The first thing I heard was Stella.
Rachel had been working on my ears since dawn, in a small white room at the Lantern Street clinic, her hands cupped gently over either side of my head and her light moving through the damage like warm water through cracked stone. It was slow, delicate work. Eardrums were thin, and the bones behind them were thinner, and Lydia Sinclair's song had broken things that were never meant to be broken.
For three hours there was nothing. Then a faint, distant rushing, like the sea heard from very far away.
And then a small voice from the doorway, much too loud and completely wonderful.
"Daddy? Can you hear me yet?"
I turned my head. Stella was standing in the doorway in her coat, holding Cecilia's hand, with an expression of fierce, anxious concentration, as though she could make me hear her by trying hard enough.
"Yes," I said, and my own voice sounded strange and thick and real. "I can hear you."
