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“Sing for me,” Verso blurted, idly picking at the strings of his guitar.
Julie was reclining next to him on the picnic blanket, legs crossed at the ankles. She blinked up at him, and a flush crept up her cheeks at the request when she realized he was serious. “Verso, I’m no singer,” she said with an incredulous laugh.
“You are,” he replied, and rubbed his nape when she raised a dubious eyebrow at him. “Sometimes … sometimes you sing to yourself while working at the bakery. You have a lovely voice. So … sing for me? Pretty please?”
The blush deepened on her face, almost matching the Merlot of the bottle they’d drained. “You sneaky rascal,” she said with that crooked smile of hers, but she sat up, relenting. Verso levelled at her the charming, sheepish grin that never failed to get him out of trouble, and she gave him a playful shove. The sweet, light scent of her hair blew towards him—jasmine and water lilies.
Of course she didn’t have the flawless technique of the soloists at the Conservatory, or the widest range, but she had a rich, velvety alto, and more than that, it was her. Julie began to sing, an ubiquitous chanson in Lumière’s taverns and harbour, and Verso strummed an accompaniment on his guitar as her melody rose towards the sunlit canopy.
Verso swept his fingers across the ivories in a glissando. “Sing for me,” he said, grinning at Julie from behind his piano.
If she thought about refusing, Simon never even gave her the chance. “Come on, Julie,” he interjected with the singular enthusiasm of the drunken. “Let’s hear it.”
Julie heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, fine.” She rose and took her glass of wine from the lounge table. “Who am I to deny my adoring public?”
Simon whooped and lifted his tumbler; Clea chuckled in her own glass, and Alicia giggled quietly, ensconced in her armchair. Julie swayed slightly on her stockinged feet as she made her way to Verso before wrapping her arms around his neck from behind. He brought his lips to her glass to steal a sip; she noticed and tilted the rim towards him, but only succeeded in spilling wine down his chin and on his collar.
He laughed. “Hey, careful. That’s an excellent vintage.”
“Better not let it go to waste, then,” she said, licking it off his lips and chin in a sloppy kiss that made even Clea raise her eyebrows.
Julie either didn’t notice or care. Neither did Verso: her breath was warm on his ear and spicy with wine, and her breasts pressed up against his shoulder blades as she inhaled, then joined her voice to the rhythmic chords his own wine-loose fingers struck from the piano. The drink turned her singing throaty and loud and a little off-key, but he only found it all the more charming for it.
Simon rose and pulled Clea in an off-beat waltz; she gave a half-hearted protest before following his lead, and Alicia clapped her hands gleefully. Their laughter filled the lounge, glowing brighter than the lights of the crystal chandelier.
“Sing for me,” Verso whispered against her skin. “I want to hear you.”
Julie looked at him down the soft, rosy lines of her body, and her eyes caught his, half-lidded and bright. “What if … what if the neighbours hear us …?”
Not an unreasonable concern, with the windows open to tempt the precious summer breeze, but Verso couldn’t bring himself to care. His tongue darted out once, teasing and light. Julie arched her spine, one hand pressed to her mouth to muffle the cry that rose to it; her breasts heaved with the movement, more enticing than the sweetest fruit. A pang of desire pulsed low inside him, so intense it was an ache, but his denial was its own pleasure.
“Let them,” Verso replied. He reached for her hand and gently pulled it off her mouth, then laced their fingers together. Her palm was warm against his; she squeezed his hand, her fingertips digging into the grooves between his knuckles. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillows, her hair spread artlessly around her head, her lips parting to loose her panting breaths.
Verso bent his mouth to her again and slowly coaxed a song out of her with lips and tongue and fingers. Her voice filled the small bedroom above the boulangerie, soft and breathy at first, then crescendoed into a full-throated aria.
“Sing for me, Julie,” Verso choked out into her neck. “Please.”
She did, bless her, she did. Her voice was still hazy with sleep, but she sang all the same, a wordless lullaby half-hummed. His arms tightened around her while she stroked his hair and pressed gentle kisses to his brow and temples, and with each gentle note, the lingering tendrils of his nightmare loosened their hold around his throat.
Fire. Fire on all sides, closing in like a living thing, like a predator, and he the prey. His lungs filling with smoke and burning him from the inside out even before the inferno enveloped him in a cocoon of flame, and what a fitting image that was: his chrysalis, the hollow, burned-out husk of his namesake from which he was birthed. The same fire that left his sister scarred and voiceless, that should have taken him—that had taken him in another life, in another world.
But as Julie sang, her sweet lullaby slowly doused the fire in his mind, until flames turned to embers turned to cold ashes. Slowly, slowly, his breathing evened out, his pulse steadied, and tears ran free at last. Inept, useless drops of water that did nothing to extinguish the fire that took Verso.
The other—the real—Verso.
But that other world faded little by little as he cried, and then it was just the two of them again tangled on the bedroll. Julie brushed the damp hair from his brow and wiped his cheeks dry while she sang for him, and against all odds, Verso felt himself sink into sleep again.
Outside the tent they shared, strange new stars wheeled over the fractured ruins of Lumière.
“Sing for me,” Verso said into the quiet.
Julie took a breath, as if to gird herself, as though preparing to refuse, he thought, but then—
Her voice was low, sweet, unadorned. It wavered with the emotion that had swept over the entire expedition when they found the remains of the old city. The survivors they’d hoped to find, seeking refuge among the slabs of marble, had instead found their grave there, trapped within the pitless, immutable walls of the quarry. Now their calcified corpses remained, faces frozen in anguish and terror, like obscene marbles sculpted from the rock surrounding them.
The sunset soaked the quarry in blood as it sank beneath the marble. No one was in the mood to sing, Verso least of all, but one word from him, and Julie, his kind, brave Julie, did. It was shy, questing at first, clearly only meant for his ears, but when her voice wavered and thickened with tears, he joined his to hers. His baritone supported her alto, lifted and steadied it when it faltered. They drew strength from each other until a light, breathy soprano rose from a nearby copse of skeletal trees, turning their impromptu duet into a trio. Another expeditioner joined them with the next verse, and another, and another, and before long their song ran through the camp like a wave.
Together they sang the song Julie had sung for him that afternoon in the woods near Lumière: a hymn to light and joy, now an elegy to all they’d lost.
“Sing for me,” Verso whispered to the wind. “Julie, if you’re here … sing for me, I beg you.”
The only answer was the silk of her armband flapping in the breeze, the rustling of the trees and the song of a lone bird rising from the shimmering leaves. He was alone in the clearing near the quarry where he’d taken her life, but if he closed his eyes and cast for her presence, he could feel her right there with him. So close he expected the weight of her arms around him any instant, her laugh in his ear, the fall of her hair brushing his cheek. The warmth of her body was in the summer air, the dark gold of her hair in the yellowing canopy, her perfume in a whiff of white flowers.
The scent carried with it the memory of petals her body had left behind after she’d died in his arms. Her chroma had returned to the canvas, and thus to his mother’s hand; but with one woman out of reach, so was the other. All that remained of his love were the handfuls of petals he’d held on to, pressed dry in the pages of his journal, white against white. She filled every line, every blank: he’d committed every memory to words and sketched her face countless times. But he was never satisfied with the likeness, fearing it was not his skill failing him so much as his memory of her, dissolving like chroma.
And her voice—her voice no longer existed anywhere except in his mind, in the fragile, unreliable amber of remembrance. As the years passed, golden digits ticking down on the Monolith, conjuring the sound of her voice was getting more and more difficult. If he forgot her, then the last part of her would die, and he had no doubt, he with her.
His heart had already died, anyway, pierced by his own sword as much as hers was, and in this his Maman’s gift was no succor. The rest was a formality.
“Sing for me, Julie,” Verso pleaded again, knowing it was futile, and yet for a moment the breeze sounded as sweet as she, and a melody unfurled right on the edge of his hearing, like a song long forgotten and at last remembered. His heart swelled as the clearing blurred around him.
And then the wind died down, and the memory of her voice with it.