The insidious nature of Hate is that it masquerades as the very thing we are attempting to achieve by our own government’s effort: Love. Therefore, we must utilize every ounce of our power to stamp it out. We have enlightened ourselves to the point of knowing the ultimate mode of being. We are only dragged back into the age of terror when we allow ourselves to be swayed by pleasant-sounding poison disguised as an opinion.
(Elite Watcher Training Manual, 51st edition, page 103)
“So wait—you’re Sirens?” I ask for the third time.
Viola nods, still smiling. “That’s right.”
“You all get together and talk about that Composer person.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Lyric,” I say, remembering another name Mumma and Dadda had used.
Viola’s smile remains patient. “And the Muse. Yes.”
“What do you say?” I venture to ask.
“Well, we sing,” says a smaller Apprentice who seems to be made of skin, bones, and sinew. He flashes a toothy grin at me. “I’m Fife, by the way. I mean, that’s not my Elite name, but you don’t need to know that.”
I look at them bewildered. “You’re not worried I’d report you?”
Hodge snorts. “You’d have to explain your contraband fitness tracker first.”
“I wouldn’t report you,” I blurt hurriedly, seeing the worry lines on Viola’s face. “I’ve seen the Realignment chambers and—” My words fizzle away in a shudder.
“That’s okay, Cadence. If Harper trusts you, then I do,” Viola says finally. “Why don’t you tell us your story?”
Ten pairs of eyes focus on me.
I shift in the hard plastic seat, feeling a tiny ember of panic. “Uh. What do you want to know?”
“How about you start with why you wouldn’t check your messages,” grunts Hodge.
“Let her be, Harper,” Viola chides, laying a hand on Hodge’s knee. “She’s here now. That’s a good thing.”
Hodge gently dislodges her hand, but he doesn’t speak.
“Did you get memories of the Before?” Viola prompts.
“Before Nursery Dorm?” I ask.
“That’s the Before,” Fife notes. “Did you have a weird Before? Was it scary? Did they beat you up?”
“Fife, don’t.” Viola throws a warning glance at the scrawny Apprentice before morphing into a smile back at me. “Yes, Cadence. Before you were in the Nursery Dorms.” She puts a hand to her chest. “I was picked up by a Love Squad patrol from my parents’ overcar out on Love Highway. Fife here was taken from his backyard. Harper—”
“She already knows mine,” Hodge interrupts.
Viola gives him a look of surprise. “Really? Well, that’s wonderful!” When her smile flashes back to me, she’s showing extra teeth.
Before I know it, I am sharing my story, from the darkened hiding place to the grasping fists of the Love Squad ripping me away from Mumma. But I don’t tell them how I later voted for her death in the Hater’s Pavilion Show.
“We’re so sorry that happened to you,” Viola says. A trio of girls near her nod their heads sympathetically.
You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I was really like.
“You had a terrible Before,” one of the girls agrees.
I look around at them. “But what does it mean?” I ask. “I’ve got all this stuff in my head I can’t understand. Like tonight, I remembered that I was with my . . . my dad, and he said that the Composer is always with us, but I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
The expressions on the faces around me range from amusement to pity.
I lower my head, feeling embarrassed. “Sorry, that’s a dumb thing to say.”
“This is a safe place, Cadence,” Viola says reassuringly. “We want you to feel like you can say what’s on your heart, and we aren’t here to judge you.”
A girl with short blonde hair leans forward. “She might understand better if we let her hear the Song.”
“Great idea, Allegra. How about this one?”
Without warning, the most amazing sound comes from Viola’s mouth. Her voice rings out in the room in clear, bell-like tones. A melody that is sweet and stirring, lilting with a sound that makes me want to weep and laugh all at once. The broken, out-of-tune melody in my head hiccups.
Prompted by her words, the rest of the group joins in, harmonies swelling around the space in tones that bring tears to my eyes. The words flow from their mouths with a strength that brings all of my senses to life. Men’s deep voices complement the lighter female tones, weaving a rich tapestry of music.
This is how we know what love is,
Lyric laid down his life for us . . .
They sing the words several times over, and as the words sink in, I feel enveloped in love and warmth and something I can’t quite describe. It’s like the first touch of sun on a spring morning, or the soft glow on waking just before the rest of the world tumbles in.
In the words, I feel connected to other voices, too. An invisible host of singers. A choir beyond a veil somewhere, all raising their voices to the Composer. When the song finishes, my cheeks are wet, and my heart is full.
Viola and the group sit in silence for a few minutes, eyes closed. I wait for something to happen, but when it doesn’t, my discomfort returns. Unwanted memories barge in like unwelcome visitors: Mumma, bloodied and beaten. My hands, poised over the red Watcher button as I condemn another Lover to Embracement and death.
The just-finished song battles in my head with the broken melody that’s been singing itself through my thoughts for weeks. A small voice of panic wells up from somewhere deep inside me, urging me to run from the room.
You don’t belong here, the small voice screams into my growing disquiet.
Viola begins to speak, her eyes still closed. “We are notes in the Composer’s Song.”
Allegra and others nod and murmur their agreement.
Viola continues. “The Composer gave us the Song to sing. We were composed in harmony with the universe . . .”
More murmurs of agreement. Two of the boys begin to hum, their deep voices forming a stirring bass behind Viola’s words. I fight back a laugh of derision. Harmony? My universe has no harmony. Stolen from my family, brainwashed and unloved by the so-called Love Collective. My closest friends turned on me. Now I’m condemned as a Watcher to select people for execution and imprisonment. If I had to describe my current existence, harmony would be the last word I would choose.
Viola’s voice rises with increasing passion. “But we broke that harmony long ago.” Her voice trembles with what sounds like a deep inner grief. “People believed they could be better if they composed alone.”
The hummed tune from the small group becomes mournful, and I pause my self-accusations to listen. Viola’s impassioned speech continues over the music. “And so the notes were scattered, the harmony vanished, the song broken and lost.”
My inner melody grows louder, limping and off-key. It competes with the group’s singing. Like an oily sludge coating the river’s surface, my inner brokenness taints everything it touches. I glance around, wondering if anyone else hears the broken melody. It’s so loud, it seems to be transmitting through my ears.
Viola’s words flow toward me like the beam from a lighthouse. “In a time long ago, the Composer wrote himself into the tune—became Lyric—to mend the music he had first composed.”
My head spins in a tornado of confusion. Lyric was . . . the Composer written into the Song? But how?
“What we could not do, Lyric did. Lyric sang the Composer’s perfect tune. When we deserved to be silenced forever, Lyric bore the silence, became mute for us.”
The humming cuts out, and the group is left in an eerie, darkened space. I feel the weight of Viola’s words. What could she mean? What silence did Lyric endure instead of me?
The answer comes to me in the darkness. An unwanted vision of a woman, broken and bleeding in front of a baying crowd. My hand, poised above an infotab ready to vote for my own mother’s execution. The word sings through my heart with the searing pain of a knife wound: murderer.
I killed my own mother. I deserve to die. I should be silenced.
Like a dying gasp, the cacophony of my own broken song splutters and stops. The weight of guilt bears down on me so heavily that I almost don’t hear Viola begin again. But as if an invisible hand rests on my shoulder to guide me, I feel my eyes drawn toward her.
“What we could not do for ourselves, Lyric did to save us. He took the full burden of the Composer’s anger, so we can experience the grace of the Composer’s Song. Sirens are the children of Lyric. Without Lyric, we are broken instruments. But through Lyric, we become part of Lyric’s mending, we become the notes were created to be, we . . .”
The pound of my heart is so loud in my ears that Viola’s words become muffled. The Composer, the Song, the Lyric. Words from my forgotten childhood that seem like so much incomprehensible nonsense. Yet I can’t explain the complete meltdown of my emotions. Am I getting sick? I desperately need some air.
The words from a dream return to me. I came to make you clean. Lyric. Lyric said that.
I am too broken, I think. But in reply, I feel the softest brush of love.
You only need to let me, the voice says again.
Harmonies erupt around the group, swelling even louder than before and drowning out my internal cacophony.
This is how we know what love is,
Lyric laid down his life for us.
And we also ought to love as
Lyric loved us first.
Brothers, sisters, sharing joy
Feeding hungry, quenching thirst.
Love in truth and act
Not just in word alone,
As the Composer taught us:
His love is truth, his presence peace
Greater in us as we believe.
One day Lyric’s country
Shall we with eyes perceive.
It’s as different to the mindless hypnotism I felt in the VR as night is to day. The words seem to echo through history. In this music I don’t lose myself. I find myself as I really am: failures, weaknesses, evil, and all.
The music carries something else, too. A Someone who has been waiting for me. Composer, Lyric, and Muse, the three/one who has my times held tightly in his hands. The Someone who has offered to heal my broken melody, replacing it with his own.
In the Sirens’ music, it’s as if the Composer himself is singing to me, his arms held out wide waiting for my embrace. Eyes knowing and compassionate. Voice clear as crystal, true and right and so sweet my ears hurt to hear.
As soon as the song finishes, the words burst out of me: “How do I get . . . that?”
Viola giggles, but it’s not a mocking kind of laugh like I’m used to. It’s a giggle of pure pleasure. Hodge beams too—an open, friendly smile that I’ve never seen before.
“Well,” he says. “I’ve been hoping you’d ask that—”
A shadow darkens the doorway. “What did I miss?”
At the sound of his voice, I turn, ashen-faced. Wil stands at the entrance, arms held wide and face beaming. Seemingly oblivious to my inner turmoil, he looks around, his dimpled smile wide and confident. Hodge’s face returns to its normal, stony scowl.
“You made it!” Fife holds his hand up, and Wil gives him a high five.
“Finally!” Allegra claps her hands delightedly. “X, you’ve been away so long we were starting to think you weren’t coming.”
Wil tosses his head, doing a brilliant impression of a famous streaming star. “Sorry. Had some business to sort up top. You seemed to be in the middle of something. Don’t let me stop you.”
With a confident strut, he crosses the room to sit in the last vacant seat, directly across the circle from me and beside Allegra. Her face goes pink, and she smiles happily at him.
Viola explains. “Cadence was just asking us about the Composer, and we were going to help her out.”
Embarrassment kicks in, and I stand up, ready to run. “Don’t worry about it. I think I probably need to get back now, anyway. Another time?” I start backing away toward the door.
“Let me walk you out,” Hodge says, getting to his feet. At the same moment, Wil leaps up.
“This might be my fault,” he says lightly. “Cadence, do you mind if we have a word?”
“If it’s what I think it is—” Hodge speaks over Wil’s continued prattle, but I interrupt both of them.
“No need, either of you.” My voice is clipped and brusque. “I’ll see myself out. Hod—I mean Harper, or whatever your name is, I promise I’ll read my messages this time. Thank you everyone. Really. I am . . . I am so . . .” Anxiety has now robbed my lungs of air. “I have to . . .”
Leaving behind confused glances and worried murmurs, I dash out of the room. Footsteps echo down the hall behind me, so I speed my pace. Just as I reach the stairwell, a hand brushes my elbow.
“Cadence,” Hodge says quietly. “Please. Wait.”
I spin on my heels, crossing my arms protectively.
“Are you okay?” In his eyes, I see concern. Pity. And something else I can’t quite understand.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
My memories splash around in my head in messy currents. Like a drowning child, I reach out for the memory.
His love is truth, his presence peace
Greater in us as we believe.
Suddenly I break. “Help me, Hodge,” I say, almost desperate.
Confusion fills Hodge’s face. “With what?”
“I want to know more of that music. I don’t know why, but for some reason I just need it. Please.”
As I talk, Hodge’s slow smile creases the scar at the side of his face.
“That is something I can help with.” He starts to guide me back to the meeting room, but my feet stay planted on the first step, welded in place by fear.
When his hands feel the resistance from my arm he turns back, surprised. “What—?”
“Not there.”
Hodge’s brow furrows. He looks to the open doorway then back to me again. “Is it Wil?” he demands. “What did he—?”
“No, it’s nothing. Don’t worry,” I say quickly. In Hodge’s face I can see a return of the murderous intentions, and I don’t want to be responsible for Wil being injured.
Hodge looks somewhat relieved. “Well, how about we go to the office upstairs? I can explain there.”
“That sounds wonderful.”