By Andrea Renae

Pearlescent light envelops me when I slide from the vent and brush the dust from my tattered dress. A groan parts my lips as my spine uncurls, limbs stretching. I glance around, anxious that I have given myself away. But the airship’s Grand Hall is empty, silent.

Trying to ignore the tempting shape at the end of the room, I linger within a pool of light to gaze at the night sky, as has become my ritual over the past months of isolation. Luminescence swathes the floor from the ballroom’s arched windows, and the stars shimmer brighter than usual. Below, the clouds’ soft carpet parries the moonbeams back to the expanse. My breath is stolen by the beauty.

But it is a silent, untouchable thing.

A thick rug muffles my bare feet as I turn and cross the hall, wiggling my toes in the luxury. By day, the murmur of polite conversation permeates this room. By night, it is punctuated with booming laughter until the lords and ladies have their fill and retire to their lush apartments. Up in the clouds, where Earth’s hellscape can be forgotten, they live as loud and as large as they like.

And if I want to survive, I must remain unseen and silent.

During one of the more extravagant parties, loneliness finally drove me to risk being discovered through the grate. The carpet had been rolled back for dancing, and frilled gowns orbited about polished shoes and pressed trousers with perfectly timed movements. I watched the gentlemen grip corseted waists with one hand and manicured fingers with the other, unable to recall what human touch felt like. But more than the longing for companionship, it was the chamber orchestra that emptied my chest.

After the nuclear cataclysm, the necessity of survival had forced music from my life. But on that night, I drank in the melodies until the small hours of the morning, daring to imagine an existence that was as untouchable as the sky.

At the end of the hall, the persistent shape beckons me from my reverie, and my pulse quickens. I pad across the carpet and lift the instrument’s lid, then reverently finger the line of its keys. In the months since I stowed away, I have not heard it played once. It strikes me as tragic that a piano would claim space on this voyage just to remain silent, like me. The need to draw out its voice branches across my chest, my hands trembling with the effort to resist.

A shudder runs through the airship, followed by a darkness that swallows the room. Off-balance, I throw my arms out for something to hold and plink out two high notes. Sucking in a breath, I pull back as if I’ve touched a firebrand.

The zeppelin emerges from a pillar of clouds, and terror ices over my skin as a woman steps from the shadows. But I do not retreat as she regards me, as I regard her. Age lines her face and silvers her hair. Gripping her silken shawl in one hand, she holds out the other in a gesture of peace.

“Do you play?” she asks with a faint smile that disarms me, convinces me to be seen.

I pull at the frayed edges of my sleeves. “Not for a long time.” My voice is foreign in my ears, belonging to someone who ceased to exist long ago.

The woman’s eyes narrow as she studies my clothes, but pity softens her features. “My Philip played so beautifully, and although I was never a strong vocalist, I learned to sing just so I could join him in his ecstasy. Together, we escaped the world.” Her sad gaze travels over the sea of moonlit clouds. “This voyage was our last hope when we boarded. But his lungs never quite recovered from the acid storms.” She pinches her lips together for a breath, then clears her throat and gestures at the piano. “This belonged to him.”

I glance down, sorrow and desire threatening to drown me.

“Play,” the woman says softly.

It’s not a command or an invitation. It’s a plea.

Unease prickles my spine. Playing could draw an audience who will take exception to a ragged urchin amid their curated finery. I was supposed to wink out of existence with the rest of my discarded class, not feed off extravagance like a parasite. I should stay silent. Instead, I lower myself onto the bench before the piano.

From the moment I press the cool, ivory keys, I’m free.

The sumptuous tone strikes my heartstrings, and my body rings with its melody. I lean my soul into its depths until cleansing tears drip from my cheeks, washing away the horrors and silence I endured to survive. With a gasp, my fingers begin to rise, dancing higher and higher, reaching to the stars themselves. Then comes the descent, like the graceful dip of the moon to the clouds below.

For the first time since this airship took flight, I leave the ground. I have claimed the skies, have given them my heart’s voice.

“Please don’t stop,” the woman whispers through tears of her own.

Making no argument, I pour myself into another aria. But this time, I am not the only one to lend the melody life.

“O mio babbino caro, mi piace, è bello, bello,” the woman sings with the voice of the celestials. I feel the breadth of every one of her days, the weight of her sorrow, the wasteland of her loneliness. Our stories twine around one another, our griefs becoming one, and together, we shed the weight of our broken world’s gravity.

When my fingers still, we are both breathless, beaming brighter than the watchful moon.

“Well,” the woman says, approaching me cautiously. She reaches out a trembling hand, and I stifle a sob when her palm finds my cheek. A warm smile blooms on her face. “I don’t think there’s any reason for you to keep hiding.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrea Renae grew up on the Canadian prairies alongside a cat companion, thrilling in tales of all kinds. She processes life’s wonders, hardships and oddities through words while deepening her hope in the Author of it all. A lover of the beautiful as well as humorous, she believes in the power of a good story to bring hope, truth, and light in the most unexpected ways.

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