Instead of pulling up outside our house, Zaneisha went for the driveway of the house across the road, where she and Gregor were quartered. I was dragged out of the car and into the house so fast, I swear my feet didn’t touch the ground. I was surrounded by people in uniforms.
“Are you injured?” someone asked brusquely, shining a light into my pupils.
“No.”
“What’s today’s date?” he persisted, clipping something to my finger.
“It’s the seventh of October. I’m fine,” I said. “Where’s Bethari?”
“Ms. Miyahputri is being escorted to her home. Clench your fist for me.”
And then Marie burst through the crowd and dropped on her knees beside me.
I’d never seen her so unsettled; not when I’d crashed into a press conference barefoot and bleeding from jumping off a roof, not when I’d starved myself, not when I’d opened my mouth to the horrible Carl Hurfest and got myself threatened with reconfinement. Her pupils were huge, nearly taking over the dark brown of her eyes, and her hands were trembling as she reached for my wrist. She checked the finger clip-on thingy, then looked into my face.
“I was worried you’d been hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, and forced myself to say the lie that might keep me free from suspicion. “I didn’t even see that guy go for his weapon, but Gregor must have. He kept me safe.”
“All right. Do you want to go home?”
I nearly said How? Home was a century away. But Marie had one lock of hair sticking up from her normally smooth, thick bob. She looked a bit like a cockatoo, feathers ruffled to scare off a threat.
“Let’s go home,” I agreed, and let her guide me across the street.
We were escorted by armed guards every step of the way.
Once the guards had gone through the house, looking for I-didn’t-ask-what, Marie politely shut them all out and asked me to stay in the kitchen while she went downstairs.
I was shaking, and the cup of tea she’d handed me was warm and smooth in my hands. I sat there holding it, without sipping it, willing the warmth to sink into my bones.
When Marie returned, she was carrying a picture of a woman I’d never seen before.
The woman was short and plump, with skin much darker than Marie’s and eyes turned up at the ends in a permanent smile. She was wearing something light and yellow that glinted and sparkled around her, and the light of humor in her eyes made her seem solid and touchable, not a two-dimensional image pressed onto a lifeless frame.
“This is Chelsea,” Marie said.
“She’s pretty,” I said, for lack of any other comment.
Marie smiled. “Isn’t she? We were married for nearly three years.”
Were? “Oh.”
“She died,” Marie said. “She was shot and killed six years ago, in our old house. The police said it was a robbery gone wrong. They found him. He went to jail. Afterward, I moved here. I couldn’t live there anymore.”
It hit me like the times I’d judged a landing wrong and knocked all the air out of myself instead of rolling with the impact. Marie smiled at me, but her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. I straightened up from my place leaning against the kitchen wall. This wasn’t a time for slouching.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last, aware that it wasn’t enough. Nothing I said could be enough.
“I know the project’s important to you for personal reasons, Tegan. I wanted to let you know about mine. I was already working on Operation New Beginning when Chelsea was shot. Afterward I kept thinking, if I’d worked faster, if we’d made more breakthroughs… It’s silly, of course. Chelsea had been dead for hours by the time I got home. I could never have saved her.”
“Is that why you invited me to stay with you?” I asked. The words popped out before I could think about them, but when I did, they made sense. Taking in a girl who was revived out of her sorrow for the woman who had been murdered—it was poetic, sort of. And tragic, too. But I wanted to be myself, not a prop in someone else’s poetic, tragic story.
“Perhaps a little. Mostly it was because I liked you, and I thought you should have a better deal than what Colonel Dawson was offering.” Her fingers tightened on the picture. “Chelsea would have liked you, too. She loved music and musicians. And you’d lost so much. I wanted you to be with someone who had lost someone. I thought I might understand, if only a little. I wanted to help. If I could.” Her frightened face said, all too clearly, that she didn’t think she was doing a good job.
I crossed the floor and hugged her, with the picture still cradled in her hands. She was all bone and muscle, strength hidden by her conservative clothes and quiet looks, and she returned the hug with interest, making my ribs creak in protest.
“You do help,” I said, and summoned a cheeky grin. “Even if it’s only a little.”
She gave me a proper smile and stepped back with another shaky laugh. “I didn’t even ask, how was your first day of school?”
I made an executive decision not to mention mistaking Abdi for Dalmar, hiding in the janitor’s closet, or turning the classroom into a spam zone. “It was okay. My basic math and literacy skills are all right, but I have to take lots of remedial classes in history and science. The remedial physics lessons look interesting. What’s a Salten Duck? Can we really make starships?”
Marie relaxed even further. “Salter’s Duck. It’s an old way of converting wave power to electricity. A fairly inefficient method, not often used.”
“And the starships? Really?”
“Theoretically,” she said, turning Chelsea’s picture in her hands. “It would be a huge resource investment, though, and no one would elect a government willing to throw that much money at something so distant. The closest potentially inhabitable planets we’ve discovered are twenty to thirty light-years away. A ship using our fastest current technology would take several hundred years to reach them, and no crew could survive that long.”
I wasn’t a science nerd like Dalmar, but I’d seen enough movies to know what the solution should be. “Couldn’t you use cryonics for that? Sleeper ships.”
Marie laughed. “We’re a long way from that. It would be hard to find volunteers for such a mission when I haven’t even—” She pressed her lips together.
“Brought anyone else back yet?” I guessed.
She sighed. “Yes. I don’t know why, but none of my other patients are responding nearly as well as you are. There’s something on the neurological side that doesn’t respond properly, and we’re having trouble narrowing it down.”
I thought again of the man in the bed, of his slack, incurious face.
“That’s classified, please, Tegan,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you even that much, but you deserve to know.”
“The other people, the, um, unsuccessful revivals. Were they all volunteers like me?”
“Of course,” she said, looking slightly shocked. “Anything else would be unethical. They have a great deal of trouble finding me viable subjects, however.”
Which reminded me of the question the Inheritor wanted me to ask. Why me?
Well, a lack of viable subjects was a good answer. I was right on the verge of asking Marie if she knew anything about an Ark Pro-something, but the question stayed locked behind my teeth.
I really wanted to trust her, after all she’d said and done for me. But when it came right down to it, Marie was working for the army. If the Inheritor’s reference had been to something dodgy, I didn’t want the army to be alerted to my search.
“I’ll get dinner started,” Marie said. “Or, well, a late lunch, I suppose.”
“I should do some assignments,” I said, and made myself smile as I went downstairs, Bethari’s computer a lump in my belt.
Bethari had far more apps than I did, and some of them looked really interesting. If I’d had more time, I would have liked to investigate MindNote or Roadcraft.
But I’d told Marie I was doing homework. If Koko was being monitored, I had to spend enough time using my own computer to make the lie plausible. I made sure the antispyware apps were running, put up the privacy shield, and set Bethari’s computer searching for Ark Pro*, cross-referenced with Operation New Beginning and Inheritors of the Earth.
Then I flipped Koko open and looked for the easiest remedial history assignment. There was one that was a project on world news. Pick five current humanitarian or economic situations, do a brief overview on each, then select something for an in-depth report, which I could ’cast, write, or display in creative form. If I displayed it to the class and invited criticism, the project would gain more credits toward my performance and sociability standards.
Fine. I started that search and looked at my other little project.
Bethari’s computer was asking permission to break into government archives.
What kind of apps did she have on there?
I checked that my door was locked, gave permission, and watched Bethari’s computer hunt through locked databases like a snake in a rat’s nest.
Koko started blinking at me, wanting to know if she should go into sleep mode. I wasn’t spending enough time on my homework.
I waved through the results, bringing up what Koko listed as the most urgent disasters facing mankind. I was trying to be quick, but I got dragged in deeper and deeper. Marie hadn’t covered anything like this in her current affairs and history lessons. I could see why Bethari thought I needed more education.
A fundamentalist revival was predicted in the Republic of Texico, which was still reeling after the secession of Austin to the United States. I knew the fundamentalist wars had ripped the old United States apart, but I hadn’t realized there were people who still wanted a Christian state.
New Zealand Green was violently protesting what it called the theft of the nation’s freshwater by Australia’s “strong-arm tactics.” New Zealand and Australia had been allies for hundreds of years. But now the Australian government was demanding preferential water sales under the closer-economic-relations agreement. “We have guarded New Zealand’s shores for decades,” the Australian president was quoted as saying. “We are good neighbors. If they continue to take advantage of our need for water with these robber-baron prices, we may have to reconsider what resources we can continue to commit to their protection.”
The New Zealand Prime Minister condemned what she called the “brutal attacks of terrorists” on Australian targets in New Zealand but argued that without water, New Zealand’s vital agriculture industry would fail. “Do Australians really want to starve us—and themselves, too? Much of the food on their tables comes from our fields.”
There were pandemics in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, and supertornadoes in the American South and Texico, and it looked as if France and Great Britain might soon be going to war.
The Ganges had dried up—well, Marie had mentioned that, when she’d briefly gone over the North-South Indian War. But the Nile was drying up, too, and there were massive fire events in the Amazon rain forest.
People were still burning fossil fuels, which came as a shock. The cars in Melbourne ran on batteries, and everything was solar-, wind-, or sea-powered, and no one except the military and the very, very rich were flying anymore.
But not everybody had been able to make the switch from fossil fuels, and countries with plentiful oil supplies had managed to offset the cost of switching to clean power by selling oil cheaply to countries that couldn’t afford to go clean, or didn’t have the infrastructure to manage massive electrical grids.
Wealthy governments had essentially exported their pollution, and now they blamed the polluters, the thirdies they regarded as stupid and backward because they still used their hoarded oil for transportation and electricity generation, because they ate meat instead of raising protein crops (genetically modified, patented, expensive crops), because they used coal, wood, and gas to cook their food instead of using clean electricity from their nonexistent solar panels.
The world was too hot, and it was getting hotter. Rising waters were threatening Fiji and Samoa, having, the report mentioned casually, already swallowed Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives and displaced tens of thousands of people worldwide. Crops that had worked fine in temperatures three degrees cooler were impossible to grow now, increased growing areas in Siberia and northern Canada weren’t picking up the slack, and there wasn’t enough water anywhere. Refugees crowded on the borders of nations that either wouldn’t let them in or threw them into huge detention camps that bred disease, crime, starvation, stress disorders, depression, and despair.
No one talked much about the Australian camps. The media lockout was still in force.
Why the hell was anyone wasting news time on something as pointless as what clothes I wore?
I had thought the future was better. Marie could talk about her wife with no fear, and Bethari had been worried that I might object to her scarf because I was from the past, when anti-Muslim prejudice had been the norm. Most people used public transportation, cars ran on batteries, new houses were built underground to save energy, and the humanure toilets that Dalmar admired were in widespread use.
And the Australian army was going to bring dead soldiers back to a second life.
Bethari had told me about the No Migrant policy and the prejudice against thirdies like Abdi, but I hadn’t understood what was happening or just how grotesque the situation was.
I hadn’t wanted to understand.
With shaking hands, I shut Koko down, knowing it wouldn’t help. The news would still be there.
Bethari’s computer beeped at me.
Caught up in a world in crisis, I’d actually forgotten what it was doing, and I fumbled to turn off the alarm. Then I saw the big red-framed warning.
BREACH DETECTED. ADVISE CLOUD SEPARATION.
TRACE 41.7% COMPLETE.
But I couldn’t disconnect just yet. Bethari’s computer, with its very clever programming, had found what I was looking for.
It was called the Ark Project.
The screen displayed that name and a list of addresses, but everything else was heavily encrypted; I probably had only that much because of a lazy coder somewhere. But there was nothing wrong with the other security protocols. Lots of other very clever computers were currently turning their very clever programming, and their much more efficient processors, toward finding where the search had originated.
Racing the trace, I dove frantically into the data. Most of the addresses were in the Northern and Western Territories, but there was one in Victoria—in fact, it was in Williamstown.
Close to the army base. I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I stared at the address, willing myself to memorize it. Pens and paper didn’t really exist anymore, and I couldn’t trust any device I might write the information on.
ADVISE IMMEDIATE CLOUD SEPARATION.
TRACE 96.2% COMPLETE.
“Fuckity fuck fuck fuck,” I said calmly. Then I grabbed my rusty iron statue of the lady in the sea and beat the crap out of Bethari’s computer.
The computer’s pliable material resisted, wrapping around the statue and trying to disperse the force, but I hammered it on the ground, hoping to open a crack somewhere. There might have been a less drastic way to separate a future computer from the online world, but I had no idea how to do it, and no time to find out before the trace got through the proxies and triangulated my position. Marie’s address would be a very clear indication of the inquiry’s source.
“Stop it, stop it!” I said, and hit harder. Even underground, with the thick earth walls, I was worried that Marie might hear. “Home, play ‘Revolution,’ volume eleven!”
The house computer obeyed, routing the song through the room’s speakers, and under cover of the reverberating strings and heavy bass, I brought the statue down again with all my might.
The iron lady’s head flew off.
But the computer’s surface had finally cracked. I grabbed my bottle of water from the nightstand and poured it into the gap. There were a few sparks, and the screen died.
I thrust the entire mess—statue, water bottle, and all—under my bed.
John sang that it was all gonna be all right.
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered, and flopped, spread-eagle, on my back.
“Tegan?” Marie’s light voice called through the noise. “Are you all right?”
I checked to make sure everything was well hidden before I replied. “I’m fine! Come in!” There was anger burning inside me, a hot, tight feeling that would not give way to tears.
Marie evidently saw it on my face as she pushed open the door. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Just… Why is the world so terrible?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You have… a faith. Does it help?”
“I have faith in a life after death. I don’t think that means we get to make this life awful.”
“We can try to make it better,” she said tentatively. “That’s always been my aim. Are you sorry that I brought you back to this time?”
I thought about it. Yes, the future was much worse than I’d thought. But the past had been bad, too, and I hadn’t even considered leaving it. There had been love for me there, and music, and joy. And here I had Marie and Bethari, and a chance at all those things. “No. Not really. I like being alive.”
Marie’s smile was glorious. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. “It just arrived.”
She leaned down and picked up a guitar case, holding it out to me in both hands.
I sat still for a moment. “Really?”
“You can’t possibly use a school guitar for music tomorrow,” she said, then laughed. “Well, I know you could, but I wanted to celebrate your first day, and this seemed like a practical gift.”
The case was smooth and black, made of something that looked like bumpy plastic but felt like cool, sturdy metal to my fingers. I laid the case on my unmade bed, slipped the catches with worshipful fingers, and caught my breath, gloating, at the treasure inside.
She was an acoustic-electric, with the classic shape, a soft brown-gold body, and a short black neck. She was nestled in the plush red cushioning like a queen in a pile of velvet pillows.
I lifted her out and slipped the strap over my shoulder. She was a twelve-fret, and the neck was slim enough for my short hand span. I positioned a few chords without strumming, checking the slip factor and reach. The strings were made out of some material I didn’t recognize, but I liked the give under my fingers—not too sloppy, not too tough. My calluses had vanished during my long sleep, but I’d build them up again.
I plucked the thin E string and listened as the high, pure note rang out. It had a lovely solid tone. My old guitar, McLeod, had been a third- or fourth-hand Ovation and an absolute delight, but I thought I might grow to love this guitar more.
She must have cost Marie a mint.
“I talked to some people,” Marie said. “Is it all right?”
“It’s unbelievable,” I breathed, sliding my fingers over the pickguard—more mahogany, inlaid with some sort of shell. “She’s beautiful. Thank you so much.”
“Do you want to play it?” she asked.
I did. More than almost anything.
“After dinner,” I said, and put my guitar back in her case. My fingers couldn’t resist one final swipe over the polished wood, but I managed to tear them away.
I couldn’t close her up in the dark again, though. I left the case open on my bed, breathing in the air under the earth.
Apart from anything else, she’d help conceal the messy truth hiding under my bed.
With Koko in my pocket and Abbey the guitar beside me, I traveled alone to school the next morning. Gregor was driving, and I could feel him watching me.
It was no part of my plan to provoke suspicions. So before I got out of the car, I said, “Thank you, Gregor. For stopping the Inheritor. You saved my life.”
Alex, who was an accomplished liar, had taught me as best she could. Keep it simple, she’d said. It sounds more sincere.
Gregor’s teeth flashed. “You’re welcome,” he said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. “All part of the job.”
Which job would that be? I thought, but my face stayed, I hoped, in the same grateful smile. I was still wearing it when I got out, to be escorted by Zaneisha past the crowd of journalists waiting for me.
“Why are you so happy, Tegan?” yelled one of them.
Hah. If only they knew.
I was hoping that I’d have time to find Bethari before music, and maybe even enough privacy to talk about what I’d found—and to apologize for destroying her computer.
But Abdi was waiting just inside the entrance. He was still gorgeous, those light eyes striking in his dark face. He still looked completely uninterested in me.
He had a flute case in one hand, though. That was new.
“I’m supposed to show you to music,” he said.
“No need,” I said politely.
“The teacher told me to show you.”
“Well, that’s fine, but I know the way,” I said, sharper this time. Zaneisha had made me memorize the building plan and every escape route.
I glanced at her for confirmation, but she was no help at all. She and Abdi could have an expressionless face-off.
Except that Abdi’s bored blankness had broken into open annoyance. As I turned back to argue the point, he grabbed Abbey’s case from my hand and took off.
“Give her back!” I snarled, and raced after him. Had it been my wallet he’d snatched, I would have tackled him. Unfortunately, he was holding something much more precious, and I couldn’t risk him dropping her. While I dithered, he dodged through a slalom course of students coming the other way and started down a flight of stairs.
Mistake. I took a deep breath and swung myself over the edge. I heard students gasping behind me, but I twisted and landed square on the bottom step, facing Abdi as he came to a halt, inches from my nose.
Okay, it was a stupid stunt. Jumping onto stairs is far more dangerous than onto flat ground, where you can easily roll to take the impact. But I’m light, and I land well, and it definitely got Abdi’s attention.
I snatched Abbey away from him, cradling her tenderly. “What is wrong with you?”
“People are staring,” he said tensely, and then walked through the door. I caught snatches of instruments being tuned.
He’d led me right to music, just as he’d said he would.
People were staring. “That’s not my fault,” I told Zaneisha, who had caught up with us and was resolutely avoiding eye contact.
I hoisted Abbey a little higher and stepped into the classroom. What a great start to the day.
When I’d asked Koko for information about my music teacher, I’d been flooded with it. Kieran—one name—had a blunt nose, dark curls streaked with blond highlights, and an incredibly impressive record. He was a Wurundjeri man who’d been a session musician, a solo artist, a producer, a soundtrack designer, and, in semesters when he felt like it, a teacher at Elisa M, his alma mater. I couldn’t imagine anyone more different from Just-Call-Me Eden. Kieran’s students were all quiet and disciplined, seated in a semicircle, straight-backed on stools with table attachments.
No one would be napping in his class.
There were instruments and equipment at the back that I longed to get my hands on and at least two recording studios elsewhere in the school. Koko could do a lot of basic production for me, but a real studio was still the golden apple of the recording world.
However, I wasn’t going anywhere or touching anything until Kieran let me. And right now, perched on my own stool in front of them all, I wasn’t sure that he’d even let me stay in the class. Now that I’d met Kieran, I could sort of see why Abdi had obeyed his instructions instead of my wishes.
So far, under the guise of “getting to know my new student,” I’d answered questions about my training (one guitar lesson a week was clearly horrifying), my practice hours (not too shabby, thank god—but I’d had to admit I hadn’t really practiced since I’d woken up), and my performance credentials (apparently playing for old people’s homes didn’t count).
By the end of the interrogation, I was more hiding behind Abbey than holding her, and the line of sweat down my back owed very little to the warm classroom.
“Well,” he said finally, “I can see we have some work to do.”
I nodded, thoroughly cowed. Abdi must have been loving it, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Kieran to check.
“Who are your favorite musicians?”
“The Beatles,” I said. “Ani DiFranco. Nina Simone. Bruce Springsteen. I like, um, Janis Joplin, Vienna Teng, Janna van der Zaag, and…”
Some of my classmates were nodding, which was a pleasant surprise. I should really have expected it—they were musicians, like me. Of course they’d be more informed than Bethari on the obscure music of the last century. But they didn’t seem terribly excited by my choices.
I cast around for something from this day and age. I’d listened to some contemporary stuff and liked much of it, but it was all falling out of my head now that I was under pressure. “Um, that bhangra-punk group—what are they called? Brighton?”
“Birmingham,” someone supplied.
“Right, I like them,” I said. Feeling like an idiot, I retreated to familiar ground. “But the Beatles, definitely, are my all-time favorite.”
Kieran nodded. “All right, Tegan. Play us something by the Beatles.”
My fingers tightened on Abbey’s case, appalled. Now? In front of everyone? “They don’t really… I mean, they’re songs, you know? It’s not compositional; it’ll sound weird without singing.”
“Then sing.”
I shook my head, pushing my voice past the lump in my throat. “I can’t, not really. Backup only.” I tried a weak grin.
Kieran wasn’t smiling. “Music is risk, Tegan. I want you to open yourself to the possibility of failure. I’m not judging you on the quality of your performance—only on your willingness to try and your ability to access emotion.”
My classmates were watching carefully, waiting for me to get over my fear and begin, so they could get a feel for who I was and what I could do. They’d decide in that moment whether I deserved to be there or if I was only at Elisa M because the government had told them to take me.
And then they’d tell the whole world what they thought. I recognized several of Soren’s cronies and wondered what a good famer could do with an exposé on my talent—or lack thereof.
Abdi wasn’t watching, though. He was holding his flute case on his lap and staring at a point above my head.
“Okay,” I said, and pulled Abbey out of her case. She got a few raised eyebrows—she really was a beautiful guitar. I checked the tuning and snapped a capo on the seventh fret. “Okay, but I warned you.”
No one seemed to recognize the tune as I picked out the first notes, which tightened my throat again right before I had to sing. So I lengthened the introduction a little bit, playing around with that bare premelody, and then gathered my courage, opened my mouth, and gave it my best shot.
It was a disaster.
I’d chosen “Here Comes the Sun” because it has a simple voice part and I knew it very well. On the other hand, the guitar part has a lot of complicated time signature changes, making it a rhythmically impressive piece. I definitely wanted to be impressive.
And in a way, it worked. My playing was fine.
But even on the simple melody, my voice cracked and warbled; I hadn’t been lying about my singing. Worse, and more unforgivable, I didn’t catch the feel of the song. I didn’t sound like someone full of hope, at a glimpse of spring and a new beginning. I sounded exactly like a schoolgirl forced into a reluctant performance before her peers. I was mechanical and flat and soulless.
Hardly the performance of someone accessing emotion.
I was trying not to cry as I struggled through the final line of the first verse, singing that it was all right, when it most definitely wasn’t. Soren’s friends were flicking little glances at one another and moving their fingers surreptitiously over their computers. I absolutely couldn’t cry. The humiliation would never end if I did.
In the brief moment between the first verse and the second, Abdi stood up and tucked his flute under his stool.
People gave him sideways looks, but he ignored them as stonily as he’d ignored me.
Then he squared his shoulders and sang.
His face looked mildly disgusted, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it. But his voice was absolutely pure, and it filled every corner of the room with warm longing. I promptly dropped back and let him take over the melody, joining in on the chorus bits for extra volume.
We rocketed through the long bridge, my fingers hitting every shifting beat.
I still don’t know if it’s because Abdi was so good that he was able to anticipate my moves, or if it was because I was so desperate that I was instinctively following his cues, or something else altogether, but in the space of that bridge, we somehow achieved the kind of mind-reading synergy you get with someone you’ve been making music with for years. Owen and I had it. Owen and Dalmar had it. Dalmar and I didn’t have it, but we would have gotten there eventually.
But Abdi and I made it happen right away. So when he nodded at me at the end of the bridge, I knew he was going to leave me on my own for the final verse.
My voice still wasn’t pretty, but my singing was bright and strong, instead of faint and unemotional. I sang about ice melting and clear skies and sounded like I meant it.
And then Abdi picked me up for the final chorus, his beautiful voice sliding around my creaky one. I strummed through the outro, and we were done.
It wasn’t until we finished that I wondered if it had really been appropriate to choose that particular song. People here were probably happy about long winters. The sun was the enemy, not something to welcome. But the silence didn’t seem angry—just faintly puzzled. And maybe a little bit awed. Soren’s friends were busily tapping away, but they didn’t have that air of triumph I knew to be wary of.
“Did you two work this out before class?” Kieran asked.
I shook my head.
“No,” Abdi said.
“Then… all right. Thank you, Tegan.” He waited a breath, and then added, “Thank you, Abdi.”
That didn’t sound like a teacher giving rote thanks to a student; it sounded like a fan thanking someone he admired. Which is when I remembered that Abdi hadn’t sung a note in public since he’d arrived in Australia.
No matter how much money he’d been offered or how many glittering stars had requested duets, he hadn’t sung for them.
But he’d sung for me.