Page 41 of Adrift!
The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d known it wasn’t the song she needed in this time and place, but how was she supposed to perfect something new?
Even as she took a deep breath for the first verse, she felt the wrongness intensifying. The counterfeit guitar, the stale stanzas on the tip of her lying tongue, the performance for an audience only here because they were trapped, kept in the dark about their looming fate—
This wasworsethan the coffee shop.
On the edges of her vision, faint rainbow fractals beginning to shimmer. The resonark, responding. But so weakly, as disbelieving as she was.
Letting the breath out, she skipped to the pre-chorus as an instrumental only. Mariah had her eyes closed, swaying slightly, and Felicity gave a stealthy thumbs-up under her elbow, but most of the passengers looked faintly confused. They all knew how a song was supposed to go. And this wasn’t it.
Remy couldn’t even look toward the bar.
She was failing. Again.
Still without a word, she broke into the chorus at a reckless tempo, far too quick for her rusty strumming, fingertips burning. She was going to lose it…
Contorting her hand, she improvised an arpeggio over the lyrics she’d never sing again—“And when all the stars go finally dark, I’ll finally hold your restless heart.”
But the intonation slipped, and as she missed a note recovering, her one true fan Mariah opened her eyes at the mistake.
For an instant, inhuman hues sparkled there. Then she blinked and the kaleidoscopic was gone.
It was all fading. With brutal focus, Remy raged to the bridge, the part of the song where a key change and the beat of her hand against the resounding body would mark a transformation…
And she stopped.
Just stopped on a vicious jangle of dissonance.
The echo in the guitar’s hollow faded away eerily, the diminuendo a niente—the diminish to nothing—breaking into discordant fractals like the resonark’s splintering light. And the silence that followed was absolute.
Past the lacy curtains, Remy locked eyes with Ikaryo. At some point while she’d played, he’d come out from behind the bar and stood poised at its edge. Where he gripped the polished surface, the cybernetic components of his hand were dark, dormant.
Waiting for her.
“I am not out here alone,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but in the hushed salon, it rang.
Ikaryo’s silver eyes spun once, fast. An unvoiced question.
Ducking out from the strap, she let the instrument slide back to its stand. Hands empty, she took another breath, filling her belly until she felt the note rising to her tongue, acapella.
The unconscious melody she’d been humming right before he’d saved her from falling off one of these very couches. Not pure, not perfect, and no words—not yet—just the raw beauty of breath and sound, a resonance matched across the ballroom when Ikaryo’s cybernetics bloomed with energy, casting through the thick filigree to reach for her with fingers of light and overtones that seemed to resonate into other dimensions.
An exclamation of wonder swept the crowd, again moving as one to face him.
Remy almost lost hold of her vibrato on a giggle at his startled expression. But he recovered like a pro, even raising his arm to change the rays of light. His pitch deepened too, and she wove a descant around him as he nudged the curtain aside to pace slowly toward her.
Oh, he was a natural, that graceful charm serving him well—and her, of course.
She moved to one side of the little stage, giving him room to step up, and grabbed the odd alien instrument again, never letting the wordless melody falter, while his harmonies echoing, sustaining, and resolving in a dance of light and sound.
When she straightened, he was right there, close enough that sparks from his augments jumped between them. He reached out to brush free her hair caught under the guitar strap.
She’d taken out the morning braid, and a wavy red lock coiled softly around his finger. He lifted the strands to his lips, and out in the audience, someone—maybe Mariah?—cheered.
Since he was accompanying her with his augments, not his mouth, his whisper didn’t interrupt the song, although it nearly broke her:
“Across any distance, Remy, I will hear you. Always.”
