Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 23 of 25

The scouts curled into sleep along the cavern walls, but Mr. Echo could not rest. He sat with his back against cold stone and pressed his palm flat over his sternum. The map's rhythm was still there, four beats and a rest, but softer than an hour ago. The drummer had warned him. A beat set into a body fades like ink on wet paper. He had until dawn. If the rhythm slipped before the scouts woke, they would smell the doubt on him and refuse the road. Clover Longear crouched beside him. She put one ear near his chest without asking, listened, and drew back. "Thinner," she said. "Not gone. Thinner." Kate came over with the brass box in her lap. Clover Wanderpaw stayed near the tunnel mouth, watching the sleeping scouts. Mr. Echo tapped the pattern on his knee. The second rest came a half breath too long. He heard it as a door beginning to close in an empty house, and his hands went cold. "I need to fix it back into me before it goes," he said. "I need a sound that will hold the shape." His box was almost empty. Longear's recorded voice was already sent north with the guide. He had nothing to layer under the beat. A small flutter moved past the lantern. A fairy stepped out of the shadow of a root, dark clothes, pale face, wings the color of wet glass. Melody Resonance. She had followed them since the burrow hollow two nights back and had not spoken until now. She set a metal case on the ground between them. Inside lay a theremin, silver, marked with runes that caught the lantern light. "It reads what a body already carries," she said. "It can put the reading back." Mr. Echo did not trust it, but he had no other tool. Melody raised her hands above the antennae. She told him to tap the map on his chest and not stop. He tapped. The theremin pulled a tone from the air that rose and fell with his beat. Kate held the brass box open to catch the sound. Above them, at the cavern's inner arch, two pale shapes drifted forward and stood still, a rabbit man and a rabbit woman in ragged spectral clothes. They did not speak. They watched, and the theremin's tone steadied, as if their attention gave it weight. He tapped the full five parts, twice through. The tone locked. Melody lowered her hands. Kate closed the box. Mr. Echo pressed his palm to his chest again and felt the rhythm sitting firm, deeper than before, roots under skin. Clover Longear listened and nodded. "Whole," she said. "Tighter than last time." The first gray light touched the cavern mouth. The scouts stirred. Mr. Echo stood. The map was his again, fixed until the glade. The two ghost rabbits were already gone. Melody was folding the theremin back into its case. Kate looked at him and waited. "West," he said. The scarred scout tapped his foot twice on the earth.