They moved the piano outside.
It took both of them, and it was graceless and difficult and the piano sustained a gouge along one side that Miles would have cared about, once. They set it up in the open space at the center of the village, the small square where the Christmas tree went in December and where the harvest festival had been held every year since before either of them was born.
The tone in the air was constant now. Shawn could feel it in his back teeth.
The villagers were still standing at their posts, still facing east, still.
"When they come," Miles said, settling onto the bench. His hands were trembling slightly. The first time Shawn had seen that. "It won't be — they won't be themselves. You understand. Whatever it's done to them—"
"I know."
"If it's reversible—"
"I know, Miles." A pause. "Is it reversible?"
Miles looked at the keys. "If you kill the source. That's what I think. The notes are sustained by the central frequency. Without the center, the harmonics collapse." He breathed. "I think they'll be themselves again."
"You think."
"I think."
Shawn moved away from the piano, into the shadows at the edge of the square. He found a position behind the old stone water trough that gave him sightlines in all four directions. He settled the rifle.
"Miles," he said.
"Yeah."
"Make it the best thing you've ever played."
A silence. Then, very quietly: "It already is."
He put his hands on the keys.
He played.
—--------
It was nothing like the modified song.
It was nothing like anything Shawn had heard Miles play before, and he had heard Miles play his entire life. It was as if everything Miles had ever learned, everything he had ever felt, everything the music had ever been for him — the joy and the grief and the love and the loss and the thirty-one years of a particular kind of attention that most people never developed — had been collected and distilled and was now being poured out into the cold Arizona night.
It was beautiful in a way that hurt.
It was the kind of music that makes you feel, for the duration of the hearing, that the world is worth the trouble of it.
Shawn watched the villagers.
They turned.
All at once — not one by one, not gradually, but simultaneously, as if a signal had been redirected. They turned from east toward the square, toward the piano, toward Miles. And then they began to walk.
They moved like people in a dream, not quite right, the gait slightly off, the head carriage slightly wrong, the eyes still blank and fixed. But they moved. They came from every direction, from yards and doorways and the road, converging on the square, drawn by Miles's music the way Shawn had guessed they would be drawn.
Three hundred and eleven people. All of them.
And among them, at the center, moving through the crowd with an ease that was also slightly wrong, a five-year-old girl in burial clothes with yellow hair.
Shawn's throat closed.
He opened it.
He watched the thing move.
—-----
The crowd arranged itself around the piano in concentric rings, standing close, the way audiences stood at outdoor concerts in summer — but silent, absolutely silent, only the music cutting through.
Miles played without looking up. His eyes were closed. He was somewhere inside the music, somewhere Shawn could not reach and did not try to reach.
The thing had moved to the front of the crowd. It stood perhaps fifteen feet from the piano, and it was listening — if listening was the word — with its whole body tilted toward the sound, the way the others were tilted, but differently. With something that resembled recognition. As if it were hearing, in what Miles played, an echo of itself.
Shawn took his shot.
One shot. Clean. The thing fell.
The silence that followed was the most absolute silence Shawn Scott had ever heard. It fell on the village like a physical thing, like a second kind of darkness, pressing on the ears.
Then one by one, like lights coming on in a building after a power failure, the villagers came back.
Not all at once. In waves. A sound of confusion, of disorientation. People looking at their hands, at each other, at the sky. Someone began to cry. Someone else called a name.
Then understanding arrived, and with it a horror that was clean and human and real — the horror of people who have lost time, who have been somewhere they don't remember and have returned to find they don't know how long they were gone.
Three hundred and eleven people. In the square, in the cold dark, with the desert breathing around them and Miles Morgan still sitting at the piano, not playing, his hands in his lap, his eyes open, looking at the small still form in the yellow-haired burial clothes.
He did not move.
He sat at the piano until the light came up.