Then the music swelled, and Zada remembered why she was here. The rich curtains at the back of the stage almost seemed to glow as she took her place. Buford, looking very handsome in his suit, gave her an approving little nod. The officiant, a more senior aide of Legislator Bassey’s, stepped up to the podium.
But then, with an enormous grin, Flora handed Zada hertriple cello, and Augusta produced the bow. How wonderful. She’d nearly forgot this was happening.
Zada took her place on the grandest stage in the grandest room of City Hall. The crowd before her was silent, rapt. They had been to enough weddings to recognize a bride going off-script. Nobody had asked her to play.
It was harmless. She had smuggled her triple cello case to the venue in a box of flowers and then into the hall itself draped in the folds of her enormous dress. Flora and Augusta had done the rest, secreting the triple cello and the bow behind one of the massive curtains at the back of the room.
She only needed to prove to herself that she was not some broken shard of a woman, that every part of her was present and ready to marry Buford. She touched the bow to the strings, playing a G on instinct. The sound reverberated through the room like laughter. The piece from before beckoned. Somehow, she knew that she could perform it by heart.
Zada brought the bow to the strings and began to play.
The floating, blissful feeling didn’t disperse all at once.
It felt like waking up very slowly from a dream, pieces of reality bobbing back up one by one to the surface of her mind. Daphne, playing her foldable mandolin and the dizzying surge of shared creation, of writing a melody together that hadn’t existed before. Zada sitting alone in her room, layering music at her triple cello. That bone-dry first kiss with Buford. Laughing with Daphne, Flora, Augusta, and Carine as they painted their faces to pretend to be statues.
Watching Daphne, surrounded by bright lines of code.Watching Daphne distract a slew of anxious first-years with a spot-on impression of Professor Egerton. Watching Daphne deftly pick the lock of her grandfather’s study.
Gathering interviews with the nuns, picking up stories that ran against everything she’d ever been taught. Kissing Daphne at the grotto rock concert. Deciding to work hand in hand with a friend Zada hadn’t spoken to in a year, a friend she had no reason to trust, because it had seemed the only possible way out of a lifetime backed into living a lie. The shock of realizing that Daphne had harbored her own agenda from the beginning. Crying alone in the interrogation room.
Zada kept playing on pure muscle memory. She felt like she was fretting the strings and bowing the notes while falling down an impossible cavern, or possibly rising from it. Every part of her mind that had been amputated and cauterized opened to her at once—the pain, the ambivalence, the bitter disappointment. At the same time, she remembered the other side of the same coin. She had chosen to go to the grotto rock concert. She had kissed Daphne, and outwitted Chancellor Fallow’s security system, and uncovered the lies behind the Heartsong program and the Core. She had turned down Counseling, and even then, she’d tried to leave herself a message in the form of seven notes inked onto her arm with makeup and tears.
Zada Chambers was shy and quiet and disastrously bad at public speaking. But some part of her was also a fighter, and meeting that part of her again was a heady rush. And not only that, she knew that Daphne had scaled the side of her home to see her, to try to break the spell of Counseling and to return to her some morsel of herself. She had it now.
She had it now, and everyone in the room was staring at her. Was there, she asked herself, a word for how she felt? She thought of the nuns and their secret library, and wondered if that word was inside one of the many volumes the leaders of New Ionia had fought so hard to keep from her.
The song ended. She was breathing like she’d run a mile. She half expected someone to run up and yell at her audience, to insist they hadn’t heard what they’d just heard.
From their seats in the hall, Zada’s parents beamed. They’d always loved her music, even if they thought it a distraction.
The officiant conjured up his notes from his SmartGem.
“Well,” he said with an awkward laugh, “I can’t follow a demonstration of love like that, and so I won’t try.”
Oh. They thought the song was for Buford. Her gaze found Daphne in the back of the room. Daphne, who for once looked uncertain.
The officiant cleared his throat. “Do you, Zada Chambers, take Buford Arnoth to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Zada breathed in. She could do this. Just because nobody else had ever done it before didn’t mean there couldn’t be a first time.
“No,” she said, voice carrying in the perfect acoustics. “I don’t.”
A loud murmur arose. Someone gasped.
“Uh, nothing personal,” she added. “Buford is a good man. But this system, letting some algorithm decide who you’re meant to be with—it’s rotten, all of it.” She swallowed. “And not just because anyone with the right permissions can go into the program and alter its results. The Heartsong program selected Buford as my soulmate, yes, but I can’t spend my lifewith someone just because the math checks out. I can’t trust an algorithm over what every fiber of my being is telling me. The Core has what data I’ve given it, but it doesn’t know me. It doesn’t know what I need or what I truly want.”
When she looked out into the crowd, Daphne was gazing back at her.
“I don’t really know what my destiny is,” Zada continued, “but I believe that love should be a choice.”
She thought of the nuns, Sister Patience and Sister Justice, who hadn’t been brought together by Heartsong. They’d picked each other, with no guarantee at all of how their story might end. Two months ago, the very thought of that would have filled Zada with panic. Now, she saw something brave and beautiful in what they’d built, even on uncertain ground.
“And I don’t choose Buford,” she said. “I can’t.” Another deep breath. Her time was running out. She knew the only reason she’d been allowed to speak for this long was because everyone in charge was too stunned to move. “The person I’d choose—if she chooses me, too—is Daphne Fallow.”
Daphne’s face lit up, sun-bright. Then she was running down the aisle, crossing the room in long strides, and vaulting up onto the stage.
“Hi,” said Zada softly.
“Hi,” said Daphne.
