Jodi Meadows: Phoenix Overture

“Years.” I glanced at the piano. “It’s not enough. I feel like I’ve improved enough to start seeing just how much work I need. But the piano needs repairs, I couldn’t always get here, and Mother was afraid someone would follow us and find it.”

“Did she teach you?” Fayden asked. She’d been his mother longer than she’d been mine, and there were things he was just now learning about her. “Did she know how to play, too?”

I nodded. “She knew. Her mother taught her. She had learned before the Cataclysm. Grandmother knew just enough about other instruments to pass that knowledge along, too, but what she really knew was the piano.”

Since the Cataclysm had happened during a performance, instruments that wouldn’t normally be here had been abandoned by their owners. Flutes. Clarinets. Violins. I wanted nothing more than to live long enough to learn to play them all, though it seemed unlikely they’d work anymore.

“So the piano was what Mother knew, too.” Fayden stared at the piano for a few long moments, while Stef hung back with his arms crossed. Wind howled outside, and sunlight slanted through the skylight. My brother shifted his weight to one hip. “I won’t tell Father about this. And I won’t tell other scavengers about the building. Your secret goes no further than the three of us.”

My heart pounded with relief. “Thank you.”

He shrugged away my gratitude. “You can thank me by playing something else.”

FATHER WASN’T HAPPY when I came home, realizing I hadn’t obeyed him by going to join Janan’s warriors, but amazingly, Fayden covered for me, saying we’d been out scavenging together, and that he and I would be working together from now on.

It was sort of true.

And it meant Father wasn’t going to kick me out for being completely useless—at least not right away.

Summer wore on, with ever-increasing heat that refused to break. The flies grew worse, and the Council, worried that disease would spread, moved plague victims out of the Community altogether. Now, they were quarantined in the old city, trapped in some forgotten building.

Every day Stef, Fayden, and I ventured into the old city to remove plates of glass from the curtain at the back of the theater. Rather, they worked, and I sat at the piano and played, my fingers dancing over the black and white keys.

One day, Fayden dropped a pile of folders and slim books on top of the piano.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Music. I think.” He flicked the pages I’d left sitting on the piano before. “They looked like those.”

I studied the sheets of fading music he’d brought; after so much practice, reading music was like reading words. Some of them were pieces for other instruments, but many of them were marked “piano.”

“Thanks.” I glanced up at him. “I don’t think I’ve seen these pieces before. They’ll be fun to play.”

“I just wanted to hear something new.” Fayden shrugged. “There are a few more places I know where there’s more of this. I can get it for you, if you want. None of the other scavengers want it except for burning in the winter.”

My jaw dropped. “ Burning music?”

“It’s a legitimate fuel source.”

I shook my head. “Please rescue it, if you can.”

“Sure.” He patted the piano’s lid. “Just keep playing. It’s . . . nice to listen to.”

I didn’t know what to say.

We’d been so distant since we were children, but now, he asked me to play specific pieces over others, showed me how to duck into the house without encountering Father, and taught me how to cook—sort of. There wasn’t much to cook, and he wasn’t particularly skilled at it himself. But we made do.

And a couple of times, Stef halted my playing to make repairs to the piano. I’d taught him what I knew about its inner workings, and how to tune it, and he’d picked up on the skills with alarming speed and understanding. He refelted some of the hammers where the felt had worn thin. He helped retune the piano, making adjustments while I listened and guided him to hit the right pitch. Soon, the piano sounded better than ever.

The improvements allowed me to play a wider range of music than before, without worrying so much about which keys needed to be avoided.

In the weeks immediately following Mother’s death, I hadn’t imagined I’d ever enjoy life again. But with Stef and Fayden working together, their mocking and encouragement, and the way our grins became easier around one another, it seemed, for the first time in what felt like ages, that I might actually be happy.

After hours of dismantling the glass curtain and organizing the bits of glass by color, we carried the blue shards in boxes into the woods, where Stef’s trap waited. The other colors would sit in the theater until we had a need for them.

Fayden and I sat at the base of an avocado tree, watching Stef shimmy up and down the tree, judging various pieces of glass against the surrounding foliage, hunting for just the angle to imitate the glimmer of sunlight on water.

Fayden cut an avocado in half, tossed the pit, and handed one side to me. Flies swarmed as if from nowhere; we swatted them away.

“Thanks.” The fruit had very little taste, thanks to the drought, but any food was a blessing. We’d all lost weight over the summer. Hunger was a constant low-grade sensation, something we were used to and didn’t even complain about anymore.

“How does it look up there?” Fayden called, startling a few nearby birds into silence.

Stef peered down from the browning leaves and grinned. “Cloudy.”

I scrambled to my feet. “Really?”

“What kind of clouds?” Fayden stood, too, and turned his face to the sky.

Only clear blue shone between the trees here, but Stef had a better view. “The kind that make rain. And they’re coming this way.”

“The trap—”

“Will have to wait.” Stef climbed down several branches, and jumped the last bit. “The glass that’s up there will stay through the storm—I think—but I won’t be able to do the rest of this in the rain.”

“But your meeting with the Council is this afternoon. What will you show them?”

Stef laughed and lifted his face as a cool wind pushed through the forest. “Nothing. I’ll tell them what I have so far, explain how it will work, show the diagrams—but there won’t be anything to see today.”

I glanced at the trees, the invisible trap hidden somewhere in the high boughs.

Stef sobered and bumped my arm. “Don’t worry. The trap is functional. If a troll comes through in the rain, it’s dead. And then we have an even better demonstration for the Council.”

“Oh, good.” Relieved, I helped pack away the bits of glass, placing them carefully between tattered shirts and strips of cloth.

Wind picked up as we hefted the boxes and headed back toward the Community, bringing an ominous hush to the woods. “We can stop by our house on the way to the Center and drop off the glass.” Father would still be out for the day, working to build up homes and shops with better walls or more level floors; most of the Community lived in sad accommodations.

Wind whipped the trees, and shrieks and shouts came from the Community ahead.

Our homes were but a large collection of hovels surrounding the far more useful building that was the Center. Once, the Center had been a domed field, meant for observing games of some kind. But legend was that the Center had been open only a month when the Cataclysm struck. It had been full, and thousands—maybe millions—of people were trapped inside. The Center had survived, and when the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes were over and the people came out to find their city in ruins, they sorted themselves by skills and began building the Community around the place that had saved their lives. Gradually, others found their way to the Community, too, like Grandmother.