Read the book: «The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1»

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ISBN 978-5-0069-8288-8

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Snow Chronicles: The Secrets of Names
Book One

Prologue

That night, nobody in the house on the embankment was properly asleep.

At least, that was how it seemed to Domino, lying on the windowsill with his eyes mostly shut and one ear turned to the world. Out by the river, the streetlamps were trembling. Not in the ordinary way, when the wind worried them or a car sent light sliding across the glass. This was different. It was as if the lamps had suddenly become doubtful, and were no longer sure whether shining was really their business.

Domino would not have put it like that, of course. He was a cat, not a philosopher. Still, he knew when a thing was wrong. And tonight, something was.

For one thing, the hall clock had stopped.

It was an old clock, and usually it ticked with a faint, put-upon effort, as if counting time was work it had never properly agreed to. Now it was silent. Its hands stood fixed at half past eleven, and nobody had noticed. Not even Vera, who normally heard every creak and whisper in the flat, chiefly because suspicious noises gave her an excellent reason for not going to sleep. Tonight she had gone off at once, as neatly as a lamp being switched out.

On the bedside table, her phone lay face-up in the dark. Domino watched the little bright shapes on the screen fade, one by one. First the messages disappeared. Then the apps. Then there was nothing left but a black pane of glass with the moon in it.

Domino dropped from the sill without a sound. Cats can do that when they choose, especially if they have decided the floor ought not to be told they are there.

He padded over and sniffed the phone.

It smelled as it should: warm plastic, smooth glass, the faint familiar trace of Vera’s hand cream. And under that was something else. Something thin and cold, like the draught from a window that looks shut until you go near it.

Domino’s eyes narrowed.

In the dark mirror of the screen, where there had been only moonlight a moment ago, something moved.

Not his reflection.

This thing had no tail. No ears. It was too smooth altogether – blank and pale, like a sheet of paper waiting for words that had never been written.

One of Domino’s ears flicked back. Behind him, from the bed, came the soft sound of Vera breathing.

Only it was too soft. Too even. Too peaceful. As if her lungs were taking orders from somewhere else.

Very slowly, Domino turned his head.

In the corner where the wardrobe shadow joined the shadow on the wall, the air had gone thick. Not dark, exactly. Dense. As though the room had folded there, and hidden something in the crease. And inside that thickness was a tiny pulsing, so faint that he might almost have imagined it – like a heart trying very hard not to be heard.

He ought to wake Vera.

That was simple enough. He had done it dozens of times before: jump on the pillow, push his nose against her cheek, tread once or twice on her shoulder if she was being particularly difficult. But now he found he could not move.

It was not fear. Domino knew fear, and this was not it. It was the certainty that if he broke the silence, something would answer. And whatever answered would not use a voice.

«Mrr,» he said under his breath.

The quilt seemed to swallow the sound.

The silence quivered.

And for one brief second Domino saw it plainly: a colourless shape standing in the corner, faceless and still, turned towards the bed where Vera slept.

Then it was gone.

At once the room came right again. The hall clock began ticking. Vera’s phone blinked back into its ordinary lock screen. Vera herself rolled over and muttered something sleepy about faceless things.

For a long while Domino stayed where he was, staring at the empty corner.

Then he sprang on to the bed and curled himself behind Vera’s knees, tucked close as a guard posted in a nest.

That night Vera dreamed that a cat was defending a girl from a pale, faceless shadow.

Domino did not sleep until dawn. He lay listening while the world outside slowly filled up again with its usual noises: the river shifting in the dark, a train far away, and at last the first tram grumbling into morning.

Morning

Morning in the house on the embankment usually began not with sunshine, and not with an alarm clock, but with somebody’s disaster.

Sometimes the kettle boiled over with such outraged energy that it sounded ready to hand in its notice. Sometimes somebody failed to find a second sock and announced it as if a matter of national security had gone missing. Domino, for his part, considered this the proper state of the world. A house ought to sound like a house. Otherwise what was the point of having one?

But this morning everything was somehow… muffled.

Not silent. There were noises. A spoon clinked in the kitchen. A cupboard banged in the bathroom. Outside, the first tram went rattling past, old and arthritic, like a bad-tempered grandmother’s stool. Only all of it sounded as if the morning had been wrapped in a wool blanket.

Domino sat on the windowsill and frowned down into the yard.

Two crows were quarrelling over a piece of bread with the usual crowish lack of manners – that is to say, with commitment, with eloquence, and every intention of turning the matter into a brawl. This was a comfort of sorts. A world where crows still knew how to abuse one another was not entirely beyond saving.

«Ve-e-ra!» called a voice from the kitchen. «If you don’t get up this minute, I’m eating your casserole!»

It was Vadim. He was not shouting. He was merely stating a fact, in the tone of someone whose conscience had long ago gone off to live its own life.

Vera emerged from under the blankets like a person dragged out of an extremely important and probably heroic dream.

«Don’t you dare,» she croaked, and sat up at once. «I was saving that.»

Domino turned a yellow stare on her.

At first glance Vera looked perfectly ordinary: hair in all directions, sleepy face, one cheek marked with the pattern of the pillow, as if the pillow had won some overnight argument. But she had woken too quickly. No grumbling. No bargaining for five more minutes. It was as if sleep had simply been switched off.

Domino did not like that at all.

He jumped down to the floor and planted one paw firmly on the phone beside the bed.

The screen lit up.

For a moment the message icons shimmered – and then one name blurred, as if something had rubbed it from the inside with an eraser. Domino’s ears flattened. The name came back at once, but unwillingly.

«Domino, move,» said Vera automatically, dragging on her jumper. «Have you decided again that technology was invented specially for you to sit on?»

Domino had indeed decided exactly that. But at present the question was not one of ownership. He lashed her ankle with his tail and looked pointedly at the screen.

Vera looked too, and saw nothing.

«Exactly. Nothing interesting,» she said, in the tone of someone answering not the cat but life in general. Then she added, more quietly, «Not one message from Mum.»

Mum was away on a work trip, and without her the household had not exactly collapsed – everyone was managing quite bravely – but it had come a little undone. Like an old jumper still perfectly wearable, except that one thread had slipped free and gone wandering off to lead a separate existence. Their father had long since moved out and was somewhere in Argentina, so for the time being their small domestic republic was governed by the children, Domino, and chaos, each within its proper sphere.

In the kitchen, her brother was sitting at the table with the air of a man who had lived alone for years and had already had ample time to be disappointed in humanity.

Vadim, though he was Vera’s twin, was nothing like her. He had his chin propped on one hand and was scrolling through his phone with his thumb without really seeing it. Beside him stood a mug of tea, cold and untouched, which meant either deep thought or a small-scale calamity.

«Is the casserole still alive?» Vera asked suspiciously from the doorway.

«For the moment,» said Vadim, without looking up. «But I can promise it neither a long life nor a happy one.»

«Greedy pig.»

«Strategist.»

She sat down opposite him, rescued the plate, and only then looked at him properly.

«What’s wrong with you?»

Vadim shrugged. It was his preferred answer to any question he did not feel like dealing with, including, quite possibly, the design of the universe.

«Nothing.»

«You look like someone who dreamed about an algebra test and woke up in a maths olympiad.»

That got half a smile out of him, though only just. Vadim never wasted more amusement than necessary.

«There’s something odd in my phone,» he said.

«What kind of odd?»

He turned the screen towards her. Vera saw a list of notes. One of them was titled:

Don’t for…

And that was all.

«Did you write it like that for atmosphere?» she asked.

«I wrote more.»

«How much more?»

«I don’t remember.»

They looked at each other.

The tap dripped in the kitchen.

From the hall came a thump. Domino, naturally, had knocked something over that had not in the least needed knocking over.

«Wonderful,» said Vera. «The cat’s decided we aren’t awake enough.»

She got up, and at that exact moment Vadim’s phone gave a soft chime.

They both looked down.

A message from Mum.

Good morning, my dears. How are you?

And then, right in front of them, the second line quivered and changed to:

Good morning. How are you.

«Did you see that?» Vera asked at once.

«See what?»

«It just – » She stopped.

The message now looked entirely ordinary. More ordinary than it had any right to.

Vadim frowned. Not nervously – he disliked looking frightened – but with the expression he wore when something offended his sense of order and he had not yet decided whether it was worth discussing.

«Maybe the signal,» he said at last.

«Yes, obviously. The signal ate my dears because it was embarrassed by affection.»

«There are worse things.»

«Such as?»

«Such as Danya arriving again without knocking.»

As if summoned by name, the front door crashed open.

Danya burst in as though he were being chased by velocity itself. Ilya came behind him at a more civilised pace, and last of all Natan squeezed through – small, round-eyed, and wearing the expression of someone who had already had an idea and was still deciding whether it was merely good or absolutely brilliant.

«We’re here,» Danya announced with the satisfaction of a conqueror reporting a captured fortress. «And we’ve got news.»

«You always have news,» said Vera.

«That is because I pay attention to the world.»

«No,» said Ilya, shutting the door behind them. «It’s because you stick your nose into everything.»

«That,» said Danya, «is what paying attention means.»

Natan was already trying to stroke Domino. Domino endured this with the martyred dignity only very beloved cats can produce.

«What news?» Vadim asked.

Danya sat down on a stool without first asking permission from either the stool or reality.

«First of all, Auntie Zina at the bakery asked me my name twice in a row.»

«That’s because she knows you as Oi, boy, stop touching the pastries,» said Vera.

«Very funny. Secondly, in school, Ilya’s history teacher forgot what he was saying halfway through a sentence.»

Ilya nodded, gloomy but not especially surprised. He generally looked as though he had accepted long ago that life was peculiar and not open to correction.

«He said, «And now a crucial turn in the fate of – «» Ilya lifted his eyebrows. «And stopped. Just stood there staring out of the window. Then he said, «Right. Open your books to the chapter.» Didn’t even say which one.»

«And in mine,» Natan put in importantly, «the sound disappeared from a cartoon. Only for one character. Everybody else was talking, and he was just opening his mouth.»

For a second nobody laughed.

This was so unusual among them that even Domino turned his head.

Then Danya gave a short snort. «Maybe he was tired.»

«The cartoon character?» Vera asked.

«Why not? Everyone has a difficult life.»

But the laugh that followed was oddly brief. It flashed and went out at once.

Vera thought of Mum’s message and turned it over in her mind. The muffled morning. Vadim’s note that had forgotten itself. Auntie Zina forgetting Danya. A history teacher betraying history. And all the while there was that dull grey lump of unease under her ribs, pretending very hard not to exist.

«Maybe the adults are just tired,» she said, though the words sounded to her like a poor excuse arriving late.

«Maybe,» said Danya lightly. «Or maybe something interesting is starting.»

That was why people liked him.

Not just because he was always the first to charge at anything odd. Not because he often spoke before thinking. But because around Danya, strangeness stopped being simply unpleasant and became, at once, an invitation.

«If something is starting,» Vadim said slowly, «the first thing is to work out what it is.»

«There,» said Danya, pointing at him. «I always said you were a hidden genius.»

«You never said that.»

«No, but I thought it.»

Meanwhile Ilya had gone to the window.

«Look.»

In the yard, a neighbour was walking towards the gate with her dog. Everything looked ordinary – except that it didn’t, quite. The dog’s shadow was running slightly to one side, half a step too far left.

Only for a second.

Then it slipped back where it belonged.

«You saw that too?» Vera asked quickly.

Ilya nodded.

Vadim was already beside him. Danya too. Natan rose on tiptoe and gripped the sill with both hands like a very small sailor in rough weather.

«Is it the sun?» he asked.

«There isn’t any sun,» said Vadim.

And there wasn’t. The sky was pale and flat, with not a trace of sunlight anywhere. Only the river beyond the houses was shining, as if no one had told it the morning was not in the mood.

Domino leapt lightly up on to the sill and sat down between them with the air of someone who had been warning everybody all along and, naturally, had been ignored.

He was not looking into the yard.

He was looking at the window glass.

At the reflection.

And if any of the children had known how to read cat just then, they would have understood at once that Domino was deeply displeased by the thing standing behind them and not reflecting as it ought.

But they did not know how. Not yet.

They only felt – all five of them, each in a different way – that something in the ordinary morning had given a tiny crack. Only a tiny one. Like ice at the river’s edge that still bears your weight, but already knows the dark water underneath is beginning to move.

«Right,» said Vera, dragging her eyes away from the window first. «After school, here. Before any adults get involved. We tell everything properly. In order. No lying, no I probably imagined it, no I don’t know exactly.»

«And with food,» said Danya.

«And with food,» Vera agreed.

«And Domino’s in it too,» said Natan, leaning his cheek against the cat’s side.

Domino half-closed his eyes with the expression of someone condemned to organise incompetence.

Then, for no reason anyone could see, the doorbell rang.

It was loud in the hallway. Much too loud.

They all jumped and stared at one another, as if one of them might somehow turn out to be responsible. Then Vera went to open the door, with the others trailing after her in a cluster and Domino streaking past everybody’s legs.

The moment the door opened, every one of them started.

Because outside the door stood silence.

Not ordinary stairwell silence, dusty and faintly echoing, with smells of paint and boiled cabbage and somebody else’s soup drifting through it. This was something else. A flat, level sort of silence. An empty one.

Domino sprang up at once.

And this time even Vera understood that he was not simply being a cat in an inconveniently dramatic mood.

He was warning them.

She stood on the threshold for a second longer than was sensible for anyone who did not want to look absurd.

«Well?» said Danya behind her. «Is it a murderer, a ghost, or the electricity bill?»

«Worse,» said Vera. «Nobody.»

For some reason, nobody was always worse. If it was a murderer, or a ghost, or even a bill, at least you had some idea what category of trouble you were in. But try doing anything sensible with nobody.

Missed

Domino slipped past Vera’s leg, stopped on the threshold, stretched out his neck, and stared hard into the empty stairwell. Then he gave a snort.

Not a frightened snort. An insulted one.

It was the sort of sound a cat makes when someone has rung his bell and then had the bad manners to disappear before he could decide whether they were worth seeing.

«All right,» said Vadim after a moment. In that pause, for some reason, they had all been listening not for sounds but for the place where sounds ought to be. «I have to get to school.»

«We all have to get to school,» Vera said.

«I mean I have to get to school urgently. As for the rest of you – manage somehow.»

«Very funny.»

«I am as serious as a physics textbook.»

After that they all began getting ready, with the particular kind of chaos found only in large groups of children: one person hunting for a hat already in their hand, another remembering a notebook only after putting their shoes on, and someone – Natan, naturally – asking whether he ought to bring a magnifying glass, just in case.

«To school?» said Vera, startled.

«It might be useful.»

«For what?»

«For the investigation.»

He said this with such complete seriousness that no one even argued.

At school, everything at first was offensively ordinary.

The cloakroom smelled of damp coats and mittens that had clearly lived difficult but interesting lives. Downstairs somebody was already running, although running was forbidden, and upstairs somebody was already shouting that running was forbidden, although this had never yet made the slightest difference. By the window, a cluster of girls were discussing something with the grave absorption seen only in people deciding the fate of the world during morning break. The world, if asked, generally knows nothing about these decisions, but that is its own affair.

Vera almost calmed down.

Almost.

That is to say, exactly until literature, when the maths teacher began taking the register.

She was one of those teachers who remembered everything. Not only surnames and first names, but who had forgotten a planner in October, who had lied about a dog eating homework despite never having owned any such dog, and who had once misspelled extraordinary and was probably still ashamed of it in private. In a person like that, memory was not simply memory. It was a branch of internal security.

So when she reached the K’s, Vera did not even look up. She was drawing a tiny crown over the word Domino in the margin of her exercise book and reflecting that the cat would certainly approve.

«Va – » said the teacher, and stopped.

Something in the classroom seemed to give a faint wobble. Nothing dramatic. It was simply that Vera realised she could no longer hear the scrape of the desk beside her.

«Varya Kotova?» the teacher said at last.

The whole class turned as one.

Vera blinked.

«I’m Vera,» she said.

The teacher looked up from the register. She looked at Vera as if seeing her for the first time. Not crossly. Not kindly either. Simply with the puzzled expression of someone who has found one small part of the world quietly replaced.

«Are you?» she said. «How odd.»

Then she looked back down at the page.

For a long time.

Far too long.

With the air of a person to whom the register itself had become suspicious, and the new version written in a language she had once known in another life and then, through sheer bad luck, forgotten.

«Hm,» she said. «Of course. Vera.»

And she made a note.

At that exact moment, something happened.

Nothing visible. The lights did not flicker. The floor did not vanish. The ceiling did not turn into a cloud, though that might at least have been clearer.

It was only that, for one dreadful instant, Vera’s own name felt strange to her.

As if someone had just tried it on.

Like a jumper in a shop changing room – pulled over a stranger’s head, inspected, then taken off again with a slight grimace.

Vera sat up so sharply that the girl next to her whispered, «What’s wrong with you?»

«Nothing.»

But there was no nothing left inside her. In its place sat a horrid feeling, as though someone had opened the door of her room, stood there quietly counting her things, and gone away again without touching anything.

Not yet.

The maths teacher went on with the register as if nothing had happened. By the next name her voice was perfectly normal again, even faintly annoyed in the usual way, as if half the class were absent not in body but only in mind.

Vera stared at the margin of her exercise book.

It said: Vera.

She went over it again quickly.

Vera.

Then once more.

Vera.

Until at least it looked like hers again.

At break she caught up with Vadim outside the biology room.

He was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, staring at his phone with the expression people wear when they already suspect the news is bad but are still hoping it belongs to somebody else.

«Something strange happened to me,» Vera said at once.

«To me too,» he said, just as quickly.

That was almost comforting. Not comforting, exactly – nobody sensible is pleased by shared weirdness – but at least it made the thing look less like private madness.

«The maths teacher called me Varya,» said Vera. «Then stared at the register as if it had betrayed her.»

Vadim frowned.

«My signature disappeared off my test paper.»

«What do you mean, disappeared?»

He showed her the sheet. The corner where his name ought to have been was blank. Not accidentally blank either. Deliberately blank. The sort of blankness you got in snow when someone had clearly been standing there and had somehow managed to leave before you looked.

«I signed it,» said Vadim. «I remember exactly. I even crossed it out once because I wrote it crooked.»

«And?»

«And now there’s nothing.»

The same chill that had been sitting under Vera’s ribs all morning, pretending to be ordinary air, shifted properly into place.

«This isn’t coincidence any more, is it?»

«No,» said Vadim. «This is work.»

He said it quietly, but it made Vera feel much colder.

«What sort of work?»

Vadim slipped the paper back into his folder.

«I don’t know. But if someone’s doing it on purpose, they’ll start small.»

«Thank you,» said Vera. «As usual, you know exactly how to make a person feel better.»

«I’m not trying to make you feel better. I’m trying not to waste time.»

That was exactly like Vadim. Somebody else would have lowered their voice, glanced over their shoulder, or begun constructing theories on the spot. Vadim spoke as if they were discussing a leaking tap. Unpleasant, yes. But first you had to find out where the leak was.

At that moment Danya arrived at speed.

Ordinary people approached. Danya always seemed to spring into existence half a second before colliding with you.

«I’ve got news,» he announced. «Two bad bits and one interesting one.»

«Start with the interesting one,» said Vera.

«The interesting one is that the bad bits are the same.»

They stared at him.

Danya lowered his voice – not because he was frightened, but because he enjoyed mystery as a process.

«In history,» he said, «the teacher called Ilya Igor three times.»

«People get names wrong,» said Vera.

«Yes, but today Ilya said, „I’m not Igor,“ and she said, „Really?“ and looked at him as if he’d changed identity without submitting the proper forms.»

«And the second bad bit?»

«In the canteen Auntie Zina gave me the wrong tray.»

«That’s your tragedy of the century?»

«No. The tragedy is that on the tray it said not Danya but Boy.»

«What?» Vera actually laughed. «Just Boy?»

«Just Boy,» Danya said darkly. «I happen to be a person with a name.»

He sounded funny, but his eyes were too sharp. Much too sharp for someone who ordinarily said things first and considered them afterwards.

After lessons, their band assembled behind the school near the old sports ground, where the goal net was still hanging on by the memory of better times. It was a good place for important conversations. Adults passing by assumed children there were engaged in nonsense, and children, as everyone knows, do their most serious business under cover of nonsense.

Ilya turned up silently, as usual, as if he did not so much walk as materialise in places where he had already noticed everything. Natan came charging in a few minutes later, schoolbag over one shoulder and excitement all over his face.

«It happened to me too!» he burst out before he had quite reached them. «Teacher called me… that… little.»

«You are little,» said Danya.

«But not in the register!»

This was a strong point.

They went round in a circle telling everything, interrupting each other, arguing over details, doubling back to the important parts. And gradually something nastier than the strangeness itself began to emerge.

The glitches were happening at nearly the same time.

«Mine was at ten to three,» said Vadim.

«Half past two, more or less,» said Vera.

«In the canteen at two-forty,» said Danya. «I checked on purpose. After they turned me into Boy.»

«Ours in history was about then too,» said Ilya.

Natan, who had not thought to look at the time, said honestly, «Mine was after compote.»

«Exceptionally valuable scientific data,» said Vera.

«I do my best.»

They fell silent.

A car went by on the far side of the fence. Down on the river someone shouted something heartfelt and completely useless at the gulls. On an ordinary day all this would have been background. Today every stranger’s voice seemed to remind Vera that one might lose one’s own.

«Right,» she said, because somebody had to speak, and she had developed a particular dislike of silence. «Tomorrow, between two and three, everybody watches. We write everything down. What happened, where, when, and to whom.»

«An experiment!» said Danya, delighted.

«Yes.»

«A real one?»

«Almost.»

«Then I’m bringing a notebook.»

«I’ll bring a watch,» said Vadim.

«And I’ll bring a magnifying glass,» said Natan at once.

«What for?» Vera asked.

«In case somebody’s name goes small.»

No one had an answer to that, which was perhaps the worst thing of all.

The next day, the hour between two and three stretched like chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. You went on moving, but all the while it felt as if something was quietly holding you back.

By second lesson Vera was looking at the clock more than at her exercise book. By third, more than at the teacher. By fourth she had begun to feel that the hands themselves were moving more slowly than usual. Though by then that may not have been magic at all, merely ordinary nerves, which are unpleasant enough on their own.

At two twenty-seven she was sent to carry the register to the staff room.

Of course she was.

The moment anything strange enters your life, fate immediately decides that for completeness you ought to be left alone in a long school corridor.

The corridor was empty. Not absolutely empty: somewhere far off a door banged, downstairs somebody laughed, and from the craft room came the smell of glue and wood shavings. But this stretch of it was still. Even Vera’s footsteps sounded wrong – duller than they ought to, as if the floor under her feet was listening and had no wish to answer back.

She walked past the timetable board, past the photographs of prize pupils, past a list pinned up for some school event.

Then she stopped.

The list had shifted.

No – not the sheet itself.

Her name.

There it was in the middle: Vera Kotova, ordinary and black and flat, like all names on all school lists. Then the letters seemed to ripple. They did not vanish at once. First they faded, as though she were looking at them through water. Then they flickered.

And disappeared.

For one tiny, impossible, freezing second.

Everything inside Vera dropped, the way it does in a lift when it suddenly changes its mind about being reliable.

She stepped closer.

The name came back.

But something came with it.

Something was calling her.

Not in a voice.

Not in a whisper.

Not in any sound at all.

It was as if one small piece had been cut out of the silence of the world, and the hole left behind was exactly the shape of her name. And that hollow was reaching for her.

Ve—

No. Not even that. No letters. No breath. No sound. Only the absence of everything else, and somehow it knew perfectly well who she was.

Vera stood frozen, clutching the register against her chest.

The corridor seemed to lengthen. The light on the walls grew thinner and paler. At the far end, a door handle twitched, though nobody had touched it.

«No,» said Vera out loud, without any idea whom she was answering.

The word rang far too loudly.

At once the world came back together.

A cough sounded in the classroom to her left. Somewhere downstairs children thundered past. The list hung on the board, and her name was there exactly where it belonged, looking innocent enough to have been there all day.

But Vera’s fingers were trembling as if they had only just let go of the edge of something very deep.

She walked home quickly.

Not running – that would have looked too much like panic, and Vera was not prepared to admit to panic, if only on principle. But she walked in such a way that the wind kept tugging at her sleeves and only just managed to keep up.

At home Vadim and Danya were already there. Ilya arrived five minutes later. Natan seven minutes after that, with the expression of a person very much inclined to say everything at once.

Domino was stretched along the back of the sofa pretending to have no interest whatever in human affairs. But his left ear was tilted towards the door, which gave him away completely.

Vera told them everything in order.

The register. The list. The way her name had vanished. The call that was not a sound at all, only a hole where sound ought to be.

When she had finished, the room went quiet.