The boy could hear lies.

Some lies were obvious, like when people said they were happy, but they sounded like a sad, hollow bassoon. Other lies sounded like rotten fruit, sweet and sticky on the outside but scratchy and dark on the inside. Yet others were like layer cake, with sounds layered within sounds so thick that it became hard to pick apart, if the boy did not focus.

Sometimes the boy lay in his bed and just listened to all the rippling, chaotic sounds of the world clashing with one another and moving along their own respective paths, and he would hold his breath and focus very very hard on finding the melodies, the hidden beautiful gems wrapped up within the pandemonium, like the small jingle of windchimes in the night, the splash of water coursing down a stream, or the silent flap of a butterfly’s wings.

He met a redheaded lad one day, who bubbled like an angry cauldron full of lava.

“I am here only to get my things,” declared the lad. “And may I never set foot again upon this cursed place.”

The lad was escorted out, civilly of course, for civil was a word they loved to speak around here, though the boy had never managed to quite grasp its meaning.

“Oh, as long as I’ve been here, there have been those like him,” said a fellow child from the island. It occurred to the boy that from his island there were only children he knew here, and none of the children who sounded like clocks and levers and pulleys, but he had never thought to ask why.

“It can’t be helped,” said the woman who sounded like wind on a rosy field. “We are not perfect, though we are always trying to improve.”

The boy learned that the other children from his island had joined the other side in the war. They had been offered the chance to change their mind, but chose not to.

“I wouldn’t dream of joining another side,” said the girl who had but to take a step, to step into any place she had been before. “I’ve been here since the beginning, and they’ve been nothing but good to me.” When asked whether she could step into anywhere she wished, she blushed and demurred. “I’m not quite there yet,” she said, “but soon, they say, I may be able to take people with me.”

The boy was confused why there had to be sides at all. No one seemed to have an answer for him, no one except the old man who worked with the girl in the training grounds.

“I have served many kings in my lifetime," said the old man. "When a king starts to care about the numbers more than his people, that is the beginning of the end."

"The end for the king?" said the boy.

"No, no," said the old man. "The king will be fine. The end of the kingdom.”

Occasionally, the boy encountered those about whom he could not be sure. Usually these were the people who could in some way control the music, like the mute child, whose music spoke to him and whispered, at will. He heard, but he never knew whether he was simply hearing what he heard, or what the mute child wanted him to hear.

The old man was also one such, yet the boy knew, with unsettling certainty, that he was telling the truth.

He began to miss the girl. He loved her, because when something emanated from deep inside her, whether it be the soft notes of a harp or the crash of a cymbal crash, it seeped into all that was around her like ink in water, and never was at odds with itself. Rather, it engulfed all that was around her and amplified the pearls of sound into a safe haven in which he no longer had to single out sounds from amidst the turmoil.

To him, she sounded always in harmony.