“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.