The Gathering Dark (40 page)

If they decide to kill me, I’m not going to go without defending myself and Walker, too. They won’t kill me without hearing me first. I won’t let them.

Chapter Fifty-One

T
HE
R
EFORMER WHO HAD
sentenced Walker turned to Pike. “Your failings were nearly as great as his. It was you who created the Experimentals in the first place. It was your ‘vision’ that we followed, marching blindly toward our own destruction. When it became obvious that your Experimentals were wreaking havoc on our very existence, you refused to come before us and answer for it. What have you to say for yourself?”

Pike scurried forward. “Your Honors. Thank you for the chance to speak. I’ve been saving up my words. A whole pile of them.”

He cleared his throat, rubbing his hand over his face
repeatedly. He looked even more unstable than he had in the cave.

“Your Honors,” he began again. Pike’s voice was stronger this time. “It’s true. The early parts of the Experimental Breeding Program failed. They hurt things. Damaged Darkside. I regret that. Really, really more than almost anything in my whole life, I regret how much damage was caused. I still believed in the program, though. I could have fixed it. But the program was stopped before I could finish my experiments.”

There was a dry murmur among the members of the Tribunal. Reddening, Pike barreled on. As he talked about his work, he seemed less scattered. More like the Pike Keira remembered—quick and intense.

“All of the Experimentals we’d created had been raised here in Darkside, force-fed music education. They were deluged with human-made instruments that deteriorated all too quickly in our Dark environment. As you know, the continual passage back and forth between our realities to bring new instruments only caused more damage.”

“Even here!” The smallest of the Reformers had a distinctly feminine voice, though it creaked and popped. “When one of your fool Experimentals tried to cross over during his pre-elimination hearing, he created a rip in this very chamber. Do you have any idea how outrageous it is that your creations have damaged
our
compound?”

Keira knew there was nothing on the other side of the room—the
earth side—but the ocean. Crossing over would be suicide.

The fact that it had seemed the better choice to that Experimental made her shudder.

Pike glanced behind him and his gaze settled on Keira. She tugged self-consciously on the hem of her shirt and was shocked when it crumbled away to nothing in her hands.

She’d been Darkside long enough that her clothes were beginning to disintegrate. It seemed so terrifyingly final. Even this last bit of the life she’d known, the life she’d planned, the life she
wanted
—was crumbling beneath her fingers. It wouldn’t be long before the Reformers would hand down their sentence and then she’d be nothing too. Gone. Like her shirt, and the instruments, and everything she’d ever known. A lump sprang up in her throat, impossible to swallow.

“But Keira was different.” Pike’s words cut through her thoughts and she blinked in surprise. He looked back toward the Tribunal but he pointed at her, his arm shaking.

“Keira was raised on earth. She had the best possible Darkside lineage. Her mother possessed tremendous musical talent. I myself heard Keira’s fledgling ability—little musical birdie who hadn’t learned to fly, plinking out the notes with her tiny, little girl fingers—I was proud. Proud, proud, proud as that thing—that funny thing—and birds. Birds with their wings and their beaks . . . ” Pike’s hands shook at his sides and his eyes wandered.

Keira curled her fingers tight against her palms. His mind was slipping again. Shit.

“Dr. Ssssendson?” One of the Tribunal members prompted him, “You recognized some ability in this earth-bound Experimental?”

Pike clasped his hands in front of him as though doing so would help him hold it together. “Yes. Even though she was so young, Keira was obviously able to make music. More than that, she seemed to have a real talent for it. I made sure she was provided with an instrument and money for the education she needed to develop her abilities.”

He turned to Keira.

His face shone with pride.

She remembered Uncle Pike putting phone books on the piano bench for her so that she could reach the keys. When she pushed down middle C with a pudgy little finger, his face had shone the same way it did now. She could hear him saying,
That’s my girl
, while he ruffled her hair. With a start, Keira realized that, in a sense, Pike himself had been her first piano teacher.

The ruined face that stared at her now was a ghost of that man.

Pike licked his lips.

“Your Honors, it was the goal of the Experimental Breeding Program to create a being with Darkling genetics who also possessed musical ability. To bring the music we worship back into our species. The damage the Experimentals did to our world was a deeply unfortunate side effect. But side effects are not
the same as failures. I believe—” He clacked his teeth together, half choking on the insane giggle that Keira heard rising in his throat. “I believe that she can play. Let her prove her musical ability to you. She’s not a failure and neither am I. I can feel it in my bones.” Pike held up his right hand, shaking back his sleeve to reveal a mutilated hand, the stubs of his missing fingers offering physical proof of the damage that the Seekers caused themselves with too much crossing between the worlds.

Keira gagged.

The Reformers eyed her suspiciously.

Keira’s blood began to burn like a signal fire. Pike was trying to prove her worth. It was a shame he was too far gone to realize what he was actually condemning her.

One of the Tribunal members tilted his hooded head, considering Pike. “If she can play, then perhaps you are right. It would be a mark in your favor to find out that all three of you were not wasted. If she can play, perhaps we have enough use for her to spare her.”

The room bucked and spun as his words wormed their way through Keira’s mind.

There was no way out of this now, because if they thought she couldn’t play, they’d kill her. And if she proved she could, they’d still kill Walker. Those were the only two possible outcomes.

Walker caught her arm as she staggered. She looked up at him, but meeting his eyes was a mistake. Pain and loss burned
in his gaze. She couldn’t breathe through the ache in her chest; she couldn’t see through the lake of tears.

“Well, then, Experimental,” the Reformer rasped. “What instrument did Dr. Sendson provide you with?”

“A piano,” Pike said proudly.

“Sssilenccce!” The hiss rose from the Tribunal in unison. Even the walls seemed to cower beneath it. “You were not invited to speak!”

Pike’s skin turned pearly gray and he shook like he’d touched a live wire.

The female Tribunal member gestured to one of the guards.

He turned neatly and swept aside an enormous curtain, revealing an assortment of instruments in varying stages of decay. Among them was a scratched and worn upright piano.

Keira’s stomach plummeted.

They didn’t just expect her to play. They expected her to do it
right now.

Chapter Fifty-Two

K
EIRA STARED AT THE PIANO
.

It was like a roulette wheel marked only with death. There was no way to win. Either she didn’t play and she died, or she did play, and they killed Walker anyway.

As she stood there, being slowly ripped in half by the choice, she had the same feeling she had when she crossed between the two worlds. The sensation that she was neither here nor there—that anything was still possible.

The idea was as sudden and unexpected as lightning and even more terrifying. Before she could lose her nerve, Keira turned to face the Tribunal.

“What?” The middle one asked.

“I’m not going to play. Not unless you agree to spare Walker.” She set her chin, pulling on every bit of stubbornness she could summon, and stiffened her spine with the same pride Walker had always teased her about.

The sibilant laughter was icy against her skin. “Then we will simply kill all of you. You for failing to play, Dr. Sendson for failing to prove his success, and Walker for both failing in his mission and also as payment for your insolence. No one refuses our order. No one.”

Fury tore through her, but it was replaced almost immediately by powerlessness. There was no way out. The snare had already tightened around her ankle. The noose was looped around her neck.

She turned to Walker. The angle of his body half hid his face from the Tribunal.

“Play,” he begged her.

“Walker, no.” She shook her head. “If I give them what they want—they won’t have any reason to negotiate with me. There has to be some way out.”

“It’s too late, Keira.” Walker’s shoulders sank in resignation. He stared at her, his eyes pinning her in place. “I knew this might happen. The only thing that you can do for me is to save yourself. Please.
Please.
”

One of the guards stepped over and pulled her away from Walker, dragging her toward the piano. Keira was so numb with
fear that she couldn’t even feel her feet as she crossed the floor. She sat on the worn wooden bench, automatically moving herself into position. She glanced over her shoulder at Walker and Pike. They both watched her. Pike bobbed his head in time to a song that played only in his head. The vacant grin was back on his face, and Keira knew he’d lost touch with reality again. She wanted to be angry at him, but he looked so pitiful that she couldn’t manage it. He was nothing more than the victim of the holes that too much crossing had eaten into his brain. It wasn’t his fault. She felt sorry for Pike, but Walker was the one that broke her heart.

Walker’s jaw was set and his shoulders were squared, and he smiled at her with pride. It was exactly how her mother had looked at Keira’s first recitals. It was like he couldn’t wait to hear her play. Like it was the only thing he wanted.

Keira refocused her attention on the piano keys. A few of them were chipped, and she wondered if the disintegrating piano was even in tune. There was only one way to find out, but her hands curled up like snails at the thought of touching the keys. Everything had taken on a slow, underwater quality, as though the ocean itself had slipped across into Darkside.

Keira shook out her hands.

Behind her, the Tribunal began to stir with impatience.

Keira closed her eyes and put her fingers on the keys, but there was no music in her hands. It was the same way she’d felt in front of her own piano, with her mother waiting for her to
remember the Brahms concerto. Only then, she’d just grabbed her sheet music. Now, all she could do was beg her fingers to remember something. Anything.

Deep inside the piano, the hammers struck the strings, as she banged out the first notes of the Beethoven sonata she’d bought the day she met Walker. The piano sounded wrong—not out of tune, exactly, but the noise was
wrong
somehow, the same way the Darkside lights shone strangely. The sound was so foreign that Keira’s ear couldn’t match the sound to what her hands were doing.

She fumbled the fingering on the fourth measure.

There was a dissatisfied grumble from the Tribunal.

She took a breath and leaned over the keys until all she could see was the piano. She’d never tried to play without
hearing
it. Repositioning her hands, she started again.

She made it as far as the third line by seeing the notes in her mind’s eye and matching them up to the keys beneath her fingers, but without the sound of it, without being able to hear what she played, she misstruck two notes in a row.

When the second wrong note sounded, a roar went up from the Tribunal.

“Dr. Sendson!”

Keira whipped around, instinctively leaning against the piano for support.

The middle Reformer pointed at Pike.

“What do you have to say about this? She is not playing. She
cannot
play.”

Pike sank to his knees and turned his back to Keira like she was an unanswered prayer; like she was his own personal Judas. He bent low in front of the Tribunal.

“She told me she could,” he gasped. “I don’t know. Oh, I can hear how it would sound. I remember notes and notes and then we laughed.”

The Tribunal members exchanged looks.

“Stand up and stop this raving,” one of the Reformers ordered. “We will deal with you later.”

Pike struggled back to his feet, next to Walker.

“Please,” Keira called. “I know I can do this. If I could try again—the piano sounds strange here and I—”

“Silence!” It was not so much a word as a roar. “You have
failed
,” the Tribunal member said. “We have judged it to be so, and our judgment is law.”

Keira sank back against the piano, as though she could disappear into the cracks between the keys. Her elbows stuck the keyboard, sending a discordant jangle through the room.

The Tribunal bent their heads together, their whispers scratching through the air. Keira looked at Walker. He stared at her as though he was trying to see every detail of her, one last time. Her hope shrank to a sliver and finally to a pinprick before it died altogether.

A Tribunal member motioned to the nearest guard, who hurried over and then left the room with purpose. Keira watched him go. Fear narrowed her throat as the door slammed shut behind him.

The Tribunal member who sat closest to Walker and Pike stood. “This is our pronouncement. Pike Sendson, as punishment for your failings, you are to witness the end of your experiment. You will live to see the last two Experimentals die, and then you will spend the rest of your lifetime imprisoned in the Darkside penitentiary, contemplating your failures.”

Keira cried out as Walker doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach.

The smallest Reformer raised her hand. “We are not without mercy,” she rasped. “There is an obvious affection between the two Experimentals, which has been the cause of at least some of these transgressions. They will be allowed to say their good-byes.” She turned her head toward Walker. “I suggest you get on with it. The extermination room is already being prepared.”