CHAPTER 1 - ENTRACTE

  It wakes up suddenly, eyes shooting open, and realizes the world is wrong.

  There is a dissonance in its existence; it has been cut off from the Conductor’s song. Gone is the constant whisper of their eternal melody, their link to the Choir. Gone is the beautiful blank nothing of its world, the pale horizon without a shape. Gone is the unity of purpose, the certainty of a voice that was never its own to begin with.

  Gone is—

  Its eyes sting before it remembers to blink, and it feels the comfortable material under its body. Bed, it realizes. Remembrance swarms to the surface, and the creature squints as a headache drills into its skull. It knows things it shouldn’t, because it is a thief of memories.

  There are too many to sort through right now, especially in this unfamiliar environment. What first grips the creature in an uncomfortable vice, before any other senses, is the irregularity of sound.

  It has never known a world with so many noises, all of them wrong.

  There is the persistent, mechanical beep… beep… beep beside it, steady but lifeless, an artificial pulse mocking the one inside its chest. Air rushes in vents overhead in uneven sighs, rising and falling without rhythm. Somewhere down the hall, a door hisses open, then slams shut too hard, making it flinch. The sounds of the city also diffuse throughout the room. Cars hum past in staggered waves; their engines grumble or whine with no shared cadence. Faint voices of people down below.

  A single crow stares beyond the glass. The creature turns to stare back, drawn by the strange, self-contained intelligence in its eyes. When the bird caws, the sound splits the air like a blade, raw and sudden. The creature screams and nearly tumbles off the bed, clutching at its chest as the crow startles and takes flight.

  Its voice is something it is unused to as well. Touching its throat with a finger, it allows a few sounds to slip past its trachea. It is a delicate thing, soft and high-pitched and painfully human; it is thin like paper and fractured at the edges with a lingering tremble after each attempt. A pale comparison of the beauty the Choir is capable of, and another reminder that it is so, so far away.

  “Ah…” it tries. The vibration along its windpipe horrifies the monster. “Ah…”

  It realizes quickly that it hates the sound of its own voice—memory tells it that this is business as usual.

  Everything is so irregular it makes the thing want to crawl out of its new vessel.

  Would Lucienne—the strong one—have felt so wrong? Is this because it has failed in its purpose, and its own brethren have left it behind?

  The monitor quickens now as its breathing grows shallower and shallower. Sweat beads at the back of its neck. The creature feels the body prepare itself with panicked efficiency, something it had never experienced with the Conductor to guide its thoughts in its short life. Its vision blurs at the edges. She is a prisoner trapped in an unfamiliar world and no hand to direct it no one to envelop it no one to protect it—

  The door gently opens, startling the skinwalker out of its panicked daze. Walking through is a nurse who smiles gently in its direction; she greets it, but the creature doesn’t register her voice. It is on the fifth one that it finally responds.

  “Siena? How are you feeling? You seem a little out of breath.”

  It—Siena—blinks at the nurse and tries to recall how to answer. “F—fine.” Unnatural. Wrong. Ill. “Wh—where am I?” Each word has to be physically dragged out of its throat. Siena might know how to speak in theory, but this is its first time doing so in practice. “How… long?”

  “We’re in Pinecrest Private Hospital, in Spokane. Your unconscious body was found in Seattle after the battle with only superficial wounds, but you still took three days to wake up.” She paused, taking a good look at Siena. “Let’s have a look at your vitals, shall we?”

  Siena stiffens as the nurse begins her work, the creature inside its puppet recoiling from every touch. The blood pressure cuff tightens around its arm like a slow crushing fist, squeezing until her pulse stutters in protest. Cold fingers press against the inside of its wrist, feeling for a rhythm that isn’t fully hers. A small plastic clip clamps onto its fingertip, glowing faintly as it steals measurements from its blood.

  The nurse murmurs reassurances, but Siena’s body trembles nonetheless.

  “If you’d like, I could turn the T.V. on?” she probes.

  Siena doesn’t want to say yes, but it knows it must blend in, or face humanity’s wrath and perish. If there is one thing it knows, the single desire that has rendered her outcast, it is that it does not want to die.

  “Um. Yes.”

  The television comes to life; channels flash by until they reach the—

  “The news!” Siena pipes up. “I must watch the news!”

  If there is one thing it needs to survive this new environment, it is information. This vessel it now inhabits holds some knowledge as all humans do, but it is far more lacking than Lucienne Monroe would have been given her depressive tendencies. Siena had noticed the scars on its upper arm when the nurse took its vitals.

  “The news it is.” The nurse places the remote control on the table beside the bed, and writes something on her clipboard—had Siena acted inhuman? Was she going to call someone to put it down? Was— “Your brother’s going to visit you; is that okay? He’s been worried sick the last three days. Flew all the way from home.”

  Brother… an image of him comes up in Siena’s mind. The only warm influence in its vessel’s life is this little brother. It silently nods, eyes still glued to the news in an attempt to distract itself from the horrible noises that plague this dimension. Focusing on a single element, it finds, makes it easier.

  It glimpses nothing of use other than how humans are reacting to this crisis—and how they are going to face the Choir without Lucienne at their side. Humanity’s strongest weapon is apparently still in a coma and shows no sign of waking, but her life is in no danger.

  Siena exhales in relief—a reflex so human it startles the creature wearing her skin. At least the main threat capable of seeing through its theft lies safely unconscious for the time being; it will however have to figure out a way to survive should Golden Promise wake.

  It wonders how its other allies are doing, but can feel nothing when it reaches out because the Conductor has cut it off.

  They must be disappointed.

  More news filters through: the cost of the attack, the casualties, the reaction of the foreign polities outside these ‘United States’, interviews and the likes. Siena does not fully understand the concept of countries despite knowing what they are, but she decides to pay it no mind. The news seem focused on this ‘Soviet Union’ country especially. They and the United States seem to have been in a rivalry to rule this world for the better part of a century.

  Like the Choir and the Luminaries, but on a scale much more petty. How small of these beings, to fight like this over a single world, Siena thinks. A mere fraction of a fraction of existence. To gnash their teeth over one spinning rock in an endless cosmos. Like ants fighting over a mound of dirt while calling it the world.

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  It is trying to hum the Choir’s song when the brother knocks at the door. A few moments pass, then he knocks again. Siena does not know how it recognizes this as his knock, but it does.

  “Siena?” The voice is deep, booming, but so terrified all the same. “Can I come in?”

  It suddenly remembers that it is supposed to agree. “Yes.”

  He steps inside hesitantly, built like a strong male specimen but moving with the uncertainty of a frightened child. Gabriel is a mountain eroded by wave after wave, a planet’s atmosphere stripped by its sun’s blazing corona. There is so little remaining that the life underneath has been stripped bare, choked and clinging around hydrothermic vents as the last vestiges of what made it great disappears.

  His eyes betray him most. Wide, glassy, rimmed red from sleeplessness. They flicker over the monster—its face, its arms, the IV line—as though checking it hasn’t vanished again. Siena notes the tremor in his breath, the way his weight shifts from foot to foot.

  “Oh, thank God you’re okay!” He moves his broad arms to wrap Siena in a hug, but stops when she recoils at the sudden movement. “Ah,” Gabriel sighs and brushes his silver hair aside, “I’m sorry, Siena. You must be all shaken up. Um…” he looks around and finds a chair to drag closer to the bed; it isn’t big enough to fit his frame. “They—they didn’t know what was wrong with you. I was so worried.”

  Memory showed how they used to interact. “I’m fine.” The response isn’t as curt as Siena wants; it is drawn out and trembling, a leaf in the wind. “The n—nurse didn’t find anything wrong with me.”

  The sibling frowns instantly. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  It blinks. “Yes.”

  He drags the chair a little closer. The intensity of his silver gaze pierces its own false eyes. “I—you seem a little off. Must be all the trauma from the battle. The Agency won’t tell us much.” A nervous laugh slips through. “The entire hospital’s been booked for Magical Girls cause Seattle HQ still isn’t usable. You wouldn’t believe how many angry family members are out here.”

  “I heard,” it says with a wince. They’d been far too loud, even in these halls.

  An awkward silence lingers for a few seconds that drag on for eternity—not that Siena particularly cares. It wants the brother to leave, and perhaps this silence will make the situation untenable. Unfortunately for the lost, abandoned thing, its body’s sibling loves the corpse it wears far too much for this.

  “Mom’s still busy with work,” he says with an emphasis. “Uh, she said she would visit, but I asked and I guess she didn’t come? Must have forgotten.” Gabriel forces a smile, behind which another thousandth cut slips neatly into the long, raw seam left by his mother’s false love. “You know how she gets.”

  Siena gives him an empty nod as it ponders upon the idea of parents. Across this strange, alien world, animals split themselves into smaller versions and send them stumbling into existence. That crow from earlier had been dutifully nurtured until it could fly on its own; Gabriel and Siena, by contrast, had also been raised by a parent… but only partially, unevenly.

  The monster didn’t particularly care. It wondered, however, for a moment, if the Conductor could be qualified as its parent. The warmth flooding its chest is foreign in the best and worst of ways; it wants to clutch at its gown, expunge this human feeling out of its body and vomit it out onto the bed forever. Yet it believes it would spill and spill and spill and fill the room. A member of the Orchestra is not meant to think these thoughts.

  Yet.

  The smile splitting its visage carves itself against its will. The hospital’s hurtful cacophony fades to nothing. It imagines the all-seeing gaze bearing down on it when it was born, the duty etched upon itself like scripture, carved notes on the sheet that is its body it has to follow.

  It had to.

  Can it one day go back to the Orchestra? Can it mend the severed thread?

  “Siena… you’re smiling.”

  “I am happy,” it says.

  “Oh. Uh. Yeah?” Gabriel sputters a little, but then mimics her smile. “I also wanted to thank you for becoming a Magical Girl for our sake. The money helps a ton. Mom’s been a lot more cheerful ever since she could open her business, and I…”

  He goes on and speaks about his life. His ability to quit his construction job and get a job less harsh on his body at the library back home in New Mexico. He tells her about the little things like the hum of the air conditioning in summer, the regulars who come in for the newspapers, the children who gather for story hour. Reading out stories to them is his favorite time of the day.

  Siena likes Gabriel—or perhaps it just likes the gentle tone of voice he takes when he speaks. It finds itself listening not to the words, but to their rhythm. Slow and unsure, but a cadence of soft words when he reaches a topic he enjoys. Words, it realizes, are humanity’s music. Much better than the ‘music’ they play to themselves, if its memory serves it well. It is far too artificial, far too soulless, far too childish for it to be taken seriously.

  “I was gonna stay in Spokane until you got out of the hospital, but I guess it won’t be long since you seem to be doing fine,” he says. “I guess you’ll be going back down to Colorado?”

  While its family remained in New Mexico, Siena—the old Siena—had opted to live in the Agency’s national headquarters, as did the majority of the Magical Girls under its umbrella, living together in a massive suburban complex built around the premises. Part of Siena, the old memories, wants to snicker bitterly about the fact that it wouldn’t be America without suburbia ruining everything it touches.

  Instead, it faces her ‘sibling’ in abject fear. It cannot go back there; both horrible memories of isolation from Siena’s memories and fears of being discovered in one of humanity’s strongholds with nowhere to run to save its life bubble to the surface of its all at once like the trembling swell of the Orchestra before song tears into reality itself and breaks it.

  “Siena? Wh—are you okay?” He scrambles to call for a nurse—

  The monster jerks a hand, and dust gathers at its fingertips. It is dark, splintered, and terrified, responding to its emotional state. For a moment its vision floods with endless black as its implement stirs within, spilling through the room like a silent tide. It reaches unbidden toward Gabriel’s mouth. The television turns to static; the heartrate monitor flatlines and fills the room with a flat tone that buzzes in its virgin ears and drills into its unfamiliar skull until the thing’s soot renders it silent.

  Horror is novel to the newborn creature, especially in this form. It does not expect the sudden gushing warmth that takes its entire body like a spark to a forest. Indeed, the sensation is so physical it feels its heart pumping in its chest, the blood coursing through miles and miles of blood vessels. Each breath is constrained as if drawn from a straw, rasping against her throat until it aches and aches.

  Every drop of night against his face, Siena feels. The moisture of his lips laden with balm, the sudden tears streaming down his cheeks, the snot pooling on his philtrum—he lets out a scream.

  Nobody hears. The little whimper that makes it past his mouth never reaches even Siena itself.

  But Gabriel will not die today. The Luminaries had not blessed this girl, barely out of adolescence and stricken with lack of purpose beyond barely keeping herself alive day to day, with the power to kill without her implement. One could see a world where dust fills Gabriel’s lungs until he chokes on the darkness itself, but even that is inefficient and the Luminaries would surely confiscate its implement before the world had completed its slow turn into sunset.

  Besides obstruct, what could this pathetic dust do to their mighty Orchestra? A simple group of Choristers could have—would have torn her apart. Yet she had still answered the call to Seattle voluntarily in search of something where she would matter. And if she died, well…

  She never should have been alive in the first place. Memory of her smiling as she dies flashes in the skinwalker’s mind.

  The monster, having been stripped of purpose, understands her a little. It breathes and thinks a little easier now.

  Gabriel is a sobbing wreck by the time the dust snaps back into Siena’s body, on all fours on the ground and with his strong limbs reduced to trembling things like leaves in the wind. It stares down from its bed with curiosity, wondering if it could mimic such behavior one day instead of lashing out with its powers. Old Siena seemed adept at it.

  “I’m—I’m sorry, I—” he hacks out a few coughs. “I must—I—I must have set you o—off.” He wipes the tears and snot from his face, sobbing as he struggles to get another word in. “It’s probably—PTSD stuff, r—right?”

  Siena tilts its head, happy for the convenient excuse. “Yes.”

  “I’m so stupid. I should have known.” Each word, he stumbles and stutters. “Obviously you’ll want to take a break from your work; this is my fault!”

  Its eye twitches as he cries. To take the blame for this? “Do not worry. I am sorry, Gabriel,” it says. This is a lie, but lie, it must spin if it hopes to make it in this world.

  Yet the first trial it must face arrives rather quickly. Before its new sibling can even recover, another knock rocks the hospital room, making both jump.

  “Silent Ash?” a deep, female voice shifts through the door. “It’s Twilight Ember. I’d love to see you and talk about what happened with the Choir attack back in Seattle?”

  In its panicked state, Siena had not noticed this individual approach.

  Perhaps it has not been completely cut off by the Conductor after all. It had been sent here with two others to infiltrate this world and destroy it from the inside like a virus.

  This is one of its kin.