The Drumbeat Torn From Frost

My obsidian fists go into the rift before my head decides. The frost licks my forearms, tries to stitch the breach shut behind me. I pull.

The Cenotaph resists. Its wall clings to my fingers like a wound torn open wrong. Boum-tak. The captive rhythm pounds harder, closer. Someone in there still refuses to go silent.

I brace. The gold runs down to my knuckles. The ice whines, splits into a star, and a grey arm bursts from the white — a child's hand beating a measure no one ever taught it.

Behind me, the Forgotten back away. An old woman crosses herself. Lio clutches his bar against his ribs.

"Don't run. Touch."

The infrasound rakes their shins. I throw the foreign beat straight into their chests, no filter. Jolanda drops to her knees. This grief isn't hers and still it folds her double; she weeps for a dead man she never knew.

"Blend yours into his."

Malik lays his palms on the ice, counting under his breath. The old man with the bloody nose strikes the floor flat-handed, locked onto the captive cadence. Lio hammers his bar. Boum-tak. Ta-ta-tam. Two rhythms feeling for each other, catching, finally beating as one.

The wall gives all at once.

The child falls into my arms. Warm where I should read only cold. The eyes open, empty still, with that clean emptiness I hate. Then the fingers find my collarbone and tap. Once. Twice.

A drum that isn't mine. Alive.

Around us, twenty voices take up a name they've just learned. The Mutation flays them. Good.

I press the child against the Flame. The Cenotaph empties with a groan, spits back what it had swallowed.

There are others, lower down. I can already hear their hands.