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THE INFERNO
Jenna Freeman was beginning to think that she should have listened to her sister before she bought the new viola. It wasn't that she was superstitious. But the instrument had survived two fires—it still had scarring on its ribs—and the last owner had nicknamed it the Inferno. Jenna's sister had said, "Don't you think that's a bad omen? It'll inspire a new category of viola jokes." Only half-listening, Jenna had played a transposed fragment of a Bach partita and was entranced by the Inferno's tone. It sounded like dark chocolate and red satin ribbons and all things shadowy, exactly the way a viola should be. After that, there was no way not to buy the Inferno.
It wasn't until rehearsals for the Twelfth Night Gala that she had an inkling that something was uncanny about the Inferno. Her quartet met in the cellist's drafty living room. The tuning pegs on her old viola had always slid loose in the chill, but the Inferno, once tuned, stayed that way. Jenna didn't think much of it at the time, other than to be grateful.
Once, putting on the shoulder rest, Jenna thought she saw the flicker of fires reflected in the varnish, orange and sweet and unmerciful. It had to be a trick of the light.
Except now they were warming up at the gala and Jenna was beginning to wish she'd brought the old viola instead. She watched the dancers gather, most of them in ruffles or suits, others in sleeker modern wear. Jenna's own dress was a red that showed up brilliantly against her dark brown skin; it had modified sleeves so she could use her bow freely. Some of the dancers swayed, flushed and eager and possibly tipsy. Jenna plucked her strings and frowned. The fifths sounded off, too airy. "I need to retune,” she said.
The first violin, Emily Kim, rolled her eyes and obligingly played a long, full A. "If you're going to do it, do it fast," Emily hissed. The second violin, Rennie Van Dale, only laughed.
Jenna played her A string. The two instruments sounded smooth and silky together, perfect unison without any betraying tremor of a beat frequency. Jenna rapidly tuned the rest of the strings, messing with the fine-tuners more for show than anything else. The off-ness had gone away.
An irrational voice in the back of her head whispered: It's out of tune, and something will go terribly wrong.
It's nothing, she told herself. She forced herself to meet Emily's eyes and smile brightly. The hubbub of people flirting, seeking dance partners, telling jokes—no viola jokes, she hoped—was suddenly unbearably loud.
The cellist, Thomas Latkiewicz, nudged her foot with his bow. Jenna, freed from her reverie, glared at him. He mouthed, "Pay attention!"
Emily raised her bow and made eye contact with each of them in turn. They all nodded at her, then launched into the sustained chord that told the dancers to pair up. When the dancers looked ready, Emily tapped one-two-three-four with her foot and began. Jenna joined in on cue two measures later with a low humming B. For a while, she lost herself in the music's patterns, the way the lacework notes were reflected in the dancers' stately movements. She kept sneaking glances at them over her stand, wishing she were a part of the dance.
Jenna felt strangely flushed as they began the second piece and the dancers paired off for a schottische. She found herself driving harder into the strings than usual. The tone that emerged was not harsh, as she would have expected, but bright, hectic, rich with promised fever. The grace notes felt like sparks, the trills like curling streamers of flame.
Oh, shit, she thought, how do I get out of this one? She willed herself to play more softly, or not to play at all, but her fingers were having none of it.
The horrible part was that she was breathing more rapidly, wondering when they'd pass the tipping-point and everything would cascade into disaster. It would be the best-dressed disaster since the Titanic, she thought.
Emily's brow furrowed. She dipped her head with particular emphasis to get Jenna to stick to the tempo, even if whatever had possessed Jenna's fingers was rhythmically well-behaved. Then Emily got that hell-with-it look that never failed to take Jenna by surprise, no matter how long she'd been playing with the woman. Jenna knew they were lost when they picked up the tempo—just a nudge, but enough for the dancers to notice and respond. Rennie and Thomas were grinning at her.
Is this what it's like to be a conductor? Jenna wondered. To breathe and have everyone in the room respond?
The four of them hit each beat just shy of together. The effect was curiously energetic. The dancers peeled off into clusters; the clusters looked, to Jenna's bewitched eyes, like the shapes of fire, curling and coiling across the dance floor.
And just like that, Jenna missed a note. Normally she would have been mortified, but she understood the real meaning: she had control over her music again.
She had a fraction of a second to decide. She played on. The dance was a dance and a fire at the same time. What were heat or sound, after all, but the excitation of molecules, the dance of matter?
I am the year's fire, she was given to understand, and the days to come. I am the lightning-strike and the summer tempest.
How did a viola survive two fires? Maybe it made a bargain to channel that hectic energy over and over again, dance by dance, in the winter's windings.
Maybe it found a way to do that without setting things literally alight.
The schottische ended. Jenna took a deep breath, resettled the Inferno on her shoulder, and joined the others in returning to the chord between sets. Jenna had her part to play in the great dance, too. The babble of the dancers' voices washed around her. Even if they couldn't name what had happened, they had felt it.
Let's do it again, Jenna thought, and they swept into the night's next dance.
Yoon Ha Lee's fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Helix; she is also a section editor at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. She plays piano and is badly out of practice on her viola.
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