Chapter Five False Congratulations from Real People, and Real Congratulations from False People
The first thing Zada did, out of years of ingrained habit, was tend to her triple cello.
She wiped down the body, checked the battery life, and then nestled it back into its plush case, which she slid into the parcher station in her closet and connected to power.
Calibrated to fifty percent humidity, it was the one spot in the house that wasn’t dripping with condensation.
The second order of business was to sink down onto her bed and do absolutely nothing.
She lay very still, nestled into her soft comforter, her sore and throbbing feet hanging over the edge.
Flora’s shoes were in a heap by the front door.
Thankfully, the blisters on her heels hadn’t bled and the flats remained pristine, ready to return to Flora when her honeymoon was over.
Zada waited for sleep to take her, but despite her bone-deep exhaustion, her mind was still whirring away, cataloguing every awkward silence, every embarrassing snub, every misstep from the last few hours.
She needed something to settle her thoughts.
A movie, perhaps. Something sweet and fluffy, the sort of thing she and Flora used to watch together when they were procrastinating on schoolwork.
Zada activated her lenses and her earring and closed her eyes, flicking from one trailer to the next.
She blinked twice, cueing up the first movie she could find with a happy ending and very limited audience participation—after hours of high emotions, simply nodding and smiling to move the story forward felt like all she could manage.
To Whom It May Concern was a rom-com she’d watched once, when she and Flora were avoiding an essay on societal roles in the modern era or something like that.
The story involved a man and a woman in their early twenties who lived in the same high-end high rise.
And, in true rom-com fashion, they were feuding with each other.
Every day, they left each other a series of increasingly passive-aggressive notes, only to discover by accident that the two of them shared a Heartsong.
The rest of the movie covered their humorous, touching journey to realizing they were perfect for each other after all.
The setup was longer and slower than Zada remembered.
She watched as the characters were introduced, their notes exchanged.
And then came the pivotal moment: The woman stepped out onto her balcony during a holiday party and ended up embroiled in an argument with her nemesis, who just so happened to be on the balcony below her.
When the woman leaned over to punctuate a point, the railing gave way and she fell, plunging for the length of a rose-tinted montage of her life, before the man caught her and reeled her back onto his balcony as their Heartsong erupted around them.
The partygoers, who conveniently appeared on the balcony above, cheered and even wept at the revelation of true love while the camera zoomed in on the woman’s stunned, upset face.
Zada paused the movie and opened her eyes.
She remembered watching this scene with Flora.
She remembered laughing and eagerly leaning forward to take in the rest of the story as it played in the dark between them, longing for the moment the woman stopped being such a fool and learned that she loved her destined match after all.
But now—
Her stomach hurt. That was easily explained.
She’d barely eaten at the wedding. And wasn’t meeting your true love famous for giving you stomach butterflies?
Zada leapt up, shedding her comforter, and paced the room.
It had been her refuge since she had returned home from school, to the point where the damp hardwood floors and cool blue hangings were beginning to feel like an extension of her mind.
The air was too wet to allow for old-fashioned paper posters, and her window was frequently glazed with condensation, allowing only the glow of the council-approved lights from outside.
But one wall featured a decent projection of an underwater scene, which she had chosen as a child for the benefit of her albino goldfish, Dashwood.
She’d been too young to realize that a fish could barely see beyond its tank, or to understand that this was a blessing for the poor little creature.
When she closed her eyes, the actress’s face filled Zada’s vision, features frozen in horror.
Of course, it was completely unrealistic that anyone would react so openly to what they considered an unfavorable Heartsong.
Zada had spent ages in etiquette class learning the importance of controlling your expression at such moments.
Zada opened her eyes again. She mentally recited the Founders Creed three times. The third time she reached “I will always remember that what confounds me today may comfort me tomorrow,” she felt a little calmer.
Without thinking about it too hard, she slid out her lenses, returned them to their charging hub and redirected her pacing to her bookcase.
It was her favorite piece of furniture in the unit, inherited from her father.
Heavy, ancient, and awkwardly large, the roomy shelves had been built for a time when there were far more books in the world and they needed to be stored as individual paper volumes.
The approved reading for New Ionians had been through several major curations since then, mostly excluding works of an obscene or otherwise morally harmful nature.
These days, the entire contents of the New Ionian library could fit on a single slim reader.
Zada’s mother had helped her convert most of the shelves into cubbies to store and charge her lenses, her earring, and her reader, plus a place to house Dashwood’s tank, the most expensive item in the room besides her triple cello.
Dashwood resided in a closed-loop system, the water glowing blue-green from specially bred algae.
Zada put her nose to the glass. Dashwood blinked at her with bulging milky eyes and swam away, disappearing into the small forest of seaweed in the back.
“Fine, be that way,” Zada muttered, straightening.
Grabbing her reader from off the shelf, she swiped past the page of recommended books and tapped on her annotated copy of Persuasion.
The reader opened automatically to chapter 23.
She scanned down the page to the beginning of a very familiar passage, what she thought of as The Letter.
Anne Elliot—the intelligent and virtuous spinster who took the life-ruining advice seven years prior to reject her true love, Captain Wentworth—had just given the captain reason to hope, causing him to pen a note confessing the depth and passion of his feelings.
“I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul . . .”
She and Flora had taken turns reading the book aloud to each other in school, laughing as Daphne insisted on pantomiming the words until it was all comically literal and Carine made some wry comment, like “I hope they make ointment for that piercing. No need to get an infected soul spewing soul pus.”
Nobody was to think about Carine, but in the privacy of her room, Zada allowed herself the space of a few breaths to break the Founders Creed’s fifth rule: “I will be reasonable. I will not stoke the fires of resentment or regret in my heart.” She couldn’t help it.
She missed her friend. She missed what she and Carine, Flora, Augusta, and Daphne had been together, that feeling of being one note in a perfect harmony.
Zada still remembered the thrill she’d felt as she’d dramatically declaimed, “I am half agony, half hope.” Even Carine had been momentarily struck quiet.
It had sounded guiltily exciting, to be able to pierce someone’s soul, to have one’s soul pierced in turn.
She had wondered how she would feel when the day finally came, if her own romance could possibly compare to that giddying rush of Anne and Captain Wentworth finally being honest with each other, opening their hearts to each other.
And it did compare, she reminded herself sternly.
They had crashed into each other at a wedding dance.
Buford had even shown the presence of mind to quote poetry.
It had been everything Zada had ever dreamed of.
Zada had revisited chapter 23 of Persuasion many times since that sunny afternoon at Dalrymple, but now, reading those same words again, it felt like pushing on a bruise.
There was no reason for Zada’s eyes to be welling up. There was no reason for this sinking feeling behind her breastbone. She and Flora had both found their soulmates. They’d achieved their happy endings.
But Zada’s soul was not remotely pierced.
The reader slid out of her hands and landed on the floor with a concerning thump. The longer she sat there, Persuasion lying at her feet, the more certain she grew. She felt like she was the one teetering out of that movie balcony, but she had nobody to catch her and reel her back.
She forced her eyes open wider, to delay the tears, and tried to dredge up some passion, some flood of emotion for her soulmate.
She thought of Buford helping her to her feet after she’d knocked him over, the touch of his hand against hers, the press of their lips together on her front step.
Had she felt anything at all beyond a certain self-consciousness, a thread of apprehension reminding her how important this moment was supposed to be?
Had any of it, any of it at all been about Buford himself, his voice or his auburn curls or his handsome face?
There was no question in her mind: No matter how Zada ransacked her own heart, she could dig up no feeling for him deeper than a vague sense of friendship.
And she strongly suspected he felt the same.