A Song for a New Day

1 LUCE ^{172 Ways}

There were, to my knowledge, one hundred and seventy-two ways to wreck a hotel room. We had brainstormed them all in the van over the last eight months on the road. As a game, I’d thought: 61, turn all the furniture upside down; 83, release a pack of feral cats; 92, fill all the drawers with beer, or, 93, marbles; 114, line the floor with soapy plastic and turn it into a slip ’n’ slide; etc., etc.

In my absence, my band had come up with the one hundred and seventy-third, and had for the first time added in a test run. I was not proud.

What would Gemma do if she were here? I stepped all the way into their room instead of gawking from the hallway and closed the door before any hotel employees could walk past, pressing the button to illuminate the DO NOT DISTURB sign for good measure. “Dammit, guys. This is a nice hotel. What the hell did you do?”

“We found some paint.” Hewitt’s breath smelled like a distillery’s dumpster. He lingered beside me in the vestibule.

“You’re a master of understatement.”

All their bags and instruments were crammed into the closet by the entrance. The room itself was painted a garish neon pink, which it definitely hadn’t been when I’d left that morning. Not only the walls, either: the headboards, the nightstand, the dresser. The spatter on the carpet suggested somebody had knifed a Muppet and let it crawl away to die. For all the paint, Hewitt’s breath was still the overwhelming odor.

“Even the TV?” I asked. “Really?”

The television, frame and screen. Cable news blared behind a drippy film of pink, discussing the new highway only for self-driving cars. We’d be avoiding that one.

JD lounged on the far bed, holding a glass of something caramel colored. His shoes were pink. The bedspread, the site of another Muppet murder.

“We considered doing an accent wall.” He waved his glass at the wall behind the headboard.

April sat on the desk, sticks in hand, drumming a soundless tattoo in the air. “How was your day?” she asked, as if nothing was wrong.

“Excuse me a second.” I ducked into the hall and fumbled for the keycard to the room I shared with April. Our room was quiet and empty and, most importantly, not pink. I leaned my guitar bag in a corner and let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, then lay back on the bed and dialed Gemma.

“We’re not supposed to be out here alone,” I said when she picked up. “When are you coming back?”

She sighed. “Hi, Luce. My brother is fine, thanks for asking. The bullet went straight through him without hitting any organs.”

“I heard! I’m glad he’s okay! I’m sorry, I should have asked first. But do you think you’re coming back soon?”

“No, I really don’t. What’s the matter? Do you need something?”

“A tour manager. A babysitter for these giant children you ditched me with, so I can concentrate on music instead of being the adult in the room when I’m younger than all of them. Never mind. I shouldn’t have called, and I’m sorry I bothered you. I hope your brother gets well soon.”

I disconnected. We should have been able to handle a few weeks on the road without a tour manager. Lots of bands did fine without one, but those were probably real bands, where everyone had a vested interest; I’d played solo until the label hired these so-called professionals to back me on tour.

Hewitt let me in again when I knocked. Inside the fridge, two large bottles had been crammed in sideways, gin and tequila. The painted minifridge left my fingertips pink and tacky. My prints made me complicit, I supposed. I pulled out the tequila and took a long slug straight from the bottle. Cheap, astringent stuff. No wonder they were chilling it. The armchair under the window was paint free, so I made my way to it with the tequila, trying not to touch anything else.

“Well, April,” I began, answering her question as if I hadn’t left, “since you asked, my day started at five this morning, with stops at two different TV morning shows. Then I did a radio call-in show. Then I spent two hours on the phone in a station parking lot arguing with the label about why we still don’t have our new T-shirts. Then I did a couple of acoustic songs for a local music podcast, ate a highly mediocre burrito, and came back here to find you’ve been far more productive than me. I mean, why did I waste all that time promoting our show tomorrow night when I could have been helping you redecorate?”

They were all glare resistant; not even April had the decency to look uneasy. They knew I had the power to fire them if I wanted, but I wouldn’t. We got along too well onstage.

It wasn’t in me to maintain stern disinterest. “So where did you get the paint?”

April grinned. “We looked up where the nearest liquor store was, right? We had to run across the highway to get there, and there were, like, six lanes, and it was a little, uh, harrowing. So on the way back, we tried to find a better place to cross, like maybe there was a crosswalk somewhere, and then we passed this Superwally Daycare that had a room being redone and it was completely deserted, right? But the door was open, I guess to air it out.”

A groan escaped me, and I took another chug of tequila. “You stole from a daycare?”

“A Superwally Daycare,” said JD. “They won’t be going broke on our account, I promise you. Anyway, we also went back out again to the actual Superwally and spent some money there that we wouldn’t have spent otherwise, so it cancels out.”

I was almost afraid to ask. “What else did you buy?”

“That’s the best part.” Hewitt flipped the light switch.

The room lit up. The pink television and the wall behind the headboard had been painted over with an alien-green glow-in-the-dark wash only visible with the lights off. On the wall backing the bathroom, our band logo: a sparking cannon. April’s drumsticks glowed, too; if only they’d stuck to painting things they owned.

“I hope one of you pulled a Cheshire Cat, because I need somebody to punch in the teeth.”

JD’s voice came from beside me. “Like I said: we considered an accent wall, but then we decided against it.”

I put the bottle to my mouth to keep myself from saying something I’d regret later. Dozed off for a second in the chair, then started awake when the lights came back on. April had disappeared, probably back to our room; JD was asleep on his bed; Hewitt was singing to himself in the bathroom. I might have rested my eyes for longer than I thought.

The tequila walloped me as I lurched to my feet. I tried to channel Gemma, our absent tour manager. She’d gone home three weeks before, after her brother was shot eating lunch at a mall. The label hadn’t wanted us to keep touring without her, but I had promised we’d be fine. I shouldn’t have called her earlier; this wasn’t her fault. Anyway, even if she’d been here today, she’d have been driving with me, managing the promotional appearances so I could play the pure artist. The band would still have been left to their devices, though they’d probably have thought twice about pulling a stunt like this with her around to ream them out.

What would Gemma say? I channeled her to mutter, “If and when the hotel bills us for damages, it’s coming out of your salaries. You shouldn’t need a babysitter when I leave you alone for one single day. I’m supposed to be the artist here. If anybody is entitled to pull shit, it’s me. You’re supposed to be the professionals, dammit.”

Neither of them responded, if they even heard. That was as far as I needed to take playing grown-up. It was the label’s fault they hadn’t sent a new tour manager, and the label’s fault the band got stuck at a suburban hotel all day while I left with the van to do promotional work solo. My jealousy that they kept bonding and I kept getting left out was best tamped down.

I took their tequila with me and went next door. April lay on the far bed, her back to me, though I had a feeling she was pretending to sleep. The bed looked tempting, but my face broke out if I didn’t scrub off my makeup, and I reeked of the podcaster’s unfiltered cigarettes. I kicked my smoky clothes to the corner and stepped into the shower. Closed my eyes and let the water hit me. Shampooed my hair, eyes still closed.

I didn’t immediately recognize the next sound. Like a school bell, except it kept on signaling. My hazy brain took more than a few seconds to declare it a fire alarm.

“Shit,” April said, loud enough for me to hear over the shower. “What is that?”

I shut off the water and regretfully pulled my smoky clothes back onto my wet self. Ditched the underwear, stuffed the bra under my arm. Shoved my feet into my boots, sans socks. “Fire alarm. Though if those yahoos in the next room turn out to be the cause, we’re leaving them here and moving on as a duo.”

My backpack still lay at the foot of the bed. Wallet, phone, van keys, laptop, tour bible were all in there. I dropped the smoky bra into it, then slung backpack and guitar bag over my right shoulder. If we were talking real fire, those were the possessions I meant to keep.

April trailed me down the hallway, where a flashing light joined the clanging bell. We ran into the guys in the stairwell. JD was naked except for his boxer shorts, gig bag, and tattoos. Hewitt wore the hotel bathrobe, covered in paint; he hadn’t grabbed his guitars. One look told me neither of them had pulled the alarm. Other people joined us on the stairs, hurried but not panicked. They gave the guys a wide berth.

The stairs spilled us out into a side parking lot. A crowd already milled on the asphalt, watching the building. A few people sat in their cars, a better idea. A gust of cold wind hit me as I hit the pavement, plastering my wet clothes to my body.

“Get in the van,” JD said. “Can’t let our singer get sick running around with soapy hair.”

“Says the bassist in boxers.”

He shrugged, though goose bumps had risen on his arms and legs.

He, April, and I walked past the crowd to where I had parked the van in the brightest spot available when I got back an hour ago—had it only been an hour ago? I fumbled for the keys in my bag, and we piled in.

“Where’d Hewitt go?” I asked, turning on the van and cranking the heat. My suitcase was still in the room, along with any warm clothes I had with me.

“He hung back to figure out what was going on,” JD said.

“So it wasn’t you guys?”

“Ha-ha. You think we’d pull a stunt like that?”

“You do remember that an hour ago you were showing me a DIY hotel paint job, right?”

“That’s different. It didn’t hurt anybody. I’d never.”

I could have pointed out they’d cause problems for whoever was responsible for cleaning their room after we checked out, or that they might hurt my relationship with the label. But I knew what he meant. Leave these guys too long and they’d get into some stupid human tricks, but they wouldn’t have risked panicking sleeping kids. They wouldn’t have wanted somebody tripping and falling down the stairs because of a prank. I was pretty sure. I’d only been playing with them for eight months now, but I thought I knew them at least that well.

The back door slid open and Hewitt climbed into the third row. “It’s not a fire. Bomb threat.”

JD frowned. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

“We can’t go,” I said, giving him a look. “Most of our stuff is still upstairs. Besides, if it’s a bomb threat, it’ll look bad for us to leave, considering everyone in that stairwell was already giving you guys the side-eye.”

JD wasn’t calmed. “Shouldn’t they be moving people farther from the building if they think there’s a bomb? Or going through it with robots or dogs or something?”

Hewitt nodded. “They’re waiting for a bomb team.”

“Are bomb-sniffing dogs a thing?” April asked. “I thought they were just for drugs.”

“There are definitely bomb-sniffing dogs,” said JD. “Also bomb-sniffing bees and bomb-sniffing rats, but I think those are used in combat zones, not hotels.”

A thought nagged at me. “Wait. Where are the fire trucks? Or the police? I thought I heard sirens, but they aren’t here.”

Hewitt shrugged. “Busy night, I guess.”

We watched for a while. I guessed the people still standing in the parking lot hadn’t thought to bring their keys out. A few parents juggled children from hip to hip. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. The others did the same, except JD. He sat tapping a foot against the frame, hard enough to make the whole van shake.

“Will you stop?” April tossed an empty soda can at him. “Try to get some sleep.”

That wasn’t going to happen. I nudged him. “Grab your bass.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What?”

“Your bass. Come on.”

I climbed into the backseat and returned a moment later with my little practice amp, the one I’d bought with babysitting money when I was fifteen, along with my crappy first guitar. It wasn’t the best-sounding amp, but it would do for my purpose. About fifty cold, scared-looking people still stood in the parking lot, the ones who hadn’t grabbed their keys or their wallets, who couldn’t escape to their cars. If they were stuck, the least we could do was distract them for a little while.

JD found an outlet on the cement island by the parking lot’s gate, and we both jacked our guitars. A couple of people reoriented themselves to watch us instead of the hotel.

“What are we playing?” JD asked.

“You pick,” I said. “Something cheerful. Something that’ll work even if they can’t hear the vocals. ‘Almost Home,’ maybe?”

He didn’t answer, but instead started playing the opening bass line. I followed with my guitar part, and then started to sing as loud as I could without straining my voice. I hadn’t noticed April following us, but when the second verse started, a scratchy beat locked in with JD, and I glanced behind me to see she was playing a pizza box.

The parents brought their kids over—I imagined them grateful for any diversion at that point—and then others followed. The hotel must have appreciated the distraction, too, since they didn’t stop us. The police might have taken issue with a two a.m. concert, but they still hadn’t arrived.

We had the crowd now. When we played “Blood and Diamonds,” a teenager said, “Mom! They’re from SuperStream! They’re famous!” My surge of pride accompanying that statement had gotten more familiar, but I still wasn’t used to it. I’d never expected anyone to know my songs.

Hewitt had discarded the bathrobe somewhere. I made a mental note to make sure he found it again so we didn’t get stuck paying, then remembered it was covered in paint, so we probably owned it now in any case. He danced in front of us wearing a kilt and a band sweatshirt. At least that way the crowd knew who was playing for them. If I were a better shill—if I didn’t feel self-conscious doing it—I would have told them about our show the next night at the Peach.

We played eight songs before a haggard-looking hotel manager made his way to us. His upside-down name tag read “Efram Dawkins,” and his hair was flat on one side. I wondered where he’d been sleeping.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay, not a problem, we’ll stop.” I raised a hand in appeasement.

“No, it’s not that. I mean, you probably should stop, but not because there’s any problem with the music. I appreciate that you’ve kept people entertained. But—the police aren’t coming. Not before morning.”

I laid my hand across my guitar strings. “False alarm? We can go back in?”

“Well, you see, we can’t let people back in after a bomb threat without the police clearing the hotel, but the police aren’t coming, so we can’t let anyone back in at all.” The manager massaged the back of his neck with his hand. “Company policy.”

A woman who had been dancing with her kid a moment before turned on the guy. “Wait, so you won’t let us go back to our rooms to sleep or to get our keys? What are we supposed to do?”

Dawkins shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what the police said.”

“Fine, then you’re going to give us a ride to another hotel from your chain, and put us up there, right?”

“I’d love to, but…” He paused, glancing around like he hoped someone might bail him out and finish his sentence. Nobody came to his rescue. “I’d love to, but every single hotel in the area received the same threat.”

“Every hotel in the chain?”

“No. Every hotel.”

“Surely not all the threats are credible?”

Dawkins shrugged. “The police seem to think they’re all credible, or they can’t tell which are credible and which aren’t.”

I looked at all the exhausted faces. A minute before they’d been dancing, cheering. Now they looked like two a.m. again.

“This is ridiculous,” said a man in saggy white briefs, clutching an attaché case in front of him. “I wouldn’t travel anymore at all if I didn’t have to. In the last month I’ve been through three airport evacuations and one ‘shelter-in-place’ at a restaurant.”

An elderly woman spoke. “We must be reasonably safe, or they’d have somebody here. A squad car, a fire chief, a dog. Somebody. They must have some kind of triage going to prioritize.”

Dawkins shrugged again.

“Okay, look,” I tried. “What about mitigating the risk? Letting one person in at a time to at least get their keys or wallets?”

“I’d love to, but what if there is a bomb? What if it goes off while even one person is in there? Or what if one of you set it? I can’t let you do that.”

Now my making-the-best-of-it crowd from a few minutes before all eyed each other like there was a killer in our midst. A little boy started crying. “Look,” said a father with a sleeping toddler draped over his shoulder. “We need someplace to go.”

April stood up from the curb. “Um, I have an idea. A place, you know?”

She wasn’t much for public speaking. When the hotel guests all turned her way, she raised her pizza box as a shield. “There’s an unlocked Superwally Daycare down the road.” She pointed. “They were repainting the playroom in the front, but the paint was low-odor and there’s a whole napping room in the back with mats. You have to cross the road, but there aren’t too many cars out anymore, right? It’s walkable.”

April and Hewitt led the group over, while Dawkins made phone calls to the local police to make sure nobody got arrested for trespassing. That left JD and me standing in an empty hotel parking lot.

He sighed. “Wanna play a little more?”

“Might as well.”

I’d quit singing an hour before to save my voice, but JD and I were still playing at four a.m. when April and Hewitt made it back.

“Don’t you two ever get tired?” Hewitt asked, collapsing onto the grass.

I held out my hand. “My calluses have calluses. Anyway, I’m not awake. I’m dreaming this.”

“I’d appreciate if you woke up, then. This is ridiculous.”

I’d been running on adrenaline, but now that everyone was gone, exhaustion washed over me. We unplugged the guitars and dragged ourselves back over to the van. I settled into the crumb-covered middle bench, where I could at least get horizontal even if I couldn’t stretch out.

“So, where to?” JD asked from the driver’s seat.

April, from the bench in front of mine, said, “You’re still too drunk to drive. I think we all are.”

“I know I am.” Hewitt hoisted the gin bottle. “I’ve been topping up.”

“Anyway,” I said. “There’s no place to go. We’ve got a show here tomorrow, which is today, so there’s no point in driving anyplace else.”

“We could go to the next town to sleep.”

Hewitt shook his head. “If they evacuated all the hotels in town, every single person who managed to walk out with a car key in their hand when the alarm went off has been asleep in a hotel room in the next town for an hour now. Every town in every direction.”

“Night in the van it is.” I closed my eyes. “Still more comfortable than my first place in New York. Bigger, too.”

“Whoa,” said April. “Did she just share a personal detail? She has a past?”

My eyes were still closed so I didn’t know if she saw me stick out my tongue at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re not the most forthcoming person. We’ve been in this van for eight months and we barely know anything about you.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s why we’ve invented an origin story for you from the two things we know—three now—you taught yourself to play guitar in high school, and you’re, like, the last person in the world to get a label deal from busking on the street. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got, other than this new tidbit, so we’ve made up the rest. Your parents are werewolves, but you didn’t get the gene.”

The others chimed in, alternating with each other. “You traded your family cow for a magic guitar.” “You sold your soul at a crosswalk for the ability to play.” “You turned down a life of riches for a chance to play in a band.” “You’re from Antarctica, which is why you turn the AC up so high when you’re driving, to feel like home.”

They were joking, but I caught something serious behind it. A challenge to let them in. But what to say? What difference did it make that I’d run away at fifteen rather than tell my frum parents and six siblings I was queer? That I didn’t have that word yet, or any other, only the conviction it wasn’t safe to say the words I didn’t have? Or how just before, little Chava Leah Kanner had wandered into a street fair and heard an electric guitar for the first time? That I’d looked at the guitarist and thought, That’s me, without any road map for the journey, and everything afterward had been an attempt to reconcile who I’d thought I was supposed to be with who I really was? How when I left Brooklyn for my one off-the-path aunt’s apartment in Washington Heights, after months of planning, that first subway ride was a thousand times as long as any drive I’d made since? How I’d only been told of that aunt’s existence by someone from an organization that helped people leave the community, and knew I’d be erased from the family in the same way? I couldn’t articulate any of that to these people, even after eight months in a van together. Maybe someday, when I trusted they wouldn’t joke about it.

“Your version is way more exciting than the truth, I promise. Like I said, there’s nothing to tell.”

“Sure,” April said. “Just because it’s not exciting doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear it.”

She sounded more annoyed than I thought she had the right to be, so I tried to salvage the situation. “But how did you guess about the family cow? I never mentioned Bossie before.”

“I knew it!” JD’s voice held sarcasm and triumph. “There’s always a cow.”

The voices quieted, and I knew they were waiting for me to add something real, but I didn’t, and the silence stretched until JD’s breathing changed and April started to snore.

“Hey,” Hewitt whispered as I started to drift. “Luce, are you still awake?”

“Awake enough. What?”

“Percentage impressed versus percentage dismayed?”

“Sorry?” I asked.

“The hotel room.”

“Ten percent impressed.”

“Only ten? C’mon. It was awesome.”

He couldn’t see my smile. “Fine. Fifty percent impressed. You get points for creativity. The glo-paint was a nice touch.”

If anyone stayed awake after that, I wasn’t awake to notice.

2 ROSEMARY ^{Another Happy Superwally Employee}

The last poster was Rosemary’s least favorite among the six mandatory inspirational posters adorning her workspace walls. The company sent new ones every three months, along with suggestions for their arrangement. Rosemary dutifully hung them, dutifully snapped daily photos of herself in her work environment to send along to headquarters. Her morning photo had even made the company website once, under the caption “Another Happy Superwally Employee.”

She wasn’t a happy employee. Not a sad or disgruntled one, either, just indifferent. Every morning she woke, ate breakfast with her parents, and went back to her bedroom, where she’d transformed her childhood desk into a Superwally Vendor Service Center. Beyond the workstation, out of the company camera’s view, were posters of the Iris Branches Band and Brain in a Jar and Whileaway; even though she’d bought them from Superwally, with her employee discount, they still weren’t part of an approved workplace environment. She used them to remind herself that she didn’t belong to Superwally: if she was valued but replaceable, so was her employer. In theory, anyway. She’d never had any other job.

At 8:29 she turned off the music player on her ancient Superwally Basic Hoodie, the school-issued one she’d had since seventh grade, placing it on the charging pad by her bed. She slipped her work Hoodie over her head and adjusted her mic.

“Welcome, Rosemary! Have a productive day!” flashed in her vision. She waved it away.

The first call, somewhere between 8:30 and 8:35 every morning, was always a test call from Quality Control. She knew that even though they never identified themselves as such.

Her earpiece chimed at 8:32. She answered on the second chime, optimal. A message praising her quick action flashed in the corner of her vision, and the hoodspace resolved into a room with a small, uncluttered wooden desk and dusky blue walls designed to project calm.

“Good morning. You’ve reached Vendor Services. I’m Rosemary.”

“Good morning.” An avatar of a gray-bearded Sikh man materialized in the virtual chair opposite her. “I was wondering if you’d help me with a problem I’m having.”

She didn’t bother skimming his culture and gender specs like she would for a real customer. “Sure, Jeremy, how may I help you?”

The man tensed, went still. “Can’t you even pretend you don’t know this is me? We’re recorded. We get evaluated.”

Rosemary sighed. “Sorry. Right. Stick to the script… . What can I help you with today? You are a valued vendor in the Superwally family and I’m sure I can find a solution for you quickly and efficiently.”

“Thank you. Our fulfillment interface is throwing a glitch. I can’t see which items you need us to replenish in your Tucson warehouse.”

“Certainly, valued customer. If you give me your vendor ID number, I’m sure we can sort this out.”

Jeremy, wearing the day’s bogus vendor avatar, gave her the day’s bogus vendor ID number and sat watching as she solved the day’s bogus issue. This wasn’t a hard one at all, but she resisted the urge to tell him to throw something more difficult at her. Somebody would, sometime during the day, she hoped. Those problems were all that made the job interesting.

She pictured Jeremy sitting in his own home vendor service center, somewhere in—where had he said that one time? His workspace walls no doubt looked the same as hers, but maybe he kept his own posters out beyond the camera’s range, too. She wondered, not for the first time, if he also still lived with his parents. She thought he might be around her own age, twenty-four, but he could as easily have been thirty or forty.

His avatars didn’t give any clue, since Quality Control were allowed to vary their looks day to day. Everyone else’s avs were set to age thirty-three, an age the company had at some point determined to project the right mix of experience and youthful enthusiasm. The most she had ever gotten from Jeremy, in all his early morning test calls, was his name and that he lived someplace starting with a V. Virginia, she thought. Or Vermont. Neither of those data points was necessarily true, either, but it was more than she knew about any of her other coworkers. The rest existed as a long list of employee performance ratings to compete against.

She took seventy-two seconds to solve the morning’s problem, and another “Timely service!” message rewarded her efficiency. Once Jeremy had gone, she flipped to clearview, straightened her desk, and waited for her first real customer. It didn’t take long. At 8:47, the earpiece chimed again. She forced a smile and answered.

“Good morning. You’ve reached Vendor Services. My name is Rosemary. How may I help you?” Good job! Your customer can hear your smile! scrolled at the corner of her eye. She waved away the bonus point.

“We’ve got a massive problem this morning.” The voice came first, then an avatar of a tall young Korean man appeared beside her virtual wooden desk. It was a high-end av, fine enough to show her the tension behind his expression.

“I’m sure I can find a solution quickly and efficiently. May I have your vendor ID number?” Her words, from her avatar’s mouth. Per company policy, her avatar wore her photographic likeness, but aged up to thirty-three, with neater hair and makeup. She was glad they didn’t care whether she wore makeup in real life, even if they did insist she get dressed in the company uniform every day. They spun that as “look your best to work your best,” but she knew about the tech woven into the fabric, the better to quantify you with, my dear.

He rattled off his vendor ID, one she didn’t recognize. Rosemary entered it, trying to conceal her excitement at the company name that popped up. “Can you confirm your vendor name?”

“StageHoloLive or StageHolo. I don’t know if we’re in there as a subsidiary or our own entity.”

“Your own entity,” Rosemary confirmed.

She had been at Superwally six years now, but had never gotten a call from StageHoloLive. It had never even dawned on her that they were Superwally vendors. Of course they were. Where else would you buy your StageHolo projector or SHL-enhanced Hoodie? Who’d fulfill orders for physical souvenirs of their shows? And for that matter, whose lines did they use when they streamed one or another of their services—SHL or SportHolo or TVHolo—into every home and Hoodie in the country?

Almost every home, anyway. Her family didn’t even have the basic StageHolo living room box that played TV and movies, let alone the add-on subscriptions or immersive live experiences. It was mostly a money thing, partly some Luddite parent principle. They would have tossed her old school Hoodie, too, if she hadn’t insisted she still needed it. It couldn’t handle much of anything, but it let her pretend she hadn’t been left totally behind.

“How can I help you?” As she asked, she repeated the vendor number to herself, so she’d recognize it faster in the future. It was palindromic, an easy number to memorize.

“We’ve got a big show tonight, and the site is telling anyone who tries to register at the day-of price point that ticket sales are closed. It was fine yesterday.”

So Superwally ran their registration sites, too. That made sense. Otherwise they’d have created a competitor by now to drive StageHolo out of business.

“Let me get right on that for you.” Rosemary pictured the code before she looked at it. It was easier when she imagined it as it should be before scoping out the real thing. When she opened her eyes to the visual representation, she spotted the problem. It took only a few keystrokes to fix. She puttered for a moment longer before closing out, so it wouldn’t look as easy as it had been. Don’t make the customer feel stupid, or like they could have solved it themselves.

“Got it,” she said. “It’ll work fine now. Do you want to test it from your end before I disconnect?”

“That’d be great. Hang on.” The av went still, then reanimated with visible relief. “Yep. You fixed it.”

Rosemary glanced at her timer. If she ended the call now she’d get another bonus point for efficient solving, but something nagged at her. “It’s not my place to ask, but I’m guessing this isn’t the first time this has happened?”

“No, actually. I’ve called twice in the last month. Why do you ask?”

“I fixed it for this particular show, but I think there’s a bug in how the system is coding dates across your entire site. It’ll probably keep happening.”

“Interesting. Could you, uh, stop it from happening?”

“I can, if you’d like.”

“Of course. That’s why I called.”

“Well, you called about the specific issue, which I just fixed. We’re supposed to fix the problem at hand, ‘quickly and efficiently.’ Which I did, but the more efficient solution is to make it so you don’t have to call back when it happens again in a week.”

“Great. Do that, please.”

Rosemary grinned for real this time. The repair took fifty-eight seconds; she didn’t wait for the optimal time. “Can I help with anything else for StageHoloLive?”

“No, but listen. You were so quick, and I appreciate that you took the initiative to fix the problem behind the problem. Can I send you a code to attend tonight’s show for free?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t accept gifts from vendors. It’s against company policy.” That saved her from mentioning how the only Hoodies in her household were this work-dedicated one, which she was prohibited from using for entertainment, and the Basic the school system had subsidized when she was thirteen and school had gone virtual, which was still good enough to listen to music and hang out with her friends, but too archaic to handle SHL technology.

“Gotcha. Oh, well. I don’t want to get you in trouble, but can I get your employee ID number? Or a direct line to contact you? You’re my new hero. I’d like to be able to contact you again, and maybe send a compliment to your supervisor.”

She didn’t see any harm in that; she already had a few vendors who contacted her directly. She passed her ID number.

“Thanks, Rosemary. Have a wonderful day.”

“You, too. Thank you for being a loyal customer.”

The call disconnected. Rosemary glanced at her reward center. She had lost her bonus point for problem-solving efficiency—the call had gone two minutes over optimum—but got another one for refusing a gift. She was 157 points away from a merit raise. Maybe she’d use it to buy an SHL-compatible Hoodie, even if it pissed off her parents.

The remaining shift-hours passed in a series of mostly easy fixes and a couple of trickier ones. Rosemary appreciated the tricky ones, even if the system didn’t adjust to give credit for dealing with more complex problems. She imagined there were other people in her position who found ways to shunt off those issues, to go for time points rather than completion points; she occasionally got calls that had been bumped from other vendor services staff. She’d never met or talked with any of them, so she could only guess some note in the system marked her.

If her parents were correct, sooner or later it would cost her a raise. The company would keep her where she was, solving everyone’s problems, but not solving them quickly or efficiently or whatever the other inspirational posters of the month demanded. At lunch she ate her yogurt with speed and efficiency. She solved issues as quickly as possible, but some couldn’t be solved any faster.

Just before she took her Hoodie off for the evening, one more message chimed. Annoyance surged through her. She was obligated to take it, even two minutes before quitting time, but she didn’t get overtime without prior approval and she’d get dinged if she ignored it.

She tapped the message envelope and found an optional overtime assignment. StageHoloLive had put through a formal request for her to observe that evening’s show to make sure there were no technical glitches from the Superwally end. Observe the show itself, but with access to the code if she was needed. She read it twice to make sure they were serious.

“I’d be happy to, but my hood isn’t SHL-enabled. I’ll see if I can borrow one in time, but it’s unlikely,” she wrote back. “I apologize for not being able to fulfill this assignment.”

The system passed her message along to whomever had sent it. She changed out of her work uniform; they weren’t supposed to track her after she clocked out, but she didn’t trust them not to.

Walking from her bedroom/workspace into the kitchen was a walk back into reality. Enclosed in her Hoodie all day she sometimes came to believe there were no real people, just voices and messages and lines of code and avatars spread out across the world. Faces that needed help from her in order to feed themselves data and packages and money. Then she stepped into the warm kitchen and was reminded humans existed, real flesh-and-blood people, and they didn’t all need something from her.

“What can I do?” she asked, stretching one arm against the doorframe, then the other.

Her mother was chopping carrots for soup, her crutches leaning against the counter beside her. She hadn’t bothered with her prosthetic today. “If you take over on the vegetables, I’ll do the chicken.”

Rosemary took the proffered knife, popping a carrot piece into her mouth, then spitting it out again. The handsome carrots Superwally droned in never tasted as sweet as the stumpy and gnarled red-cored Chantenay they grew in their garden, but those had all been harvested months ago. Her mother gave her a look, and she ate the bland piece rather than waste it.

“Hey, Ma, do you know anyone nearby with a StageHoloLive hood? Near enough for me to get it in the next hour?”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a chance to go to a free concert. I thought it might be interesting.”

“That’s not ‘going to a concert.’ Trust me, it’s a slippery slope. The hood is cheap, and maybe the show itself isn’t too pricy, but then they make you pay for more and more inside the experience, and it’s too easy just to say yes and transfer money. It’s a system designed to make you spend and spend—”

She heard the frown in her mother’s voice without seeing her face. “I know, I know. But they’re covering me. I’m curious about the full experience. Just once. I’d get paid overtime, too.”

The overtime made a little difference. “I didn’t realize it was for work. Maybe Tina Simmons? She practically lives inside that corporate playground.”

Rosemary didn’t bother to check; her mother hadn’t noticed she’d been avoiding Tina for years. She wracked her brain for others among their closest neighbors, but nobody came to mind whom she’d be comfortable asking. The more she considered it, nearby was only the first problem. Her mother was right that Tina spent all her time in hoodspace, like everyone else but Rosemary; asking to borrow something most people put on when they woke and took off when they went to bed was the second problem. It wasn’t going to happen.

She cut the remaining carrots, moved on to celery and onions. She was setting the table for dinner when the proximity alarm on the front door beeped. Her mother washed her hands, wiped them on her jeans, and pulled her phone from her pocket to check the security camera feed. “Package drone. Are you expecting anything?”

Rosemary shook her head. “I’ll go see what it is.”

She unlocked the door. The package was small and light. It was addressed to her employee ID number, not her personal ID. Inside nestled a brand-new, top-of-the-line, honest-to-goodness name-brand Hoodie^™, along with all accessories. She turned it over in her hands, amazed at how little the new model weighed. No wonder people never took them off.

The packing slip had a sentence in the notes section saying, “Thank you for supporting our concert this evening.” She ran back to her room and pulled her work hood back up to check if the assignment was still available to her. It was.

“I will be able to assist,” she said, happy that the interface wouldn’t convey her excitement.

3 LUCE ^{The Peach}

The morning sun pried my eyelids open far too early. Hewitt slept in the passenger seat, wrapped in the pink bathrobe, T-shirt over his face. JD dozed against the steering wheel. April had taken the far back row, behind me. She was already awake. “Good, you’re up. I needed to show this to somebody.”

She passed me her tablet. I rubbed sleep from my eyes with my still-smoky sleeve, wincing at the odor. Focused on the tablet. Looked up. “Every hotel?”

“Every hotel.”

“The whole city?”

“The whole state.”

I closed my eyes again. “And no bombs were found?”

“No. Not yet. The bomb squads haven’t gotten to half yet.”

“And they’re planning on getting to all? They haven’t caught someone or found something to make them think it was a hoax?”

“Are you going to read the article or not?”

“No.” I handed her back her tablet. “It stresses me out. It’s some terrible hoax. I need sleep. We all need sleep, and then we need to get ready for the show tonight.”

April and JD and I spent part of our per diem on breakfast at a diner near the hotel while Hewitt dozed in the van. The diner was packed with groggy people, some of whom I recognized from the parking lot. I dumped sugar in the weak, acidic coffee until it approximated something drinkable.

We had a noon radio spot scheduled, but we still weren’t allowed back in the hotel room, and I still stank like the podcaster’s ashtray. I scrubbed myself as clean as possible with paper towels in the diner bathroom, and tried to scrape the caked shampoo out of my hair, but it didn’t fix my clothing.

“It’s radio, Luce,” JD said when I returned to the table. “Nobody can see that you smell.”

He ducked the yellow sweetener packet I chucked at him.

I hated shopping at Superwally, resented the way they underpriced local businesses to close them, then automated the checkouts and fired cashiers, but it seemed the best option given the circumstances, so I ran across the parking lot to buy clean jeans and a tank top, hoping Hewitt would do the same when he woke. I couldn’t say that, though. The one other time I had tried to suggest he change clothes for a show, he had shown up wearing a wrestling thong.

Why did he have a wrestling thong with him? We made guesses among ourselves, but refused to ask him directly; better to look unimpressed, so as not to encourage him. He couldn’t surprise us with anything from his bag today, but if I asked him to buy something to replace the bathrobe he’d probably arrive in a union suit and bunny slippers.

When we got back to the van, I was relieved to see he’d found jeans somewhere, which he wore with the band-logo shirt he had liberated the night before. We didn’t have his guitars, anyway, so he could have sat the radio promo out, but I appreciated the effort.

The radio show was business as usual. Guitar, bass, an overturned plastic garbage can for a drum, all within a space the size of a port-a-potty. There was an old Disappear Fear song with a line about negotiating the angles of guitar necks in radio studios, which always came to my mind as we tried not to put each other’s eyes out.

“Is ‘Blood and Diamonds’ autobiographical?” the DJ asked after we played it.

“No.” Served him right for asking a yes/no question, anyhow. Everybody knew you asked open-ended questions if you wanted open-ended answers. If he had asked “What inspired that song?” I might’ve given him something. As it was, April and JD exchanged a smirking glance, and I realized I’d shut down another personal question, like they’d said the night before. It wasn’t that I set out to tell nothing; I didn’t see how it mattered.

The DJ realized his own mistake—shrugged at me in apology—and moved on. We answered questions about that night’s show, the tour in general, the album, the hit song, and even managed to turn the hotel scare into a more lighthearted anecdote. We gave away some tickets to a few lucky listeners. Watched in amazement, not for the first time, as actual callers lit up actual phone lines to get the tickets. The DJ passed me his tablet to show that people were responding on social media as well.

I still hadn’t gotten used to being in demand. After seven months of slogging, we had played seventeen sold-out or near-sold-out shows in the last twenty-two nights. It had all happened so fast. One video in the right place at the right time, a feature on SuperStream, and all of a sudden we had been bumped from opening act to feature. “Blood and Diamonds” wasn’t even my best song. It was easy to believe in the mundane details of promotion and driving and lousy food and scuzzy club bathrooms and time onstage, but the idea that people were listening was still beyond my comprehension.

They let us back into the hotel at two in the afternoon, just before I transitioned from panic to high panic. April had already started searching online for a local store where we’d be able to buy or rent Hewitt a new guitar, and I was trying not to think about having to go back out to Superwally to find makeup and something appropriate to wear onstage. Nobody from the hotel mentioned the pink room, which made me think either the bomb squad never got to our rooms or they had orders to ignore anything other than what they were looking for. Made sense. Nobody wanted to walk through hotel rooms that weren’t expecting visitors.

“Maybe we should take everything with us in case it happens again.” April flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. She had a habit of taking her clothes out of her bag and putting them in the dresser and closet, even when we were only in town for a night. Said it made her feel less vagrant.

“That can’t happen twice in a row. Can it?” I pawed through my own chaotic bag of stage clothes, looking for what I wanted to wear. There weren’t many options. I’d spent Monday, our usual laundromat day, doing the promo for tonight’s show, and the band had spent it redecorating. The plan had been to make up for it today, but we hadn’t anticipated getting locked out of the hotel.

April started snoring gently, and a nap struck me as appealing. I set an alarm on my phone and closed my eyes. Woke what seemed like two seconds later to my phone’s chime. April was drying her hair. I never figured out how she managed to wake herself without alarms, no matter how little sleep we’d gotten. I followed her lead with a blissful, uninterrupted shower.

I debated taking everything with me, decided against it, then for it, then against it again. What were the odds that someone might pull the same hideous stunt two nights in a row? I packed my gig stuff into my backpack and left the larger bag, just to make a point.

The guys met us in the parking lot. I handed Hewitt my tour bible, and he read the address to the van’s GPS to route us. The guys had laughed at my insistence on a hard copy of our itinerary for the first few days of the tour, until the afternoon the phones had crashed but I still knew where we were going. We stopped to buy an actual atlas that day. “Haven’t sold one of those in a while now,” the convenience store clerk said. Nobody had mocked my book since then, and I loved making notes in the margins of the atlas. A childhood spent in the confines of a single neighborhood had left me a fan of maps and all they could tell.

We drove through a cute little business district full of boutiques and restaurants, before turning off the wide street and onto a narrow one.

“Stop the van.” I was already opening the door. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Hewitt slammed on the brakes, and I jumped out. The Peach, our destination, had an old-fashioned marquee out front. An old-fashioned marquee with my name on it. TONIGHT: LUCE CANNON. I had seen my name on chalkboards and posters, but never on a marquee before.

A year before, when things had started moving for me, I’d made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in my music career. Two lists, actually: one of things within my control, and one of things outside my control. On the first list, I had line items like “learn how to play better lead guitar.” On the second, the more pie-in-the-sky stuff: clubs and theaters I wanted to headline, people I wanted to share a stage with. I had never even thought to put “my name on a marquee.” The first chance I had to open my journal, I’d write it down for the thrill of crossing it off.

“How cool is that?” I asked nobody in particular, pulling out my phone to snap a quick picture.

A car honked behind our van, and I waved the band on. “I’ll meet you inside.”

Hewitt had my tour bible, which meant he’d seen the note about the loading dock behind the club. This gave me another few minutes to admire my name in lights.

A woman walked by on the opposite side of the road with a German shepherd, heading into a park.

I pointed at the sign. “That’s my name!”

She smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

The theater looked like it had been a cinema once upon a time. The label’s PR team had sent posters, and one was displayed in a fancy bulb-framed display beside the old-fashioned ticket booth. I tried three locked doors before I found one that opened into a rotunda-style lobby with a bar. A guy in a black T-shirt with a giant peach on the back was stocking a beer cooler. He looked up when I entered.

“I’m in the band,” I said before he asked. “Is the loading dock open, do you know?”

He nodded, and I stepped into the theater.

No wonder they had been pushing me to do promotionals in this town. We’d mostly been playing midsized rock clubs, but this was an honest-to-goodness theater, with chairs and a balcony and everything. A theater we were headlining. I was headlining. On a Tuesday, granted, but still a step up.

I walked down the aisle. The house lights were on, displaying all the details: the art deco wall sconces, the carved proscenium. April staggered onto the stage from the wings with her giant bag of drum hardware, always the last thing loaded and the first thing unloaded, as tall as she was, and twice as heavy. Behind her came the other guys, with her throne, her cymbal bags, her bass drum. Everyone helped with everything, but April always grabbed the big bag herself as a point of pride.

I made my way out to the van. Gemma had said early on that I didn’t have to help unload. “Play diva if you want. We’re on your payroll.”

Maybe I’d have been able to get used to it, but it felt like a weird separation between me and the people I played with, even if they were hired guns. I wanted to be part of the group, but situations kept conspiring to set me apart: the solo promotion spots, their painting expedition. My own unwillingness to share much of myself. The least I could do was carry my own gear and help with theirs.

After Gemma left, I was glad I’d already gotten them used to me stepping in alongside, so it wasn’t some weird change in procedure. I might claim some point of “That’s my name up there” privilege every once in a while, but I didn’t actually know how to play diva, when it came down to it.

We got everything unloaded, and started on setup. Another Peach-shirted employee joined us onstage after April had assembled her kit. He started pulling drum mics and stands from an alcove and fussing with their placement.

“Hi—I’m Luce,” I said when he paused for a moment. Step one: always be nice to the people responsible for making you sound good.

“Eric Silva. Call me Silva. I’m looking forward to this. We’ve been playing your stuff in the house mix for the last few weeks, and I really like your sound.”

Points in his favor. I could often tell how the show was going to go by the sound person’s attitude. The ones who didn’t want us to be there, maybe preferred another genre or didn’t go for chick singers, didn’t introduce themselves by name. When I introduced myself, they’d grunt or nod or go about their business. Those guys directed all their questions to JD or Hewitt, and talked down to April and me, or didn’t talk to us at all. I’d learned the introduction served as an easy test.

Somebody in the booth was cycling through various gels and positions for the lights, throwing rainbows and occasionally blinding us. Silva orbited the band as we set up, placing mics and shifting monitor angles. He didn’t ask us any questions about the makeup of our band, or where we wanted the monitors, and I realized he’d actually studied our tech rider, something that put this place in the top one percent of venues as far as I was concerned. When somebody met us on the stage with all our needs and preferences attended to, I got the feeling the show would be a good one.

The soundcheck went well. The theater had the nicest sound system we’d run into on this tour, and Silva gave us the exact monitor mixes we wanted. The room sounded like a cathedral, full and warm; it would sound even better filled with people. After Silva had all the levels set, we asked him if we had a few minutes to work on a new song I had written over the weekend.

“Be my guest,” he said. “You’ve got two hours before the doors open and dinner’s on its way to the green room. Come find me if you need me.”

I had gone through a fallow period at the tour’s start where I couldn’t figure out the rhythm of things. We were driving to the next town after each show, checking into hotels in the middle of the night, sleeping a few hours before I had to start the promotional cycle; everyone else got to sleep a few extra hours while Gemma dragged me to morning shows. I was haggard, getting myself wired for shows on caffeine alone, eating crap.

After three weeks, I begged Gemma for a change, and we settled into a new schedule. When possible, we started sleeping in the town we had played, so I could get a solid night’s sleep. Wake up, try to get to the hotel gym, drive, soundcheck, play, sleep. It didn’t work if we had to be at a radio show six hours away by eight a.m., but the PR people got some promos rescheduled for lunch shows instead of morning, and worked it out that I called in for others.

The previous Saturday, in the hours between soundcheck and show, I’d sat down to write for the first time in the entire tour. An idea had wormed its way into my head while I drove. I got most of my ideas behind the wheel; something about the rhythm of the road lent my mind permission to wander.

The seed had been a piece of graffiti I’d spotted along the way. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, the sign read, scrawled on the WELCOME sign below the town’s name, the mayor’s name, and the population. Don’t even think about what? I wondered, and from there the song came, a punchy little meditation on insularity and fear. I had written it out for the guys in the van on Sunday morning, and we had tried an arrangement at that day’s soundcheck that made me happy.

Two days later, it sounded a little less ready than it had on Sunday, when the newness had obscured the roughness. This far into the tour, I had mostly outgrown my hesitance over telling the band what to do. At the beginning, I’d been reluctant to tell them when I thought something wasn’t working.

“Let us know,” April had told me, when she noticed. “We’re here to make you sound good.”

“But you’re all more experienced. You’re amazing musicians. Maybe I’m wrong?”

“They’re your songs, right? We can make suggestions, but you get final say. We’d all rather sound good, at day’s end, right? We’ll sound better if you’re happy.”

I’d worked on it over the following months. Developed the nerve to say when I thought someone was out of tune, or a drum fill was too distracting.

“JD, why don’t you and April both wait to come in on the second verse?” I asked now. “The beginning needs a little room to breathe.”

We tried it the new way. I made another tweak, a change from one chord to its relative minor. It brought a dark nuance the song needed.

“I think that’s it,” I declared after the fourth time through. The lyrics still weren’t quite right, but nothing was set in stone until we recorded it.

“Thank goodness,” said Hewitt. “I’m hungry enough to eat my own arm.”

“Not our fault you don’t bother to eat breakfast,” said April. “It sounds good, Luce.”

I flashed her a grin. “Do you guys think we can squeeze it into the set list for tonight?”

“If you think we can get through it without messing up.” JD leaned his bass against his amp and flipped the standby switch.

“Do you mind if I play a little more?” I asked into the mic.

“Go ahead. Opening band hasn’t shown yet.” Silva’s disembodied voice came back to me through my monitor. “Do you need me to stay up here?”

“No, thanks. Everything sounds perfect.”

I lingered for a few minutes after everyone left to find dinner. Not because I had anything left to do, but I wanted a moment alone on this beautiful stage. The house lights were on again, and I looked out on a sea of empty seats, two long aisles, an elegant balcony level. I played a cover I used to play on the street, digging how my voice sounded rich and strong, my guitar muscular. It expanded to fill the space, like a liquid or a gas, pushing into the farthest corners. I belonged here.

My phone buzzed, a text from April. Check out this green room.

The second I walked in, I knew why she had messaged me. It was bigger than any other green room we’d crammed into on this tour. The couches were worn but didn’t look like the biohazard sites we often found backstage. A mirrored vanity table sat in the corner, promising movie-star glamour. The walls were plastered with band stickers and black-and-white 8 x 10 photos, new and old.

“That’s not intimidating at all.” Hewitt pointed to a signed photo of Johnny Cash. He was kidding. I’d never seen him daunted by any room or any situation. He was a lead guitarist through and through, full of lead guitarist confidence.

“Is that a bathroom? We get our own bathroom?” I asked. In most clubs we had to share a green room with one to three other bands, so there was no place to change except the public bathroom, standard model: two stalls—one clogged, one dubious, no toilet paper; more graffiti than wall; cracked mirror for putting on makeup; and no surface that looked safe to touch without a glove. This one sparkled with cleanliness, even if it was still too small to change in easily.

“Eat something.” Every once in a while, April tried to step into Gemma’s managerial shoes for a minute. Not long enough to, say, choose not to paint the hotel room pink, but at least long enough to make sure I considered dinner.

I looked over the spread. They’d followed our full rider; lots of places ignored what we asked for and served us pizza and M&M’s, or handed us money and told us to buy dinner. I didn’t mind the buy-dinner option—that was when we got a chance to find local restaurants, see a little of a new city.

After that lousy night, the side table holding an electric kettle, throat-health tea, and honey and lemons looked enticing to me. Other teas and coffee for everyone else, since they all agreed that throat tea tasted like rotting licorice. Veggies and hummus, cold cuts, cheese for the nonsingers in our midst. I made myself a plate, started a tea steeping, put a chipped saucer over it to concentrate it, and settled on a couch to eat.

“The show is sold out,” April said. “I talked to the lighting tech outside. The venue’s super happy.”

“Awesome.”

“If it goes well, maybe the label will book the whole next leg of the tour in theaters like this. I could get used to that. If we don’t all get fired for painting the hotel room.”

That was probably as close to an apology as I’d get.

Somebody knocked on the door, sharp and urgent.

“It sounds great out—” I started to say when Silva walked in, but the sentence died halfway through. He looked distraught.

He waved his phone at us. “Have you seen?”

None of us had looked at any news sites since we’d gotten to the club.

“Is it the hotels again?” asked JD.

Silva shook his head. Didn’t offer any more.

“Oh, God.” We all turned in April’s direction. She had her tablet out and her face had gone pale.

She turned the tablet to face us.

4 ROSEMARY ^{The Crash}

Rosemary spawned in a parking lot.

The Bloom Bar’s exterior carried a strange air of both “Welcome” and “Get lost.” Daisies and black-eyed Susans overflowed from beds on either side of the door and beneath the long dark windows. The outer walls were yellow stucco, and both o’s of “Bloom” had been transformed into smiling flowers. The friendliness ended there.

A sign over the parking lot proclaimed PATENT MEDICI E TON TE! SHL! A dry-erase board by the door said the same thing, but without letters missing. Rosemary wondered why a virtual environment pretended to run out of letters for their sign; she guessed it added authenticity. For that matter, the entire parking lot was unnecessary; just another place for people with money to show off their gas-powered sports cars and unicorn-drawn pumpkins and whatever other virtual extravagances high-end hoodspace offered. Not that she’d ever been in any hoodspace this well-developed before.

An av perched on a stool between two doors: at least ten feet tall, sized well past human. No, not an avatar, a nonplayer bot. Rosemary wasn’t sure if he was security or a ticket taker or both. A scanner sparkled on the wall beside him.

“Are you here for the show or the bar?” The bot’s tone was bored.

“The show?”

He nodded as if she had given the answer he expected, which she probably had; she couldn’t imagine that people paid for the privilege of hanging out in a virtual bar if they weren’t going to the show. Then again, there was a dragon tethered in the parking lot. People paid for all kinds of strange privileges.

He looked at her as if she had missed something. “Thirty dollars if you didn’t prepurchase,” he said, and she guessed he was repeating it.

“I have a code? To get in free?” Apparently her nerves turned statements into questions.

“I’m working for SHL,” she said, attempting a sentence.

“Paste your code here.”

She opened her bag of holding and snagged the invitation, dropping it in front of his scanner.

The bot waved her past. “Door on the right.”

She guessed the left door was where the regulars went, whoever came here for the bar instead of the show. This bar probably existed in the SHL virtual landscape even when shows weren’t going on, for subscription holders’ benefit.

The ceiling dropped low as she entered, less than a foot over Rosemary’s head, the passage narrow and dark. She made it ten more feet before she encountered another person on another stool, this one a tiny blonde woman.

“ID,” said the woman. Av or bot?

Rosemary fumbled for her bag of holding again, managing to open two other apps and a screenshot camera before she flashed her digital ID. “Sorry, new Hoodie.”

The woman was unimpressed. “Bag.”

Nobody here spoke in anything more than one-syllable words. Rosemary opened access to her bag and waited while the woman searched it. “It’s my wallet and camera and workstation. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to bring, you know?”

The woman gave her a strange look, enough to tell Rosemary she was an av, not a bot.

“I’m sorry,” said Rosemary. “I know I’m talking a lot. It’s my first time here. First time at an SHL show, too. In case you couldn’t tell.”

The woman handed her bag access back. There didn’t seem to be any point to the security rituals; maybe they added authenticity for those who remembered real places like this. Or maybe they were meant to dissuade people who brought virtual guns to virtual bars.

As she moved past, the woman spoke. “You can only use your camera app for the first two minutes of the show. The first two minutes use a different format, so people can take pictures with the band if they want and tell people they were here. After that, don’t bother. The rest don’t photograph well. If you keep trying, people will know you’re new. Also, don’t go in the bathroom unless you’re looking for drugs or sex.”

Rosemary flashed a grateful smile. “Thanks!” She wasn’t sure why anyone wanted to photograph a holo, or why a virtual club needed a bathroom, but she filed the information away. She blew her next moment of cool by pushing on a pull door.

After passing Door Entry 101, she found herself in a room so dim she had no sense of the space’s size. It felt limitless. She’d seen the building from the outside, but the outer dimensions didn’t correspond to anything inside. This was SHL’s world.

SHL’s world. Her eyes adjusted. The club was as large as any room she’d ever been in, but blander, like it hadn’t yet been mapped over with any personality or style. No, on closer look, it was more than the black box it had at first appeared to be. There were layers, textures. Black paint on black walls, black tape on black paint on black walls, strata of stickers upon stickers upon stickers on black walls, some with embedded links. The illusion of metal struts and lighting scaffolds, far above their heads, and of grime on the scuffed cement floor.

Staring at the Bloom Bar logo on the wall revealed a text scroll explaining how this was an amalgamation of several venues from Before, not a re-creation of any one in particular. There were also options for a list of bands that had played here in the past, and the full upcoming music calendar. She blinked it all away.

The first person who crossed her sight line looked like a lion, and for a panicked moment Rosemary wondered if cat avatars had come back into style while she wasn’t paying attention. They had been all the rage among those who could afford them when she was in high school, but after schools and Superwally workplace policies banned them, the fad petered out. On second glance, this was a man’s avatar with a big teased halo of blond hair. She scanned the room to see if that hairstyle was a popular one, but there weren’t any others like him.

All the seats at the bar down the long side of the room were taken. She studied the people on the stools, trying to pick up what to say. She’d only been in a bar one time before, for her twenty-first birthday, when her school friends had made her meet them for drinks. Real cocktails, which droned to her doorstep in mason jars nestled in protective packaging. The bar itself had been flat and boring, a generic Irish bar with outdated graphics and a glitchy interface made worse by her Basic Hoodie. She’d never cared to repeat the experience; she preferred chatting with friends in a game or somewhere else where they had something to do while they talked. Her friend Donna had said the bar had history, like history was a selling point. The highlight had been the jar of vodka-spiked basil lemonade.

She watched people at the bar order wine by the glass, bottled beer, cocktails in tumblers. Somebody walked away, and she pushed in to grab his stool. Rested her elbows on the bar, careful not to let her hands touch it. It was virtual, but it still looked sticky. The bar itself held a shimmering menu that appeared when she was right on top of it, advertising a variety of drinks and legal drugs, with two prices beside each, real and virtual. When the bartender finally noticed her, she ordered a birch beer.

“Real or virtual?”

She was on the clock, and it took an hour for drones to get to her house, anyway. “Vee.”

“VCash or Superwally credit?”

“Superwally!” She hadn’t even thought that was an option. Excellent. The drink could be debited straight from her store credit account. The bartender pulled out a handheld and she passed her account number. He grunted and turned his back to make her drink. He’d have to hold the glass, and scoop the ice, but the birch beer came out of a bottle. She wasn’t really drinking it, she reminded herself. Any germs were virtual ones, too.

“If you use Superwally there’s no way to tip him. He only takes VCash tips,” whispered the person to Rosemary’s right. She turned. A black woman with a cloud of natural hair raised a phone in her direction and wagged it. “If you’re planning on having a second drink or coming back here again, throw a dollar or two in cash on the counter. He keeps track of who stiffs him.”

She hadn’t even considered anybody would need to be tipped.

“Thank you,” Rosemary whispered back, reaching for her wallet. When she looked over at the woman again, she was amazed to see that the avatar’s face was covered with pox scars. Even at Superwally, where avs were supposed to be photorealistic, she’d never seen one with scars. She hadn’t even considered that it was possible, though if you could have a cat head, of course you could have scars if you wanted. Her hand went to her stomach, where her own scars were worst.

She hadn’t meant to stare, but now the woman was watching her, and she felt obligated to make more conversation. “Are you a big fan of the band?”

“I don’t care who plays. This place reminds me of a club I used to hang out in. How about you?”

Rosemary shrugged. “I like their music, but this is my first time seeing them. My first time seeing any band, actually.”

The av brightened with enthusiasm. “In that case, you should go get closer.”

“Closer?”

“Trust me.” She pointed toward the room’s center. A loose circle of people had formed around the stage area. “If this were my first show, I’d be over there.”

The bartender handed Rosemary her drink in a red plastic cup. She made sure he saw his tip, then went in search of a good place to stand. The projectors—projections of projectors, really—moved in a circle above a clear area ringed with angled speakers. She guessed that meant the band holo appeared in the center. She situated herself behind the largest group, under the assumption they knew what they were doing.

This was the most people Rosemary had seen in one place since she was a kid, even in hoodspace. More than any of her classes, or any party she’d ever been to, though in truth she preferred smaller gatherings. She wondered if it was an unlimited space, or if there were multiple iterations of this same bar, or if it was coded to allow overlay. She could look, but she didn’t want to know. The thought of someone else standing in the same spot as her, even virtually, made her shudder.

The room buzzed with voices, a baseline noise. Snippets of conversation drifted her way. Discussions of bands they’d seen, bands they wanted to see, bands they wished they had seen. The weather where they were. She concentrated on their clothes, on what people put on their avatars in this place. She’d used her work avatar, with her work avatar’s uniform, a polo shirt and slacks. She hadn’t been sure if she was allowed to change into more casual clothes, given that she was here on assignment. Her real body wore her uniform as well, of course. A majority of the crowd wore T-shirts for Patent Medicine, or else for other SHL bands. One man had dressed all in feathers, another person in tight leather pants and a skin that she was fairly sure she recognized as a celebrity from her parents’ generation. She filed the information away for the future, if she ever got to do this again. Even if they didn’t ask her for the fancy Hoodie back, she couldn’t afford a subscription, so it was a moot point.

The dim overhead lights got even dimmer. The crowd cheered. Who were they cheering? It wasn’t like the band could hear them. Rosemary hesitated, then joined in. It felt good to add her voice to a group. She’d never done that before. It left a pleasant vibration inside her; she’d done it in real-space as well. She imagined what it must have been like in the old days, when entire stadiums cheered together.

The rig overhead whirred to life. Rosemary glanced up, and was rewarded with a blinding flash. She looked back to where ghost gear now rested in what had been the empty space. A drum kit at the center, a couple of large amplifiers, three microphone stands. A rack full of ghost guitars. Somebody near the stage reached a hand out and chopped through a guitar neck. He disappeared a second later; there were penalties for disturbing the illusion.

The lights flickered, and a moment later musicians stood holding the instruments. The effect was eerie. The original empty stage must have been a recording, because there wasn’t even a second’s pause before they hit a chord. Out of nothing, music: three voices and two guitars. They held the note for ten seconds, then drums rolled over it.

Rosemary had been to a wave pool once when she was five, at a run-down amusement park, in the Before. She had waded out into the water holding her father’s hand. The pool was crowded and flat, full of people lounging in tubes in the lull between wave sets. She spotted something on the bottom, a nickel or a quarter, shining just beyond her reach, and released her father’s hand to grab it. That was when the first wave hit, knocking her back toward the shallows. She surfaced lost and sputtering and terrified, but strangely exhilarated.

The music hit Rosemary like a wave, knocking her breath from her. Louder than anything she had ever heard, filling every corner of her. One chord, and she was full. Don’t stop, Rosemary thought. Don’t ever stop.

The song shifted, and she recognized it now. It was one of the songs she had checked out this evening before the show, but altered. The intro in the recorded version had been tamed, tempered. She had thought it was okay, nothing special. She hadn’t realized music could reach inside you.

She pushed closer. Camera flashes went off throughout the room. The bag checker outside had said pictures were possible for the first two minutes, but she couldn’t tear her attention away from the band long enough even to blink a screenshot. What would it have captured anyway? Ghostly faces, a tinny recording. Nothing like the magnet in her gut drawing her toward the stage.

The holo quality changed, the second-minute change the girl had mentioned, a momentary shimmer. Rosemary pressed her avatar up against the people in front of her, the closest she had been to strangers in her adult life. The Hoodie gave a warning jolt, but the other people didn’t notice, or if they noticed, they didn’t care. A gap opened between two men in front and she pushed through, hoping there wasn’t etiquette against it. The space expanded before her, a highlighted path leading her to a better spot.

She found herself in the front row and right of center, gazing up at the bassist, a tall, lean, shaven-headed woman with skin so brown the hologram pushed it into purple. She wore jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, showing off amazing biceps, and she was barefoot. She had a bruise under her left big toenail, which made her more real. Rosemary fought the urge to touch her; God, she fell in love easily, not that it ever led anywhere.

Rosemary had always liked music, even if she didn’t know much about it. She’d listen if somebody told her to listen to something, bought songs and posters of artists she enjoyed, but she had never gone out seeking anything. She didn’t know what was cool and what wasn’t. She’d played this song, “The Crash,” after the Hoodie arrived this evening, and had thought it was decent. Nothing like how it sounded now. Nothing had ever satisfied her the way writing code did, but now she was the code, and she was being overwritten.

“The Crash” ended. Rosemary felt its absence as a physical loss. She placed her drink by her feet to clap, and a second later it disappeared. The lead singer stepped back to the mic. He shielded his eyes and peered out as if he saw them. The people in front of him hollered for attention he couldn’t give them.

“Good to see you all. Good to be here at the Bloom Bar.” His lips shimmered as he said the words “Bloom Bar,” as if they had been inserted separately. A lock of hair fell in his eyes and he brushed it aside. “We’re going to go ahead and play some songs for you, yeah?”

The bassist opened her eyes for the first time. Something caught her attention, something in whatever place she was actually in. She glanced down, shook her head, then looked straight at Rosemary and winked. It was the sexiest wink Rosemary had ever seen. She knew it hadn’t been meant for her, but it might as well have been. She took a step forward before reminding herself she was an avatar looking at an avatar of someone standing in a warehouse somewhere—where?—a hundred or a thousand or three thousand miles away. Someone who had just winked at someone else.

Rosemary refocused on the singer. Something shimmered above his head, and when she examined the link she found a menu of optional enhancements and accessibility options. Subtitles, translation subtitles, vibration boost, visual description tags. Nothing she needed, but cool to know it was there.

The next song began with a bass pulse. The bassist closed her eyes again, and Rosemary stepped back, trying to regain her composure. She examined the stage. From here she could read the song titles on the set list at the bassist’s feet, though she didn’t recognize any of them after “The Crash.” Ghost sweat rolled off the drummer’s face, and he wiped it with a ghost forearm.

What would it be like to have a subscription and relive these shows anytime she wanted? To capture this band and have them to herself? Go to more shows? Not for the first time, she wished she could do this every night. If SportHolo and TVHolo were this real, too, that explained why her friends always looked at her with such pity when she said her family didn’t go in for any of it. She’d been missing out on so much.

“Encores are awkward in this situation,” the lead singer said after the twelfth song. “So we’re all going to pretend that was our last song, and we left the stage, and you stomped and cheered until we came out to play one more. We’ll play one more and then we’re going to go for real. Thanks for listening.”

Don’t go, Rosemary wanted to say. Keep playing. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the songs. The music had stirred something inside her.

The real last song ended with a long cymbal splash and four cha-chunks of the guitars, which also wasn’t the ending on any music she’d ever heard before. It had to be rehearsed, but it felt a little wild at the same time, a loose possibility that things might not work out as planned. The band members grinned at each other on the third cha-chunk, and the bassist raised one lovely eyebrow as she watched the drummer. The last note hung in the air, the singer gave a final salute, and then the band blinked from existence. They were there and then gone, like magic, leaving a three-dimensional StageHoloLive logo floating in the place where they had stood.

It was followed by a voice saying, “Patent Medicine merchandise is for sale here, as well as at Superwally and StageHoloLive. Purchase now to wear instantly inside, or have the real thing droned to you by the time you get home.”

A recording filled the room, flat in comparison with what had been there a moment before. The lights came on. The room was much smaller than it had seemed in the dark, or maybe that was an illusion, too. The ceiling lower, the walls closer, the floor scuffed and littered with plastic cups, which winked away a moment later.

Most of the audience had already headed for the exit or blinked out from where they stood, but a few people still lingered by the bar, or stood blank and absent, probably buying Patent Medicine merchandise. A couple of T-shirts changed before her eyes. Rosemary understood the appeal. If there were a way to capture that first moment, when the band had played the chord that had crashed into her, she’d buy it. A T-shirt wouldn’t do that. Maybe, maybe a live recording. If not, she’d have to find a way to see them again.

She could have pulled off the Hoodie and disappeared from the room, but she wanted the full experience. Her ears rang as she walked out. There was a muffled quality to everything, like she had cotton wrapped around her. She stayed in the silent hood even after she had turned off the visual; she didn’t want to lose the feeling she had walked out with.

In her dream world, a job offer from StageHoloLive would be waiting when Rosemary checked her messages again, along with a drone delivery of a concert souvenir—a T-shirt, maybe, or a poster to add to her bedroom collection—and a free SHL subscription. Or any of the above. She wasn’t greedy.

It wasn’t until a message chimed in her work Hoodie that she remembered she’d ostensibly been there on business.

“Thank you for your help,” the message read.

She hadn’t done anything, though she would have. She had to word this carefully, so her own bosses didn’t think she had charged fraudulent overtime, or used their time to pursue something else. In the end she decided on, “I was happy to do it. It was useful for my professional development to experience how the StageHoloLive system works firsthand. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance in the future.”

She took off her work rig and replaced it with her fraying Basic. Lay back on her bed, turned on audio of “The Crash” again, closed her eyes. It wasn’t as good as the live version.

5 LUCE ^{The Last Power Chord}

A baseball stadium, or what was left. Smoking wreckage gaped where the stands behind home plate had been.

“Were there people there?” I asked, as if they knew more. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Six p.m. “It couldn’t have been full yet.”

“West coast,” Silva said. “Seventh inning, first matinee of the season. The stands were packed.”

“Oh, God,” April repeated.

A number scrolled past, an estimated casualty count, but my brain made no sense of it.

“Do they know what happened?” Hewitt asked.

“Bomb.” I pointed at the screen.

“That’s not all,” said Silva. “There’ve been bomb threats tonight at three other baseball stadiums, two airports, an arena concert, a convention, and a whole bunch of malls. All over the country. The president made a statement a few minutes ago, asking people to stay home tonight if possible and cancel public gatherings.”

“Isn’t this when they usually tell people to go about their business, and not to let terrorists terrorize?” My voice pitched itself an octave higher than usual. The picture on the screen moved closer. Rubble, smoke, a tiny shoe. I looked away.

“That’s what they say when they think the threat is gone.” JD shook his head. “They say that after.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “But this place wasn’t threatened? We’re still playing?”

Silva shrugged. “Nobody from the office has said anything yet.”

I pulled out my phone, muted since before soundcheck. I had a dozen messages and missed calls, mostly from the label. An email, also from the label, saying they’d been trying to call.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Margo at the label, texting. Cancel your show tonite. Tell me u got this.

Silva’s phone chimed as well. He looked down, then back at me. “The production company wants to know if you’re playing. They say it’s up to you.”

I glanced at the clock again. “If doors open at seven, people are probably already on their way here.”

“We’ll do refunds, or promise tickets to another show. If they’re listening to the news, they’ll have turned back by now.”

I wandered over to where I’d left my tea. Condensation beaded on the underside of the saucer I’d used to cover it, and dripped when I lifted it. The tea was even more bitter than usual when I sipped; I’d forgotten to stir in honey. I added some, watched it stick to my spoon, then grudgingly dissolve, like it was trying to hold on to its shape.

I wished Gemma was still with us to make the decision. She worked for the label, so she would have followed their instructions. They’d never ask us to cancel if they didn’t think we had to; they were all about pushing through and playing, regardless of weather or health or whatever else had been thrown in our way. For them to tell us to cancel, it must be serious. They had insurance. As Silva said, the theater would give refunds or reschedule us or give tickets to another show. We’d have a chance to play here again, on a less somber night, to a fuller house. There’d be other, safer opportunities. If we played, it might be for nobody at all, or for ten people who felt awkward in a giant empty theater.

Or it might be for ten people who needed a lift tonight, who wanted music to make them forget the news, or make sense of it. Maybe there were people who wanted to defy the “Please stay home” order, to show they weren’t going to let anyone make them afraid. How could we deny that, when we had the power to give it? No answer seemed the right one.

“Don’t look at me,” Hewitt said when I turned in his direction. “You’re the boss.”

April and JD shook their heads as well, telling me it was my decision. I had no logic in me; the only picture in my head was that one tiny shoe in the rubble. What was I supposed to do with that image? I couldn’t weep over a number, but I could weep over a shoe if I let myself. A shoe could wash me away if I didn’t have something else to do, something else to think about.

I wanted to play, but I didn’t want to force them. “Somebody say something. You’ve never held back opinions before.”

JD studied the posters on the walls. “Who are we to keep the staff here if they want to get home to their families? Or to put them at risk if there’s a legitimate threat? Let’s call it off.”

“I think enough of them would be willing to stay,” Silva said. “And I’ve been here all day. I don’t think there’s a big risk.”

“We walked right in,” April pointed out.

“Nobody else did.”

“Would your bosses be pissed off if you paid to keep staff here and nobody came? Nobody bought drinks?” Hewitt had been a bartender.

Silva scratched his head. “I think it’d be okay. The thing is, if we hold the show, I’m not sure the people who stayed home as instructed would get their refunds. I guess we can work something out, under the circumstances. I suppose people are as safe here as anywhere.”

“Was that an opinion? Do you want us to play?” I tried to read him, but gave up. “I don’t know you well enough to tell.”

“Not an opinion. Sorry. This is all you.”

I tried another tack. “How many staff do you need to keep here to hold the show, knowing a lot of ticket holders won’t show? Could you let the ones who are scared to stay go home?”

He thought a moment. “We wouldn’t want to lessen security. Other than that, we can get by with one person at the box office, one bartender. If you don’t mind the lights and monitors staying static, I can let most of my crew go home.”

“So you’d be willing to stay yourself?”

“I’m here. I’d stay. And since it sounds like you’re leaning that way, I’ll say I always prefer having a show to explaining to a bunch of angry people that they shouldn’t have come.”

“Okay. We’ll play. I want to play.” Saying it made it even more true. I surveyed my bandmates for affirmation I’d made the right choice. April gave me a thumbs-up. Hewitt grinned.

Silva pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and asked his staff to meet him in the lobby. I glanced at my silent phone. A repeat message from Margo, and two more missed calls. I turned it off. Sipped my tea again. Still bitter, but bearable with honey.

JD grabbed my arm. “Hey, Luce, can we talk for a sec?”

“Sure. Oh, do you mean in private?” Privacy wasn’t usually a consideration in this band; we’d given it up months ago. The others had settled on the couch and looked immovable. I motioned toward the bathroom. “Step into my office.”

The space wasn’t made for two people. He sat on the closed toilet, and I leaned against the sink.

“I’m trying to stay on board,” he said without preamble, “but I don’t know if I can do it.”

“What? Why didn’t you say that a minute ago?”

“I didn’t expect everyone else to agree to do it. I didn’t want to be the bad guy.”

“There are no bad guys here. I wanted opinions and nobody gave any.”

“I did. I thought someone else would agree with me. It’s not safe to play and I don’t want to be here. I have a family.”

“We all have families.”

“Yeah, but I actually like mine. I want to see them again.”

I ignored the dig, built on more made-up stories. “Nobody’s going to do anything. We’re not famous. We’re at a not-so-famous theater in a random town.”

“You say that, but somebody called in bomb threats to the hotels here last night.”

“The whole state got bomb threats, not bombs.”

“And today there were actual bombs. I thought you said there wouldn’t be any hard feelings if we didn’t want to play.”

“That was ten minutes ago, before everybody agreed.”

He shrugged. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t play.”

“We can’t do the show without bass.”

“I’m so sorry, Luce. I’ll go back to the hotel, or sleep in the van, or clear out entirely if you want me to.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say to convince him. Hewitt and April looked at me when I stepped out, and I shook my head. Why had he spoken to me in private, anyhow? It wasn’t like they wouldn’t find out a minute later. He couldn’t sit in the bathroom forever. Wouldn’t want to, if he was that scared.

I went to find Silva, to tell him we wouldn’t be playing after all. Out in the lobby, a woman was unpacking our merchandise. We carried some with us, but since Gemma had gone home, the label had been shipping the bulk of it to venues—everything except the new T-shirts that had disappeared into the shipping ether—and hiring local fans to run the booth.

“Hi, I’m Luce.”

“Alaia Park.” She jotted a number on the side of a box, looked up, and smiled. She was older than me, maybe midthirties, with jet-black hair framing her face. When she spoke, she tucked one lock behind her ear. “I expected you to be taller than me.”

“The video was filmed from a low angle. I get that a lot. Did Silva already talk to you? You were okay with being here tonight?” I asked her. I’d already shifted into past tense, resigned to the decision JD had made for us.

“Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for this for weeks. I love your music.”

“You’re not scared?”

She bit her lip. “I’m a little scared, but I’m also scared some semi driver will fall asleep and cross the median while I’m driving home, or somebody will ignore a stop sign when I cross the street, or I’ll step on a snake while walking my dog, or I’ll catch some terrible virus from a public bathroom. All of which seem more likely than somebody attacking this place tonight.”

I signed a poster for her: “To Alaia, who is brave.” She let her fingers brush mine when I handed it back to her.

I found the narrow stairway to the sound booth.

Silva tucked a bookmark into the paperback he was reading and folded his arms over it.

“Better futures?” I asked, pointing to the rocket ship on the cover.

“Different futures, I guess. The staff all want to stay, except for one bartender. I won’t need them all, but I didn’t want them to lose a night’s pay if they were willing.”

“You’re going to have to disappoint them after all. My bassist is bailing.”

“What? I thought they were down to play.”

“I thought so, too, but he waited until you left the room to express his concerns.”

“Huh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. Damn.”

“I’ll leave you to talk to your staff again, I guess.” I turned to leave.

“There’s one other option,” he said.

“What’s that?”

He gave a half smile. “I play bass.”

He must not have had trouble reading the skepticism in my look. “I can do it,” he went on. “I’ve been playing bass longer than I’ve been running sound, by a long shot. And your songs are pretty straightforward—no offense meant. I’ve been playing you in the house for a week now, so I’m familiar with the stuff you’ve recorded, and if you give me a cheat sheet of keys and changes I’ll be good to go.”

“Who’d run sound?”

“The lighting tech can do both. She’s more than good enough.”

I gave him another look. The offer was sincere. “I guess we’ve got nothing to lose, since we’re not thinking anyone’s going to show up anyway. Welcome to the band, I guess.”

He grinned. “I was hoping you’d say yes.”

We waited to see how many actually came out of the two thousand ticket holders. The local opening band never arrived; neither did the DJ whose show we had played earlier in the day, who was supposed to introduce us.

I stood in the wing, behind the curtain, and watched people file in. Tried to interpret their expressions, figure out why they had showed up. The theater had assigned seating, so some sat too far for me to read their faces, but body language had a longer wavelength: grim, weary, wary. A couple near the front laughed and joked with exaggerated movement, trying too hard. The rest were quiet, far quieter than usual. Most nights, canned music filled in the wait time, but what to play on a night like this? Any choice was a statement, to be judged too upbeat, too downbeat, too heavy, too disrespectful. None of those options were right when there was a tiny shoe in rubble three thousand miles away.

The house lights were off, so I had no idea of the size of the audience, though I knew from their movement in the dimness there were at least a few people out there. I wasn’t sure if I’d have made the same decision in their shoes, to risk being out in public.

Except I had; I kept forgetting. Some part of me kept fooling the rest of me into thinking I hadn’t had a choice. Music wasn’t a choice as far as I was concerned, even if I hadn’t managed to say as much to my band. Playing music was the fire that kept the monsters at bay. Nothing could touch me in the middle of a song.

The audience had a choice; they had come. Checking their phones, murmuring numbers and updates to each other, shaking their heads, but present. Maybe they wanted my guitar to keep them safe, too.

April walked up behind me.

“What if they don’t like us?” I whispered.

“They like us, or they wouldn’t be here,” she whispered back.

Hewitt appeared from the wing, looking grim. “They’ve grounded all planes. Schools are canceled tomorrow.”

“Damn,” I said.

He waved his guitar at me. “I’m going to go out and tune one more time for both of us. When we’re ready, you’re going to come out there and start playing, and we’re going to make people forget what’s outside this room for a little while.”

I peeked out from behind the curtain again, then nodded. I still hadn’t thought of anything worth saying. No words could be more appropriate than the four bars of guitar noise starting “Block Letters.”

Hewitt tuned my guitar one more time, then his. The others took their positions, Silva the soundman standing in JD’s spot. The room was eerily quiet. Normally there’d be cheers, clapping. I panicked. We should have had someone introduce us. I should have come up with something to say. I had no idea what they wanted from me.

My band looked in my direction. Waiting, watching as I stood paralyzed. As the numbers from the news hit me, a wave of numbers that were also names, names I didn’t know, people. People who had gone out to a baseball matinee and hadn’t come home. In all the fussing over whether to play or not to play, I had locked that image away from myself. Had these people done the same? Numbly gotten in cars, driven to our show because it was what they were supposed to do tonight? Or did they want more from me?

I took a step out onto the stage. It was dark, except for a spotlight where I was supposed to be.

“You got this, Luce,” April whispered. I walked past her, to where my guitar and my spotlight waited. I put my hand to my brow to shade my eyes, strained to see the people scattered among the empty seats. They sat quiet, waiting. Waiting for me.

I stepped to the mic. “Come closer. There are plenty of empty seats up front.” Then, “Please.”

Nobody moved for a moment, and then one person in the back stood. Her chair closed with a creak behind her. It was so quiet every step echoed as she walked to the third row and chose a new seat. Another pause, then others began to move, as if she had given them permission. I strapped on my guitar while they rearranged themselves.

When the shuffling and creaking stopped, April counted us off. I hit my distortion pedal and played. Four bars of noise scaffolded on the solid frame of an A chord and its cousins, all of us building onto it with muscle and bone and blood. I almost forgot to come in with the vocal, the guitar felt so good in my hands.

With the song came the realization. The audience wasn’t here for mourning; they had come for elegy. That was within our power.

We had chosen our set carefully. No “Timebomb,” no “End Days.” Tried to keep to the upbeat stuff, other than “Blood and Diamonds,” which was uptempo but dark, and which they’d expect no matter what. Really, it didn’t matter what we played. Silva locked in with April as if they had been playing together for all the months JD had been with us. We butchered “Don’t Even Think About It,” the new song, but it was Hewitt who forgot the change we’d made at soundcheck. It came around by the end, though. What mattered was that we were there and they were there, a conspiracy against despair.

The ovation surprised me. I toweled my neck, turned to the band. “Do you guys mind if I do one alone?”

“It’s your show,” Hewitt said.

“Thanks—can I use your acoustic?”

He passed it over. I put my own guitar back on its stand.

“Can you bring the house lights up, please?” I asked into the mic.

We saw them for the first time for real. Maybe fifty people out of two thousand seats, all crowded to the front.

“If you get the gist and want to sing along, feel free.” My lone voice felt enormous in the silent room. I hadn’t played this cover in years, but it was the kind that came to my mind on a night like this. A few voices joined in, then more. When the song ended, I gave a little salute and hopped off the front of the stage.

“That’s it,” I said. The house lights rose, again without music. Hewitt came to take his guitar from me.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll pack up.”

I spent the next thirty minutes chatting with the people who’d come. Sold some T-shirts, signed some records, but mostly hung around and talked. Everyone was reluctant to step back into the ugly world outside.

“Thank you for playing. I couldn’t sit at home alone tonight,” one woman said.

“I drove an hour to get here,” said another. “I’m glad I did.”

More so than usual, they all wanted a piece of me, a moment. I tried to give the time they needed. One after another, they each gave their variation on that story, and then wandered out into the night.

One thousand, three hundred, and twenty-three people died in the stadium bombs. Five more—all janitorial employees—died in another bomb in a shuttered mall while we were onstage.

A couple of years later, a journalist worked out that our show was the last large concert. They had to stretch the definition of large to make it work, but I guess they went on the theater’s size, and the fact that all the stadiums and arenas and concert halls went dark that night for good.

The journalist didn’t know it, and I didn’t bother to say, but I think we probably had the last two shows, if you wanted to count the dance party in the hotel parking lot in the early hours of that day. I tended to always think of the one whenever I thought of the other. Making music in the darkness, then music against the darkness. The decision to play for the people who chose to go out instead of hiding in their homes. They’d have years and years for that.

All that came later.

That night, after the audience straggled out, after Alaia boxed up and counted our remaining merchandise, after her hand lingered against mine again far longer than necessary for passing a pen from one person to another, she and I stole a moment in the dark balcony. Hewitt called for me once from the bottom of the stairwell, and we giggled and shushed each other to keep from giving ourselves away. We leaned into each other, me and the woman who mistakenly thought I was the brave one. She wanted me, and I wanted someone to coax me from my head for a few minutes. Maybe that was what she’d come looking for, too; we didn’t talk.

I don’t know how JD got back to the hotel, but all his stuff was gone from the room he and Hewitt had shared. The DO NOT DISTURB sign was still illuminated, the pink room still a problem we’d have to deal with later.

“Do you want me to take JD’s bed so you can have a room to yourself?” April asked, reaching into the painted fridge.

“No,” I said. “But I’d love a few minutes alone.”

“You got it, boss.”

On the way out, I snagged the can of glo-paint. Back in our room, I propped my guitar in the corner and grabbed a needle from the emergency sewing kit I kept in my bag. Pushed aside the dresser, dipped the needle in the remaining paint.

Where nobody was likely to ever see it, I wrote the lyrics to a song I wasn’t yet prepared to put to music: a song that had come to me on the silent drive back to the hotel from the show, jumbled and half-formed. Some songs stayed that way forever, ragged and ruptured and far from reach; those ones I’d rehearse and put aside, start again and put aside, saying it’s not ready yet, but someday. I locked this one into order, painstakingly, letter by letter.

The dresser was back in place by the time April slipped into the room. I had the lights off, my guitar in hand, and I was listening to the tiny words that glowed behind the dresser, waiting for them to tell me what form they wanted to take. There were, to my knowledge, one hundred and seventy-three ways to wreck a hotel room. The one hundred and seventy-fourth was a slow, small form of destruction: tiny words, tiny fears, tiny hopes, etched in a place they might never be found.

6 ROSEMARY ^{Career Opportunities}

She’d never had any plan to leave Superwally, so Rosemary couldn’t say why she started poking around StageHoloLive’s job listings, only that she was curious. The position that initially caught her eye was “upload supervisor,” which involved being online at home to make sure there were no glitches in getting performances to the people who had paid for them. She was qualified; she had six years’ experience at Superwally, including working out that bug before one of SHL’s own concerts.

She debated expanding her one concert experience into talk of a lifetime’s love for SHL, but they probably had ways to check. Cross-reference her address and they’d know she didn’t have a home box, much less an SHL-enabled Hoodie. Cross-reference her credit account and they’d see the one drink at the one concert. She settled on mentioning how wonderful that Patent Medicine show had been, leaving out that it was her only one.

As she went over the job description one last time, she noticed a listing for an “artist recruiter.” It paid the same, but included travel and expenses. What kind of job required travel? Plumbers and construction workers and blacksmiths drove around the area, but they made it home every night. This position didn’t require experience; just enthusiasm, love of music, people skills, and a willingness to travel. She had enthusiasm, she loved music, and she could point to her vendor services record as proof of her people skills. She was willing to travel, even if she’d never done it before. She checked the boxes to apply for both positions.

The skills assessment and psychological section were easy enough. Then there was a fun little field test, where they posted a series of live videos with all information stripped from them, and she had to decide whether to pass on each act or make an offer. Five in total.

She didn’t know anything about the music business, so she approached the problem in the same way she approached code, envisioning a perfect combination of catchy music and visual style first, using Patent Medicine’s show as a guide, and then looking at the examples to see where they deviated. There wasn’t such a thing as perfect in this case; music wasn’t code, and musicians didn’t snap to her rulers. Still, she disqualified one video because the act lacked energy, and another because they came across unfocused. She “signed” one band of the five. Nobody had messaged her to ask for the SHL Hoodie back, so she used that for the remote interview, rather than risk using her work rig or the glitchy old Basic model.

She was surprised when the offer came through for the recruiter job instead of the upload supervisor position. She closed and reopened the message, making sure she hadn’t misread it. “Uniquely qualified,” they said. She went back and reread her application to make sure she hadn’t promised anything she’d be unable to deliver, but she’d made no rash declarations. She hadn’t even exaggerated much. Her enthusiasm must have shown through, or maybe her dedication to her current position. Or maybe they saw her as a blank slate. Moldable.

Leaving Superwally was trickier. For starters, she had no idea how to do it. For all their “You are valued but replaceable” posters, they didn’t leave any instructions for severing ties with the company. Maybe that was deliberate. In the end, she waited for Jeremy’s morning call.

“You’re doing what?” he asked. He was a young Igbo man today, wearing a mix of traditional and modern clothes. The Superwally avatars weren’t fancy enough to show much emotion, but his made a good stab at surprise.

“Quitting. How do I quit?”

“Why would you quit? You have six years’ seniority. You’re good at your job.”

“I found a better job. I hope. A different one, anyway.”

“Nobody quits, Rosemary. There are no better jobs.”

“You mean no better jobs for people like me?” That was what she’d been told since high school. She hadn’t been able to afford the online certification courses she needed for higher-end jobs, and her parents’ credit hadn’t been good enough for loans. She spent all of high school preparing for Superwally customer service. Leaving was unthinkable.

“For people like us.”

“I am. I’m leaving. I’m leaving Superwally.” She psyched herself up in the saying. It was as much for her benefit as Jeremy’s.

He sighed. “I’m sorry to lose you. You’ve been reliable.”

He gave her instructions for contacting a mysterious Talent Management hotline. She repeated the whole conversation, almost verbatim, with a generic gray-blonde white woman avatar exuding generic concern. It wasn’t that anyone was worried they couldn’t replace her. It was touching; they genuinely didn’t believe there were other jobs out there. She appreciated the concern. It embroidered her own terror nicely.

What was she doing? She had a real job, a good one, one she performed well. She was leaving it because she had been struck by lightning, had gone crazy, had some idea she could do something else.

“Superwally is reliable work. What if this new company goes out of business? Where will you be then?” her father asked when she told him. He asked all the questions that swirled in her head, as if they were leaking out.

She held a panel for him at the windmill’s base while he fiddled inside it. They wore thick winter work gloves, which made the adjustments cumbersome and slow. “They’re not new. They’ve been around for a bunch of years and they’re in eighty percent of American homes.” Answering felt good. It built her own confidence in her decision.

“What if Superwally decides to go into the concert business? They’re in even more homes.”

“If we—they—wanted that they’d have done it already. It’s some kind of partnership, with Superwally as the conduit.”

“And tell me again why you have to go there in person?”

She hadn’t yet mentioned that her job would involve more travel after this trip. Baby steps. “It’s a training program. They want us to see how they make the magic happen, so we can fix it when it goes wrong.”

“Wrong magic?”

“Wrong metaphor, I guess, but you know what I mean. And how cool is it that I get to go someplace?” Her father looked hurt, and she scrambled to appease him. “Not that I ever felt like I needed to go anyplace before, but I’ve been doing the same job for six years. I think I’m allowed to want to change it up a little, aren’t I?”

He scratched his winter beard. “I want you to be safe.”

“And happy?”

“And happy, but mostly safe.”

“I’m old enough to take care of myself. You lived in a city a thousand miles from your parents by the time you were my age.”

“That was a different time…”

She knew the speech by heart. “‘That was a different time, and this was a different country. The best thing we can do now is take care of each other and stay in the safest place we can, and make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible.’” She paused. “But Dad, you’ve been saying that my whole life. You’ve made this a great place to grow up, but if you don’t want me in a hood twenty-four/seven and you don’t want me to go anywhere, then I’m trapped with Superwally forever. I’m not going to do anything dangerous. I just want to know what else is out there.”

He held out his hands, and they fit the panel back into place. The more he argued, the more convinced she was she needed to try this.

7 LUCE ^{Something’s Gotta Change}

A hotel in Pennsylvania found another bomb before it detonated. A gunman had shot up a bus station in Mississippi and barricaded himself in. That was the news we woke to the following morning: a study in random lone wolf horror, with nobody sure if it was actually random lone wolves or not, and the same ominous requests from the government to get home, and stay home. Whatever they knew, they weren’t telling.

“The tour is over,” Margo at the label repeated over the phone. “All the venues are dark. Go home.”

Home. I didn’t have one. I’d sublet my rented room in Queens a year before, to a guy who had taken over the lease when I didn’t come back. He had offered to give my bed back if I came knocking, but I didn’t have any particular ties to the furniture, and my few personal belongings traveled with me.

I sent messages to friends in a few cities I thought I could survive lying low in, and was rewarded with an offer of a situation similar to the one I’d left: a furnished sublet in a Baltimore artists’ collective. The occupant was also a touring musician, currently on an extended gig in Europe.

What about a European tour? I texted Margo.

Months to arrange. Visas, instruments, etc. We’ll see, she wrote back.

April and Hewitt tried to book flights home, to New York and L.A. respectively, but the planes were grounded. Hewitt ended up squeezing into a rental car with two businesswomen who were also trying to get west, and April bought a one a.m. bus ticket, the only one available.

The van felt empty, quiet, even with music playing. Loosed from the magnetic pull of the next show, the next stopover, the potential of any nextness at all, the road dulled and flattened. I was the losing team slinking home, except my destination wasn’t even home. I dumped my meager belongings at the new place, turned in the rental van with a wistful pat, and resigned myself to a stay of unknown duration in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room in someone else’s house in someone else’s city.

I had no idea what to do with myself. I woke around noon every day. Checked the news before leaving bed, to see if the curfew had been lifted; it hadn’t. People protested here and there, on principle, but the protests were halfhearted. The frequency of the attacks and the randomness of the ongoing threats had left people genuinely scared.

I’d pad downstairs in pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, not even bothering to get dressed. There were four roommates: a sculptor, a nurse, a filmmaker, and a burlesque performer. The filmmaker, Jaspreet, was a teacher by day, but the rest of us kept odd hours. We mostly ran into each other in the kitchen: someone on coffee, someone else eating breakfast, another lunch.

“We should be getting back to normal,” one would say. “Before we forget what normal is.”

“We have to find a new normal,” said another. I knew all their names by then, but it didn’t really matter who said what. It was the same conversation, over and over.

Then somebody would point out some aspect that was improving—schools reopening, say—and we’d all pretend to be cheered. I’d fill a bowl with cereal and slink back upstairs. It wasn’t that I disliked their company; it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

I’d call Margo at some point in the afternoon. “Have you heard anything today?”

She’d assure me that she’d let me know if she had, and I didn’t need to call daily. She didn’t understand that I did. I needed her to tell me to head back out on tour. I thought of Alaia and the staff at the Peach, and at all the other places we’d played. They all got paid hourly. How many people were going to struggle to pay their bills next month if the clubs stayed closed? Clubs, theaters, cinemas, stadiums, malls. Even a day could be devastating for an hourly worker. I remembered what that was like.

I’d never done so much nothing before. High school had been a blur of new experiences once I relocated myself to my aunt’s couch uptown: jeans, guitars, music, girls, the entire glorious city I’d missed out on. When I graduated, booking and playing and promoting for myself were three full-time jobs, even while I held a fourth to pay my rent. Touring and promotion kept me busy once I got on the road; writing and recording and rehearsing kept me busy the rest of the time. Downtime was new territory.

Telling myself to write didn’t work, either. The song I’d written on the hotel wall had hidden itself from me. The lyrics still glowed in my head when I closed my eyes, but it didn’t feel right putting them to music. I lay on my bed and did nothing, a pointed nothing, an arpeggiated chord of a nothing, strung out over the afternoon.

April called once to ask me the same question I asked Margo; I gave Margo’s answer.

“You’re a mess.” April’s hands tapped a beat into her kitchen counter.

I turned off my camera, though she’d already seen me. “How are you not a mess? Where are you, anyway?”

“Home.” She looked unperturbed. “New York is always New York.”

My heart lifted. “Do you mean clubs there are open?”

“No. The clubs and museums are still closed, and there aren’t many tourists, but that makes it nicer. I’ve found enough session work to pay rent. Everybody’s recording since they can’t play out. What are you doing? You look like shit. When was the last time you washed your hair?”

I couldn’t remember. “I’m not doing much. Our stuff has been selling well online since people got stuck inside. SuperStream royalties are decent. It’s paying the bills.”

“Silver lining, I guess. You can come visit if you want.”

It took me another month to convince myself to take her up on that offer. Schools reopened, then a scattering of other places: local stores, a movie theater here or there. More threats rolled in behind. Major League Baseball discussed kicking off an abbreviated season, then called it off. A museum opened for a day, then closed again.

“If this were a war zone, people would go about their business.” My sculptor-roommate was Syrian, and knew war zones. “People here fool themselves into thinking they’re safe, and they can’t take it when that illusion gets shattered.”

I nodded, retreated to my room again, called Margo. “There’s got to be someplace to play.”

“Not enough to build a tour on, Luce,” Margo said. “Hang in there. We’re waiting to hear about summer festivals. If those are a no-go, we can start looking for small clubs again, maybe.”

I called April. “Waiting is killing me. Are you still telling me there’s not a single club open in New York?”

“That was last month. Now there are some spots booking shows under the radar.”

She tossed venue names at me. One was a hole-in-the-wall I’d played as a teenager. I called and convinced them to let me do a show under a different name, no publicity; nothing that would draw attention while they were supposed to be closed at night.

I took an interstate bus up to the city. I’d expected people to be warier, but we stood in line and chatted as if the social contract was still being followed by all parties. Everyone angled for a window seat; I earned a few dirty looks when I leaned my guitar into the window and sat beside it on the aisle, but I waved a second ticket at them. “She paid, too.”

The road looked the same as when I’d left it, if a little emptier. The bus spit me out at six p.m. in midtown and I wasn’t due until eight, so I walked the forty blocks down to the bar, stopping on the way for a hot dog and pretzel from a vendor. New York looked the same but emptier. Mine and not mine.

Mine: the street corners where I’d played at eighteen; the clubs that hadn’t blinked an eye as long as I walked in with a guitar; the bands that saw me sitting hungry in a corner during their soundchecks and shared their fries and let me open for them.

Not mine: the combination of the resolute “We are New York” bustle and emptier-than-usual streets. The feeling that behind the bustle, even New York was afraid.

I wondered if my parents had noticed any of the upheaval. They and all my siblings were over the bridge in Brooklyn, where they might as well have been on another continent, living as if a wall separated them from the rest of the city, with their own wonderful social structures that I guessed were impervious to the closures hitting the outside world. Once in a while I’d tried calling a sibling to invite them to a New York show, but I never expected them to come, and they never did.

April was already at the Carryback when I arrived, nursing what looked like a hot toddy. I almost hugged her after so many months living with strangers, but I held back. She looked more tired than I’d expected.

“I’m sorry you can’t play with me here. No-drums policies are stupid.”

She shrugged. “No worries. This place is pretty small for a full band.”

“I remember.”

“I forgot you’d played here before. They still have the same house amp, but half the knobs are broken off and it sounds like crap. Anyway, I borrowed a better one for you.”

“You’re the best,” I said. “Can I pay for your drink?”

“I already paid for this one, but you can buy me another.” She raised her empty mug.

I paid for another toddy for her and a Casa Dragones for myself, and we stepped past a thick curtain into the back room, April dragging a small road case behind her. The venue space was tinier than I remembered. Six barstools stood under a ledge on the far wall, and there was room for another fifteen or twenty people to stand, if they didn’t mind getting cozy. A small soundboard ate into the raised staged area, which was barely large enough for two people with guitars. Definitely not a drum kit. “You could have played bongos, I guess.”

“Bite your tongue,” she said. “Anyway, I feel cruddy tonight. Just as well you fly solo.”

“That explains the cold-weather drinks. Hung over?”

“I shouldn’t be. I dunno.” She hoisted her small case onto the stage, pushing aside the house amp. The house amp’s grille cloth had torn down the middle like an autopsy, exposing twin speakers underneath. The treble, volume, and overdrive knobs were missing; pliers rested on the cabinet for anyone who wanted to make adjustments.

“Ouch.” I tried turning a knobless knob. “That has definitely seen better days.”

“Right? You’ll like this better. My friend Nico made it. It’s good for small spaces.”

I unclasped the case April had brought, and removed the top to reveal the amp inside.

“Whoa. That’s beautiful.” The cabinet had an art deco look, stylish and sleek. No branding on the front, but a little brass plaque on the back read “Nico Lectrics, B’klyn.” I plugged the amp into the surge protector and my guitar into the amp. Turned my back on April to fiddle with the settings and play a bit. It had a wicked clean crunch, and I found a tonal sweet spot before I raised the volume to five.

“It sounds gorgeous,” I said to April. She leaned against the wall, looking a little worse for wear. “I don’t suppose he’d sell it?”

She shook her head. “One of a kind. I told him you had the money to pay for it if you fucked it up. I’m pretty sure that’s true, but don’t.”

I played a while longer, then glanced at my watch. Eight o’clock. “What time do the doors open? Shouldn’t the sound person be here already?”

“Not if you haven’t paid one, sweetie,” someone said, stepping through the curtain. “And hopefully you’re not expecting to get paid, either.”

The man speaking might have been an old forty or a young sixty, with an unfiltered-cigarette voice. He leaned a battered guitar case against the stage; the case was mostly duct tape. I wasn’t sure how much protection it actually gave the instrument inside.

I smiled my fakest smile. “If I needed money, sweetie, I wouldn’t be playing here. Thanks for letting me know about the sound, though. Not a problem. Are you on the bill tonight?”

He nodded. I couldn’t tell if he had caught the chastisement. “The owner shows up with the set times at some point. I’ll run sound for you for twenty bucks if you want.”

“I can take care of myself, thanks. If you want, I’ll run sound for you for fifty.” I dropped the smile.

April stifled a laugh, then a cough. The guy stared at me for a minute, then moved on to ignoring me, which I could already tell I’d prefer to anything he said. Even if I’d needed his help, which I didn’t, I knew his type. It had been a while since I’d had to deal with an asshole of this particular variety; I’d gotten spoiled.

The bartender pushed through the curtain, waving a slip of paper and looking harried. “Hey, y’all, Shaun’s sick, so he’s not coming in. He said these are the set times, but if you don’t like the order, you can switch. It’s just you.”

The other musician walked over to grab the paper from her hand.

“You’re here because you want to play,” April whispered. “Don’t let him ruin your night.”

She was right; he had already crept into my mood. An evening of like-minded musicians pushing back against ridiculous times would have been nice, but this wasn’t going to be that, and that hadn’t been my purpose in coming. I needed to play. I said a silent prayer to have even one person show up; playing for April and this dude wouldn’t be the same.

“Ladies first.” The other musician held up the scrap. Two forty-minute sets, me and then him, starting at nine thirty. I realized we hadn’t even introduced ourselves. The paper had his name as Tanner Watkiss.

“Molly Fowler?” He squinted at the page. “I haven’t heard of you. Where else do you play?”

I hadn’t even remembered the name I’d chosen when the owner had suggested a pseudonym. I shrugged. “This is my first show. It’s probably better that I’m opening for you.”

Watkiss gave me a suspicious look, and I tried to mold my face into some semblance of innocent and sincere.

Messing with his head distracted from the empty room, in any case. So did finishing my self-soundcheck. I pulled my own microphone from my backpack to replace the club’s battered SM58. It was possible to adjust the PA faders from the stage if I didn’t mind working upside down, which I didn’t. Watkiss judged in silence from the center of the room. April sat on a stool against the back wall, holding her drink to her face to inhale the dissipating steam. Normally I’d have asked her if I’d gotten the balance right, but I didn’t want to leave an opening for Watkiss’s opinion, so I decided to trust my own judgment. When I was satisfied, I leaned my guitar against the amp and went to sit with April.

“Sound okay?” I asked.

She opened her eyes. “I’d be lying if I said I’d been listening. Sorry, Luce. I feel like crap.”

“No worries. Sorry you’re sick. Do you need to go?”

“Nah. I’ll sit here and hold up the wall ’til you’re done.”

To my relief, four people walked in as I finished writing my set list. Prayers answered: an audience, albeit a small one. I knew they hadn’t come for me, since “Molly Fowler” didn’t exist. That meant either they were Tanner Watkiss fans or they’d come to hear new music. I spotted Watkiss giving them the same once-over, and settled on the latter. Excellent.

By nine thirty, five more people had wandered in. It didn’t take much to make this room look full. I stepped onto the tiny stage, tuned one more time, then flipped the little amp on and stepped to the mic. The small crowd kept chatting among themselves.

For one moment, staring out at eleven people from a stage the size of a shower stall, nerves gripped me. I shook it off. Ridiculous. I’d played for thousands without a second thought. Why did eleven hit me this way? Because I had to win these people over from scratch. It had been a while since I’d done it, but it wasn’t like I’d never been in that position before.

“Hi, I’m—” I paused to remember the pseudonym, but it was gone. It didn’t matter, anyhow. “—I’m gonna play a few songs for you. Thanks for coming.”

The set I’d written skipped the songs that had hit it big on SuperStream. I lit into “Lost and Found,” urgent, upbeat, an opener designed to silence anybody who thought they’d talk through my set. It worked. I shifted my gaze, stopping short of eye contact to avoid making anyone uncomfortable in a room this small, inviting them into the song but not putting them on the spot.

The speakers let out a squeal and broke the spell I was trying to cast. In between lines I glanced over at the PA: Watkiss was playing with the equalizer levels I’d set. I glared at him, but he didn’t look up. I knew his type; he’d never stop fiddling. He stared at the knobs as he twisted them, like perfection was just out of reach.

I brought the song to its end, then turned to him. Silent stares weren’t going to do it. “Dude, step away from the mixing board before I break my guitar over your head.”

A few laughs from the audience. At least they understood I wasn’t the problem. When I had the levels back where I wanted them, I turned to the mic. Smiled. Pretended the first song hadn’t happened. “Hi! I’m gonna play a few songs for you. Thanks for coming.” Another laugh. They were on my side.

The set went fine after that. The audience was there because they wanted to hear something new, or maybe because they wanted to pretend things were normal for a minute.

I was there because I needed the energy I could only get from this connection: the elusive collision of a song, a performance, a moment; the agreement that I would try to reach them, and they’d open themselves to being reached. The last few horrible months fell away for the duration of nine songs. Nine songs to stave off whatever was going on outside. I’d thought I needed to be on tour, but it wasn’t the road I was missing. It was this, in whatever room I could find this, big or small.

I didn’t want it to end. I had enough songs to play another hour, but this wasn’t my room. I finished my last song and walked off to solid applause. Waited a moment to show the set was really over, then stepped back up to grab my guitar, mic, and amp. No way was I sharing my gear with that dude.

“Good set, sweetie,” Watkiss said. “You could probably make a go of it if the world wasn’t going to shit.”

“Apology accepted.” He looked like he had more to say, but I turned my back on him.

A couple of people stepped over to make conversation. “Do you have anything I can buy?” asked one of the women who had walked in first. Her tank top showed off amazing shoulders. I’d kill for shoulders like that, though working out or swimming to get them made more sense than killing.

“Or SuperStream?” one of her friends asked.

I almost said no, then realized the pseudonym’s purpose had been to keep from bringing too many people into the room; it didn’t matter now that the show had ended. “Yeah, but it’s under another name.”

Most of them looked blank at my name, but one opened his eyes wider. “Oh, man. You’ve got that song. I know that song.”

He sang the chorus of “Blood and Diamonds” and the others nodded in recognition.

“What are you doing in this dump?” his friend in thick-rimmed glasses asked.

“It’s the only place open,” another answered before I could.

“She could be playing StageHolo to way more people.”

I looked at the guy with the glasses. “What’s Stage Hollow?”

“It’s a new company. I’ve got a friend who works there. It’s going to take off huge any day now.”

I made a mental note to look into it.

“I’m glad you’re here, anyway,” declared the guy who’d recognized me. “I didn’t care who played tonight, but I’m glad it was you.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” asked the woman with the delicious shoulders.

Come-on, or friendly offer? She put her hand on my arm. A strong hand, with exactly the right weight behind the gesture. Definitely hitting on me.

“I’d love nothing more, but my friend over there”—I nodded my head toward April—“needs help getting home.”

She looked at April and withdrew the touch. “Uh, yeah. She doesn’t look so hot. Rain check.”

Tanner Watkiss started to play, and the group that had chatted with me reoriented themselves toward the stage. I’d hoped he would be an awful performer, but he was disappointingly adequate. He’d bypassed the amp and plugged his Gibson Hummingbird into the PA. He had a solid fingerpicking style, and his singing voice had craggy charm. The song wasn’t memorable, but he played it well.

Politeness dictated that I stay for his set since he’d stayed for mine. On the other hand, April looked worse by the second. I turned my back on Watkiss.

“Let me help you get back to your place,” I told April.

She opened her eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

The fact that she didn’t even try to protest told me it was the right move. I didn’t have to wait to get paid since there wasn’t going to be any money. I slung my gig bag and knapsack over my right shoulder. The amp’s road case, blessedly, had wheels and a collapsing handle.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

April nodded. As she slid off her stool I doubted it, but she made it to her feet. I let her lead the way so I could keep an eye on her. She traced the wall with her hand as she walked.

It was only eleven p.m., and the weather was on our side. The Hack I’d called arrived before we even made it to the door. April slid into the backseat, but didn’t shift over. I piled my gear into the trunk and walked around the other side. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to a hospital?”

She shook her head. “No hospital. I let my insurance lapse. Stupid, I know. I’ll be fine. I’ll sleep it off.”

I put a hand on her forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“A cold. I’ll be fine.”

I knew she wasn’t fine just from the fact that her hands were still. I thought back through the entire evening, but couldn’t remember her hands drumming at all.

We rode to Harlem in silence. I carried the gear to her third-floor walk-up, then came down to help her with the stairs; she’d only managed the first four steps. I put her in bed in her clothes. In the kitchen, I pulled a glass off the drying rack and filled it with water. It was a mystery to me whose stuff was whose in the bathroom, but I grabbed a bottle of Tylenol and another of store-brand cold medicine for her to choose between. I didn’t know what else to do for her. Didn’t know where she’d intended for me to sleep, either: the living room had a curtain pulled across the entrance and was clearly now somebody’s bedroom. I opened her closet and rummaged until I found her sleeping bag and laid it out on her floor.

April moaned and tossed, obviously exhausted but not sleeping. I felt helpless. She needed a doctor, but I couldn’t make her go. I sanitized the bathroom and kitchen sinks and all the doorknobs, scrubbed my hands raw with soap and hot water, and managed to fall into a half sleep until one of her roommates walked in around four. I got up to talk to them, but the other bedroom door closed before I got there, and nobody answered when I knocked. Back to the sleeping bag.

“Go home,” April whispered not long after the sun rose. “I’ll be fine.”

“Like hell. I’m not leaving until you go to a doctor or one of your roommates says they’ll keep an eye on you.”

“Don’t count on that. They’re assholes.”

“How about a clinic, at least? Finite cost. I’ll pay if you don’t have the cash.” I knew I shouldn’t have said that the second it was out of my mouth.

“Go home, Luce. I’ll go to a clinic later if I’m not feeling better. I promise.”

I’d stepped over a line. We weren’t really friends. I’d been her employer, sort of. We’d been in a band, sort of. Her pride was never going to let me help more than I’d helped already. I went online to switch my tickets to an earlier bus.

“Feel better. Thanks for the gig and the awesome amp and the place to stay…” My voice trailed off.

She propped herself on one elbow. “The amp? It made it back here, right?”

I pointed to the corner, and she leaned back again. “Thanks.”

“You’re sure I can’t do anything else?”

She waved me away. I would have preferred to tell a roommate how sick she was, but I didn’t see anyone, and she had said they were assholes. I showed myself out.

I bought a coffee and a sourdough bagel on the way to the subway, both of which I regretted when I realized it was rush hour. Even with all the closings, rush hour in New York still strained the system. I had to swing my guitar off my back and hold it in front of me to protect it, while the other elbow hooked the pole, keeping my coffee from my face. I distracted myself by people-watching, but even that was less fun than usual with the bad night’s sleep setting in. It might have been my imagination, but everyone looked drawn, lessened. By the time I got off the train, my coffee had gone cold. I tossed it in the nearest wastebasket.

The morning bus back to Baltimore wasn’t as crowded as the one I’d taken the day before. Nobody fussed over the guitar’s seat, and there were enough windows for everyone. I took a seat on the top level to see Manhattan as we drove away; New York always looked majestic from New Jersey. After the island’s southern tip dipped from view, I turned my attention to the thought I’d been avoiding.

What to do next? I’d hoped playing a show would buoy me, but a single show’s high faded too fast. It had been a temporary distraction at best. I needed something real and lasting, and nothing I thought of fit the bill.

What was the new site the guy with the glasses had mentioned after my set? At least researching and setting myself up on a new platform might eat some time and make me feel productive. He’d called it Super Hollow. No. Stage Hollow? I searched on my phone until I found it: StageHolo. Not the catchiest brand name.

The bus braked hard and I braced against the seat in front of me, arm across my guitar to keep it from shifting. I looked out on a sea of brake lights. A little odd heading away from the city at this time of morning.

I turned back to the StageHolo site. It looked like they were offering private shows through proprietary hardware, at a fee. “No parking, no puking. Like a live show, but better.” Their taglines needed work, and they didn’t seem to have an artist sign-up link. It looked a little rough.

The bus still hadn’t moved. I stood to look through the front window. Others did the same.

“Can you see what’s the delay?” I asked a man who looked like he’d been paying attention.

“Nah. An ambulance pulled up on the other side of the highway, way in front. I think they tried to get through on this side but the shoulder was too narrow.”

I went back to my seat to wait. Another twenty minutes passed. The bus lurched forward, and eventually passed a tow truck trying to extricate a car from the guardrail. Once we got past, the highway emptied out again, as if there’d never been a problem.

We made it as far as the Thomas Edison rest stop. This was supposed to be an express from New York to Baltimore, but the loudspeaker crackled and the driver announced, “We’re making a quick stop to disembark a sick passenger. Stay on the bus and we’ll be back on our way momentarily.”

The doors were on the opposite side from where I was sitting, so I had to crane my neck to see. An ambulance waited for us at the rest stop, and we all watched as a passenger I didn’t remember from the line made his way to it with the help of two paramedics. There hadn’t been much noise from downstairs; I assumed if something dramatic had happened, we would have heard it upstairs.

I checked the time. Eleven a.m. already. Late enough to text April without feeling too guilty if I woke her.

How u doing? I wrote. No response.

The bus started again. The rest of the ride was uneventful. I texted April a couple more times then gave up, hoping she was sleeping it off. If she didn’t answer, I didn’t have any other way of reaching her.

Trudging from the bus back to the house reinforced the letdown. A single show was not a tour. It wasn’t even enough of a rush to get me through a day. I let myself in to the house I lived in, a house that still didn’t feel like a home. Not that there was anything homey about a tour’s worth of hotel rooms, but at least that carried some payoff. Home was the road, the gig, the music.

There was nobody in the living room. Nobody in the kitchen. A cat I’d never seen before mewled a greeting, but when I stooped to pet it my gig bag swung off my shoulder and it skittered away. Back in my room, I leaned the guitar against a wall and collapsed on the bed in an exact replay of every day previous to the day before. Playing a single show hadn’t changed anything, and I still didn’t know what would.

8 ROSEMARY ^{Little Boxes}

The farm truck hadn’t been allowed on highways since the phaseout, so Rosemary had to hire a single-cell cab to drive her to the StageHoloLive orientation. She’d never been in a single-cell before. A nice bench seat to herself, and if she kept her hands in her lap she didn’t have to contemplate the other people who’d sat here and touched the surfaces. She didn’t have to touch anything other than her own phone and the door handles, and there was no driver to force awkward conversation, the way they did in her parents’ old shows.

She was glad she hadn’t driven the farm truck; she’d be stuck watching the road ahead and listening to the misfiring engine, which roared too loud for her to bother with music. In the truck she’d be stuck on the rutted county roads, since Rattlebang wasn’t allowed on this smooth new automated highway. This way she got to look out the windows at everything she’d missed for the last dozen years stuck in Jory. Not that she could see much from the highway, but she caught glimpses: shopping centers turned detention centers turned Superwally distribution centers; barns with winter-bare oaks thrusting through caved-in roofs; the skeletal spines of roller coasters in an abandoned amusement park; a motel captured in time; a cinema, where total strangers used to gather in large groups to watch movies. Everywhere, the ghosts of a past she was old enough to remember, barely, but not to remember well. Her parents’ world, not hers.

Her own world overlay theirs. The silent-running cab meant she could listen to Whileaway songs as she rode, the perfect soundtrack. She kept her new Hoodie in mapview, generated highways painted onto blacktop, landmark identifiers whizzing by in the periphery. Ads for the latest Patent Medicine song and Nightlights birch beer hovered in the cumulus clouds. Migrating flocks, flying north, tagged on the wing with the BirdGoggles app. Here and there, a walled compound, the houses of those who had fled the city with more money than her family, or a trailer enclave, for those with less.

She didn’t resent the tiny safe place they had built for her. She’d had friends, even if they were online. There was always enough to do to keep her from getting bored, except for at work, which was expected. If she took this one opportunity to see what went on outside of her Hoodie, her house, Jory, then she could say she’d done it. Done something, even if it led right back to her room.

Her stomach tied itself in knots as the single-cell exited the highway and navigated a series of quick turns to arrive at a ten-foot security gate. NO UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES read one sign on the gate, alongside NO UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS. A bored-looking white guard at the gate inspected her ID through a clearviewed Hoodie. “You’re on the list,” he said after a moment. “But the vehicle isn’t. I can get them to send a car up here for you, but if you’re able to walk, it’ll be less hassle.”

“I can walk.” No point in making trouble. The single-cell puttered off toward its next customer as soon as she’d lifted her bag from the trunk and released it. No turning back.

She wanted to ask where she was supposed to go, but she didn’t want to be a bother. Anyway, there was only one road, wide and tree-lined. The ancient suitcase she’d borrowed from her mother had one cracked wheel and pulled to the right as she walked. Too early for budding back home, here trees bloomed pink and white, big puffballs she didn’t recognize. It must have rained recently, because the ground was carpeted with more blooms, making it that much harder to pull the suitcase, even if it did serve as a delightful welcome mat rolled out just for her.

After a ten-minute walk, an enormous building loomed into view. Bigger than the abandoned high school in town, bigger than the Superwally Fulfillment Center between Jory and Belgicus. There was a giant door and a human-sized door, so she picked the human side.

A man about her age smiled at her from across a reception desk, and she realized with a shock that she couldn’t identify his features. Online she knew the shorthand that told you an avatar’s ethnicity, or where to check if you didn’t know. It was considered appropriation to wear an avatar of a culture that wasn’t yours, unless you were Quality Control, and even they only did it for a minute. She wasn’t sure how to categorize his ethnicity at all, and her assumption of male pronouns might be wrong, too. Nor was she sure why it mattered, or if it mattered. Maybe she cared because she liked the idea of being from somewhere, even far back in family history, since she wasn’t from anywhere special. Maybe she was used to inhabiting spaces where people had ways of telling you how they wanted to be perceived. All those thoughts ran through her head in the time it took him to say, “Welcome to the StageHolo family, Rosemary,” in a Texan accent.

StageHoloLive had the same Talent Management hoops to jump through as Superwally; they called it People Operations here, perhaps to distinguish from the actual talent onstage, and after letting her drop her bags in the dormitory room, they ran her through all the paperwork required to get paid and stay employed. She waited for the part where they’d start listing workplace restrictions, but they didn’t seem to care. They didn’t require inspirational posters, or put any demands on her workspace at all. She also wouldn’t be doing much work from home, though they didn’t say what that meant. Those were the pleasant surprises.

Her private room was a pleasant surprise, too, with its own tiny bathroom and meals delivered to the door during her stay; she hadn’t realized how apprehensive she’d been about sharing space until she walked through the dormitory area. The macaroni and cheese she ordered had different spices from those she was used to—onions, and paprika—but it was still a relief not to have to eat in a cafeteria. She’d seen cafeterias in her parents’ old movies, and they always looked chaotic and dirty to her.

It turned out the main reason they brought new employees in to the compound, other than the paperwork, was to show them how the actual concerts were recorded. It made sense. Some new hires would be working on the broadcasts, as stagehands or technicians. Others supported the talent: makeup, wardrobe, artist liaison. There were eight altogether in her training group, all around her age or younger, but Rosemary was the only new hire going out to work “in the field,” whatever that meant.

The second day started with a tour. Her training group all eyed each other, assessing, leaving as much space as possible between their bodies in the small classroom. Rosemary had agonized over what to wear to an in-person training, settling on something not too unlike her Superwally uniform. The others were a little more casual, in jeans or tights and unbranded long-sleeved T-shirts. They all looked scruffy in comparison to the avatars she was used to interacting with. Their colors were off, their hair frizzed. A couple had pox scars on their cheeks or arms. She’d been lucky enough to get through the outbreak with scars only on her torso, hidden beneath her clothes.

“Ah, you’re all here! Welcome!” The new woman in the room had a military bearing, ramrod spine, and a geometric twist piled on her head that surpassed even the most gravity-defying av hairdos. She had the darkest skin Rosemary had ever seen outside hoodspace. “My name is Jeannie. I’ll be your mama duck, and y’all will be my ducklings. Follow, ducklings.”

They followed. Jeannie marched her gawking charges through artist lounges, dressing rooms, practice rooms, and editing studios at a pace that left the group gasping for breath.

As they passed people in their work environments, Rosemary wondered how anyone had gotten the experience to wind up in these careers. She’d been led to computers the moment she had shown aptitude, and had never gotten any hint that any other path existed. High school funneled her classmates to one of eight concentrations: medicine/nursing, farming, military, construction, teaching, trade, computers, or some aspect of the Superwally empire, which technically bled over into the other seven. Did people teach themselves sound and makeup, or was there someplace they learned those things? She kept her mouth shut, afraid she’d sound silly or provincial, until Colton, the wardrobe guy, asked, “How do people become musicians, anyway?” and nobody laughed.

Jeannie stopped. The woman behind crashed into her, and Rosemary walked straight into both of them. She flinched at the contact, stepping backward onto someone else’s foot. The unexpected touch left her so flustered she almost missed the response to Colton’s question.

Jeannie answered without teasing, which suggested why she was the guide; it would be easy enough for someone working here to laugh, to forget what it had been like to be new. “Some were musicians already, Before, with live shows and everything. I know it’s hard for some of you to imagine a time when people made a living playing live concerts for live audiences, but a lot of our musicians, even the younger ones, never stopped imagining it. They came to us, or we sought them out, because we’re the ones who can make it happen for them.”

She started walking again, and the group raced to keep up with her. “I know we promised to show you a live recording, and you’re in luck. We have a very special performance today. If you’ve never seen Magritte play, you’re in for a treat.”

Colton gasped, and a couple of others perked up at the news. Rosemary pretended to be excited as well. She knew she had a lot of catching up to do in her musical education.

The narrow hallway ended in a locked door. Jeannie flashed a pass and ushered them into a space as big as a Superwally Fulfillment Center. The change from low-ceilinged hallway was drastic, but the soundstage itself wasn’t so different from what Rosemary had expected. She’d pictured an auditorium, given the way Patent Medicine had played, or at least something the size of the Bloom Bar. All of their moves had been so much larger than life.

She’d expected the size, but not the silence. She’d imagined a set filled with people, bustle, music. Instead, the enormous space was filled with small modular rooms, like trailer homes. Rosemary looked for a stage. If not the exact one from the Bloom Bar, at least something similar. Speakers, amplifiers, lights. Something.

Jeannie spoke as if someone had asked a question. “You’ll understand in a minute. Take it all in. There’s a quiz later.”

They all exchanged glances. Rosemary couldn’t tell if the part about the quiz was true or not, so she tried to memorize the layout. The walls were lined with digital clocks stating the hour, minute, and second in three dozen cities around the world. Wires snaked everywhere from the trailer-boxes.

Jeannie glanced at her watch, smiled. “They’ll arrive any second now.”

As if on cue, a door opened on the hangar’s far side, where the wardrobe and makeup wing branched off. A tall black woman entered, wearing a silk dress the color of rain. The man following her looked like he might be related—they had the same cheekbones, the same build—and a white woman trailed them waving a tablet. “Are you sure you want to change the order now?” she asked. “The techs aren’t going to like it. You’re on in ten minutes.”

The tall woman had an accent Rosemary was unable to place, even after all her vendor services calls. Caribbean, maybe? “I am not interested in playing ‘Warm Bed’ tonight. I am not feeling that song. I want to play ‘Misnomer’ instead.” She wasn’t shouting, but her voice carried across the cavernous space.

“Mags,” the man said, in a similar accent, matching her in volume, tone, and timbre. He wore a black suit with a stripe and tie the same color as the woman’s dress. “Be reasonable. They don’t have time to redo the cues for us.”

“Asking to take one song off a set list is not unreasonable.”

“Are you asking to remove the song, or replace it? Removing is easier than replacing.”

“If we remove it, the set’s too short.” They neared Rosemary’s group. Up close, the performers were even taller, and both faces were covered in thick makeup. The woman sighed dramatically, but didn’t acknowledge the audience to her conversation. “We are artists, not trained dogs. I don’t bark on command.”

The man looked at the second woman, raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. “My sister says we aren’t playing ‘Warm Bed’ tonight. Let us know if you prefer for us to cut it and run short, or substitute ‘Misnomer.’ It’s the same length.”

The second woman exited through a side door, leaving the performers—the artists—behind.

“I am not being unreasonable,” the woman repeated as they walked over to two box-rooms, each entering one.

“You can move closer to take a look.” Jeannie gestured for the group to follow the artists.

“Who are they?” Rosemary whispered to Colton. She chose him in part because he had reacted so dramatically to the performer’s name, and in part because he’d been the one brave enough to ask anything. Not to mention he was the one she was least likely to ever interact with again if hers was a stupid question.

“Are you serious?” he whispered back. “She’s the queen of Zoukhop. She and her brother practically invented it. She’s like the national hero of Dominica.”

As they got closer, Rosemary realized each trailer was an isolation booth, each with an array of cameras and lights and microphones orbiting a ministage. They had foam-padded walls, with windows into the booths on either side. She tried to reconcile the new information with her memory of Patent Medicine. The bassist’s wink must have been to someone outside these windows.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Jeannie heard her. “It’s always a shock when you first see them. Like being handed a single puzzle piece and asked what the whole looks like.”

Rosemary struggled to make sense of it. Inside the room on the left, the man stood just outside his spotlight, tuning his guitar. To the right, Magritte—Mags—sat on a stool, staring into a camera, arms crossed. Air conditioners whirred, creating more noise than any of the other equipment.

A voice boomed over an intercom, bouncing around the hangar. “We’re cutting ‘Warm Bed.’ Please cut ‘Warm Bed’ from your cue sheets. The set will be two minutes and forty-seven seconds short. I want acknowledgment from every department in the next minute. Ping Control if there’s a problem, but don’t have any problems.”

Rosemary didn’t hear any acknowledgment, or any problems, so there must have been some other method of conveying those from each department to the mysterious intercom person. The guitarist moved into the spotlight in his tiny room. A light shifted a couple of inches along a track, then another did the same. The woman in the other booth still hadn’t moved.

The air conditioners cut off and the hangar’s overhead lights guttered, leaving machine silence, an absence of hum. Someone in the group giggled. Inside the booths, spotlights lit the performers, stark against the surrounding darkness. The man began playing his guitar. Mags must have stepped into her position in the moment the lights went off; now she swayed in time with her brother’s syncopated strum.

“Why can’t we hear them?” somebody asked. Rosemary was glad the question had come from someone else.

“Ssssssh,” said a second person.

“Those are isolation booths,” another voice whispered. “They’re soundproof.”

“In both directions?” the second one asked again.

“Ducklings,” said Jeannie in a normal voice, cutting through the argument and answering in favor of soundproofing. “This way.”

The group followed their guide away from the booths. Rosemary kept pace but glanced over her shoulder as she went. She still didn’t understand how the pieces added up to the whole.

They went through yet another door. So many doors. Rosemary had no idea if they had already been down this hallway or seen this control room earlier. If they had, it had only been in passing. Now it was full of technicians and engineers, all in their own half-walled booths, all watching the two performers on monitor screens, from a hundred different angles.

She was grateful to have a wall at her back, and oriented herself to be the nearest of her group to the door, even if her view was now blocked. Way too many people. How did they all stand being in the same room? The heat of them, the air they displaced, somebody’s cologne, somebody else’s sweat, unless it was her own. Even in the packed Bloom Bar show, she hadn’t felt so crowded, though of course that hadn’t been real. Concentrate on the tech, she told herself. Find something to take your mind off it.

Jeannie whispered, “That bay over there is sound mixing.” She pointed to a man in headphones behind a large screen filled with dancing meters, green cresting to yellow tips then falling back again.

An identical bay, with a young woman at the controls. “The one next to him is another mixing bay, for in-ear monitors, making sure the musicians hear what they need to hear. And that whole section is cameras.” She pointed to the vast monitor bank covering two walls. “Some for the actual camera feed, some for what the audience sees, some for knitting it all together. The holo camera rig is automated, but we keep people at the controls in case anything needs a human touch. They’re watching carefully during this particular set because there’s a chance some camera may not follow the updated path for the new set list. Anytime you make last-minute changes you increase the likelihood things will go wrong. Remember that, kids.”

Some monitors showed Magritte, some showed her brother, but the vast majority showed the two together. On a raised platform at the room’s center, overhead projectors conjured a life-sized, living, breathing holo of the two performers without backdrop, knit seamlessly into one image.

Rosemary’s jaw dropped. “How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Put them in one room together when they’re not!”

Her eyes understood how. Each performer had their own camera array, with their own fake stage set behind them matching the others. The two were combined in studio. “How?” wasn’t the question she wanted answered, though it was the first that had come out of her mouth. Not “Why?” either, since why was obvious: to make each performer look three-dimensional, they needed to be shot from all angles, with nobody else blocking them.

The question was a different “How?”—it was, How do those performers act as if they’re interacting with each other when they’re isolated? Patent Medicine must have been in booths like these as well. Those songs that had so moved her, the performance that had reached out and spoken to her; it had all been an elaborate ruse.

The musicians in the booths started a new song. The guitar had an effect on it that made it tremble. Magritte sang a line in some other language, something intense, with a dark turn at the end. The guitar echoed her, in her own voice, trembling, snarling. She looked at her brother, locked eyes with him. Cut him with another line, which his guitar tossed back at her. Their faces drew closer to each other. Inches apart.

Rosemary tore her eyes away from the holographic combined image to look at the individual monitors again. They were still in the same positions they had been in in the three-dimensional version, but now she internalized the isolation again.

“Can they see each other?” she asked, hoping it was a less naive question.

“Sometimes. They can’t see much beyond the lights, but they have marks to show where they expect each other to be, and they do have visual monitors in their floors. We can correct if they’re off by a few inches.”

It was amazing. If either missed their mark, they’d look ridiculous. One singing to the other’s nose, or playing guitar at nobody. Instead, this was a performance built in two halves, a relationship carried out by two people with complete faith that the other was where they were supposed to be.

The song ended, but the guitar continued into another song. The image flickered, jumped, then crumpled the two performers’ images like paper. The holo in the room’s center spun them into prismatic arcs, flattened Picasso figures given flesh: jaws elongated, limbs twisted, impossibly long shards of arm and body and guitar wound together.

“Fuck!” somebody shouted. “Nobody said they’d segue from ‘Carajo’ to ‘Contagious.’ Those were supposed to be hard stops.”

“Cameras are three seconds behind cues.”

“Jump forward.”

“We’ll miss a few seconds. There’ll be a gap.”

“Better than the paper dolls we have now.” The paper dolls were creepy, distorted versions of the people in the booths. Rosemary slipped around her group to get a look at a console running code.

“On my mark, jump to the thirty-second cue for ‘Contagious.’ Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

The real-time monitors stayed on the performers. The holo took a stomach-churning leap to match up, then they were restored to three-dimensionality. It was a strange relief, an escape from an uncanny valley.

Magritte and her brother never lost a beat. If any control room stress had reached their earpieces, they showed no sign. The woman was a mesmerizing performer. It wasn’t a matter of losing herself in the songs; she was part of the music, but she controlled it, used it. Something about the way she addressed the cameras said, “I am putting on this show for you.” Not warmth, not connection. Power. Even in a setting this clinical, that much came through. Even in a playful song like the next one, or a quiet song like the one after that.

“And we’re offline,” announced someone in the room as the last song came to an end.

The holo faded out of existence, but the artists on monitor in the booths did not.

“What was that?” asked Magritte, looking straight into a camera as if she was about to reach through it. “That shouldn’t have happened. Who missed the cue?”

Her brother lifted his guitar strap over his head, placed the guitar on a stand. Sweat shone on his face, dripping down his neck and into his collar. “Mags. It was our fault. My fault. We told them to cut a song, not to stitch the empty space.”

She turned her glare on him. “If anybody complains, you can refund them yourself.”

“Yes, yes.” He waved a hand at her. “Now, can we please leave these sauna boxes and argue off camera?”

“Yes. Or the eavesdropping ghouls behind the cameras and mics could turn them off, since we’re not talking to them anymore at this point.”

Somebody shut the cameras off.

Jeannie turned to her tour group. “That’s it, start to finish. Y’all will go off and learn the specifics of your jobs through online training modules. Then some of you’ll recruit and you’ll send people here, and then some will dress them and paint them and make them pretty, and the rest will mix them and film them and send them out to their fans. You’ve got the best gigs in the world. Have fun, learn your jobs well, and as you’ve seen tonight, don’t ever let it be your fault something went wrong.”

She said the last bit with a grin, but Rosemary couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

9 LUCE ^Rip

Whatever April had hit three of my roommates over the next week, and whatever it was, it was bad. Started with chills and fever, same as April. I kept to myself, afraid to catch it, afraid I was the vector, afraid to infect the fourth, Jaspreet, the teacher-filmmaker.

She laughed when I told her as much. “I teach third grade, Luce. I have the immune system of a… what has a good immune system? Anyway, half my kids are out, too, and some had it before you went to New York. You’re not Patient Zero. If anyone brought it into the house, it was me.”

I allowed myself to be somewhat reassured, until the next day, when she fell down the stairs. I heard the crash from my room.

“I got dizzy,” she said.

When I reached to help her up, she screamed like I’d hurt her. For a minute I thought she had injured herself falling, but then she tugged her sleeve back: her arm was covered with welts.

I drove her to the emergency room in her car, since I didn’t have one. The ER was full. Every seat was occupied by someone in a state similar to Jaspreet’s. Flushed, sweating, shivering, moaning. Some tore at spots like hers, screaming like they were being stabbed or burned.

“I can call a friend,” Jaspreet kept saying, but she didn’t protest when I joined her on the floor of the waiting room.

“I’ll stay until they show up.” We weren’t friends, but I regretted leaving April to her asshole roommates; I still hadn’t heard from her. If I couldn’t have been more helpful to April, the least I could do was stay here with Jaspreet until her friends came.

Nobody came. Hours passed. I read headlines on my phone. The president called for people to stay home, for health and safety. Schools closed again. Something something legislation something something. It all made me uneasy.

I glanced over to check on Jaspreet, who had her eyes closed and her head leaned back against the wall. “Um, you’ve got new spots. On your neck.”

“I know. They feel like fucking cigarette burns.” She tried to turn on her phone, but her hands shook. She thumbed it unlocked and then handed it to me. “Document this for me. I’ll give you a producer credit if this turns out to be film-worthy.”

I took the offered phone and panned over her spots as she displayed them. Recorded as they pulled her into a vestibule to get her blood pressure and temperature, both through the roof.

The nurse had obviously had a night of it already, but she mugged for the camera. “The good news is, your stats have won you a bump to the front of the triage line. Highest fever we’ve seen all night. The bad news is that we don’t have enough beds. There’s a chair in a hallway and a nice IV of fluids waiting for you.”

“What is it?” Jaspreet asked. “I swear I had chicken pox, and I’ve had the measles vaccine. What else causes spots?”

The nurse shook her head. “We’re not sure yet, but we’re full of it tonight, whatever it is.”

I waited with Jaspreet for another three hours. She slept. I watched a game show on an overhead TV with the sound off and tried my best not to touch surfaces. Whatever this was, I didn’t want it.

The doctor who attended her—for all of two minutes—seemed more interested in cataloging and mitigating symptoms. Pill for the fever, fluids for dehydration, shot for the pain, cream to stop the itching if it started.

“And then I can go home?” Jaspreet asked. She considered the place we lived home, my distracted brain noticed.

The doctor shook her head. “And then we admit you. You’re not going anywhere until your fever drops out of the danger zone.”

“Can you say ‘danger zone’ again for my camera?” she asked, but the doctor had already left.

She turned to me. “You might as well go home. Thanks so much for hanging out all night and distracting me. It was nice getting to know you a little. I think this was the most we’ve ever chatted.”

It was true. I gave her back her phone and told her to call if she needed anything, then returned to the house. Back to the moans of two other sick roommates and the place they considered a home but I didn’t.

It had been midafternoon when I drove Jaspreet to the hospital, and it was nearly eleven now. Eight hours of hospital hum had exhausted me, but there was still one thing I wanted to do, since April’s phone kept ringing through and I didn’t know her roommates. We weren’t even connected on any social media platforms, so I couldn’t look to see who else knew her who I knew.

The plaque on the amp’s back had read “Nico Lectrics,” which was easy enough to search online. I’d hoped for a phone number, but settled for an email address. I dashed off a short message. “Hi, April Mennin loaned me one of your amps the other night—it was amazing, and I’d like to talk to you about buying one sometime—but mostly I wondered if you’d heard from April in the last few days or if you had any way of checking on her. She wasn’t feeling well when I left.” I closed with my name and phone number.

There. That was something, at least.

The phone woke me in the morning. I leaped from the bed, catching my feet in the sheet and tumbling to the floor, then scrambling to extricate it from my jeans pocket before the fourth ring. A New York number I didn’t recognize.

“April?” I rubbed my bashed knee.

“Ah, shit, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” I repeated. “Who is this?”

“My name is Nico. You emailed me. I, uh, fuck. There’s no good way to say this. April died five days ago.”

I dropped the phone as if it had burned me. A spiderweb crack spread across the screen from one corner.

“Hello?” Came a muffled voice from the floor. “Luce? Hello?”

I stared at the crack until the screen lit to tell me the call had disconnected. Kept staring. It rang again, but I didn’t answer. If I pretended I hadn’t heard, if I didn’t answer, it wouldn’t be true. She’d died five days ago. Alive for me, dead for anyone who knew. Five days. I’d been home for a week. She’d died two days after I’d left New York.

I sat down on the floor. Retrieved the phone, traced the crack in its facade, hit redial. He answered on the third ring.

“Sorry,” I said. “You took me by surprise… What happened?”

“It’s this thing that’s going around. She got a real bad case.”

“Did she—did she go to the hospital?” I pictured her tossing and turning the night I’d spent on her floor. I should have tried harder to get her to a doctor.

“She wouldn’t go. Said she couldn’t afford it. One of her roommates called 911 on Tuesday when they found her in the bathroom. She’d passed out and hit her head. She was in the hospital for a day after that, but none of her friends knew. She was unconscious the whole time, anyway.”

“I should have made her go to the hospital.”

“You know she wasn’t someone you could force. It’s not your fault. Who dies of the flu? I thought that was old people and babies.”

“Is that what it is? The flu?”

“No,” he said. “Or, anyway, I have no idea. All they’re saying is wash your hands and go to an emergency room if you get spots or a bad fever.”

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Everyone here has that, too. Everyone but me.”

“Yeah, I’m still okay, but it feels like a matter of time.”

“Is there a funeral?” I didn’t know if this was the right question to ask. I’d never known anyone near my own age who’d died before.

“In Nebraska or Arkansas or wherever it is she’s from. Her parents claimed her body, I guess.” From the sound of it, he was new at this, too. “Anyway, we wanted to have a memorial, but the newspapers say to avoid big gatherings right now, so I guess we’ll do it… whenever this flu runs its course? Do you want me to let you know?”

I told him I’d appreciate it. I did want to buy one of his amps, too, but now wasn’t the time. Guilt hit me that I was thinking about amps instead of April. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea, so my brain took me elsewhere. I sat on the floor and traced the crack in my phone, over and over again. It was readable, but fractured. Fitting. What wasn’t broken at this point?

I called my aunt, who said she was fine, thanks for asking; she’d called an ambulance for a neighbor the day before. She hadn’t heard from my family, but they didn’t talk to her any more than they talked to me. My parents’ number had never been in my phone, but I still knew it by heart. It rang eighteen times before I disconnected. I pictured the Hatzolah ambulances running themselves ragged shuttling people to hospitals, and feverish mothers tending to feverish children by the dozen. I didn’t know what I would have said if they’d answered.

I fought the urge to chuck the phone across the room. What did it do for me anyway? It was a way for people to reach me with bad news at this point, nothing more. No more touring. No more April. Another way for me to lock myself in my room and avoid getting to know my roommates, and who knew if they were going to survive, either.

Ten a.m., and I’d left Jaspreet at eleven p.m. I searched for her number in my cracked phone and realized I didn’t even have it. We weren’t friends. I’d told her to call if she needed anything, but I didn’t remember leaving my number. I called the hospital and asked them to connect me to her room. Waited to hear that she hadn’t survived the night.

“Hello?”

I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Hey, Jaspreet, this is Luce. I’m just checking you’re okay. You’re okay?”

“Tired as fuck. They wake me every two hours for one thing or another. Blood, temperature. But yeah, otherwise okay. The fever is lower, and they have me on something for the nerve pain. The spots itch.”

“I’m so glad.” She couldn’t have understood the relief in my voice, and I wasn’t about to tell her. “Glad the fever is down, I mean, not the itchy spots. Listen, I realize I said last night for you to call me, but I didn’t leave you my number, so I thought I’d give it to you. For anything.”

“Sure. My brother is coming in a little bit, but thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for bringing me in last night when nobody else could.”

“No problem.”

I hung on the line for a few more seconds, then said I had to go.

April and I had mostly spoken on the phone or in person. Our only text messages consisted of my last several attempts to reach her. I scrolled through the tour pictures on my phone; there weren’t many. A couple from the backseat of the van to the front, a couple from the front seat to the back. One in a diner where she posed with an enormous banana split. She had her sticks in her hands in every picture, even with the ice cream.

She wasn’t the best drummer I’d auditioned. Second best, but I’d liked her more, and I’d decided compatibility mattered more than perfection. We roomed together for eight months with no complaint, and I’d still held her at arm’s length. Why?

I plugged my guitar in and sent silent apologies to the other sick roommates. Cranked the gain and the distortion, turned it up until the room hummed with potential noise. I stared at the neck, waiting for something that wanted to be played. Finally, I hit an E minor chord, all six strings, a wave, a wall. Hit it again and again, noise layered on noise, until it drowned out my head. Somewhere in the middle, the downbeats started sounding like words. Nobody is coming to save you, the chord told me, over and over again. Nobody is coming to save you. Chorus and verse.

I played until my B string snapped, slashing the meat of my right thumb, and kept playing with blood running over the pick guard. Didn’t stop until my left hand was too sore to press the strings anymore, and my right hand’s cuticles were seeping and raw. It felt good to bleed. Punishment for being the one left standing.

When I couldn’t play anymore, I left a message for the entertainment lawyer who’d vetted the label contract for me, asking him to help me get out of the rest of the contract.

If the big clubs were closed, I’d play small ones again. I’d busk on the street. I’d open my own club if I had to. If having a label meant sitting on my hands I didn’t want a label anymore. Whatever it took. I was a lousy friend, and I didn’t know how to sit still. If all I was good at was being a vector for noise and hope, I’d be a vector. If nobody was coming to save me, I’d have to figure out a way to save myself. If I was lucky, I could do the same for some other people along the way.

And first, I was going to go downstairs and make a big pot of chicken soup for my sick roommates. This might have to be home for a little while.

10 ROSEMARY ^{Who Can You Trust}

The online training modules could as easily have been done at home, but trainees were supposed to finish them on campus. Maybe so you’d still be there for them to call back in if you failed one, so they could offer you a different job or send you packing.

Rosemary didn’t mind working in the private dorm room she’d been assigned. Instead of inspirational slogans like the ones Superwally issued, the posters depicted SHL musicians. The bed sagged, but not too badly, and the desk chair was comfortable. Nice view, too.

They’d even provided free Veneers! She’d never tried a Veneer before, since her old Hoodie didn’t support the tech. Rosemary spent ten minutes cycling through the options for the room (monk’s cell, tropical gazebo, Versailles bedroom, a dozen more) before settling on one called “Chelsea Hotel 1967.” Now when she observed the room with her Hoodie on the next setting up from clearview, the threadbare red carpet became a scuffed hardwood floor. The plywood headboard looked like wrought iron, velvet curtains filtered the sunlight, and every surface was draped with jewel-toned scarves. Given more time, she might have found one she liked more, but six years at Superwally told her not to waste company time on it, even if they offered the option.

Rosemary dedicated herself to doing well on her modules. She knew she’d made the right choice to take this job; now she had to prove it to them. It helped that the modules interested her, or some did, anyway, the ones that weren’t about avoiding inappropriate relationships or how to log your expenses. She learned how to read a map, how to navigate interstate buses and city buses and trains, where to find information on schedules and safety. A training on what to wear would have been nice; she still didn’t want to ask.

They had techniques for how to approach a band, how to recognize if a band had SHL potential. That part came down to, “We hired you to know it when you see it.” There were a few suggestions about tip-offs for musicians who made bad SHL artists. They said not to waste time on alcoholics or drug addicts; now that Rosemary had seen the precision necessary to run an SHL concert, she understood the need for reliable talent. Nothing too political. Bring excitement, personality, charisma, the ability to connect with an audience, mainstream appeal, whatever that meant. Maybe it was code for some demographic? An age group, an economic class? If she had to guess, it was tied to the apolitical. They wanted excitement but not edge or danger or anything offensive.

The rules for contact were similar to the Superwally Ethics & Values Code, but less concerned with ethics than with line crossing. You are not there to be anyone’s friend. Observe. Don’t be a stranger to them, but don’t get too involved. There’s always a temptation to sign acts because you like them. Sign them because we need them, because the world needs them, because they’re wasting their talents in that dump they’re playing. No taking money or gifts from musicians you were pursuing. No promising attention in exchange for sex or favors. She wondered how many rules were based on experience.

Rosemary waited for them to tell her how to discover her exciting, personable, charismatic performers. When that information didn’t come, she searched for a missing module, but the only clue she found was the line in the code of conduct that said “wasting their talents in that dump they’re playing.” Where was she supposed to find that dump?

“So… where do I go first?” Rosemary wrote to her new supervisors in Recruiter Management. She was too embarrassed to use the live interface. They had been sending her encouraging messages all day long, telling her no question was too basic, but this one might be.

“Anywhere you want!” came the unhelpful reply. Slightly more helpful: “There’s a map”—a link lit on her screen—“showing where the current recruiters are. No sense duplicating their effort, but anyplace else is fair game. You let Logistics know, and they’ll book your travel. Pick wherever your favorite band is from and start there. Or start with whatever’s local to you.”

It wasn’t the best time to mention she didn’t know any local bands. She pulled off her Hoodie, facing a momentary disorientation when she saw her room as it was instead of her scarf-draped Veneer. They had invited new employees to explore the campus if they needed a break; that sounded like as good an idea as any.

She had been surprised from the beginning at the campus’s enormity.

“We need it, legally, to hit the legal ratio to the number of people here,” Jeannie had explained. “But also, given how many people live and work here, the campus is considered a job perk.”

The campus held not only the hangar and the studio wing, the offices and dorms and performer village, but also four hundred acres of pinewoods and paths. She chose the two-mile loop path marked with red circles. Two miles in brisk March air was a reasonable head-clearing distance.

The trails were wide and well-groomed, with footing that sprang back beneath her feet. A few yards past the first marker, she encountered an exercise station with metal bars fixed at two heights. A few minutes later, she came to a wooden beam anchored a few inches above the ground. She hopped onto it and walked its length, just for fun. The third structure, a little farther into the woods, was a byzantine jumble of lumber and metal.

“I’ve been walking past here for a year now and I can’t figure this one out, either.”

Rosemary turned to see a man standing in the path. He wore expensive-looking workout clothes, a lopsided smile, and hair that fell across his eyes in a way that looked both messy and deliberate. Latino, maybe, or Middle Eastern? She was much better at reading ethnicity in avatars. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. Not from her hiring group, but maybe she’d seen him in the control room or an office they’d toured through.

“Maybe this one isn’t for exercising,” she guessed. “Maybe it’s art. I think I saw this on a museum site once.”

He accepted the challenge. “Maybe a chin-up bar and a seesaw were spliced in a genetic experiment gone horribly awry.”

“Maybe it’s a torture device.”

“Aren’t all exercise machines?”

“I wouldn’t know. This is my first—well, third if you count the others today. They seem friendly enough.”

“Don’t let them fool you.”

She smiled. “I’ll stay vigilant. Is it safe to continue toward the next one?”

“They’re all safe compared to this one. Do you mind if I join you?”

She was supposed to be clearing her head, but it felt rude to say she didn’t want company.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m Aran. I should introduce myself to people before I go inviting myself along on their walks. I never run into anyone out here, so I’m forgetting my manners. I mean, I come out here to get away from the folks in there, but it’s nice to meet someone who had the same idea. That’s what you’re doing, too, yeah?”

Rosemary didn’t know what to answer other than the last question, so she nodded. She also didn’t have any clue about the etiquette of walking with a stranger in the woods. Did you talk? Walk in companionable silence? How close did you stand, and who got to set the pace? She started moving again, to let him fill in the blanks on distance, at least.

“You didn’t say your name.” He matched her stride, an arm’s length away.

“Rosemary.”

“Pretty name.”

“Thanks. Um, my parents came up with it.” She was flustered by the sudden suspicion he was flirting with her. She had no idea how to tell someone in person she was uninterested. In hoodspace you just threw a flag. “Um, I ought to tell you I’m not really into guys.”

He cocked his head at her. “That’s okay. I’m not often into girls, and anyway, if I was looking for somebody, this would be the worst place to look. I told you I never run into anyone out here.”

She walked faster, embarrassed to have said anything at all.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I appreciate a person who’s clear on her intentions. Let’s go back to the part where we were just chatting. I don’t recognize you, so I assume you’re either new talent or new hire?”

“New hire.”

“Let me guess: I don’t think you’re wardrobe or makeup. You don’t have that look. You’re a sound tech or something behind the scenes. Uploads, downloads, interfaces.”

Rosemary tried to relax again, pretend she was chatting in hoodspace, instead of walking through an actual real-life forest with a total stranger who made surprisingly good guesses. “That’s what I should be doing, only for some reason they gave me the artist recruiter job instead, and now I’m terrified they’ll figure out I’m clueless.”

She realized she hadn’t asked him about his own job; that thought stopped her dead in her tracks. He was probably in office or logistics or people management, and now he’d know she was faking it. “So, um, how about you? What do you do here other than walk in the woods?”

He stopped to wait. “I make music.”

“Like, you write? Or you play?”

He looked at her as if she’d missed a connection. It took her a minute. “Oh. You mean you play music for SHL? You’re Talent?” She didn’t know how she managed to put a capital T on a word as she spoke it, but that was how it sounded.

He looked more and more familiar, and she knew so few musicians by sight. “Wait. You’re the singer for Patent Medicine!”

She knew it was true even before he answered. “I love ‘The Crash.’ I saw you play at the Bloom Bar. It sounded even better live. That thing where you drew out the ending was cool.”

“Thanks!” He smiled. “That’s the goal, I guess. If we make you think you’re going to get something different on SHL than the recording, you’re more likely to come to the show, yeah?”

“I’d go to another in a second.” It was an honest answer, though she worried she sounded a little too earnest now.

“I look forward to seeing you there.”

He was joking, obviously, but it led her to another question. “Is it weird playing in a box? Not being able to see your audience?”

“It took some getting used to. It closes down the conversation between performer and audience, which is a weird sensation. Like leaving a message for someone that they’re going to read in real time. Not seeing each other while we play is the harder part. We have monitors, but learning how to cue each other in that situation is tricky, and we have to practice a lot more to get to a point where we can play something that sounds fresh or improvised.”

“So it’s not improvisation when you do something like that ending?”

“It can be, but we have to time it carefully. Like, if you say you want two minutes to talk to the audience you have to say where you want it, and you get exactly two minutes, with countdown. Or you say you’re going to take x number of bars to solo at exactly this point. There’s no room to let somebody keep going if they’re on a roll, but I think that’s more a problem for jazz than my kind of music. There, now that you’re on the payroll, you get to hear all the trade secrets. I hope it doesn’t ruin the experience.”

She considered. “No. Not any more than learning you play in those tiny booths.”

They came to another piece of exercise equipment, two sets of raised footsteps on hinges, with handholds beside them. “This one is more self-explanatory.” Aran hopped onto one and began swinging his feet.

Rosemary climbed onto the other set. The machine’s action was looser than she expected, moving her arms and legs out and away. “But why use a walking machine when you’re already on a walk?”

“An excellent question. I don’t have an answer.”

“Hey, Aran, do you mind if I ask you something else?”

“Absolutely. Anything about music or exercise equipment is in my realm of expertise.”

“My new job. I’m supposed to go someplace to look for musicians to sign, but I don’t know where to start.”

“I think most people start with the place they’re from. A local singer you dig, maybe? Somebody flying under their radar?”

That was what she was afraid of. “I live on a wind farm in nowhereville. There are no local singers or bands. None I know of, anyway.”

“There’s no bar with bands playing in a secret room? No living room concerts?”

“If there are, nobody has ever invited me. There’s only one bar. I’ve never been inside, but I can’t imagine they have room for a stage.”

She hopped off the machine and started walking again. When she heard his footsteps behind her, she asked, “So how did you get discovered? Living room concert?”

He laughed. “I came to them. That’s not a recommended course of action, though. Most people who show up without an invitation get booted or arrested. There are procedures.”

“How come you didn’t get booted or arrested?”

“I was really, really good.”

“And modest.”

“If I was modest, I’d still be home in Baltimore playing basement shows.”

Baltimore. She made a mental note.

“Well, Rosemary, it’s been nice chatting with you, but we’ve reached the end of the road.”

She realized the path had looped back. The SHL hangar loomed on the other side of the field.

“Thanks for keeping me company.” Rosemary gave an awkward wave. It would have gone better in hoodspace. “I suppose I need to finish my trainings.”

“And I suppose I’d better go back to the song I was working on. Hey, I don’t know if you’re allowed in the talent residences, or if they’ve got your evening booked, but I’m having a few people over at seven tonight. You’re welcome to come. Sixth cottage on the right.”

Once she’d made sure he wasn’t hitting on her, she had enjoyed talking with him. He was easier to make conversation with than the others in her training group. Maybe because they were all as nervous as she was. “The trainings say we’re not supposed to make friends with the talent we’re trying to sign, but that’s probably different once you’re already here?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “But you can check over your manual or whatever, make sure it’s not against the rules. Consider it job training. You need to learn to talk with musicians, anyway. And how to ‘be friendly without crossing the line,’ right?”

“That’s a good point.” Her second wave went a little smoother.

11 ROSEMARY ^{Deep Water}

She didn’t know what you wore to a talent party, or to any real-life party, for that matter. He hadn’t said “party,” she didn’t think. He’d said “having some friends over.” Even though Aran had been wearing casual clothes in the woods, she pictured his friends lounging in their stage clothes. Magritte in her rain-colored dress and silver makeup, her brother in his impeccable suit. And would Aran’s gorgeous bassist be there? She’d intimidate Rosemary whatever she wore.

She pulled out a pair of jeans and a new short-sleeved shirt from the Superwally SHL Social pack she’d bought before she left, “Guaranteed Cool for Any Occasion.” The shirt had spangles. She tried it on, then stuffed it back into her bag and replaced it with a work-style polo and her farm jacket. She didn’t want to stand out. Better to look less cool than like she was trying too hard. Spangles.

The Talent Village was on the opposite side of the hangar from the woods, behind its own security gate. She gave her badge to the guard, waiting to be refused entrance, but he waved her through. Inside the fence, a neighborhood of tiny cottages on the outside ring of a giant circle, and an interior ring of larger modular dwellings with narrow porches and three or four doors on the front. An older white woman in a suit and a fedora sat on the first porch strumming a guitar. The woman waved at Rosemary when she passed, and Rosemary waved back, starstruck. She’d heard the biggest performers lived in their own private compounds and only came to SHL for shows and rehearsals, but maybe some hung out here.

Sixth cottage on the right. The first few had painted trim, but Aran’s was basic. She knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

She stepped inside, then took a step back as everyone turned to look at her. In hoodspace you didn’t have to feel this exposed when you walked into a room. You spawned directly in to make a statement, or you walked in invisible and decloaked when you were ready. She wouldn’t turn heel and leave. She could do this.

Aran sat on a queen-sized bed with his back against the headboard, his legs out in front of him. Rosemary had expected his bandmates to be the friends in attendance, but she didn’t recognize the others. A black woman with short locs lay on her stomach crossways at the foot of the bed, head on elbows and Hoodie up, and a white guy with long blond hair sat on the floor, his mouth full of microwave pizza, using the box as a plate. She was glad she’d changed out of the spangled shirt. They all wore T-shirts and jeans, though Aran’s T-shirt looked soft as a lamb and fit him as perfectly as an av’s.

“Hey,” said Aran. “I didn’t think you’d come! Y’all, this is my friend Rosie. She’s a new recruiter.”

“Rosemary.” She didn’t want anyone getting ideas about nicknames.

He continued as if he’d never goofed. “Rosemary, this is Bailey. You might know her as MC Huntress. And that’s Victor. He makes pop music.”

The woman dropped her hood. Rosemary tried not to notice the once-over they gave her, or show that she’d recognized Victor Janssen. Half her classmates had crushes on him in high school.

“Hi.” She wished they’d go back to whatever they’d been doing a moment before so she could figure out her place in the room. She wanted to flip up her Hoodie to see if the cottage had a Veneer, but didn’t know if it would be rude, since nobody else was in theirs anymore. There was the bed, a little kitchen area with a sink, microwave, and minifridge, a bookshelf, a metal rod with clothes hung on it, a dresser. A door to the bed’s left, which she assumed led to the bathroom. An acoustic guitar hung on one wall, and a keyboard rested on a stand beneath it with a paper notebook on its bench. Behind the front door, she spotted an empty chair with a jacket hung over the back and picked that as a reasonable place to situate herself.

“You don’t have to sit in the coat closet,” Aran said.

Rosemary jumped. She looked for another spot, but the keyboard bench was taken by the notebook, the bed was too awkward, and the rug too close to Victor. She sat down. “I’m fine here, thanks.”

Aran shrugged. “Did you figure out where to go on your first trip? Rosemary is supposed to figure out for herself where to find musicians to sign, but she doesn’t know where to start.”

Bailey cocked her head. “But that’s savage! You can go anywhere. Is there any city you’ve ever wanted to see? A scene you want to check out?”

“What’s a scene?” Rosemary felt the color rising in her face again. The more she considered her situation, the more she felt in over her head. There was a whole vocabulary she didn’t know.

“It’s hard to know what a scene is unless you’re in it, Bail. I know it’s easy to forget when you’ve been here a hundred years. Rosemary’s starting from scratch.” Aran turned to Rosemary. “A scene is the bands and audience and venues of an area, all combined into a stew. Musicians inspiring each other, working with each other. Sometimes there’s a similar sound or feel that gets associated with the place.”

“I thought that was what I suggested,” Bailey said. “I said, a city she wants to see.”

“What’s there to want to see?” asked Rosemary. “Anyway, I’m not supposed to go see some city. I’m supposed to find local musicians, but I don’t know how, so I guess I’m not going to have this job for long.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and examined the book titles on the shelf on the opposite wall. Decided to take control of the conversation. “Aran said he just walked in here and told them to sign his band. How did you all get found?”

Victor snorted. “Aran’s full of shit. Don’t believe everything he says. I was one of the zillion people who are out there uploading music. Nobody hears it because if you don’t have an SHL contract you have no access to Superwally distribution or audiences or anything but the tiniest streaming services, which you can’t even access without hacking your own devices to ditch the proprietary stuff. SHL makes sure nobody hears you if you’re not theirs. But I got to chatting with a recruiter when we both played on the same team in a shoot-’em-up, and she invited me to send her some of my stuff. Then I had to audition for an audience of one, which was weird, and then another audition as an opening act for Huntress here, and I got her fans dancing, so here I am.”

That story calmed Rosemary’s nerves a bit. If he had been discovered through a game, there was a chance she could start out online, from home. Baby steps.

Bailey rolled over onto her back and rested her head on her hands. “And I was playing in the Atlanta underground clubs when a recruiter told me he liked my stuff. I thought he was trying to scam me, but he kept coming round to shows ’til I started to believe him.”

Rosemary filed that information away, too. What had the training packet said? Don’t be a stranger to them, but don’t get too involved. Bailey’s story bore that out.

“How do you find underground clubs?” she asked. Better to sound ignorant in front of three people and learn something. If she asked anything too embarrassing, she’d have to make sure she never saw them again. “I’m sorry if it’s a stupid question. I really don’t know. Do you need a password? Aran mentioned earlier how some bars have secret music rooms, and I’d never have guessed that in a million years.”

Bailey stood and stretched her legs. She was smaller than Rosemary expected, compact and muscular. “Sometimes you do need a password, or a person to vouch for you. Sometimes it’s a matter of showing up in the right place on the right night. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t know, so obviously you’re meant to be there.”

“I’ve never understood that logic,” said Victor. “Anyone could be there if they did enough research. Cops, shooters.”

Aran threw a pillow at him, which he ducked. “That’s why nobody would’ve found you in a million years if you hadn’t gotten lucky. Little bedroom geek making music in your room for nobody.”

Victor threw the pillow back, with a little more force. It looked like Aran’s comment had stung. “Better to be a bedroom geek than get arrested making music for slightly more than nobody. Why risk it?”

“And this is what you’re up against, Rosemary. There are talented musicians hiding in their bedrooms, and talented musicians playing for ten or twenty people in hidden rooms all over the country. The company doesn’t care where you find us, as long as you find us. Bring us in! Make us yours.”

Aran tossed the pillow Rosemary’s way, and she grabbed it and held on. She felt a little more comfortable now, a little less like a mouse for the cats to bat around. Still, if she asked another question, it would keep them from asking her any. They were performers. They didn’t mind attention.

“So, what else can I tell the, ah, new talent about what they can expect if they come out here? They want me to sell something I’ve never seen. I think there’s a talent FAQ, but maybe y’all can tell me more about what I’ll be asked?”

“You can tell them all this can be theirs.” Aran waved his hand at the room. “If they want. They can also live at home and travel in for shows, but if they’re not a solo act, they’d be better off staying here for a while to practice in the isolation booths.”

“Free food,” said Victor. “Well, free-ish. It gets deducted from our pay, but the prices are reasonable, so it’s not like owing the company store, unless you have fancy tastes or eat a ton.”

“Or unless you’re an alcoholic,” said Aran. “If they drink a lot and buy at the commissary, they’ll be poor very quickly. If they can wait the hour, they should drone it.”

“It doesn’t feed you in the same way a real live show does,” said Bailey.

Victor squinted at her. “Superwally? The commissary? Are you still talking food?”

Bailey ignored him. “It’s different from performing for an audience. More intimate, in a way, because it’s more like playing for one person—the camera—than a whole crowd. If you’re somebody who gets charged up by screaming fans or playing to the cutest person in the audience, you’re not going to be fed.”

“They do bring in audience for some people.” Victor stood to toss his pizza box in the garbage, then returned to the floor.

“Yeah, but they don’t like to, except on special occasions, and even then it’s only, like, ten or twenty people. Cuts the profit margin. They have to screen everyone, and worry about security on campus…”

“But it can be worth it.” Aran had a dreamy look in his eye.

Bailey swatted his leg. “You’re only saying that ’cause you found a guy to hook up with at the festival last week.”

“I used to meet someone at every show. Don’t tell them that part or they won’t come, Rosemary.”

“That’s the choice,” Bailey said. “Fame and fortune, a chance to make an actual living playing music, but you have to give up the most fun parts of the job. I’m not even saying sex, but talking with fans after the show, signing stuff for them, watching their reactions…”

“…Sex…” said Aran.

Bailey frowned at him. “Living here doesn’t make you a monk. There are new hires all the time. It’s a big campus.”

“Not big enough when things don’t turn out well.”

“Not any smaller than the incestuous scene you came out of.”

Aran nodded, conceding the point.

Rosemary listened in silence. She still had the sinking feeling she wasn’t the person for this job. Who was she to tell some musician in some as-yet-undecided city that playing for millions on SHL made more sense than what they were doing? Not that she could speak from experience on any of the subjects they talked about, either; all of her dating had been within the safety of hoodspace.

She wasn’t in a position to give anyone advice on music. She had expertise in other areas. Growing carrots. Solving database errors. Troubleshooting. That was what SHL had seen in her: good problem-solving skills, resourcefulness, enthusiasm. If they hired her, they must believe those skills carried over. She worked on memorizing what everyone had said, so she’d be able to repeat it back if she ever needed to have an opinion.

12 LUCE ^{Never Really Ever Had It}

We had a large dry-erase board on the kitchen wall. On one side, roommates put notes about groceries needed and leftovers available and things like “Good luck on the interview, Jaspreet!” On the other side, we kept a running list titled “Don’t Forget Normal.”

The Don’t Forget Normal list included: street festivals, Renaissance fairs, amusement parks, supermarket runs, movie theaters, malls in December, talking to strangers in a waiting room. We debated whether some of those were things we actually missed, but decided they all went on the list. Just because something had needed improvement didn’t mean the solution was to cancel it entirely. Jaspreet, the public school teacher, had hated her school’s principal and adored her students. She applied for the new virtual grade schools one after another, but there were far more teachers than spots, between the sick kids out of school and the ones who had died, and the constricting job market.

The whiteboard was impermanent, and some of the changes were clearly not going away. Plus, there were too many of them. They snowballed. We traded the dry-erase for permanent markers and expanded off the board and onto the kitchen wall, moving from generalities to specifics, good and bad. Pride parades, school assemblies, outdoor movies, outdoor concerts, baseball games, crowded trains, roller derby bouts, grocery store crowds before a snowstorm, and how the shelves emptied of bread and milk and bottled water and toilet paper. The “list” spread out of the kitchen and onto the dining room wall, black and blue and green and red against eggshell. We brought in a ladder.

With more room, it expanded into anecdotes, paragraphs, whole stories. Write it all down, we thought, so it would still exist somewhere. I found it safer to share there than to utter any of it out loud.

My first contributions were personal but distanced. We used to play this room that had been a strip club in its previous life, the Wrecking Bar. Every surface was mirrored, and the bands played around the poles, and the stage extended out onto the bar, which worked better for a strip club than a music venue, but made for some interesting and unsanitary shows.

I remember watching Patti Smith ride a bucking Stratocaster to a standstill, then rip the strings off one by one until she had nothing left to play.

The Patti Smith show had destroyed me in all the best ways, but I couldn’t explain. I tried again, another day. I remember Young Sport’s set at Bumbershoot. I saw them a few other times as well, unmemorable shows, but for some reason that performance in Seattle was transcendent: the band was so present they moved a seated audience of thousands to dance in the aisles. Will we have festivals again? I miss joy sweeping through a crowd. The good contagion.

I used to sneak into clubs without paying cover or showing ID by carrying my guitar in behind a band loading in. Some of them took pity on me and shared their fries and drinks. That was personal; so many kindnesses I’d never forget.

And finally, the most personal of all, though I wasn’t ready to expand on it: I wrote on another wall once, on the hardest night. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed.

Jaspreet photographed the whole thing and created an interactive online exhibit. She encouraged others to add to it, in comments or photos, which they did, by the thousands. We all felt our world slipping away, in cascades and cataracts, the promises of temporary change becoming less and less temporary. Didn’t we feel so much safer? Weren’t safe and healthy worth more to us than large weddings and overcrowded schools? Hadn’t the pox been spread by people working and attending school when they should have stayed home? Never mind that they didn’t stay home because they couldn’t afford to. The talking heads were in agreement that necessity would fuel innovation. Good things were coming fast, they promised; I stopped watching the news.

My money was running out equally fast. The royalty checks still came, but they got smaller and smaller. My roommate Lexa, a nurse, suggested I look into getting certified as a nursing assistant, and it seemed as good an idea as any. I started taking online courses. It made sense on several levels, beyond just making sure I had cash coming in. As Lexa pointed out, no matter what happened, we’d still need medical professionals. I hadn’t saved April, but maybe I could do some good for other people.

I threw myself into the nursing gig. If music wasn’t going to be my thing anymore, I had to have a different thing. My world turned gray and quiet. Even when the roommates had parties (small parties, nothing to scare the neighbors into calling the police), I stayed upstairs or scheduled shifts to coincide. Better to leave it all behind completely. People, parties, fun. When I played music for myself, all I could manage was deep noise, mournful chords, janky tone. Every wanting sound.

I wasn’t keeping track of time, so when Nora Bowles from Superwally’s Tuning Fork ezine contacted me, I had no idea why she’d sought me out. She offered me six different platforms to talk, including one of those new Hoodie things some of my patients wore to distance themselves from their current reality, before I gave up and agreed to a phone call.

“You’re hard to get hold of,” she said without preamble. “Your old label didn’t have any contact info for you.”

I still had the same phone number and email; I’d told them not to pass my info along to anybody.

She continued. “I finally got your phone number from your old guitarist. He said to say hi.”

Good old Hewitt. I’d never talked to him again, but he’d been a nice guy, when he wasn’t drunk or stupid.

“Why are you calling?” I could tell she wanted me to ask.

“Well, as you know, we’re coming up on the third anniversary of the Stadium Tragedy, and I pitched a story to my editors about finding the last musicians to play big live shows, and, well, as far as I can tell, you were the only one who actually played that night.”

I didn’t think that was true. She meant the only one who played a venue big enough to count by Superwally standards, and probably the smallest one of those. Surely there were others in living rooms and tiny clubs who’d had the same instinct as I’d had that night to push back against despair. Before I’d realized it was pointless. That I could make all the noise I wanted, and nobody would hear it anymore.

“Cool,” I said.

“So are you still playing?”

“For myself. Sometimes.”

“Writing new songs?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

“I’d love to hear them sometime. I really liked ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ You should get with StageHolo to do a show sometime.”

I remembered the name, but I hadn’t kept up with any of the new platforms, so I made a sound of noncommittal agreement instead. We chatted a little longer, and hung up.

A week later, I heard a low whistle from one of my roommates, then a door creaked open.

“Luce!” yelled Lexa. “You’re famous again!”

The article blew up. Tuning Fork had sold it to the other news outlets. The title was “The Last Power Chord,” and we were indeed the only band of any renown that had played that night, according to Nora Bowles’s research. The article linked readers to Superwally to buy the song, and the article went viral. I watched the song and the album climb their rankings. A couple of TV shows paid me to use it, then a movie. I even heard it playing in a car once as I biked to work. And still, I didn’t realize the extent of its reach until I was bathing a patient and she reached over and touched my name tag. “Luce,” she said. “Like the singer.”

“Kinda,” I said.

13 ROSEMARY ^{Adventures Close to Home}

Leaving the highway for the county road, watching the county road roll into Jory’s Main Street, Rosemary was struck by the emptiness. She’d never noticed before, or else she’d assumed the mix of dead businesses and thriving ones was normal. Now that she was supposed to seek out secret places, she had no idea where to find them. Were they hiding in the back rooms of the open stores or the boarded-up ones? Were there dance parties in the old high school gym? Rap battles on the playground after dark? She still couldn’t figure out how to find what she’d been sent to look for.

Her mother was waiting for her in an isolation booth at Micky’s. She unlocked the door and grabbed the handle of the rolling bag, squeezing Rosemary’s hand for a moment before pulling the bag onto the seat beside her. Rosemary took the opposite bench. They both ordered the macaroni and cheese without even bothering to scroll through the menu screens, and she paid for both her own and her mother’s meal, with a smile into the camera; it was nice to feel known.

“So tell me,” her mother said. “Do you like the job? Are you glad you quit Superwally? Unless that’s a bad question…”

“It’s not a bad question at all, Mom. I’m glad I quit Superwally. It’s an interesting job. I get to help people, kind of.”

“Well, that’s exciting. What’s the downside?”

Their food arrived, looking and smelling like Micky’s mac and cheese always looked and smelled, at exactly the right temperature. The SHL food had been fine, but different. Rosemary poked the edges with her fork. “It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

“Good. How long are you home for? Your father thought you were coming back for good, but I said I thought this was a visit.”

“It’ll depend, I guess. There’s an assignment I have to do here, unless it goes badly.”

Her mother cocked her head. “Well, eat and then I want to hear whatever you’re willing to tell.”

They got back to the farm in midafternoon. She took a moment as they stepped from the truck to appreciate what she had always taken for granted: home, the friendly ruckus of chickens conversing, people who loved her and didn’t expect her to do miracles.

She dropped her bags in her room, where the Superwally customer support posters still decorated half her walls, and bands the other half. Funny how she’d always thought those bands lived in a different world from hers; she’d never considered them people before. They’d existed as verse and chorus, as notes and chords, as videos or recordings, as celebrities whose clothes and breakups were the subject of gossip, but never as people who had their own opinions and personalities outside the time they spent in public. The fact that she hadn’t grown up watching them in glorious SHL quality probably contributed to her flat image of them. She lay back on her bed and imagined striking up a conversation with Iris Branches at a bar.

Her father was in the kitchen making dinner when she came out.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He didn’t turn from grating potatoes.

It took her a moment to realize he was angry. Had he ever been angry with her before? Never in a way he’d let show. “I don’t even get a hello?”

“Hello.” He still didn’t face her.

“Or an explanation of why you’re not turning around? This is a weird welcome.”

He slammed the grater onto the counter and turned to look at her. “Welcome home. I’m glad you’re back. I’m pissed off.”

“Pissed off?”

“You would be, too, if your daughter told you she was going to a training program at a protected compound, but secretly took a job requiring her to travel to places where she could be killed.”

Ah. “Okay, first, I should have explained. I’m sorry I lied, but it’s not like that. I’m here first, aren’t I? This job could take me anywhere, but I’m starting at home, because I know it’ll make you sleep easier if I can stick to towns near here. It’s a good job, and I’m lucky to have gotten it.”

If he hadn’t started down this line, she might have talked to him about her fears about the job. Instead, she was stuck defending it. “Secondly, I could be killed anywhere. A blade could fall off a windmill and kill me tomorrow. Some chicken virus might mutate and kill more than the pox did. ‘Safe’ is not a reason to stay home.”

“Statistically speaking…”

“Statistically speaking, you could have a heart attack tomorrow. Are you going to stay in bed waiting for it?”

He cocked his head. “I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself in danger. We built this farm so you’d be safe. You can live here forever without any of these jobs between state basic income and the windmills.”

“Because I’m twenty-four and my entire world for half my life has been these five rooms and this farm, and I like having a job. You got to live in the real world before you hid here. Why can’t I have a chance to do the same?”

“It’s more dangerous now, honey. You know that.”

“Is it, though? How old are your statistics? I was terrified for the first few days, even on that compound, because you made me terrified to be there. Maybe I don’t want to be terrified anymore.”

“She’s right, Dan.” Rosemary hadn’t heard her mother come into the kitchen.

“I don’t care if she’s right, Em. I’d rather she was safe.”

He turned back to the potatoes. Her mother looked at her and shrugged. “I should have warned you he was upset. Go feed the animals. I’ll talk to him.”

Her father was still sullen over dinner, but her mother must have convinced him that being mad at her was pointless.

“So tell me about your job.” It sounded like a forced line reading.

She explained the basics, putting the most positive spin on it, leaving out the cities. She wished she could tell him she understood his fears, that she’d felt them, too, but she thought she was better off taking a hard line. Talking about the job—even if it was still conceptual to her—made her feel braver and stronger. She concentrated on describing the bands she’d seen in the studio, the people she’d met, the compound itself.

“That’s a lot of responsibility. I’m impressed, honey.” At least that sounded genuine. Maybe he would come around. “So what are you back here for?”

“I’m supposed to try to find local musicians.”

He cocked his head. “In Jory? There’s nothing here.”

“That’s what I said, too, but everyone I talked to says there are hidden pockets of music everywhere. I wanted to give it a try. See what I can find.”

“Like venues? Secret garage bands? Or people making professional-quality music on their computers?”

“Any of the above. Are garage bands a real thing?”

He nodded. “They used to be. I guess if it’s ‘any of the above’ you’ll find someone. Not necessarily anyone good, but someone.”

She woke early to feed the chickens and clean their coop, the closest she was willing to come to apologizing for deceiving her parents—both the deceptions they knew about and the ones yet to come. She drove the farm truck toward town on an empty two-lane. High overhead, a hawk sketched circles in the cloudless blue, while a package drone took the more direct route at a lower altitude. She’d only witnessed a hawk attacking a drone once, years ago, but she always held her breath waiting to see it happen again.

A second bird darted low across the road, small and quick, brown with wings and tail tipped electric blue. Even though you weren’t supposed to use a Hoodie for anything other than maps while driving, she asked for a quick ID: indigo bunting, male, winter plumage. A “First of the Season!” birding badge flashed in her peripheral vision, which wasn’t an accomplishment anyone should be celebrating. Buntings never arrived before summer, and this one was here before it had even put on its breeding finery.

She drove through the license plate scanner at the north end of town, where the county road became Main, past the twelve stately houses lurking behind their security fences, houses that told of a past Jory she’d never known, ten of them now subdivided for multiple families. Then the municipal lot, where she parked the truck and continued on foot. What remained of Main Street was a long strip of vacant two-story buildings with signage nobody had bothered to remove, for types of stores she’d never seen. Ghosts: laundromat, Lucky Chinese, Carrie’s Hair, Quigley Antique Mall. She didn’t remember any of them ever having been open, though someone once graffitied KILL THE POXIES—SAVE A LIFE on the side of Quigley’s, and her mother told her to look the other way, as if she hadn’t already seen it, and it was gone the next time they returned to town.

There was still a feed store, a small grocery with a post office and health clinic inside, a gas station, a Micky’s, and a bar. Of those, the only one she’d never been in was the bar. She wasn’t going to find a secret venue in any of the others.

The bar was called Sweeney’s, according to the marquee, and the Shamrock, according to the front door, propped open. It was a sunny day and dark inside, so her eyes took a minute to adjust. Inside, it looked like a replica of the one hoodspace Irish bar she’d been in, unless she had that backwards.

There were only two customers this early, both older white guys, on opposite ends of the wooden bar, with eight stools in between them. The rest of the room held six tables, separated and sealed by clear floor-to-ceiling booth isolators, like at Micky’s. The bartender was middle-aged, another white guy, with more hair on his forearms than his head. She chose a stool midway between the two customers, realizing too late that it put her behind the tap handle contraption. She didn’t want to move, so she stuck with her choice. Brave enough to not be isolated in a booth, but nowhere near the other customers.

“Can I help you?” the bartender asked.

She was on the clock, but she wanted to look like she belonged, and SHL had made it clear she should do what she needed to get the job done. She pointed to the tap handle shaped like an apple slice. The bartender poured a tall golden glass. She sipped cider, as she’d hoped. She rested one elbow on the narrow bar and tried to ignore the fact that her elbow was now sticky with who knew what. Exude nonchalance, that was the key.

“So, ah, anything interesting happening around here tonight?”

The bartender squinted at her. “Here, like this bar? Or in town?”

“Either?”

“Neither.” He grinned like he’d been clever. “A new girl walking into my bar is enough to make the newspaper.”

“We have a newspaper?” Even after over a decade here, her family was still not part of the town. Her parents would say it didn’t matter because they had each other.

“Nah, figure of speech, sweetie.”

Ugh. She couldn’t tell now if the grin was a leer. Avs were so much easier to read than actual human faces.

It wasn’t like she didn’t know nothing happened here. She’d lived here forever, even if she was a stranger to the bartender. She remembered fragments of things before they’d moved to Jory: the water park, fireworks watched from a blanket on a crowded hillside. But here? No parades, no ball games, no dances. None of the stuff she’d read about or seen on-screen. This was a place where people followed the congregation laws. That was why her parents had moved here. Silly to think she’d find anything, even if everyone at SHL said all places had secrets.

Silly, too, to think even if the town did have secrets, anyone would tell them to her. Even here, in her own hometown, nobody knew her but the farm’s most immediate neighbors and the staff at the feed store. Maybe that was the trick. Instead of marching into this bar and expecting people to tell all to a stranger, maybe she needed to start with people she knew. Let them connect her with others, who’d connect her with others. She put her drink on the bar and reached for the pay terminal.

Rosemary tried. She browsed the gas station’s convenience store eavesdropping on other customers, but nobody talked about anything except the weather and the fishing. The grocery store was empty, except for a single bored-looking attendant and a security guard behind glass; if everyone else was like her family, they droned in most stuff they couldn’t grow or raise. The attendant was in her eighties and didn’t look like she’d be a source of hot leads.

She called her father. “Do you need anything at the feed store?”

“We’re low on probiotics for the chickens, if you want to pick some up.” She could tell he was surprised. She’d complained about going in there for years now.

Simmons’s Feed smelled sweet as grain, but was always freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, thanks to the open door to the warehouse. This was the only store she’d ever spent much time in, before she’d started inventing excuses not to go.

She’d always resented being dragged along to load the truck. It didn’t help that the Simmons kids never dropped their Hoodies, while Rosemary’s parents still insisted she not use hers outside school. It took until she turned sixteen to convince them she had no social life because of that rule, and even then she was stuck with her lousy old Hoodie. “Why do we have to come here? Can’t you just order it?” she would ask.

Her father would shake his head. “Feed, vitamins, salt. Too expensive to drone because of the weight.”

At least his insistence she come along had bought her a passing familiarity in this one place, and at least it was spring, so the store’s temperature was tolerable. She wasn’t sure if luck or the opposite had put Tina Simmons behind the register. Tina was the closest person to her age she had ever known in person until the last few weeks. She was two years older than Rosemary, and had taken her to the one party Rosemary had ever been to, when Rosemary was eighteen. That party was the only proof she had that people did gather occasionally, even in a by-the-book town like Jory, and she had never even thought to ask Tina how she had met those guys.

She still remembered it with embarrassment. Eleven total strangers, the only other teenagers left in a fifty-mile radius who hadn’t been killed by the pox or kept from leaving the house by their parents. It was nothing like hoodspace: a haze of too much beer; people sitting too close and talking too loud and calling one of their own friends Poxface, as if most of them didn’t have scars under their clothes; boys who smelled of sweat and kept trying to put their hands on her; a five-mile walk home in the dark because she wanted to leave before Tina. Bodies. Her overwhelming impression had been bodies in proximity, and every motion having so much more impact than it had in hood.

“Hey!” Tina said. Apparently whatever memory Tina had of that party, it wasn’t as awkward as Rosemary’s. She was always friendly, even if she’d never invited Rosemary out again. “I heard you quit your job.”

“Quit because I got a better one.” Amazing how fast news traveled; her parents must have been in while she was gone.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. Actually, I have a funny question, related. You know those people you used to hang out with?”

“My friends?”

Rosemary’s cheeks burned. “Yeah. Your friends. Anyway, I was wondering, do any of them play music?”

Tina gave her a quizzical look.

“Like, a band,” Rosemary said. “Or computer stuff. Anything. I’ve been told there are bands in Jory, playing in secret rooms or barns or garages.”

“Sorry. I don’t know of any. Mike Powell plays guitar, but he isn’t exactly good. Oh! And Roberta Parker plays keyboard for her online church.” Roberta Parker was the elderly attendant at the grocery.

“Thanks anyway. Can you charge five pounds of Fancy Feathers probiotics to our account?”

“No problem! Do you want me to invite you the next time we get together? I can tell Mike to bring his guitar.”

“Sure.” Rosemary hefted the tub of chicken vitamins into the truck bed and drove back to the farm. There was no way Mike Powell was what she was supposed to be looking for if even Tina admitted he wasn’t any good. A church keyboard player wouldn’t impress her bosses, either. She’d hit a dead end. She could call her high school friends, wherever they were, and ask if any played music, though that promised a long, awkward series of conversations with people she hadn’t bothered to stay in touch with.

Back in her room, she pulled up her SHL Hoodie—they’d offered to issue her another new one, but she didn’t see anything wrong with using the one that had been sent to her for the Bloom Bar. Aran had given her his number, and she found herself pinging him into an empty chat room.

He spawned into the empty space, glanced around, and with a quick swipe, conjured a woodsy background. “For old times’ sake! I get nervous in empty rooms.”

He had an expensive, photo-realistic av. His band did well enough for him to afford it, or maybe SHL gave talent high-end looks to keep up appearances. Either way, she felt shoddy in comparison.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the whole day searching this stupid town trying to find musicians, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do short of inspecting every barn and garage in the county for amps and drum kits.”

He laughed. “That’d be some good detective work, but it does sound time-consuming. How big is the town you’re in?”

“I don’t know. Small.” “I don’t know” was a lie. Four hundred and ninety-three people within the town’s outer limits. She didn’t want to admit she’d gone home.

“Okay, if you’re in a small town, you’ve got two options. If you think there’s something to find, then hang around longer. Win trust. Watch people. Listen. It might take weeks.”

Weeks. How long would they give her? “Or?”

“Or give up on that town and go somewhere else. You said you’re from a farm, right? You know there are some places nothing grows, no matter how hard you try.”

“Just give up? They won’t be mad I wasted their money?”

“Not if you leave because you’re following a lead.”

“I don’t have any leads.”

“You do, because your buddy Aran is giving you one.”

The background blanked out, then morphed into a cityscape she didn’t recognize. She’d known sooner or later it would come to this. If she wanted to keep the job, if she wanted to get out of this town and this house, she had to leap. Somewhere out there, somebody waited for her to connect their dream of a life in music with the dream enablers at SHL. She had a mission to fulfill.

14 LUCE ^{Leather Jacket}

The next royalty check was big enough that I called an accountant for advice. He told me to put a third of it away for taxes and pretend it didn’t exist, to invest a third, and to use a third for living expenses or spending, however I saw fit.

That made as much sense as anything. I didn’t feel bad taking money I’d earned, but I had mixed feelings about this particular windfall. People listening to my music again? Great. People only listening to that one song? That frustrated me. I wanted them to hear the other stuff, too, but most of all I still wanted to play. It wasn’t fair that one old song kept rattling around like a dying echo of everything before, and I couldn’t reach its listeners to introduce them to any of my other, better songs. Not in person, anyway.

My first thought was to buy a used van and hit the road again. But to where? There was still no place to tour. I missed music as sustenance, music as contact, music as currency; I had no idea how to make that happen again. I’d burned the bridge at my old label, so there’d be no help from them. My searches for open venues had come up blank. Anything that existed was flying under the radar, which meant there was no way to tour and capitalize on my new fame. Places would open again soon, I was sure, when people stopped accepting the government-fueled paranoia as normal.

Another thing had started bothering me, too. How many stories had I heard of musicians who achieved success and used their earnings to buy their parents a home or a car? I didn’t even know if my family was still alive after the pox had swept the country. They were unsearchable, unconnected to the world outside their community. I sometimes rang the house to listen to my father’s voice mail message, but nobody ever picked up the phone. Caller ID or nobody left to answer? There was only one way to know for sure.

I got to the bus early out of old habit, even though I had left my guitar home for once. I needn’t have bothered; there were only four other people in line. They stood with oceans of space between them, so far from each other it could barely be called a line at all. I couldn’t stand the suspicion in everyone’s eyes, like the other travelers were there to kill them or infect them or both.

The day was supposed to get unseasonably warm for March, but it started out as a chilly morning. I’d dressed for my destination in a sweater and borrowed ankle-length skirt. The only part of my outfit that still felt like me was my combat boots, which I figured nobody would notice. Now I shivered and wished I’d worn my leather jacket, too.

“Coffee’s on me,” I said to the four others, pointing to the vending machine. “Then I can say I bought for the whole bus.”

Nobody responded. I wondered if this was just the way things were these days, if I was violating some new travel protocol. I felt awkward, out of sorts; partly nerves from the trip I was embarking on, and partly the long skirt and cardigan, which made me feel like I was wearing a costume of the person I would have been if I’d never left Brooklyn. Were they all looking at me and thinking they knew something about me? They didn’t. I bought a cup of bitter vending machine coffee for myself; it made a good hand warmer.

The bus arrived twenty minutes late. A sign on the side read THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE WHILE WE IMPROVE OUR FLEET. There were a few people already on board, each in a separate row except for one couple and another pair that looked like a mother and child. Everyone else sat as far from each other as possible.

It was the quietest trip up I-95 I’d ever experienced. Nobody said a word, and if anyone was listening to headphones, they kept them at levels I couldn’t perceive. All that silence made me want to scream, but I settled for looking out the window and willing a new song into existence. It didn’t happen.

The corner where the bus dropped us normally bustled. There were still people out and about, and they still moved with proper New York speed and conviction, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this place, too, was diminished. I walked two blocks crosstown toward the train I wanted, noticing presences and absences: more police, no street vendors, shuttered stores, delivery bikes traveling in vast pelotons. No tourists as far as I could tell, though these weren’t tourist-heavy blocks. It wasn’t until I approached the subway entrance that I encountered a crowd.

“What’s going on?” I asked a man standing at the group’s edge.

He shrugged. “Same old.”

“I haven’t been in the city for a couple of years. What’s ‘same old’?”

“They meter the stations now, y’know? There’s a bag scanner and a body scanner, and they only let a certain number of people down there at a time.”

“That must take forever!”

Another shrug. “It’s not so bad, as long as the weather’s okay. It moves faster than you’d think. There’ll be another wave in a second.”

I didn’t see how that could possibly work, but two minutes later, we moved forward. My backpack set off the scanner, and after I passed through the metal detector I had to argue that the wire cutter I used to clip new strings wasn’t meant to cause trouble. I didn’t even know why it was in my backpack instead of my gig bag where it belonged, but it had somehow hitched a ride. None of which swayed the officer, who confiscated it anyway.

The day up above had gotten sunny and warm, but the station was warmer still. I pushed my sleeves past my elbows. Once through security, the platform was surprisingly uncrowded, as was the train. There were seats for everyone. I held my backpack on my lap, but it wasn’t in anyone’s way. I remembered the last time I’d been here, leaving April’s place, standing with guitar and coffee clutched close, and still feeling like I was taking up too much room.

Even after all that had happened, I’d somehow expected New York to be the same as always, unflappable. The subway had been overtaxed before, but the only way it could be this empty—the only way metering and inspecting could work without backing up the whole city—was if there were a whole lot fewer people using it. The pox, the people who’d shifted to working from home. I’d thought in a city this dense everyone would have just laughed at any proposed changes, but it felt like fear had made a dent even here.

As we crossed into Brooklyn, I realized I’d clenched my jaw tight enough to ache, and rubbed the joint to relax it. I didn’t have to make this trip, but I wanted to. Needed to, to see for myself. I tugged my sweater sleeves back down to my wrists.

The subway hadn’t been part of my childhood experience, so it wasn’t until I was streetside again that the eeriness kicked in. One block from the station, then two, then I was on the tree-lined streets I remembered. A knot of teenage girls walked toward me; like me, they wore long skirts and sweaters even on this spring day. I examined their faces, looking for familiarity, before realizing that they would have been small children when I left.

As they passed, one of them said, “Her boots!” in Yiddish, and they all burst into laughter. They didn’t even bother whispering; my boots marked me as an outsider.

The door to the girls’ school I’d attended was chained shut; I’d assumed it would be open, that there would be exceptions for private religious schools. The streets were crowded with mothers pushing double strollers, toddlers walking alongside, and more clusters of girls and boys, everyone giving me a wide berth. It took me a minute to figure out that the kids were all coming out of houses. A neat solution in a community this small: classes around dining room tables. That was my guess, anyway. I’d been wrong to assume even this place would be unchanged.

Four more blocks, three more blocks, two more blocks, one. This street had been our street. These steps had been our steps. This door had been our door.

I knocked, waited, knocked again. I imagined one of my sisters ushering me in. Would we sit at the dining room table and drink tea? Or in the living room? I settled on the top step, wishing I had my guitar with me to play away my nervousness, though this wasn’t the time or place. I traced arpeggiated patterns on my palm with my fingertips. Music only I could hear.

“Can I help you?”

I hadn’t seen her approach, and now that my mother stood on the sidewalk, and I sat blocking her door, I couldn’t move. She looked older, of course she did, and shorter, but maybe that was because I was on the top step. I didn’t recognize the two children hiding behind her.

She tried again. “Are you looking for some—Chava Leah?”

I nodded, incapable of speech. And then she was hugging me, touching my face like she wasn’t quite sure I was real. When she pulled away, it was to unlock the door. She looked up and down the block, then gestured me into the house behind the two boys. I wondered if they were my brothers or nephews, then was walloped by a wave of grief that I had created a situation where I didn’t know the answer to that question. No, I reminded myself. This was never your path. You couldn’t have stayed.

The door opened into a small vestibule filled with shoes. Just beyond it, to the left, the dining room, looking just as I remembered it. The dining room, the long table with the worn white tablecloth and a dozen mismatched chairs. The desk in the corner overflowing with books and papers. The side table displaying my great-great-grandmother’s candlesticks. The boys had gone straight to the table, and one was standing on a chair to reach a jar of crayons.

I followed my mother into the living room. I moved automatically toward my spot on the couch, but she gestured for me to sit in the guest chair, which didn’t creak or sag. She sat in my father’s reading chair beside me and took my hand in hers.

“Are you coming home?” There was hope in her voice.

To stay, she meant. “I wanted to see how you’re doing. I didn’t know… So many people got sick, and you never answered the phone…”

Her face closed off. I hadn’t given the answer she had hoped for; if I was returning, I would have led with that. “You shouldn’t be here. The rabbi doesn’t want outsiders coming here anymore. He says we’re safer with no contact at all.”

“I won’t stay long.” No wonder everyone had been eyeing me with suspicion. “I just want to know. Please.”

Her face twisted. “Two little ones, Rachie’s youngest daughter and Jacob, who was already so sick, may their memories be a blessing. Your sister Chana got a bad infection from it that spread to her brain; she has spells now, memory problems. Her boys are living with us so Eli doesn’t have to take care of them all on top of his studies.”

She kept going, listing friends and family. My oldest brother Avi’s son Jacob had been born with spina bifida and a host of developmental disabilities; he was only a couple of years younger than me, and all of us who were old enough had taken turns babysitting him. At least I knew his name to mourn him; I felt terrible that I’d lost a niece whose name I didn’t even know, and too ashamed to ask. “Is Chana in the house? Can I see her?”

She shook her head. “It’s not a good idea. She’s had a hard time.”

I don’t think I’d realized until that moment that this was it. She wouldn’t introduce me to the boys, or let me upstairs to see my sister. We both looked at the door, looked at each other, looked away. She still held my hand.

“I’m doing well,” I said. “I wanted to tell you. Do you need anything? Chana’s care, doctor bills, anything at all? I want to help.”

She lifted her chin. “We don’t need. Give to others if you want to help.”

Another mistake. I should have known I couldn’t offer outright; she’d always been too proud to take anything. Clothes got handed down until they were scraps; toys and furniture, too. For other things, the community stepped in. Need to see a doctor? Too poor for a wedding? There were people who made that happen, out of love and support, without ever making it feel like charity. I’d offered charity. We’d never had money, but we’d never wanted for anything; the community provided. I’d loved all of that, even when I knew I couldn’t stay.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “But it’s good to see you. You should probably go. It would hurt your father to see you.”

He wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours yet, if he still held the same job, so it was more than that. She didn’t want any of the others to see me. Didn’t want me confusing them; I was an aberration. Was I spoken of at all? Thought of, if not spoken of, judging from her expression. My being here was causing her pain.

I gently extricated my hand from hers. “I tried. I tried so hard to belong here, but it didn’t work.”

“I know.”

She leaned over and threw her arms around me, pulling me tight to her. When she let go, I stood and walked toward the door. I paused before opening it, digging in my pocket for the wad of cash I’d hoped to give to her.

“I forgot,” I said. “I wanted to return this money I borrowed from Chana. Will you make sure she gets it?”

Her chin lifted again, and I could tell she was about to refuse. We’d never had money as children; the idea that Chana would have had anything to lend me was ridiculous.

“I’ll make sure,” she said.

I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and headed back toward the subway. This trip was only slightly more familiar; this was the one I’d taken the day I’d left, not before or since. It had felt permanent then, and more permanent now. I cataloged the streets, the stores, the faces, knowing this was the last time I would be here.

Once on the train, still not full even in late afternoon when it should have overflowed with students and day workers, I began to feel the burden of the costume I was wearing. I was not me in these clothes and I couldn’t remember now why I’d worn them. Respect? A concession? I hitched the not-me skirt up a couple of inches and studied my thrift store boots, the scuffed toes, the too-long laces wrapped around my ankles. The other time I’d made this trip I hadn’t had these boots yet, hadn’t yet bought my leather jacket or my first guitar, hadn’t known any of what lay ahead, for good and for bad. I pushed the sweater sleeves up over my elbows and wished again that I’d worn my jacket. My armor.

I’d promised my aunt I’d spend the night at her place at the northern end of Manhattan, but it hadn’t struck me at the time we’d made the plan that I’d be re-creating my own exodus. By the time I got to her place, I was a mess. She fussed over me and fed me and made tea and listened as I recounted the visit.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said when I finished. “We can’t control what family we’re born into, but we can choose what to take away from the experience. They love you. They just have no idea how to fit a gay daughter into their worldview. That’s their problem, not yours.”

We sat on her couch, the same couch I’d lived on after I’d left home. It had been donated to her by the nonprofit that had helped her start a new life when she’d made that same journey. In her case, she’d left behind a husband as well.

“Do you ever regret it?” I’d never asked her that question before.

“No.” For a second I thought that was going to be her entire answer, but she sipped her tea and continued. “I miss some things about the celebrations, and some of the melodies, though my new shul community makes up for some of that. I miss family. But I can miss those things and those people and still know I didn’t belong there. Right?”

“Right,” I said. I’d known that when I still lived there, knew it when I left. It was only this extended unmoored moment that had me confused. “I almost apologized to her. I almost said it wasn’t her fault.”

“It is,” she said. “If their worldview doesn’t include their own daughter, they’re the ones who need changing, not you. Anyway, it’s probably good you went. Closure is good.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You’re the one I should be helping, after everything you’ve done for me.”

She drained her cup and smiled. “I’m okay. I promise I won’t be ashamed to ask if I ever need anything. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll move back here, or I’ll move to Maryland to be near you. In the meantime, you earned that money. You should use it to help with your own next chapter.”

Whatever that was.

The next afternoon, I took the bus back to Baltimore. I arrived back at the house to find a half dozen bicycles on the front porch, and the owners of said bicycles inside. The table had been pushed to the side and the chairs arranged theater-style. Jaspreet had tacked a sheet over our graffitied dining room wall to show her friends the project she was working on: a documentary cataloging vacant houses, interspersed with interviews of wealthy residents packing up to leave the city.

“Why are you going?” Jaspreet would ask each interviewee.

“They say it’s better to get some distance between people.” Or “I just don’t feel safe anymore.” Or “People cross the street when they see my pox scars. It’s not like I’m contagious anymore.”

I pictured their grand pilgrimage, their stately moving trucks, an endless search for the place where fear wouldn’t follow them. The homes she documented were a mix: large houses abandoned by the professors who no longer needed to live near their shuttered campuses; gentrified and ungentrified row homes; row homes that had been vacant long before any of the current troubles. Jaspreet gave statistics for the number of homeless people versus the number of available houses, the number of people who’d left in each of the previous four years.

The film was well made, but I was distracted. My mind kept juxtaposing my parents’ neighborhood, where nobody was going anywhere. It kept playing with thoughts of family and community and what makes a place a home, all overlaid with this gathering of people whose lives had collided with mine, the potluck dishes on the table, the things we’d written on the wall, the cheering and the compliments for Jaspreet’s work, their mutual understanding that this film was art and politics and a statement on what it took to stay, and what it took to leave, and what it meant to have no choice in the matter.

People chatted late into the evening, and for once I stayed downstairs, drinking and snacking and getting to know my roommates’ friends. When everyone finally left, I asked Jaspreet a question I’d been waiting to ask. “That street in the scene with the community garden. Where’s that?”

Jaspreet rewound to look at which one I was talking about. “Not all that far from here. A whole block of vacants in pretty decent shape.”

I copied the address and looked it up after we were done cleaning. Then I started researching realty agents. I had a wonderful, terrible idea for how to use my “Blood and Diamonds” money.