The Hush (31 page)

She was a moment too late.

The noise had distracted her – the bangs, the shouts from the dark, the snarls of Songshapers as they hunted their prey. Susannah had whipped her head around to seek out their hunters, but in that moment, she felt the brush of fabric against her arm. She felt the rush of breeze as Chester's body shifted – as it moved from inhabiting the space beside her own, to vanishing. When she whirled back – grasping around her, desperate to pull him back – he was already gone.

Susannah screamed.

She threw herself against the bars and tried to smash her own body through the gap, but it was like trying to float through a solid wall. The space between the bars thrust her backwards like an almighty slap and she fell to the ground. Staggering to her feet, she tried again, but again the cage repelled her.

‘Come back! Chester, come back! We'll find another way!'

She beat her fists against the bars, again and again,
but the Music shoved her violently backwards. With every useless punch she swore a litany of curses against her own mistake. Why had she told him? Why had she let the original plan slip from her lips? She had promised herself that they would find another way. They could break down the bars with one of Dot's inventions, perhaps. Or they could trick the Songshapers into opening the bars for them. Something.
Anything
…

Anything but this.

Because Susannah knew what it took to escape from the cage. It wasn't just a matter of climbing up the bars and out of the top – that had been a lie, a desperate lie. It had taken a death for her to break free. And once Chester realised what needed to be done …

She glanced from Travis to Dot and for a single moment she hated them. She hated them both for their innocence, for their ignorance. All along, she had fed them a sanitised version of the plan. She hadn't told them the true reason she wanted an unlicensed Songshaper on the team. She hadn't told them that Chester's original role was to sacrifice himself. They had waltzed through the preparation for this job with clean hands and they would walk away with clean consciences.

Not her, though. She and Sam had planned it all.

Inside the cage, the Silencers writhed. They clawed at each other, fighting to reach the bars, their futile hope of escape. Did they guess that a real chance of freedom was coming?

‘Chester, come back! Ches–'

Someone thrust her aside. Her head crashed against
the floor and the world swam. There was blackness, and shouting, and the sting of shame and horror and –

Susannah took a shuddering breath and raised herself onto her elbows. She blinked, struggling to get a grip on her vision. The world slowly drifted back into focus, looking like a broken shadow-puppet show. Her eyes fixed on her companions. Travis. Dot.

Sam. Where was Sam? She spun around, the movement sending a new surge of dizziness through her veins. She saw him. He gave her one last look. One last glint of pale blue. And then he was gone, following Chester into the maelstrom of bodies behind the bars.

‘Sam! Sam, come back!'

But her voice was choked now, strained with disbelief. He was a Silencer, like her. He shouldn't be able to slip between the bars. He shouldn't be able to …

‘He can hear the Music,' whispered Dot. Her face was paler than ever and her eyes were red with shocked tears. ‘I can't believe I didn't see it before. They messed up his transformation – that's why he's so affected by Music, why it changes his emotions.' She stared into the dark of the cage. ‘He's not a proper Silencer. He's … something else.'

And suddenly, Susannah thought of Sam's words in the driver's cabin. The memory jolted back, so sharp that it hurt. Sam's fingers on the wheel as he plunged the
Cavatina
into the dark. The pain in his eyes. The resolution in his voice.

It's getting worse
…
Every day it hurts a bit more
…
I can still feel it in my head. All the time. Just the Music,
running over and over and over
…
I'm gonna be the one who takes 'em down
…
Whatever it takes.

‘Something else?' Susannah knew she sounded hysterical but she couldn't hold back the surge of words. They clattered against the back of her teeth, fighting for release like the souls in the cage. ‘I don't care what he is – we've got to get him back! We've got to get both of them back!'

Travis grabbed her arm. ‘Captain!'

She didn't want to see what he was looking at. Didn't want to know. All she could think was that Sam was going to die. He was going to throw his life away, to quash the living hell of Music playing in his brain …

But the rest of her gang needed her, and she was still their captain. She wouldn't let them down. So she turned her gaze away from the cage – hating herself with every jolting breath – until her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. On the Songshapers – and their pistols – at the edge of their circle of light.

‘Well, well, well,' said their leader. ‘What a fine place to meet old friends.'

It was Nathaniel Glaucon.

Chester staggered into the dark. The space between the bars had seemed tight at the time, a cold scrape of metal along his back and his chest. But now, compared to the crush of the crowd, it seemed like nothing. Here, he could barely breathe.

There were bodies everywhere. They pressed around
him, hot and heaving and bloody. They scratched at each other, crazed in their desperation to escape the cage. Once they saw him they pushed harder, shoving, shouting silent whispers into each other's ears.

Could they hear each other? Could they hear their comrades' silent screams? All Chester heard was the weight of the silence and the rush of his own panicked breath as he pushed into the fray.

Shoulders battered him; elbows knocked him down. Chester almost fell to his knees but he forced himself – with every inch of strength in his limbs – to stay upright. To fall down here would be to never rise again. He would be trampled, a fallen calf in a buffalo stampede, and he would be a bloodied mess before he died.

He pushed on.

Every step was torture. A hand swiped dangerously close to his eyes. A woman gouged a bloody gash into his side and he swore at her, shoving her aside – but there were too many bodies to push her more than a few inches away. For a second he thought she was going to lash out again, to retaliate with another swipe of her gore-flecked fingernails, but then the crowd washed to one side and she was carried away in a tide of flesh.

Was his father here? Was Penelope here? Chester felt a burn of terror in his chest, worse than anything he'd felt since the night of his father's vanishing. He hadn't known it would be like this. He'd thought the cage would be filled with weary prisoners: broken bodies, souls in need of rescuing. Not this. Not this writhing, desperate, animal mass of bodies.

And somewhere in the mass, his father. Would he be cowering on the floor, trampled and broken by the viciousness of his peers? Or would he be one of those clawing and fighting and shouting silent screams?

Chester didn't know. He didn't
want
to know. He just wanted a clear space, a space to breathe, to open up his arms, to feel as though every inch of world wasn't pressing in to smother him.

But Susannah had planned for him to enter this cage. Which meant that here, somewhere, was his key to setting the prisoners free. As Chester staggered forwards, his bubble of Hush-light travelled with him. He had lost his hideaway lamp in the crowd – trampled and shattered underfoot, no doubt – and so his only light was the natural sphere of vision that always travelled with him in the Hush. All that he held was his fiddle case, which he clutched desperately against his chest.

Chester pushed onward and something new crept into sight. Something that wasn't floor, that wasn't marble in the real world. Something that rippled.
Water
. A pool of water, black as coal in the darkness.

As he approached, the crowd thinned until Chester staggered out into a haze of empty shadow. He drew a shaky breath, startled by this sudden rush of personal space. Even the Silencers, in their state of writhing desperation, were sane enough to avoid the water.

Chester stopped. He didn't dare allow his own reflection to fall upon its surface. He remembered the night that Sam had taken him to join the others on the
Cavatina
. The way the water's reflection had caught the ship in its
grip and how it had tried to drag the vessel down into its mirrored depths …

Sam's words came back to him.

Can't trust water in the Hush
…
The ripples, the gurgles, the way it sloshes on the shore – all of that's making a tune … It grabs you … It drags you down
…

Chester looked up from the water, his gaze rising to the space above it. High above, at the very edge of his vision, he saw the roof of the cage. Glinting dark silver bars crossing the blackness. Right in the centre, above the pool of water, the bars met in an arch of joining lines.

Why was the pond here? And why wasn't it pulling down the bars?

In an instant, Chester knew.

They were counterweights. Opposites. Opposing forces, pushing against one to keep the other in check. It was an ingenious design. The pond and the cage worked like magnets, north poles turned towards each other, strengthening each other with their mutual repulsion. It was how the cage's Music kept running, day after day, month after month, year after year. It pushed against the pond and the pond pushed back, and that clashing energy travelled in an invisible wall between the bars to keep the prisoners in place …

But if the water was disturbed …

Chester knew what he had to do. He had to touch the water. He had to hear its melody, feel it, sense the ripple of its song and the rhythm of its tune. He had to touch it so that he could reverse it.

But, if he touched it, it would consume him.

Chester tightened his grip around his fiddle case. It was hard and sleek and dug into the flesh above his ribs. Goldenleaf lay tucked inside, waiting to be summoned. Once he touched the pond and sensed its tune, he could play it backwards. Unravel the power of its Music, like unravelling an Echo. He could break its connection to the cage's walls and the prisoners could claw their way between the bars …

He inched forwards. How long would he have, once he touched the water? Would it suck him down right away or would he have time to belt out a few repetitions of its melody as he sank? Once Chester – thrashing and gasping – stopped playing, the water would return to its earlier state of calm and the cage's Musical shield would be reinstated, trapping any remaining prisoners inside its shell.

How long could he give them? How long would it take him to drown? Would playing underwater work?
Could
he still keep playing underwater, while the last breaths in his lungs eddied out into black and bubbles …?

Chester felt sick. He shut down the train of thought and forced himself to take several long, slow breaths. He couldn't do this. He wasn't brave enough. The thought of slowly drowning in that pool, unable to fight the pull of water as it sucked him down into the dark …

He wanted to run. He wanted to run and run and never look back.

But there were hundreds of souls in this cage. His father. Penelope. They were here somewhere, caught in a silent scream and a tangle of desperate limbs. They were scratching and clawing – perhaps being driven mad – and Chester
was the only one who could save them. He imagined Dot ladling soup into Penelope's lips. He imagined Susannah helping to care for his father, nursing him back to health …

Susannah
. The thought hit him hard, like a kick to the gut. She had planned this all along. She had recruited him then she had tested him. She had known all along that his role would be to die.

Chester felt almost numb, now, as if a heavy blanket of wool had been wrapped around his heart and squeezed. It felt hot and itchy and tight and sore. Susannah had planned for him to die, and she was right. There was no one else who could take his place, no one else who could make it through the bars of the cage, no one else who could reach this pond.

There was no time for goodbyes. No time for emotion. The alarm had been triggered and the Songshapers would surely be closing in on them by now.

Chester crept forwards. His limbs were trembling. He pulled Goldenleaf from its case, and pressed the chinrest into his shoulder. He raised his bow. He took a deep breath.

And he lifted his foot, ready to touch the water.

Nathaniel Glaucon smiled. It wasn't a cold smile or a vicious smile. In a way, that made it more chilling. It was benign. So quiet. So … pleased.

‘What are you doing here?' Susannah's tongue felt like dust. ‘You were supposed to report us to the Head Songshaper –'

‘Oh, I did.' Nathaniel took a step forwards. The other Songshapers stood behind him, all with dark-cloaked smirks. ‘I did. And he set off the alarm, like you wanted.'

His eyes were bright now, alight with a joke he was yet to reveal. ‘And then he sent for the head of the Hush Initiative. He sent for the man who really plans this nation's future. The man behind the curtain. The man who pulls the puppet strings.'

Silence.

‘Me.'

Susannah stared at him. She watched the word roll off his tongue but it didn't make sense. Nathaniel Glaucon, head of the Hush Initiative?

‘It can't be you!' she said. ‘I mean, you don't even live in Weser City! You live in Hamelin, of all places!'

Nathaniel cut her off. ‘I chose to live in Hamelin. I happen to like it there. It was my home town, once. A long time ago.'

There was a pause.

‘You see, my dear, you made a terrible mistake. You assumed that a Songshaper living in a tiny town must be a failure. Someone too humdrum to make it in the big city. Someone with no accomplishments, no career, no prospects.

‘But you forgot the other reason that a Songshaper might live in a tiny town: because he's a success. He's someone with enough clout and power to live wherever he likes. He's someone with the wealth to buy long-distance communication globes and enough pegasi to travel to and from Weser whenever he pleases. He's someone who hires underlings to do his dirty work. He's someone with a great career and limitless prospects.'

He tightened his smile. ‘He's someone like me.'

‘You're lying!' Susannah said. ‘If you're such a high-up Songshaper, why the hell would you let us break into the Conservatorium?'

Nathaniel shrugged. ‘I was curious. I wanted to see what your plan entailed and what flaws you'd discovered in the Conservatorium's defences. Nice job on the dome descent, by the way. I shall have to remedy that one. And I'm impressed that you dismantled my light-beam trap. I must admit, I wasn't expecting –'

‘You stole it!' Travis shoved himself forwards, anger on
his face. ‘You stole that trap from my sister, just like you stole her –'

Nathaniel raised his pistol and Travis froze.

‘Uh, uh, uh.' Nathaniel wagged the finger on his other hand. ‘One more step, my lad, and I'll be forced to use this. And that would be such a pity, wouldn't it? I have so many questions to ask you all. So many things to learn.'

‘You stole my sister!' Travis snapped, breathing heavily. ‘You stole her away in the middle of the night, and you stole her ideas and turned them into weapons.'

‘We steal many things,' Nathaniel said calmly, ‘and many people. You can't expect me to remember the identity of every soul we gather up for our mission.'

‘What mission?'

‘Why, our mission to keep the Hush populated, of course. Our mission to replenish the supply of Echoes.'

Susannah stared at him. ‘What are you talking –'

And then it hit her. She twisted back around to face the cage.

The cage.
The cage full of writhing bodies, of grasping hands, of silenced throats. The cage full of Silencers, twisted into something less than human, pumped with warped Music and imprisoned for months in the Hush …

And she understood. She understood it all.

‘The Silencers,' she whispered to herself, her throat barely managing to form the syllables. ‘We're not finished transformations … We're just … just … unfinished Echoes.'

Susannah stared at the cage bars. At the grasping hands.
Unfinished Echoes
. The Songshapers were building an army
of Echoes. They were stealing people from their beds, sparking the transformation with drugs and melodies, and then somehow letting the Musical toxins of the Hush do the rest.

‘That's why we're immune to Echoes,' she whispered. ‘We're half-baked Echoes ourselves.'

It all made sense. The truth throbbed; a pulse of terrible realisation in her brain. Echoes were people. They were all just people who'd been taken and twisted and driven mad by the Songshapers' schemes.

She looked up at Nathaniel. ‘But how …?'

‘Oh, the process is simple,' Nathaniel said quietly. ‘We take a man and we impregnate him with a melody. A melody of control. The tune is only a seed, at first; it hasn't yet germinated. At this stage, he is what we call a Silencer. He still retains his mind, his memories, his free will.

‘Then we lock him down here in the Hush. The tune inside him will slowly germinate, nurtured by the twisted Musical pollution of the air. So long as he never leaves the Hush, the melody inside will awaken. Little by little, day by day. The melody prevents him from connecting to other Music – even if he has studied Songshaping – so he cannot escape the cage.'

Susannah could not breathe.

‘Eventually,' Nathaniel said, ‘the man will lose himself. His natural qualities will remain intact – strength, courage, resilience – but he will use them on our behalf, not his own. He will forget his past, his future. He will forget everything but the tune in his veins. The Music inside him
will grow and strengthen, gradually hijacking his mind and body, until nothing is left but a hazy ghost of humanity.

‘Finally, when his mind is gone, he will regain the power to detect other melodies. He will not only detect them, but he will crave them, just as a starving man craves nourishment. He will drift out between the bars of the cage, hungry for a new source of Musical energy. He is now an Echo. He is a slave, ready to roam the Hush on our behalf.'

‘But why?' Susannah's voice was hoarse. ‘Why would you –'

Nathaniel took a step towards her. He didn't lower his gun. ‘Ah, now – that's the question you should have been asking all along, isn't it? Not so clever as you think you are. Not so clever by half.'

Susannah could sense Dot and Travis on either side of her. The entire world seemed to take a giant intake of breath, teetering on a precipice, as she waited for more horror to unfold.

Part of her wanted to leap forwards, to throw herself onto Nathaniel and tackle him now, to shut him up, to stop him revealing whatever terrible gloat was about to drop from his lips. Because she could tell from the twist in his smile that it wasn't good. Part of her didn't want to know.

But the rest of her – the part of her that had propelled her on this mission to form the Nightfall Gang, to fight back against the cruelty of the Songshapers, to release the Silencers – that part of her burned for the truth. It hungered for knowledge, for answers. For the reason this had been done to her.

So she took a deep breath and forced her feet to stay steady. ‘Why do you care about making Echoes?' she said. ‘The Songshapers are more powerful than the government! You've already got power in the real world – you don't need the Hush to –'

‘The real world?' Nathaniel's lips curled up higher, revealing his teeth. ‘Ah. That's an interesting label, isn't it? The thing about reality, my dear, is that it's all so relative.'

‘What do you –'

Nathaniel's teeth were white as lightning. ‘What if I told you that the
real
world is the Hush?'

A hand grabbed him.

Chester's body was jolted, caught by this tug against momentum as he leant towards the pond. He jerked backwards, startled by the strength in the arm that held his shoulder. Then a thought hit him and he almost couldn't turn around. He was certain that it was him.
His father
. It had to be. His father had found him and saved him and how was Chester supposed to sacrifice himself when his father was standing right –

But when Chester turned, it wasn't his father.

It was Sam.

Chester choked. The pale blue eyes of a Silencer, eerie and shining in the dark. Sam held him so tightly that his fingertips stung against the bone of Chester's shoulder but the older boy showed no signs of letting go.

‘Don't,' Sam said.

It was such a simple word.
Don't
. One little syllable. How could one little syllable hold so much meaning?

Chester shook his head. ‘It's part of the plan …'

‘No, it ain't. She's back there screaming for you, Chester. She wants you to come back until we figure out something else.'

Chester stared at him. ‘She?'

‘The captain.'

They met each other's eyes for a moment and Chester had no idea what to say. Susannah had planned this. It was the only way. How could she want to back out now, when they were so close to victory?

‘This is her chance for justice,' Chester whispered. ‘This is what she wants.'

Sam shook his head slowly. There was a strange expression on his face, a slow kind of weariness that Chester had sometimes glimpsed in his eyes, when the older boy thought no one was watching.

‘It's the only way to save my father,' Chester said. ‘And Penelope. And all these other people, too.'

‘Ain't the only way.' Sam's voice sounded gruff now, choked with something left unsaid.

‘I've got to disrupt the melody,' Chester said. ‘It's what's holding the cage's Music together. If I can touch the tune, then I can reverse it …'

‘Don't need a fiddle then,' Sam said. ‘You're just planning to break the water's tune, ain't you?'

‘I suppose so,' Chester said, ‘but –'

‘Remember when we crashed into that river? Dot said maybe we could just throw in an Echo. A creature with
Music inside it.' Sam gazed down at the water. ‘She figured it might be enough – the mixture of its Music and its dying life-force, or something like that.'

Chester shrugged, helpless. ‘Yeah, but we haven't got an Echo to throw in there! There's just me and you.'

‘I'm a Silencer,' Sam said. There was a haunted look in his eyes. ‘Know what Silencers are? Know what we're really made for?'

Chester felt his heartbeat stammering. He could tell that there was something very wrong in Sam's voice. Another secret? Another revelation?

‘No,' he whispered. ‘I don't know.'

‘Silencers ain't the final product,' Sam said. ‘We're just a step along the way. A half-baked recipe. A work in progress.'

A glimmer of understanding brushed the edges of Chester's mind. ‘No,' he whispered. ‘It can't be …'

‘A Silencer,' Sam said, ‘is an unfinished Echo.'

The glimmer became a shine, then a fire. Chester's brain lit up with too many understandings to bear. It all made sense, a horrible, calculated kind of sense. Silencers were immune to Echoes' touches; in fact, the creatures floated right through them. Silencers were kept in this cage for months and months, in the twisted air of the Hush, as if they were seeds being kept in a greenhouse to develop …

‘No,' he said. ‘It can't be.'

But it was. He knew it now, as sure as he knew his own breathing. Susannah was halfway to being an Echo. His
father
was halfway to being an Echo. Penelope was halfway to being an Echo, alongside all the other half-mad
souls that clawed their way through the thick of the cage. Their voices were gone, their minds were being twisted, their memories were slowly fading …

All the Echoes he'd encountered on his journey through Meloral – the one he'd killed on his first night in Sam's echoboat, the ones he'd fought in Yant's vault – they had been
people
, once. Vanished people, turned into monsters by the Songshapers …

‘Why? What do they make them for?'

Sam shook his head. ‘Don't know.' He was staring at the pond now, at its quiet ripples, at its sheen. His fingers flexed on Chester's shoulder and a new twinge of pain ran up Chester's collarbone.

‘I only know 'cause I heard 'em talking when they chucked me onto death row,' Sam said. ‘After they stuffed me up with their experiments, they figured I'd never make a proper Echo so they might as well be rid of me. And since they were getting rid of me, they didn't figure I'd live to spill their secrets. I did live – but I never told a soul. Not even Susannah. Figured she'd be happier not knowing what she really was.'

‘But you're not a full Echo,' Chester said, breathless. ‘It's just the start of the process – you're still human, mostly …'

‘Maybe,' Sam said. ‘Maybe not. Either way, they put a melody in me. It ain't properly developed, yet, but it's there. It whips me round like a damn lasso. It fills up my head with … with fear, or hate, or happiness, or fury – all just from hearing a bit of Music …'

Sam sucked down a breath. ‘I ain't even sure what I am anymore. I feel like … like a bull at a rodeo, all
roped down and trembling in the dust. Nothing left but the whip.' His voice cracked. ‘But I know one thing for sure. I'm gonna make the bastards pay for what they done to me.'