It’s very pretty,” Libra says, wiping tears from her cheeks with her fingertips.
“This is the last part coming up…it’s the Moderato. Also known as ‘The Eternal Question: Why? And for What?’”
Those are very good eternal questions.
In my mind, the plan was to stay here for a few minutes, tops, and then get moving to the Security Garrison to pick up our weapons and get the frack out of here before Angel Fire and his Army of the Unsettled changed their minds and decided to eat us after all.
But “a few minutes” has morphed into half an hour as the waves of music continue to wash over us.
A couple of seconds of silence snap me to full attention. I wonder if maybe the performance was worse than I thought, and the Unsettled in the audience are expressing their quiet disapproval.
And then, with a roar that drowns out every grumble, rumble, and ambient sound around us, the Unsettled in the moving, make-shift pub-slash-concert hall explode into a full-on round of standing, thunderous applause.
I can feel the vibrations of their ovation in my bones.
Flanking me, Matholook and Libra start laughing, and then I realize that Sara, Arlo, and Ignacio are laughing, too. And so am I, and it occurs to me that we’re all experiencing the same wave of relief. Not just about being alive, but because—after being swept away by the mastery of these four musicians—it feels like now we have something unexpected but vitally important to stay alive for.
I make a mental note to talk to Kress about adding some Fine Arts to the Academy’s courses if…when we get home.
28
Friends
With the concert over, Angel Fire weaves between the high-top bistro tables as he rushes forward to embrace the four musicians.
The five of them leap into each other’s arms, bouncing and jumping around to the whistles and cheers of the rest of the Unsettled audience. With all the foot-stomping, chest-bumps, and happy s
houlder punches combining with the slight but still noticeable shifts and shimmies of the rig, the place has the feel of a jubilant birthday party in the middle of a mild earthquake.
Jumping to our feet, my Asylum and I join in, cheering and clapping, with Ignacio climbing up onto his barstool, pumping a fist and whistling through his fingers as he ducks down to avoid the shade-netting sagging over his head.
“Get down from there, Dummy,” Arlo warns, reaching up to keep Ignacio from being flung down by the jostling crowd of celebrating teenagers.
Libra joins Arlo in helping Ignacio clamber back down. Blushing, Ignacio says, “I guess I got carried away.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Libra tells him. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”
High-fiving everyone in the crowd as he passes, Angel Fire makes his way back to our table. He dabs sweat from his forehead with a folded white handkerchief, which he refolds and tucks into the breast pocket of his oversized blazer. “So…,” he pants, “did you enjoy that?”
Libra plants both hands on his chest, and for a second, I think she might be about ready to kiss him. “What was that?”
“It’s called chamber music,” Angel Fire laughs. “Joseph Haydn was one of its pioneers. He helped music become a kind of conversation, as much about socializing as about performing. It requires a balance of skills and personalities where all the players at every moment in every measure need to know when to be assertive and when to turn over command to someone else. It takes something that has the potential to be divisive and balances it to form something harmonious, intimate, and potentially life-changing. Kind of like what we’re doing now.” He tugs his handkerchief back out and gives his forehead a second wipe before telling us it’s time to move on. “A fun fact,” he adds, peeling back the canvas panel-door and hopping down from the moving pub, “it used to be called, ‘the music of friends.’”
At that, Matholook and I, hand-in-hand, follow him out, with the rest of our Asylum hopping down to the ground right after us.