Vow

The book opens in darkness before the world begins. A prophecy. A pendant. A light that creates rather than reveals. Tony Anderson's Low Tide opens the same way — ethereal pads and voices breathing in the dark before a reverberated piano strikes like thunder. That interval, low to high, high to low, feels less like a melody beginning than a universe being called into existence. The pads are holy. The piano is heroic and grief-touched simultaneously. It builds toward something that sounds like an angel choir standing in a storm. This is the sound of a promise being made before anyone knows what it will cost.

Two teenage girls have a fight about God in a cornfield and hug it out walking home. Elijah Siegler's piece plays softly underneath — holy and sad and hopeful all at once, slightly more epic than the moment seems to deserve. If these two girls had walked away from each other that afternoon, the universe would have been lost. Their friendship is the structural foundation on which everything that follows is built. Everthing hinges on two seventeen-year-old farmgirls squabbling in the dirt.

Lockers. Skateboards. Kids walking home. Kite Flats in 2466 looks a lot like anywhere you grew up. Sultan Shepard's breezy techno pulse is the Kite Flats teen theme. A deliberate signal: the future isn't foreign. These are your kids. This is your neighborhood. The red Earth hanging overhead is the only thing that's different.

Slow piano. A droning reverb underneath like a room that never quite goes quiet. Perennial sounds like a small town at night — airy and sad. It yearns without demanding anything back. This is Alex's theme at seventeen. Her mother is present in the house, absent from the world, drowning her own grief. Alex keeps the lights on anyway — fixes what's broken, works jobs no one her age should have to work. She's technically brilliant and completely trapped. Kelli is the only reason this life is bearable — and Kelli is leaving. Perennial is the sound of resigning yourself to a fate you didn't pick. The hope in it is almost worse than despair.

Warm piano. Rural and pastoral and quietly hopeful — golden hour in a cornfield. Alex is seventeen and she's decided to do something just for herself. Not for her mother. Not for Kelli. A girl. A cornfield. A silly kiss. For someone who has spent her whole life absorbing what the world hands her, this moment of reaching toward something is its own quiet revolution. A Million Different Ways plays at exactly that register. Just a girl in a field deciding she deserves to make her own choices.

The hopeful warmth of the previous scene doesn't last. Perennial returns — slow, droning, resigned. Alex crushed Brandon's windpipe with her bare hands and ended up in detention. The men her mother brought home taught her to fight back. She got too good at it. She's sitting in a cell wondering if she just destroyed her only way out. Then Kuranis walks in. He's not angry. He's impressed. He wants her for the Moon Guns.

Alex's agency theme returns — same track as the kiss, same register of choosing. Larry Underwood keeps being annoyingly kind to her. He's cursing at a pipe he can't fix and Alex finds that genuinely funny. He becomes a dad-shaped thing in her life. She takes the job even though the pay is terrible.

Two scenes of pure joy — Kelli dyeing Alex's hair, relentless teasing, laughter that fills a room. Pray for Rain plays like a song already on in the background — fun, slightly sad, dancing with a little heart underneath. The sadness isn't grief — it's the specific ache of a beautiful moment you can already feel slipping. The lyrics about love and rain fit. Lyrics about wanting more of something you already have. They have everything here. They just don't know yet how little time is left to be this version of themselves.

Two reverberated notes. That's almost all Pastoral is — and it's enough. Kelli and Alex on the porch the night before everything changes. Cocoa going cold. Tony Anderson's track doesn't dramatize the moment. It just sits with them. This is the last night of their childhood. Kelli names something here that will echo across the entire series: Rooms not Streets. The track Pastoral aches.

Ember is a love song with something prophetic underneath it. Tony Anderson's wife performs haunting vocals that feel less like singing and more like witnessing. Two girls fall asleep holding hands, foreheads pressed together. A promise is made in the dark. Simple words. The kind you mean completely and hope you never have to keep. Alex promises to hold Kelli's hand if the world falls apart. Even from Mars. Even across everything. Some promises are just promises. Some are this.

Morning's Wings moves like time that won't slow down. It aches and rushes simultaneously — the sound of a goodbye that isn't finished when the door closes anyway. Tony Anderson builds tension like a band pulled taut between two people walking in opposite directions. Then it snaps.

Sad piano and cello that climbs out angelically into hope and bliss. Female chorus. Becoming doesn't fit Uthul — a place designed to break children into soldiers. It fits her. She has a buzzed head and is too sick and too cheerful for where she is. She tells Sam about dolphins — how they never leave anyone behind. Arienne is the first person Sam loves in this world. She is inspired by Nightbirde — Jane Marczewski — whose audition on America's Got Talent stopped the world for a few minutes. Same impossible lightness. Same refusal to let suffering be the loudest thing in the room.

Elijah Siegler's A Longing carries the weight Uthul deserves — sad, aching, searching. She collapses in the mud. He carries her back. Promises to bring her lunch. Does. She teases him for it. This is Sam learning what it means to stay.

A string quartet — sad and romantic and intimate. Two people eating together, teasing each other, finding every reason to stay in the same space a little longer. She makes him a promise before lights out.

A male falsetto crying something holy into the dark. Angelic choirs joining him. Sam finds her too late. He goes to her anyway. He stays. He kisses her. He takes the pendant. He makes a vow. The dolphin is with him now. It will never leave anyone behind. The vow he forms here is the spine of everything that follows. Every relationship, every sacrifice, every impossible act of staying — it starts on this slab, in this room, with this kiss.

Ethereal and oceanic — the sound of open water, of something vast and unhurried. Months have passed since Arienne. Sam builds a box for the pendant in the woodshop — his first act of deliberate remembrance. His first attempt to build something that holds grief rather than just carrying it. It's also the first thing he makes with his hands that isn't a weapon or a tool. To The Forgotten plays like the ocean Arienne never saw.

Soft oceanic breeze. A light organ. Pads breathing slowly. Channel is the sound of something being transmitted across a distance that shouldn't be crossable. Aesh-Nine carried her message across months of silence: "Tell him it's okay. Tell him if he feels lost, he won't be." Sam lets the robot go. Kuranis watches a teenager dismantle trained soldiers because a machine told him a dead girl said it was okay.

Two notes. Yearning and achy. Pads and strings breathing softly. Sam brought them to West Comm Tower — the same place where he met Arienne. He didn't say that. He just knew the tower would work and brought Alex here and it did. He stands back and watches two sisters reach each other across space.

Metal guitars. Horns. Drums. The one track on this companion that doesn't ask you to feel anything quietly. Sam and Alex in basic training, moving together like they've been doing this their whole lives. One body. One mind. Alex didn't like him at first. None of that matters on the obstacle course. They are one thing — fearsome, formidable, completely synchronized. To Glory is big and fun.

Warm and slightly uncertain. Kelli is coming home for summer. Alex tells him not to touch Kelli. He tells her what he looks for in a woman: someone who drowns quiet. Alex freezes. That's not a phrase anyone says. That's from the porch. That's sacred language between her and Kelli. Sam is standing in that register without knowing it exists.

Recede again — that soft two note theme earned its return. Kelli comes home from Mars and two sisters find each other at full speed in a field. Sam watches from the porch. He hadn't felt this since Arienne.

Recede one final time — and earns its trilogy. Alex is asleep between them, bare feet in Sam's face. Kelli is pig-snort laughing. Sam and Kelli talking quietly underneath all of it.

Deep cellos. Soft chorus. Something that sounds like stages of love moving through a single piece of music. Kelli sees the pendant. Sam tells her about Arienne — all of it. Kelli listens and then chooses him anyway. All of him. Then Alex and Edie burst through the door completely blitzed and pass out on the floor and Kelli laughs at all of it and decides this is exactly what family looks like. Perfect and ridiculous and completely hers.

Oceanic and crying and sweet. Elijah Siegler writes water into his music the way other composers write light. They tell him he is their shared heart. That's why the dolphin. They're tattooing his symbol — Arienne's symbol — over their hearts and telling him it's because of him. Sam takes the picture. He doesn't have words for what that does to him. The pendant came from Arienne to Sam. Now it lives in their skin. The dolphin is no longer something he carries alone.

Ember returns — same track as the last goodbye, same feeling of time compressing. Alex falls apart like Kelli is dying. Kelli almost stays. Almost. Then she pushes on. Sam holds Alex while the shuttle takes Kelli back to Mars and something shifts in him about what these women are to each other and what he's been let into. Some themes in a life just keep returning until you understand what they're telling you. Time is the enemy of family. The only answer is to stay as close as you can for as long as you can.

Soft and quiet. Tony Anderson at his most restrained. He holds her on the sofa and she cries.

Soft piano and pads. Holy and quiet. The photo he took at the tattoo parlor — Kelli and Alex pulling their tank straps aside to show their fresh sister-dolphins, both of them laughing — he had it tattooed on his chest on Christmas night. A portrait of both women. Both dolphins. He already chose them in ink before he ever said it out loud. He goes outside after. Looks up at the sky. Cries quietly where no one can see him. He has levers now. Things he's terrified to lose.

Dark techno pulse. Forward momentum. No sentiment. The Killtech gang has taken a water tower. Families on Luna are being rationed. Sam and Alex are backup — green, trained, terrified, and moving anyway. There's nothing holy about this yet. Just a beat and a carrier and two people about to find out what they're actually made of when it stops being an obstacle course.

Loud. Operatic. Full orchestral action. Elijah Siegler, who elsewhere on this companion writes oceanic whispers and crying falsetto, here writes something that could score an Avengers set piece without apologizing. Their first real fight and they're good at it. Jamestown is there — which matters more than this scene lets on yet. Siegler writing both We Are One and The Dome is the composer flex of the entire companion.

Not ethereal this time — sad and sweeping and fully orchestral. Elijah Siegler in the register of Howard Shore. Alex puts it together at the funeral — the church, the pipes, the potluck, the man who kept being annoyingly kind to her — his daughter died where Alex was standing. She runs to him after. Holds him. Tells him his daughter had to love him because she does and he's not that bad. Rooms not Streets. She learned it on a porch from Kelli. She's living it at a funeral. Underwood is going to carry things for a very long time.

A trumpet resolving into soft strings — military honor bleeding into something warmer, more private. Then she sees the tattoo. Her face. Kelli's face. Both dolphins. Over his heart. He had it put there on Christmas night alone and never mentioned it and now she's seeing it for the first time in a shower after the worst day of her life.

Soft and reverent. Judah Earl and Inola at their warmest — no ache, no yearning, just arrival. She's wearing Christmas socks and nothing else and that is somehow the most Kelli thing that has ever happened. She sees the tattoo and melts completely. Boundless is the right title. Every time they think they've reached the full depth of it there's more. The socks stay on.

Boundless returns immediately. A stick. A tackle. A bed. Ecstatic doesn't cover it. But a corporate decision Kelli made at work is being weaponized and that shadow is in the room. Sam looks at his pregnant wife wearing the biggest smile he's ever seen and decides the shadow can wait until morning.

Soft and holy. Sea of Light sounds like something being released upward. Larry Underwood leads the lantern release. Hundreds of families are dead in the crater. Kelli's name was on the decision that was weaponized to kill them. She didn't know.

Cellos leading a full string ensemble into something regal and majestic and warm. Tony Anderson wrote this track and it sounds like it was written for a throne room. It plays over a backyard wedding.

High Tide is Low Tide answered. Same composer, same architecture, more light. The book opened with a pendant forming in darkness. It was never the pendant. It was always Lila. The pendant was her symbol before she existed — a placeholder, a promise, pointing forward at something it couldn't name yet. Sam carried it through Uthul and a woodshop and a tower battle and a gazebo wedding and the whole time it was just an arrow. High Tide plays because she's here now. Lila is the dolphin. She always was.

Ethereal choir and pads. Holy and searching. A dream. A river. Someone standing in rising water between two shores, unable to choose. Kelli wakes up crying because something in it was real even if she can't say what. Kelli doesn't know what Alex needs to choose. She just feels it pressed on her heart.

The title says one thing, the music says another — Losing Hope opens sad and then finds its way toward something reverent. Lila runs and plays. Kelli tells Alex about the river dream. Alex doesn't love religion but she does love Kelli. She echoes the promise to hold her hand, no matter what.

Dual violins bubbling up into something playful and sweet and completely joyful. The same piece of music that opened in ethereal searching closes here in a Randolph house Christmas.

Four piano notes. Holy pads and strings. Scott Buckley's In Search of Solitude opens like Brian Eno's Dune prophecy music grown to full size. Kelli is scared. She doesn't trust her company. She doesn't want to go on this trip, but she feels like it's what God wants. Alex hears her crying and comes and sits with her and doesn't leave.

Softer. A little more ominous underneath the sadness. Three people on a launch pad getting smaller. One person on a shuttle getting farther.

Noir and mysterious. Harmonix is military technology. It's not supposed to touch civilians. Lang is using it on Susan's street and Sam watches it happen in real time — people falling over, minds being tuned like instruments without consent. This is institutional evil. The kind that is planned in boardrooms.

Hopeful minimal piano. A violin echoing the throughline softly. Stories plays across three scenes: a father and daughter on a tram looking at new construction; a scratchy transmission with Lila convinced she's still in trouble; and finally — banners, balloons, Alex ordering too much pizza, everyone piling into the rover to go pick up mom. Three movements of waiting.

Here is a track I wrote to music, but I think it might sit more powerfully without it. However, this is the music that was playing in my head when I initially wrote the scene, so I want to share it anyway. Soft piano. Then strings arriving like something that has been waiting a long time to be needed. BG-0239 burned on landing. They pulled her out alive. She died at Luna City Hospital with Sam at her side. "Kiss me, lawman." Alex held her hand and her skin came off in her hands. Sam took her last breath in a kiss. The nurse hands him a plastic bag with her belongings. Her Christmas socks. She had been wearing them when they brought her in. She put them on for him.

A hymn. Larry Underwood at the pulpit. He remembers that Kelli could not sing — she sang anyway, loudly, joyfully, completely unself-consciously. Then outside in the golden hour: Sarah Joy's cello tears the sky open and the sky cries back. Lila asleep on Jamestown's lap. Sam looks out across the Swale and has a vision of Kelli standing there. Crying. Saying she's sorry. Not goodbye. He looks away momentarily. When he looks back, she's gone.

Grief and loss and a violin solo that swells through pads and strings with massive reverb. Siegler writing music that changes shape the way surviving does. Sam and Alex are trying to understand how BG-0239 burned. Trying to hold Lila through the implosion. Alex gets a message from God for the first time in her life. It arrives in a bar fight because Alex would never receive a quiet revelation. Then a dream. Kelli. The meaning just out of reach. The violin solo is the throughline — it keeps finding its way back.

The Wife returns. Same sad mysterious noir register. Now Sam and Alex are watching what sustained illegal civilian tuning does to a person from the inside — the paranoia, the collapse, the erosion of someone who was whole.

Haunting and somber. Eerie underneath the sadness. The Arbitor poisoned Alex and left the antidote at the hospital and left Sam the terms: save Alex and another close to Sam pays the debt, let Alex die and it's over. What else can he do. He runs. He gets her there in time. He saved her. Something is coming for a loved one because he saved her.

The third movement of In Search of Solitude arrives more holy than it left. Sadder. More prophetic. Something powerful is stirring. Sam and Alex fight about Kelli. Sam says she was ignorant for trusting a stranger on Mars. Alex hits him. It breaks her the moment she does it. She runs to her rover and cries alone. Sam cries alone in his bedroom. Then the socks are hanging out of the drawer by his face. He pulls them out. Breathes them in. The last remnants of her — just the smell of her feet from Christmas morning when she was alive and wearing them for him. He completely collapses. Lila runs in crying because she misses her mom too. Sam holds her until she's asleep and then stares down the hall. He can't lose Alex too. He knew it before he said the thing he said. He said it anyway because grief takes aim at the people you love the most.