• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 734 0

for three days under a famed Chinese conductor, learning this single variation on a work that was untitled on their sheet music but which each of them already knew well. At night, they slept in a large complex of luxury safari tents that had been arranged in a nearby clearing. Only in brief hushes did any of them speak about their strange circumstances and most of the time they acted as if this were the most ordinary of command performances. Each had been sworn to secrecy by a confidentiality agreement that stipulated a penalty none could ever afford, as well as, many felt, an unspoken threat. The name of the organization that had hired them was never revealed. They had been promised that when they returned to their homes after the performance, fifty thousand euros would be placed, via wire transfer, into each of their accounts.

But when they saw the music they knew. Few of them saw the entire piece—each musician glimpsed only his own part. Still, they knew what it must be and they were awed.

The night of the performance, they dressed formally in their tents and took the stage. The audience of twenty-seven men and thirteen women sat politely in tuxedos and evening gowns. Each wore the mask of an animal to hide his or her identity from the musicians onstage. There were pigs and birds and dogs and cats and foxes and horses and even dragons.

All wore black except for one woman, seated in the center of the first row, dressed in brilliant white cotton, somehow undusted by the remoteness of the landscape outside and the years of neglect within. Her mask was a sheep. A lamb, more precisely. In whispers within the small cliques of musicians thrust together by common language, all agreed she must be the guest of honor.

There were no introductions, no speeches, no toasts. The masked men and women greeted the orchestra’s arrival with enthusiastic applause. During the performance, they wept. Many of the musicians did, too, and in the newly elongated Dies Irae, some ten minutes into the piece, one large section of the choir erupted in a contagion of tears and the appreciative audience responded with a gasp.

•

The woman in white, who could not help being both thrilled and disturbed at the resemblance of her simple dress to a wedding gown, did not know if the mathematici had really caused three planes to crash, or the blackout in Chicago, or if their rivals and brothers, the acusmatici, had killed Marlena Falcone. This was business that had been settled and dismissed long before this night of her induction, but she was also not discouraged from suspecting it. She had been fascinated by the Thousand when they were only a rumor to her, when she first discovered evidence—later confirmed—that her father had been one of them, and now that they were real, sitting all around her, feting her, paying tribute to her, now that she was about to join them, they terrified her.

She realized only now that members of the Thousand were not joined by knowledge so much as by fear.

There was so much Della wanted to share with Reggie, but so much she couldn’t. “They’re going to make us all wear animal masks” was all she told him about the ceremony, and it was more than she should have. “The masks are supposed to reflect our essence. An animal we were in a past life. It’s totally weird.”

• •

The orchestra began the Benedictus, the longest sequence in the Gold Completion, and in the seventh row was another woman who now understood that, contrary to the lies sworn by Della Dickey to gain acceptance here, Reggie Vallentine had murdered her husband and stolen the requiem. She had said nothing because she had her own secret—a secret, thanks to her daughter, Vallentine no doubt now suspected, as well.

She would need to be careful and creative when she eventually moved against the lawyer, an act that would be both preemptive strike and revenge.

Like Della, she was also a legacy, also a daughter of one of the mathematici, a great-great-granddaughter, and more, a member of this organization since the year she graduated from Vassar, a woman who, since a night