The Dirty Rhythm

A swift kick of the heel is enough. The slab gives way.

I crash one level down, my knees sinking into a slush of frost. Lio slides in my wake. Jolanda follows, the rescued child clutched against her hip, short of breath. We are at the bottom. The belly of the beast.

Ahead of us, resting on a pedestal of ice, a relic awaits. A frozen memory.

It is a drum.

It looks like Marisol's. The same curvature, the same hooping. Except here, the wood has no scratches. The skin is stretched without a snag, without the sweat stains, without the dried blood of starving days. An object washed of its own history. A sterile lullaby designed to put us to sleep.

My obsidian hand dives. The air retracts. I shatter the frozen bell with a clean strike and tear the memory from its base. The bite of the cold attacks my palm. It is heavy. Mute. Dead.

I turn around.

"Take it."

I toss the instrument to Jolanda. She catches it mid-air. Her flayed fingers wrap around the smooth edges. Her palms bleed onto the intact skin of the drum, staining the surface with a sticky, very alive red.

Lio steps up, his iron bar raised.

"Hit it," I grunt.

The kid brings down his weapon. I release my Flamme all at once. The thermal wave strikes the metal, the wood, the air, the flesh of our faces. The Mutation takes hold at the moment of impact. The sound that erupts has nothing clean left about it. It cracks. It spits. A jagged, dirty boom-tak that carries the echo of the Hauts-Fourneaux and the cough of the Oubliés.

The fire eats the walls. The frost weeps black water. We all beat the measure, Jolanda's fists, Lio's iron, my burning knuckles. A fierce joy twists our guts.

The shockwave tears the vaults apart. The upper concrete slabs sag under the uproar. The gallery collapses to lock us in with our dead, but the cadence no longer stops. How far down will we descend to keep our noise?