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“True. But… this isn’t what I came to talk about; even though, itisabout shitThe Gardenimplanted in us.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What then?”
“I need to be able to go after Renard, but before I can… I need to have certain assurances in place,” I told her. “Have you figured out yet how to overcome the song trigger?”
A grin spread over her face.“I thought you’d never ask.”
She motioned for me to follow her, and moments later, she and I were in a completely different room at the compound. On the way, we swung by the cafeteria where she’d poured a coffee—no cream, no sugar, nothing added.
She set the coffee down on the table in the middle of the room and then sat down at one chair. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing at the empty chair across the table from her.
I raised an eyebrow, but accepted her invitation and took the seat, all while wondering what this was.
“So… no one is supposed to know what their song is,” she started, and I leaned in, instantly fully invested. “But, I’ve been working on something—veryexperimental. Not a lot of people know this, but years ago, when I went intoThe Gardento get Dacia… Etienne played my song. And he used that control to try to get me to kill Cree.”
“Try?” I asked and she nodded.
“Yeah. See… I think because I was so far removed fromThe Garden, and because I’d already managed to get so much of my humanity back, the hold wasn’t as strong anymore. So while he was able to control me still, I was somewhat lucid. Not completely, but just enough for Cree to trigger something in me that snapped me out of it. And because of that, I think, I knew exactly what the song was. Because I came back to myself while it was still going.”
“That’s excellent. But unless we’ve all got the same song…”
“No.” Alicia shook her head. “But, Etienne made a comment to me, because like all villains, he never thinks anybody standing against him is going to make it out. ButIdid. With the knowledge that he has a penchant for Black composers,” she said, sitting back with a satisfied smirk, arms crossed. “My song is by a Black composer. Isaiah’s song? Black composer.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You know his song?”
She nodded. “He was the first one to let me test my method. And we figured it out. After that, we tried with Dacia; figured it out.”
“So that’s it then? You’ve got some way of combing through, getting the song, so it can’t be used against us?”
She shook her head. “You’re not thinking itall the waythrough,” she said. “Just knowing it doesn’t defend against it. It helps, but only the tiniest bit. Only with keeping you alittlemore aware. It’s not a defense.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “So how do we get there?”
“Interruption,” she answered. “But interruption requires someone being with you. It requires certain conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“Well, for starters, the interruption has to be during something you couldn’t otherwise overcome.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
She chuckled. “If someone played my song right now, and they wanted me to drink this coffee, I would not drink it. Besides the fact that I’ve been training myself against it, it’s just disgusting to me and I don’t want to. Which makes it very easy to just…not. But let’s say it was a bigger task. Something dangerous. Bend your fingers back. Break them. Break themoff. That would be harder thing to decline.”
My eyes narrowed. “Shouldn’t it be the opposite?” I questioned and she shook her head.
“I understand why you’d think so, but that’s not how the psychology of it works,” she explained. “The worse the task, the more ingrained the response is. We’re more conditioned to be obedient to the bigger task than the small ones. Wasting time training obedience to insignificant things… it’s inconsequential, it doesn’t matter. Because we’d probably just do those anyway, in deference. And… I think if you can’t say no todrink the coffeewhen you don’t want to, it would be a trigger to your brain that something was off. And every trigger degrades the connection a bit more. But all that is more in the weeds than we need to be.”
“I’m following you though,” I assured. “But where does theinterruptionyou mentioned come in?”
“What I think, after researching this into the ground as much as I could, is that it ties into the mechanism of control. It’s not as if the song is playing the whole time we’re under whatever instructions, right? Or else we have to have… I don’t know, some sort of implant in our heads that always kept it playing. But during the training, the way they broke the hypnosis—the way that they turned it off—was an interruption in the psyche.”
“So someone has to get to the source of the music?”
“Not necessarily. They just need… a break. Something unexpected to shock the senses For me it was the shock of cold water in my face, in my ears.”
“But if that’s all, wouldn’t that mean that any loud sound, or pain, or something along those lines would pull us out of the hypnosis?”
“Only in very specific conditions,” she answered. “Knowing your song, it gives your brain that itch that something isn’t right. That’s the first condition. The second requires you to be mentally strong enough to play your own partial interruption, in your head.”
