Stevie Sanity's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Stevie walked until his legs ached and the song in his chest thinned. He carried Sam's handle now, a tune he could hum but no longer read. It pointed him toward Djinn's lamp, his soul twin's resting place. But he could not remember where the lamp sat. Each hour, the melody faded a little more. Then he saw a small tent ahead, cream canvas strung with daisies, a warm patch of light in the dark. He ducked inside to rest. A girl sat cross-legged on a patchwork blanket, cradling a carved guitar. Blue smoke curled off its strings. She had dragon wings folded at her back and a hood pulled low. Sophia. His soul fam, though they had not met in years. She did not look up. "You brought a song in with you," she said. "It's out of tune." Stevie sat. "Sam locked it in me. It leads to Djinn. But I've forgotten the road. The song's going quiet before I can follow it." Sophia's fingers stilled on the strings. "I've been chasing that same song for weeks. I hear the start. I lose the middle." She tapped her chest. "Right here it drops out. Like a radio between stations." Stevie hummed the three low notes Sam had buried in him. The part he could not name but still felt. Sophia's head lifted. Her green eyes went wide. "That's it," she whispered. "That's the piece I lost." She played it back on the smoking guitar. The blue smoke thickened and spun. The tune snapped whole, start to middle to end, and it held. The finished song did something Stevie's failing memory could not. It pulled a picture up clear. A lamp resting in a bend of dunes, half-buried, waiting. He knew the place now. Not because he remembered it. Because the song showed him. "The lamp," Stevie said. "I can see it. Sophia, I know where Djinn is." Sophia set the guitar down. "Then I'm coming. You mentioned Sam. The owlcat." Her voice stayed flat, but her hands pressed the blanket. "I've been looking for Sam a long time. He's the only one who remembers the words I lost." "He's the one who gave me the song," Stevie said. She nodded once. "Then we finish this together. You find your twin. I find Sam." Stevie stood. The melody was steady in him now, no longer fading. He had traded a fading handle for a whole map, and gained someone who needed the road as much as he did. But the picture showed only sand and a half-sunk lamp. Djinn was inside it, and Djinn's true name was gone. He did not yet know what waited when he lifted the lid.