Syphon's Song (22 page)

McIssac froze halfway out of the car, an unnatural position. The soldier beside her had iced him there. Fear bubbled at the amount of mage power and control that man must have. Ice someone too much and his heart would stop. She shivered.

Bronte’s door opened. Her handler pulled her out. They walked around to the back of the house. Dozens of buildings sprawled among the fields, dark blotches against the night. A helicopter sat off to the left in an empty field, its rotor circling slowly, each blade visible. Two men walked away from it as if they’d just landed.

Despite the quaint house, this was no farm.

The blond mage guided her inside and then straight down a set of stairs that lined the interior wall of the house. The musty smell of a basement filled each breath. She felt her way into the pitch-black one foot at a time. For all she knew, there was a pit ahead of her ready to swallow her up for good.

The soldier stayed with her and plunked her down into a metal chair. The gap between the back of the chair and the seat gave her space for her cuffed hands. Bronte gave a small sigh of relief. No pit.

“You can’t see, can you?” he called.

She shook her head. “No.” The word was hardly more than a puff of air.

His shoes whispered against the steps. He was leaving. He didn’t care that she couldn’t see. She bit back a cry and converted it to a whimper instead.

Non-mages were at a complete disadvantage in the dark compared to their so-called betters. No Non trusted the dark.

A quiet thought flickered in her mind. She wasn’t a Non. But it made no difference here. Her mage power was useless.

Bronte nearly wept when the light over the stairs flicked on. Metal clacked to the floor as her cuffs released without a physical touch. She slumped, let her shoulders droop forward and dragged her numb arms forward until they hung free of the chair. Feeling returned slowly and brought painful pins and needles. She wrapped the cold appendages around her body.

Despite the light, there was nothing to see, no other furniture, just plain, gray walls. She rocked back and forth, trying to comfort herself in the stark surroundings. Her chair wobbled against the uneven concrete floor.

She should do something, she thought. Fight for freedom. But she was too afraid to move. They weren’t going to let her simply walk out. A sob burst from her throat. Or maybe it was a laugh. She wasn’t sure. She waited, as if another sound might take the initiative and pop out as well. But no. She was empty. As empty as this room.

Her mind crept back to Vincent, like scared prey sneaking to safety. Was he still asleep? Maybe the absence of his energy was why the gauge of her soul was on E. Maybe it had nothing to do with being captured.

Syphons were always captured. And killed.

Footsteps drummed down the stairs. A pair of legs appeared. She turned her head away before she could see his face. What did it matter?

Somewhere inside her she’d always known this was bound to happen—that she would be revealed as a syphon and punished accordingly. Maybe that was why she’d never found the courage to leave the Republic. Since she couldn’t escape fate, she’d stayed and waited for it.

The man walked over to her, dragging a metal chair behind him. He put it directly in front of her, but remained standing. She glanced up at him. It was the bald man from the symphony.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Miss Casteel.” He smiled at her. “Do you know who I am?”

Bronte dropped her eyes and stared straight ahead. “General Wilen, I presume.” Her dry, scratchy voice fell flat, barely reaching past her ears.

He sat down. Their eyes met. A scuffle of shoes came from deep in the gloom to her left. Another person hid in the shadows. Either he’d been down here all along or the darkness concealed another entrance.

“I understand you like music, Bronte,” the general said.

She nodded.

He didn’t say anything else. She shifted her gaze back and forth from his eyes to the floor. He stared. She squirmed.

Finally, she blurted it out. “I’m a syphon.”

His expression stayed frozen, unmoved by her confession. His dark stare stabbed at her mind.

She hated his eyes.

“Your friend, Claude, likes music, too.” He crossed his legs. “You know what else Claude likes? Newspaper clippings.” He smiled. “You don’t get any newspapers though. You’re not known to read them. We asked your friends. They seemed to find that as odd as we do. Everyone likes newspapers…gossip, scandal, comics.” He paused.

Bronte had nothing to add to the silence. She’d long since stopped caring about the doings of mages, avoiding even the written accounts of their lives.

Finally, he began again. “Claude has scrapbooks full of clipped articles. We found them when we searched his trailer. Someone mails the articles to him. He saves the envelopes and glues them into the scrapbook too. According to Claude’s mailman, he never mails anything back. Each newspaper clipping focuses on a particular event or location, for instance a mage school or hospital, a shopping center. Within one week of the articles appearing in the newspaper, the location was bombed by Double-Wide.” The general paused. “You startin’ to see the problem here?” He raised his eyebrows high. They looked like they might climb onto his bald scalp.

If Claude had newspaper articles about places that were bombed, there might be a problem. She just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

He didn’t wait for her answer. “Also. Claude has a lot of maps. You know anything about those?” At the shake of her head, he continued, “Well that’s a darn shame. Because you’re pretty much the only person we know who Claude talks to. You show up there every now and then, right?”

“Yes.” Her hoarse voice barely carried the word. She cleared her throat. “I go there to pick up copies of his music. Sheet music. His compositions.”

“Right, right. That’s what we heard too. You go into his bedroom?”

“No! Never.” She shook her head. “Claude and I are…friends…though I wouldn’t call him that anymore.”

“The maps are marked up with the longitude and latitude of specific places in the Republic. Is Claude some kind of explorer or cartographer? That a hobby of his?”

Her stomach dropped with every bit of information the general revealed. “Not that I know of. He doesn’t leave his house anymore.”

“Yeah. That beating he took must have done him some mental damage.”

Bronte scrunched her brow. “Beating?”

The general feigned surprise.

She didn’t need to be a mage to recognize the expression was a lie.

“You don’t know about this? He got beat up outside Tremont Tavern by a couple of mages. You really don’t read the papers, huh? And he didn’t tell you?” The general kept going as she shook her head. “Probably too embarrassed to admit to his best girl that he got beat up. As far as we can tell, that’s when he started hunkering down in the craphole trailer he lives in. November 11 of last year. Sound about right?”

Bronte could hardly think straight, but the timing was possible.

“The only thing that goes out of his house is the sheet music he gives to you. You play it. And then you know what happens?” His voice got softer and softer.

Bronte shook her head, swallowing hard.

“Things go boom,” he whispered.

12

“The Double-Wide terrorists set off a bomb every two days after you play one of Claude’s new songs.”

Bronte’s heart stuttered and stopped, cycling through the pattern again as the general’s words rebounded through her head.

He continued, “We have the music. Confiscated it from Claude’s house along with the scrapbooks and the maps. One of the code guys played the songs on the piano. Sounded pretty weird to me. But what do I know about music? The code guys are the smarties, not me.”

She didn’t believe that for a minute.

“According to the smart guys, it’s a pretty simple code once you know what to look for. A specific note corresponds to a specific number. Play the notes in order and you can decipher the coordinates of the location for the bomb. Best we can figure it, you stand on stage and play the music, and, if our Double-Wide agent can recognize notes by hearing them, he knows where to set off the bomb. Now, I can’t recognize one note from the next. But I’m told there are people who can do this.” He stilled. “Can you?”

She nodded, her neck muscles almost too tight to move.

“The notes of the chorus represent the longitude and latitude of the bomb sites. It’s possible the verses hold the code to the staging areas for the explosives. We’re still working on that part. You know anything about this?”

Bronte shook her head vigorously, feeling sick to her stomach.

“Four bombs. Four. In the last eight weeks. Not gone as planned. The code guys say the music we got from Claude’s house contains the coordinates for logical targets for Double-Wide’s bombs. A school, a hospital, a playground and a market. But none of them were bombed. The explosives were planted off target. One by less than a mile. One by over fifty miles. What I want to know is this: what happened to make the bombs go off in the wrong places? And who comes to listen to you play when Claude gives you new music?”

Bronte’s lips felt numb. Her head spun and somewhere down the line, sooner rather than later, she was going to be sick. “I changed…” She had to clear her throat. “I changed the music. Claude’s stuff wasn’t good anymore. I told him multiple times that I didn’t like what he was writing. I got tired of putting up with it. I changed the notes. On stage. Only a little. It didn’t take much. I improvised during the performance. The rest of the band followed along. We’re pretty good at that.”

“Uh-huh. Do you remember what you played?”

She cleared her throat again. It kept getting clogged. “Yes. I always remember what I play.” She squeezed her eyes shut, dizziness spinning the room.

“Well, that’s great. We’ll get you a viola, and you can play it for us.”

“Violin.”

“What about your fans? You got any groupies that show up on regular basis? Somebody who knows all this music stuff. Enough to hear the notes and know what they are.”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head. She could picture the bar in mind, looking out from the stage, the lights not quite dim, but dark enough to hide the dirt embedded everywhere. “We have a good number of fans. We’re rather well known for a band of Nons. But there are three men. Boys, really. Younger than I am, I think. They certainly act like it.” She could see their faces in her mind. They usually sat against the wall. “They always made me uncomfortable. They…leered. At me. The band started calling them Broupies…for ‘Bronte’s groupies.’”

She took a breath and looked off to the left into the nothingness. “They were overly touchy. I started to avoid them as best I could, getting offstage as quickly as possible, or taking the last seat at a table of regulars. Friendly ones. I don’t know for sure that they all know about music. But one of them asked me about my violin once. He claimed he had a Stradivarius.”

The general’s eyebrow twitched. It was against the law for a Non to own such a cultural emblem.

As she tattled, she violated an unspoken Non code of ethics, betraying her people. But they weren’t really her people. She had no people. No other syphons existed, to her knowledge. She had to save herself. “He said it played like nothing else he’d ever touched. He invited me over to try it.” She shivered from the ugly memory. “I declined.”

She shrugged as best she could with her arms still aching slightly. “After that I made sure to stay close to one of the band members whenever those guys were around. But none of that means they’d be involved in…Double-Wide.”

The general sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. His expression was flat, as if no plea for mercy would ever penetrate him. “He’s breaking the law already if what he told you was true. We’ll find out. We always get the truth.”

A woman spoke from the gloom. “Well, Tom, darlin’, you got the truth this time. She’s honest.” Lucinda. Bronte recognized the voice from the bathroom conversation. The woman stepped forward until she stood next to her husband.

“Hi there, Bronte.” Her smile wasn’t friendly.

“Mrs. Wilen.” Bronte nodded.

“Oh now, call me Lucinda. After our girl talk in the loo, let’s not go back to being all uppity.” Lucinda waved her hand in the air and mage lights coalesced in the air along with a burning pressure in Bronte’s ears. The lights didn’t extinguish the gloom of the basement.