When the Sky Fell on Splendor(54)

The six of us looked at one another for a long, laden moment. Goose bumps had sprung up beneath my damp clothes, but the knot of anxiety that had been building in my chest all week loosened a bit.

Maybe he was right.

We had the video from the cave, and soon we’d know who’d dropped those bullets. We’d have proof that they’d taken the debris, so we’d have leverage to make sure our secret was safe (if we even needed it). We were figuring out what had happened to us and how to control it. The investigation was winding down.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actively thought, Things are going to be okay.

But it honestly, truly looked like they might be.

“Nick,” Sofia said, nodding through the doorway to the little red piano against the wall.

Nick drifted forward, and we hemmed in after him. He ran a hand along the dusty top of the piano.

I hadn’t noticed last time that chunks of it had been gouged out, that every bit of surface that hadn’t been carved or chipped had been graffitied in Sharpie. “It’s the same one from your dreams?” I whispered.

His fingers played on a massive chip in the corner. “This was there,” he said, brow furrowed. “But the rest of it wasn’t.”

“It looks like a regular piano,” Levi mused. “Except . . . you know, small.”

“Definitely doesn’t look like a secret spaceship or anything,” Remy agreed.

“Well, he hasn’t played it yet,” Arthur said, without a hint of irony. Levi even nodded. After everything else we’d seen, why shouldn’t this be something spectacular, some alien secret?

Nick slid onto the undersized bench, examining the keys wordlessly as his fingers trailed over them too lightly to make sound.

“It’s kind of sad,” Sofía said, walking a half circle around it. “It’s so small. It’s like—hard not to think of it like an abused puppy.”

“Nicky Jr.,” Arthur pressed. “We don’t have long . . . someone could have seen the lights again.”

Nick depressed one of the keys, and it brayed gracelessly.

“Yikes,” Levi said.

Nick pressed another key with his pinky. In the dim light, the blurry bird tattoos on his fingers blended into the words scribbled over the ivory keys. He tapped the highest key, then went down the line playing all the rest in quick succession. Every once in a while, a saggy, deflated noise rang out, but for the most part they sounded okay.

Levi poked a key too. Without looking up, Nick swatted his hand away.

Remy snorted. “Now you know how the rest of us feel when you pet us, dude.”

Nick set both hands on the piano, slowly, carefully.

No one moved; we held our breath.

Nick played a note—or was it a chord? It required at least three keys and it rang out low and calm, the slightest bit dissonant but not at all ugly. His hands moved position and he played another, and then his fingers began to move more quickly, skating across the keys with ease, pulling notes from them expertly, apart from the occasional honk of the more severely out-of-tune keys.

The smile slid off Sofía’s face, morphing into an awed O.

“What the . . .” Remy breathed.

Levi lifted his camera and hit Record.

It wasn’t proficient . . . it was enchanting. Nick’s hands danced over the keys. The song was felt, tender and melancholy and haunting. His eyes closed, his brows knit together, and his lips pressed tight. As the song sped, it became hard to tell where his fingers ended and the keys began, he and the piano fading into each other.

As far as I knew, the closest Nick had come to playing an instrument was three weeks with a trumpet in seventh-grade band class. He swore he’d quit because the teacher hated him, which I’d always assumed meant he’d taken advantage of the opportunity to make a lot of well-timed fart noises until finally, he’d been asked to drop the class.

Maybe this should have been less shocking than what I’d done, but to me, it wasn’t. This thing Nick was doing was entirely foreign. It was from outside himself.

It was a gift.

The song ended.

Nick opened his eyes and drew his hands back from the keys. The whole room seemed to draw its first breath in minutes.

And then something thudded heavily to the floor behind me.

All of us spun toward the sound.

Remy was on the ground, his eyes rolling, his back arched and limbs contorted in odd, sharp angles.

A low, horrible sound gurgled from his throat. The others were running toward him.

Nick screaming Remy’s name.

Sofía calling out for someone to dial 911.

Arthur shouting that we couldn’t, we were trespassing.

Levi screaming that it didn’t matter.

But I was frozen in place, all my floaty optimism turning into ice inside my chest as my best friend lay writhing on the floor.

“What’s happening?” Levi shouted through tears, trying to hold Remy down.

“He’s having some kind of seizure!” Sofía said.

“The song!” Nick yelped. “The song did it!”

“Don’t be stupid,” Arthur snapped.

The pressure inside me was building, and I wasn’t strong enough to hold it in. The lights shivered overhead and the hum rose until everything in the room was quivering.