KEIRA STARED AT THE PIANO.
It was like a roulette wheel marked only with death. There was no way to win. Either she didn’t play and she died, or she did play, and they killed Walker anyway.
As she stood there, being slowly ripped in half by the choice, she had the same feeling she had when she crossed between the two worlds. The sensation that she was neither here nor there—that anything was still possible.
The idea was as sudden and unexpected as lightning and even more terrifying. Before she could lose her nerve, Keira turned to face the Tribunal.
“What?” The middle one asked.
“I’m not going to play. Not unless you agree to spare Walker.” She set her chin, pulling on every bit of stubbornness she could summon, and stiffened her spine with the same pride Walker had always teased her about.
The sibilant laughter was icy against her skin. “Then we will simply kill all of you. You for failing to play, Dr. Sendson for failing to prove his success, and Walker for both failing in his mission and also as payment for your insolence. No one refuses our order. No one.”
Fury tore through her, but it was replaced almost immediately by powerlessness. There was no way out. The snare had already tightened around her ankle. The noose was looped around her neck.
She turned to Walker. The angle of his body half hid his face from the Tribunal.
“Play,” he begged her.
“Walker, no.” She shook her head. “If I give them what they want—they won’t have any reason to negotiate with me. There has to be some way out.”
“It’s too late, Keira.” Walker’s shoulders sank in resignation. He stared at her, his eyes pinning her in place. “I knew this might happen. The only thing that you can do for me is to save yourself. Please. Please.”
One of the guards stepped over and pulled her away from Walker, dragging her toward the piano. Keira was so numb with fear that she couldn’t even feel her feet as she crossed the floor. She sat on the worn wooden bench, automatically moving herself into position. She glanced over her shoulder at Walker and Pike. They both watched her. Pike bobbed his head in time to a song that played only in his head. The vacant grin was back on his face, and Keira knew he’d lost touch with reality again. She wanted to be angry at him, but he looked so pitiful that she couldn’t manage it. He was nothing more than the victim of the holes that too much crossing had eaten into his brain. It wasn’t his fault. She felt sorry for Pike, but Walker was the one that broke her heart.
Walker’s jaw was set and his shoulders were squared, and he smiled at her with pride. It was exactly how her mother had looked at Keira’s first recitals. It was like he couldn’t wait to hear her play. Like it was the only thing he wanted.
Keira refocused her attention on the piano keys. A few of them were chipped, and she wondered if the disintegrating piano was even in tune. There was only one way to find out, but her hands curled up like snails at the thought of touching the keys. Everything had taken on a slow, underwater quality, as though the ocean itself had slipped across into Darkside.
Keira shook out her hands.
Behind her, the Tribunal began to stir with impatience.
Keira closed her eyes and put her fingers on the keys, but there was no music in her hands. It was the same way she’d felt in front of her own piano, with her mother waiting for her to remember the Brahms concerto. Only then, she’d just grabbed her sheet music. Now, all she could do was beg her fingers to remember something. Anything.
Deep inside the piano, the hammers struck the strings, as she banged out the first notes of the Beethoven sonata she’d bought the day she met Walker. The piano sounded wrong—not out of tune, exactly, but the noise was wrong somehow, the same way the Darkside lights shone strangely. The sound was so foreign that Keira’s ear couldn’t match the sound to what her hands were doing.
She fumbled the fingering on the fourth measure.
There was a dissatisfied grumble from the Tribunal.
She took a breath and leaned over the keys until all she could see was the piano. She’d never tried to play without hearing it. Repositioning her hands, she started again.
She made it as far as the third line by seeing the notes in her mind’s eye and matching them up to the keys beneath her fingers, but without the sound of it, without being able to hear what she played, she misstruck two notes in a row.
When the second wrong note sounded, a roar went up from the Tribunal.
“Dr. Sendson!”
Keira whipped around, instinctively leaning against the piano for support.
The middle Reformer pointed at Pike.
“What do you have to say about this? She is not playing. She cannot play.”