Chapter Two In Which Chaos Ensues
Everyone spoke at once. The air boiled with concerned voices and scandalized whispers, like the din of a thousand orchestras tuning up on top of each other.
To misplace the Applicator during a ceremony of this scale was unthinkable.
The wedding party ransacked their purses and pockets—all except for Zada, who’d been unable to afford a new clutch in the required dove-gray silk and had left her things with Augusta.
Lieutenant General Dobson herself began organizing a search party, deploying the guests to each of the many nooks and crannies of City Hall.
“Remember,” the Lieutenant General kept barking, “it’s about the size of a finger. It could be nearly anywhere!”
Flora’s mother was sternly admonishing the young nephew, who had started to sob.
A few of the more enterprising guests were methodically stripping the cushions off each bench, and Buford circulated the room, trying in vain to lighten the mood.
For every second that the linchpin of the wedding failed to appear, the noise grew louder and more frantic.
Nobody was watching the stage. This was Zada’s chance to escape.
She wove through the crowd and slipped into a hallway, letting an ornate door swing shut behind her.
Blissful quiet enveloped her. She would help search for the Applicator, like everyone else, and if it took her away from the crush of wedding guests, all the better.
She slipped through one unassuming door after another, passing office pods and several of the many mandated indoor green spaces, finally coming to a stop in front of City Hall’s famous grand central control room.
She’d seen it once before, on a school field trip, although her attention had been split between marveling at the technology that powered the Core, keeping a fascinated Flora from touching anything, and trying to make sure Daphne didn’t get them all kicked out.
The room was massive, she remembered that much.
It had to be, to contain the tech that allowed New Ionia to keep a perfect imprint of the minds of the four wisest people ever to found a city.
That mental architecture powered the Core, and the Core in turn generated the algorithms not just for Heartsong, which divined the perfect romantic match for each citizen of New Ionia, but also those which presided over secondary school admissions and career assignments.
Zada had the Core to thank for her scholarship to Dalrymple, and she paused to wish it a silent thank-you.
As she approached, she felt almost dizzy standing so close to something so important—like cracking open the rib cage of a sleeping patient and watching the heart shudder and beat.
That shock hit her before the second mental jolt: The control room was completed unguarded.
Of course, all the guards in the area were currently in the thick of the action in the main room of the courthouse.
Zada’s mouth dropped open. The door was several inches ajar. The room hummed invitingly, blue lights twinkling.
She thought about doubling back, about informing the Lieutenant General of this definite breach in security. Then she stepped up to peer through the narrow opening.
Inside, she caught a flicker of motion—additional to the motion of the giant, glowing three-dimensional screen in the center of the room. Someone wearing a well-tailored dark blue waistcoat and holding the Applicator in one hand.
“Daphne?” Zada blurted out.
The navy-clad figure turned. “Zada Chambers,” said Daphne. “I’m impressed you still remember my name.”
Up close, Daphne’s dark hair looked more messy than deliberately disheveled, and her dark brown eyes were red-rimmed, with purple bruise-like smears of exhaustion marring her usually perfect rosy gold complexion.
She looked tired. She looked vulnerable.
Zada opened the door and stepped into the room, briefly forgetting about everything else.
“Are you—I mean, are you okay?” said Zada.
“Am I okay?” Daphne echoed. She let out a long breath, like the suspiration of a short-range ship leaving the ground.
“No, I’m not okay. I had to stand there for your entire—ha, calling it a speech is generous.
I don’t know if it’s possible for a person to die of embarrassment, but you seemed pretty determined to push those medical boundaries. ”
Zada recoiled. It wasn’t the bite of the words that stung. It was knowing that Daphne was only ever this cutting to someone who had truly hurt her—and Zada had only ever done one thing that could qualify.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that Daphne might still be nursing her wounds over the end of their friendship.
For all her shocking tendencies, Daphne was outgoing and well-liked at school.
She was the ringleader of every prank and the life of every party.
Knowing all of that made their estrangement bearable to Zada: It was understood that their close friends would split time between the two of them, and everyone else flocked to Daphne anyway. She, at least, would be fine.
Zada wasn’t sure what her face was doing, but Daphne’s lips pressed into a thin, sardonic line.
“Nobody could blame you, of course,” Daphne said. “It doesn’t matter what color you paint the exterior; this marriage is still fundamentally a goddamn clown car.”
To punctuate her point, Daphne twirled the shiny silver tool in an elegant flourish.
Zada knew the Applicator was priceless, a carefully calibrated surgical implement capable of searing a hole through the wall.
In Daphne’s hand, it looked like an afterthought, a toy.
She watched the metal winking between Daphne’s long fingers, mesmerized for a brief moment before she snapped out of it.
“What are you doing?” said Zada quietly. “The Applicator—”
“I know, I know,” said Daphne. Her eyes widened in mock horror. “Without the Applicator to mark the happy couple’s eyes and record their binding, can they even be considered married? Heaven forbid that a Heartsong match go unfulfilled!”
Daphne backed toward the room’s disposal unit. Zada had a brief flash of their tour guide during that school trip, all those years ago, warning them not to get too close: “For security purposes, these chutes reduce anything inside to atoms.”
Zada couldn’t help it. She gasped. This was unlike Daphne. Her pranks at school had been flashy but never cruel.
“Why are you doing this?” said Zada, taking a step forward. If she moved fast enough, maybe she could snatch the Applicator out of Daphne’s hands.
Daphne shifted out of reach and closer to the chute, shrugging airily. “Well, this thing’s too big to flush down the toilet.”
“No,” Zada persevered, “I mean, Flora and Aiden haven’t done anything to you. Why spoil the single most important day of their entire lives?”
Zada wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it was not for Daphne to straighten and say, “Who cares? Flora won’t even remember any of this. Did you see how glassy her eyes were? She’s been a thousand miles away all morning.”
“She’s happy,” Zada said automatically. Flora had looked a little dazed up there on the stage. “True love and a little Counseling can have that effect. It’s not her fault.”
“No,” said Daphne with a sad smile, “it’s not.” She reached behind her, activating the waste disposal, which instantly hummed to life. “And I’m not spoiling anything. It’s already spoiled.” All Daphne had to do was drop the Applicator into the chute, and it would be reduced in a blink to nothing.
Flora had looked so beautiful in her wedding dress.
For years, Flora and Zada had dreamed of finding and marrying their Heartsong match.
Daphne couldn’t have forgotten that, the weight of that longing during the six years they’d been together at Dalrymple Academy.
To snatch that dream away from Flora, who’d done nothing to Daphne—it made no sense.
Zada took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the way Daphne had taught her.
Unbidden, Zada could almost see the jewel-bright meadow behind the Auxiliary Building, could almost smell Dalrymple Academy’s signature scent wafting off the silk grass, a heady mixture of vetiver, sandalwood, and ozone.
Lying side by side in that grass, Zada and Daphne had marveled that there was a world in which they could have never met.
It was almost unbelievable that they’d both grown up in New Ionia and hadn’t crossed paths until they were partnered together in lab class.
Back then, it had felt inevitable that they would always be in each other’s lives, like a pair of moons orbiting each other, spinning together in an endless spiral by shared gravity.
They went everywhere together, elbows and hips and shoulders bumping against each other as they rushed to class or wandered to the dining commons.
That had been a lifetime ago, years before Zada had come of age and graduated.
At eighteen, she followed the same rule as every other unmatched debutante: No skin contact with anyone outside your family.
The only exception, of course, was at designated social events, like dances or dinners or strolls through the botanical gardens.
After all, your Heartsong was designed to play when you touched your destined match.
Your perfect partner was chosen for you, for your own good and the good of everyone in New Ionia.
It followed that experiencing your Heartsong was meant to be a public event, one that you celebrated with everyone around you.
Keeping this thrilling and magical experience to yourselves would’ve meant hoarding the greatest joy of your life.
Some students started following the rules of Heartsong at fourteen or fifteen, years before they came of age. It made going without contact later on easier. Plus, it made you seem older and more mature.