Li slammed her palms on the table, making spoons and bowls clatter as she stood. Her glare darkened. “Whatever you think you feel? It’s not real. You’re a nosoul. You don’t feel. You barely exist. In a hundred years, no one will remember you were ever alive.”
“You’re wrong.” I knew I shouldn’t have spoken, but my muscles shook with the strain from a fortnight of physical exhaustion and emotional torture. “People will remember. Sam made sure of it.”
The rage cooled from her eyes. “Is that so?” Dread cut me deep as she crossed the kitchen and reached into a drawer. “Paper is so temporary, don’t you think? Many of our oldest records have been copied dozens of times, simply because the pages don’t last. Like someone else I know.”
I kept my eyes on the bundle of pages she carried. “What is that?”
“The other problem with paper is if you spill something on it, or burn it, whatever you kept on there is lost.” She dropped the pages on the table; they spread out and settled without order. Even so, I knew what they were. Music. Bars and notes and tiny doodles in the margins. AI-4, AI-10: they were pages of a longer piece.
My hand was as heavy as a brick as I reached for the title page and turned it toward me. “Ana Incarnate,” it read, no fancy flourishes or underlines with it, just a tiny butterfly in the corner.
It was the waltz Sam had written for me. My song.
“Don’t hurt it,” I whispered.
“Paper is so temporary,” she repeated, looking pointedly at the fireplace.
“No!” I threw myself across the table and scooped up pages, but Li was faster.
She ripped the pages from my hands and tossed them at the fire. Paper fluttered, some into the flame, and some drifted to the ashy hearth.
I lunged across the room and rescued as many sheets as I could, but fire singed my hands. No matter how many I saved from the flames, Li balled up more pages and threw them in, laughing.
When she was bored, she wiped her hands on her pants and headed for the door. “Go to bed. You have a long day tomorrow.”
I patted out the last of the embers with a dish towel and struggled to put the pages in order. My hands stung as I sifted through the delicate sheets. Some were salvageable; others were burned so badly they hadn’t been worth rescuing, as black blotted out the bars of music.
Those pages went in back. Maybe Sam would know how to save them. Determined to see him try, I eased the pages of my song into a stiff notebook for safekeeping.
Forget Li. Forget the Council. If this was life in Heart, I would give up my quest. I’d rather never know where I came from than let Li destroy everything that mattered to me.
I went upstairs to get my knife.
There wasn’t much to pack. My song fit inside my backpack, along with a few other necessities. For the last two weeks I’d been too scared to escape. There were guards—Li made sure I saw them every morning—and I’d been afraid of what would happen if they caught me. Now I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t try.
I waited until the sun dipped behind the wall, casting the city in hazy indigo. Within minutes, it would be full night.
Dressed in the darkest clothes I could find, I tied and tucked my hair into a cap and picked the lock on the window. Stef had taught me, saying I shouldn’t be the only one in Range who didn’t know how; Sam had called her a miscreant.
Clouds covered the sky, threatening some kind of unfortunate weather. In the inky-dark yard, I found only fir trees and bushes, a small garden. Normal things. Most people had what they needed to be self-sufficient between market days, even Li.
Bored-sounding voices came from the north side of the house. No footsteps or swishing brush accompanied them, so they were standing still. Chances were they faced my window, hidden at an angle so I wouldn’t be able to see them unless I leaned out. And then they’d see me.
I hurled an old shoe outside. It landed inside a thick copse of conifers. Two pair of footfalls followed, and I hauled myself out of the window, turned to catch my toes on a ledge, and reached for a bare cottonwood branch. I hung two stories up as the footsteps came toward the house again.
Frantically, I swung myself into the tree, which obliged me with silence. I stayed huddled on the thick branch until the guards were settled. When they went around to the house—discussing whether or not I’d tried to escape, or just wanted to tease them—I scrambled down the tree and into the brush on the far side of the yard.
When everything was quiet, only a breeze and night birds singing lullabies, I crept around to the walkway. As much as I wanted to run, I made myself stop and listen every few steps.