Infinite

20 CONNECTION

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED IN sharp fragments, like shards of glass and light. Warm water on my face and neck. Sips of thin soup. The scent of ozone. Voices that seemed as though they came from the other end of the earth.

A dark figure with his knees to his chest, face buried in his arms, shoulders hunched and heaving.

When awareness settled and stayed, I found myself wrapped inside my sleeping bag, wearing clean clothes and listening to a piano in one ear. My SED lay just outside my bedding, the wire of one earpiece twisting its way to me. The second earpiece played music at nothing.

“It’s crooked.” My voice rasped as though I’d been screaming. Maybe it was just waking-up raspiness. “The music. It’s crooked.”

A quiet din I hadn’t been aware of until now suddenly stopped, and someone gave a long, relieved sigh. Sam. “You did that. You said one earpiece was for you, one was for us, and when I suggested using the SED speakers for everyone, you said you didn’t have time to argue.”

“Oh.” That did sound like me, but I didn’t remember the discussion. I pulled the earpiece out, silencing the piano sonata, and pushed myself onto my elbow. My whole body was stiff and aching.

Whit and Stef were sitting on their sleeping bags, paused from tapping at their SEDs while they looked at me. A pot of soup sat near the open tent flap, steaming with a sylph coiled around it. Slanted light fell through the opening, making the gloom of the rest of the tent darker and deeper.

“Look who’s finally awake,” Whit said. “When I said you should get some rest, I didn’t mean this much.”

I made a face that might have been a smile.

Sam sat just beyond my SED, in the dark, so close I hadn’t yet focused my eyes the right way to see him. But now I noted the folded paper in his hands, the slumped posture, the way he’d been right beside me when I awakened.

I sat up the rest of the way, ignoring the twinges of pain in my back and shoulders. “Sam.” His name came out in a breath, sorrow and hope and longing all tangled up in three letters.

“Hey.” His voice was soft, rough, and for a moment we looked at each other and there was nothing else in the world.

Light rippled in the corner of my eye as the others got up and left the tent. Even the sylph vanished, leaving Sam and me alone.

He swallowed hard and leaned toward me. “Ana, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

I rubbed sleep from my eyes and shimmied out of my sleeping bag. “Maybe start by telling me how long I was”—not unconscious, even if that was the truth—“asleep.”

“Three days.”

Three days. Time we didn’t have to waste.

I pushed hair off my face, shifting questions in my mind. Who’d washed and dressed me? Were we still at the same camp? I couldn’t tell without peeking outside, and the light hurt my eyes. “Have the dragons returned?”

What had they said? The one with the song? The phoenix song.

Sam shuddered. “No. They haven’t come back.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know where to go from there. I’d done the impossible. I’d spoken with dragons. I’d survived. I’d kept the dragons from attacking my friends because I was a very frightening tiny person with little regard for her own life.

A high, hysterical giggle slipped out. My voice sounded thin and weak in the shadows of the tent, but I couldn’t stop it. After everything, I could do nothing but laugh to release the knot of tension in my chest.

Sam just watched me until the fit wore off. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.” My stomach felt hollow as I sat back, shoving hair away from my face again. I had vague memories of sipping thin broth, but before that, there’d just been the pigeon the sylph had cooked for me, and hours and hours of being awake and walking through the woods. “Oh yes.”

He nodded and hurried to the pot of soup. “We haven’t moved camp. We didn’t want to disturb you.” He returned and handed me a bowl with mostly broth, but a few chunks of some unfortunate forest creature, as well as what passed for vegetables when trapped in a winter forest.

I thanked him and sipped slowly, letting my stomach get used to the sensation of food again. It was bland, but filling, and too soon the bowl was empty. I set it aside; I’d get more, once I was confident I’d be able to hold this much.

“So, the note you left.” He turned over the folded paper in his hands, and when he angled his head, I could see the worry line carved between his eyes, and the shadows beneath. Stubble darkened his chin and cheeks. “I read it.”

Frantically, I tried to remember what I’d said. It seemed I’d written that note a hundred years ago. So much had happened since.

“Is that how you feel? Selfish to have asked us to come? Like we don’t believe in you?”

I should never have written that note.

“My feelings for you haven’t changed. Did you think they had?” He stretched his hands toward me, but stopped halfway, as though he wasn’t sure whether we were allowed to touch anymore. “Ana?”

No. Yes. “What did you expect me to think?”

He pressed his hands to his knees, and his gaze followed. “Ana,” he said again, like a prayer. “Just because you want friends with you doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you human. And even when we think something’s an unwise idea, that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped believing in you. I will never stop believing in you. What I said about believing you can do anything, be anything—I still think that. I still admire that you don’t let others’ limitations stop you. I love that about you. I love you.”

Tears blurred my vision, catching on my lashes when I tried to blink them away.

Sam pushed himself forward, cupping my cheeks in his hands. Gently, he swept away my tears with his thumbs, and the way he looked at me was so sad and hopeful and intense, my heart ached with the desire just to be close to him. His voice was husky when he spoke again. “I’m sorry that I made you feel like you needed to go the rest of the way alone.”

All I could feel were his hands on my face, strong and warm and calloused from music.

Before Sam, I’d feared touch. My mother had only hit me, but Sam had shown me affection and comfort and pleasure. I wanted him to touch me. I’d grown to crave it, the way he held my hand or tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. The way he’d made me feel safe and connected, simply because he was close to me.

And these last weeks without—they’d felt like being locked away by myself. Alone.

“I was already alone, Sam.”

He dropped his hands to his lap.

“Not physically. But for weeks everything inside of me was slowly unraveling, and not all of it was because of where we were going, what we’ve learned, and who we’ve lost. Some of me was unraveling because of you. Even though you were angry with me, and hurting just as much, I still wanted you.”

His throat worked as he seemed to realize how far we’d pulled away from each other, and how we’d both been doing the pulling. “I wanted you, too.” He drew a shuddering breath. “But every time I looked at you, I thought about what I did. What we all did. I thought about how it might have been your life exchanged for mine, and I couldn’t bear it.”

It almost had been my life.

“Is there a way to fix this?” he asked.

I lifted my eyes to his, meeting darkness and anguish. “Do you love me?”

He spoke without hesitation, without the usual line of thought between his eyes. “Infinitely.”

“Then we can fix this.”

“That’s good.” He closed his eyes, letting out a long breath. “That’s really good.”

I wanted to move closer to him, or for him to move closer to me, but it all seemed like moving too fast. I didn’t want to risk breaking this tenuous truce. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

The one with the song.

He caught the shift in my tone, that we weren’t talking about our relationship now, but something far bigger.

Though our relationship felt very big to me.

“The dragons.” I hated talking to him about dragons. “I spoke to them.”

“I saw.” He was somewhen else for a moment. “I saw you on the wall. When I woke and found your note”—he tensed all over—“I saw that your things were gone, too. Your flute. Your SED. Your sleeping bag. Everything. I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“You were supposed to go home.”

He snorted and shook his head. “No, I would never leave you. No matter how afraid I am of dragons, losing you scares me more.” He shifted closer to me, just a little. Enough that our knees touched. “I woke the others and called out for you, hoping you hadn’t gone far. Hoping you would hear.”

“I left just after midnight. By the time the sun rose, I was already on top of the wall. I wouldn’t have heard you calling in the forest.” Maybe when he’d been on the cliff, though. I’d heard something I thought was forest animals, but now that I thought of it, the noises could have been voices.

Sam slid one hand forward and touched my ankle, all caution in his movements. “When we finally read your note again, it was obvious you meant to find the dragons, but not where you were going. So we kept searching and found the cliff, and when we looked north, we saw the dragon perched on the wall. And you were lying in front of it, sylph all around you.”

His voice had deepened, heavy with the things he wasn’t saying. I finished his thought. “You feared it had killed me.”

“Yes.” His voice was wretched. “Yes, I was certain. You were lying across your backpack. You looked broken. You weren’t moving. I couldn’t imagine how you were still alive.”

I rubbed my head, still sensitive after the falls and the shriek of dragons’ voices. If not for the sylph, I would have been dead.

“But then you got up, and I couldn’t understand what you were saying, but I could hear your voice. I wanted to fly across the valley to you, even if it meant I had to face the dragon, too.” He took a long breath. “Then you started playing your flute, and the sylph were singing with you. The sylph you’d left with us started singing, too. It was amazing. You were amazing.”

I ducked my face to hide my blush.

“What happened to you on that wall?”

I took a long breath. “This is probably something everyone needs to hear, but I think I know what the dragons’ weapon is. And why dragons always attack you.”

His expression darkened. “Why?”

Haltingly, I rested my fingertips on his knuckles. His hand was still on my ankle, just barely. “Because they don’t have the weapon. I mistranslated those lines in the book. You are the weapon.”

I didn’t feel well enough to explain everything twice, so Sam went to fetch the others. I ate another bowl of soup, a little more confident in my ability to keep it down. My muscles and bones still ached whenever I moved, but the movement did help.

While I ate and stretched, sylph came in, warming the air that had cooled in their absence. Cris trilled comfortingly as he dropped into the natural shadows with the other sylph, and I managed a smile.

“Did it hurt you?” I asked. “Absorbing the acid to protect me?”

Cris rippled, like a shrug. -Our powers seem limitless at first. We can absorb tremendous amounts of energy. But yes, like Menehem’s poison hurt the others, the acid hurt. The pain fades and we recover, but too much at once might do irreparable damage.-

I lowered my eyes. “I’ll try not to rush into danger from now on.”

He trilled, a laugh. -Sure.-

“I mean it.”

-We are your army. We’ll protect you, no matter the pain or cost. That is all you need to concern yourself with.-

He meant it, too. They would do anything for me. I wasn’t sure I liked the burden of their commitment and confidence. They believed I could help redeem them, but what if I couldn’t? The thought of disappointing them was unbearable.

When Sam returned with Stef and Whit, they each gave me a long, appraising look and didn’t comment when Sam sat near me. Not next to me. Not touching, as he had been. But near. It was enough for now.

“I’m glad you’re back, Ana.” Whit flashed a smile. “And unhurt.”

“Me too.” Stef glanced at Sam, then back to me. “I hear you have quite the story to tell.”

Their attention was unnerving. We’d hardly spoken for weeks, even about Armande’s death, and now everyone was watching me. Waiting. I wanted to look away while I told them about my trip to the prison wall, but I made sure to hold their gazes as I spoke of the climb, playing my minuet to lure the dragons, and the way the sylph had fought for me. I refused to look weak, or like I doubted my actions.

I’d spoken with dragons.

Maybe I could do anything.

Still, the story sounded crazy when I tried explaining the buzzing in my head, the way the sylph had been able to protect me from the volleys of acid, and the urge to jump onto the dragon’s leg while it flew across the valley. “You saw the rest.” I stopped there, not wanting to talk about how I must have looked, yelling and threatening the dragons. “Sam said they haven’t been back at all. Not even to hunt?”

Stef shook her head. “A couple of sylph have been watching the valley just to be sure, but it looks like the dragons aren’t coming back.”

So the dragons had made a decision: no, they wouldn’t help.

I eyed the tent flap, still open and letting in afternoon light. I could just see the edges of our lanterns and solar battery chargers, soaking in the light while it was available. Though we were only a few weeks from the spring equinox—Soul Night—winter kept a tight grip on the land. “I guess it’s not like we expected dragons to agree to anything, anyway.” The admission crushed my pride a little.

“They agreed not to attack us after you threatened them.” Stef gave me a pointed look. “That’s pretty impressive.”

Whit looked up from writing down the last of my story. “Tell us more about the ringing. You said it grew so loud it knocked you out. I thought I heard something like that too.”

I rubbed my ears and nodded. “I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it must have come from the dragons. They think at one another to communicate, and I was unlucky enough to start picking up on it. It got easier to understand them, like I just needed to practice, but . . .”

Sam leaned toward me and curled his hand over my knee. “They understood our language, it sounds like.”

I hmmed. He was right. Centaurs hadn’t understood us, and their upper halves were human. So why dragons? “Perhaps because their language is thought? Perhaps if I’d focused my thoughts as though I were about to speak, or speaking in my mind and not out loud, they would have understood it the same way, and what I say out loud is inconsequential.”

Whit nodded and wrote more into his notebook. “That seems reasonable. When we speak aloud, we’re organizing our thoughts and sharing them. Dragons may simply pick up on something we’re doing unconsciously.”

That made sense. “I think there’s another level of their language, like we pick up on body movements and facial expressions as a sort of shorthand for what someone truly means.” Having been raised with only Li as an example of this, I wasn’t very good at picking up the subtler signals people gave, but at least I knew now what I was missing and could try to keep up. “But theirs also stands in for words they drop. I think.”

“That’s very interesting.” Whit logged all of that as well. “I think we’ve learned more about dragons in the last twenty minutes than we did in the last twenty quindecs. All we needed was Ana to decide she can talk to anything.”

“Apparently, I’m willing to try.” I twisted my mouth into something like a smile.

“What made you decide to lure them with music?” Sam kept his voice low, like the question was only for the two of us, but the others looked interested, too.

“I’m not sure.” I bit my lip. “It was the loudest sound I could make, but also, everything loves music. Humans, sylph, even the centaurs when I played Phoenix Symphony that night. One of the boys touched my SED and looked—I don’t know—happy. Like he understood it.” Sometimes I felt like everything understood music, or wanted to.

A smile twitched at the corner of Sam’s mouth. “I miss playing music.”

“You can borrow my flute.”

“Ana,” Stef said, “you told Sam you know why the dragons attack him?”

The one with the song.

“I think I know.”

Sam paled, and I couldn’t imagine what was going through his head.

“When they asked me to play for them again, they had another conversation among themselves. One was worried I had ‘the song.’ Another said he couldn’t see it in me.” I shook my head, trying to recall exactly how the dragons had worded it, but my headache had been so powerful. The way my ears rang had made it hard to focus. “They were testing me. And then when they noticed you all on the cliff, one said, ‘The one with the song,’ and they all got worried. They could see it in you. They tried to lie to me then, saying they were getting rid of my distraction so I would play for them more, but—”

“But they came to kill me.” Sam’s voice was low and terribly even. “I’m the one with the song.”

I nodded.

“I thought they liked music.” Whit studied him. “Why kill Sam if they like music?”

“Because of what song he has. The song is the weapon. I mistranslated the symbols from the books. I thought it was a weapon they possessed, but it’s not. It’s a weapon they’re terribly afraid of.”

Whit snorted. “And that’s Sam.”

We all looked at Sam, who sat hugging his knees and biting his lip. Stubble darkened his chin, and black hair breezed above his eyes. “I don’t feel like a weapon,” he said after a minute.

“You don’t look like one either,” Whit replied.

I rubbed my temples, trying to piece together all their clues. “The weapon is the phoenix song. They were afraid Sam would use it against them.”

“What’s the phoenix song?” Whit looked at Sam, who shook his head and seemed lost.

“The only music I have involving phoenixes is Phoenix Symphony, but I wrote that long after dragons started making my death their priority.” Sam shoved his fingers through his hair. “Unless dragons can see possibilities of the future like phoenixes, I don’t think that’s the phoenix song they’re worried about.”

“They’re convinced the phoenix song can destroy them,” I said. “One at a time. All at once. I don’t know. It seems to me they should be more concerned about actual phoenixes coming around and singing at them.” But real phoenixes didn’t kill, so maybe they weren’t a danger after all. “Phoenixes don’t exactly travel far from their jungles, though, do they?”

One of the sylph shook its head. Cris. -The last time phoenixes emerged from their jungle was to curse the sylph.-

“Five thousand years ago,” Stef muttered. “So it’s not Phoenix Symphony, and they’re not worried about actual phoenixes. Because actual phoenixes aren’t a danger. But anyone else who knows the song is in trouble.”

“And that’s me,” Sam said.

I touched his hand. “That doesn’t seem fair.” Not that the dragons appeared to care much about fair anyway.

Something else the dragons had said, though, about my asking them not to destroy Sam, but also asking them to do it . . .

The thought flew away.

“I wish I could say it makes me feel better to know I have the power to destroy dragons.” Sam grabbed his water bottle and turned it in his hands. “I’d feel better if I had any idea what this phoenix song actually is and how to use it.”

“Would you use it?” I asked. It was strange, imagining Sam going out and singing at dragons until they were no more. The Sam I knew wasn’t that callous. He’d applauded my compassion when I couldn’t kill Deborl—though I had no doubt he would have shot Deborl if he’d been given the chance. Not after seeing him the night of the earthquake, when Mat had attacked us in the washroom. Sam had killed him and others. There was a darker side to Sam than the one I knew. There were thousands of years to Sam. I’d never know all of him. But he wasn’t a murderer.

“I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Well, I hate to be the one to bring it up.” Stef’s expression was hard. “But in spite of Ana’s success in speaking to the dragons, I don’t think they’re going to help us.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“What’s our next step?”

No one looked at me.

I looked at my hands.

Very slowly, Sam said, “What if we did know the phoenix song?”

The tent went quiet.

“Rather, what if”—Sam set his water bottle on the ground in front of him—“we let the dragons believe we know it in order to persuade them to help us with Ana’s original plan: use the poison, get the dragons to destroy the temple, and hopefully keep Janan from ever having a chance to ascend.”

I didn’t like that hopefully in there. It still sounded so unlikely, though it wasn’t as if anyone else had other suggestions. And now Sam was thinking up ways to make my idea happen again.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Relieved, because he believed in me? Horrified, because he’d risk his life pretending he knew something he didn’t? What if Acid Breath called his bluff?

“No,” I whispered.

Everyone looked at me.

“For one, we’d have to go after the dragons. They haven’t returned here. They can make the trip much more quickly than we can. We won’t have time to get back to Menehem’s lab and the poison if we have to go searching for dragons, too. Already, we’ll have to hike extra hours to get there in time.

“The second thing is, even if we do go after them, who’s to say the wrong dragons won’t find us and kill us on sight? The sylph can protect us, but not forever. We’ll have to keep moving and keep looking for Acid Breath and his friends.

“And the third thing is that Sam is not consciously aware of the phoenix song, so it’s useless. I don’t want to make threats with a weapon we don’t know how to use. They believed me when I threatened them the other day, and they left. That will have to be enough. I won’t risk it again.” I dropped my voice. “I won’t risk you all again.”

The tent was silent for a minute, and Sam just looked at me, something indecipherable in his expression. “Then what do we do?”

“We came here looking for both help and a weapon. We’re not getting help. The dragons have made that very clear. But we did learn that the weapon we’ve been seeking has been with us all along. Sam might not know it right now, but maybe we can find a way to use it against Janan.”

“Which was what you originally wanted to do,” Sam said. “Use the weapon to fight Janan.”

I nodded. “We go back to Menehem’s lab, gather the poison, and return to Heart. Sarit can help us get inside.” If she was still alive. “We destroy the cage Deborl is building, and anything else that looks important to Janan’s ascension. We do whatever we must to wreck things. On the way, we learn as much about the phoenix song as possible and hope we can actually use it.”

Sam folded his hands. “All right. Then we head back tomorrow. Unless there are any other ideas?”

Stef and Whit glanced at each other but shook their heads.

In the morning, we packed our things and began the long journey back to Range.