The Hush (33 page)

Nathaniel Glaucon.

Chester charged. The pistol shrieked, blasting a bullet up into the air. Nathaniel swore and fumbled, struggling
to aim at Susannah's face, but Chester rode the crowd like a wave and in a second had hurled himself onto the man's back and yanked back his arm, jerking the pistol skyward once more. His fiddle slipped from his arms.

Chester forgot the crowds, the dark, the rain. His whole world was just this moment, this clutching of limbs, this fighting for control of the gun. All he knew was that he had to grab that gleam of silver, to point it away from his friends, to –

All of a sudden, Nathaniel stopped fighting. He stood motionless and stared out at the Hush around them, as though he could barely grasp what he was seeing. Chester, still clutching at Nathaniel's back, turned his blinking eyes outwards to survey the scene.

Hundreds of bodies stood around them. Hundreds of Silencers, freed from their cage, loomed in the flickering light of the cage bars. They stood still. They stood silent.

And their eyes were turned on the Songshapers.

Chester slipped down from Nathaniel's back. The Songshaper seemed hardly to notice. His expression was numb with panic, as if he was barely able to comprehend the hundreds of haunted faces surrounding him.

Unable to think straight, Chester picked up Goldenleaf. The fiddle was damaged – its scroll was shattered, one of the tuning pegs was gone, and broken strings spiked outwards in a tangle – but his shock was too raw for any new emotions to register. He staggered back to his friends and felt the painful squeeze of Susannah's hand on his shoulder. Her breathing was sharp and heavy as though she didn't know whether to sob or shout. Chester felt the
same terror building inside himself: a terrible mixture of fear and hope and something else. Something like the first bar of a folk song, just waiting for the melody to kick in …

The nearest Silencer opened her mouth. She was as tall as Travis and she shared his high cheekbones and thick black hair. She stood in front of Nathaniel looking thin and ragged but still she was beautiful. Her eyes glinted with the pale blue gleam of a Silencer.

Penelope
.

‘You stole us,' she said, and the words were not silent. The sound left her lips, hoarse and tight. ‘You did this to us.'

Her accusation hung on the air.

And as one, the Silencers charged.

The Songshapers died quickly.

For a moment, Susannah thought they might all go down screaming – not just Nathaniel and his comrades, but her own friends as well. But they were buffeted backwards, carried on the sea of frantic bodies.

She didn't see Nathaniel die. She heard his screams, then there was a moment of quiet broken by the howls of the Silencers as they charged into the darkness, voices returning, alive, free and unconstrained.

Susannah stumbled sideways but caught herself and grabbed Chester's arm before he could be swallowed by the crowd. Before Susannah knew what was happening, she had wrapped her arms around him and she was breathing into his neck, his shoulder. There was nothing but the scent of him, his warmth against her, the knowledge that he was here, he was alive, he was
Chester
.

‘I'm sorry,' she whispered. ‘I'm so, so sorry. I never meant to go through with it, Chester. I thought we'd find another way …'

And then he was returning her embrace and his face
was warm and damp against her cheek. ‘It's okay. I know why you … it was the only way. But Sam …'

She didn't need him to finish the sentence. If Sam wasn't here – if the cage was broken and Chester was alive and Sam was missing … well, there was only one answer. Shock and sorrow welled in her like liquid fire and she pressed her face closer and breathed the scent of Chester's living body. He was alive but Sam was dead. Sam. He had been like her brother.

She looked up and saw hundreds of Silencers. They needed her. They needed someone to lead them out into the light, into the real world – or the false world, or whatever you wanted to call it. To lead them back into Meloral. Their world might have been carved from a melody, but it was still real, in a way, wasn't it? It was still a version of reality. And it was a hell of a lot better than this one.

She would finish the plan. She would get these prisoners out of here and give them a chance to take back the lives that had been stolen from them.

With a startled cry, Chester broke free of her embrace. Susannah's heart stuttered. Had the full weight of her betrayal hit him? Did he want nothing more to do with her? But then she saw him slipping through the crowd, his hands outstretched as he lunged towards an older man with dark hair and gleaming eyes …

His father.

The man was limping and staggering about with a haggard look of sickness in his face. How long had he been down here? Months, from what Chester had told her. She
helped Chester support the man and they hauled him up between their shoulders.

‘Captain!' Travis shouted.

They met in a patch of open floor on a newly vacated stretch of marble, as the Silencers swarmed outwards in their desperation to escape. Dot and Penelope were in each other's arms, lips locked in the tightest of reunions, filled with so much longing that they looked ready to dissolve from the sheer intensity. Dot was crying, tears streaming down her face.

Susannah was overwhelmed. They had done it. They had released the Silencers, they had Chester's father, they had Penelope, and they had finally achieved justice.

But Sam …

She drew in a breath. ‘Start the melody!'

Travis placed one hand on Dot's shoulder and the other on Penelope's. Together, they began to hum. A run of quiet notes, bursting from pursed lips. Chester joined them and suddenly the music was spreading, ebbing outwards, floating like a wave through the crowd. One man would stop in his panic and pick it up, then another. Each person passed it to their neighbour like a secret on the tongue. Sweet and succulent, it rippled outwards, their twist on the Sundown Recital, the tune that would pull them back out of the Hush …

One by one, the people disappeared. Susannah watched them vanish, winking out of the Hush to return to their real world. As others saw what was happening – as they realised that the melody was their escape route – they took up the tune like a man in the desert grasps for water. The
notes rolled outwards and bodies vanished into the haze of shadow as the cage behind them shone.

Susannah waited until they were all gone, every body, every soul. Just darkness hugged her. She let the Hush-rain play upon her skin.

She stared down at the Songshapers' bodies. Broken. Crushed. For a second she could see their features, then the light from the cage behind her flickered out.

She had seen this cage once before. The last time, she had escaped when a fellow prisoner had tripped into the pool, when he'd let the water snare a taste of his ankle. He had crawled out again, dying slowly from the shock of the magic, but the water's Music had broken for a moment – and in that moment, Susannah had slipped between the bars.

This time, Sam had bought the prisoners more time. He had thrown his whole body into the water, had let his Music churn and writhe in violent death throes through the dark, so that the spell would stay disrupted until the last of his body burned away.

Sam
.

Susannah let the melody slip softly from her lips. He was gone. She would never see him again.

For Chester, the next few minutes were a blur. The marble floor was white again, and the beds and medical equipment punctuated the curving walls.

People were screaming, kicking over the beds, smashing canisters and trays and needles and tearing buckles free
from the walls. Mirrors splintered and bodies shoved and all Chester could think was that it was so
bright
in here, after the black of the Hush. His eyes burned and he wondered how the Silencers would cope after months of darkness …

The Silencers.

His father.

Chester still had Goldenleaf pinned under one arm. With the other shoulder he supported his father. He looked like a broken man, hunched over, his breath ragged against Chester's neck.

‘You found me,' his father whispered. ‘Chester …'

‘Shhh,' Chester said, and hoisted him a little higher. His legs felt like they were about to buckle under the strain but this was his father, dammit. Chester wasn't about to let him fall, not even if his legs shattered and his arms turned to sawdust. No matter what, Chester would not let him fall.

When Susannah appeared he let out a little choke of relief. She was pale and dishevelled, her red hair a mess of tangles more than curls. When his gaze fell upon her, Chester was struck by how wild she was. Wild and beautiful. She looked back at him and there was a desperation in her gaze that made his insides flip. And he knew – in a tangle of hurt and hope and fatigue – that Susannah had told the truth when she apologised. She didn't mean to go through with the plan tonight.

She didn't mean to betray him.

People were pouring out of the chamber now, pushing and shoving through the door into the corridors beyond.
The shield systems were still shut down, deactivated by the emergency alarm that had allowed Nathaniel to find them so quickly. Bodies pushed out into the corridors, spilling like sand through the neck of an hourglass.

‘I believe,' Travis said, ‘that this is the part where we flee the city.'

Chester nodded. Every Songshaper in Weser would soon be dashing from their beds to investigate the chaos. It was too risky to leave with the crowd; the gang looked too clean and healthy to fit in with the escaping prisoners, and half the gang lacked the pale blue eyes of the Silencers. Besides, it would take too long to navigate the corridors, let alone to escape onto the streets of Weser. If anyone identified them as suspects …

Susannah produced a final charge from her pocket. It looped into a perfect silver ring. ‘Ready?'

They nodded.

Susannah laid the charge on the floor, right beneath the centre of the dome. It would connect to the charges she'd lain on the outside of the building: they were double-use charges, ready for one last bang.

They cried out the notes together – the notes that Dot had taught them, which were programmed into her final system of charges – and the metal twist came alive with light. It spun and sputtered, shooting sparks into the air, and there was a sudden tremendous bang.

Above them, the dome exploded into tiny fragments.

The residue fell softly, like a sandcastle dissolving in the wind. It poured down around them, soft and harmless, and Chester felt for a moment that he was back in the Hush and
the air was made of dry rain. Overhead, all that remained of the dome was its iron frame, a skeleton in the sky. Their pulley ropes – deliberately attached to the frame rather than the dome itself – still dangled down to greet them.

The room was almost empty now, and Chester found himself staring at his friends in the sudden quiet. The absence of Sam made his throat clench. But there was Susannah. Dot. Travis. There was Penelope, and there was his father.

‘Come on,' Chester said. ‘There'll be more Songshapers along in a minute – when they hear all the –'

‘I think they'll be busy for a while.' Travis stared at the disappearing remains of the crowd. ‘They've got a few unexpected visitors.'

They all stared at each other for a moment and – against all odds – Chester found himself laughing. It was an exhausted, wild laughter that bubbled up from his stomach to his chest, and tumbled from his lips. They were almost free. The Conservatorium was in chaos, the prisoners were escaping, and they were almost out of here.

Almost.

They used the pulley to winch themselves up, two at a time. Dot and Penelope went first, then Chester and his father. Chester left his fiddle for Susannah to carry, since she had no injured Silencer to occupy her hands. Chester supported his father's drooping body, barely aware of the ache in his limbs and simply relishing the warmth of his father beside him. They were a family again, father and son caring for each other, struggling to survive in the chill of the world.

They clambered out onto the rooftop, where the pegasi were screaming panicked neighs, whinnies, and shrieks into the night. The explosion of the dome had been too much for the beasts and they kicked wildly in their stalls. Chester left his father leaning on the side of a chimney stack and ran along the stable front with fumbling fingers, unlocking the stalls one by one. The horses charged out into their new-found freedom and took to the skies, flapping wildly, another contribution to the chaos in the city.

Down below, he heard screams and shouts as Silencers poured out onto the streets, disrupting late-night diners and overturning tables as they rushed into the freedom of Weser City's streets and alleyways.

‘Their minds will be returning, slowly,' Dot said. Her eyes were bright and more vivid than he'd ever seen them, and she clutched Penelope's hand as if it was a lifeline in a storm. ‘They'll remember themselves and they'll go back to their families.'

‘How long will it take them to recover?' Chester said, glancing back at his father. ‘If they've been trapped in the Hush for weeks … some for months …'

‘It will take time,' Dot said. ‘But not forever.'

Beside her, Penelope gave a weary smile. She looked a little distant, a little lost, but her eyes were shining like her girlfriend's, and she leant her head on Dot's shoulder as if it was a pillow.

‘Home,' she whispered.

‘Yes,' Dot said. ‘A new home. A home where they can't find us.'

When Travis and Susannah had clambered up onto the roof, they seized the last of the pegasi – three shining beasts that Chester had left in their stalls – and took to the sky in pairs. Susannah rode with Travis, Dot rode with Penelope, and Chester rode with his father.

And as the wing-beats threw a breeze across their faces, they flew towards the stars.