Alpha's Forbidden Frequency

Soldier's Question

Mila slept through the remainder of the night and into the grey morning that followed.

I did not leave her bedside. Doctor Parrish brought me a blanket somewhere around dawn. Lena brought a tray of bread and cheese that I barely touched. The hum stayed quiet, coiled beneath my ribs like a cat sleeping in sunlight, temporarily content. I watched my sister's chest rise and fall beneath the white sheets and counted every breath as if each one were a borrowed coin.

"She is stronger than she looks," Doctor Parrish said during one of her periodic checks. She pressed a chronostatic instrument against Mila's wrist and studied the readings with her sharp green eyes. "The temporal toxin has caused significant damage to her respiratory system, but her body is fighting back. The treatment we administered last night is holding."

"Will she wake?"

"Eventually. Her body needs rest more than consciousness at the moment." The physician hesitated, her gnarled hands pausing over her instruments. "There is something else you should know. The toxin that was used on your sister is not a common variety. It was engineered. Precisely calibrated to target Song-Wolf blood. Whoever poisoned her knew exactly what they were looking for."

My hand tightened around Mila's fingers. "Someone in the Synchrony."

"Almost certainly. The question is which pack. The Finch Pack has enemies on the Council, but so does every pack. Narrowing down the source will require more information than we currently possess."

"Then we will find more information."

Doctor Parrish studied me over the rim of her spectacles. "You sound very certain."

"I am not certain of anything. But I have spent nine years hiding and swallowing my hum and watching my sister grow sicker while the packs lived in luxury above us. I am done hiding. If someone poisoned Mila to find me, they succeeded. Now they will have to deal with what they found."

The physician's mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. "You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago. A woman who refused to be afraid even when fear was the only rational response. She died in the m******e of the Thirteenth Pack. I hope you survive longer."

She left before I could ask who the woman was.

Midmorning brought Caspian.

I heard his footsteps before I saw him, that steady, measured tread I was beginning to recognize. He paused in the doorway of the medical wing, his broad shoulders filling the frame. He had changed into formal attire, a coat of deep grey wool with the Finch crest embroidered at the collar. The tremor in his hands was barely visible today.

"Your sister's condition?"

"Stable. Doctor Parrish says she will wake eventually."

"That is good." He stepped into the room but did not approach the bed. He kept a distance, as if recognizing that proximity to Mila was a privilege I had not granted him. "Madame Flux has identified the second Chronoclast. She says we should leave within the hour."

"I am not leaving my sister."

"Mila will be guarded by Darian and two dozen Finch shifters. No one will touch her while we are gone." He paused. "I give you my word."

"Your word." I turned to face him. "The word of a man who purchased me at auction and bound me with silver."

"The word of a man who is trying to earn something he does not know how to ask for."

Silence stretched between us. The chronostatic lamps hummed faintly. Mila's breathing was the only other sound, soft and steady and precious.

"What is the second Chronoclast?" I asked finally.

"A battlefield. The last stand of a revolution that failed in a timeline that never existed. Alaric hid the second cog in the hand of a dying soldier who believed freedom was worth the price of death." Caspian's pale eyes met mine. "It will be more dangerous than the Romanov cellar. The soldier's echo will not be as gentle as Anastasia. He will fight to keep what he holds."

"I am not afraid of a memory."

"You should be. Memories in Chronoclasts are not passive recordings. They are moments frozen at the instant of their greatest intensity. A battlefield memory is frozen at the instant of death. It will be violent and chaotic and utterly indifferent to your survival."

I stood, releasing Mila's hand gently onto the sheets. "Then we should not keep it waiting."

We walked together through the Spire's corridors, past tapestries of wolves and clockmakers, past servants who averted their eyes, past Darian who was already stationed outside the medical wing with her sword drawn and her scarred face set in grim determination. She nodded once at Caspian and did not look at me.

Madame Flux was waiting in the eastern parlor. The rippling door had reappeared, its iron surface pulsing with faint violet light. She leaned on her cane, her brass eyes tracking our approach.

"The soldier's name was Emil," she said without preamble. "He was twenty-three years old. He died holding a flag he had sewn himself from stolen cloth. The flag meant nothing in the grand scheme of the battle, but it meant everything to him. Alaric chose him because that kind of conviction cannot be erased. It lingers. It waits. It will test you."

"What kind of test?" I asked.

"The kind that requires you to mean what you say." She struck her cane against the floor. The iron door swung open onto darkness streaked with red light, the color of fire and blood and dying suns. "Caspian. Keep her close. The battlefield fragment loops every seven minutes. If you miss the exit window, you will be trapped until the next cycle. Very few people survive two cycles in a combat Chronoclast."

Caspian extended his hand. I took it without hesitation this time.

We stepped through together.

Heat hit me first, a wall of it, scorching and dry and filled with the smell of burning wood and black powder and something worse. Burning flesh. Then came the noise. Screaming. Gunfire. The thunder of hooves on bloody ground. A bugle call that cut off mid-note, unfinished, eternal.

We stood on a hillside overlooking a valley choked with smoke and bodies.

The battle was frozen at its worst moment. Soldiers in blue uniforms were breaking against a line of grey-clad defenders. A cannon had just fired, its plume of smoke suspended in the air like a grey flower. A horse was falling, its rider thrown, both of them caught mid-tumble. Everywhere I looked, men were dying, their faces twisted in expressions that ranged from rage to terror to a strange, peaceful resignation.

"The soldier," I said. "Emil. Where is he?"

"At the center of the line. Where the fighting is thickest." Caspian pointed toward a cluster of figures near a broken stone wall. "The flag will mark him. Stay behind me. Do not engage any echo. If one of them touches you, the fragment will try to pull you into the loop. You will become part of the battle."

"Permanently?"

"Until the Chronoclast collapses and takes you with it."

We descended the hillside. The ground was churned mud and crushed grass and things I did not want to identify. Smoke stung my eyes. The noise grew louder as we approached the battle line, screams and shots and the clash of steel against steel. None of the soldiers looked at us. We were ghosts in their final moment, invisible and irrelevant.

The broken stone wall appeared through the smoke. Behind it, a cluster of defenders were making their last stand. I saw him immediately. A young man with dirty blonde hair and a flag clutched in his left hand. The flag was crudely sewn, red fabric with a gold star that was slightly crooked. His right hand clutched something against his chest. Something that pulsed with a frequency I could feel in my molars.

"The cog," I said. "He is holding it."

"He is also dying." Caspian's voice was tight. "Look at his chest."

I looked. A dark stain was spreading across Emil's uniform, centered on a bullet wound just below his heart. His face was pale. His breath came in short, ragged gasps. He was frozen at the exact instant of his death, the moment his body realized it was dying but his spirit refused to accept it.

"He is aware," I realized. "Like Anastasia. He knows he is an echo."

"Alaric chose moments of intense consciousness. People who were fully alive at the instant they died. Their echoes retain more awareness than most." Caspian released my hand. "He will speak to you. Only to you. I cannot retrieve the cog."

"Why not?"

"Because I am not a Song-Wolf. Alaric's fail safe responds only to his own bloodline. You are his last living descendant. You must be the one to take it."

I stepped toward the dying soldier. The smoke parted around me. The sounds of battle faded to a dull roar. Emil's eyes, pale green and already clouding with death, shifted to meet mine.

"You are the one," he said. His voice was a rasp, barely audible over the gunfire. "The clockmaker said a woman would come. A woman who hummed the wrong note. He said to give her this and to ask her a question."

"What question?"

"Is it worth it?" His grip on the cog tightened. "Freedom. The fight. The dying. I am twenty-three years old. I will never see my mother again. I will never marry. I will never hold my children. I died for a revolution that failed in this timeline and succeeded in none. So I ask you, woman who hums the wrong note, is freedom worth this?"

I stared at the young man with the crooked flag and the mortal wound and the question that had no easy answer. Somewhere behind me, Caspian was waiting. Somewhere in the Constant Era, Mila was sleeping in a medical wing. Somewhere in the future, the Grand Escapement was preparing to erase every possibility of a world where a soldier could choose to die for what he believed.

"I do not know if it is worth it," I said. "I am not a soldier. I am a cleaner who sold herself at auction to save her sister. But I know that a world without the possibility of this, without the possibility of choosing something worth dying for, is not a world worth living in. I am fighting to make sure your death was not meaningless. That is all I can offer."

Emil smiled. Blood stained his teeth. "Good answer. The clockmaker said you would give a good answer." He pressed the cog into my palm. His fingers were cold, already dead, already memory. "Take it. Finish what he started. And when you see the clockmaker in the final Chronoclast, tell him Emil said the crooked star was the best part."

The battlefield shattered.

Caspian grabbed my arm and pulled me backward. The world inverted. Smoke became light. Screams became silence. I fell through layers of dying history, clutching the second cog against my chest, Emil's question echoing in my skull.

Is freedom worth this?

We crashed back into the eastern parlor. Madame Flux was waiting, her brass eyes sharp. "Thirty-four seconds. You are getting faster. Did you retrieve it?"

I opened my palm. The second cog lay beside the first, both of them humming at the same frequency, their notes harmonizing in a way that made the silver marks on my arms pulse with warmth.

"Eleven remain," I said.

"Ten," Madame Flux corrected. "The second cog is retrieved. Ten remain. And the Synchrony's Iterators are getting closer. They searched the Low District last night. They questioned your former neighbors. They know a woman matching your description was sold at auction three days ago. It is only a matter of time before they trace the purchase to Finch Spire."

Caspian's expression hardened. "How long?"

"A week at most. Possibly less. You need to retrieve the remaining cogs before the Synchrony arrives with a Council warrant. Once they have legal grounds to search this Spire, even Alpha authority cannot keep them out."

"Then we retrieve them faster." I tucked both cogs into the pocket of my dress. "What is the third Chronoclast?"

Madame Flux hesitated. For the first time since I had met her, the old seer looked uncertain. "The third Chronoclast is different. It is not a moment of death or love. It is a moment of silence. The last nightingale's song, recorded in a forest that no longer exists. Alaric hid the third cog inside the bird's song itself. Retrieving it will require you to sing a duet with a creature that has been dead for over a century."

"I cannot sing. I have only ever hummed."

"Then you will learn. Tonight. The nightingale's Chronoclast is the most fragile of all the dead timelines. If you make a mistake, the entire fragment will collapse, and the cog will be lost forever." She gripped her cane with both hands. "I will teach you what I can. The rest you must discover yourself."

Caspian stepped forward. "She needs rest first. She has not slept in two days."

"I do not need you to speak for me," I said.

"I am not speaking for you. I am stating a medical observation. Even Song-Wolves require sleep."

"I slept while you were unconscious on the floor of your north wing. That was rest enough."

"That was two hours of sitting vigil in a freezing room. That is not rest."

Madame Flux struck her cane against the floor. "Enough. Both of you. You bicker like an old married couple, which is ironic given that you are contractually bound and fated to mate. Iskra, sleep for three hours. Caspian, prepare the Spire's defenses in case the Iterators arrive sooner than expected. I will prepare the nightingale's Chronoclast for entry. We reconvene at dusk."

She limped toward the rippling door and vanished without looking back.

Caspian turned to me. His pale eyes were unreadable, but his jaw was tight. "Three hours. Lena will wake you."

"I know where my room is."

"Then use it. Please."

He left before I could respond. I stood alone in the eastern parlor with two humming cogs in my pocket and a dying soldier's question still echoing in my skull.

Is freedom worth this?

I did not know the answer yet. But I was beginning to understand that finding out was the entire point.