The Last Days

The Black Death had a distant twin.

At the same time the Plague of Justinian was raging across the Roman world, a great empire in South America, that of the Nazca, was also disappearing. The Nazca temples were suddenly abandoned, their cities emptied of life. Historians have no clue why this vast and sophisticated culture, thousands of miles away from plague-ridden Rome, vanished at exactly the same historical moment.

Most people haven’t heard of the Nazca, after all. That’s how thoroughly they disappeared.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that the outside world discovered their greatest legacy. Airplanes flying over the arid mountaintops of Peru spotted huge drawings scratched into the earth. Covering four hundred square miles were pictures of many-legged creatures, vast spiders, and strange human figures. Archaeologists don’t know what these drawings mean. Are they images of the gods? Or of demons? Do they tell a story?

Actually, they’re a warning.

It is often noticed how they were built to last, cut into mountaintops where rain hardly ever falls and where there’s almost zero erosion. Amazingly, they’re still clearly visible after fifteen hundred years. Whatever they’re trying to say, the message is designed to last across the centuries.

Maybe the time to read them is now.

NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

282–287

13. MISSING PERSONS — PEARL-

The halls of Juilliard seemed wrong on that first day back to school.

This was my fourth year here, so the place was pretty familiar by now. But things always felt strange when I returned from summer break, as if the colors had changed slightly while I was gone. Or maybe I’d grown some fraction of an inch over the last three months, shifting everything imperceptibly out of scale.

Today I couldn’t get used to how empty the hallways felt. Of course, it made sense. All my friends in Nervous System (or ex-friends, really, thanks to Minerva’s meltdown) had graduated last year, leaving the school full of acquaintances and strangers. That was what I got for hanging out with so many seniors when I was a junior.

I picked up my schedule from the front office and checked over the signs saying which classes and ensembles had been canceled due to lack of interest. No baroque instruments class this year. No jazz improv group. No chamber choir?

That was kind of lateral.

But all my planned classes were still scheduled. They made you take four years of composition and theory, after all, and my morning was full of required academics: English, trig, and the inescapable advanced biology.

So it wasn’t until lunch that I began to see how much had really changed.

The cafeteria was the biggest room at school. It doubled as a concert hall, because even fancy private schools like Juilliard couldn’t take up infinite space in the middle of Manhattan. My third-period AP bio class was just next door, prime real estate for getting to the front of the food line. Walking in ten seconds after the lunch bell, I was happy to see all the vacant tables. The familiar floury smell of macaroni and cheese à la Juilliard, one of the nonfeculent dishes here, made me smile.

Even if the System was gone, it was good to be back.

I got a trayful and looked around for anyone I could sit with, especially someone with useful musical skills. Moz and I might want to bring in backup musicians one day.

It only took a few seconds to spot Ellen Bromowitz all alone in the corner. She was in my year and a fawesome cellist, first chair in the orchestra. We’d been temporary best friends in our early freshman days, back when neither of us knew anyone else.

I took a seat across from her. Cellos could be cool, even if Ellen sort of wasn’t. Besides, there was hardly anyone else there.

She looked up from her macaroni, a little puzzled. “Pearl?”

“Hey, Ellen.”

“Didn’t expect to see you here.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Well…” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Just thought I’d say hi.”

She didn’t answer, just kept looking at me.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Interesting question.” A wry little smile played across her face. “So, you don’t have any friends to sit with either?”

I swallowed, feeling more or less busted. “I guess not. The rest of Nervous System were seniors. All your friends graduated too, huh?”

“Graduated?” She shook her head. “No. But no one’s back yet.”

“Not back from where?”

“Summer.” She looked around the cafeteria.

The place still hadn’t filled up. It seemed so quiet, not like the lunchtime chaos I remembered. I wondered if it had always been this spacious and peaceful in here, and if this was just another of those little summer-shifted perceptions making everything feel wrong.

But that didn’t quite make sense. Things seeming smaller every year, I could understand. But emptier?

“Well, it was a pretty feculent summer,” I said. “Between the sanitation crisis and the rats and stuff. Maybe not everyone’s back from Switzerland or wherever else they escaped to.”

Ellen finished swallowing some mac and cheese. “My friends don’t go to Switzerland in the summer.”

“Oh, right.” I shrugged, remembering how scholarship students always hung out together. “Well, Vermont, or whatever.”

She made a little sighing sound.

“Still, it’s great to be back, huh?” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re in an awfully good mood. What’s that all about? Got a new boyfriend or something?”

I laughed. “No boyfriend. But yeah, I’m really happy. The weather’s finally cooler, the subways are working this week, and I’m getting another band together.” I shrugged. “Things are going great, I guess. And…”

“And what?”

“Well, maybe there’s a boy. Not sure yet if it’s a good idea, though.”

I felt an embarrassingly nonsubtle grin growing on my face.

True, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea at all, but at least the downright feculence between me and Moz had finally ended.

Having a band had wrung all the resentment out of him. He never complained about our early Sunday morning rehearsals anymore, just showed up ready to play. Moz could be so amazing when he was like this—like my mom said, totally fetching—focused when he played, intense when he listened to the rest of us.

So maybe sometimes I imagined distilling that concentration down to just the two of us, putting his newfound focus to work in other ways. And maybe, writing songs in my bedroom, I occasionally had to remind myself that it wasn’t cool to jump the bones of your bandmates.

Mark and Minerva had shown me how much trouble that could cause. I’d heard he’d cracked up completely over the summer. Must be tough, losing your girlfriend and your band on the same day.

So I bit my tongue when Moz starting looking really intense and fervent, reminding myself it was for the good of the band, which was more important to me than any boy.

But that didn’t mean I never thought about it.

The band had changed Minerva too. She could be nine kinds of normal these days. Maybe she still wore dark glasses, but the thought of going out in the sun didn’t terrify her anymore. Neither did her own reflection—mirrors were her new best friends. Best of all, she loved dressing up and sneaking out to rehearsals. Her songs evolved every time we played, the formless rages slowly taking shape, bent into verses and choruses by the structure of the music.

One day soon, I figured, the words might actually start making sense.

The funny thing was, Alana Ray seemed to help Min the most. Her fluttering patterns wrapped around Minerva’s fury, lending it form and logic. I suspected that Alana Ray was guiding us all somehow, a paint-bucket-pounding guru in our midst.

I’d gone online a few times, trying to figure out what exactly her condition was. She twitched and tapped like she had Tourette’s, but she never swore uncontrollably. A disease called Asperger syndrome looked about right, except for those hallucinations. Maybe Minerva had called it during that first rehearsal, and Alana Ray was a little bit autistic, a word that could mean all kinds of stuff. But whatever her condition was, it seemed to give her some special vision into the bones of things.

So now that we had a drummer-sage and a demented Taj Mahal of a singer, the band only had two problems left: (1) we didn’t have a bass player, which I knew exactly how to fix, and (2) we still didn’t have a name…

“How does Crazy Versus Sane sound to you?” I asked Ellen.

“Pardon me?”

“For a band name.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I guess it makes sense; you’re going to be all New Sound, right?”

“Sort of, but better.”

She shrugged. “It’s a little bit trying-too-hard; the word crazy, I mean. Like in Catch-22. Anyone who tells you they’re crazy really isn’t. They’re just faking, or they wouldn’t know they were crazy.”

“Okay.” I frowned, remembering why hanging out with Ellen could be a drag sometimes. She had a tendency toward nonenthusiasm.

But then she smiled. “Don’t worry, Pearl. You’ll think of something. You playing guitar for them?”

“No, keyboards. We’ve got one too many guitarists already.”

“Too bad.” She pulled up an acoustic guitar case from the floor, sat it in the chair next to her. “Wouldn’t mind being in a band.”

I stared at the guitar. “What are you doing with that?”

She shrugged. “Gave up the cello.”

“What? But you were first chair last year!”

“Yeah, but cellos…” A long sigh. “They take too much infrastructure.”

“They do what?”

She sighed, rearranging the dishes on her tray as she spoke. “They need infrastructure. Most of the great cello works are written for orchestra. That’s almost a hundred musicians right there, plus all the craftsmen to build the instruments and maintain them and enough people to build a concert hall. And to pay for that, you’re talking about thousands of customers buying tickets every year, rich donors and government grants… That’s why only really big cities have orchestras.”

“Um, Ellen? You live in a really big city. You’re not planning to move to Alaska or something, are you?”

She shook her head. “No. But what if big cities don’t work anymore? What if you can’t stick that many people together without it falling apart? What if…” Ellen’s voice faded as she looked around the cafeteria once more.

I followed her gaze. The place still was only two-thirds full, with entire tables vacant and no line at all for food. It was like nobody had been scheduled for A-lunch.

It was starting to freak me out. Where the hell was everyone?

“What if the time for orchestras is over, Pearl?”

I let out a snort. “There’ve been orchestras for centuries. They’re part of… I don’t know, civilization.”

“Yeah, civilization. That’s the whole problem…” She touched the neck of the guitar case softly. “I was so sick of carrying that big cello around, like some dead body in a coffin. I just wanted something simple. Something I could play by the campfire, whether or not there’s any civilization around.”

A weird tingle went down my spine. “What happened to you this summer, Ellen?”

She looked up at me and, after a long pause, said, “My dad went away.”

“Oh. Crap.” I swallowed, remembering when my parents had divorced. “I’m really sorry. Like… he left your mom?”

Ellen shook her head. “Not right away. You see, someone bit him on the subway, and he… got different.”

“Bit him?” I thought of the rumors I’d heard, that some kind of rabies was spreading from the rats—that you could see people like Min on the streets now, hungry and wearing dark glasses.

She nodded, still stroking the guitar case’s neck. “At least I’m still on a full scholarship. So I can switch to guitar before—”

“But you’re a great cellist. You can’t give up on civilization yet. I mean, New York City’s still around.”

She nodded. “Mostly. There are still concerts and classes and baseball games going on. But it’s kind of like the Titanic: there’s really only enough lifeboats for the first-class passengers.” She scanned the room. “So when I see people not showing up, I sort of wonder if those passengers are already leaving. And then the floor’s going to start tilting, the deck chairs sliding past.”

“Um… the what?”

Ellen turned to me with narrowed eyes. “Here’s the thing, Pearl. I bet your friends are already off in Switzerland, or someplace like that.”

I shrugged. “They mostly just graduated.”

“I bet they’re in Switzerland anyway. Most people who can afford it are already gone. But my friends…” She shook her head, then shrugged. “They don’t have drivers or bodyguards, and they have to ride the subway to school. So they’re in hiding, sort of.”

“You’re here.”

“Only reason is that we live around the corner. I don’t have to ride the subway. Plus…” She smiled, touching the case in the seat next to her. “I really want to learn to play guitar.”

We talked more—about her father, about all the stuff we’d seen that summer. But my mind kept wandering to the band.

Listening to Ellen, it had occurred to me that bands like ours needed a lot of infrastructure too, as much as any symphony orchestra. To do what we did, we needed electronic instruments and microphones, mixing boards and echo boxes and stacks of amplifiers. We needed night-clubs, recording studios, record companies, cable channels that showed music videos, and fans who had CD players and electricity at home.

Crap, we needed civilization.

I couldn’t exactly see Moz and Min jamming around a campfire, after all.

What if Luz’s fairy tales were true, then, and some big struggle was coming? And what if Ellen Bromowitz had it right, and the time for orchestras was over? What if the illness that had ripped apart Nervous System was going to bring down the infrastructure that made having our kind of band even possible?

I straightened up in my chair. It was time to get moving. I had to quit patting myself on the back just because Moz was happy and Minerva was relatively noncrazy and rehearsals were going well.

We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in.

14. REPLACEMENTS — ZAHLER-

We churned out one fawesome tune after another—me, Moz, and Pearl, meeting two or three times a week at her place. After we’d used up all our old riffs, we started basing stuff on Pearl’s loopy samples, and the Mosquito didn’t even buzz about it. Ever since the band had gotten real—with a drummer, a singer, even separate amps for Moz and me—he’d finally realized that this wasn’t a competition.

What he hadn’t realized was how hot Pearl was or that she had a major crush on him.

All I could do was shake my head about that last part. The problem for Pearl was, she’d really given Moz something. She’d stripped away his shell, had shown him a way to get everything he really wanted, had helped him find a focus that he’d been too lame to discover for himself.

He was never going to forgive her for that.

Me, I still thought Pearl was hot. But for now, there was nothing I could do about it. And actually, I was happy with things the way they were. My best friend and the foolest girl in the world had finally quit fighting, the music was fexcellent, and Pearl loved the band, which meant she wasn’t going anywhere without me tagging along.

It was all going so good, I should have known something was about to explode.

We were working on the B section of one of the new tunes, called “A Million Stimuli to Go.” It was totally complicated, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t play it. Moz kept showing me how on his Strat, but for some reason it didn’t work on my fingers.

At least, it didn’t until Pearl jumped in. She swept aside the CD cases and a harmonica scattered across her bed and sat down next to me. Unhooking the strap of my guitar, she pulled it over into her lap.

“Let me, Zahler,” she said.

Then, like it was no big deal, she started playing the part.

Normally, sitting that close to her would have been pretty fool. But at that moment I was too dumbfounded to appreciate it.

“See?” she said, her fingers practically smoking as they cruised across the strings. “You’ve just got to use your pinky on that last bit.”

Moz laughed. “He hates using his pinky. Says it’s his retarded finger.”

I didn’t say anything right then, just watched her play, nodding like a moron. She was dead on about how to make the part work, and now that I could see it from behind the strings, it didn’t even look that hard. When Pearl handed me back my guitar, I managed to get it right the first time.

She stood up and went back to her keyboards, tweaking her stacks while I ran through it a dozen more times, pushing the riff deep into my brain.

I didn’t say anything more about it till later, when it was just me and the Mosquito.

“Moz, did you see what happened back there?”

We were wandering through late-night Chinatown, surrounded by the clatter of restaurant kitchens. The thick sweat of fry-cooking rolled along the narrow streets, and the metal doors of fish markets were rumbling down, the briny smell of guts lingering in the air.

It was pretty quiet at night since the pedestrian curfew had been imposed. Moz and I always ignored the curfew, though, so it was like we owned the city.

“See what?” Moz twisted his body to peer down the alley we’d just passed.

“No, not down there.” Since that day with my dogs, I didn’t even glance into alleys anymore. “Back at Pearl’s. When she showed me that riff.” My hands lifted into guitar position, fingers fluttering. The moves were in me now, too late to save me from humiliation.

“Oh, the one you had trouble with? What about it?”

“Did you see how Pearl just did it?”

He frowned, his own fingers tracing the pattern. “That’s how it’s supposed to be played.”

I groaned. “No, Moz, not how she played it. That she played it, when it was driving me nuts!”

“Oh,” he said, then waited as a garbage truck steamed past, squeaking and groaning. For some reason, there were six guys hanging onto the back, instead of the usual two or three. They watched us warily as the truck rumbled away. “Yeah, she’s pretty good. You didn’t know that?”

“Hell, no. When did that happen?”

“A long time before we met her.” He laughed. “You never noticed how her hand moves when she calls out chords?” His left hand twitched in the air. “And I told you how she spotted the Strat, same as me.”

“But—”

“And that stuff in her room: the flute, the harmonicas, the hand drums. She plays it all, Zahler.”

I frowned. It was true, there were a lot of instruments lying around at Pearl’s. And sometimes she’d pull one down and play something on it, just for a joke. “I never noticed any guitars, though.”

He shrugged. “She keeps them under the bed. I thought you knew.”

I looked down and swung my boot at the fire hydrant squatting on the curb, catching it hard in one of its little spouty things. It clanked and I hopped back, remembering I didn’t mess with hydrants anymore. “That doesn’t bug you?”

“Bug me? I don’t care if she keeps them in the attic, as long as I get to play the Strat.”

“Not that. Doesn’t it bug you that I’m supposed to be our guitarist, and I don’t even play guitar as well as our keyboard player?”

“So? She’s a musical genius.”

I groaned. Sometimes the Mosquito could be spectacularly retarded. “Well, doesn’t that sort of imply that the ‘musical genius’ should be our second guitarist, and not me?”

He stopped, turned to face me. “But Zahler, that won’t help. You don’t play keyboards at all.”

“Ahhh! That’s not what I mean!”

Moz sighed, put his hands up. “Look, Zahler, I know she plays guitar better than you. And she understands the Big Riff better than I do, just like she does most music. She probably drums better than a lot of drummers—maybe not Alana Ray, though. But like I said, she’s a musical genius. Don’t worry. She and I were talking about you, and Pearl’s already got a plan.”

“Talking about me? A plan?”

“Of course. Pearl’s always got a plan—that’s why she’s the boss.” He smiled. “I got over it, why can’t you?”

“Why can’t I get over it?” I stood there, breathing hard, hands flexing, looking to grab something by the throat and choke it. “You weren’t over jack until a couple of weeks ago! And that’s only because you think that weird junkie friend of hers is hot!”

He stared at me, eyes wide, and I glared back at him. It was one of those things I hadn’t known until I’d blurted it out. But now I could see that it was totally true. The only reason Moz had been so fool lately was that Minerva had clicked the reset button on his brain.

I’d already told Moz what I thought of her. She was a junkie, or an ex-junkie, or a soon-to-be junkie, and was bad news. Even before she’d freaked out at Alana Ray during that first rehearsal, the whole dark glasses and trippy singing had been totally paranormal.

I’m not saying she wasn’t a good singer, just that I like my songs with words. And I like my skinny, pale chicks with veiny arms as far away as possible.

“Min’s not a junkie,” he said.

“Oh, yeah? How do you know?”

He spread his hands. “Well, how do you know she is?”

“Listen, I don’t know what she is.” I slitted my eyes. “All I know is that it’s something that they only let out for two hours a week! That’s why we rehearse early Sunday morning, right? And why those two run back to Brooklyn? Because visiting hours are over?”

Moz frowned. “Yeah, I don’t really know what that’s about.” He turned away and started walking again, like I hadn’t just been yelling at him. “I think Pearl likes to keep Minerva to herself. They’ve been friends since they were little kids, and Min’s kind of… fragile.”

I snorted. Junkies might be easy to knock down, but they’re never fragile. They have souls like old leather shoes studded with steel, and they’re about as much good as friends.

From the fish store across the street, a big Asian guy was eyeing us, a baseball bat in one hand. When I waved and smiled, he nodded and went back to tossing out bucketfuls of used ice, spreading them across the asphalt to let them melt. The icy splinters glittered in the streetlights, and I walked over to crush some under my feet.

Stupid Pearl. Stupid Moz. Stupid guitar.

Against the street, the ice looked black. People said that if you got black water into the freezer fast enough, it would freeze up instead of evaporating, and you’d have black ice. Of course, they never said why you’d want anything like that in your fridge. When I went over to Moz’s, I still crossed the street so I didn’t get too close to that hydrant, even though it had one of those special caps on it now to keep kids out.

“There’s something I should tell you about, though.” Moz’s boots crunched through the ice behind me. “But you can’t tell anyone else.”

“Great,” I murmured, smashing more ice. “Just what this band needs, more secrets.” Moz still hadn’t told Pearl he was paying Alana Ray, or me where he was getting the money from. And apparently Pearl and Moz had their own secret plans for me…

“Min gave me her phone number.”

I spun toward him. He was smiling. “Dude! You do think she’s hot!”

He laughed, kicking a glittering spray of hail toward me. “Zahler, let me explain something to you. Minerva isn’t hot. She’s way past hot. She’s a fifty-thousand-volt plasma rifle. She’s a jet engine.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. When Moz started talking this way about a girl, it was all over. His obsessions were like an epic guitar solo playing in his brain, endless skittering riffs without any particular logic.

“She’s luminous. A rock star. So of course she’s a little strange.” He sighed. “But, yeah, you’re right. It might be weird with Pearl…”

When he said those last words, that’s when I probably should have tried to talk him out of it, but at that moment, I was all tangled up about the guitar thing—deeply pissed with Moz and Pearl. They could have at least told me I was a worthless doofus instead of thinking it behind my back and making plans.

I opened my eyes. “So, you’re plasma-rifle serious? Jet-engine serious?”

“Yeah, man. She’s hot.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t my fault if Moz decided to screw everything up. “When did she give you her number?”

“Sunday before last?”

“Ten days ago?” I rolled my eyes, wanting to make him feel stupid. “Don’t you think you should maybe do something about it?”

He swallowed, rocking on his feet a little. “It was kind of funny, though. She handed me her number so Pearl couldn’t see, and she told me to call at one in the morning. Exactly. She even set my watch to hers.”

“So she’s weird. We knew that, right?”

“I guess. Yeah, I should call her.” He started walking again, kind of twitchy, like Alana Ray before rehearsals.

I sighed, even more miserable now. Here I’d pushed Moz into going after a weird junkie chick, and it hadn’t even made me feel any better. I stopped next to a row of mini-Dumpsters outside a restaurant kitchen door and jumped up onto the edge of one, sitting there and pounding my boot heels against its metal side.

“Anyway,” Moz said. “What does that have to do with Pearl playing guitar?”

“Can’t remember. All I know is that this sucks. I mean, what good is it being the third-best guitarist in a band? Or does Minerva play guitar too?”

He laughed, jumping up beside me. “Listen, Zahler. You’re important to the band. You give us energy.”

“What, like a puppy?”

“Don’t you remember that first day? If you hadn’t been there, me and Pearl wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes.”

“So what? You two are past all that stuff. You don’t need me anymore.” I looked at him, frowning. “So what’s this plan of Pearl’s?”

“Well, she figures it’s not really New Sound, having more than one guitar.”

“Oh.” My throat closed up, and my feet stopped swinging, freezing in midair.

I was toast. Gone.

“Pearl was going to tell you this, but I guess I have to now. Um, the thing is… we want you to play bass.”

“What?”

“We need a bassist. And with this band, anytime we add somebody, everything goes haywire.” He shook his head. “I mean, I don’t want to have to explain Alana Ray to someone new.” His voice dropped. “Or Min, for that matter.”

One of my heels hit metal. A soft boom. “But Moz, I’ve spent the last six years playing guitar.”

“Zahler, you’ve spent the last six years playing guitar like a bass.” He moved his fingers all spastically. “You never noticed that every part I’ve ever written for you is on the bottom four strings, with hardly any chords? You could switch over in about five minutes. I would’ve told you to change years ago, except you and me didn’t have a bass.”

“But Moz,” I said, my world crumbling. “We still don’t have a bass.”

“Yeah, we do. Pearl’s got one under her bed.”

I yelled, pounding both heels against booming metal. “But doesn’t that mean she plays? Better than me, probably, seeing as how I never even touched one except one time in a music store?”

“Don’t you worry about her.” He smiled and half-turned, held out his palm toward me. “Come on.”

I stared at his hand. “Come on what?”

“Put your hand up to mine.”

I frowned, then did it. My fingers stuck out almost an inch longer than Moz’s. Big, fat, clumsy fingers.

“Whoa,” he said. “That is fawesome. You should try this with Pearl sometime. She’s got really tiny hands.”

“She does?” I remembered playing the bass that time in the store, slapping at strings thick as steel worms. The frets were miles apart.

“Yeah. She can hardly get her left hand around the neck.”

I looked down at my big, fat, fawesome fingers and laughed.

“Can’t even hold a bass, huh? Some musical genius.”

15. THE NEED — MOZ-

It felt weird, waiting for one A.M. exactly.

I’ve always hated clocks and schedules, but this felt different—more like the sensation I’d gotten just before the TV had shattered on the street in front of me. My magic powers were screaming that something was about to happen.

As if I didn’t know that already.

I sat there in the kitchen with no lights on, the window wide open and trying to suck in some late September coolness. My parents’ apartment is on the sixth floor, and all night long leftover heat filters up from the rest of the building, like we live in the top of a steam cooker. The ancient refrigerator was humming, rattling mightily as it tried to keep beer cold and milk from going sour. An occasional whoop of siren leaped up from the street, along with the staticky pops of police radios.

The darkness was buzzing around me, my skin tingling, fingers drifting over my unplugged Stratocaster’s strings, pulling small noises from them. I imagined the notes amplified and her voice singing over the lines I played.

The whole one o’clock thing didn’t make sense. Minerva had said something about not waking her parents up, but if they were the problem, why call in the middle of the night?

I wondered if her mom and dad were some kind of religious freaks, the kind who didn’t let her talk to boys on the phone. Was that why she only went out on Sunday mornings? Did they think Pearl was taking her to church?

Wouldn’t that be perfect? If rehearsal was our church, Minerva was the high priestess.

I skidded one fingernail down my lowest string, making the sound of a tiny jet plane crashing to the ground. I was always edgy calling a girl the first time, even a normal girl with normal parents. Even one who’d never screamed holy sacraments while I played guitar.

Minerva had handed me her number when no one else was looking, had whispered her instructions. She knew this was a bad idea, and I knew too—the sort of thing that broke up bands. The badness of it was all over me in the darkness, hovering an inch from my skin, like a cloud of mosquitoes getting ready to bite.

And one A.M., which had seemed, like, forever away fifteen minutes ago, was almost here…

I placed the Strat on the kitchen table, took the phone from the wall, and pulled out the number she’d given me. Her handwriting was sloppy, almost as bad as Zahler’s, the paper crumpled from ten days in my pocket, crammed against keys and coins and guitar picks.

I dialed slowly, telling myself it didn’t really count until I pressed the last digit. After all, I’d gone this far a few other nights, only to choke.

But this time, five seconds before the hour, I finished the spell.

She picked up before it even rang.

“Ooh, no dial tone,” she said softly, which didn’t make any sense at first.

“Minerva?”

“You finally did it, Mozzy,” she whispered.

I licked my lips, which felt as dry and rough as burnt toast. “Yeah, I did.”

“I’ve been sitting here waiting, ten nights in a row.”

“Oh. Sorry it took so long.” I found myself whispering back at her, even though my parents’ room was at the other end of the apartment.

“I’ve been really good every night, picking up exactly at one.” She sighed. “And every time… buzzzz.”

“Oh, a dial tone.” I cleared my throat, not sure what to say.

“A dial tone instead of you,” she said, her voice slipping out of its whisper. Minerva talked like she sang, low and growly, a tone that penetrated the rumble of the fridge and the whir of cars down on the street.

I reached over to the Strat and plucked an open string. “Doesn’t your phone have a ringer?”

“Yes, it has a ringer.” I heard a distant clank on her end, like she’d kicked something. “But it rings in my parents’ room and downstairs too. Only Pearl and Luz are supposed to know this number.”

“That sucks.” I wondered who Luz was. Another friend?

“And the worst thing is, Luz took all my numbers away.”

“Took your numbers? You mean she stole your address book?”

Minerva giggled. “No, silly Moz. The little buttons with numbers. There’s no way for me to dial out.”

“Crap. Really?” What was the deal with her parents? Or Luz, whoever she was?

“Smelly phone.” Another soft clank. “So I’ve been sitting here waiting every night, hoping you would call. Wanting you to, but all nervous in case a little ring squirted out. Picking up exactly at one, and all I get is buzzzz… like some horrible bee.”

“Sorry about that.” I shifted my weight on the kitchen chair, remembering staring at my own phone at one o’clock, wishing I’d had the guts to call. “Well, I’m talking to you now.”

“Mmm. It’s yummy too. We finally get to talk with no one else around.”

“Yeah, it’s cool.” My throat was dry, and the badness was clinging to my skin now, like an itch all over me. It reminded me of hiding in the closet when I was little, excited but scared that someone would open the door. “So, can I ask you something, Min?”

“Sure. You get to ask me anything, now that no one’s listening.”

“Um, yeah.” The fridge turned itself off, leaving me in sudden silence. My voice dropped as I asked, “So, when you and Pearl leave early? You’re not really going to Spanish lessons, are you?”

She giggled softly. “No. We have to get back before Luz knows I’m gone.”

“Oh. Luz again.” I noticed that my right hand was all twisted up in the phone cord, my fingers strangled white and bloodless. I started to unwind it. “But that’s, like, a Spanish name, right?”

“It means light. ‘Let there be Luz.’”

“So she’s your Spanish teacher.” Or whatever.

“Sí. Y un problema grande.”

Even I could figure out that bit of Spanish. Luz was a big problem. But what was she? A nanny? Some sort of religious homeschooling tutor? A shrink?

“What are you thinking?”

I shifted around on my chair, skin itching again. “I’m wondering about you.”

“Mmm,” she purred. “If I’m crazy? If I’m bad?”

I swallowed. “No. But I don’t really know you, outside of practice.”

“I think you do know me, Mozzy. That’s why I wanted you to call. Because you know things.”

“Um, I do?”

“Sure. Just close your eyes.”

I did, and she started humming, the sound barely carrying over the wires. I imagined her singing in the practice room, drawing me into her slipstream as we played. Fragments of her songs echoed in my head. It felt like I was being pulled somewhere.

She stopped humming, but her breathing still reached my ears.

“Where do you get those words, Min? For our songs?”

She laughed softly. “From underneath.”

“Like, from underneath your conscious mind or something?”

“No, silly,” she whispered. “Underneath my house.”

“Uh, really?” With my eyes closed, she seemed so close, like she was whispering in my ear. “You write in your basement?”

“I did at first, back when they let me go down there. I had fevers and could feel something under the house. Something rumbling.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I know what you mean. I can feel something kind of… underneath us when you sing.”

“Something in the ground.” She was breathing harder now. “You do know things.”

“Sometimes I feel like my music’s just buzzing around in the air. But you pull it down, tie it to something that’s real.”

“Mmm. It’s realer than you think.” She breathed slowly for a while, and I just listened until she said, “Do you want more, Moz?”

I swallowed. “How do you mean?”

“Do… you… want… more? I can give you the rest of it. You’re only tasting a little tiny fraction.”

I opened my eyes. The darkness in the kitchen was suddenly sharp. “A fraction of what?”

“Of what I have. Come over, and I’ll show you.”

The table seemed to tremble: my heart beating in my fingertips. “Come over… now?”

“Yes, Mozzy. Come rescue me and Zombie.”

“Um… Zombie?”

“He’s my undead slave.”

I swallowed. “Yeah?”

She let out a giggle, just above a whisper. “And his breath smells like cat food.”

“Oh.” I let out a slow breath. “Zombie has whiskers too, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, and he also knows things. But… Moz?”

“What?”

“I’m hungry.”

I laughed. She was so skinny, I never thought of Minerva getting hungry. She ate a lot of beef jerky at rehearsal, but I figured that was for her voice or something.

“You want to go and get something? I’ll wait.” I wanted to sit there in silence for a minute or two, just to recover. Just to scratch myself all over.

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“See, here’s the thing. The door of my room has this smelly lock. On the outside.”

“Really?” I blinked. “Like, your parents keep you locked in at night?”

“Daytime too. Because I was sick before.”

I closed my eyes again. A new layer of hovering badness sprang up all around me, filling the room with a buzzing sound.

“That’s why you have to come rescue me,” she said. “Come let me out and I’ll show you everything.”

I bit my lip. “But you live in… Brooklyn, right?”

She groaned. “Don’t be lame. Just take the F train. Half an hour.”

Just half an hour. Plus however long it took the train to come, maybe an hour total. Not forever; I wasn’t afraid of the subways yet.

And if I didn’t go see her, how long would it take to fall asleep in my room all alone? A thousand hours, at least.

Every time I’d watched her sing, her songs moving through my hands as I played, I’d gone to bed that night with her cries still echoing in my brain. Every time, I’d imagined a thousand ways of following her back to Brooklyn, and now she was inviting me.

If I said no, this itch would never leave my skin.

“Everyone’s asleep here,” she was saying. “And I can show you where my music comes from.”

“Okay, Min. I’ll come.” I stood up, like I was heading out the door right then, but my head started to spin. I sat back down. “But how are you going to get out?”

“You’re going to rescue me. It’s easy. Pearl does it all the time.”

“Um, am I supposed to climb up to your window or something?”

“No, silly. Just walk up the stairs.” She giggled. “But first, you have to find the magic key…”

16. LOVE BITES — MINERVA-

Mozzy was taking forever.

I was dressed up so pretty, it was killing me just sitting here at my desk, staring at myself in the mirror. Zombie was pacing, knowing from the tinkle of my earrings that we were going out.

“Not long now,” I said softly. My stomach rumbled.

The thought of Moz coming over had changed the balance inside me—the hungry thing had woken up, stirred from the sleep Luz had forced upon it. I’d already chewed through all my emergency beef jerky, trying not to think of the way he smelled. So yummy and intense.

I took a bite of pork rind, letting its unctuous texture coat my mouth. Zombie wandered over and mur-rowed, so I gave him my fingers to lick.

“You can go play with your little friends soon.”

I looked at the clock: after two. Smelly Moz. What if he’d chickened out? I wanted to get closer to the earth. Singing felt wonderful, but I needed to feel the dirt under my fingernails, to smell and taste the things down there.

I needed to learn more, to put flesh on the words in my notebooks.

My stomach rumbled again, and I felt funny in a way I hadn’t for a while. Like before Luz came along—kind of… inhuman. That wasn’t good.

Mustn’t eat Mozzy, I thought, and peeled a clove of garlic. It was fresh, the way Luz said was best, the papery skin still flecked with purple. The clove split between my teeth, sharp and hot as fresh chicken blood. My next breath sucked the flavor into my lungs, and my nerves steadied.

“That’ll teach you,” I whispered to the hungry thing inside me, then took a swig from the little bottle of tequila Pearl had smuggled in, swishing it around my mouth. Didn’t want to taste funny for Moz.

In the clarity of my garlic buzz, I took off my dark glasses and stared into the mirror, wondering in which direction I was headed tonight.

Some things, like Luz’s teas and tinctures, made me better, more boring and sensible. Others, like singing with Pearl’s band, brought out the magnificent beast inside me and summoned the big things underground. It was the same old balancing act—how far to go with boys, with booze, with dangerous places—but magnified until the whole earth shook.

I wasn’t sure yet which way Moz was going to take me. I knew that both halves of me wanted badly to take him under the ground, but I was pretty certain they had different ideas about what to do with him down there.

I gnashed another clove of garlic, swilled another shot of tequila, just in case.

The stairs creaked… Moz.

I stood up, crossed to the door, and pressed my ear against it. He was down at the very bottom, making his slow way up. My thirsty hearing swept through the house: Max’s heart beating in the room next door, Daddy snoring low and even, no pages turning from my mother reading late in bed. Silence, except for the slow, cautious feet creeping up the stairs, the occasional crinkle of the house cooling down.

Zombie did figure eights around my feet.

“No purring,” I hissed. “Mommy’s listening.”

I slid my cheek along the door, put my nose up to the crack. Sniffed.

Moz was still too far downstairs to smell. I counted my own heartbeats to a thousand, spread my palms out on the door, pressed my anxious weight against it, groaning. Even shiny Pearl didn’t climb the stairs this slowly.

Finally he reached the top floor and I caught his scent, nervous and unsure.

And hungry. I smiled.

He turned the hasp free, the faint vibrations traveling through wood and into my thirsty skin. The metal bolt slid across.

I took a step back, dizzy. Being rescued was much better when it was Mozzy doing it.

The door opened the tiniest crack.

“Min?” On a little puff of air, smelling of yummy Moz breath.

I didn’t answer, just stood there behind the door, Zombie warm against my ankle. Everything was tingling.

The door pushed open another nervous inch. “Minerva?”

“Mozzzz,” I buzzed.

“Jesus.” His face peeked through, shiny in the candlelight, expressions squirming across it.

I put my hand out to stroke his cheek. Brought it back and licked my fingers. Nervous-tasting, but Mozzy.

He pushed through into my room, leaned back to softly shut the door. Closed his eyes. “Jesus, Min. Those are some creaky-ass stairs.”

I giggled, slipping a hand through the unzipped top of his jacket, pressing my palm against his chest. His heart was pounding deliciously. If he hadn’t been breathing so hard, I could have heard the warm blood rushing through his veins.

Don’t think naughty thoughts, I scolded myself.

“You made it, though.”

His eyes opened, a relieved grin making his face shimmer. “Yeah.”

I pulled my hand back from the hothouse of his jacket, pressed fingers against the door. “No one heard you. Relax.”

Mozzy nodded but didn’t relax at all. His expression was so naked, tension transforming into excitement, his own hunger rumbling. His eyes rolled across my tight black dress and boots, growing wider, about to burst.

“You’re all dressed up.”

I smiled. “Well, we’re going somewhere special, you know.”

“Oh.” He glanced down at himself: T-shirt under leather jacket, jeans. “I didn’t think… I mean, it’s two in the morning.”

“Shush, Moz. You look delicious.” I bent down and swept up Zombie. “Come on. Time for the creaky-ass stairs again.”

“Okay…” He frowned. “The cat’s coming?”

I sighed. Why was everyone always giving Zombie funny looks? He never stuck his nose into their business. Zombie had things to do, places to be. Zombie needed rescuing too. And he knew things.

If he could talk, Zombie would’ve told us what was coming.

But all I said was, “He’s got a date with a tree.”

“Oh, sure.” Moz smiled and softly opened the door.

With no smelly sun wrecking everything, outside was much better.

In beautiful soft starlight, I could see the dead leaves scattered on the ground, the spiderwebs sparkling in the grass, captured insects making them dance. The unburnt air was moist, thick with scents and sounds.

I put Zombie down, watched him slip in among the glistening piles of plastic bags. Those garbage mountains were alive in the darkness, the steady breeze carrying messages from deep inside.

I put my hand against one, felt its cool slickness. It had a scent like my room, my bedclothes, like something that Zombie and I shared. Little tremblings were rampant in the pile’s depths, answering my presence.

“Family,” I murmured, rustles of understanding moving through me.

“Um, yeah. Your family,” Moz whispered, glancing nervously back at my house, as if the porch light was about to pop on, Daddy emerging with a shotgun. “Where’re we going anyway?”

His anxious smell made hunger bubble up inside me again, and I wished I’d brought more garlic. I turned and took his hand, pulling him down the street. “This way. I’m taking you where I can show you things.”

“Oh, okay.” He followed in a silent trance, obedient in my grasp. As we neared the first intersection, though, my steps slowed. Everything was muddled.

I’d grown up on this street, but somehow things had changed. A new world had descended on my old neighborhood—a terrain of smells, skittering sounds, and territorial boundaries. The old maps inside my head had crumbled over the last two months, turning the street signs into gibberish.

“Which way’s the F stop, Moz?”

“We’re going somewhere by subway? It’s, like, two-thirty, Min!”

I frowned. “We’re not getting on a train. Just need to remember.” I squeezed his hand, looking up into his bulging, thirsty eyes. “I’ve been locked up for a while, you know.”

“Oh, right.” His throat rippled with a swallow. “Sure. It’s back this way.”

I followed him, familiar landmarks seething with the new reality—the vacant lot one block over, alive now with shivering forms; my old preschool, playground swings creaking in the breeze; the best Lebanese restaurant in Brooklyn, its garbage smelling of rancid honey and chick-peas, trembling with movement.

Luz has been robbing me of all this, I thought. She wanted to cure me of my new senses, to lock me away from this sumptuous half-lit world. Every step I took, I was finding out more… I still had enough crazy left to understand.

Moz took me to the F station down the block, and I pulled him to the lip of the stairs, breathed in the subterranean hum for a dizzy and exultant moment, like when la musica traveled through me. The beast rumbled, twisting happily in my guts.

“But I thought we weren’t—”

“We’re not taking the train,” I said. “This is just a shortcut.”

“A shortcut?” he said, not quite believing.

“You can only get what you want underground, Mozzy. But believe me, you’ll love the way it tastes.”

He blinked, then nodded. I smiled, covering my eyes as I pulled him down into the fluorescent lights, his pulse fluttering under my fingers.

Every step we took, the pull was getting stronger.

Moz could sense it too, as if its influence traveled through my skin and into his, an electric current of desire. Or maybe he could smell it on me—here underground I felt myself glowing with it, the beast inside me doing back flips, screaming that it was almost loose. Whatever was down here had freed it from Luz’s restraints. My tongue ran across my teeth uneasily.

Must… not… eat… Mozzy.

But I couldn’t stop moving forward either.

Behind me Moz was panting, eyes glittering like wet glass. When I jumped down from the platform onto the empty subway tracks, he didn’t say a word, just paused for a moment before following. His lips were full of blood, and I could see his heart racing in his throat. It was all I could do not to take him right there, but I knew it would only get better the farther down we went. I pulled him into the darkness of the tunnel.

Gravel crunched under our feet, and the skitters and smells of tiny things were all around us. My friends, my family.

Then a shiver traveled up into my toes… danger.

Moz pulled me to a stop. He’d felt it too. “Crap! Is that a train?”

I knelt, put one hand on a rail.

“Watch out! That’s—”

“Don’t be scared, Moz.” I pointed with my free hand. “That’s the electric one. This one’s just for listening…” The smooth, cold metal under my palm was trembling, but not with the approach of a train. Everything around us shivered: gravel, iron beams, the work lights hanging from their cords. The earth was shuddering in fear.

Calling me to the struggle—la lucha. Calling Moz too.

And suddenly I knew something that Luz’s cures had hidden from me, something I’d only glimpsed in my songs. The thing underground, the thing that made the earth rumble, was our enemy.

The beast inside me had been created to fight it.

“We have to be careful. It’s close.”

He sucked in deep breaths through his nose. “I’ve heard this, Min, at practice. It’s in your music.”

“Clever Mozzy.”

He shook his head. “But how come it has a… smell?”

I shrugged. “Because it has a body. It’s real and dangerous. And I don’t think we want to meet it just yet, so shush.” I dragged him farther into the tunnel, toward the trail that the old enemy had left behind—the perfect place to quicken the beast inside me.

As we grew nearer, I felt the rest of Luz’s restraints stripped away, the lures and tangles and spores of the beast spilling through my system. Finally I understood how it worked. Down here, the beast inside me didn’t want to eat Mozzy, it wanted to spread itself.

The old enemy somehow made it… horny.

Here was the hole, chewed and broken earth, like a wound in the side of the man-made tunnel, stained with the black stuff the enemy used to melt the earth. The ancient enemy was huge, I realized now, big enough to make its own tunnels, though it loved the subway’s free ride.

I dragged Moz into the gashed stone of its trail, pushed him against the crumbling edge, easily holding his shoulders in a grip he couldn’t break.

His pupils were as big as starless skies. “Min…”

“Shhh.” I put one ear against the tunnel wall and listened… The enemy was drifting away, my bad hunger growing as its influence faded. My teeth wanted to pull Moz to pieces, to sate my hunger in a way no chicken blood could touch…

“I need to give it to you now,” I said.

“But what—”

“Mozzy…” I put my hand over his mouth. “Here’s the thing: if we stand here talking, I think I’ll eat you.”

His eyes wide, he nodded.

Pulling away my hand, I leaned forward, my mouth covering his, and the beast exploded. It struggled to filter through my skin, trying to wring itself out every pore, squeezing itself into my sweat and spit and blood, saturating every drop of me.

Infecting Moz, injecting him.

The kiss took long seconds, and when it was over I was dripping.

I pushed myself back from Moz and stared into his glittering eyes. He was panting, beautiful, infected. Relief swept through me, and I kissed him softer this time, finally certain that he was safe. Just this once, sane had beaten crazy.

After that first kiss, the hungry beast inside me didn’t want to consume this new warrior in the struggle. It was satisfied.

But me… I was only getting started.

17. FOREIGN OBJECTS — PEARL-

I’d bought a new dress just for this, and nine kinds of makeup. My hair had been redone that afternoon, cut and blown and sculpted with goo. I was dripping borrowed bling and staring at my bathroom mirror, a contact lens balanced on the tip of my finger.

Color my mother ecstatic.

“You can do it, Pearl.” She was hovering behind me, similarly glammed.

“That’s not the question.” I stared at the contact lens, which shimmered like a tiny bowl of light. A dreadful, painful glow. “The question is whether I want to.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You said you wanted to look your best tonight.”

“Mmm.” Foolish words that had sent Mom into a spending rampage.

Back a million years ago when she was seventeen, she’d actually had a coming-out party, like a real old-fashioned debutante. She still had the pictures. And we’d stayed in New York City no matter how high the garbage got, no matter how dangerous the streets—because this was where the parties were. So she probably hoped this was the beginning of a new era of Pretty Pearl, no more blue jeans or glasses or bands.

“I could just go there blind.”

“Nonsense. To be truly lovely, one must make eye contact. And I don’t want you stumbling all over the art.”

“She’s a photographer, Mom. Photos are traditionally hung on the wall; you can’t stumble on them.” Typical. It was my mother who always got invited to these things, but she never bothered to Google the artist. Which was lucky, I guess. A glance would have revealed who else was on the guest list tonight, giving away the real reason I wanted to go.

“Quit stalling, Pearl. I know you can do this.”

“And how do you know that, Mom?”

“Because I wear contact lenses and so did your father. You’ve got the genes for it!”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks for passing on those sticking-a-finger-in-your-eye genes to me. Not to mention the crappy-eyesight genes.” I stared at the little lens gradually drying to razor-sharpness on my fingertip, imagining all my totally lateral caveman ancestors jamming rocks and sticks into their eyeballs, none of them realizing the whole thing would pay off a thousand generations later when I had to look good at an art gallery opening.

“Okay, guys, this is for you,” I said, taking a breath and prying my left eye open wide. As my finger approached, the little transparent disk grew until it blotted out everything, dissolving into a fit of blinking.

“Is it in?” my mother asked.

“How the hell should I know?” I opened one eye, then the other, squinting at myself in the mirror.

Blurry Pearl, clear Pearl, blurry Pearl, clear Pearl…

“Hey, I think it’s in.”

“See?” my mother said. “That was easy as pie.”

“Pi squared, maybe. Let’s get going.” I scooped new makeup into my brand-new handbag, its silver chain glittering softly in my blurry eye.

My mother frowned. “What about the other one?”

I alternated eyes again—blurry mother, clear mother—and shrugged. “Sorry, Mom. I don’t think I’ve got the genes for it.”

As long as I could recognize faces, the demimonde was good enough for me.

Out on the street, Elvis made a big deal about my new look, acting like he didn’t recognize me, trying to get me to blush. The older I got, the more he thought his job was to make me feel ten years old. Lately, he was tragically good at it.

The weird thing was, though, by the time we arrived at the gallery, I felt twenty-five. There weren’t any cameras popping as Elvis swung the limousine door open for me, but there was a guy with a clipboard and headset, other blinged-up art lovers sweeping into the entrance, their bodyguards piling up out in the street, the clink and chatter coming from the crowd inside… It was almost like going onstage.

Even with everything going on, New York still had gallery openings. Civilization was still kicking ass, and here I was, in costume and in character. Ready to charm.

Once inside the gallery, the first trick was extricating myself from Mom. She kept showing me off to friends, all of them dutifully not recognizing me and dropping their jaws, reading from the same script as Elvis. Soon Mom was striking up conversations with strangers, dropping “my daughter” comments and clearly craving “Not your sister?” in response.

And she wonders why I don’t dress up more.

Finally, though, I weaseled out of her orbit with the lame excuse of wanting to look at, you know, the art. Her fingers trailed on my shoulder as I slipped away, reminding everyone one more time that I was her daughter.

I made my way straight to a table full of champagne, rows and columns of it bubbling furiously, and smiled. The open bar: where else would a record company rep hang out at an art opening?

I snagged a glass and hovered near the table, keeping an eagle eye (just one) out for the face I’d downloaded that morning. My trap was finally set—I was ready. All my lines were memorized; I was dressed ravishingly and standing in the perfect spot. There was nothing more I could do but wait.

So I waited…

Twenty minutes later, my enthusiasm had faded.

No record company talent scout had materialized, the glass was empty, and my feet were unhappy in their new shoes. The party buzzed around me, ignoring my little black dress and borrowed bling, like I was some kind of nonentity. Bubbles rattled unpleasantly in my head.

All my life I’d wondered how my mother’s sole life purpose could be going to parties, even while the world was crumbling around her. Finally Google had shown me the answer: her reason for existence was to get me into this party. Astor Michaels, Red Rat Records’ most fawesome talent scout, was also the biggest collector of this photographer’s work. He’d discovered the New Sound, signing both Zombie Phoenix and Morgan’s Army—not huge, commercial bands, but gutsy bands like us.

It was a perfect match, like when Moz and I had been brought together. Surely this was fate playing with my mother’s social calendar.

But as I picked up my second glass and wandered through the crowd, squinting at two hundred half-blurry faces and recognizing none of them, I started to consider an awful possibility: could fate be messing with me?

What if Astor Michaels was out of town? Or busy scouting bands at some undiscovered club instead of here? What if Google had lied to me? All my efforts tonight would be wasted—in fact, my mother’s whole life would be wasted…

I stood there, dizzy on my feet, staring at a half-empty glass and realizing something equally dismaying: the champagne gene was another one my mom hadn’t passed on. Maybe it was my half-blurry vision or the buzz of the uncaring crowd around me, but I felt like reality was in a blender.

I had to get control.

I took a deep breath and pulled myself out of the crowd, wandering to the party’s edge to look at the pictures. They were gigantic photos of the sanitation crisis: glimmering mountains of plastic bags, garbage guys on strike, lots of rats. All were dramatic and weirdly beautiful, almost life-size, as if you could walk straight into them. Which begged the question: Why would you want this stuff on your wall when it was all happening right outside?

The crowd seemed to agree. People were crowded into the middle of the room, shrinking from the images of decomposition. Only a few of us hovered at the fringes of the party, sullen and extraneous, like sophomore guys at the senior prom.

Poor art lovers, I thought, and then, in a fit of champagne-stoked genius, I realized where Astor Michaels had been hiding.

He wasn’t here for the prom; he was here for the art. He was one of the sophomores.

I started to circle the room, ignoring the crowd in the middle this time, the ones who looked well connected and happy and cool. I looked for the lonely guys, the losers.

Halfway around, I spotted him out of the corner of my eye—my good eye, luckily. He was ogling a vast photo of a shrine built by sanitation workers out in the Bronx: praying hands and crosses and skulls (again!) all jumbled up to provide protection on their route.

I took a deep drink of champagne to steady myself, my lines beginning to tumble through my head.

“What am I listening to? Oh, just this lateral new band.”

My fingers fumbled with the sticky clasp of my new handbag, scrambling around inside until they found my music player at the very bottom. Its earphones were non-helpfully tangled with makeup and hair goo and a million other things I never normally carried. After long seconds of unwinding, I managed to drag the player out and get the phones into my ears. But where was my neck strap? I peered down into the bottomless handbag in horror, realizing I hadn’t brought it.

I flashed back to my hours spent at the Apple store looking for just the right strap: sleek black leather with a shiny steel USB connector. I could see it in my mind’s eye, still in its packaging, sitting on my bed with all the other crap.

And of course this stupid cocktail dress, like all stupid cocktail dresses, had no pockets. It would look way too obvious just carrying the music player in my hand, and a pair of earphones snaking out from my handbag wasn’t going to make me look like the hip young trendsetter I was supposed to be. The kind who says things like…

“No, they’re not signed. Everyone just knows about them.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think.

There was only one place to put it.

I took a gulp of champagne, switched the music player on, and dropped it down my cleavage. It fit perfectly and was kind of warm down there. Really warm—I looked down and realized that while scrabbling in my handbag I’d locked the screen backlight on.

Framed by the black velvet of my dress, my breasts glowed softly blue.

In my champagne haze, it was kind of cool looking. Carrying your music this way might not be the Taj Mahal of class, but it was definitely going to get the guy’s attention.

I moved closer.

“What language is she singing in? I don’t think it is one, really.”

The player was set to shuffle our four best songs— long, intense rants of Minerva’s peppered with Moz’s cleanest, simplest lines, Alana Ray shattering it all into a thousand glittering shapes, Zahler finally playing a proper bass underneath. As I drew nearer, the music began to synchronize with the bubbles in my bloodstream, my footsteps falling with the beat. I was cool and connected, seventeen and covered with bling, a record company’s dream demographic in the flesh.

The world began to shift around me, just like when we played, my fingers twitching with the keyboard parts. Huge photographs rolled past my shoulder, a galaxy of rats’ and cats’ eyes flickering on my blurry side.

“What’s their name? I don’t think they have a name yet, actually…”

By the time I walked up beside Astor Michaels, swirling one last smidgen of champagne in the bottom of my glass, I was cool and predatory and confident, the embodiment of our music.

He turned and looked at me, his eyes following the white cords from my ears down into my glowing cleavage. His gaze flashed a little, reflecting the soft blue light.

Then Astor Michaels smiled at me, and his teeth were pointy, a hundred times sharper than Minerva’s…

All my lines flew from my head, and I pulled my earphones out, pushing them toward him with quivering hands.

“You’ve got to listen, man,” I said. “This shit is paranormal.”