The Hush

by Skye Melki-Wegner

  She didn’t mean to betray him.

  People were pouring out of the chamber now, pushing and shoving through the door into the corridors beyond. The shield systems were still shut down, deactivated by the emergency alarm that had allowed Nathaniel to find them so quickly. Bodies pushed out into the corridors, spilling like sand through the neck of an hourglass.

  ‘I believe,’ Travis said, ‘that this is the part where we flee the city.’

  Chester nodded. Every Songshaper in Weser would soon be dashing from their beds to investigate the chaos. It was too risky to leave with the crowd; the gang looked too clean and healthy to fit in with the escaping prisoners, and half the gang lacked the pale blue eyes of the Silencers. Besides, it would take too long to navigate the corridors, let alone to escape onto the streets of Weser. If anyone identified them as suspects …

  Susannah produced a final charge from her pocket. It looped into a perfect silver ring. ‘Ready?’

  They nodded.

  Susannah laid the charge on the floor, right beneath the centre of the dome. It would connect to the charges she’d lain on the outside of the building: they were double-use charges, ready for one last bang.

  They cried out the notes together – the notes that Dot had taught them, which were programmed into her final system of charges – and the metal twist came alive with light. It spun and sputtered, shooting sparks into the air, and there was a sudden tremendous bang.

  Above them, the dome exploded into tiny fragments.

  The residue fell softly, like a sandcastle dissolving in the wind. It poured down around them, soft and harmless, and Chester felt for a moment that he was back in the Hush and the air was made of dry rain. Overhead, all that remained of the dome was its iron frame, a skeleton in the sky. Their pulley ropes – deliberately attached to the frame rather than the dome itself – still dangled down to greet them.

  The room was almost empty now, and Chester found himself staring at his friends in the sudden quiet. The absence of Sam made his throat clench. But there was Susannah. Dot. Travis. There was Penelope, and there was his father.

  ‘Come on,’ Chester said. ‘There’ll be more Songshapers along in a minute – when they hear all the –’

  ‘I think they’ll be busy for a while.’ Travis stared at the disappearing remains of the crowd. ‘They’ve got a few unexpected visitors.’

  They all stared at each other for a moment and – against all odds – Chester found himself laughing. It was an exhausted, wild laughter that bubbled up from his stomach to his chest, and tumbled from his lips. They were almost free. The Conservatorium was in chaos, the prisoners were escaping, and they were almost out of here.

  Almost.

  They used the pulley to winch themselves up, two at a time. Dot and Penelope went first, then Chester and his father. Chester left his fiddle for Susannah to carry, since she had no injured Silencer to occupy her hands. Chester supported his father’s drooping body, barely aware of the ache in his limbs and simply relishing the warmth of his father beside him. They were a family again, father and son caring for each other, struggling to survive in the chill of the world.

  They clambered out onto the rooftop, where the pegasi were screaming panicked neighs, whinnies, and shrieks into the night. The explosion of the dome had been too much for the beasts and they kicked wildly in their stalls. Chester left his father leaning on the side of a chimney stack and ran along the stable front with fumbling fingers, unlocking the stalls one by one. The horses charged out into their new-found freedom and took to the skies, flapping wildly, another contribution to the chaos in the city.

  Down below, he heard screams and shouts as Silencers poured out onto the streets, disrupting late-night diners and overturning tables as they rushed into the freedom of Weser City’s streets and alleyways.

  ‘Their minds will be returning, slowly,’ Dot said. Her eyes were bright and more vivid than he’d ever seen them, and she clutched Penelope’s hand as if it was a lifeline in a storm. ‘They’ll remember themselves and they’ll go back to their families.’

  ‘How long will it take them to recover?’ Chester said, glancing back at his father. ‘If they’ve been trapped in the Hush for weeks … some for months …’

  ‘It will take time,’ Dot said. ‘But not forever.’

  Beside her, Penelope gave a weary smile. She looked a little distant, a little lost, but her eyes were shining like her girlfriend’s, and she leant her head on Dot’s shoulder as if it was a pillow.

  ‘Home,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Dot said. ‘A new home. A home where they can’t find us.’

  When Travis and Susannah had clambered up onto the roof, they seized the last of the pegasi – three shining beasts that Chester had left in their stalls – and took to the sky in pairs. Susannah rode with Travis, Dot rode with Penelope, and Chester rode with his father.

  And as the wing-beats threw a breeze across their faces, they flew towards the stars.

  EPILOGUE

  One Week Later

  Chester sat in his hotel room, staring through the window.

  A quiet town rolled out before him, gleaming in the early morning light. Behind him, his father snored quietly on the bed, a curling frame of messy hair and wrinkled eyes. There was grey in his hair now, which hadn’t been there before. Chester sometimes caught himself staring at the man in disquiet. He had aged so much in just a few months. Suffered so much.

  ‘It’s just stress,’ Travis had assured him, checking vital signs and blood pressure. ‘Once he’s recovered, he’ll start looking better again.’

  But there were some things that time couldn’t fix. Time couldn’t erase the wrinkles, or the grey, or the trauma. Chester’s father had aged before his time, and the knowledge made Chester sick to his stomach.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  It was Travis. He carried a medical kit under his arm and gave Chester a reassuring nod as he entered.

  ‘How are the others?’

  ‘Better,’ Travis said. ‘Penelope is mending much faster than your father, although I imagine her youth has something to do with that.’

  Chester turned back to the window. He could hear Travis behind him, rummaging around for needles and equipment as he performed his daily tests on Chester’s father’s body. The man had slept almost constantly since their escape from Weser City.

  Occasionally his father woke for a few minutes at a time. Chester snatched those minutes like the berries atop a pudding: little bursts of sweetness before the stodginess set back in. Chester tried to talk, to ask questions, to reassure, but his father would slip back into his dreams and Chester would slip back into loneliness.

  He didn’t blame the others for not keeping him company. They were busy with their own problems. Dot barely left Penny’s side, and Travis stayed with them. Penelope was his sister, after all – what else did Chester expect?

  Chester fixed his eyes on the sun-streaked sky. It was early morning and out in the town, people were beginning to wake. They dribbled onto the streets, yawning and calling to each other, bustling out to buy their morning bread and paper.

  As for Susannah …

  Inside this hotel, in another room, Susannah kept silent.

  Chester had tried to visit her, once. But when he knocked on her door, she hadn’t answered and he’d slunk back to his own room, back to staring through the same damned window. Back to watching the same damned streets. Because Susannah didn’t want him here. She wanted Sam. And deep down, Chester knew she would trade his life for Sam’s in a heartbeat if it would bring the older boy back.

  He traced a finger across the window, blotting out his view of people on the street. One by one they vanished, then reappeared as his finger moved on. That was how it felt, sometimes. Like some huge invisible finger was moving through the heavens, stealing random people from the world before their time. Stealing Sam, and leaving Chester.

  Why? Why had the o
lder boy done it? Chester knew they’d grown to understand each other a little more as time wore on, but this? To throw away his life for Chester’s sake?

  It didn’t make sense. It didn’t –

  ‘He’s fine,’ Travis said, interrupting this train of thought. ‘Blood pressure’s about what I expected, and I’ve given him another set of injections. Just a matter of waiting for him to wake up properly, I’m afraid.’

  Chester yanked his gaze away from the window and turned back to Travis and his father. The latter lay quietly on the bed, so still that he looked more dead than sleeping. His breaths were deep, though; his chest moved up and down with the quiet rhythm of his lungs.

  ‘Thanks,’ Chester said.

  ‘Don’t mention it. If you need anything else, let me know, all right?’

  ‘All right.’

  The bed creaked, the door swung. Chester was alone again.

  He crossed to the foot of the bed and slid onto the blanket by his father’s feet. He pulled Goldenleaf from its perch on a nearby chair and began to tune the strings. Chester had carved a new tuning peg from a lump of firewood, mended a crack in the pegbox and replaced the broken strings. He had even ventured out to buy a bow from a shabby little instrument shop across the road. The fiddle’s scroll was shattered and its gold adornments were gone, but those were only decorative. Goldenleaf was ready to be played.

  Yet despite these repairs, Chester hadn’t played music for days – for a week, actually, now he came to think of it. Not since the Conservatorium.

  All he had done was tune the strings, again and again. Often they weren’t out of tune in the first place, but Chester would twiddle the knobs until they sounded like cat screams. Then he would fix them, one by one, coaxing the fiddle back into wholeness of sound once again. He did that now, one string at a time: a plink, a howl, and then a perfect twang.

  But no music. No songs. He didn’t feel like it. Not when he thought about his father, unconscious on the bed, or Sam, dead in that black pond in the Conservatorium.

  Or Susannah, shut away in her room, not wanting to see him.

  Chester’s fingers grew heavy. He dropped the fiddle back onto the chair. He ran the bow between his palms for a moment, then placed it beside the instrument and returned to the window. The sun was a little higher now, and the streets fuller. He raised his finger and blotted out another random passer-by. Here. Gone. Just like that.

  The next knock startled him. Chester frowned at the window, but refused to look back in the direction of the door. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. No one had visited him in days, apart from Travis. Who else …?

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The door slid open. Even without looking, he knew it was her. It was the way she moved through the air, sleek and stealthy, so light on her feet. He caught a glimpse of red reflected in the window glass and knew he was right.

  Chester turned slowly to look at her. Susannah had changed in the days since he’d seen her. She was thinner, more brittle. Her skin was paler and her eyelids puffy. She had pulled her hair into a bun atop her head and it balanced there like an angry red bauble.

  ‘Chester …’

  They stared at each other. The sadness hit Chester unexpectedly. He had thought he’d be happy to see her, or shocked, or perhaps just hurt and angry at her for ignoring his knock on her door. But this? Sadness? It wasn’t what he’d expected. It was too quiet, too cold. It started in the depths of his gut, rolling up like an incoming tide, slow and subtle, but with a lapping progress that seeped all the way to his scalp.

  ‘Chester,’ Susannah said again. ‘I …’ She trailed off then cast her eyes around the room. ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘Travis says he’s better,’ Chester said. ‘Looks the same to me. I’m just waiting to see if he wakes up.’

  ‘If?’

  ‘Hopefully “when”. Maybe “if”.’

  She nodded. There was a pause.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Chester didn’t answer. Was she talking about his father? Or did she mean she was sorry that he’d survived – that Sam was gone?

  ‘I’m sorry about our original plan.’ Her voice was barely a whisper now. ‘It seemed like the only way. But once I got to know you, I knew we had to change it and I kept trying to think of another solution but it seemed impossible to –’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought you’d run. I thought you’d leave our gang behind and we’d be back where we started, with no way into the Conservatorium.’

  ‘I’d spent months on the road looking for my father,’ Chester said quietly. ‘Did you think I’d just up and run when your plan might save him?’

  Susannah hesitated. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She dropped into a nearby chair and looked down at her steepled fingers. ‘I just … maybe it was something else. Maybe I was afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘That you’d think we were your enemies. That you’d hate me – us, us!’ she corrected herself quickly, flushing. ‘That you’d hate us.’

  Chester stared at her. She was behaving so oddly, flexing her fingers, staring at her lap, head bowed low to hide the red in her cheeks and the puff in her eyes.

  ‘Captain, I wanted to …’

  ‘Susannah,’ she said wearily. ‘Just call me Susannah. I’m not your captain anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Nightfall Gang’s over. We finished what we set out to do. The Conservatorium’s in an uproar, the prisoners are free. You’ve got your father, and Travis and Dot have got Penelope. No more gang. No more thieving. No more schemes.’

  ‘Susannah,’ he said, after a moment’s hesitation. It felt strange to address her by her name. ‘I wanted to apologise, too.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For what happened in the cage.’ He took a breath. ‘For Sam.’

  A breeze played on the windowpane, light and hollow.

  ‘That wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I should have stopped him. I should have jumped in quicker, in front of him or something, or gone for it before he even caught up to me, or –’

  Susannah stood, the movement jerky. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t you ever say that.’

  Chester blinked.

  ‘There are lots of things I regret about that night,’ Susannah said. ‘Things I’d go back and change if I could … But not that. Not the fact that you survived.’ She took a ragged breath. ‘Do you have any idea how I felt when you ran into that cage?’

  He stared at her for a moment then quietly shook his head.

  ‘It felt like my insides were being pulled out.’ Her voice was hot and serrated, stained with the effort of holding back tears. ‘I thought I’d killed you, that I’d cared more about justice for the past than for what the future might’ve been. I thought … I thought I’d never see you again.’

  They stared at each other and Chester realised that his own eyes were damp now. How long had they been like that? He hadn’t even noticed the saltiness welling. He raised a sleeve to wipe at his face, too exhausted and sad and drained to even feel embarrassed.

  Chester waited for Susannah to break the gaze, to look away. To pull her eyes from the boy who had let her friend die. But she didn’t. She stared at him, and he stared back, and the whole room shrank into the line of light and dust and quiet air that stretched between them.

  ‘Sam was always going to die fighting,’ Susannah whispered. ‘He threw himself into battles whenever he had a chance. He couldn’t bear it anymore – the Music in his head, messing with his emotions. He was always in that cage, in a way. Not a physical cage, but a cage in his head. In his veins. He knew he’d never leave the Conservatorium alive.’

  She took a shaky breath. ‘He wanted to be the one to bring them down, Chester. Whatever it took, he told me. And he did it. He got his revenge and he saved a friend. I think he’d be happy, if he knew.’

  ‘But I wasn’t his frien
d. He shouldn’t have –’

  ‘You were a part of his gang, Chester. It took a while for him to realise that, but then he accepted it. And once you were part of his gang, you weren’t just a friend. You were family.’

  Chester broke the gaze. He couldn’t help it. The words were such a jolt that he took a faltering breath, crossed to the window and rested his hands on the sill. He stared out through the glass, his mind awhirl with the weight of her words.

  She joined him a moment later. Her fingers rested beside his own. They were long and slender, with nails worn down to stubs. A couple of scars marked the backs of her hands, and they glinted white in the morning sunlight.

  ‘What happens now?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Chester nodded out the window, to the milling streets of people down below. ‘We have to let people know the truth. About the Hush, and the recital. About which world is real.’

  Susannah followed his gaze. ‘They’re both real,’ she said. ‘In their own way.’

  ‘But this one …’

  ‘This one was built by sorcery, yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It just means it’s newer. And it’s where people have made their homes, their lives, their families.’ She let out a slow breath. ‘It’s real, too, Chester. They both are.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We get the word out, I suppose. We get the word out and we let people make up their own minds.’

  ‘You think people will stay here?’

  ‘Most will, I think. The Hush might have been our world once, but it’s been ruined. Not many people would want to live there, now. Not now that we’ve got a better home.’

  ‘But we’ll give them the choice.’