Pause the Sonata

Pause the Sonata

Jordan Michael wasn't worth stopping the sonata.

Ashen has just ended a relationship. Her leader is concerned.

22 — 01. Spring
Kingdoms and Thorn Science Fiction
Flash Fiction Short Story

Ashen kept her fingers playing over the black and white keys of the small ebony upright beside a broad stone fireplace and hearth. The living room was large and cosy, crowded with plump mismatched seating and blunt-edged curved-corner coffee and end tables with glass insets—ready for children. A fire was going and warm winter sunlight filtered through white lace curtains hanging in the windows.

It wasn’t her living room though. It was her leaders’.

Sonata for Heavens was Ashen’s favorite piece of the ones in the old book she had scrounged at a local secondhand shop. She purchased the book when she was still an operative, when she wasn’t free, and when she didn’t even know what freedom meant. Music fascinated her with its mathematical rhythms which could not account for such transient beauty.

“Whisper told me Michael wouldn’t be coming,” Red Wolf commented quietly.

He had wandered in earlier, leaned an elbow on the piano, and she kept playing, letting him listen. He had no memory before his time with the team, but he had music. Ashen liked to come over to the home he and Whisper had made together and run her fingers over their growing collection of books, put her head down to listen to the growing life in Whisper’s womb, practice smiling in the several mirrors hung around their walls. Finally, she would settle at the piano where Red taught her how to play.

She was playing now, guiding her fingers up on the black keys, down to the white—never pausing the sonata. She let the statement stand; it was true. She had left Jordan Michael, her companion of months, on the cold, wintry steps of Glaston, a shattered glass angel and proposal of marriage at his feet. The city had been a getaway as promised. It was an experience far away from anything she had previously known.

“Did you like him?” Red asked—carefully, like he’d rolled the words around in his mouth and tasted them, perhaps discarded another set first, before deciding to speak.

Ashen shrugged, kept playing, kept playing. Music soothed her when the only dance they taught her was the dance of death.

Red set his teeth together and narrowed his gaze at the wall over Ashen’s head. A mirror hung there, made of special glass so a casual whisper wouldn’t shatter it. He tended to look into walls and mirrors when a person’s eyes had ceased to hold an answer.

So Ashen asked, “Does that help you think?” genuinely curious.

It surprised him and he laughed. “Yeah. It does. So.” His eyes went serious. “Did you love him?”

More direct that. Ashen frowned, let her fingers glide up an octave, down a step, chasse to left to right.

She knew little about Jordan Michael except that he liked her eternal curiosity, her stability. She had never liked change and so he knew when she settled into something, it was somewhat permanent. She liked his taste in books. She disliked his dislike of new things, the way he sounded fearful when he read about people like her in the news—specials, they called them. She didn’t know what was so special about biotransference or cyperpathy or telepathy or…

Her leader had raised his eyebrows at her, prodding her to answer.

…or a wolf.

“He didn’t know me,” Ashen answered. Plainly. She did not pause in the sonata. “I do not want a man who cannot name me new.”

Red breathed out, shook his head, and ran one hand through his own red hair. He came closer than anyone else to understanding her, but even he could not always bridge the chasm between normalcy and a child-soldier once named Wings of Death. His exhale sounded like a helpless laugh, but he leaned over and kissed the top of her straight black hair with the affection held for a younger sister.

“Seeker,” he named her. “You’ll find someone. I promise.”

And because he had never lied and never failed, she practiced a smile and slid her fingers off the keys to follow him into dinner.

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Kingdoms and Thorn Science Fiction

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