Navaa takes my hand and pushes it up to my neck, to my carotid artery, and I am grateful. I’m not sure I would have found it without being able to actually feel it first.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Once I lock on to it, I wrap it around me like a blanket knit of heat and sinew. I find my pulse everywhere—inside my chest, in the veins running up and down my arms—and slowly, the noise, which was a constant thrum, begins to echo in the short bursts of my own beating heart.
“I have it,” I tell her.
“Excellent, just keep at it. Hold on to it. Its nature will change. The Kir-Abisat is like an excited animal snarling and leaping, pulling against its leash, but eventually, your focus will make it heel. Tell me when you get to the point that aligning the noise with the rhythm is no longer a struggle.”
Navaa’s analogy is a good one. This ability of mine feels wild and untethered, but after a few long moments, the fight in it subsides. My head doesn’t hurt. The sound is there, pulsing, but it’s like hearing music in another room. “Okay, okay, it’s more controlled now,” I tell my guide.
“That’s good. That was fast. Let’s just see, shall we, if we can get you to sing one of those tones. Perhaps the loudest one, the song from home.”
“Wait, what?” I ask, my eyes flying open. “I’m not ready to do that. I don’t know if I ever want to do that. I’m only listening to you now because I don’t want to walk around with an amplifier in my head all the time.”
“Some people are afraid of weapons,” Navaa’s voice lulls just inches away from my ear. “They find it distasteful to even touch one. A soldier does not have that kind of philosophical leeway. If it’s possible for you to open a Rift, then you must learn how. You cannot waste the tactical advantage.”
Damn—she’s right. Of course she’s right. But there is something about this that terrifies me.
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I tell Navaa honestly.
“It’s a question of multitasking,” she tells me. I look slightly over my shoulder at her tapered fingers and the slight curve of a wing. “It’s like playing an instrument. You must always keep time; your muscles know how to keep the beat going, but then your fingers play the melody. This is no different.”
I did use to play the cello. I would have never made it professionally as a musician, but I had some talent. Maybe that’s why the Roones chose to insert this mutation into my genome. “Fine. All right,” I relent. “You want me to sing?”
“I want you to become the tone. You start with your voice, but you must try to pull it out from every inch of your being. It should feel more like a meditation than singing a simple song.”
I close my eyes again. The noise is still tethered to my heartbeat, but with considerable effort I am able to find the strongest frequency. I clamp down with my molars. This feels dumb and wrong, but I suppose I have to see how far this ability goes as much for Navaa as for myself. I begin to hum with clenched teeth, matching my own pitch to the one I hear. And then, something shifts. I feel my entire body relax as if I was slipping into a warm bath. I open my mouth and eyes and continue to sing, although that word no longer applies. Navaa is right. The frequency of home infiltrates every cell of my body. I become the tone.
Within seconds a green neon dot appears on the plaster wall in front of us. The dot begins to spread out, but only a little. It isn’t the spinning pinwheel of Navaa’s Kir-Abisat. This is a shimmering circle. It is a small, glimmering thing, certainly not big enough for me, or anyone else to slip through unless they were action figure size. I sing louder but the circle doesn’t grow, and it doesn’t change into the inky black of a Rift that’s ready to take on riders.
“Stop,” Navaa says loudly.
“What? I can do it. I think. Maybe?”
I turn around and face Navaa. Her heart rate has increased and there is a faint crease between her brows.
“Possibly,” she says with concern. “But you shouldn’t have been able to get that far. The sound blockade is up again.”
I practically grunt in frustration. “Then why did you have me even try?”
“I wanted to see and now I know. Your Kir-Abisat gene has expressed itself differently. Like everything else with the humans.
“The Roones have made you stronger.”
Navaa has said nothing more about what had transpired in the cell. I don’t think she’s concerned that I will open a giant Rift because of a bad mood or because someone pissed me off. I’m nowhere near being able to do that, even by accident. Still, I’m quite impressed with my first attempt at opening a Rift. It wasn’t anywhere near usable, but it was green. However, I am an unknown. I think she had dismissed us human Citadels as petulant and possibly easy to maneuver. Spending time with me, she is beginning to understand that while we are young, we have been forged in pain and sacrifice, just as her own people were. Our strength and my Kir-Abisat ability is not what she expected. Soldiers don’t like the unexpected.
She has taken me to the floor above. Well, she flew there in the cave elevator. I took the stairs. These are the living quarters, large wooden doors running down what looks like an almost endless hallway. There are plush rugs on a wide-planked floor and gorgeous oil pictures with no frames. The Faida are confounding. They enjoy their luxuries, but don’t seem to want to admit that they do.
My room is across from Levi’s and beside Ezra’s. I have promised Navaa that she can look at our SenMach computers, as long as all of us are present. She is concerned about the sound blockade and the technology we used to get through it. I told her that even her most gifted computer scientists would not be able to get into our system. I understand why she’d be worried, though, and there might be something that we can do to help boost the sound blockade’s efficiency without it interfering with us being able to Rift out if somehow this all goes to shit (which, let’s face it, is a distinct possibility given my luck).
I dump my things in my room and take a look at the accommodation. The bed is unnaturally large with a fluffy duvet that must be three inches thick. Several leather books are lined up in a built-in bookshelf, and a delicate glass lamp sits on a bedside table. There is also a tall wooden armoire. When I open the two doors, I expect to see maybe a TV, but there are only hangers and drawers. Are humans the only race to have TV? I feel like we might be. Those bear people certainly aren’t sitting around watching some bear equivalent to Downton Abbey, that’s for sure. I continue my exploration of the room and find a small electronic panel on the wall hidden behind a piece of carved wood. There are controls here, for the lights and temperature. There is also a mystery button, which I push. Suddenly, two Faida are in the room speaking about the current unrest. I crane my neck and find a holographic projection system in the corners of the ceiling. It makes sense; the two are arguing in a studio behind a large desk, so the image isn’t life-size and I can tell it isn’t real—more like a diorama. I press the button again. If this is what passes for entertainment on the Faida Earth, no thanks. Even if there is a way to change the channel, it seems like a pretty dumb question to ask