Alpha's Forbidden Frequency

Chapter 6: Madame Flux

Morning arrived with grey light and a visitor I had not expected.

Lena woke me before dawn, her knock sharp and insistent against my door. She carried another new dress, deep green wool this time with silver buttons shaped like tiny clock hands. A message accompanied it. Caspian requested my presence in the eastern parlor within the hour. Not the training hall. Not the medical wing. A parlor. As if I were a guest rather than a purchase.

"What is the eastern parlor?" I asked, accepting the dress.

"Where my lord receives individuals he does not wish to intimidate." Lena's tone suggested she disapproved of this approach. "You are being granted a courtesy. I advise you to accept it gracefully."

"Who is the visitor?"

She hesitated. "Someone who has waited a very long time to meet you."

I dressed quickly and followed her through corridors I had not yet explored. The eastern wing of Finch Spire was older than the rest, its stone walls worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, its windows narrower, its ceilings lower. Tapestries here depicted not battles but gatherings. Wolves and humans seated together at long tables. Clockmakers bent over intricate devices. Women with silver hair singing to audiences of rapt shifters. Song-Wolves, I realized. These were images of the Thirteenth Pack before the m******e.

My chest tightened. My ancestors had walked these halls once. Had dined at those tables. Had sung songs that stabilized the very fabric of the Constant Era. And then they had been slaughtered by the same packs who now ruled from iron spires and pretended the Thirteenth had never existed.

Lena stopped before a door of pale wood inlaid with silver filigree. "She is waiting inside. My lord will join you shortly."

"She?"

But Lena had already retreated down the corridor, her footsteps fading into the Spire's constant ambient hum.

I pushed open the door.

The eastern parlor was small by Finch standards, which meant it was still larger than any room I had ever occupied in the Low District. Windows lined one wall, their frosted glass diffusing grey morning light across furniture upholstered in deep blue velvet. A fire crackled in a hearth whose mantel was carved with wolves running through a forest of clock hands. Tea steamed on a low table. Pastries had been arranged on a silver tray.

A woman sat in the chair closest to the fire.

She was older than Doctor Parrish but carried her years differently, as if age had settled into her bones without diminishing the sharpness of her presence. Iron-grey hair was braided tightly around her head. Her eyes were the color of tarnished brass, and they fixed on me with an intensity that made the hum stir beneath my ribs. Her hands, gnarled and strong, rested on the head of a carved wooden cane.

"So you are the one," she said. Her voice was low and rough, roughened by pipe smoke and decades of hard living. "Four point seven seconds. I timed it from three pruned timelines away. Rattled my best glasses right off their shelf."

"You are Madame Flux." I remained standing near the door. "Caspian's seer."

"Caspian's many things. Seer. Pain in his backside. Occasional conscience. I was also his father's seer, and his grandfather's before that. I have served the Finch Pack for longer than any living soul in Neovictoria." She gestured toward the chair opposite her. "Sit, girl. I did not travel across three collapsing Chronoclasts to watch you hover in a doorway."

I sat. The velvet upholstery swallowed me to the knees. Madame Flux poured tea with hands that did not tremble despite their age and pushed a cup toward me.

"Drink. You look like you have not slept."

"I have not. Your Alpha shifted into a pup in front of me last night. Sleep felt less important than understanding why."

"My Alpha." She laughed, a dry rattling sound like stones shifting in a stream. "Caspian is not my Alpha, child. I am packless. I recanted my oath to the Synchrony over a century ago, before Caspian's grandfather was a gleam in his father's eye. I serve the Finch Pack because Alaric asked me to, and Alaric was the only man I ever respected enough to obey."

"Alaric Finch. The thirteenth clockmaker. The one who composed the song I carry."

Madame Flux set down her teacup. Her brass eyes studied me with an intensity that felt almost physical. "You know more than Caspian expected you to know. Doctor Parrish has been talking, I assume."

"Doctor Parrish told me enough to understand that I am a weapon. She did not tell me what I was designed to destroy."

"Everything." Madame Flux leaned back in her chair. "You were designed to destroy everything. The Constant Era. The pack hierarchy. The Correction itself. Alaric built a fail safe into the Pendulum that could unmake the entire system if it ever became what it has become. A cage. A slaughterhouse. A machine that grinds up free will and spits out perfect, obedient silence."

"Then why did the packs not destroy the fail safe along with the Song-Wolves?"

"Because they could not find it. Alaric hid his counter-frequency inside a bloodline. Not a device. Not a text. A living, breathing lineage of women who could sing the wrong note and shatter the harmony that holds this world together. Every Song-Wolf carries a fragment of that frequency. You, Iskra Volkov, carry the complete composition. I do not know why it chose you. Perhaps it is random. Perhaps it is fate. Perhaps Alaric's ghost has been nudging pieces across the board for a century and a half." She picked up her cane and pointed it at my chest. "What matters is that you exist. You survived the m******e. You survived your mother's erasure. You survived nineteen years in a city that would execute you in a heartbeat if it knew what you carried. And now you sit in the heart of Finch Spire, purchased by the direct descendant of the man who created you."

"Caspian is Alaric's heir."

"Caspian is Alaric's heir, and he is dying, and you are the only cure. Alaric designed it that way. He ensured that the fail safe could only be activated by someone bound to his bloodline. A Song-Wolf and a Finch Alpha. Two halves of a single frequency." Madame Flux lowered her cane. "The mating marks on your skin are not random side effects of the silver contract. They are the first notes of a song that has been waiting a hundred and seventy-three years to be completed."

I looked down at my forearms. The silver contract marks had spread since the auction, branching into delicate patterns that resembled musical notation. I had noticed them while dressing but had attributed the change to stress or the contract's natural progression. Now I understood. Something was composing itself on my skin.

"You are telling me I am fated to mate with the man who purchased me."

"I am telling you that fate does not care about your feelings. Fate wrote this symphony before your grandmother's grandmother drew her first breath. Whether you accept the bond or reject it, that is your choice. Alaric ensured that much. He refused to create a fail safe that overrode free will. That would have made him no better than the colleagues he opposed."

A knock at the door interrupted her. Caspian entered without waiting for a response, his broad shoulders filling the frame, his silver hair still damp from a recent wash. He wore formal attire today, a coat of charcoal wool with the Finch crest embroidered at the collar. His pale eyes swept the room, assessing Madame Flux, then me, then the tea tray between us.

"I see you have begun without me."

"You were taking too long." Madame Flux did not rise. "I have told her the basics. The fail safe. The bloodline. The mating bond. She took it better than most women would, which suggests she is either remarkably resilient or still in shock."

"I am not in shock." I stood, facing Caspian across the low table. "I am angry. You knew everything. From the moment your seer detected my frequency, you knew I was a Song-Wolf, knew my bloodline, knew my ancestors were slaughtered by your ancestors. You purchased me anyway. You bound me with silver and threatened my sister's care. You demanded my song without telling me what it meant."

"Yes." His voice was flat. "I did all of those things."

"Why?"

"Because if I had told you the truth before bringing you to the Spire, you would have fled. If you had fled, the Synchrony would have found you within days. They have been hunting Song-Wolves for a century. Their detection methods have improved. Their Iterators are faster. Their Corrections are more thorough. You would have been erased like your mother, and your sister would have died alone in a charity ward." He stepped closer, his pale eyes burning. "I purchased you because purchase was the only protection I could offer. I bound you with silver because the contract marks mask your Resonance signature from Synchrony detection. I threatened your sister's care because I needed you to cooperate long enough for me to explain what you are before you did something that got us all killed."

"Us."

"My pack. My people. Every shifter who has ever questioned the Synchrony's rule. Every human who has been crushed under the Constant Era's perfect, grinding silence. You are not merely my cure, Iskra. You are the key to ending a century of tyranny. I did not purchase a tool. I purchased a revolution."

Silence filled the parlor. Madame Flux watched us both with her brass eyes, her expression unreadable. The fire crackled. The tea cooled in its porcelain cup.

"You could have told me this last night," I said quietly.

"Last night you were still deciding whether to cooperate. Last night you needed to see my curse firsthand, to understand that I am as bound by this fate as you are. I did not choose to inherit Temporal Dysplasia. I did not choose to be Alaric Finch's descendant. I did not choose to need you." His voice dropped. "But I do need you. Desperately. And I am asking you, not commanding you, to help me."

"Asking. Not commanding. That is new."

"I am capable of learning."

Madame Flux snorted. "That is debatable. It took him six years to admit he needed a Resonant. Another year to accept that the Resonant might have opinions about her own fate. Caspian Finch has many talents. Humility has never been among them."

Caspian ignored her. His attention remained fixed on me. "Will you hear the full story? Alaric's journals. The m******e. What the Synchrony is planning. Everything I should have told you before I placed that bid. I will hold nothing back. After you know the truth, if you still wish to leave, I will release the contract. Your sister's care will continue regardless. You have my word."

"Your word. The word of a man who purchased me at auction."

"The word of a man who has spent his entire life preparing to burn down the system that made that auction possible." He extended his hand. Not the commanding gesture of an Alpha demanding obedience. An offering. A question. "Please."

I looked at his outstretched palm. The same hand that had bid five thousand chrono-marks. The same hand that had gripped my chin in the training hall. The same hand that had, as a trembling pup, clung to my dress with desperate small claws.

I did not take it. Not yet.

"Show me the journals first. Then I will decide."

Caspian lowered his hand. A muscle in his jaw twitched. But he nodded. "Madame Flux will accompany us. The journals are stored in a Chronoclast that only she can access."

"Alaric's workshop," I said. "The calcified tower. The one with the staircase that spirals left instead of right."

Madame Flux raised an eyebrow. "You really are his fail safe. No one else has ever guessed that location without being told."

"I did not guess. I have been dreaming about that tower since I was ten years old." I turned toward the door. "Take me there. I am ready to learn what my dreams have been trying to tell me."