Feversong (Fever #9)(100)

I pushed the troubling thought from my mind and refocused my efforts on the abbey.

And when I sifted out a few minutes later, to the sound of deafening cheers, the mighty fortress had never looked finer.



I materialized in the physics lab at Trinity College with the left half of my body inside a wall, gasped, sifted instantly to the right and glanced hastily back at the offending structure, afraid I was going to see one of my arms sticking out of it.

The wall was intact. So was I.

I shuddered. That was horrifying. As if part of my body had been neatly displaced and I had no idea where it was until it was abruptly back again. Maybe Fae didn’t mind the feeling of being amputated by inanimate objects, but I did. Perhaps I’d stop sifting until I talked to Cruce and got a better handle on the mechanics. Or aim for wide-open places like Christian.

“Holy hell, what did that feel like?” Dancer exclaimed excitedly, leaping to his feet. “Your bloody molecules must have been displaced. The wall couldn’t possibly hold the combined mass. Where did the excess parts go? Do you know? Can you explain it to me?”

“Beyond wrong and I have no idea,” I said as I joined them. Dancer was standing in the middle of a U-shaped desk, with a portable keyboard on one side and computers of various shapes and sizes on every other available inch of it.

Alina was sprawled in a chair next to it, and for a moment I just basked in seeing my sister, here, with me, in Dublin, alive.

She grinned, checking me out from head to toe. The grin turned to a smirk and she said, “Hey, Junior, looked in a mirror lately?”

“Pretty sure I don’t want to,” I said wryly. “Did you listen to the music box?”

She sobered instantly. “Yes. It’s horrific. Seriously. Worst. Music. Ever. I’m not sure you can even call it music.”

“Worse than the song you hear coming from the black holes?”

She considered a moment then said, “No, it’s more like the song I hear from the different Unseelie castes. There’s something wrong with it.”

“Why am I the only one that hears a beautiful song?” I said irritably.

Dancer shrugged. “No idea. I’m still working on converting it to numbers. Here, let me play part of it for you and we’ll see if it sounds as bad on my keyboard as it does coming from the box. Maybe there’s something about the box itself that distorts it for us.”

He dropped back into his chair, turned around and powered up the keyboard, then glancing over his shoulder, reading lines of music off the computer, began to play.

“Ah! Stop!” I shouted, hastily covering my ears. “That’s not the song I hear. That’s awful! You must have written it down wrong.”

“Those are the exact notes,” Dancer protested. “I converted them to numbers starting at C.”

“Well, you did it wrong somehow. Maybe you started at a different note than you thought you did.”

He gave me a blank look. “I don’t do things wrong, Mac. I played exactly what the music box plays.” He glanced at Alina for confirmation and she nodded.

I said, “All I know is that’s not the melody I hear. This is what I hear.” I began to hum softly.

Alina said, “But that’s not what we hear at all, Junior.”

Dancer waved a hand at her, shushing her, his eyes suddenly intensely bright. “Nobody talk. Hum, Mac. Just keep humming.”

I hummed. And hummed. And hummed some more. While he sat, eyes growing more and more unfocused, listening, nodding, finally grinning broadly.

“I’ll be damned!” He spun back to his computer. “I hear patterns. I see them, too. It’s one of the quirks of my brain. Everything has structure. Even social interactions. Sometimes it’s hard not to get lost in them. Sometimes,” he said, as he typed away, “I get so distracted designing mathematical constructs out of social situations that I forget I’m actually involved in them.” He fell silent then and typed for several minutes, hummed a few notes, typed some more then pushed away from the computer and beamed up at me. “I know what’s wrong with you,” he announced excitedly.

“Let me have it,” I said warily.

“You’re hearing the song inverted. Perfectly inverted. Every bloody layer of it. Unreal. And you aren’t even intelligent enough to understand how fantastically improbable that is. Do you have Asperger’s?” he demanded. “What other unusual things does your brain do?” He narrowed his eyes, peering at me as if I was a fascinating specimen he’d like to slap on a slide and push beneath a microscope.

“Inverted. Explain.”

“I knew as soon as you began humming that it was essentially the same thing. But not. Inversion is the rearrangement of the top-to-bottom elements in an interval, chord, or melody. In simpler terms, you’re hearing the music the box plays with every last bit of it flipped.” He made a rotating gesture with his hands. “Perfectly flipped, and that’s impossible. People don’t hear music perfectly inverted.”

“Play it the way I hear it on the keyboard.”

“Give me a sec.” He went back to work on his computer, inverting what he’d converted to numbers earlier. When he was done, he opened a program, exported the data, punched a few more buttons, and music began to play through the computer speakers.