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Chapter One
Aveline
I feel the sound of the opera rehearsal through the pavement, in the soles of my boots, but I can’t hear any of it. I feel it in the bones of my feet, it climbs up my shins, and when the drums start, I feel them in my back teeth. I stand in the shadow near the performers’ entrance with my shoulders against the brick, so I can feel the music through the wall in my spine. I know from the way it builds and drops that they’re close to the end of something big. Inside the building, people are breathing together, counting together, and waiting on the conductor’s hand. I used to stand in the middle of it. Now I’m on the outside, with the music going through me like I was never a part of it. It hurts more than I thought it could.
I open my hand and stare at the six copper pieces and one silver coin, which is what I earned at the market today, singing with my palm pressed to my chest so I could feel the notes. People stopped, and some of them stayed until the end of the song. One woman put the silver in my cup without looking at my face, and I thanked her. It’s enough for a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese. I count the coins again, not because I’ve forgotten the number, but because I need something to do with my hands while I wait for the door to open. Because I’d rather look at the meager coins than at the door.
The performers’ entrance is a plain door of dark wood set into the side wall, with an iron lamp above it and a stone step worn hollow in the middle. Around the corner, the façade has columns, gilded letters, and tall posters for the current performances.
I’ve come here for two months now. I’ve asked the doorman, the wardrobe mistress, the men who carry the scenery, and anyone else who’s opened this door while I was standing out in the cold. I’ve offered to sew, and I’ve offered to scrub the dressing rooms, the corridors, and the privies. I’ve offered to carry, to sweep, to run messages, mend, and do whatever else they’ll hand me. I stopped asking to sing after the first few refusals. Some of them have told me no with pity, and some with disgust. The ones who refuse me with pity are always harder, because I can see them wanting to say yes and deciding against it while I watch their lips move.
I pull my hood a little farther over the right side of my face and settle in to wait.
I don’t need to walk around the corner to know what’s on the posters. Six months ago, they had my face on them. I was twenty years old and the youngest prima donna in the history of the Rosemere Lyric House, with my name printed larger than the title of the opera. People came from every part of the city to hear me sing. The critics called my voice clear and luminous. Strangers said my name in the street.
Home was Bellflower Row, where the houses stand so close together that there’s no gap at all between one and the next. My family’s bakery was on the ground floor, and our rooms were above it. My father worked the ovens, and my mother worked beside him with her sleeves rolled up and her hair tied back. She ran the shop, the books, and the four of us. My brother was sixteen and apprenticed to my father. He was learning to shape the loaves. I used to help in the shop when I was little, but then I was at the Lyric House every morning, every evening, and most of the time in between, so my family took over the work I couldn’t do anymore and never once said a word about it. My mother said my career belonged to all of us. She said it exactly that way – that it was ours.
The drums start again through the brick, and I press my palm to the wall behind me. I make myself keep going, because I’ve learned that if I stop halfway through remembering, I only have to start again later. Remembering what happened that night hurts, but it also keeps me grounded. Keeps me grateful that I am here, alive.
And if I’m alive… Then life can still…
It can get better.
That night, six months ago, I’d come home from a performance and gone straight up to my room and fallen asleep. My parents and my brother were downstairs starting the morning bread. I remember unbearable heat. There was a sound, and it’s the last sound I ever heard.
I’ve never been able to say what it was exactly, only that I felt it in my bones as much as I heard it. My skin went soft on one side, which is the only way I’ve ever found to put it, and then there was the pain, then nothing. I don’t know who pulled me out or how. I woke up in the hospital and couldn’t hear the nurses, couldn’t turn my head. The Peacekeepers came later and told me the rest.
They were kind about it or tried to be. They wrote it out for me because I couldn’t follow the movement of their lips yet. Their investigation had discovered that the flour chute jammed while my father was working. When it came free, it filled the workroom with dust, and a worn bearing in the old sifting mechanism made a spark. The dust caught, and that was the first explosion. It shook loose every bit of flour that had settled over the years in the rafters, on the shelves, and in the corners no one swept. All of that went up in a second blast that tore through the building, lit the ovens, the stored wood, and the timber floors.
The houses on Bellflower Row stand too close together for a fire to burn in only one of them. It spread into the neighbors’ homes and the neighbors’ shops. The noise woke everyone, and everyone got out. People were hurt, and dozens of families lost their homes or their livings. My father, my mother, and my brother were the only ones who died.
The blast threw me through part of the front wall as it came down, the Peacekeepers wrote, and someone pulled me out of the burning wreckage before the rest of the house collapsed on top of it.
I lost my hearing to the concussion. Burns now cover the right side of my face, from my temple down across my cheek, jaw, and along my neck. They go on down my shoulder, my arm, my ribs, my back, and my thigh. The smoke went into my throat and my lungs, and for months I couldn’t speak and couldn’t sing at all.
I spent every coin I had on the hospital. When I could talk again, and later sing again, the Lyric House had already found a new prima donna. My voice came back different. I can feel that much. I feel it lower in my chest than I used to, it’s warmer and rougher in my throat. I can’t hear it, so I don’t know if it’s still a voice anyone would pay to listen to. I only know how it feels, and that’s not the same as knowing.
I touch my throat, then I take my hand away.
The house and the bakery are gone. What was left of our things was taken or sold to pay for some of the damage. The survivors of Bellflower Row decided that my father’s old machinery and his flour storage had done this to them. I don’t think they’re wrong. No one could prove he’d been careless, but the sifter was old and the flour had been in those rafters for as long as I’d been alive. The people needed someone to hold it against, and I’m the only one of us left.
My neighbors drove me off when I went back. The shopkeepers I’d known since I was a child wouldn’t serve me. When they rebuilt the street, they made it clear I wasn’t to come back to it.
They call me the Bellflower Fire Girl. I’ve seen the words on people’s lips when they didn’t yet know I could read them.
I don’t hate them for it. They lost their homes and I’m still alive, and that gives them more right to Bellflower Row than I have.
I understand the Lyric House too. They don’t want a singer who can’t hear the orchestra. They don’t want patrons who’ve paid for an evening of beauty to look up and see this. I don’t look in mirrors anymore unless I have to, and when I do, I understand exactly why people turn away. It would be strange to expect them not to.
The door finally opens. I feel it before I see it, a change in the vibration through the wall as it swings. I pull my hood down on the right and step out of the shadow into the last of the daylight. I put myself where the light will fall on the other person’s face and not on mine.
It’s the stage manager, the new one. She came to the house not long before the fire, and I worked under her for a handful of performances but never learned much about her. She’s holding the door open with one hip and looking down the street, not at me. I move into the edge of her sight and wait until she notices me.
“Excuse me,” I say.
She flinches, and I know I’ve said it too loud, though I can’t always tell. I bring my voice down and try again.
“I’m sorry. Is there any work? I’ll take anything at all. I can sew. I can clean, carry things, or work backstage, wherever you need someone. I know the building. I’ll stay out of everyone’s way.”
