“Creepy, hm?”

“Sure is.” Though not because it looked creepy. Because of the quiet. The cavern was like a petri dish for Black Screams. A couple of them started to moan. Started to rise. Started to swell within.

Until he had a thought. A new mission. Good, good.

The Black Screams faded.

A new mission.

Which involved Lilly. And suddenly he was wildly grateful they had met. It was as if his muse had sensed his distress and sent her to him.

Thank you, Euterpe…

Of course, he realized, as he’d thought downtown, this was definitely not a good idea. But he also thought: As if I have any choice.

The failure last night…The swish, swish of the knife at the refugee camp. The spreading blood in the shape of a bell. The nightmares, the sound waves of approaching Black Screams.

Oh, he needed this.

He was looking Lilly over carefully. Probably hungrily. Before she caught him, he gazed off.

Lilly was acting girlish now. Smiling, despite the wall of skulls, the dark eye sockets turned their way. “Hello!” she called.

The echo danced back and forth.

Stefan heard it long after she’d turned her attention elsewhere.

They walked farther into the dim, cool space.

“Your face,” she said.

Stefan turned, cocking his head.

“Your eyes were closed. What’re you thinking about? Who all these people were?” She nodded to the skulls.

“No, just listening to things.”

“Listening? I don’t hear anything.”

“Oh, there’s a thousand sounds. You hear them too but you don’t know you do.”

“Really?”

“There’s our blood, our heartbeat. There’s our breath. The sound of our clothing against itself and our skin. I can’t hear yours and you can’t hear mine but the sounds are there. A scooter—that one’s hard because it’s an echo of an echo. A tapping. Water, I’d guess. There! That shutter. Somebody took a picture. An old iPhone Four.”

“Wow. You can tell that? And it was so far away. I didn’t hear a thing.”

“You have to allow yourself to hear things. You can hear sounds everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Well, not exactly. Not in a vacuum. Not in outer space.” Stefan recalled a movie, Alien (not a bad flick, by any means). And the advertising line was: In space no one can hear you scream.

He told Lilly about this now. And added, “You know in space movies, when you hear ray guns and spaceships colliding and exploding? Well, that’s wrong. They’d be completely silent. All sounds—a gunshot, a scream, a baby’s laugh—need molecules to bump against. That’s what sound is. That’s why the speed of sound varies. At sea level it’s seven hundred sixty miles an hour. At sixty thousand feet, it’s six hundred fifty miles an hour.”

“Wow, that’s way different! Because of the thinner molecules?”

“Right. In space there are no molecules. There’s nothing. So if you opened your mouth and vibrated your vocal cords no one would hear you. But say you were with somebody else and he put his hand on your chest while you were screaming, he’d hear you.”