Veronica Roth: Shards and Ashes

The song, moving in Darya’s brain—melodic—dissonant—fast—slow—low—beautiful.

Then she felt tears on her face, and she threw the violin onto the bed and ran.

She ran backto her room. As she ran, she heard pieces of songs all around her and clapped her hands over her ears, but it did her no good. The world was loud , too loud to bear. Still, no matter how far she ran, she could hear her mother’s death song in her memory, the most powerful of all the music she encountered in her sprint back to the room.

The nurse saw her on her way back in and grabbed her by the arm. “Where are your ear covers? Where have you been?”

Darya just shook her head. The nurse ran down the hall and returned a few seconds later, new ear covers in her hands. She shoved them over Darya’s ears, and all the music stopped. Relief flooded Darya’s body like cold water. The nurse steered her to her bed.

Darya crawled under the sheets, gathered her knees to her chest, and stared at the opposite wall.

She slept pastnoon. Khali came in to speak to her, even touched her hand lightly, but she pretended that she couldn’t feel it. She had done what her sister wanted, but she had not done it with a good heart; she had done it out of obligation, something she had always avoided. And she felt angry—angry with herself, for doing it, and angry with Khali, for making her feel like she had to, and angry at the death song itself, for refusing to leave her alone from the second she awoke.

Darya sat in bed for the rest of the day, eating small spoonfuls of flavored gelatin and watching the news report on an attack that had happened in Kansas City earlier that morning. She stared at the death tolls, numb. Sometimes it was weeks before a person showed signs of infection, and sometimes it was minutes—it depended on the potency of the bio-bomb. How long would it be before the world ran out of people?

Darya winced as part of her mother’s death song played in her mind again. It ached inside her, feeble but intricate, and every few seconds she felt tears pinching behind her eyes like tweezers. She tried to suppress them, but they came anyway, blurring the news. She didn’t know what to do, so she just sat there.

That evening she left her food uneaten on her tray and walked down the hallway again to the waiting room. There were more people in it now, most of them reading magazines or staring at the clock. And Christopher was there, too, sitting in one of the chairs with a stack of paper in his lap. His eyes moved straight to her when she walked in.

He beckoned to her again. His ear covers were off now, and he looked slightly agitated, twitching at sounds she couldn’t hear. But the songs didn’t seem to pain him. Maybe he had learned to tune them out.

She sat down next to him and removed her own ear covers. This time she didn’t hear a series of random sounds when they were off—she heard music right away, everywhere, but not as loud here as it had been in the rest of the hospital. These people weren’t sick.

Everyone had a death song, no matter how young or healthy they were, and everyone had a life song, even when they were dying. Everyone was both dying and living at the same time, but the death song grew louder as death approached, just as the life song was loudest at a person’s birth. She could hear Christopher’s death song, so faint it was barely over a whisper, but she thought she could hear an organ in it, and a clear voice.

“I stayed here all day, hoping you would come back,” he said. “I wanted to tell you I was sorry for last night, how I acted.”

“You could have asked them for my room number,” she said.

He frowned, like this hadn’t occurred to him.

“Well,” he said, “it felt more like paying penance, this way.”

Darya couldn’t help it—she smiled a little. Then she remembered how hastily he had shoved the ear covers back on, and her smile faded.

“It was overwhelming,” he said. “Your song. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Even while I was listening, it was too much . . . it was too much to bear, so I had to stop.” He showed her the first sheet on the stack of paper he was holding. Written at the top was Daria . She ignored the misspelling and stared at what was beneath it—crudely rendered musical notes, line after line of them.

“I wrote some of it down,” he said. “Do you want to hear it?”

Did she want to hear her life song? Of course she did.

Slowly, Darya nodded.

“Come on, then,” he said. He reached for her hand, and led her out of the waiting room. Darya stared at their joined hands as they walked through the hospital corridors. Then she stared at the side of his face, which was also covered in freckles, but these weren’t as dark as the ones on his arms, except on his long, narrow nose.

He led her to a set of double doors. The one on the left was marked “Chapel.” Christopher pushed it open, and they walked down the aisle between the pews. No one was inside, which was good, because he was heading straight for the piano.

He sat down on the bench and put the first few sheets of music on the stand. He looked at her furtively from beneath his eyebrows, set his hands on the keys, and began to play.

At first the song was unfamiliar—a few chords, some isolated notes, slow and methodical. After a few seconds she felt like she recognized it from somewhere, though she could not have said where. Was it simply that a person always recognized their own life song, whether they had heard it or not? Because it belonged to them, maybe?

His fingers moved faster, pressing harder into the keys. The notes swelled, became loud , fierce, as if giving a voice to her own anger. And then, when they began to clash, she knew where she recognized them from.

She put her hands on the piano, an octave above Christopher’s, and played, as best she could, the section of her mother’s death song that had been going through her mind since the night before. It fit in perfectly with a section of her life song. It was not quite harmony but not quite repetition—sections of notes matched up perfectly, and other sections layered above her life song, bringing out by contrast its richness, and still other sections were similar but came just a second too late, like her mother’s song was chasing her own across the piano.

And she realized that her mother was like her—angry, weak, complex, sensitive—everything, good and bad, moving together in this song that made Darya’s song more beautiful. Darya had never seen the similarities before, but they were there—buried, but emerging in her mother’s occasional lucidity, emerging in Khali’s memories of a woman Darya had barely known, and now, emerging in Darya herself.

She felt herself smile, and then laugh, and then cry, and then all at once.

“It’s not exactly beautiful,” Christopher said, as he played the last note on the last page. He glanced at her. “I don’t mean that as an insult. I’m very attached to it. It keeps following me around.”

When she didn’t respond, he looked slightly alarmed. “I’m sorry, was that rude?”

Darya shook her head and set her left hand on top of his right, guiding it to the right keys. His fingers warmed hers. He glanced at her, smiling a little.

“Play that again,” she said quietly, pointing at the place in the music where the section began. She took her hands from the piano, and listened as Christopher played the section again. She closed her eyes and swayed without knowing it to the rhythm of the notes.

She had been wrong to say that death was the mystery, not life.

Her mother’s death song had revealed a secret beauty inside of her, something Khali had known, but Darya’s anger had prevented her from seeing.