“Everyone has a name.”
His brow furrowed with concentration, then broke with mourning. “I have forgotten.”
Selene prepared a rebuttal, until she saw his face. The sorrow in his eyes was a beacon of truth. There was something so honest and tragic about him, as eerie as a worn stone statue guarding a forgotten grave. She thought of a riddle, a callback to childhood. Victor loved to try and catch anyone he could in riddles and word games.What belongs to you but is used more by others?A name, a name. She wondered if names, like the voice, were lost from disuse. Like the door that led her here, rusted shut.
“Whatcanyou remember?”
He closed his eyes. His hands laced and folded in front of him. She counted the scars overlapping his forearms, following them until they disappeared beneath his sleeves. There were too many. She imagined what it would be like to trace those scars with the lightest touch. She reached for her own scars, the familiar grooves soft against her fingertips. It was another sharp reminder of the difference between her and her peers. Selene knew pain.
So did he.
When the ghost opened his eyes, he looked bewildered. Afraid.
“Nothing.”
But that couldn’t be true. A person couldn’t just be lost entirely. Even the dead remained, clinging to the edges of memory, kept until the last person forgot, until every book and story rotted into dust. But this man wasn’t a fading memory. He was speaking to her. He had sung her here.
Music.
He remembered music.
Selene sang the light doloroso. All the melancholy in the world: for want of a name, for the loss of it. For the stranger inside the mirror who had lost so much of himself.
She turned the constellations brighter, grew a distant star into a moon that waxed and waned. He listened for a moment, head tilted in concentration, then joined in. Selene sang the counterpoint, turning her magic into illusion. She grew a forest around them, trees yearning toward the light. Already, she mourned the loss of this beauty. It would all fall away the moment her song ended. That was the trouble with illusion and tableau. Nothing stayed.
He pulled the stars down, letting them hang from the trees like ripe fruit. Selene sustained her motif in wonder. He was changing her magic. She didn’t know it was possible. For all the duets she’d sung, they had to maintain their own motifs and choreograph the magic separately. This was something else entirely, as if music here yielded a different magic. She caught his eye and they let the song fade. The magic stayed. The forest—which outside the mirror would have faded with the final note—stayed lush and full and too close to real.
“That was …” She didn’t have the words. She’d never sung with anyone like this. It was more than a duet; it was two souls crashing together, raw and wretched and open.
“Incredible.” He collapsed against one of the trees, hands splayed against the bark. It held, like it was solid and not an illusion.
Selene pressed her fingertips against one of the trunks. She did not pass through, as she would with an illusion. She reached up and plucked one of the perfect fruits. “It’s real.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
Selene broke it open. A hundred golden seeds gleamed up at her. A pomegranate made of light and song. She crushed one of the seeds against her teeth. It tasted like that last day of summer, a sweetness marked with grief.
Selene offered him the other half. He took it. “Outside the illusion is just an illusion. You can’t make a real tree out of nothing. You need seeds.”
He peeled back the skin of the pomegranate, tearing into the jewels inside. Some of the juice glowed on his fingers. His expression shifted. “Things are different here. The magic is closer.”
Selene leaned forward, eager for some crumb of memory. “You remember?”
“It’s hard to put it to words.”
“Try.”
“I have language and music and magic and pain. The rest—who I am, where I come from, my name—is inside me, under the surface. I have the sense that I deserve this. That I’m being punished for something terrible.” Those blue eyes were resolved, intensely fixed on Selene. “Singing with you is like the first breath after drowning. It brings back pieces of who I am—who I think I might have been.”
Selene’s heart skipped, heat rising through her, feeling more than the magic of his voice or the cold blue of his eyes or the darkness that surrounded him.
“Is it the magic in the music?”
He shook his head, wisps of dark hair falling into his eyes. She wished she was brave enough to smooth them away. “It’s you.”
She drew in closer to him, aware of the rise and fall of his chest, the flicker of his pulse along the lines of his throat. Singing with him was a union of souls, so much more than any duet had ever been for her. Maybe that connection could make him whole.
“All I do is sing.” Selene was quiet. “From the moment I wake up until I go to sleep. I dream in treble clef and wake up knowing the key in which the birds trill. Every part of my brain is made for music. But what we did is different from anything else. It’s more.”
