Page 139 - DivineSparkRising II-TheMirrorofSilenceFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Sera tapped the rim with a fingernail. The room
sang a little. She tapped again, wrong on purpose.
Carolina added a counter-beat with the butt of her
lamp. Henry clapped once in a way he’d learned
from a teacher in India who’d taught him the truth
of timing. They repeated the pattern, then bent it,
then bent it again. Somewhere a mechanism that
had never met computers decided it liked them.
The wheel turned a quarter-inch.
“Again,” Jinji urged, glee in the wire. Make it
messy, make it kind.
They made rhythm the way children make
alliances — sincere, silly, sudden. The wheel
turned. A seam opened in the floor. Cold air sighed
upward. The subsonic hum took a breath.
5. The Hall of Echoes
The hatch gave onto a stair carved in rough
spirals. They descended, the air cooling into
thought. The walls widened into cells. Inside each:
a narrow bench, a slot, a shelf covered in marks —
tallies, sentences, a crude drawing of a hand.
Someone had lived in each, or tried to.
Carolina stopped at one and brushed dust from
a phrase scratched with a key: I WILL SAY IT
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