Song Between the Waking and the Dreaming

Red Wolf’s team has taken an assignment they should not have received and the key to its accomplishment awakens the phantom of memories he no longer has.

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

None of the women showed any natural talent for the instrument—a lovely violin that had Red Wolf’s hands longing to do something with it.

It wasn’t normal for his team to have to play a part. They came, they struck, they left. The work of a military strike team was rather straightforward. But this time was different. The target was in an exclusive club and their only way in without leaving a trace was a performer, which needed to be a woman who could get close enough to the problem—an illegal underground slave trader with diplomatic immunity. The Department should have assigned the work to a general purpose team, but Red Wolf’s got the call due to Shift’s being overseas and due to their speed with dispatching the death penalty to someone who hired their own armed guards.

Which brought them to the violin. Whisper tried her hand at it and had no patience for it. Minder’s wrist couldn’t bend far enough to do it any justice. Surge’s tiny wrists protested long before she did. Ashen simply had no knack, which meant that Ashen would get the job.

Red Wolf shook his head and ordered her to try again. Obediently, she did, and he winced at the shrieking bars of sound. There was a melody somewhere in the back of his head. Sometimes since he had lost his memories, he would reach out for it and try to understand why it was there, but it always seemed to elude him. Until now.

He held out his hand for the violin. Ashen passed it to him wordlessly, grey eyes glimmering with interest. The rest of the team turned their attention his way as he fitted the instrument to his hand, tucked it into his body just so, remembered if hands could be called remembering, and played. He played the melody that haunted the space between waking and dreaming and let his wrists teach him the way to express it. Ashen studied his motion intently, deliberately consigning the methods to her memory. He hoped she could capture its heart.

Too long playing and it made his soul ache that this, whatever this was, was lost to him. He gave her the violin and roughly ordered, “Play.”

Ashen copied his motion, fitting the violin to her body, turning her wrist, and fixing her gaze on his for feedback. She began to play, failing mostly, but learning when he reached out and guided her hands, tweaked her position, her understanding.

And when the learning was over at the end of long, endless hours, he felt Whisper slide her arms around him and lay her head against the back of his shoulder. He let her hold him, closed his eyes, and let the loss wash out of him to the music as Ashen played.