Isabella "Isa Machine" Summers's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Isa Machine crouched at the edge of the bog with a pencil between her teeth and three false starts crossed out on her staff paper. Somewhere under the peat slept a god that could wake if she got a single interval wrong. The lost hymn was supposed to keep him dreaming. She had come to this bog to learn it, to master it, to hand Florence a score that would hold when her partner opened her voice and let the raw magic through. But Isa only had pieces. A rising fourth. A held breath where a word should be. A shape her ear kept reaching for and missing. She had been at it since dawn. Each draft she hummed to herself sounded almost right, then wrong in a way that made the ground under her boots feel thinner. Twice the reeds had stilled when she got a phrase close. Once a frog had stopped mid-croak and stared. She was not guessing at a song. She was knocking on a door. A man came down the path with a bass slung across his back and feathers edging his shoulders like a dark collar. Isa knew him by description — the quiet one who kept the bog man steady. Alex Ryan. He stopped a polite distance away and waited until she looked up. "You're getting the bones," he said. "Not the joints." "I know." She spat the pencil into her palm. "I need someone who remembers the joints." He did not answer right away. He looked past her, at the water. "That sounds like a melody I have only ever known by the lack of it." His voice cracked on the last word. A caw came out with it. He pressed a hand to his throat, surprised, and a black feather slipped from behind his ear. Isa stood. "Sit down. Hum what you almost said." He sat on the mossy bench under the arbor, unslung the yew bass, and set his palm flat on its body. He hummed four notes. Isa wrote them. He hummed four more, slower, and his eyes went somewhere else. She wrote those too. The shape she had been chasing snapped into place on the page like a bone into a socket. A crow landed on the arbor post. It was not a crow. Morrígan settled into woman shape between one blink and the next, red cloak dragging peat. "He remembers because I let him," she said. "The machine is mine now. So is what it plays." Isa's hand closed over the page. "Then we have a problem." "You have the hymn," Morrígan said. "I have the instrument that carries it. Decide what that makes us." Alex was still humming, eyes closed, feathers thickening at his wrists. The hymn was whole on the paper. The piano she needed to play it on belonged to someone else now.