Not for the first time that day, Adagio Dazzle held the broken shards of her pendant and cursed every name she could think of: Sunset Shimmer, the Rainbooms, Aria Blaze, Sonata Dusk especially, and basically everybody who wasn't her.
She was pacing up and down behind the cell bars, tapping them from time to time as she did so. Not so long ago, she could have simply wished for escape and the bars would’ve crumpled under her power. Her fingers fidgeted around the shards again, grinding them against each other.
Finally, she stopped and folded her arms to glare at the other side of the cell. In one corner, Aria Blaze had draped herself over the top deck of the bunk bed – her bed, Adagio noted – and was now staring at the ceiling as if it were barely worth the effort of staying awake. In the other corner, Sonata Dusk was sitting cross-legged on the floor and happily slurping down a bowlful of what could only be described as porridge with the fun taken out.
“Some plan, Adagio,” muttered Aria.
“At least I had one!” Adagio snapped. “If it were up to you two, we’d still be sitting around a café table, nibbling fast food forever. I could have had this world in the palm of my hand. I could have had it all!”
“Uh,” said Sonata, putting the bowl down for a moment, “don’t you mean ‘we’? And I don’t think you can get the world to fit inside the palm of your hand, unless you do a handstand or something.”
“Urgh!” Aria turned to face the wall. “Wipe your mouth, Sonata. That stuff’s disgusting enough without seeing it all over your ugly face.”
“It’s actually not that bad once you get past the blandness. Do you think they do seconds?”
“‘Do you think they do seconds?’” Aria rolled her eyes at the wall. “No wonder we lost to those losers when we’ve got you on the team, Sonata.”
“Well excuse me,” said Sonata, “for trying to make the best of things. I didn’t even want a battle of the bands in the first place. I was happy where I was.”
“Well, you would be, wouldn’t you?”
“What does that mean?”
“Gee, you can’t figure it out. What a shock. You don’t have any standards. There. That’s what I mean.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re just saying stuff to confuse me and make me look stupid.”
“Like you need me for that.”
“Well, I don’t. So there.” Sonata smirked long and hard before her brain finally caught up with her ears. “Wait a minute… Hey!”
Adagio let the argument jump back and forth. Once upon a time, this nonsense would have been cut short by a carefully placed name-drop, a stern slice of the hand, or, if she was really fed up, a flat-out insult. Listening to it had all the pleasures of listening to a screwdriver carving lines in corrugated iron. But after a few long hours in a dingy cell, it was starting to sound like the most sublime of duets.
She let the words shoot back and forth, and peered down at her shards again.
It wasn’t her first defeat – she knew that much – but at least those other times had left her with a pendant still in one piece. If you had your pendant, you could sing. If you could sing, you could reach into the heart of another and caress a few strings. If you could get a melody out of it, you could get an argument, a sneer, or a full-blown fight out of someone else. And if you could get that, then you could get negative energy. You basically got to live.
The mere memory of it made her mouth water, but like all the best things, it didn’t come cheap. The whole thing could be derailed at a single step. Perhaps she had a sore throat, or the victim wasn’t musically inclined, or the worst argument they could manage was just a spat, or one of the many magical beings of Equestria would swoop down and suck up all the negative energy before a drop had reached her. Not to mention the whole thing only really worked when it wasn’t ripped out of a magical field and dumped into a place where physics was the law.
Like this miserable world.
Ignoring the two idiots behind her, Adagio peered through the bars to the corridor outside. Remarkably, no one else seemed to be about. There were no guards patrolling, no fellow criminals running mugs across the bars or writing their memoirs. It almost made her sick. This place really was as goody-goody as Equestria had been.
“You want to know what I think?” Sonata began. “I think this wouldn’t have happened if Adagio hadn’t said –”
“There must be a way out of here.”
The two fell silent. Sonata’s wide eyes flitted to Adagio, while Aria deigned to lift her head and look around as if perfectly willing to let it drop back if the follow-up didn’t impress her.
“There isn’t,” she said, testing the waters.
Adagio strode over to the barred window and stretched up on tiptoe to rap the iron with her knuckles. “The only things keeping us in here are these bars. Remove those or slip past them, and with the bunk bed and each other to climb up, we could be out of here in no time.”
“Oh yeah,” said Aria. “Great plan. I’ll go on a diet until I’m three inches thick. Sonata, why don’t you chew your way through the unchewable iron bars, or something?”
“I’m game.” Sonata champed at the air. “Which one first?”
Adagio rounded on the bunk bed. “Make yourself useful, Aria, and get off that bed for one minute.”
Aria waited several seconds just to drive the point home. Then she swung her legs over the side and lowered herself as though her feet were made of glass. Not once did she break eye contact with Adagio, who simply stood there frowning until she was off.
“Good girl,” Adagio said. “I’ll give you a treat later.”
“Oh goody,” said Aria. “I’m not a dog, you know.”
“You keep telling yourself that. Now get out of the way.”
“Why?” Aria folded her arms at her.
This time, Adagio gripped her shoulders and almost threw her aside. “Just get out of the way! Do I have to walk you everywhere? Do I have to breathe for you next?”
While Aria stopped stumbling and straightened up as coolly as she could manage, Adagio gripped the bars of the bed and heaved, gritting her teeth and groaning under the strain. Her face began to ripen. Veins pulsed in the backs of her hands. Her eyes seemed to be melting the frame with a glare like a laser blast.
After a while, Sonata cocked her head. “What are you doin’? Is it a game of some kind?”
Aria didn’t even try to hide the smirk. “Yeah. It’s a game called Who Will Be The First To See The Bed Is Nailed To The Floor?”
“Shut… up.” Adagio released the bed and gasped and panted over it. “At least… I had… a plan…”
This was met with a slow, limp-wristed clap. “Yes, yes you did. You must be so proud of how well your plans keep turning out.”
“Do they?” Sonata ran a finger around the lip of the bowl. “I don’t think they work out that well. I mean, look at us now. Yesterday, we were running around all over the place looking for a jewellery store –”
“And whose… idea… was that?” Adagio clawed her way from the depths of exhaustion. “Neither of you would’ve done anything but whinge. I took the initiative.”
“Now, we’re in jail. I’m not the best judge, but even I think that’s kind of a step down.” The gruel-slopped face ducked back down into the recesses of the bowl, and the other two wrinkled their noses.
Adagio was still clawing her way from a depth, but she could feel the cold and the dark creeping up on her. Yes, they were in jail, but they wouldn’t be for long. Every locked door she’d faced had a key somewhere. If there was a lock, there was a key. If there wasn’t a key, there was a battering ram. If there wasn’t a battering ram…
Like the park bench. It still amused her, somewhere in the pit of her current desire to strangle Sonata, that they had run through the park, lifted the bench under moonlight, and run back out without anyone stopping them. Plenty of people saw them, and a fair few jumped off the pavement and cursed them as they barged through, but no one had dared to stand in their way on purpose. Most had been content to watch. Apart from being walking snacks, that was all they were good for.
The jeweller’s hadn’t put up any further resistance when they smashed the front. No shutters came down, no automatic locks clicked, and even the alarm that blasted their eardrums went dead once she'd found it and ripped it out of the wall. It should have been a perfect crime.
“Go in,” she murmured, “get the glue, come out again.”
Gruel rose out of the bowl and opened its eyes at her. The slop oozed and dropped off, revealing Sonata’s small mouth. It was like looking at a bowling ball with a ponytail.
“Wazzat?” she said.
“Go in. Get the glue. Come out again.” Adagio massaged her brow to give both her hands something to do; they were itching to crush someone’s neck. “That’s what I said at the jeweller’s, if your tiny little mind can remember that far back.”
“That’s what I did! I went in, I got the glue, I came out again. Just like you said.”
“Yes. And then you stood outside, forgot to tell us anything, and left us still searching. Who does that? Who on this miserable little planet would be dumb enough to do that?”
“It’s not my fault!” Sonata quivered where she sat. “I didn’t know what you were planning. I thought you’d come out and tell me what to do next. Honest, I did!”
Aria leaned against the bars and the wall in the corner, and stared up at the ceiling as if beseeching someone. At this, Sonata whipped out an arm and aimed a finger at her.
“Anyway, she saw me standing outside. She didn’t say anything too! Why don’t you yell at her?”
A scoff met this suggestion, and Aria swung her gaze back down. “Of course! Because there was no chance you’d simply forgotten what we were doing. That would totally be out of character for you.”
“Whereas,” piped up Adagio, “letting her stand out like a beacon for any passing coppers – out of spite – would be totally out of character for you, wouldn’t it Aria?”
Aria shrugged. “The decoy would’ve worked if you’d just slipped out the back like I said we should.”
“I saw she had the glue!” lied Adagio. “Besides, a repeat break-in would have been easier with three of us rather than two. If the coppers hadn’t been so fast, we could have made it.”
“Or if Sonata hadn’t been so slow on the uptake. Again.”
Both Sonata and Adagio gave a simultaneous “hmph”, the former diving back into her bowl, the latter frowning at what she’d just done – however accidentally – and turning her back to the cell.
It was so typical of Aria to blame anybody but herself. She acted like the world was denying her one true destiny of leadership, and yet all she did was either drag them down like a dead weight or piggyback on her – Adagio’s – own plans. Like she had the brains to think up the decoy plan, instead of just hating Sonata enough to let it happen on its own. Not that she could blame the deadbeat, but even she – Adagio – could tell it was just Aria’s excuse not to do anything and pretend that her laziness mattered.
While Adagio checked the tiled floor for any dropped objects, a mechanical squeak tapped her ears and she glanced up. For a moment, she just saw rows of strip lights hanging overhead in the corridor, but as she leaned towards the bars, what had been a patch of grey shadow swivelled with a squeak and she caught the glare of a lens peering down at her.
A camera. Someone was watching her through a camera. She filed this fact away for later use and, because it gave her some amusement, made a rude hand gesture up at it.
“Really mature, Adagio,” said Aria.
“Come up with a brilliant plan of escape, yet?” said Adagio, lowering her arm.
“Not my job.” Under Aria’s pointed eyebrows, the look in her eyes had daggers. Adagio turned around on the spot, careful not to expose her back to that corner, just in case the daggers weren't entirely metaphorical.
Moonlight was pouring through the barred window. Adagio tried to dissect it in her mind, but a slopping from the floor was worming its way through her ears and into her brain. She had an urge to swat at her own earlobes. Inexorably, her head turned to face Sonata, who was still sitting on the floor and still drooling that vomit-worthy gruel as though it were sweet nectar.
If she ate any faster, she was going to make herself ill. Just what they needed right now.
Adagio peered over her shoulder at the camera. It was still locked onto her cell. She looked back at Sonata.
“Hey Sonata,” she said. “Are you feeling OK?”
Two grunt-like noises came from the bowl and the slop, and she guessed the first one had been, “Yeah,” and the second one had been, “Why?”
“That stuff doesn’t contain any gluten, does it?” she said. “Or any nuts, or milk, or artificial sweeteners?”
Sonata lowered the bowl again, and it was all Adagio could do not to yell at her in disgust. “What?”
Adagio sauntered over, trying not to smirk as she cast her shadow over the bowl in Sonata’s lap, and then over Sonata’s face and hair. Behind her, Aria shifted so that she was no longer leaning against the wall.
“Yeah, nothing in there that’s a problem, is there?” Aria said.
“Are you kidding me?” Sonata beamed up at them both. “This is some of the most delicious stuff I’ve ever eaten.”
“It’s not a question of how tasty it is,” said Adagio. “I’m just worried about your sensitive stomach.”
She paused for a moment and focused. A few twitches ran along her brow, and her cheeks stretched uncomfortably. She forced the expression onto her face and tried, with much straining and burning, to radiate pure soft-hearted concern and compassion for all living things, or at least for the one right in front of her.
Sonata tried to bury her head into her neck. “Uh, Adagio, are you OK? Your face, um, looks a teeny tiny bit, er, really super s-s-scary.”
“I mean, prison food isn’t exactly tailored to your dietary needs, now is it?” Adagio clasped her hands together above her chest. She leaned forwards – Sonata’s whole body flinched and hit the wall – and with her teeth gritted in a rictus, whispered urgently, “This is a plan. Pretend to be sick, and someone will come. We overpower the guard and we might just get out of here. And don’t blurt out what I’ve just said.”
Watching the sun rise on Sonata’s face was a painfully drawn-out experience. It started with the chin, which lowered as the jaw muscles went slack. It rose up to her mouth, which parted from a line as straight and neutral as a groin-straining high-wire act and became a tunnel of comprehension. Lastly, it rose up to the eyes, which lit up when the brain finally rolled out of bed and found the light switch.
“Sonata!” said Adagio, hands to mouth. She lowered them when she realized the practical problems and continued, “You look awful.”
“Um…” Sonata glanced down at the bowl for inspiration, and rubbed her stomach. “Actually, I kind of feel awful too.”
“Good, good, now go with that,” whispered Adagio. Aloud, she said, “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
“So long as it’s not my bed,” came a mutter from behind her.
Adagio almost jumped out of her skin as Sonata shot up to her two feet and groaned at the top of her voice. In a nice touch, she then clutched her stomach and bent double.
“Ooh, my stomach! What’s happening!? It hurts! Oh, it hurts so much!”
“Sonata!” Adagio lunged forwards and tried to support her, one arm over her own shoulders, and she glared at Aria in the corner. “Don’t just stand there like a dummy! Call someone! Get help!”
“What?” Aria almost howled the word. “Why me?”
“Just do it! I think she’s going to faint at any moment!”
She suddenly felt the weight threaten to buckle her. Hurriedly, she whispered to Sonata, “Don’t actually faint. Save that for later. Just keep groaning.”
“I’m burning up, Adagio!” Sonata waved a hand in front of her face. “Adagio? Adagio? I can’t see anything!”
“What?”
“I can’t see anything. I’ve gone blind!”
“No you haven’t,” Adagio said, trying to get the camera-exposed side of her face to look concerned while the other side burned and glowered. “You’re just overreacting. It’s just a sore stomach, and that’s all it is.”
Sonata’s free hand clutched her side. “Oh, now my kidneys ache!”
“That’s your ribcage, you fool,” hissed Adagio.
“Eh?”
“Lower down. Your kidneys are lower down.”
“Oh, sorry.” Sonata burst out groaning again. “Oh, now my ribcages ache! Owee, owee, owee!”
“Just don’t improvise, OK?” She glared at Aria. “For Pete’s sake, shout for someone!”
“What’s improvising?” whispered Sonata.
“Don’t stop groaning! Aria, call someone over!”
Aria grunted with bad grace and sloppily threw herself at the bars. She cupped her hands to her mouth and simply set her drone to a louder volume. “Hey. People. Got a problem in here. Is there a medic or something? Medic. Medic.”
Adagio growled. “Put some life into it! Sonata, get into the bed now.”
“Owee, owee, owee – Which one? – Oh, my spleen!”
“That’s your throat. I don’t care which one. My one! Just get in, uh, you poor, sickly thing,” she added with a quick glance at the camera. When Sonata’s top half slumped over the edge of the mattress and started sliding off, Adagio rushed over to the camera and waved at it with outstretched arms.
“Hey!” she shrieked as much as she dared, dignity be blown. “Someone get down here! We don’t know what’s wrong with her! Help! Help!”
She tactically ignored Aria’s sniggering, but somewhere in the depths of her mind, she added it to a list. She also decided against pulling out of her soul any tears; method acting was out of the question in case Aria followed it up with questions later.
“I think I’m going to be sick!” Sonata slipped and seized the bed frame, her ponytail bouncing off the lower mattress. “Ow, my… my brain hurts!”
“There’s a shock,” muttered Aria. “Sonata has a brain. Who knew?”
Sonata scrambled back onto the upper mattress, made harder by her efforts to curl up and cradle her torso at the same time. “Course I… have a brain – Owee! And I thought… I was bad… at anamy in science class.”
“Anatomy.” Aria shook her head, and her long tails stroked the bars one at a time. “At least I didn’t flunk English.”
“Will you stop arguing and help me!?” shouted Adagio, and she turned back to waving at the camera and pounding the bars with her fist. “Hello! I know you’re watching us up there! Sick girl down here! She needs help! Please!”
Aria shrugged and went back to droning half-heartedly. “Medic. Medic. Prisoner needs a jab, or something, I guess. Medic.”
“My pancreas!” Sonata wailed from the bed. “Now, it’s hurting my pancreas! Make it stop! Make it stop!”
Adagio was almost shrieking. “Help! Somebody bring a barf bag, quick! Please help, please! I don’t know what’s wrong with her! Please, for Pete’s sake! Help! I just don’t know – Sonata stop making stuff up it’s really not helping – what’s wrong! Help! Please! Somebody, anybody! Help!”
Despite the sniggers sneaking under Aria’s requests for a medic, Adagio was feeling more… alive with each wail and histrionic wave. The shouting was running out from her chest and bowling over the air like a band hankering for its audience, and she knew that the beating, shrieking, and pounding percussion had a purpose, which made it switch from a pack of nice-sounding noises to a single spirit living through the music. She almost saw the tantalizing green haze of the crowd, just lurking out of reach, and for a moment her pleas and desperation seemed no longer to be an act, but was felt right down to her heart.
This rather shocked her.
Up until now, she’d never believed she had a heart. Yet, here it was, shouldering Aria’s dull-as-ditchwater performance, and not merely because she had to do so for the sake of the plan. It even found the strong back to bear Sonata’s inane mumblings, as she’d run out of body parts and was now throwing out synonyms for “It hurts.”
The moonlight started to fade at the window, but she reached further down into the darkest recesses of her lungs and tried not to notice the crack in her voice. Aria had fallen back into the corner again, not even pretending to be interested. After a while, Sonata’s groaning gave way to yawning and then to snoring.
With a final beat of the bars, Adagio fell silent, spun around, leaned against the cell door – making it shudder on its hinges – and slumped down to the floor. Her throat was stinging the rest of her neck.
The dawn light filtered through the little window.
Aria cocked one hand to her ear. “Do you think they’re coming?” she said. “Or are they still looking for the heartburn pills?”
Adagio summoned up the last of her spirit into a glare and shot it at Aria’s drooping eyelids. When she’s sleeping, she thought, I’m going to take a pillow off my bed, climb down that ladder, and make sure she never wakes up.
After a while, Adagio pushed herself off the floor and marched over to the bunk bed to shake Sonata awake.
“Wha?” said Sonata as she opened her eyes. “Can’t a girl die in peace?”
“Cut the act, and get off my bed. Now.”
“You never let me have any fun.”
Once the bed was free of Sonata, Adagio cringed and wiped off a few hairs before throwing her back against the mattress. Overhead, she could hear footsteps and she clenched her fists.
“All cried out, Adagio?” said Aria.
“I’m thinking,” said Adagio to the ceiling.
“Why don’t you just admit we can’t get out of here and save your sanity? That’s how I get by.”
“I said I’m thinking.”
Aria sighed and her footsteps moved away. “You try to be nice…”
A rumble escaped from Adagio’s stomach, and she was suddenly feeling deflated. Blushing, she covered her stomach with both arms and tried to ignore the second rumble.
Sonata’s frown loomed over hers. “Someone’s tummy is rumbling.”
“Get out of my face, Sonata.”
“You want some?” The bowl hovered over her, and a single drop plopped off the rim and splashed on the bridge of her nose, which wrinkled in self-defence.
Adagio opened her eyes and wiped her nose with one hand. “I wouldn’t eat that mortal muck if it was the only thing between me and starving to death. Now get out of my face.”
“You sure about that? It’s all we’re going to get, you know. Unless you get us out of here, I mean. Or if Aria does. Or me.”
“I’ll get us out of here when you get out of my face.”
“So rude.” The shadow of Sonata skipped out of sight. Adagio let out a breath.
She didn’t dare close her eyes. The thought of Aria holding a pillow over her and saying, “Sayonara, Adagio,” drove all tiredness out of her own head. She made a point of waiting until she could hear the snores from the bunk below before she even tried to let herself go, and by that point, the midday sun was shining into her eyes. She rolled around and tried to bury her head in the fabric, but every time she breathed in, acid burned her nostrils. These beds still had stains on them, for goodness’ sake.
All the while, the rumble in her stomach came and went, pulling her out of sleep just as she was drifting off. Clawing pains stabbed at her insides, and she kept wiping the spittle off her lips and swallowing the build-up behind them. At some point, the rattling of fingernails on a bowl and the gulping of Sonata’s gullet made her wince over and over, and she never got used to it. When it came to mealtimes, Sonata had the rhythm of a heart attack patient.
The shards jingled against her fingers.
By the time the sun had set, Adagio’s brain was trying to curl into a ball and crush itself out of existence. Everything felt tight inside her head; she could feel her brain peeling away from her skull. Each thought was a false note that set her teeth on edge. Her eyes were burning so much she wondered why they weren’t smoking.
A hatch in the wall creaked open. Adagio forced her mind to focus and she lifted herself onto her elbows. On the other side of the cell, Sonata was kneeling patiently beside a letterbox-shaped opening as a bowl of gruel slid out. The hatch slammed with a metallic thud.
“When it gets too repetitive,” said Sonata, “I imagine I’m eating custard and there’s a mince pie at the bottom.”
Joints creaking under protest, Adagio swung herself forwards to kneel next to the bars of the window, which were within arm’s reach of the bed. She jingled the shards in her fist again.
“The way I see it,” said Sonata in between two mouthfuls, “if we escape, then we get to go out eating negative energy again on a full stomach. If we don’t escape, then we get to keep ourselves going until they let us out.”
A snore rose up from the bed under Adagio’s. She placed the other shards carefully on the mattress beside her and twirled the largest one between her fingers.
“What makes you think they’ll let us out?” Adagio didn’t look up, but gripped the shard as though holding a knife.
“Well…” Sonata put an elbow on her knee, or would have done if the bowl hadn’t been in the way. “All they did was find us stealing glue. That can’t be more than a few months in prison, right? So we’ll be out of here sooner or later.”
“Oh yes,” said Adagio with apparent carelessness. She weighed the shard in her fingers and straightened up. “And I suppose the stuff we did at Canterlot High was just a technicality?”
“Um…”
“Don’t answer that. You’ll strain yourself.”
Adagio grunted and raised the shard to the nearest bar. Now, if I just slide it across like this and keep going for a few strokes, then if the pendant’s hardness is what I think it is, this shouldn’t be too difficult.
She glanced across the bars at the camera, but it was just out of sight here. She grinned, and started sawing, the jagged edge scraping against the metal and dust sliding out from under it.
“But who’s going to believe there’s magic up at the school?” said Sonata. “It was like the most low-profile thing ever.”
“Oh yes, we just hypnotised an entire school faculty and got blasted by a spirit of pure light at a publicized rock concert.” Adagio winced as a finger got caught between shard and bar. “‘Low-profile’: that’s definitely the word I would have used.”
Sonata set the bowl down beside herself and wiped her own elbow. “This is sarcasm, isn’t it?”
“Ow!” Adagio sucked her finger and flapped the pain out of her wrist. “Give the girl a medal. She’s finally learned how to learn.”
“Won’t they just forget?” said Sonata. “I thought nobody noticed when we controlled them.”
“If anybody forgets what happened at that concert, then I’m Star Swirl’s great aunt Hickory. Which means” – Adagio grunted under the effort to keep her arm up, but she was definitely scratching the metal – “that our crimes will already be on our criminal record. And I don’t think they have enough paper to write all that down. OW!”
The shard snapped.
For a moment, one fragment crumpled inside Adagio’s clenched fist while the other whirred and hovered over their heads. Both their gazes arced with it as it rushed for the floor, tinkled against the ground, rolled across to the corridor, and then came to rest under the cell door.
Adagio’s growl began to rise up her throat. She glared at the barely-there red mark on the solid black iron, and the growl crept past her tonsils. She opened her fist and cupped the fragments, and the growl rolled over her tongue. Lastly, and with unerring finality, she spotted Sonata waving at her in a desperate bid to engage her good side, and the growl broke through her teeth and savaged the air around her.
One arm shot out, and Adagio vaulted herself off the bed and towered over Sonata. “Give me that bowl.”
Sonata clutched it defensively. “Ask nicely or don’t ask at all.”
“Do you like it here, or something? Give me that bowl or I’ll come and take it.”
“All right, all right, have it!” Sonata heard the rumble echo in the cramped space. “Wow, you really must be hungry if you want it this bad.”
Adagio toyed with two conflicting ideas that battled across her face and pulled every muscle this way and that. One idea won through.
She upturned the bowl over Sonata’s head. As the oh-so-satisfying spluttering and yelping waged under the slop, she reached up and started sawing the bar with the edge of the bowl.
“Adagio, what’s gotten into you?” The muck monster stumbled her way off the floor, one hand held out for balance while the other wiped the gruel off her face. “If you didn’t want it, you could’ve just said so.”
“We are not some stupid ponies or pathetic humans swallowing dirt and plant mulch to survive!” Sparks leapt from the edge of the bowl and Adagio lowered her face to avoid them. “We are sirens! And we’re going to act like sirens, starting with getting our birthright back!”
Sonata looked around for a clue as to what to do next. Apart from Aria still snoring on the bed, she was short of inspiration.
“Did you sleep well last night?” she tried.
Another rumble echoed from Adagio’s stomach. Adagio was almost hammering the bowl against the bars.
“This is night!” she hissed.
“OK. Did you sleep well last… day?”
The scrapes and strikes of the bowl against the bars turned into a cacophony of bangs and thuds. Adagio’s arm jolted with the effort, but she always used the momentum to throw her weight harder against the bars. She was almost off her feet.
A thunk sent the bowl thwacking the ceiling and rebounding off the cell door’s bars behind them. It spun on its side like a spinning top, and then rattled its way to complete stillness. One edge had crumpled slightly like tinfoil.
Adagio had already seized it and hammered it against the door three times before she dropped it and threw her hands up.
“There is a way out of this mess.” She rounded on Sonata, who even in her permanently cotton-clouded mind felt enough of a mental blow to step back. “You got any bright ideas?”
“Uh… Wait for the next bowl?”
To her credit, Sonata didn’t flinch when both hands slapped down on her shoulders. She didn’t even blink when Adagio went eye-to-eye.
“We’re not going to live that long,” whispered Adagio. “Don’t you get it? I’ll touch that stuff the day Sunset Shimmer drops dead. And even if I didn’t, even if I took your idea of eating this garbage, how long do you think we could last on a diet of mortal food?”
Sonata blinked at last. “Your right eye looks really veiny, you know.”
“Years, months, maybe not even weeks. We’re not built to cope with the stuff. I need the nourishing taste of hatred on my tongue. A morsel of fear, a smidgen of doubt and uncertainty. What I wouldn’t do right now for a bite of everyday resentment and anxiety…”
Sonata toyed with the iron fingers on her and, when she couldn’t prise them off, patted them in what she hoped was a friendly manner. She tried for a grin. Her heart wasn’t in it, and was currently trying to exit through her gut.
“We could live for centuries on that,” said the thing that was Adagio. “We will live for centuries! Where there’s hunger, there’s a way to satisfy it. You are going to help me find that way.”
“Help?” said Sonata’s voice from somewhere around her shoes.
At last, Adagio let her go and began pacing the cell. As discreetly as she could, Sonata sighed with relief. She knew as well as anyone that she was really a brute with very little brain, but even the pea bouncing around her skull knew to flash red when faced with something like this.
“Um,” she said. “What would you think if I said – not that I’m saying this, but if I did – that it’s either eating the custard – I mean, gruel – or not eating anything?”
Adagio swept over to the barred window and peered out at the stars. “There must be people coming near this police station. Maybe I can snatch some doubts and insecurities as they pass.”
The shards jingled in her hand. Sonata coughed and wiped the ooze out of her eyes as it crept down again. “Uh, what with?”
“Or maybe we’re expecting more criminals to come in.” Adagio shot to the cell door. She gave it a funny look and rattled the bars. “These hinges feel loose, don’t you think?”
“Um…” Gruel splattered on the floor as Sonata wrung her ponytail out.
“If I had a screwdriver, I could get out of this door.” She started twisting another shard into the hinges by the door, and a mechanical squeak made her look up. “Watch away, you pathetic little piles of misery. You’re first on the menu once I’m out of here.”
Being a creature that preyed on emotions en masse, Sonata was none too skilled at recognizing them in others. It would be like recognizing the air she breathed.
True, she noticed muscle movements in the general area of the face, and if pressed could probably make an educated guess – or as educated as it could be when she’d flunked the school of common sense – but it was a skill that even Adagio and Aria had been forced to hone down to an art, and only because Adagio had wanted to try something different. The sirens wouldn’t even have spooked Star Swirl so much if they hadn’t aimed higher than normal.
Sonata went along with it, but she never quite saw the point. After all, every being had some small flicker of anger or fear in their hearts at all times. On her own, Sonata had relied on the time-tested method of, “It’s always there; just open your mouth wide and swim through it.”
And it had been fun, especially the parts when they sang and danced and watched the green mist flood the stage. But then, tacos had been fun too, and they didn’t blast you with positive energy because you wanted a gourmet buffet instead of a quick snack.
“That’s it,” muttered Adagio without looking around. “That camera is starting to annoy me. Sonata, pass me the mattress.”
Sonata, who had been wiping gruel off her top, woke with a start from her daydream. “Huh? What?”
“I said pass me the mattress.”
Sonata glanced from bed to rattling door. “Why?”
“Don’t ask! Just do it!”
As she fumbled with the mattress and tried not to trip over the dislodged pillow, Sonata wondered if Aria was sleeping or just pretending. She thought she saw a peep of white in the general area of the eyes.
She turned to find Adagio staring her down, and made the cardinal mistake of making eye contact. It didn’t take a mind-reader to point out Adagio was a tick away from going cuckoo. She turned away quickly and let Adagio ram the mattress against the door, curling her hands around it to try picking the lock from behind it.
Sonata scratched her neck as Aria began to stir. “Aren’t you supposed to hide on the other side of the mattress?”
“Don’t be an idiot. How could I secretly break the lock if I was on the other side of the mattress? The camera would see me.”
“Can’t it see you already? Your hands are poking out.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t know I’m hiding behind it.”
Sonata shrugged and went to lie down on the now-exposed bed frame.
Made sense, as far as she was concerned. Her finger traced a figure of eight on her top and she popped the gruel into her mouth as Aria stood and stared at the figure on the other side of the cell.
“I won’t ask,” she heard Aria say.
“That’s OK,” she replied from the top of the bunk bed. “I don’t know the answer anyway.”
Aria shrugged, slunk over to the far corner, and sat down. After a few grumbles from Adagio’s restless stomach and a few curses from her restless mouth, Aria pulled out a harmonica from a back pocket and began throwing it up into the air and catching it. As the moonlight faded away once more, she caught it, brought it between her lips, and began to play.
The harmonica whined and howled and hummed its way through a steady melody. Sonata found herself humming along with it. Dawn light shone through the bars and down the wall, and began to make its way across the floor. Although Adagio still leaned against the propped-up mattress, the clink of gemstone against metal had long since died away. Still Aria hummed and howled and whined on, pausing only to massage her lips and stare at the ceiling as if waiting for it to recharge her.
As the patch of sunlight crept along the bed, Sonata rolled over to the edge and clambered down, slipping on a rung near the bottom. Music always soothed her muscles and loosened her skin, and she wasn’t going to relax on an exposed and mattress-deprived bed frame. Even she knew it would only give her red stripes on her back.
Adagio’s stomach rumbled as Sonata skipped past and sat down next to Aria, whose stomach rumbled in sympathy. Nobody complained. If anything, Aria’s harmonica breathed new life into them, and a zippier, jazzier solo echoed in the cell. Both she and Sonata looked over at the door.
Springs clinked and twanged. Adagio was beating her head against the mattress. Her lips were moving, and both Aria and Sonata stopped to listen.
“Get out of my head,” they heard her saying. “I know you’re in there. Get out of my head.”
“What’s in your head?” said Sonata, with all the caution of a tourist wading into a tar pit.
“The plan.” Adagio glanced at their corner, and Aria looked away quickly. “It’s in there somewhere. I will have it, even if I have to beat it out to do it.”
Sonata chewed her lip. Eventually, the clinking and twanging returned.
Aria turned the harmonica around thoughtfully, and then led them through something slower, each note drawn out on a rack of musical torture, each note dying in an instant at the end, and each note succeeded by another long, relentless stretching as though it were one flat scream of terror fully realized and never changing. When she finally killed the tune and let oblivion take over, they both noticed the clinking and twanging had stopped. Instead, there was a dull thumping.
Adagio was beating her forehead against the wall.
Steady as footsteps down an endless corridor, with no hope at its beginning and none at its end, and never so much as a waver of hope in the middle, she beat her head against that wall. She simply swayed back, leaned forward, and kept going until her forehead hit something. Then she swayed back again. She was glowering at the wall, willing it to collapse through sheer relentless staring. The beat was just an act of defiance.
Sunlight rolled up the opposite cell’s bars, and began to fade. Sonata scrambled onto her feet as Adagio swept over to her and crouched down. The hatch waited.
“What are you doing?” said Aria with a sigh. “Trying to freak out the guards on camera?”
“Shh!” hissed Adagio. She was staring at the hatch as though it had challenged her to a duel. Sonata craned her neck over the steady shoulder.
Both hands were clenched tight over Adagio’s knees. With the slow ease of a hunter trying not to startle prey, Adagio reached over and scraped the empty bowl across the floor and left it in front of the hatch. She resumed her tight crouch. Even Aria kept the scene in the corner of her eye and put the harmonica back in her pocket.
Once the light had dimmed and the square of sunlight opposite had vanished, something went thunk.
Without appearing to move an inch, Adagio was coiled tighter than a spring, and Sonata almost darted back at the sudden tension.
The hatch snapped open. It sucked the bowl in just as Adagio’s hand shot after it.
“OW!”
She sucked her fingers away from the closing snap. A new and full bowl of gruel lay steaming before her.
Adagio jumped to her feet and kicked the bowl into the wall, slopping gruel on Aria’s arm before she could push off in time.
“Hey, watch it!”
“I almost had it then! If I’d been just a bit quicker –”
“Well, you weren’t,” snapped Aria. She was rubbing her gloved hand with a curled lip. “Look, Genius, why don’t you sleep on it or something? Give us all a rest.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Adagio with a snap of her fingers. “I’ll sleep on it and give myself a rest. If I can just set my mind at ease, my subconscious’ll sift through all these distractions. Then I can see where I’ve been going wrong.”
“You can start with being born, and work your way up from there.”
But Adagio was already marching away, Sonata ducking out of her path. A flop of the mattress being restored, and Adagio was looking down upon her made bed again.
Neither Sonata nor Aria moved until the creaking had stopped and Adagio was on the top bunk, either staring at the ceiling or drifting off to sleep. Neither of them wanted to check.
Both of them exchanged creased brows and twisted mouths. Sirens were not sociable creatures as a rule. The closest they could get to the idea of a “friend” was another siren who just happened to be feeding on the same crowd. There were desert-wandering lizards with more intimacy and fellow-feeling.
Even these two, however, could smell something off. They had – not exactly a bond with Adagio, because that would be like bonding with the school just because it was always there – a certain mutual understanding. If the school had cracked and begun collapsing in on itself, they couldn’t have been as rattled as this.
Sonata and Aria sat back down in the corner, while the bars of moonlight began to creep in. They both could see the bunk bed. They watched it for the slightest twitch.
Aria’s stomach rumbled.
It might have been her imagination, but out of the corner of her eye, Sonata could’ve sworn she saw the girl wince. She reached across and righted the bowl, scraping up the last scraps from the bottom and offering them on an outstretched hand.
Aria slapped it away and shook her head, scraping her tails against the stone wall.
“What’s up with her?” Sonata whispered, wincing herself at each echo of her voice.
“Shock. Or madness,” Aria whispered back. “Or maybe she’s just as bored as I am. I don’t know.” The shrug scraped across the stone too. “Why don’t you ask her?”
Sonata shuddered and licked her fingers. “You kidding? Because I don’t want to get the answer. That’s why.”
“You think she’s asleep?”
“I dunno. I can’t hear any snoring.”
By craning their necks and focusing on their ears, they could make out the slight breaths in the stillness.
“Just because she’s not snoring,” whispered Aria, “doesn’t mean she’s awake.”
“Why are we whispering, then?”
“Doesn’t mean she’s asleep, either.”
“Oh.”
They both peered across and heard the mechanical squeak of the camera. Beyond the strip lights, a lens gleamed at them. They waited in case it tried anything.
“They’re never letting us go, you know,” whispered Aria suddenly.
They both had their backs pressed up against the wall hard enough to catch threads on the brickwork. While Sonata’s legs stretched out before her and her hands flopped over the rim of the bowl from the wrist, and her head rested back so that her ponytail’s base was scrunched up, Aria had drawn her knees up to her collar and folded her arms over them, chin resting on the topmost arm, and her tails running either side of her elbows. She appeared to be making herself as small as possible.
Neither of them dared move an inch, and both of their pupils flickered if they so much as imagined a flicker in Adagio, their partner lying on the bed.
“Of course they gotta let us go sometime,” Sonata whispered back.
“Think about it, numbskull. No one’s been down here in days. We’re supposed to get a police officer come down and tell us something like, ‘Here’s your letter, and we’ll see you in young offender’s court,’ or, ‘You got one call, and don’t waste it.’ They don’t care about us. They know what we did. I bet they’re not even watching us with that camera, they hate us that much. They want us to know we don’t add up to spit.”
Neither of them moved. They thought they saw Adagio shift slightly, but minutes later she was as still as she had been before. They couldn’t even see her chest going up and down. Only the faintest of puffs of breath proved she was still alive.
“Maybe they’re just delayed.” Sonata’s fingers curled and scooped up two thick lines of gruel. “Don’t we get a trial, or something?”
“Big delay if it is one. What, they have to redecorate the station first?”
“That’ll make it look nice for the trial.”
“Open your eyes, Sonata. We’re not getting a trial. Dogs don’t get trials when they bite someone; they get put down.”
Sonata raised her fingers and licked them dry before returning them to the bowl. “But we’re not dogs.”
“Well, we’re not human either, are we? We look like humans, but then changelings look like ponies. That doesn’t make them ponies, and it doesn’t make us humans.”
“So does the law apply to us?”
“Like heck it does. Besides, they don’t have trials in the station. They have them in a courtroom.”
“Huh. Well, maybe they’re redecorating the courtroom.”
“Urgh.” Aria rocked forwards and turned to face her. “You really are an idiot. No wonder Adagio ends up leading us everywhere; you always back her up, not me, just because she pulls your feeble little mind along on a leash. And then I get outvoted all the time. And then we get ourselves in deep. If you’d had an ounce of brains from the beginning, none of this would have happened.”
“I’ve got brains,” said Sonata, though there was a trace of uncertainty in her voice. She rallied at once. “Anyway, so what? You think you’d be a better leader than Adagio?”
“Keep your voice down!” Aria hissed.
A particularly long and loud rush of breath made their gazes snap from each other to the bed. Adagio’s chest eased itself down, and another long and loud rush of breath came out. Aria curled tighter and shuffled back into her corner. Neither she nor Sonata came alive again until the silence settled back in.
“You know what I think?” whispered Aria. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“Oh yeah?” Sonata whispered back. “And what would you do right now?”
“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do right now. I wouldn’t waste my time and energy looking for an escape that doesn’t exist. Adagio’s just delaying the inevitable.”
“So what would you do?”
Aria lowered her head so her gaze settled on the tips of her shoes. “We’re not going anywhere. We can’t consume any negative energy, and the only thing we’ve got is food that’s taking centuries off our lives. You saw Adagio just now. We’ll go mad if we’re stuck in here forever.”
A chill crawled down Sonata’s spine. Ever so slightly, she reached down and braced her hands on the stone floor. She shuffled an inch away from Aria, careful not to tip the bowl out of her lap, and settled her fingers inside the rim again.
“So what do we do?” She flushed scarlet at the quiver in her voice.
Aria’s stomach rumbled.
To Sonata's shock, Aria winced and was instantly curled up more tightly. When Sonata looked closer, her friend's face had twisted itself, burying the eyes and baring as much tooth and gum as possible. Both of Sonata’s hands gripped the bowl, and she held it out to her, but Aria forced one eye to open into a slit, and pushed the bowl away. Sonata pressed it firmly into her shin, but Aria loosened her limbs and elbowed the bowl away.
“You have to eat something, Dummy, when your tummy’s rumbling,” hissed Sonata. “And you call me the idiot.”
Aria’s face slackened, and under heavy lidded eyes, she threw Sonata a sidelong glance before looking away. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? Don’t answer that. Of course you haven’t. So let me spell it out for you: the choice is starve now, or kiss our brains goodbye and starve later. Nothing’s coming to save us this time, not even Equestrian magic. Everybody outside this cell wants to see us suffer. That’s what that camera is for.”
“I thought you said –”
“I know what I said. They’re not watching us now. They’re recording what we do, and then they’ll put it on the net and get a million hits laughing at Adagio’s crazy act. It’s what I would have done,” she added with a scowl.
The mechanical squeak rang out. Sonata glanced up – briefly glancing back and noticing Aria hadn’t paid it any mind – and the camera was now focusing on Adagio’s bed. She looked across. There was some movement there, but only by focusing on the outline could she make it out.
“She’s waking up,” whispered Sonata.
“You see?” whispered Aria. “And every time she thinks up a plan, it’ll swing round and see what she does.”
As the darkness outside faded into blue, Sonata shuffled a bit further from Aria’s corner, and she felt the cold plate of the hatch against her lower back. There had been a moment, at that fateful concert, and just before the beam of positive energy had cascaded over her, when she’d seen the giant spirit of light hovering overhead and felt the skin on her front try and crawl its way to her back. For a few seconds, her tiny fluff of mental activity had blasted apart, and a solid kernel as hard as crystal had been all that was left. Nothing but freezing clarity and cutting edges had been left. Everything inside her had wanted to sink into the earth and dig its way to the other side of the world.
She'd recognized the giant spirit's shape.
She still had nightmares about that moment. A moment of cold, soul-sapping clarity. And it was plunging into her mind, in the same way that a knife cuts through cotton candy, that Aria might have a mind like that all the time.
The mechanical squeak made her glance up, and the lens winked at her.
“They hate us that much?” she whispered. “But I thought they were all goody-goody two-shoes.”
“I can’t see them feeling sorry for us at all. We’re the bad guys, remember? Bad guys don’t usually live happily ever after. Well, I’m not giving them the satisfaction of laughing at my last few moments, and if you had any sense – which you don’t – you’d do the same as me.”
Aria grimaced and tried to squeeze the rumble out of her. Her teeth ground against each other.
“Forget Adagio.” Her voice was scrunched up into a near-inaudible black hole of suppressed agony. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“Yes, but if you eat the gruel, at least you get a bit more time to think. And who knows? Maybe, just maybe –”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” Aria hissed. She almost collapsed onto her side. “I don’t want your false hope! Or your pity! Just get lost!”
“OK, OK…”
Mumbling and groaning, Adagio rolled off the bed and struggled down the ladder. Her hair, a mass of curls that were never tamed or restrained to begin with, was starting to resemble a haystack savaged by a weed-whacker. Despite her frowns and grimaces, she was struggling to keep her eyelids from drooping. Even when she towered over the two of them, hands on hips, there was a slight sway in her posture, and she winced once or twice as if at some private assault.
She peered down at the weak smile and half-empty bowl Sonata offered her. Then she peered at the shaking huddle in the corner.
“What’s wrong with you?” said Adagio.
“Nothing!” spat Aria.
Adagio curled her lip. “If you’re going to be like that, then I’ll get right to the point. Give me your pendant shards.”
“Help yourself!” The shards tumbled across the floor and scattered beneath Adagio’s blue dress when she kneeled to collect them. “Like they’ll do us any good.”
“Er, hey,” said Sonata, suppressing a yawn, “you want mine too?”
Adagio snapped her fingers and pointed down. Sonata sighed and placed her shards carefully next to the kneeling figure before staggering to her feet.
“Can I have your bunk bed?” Sonata almost yawned the words, and didn’t even bother to cover her mouth when she did yawn. “I’m getting tired of sleeping on the floor.”
“Get stuffed,” said Adagio, but more out of habit than because she could muster any genuine spit or sneer behind the words.
“Have mine,” mumbled Aria to the floor. “It’s not like I’ll be needing it.”
“Thanks.” Sonata put the bowl down next to the hatch. She didn’t meet anyone’s eye on her way over to the bed.
Once the snoring began, Adagio piled the shards into a pyramid shape and clasped them with both hands. One hand broke off and she felt the bags under her eyes, but she snorted and went back to patting the pile into shape. It was only when Aria’s stomach rumbled that she turned and faced the shivering mass in the corner.
“I’m surprised you’re not tucking into that gruel already,” Adagio said. “Finally coming round to my way of thinking, are you?”
From somewhere behind the knees and the folded arms, Aria grunted a flat note that could have meant anything. Silence then reigned in the cell.
Adagio frowned. For a moment, she abandoned the shards and went over to the barred window to pull herself up and peer out. Buzz-cut grass stretched away from the bottom as far as she could see. There were tall poplars and gnarled oaks several yards away, and beyond them were green hills. If there was a road or a pathway, her gaze was too level with the ground to see it.
“Weird,” she muttered. “I can’t hear anything.”
“So?” Aria groaned from the floor.
“Well, we’re in a town, right? Even if we’re somehow next to a park or on the outskirts, there should be some distant traffic or someone should be out walking a dog. We’ve been here days, and the only sounds we’ve heard have all been in this room.”
Aria groaned again, clutching her stomach tighter. She was trying to compress herself into the corner as hard as she could.
“Look,” said Adagio, “if you’re just going to moan, at least get into bed and sleep. You make the place look untidy.”
Adagio braced herself for the whip-crack of a retort, or at least for some mumbled insult. To her surprise, Aria unfolded and forced herself to stand up. She was shaking slightly, but her dull glare never left the bed until she had shuffled with the grace of a zombie over to it. Aria stared down at the snoring Sonata that was strewn across the lower bunk, and then swivelled round to start the long shuffle back.
At this, Adagio pushed herself away from the window and back to the shards, cutting her off en route. “For Pete’s sake, stop trying to make a point and just use mine if you have to.”
This was met with a painful groan and a rumble. When she turned around, Aria was slipping on the rungs. At one point, she banged her chin on the frame’s edge. Adagio waited with almost infinite patience before Aria slipped and fell, half-slumped, across the mattress.
Adagio wiped her face with one hand.
“Drama queen,” she muttered.
Quickly as possible, she hurried over and seized Aria’s dangling ankles before guiding them over the frame and letting them drop against the wall. Next, she seized Aria under each armpit and, ignoring the shiver of protest, forced her face-first up the bed until nose met pillow. Thus, Aria was draped, already asleep, on the top bunk. Her, Adagio's, own rightful bunk.
Moodily, she was about to leave it at that, but then it occurred to her that Aria would suffocate face-down.
Hm.
Attractive as the prospect was…
No. Adagio growled. No. Cursing under her breath, she seized both shoulders and rotated the girl until her closed eyes were frowning at the ceiling. After a pinch of the leggings to lift them up and uncross them and drop them, Adagio threw herself back and hurried away as though keen to wash her hands somewhere.
There was, after all, the chance that Aria might prove useful. As a decoy, perhaps.
She thought the shards were glowing slightly, but when she sat cross-legged next to them, they didn’t look any less dull than last time. She waved a hand in front of her eyes. It was probably one of those optical things.
Adagio clasped the shards in both hands and closed her eyes, ignoring the snores from behind her as the two slept on.
Her last hope… It had to work…
She blushed only a little as she began to chant under her breath.
Despite the echoes, she was trying not to be obvious in case the snores were only fake, but after a long while of this, she checked the shards, and closed her eyes again to put more oomph into her notes. A lifetime ago, one drawn-out croon would have seen the ruby-like gems sear the air with light. Her voice would have soared, and then it would have swooped, and any soft-brained mortal within earshot would have danced as madly as a puppet under her fingers. She licked her lips and focused on fighting the warble out of her voice.
“Come on, gemstones,” she muttered. “There must be some power left. And a little power in three gemstones adds up. Just give me one drop. It’s all I need.”
Try as she did, though, her song croaked and growled and struck out at odd moments. She stopped to grind her teeth. It sounded like a dog pretending to sing: nothing like the angelic choir she’d once revealed at a whim.
“Come on!” she hissed. “I made you what you are! You must answer to me! That spell couldn’t have broken everything.”
None of that’s actually true, you know, she thought, but before her thoughts could rise up in a swarm, she threw herself into softly crooning. Maybe it depended on how much she wanted it. Most magic did, after all. She screwed up her eyes and clenched her stomach.
Hear my song, darn it!
The false notes, the mismatched rhythm, and the cacophony of the whole thing poured over her like burning oil, but onwards she sang, wincing only at the spectacularly screechy parts, but never breaking off.
Sunlight began its familiar run across the prison wall, but she ignored it and the snoring and the eerie silence outside, and onwards she sang. Her throat turned sore and felt as if it was bleeding, her knees went numb on the hard floor, and she started breathing in every other note rather than belting it out, but onwards she sang.
The longer it went on, the closer the cold and the dark came to her back, creeping silently. She forced her heart to calm down.
It didn’t matter how badly it hurt. She wasn’t going to fail. There was no future in failing. There would be no future at all.
She remembered the screams.
“No!” she yelled.
She spun around as if someone had tapped her back. Still lying on strange beds, Sonata snored on and Aria was puffing gently with each rise and fall of her chest. A stray strand of Aria’s hair waved up and down over her gaping mouth. The sunlight was crossing over from their cell window to the one opposite. She glanced up at the camera. Its lens stared at her like a dead eye.
Adagio wiped the sweat off her brow, and then wondered how it had gotten there to begin with. The shards were patted into shape, and then she clenched her fingers around them. A few halting notes stumbled out of her mouth, but she coughed and fell into silence for a bit, trying to sing in her mind instead.
There had been screams. She found her thoughts drifting back down an old avenue and into an old world, and she caught snatches of ponies running under dark skies and shadowed rooftops before she shook her head back into the present.
Too late. Her stomach rumbled, the rumble clawing again at her insides, and she found spittle oozing along her teeth. She swallowed it down and tried to focus again, but it shouldn’t have taken this much effort to get some power out of the gemstones.
It used to be flawless. As the ponies screamed and galloped and occasionally smacked into each other, she had been there among them, closing her eyes and sighing with contentment. So much negative energy, all for the taking…
Adagio focused on the song in her head. Her inner voice ran as a stream along the ears, clear and fluid as it rushed and rippled and flowed and dipped down sudden falls and valleys, sliding off peaks and sweet to the taste, all that negative energy, all for the taking, as she stood there in her pony form and drank, sipped, and gulped it all in…
“Focus, Adagio,” she whispered to herself, but by now her mind was too far gone, and everything she thought – including the song she was trying to focus on – was fundamentally changed.
She’d never felt so homesick for Equestria. She had to bite her lip hard to stop it.
Up till now, she'd never felt homesick at all. A lifetime spent hitchhiking on carts and wandering lonely roads had destroyed the very meaning of the word “home”. “Home” was something for ponies. Siren as she'd been, disguised as a pony, she’d come – preferably in the middle of a monster attack or a war – and watch the green haze billow out like a fog to rush towards her emaciated frame.
Those had been the really great feasts. The muscles would thicken. Bones had stiffened and joints clicked back into place. Her lungs swelled and almost broke her ribcage open from shock. And her lank hair would curl back into its bushy splendour.
In the present, Adagio’s fingers crushed the shards until they bit into the palm, and then crushed tighter until something liquid ran between the fingernails.
Of course, once everypony saw what was happening to her, they had realized what she was and run her out of town. They were reliable mirrors, in that regard.
Then, she’d spend days and weeks walking, prowling, and sticking her leg out at any passing carts in a bid to find and savour the next town’s delights before she starved, and all her hard work would be undone just travelling from place to place. All while she struggled not to keel over from exhaustion and despair.
It was no life, being a siren in the old days. No wonder they'd almost gone extinct.
Behind her, Sonata choked and coughed on the bed, and then settled back into snoring. Adagio opened her eyes briefly. She didn’t dare let go of the shards.
Not all sirens had lived like her – some used to hang around one town and nibble their way out of starvation – but it didn’t matter when every year there were more and more ponies and fewer and fewer sirens. Windigoes started gliding down and snatching the negative energy from their mouths, freezing up what was left and locking the sirens out. Love-eating changelings that could switch from form to form – and so avoid being caught as easily – began to sneak around and calm down every war and every argument and every attack that Adagio and her kin had worked hard to stir up.
Worse still, these upstart species were good at what they did. In her first ten years of roaming Equestria, she used to see at least twelve other sirens hidden among each town’s population. Her eyes could penetrate their superficial pony appearances, partly as a personal game, mostly to make a point to them in case they got uppity about her being there.
In her last ten years, however, the only other sirens she ever saw were Aria and Sonata. She'd travelled across Equestria, and found no others.
The gemstones that had once been embedded in their chests tended to be a giveaway too, even after the sirens learned to hide them under clothes or to disguise them as necklaces or pendants. How ironic, she used to think, that the one thing that let the sirens live would just as often get them killed.
Behind her, the snoring and the faint puffs of breath continued. Adagio found her voice and crooned to the shards. She was no longer even aiming for a rhythm, so long as she could squeeze some sound out of her chest.
Unbidden, the song leapt up inside her, a brief torrent of white, frothing river crashing over the mud. She fumbled to stop herself dropping the shards in surprise.
“Welcome to the show…” she sang. “We’re here to let you know… Our time is now… Your time is… running… out…”
Then the flicker faded and vanished. She coughed and spluttered; her briefly clean throat was suddenly full of phlegm and sores.
In Equestria, and for an all-too-short while in this wretched place, every note had been magical. Not with the starry-eyed, “isn’t music the food of love” kind of magic that sent mindless peasants clamouring to the nearest mountain temple, but with real heart-bursting, mouth-watering, eye-sizzling, arm-flexing, fingertip-scorching, air-boiling, earth-shaking, world-moulding magic. The sort of magic that turned her from some forgotten spit on the world to the world itself, consuming whatever she wanted, whoever stood before her, however she wanted to take it: toy with it, wolf it down, savour it, swallow it whole.
That was, in the end, how she and Aria and Sonata had survived. They'd discovered the power of song.
She held her hands close to her lips and licked the red taint across her thumb and her interlocked fingers. It was warm and tasted slightly of iron. Another spark flickered, fainter than the first, but still like clean water through a dry desert.
“You didn’t know that you fell…” she crooned. “Now that you’re under our spell…”
Adagio groaned with the effort. Everything inside her mouth was baked and her breath was fire on her hands. The stream trickled to nothing.
Aria and Sonata had picked up the song magic faster than she had, but then she’d done the hard work of testing and grafting the new magic onto their gemstones. They had been the last sirens she could find, and it had been her idea to band together. It was that, or nothing. The other two had jumped on it.
Once, they had been shoulder-to-shoulder, standing the last stand against the ponies, the changelings, and the windigoes, with the song rising up their throats against the flail of hooves, the slobber of green ooze, and the ice particles frosting across their fur. It had felt, for too short a moment, brilliantly simple.
Songs had a power of their own when swimming through the seas of Equestrian magic. They could possess whole crowds on a whim. They were like genius locii, nymphs, even gods. Once she’d seized them and learned to weave them, ponies – and humans now – could be strung up, tangled up, dangled, and hoisted up to her. There wasn’t a town that could resist once she and the others had them in the grip of songs and had enflamed their hearts and desires. Even changelings and windigoes fled from the waves of sound, such was the power of songs. They could eat into almost any mind and yank whatever they found into shape.
One last memory fizzled and evaporated under the corona of the writhing sun.
“We heard you want to… ‘gether…” She coughed into her sleeve. “We heard you wanna … rocking… school…”
One last drop evaporated. She collapsed onto her face. Her whole body was drenched with sweat, and she was gasping and straining her chest to keep from suffocating.
And just as she – brimming with almost alicorn-melting magic from sneering nose to swishing tail, hooves branding the earth, sparks leaping among her curls, and fire burning across her eyes – just as she had found the last of the pony fortresses and rallied the other two sirens for the ultimate climax, the ultimate revenge, the ultimate feast of Equestria, who should gallop over the horizon and across the plains but HIM?
If it hadn’t been for HIM, they would have left every last changeling fighting amongst themselves. If it hadn’t been for HIM, they would have blown the last windigo blizzards apart and shrieked the red waves until the winter spirits had all disintegrated. If it hadn’t been for HIM, they would have had the entirety of Equestria locked in a permanent civil war that could’ve fed them forever.
If it hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t be here, in this cell, in this town, in this wretched world, trying not to lose themselves.
The mechanical squeak of the camera –
She shot to her feet. She pointed a shaking finger at the lens.
“STAR SWIRL!” she yelled.
Behind her, someone squealed and hit the floor.
Adagio spun round to find Sonata, rubbing her backside on the floor with one hand. Her other hand clutched a pillow.
As one, their gazes locked onto this last detail.
“What,” whispered Adagio in a voice deep enough to weaken bowels and echo through bones, “were you doing with that pillow?”
“I…” Sonata glanced around wildly, trying to keep the grin on her face and stop it running off to hide. “What pillow? Oh, you mean this pillow? The one I’m holding in my hand? Goodness me, I don’t know how that got there. Silly me! Pillow should be on bed, not in hand. Forget my head next if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. Ahahaha.”
Adagio’s eyes narrowed. “Ahaha,” she said. Every word was a bullet slammed into a revolver’s drum. “How… interestingly… silly.”
Sonata tried a bigger grin, but her eyes wanted no part of it.
“Head not attached to your shoulders,” continued Adagio. Fingers flexed in her fist. Shards clinked and scratched each other, raining down like drops of blood. “Now there’s an idea.”
“I… I thought you might be tired.” Sonata made the nigh-fatal mistake of making eye contact. She snatched her gaze away as though she’d put her hand under a blowtorch. “You were slumped on the floor. I thought you were sleeping, and seeing as I was waking up and didn’t need it anymore, I thought I’d give you this pillow. Um. You startled me.”
The clinks and scratching noises were starting to put her teeth on edge.
“Just a friendly gesture, huh?” Adagio folded her arms and swung her foot forwards to begin a slow, swinging walk, while Sonata began backing away on her hands and heels. “You were being merciful, were you? Saw me lying there and thought, ‘Poor Adagio looks tired. I should give Adagio a rest. A nice, long rest.’”
Sonata’s back hit the bed frame, and she tried to sink into the floor as Adagio’s glare loomed over her and almost reached the zenith of her suddenly cramped little world.
“Yeah, yeah!” she said with what little chuckle dared make a dash for it. “You must have been uncomfortable without a pillow to the face. I didn’t want you to get cold. Would I want my best friend to get cold?”
“Or stiff?” Adagio almost spat in her face.
“Or stiff! Yeah. I mean who’d want that? Not me, am I right?”
The swollen, red-veined fist seized her naval and almost bounced Sonata’s head off the bed frame’s post. She breathed in and quickly regretted it as a coagulated iron smell rushed up her nose.
“I don’t need your ‘friendly gestures’,” hissed Adagio into her cringing eyes. “You try a ‘friendly gesture’ anywhere near me again, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Well, apart from screaming in agony. So let me clear this up now before we have any unfortunate accidents: I don’t care how tired I look. I don’t care if I look like I’ve strangled myself and thrown my head at the floor, which – let me remind you – is made of stone. I don’t need and have never needed help from a slouch like Aria and an idiot like you. You wouldn’t even be here, Sonata, if I hadn’t rescued you from the village mob all those years ago. You’d have been just another beast the ponies buried, so don’t come to me as if I’m the one who needs help! And if I’m stuck in here, you two aren’t going to make it any better! Who comes up with all the ideas!? Who gave us the power of song!? Who went hoof-to-hoof with Star Swirl and almost beat him!? Whose idea was it to reclaim our power through a battle of the bands, and who almost got us to the top!? Because it wasn’t Sunshine on that bed, and it certainly wasn’t the clueless ditz sitting on the floor in front of me!”
Sonata blinked up at her and glanced around.
“I WAS TALKING ABOUT YOU, STUPID!” screamed Adagio.
“Oh.” Sonata tried squirming. It didn't work, but she felt a little less terrified for it.
“He was playing with us all along!”
Sonata cocked her head and scratched her scalp. “Who?”
With a shriek of sudden rage, Adagio seized her by the shoulders and steered her towards the bars. For one shock of a moment, Sonata thought she was about to be thrown into them. A finger pointed at the dead lens overhead.
“Don’t you see!? Star Swirl was the one who banished us here! He must have been the one to send Sunset Shimmer and Twilight Sparkle to cut us down. Of course he’s the one behind that camera. He’s finishing what he started. It all comes together!”
“Um… what does?”
“See the walls down the corridor?”
They were white, and stained slightly with damp. Sinister, they weren’t.
“Yeah?” said Sonata.
“They’ve moved. Yesterday, they were only twelve cells wide. Now they’re only ten cells wide. He’s doing this. He’s watching us right now, trying to psyche us out.”
Sonata frowned. “But they’re the same as they were yesterday.”
“That’s what he wants you to think. First, he’ll sow some doubts into your head, get you thinking you’re seeing things, and make us disagree amongst ourselves. Then, he’ll push it a bit more, and we’ll see it moving along, day by day, knowing that there’s nothing we can do about it. And then, when there are no more cells left, and we go to sleep for the last night…”
Freeing herself from Adagio's grip, Sonata was panting when she pointed a shaking finger. “L-Look, the door we came in from is in the same p-place. C-Count them.”
“Don’t fall for it, you dolt! Didn’t you hear what I just said? That’s the first stage. He’ll change just enough that we’ll think we’re imagining things, just to prove he’s the master and the one in control. Don’t fall for it.”
“But how could he move the door?”
“How could he banish us here? How could his spirit appear at our concert in the sky and blast our gemstones into grit with positive energy? How do you think he can do all that? Parlour tricks?”
Adagio massaged her forehead. She no longer seemed to be looking at Sonata. Instead, she was staring off into a parallel universe, and Sonata just happened to be nothing more than air in the way.
“This is his punishment. He’s going to shove us in here and let us rot to nothing. He’s showing us who’s in control. We lost! This is what happens when you lose! I wasn’t supposed to lose! I’m the one who did all the work! I survived the death of the sirens! I can’t die like this! Ask Aria! She was there!”
Adagio cackled at the top of her lungs and pointed at the camera.
“Is this your idea of a sappy moral, Star Swirl? ‘Be yourself’, something trite like that? I’ve never been anybody else! I’ve always been myself. Guess it doesn’t count when you’re a siren, does it? What else did you like to preach? ‘Be the best you can be’? I tried. I proved it over and over, and that was never good enough for anybody, even when they did nothing but be my prey! And they still got the world after it’d been snatched from my hands! Ooh, ooh, how about this one; ‘let the music flow from your hearts’? What is that even supposed to mean? There isn’t a beat I’ve taken that was out of step. I’m the only one in this pathetic backwater in tune with herself. But no, that’s just not good enough, IS it!?”
Behind her, Sonata bent down very, very slowly. And very, very quietly, she picked something up.
“There is only ever one rule; you get power before someone gets one over you. Star Swirl and the other ponies pretend being good makes you powerful, but they just happen to win the rat race.”
Very, very carefully, Sonata crept closer to Adagio's open back. Very, very keenly, she stared at a spot between the shoulder blades.
“Power makes you powerful! Being nice doesn’t. It’s just something you can do once you are powerful, and if you’re powerful enough, it’s not like someone can rap you over the knuckles if you aren’t a nice little girl. And that! Says! EVERYTHING!”
Then Adagio spun round just in time to catch the arm in mid-strike.
Sonata howled with shock. It wasn't just the speed. Adagio's mouth was frothing like the jaws of a shark breaking through stormy waves. Whatever looked through those eyes, it was seeing nothing in this world right now.
For a moment, Adagio's pupils quivered as though she'd suddenly glimpsed a light in Sonata's own.
“Um,” said Sonata.
Adagio grinned.
“There you are,” she breathed with sudden, horrible joy. “Star Swirl.”
She twisted the arm. Sonata's body screamed louder than she did, and the pain shot into what was left of her mind and ricocheted around her skull like a shrieking bullet. The red shard of gemstone fell out of her shaking fingers to tinkle on the floor.
Sonata lunged.
Something animal and shrieking took over, and it thrust her forwards and gripped Adagio’s mass of curls and yanked. Hard.
As Adagio screamed and fell forwards, Sonata’s teeth bit into the girl's restraining arm. Both of them shot away from each other, stumbling, whimpering, clutching their own arms and fighting through tangled veils of agony to break out of their daze.
Sonata got there first. She snatched at the pillow lying nearby.
“You –” She began raising it to smother –
But Adagio made up for her lagging time with light fingers. Her hand shot out. Shards of pendant struck Sonata in the eyes, and red stings tore her away, gasping and clawing at her own face.
Through stings refusing to go away, she blinked and saw a figure bend down, heard the scrape of metal on stone, sensed rather than saw Adagio’s surge of confidence.
Blinking furiously, she made out an arm rising, its hand clutched around the metal bowl. The bowl with an edge.
“Adagio,” she said. “Wait!”
She dodged the first blow. Veins stood out on Adagio’s eyeballs. Whatever propelled her was utterly oblivious to reason, were Sonata in any way able to give it.
“I heard you WHISPERING!” Adagio swung wildly; Sonata ducked back at once. “I heard you! Thought you’d plot against me, did you!?” Another swing, another frantic dodge.
“What!?” Sonata raised her arms defensively. “What plotting!? I wasn’t plotting!”
“Keep still!” A third swing, a third dodge.
“We were just concerned!”
“Rubbish! We’re sirens!” A fourth swing, a fifth, a sixth. “At least, I am! What’re you, Star Swirl? Unicorn? Monster? Demon? WHAT!? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?”
Sonata’s back hit the bunk bed. Flecks of flying spittle splattered over her face. Behind her, Aria was silent.
The seventh strike… stopped.
Thinking faster than whatever passed for her brain, Sonata’s arms shot up and gripped Adagio’s own. Both sides trembled with the effort. The edge of the dish itself trembled inches over Sonata’s wide eyes, which stared past and saw froth encrusting the edges of Adagio’s mouth. Lips warped under the stress of shouting insanities.
Adagio’s trembling intensified. The edge was closing the gap between itself and Sonata’s eyelashes.
And then Sonata thought laterally. She ducked aside. Adagio’s bowl banged off the iron bed frame, shortly before Sonata grabbed Aria’s limp wrist and thrust it away.
There was a smack. Adagio yelped.
It wasn’t even strategy. Sonata’s mind wasn’t thinking at all by now. She simply did the first thing that came to her, and her time in this world had given her some confused ideas.
For instance, that grabbing the iron bars of the window, heaving herself up, and kicking out was something she could do.
Her hands slipped. She landed hard on her rump, banged the back of her head, yapped in pain, saw Adagio turn, saw her raise the bowl as though summoning enough hatred to slash through flesh and break bone.
Fear threw Sonata onto the lower bunk in time to hear the clang behind her scrambling legs.
“Look!” she shouted.
The mattress there came up easily once she braced herself against the wall and kicked out. Adagio vanished behind a shadowed underside. Sonata held it up as a shield.
“We’re on your side!” Sonata clenched her teeth; thuds almost knocked the mattress out of her grip, as though Adagio were ramming it repeatedly with a park bench. “Aria played her windy mouth harmonica thingy for you! How can we NOT be on the same side?”
“You!” THUD! “Really!” THUD! “Are!” THUD! “An idiot!” THUD!
Frantic, Sonata braced her legs against the underside and stretched as far as she could. The mattress didn’t budge; the thuds stopped and suddenly the force on the other side was unmoving.
“Harmonicas,” spat Adagio. “Music. Songs. There’s no magic in them anymore! There never will be!”
To Sonata’s horror, she heard the whine threatening to sob its way out of Adagio’s voice.
“We were supposed to thrive! Together! Just the three of us! No more living like rats on the road!”
“We will! We will!” Sonata didn’t know. She just wanted Adagio to stop trying to kill her now, please.
What burst out of Adagio’s mouth was no longer sirenian. It wasn’t even human. Simply the loudest, angriest, most lamentable shriek she could rip out of her own lungs, trying to throttle its victims by the ears.
Sonata threw herself forwards, off the bed, pushing the mattress back a few feet.
She ducked in time to avoid instant braining by the bowl coming overhead. Adagio’s grimace rose up and over, as did her arm to strike again.
Sonata rushed down and under. The mattress flipped over her head as she barrelled through the bottom half.
Caught by surprise, Adagio cried out – the mattress weighed down on Sonata’s crawling back far more than it alone should have done – and something smacked onto the floor behind her just as the mattress itself fell away. She crawled a few steps and her hands met what felt like glass pieces scattered over the floor.
Then she flipped over. Then she stared back.
Adagio got up, massaging her chin and jaw. She wiped something trickling from the side of her mouth.
She glared at Sonata. Through sheer rage, she cleared the gap between them and the bowl was a blur –
Sonata’s last impulse jumped up her own throat.
Were she still a siren in full health, her shrieking, solo note would have overridden even the remnants of Adagio’s contorted brain. As it was, it was merely so much screechy noise. But even noise had its uses. Adagio’s own scream was inaudible against it. She dropped the bowl and clung to her own ears, every orifice in her head straining to shut out the long, loud, resonating note. And so it was an utter shame that Sonata ran out of breath and had to stop to gasp.
Adagio was on her so fast the slap didn’t even register. By the time Sonata’s senses grabbed control again, she was hauled onto her feet and her back slammed against the bars of the cell door.
Tightness cut off her gasp.
She wheezed. She hit at her neck. She wormed fingers over the iron grip of Adagio’s hands. She struggled to see through eyelids trying to close over her pain. She couldn’t breathe.
“I’m not going before you!” Adagio’s voice shook. “I’m not going at all! Because when I wake up, you snake, I don’t want to find that you’ve spirited me off to yet another miserable world. I’m not going into the darkness! Never! I know what you’d do. Your mind’s sick. You’d send everyone I’ve ever hurt or worse out to get me. Well you won’t get the chance, Star Swirl! You… WON'T!”
Strangling hands pressed so hard into her neck that tubes and bits burned against her throat. Her chest and lungs heaved fruitlessly against the blockage. She almost felt them crumpling.
Sonata jiggled the glass-like shards in one hand.
She had just enough strength to open one eye and check Adagio’s own before her. After that, she threw the shards of pendant roughly at the contorted face.
Adagio screamed and scrabbled at her own eyes. Instantly, Sonata pushed her away.
“I am NOT Star Swirl!” she yelled. “I would have noticed!”
Adagio spluttered under the cascading red dust.
“No, you!” Sonata hazarded, just in case.
She saw the metal bowl lying nearby. Her hand reached out automatically. She towered over Adagio, who’d spotted her and yelped and fallen back and scrabbled against the bed frame and raised her hands and –
Sonata noticed the tears.
She paused.
She felt the shrieking animal sink out of her mind. She saw clearly again.
Slowly, watched the whole time by two shimmering eyes, she lowered the bowl until it dangled by her side.
She stepped back.
“Not gonna do it,” she said, petulant as a child.
Adagio didn’t move. She didn’t seem quite prepared to believe it…
Then Sonata raised the bowl and Adagio flinched –
But Sonata merely held it as though carrying dinner from a table, and then she about-turned and stepped over to the hatch and about-turned again. She sat down next to said hatch. Carefully, never taking her eyes off Adagio, she placed the bowl in front of the hatch.
They waited.
Both of them noticed the lack of breathing sounds.
Adagio was the first to move. She stood up and shuffled away from the bunk beds, still putting as much distance between herself and Sonata as she could, ending up in the far corner. Shaking. Twitching. Gritting her teeth.
They both looked at Aria.
Neither of them said anything. Apart from her hand now resting beside her head where Sonata had thrown it earlier, she was utterly unchanged from before.
Adagio began to murmur. Or gibber. It was hard to tell.
Aria was still. If they focused, they could just imagine the tiniest movement of chest that suggested breathing, but then again they had to squint to see that much and no sounds could be heard. Not even a rumble.
Unexpectedly, Adagio rushed to the bars and rattled them. “Sick girl! Sick girl down here! Help! HELP!”
She waved at the camera. She punched the bars in frustration. She rattled and thrashed and kicked and shook whatever she could reach, but her shouting died down within minutes.
As though jolted by some fresh signal, Adagio threw herself back into the corner. Her eyes darted hither and thither. No corner of the cell escaped her paranoid sweep.
Sonata glanced at the window. No light came through now. Not even moonlight.
And, clear through the silence, the mechanical squeak of the camera. They saw the glint of its red lens. They saw it focus on Adagio.
“I regret nothing,” said Adagio, but now she sounded frightened of her own words. No triumph lived in those tones. “You hear me? I regret nothing!”
For it was dawning on her that her stomach was no longer aching. Rumbles had stopped long ago. This wasn’t the ache of hunger. No, this? This, deep inside: this felt like she was bleeding from a wound.
Her gaze jumped from Sonata to Aria and back. “You were planning something… You were planning something… After all I’ve done for you…”
Opposite, the hatch creaked. A fresh bowl scraped across the tiles. She hadn’t even seen the hatch move.
Calm as ice, Sonata reached across and picked up the bowl. She nestled it between her knees and glared at Adagio.
“Well, now,” she said with the air of a child talking to a naughty parent, “someone’s got themselves into a tizzy.”
Adagio licked her lips. No snarl or sneer came to her aid. That bowl looked sorely and exquisitely tempting.
“Look, it’s really simple.” Sonata dipped a finger into her gruel and brought it up to her lips. There was a satisfied smacking sound. “We’re not planning anything. Why would we? We could have stabbed each other in the back before, but we didn’t.”
Adagio squirmed as another finger-lick taunted her.
“You were too stupid,” she hissed. “And Aria was too weak.”
“Oh? What about you?”
The question was innocently asked. Yet it rang across Adagio’s mind like a blow from a metal pipe.
What about her, come to that?
Angrily, she quashed the question.
“So,” said Sonata, still calmly, still as though she were telling Adagio something she herself had preached, “it’s like this. You eat your gruel, and we keep going –”
“Never!” She glanced out of the cell. Had there been eight cells opposite, or seven? She’d lost count. To her horror, she’d forgotten what it was the last time she’d counted. “You know what it’d do to us!”
She peered closely. Now that she thought about it, was the skin wrinkling around Sonata’s eyes? What happened when an immortal diet was suddenly cut off? Where did all those resisted years of ageing and waste go?
“So?” said Sonata. “I'm feeling OK. And Aria's already said no. That just leaves you. Maybe it’s some kind of test. You don't have to act so high-and-mighty all the time –”
“Test?” Adagio's voice was sharp.
“You know? Show you're not so high-and-mighty, and eat what everyone else eats. Maybe if we do that, they'll let us go.”
“You must be joking!”
Sonata gave her a more usual puzzled look. “Why 'must' I be? This clearly isn't a normal prison. Maybe the rules are different here.”
Adagio opened her mouth to argue, but then stopped. It had a certain kind of sense to it. Show they weren't full of pride, join the humans as humans? Yes, that sounded like Star Swirl's style.
Didn't it?
“Where did you get this idea?” she said suspiciously.
Sonata blinked at her. “I dunno. What idea?”
“The one you were just talking about!”
“Oh. The one where we give up trying to be sirens and they let us go?”
“Yes!”
“I dunno.”
Adagio groaned in irritation.
“What was the idea again?” said Sonata. She shook her head and shrugged. “Well. Anyway. Or… Or you can not eat anything, and end up very very sick. That sounds right to me.”
They both glanced up at the top bunk, and at Aria.
Where was Aria now? What was she seeing? Was there an Aria at all? Or worse, what if that Star Swirl had sent her into darkness, and Aria was waking up right now? And surrounded by shadows, and right before Tartarus opened up before her in all its fiery glory, one of the angry shadows would say, “We’ve been waiting for this…”
How many shadows would there be? After all, the three of them had ruined whole towns…
No. Aria wasn't… whatever she was… yet. She couldn't be.
To her shame, Adagio found her own hands were shaking, no matter how much she willed them to stop. Her skull was on the verge of cracking. It strained against its own pressure.
She gritted her teeth. She stared out, no longer caring where her gaze fell. Out the window: darkness. Outside the cell: seven… or was it six… barred cells opposite. Overhead: the red lens, sucking in everything that it saw, including Adagio, her face, her heart, her inner torment.
And all of it could end, with a bit of gruel? Live a normal life as a human? Never dream of power again? Have all the peace she'd secretly wanted, and always been forced to snatch?
Opposite: Sonata, unsmiling, waiting for an answer. Suddenly smelling of age and mortality, like damp earth. But at least she wasn't Aria.
Sonata wasn't a siren anymore. Adagio could smell the difference. She wasn't a Dazzling, as far as she was concerned. Well, to heck with that…
…right?
Then Adagio looked into her eyes, and for a moment, she swore she saw, glaring back at her, reminding her of the day when victory was snatched from her and she was thrown screaming across the rip in the universe, nothing less than the cold eyes of Star Swirl.
She closed her own. Sweat and heat radiated from the skin of her face. Pride of the sirens? Or another mere mortal? And what if Sonata was wrong?
What if she was right?
Adagio's lips fought against the answer. But there was only one answer she could ever give.
