Atop the dais stood Roark, tense and heedless of the blood gushing from his ears. His eyes were twin voids, his hands limp at his sides. Victor stood behind him, a leeching shadow. To their right were four prisoners crowned with headphones and garbed in grimy hospital gowns.
Layla was one of them.
Her matted gray hair had been shaved, emphasizing her rough features and hooded yellow eyes. She had wasted away. Her joints jutted dangerously from beneath her pasty skin.
Layla’s gaunt eyes flashed toward Ronja. For a slice of a moment, their gazes locked.
Then the Offs were upon Ronja, tearing the automatic from her fingers and pinning her to the ground. She felt her nose crack against the tiles and coughed as blood pooled in her mouth.
Movement flared to her left. She struggled to see through the tangle of limbs around her. Terra was fending off a pair of Offs with her knives. She felled one with a slice to the throat, but the second put her in a headlock, forcing her to the floor.
“Enough.”
The word broke the Offs’ grip, and in an instant she was free.
Ronja leapt to her feet, wiping her oozing nose with the back of her wrist. She readjusted her headphones hastily, but her gaze never left Victor. He smirked at her from atop the stage.
“Bring her to me.”
Two pairs of hands grasped her shoulders and started to force her toward the stage. She shoved them away, baring her teeth at the Offs in a silent warning. They hesitated, ready to catch her if she bolted.
Ronja stalked toward the stage, her naked feet leaving red silhouettes on the floor.
Victor’s smirk morphed into a delighted grin, his mouth stretched too wide across his wolfish face.
Ronja halted at the foot of the platform, her neck craned back to regard the man.
“I am rarely surprised, Ronja,” his voice intoned in her ear, disturbingly close. “I thank you for an intriguing day.”
“Pitch off,” Ronja growled.
“I apologize: this is a one-way stream. I cannot hear you, though I assume your words would have scorched my ears.”
“What have you done to Roark?”
“Impressive, is it not?”
Victor turned to his son, clapped a hand on his shoulder. Roark did not seem to notice his presence. His gaze was trained on the opposite wall, his mouth faintly slack.
“It is far from perfect,” Victor acknowledged with a thoughtful tilt of his head. “We are still refining it, but by the time this Song takes its final form, our city will be filled with innately loyal citizens, unhindered by emotion.”
“Roark,” Ronja implored, ignoring the senior Westervelt’s exultation. She took a tentative step forward, rested her sweaty fists on the wooden stage. “Roark you have to fight it. Can you hear me?”
Roark blinked sluggishly, his eyes heavily lidded. He did not seem to recognize her presence.
“Roark,” Victor said. “Look at me.”
Roark snapped to attention and spun to face his father.
“Bow,” Victor ordered lazily.
Roark swiped his hand behind his back and bowed low, his long hair sweeping forward to obscure his face.
“Rise.”
Roark smiled vaguely as his spine uncurled.
“He is completely obedient,” Victor said, shifting his attention back to Ronja. “There will be no question of loyalty in the future.”
“Roark,” Ronja repeated.
She could hear nothing but Victor’s breathing, his quiet laughter. She could not even hear her own heart pumping in her remaining ear. The Music was clawing at her headphones, begging to be let inside. It was thick in the air, crackling like static electricity, kissing her skin with razor teeth.
“Roark, you can beat this.”
Roark was gazing at his father with unmistakable reverence. If he heard her voice, he did not acknowledge it.
Ronja opened her raw palms on the rough stage and launched herself up. She rose quickly on her bare feet. She felt the Offs swarm behind her, preparing to take her down.
Victor shook his head subtly, and they retreated.
“Please, try to sway him,” Westervelt invited her, splaying his hands. “It will make a good show.”
Ronja snapped her gaze toward the audience. Most were on their feet, their expressions twisted with misplaced rage and terror. Terra was still ensnared in the beefy arms of a female Off. She locked gazes with Ronja and offered an almost imperceptible nod.
Ronja turned back to Roark.
“Roark,” she said loudly.
She reached forward and grasped his stiff hand. The boy finally looked down at her, confusion briefly cracking his glassy stare. It faded quickly when he glanced over his shoulder at Victor, who gave him a reassuring nod.
Ronja twisted to view her mother. Layla was regarding her intensely. She had seen such a sharpness in her mother’s eyes before, but this was different. Her expression was focused, potent.
“I was angry with you,” Ronja said, returning to the shell of the boy she knew. “But I’m not anymore. You freed me from The Music—I won’t let you fall to it because of me.”
Roark blinked lethargically. His eyes tracked something nonexistent beyond her head.
“It is useless,” Victor said almost gleefully. “He’s—”
“When the day shakes beneath the hands of night,” Ronja whispered.
Victor ceased breathing. Out of the corner of her eye, Ronja saw his smile falter.
Ronja raised her voice.
“When your page is ripped from the Book of Life.”
She could feel the words flying from her mouth, though she could not hear them. She did not need to hear them. She could see them spark and pop when they struck the air, smoking and crackling against the electric wall of The Music.
“When your knees crash into the ground, and your desperate lips won’t make a sound.”
Ronja took Roark’s stiff hands in her own. He was trembling. Sweat beaded on his dark brow, and his eyes glinted anxiously.
“Raise The Music,” Victor ordered in her ear.
Roark shuddered and his vision stilled.
“When you’re all alone and the night is deep,” Ronja sang, tightening her grip on his still fingers. She pulled Roark down to her level, holding his bleak gaze in her own. “When you’re surrounded but you want to weep. When the morning comes and it’s all but bleak, and you want to scream but instead you’re meek.”
Roark blinked.
Once.
Twice.
There.
“Sing my friend into the dark.”
She could see it all around her in her mind’s eye. Her own voice, clashing with The Music in the air.
The Music was stark white with arms like whips. It was omnipotent, riding every air current, lurking in every brain.
Her own voice was black, exploding around her like dark supernovas and obliterating the tendrils of The Music.
“Sing my friend into the deep, sing my friend into the black, sing my friend, there and back.”
There and back.
Ronja felt her breath catch in her ribs.
His lips had moved, reflecting the words only he could hear.
“Roark?” she whispered.
Ronja.
The room erupted in a soundless surge of white.
59: On the Mend
Ronja and Roark dove from the stage as the explosion ripped through the atrium. The force knocked her headphones from her ears, but when she lifted her rattled head all she could hear was a high-pitched keening, the aftermath of the eruption.
The boy wrenched Ronja to her feet, wound his arms around her head protectively. She pressed into his chest and wrapped her arms around his waist, peeking out from beneath his bicep.
Around them was chaos and sunlight.
Chunks of metal and concrete and wire littered the ground, smoking in the shafts of brilliant sunlight that tumbled through the gaping hole in the roof. Screams and cries of shoc
k began to break through the shrill note that lingered after the blast. People scrambled, clambering over each other to get to the double doors, which were thrown open. Even the Offs seemed stunned.
Ronja looked around fearfully for Victor, but he was nowhere to be found.
“Roark!”
Terra was sprinting toward them, waving her arms and leaping over mounds of rubble.
Ronja felt Roark beam, his jaw perched atop her head.
“Terra!” he shouted, uncharacteristically overjoyed at the sight of the blond solider.
“We needed an exit!” Terra called through her smug grin. “She should already have picked up the others in the bay.”
“She?”
Terra pointed toward the new skylight. Ronja and Roark followed her finger, but all they could see was an unusually blue sky.
A low rumble flooded the air. Ronja gaped as a behemoth, burgundy airship slid into view in the ragged portal. Its propellers glinted sharply in the midmorning light. The cold air lashed Ronja’s raw skin, but she welcomed the sting. It cooled her burns.
A rope ladder spiraled down through the hatch. Terra caught it singlehandedly.
One moment Ronja was grinning. The next, the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. She whipped around, poised to shout a warning. Before the hail of could bullets riddle her, Roark dragged her to the ground behind a hulking slab of concrete. Terra dove to the floor beside her, her hands clamped over her own head.
“Skitz!” Roark bellowed over the shelling, his arm wrapped around Ronja. “What do we do?”
“Wait!” Terra yelled back.
“For what?!”
The gunfire stopped as quickly as it had began, the last shells singing against the floor almost cheerily. For a beat there was only the thrum of the propellers and the sound of their labored breathing.
Then, the screaming began.
Terra was the first to get to her feet, a twisted grin splitting her mouth. The wind whipping her hair, her eyes glittering, she looked terrifyingly beautiful. She craned her head back and released a ringing laugh, motioned for Ronja and Roark to rise.
They got to their feet cautiously, wincing as the gut-wrenching cries continued. Ronja peered around the chunk of rubble. Her mouth fell open.
The team of Offs was writhing on the floor, their black uniforms caked in white debris. Their bodies were rigid with pain, their fingers paralyzed with agony. Blood drained from beneath their headphones, dying the powdered concrete.
“We sent Henry to cut the power,” Terra laughed, grasping the rope ladder with a strong, tanned hand. “He had a better idea.”
“The Lost Song,” Ronja realized with a breathless laugh. “He put it in their headphones.”
“Come on,” Terra called over the din, already several rungs above them. “We don’t know how long it’ll hold!”
“My mother!” Ronja gasped, spinning toward Roark and grabbing him by the forearms. “The other prisoners!”
She and Roark separated and whirled about. The stage was smashed to splinters, crushed beneath a hulking slab of concrete.
Ronja rushed forward, picking through the rubble. A debris-dusted foot caught her eye and she lurched forward. Roark came up behind her and ripped away several jagged planks of wood.
A skinny girl about their age emerged from the rubble, bleeding profusely from a gash in her forehead, but otherwise unharmed. Roark put a hand behind her back and helped her to her feet. Ronja ignored the girl and continued to search through the debris.
“Layla!” she screamed. “Mom!”
A twitch of motion to her right.
Ronja flew toward it and began to dig through the splintered planks. A hand shot from the pile, clawing at the air. The fingers were clubbed.
“I got you! Hang on!” Ronja cried.
She tore away the final few planks. Sunlight shot across her mother’s coarse features. Her mouth was twisted into a grimace of pain.
“Mom, I—”
“Took you long enough,” Layla grumbled, shoving a chunk of stone the size of an apple from her chest.
Ronja let out a laugh that was closer to a sob. She threw her arms around her mother and rocked her back and forth steadily.
“Ach . . . you’re hurting me . . . ” Layla grumbled.
“Ronja!” Terra screamed from above. “Get your pitching ass up here!”
Ronja drew back from her mother and yanked her to her feet, brushing tears from her eyes.
The rope ladder swung hypnotically in the bright air. The atrium was almost completely empty, save for the Offs who were falling silent in droves. The girl with red stubble and an old man with birdlike features were scaling the ladder steadily. Roark stood at the base, steadying it. His eyes were bright in the glare of the sun, his white teeth flashed.
Ronja’s stomach twisted itself into knots.
We did it.
“Go ahead!” Ronja called. “I’ll get her up!”
Roark nodded and leapt onto the ladder.
“Come on,” Ronja said, ushering her mother forward.
Layla shooed her flustered hands away and jumped toward the ladder. She began to climb.
Pop.
Ronja blinked, squinting up into the sunbeams.
A drop of rain, warm and full of life, graced her forehead.
For today my friend
I promise you are on the mend,
The water sang, just as it had in her dream. By the time Layla struck the ground, she was long past the world of dreams and nightmares.
60: Could Have
Her mother’s eyes were still open. They gazed up at the waiting airship, the swaying ladder, the crisp, autumn sky. A wary smile hung on the corner of her Layla’s perpetually swollen mouth. A politely tiny hole dotted the center of her rumpled forehead where the bullet had exited.
Ronja crashed to her knees, her hands limp at her sides. Roark was hanging off the top of the ladder, screaming for her to climb.
The tears would not come anymore. Her whole body was dry. Parched of blood. Starved of sensation.
When she got to her feet, her vision was clear. The Offs were as quiet as corpses, twitching occasionally in the debris.
Ronja looked around calmly in search of her mother’s killer. A thin trail of smoke wormed through the air several paces to her right. She followed it to the shooter.
She knew who it was before she saw his broken form beneath a jagged wedge of concrete.
His breaths came out in rattling hisses. Blood gushed from his mouth, drawn from his crushed legs. A revolver lay smoking in his palm, empty of bullets. The sharp tang of the gunpowder mingled with the metallic scent of his blood. His headphones had been knocked from his head and lay nearby, cracked clean in half.
Victor Westervelt II choked a laugh as he regarded Ronja with manic eyes. “I was . . . aiming . . . for . . . Roark . . . ” he coughed.
Ronja nodded.
“The Music . . . will get out . . . ” he continued. “It doesn’t matter if you kill me or not.”
“I killed six people today,” Ronja said quietly, drinking in the destruction around her. The bodies she had left in the doorway had been trampled by the escaping crowds. Their limbs were cranked into strange angles, but they did not bleed. “I pulled the trigger, but their blood is on your hands.”
“Finish . . . it . . . ” Victor choked out.
Ronja shook her head slowly.
“Zipse . . . ” Victor rasped. “Finish it . . . ”
She turned her back on him.
“I’m done taking orders from you.”
Ronja strode away from the man, impervious to the rubble beneath her naked feet. She did not look back, even as his cries for mercy commenced.
Before she started to climb the waiting ladder, she stopped before her mother.
Layla looked peaceful in the morning light. The red on her forehead could have been war paint. She could have been on her way to a jam.
She could have been.
Ronja knelt by her mother, caressed her rough cheek. Westervelt’s screams were dissipating in the background. His cries were almost childlike, as if they did not belong to him. Ronja ignored them.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ronja said softly, shutting her mother’s eyelids with her palms. “I know it wasn’t. You would have loved me.”
She pressed two fingers to Layla’s jaundiced forehead, plugging the bullet wound.
“May your song guide you home,” she whispered.
61: The Weight
Ronja had always wondered what an airship looked like from the inside. She had imagined luxuriating in a floating palace, garbed in fine clothes and sipping champagne as she watched the world turn far below.
Instead, she was doused in blood and draped in nothing but an ill-fitting overcoat. She almost chuckled at the irony as she scaled the writhing rope ladder, leaving her mother and the screaming silence of Red Bay behind.
When she emerged from the hatch in the belly of the airship, she was greeted by a hushed ring of her companions. Their gazes were heavier than the weight of the concrete that had crushed Victor.
Roark was there and so was Terra, both cloaked in debris. Iris and Evie, both drenched to the bone in the waters of the bay, stood side by side, their hands clasped tightly. Iris was crying silently, but did not seem to be aware of it. The two surviving prisoners, the redheaded girl and the old man, lingered on the outskirts of the semicircle. The man was clutching his skull and muttering to himself, but the girl seemed stable.
Someone was missing.
“Henry,” Ronja breathed, getting to her feet. As if it had sensed her presence, the airship lurched and began to sail forward with impossible speed.
Roark bowed his head.
“I’m right here, Ro.”
Ronja looked around wildly, her breath catching in her throat, a smile budding on her lips. But her comrades were not rejoicing.
Terra stepped forward, her face turned down, her hand outstretched. She was holding a small black radio.
Ronja reached out, her expression blank. She flinched when her fingers wrapped around the warm metal.
Vinyl: Book One of the Vinyl Trilogy Page 31
