When All is Null and Void

Chapter Fourteen

"Found it!" he said. In his hand he held a completely bloodless, perfectly intact ear. "Oddly enough it was in the cabinet next to the fridge."

"What?" Caleb said with heavy blinks.

"Did you think of a colander? I thought that was sort of weird, but if you thought of it, then I guess it makes sense." Alexander stooped down in front of Caleb and held the unattached bit of cartilage up to Caleb's hole. With a bit of pressure, Alexander touched the ear to Caleb's head. The eardrum popped and tingles like sheets of rain washed along his right side, down to his toes.

"No, I didn't think of a colander," Caleb replied. He yawned, hoping his eardrum would pop even more. "What did you do?"

"You had a Void Cut," his mentor replied, as if that should explain it.

"And?"

Alexander lifted Caleb by the armpits.

"Your body parts want to stay connected. If you don't concentrate, though, the ring tries to send part of you, and you get cut. Usually you just have to reconnect the missing part."

"How does that work?" Caleb's neck was stiff as he rotated it. The dry blood flaked off to the ground.

"The ring sort of reverses your own biological clock to the moment you actually had an ear," Alexander said. "The rings didn't use to work that way, y'know, back when they were first created. They just manipulated time."

"Well lucky me, then." Caleb wasn't particularly sure how lucky he really was, because despite having the ear back, he couldn't take in even breaths, and he was shivering and sweating at the same time. "I need to shower," he announced, gesturing to his bloody body. There would be no more Hops today, and Caleb secretly hoped for none tomorrow either.

Under the stream of almost boiling water—how Caleb liked it—copper-tinted liquid slid past his feet and down the drain. Caleb attempted to be gentle as he wiped at his ear, but the pain hid somewhere beneath the surface. A sort of ache that radiated to the jaw bone. Unlike a bruise, unlike a cut. Just there with no evidence that Caleb had ever been wounded.

He dried off and ran a brush through his hair to tame the curls and darted across the hall in his towel. Once fully dressed, Caleb walked downstairs to the kitchen to scrounge for something to eat. Alexander was nowhere in sight, but Caleb heard the slightly under pitch piano in the office upstairs.

He walked up the steps and past his room. He couldn't pick out the song, but it was definitely classical. A mournful, dark melody with deep bass notes accompanied by tinkling high notes lofted on the air. Caleb watched Alexander through a crack in the office door; his shoulders were upright and loose. Caleb had gone through many lessons where his teacher had told him to sit up straight and would poke him with long spindly fingers when he didn't. Alexander had mastered this—unlike Caleb. His eyes closed, Alexander was lost in the waves of crescendos and diminuendos.

"Who's that?" Caleb asked through the door.

Alexander nearly fell off the piano stool. "Good lord." His eyes popped open. "You scared me."

"Sorry," Caleb replied, nudging the door wider with his bare toe. The hinges howled their own long, mournful note.

"Don't be. I was just messing around. It's Rachmaninov."

"It was nice," Caleb offered. "Really nice actually." He walked into the room. "How long have you been playing?"

"Would you believe me if I said a year?" Alexander's glasses had slid down the bridge of his nose, and he pushed them up now.

"That's good!" Caleb said. The itch to sit at the keys settled over Caleb. His mom—before she'd left him—had once said the very fact of a piano existing didn't mean someone needed to play it.

"What if I told you Rachmaninov taught me?"

Caleb smiled, shaking his head a little. "Probably not."

"Videos on the internet can do wonders." Alexander seemed almost wistful as he stepped away from the piano and gestured for Caleb to sit. "Your fingers are twitching."

Caleb hadn't realized it, but his fingers had been playing along to a tune in the back of his mind. When he did sit, his right thumb fell on middle C. He knew the note backward and forward. He shifted his hand and played a triplet an octave above. Played it again, this time with his left hand adding a harmonized bass line. He didn't know what the song was, but he knew it was supposed to come out of him. That's how Caleb often played, tinkering and finding the key that fit, and then allowing the sea of song to carry him. Wrong turns, backpedals, forward marches. Subtle melodies, followed by echoing harmonies, clustered chords, wide sweeping releases. Somehow Caleb was the music. It bled from his mind to the keys like an open wound.

By no means was Caleb an expert pianist. He still struggled to read notes on the page, but when he played the final note, Alexander was staring at him with fascination. "Wow," he said.

"Sorry," Caleb responded, neck warm. He rubbed the perspiration from his hands onto his jeans. "I didn't mean to take over or anything."

"No, no," Alexander said. "Caleb, you're fine. You're totally... wow." His nod was sharp and quick with a gentle sniff. "Yeah."