Melody Resonance's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The warm passage narrowed. Melody kept the moon drum against their hip and tapped it low. The floor answered with faint ripples that curved left, then right, then held straight. The tall rabbit walked ahead in his robe of bark and ivy. He did not look back. He had said three nights ago something killed one of his warren, and if Melody could not name it before the next fork, he would turn and leave them in the dark. The passage opened into a round dig. A body lay curled against the wall. An old rabbit, gray at the muzzle, fur matted flat. No blood. No bite. Melody knelt. The tall rabbit stopped at the edge of the light and would come no closer. "Name it," he said. "Or find your own way back." Melody set the drum down and lifted the theremin from their coat. They turned the far dial up, the one the clock tower man had shown them how to use, the one that measured what sound should be in a place and was not. The dial swung hard. The dig should have carried the hum of roots, the drip of the wall, the old digger's last breath still fading in the dirt. It carried none of that. A pocket of missing sound sat over the body like a lid. Melody had seen the same reading once before, at the mouth of the hoard chamber. The tyrant's work. A small jar, buried or dropped, drinking every sound within three paces. The digger had walked into it and suffocated on silence. His heart had stopped without a sound to mark it. Melody swept the antenna along the floor. The needle spiked near the wall. They dug with their fingers and pulled up a clay bulb no bigger than a plum, sealed with black wax. It weighed almost nothing. It hummed against their palm the way a held breath hums before a scream. "This," Melody said. They held it up. "He seeds these in the tunnels. It drank the air around your digger. He did not choke on a hand. He choked on nothing." They cracked the wax with their thumbnail. A thin gasp of stolen sound spilled out, a rabbit's last exhale, and dissolved into the walls. The tall rabbit's ears went flat. His yellow eyes did not leave the shell. "Then the warren is full of these," he said. He crossed to the body and lifted it in his arms without effort. He turned to Melody. "You have your guide. Every branch, until the hoard. In return you carry every shell you find, and you break them on his floor when we arrive. Agreed." It was not a question. Melody tapped the drum once. The floor rippled forward, deeper, toward the warm heart of the tunnels, and the tall rabbit walked with them.