The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Skin in the Game

Peter was waiting for me when I got backstage.

I had been expecting the publicist to show up for weeks, ever since I started getting the sense that the tour numbers weren’t what the label had hoped. But as I walked out from under the glare and heat of the lights, it didn’t make me any happier to glimpse his hollow-cheeked, handsome scowl off in the wings. I ignored him for a few precious seconds, gratefully burying my dripping face in the snowy, chilled towel that Mitchell, my road manager and best friend, handed me. Sweat and makeup flattened the plush Egyptian terrycloth. I gulped water while I dropped the first towel, handed the glass back to Mitchell as I took another, and wiped myself down again.

I gave him a questioning glance. He waited until I pulled the Dampitronics from my ringing ears and handed them to him to roll his eyes toward Peter and murmur, “You want some backup with the cadaver, Nee?”

I shook my head. My ears shrilled like a temple bell despite the earplugs; my body trembled with exhaustion. A line of itchy soreness ran across my back where the low band of my costume had chafed because I’d lost weight on tour. I wanted: my dressing room, a shower, yoga pants, a sandwich, and my bed—in negotiable order.

I did not want: a conversation with Peter Sullivan.

But there he was, curly graying blond hair atop a tall frame, a debauched cherub in a bespoke suit. Making me tired.

I was slumping. I spackled my best smile across my face (pin the grin on the clown) and hauled my tired spine upright to sashay over to him. Don’t forget to look spunky but demure. The Patriarchy hates it when you’re not appropriately deferential.

It had been a so-so night, and I had just now, without so much as a glance at the time, given up on expecting it to get any better.

“Neon, sweetheart,” he said, and leaned in to kiss beside my cheek. He glanced at his phone, then dropped his hand to his side. “Great performance. You’re looking better than ever.”

“Glad to hear it,” I replied. “Lost weight?”

“Good suit,” he answered, with a self-deprecating flip of his hand he probably practiced in the mirror. His VIP pass fluttered in the breeze. “Can we talk?”

No wasn’t an option.

“Dressing room,” I said. “Follow me.”

Once the door was shut, I stepped behind a screen to undress. I wriggled out of the drum rig with its electrostatic panels and synth triggers and touch plates, and hung it up to air out. Suzie, my dresser, would be along to disinfect it before packing. My costume was as sodden as if I’d walked into a swamp wearing it, and smelled considerably worse. I dropped the sopping scraps of sequined white stretchfilm into a laundry bag and sealed it, then toweled off and pulled on panties, bra, a v-necked t-shirt and an old pair of ivory-colored jeans. Even here, in private, my clothes were in my trademark ivory, silver, and white, a scheme I’d selected years ago to set off the darkness of my skin and my auburn halo of zigzag curls, sweat-damp and frizzy now.

Branding, branding, branding. Cameras were literally everywhere.

Barefoot, on the balls of my feet, I padded out of concealment. The white shag throw rug stretched itself and massaged my soles as I curled my toes into it.

Peter handed me a glass of wine—my own Neon White Red, of course, from my own minibar in the corner—and settled into the visitor’s chair with one of his own. I chose to stand. I paced slowly, enjoying the ministrations of the rug, stretching sore calves with each step, aware that Peter was watching.

I bit my lower lip to keep from asking why he’d come. It didn’t matter if I chewed on it now; the lipstick was all over the dirty towels.

It was all about the dominance games with Peter.

I sipped my wine, which was about the only thing around besides me that wasn’t some shade of white. It was rich, not too sweet, a bodacious red with layers and textures. I had never had much patience for delicate, ladylike wines. I wanted something that tugged your shirtsleeve and demanded attention.

There was probably something Freudian in that.

I gave the silence a calculated forty-five seconds and glanced ostentatiously at my bangle. Blood alcohol content .01%, heart rate leveling off at 72 beats per minute, time 11:42 p.m. “Peter,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

Awarding him the point, but maybe keeping a moral edge. He’d be easier to deal with if he thought he was winning.

His smile was stained with wine. Whatever it was, it was so important that he physically set his phone down. “We’ve got an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with a new marketing technology. Something that could be as much of a game changer as music videos were, or downloads. They asked for you specifically.”

A nervous shiver raised the hairs along my nape and arms. I could tell already: This was going to be a pain in the ass. He wouldn’t have come in person to pitch it to me—to pressure me—if it wasn’t.

I’d been dreading a deeply uncomfortable conversation about what we could do to bring my tour more relevance. I’d rather have that.

“Who’s they?”

He held up a hand. That was Peter for I’m withholding that data until the end of my pitch.

“Could be a career-maker,” he said. “You need to get some skin in the game, something we can hook some press coverage on. Some pathos. You’re stable and professional, which is great—but you’re too stable and professional. Your image is, anyway. It’s getting boring. Stable and professional is not what sells rock and roll. The fans are hungry, and you have to keep giving them something to chew on, or they move on. And you have a reputation of staying on the bleeding edge to maintain.”

That was the trick, actually. The actual bleeding edge was too far away for most people to stretch to comfortably. In reality, you wanted to be just behind it, safe-ish but plausibly trend-setting, so you didn’t make people uncomfortable, you just made them feel excited. As if they were taking a risk, when it was really a very, very safe investment.

The public likes to feel that they’re standing next to a visionary. But they don’t want to face the social consequences you get when you’re fighting for real change. Jesus was right about Peter—and in two thousand years, the only thing different about people is what’s on the surfaces.

I started off on the actual bleeding edge, a long long time ago. A real artistic revolutionary. Then I realized I liked eating and having a roof over my head, and I let that edge overtake me. Much better to surf it. Stay on the curl.

Putting up with Peter was just one of the prices I paid for the very nice rug massaging my sore feet right now.

I was probably a more effective double agent for social change here than further out, anyway. And that’s totally not self-justifying twaddle.

I drank my wine politely until I was sure he’d finished. “Can I hear the name now?”

“It’s an app called Clownfish.”

I didn’t drop my wineglass. Which was a good thing, because Envirugs were a bitch to clean. I glanced down at my bangle, thinking about adjusting my endorphin mix a little, but I didn’t want Peter to see that he was getting to me. I caught myself doing it and tried to make it look like I was checking the time.

“I see you’ve heard of it.”

I read Scientific American and The Wall Street Journal in addition to Boing Boing and Ars Technica. That wasn’t one of the things that made it into the carefully curated press releases, but I’d heard of it. I shrugged. “It’s a bit more than an app, Peter.”

He shrugged right back. “I understand there’s a widget or a dongle or something. An interface.”

“It’s a kind of machine empathy, right? Lets a user feel what somebody else is feeling?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “It lets you decide what you—or somebody else, if they allow it—will be feeling. Set emotions on a dial. We’ve been thinking, we sell it as access to your emotions. What you feel as you’re performing. Your own experiences in relationship to the song.”

“Fans don’t want to know that my feet hurt and the grilled cheese I had for lunch is giving me indigestion, Peter.”

He tapped his bangle in demonstration. “We can fiddle that. It’s editable. Movie magic—more real than real. Hell, they don’t even have to be your emotions. We can outsource the recording, distribute it as downloadable content. Micropay—”

“No.” I should have walked away from this nonsense years ago. But it was safe and easy, and Peter was easy. Easier than either finding a new label or going it on my own.

I have good lawyers, but breaking contracts is a nightmare. And anyway, my deal was up after this tour. I wondered if they would drop me. I knew I should probably drop them. But things like that are so much work. I have enough to do concentrating on the art, the tech, the brand, the business. I want people who can handle the fiddly stuff and go away.

This is exactly how artists and entrepreneurs get into trouble, time and time again. Knowing it doesn’t make it any more fun to deal with.

“I’m thinking of us both,” he said. “You know how well you do affects how well I do. You owe me a hearing, Neon. And I know you’re going to give me one. You’ve always been a loyal friend.”

Dammit, the man knew where my buttons were installed.

“No.”

He sighed. “No?”

My head was full of ways it might backfire. Exhausted, without really trying, I could think of dozens of different potential disasters. Public relations fallout. Personal attacks. Creeps. Injuries from inadequately tested tech. Lawsuits. Peter probably could, too—but it wasn’t his career at risk the same way it was mine, no matter what he said. Sure, if his acts were successful, he was successful. But I wasn’t his only act.

It also felt like a huge ethical overstep, an outright lie in a way that the branding and marketing didn’t approach. I almost made a joke about Milli Vanilli, but Peter has had the ethical part of his brain turned off, so that wasn’t an argument that would carry any water with him.

He said, “Your reasoning?”

I held up a hand. “Peter,” I said. “It’s midnight. I just spent two hours on stage. I’ll be happy to discuss it with you later. But I think fiscally as well as brand-wise it’s a bad idea.”

The money argument always went over better with Peter than any appeals to personal decency or artistic integrity. Say one thing for elective sociopathy: It made him predictable.

“I don’t think that’s what’s bothering you,” he said.

“No?”

“Your face did that thing.” He copied it, then grinned. “Like you just stepped in dead rat.”

His next gesture took in my augmented body, the permanent surgical arch of my feet to Barbie toes. There’s a little repulsor unit implanted in the heel that does most of the work, and makes the stage shoes bearable for a two-hour show. Keeps me from developing plantar fasciitis, too. Supposedly.

He said, “You’ve never hesitated to do what it takes.”

“That’s marketing. It’s different. This is about…” I didn’t want to say authenticity. “…authenticity.”

His eyebrow went up. He didn’t say what he was thinking. And I didn’t know how to explain what I meant—that making a splash was one thing. Mediating, managing, even spinning the sense of intimacy with the artist was one thing.

Selling yourself in a totally false package was something else.

“Look, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re a savvy businesswoman. One of the smartest I’ve met. You know how this game is played. Theater and flash. It’s not really you.”

“Well, it couldn’t be, could it?” I patted down my frizz. Nobody pays for an authentic celebrity with bunions and contact lenses and Botox appointments. They pay for a cunning facsimile of authenticity. A scaffolding they can drape their fantasy over to make it three-dimensional. Not reality.

Real people have real feelings, and real feelings are ugly and complicated. Real feelings are the “bleeding edge.” Real feelings make people uncomfortable. Nobody spends their beer money on uncomfortable. Part of turning people into consumers is making them think your product will make them like themselves better, not ask themselves harder questions. You have to trick them into confronting uncomfortable. What did John Waters call it? A counterculture stealth bomber? Something like that.

Peter said, “How is it different than convincing the front row that that torch song you’re making love to is really for them?”

I shrugged. “I’m paid to emote, Peter. Not to have emotions.”

He pursed his lips and swirled his wine. My better judgment was under siege. They’d be eating rats and sawdust in there before I knew it, and then it was only a matter of time.

I nibbled a thumbnail. “It’s different, that’s all.”

“Your numbers have been better than they are,” he said slowly. “I had to call in some favors to get them to consider you as a flagship for this. Twist a few arms.”

Whatever happened to ‘they asked for you specifically?’ I let the wine touch my upper lip. I licked it off.

I really was too tired for this. “I’ll talk it over with Mitchell.”

“Neon—” His mouth said my name, but his eyebrows said, Are you really taking business advice from that guy?

“Tomorrow,” I said. “No show tomorrow. I’ll have some time to look at numbers, okay? Have Clarice send them over?”

He scowled, but I knew the species and subspecies of his scowls by heart. This one was a scowl of assent.

At least I liked those better than the sneaky smiles.

I took a mouthful of wine and whiffled air over it to release the bouquet. It was still delicious despite the churning in my stomach. I’d write it differently in the song.

“I can stick around for a day,” he said. “I want to hear your answer in person.”

And that was Peter for “I intend to keep the pressure on.”

I Should Never Have Slept With Him: The Neon White Story.

“Damn, honey,” Mitchell said. “He didn’t even ask you if you wanted to get your shoes off first?”

He was sprawled sideways across the boxy beige armchair on the darker beige carpet of the beige-walled hotel room, the tip of one sock-clad foot flipping, flipping, flipping. His head lolled over the opposite side of the chair, dark curls half-hiding his eyes. One of his spidery arms was cocked at a weird angle, the other hugged in close to his chest. He balanced a tablet in front of his eyes and fingertip-skipped through screen after screen of information. His frown got deeper. He huffed and made disgusted cat noises, and I paced and yawned and picked my hair and scavenged an unappetizing room service tray on the theory that it would do my system good to eat something, even if that something was pretty nasty.

Rocks on the road. But they don’t let you write paying-your-dues songs anymore after your third platinum record.

Finally, Mitchell let the tablet fall against his chest. His eyes closed and he seemed to doze for several minutes. I had just given up watching him and gone back to see if there was any warmth left in the coffee when he said, without expression or gesture or opening his eyes, “What have you told him you’re going to do?”

I dolloped in cream. The coffee was gray from reheating. “Talk to you.”

He sniffled dismissively. “Gamble either way. If it flops, and you adopted early, you’ll look desperate. If it takes off and you didn’t pick it up out of the gate, you’ll look out of touch.”

“And so the oracle confirms the truth I already knew.”

That at least got him to crack an eyelid. “You gotta get rid of that guy.”

I knew. Honestly, I’d known that for five out of seven years. But that sort of thing—abandoning a relationship—doesn’t come easily to me.

“Does he have a rollout proposal?” Mitch, for reasons of his own, never seemed to say Peter’s name. I wondered if it was conscious avoidance or subconscious disgust.

I rolled my neck, trying to get the tension out. The room was ugly but the bed hadn’t been too bad. “I thought I might offer to wear the widget for a week or two, just to see what it records,” I said.

He swung his feet to the floor and sat up, corkscrew curls stretching and bouncing like springs as they first caught against, then released from, the rough weave of the upholstery. “Why do you have to record anything? They’re just making it up, right?”

“For the same reason my face has to be under the makeup, I guess. The illusion of depth.” I made a face over the coffee. “Apparently, they can. They can do all kinds of magic with it. But that’s… cheating. Soulless.”

“They used to say the same thing about multi-track remote recording.”

“They were probably right.”

He laughed, knuckled the corners of his eyes, and said, “And intimacy in art is a construct anyway. Art isn’t really about raw unmediated access to reality: that’s reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing.”

Most of my conversations with Mitch could loosely be characterized as ‘preaching to the choir.’ I indulged myself in a little bit of that now, and paraphrased something we’d both said before: “Art isn’t art if it doesn’t have a frame.”

He kept looking at me, as if he expected me to continue.

I shrugged and obliged. “I think a lot of this is getting a baseline. He just wants me to wear it, you know, around for a week or so, until I forget I’m wearing it. We’ll try recording some performances over that time. That would be when we start putting a frame around the thing. The studio bit of the process. So, performance, editing—”

“Can you track out a human heart?”

“Peter thinks so.”

We shared a smile at that, because of course Peter didn’t have a human heart, exactly. He’d had his pulled like a rotten tooth. Or at least rooted out, ground down, and crowned in gold and porcelain.

“You know,” I said, “there have always been people who wanted to control somebody else’s performance, and people who want to control somebody else’s experience of that performance. I think it’s a pathology.”

Mitch raked a hand through his curls, got it caught, tugged it back out again the way it went in. “Never mind that,” he said. “Do you think Peter’s even thought of the risks involved?”

I thought I had, but by the expression of tremendous concern Mitch was wearing, it was obvious I hadn’t thought about it enough. I must have looked completely blank, because Mitch said, “Every celebrity has stalkers, Nee.”

The worst bit was, Peter was right. At least a little bit right: the early signs were there. And as I hunched over my phone checking concert reviews—a terrible narcissistic self-destructive habit, and one I encourage all of my colleagues to quit immediately—I could see all of them. Engagement metrics told me my audience was restless. I needed to bring them something new… but not too new. Something satisfying. I wasn’t the flavor of the month anymore, and there were only two ways it could go from here: I could become a perennial favorite, a mint chocolate chip or coconut sort of a thing… or I could go the trendy way of acai berry, pomegranate, and betel nut.

I closed the app and speed-dialed Peter. He was just down the hall, but I didn’t want to see his face.

“I’ll take the trial rig,” I told him.

“You won’t regret it,” he said.

Peter elected to stick around through the first performance with the new kit. Seventy-two hours is a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and Peter never does anything out of sentiment. Either he was really interested in the results, or he expected me to pull a fast one on him.

I found myself fiddling with my bangle a lot. Maybe Peter had the right idea, and I should get my personal loyalty downgraded a little bit. The problem was, I liked myself the way I was. And that hadn’t always been the case. I’d worked hard for that self-respect, and it seemed cheap to sell it just to make myself a little more comfortable.

I’m a lousy consumer.

The tech guy’s name was Claude, and he was a total dreamboat in a hoodie-and-purple-chucks, West-Indian-accent tech-warrior sort of way. Claude was also good at his job. He built the Clownfish into the drum rig, which was convenient, at least—and he managed to do it in under six hours. I could shrug into it and zip it on and off just as I usually did, and there would be nothing to throw me off my stride except making sure the contact surfaces touched the right spots—and my dresser would handle most of that. Suzie was there to help out so she’d have some practical experience for the next time.

The headset was a little more built up than I was accustomed to, into a fairy-wire sort of tiara thing.

And it took a lot of boring, boring fitting. I was used to standing and turning and moving on cue, though I usually listened to audiobooks while I was being fitted for things. This time, I just zoned out.

It was the wrong choice, apparently, because Claude tapped me hesitantly on the shoulder and I jerked out of my reverie.

“Sorry,” he said, with that eye-avoiding deference that makes me want to turn mean, “but can you think about something with some emotional freight? Preferably negative, for this bit? The alpha state doesn’t give us much to tune to.”

“How long have you worked for Clownfish?” I asked.

He winked. “Since the first day. I’m on the board.”

My irritation at his deference turned to respect. This might be a future legend of technology with his hands under my blouse. “I’m flattered.”

He ducked his head. “Management doesn’t get overtime.”

I laughed, and was trying to figure out something that might get my dander up when the dressing room door opened without a knock and Peter sauntered in.

“Hey, Neon,” he said. “Hope you’re disproving the stereotype of the empty-headed singer.”

I sat down hard on a flare of dislike. Claude said, “That’s good. Nice and strong.”

His cool professional demeanor was a pretty good trick, too, since his hands were shoved up underneath my breasts while he adjusted a pearl-white leather strap so it wouldn’t chafe or pinch. Peter strolled over and patted me on the shoulder. The tech and I both jumped as he inadvertently triggered a snare fill from the drum rig. Suzie the dresser didn’t flinch. She must have seen it coming.

“I’m glad you decided to get on board with the Clownfish,” Peter said. “I think it’s a smart business decision.”

He was always nice when he was getting his way. I thought about making some comment about the alteration and curation of self necessary to manage my future as a pop star, but it felt like too much work. Instead, I shrugged, and reminded him, “This is just a test.”

I snapped my fingers and got a light, bright cymbal. Peter, damn him, didn’t jump. Neither did Suzie. Maybe she’d just had her startle reflex turned off.

“This thing can receive as well as record?”

Claude nodded from somewhere around my belly button.

“I want a taste,” I said.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. The toes of his purple All-Stars creased as his weight shifted in the crouch.

“Okay.” A brief pause while he rummaged in his tech-warrior tool kit. “This is not set up to run off my bangle. Just let me sync my phone to the rig… Got it. You like beaches?”

“I like beaches.”

He tapped his screen with a single-finger flourish.

And I was on a beach. Well, not exactly on a beach: there was no sensation of gritty toes, no sound of water, no burn of heat. But the meditative sense of peace and ease that washed over me was the one that only comes with the hiss of waves, the warmth of sun and the cool of the breeze, the cry of gulls.

There were no distractions in it, no sense of nagging tasks that must be taken up again when my stroll was done. No bikini strap digging into my shoulder. No worry that some tabloid camera might catch a glimpse of cellulite at the top of my thigh.

It was pure. And impersonal. Timeless. A little chilly. My feeling, and not my feeling. Better, for being unalloyed. Somehow less, for being so clean.

How were people going to react to this? I thought about human emotions. Messy emotions. Emotions that clash and conflict and contradict and confuse. That don’t bother to explain themselves. That send us into therapy, self-medication, medication medication. And here you could get them cleaned up, tidied up, cozied up and comfortable.

Consolatory.

And we worry about people judging themselves against the photoshopped bodies in fashion ads.

“You edited out all the sand fleas,” I said, when Claude tapped his screen again and the moment ended.

“Nobody pays for sand fleas,” Peter said.

“The second generation is under development, you know,” Claude said. “Once the rigs are more widespread, we’ll be able to set up a sensory loop with the audience. Feedback trance state. We can guarantee that every concert will be the next best thing to an out-of-body experience.”

“Sex,” I said. “But deniable.”

Movie sex, where nobody rolls onto anybody’s hair and nobody ever sneezes.

Peter peered around me to fix his tie in the mirror. Subdued blue and charcoal paisleys, very elegant. “They’ll eat it up,” he said.

I drove my team crazy at the sound check, but you would have, too. I couldn’t even tell the Clownfish was there. Maybe the headpiece was incrementally heavier, or maybe it was my imagination. But other than that homeopathic sensation, the drum rig felt the same, it sounded the same, it moved the same—but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I just tested enough different combinations enough different ways, something would provoke a failure. So I put the rig and the band and the sound team through everything I planned to do on stage that night, and everything I could ever remember having done by mistake, and everything I could imagine doing by accident. Probably twice.

The rig, for a wonder, worked. Which just redoubled my unease, and the conviction that it was going to fail catastrophically in front of nine and a half thousand people, probably in the middle of “Mystic Verses” or “Digger” or “The Judge.” I was terribly afraid that the new tech would not just crash, but crash in the middle of the popular, show-stopping numbers. Thereby, ironically, actually stopping the show.

But if there was a failure built in, or some accidental combination of drum and brain wave that would crash it, I couldn’t find it. And Peter had promised that he and the Clownfish tech were going to be there all night, and that if anything went wrong it would be fixed post-haste. I disgusted myself by finding Peter’s assurances, well, reassuring. But I also made sure Suzie had the backup drum rig out, and oiled, and ready to go.

And then I stood in the wings and hyperventilated and got in the way—I mean, “supervised”—while the roadies broke down the set for the opening act and wheeled our stuff out, mine and my band’s. I watched chrome and steel and enamel catch the lights from above, and I watched the roadies file off, and I caught my breath and held it as the spots went down.

You think it’s going to get easier with time, that you’re going to get used to it. That with experience, your hands will stop shaking before every show. But they won’t; not as long as you’re alive up there. It’s the adrenaline.

It doesn’t get easier. You just get addicted to it.

At 9:15 p.m., by my bangle, I followed the glow tape onto the darkened stage. I found my mark and took up my position center stage and waited for the hired guns to locate their instruments in the dark. My bangle lit up pale green when everybody checked in as ready.

I snapped the fingers on my left hand.

The electrostatic triggers in the drum rig pick up every motion. Some, they’re calibrated to ignore. But most—the intentional movements of dance, the gestures that punctuate a song—are transformed into percussion, into rhythm, into joy. So my fingers went snap-snap-snap-snap. And the rig translated it into the thump-thump-thump-thump of the bass drum, setting time.

The spots came up. All my white and silver trappings dazzled in the sudden glare.

I’d found my beat. I’d found my light. The technology was working fine. It was going to be okay again, just as it always was in the end. We were going to do a good show.

And you know, it was a really good crowd that night. I felt the energy as I hadn’t all tour, and I think the hired guns felt it too. At least, I saw the bassist and the keyboard player grinning at each other through the sweat, and that’s never a bad sign.

I was still high on it when I walked backstage after the encore, and Mitch wasn’t there with my towels. I should have known then, right then, that something was terribly wrong. But the bassist walked over to hug me, and I hugged her, and then we all had a good stoned-on-adrenaline giggle, feeling like we’d finally started working as a group.

When I finally extricated myself, there were still no cold towels. I was irritated, but not really irritated: I’d known Mitchell Kaplanski for the better part of a decade and if he wasn’t there when I got off stage, something or someone was on fire or shorting out or drunk inappropriately. I resisted wiping my face on my arm, so as not to get makeup on the costume or the rig, and I picked my way over cables and past the bustle of load-out to my dressing room. I poked my head into the buffet along the way, just in case. No Mitch, and it was pretty picked over at this point, but I managed to assemble a chicken fajita with extra extra salsa and a smear of guacamole and ate it—balanced over a paper plate and seasoned with sweat and lipstick—as I minced on aching feet back down the hall to the dressing rooms.

I pressed my bangle to the lock and the door clicked tunelessly. It had been unlocked. Bad news. Had I left it unlocked?

I didn’t think so, but I had been fretting so much about the new technology that I might have forgotten. It was a stupid mistake if I had. Or maybe it had been Mitch or Suzie? Or Peter? Or the venue manager? Nobody else was supposed to have the code…

I opened the door.

Of course it’s no surprise what I found. Everybody knows what I found.

Mitchell lay sprawled bonelessly across the ruined Envirug. It had humped up around him, trying to support his spine and neck, but it hadn’t been able to do much other than flop him like a rag doll. His blood had soaked the white pile, which was thick and sodden with syrupy, gagging crimson on every side of his corpse.

I was cooler than I would have expected myself to be. When I realized where I was, the wooden floor had bruised my knees, but I hadn’t screamed and I had my bangle to my ear and was dialing 911.

It was four a.m. before the police finished with me, but the Clownfish tech was fiddling with the backup rig when I walked in, the one I’d been wearing on stage dangling from my left hand.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Er,” he said. “Yes?”

I gave him my best Dazzling Smile. God knows the orthodonture cost enough. “Hey, Claude?”

He raised a properly suspicious eyebrow. Flirting was the wrong tack, I decided. An appeal to his hacker identity was more likely to get me what I wanted.

I said, “Can you show me how to download and compile that raw file? The one we made tonight?” I held up the drum rig and let it swing from my crooked fingers.

“You going to do something illegal with it?”

“Only technically.” I winked.

A smile spread across his face like bread rising, warm and steady. I felt like a first-class heel for using his ideals so cynically. But I did it anyway.

At least I felt bad about it. It’s possible that’s the biggest thing separating me from Peter.

Peter was on a call, headset rather than bangle, when I found him in the business office. Because he was Peter, and if he went without contact with his phone for longer than fifteen minutes, withdrawal symptoms might set in.

From his end of the conversation it sounded like he was setting up a press conference. About the death. Of course.

“Put this on.” I shoved the Clownfish tiara at him.

He stared at me, his hands not moving, his mouth making noises that were probably very important to the person on the other end of the line. The tiara wobbled across my palm. I wanted to jam it down his throat.

I threw it into his lap because that was better than hitting him with it. “Put it on,” I said again.

“Gotta go,” he said to the phone call, and dropped the connection. He set his gadget aside and picked up the headpiece. “Are you about to pull a gun on me, Neon?”

“There’d be some buzz in that.” I tried for sweet reason and probably approximated icy mildness. “And the cameras in here aren’t mysteriously malfunctioning, the way the ones in my dressing room were.”

He blinked and glanced at the door.

I said, “You got your wish. Plenty of news coverage.”

His eyes went sideways to the phone this time. Probably a better bet than trying to get past me. “You know, in the long run, Mitchell’s death might turn out to be a good thing for you.”

“Are you insinuating I killed my best friend, Peter? Because I think we both know that’s not true.”

“You couldn’t have,” he said calmly. “You were on stage in front of ten thousand people.” The consummate press agent, still: always rounding up the numbers. “And you were wearing the Clownfish. Your alibi is airtight. If I do say so myself.”

My lip curled. I felt like Grace Jones for a moment. Billy Idol. It was probably a better look on them.

“How’s your alibi, Peter?”

He tapped the thin plastic oblong in his shirt pocket. “I’ve been on the phone all night, except when the police were talking to me.”

God. I wondered if he could manage to carry on an upbeat conversation with some fluff page reporter while simultaneously shooting Mitch three times in the chest. The headset was a noise-canceling model.

It was actually plausible. He would only have felt fear, remorse, emotional connection if he chose to, after all: he’d elected to turn all that off by default. Otherwise, assuming he got the drop on Mitch—which whoever killed Mitch patently had—it would have been as complicated for him to kill somebody while carrying on a conversation as it was for most of us to talk on the phone while rummaging in the fridge.

Yes, he was capable of planning a murder, carrying it off, and never getting caught. And it’s not like I had any proof. I just… knew Peter.

“Put the tiara on.”

I must have gotten the sneer right that time, because he reached out gently and picked the thing up, then set it on his head. I’d cued it up to autoplay at the moment when I turned the knob and opened the door.

I watched him with a lover’s interest.

His face pinched. He winced.

And then he shut off—touched his bangle and calmed himself, tuned out, edited whatever empathic function he’d been feeling. Back to his baseline sociopathy.

It probably was a good thing I didn’t have a gun.

“Of course it’s a miserable thing to have happened, sweetheart. And of course you’re upset. But think of how advantageously we can cast this. It’s romantic. It’s tragic.”

“Mitch and I weren’t romantically involved, as you know perfectly well.”

He shrugged.

I said, “You killed him.”

“What possible benefit to me could there be in such an action?”

Media interest. Buzz. Drama. Gossip. The top of the news cycle, baby.

But I didn’t actually have to say that. Instead I dropped my voice and said, “Promise me you did not kill him.”

Peter smiled sadly. “I promise you, Neon. I did not kill your friend. But I don’t expect that to change your mind.”

He was lying. Was he lying? He must have known that I would never allow him to pressure me into using Mitch’s death to my advantage. Mustn’t he? Had he turned off those parts of his brain as well?

Could I avoid Mitch’s death serving my career? Actually, I couldn’t see how, when, as Peter said, my alibi was bulletproof. Hell, I’d been wearing the Clownfish. It wouldn’t even hold water that I might have hired someone to do away with him.

“A virtual poker face isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Peter said. “The fans want to feel you have skin in the game. Real loss. This will help you. You’ll see. Everybody loves a little tragedy.”

“Murder,” I said. “But deniable.”

He smiled. Yes, I was sure he’d done it. And I was sure that no one would ever prove it. Peter was a very, very plausible man: an asset in his profession.

Even if I went to the police with my suspicions, Peter would somehow use our history to suggest that I was a jilted girlfriend out for revenge. Even if I hadn’t killed anybody, that was going to look great in the tabloids. If I thought I could convict him, I’d go for it. But no. Not for nothing, not to make him look like a martyr. No.

“And we have the Clownfish recording.” He tapped his ugly plastic tiara. “That’s unbelievable, what that’s going to be worth. The artist who is willing to exploit this medium is an artist who is going to the top.”

“You’re fired,” I told him.

“I work for the label, Neon, not for you.”

“The label’s fired. You’re all fired. I’ll walk away right now.”

“Neon.” He shook his head soothingly. “I know you’re upset and confused. But what are you going to do without Mitch and without me? Nobody can handle that kind of isolation in a high-stress career, sweetheart.”

I closed my eyes. Nausea clotted at the back of my tongue. “You’re probably right.”

He smiled.

“You’re still fired.” My “reasonable voice” was coming out as more of a snarl. “Have Clarice write up some sort of buyout agreement for the rest of the tour. You can tell her I’ll pay anything reasonable to settle. Unless you really want to fight out a long, expensive breach of contract suit.”

The smile sagged into a gape. I wished I were still wearing the Clownfish. I would have liked these emotions on tape.

“And I’m releasing that Clownfish tape,” I said. “You’re not going to make a penny selling it.”

His stricken look—so much more pained than when he’d watched Mitch die through my eyes—told me I’d struck paydirt. Filthy, stinking paydirt.

Well, there would certainly be buzz all right.

“You can’t release it,” he said. “It’s our intellectual property. Ours, and Clownfish’s.”

“Is it?” I smiled, though it felt like plastic pinned across my lips. “What a pity it’s already been pirated, then.”

I turned away. It took a lot of will not to slam the door behind me, but it was so much more satisfying to let it drift slowly, aimlessly closed between us.

I glanced back over my shoulder once as I walked away down the hall. Peter was standing there. He’d opened the door and stood framed in the doorway, waiting for me to come back to him, the ridiculous tiara crooked on his head.

Peter waited. And I walked away.