Even slitted against the dim candlelight, his eyes glowed, full of pity for me. He must have known what I’d wanted.
But she’d taken it instead.
Suddenly the desolate feeling in my stomach was swept away by fury: Minerva had done it again, hooked up with someone in the band—in my band. Even after what had happened with Mark and the System, after everything Luz had told her, Min had done this to me again. I clenched my fists. Of course she would throw it in my face now, when we were this close, the contracts near enough to touch, ready to be signed.
I felt Astor Michaels’s gaze, willing me to keep it together. For the good of the band. For the good of the New Sound… the music of monsters.
He snapped open the locks on his briefcase, pulled out his pen.
I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.
“Hi, guys,” I said. “Nice place.”
PART V
THE GIG
Study the Black Death, and you’ll understand one truth: when things start to go wrong, human beings always find ways to make them worse.
The year the Death came to Europe, a city called Caffa on the doorstep of Asia was under siege. When the attackers found themselves coming down with a strange new disease, they wisely decided to run. But first they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the city—so both sides would get the disease. Brilliant move.
When the Black Death was at its worst, the church decided to look for someone to blame and began to persecute heretics, Muslims, and Jews. As people fled these attacks, the disease fled with them. Nice work.
England and France had gone to war one year before the Black Death struck, but instead of making peace while the pandemic raged, they kept on fighting. In fact, they kept on fighting for 116 years, keeping their people poor, malnourished, susceptible to disease. Now that’s commitment.
The Black Death was helped along by war, by panic, even by the weather, but it had no greater ally than human stupidity. Sometimes, you wonder how our species has made it this far.
Not without a lot of help, I assure you.
NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:
411–421
23. MORAL HAZARD
— ALANA RAY-
I still hadn’t made a decision, but my hands were steady.
I’d been here at the nightclub more than three hours and hadn’t needed to drum my fingers or touch my forehead even once. Like being suspended in that moment before playing, the cadence of the universe around me needed no adjustments.
The club was at one end of a long alleyway in the meatpacking district, one free of garbage, the walls painted with giant murals and tagged with graffiti. I’d come in through a huge loading dock, trucks full of equipment rumbling in a tight line, waiting to disgorge.
Inside, the space was more than three hundred feet from stage to back wall, the echoes returning lazily, almost a whole second late—two beats at 120 beats per minute. Useless for playing, but that was fine with me. I liked my fake echoes with this band, just to be in control of something. My visions, my emotions, even the patterns I played all seemed to spring unbidden from the air, but at least my echo boxes obeyed me.
Astor Michaels had asked me to come early for sound check, so that the engineers could get used to my paint buckets. I’d brought thirty-six to arrange in eight stacks (S8 = 36), along with my special buckets: unusual sizes and thicknesses, even the broken ones that gave off the buzz of cracked plastic.
Unlike Pearl, the engineers here thanked me when I ran only two channels from my board to theirs. They had four bands to worry about tonight—each with its own array of treble, bass, effects, and volume settings—and wanted things as simple as possible. They let me hang out for the whole sound check, watching as they plastered the club’s huge mixing board with notes scribbled on masking tape. Its backside sprouted a tangle of cables, four bands’ worth of musical specificities sculpted in color-coded spaghetti.
I was still watching them work when I felt Astor Michaels behind me.
“Miss Jones,” he said, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“I prefer Alana Ray.”
He smiled. “Sorry to be formal, but we have business to conduct.” The papers rustled, making the air ripple. “You’re the only one who hasn’t signed yet. Not embarrassed about your penmanship, are you?”
“Top of my class,” I said, then shrugged. “The competition was less than average.”
“Ah. Didn’t mean it that way.” He pulled out a thick fountain pen. “I’m sure your signature’s more legible than Zahler’s—or his mother’s, for that matter.”
The drummer on stage started a long fill, rolling across his whole set, the sound phasing and twisting as engineers played with their settings. For a few moments, we couldn’t speak.
When the drumroll stuttered to a halt, Astor Michaels spread the contracts out on the mixing board. “Shall we?”
I stared down at them, all those carefully chosen, hair-splitting words. When I’d read the contract, it had made a tangle in my mind, the numbered and cross-referenced paragraphs twisted around one another like the theme of a fugue.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m concerned about… the ethics of signing.”
“Ethics?” He laughed. “Good God, Alana Ray. This band has four minors, two of whom are bat-shit crazy. Minerva had to forward-date her contract to next week. We’ve got a simpleton and a control freak as well. The ethics of you signing? You’re practically the only one of sound mind!”
I didn’t like how he was talking about the others, but first I had to explain: “I’m not concerned about my own competence. I am worried about tonight.”
“Stage fright?” His voice softened. “Is it tough with your condition?”
I shook my head. “This is not about me. What if signing this contract risks harm to others? In the law, that is called a moral hazard.”
“I don’t follow you.”
I looked up from the mass of words spread out across the mixing board, finally meeting Astor Michaels’s eyes. “I think that something dangerous may happen here tonight, because of us. Because of what Minerva is.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “So you’ve… seen something?”
“Only what I always see when she sings.”
“Your little Loch Ness hallucination?” He smiled.
“I also saw it at the Morgan’s Army gig, but stronger.” The drummer hit his snare, its echo bouncing across the vast club. There would be a thousand people here tonight. Huge stacks of amplifiers waited on either side of the stage, buzzing in the silence, crinkling the air. “More people makes the beast bigger; more sound makes it bigger.”
“I hope so, Alana Ray, but that doesn’t make it real.” Astor Michaels frowned. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
He stared at me for a moment, genuinely puzzled. Then he shook his head. “We’ve both seen strange things in our lives, I’ll grant you that. We’ve both had… conditions to deal with. But both of us made something from them. That’s why we’re sitting here across this contract, you and me.”
I looked at his teeth, remembering what Pearl had told me on the phone last night. How Astor Michaels had made a career out of making more insects.