Totality

POV: Roz

Three hundred and twelve hearts were running too fast, and one was running too slow.

Roz stood at the rail of the choir loft with her palm flat on the cold wood and her eyes shut, and let the Dome come to her through her skin.

It was always like this. A crowd was not a sound but a weather. It came at her from below in great waves, a wild thicket of rhythms, hundreds of small private drums all beating out of time. The old Councillors in the front tier had slow, thick, laboring hearts, like pumps in a flooded cellar. The young ladies in white had quick light ones, fluttering. A child's, somewhere in the east gallery, going like a bird in a hand. The Lamp Order troops along the wall, forty paces down, were quiet and sleepy and soft, all those cradle-slow beats. And among them, scattered like salt, the others. The Saints in their gray smocks. Penny's girls. Big Ned's nephews. Hearts that were fast, because they were afraid, and steady, because they had decided not to be.

She let them run through her. She counted. She sorted them by feel, one hand on the rail and the other on her own breastbone, as she had done at ten thousand bedsides.

Three hundred and twelve. All right.

Now find him.

…

It was not difficult. His was the slowest in the hall.

Dex stood in the white column of light at the center of the dais, thirty paces below and forty feet across, with a black cane in his right hand and his shoulders squared against the sky. She had heard that heart in a cellar, in a vault, in a nave, in the dark at the foot of a pier. It was a clever, skittering, secretive thing, a heart that always seemed to be doing sums. Today it was none of that.

It was walking. One plodding step after another. One. Two. Three. And on three it paused, and began again.

He's counting, she thought. He's counting in threes.

Beside her, Josiah had gone motionless. She could hear his heart as well, a heavy, hard, controlled beat. He had not spoken since the far gallery. She had felt him go still with the particular focus of a man who is looking at something he does not like. But he said only, in a low flat voice, "Whitcomb is speaking."

She opened her eyes.

…

The sun was nearly gone.

She had never seen anything like it. The sky in the oculus had turned from pearl to slate to a deep, stained violet, and the last bright sliver of the sun was a thin curved blade of white fire, shrinking, shrinking, at the edge of a perfect black disc. The light that fell through the roof was no longer light. It was a pale, cold, silvery radiance that drained the color from everything it touched. The marble was gray. The gold was gray. The faces below her were the faces of corpses.

And it was growing cold.

She felt it on her arms, a fine prickle, as of a window opened somewhere. She heard a woman in the lower tier cry out softly. A man laughed, high and breathless. Somewhere in the vaulted roof a flock of swifts that had been circling peacefully for an hour broke apart and went screaming in every direction, wings clattering against the glass.

Four minutes, thought Roz. Four minutes of dark.

And the hall went quiet.

It happened all at once, like a hand closing over a bell. Three hundred and twelve people stopped talking. Three hundred and twelve people looked up. She felt the hearts below her tighten, and rise, and stumble together in a single great shuddering beat of awe. The sun was a thin white thread. The thread was a bead. The bead was a dot.

The dot went out.

…

It was night.

It was a night more complete than any she had known. The sky above the oculus was black, and in it hung a hole. A round black disc with a ring of pale fire around it, flickering, streaming outward in long, thin, silver plumes, like the hair of a drowned woman. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It was the most terrible. She understood, for the first time in her life, why the old people called it the Black Noon.

The stars came out.

They came out in the oculus, one by one, small and cold and distant. A tiny gasp rippled through the hall. A child began to cry. Somewhere, a woman said a prayer in French, rapidly, under her breath.

And in the darkness, on the dais, a circle of brass mirrors began to glow.

She saw it. She saw twelve tall dull shapes catch the light of the corona, and kindle, one after another, with a pale silver fire. The brass shone. The light slid from mirror to mirror round the ring, and where it passed it left a thread, so that in a moment the whole dais was held in a net of cold glimmer. And in the middle of it, in the ring of fire, the two men stood.

"Mr. Aldridge," said Whitcomb.

His voice was low. It carried to the farthest tier.

"The hour has come."

…

Whitcomb laid his hand on the sphere.

It sat on the lectern before him, clear as water, with its pink light turning in its heart. He rested his palm on its curve, lightly, like a man steadying a bird. The black seam ran under his fingers. And he looked at Dex with an expression of grave and almost tender courtesy.

"Sing."

Dex did not move.

"You have a voice, Mr. Aldridge. I am told it is a very good one. Your mother's." The old man's hand pressed a little. "Sing the song she sang to you. The one you have carried so long. I shall hear it. The city shall hear it. And then," a faint, kind smile, "we shall all go quietly home."

Roz leaned over the rail.

She could hear it from here: the pulse in Dex's throat. It was beating hard and unsteady, stumbling, with a catch in it, as a horse stumbles on loose shale. He was shaking. She could see the tremor in the cane. His face, in the white light, was gray as ash.

He's going to fall, she thought. He's going to freeze.

Not now. Not here.

She did not decide. She never decided, afterward, whether she'd done it out of love or fear or the plain stubborn professional reflex of a woman who had spent ten thousand nights between a heartbeat and the end of it. She only knew that her palm was flat on the rail, and her eyes were closed, and her whole will had gone out across the gulf of the Dome like a rope thrown to a drowning man.

Slow, she told him. Slow down. Breathe. I have you.

She felt for his heart.

It was thirty paces away, across a hall full of strangers. But it was the only heart in the room that she knew like her own. She found it in the dark. She laid her will on it, very lightly, as one lays a hand on a frightened horse's neck. It leaped. It steadied. It slowed.

Slower. Slower. The shake went out of the cane.

The price came due.

It came in a breath, and it was a soft thing, a faint sweetness at the back of her mind, that went out like a candle. She had been thinking, absently, of a smell. A warm, powdery, floral smell, jasmine and orange-flower and a little clove, on a dark neck bent over a cradle. Her mother's perfume. The one she wore on Sundays. The one that had clung to every dress in the cupboard.

It was gone.

She reached for it, and the place where it had been was smooth and cold. She stood at the rail of the choir loft and wept without a sound. She did not let go.

On the dais, Dex lifted his head.

…

He sang.

He sang so quietly at first that she could hardly hear him. It was a thin, rough, cracked boy's voice, with no polish and no training. It was not a performer's voice. It trembled on the first note, and caught on the second, and then, by some strange alchemy, found its footing, and rose. It rang in the great white shell of the Dome like a single bell.

"Wake now, little rattler, shake your warning free,

The dark was only borrowed, and it's time it let you see."

Whitcomb's hand tightened on the sphere.

"Every name they locked away is waiting at the door."

She saw the Chairman's face change.

It was the smallest thing. A narrowing. A stillness. The smile did not slip, exactly, but it stopped, as a clock stops. She saw his lips part. She saw his head turn, sharply, toward the boy with the cane.

"That is not—" said Augustus Whitcomb.

"Wake now, little rattler. You were never lost before."

…

The silence that followed lasted perhaps two seconds.

It was the longest two seconds of Roz's life. She felt the whole hall hold its breath. She felt three hundred and twelve hearts hang on the edge of a beat. And on the lectern the clear glass sphere, the false one, Felix's perfect lie, went on glowing, softly, steadily pink, doing nothing at all.

Then, from above, from somewhere far overhead, up in the roof of the Dome, in the open lamp-chamber where a boy and a gunman and a woman in black bombazine knelt over a plain wooden table, something answered.

She felt it before she heard it.

It was a thump.

A single deep thump, like a great door closing in the heart of the earth. It shook the air. It came down through the stone of the Dome, through the pillars, through the soles of her boots, through the wood of the rail under her palm, and it went through her chest like a fist.

Thum.

And again.

Thum.

It was not the slow beat of the Heart she had heard in the vault: one beat an hour, unhurried, patient as a sleeping giant. This was a pulse. A rapid, urgent, living pulse, a drum-roll, a heart that had been asleep for a hundred and fifty years and had been called by name. It beat harder with every stroke. It shook the chandeliers. It rattled the brass of the mirrors in their plinths. It filled the dark with a thunder like the sea.

It's awake, thought Roz. Oh, God. It heard him. It's awake.

…

It came down on her like a wave.

She had not expected it. She had thought, in the quiet corners of her mind, that she would hear the Heart beat. That she would feel it, perhaps, as one feels a drum. She had not known that the beat would carry every other beat within it.

She heard them all.

Not three hundred and twelve. Not three thousand. All of them. Every living heart in Merrick Bay, in every street, in every cellar and garret and crowded tenement, from the Terrace to the Docks, from the Cinder Line to Gray Willow Lane. They came to her out of the dark like lights in a window, a great bright shifting net of them, each with its own pulse, each with its own song. A newborn's tiny flutter on Tallow Street. An old man's slow tick in a bed on Fell. A girl on a rooftop. A boy in a doorway. A woman in a sunlit kitchen, miles off, who stopped in the middle of kneading dough.

Mama.

She found it among the rest. She found it as she'd have found it in a roaring crowd, unmistakable, the deep, slow, steady, dark river-beat that she had listened to through a wall, through a childhood, through a door slammed in her face. It was a long way off. It was a very small sound. It had been going for five years like a clock with a missing hand.

It stumbled.

She heard it stumble. She heard it check, and catch, and race. She heard a woman in a chair at Gray Willow Lane lift her head and look at the window and say, aloud, to nobody, in a voice that Roz could not hear but felt in her bones: oh.

Oh. Oh, there you are.

And the thread of gold in the empty glass vial in Roz's pocket flared, once, very bright, and was gone.

She dropped to her knees on the carpet.

She could not stop crying. She was laughing too, she found, with her hand clapped over her mouth, a high, wet, helpless sound. She could hear the song. Not in the air, but in her blood. The whole of it, all three verses, in her mother's voice, deep and unhurried and warm. Dodo, ti-pitit, dodo. She heard the potatoes. She heard the knife on the board. She heard a girl of nineteen say Mama, I'm not a baby, and a woman's low laugh in reply.

And she heard what had come back to the mind of Delphine Boudreaux, five years late, an afternoon in a kitchen.

My Roz, said the heartbeat. My little heart. There you are.

…

"Roz."

Josiah's hand was on her shoulder.

He had dropped to his knees beside her. His face, in the pale light, was a hard gray mask, and she saw that he too was weeping, silently. His hand was shaking. But it held her up. "Roz," he said again, low and urgent. "The guards. You must hold the guards."

She nodded.

She could not trust her voice. She set her palm on the rail again, and pressed her forehead against the wood, and reached out. It was easier now. The Heart was pouring its great rolling beat through every stone in the building, and it was like swimming with the current. She found the guards along the wall. A dozen of them, in blue. She found the twelve hearts and laid her will on them, soft and heavy as a blanket, and slowed them. They stood up straight. They went quiet. They looked up at the beating dome with blank, wondering, peaceful eyes, and let their rifles sag.

Slow, she told them. Slow. It's all right.

The Dome was shaking.

She could hear the glass singing in the oculus. She could hear the great ring of mirrors humming on their plinths. In the gilt chairs below, the Houses of Merrick Bay had risen to their feet, and one by one, in a wave, they were putting their hands to their foreheads. She saw an old man in the front row sink into his chair with a face of utter blankness. She saw a woman begin to scream. Something was moving, in the dark air above the dais, a thread of faint light, then a second, then a hundred, streaming down from the lamp-chamber like silver rain.

Memories.

She saw them fall.

And through it all, on the black stone dais, Dex Hallam, who was not Dex Hallam, stood with his head thrown back and his eyes closed and sang.

…

She was crying so hard she almost missed the sound.

It was a small one. It came from across the Dome, from the far side of the hall, over the thunder of the Heart and the screaming of the crowd. She did not hear it with her ears. She heard it in the way that she heard everything. It was a heartbeat, one she had never noticed, tucked away in the shadow of the opposite gallery behind a blue velvet curtain.

It was perfectly steady.

It beat at fifty-two. Not a hair faster. Not a hair slower. It had the cold, mathematical regularity of a metronome, and under it, so faint that she felt it rather than heard, a tiny dry click.

Click.

She knew that sound.

She had heard it in the Wild West show tent, once, years ago, on a Sunday afternoon with Hollis. A bolt sliding home. The little oiled brass snick of a round going into the chamber of a good rifle.

Her stomach dropped.

She turned her head. Across the vast white hollow of the Dome, forty yards away, in the deepest shadow of the far loft, there was a man. She could not see him. She did not need to. She could hear him breathing, slow and shallow, and the faint whisper of a gloved thumb on a trigger-guard, and the creak of a rifle stock settling into a shoulder.

She knew what the barrel was aimed at.

She had heard that, too. She had heard it the moment before the click. A small cold interest, a narrowing of purpose, a heart turning its whole attention onto something and settling.

It was not Dex he was looking at. It was not Whitcomb.

It was a woman in a gray scullery dress, kneeling at a rail, with her hand outstretched and her heart beating loud enough to be heard across the hall.

Oh, thought Roz. It's me.