The Hush (30 page)

With another breath, Susannah bent down to fiddle with the harness buckles, pulling the contraption free from her torso. As they hoisted it back up towards the ceiling, ready to lower the others down, she stared up at the sliver of night sky visible through the dome crack.

I survived
, she reminded herself.
They didn't beat me.

They had tortured her, changed her, twisted the natural
Music of her body. They had turned her into a Silencer, and they had locked her into a cage. But they hadn't beaten her.

This time, she was here on her own terms.

This time,
she
would beat
them
.

Five figures stood in the centre of the white-floored room. Chester clutched his fiddle case and watched as the others caught their breath. Sam and Dot, fresh from their swing down the rope. Susannah, a mask of careful blankness as she surveyed the room. Travis, his eyes still hard behind his glasses.

Chester had been impressed with Travis's handling of the mirrors. The older boy had used medical tools and trembling fingers to readjust the reflections, manipulating their angles into a careful pattern. Finally, the light beams had vanished and the room had been left in a smouldering haze.

Travis had been forced to use his fingers at one point, twisting a mirror into the exact angle that would interrupt its Musical flow. The edge of the mirror had been sharp and his fingers had bled from the contact, trailing blood across the white of his shirt cuffs. He hadn't seemed to care. In fact, he had wiped his fingers on his vest and forced a smile. ‘Lucky I had to wear this hideous servants' outfit, eh?'

Dot produced a coil of bandage from her pocket, snipped off a couple of feet in length, and bound his bleeding hand. As she worked, she glanced up into Travis's eyes. ‘Was it really Penny's design? The light beams, I mean?'

Travis nodded.

‘Well, doesn't that mean she's alive? If they're forcing her to work for them, then –'

‘Not necessarily …' Travis said. ‘She had plans in her bedroom – blueprints, material lists, patent diagrams … I'd say they just stole the plans when they took her.'

Dot's face fell. ‘Oh.'

‘But that doesn't mean she's dead,' Susannah put in quickly. ‘She's probably in the cage, still. And that's why we're here, remember? To break everyone out of the cage?'

Dot looked unusually serious now, with a wistful distance in her eyes. She cast her gaze across the room – at the beds, the equipment, the mirrors – and her expression hardened. ‘Yeah, you're right. We're going to get them out.'

There was a pause.

‘So where's the cage?' Chester said.

‘Here,' Susannah said. ‘Right here, but in the Hush.'

Chester stared at her. ‘But we can't get into the Hush from this room! It's blocked off – the security spells …'

Susannah gave him a grim smile and pulled a signalling globe from her pocket. She pinched it carefully between two fingers. ‘Ready?'

It took a moment for Chester to realise what she meant. Only one person could be holding the matched pair of that globe.

Nathaniel Glaucon.

Susannah closed her fist around the globe. There was a flash of light between her fingers. Chester stared at her hand, stomach churning. Somewhere in this building, Nathaniel's matching globe would be flashing. He would run to the Head Songshaper's chambers, report an emergency, and …

‘The Conservatorium's got an emergency shutdown system,' Susannah said. ‘It locks the building externally, so that no one can get in or out. But it also shuts down the internal Musical boundaries so Songshapers can reach the scene of the crime more quickly.' Her smile tightened. ‘And it will shut down the Hush blocker in this room.'

Chester gaped at her. He had known that Nathaniel would be reporting them at some stage … But
this
? Setting off the alarm
before
they'd rescued the prisoners? Their chances had been slim before, but were definitely worse now. How were they supposed to make it out of here alive, with countless prisoners to care for and dozens of Songshapers on their trail?

Susannah caught his look. ‘It's the only way, Chester. We've been planning this for months – there's no other way to shut down the blocking spell.'

Chester glanced at the others. None of them looked surprised.

‘You all knew?' he said, his voice a little hoarse. ‘No one thought it'd be a good idea to warn me?'

Dot gave him an apologetic look. ‘Well, we didn't know you at first and we didn't want you chickening out on us.'

Chester felt sick. ‘I thought I could trust you.'

Dot looked taken aback. ‘Of course you can trust us! It was just a little …'

‘You're the one who told me to be honest!'

‘I told you not to lie to
yourself
,' Dot said. ‘To be honest with
yourself –
to stop pretending to be someone you're not. And until we knew you were reliable, we couldn't risk …' She trailed off. ‘Chester, we told you the truth about everything else. I swear it.'

Chester wanted to believe her. Her eyes were honest and she looked genuinely shocked at the idea that he might consider this a serious breach of trust. Had she just made an honest mistake of judgement? Or was she still lying?

‘I swear,' Dot said again, her voice quiet. ‘I swear you know everything I do.'

And despite himself, Chester believed her.

He looked at the others. Travis was still tidying up the bandage that Dot had wrapped around his hand and didn't seem to be listening. But when he looked at Susannah, she was gazing down at her feet. Only Sam met his eyes. Shadowed and stone-faced under his cowboy hat, the older boy looked as weathered as the dome above.

‘Chester,' he said slowly, ‘there's something else we gotta tell –'

A high-pitched wail cut him off, slicing the air like Penelope's light beams had. But the wail wasn't made of light; it was a wave of rippling sound, harsh and discordant, and Chester dropped to his knees with his hands over his ears. He caught a glimpse of the others doing likewise before he scrunched his eyes shut. His very pupils seemed to burn with the sting of the sound.

He doubled over, face pressed down onto his thighs, and curled his body as small as it could go. Some animal instinct screamed that he must shrink himself, he must hide, he must shield his face and hands and chest from the agony …

And then it was gone.

There was a long moment of silence. Chester heard nothing but the haggard rasp of his own breath and the gasps of those around him. He forced his eyes open and slowly uncurled his limbs. ‘What …?'

Susannah glanced around the room. ‘It must've been the alarm. They're activating the security shutdown – come on!'

They all pressed their palms to the floor. Susannah placed one hand on the floor and the other on Dot's shoulder. Chester closed his eyes and clenched his fiddle under his arm, struggling to subdue the crash of emotions in his chest. The Songshapers were coming. The others had lied to him. And Sam still had one more secret …

‘Three,' Susannah said, ‘two, one!'

They hummed the notes. The air lashed out and Chester's breath turned cold.

And when he opened his eyes again, he stared into a swirl of darkness.

The Hush stretched out before him, black and cold. The lash of dry rain, the whirl of mist and shadow. Chester breathed in its chill and let the bitter taste slip back across his tongue and teeth.

‘Watch your step,' Susannah said. ‘This is the most Musical building in the country. I bet the Hush'll be twisted here in all sorts of deadly ways.'

‘Starlight and shadows.' Dot sounded distant, almost dreamlike. She raised a hand and brushed it through the air, a peculiar look in her eyes. ‘I had a theory, once, that the Hush was more than leakage. That it was a layer, a trick, a dream …'

Her voice trailed off and her hand brushed silent air.

‘A nightmare, more like it,' Susannah said. ‘Now come on – I'm sorry, Dot, but we haven't got time for theories. Follow me.'

She strode forwards, a hideaway lamp shining in the palm of her hand. Chester followed. His insides were still churning from shock at discovering their plan, but he forced his emotions to the back of his throat. All he could think about now was survival.

‘You've been here before, Captain,' he said. ‘Don't you know what traps we'll run into?'

Susannah shook her head, looking grim. ‘These aren't permanent traps set by the Songshapers. They're just surges of Music – side effects of the magical leakage. It all depends on what Music's leaked through recently. There's no way to predict it.'

Chester nodded. He drew his own hideaway lamp from his pocket and the others echoed his movement. Soon they all clutched sparks of light: five tiny fireflies, flickering in a swarm as their fingers shifted. It made little difference to the dark of the Hush: even with the globe in his hand, Chester could barely see two yards through the black. But it was better than nothing and it helped him feel a little safer.

At least, until he heard the scream.

He whirled around, his ears registering the voice in a panic. Dot. It was Dot. Her arms and legs were splayed backwards, pinned out against the limbs of a shadowed tree.

Chester reeled.
A tree?
There were no trees in the Conservatorium …

But it wasn't solid. The tree didn't loom with the heavy weight of bark and wood and ringed years inside a groaning trunk. It flickered. It shifted. It was made of shadow, darker, even, than the air around them, and its branches moved like water through the air. Leaves and twigs reached around Dot's limbs and she screamed again as the darkness stretched her.

‘In the name of the Song …' Travis whispered.

A moment later they were on her. Sam and Susannah grabbed at Dot's arms, struggling to pull her free, but she only screamed more and sobbed as the magic pulled at her, stretched her, abused her body like it was a string of dripping toffee. Travis hacked at the tree with his signalling globe – forgetting that it was fragile glass – but it floated through the trunk as though it was made of smoke.

Chester tried to help, thrusting his hands into the shadow, but he quickly yanked them back. His flesh felt as though it was boiling in a surge of heat and light and agony. But in that brief instant, that second of contact between his hand and the tree, he heard it. He heard the Music of the tree, distorted and twisted like a jolting nursery rhyme being played by a broken-down music box.

The others were still screaming, fighting, pulling. Dot's head lolled forwards as she sobbed and Chester realised for the first time that she was trying to hum a tune through her pain. She was fighting to save herself. Her sobs and cries came in a strange rhythm, which she fought to work in opposition to the quaver of the tree's melody – but her voice was too shattered, and her notes too shaky.

Chester dropped to his knees and wrenched open his fiddle case. Goldenleaf came up into his arms and he rested it beneath his chin and pressed his bow to the strings, so quick and desperate that he didn't even think to tune it. If one of the strings was out of tune, he would have to work around it. He had no choice.

With a quavering breath of his own, Chester began to play. He started on the last bar of the tree's four-bar
melody and ran it backwards, trickling back into the third bar, the second, the first. He could barely hear his music over the screams, the whipping, the thrashing and cursing, but he pressed on, the world a whirl of rain and pain and darkness.

His melody leaped up from the strings, almost alive, and he felt a hum of heat through his fingers as it melted from music to Music. It filtered through the air until it hit the shadowed trunk of the tree. The Music lodged there, curling around the trunk like a woodchopper's blade. Chester stared through the blackness, eyes straining as he opened them wide, trying to let his pupils drink in any smidgen of light they could scavenge.

And in that greyish light, he saw the tree fall.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. The trunk leant a little to one side, creaking under the weight of his Music. Then it began to unravel. It groaned and it bent further sideways, its limbs unknotting from around Dot like a ball of twine. Its shadows twisted from tree limbs into ribbons then collapsed to the ground like a nest of writhing snakes …

Dot fell to the ground with a cry. The others rushed to surround her, pulled her up into their arms and urged her to breathe. But Chester kept his focus on his fiddle and the Music. He played on and on, coaxing another four bars from his strings, until those slithering snakes had faded completely into the black of the Hush.

Then, and only then, did he fall silent.

Dot groaned in Susannah's arms; she was frail and shaking and looked as small as a child. But her fingers
moved and her eyes were alive, and she staggered back onto her feet.

‘'M all right,' she murmured, her voice almost swallowed by the Hush-rain. ‘'M all right.'

Chester took one of her arms and Susannah took the other. Together they supported Dot, helping her limp forwards into the dark. Every step drew from her a sharp little intake of breath, as though her muscles burned with every stretch and retraction. But she gritted her teeth and staggered onward, and Chester felt a surge of admiration for her. Dot might
look
like a little blonde pixie, but by the Song she was tough.

‘Look,' Travis whispered. ‘Up ahead.'

Chester looked. The edge of their light bubble was brushing something different now, and it solidified as he took another step forwards. His throat tightened.

Bars. Tall metal bars, stretching like corn stalks into the dark. And around the bars, fingers. White fingers. Brown fingers. Fingers in the tattered remains of gloves. Fingers with wedding rings, and fingers covered in scars. All desperate, all grasping. A snippet of the souls trapped beyond, as they clawed at the bars on the outskirt of their cage.

As the gang ventured closer to the cage, their circles of light lurched to encompass more of the bodies within it. They weren't just hands now. They were arms, torsos, shoulders. Faces. Starved and weathered, lined with wrinkles and cries and screams that refused to sound from their muted throats. Some had scratched at their eyes and others had torn chunks from their hair. Scars on their scalps and blood on their cheeks and –

‘It's so quiet,' Chester whispered.

Somehow that was the most disturbing thing of all. Here they were, barely a yard from the cage – one more step and he would be able to touch the prisoners' grasping hands – and yet there was no sound. No cries, no moans, no screams for help.

Just … hush.

‘Their voices are gone,' Susannah said. Her own voice was hoarse, almost stunned. ‘I forgot. I forgot what they do to you …'

‘But you've got a voice!' Chester said, desperate. Was his father in there, trapped in that writhing mess of hands and bodies? Was his father doomed to be mute forever?

‘They've been in the Hush for too long,' Susannah said. ‘Weeks, for most of them, or months. Maybe even longer.' She took a shuddering breath. ‘That's why we never stay in the Hush for more than a few days at a time. There's too much Musical pollution. The air is twisted, tainted. It does things to you … to your body. To your soul.'

‘But they'll get better, right? Once they've had some time back in the real world?'

‘I think so.' She paused. ‘I mean … Yes. Of course they will.'

Chester stared into the morass of hands and bars and his stomach twisted. He wished Susannah's voice had sounded as certain as the words she produced with it.

Then he noticed something odd. The prison bars were spaced at least a foot apart – it was plenty of space for a body to squeeze through. ‘Why don't they leave? Why don't they slip through the bars?'

‘The real trap isn't the bars.' Susannah sounded strange now, her voice wound tight with some unknown fear. ‘It's the Music. It runs between the bars and it holds back anyone who can't hear it. You have to touch it, connect with its rhythm, to pass between the bars – that's how the Songshapers get in and out. But these people …' She waved at the writhing mass of hands and faces. ‘… They're Silencers now, like me and Sam. Even if they'd all been trained as Songshapers, they still wouldn't hear the melody.'

‘So how do we break them out? Chester said. ‘There isn't time to drag them through the Music one by one …'

Susannah hesitated. She exchanged a glance with Sam then looked down at her feet. It wasn't just her voice strung into a tight sort of coil, now: there was an odd tenseness to her body language, too. It looked and sounded as though she was about to face a moment she'd been dreading. Chester thought suddenly of Sam's words before they'd stepped into the Hush:
Chester, there's something else we gotta tell
…

Sam hadn't been able to finish the sentence, but Chester could guess what word had been coming:
you.
They were keeping something else from him. Another risk. Another secret.

‘Chester.' Susannah's voice was so quiet that he had to strain to hear it. ‘We had another plan, to start with. When we were looking for an unlicensed Songshaper, we wanted you for something else, more than just the audition. But …'

She took a rickety breath. ‘But I don't want to do it that way anymore. We're
not
going to do it that way anymore.
Not now … now that I know you. Now that
we
know you. It means we've got to find another way, without you going into the cage, but I haven't quite come up with another plan –'

Travis grabbed her shoulder. ‘What do you mean? You never said anything about this – I thought we'd just pick the lock!'

‘Pick the lock?' Susannah gasped out a raspy laugh, although it was stained more with hysteria than amusement. ‘Pick the lock? You really thought it'd be that easy?'

There was a muffled shout from the darkness behind them. Chester winced and sensed the indrawn breaths around him as the others did the same. The Songshapers were coming. They were running out of time. He swallowed the roar of wild emotion that was churning in his throat.

‘My father's in there! Tell me what to do, and I'll do it!'

Susannah clenched her fists, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, they glistened with moisture in the light of her hideaway lamp. She ran a hand through her curls then shook her head. ‘I saved some of the charges; I thought we could try blasting open the cage –'

‘It won't work, Captain,' Dot said. ‘The charges only work on physical targets, like the dome. You can't blow up a melody.'

‘But your extinguishers worked on the flame wall …'

Dot shook her head. ‘They can quash external manifestations of Music, things like flame or heat. But this is a wall of pure melody, conjured by the best Songshapers in the country. Nothing I've built could erase it.'

‘All right,' Susannah said, sounding desperate. ‘All right, so we'll just have to trick the Songshapers into unlocking the cage. Quick, hide! I'm going to grab their attention and … and …'

She faltered, one hand half-raised, as though the darkness itself might drop a solution into her palm.

Chester stared at her for a long moment. Then it hit him. What had she said?
We've got to find another way, without you going into the cage.
Did that mean the cage could be opened from the inside? So there was something in there that could break the Music, something in there that could set the prisoners free …

And he alone could reach the key.

Chester knew how to connect to a piece of Music. He could cross the threshold between the bars and enter the cage. Only he could do it. Not Travis, who didn't have a musical bone in his body. Not Susannah or Sam, who were impaired by their status as Silencers – and who had never been Songshapers anyway. Not Dot, whose tattooed hands prevented her from crossing Musical thresholds.

It had to be him.

And if Susannah's plan required someone to go into the cage, he'd damn well do it. He hadn't come this far and survived this much to walk away and leave his father in a world of silent screams.

Behind him, he heard a charge of footsteps as the Songshapers drew near. He heard the shouts, the bangs, the wild firing of pistols.

Before the others could stop him, Chester lunged to touch the cage. The air gave a violent surge, clearly
designed to repel him, but he could feel its melody now; it surged through his veins like water and he breathed it in, every muscle shifting in time with its tune.

He could taste it. And he could defy it. There was a single, deliberate flaw in the rhythm – a choke between Musical bars when the melody faltered and a person connected to its tune could force their body through …

With a breath like fire, Chester plunged between the bars.