Infinite (17 page)

Sam leaned toward me and curled his hand over my knee. “They understood our language, it sounds like.”

I hmmed. He was right. Centaurs hadn’t understood us, and their upper halves were human. So why dragons? “Perhaps because their language is thought? Perhaps if I’d focused my thoughts as though I were
about
to speak, or speaking in my mind and not out loud, they would have understood it the same way, and what I say out loud is inconsequential.”

Whit nodded and wrote more into his notebook. “That seems reasonable. When we speak aloud, we’re organizing our thoughts and sharing them. Dragons may simply pick up on something we’re doing unconsciously.”

That made sense. “I think there’s another level of their language, like we pick up on body movements and facial expressions as a sort of shorthand for what someone truly means.” Having been raised with only Li as an example of this, I wasn’t very good at picking up the subtler signals people gave, but at least I knew now what I was missing and could
try
to keep up. “But theirs also stands in for words they drop. I think.”

“That’s very interesting.” Whit logged all of that as well. “I think we’ve learned more about dragons in the last twenty minutes than we did in the last twenty quindecs. All we needed was Ana to decide she can talk to anything.”

“Apparently, I’m willing to try.” I twisted my mouth into something like a smile.

“What made you decide to lure them with music?” Sam kept his voice low, like the question was only for the two of us, but the others looked interested, too.

“I’m not sure.” I bit my lip. “It was the loudest sound I could make, but also, everything loves music. Humans, sylph, even the centaurs when I played Phoenix Symphony that night. One of the boys touched my SED and looked—I don’t know—happy. Like he understood it.” Sometimes I felt like everything understood music, or wanted to.

A smile twitched at the corner of Sam’s mouth. “I miss playing music.”

“You can borrow my flute.”

“Ana,” Stef said, “you told Sam you know why the dragons attack him?”

The one with the song.

“I
think
I know.”

Sam paled, and I couldn’t imagine what was going through his head.

“When they asked me to play for them again, they had another conversation among themselves. One was worried I had ‘the song.’ Another said he couldn’t see it in me.” I shook my head, trying to recall exactly how the dragons had worded it, but my headache had been so powerful. The way my ears rang had made it hard to focus. “They were testing me. And then when they noticed you all on the cliff, one said, ‘The one with the song,’ and they all got worried. They could see it in
you
. They tried to lie to me then, saying they were getting rid of my distraction so I would play for them more, but—”

“But they came to kill me.” Sam’s voice was low and terribly even. “I’m the one with the song.”

I nodded.

“I thought they liked music.” Whit studied him. “Why kill Sam if they like music?”

“Because of what song he has. The song is the weapon. I mistranslated the symbols from the books. I thought it was a weapon they possessed, but it’s not. It’s a weapon they’re terribly afraid of.”

Whit snorted. “And that’s Sam.”

We all looked at Sam, who sat hugging his knees and biting his lip. Stubble darkened his chin, and black hair breezed above his eyes. “I don’t feel like a weapon,” he said after a minute.

“You don’t look like one either,” Whit replied.

I rubbed my temples, trying to piece together all their clues. “The weapon is the phoenix song. They were afraid Sam would use it against them.”

“What’s the phoenix song?” Whit looked at Sam, who shook his head and seemed lost.

“The only music I have involving phoenixes is Phoenix Symphony, but I wrote that long after dragons started making my death their priority.” Sam shoved his fingers through his hair. “Unless dragons can see possibilities of the future like phoenixes, I don’t think that’s the phoenix song they’re worried about.”

“They’re convinced the phoenix song can destroy them,” I said. “One at a time. All at once. I don’t know. It seems to me they should be more concerned about actual phoenixes coming around and singing at them.” But real phoenixes didn’t kill, so maybe they weren’t a danger after all. “Phoenixes don’t exactly travel far from their jungles, though, do they?”

One of the sylph shook its head. Cris. -The last time phoenixes emerged from their jungle was to curse the sylph.-

“Five thousand years ago,” Stef muttered. “So it’s not Phoenix Symphony, and they’re not worried about actual phoenixes. Because actual phoenixes aren’t a danger. But anyone else who knows the song is in trouble.”

“And that’s me,” Sam said.

I touched his hand. “That doesn’t seem fair.” Not that the dragons appeared to care much about fair anyway.

Something else the dragons had said, though, about my asking them not to destroy Sam, but also asking them to do it . . .

The thought flew away.

“I wish I could say it makes me feel better to know I have the power to destroy dragons.” Sam grabbed his water bottle and turned it in his hands. “I’d feel better if I had any idea what this phoenix song actually is and how to use it.”

“Would you use it?” I asked. It was strange, imagining Sam going out and singing at dragons until they were no more. The Sam I knew wasn’t that callous. He’d applauded my compassion when I couldn’t kill Deborl—though I had no doubt he would have shot Deborl if he’d been given the chance. Not after seeing him the night of the earthquake, when Mat had attacked us in the washroom. Sam had killed him and others. There was a darker side to Sam than the one I knew. There were thousands of years to Sam. I’d never know all of him. But he wasn’t a murderer.

“I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Well, I hate to be the one to bring it up.” Stef’s expression was hard. “But in spite of Ana’s success in speaking to the dragons, I don’t think they’re going to help us.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“What’s our next step?”

No one looked at me.

I looked at my hands.

Very slowly, Sam said, “What if we did know the phoenix song?”

The tent went quiet.

“Rather, what if”—Sam set his water bottle on the ground in front of him—“we let the dragons believe we know it in order to persuade them to help us with Ana’s original plan: use the poison, get the dragons to destroy the temple, and hopefully keep Janan from ever having a chance to ascend.”

I didn’t like that
hopefully
in there. It still sounded so unlikely, though it wasn’t as if anyone else had other suggestions. And now Sam was thinking up ways to make my idea happen again.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Relieved, because he believed in me? Horrified, because he’d risk his life pretending he knew something he didn’t? What if Acid Breath called his bluff?

“No,” I whispered.

Everyone looked at me.

“For one, we’d have to go after the dragons. They haven’t returned here. They can make the trip much more quickly than we can. We won’t have time to get back to Menehem’s lab and the poison if we have to go searching for dragons, too. Already, we’ll have to hike extra hours to get there in time.

“The second thing is, even if we do go after them, who’s to say the wrong dragons won’t find us and kill us on sight? The sylph can protect us, but not forever. We’ll have to keep moving and keep looking for Acid Breath and his friends.

“And the third thing is that Sam is not consciously aware of the phoenix song, so it’s useless. I don’t want to make threats with a weapon we don’t know how to use. They believed me when I threatened them the other day, and they left. That will have to be enough. I won’t risk it again.” I dropped my voice. “I won’t risk you all again.”

The tent was silent for a minute, and Sam just looked at me, something indecipherable in his expression. “Then what do we do?”

“We came here looking for both help and a weapon. We’re not getting help. The dragons have made that very clear. But we did learn that the weapon we’ve been seeking has been with us all along. Sam might not know it right now, but maybe we can find a way to use it against Janan.”

“Which was what you originally wanted to do,” Sam said. “Use the weapon to fight Janan.”

I nodded. “We go back to Menehem’s lab, gather the poison, and return to Heart. Sarit can help us get inside.” If she was still alive. “We destroy the cage Deborl is building, and anything else that looks important to Janan’s ascension. We do whatever we must to wreck things. On the way, we learn as much about the phoenix song as possible and hope we can actually use it.”

Sam folded his hands. “All right. Then we head back tomorrow. Unless there are any other ideas?”

Stef and Whit glanced at each other but shook their heads.

In the morning, we packed our things and began the long journey back to Range.

WE WEREN’T GOING to make it back to Heart in time.

A snowstorm smothered the world with white powder and wind, and though we trudged through it whenever possible, we had only twelve days before Soul Night. We’d have to hike extra, but even that wouldn’t be enough.

Twelve days.

It was well after dark when we stopped to set up camp. “I wish I’d been able to test the temple key on the prison.” I grabbed my food sack as sylph darted into the woods to hunt.

Whit looked suspicious as he and Stef put the tent together by lantern light. “Why?”

Stef let out a breathy chuckle. “Scientific curiosity. She gets it from Menehem.”

“I like to think I get it from being me.” I put no bite into my words, but I met her eyes. She needed to know I was serious. “Curiosity is just part of who I am. Like music.”

“All right.” She flashed a smile, but it was awkward and vanished quickly. Our relationship hadn’t recovered, not wholly. They talked to me now, and every night Sam moved his sleeping bag closer to mine, but even the most minor disagreement strained conversations.

“I just wonder about things. The other towers have all fallen into ruin without anyone living inside them. Janan is the only thing keeping the one in Heart intact. But it seems like if phoenixes made the towers, they should last forever, right?”

Stef shrugged. “Perhaps they would have stayed forever, had the sylph not been released.” She bent and tied the last of the walls to the tent. “Better go pick up our dinner. I’ll be ready to cook soon.”

At her dismissal, I hunched my shoulders and followed Cris into the forest, the beam of my flashlight illuminating the snowy world. By now, the other sylph had probably caught plenty of food, so I put in my SED earpieces and flipped to Phoenix Symphony.

I’d listened to the entire symphony a dozen times over the last week, and discussed it with Sam, but so far we’d heard nothing unusual in the music. The four of us even retranslated the passage I’d found about the weapon, but while that was interesting, it was not particularly descriptive of the weapon’s nature or purpose.

Our latest translation was
Dragons fear the instrument of life and death
. Or the
song of the phoenix
.

I grabbed a burned rabbit and dropped it in my bag, humming the flutes’ melody of the symphony’s fourth movement. It was a faster-paced, majestic-sounding movement, one of my favorite parts, which always made my heart swell up with fierce joy.

A hand closed over my shoulder. I jumped and spun to find Sam watching me with an amused smile. A lantern swung by his side. “Are you honestly not tired of that yet?”

I shrugged and pulled out my earpieces. “I don’t anticipate ever being tired of it, but if that happens, I’ll let you know.”

“I do have other pieces. Some better than that one.”

“This is the first piece of your music I ever heard. It will always be my favorite.” I paused by a fallen tree, whose death had given way to new life. Smaller plants huddled in the ground, waiting for springtime. “Besides, if there’s a clue about the phoenix song, surely it’s in the song you named after them.”

“Songs have words,” he said for the thousandth time as he placed his lantern on the ground. Shadows jumped up around his face as he looked at me askance, a weird little smile tugging at his mouth. “You say that just because it bugs me, don’t you?”

I grinned and admitted nothing. “Then what about birdsong? Or songbirds? Are they singing words?”

“Who knows? Maybe birds have a language, too, like centaurs.” He said it teasingly, but when I straightened and our eyes met, challenge snapped between us.

“Could it be something small?” I rested the sack on the ground and tried to shape my thoughts into words. “We were thinking it might be a whole song. The whole symphony. A whole sonata. But what if it’s something small, something so tiny you don’t even realize it’s there?”

“Because birdsong is usually short, or a repeated series of notes.”

“And phoenixes are birds.”

Sam seized my upper arms, pulled me close, and kissed me so hard I’d have fallen over if he hadn’t been holding me up. I gasped and shifted my weight closer to him, but just as I started to kiss him back, my SED chimed with a call.

We pulled apart as I fumbled for my SED, both of us eyeing each other like we weren’t sure kissing was okay again. We hadn’t yet, not since my birthday, like we were both waiting for the other to make the first move.

Now he had.

My SED chimed again. I answered, breathless. “Sarit?”

“Oh finally.” Relief filled her tone. “You’re there.”

I checked the signal strength. “Barely,” I said, handing one earpiece to Sam so he could listen, too. “I didn’t think we were yet. Are you okay? What’s going on?” It was later than she usually called. Much later.

“Yeah, I’m fine now. There was just—” She hesitated. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

I met Sam’s eyes, dropped my gaze to his lips. He was standing so close still, so that we could both talk to Sarit. “I’ll believe anything right now,” I whispered.

“Three dragons just flew over Heart.”

“Just now?” Sam looked up, like he’d be able to see them from where we stood.

“Is that Sam?” Hope tinged Sarit’s voice. “I guess you’re talking again. That’s good. Yes, just now. They circled the temple and then flew north again.”

“They didn’t attack?” I could hardly believe what she was saying.

“They didn’t. They were in and out so quickly there was no time to send up the air drones.” She sounded like she couldn’t believe it, either. “Have you seen any dragons?”

I made something between a squeak and a hysterical laugh.

“Ana has.” Sam’s voice was low and serious. “But it’s more than we can explain right now. We might be on the verge of a discovery. We’ll let you know if it comes to anything.”

“We’re on our way back to Menehem’s lab,” I added. “Then back to Heart, so we’ll need to start thinking about ways to get into the city without Deborl noticing.” We’d have to run to get there. I didn’t see how we could make it, but we’d keep trying. We all agreed on that.

“Oh, guys. Deborl is worse than ever. People are being interrogated about where you are. No one knows, of course, but that doesn’t stop Deborl from asking. His people have wholly taken over the guard. Everyone is recruited for it. If they don’t help with his cage, they’re in the guard now. He keeps talking about his friend Merton, too, and where they all went. I don’t know what Deborl sent Merton after, but I guess it wasn’t you. Whatever it is, Deborl makes it sound like it’s even
more
important than you.”

“I wish we knew what he’s after. What else is going on?” The Heart I knew seemed so long ago.

“The cage is almost complete. The bars are electrified, and the whole thing is set off the ground. I’ll send a picture.” She paused to take a breath, and my SED beeped as the image arrived. “There have been earthquakes every day. Animals are leaving the forest around Heart, and Midrange Lake is nearly dry. It’s falling apart. All of it.”

I closed my eyes against the dark woods, my sylph all around. It seemed wrong to stand in such peace while everything at home was in ruins.

“The obelisks in Templedark Memorial have collapsed. Deborl says it’s a sign that Janan is punishing us.” She choked on a sob. “I wish you were here. I miss you. And I miss Armande. I’m going crazy by myself.”

“I’m sorry, Sarit.” Sam spoke with her a moment more, calming her. Then he said, “We’ll be home soon,” and clicked off.

I picked up the sack of dinner. “The others will be wondering where we are.”

He seemed reluctant to move away from me, but he nodded. “You’re right, and Stef gets cranky when she’s hungry. I’ll help you with the rest.”

We worked together without speaking, but I watched him from the corner of my eye. When he caught me, he offered a shy, hopeful smile. Relief warmed through me.

“Birdsong, hmm?” He shoved a strand of hair off his face, tucked it into his hood. “That gives us a lot to think about.”

“We’ll have to listen to all of your music to figure out if there’s anything you do over and over.”

“Like what?”

“Like rhythms or harmonies that appear in your music a lot.” I shook my head. “Or something else, even. I suppose you’d have noticed already if you used the same theme in multiple pieces.”

He frowned. “I like to think I would have.”

“Maybe it’s something in your preferred instruments. Or even just the way you play music, and nothing to do with what you’ve composed.”

“This could take years.”

Which we didn’t have. “But if dragons are afraid of it, it’s worth understanding.”

Sam nodded and lifted the bag. “We’re finished here.”

It was almost midnight by the time we ducked inside the tent. Stef had water boiling, and Whit was paging through the temple books and my notes translating different sections.

“Took you long enough,” Stef muttered.

“Sarit called.” Sam crouched next to her, and while they skinned the rabbits, he told her about the conversation with Sarit.

“Ana.” Whit looked up from his reading. “Come here a moment.”

I collapsed next to Whit and the lantern, all my muscles aching. He flipped pages, back to the beginning of a notebook.

“I’ve been thinking about Menehem’s research and your follow-up notes.” He placed the notebook in front of me and took out one of Menehem’s diaries. “I see here you were concerned about both the size and the delivery of the dose of poison to use against Janan.” He pointed at one of my notes. “So I went to see what Menehem had done during Templedark.”

“He had six of these big canisters of aerosol. We have at least twenty, and the machine has been on since we left, making more. We could have twenty-five.”

“You said the sylph gained tolerance exponentially, so considering the size of the Templedark dose, we might have enough to affect Janan for a little while. Ten minutes? Twenty?”

I didn’t argue with his optimism.

“But in these notes, you’re also concerned about the delivery. If I’m reading right, Menehem had his canisters set up on a timer. They were positioned around the temple, and when he was ready, he remotely opened the canisters in order to prolong the exposure. To help compensate for the tolerance, he did one, then two, then the final three.”

“That’s right.”

“I think you were right to worry about an effective delivery. Will we be able to do anything like Menehem? We have twenty canisters. How can we release the poison so it has an immediate effect?”

“All at once.”

“But then,” Stef said, looking over as she finished dropping meat into the pot of water, “the effect wouldn’t last. We’d get maybe a couple of minutes.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have enough to make it last. That’s what we’ve been talking about. There’s simply not enough.”

As he finished washing his hands, Sam looked down and didn’t say anything. He’d been the one to turn on the machine, hoping it would help.

“It’s like a knife.” My words drew Sam’s gaze again. “It may not be enough to destroy Janan, but if we time the poison to release at the right moment, it might hurt him. It might be just enough to give us time.”

“To do what?” Stef’s voice deepened and she crossed her arms, but it was because of fear, not anger. Soul Night was so close, and people we loved were dying. Forever. She was as afraid as I was. “If the temple is dark when Soul Night begins, is that it for Janan? Will he just go away then?”

That seemed unlikely. But would he be able to ascend? Maybe not. That might simply delay him, or everything might go back to how it was before. Newsouls included.

No, I had to find a permanent solution.

“There is one thing we can do that Menehem couldn’t.” I stood and fumbled through Sam’s coat pockets until the corners of a box bumped my fingers.

“It’s true,” Sam muttered. “I’d never allow Menehem to poke around my clothes. What are you looking for?”

“This.” I unzipped an interior pocket and removed the temple key. “Both times Menehem poisoned Janan, he did it from outside the temple. But
we
can release the poison inside.”

“Will that make a difference?” Whit lifted his eyebrows.

“Maybe it will buy us one or two minutes more than if we used it outside.” I started to put the key back into Sam’s coat, but he caught my wrist and pressed the box against my chest.

“You keep it. I meant to give it back to you, anyway.”

With a somber nod, I stashed the key inside my coat.

“If we use it inside the temple,” Sam asked, “will we be able to get out?”

I dropped my voice. “I don’t know.” Again, I wished we’d had time to test the key on the tower in the north. Would the temple still respond to the key if Janan were unconscious?

Sam touched my hand. Snow began to fall, tapping the tent in a soft rhythm until all outside sound was smothered. “We did have a small breakthrough about the phoenix song,” he told the others.

“Maybe.” I didn’t want to get their hopes up in case we were wrong. “We still need more information. I keep hoping the books will help.” I glanced at the pile, but sleepiness tugged at the back of my thoughts. The books hadn’t provided any new information during the time we’d been snowbound, and it was unlikely we’d find anything else before Soul Night.

While we ate, Sam repeated our conversation about birdsong and our guesses about the nature of the phoenix song.

“What’s the next step?” Whit asked.

“I’m going to listen to as much of Sam’s music as possible,” I said.

“Oh
no
.” Whit clutched his chest. “How will you manage?”

I grinned. “I know, but to save the world, I’ll do it. I’m also going to look at the scores on my SED if I can figure out how to do that and walk at the same time. I want to make note about any trends in style or instrumentation. All trends, really.”

“So you’ll need a volunteer to carry you back to Range, hmm?” Whit glanced at Sam. “You’re looking a little scrawny lately. I’ll carry Ana.”

Sam snorted. “If anyone’s carrying Ana—”