Melody Resonance's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

Melody had gone three shells deeper when the whisper started behind their left shoulder. It came in a voice they knew. Their own. Thin, tired, singing the last true note of the forest, the one they had poured into the shadow's record two turns back. The debt was awake. The tall rabbit stopped in the passage and flattened his ears. "That is not you," the tall rabbit said. "That is what you owed. It is walking now." Melody listened. The whisper was faint, but it carried the shape of a song. Ahead, somewhere past the next bend, the tunnel warmed and smelled of glass. The tyrant kept jars along that wall. Jars that listened. If the whisper reached them, the jars would hold Melody's voice, and the tyrant would know the shape of the thief in his tunnels. Every stolen echo Melody meant to take back would be locked twice as deep by morning. "I have to smother it," Melody said. They set the iron box down against the wall. They lifted the drum from their hip and the theremin from their belt. The needle on the theremin twitched toward the whisper, then toward Melody's throat, then back. A thread ran between the two. Their own voice, tied to a record turning in a mushroom hut two branches behind them, tied to the shadow that had lent the box. The thread had to be cut here, or muffled here, before the warm bend. Melody thought of a red-haired singer they had watched once in a stone hall at the edge of the forest, before the silence came. Luna Meridian. She had played through a fever with the drums so loud the king's guards covered their ears. Loud kills quiet. Loud eats quiet. Melody set the drum between their knees and tuned the theremin's mouth toward the drum skin, not the air. Then they played, hard, one flat palm, then two, a marching beat with no melody in it. The theremin caught each strike and folded it inward, feeding the sound into the drum's belly instead of the tunnel. The whisper thinned. The drum swallowed it. Melody kept the beat until their palms burned and the theremin's needle went flat against the peg. A slow shape stepped out of the dark ahead of them. Tall ears. Robe of bark and ivy. Yellow eyes. The Burrow Elder. He had come down the passage without a sound. He looked at the drum, at the box, at Melody's hands. "You buried your own voice," he said. "Good. The jars did not hear. But the shadow will send another collector. You have one night before the next knock." He turned back into the dark, and the tall rabbit followed him a pace, then waited. Melody lifted the box. The whisper was gone. The debt was not. They stepped past the warm bend, toward the hoard, with a drum full of themselves and a clock now running behind their ribs.