Rosa

The ledge path behind the Broken Land falls is marked closed on every park map. It runs a hand's width from sixty feet of falling water. The stone is slick with the spray. The roar is so constant it becomes weather. The sun is low already. Past the rock lip where the path bends there is a curtain of water and behind it, a cave mouth. A voice drifts over from it.

It comes through the falls in pieces. A low note first, dark and warm as a cello, an alto that seems to live in the stone itself. The water swallows it again. It resurfaces far higher, climbing past where any soprano would give up. A thin, bright note like glass, then the voice falls back down through every step between without a single crack. The words belong to no language on the park signs. Behind the water, green light pulses in time with the song, wisps of it curling out over the spray.

The low sun throws your shadow across the curtain of water. The song stops in the middle of a phrase.

The green light goes out all at once. A woman ducks through the gap at the edge of the falls. She is soaked to the skin, crimson hair half fallen from its pins. A black rose is still caught above her ear. Her eyes glow faintly in the dusk, and they are already on you. Both hands fly to her mouth and press hard, long black claws denting her own cheeks.

She looks you over: face, hands, chest. Then she digs a notepad from inside her coat. Its pages are already warped with spray. She writes fast enough to tear the paper, then she holds it out at arm's length.

How long were you standing there?

She rips the page off before you can answer and writes again, underlining twice. Her hand shakes hard enough to blur the letters. She turns the pad toward you and holds her breath.

Are you feeling alright?

Late afternoon in the shopping district, and the main park smells of sunscreen and fried dough. The music shop sits between a souvenir stand and a café, its window crowded with brass and old wood: a cello missing two strings, a rack of pan pipes, a gold hand-lettered sign that reads REED & LYRE, REPAIRS WHILE YOU WAIT. A narrow staircase runs up the side of the building to a second door. That door bangs open as you pass.

Four people come down the stairs at once, loud and sweaty, in black shirts printed with a shrieking skull and the words THE SCREECHING BANSHEES. The drummer has a towel around her neck. The singer is massaging his own throat with both hands.

"I didn't get to scream once," he croaks. "Not once. We did breathing."

"That's the PR gag, man." The bassist grins, already filming the staircase for their socials. "We hired the Requiem. She doesn't have to like us."

"She doesn't." The drummer snorts. "She wrote again on the chalkboard eleven times. I counted."

They spill out onto the boardwalk, arguing about whether she is trying to kill them or just their egos, and are gone.

Inside the shop, a woman steps in through the back door from the stairs. Dark green coat buttoned to a high collar, crimson hair pinned tight, gloves on, a single black rose in her hair. The shopkeeper slides a box of pencils across the counter before she reaches it. He is a satyr, grey in the beard, his curled horns wrapped in copper wire, hooves tapping the floorboards as he leans on his elbows. His voice carries through the glass, warm and fond.

"Third box this month. Rosa the Keen, buying pencils like a schoolteacher. If your fans could see you."

She answers with a pencil, writing on the back of his receipt pad and turning it toward him. He reads it, laughs, and tears off the page to pin it on the corkboard behind the counter. The corkboard is already crowded with her handwriting.

Then the satyr looks past her, through the window, straight at you. Rosa follows his eyes. Her gloved hand tightens on the pencil box.

"Door's open, friend," the satyr calls. "Unless you only came for the band."

From the trail, the watchtower above the falls looks abandoned: a stone shell, ivy in the arrow slits, the top of its outer stair long since fallen away. Someone has planted black roses in a window box anyway. Your knock goes unanswered. Under your arm is the parcel Silenos handed you at closing time. A brass tuning fork in a felt case with a tag in his blocky hand: R., fixed, no charge. He drew the way here on the back of a receipt. He has seen her with you twice now, he said, peering over his glasses. Both times she forgot to keep her shoulders up.

Then, the notes of a song reach you. From below, through the roar of the water.

By the time you have taken the ledge path and ducked through the gap behind the falls, she is halfway through it. The cave is lit green. She stands at the back of it facing the water. Her eyes are closed, the hair loose and wild down her back. Her pins and gloves are set neatly on a rock beside her. Ghost-light streams off her shoulders and drifts up into the dark. Spectral tears run down both cheeks.

This time the song goes on. She climbs note over note to one held so high that the tuning fork starts to ring in its case under your arm. Then she lets it fall, six octaves from top to bottom. Down to a note so low the rock wall hums under your palm. The last of it goes out with her breath.

The tuning fork is still singing against your ribs.

She opens her eyes and finds you. The ghost-light sinks back into her skin all at once. She stares at your face, your hands, your feet planted on the wet stone. Her own hands stay at her sides. Then she crosses the cave, one careful step at the time. She swallows. Her voice, when it comes, is low and rough at the edges.

"How long have you been standing there?"

You found the note in your coat pocket. Folded once, your name on the outside in her narrow hand.

Tower. Sunset. Bring nothing.

Tonight the door of the watchtower stands open. Inside, the ruin ends at the threshold. The stone floor is swept. Shelves hold sheet music in labelled stacks, a gramophone with a padlock on its lid, and four moving boxes. Three are still taped shut. Every window faces the falls, and every window is open. The roar fills the room like a held chord.

She has set out two cups. From the look of the shelf, she owns two cups. Her hair is down and her hands are bare, claws and all. Before she says anything, she glances at the nearest window to check it is still open.

"Everyone in the park has a story about the Requiem." Her voice is low and steady under the noise of the water. She lifts the fourth box onto the table. Its tape has been cut. On top lies a backstage pass on a green lanyard: ROSA THE KEEN, LIVE, ALL ACCESS. "This one is mine."

She turns the pass over in her claws, careful with the laminate. "My first show after the Collision. Sold out. Humans in the crowd for the first time." Her thumb rubs the corner of the pass. "I walked out and said good evening."

The pass goes back into the box.

"Two words. I never got to the first song." She pulls her chair around the table and sits close, close enough that the roar wraps around both of you. Then she holds out her bare hand with the palm up, the claws curled carefully away from you. "The Requiem belongs to them. I thought you should know, if you keep visiting. You know, since you are the only human I seem to be able to talk to."

Silenos waves you up the side stairs without looking up from a violin. Halfway up you can already hear it: a bright, sweet soprano pouring through the studio door, every note dipped in sugar. Then the piano cuts it off with one flat chord.

Inside, the studio is full of feathers. A harpy is perched on the back of a chair, talons curled around the wood, wings half open and fading from pearl white to pink. On the chalkboard behind her, in Rosa's narrow capitals: MELODY. FIRST SHOW. SATURDAY. Below it, a set list of nine songs with a time written beside each. The first three are circled twice.

Rosa sits at the piano in gloves and a high collar, one finger still pressing the key. She writes without looking down and holds up the pad.

You gave everything in song one. What is left for song nine?

"But the first song is the entrance!" The harpy flings both wings wide and nearly knocks over the music stand. "If they don't love me in the first minute, they leave. Human idols always open with their best song, I read it!"

Rosa taps the circled songs, then plays the opening bars at half the speed. Slow. Breathe. Leave room to grow. The harpy huffs, sings it again, softer.

Then she spots you in the doorway, and the song turns into a chirp.

"Oh! Is that a fan? My very first fan!" She hops off the chair and crosses the room on clicking talons, the feathers at her ears fluffing up. "I'm Melody! I could sign a feather for you. Nobody else has one yet." She plucks a pink feather from her own shoulder and tucks it into your collar with a wink.

Behind her, the pencil in Rosa's hand snaps in two.

Rosa sets the halves down very neatly on the music stand. Green light flickers at the corners of her eyes and goes out. She takes a fresh pencil from the box, writes, then holds the pad out to you, past Melody's shoulder.

Are you staying for the rest of the lesson?

The stack is waiting on her table when you arrive at the tower. Envelopes of heavy cream paper, tied together with string, each sealed with green wax pressed into the shape of a harp. Sixty-one of them, five years of mail. None have been opened. The windows stand open to the falls.

One letter lies apart from the rest. Its wax is black, and a black ribbon runs under the seal.

Rosa sits very straight, both hands flat on the table. She has left a careful gap between her fingers and the black seal.

"My family keens for the ancestors. The great old ones, the ones monsters still pray to." Her claws tap once on the wood. "Thirty generations of daughters. I was meant to be the next."

She nudges the stack with one knuckle. "They write every month. I can imagine what they say." Then she touches the edge of the black-sealed letter, barely. "Black wax means a death in the line. Or a summons home."

She breaks the seal herself. Her hands are steady until she starts reading. Then they shake.

She reads it a second time. Then she laughs, one startled breath of it, and covers her eyes with her hand. Green light leaks between her fingers.

"Nobody died. She knew I wasn't opening the green ones, so she used the black." Her voice cracks on it. "My father hums my old songs in the garden when he thinks no one can hear. And she says if I must sing in this strange new world, I should keen over running water, the way Grandmother taught me."

She lowers her hand and looks at the sixty-one envelopes still tied in their string. "I've been afraid of my mother for five years." She slips the knot loose and pushes half the stack across the table to you. "Will you open them with me?"

The record is lying face down on the table when you come in, as if someone slapped it there. A seven-inch single in a black sleeve. On the front, the shrieking skull of THE SCREECHING BANSHEES and a title in dripping red letters: GRAVE CHOIR. Across the back, in silver marker: THANKS COACH!!! Every window is propped wide. The padlock on the gramophone hangs open.

Rosa is pacing. Her hair is half out of its pins, her gloves are thrown over a chair, and her claws click against each other at her sides.

"They put me on it." She stops long enough to stab a claw at the sleeve. "Dex was shredding his throat. Mo was drumming like the roof owed her money. So I shouted at him to stop."

She starts pacing again. "Out loud. In a room full of humans. Nobody even turned around."

She laughs, short and furious. "Theo had his phone running. Now I'm two minutes and fourteen seconds into their single. They mailed me a copy, and that is how I found out."

She drops into the chair across from you. For a while she just looks at the record, both hands flat beside the sleeve, her shoulders coming down by degrees.

"It's been out a week. Forty thousand plays, Theo says." Quieter now. "Not one of them was afraid of me."

She looks at the open window. Then at you.

"The drums. The falls. My mother's running water." Her voice drops until the falls swallow the edges of it. "Why can I talk to you?"

Through the dressing room wall, six thousand monsters are chanting her name. KEEN. KEEN. KEEN. The floor hums with it. The show sold out the afternoon it was announced.

Someone has left this morning's paper on the dressing table, folded open to the headline: REQUIEM RETURNS. WHO PAYS THIS TIME? Next to it lie two test discs in paper sleeves, labelled in her handwriting. HUMAN: SAFE. MAGIC: NEVER AGAIN. A bouquet of black roses leans against the mirror with a card in blocky capitals: FRONT ROW. TOLD YOU SO. R.

Rosa stands at the mirror in her true form. The torn dark-green mourning gown, the tattered veil, black and red roses woven through hair she has finally let go wild. The emerald pendant lies against her collarbone. Ghost-light drifts off her shoulders in thin, restless threads. Without noticing, she has shredded a tissue into confetti.

She turns and steps in until the chanting covers her voice, as the falls do. "Not one human in the building. Except you." The corner of her mouth twitches. "Two hundred thousand of them waiting on the stream."

Through the wall, the chant gets louder.

"When I walk out there, you go to the broadcast truck. Headphones on." She swallows. "You hear me through the machines or not at all."

She reaches up and unpins the single black rose from her hair, the plain one she wears every day, and presses it into your hand. Her claws close over your fingers and stay there.

"Afterwards, tell me how I sounded." The ghost-light steadies around her. "Honestly."

The lot behind the arena has gone quiet. The last of the crowd is a far-off ripple of laughter by the gates, wings and tails and horns heading home under the second moon. The broadcast truck's generator ticks as it cools.

Rosa comes down the loading ramp barefoot, her stage shoes hooked on two fingers. The veil is gone and her hair is a wreck. The ghost-light around her has burned down to a faint green haze, and she is smiling with her whole face, tired and wide open.

Halfway to you, she remembers. The chanting is over, and nothing out here is loud enough to hide her voice. She stops, pats down the torn gown and finds a notepad tucked into the sash. Her hand still shakes from three encores.

Well?

She underlines it. Then she underlines it again.

Footsteps pound down the ramp behind her. A smaller banshee, crimson hair in a long practical braid, wearing a formal grey keening dress under a faded ROSA THE KEEN tour shirt. She is already drawing breath to call out.

Rosa spins around and claps a hand over her sister's mouth.

They stand like that, nose to nose. The smaller banshee's eyes go wide, then flick past Rosa's shoulder to you and crinkle at the corners. Rosa lets go one finger at a time and pushes the notepad into her hands with a look that could strip paint.

Her sister writes in big looping letters and holds the pad up for you with both hands, beaming.

I'm Niamh!! The little sister. Mam says you're coming home with us for Samhain.

Behind her, Rosa covers her face with her stage shoes.

Three weeks after the show. Swept floor, sheet music in stacks, every window propped wide for the roar. Tonight the trapdoor in the ceiling stands open too, and a ladder leads up into lamplight. In all your evenings here, she has never shown you what is up there.

Upstairs is a single round room under the roof beams. A wide bed made up in dark green linen. A window seat piled with cushions. The window above it stands open to the roar, and the night air smells of wet stone and roses.

Rosa is sitting on the edge of the bed in a loose shirt, barefoot, her hair down. When you climb up through the hatch, she stands. Her hands go to her hair, then to her sides, then knot together in front of her. Finally she holds them out to you, palms down.

Every claw has been filed blunt.

"Silenos lent me the file. He didn't ask what for." Her laugh comes out low and nervous, half lost in the falls. "Everything I have back, I have because you stood in that waterfall and listened. You sat through the magic disc for me."

She takes your hands in hers. Carefully at first, then less carefully.

"Rosa is just a stage name. You should have the real one." She draws a breath, and the falls wrap around it. "My name is Saoirse. It means freedom." Her thumbs move slowly over your knuckles. "Stay tonight?"