The Last Days

The Plague of Justinian was the first time the Black Death appeared.

Fifteen hundred years ago, the emperor Justinian had just embarked on his greatest work: the rebuilding of the Roman Empire. He wanted to reunite its two halves and place the known world under Roman rule once more.

But as his vast war began, the Black Death came. It swept across the eastern Mediterranean, leaving millions dead in its wake. Thousands died daily in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and Justinian was forced to watch his dreams crumble.

Oddly, historians aren’t certain what the Black Death was. Bubonic plague? Typhus? Something else? A few historians suggest that it was a random assortment of diseases brought on by one overriding factor: an explosion of the rat population fostered by the Roman army’s vast stores of grain.

That’s close, but not quite.

Whatever caused it, the Black Death’s effects were clear. The Roman Empire slipped into history at last. Much of the mathematics, literature, and science of the ancients was lost. A dark age descended on Europe.

Or, as we said back then, “Humanity lost that round.”

NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

142–146

7. STRAY CATS — ZAHLER-

My dogs were acting paranormal that day, all edgy and anxious.

The first bunch seemed fine when I picked them up. In the air-conditioned lobby of their fancy Hell’s Kitchen building, they were full of energy, eager to be walked. Ernesto, the doorman, handed over the four leashes and an envelope stuffed with cash, my pay for that week. And then—like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—I headed one block uptown to pick up three more.

I got the idea of being a dog walker from an old trick of mine. Whenever I was totally bummed, I’d go over to the Tompkins Square Park dog run—a big open space that’s just for dogs and owners—and watch them jumping on one another, sniffing butts and chasing balls. Huge dogs and tiny ones, graceful retrievers and spastic poodles were all jumbled together and all fawesomely ecstatic to get out of their tiny, lonely New York apartments and into a chase, a growling match, or a mad dash to nowhere in particular. No matter how depressed I was, the sight of scrappy puppies facing off with German shepherds always made me feel much better. So why not be paid to get cheered up?

You don’t make much per dog per hour, but if you can handle six or seven at a time, it starts to add up. Most times it’s easy money.

Sometimes it’s not.

Straight out the door, the heat and stink seemed to get to them. The two Doberman brothers who usually kept order were nipping at each other, and the schnauzer and bull terrier were acting all paranoid, zigzagging every time a car door slammed, too jittery even to sniff at piles of garbage. As we battled down the street, their leashes kept tangling, like long hair on a breezy day.

Things only got worse when I picked up the second pack. The doorman realized that the owner of the insanely huge mastiff had forgotten to leave money for me and buzzed up to ask her about it. While I waited, the two packs started tangling with each other, nipping and jumping, their barking echoing off the marble walls and floor of the lobby.

I tried to unwind them and restore order, one nervous eyeball on the elevator. It would be totally unfool for my customers to see their dogs brawling when they were supposed to be getting exercise. So when nobody answered the doorman’s buzzing, I didn’t stick around to complain, just hauled them out of there and back into the heat.

I was already wishing I hadn’t been in such a hurry to show Moz our possible drummer. A trip to the anarchy of Times Square was exactly what my unruly dog pack didn’t need.

Here’s what I’ve learned about dogs:

They’re a lot like pretty girls. Having one or two around makes everything more fun, but when you get a whole bunch together, it turns into one big power struggle. Every time you add or subtract from the pack, everything gets rearranged. The top dog might wind up number two or fall all the way to the bottom. As I watched the Doberman brothers trying to stare down the mastiff, I was starting to wonder if being in a band was pretty much the same thing—more Nature Channel than MTV.

And really, all the jostling was a big waste of time, because Pearl was clearly the right girl to run things.

Don’t get me wrong, the Mosquito was my oldest and best friend. I would never have picked up a guitar if it hadn’t been for him, and he was the fawesomest musician I’d ever seen. But Moz wasn’t cut out to be in charge. Of anything. He’d never held on to even the crappiest job, because any kind of organized activity—waiting in line, filling out forms, showing up on time—made him all buzzy. There was no way he could keep five or six unruly musicians on their leashes and pull them all in the same direction.

As for me, I thought the little dogs had the right attitude. The schnauzer didn’t really care whether the mastiff or the Dobermans took charge: he just wanted to sniff some butt and get on with the walk.

He just wanted the struggle to be over.

Today, though, nobody was in control—certainly not me. The seven leashes in my hand didn’t mean squat. Each time we got to an intersection, I’d try to pull us toward Times Square, but the pack kept freaking out about every stray scent, surging off in random directions. I’d let them wander a bit until they got it out of their system, then pull them back toward the way I wanted us to go. We weren’t going to set any crosstown speed records, but at least there was plenty of time before we were supposed to meet Moz, who, like I just mentioned, was probably going to be late anyway.

The weird thing was how much the vacant lots scared them. Even the mastiff was slinking past open spaces, when normally she would have charged straight in for a run.

How weird was that? A creature the size of a horse who’d been cooped up in a Manhattan apartment all day, and all she wanted to do was cling to me, shivering like a wet poodle.

In this mood, the commotion of Times Square was going to turn my pack into a portable riot. It seemed like Moz and I might have to see my drummer some other day.

Then we passed the mouth of a dark alley, and things really got paranormal.

The bull terrier—who always has to pee on everything—took advantage of the anarchy to pull us all in. He trotted to the piss-stained wall, cocked his leg halfway, then suddenly froze, staring into the darkness. The yapping of the other dogs choked off, like seven muzzles had been strapped on all at once.

The alleyway was full of eyes.

Hundreds of tiny faces gazed up at us from the shadows. Behind me trucks rushed past, and I could feel the warmth of sunlight on my back, the reassuring pace and movement of the real world. But in the alley everything was frozen, time interrupted. The bulbous bodies of the rats were motionless, huddled against garbage bags, their teeth bared, heads poking out of holes and crannies. Nothing moved but a shimmer of whiskers as a thousand nostrils tested the air.

In the farthest corner, a lone cat was perched high on a leaking pile of garbage. It stared down at me, unimpressed by my small army of dogs, offended by my presence in the alley. I felt tiny under its arrogant gaze—like some street kid who’d stumbled into a five-star restaurant looking for a place to pee.

The cat blinked its red eyes, then yawned, its pink tongue curling.

This is totally unfool, I thought. If my Dobermans spotted that cat, they’d go after it, dragging me and the whole pack deep into the alley. I could imagine myself returning seven rat-bitten, half-rabid canines to the doormen and never seeing another dime of dog-walking money again.

“Come on, guys,” I murmured, gently pulling the fistful of leashes backward. “Nothing to see here.”

But they were paralyzed, transfixed by the galaxy of eyes.

The cat opened its mouth again, letting out a long, irritated mrrr-row…

And the Dobermans ran like scaredy-cats.

They both leaped straight up, twisting around in midair, and charged past me toward the sunlight. The others followed in a mob, wrapping their leashes around my legs and dragging me stumbling into the street.

It was all I could do to stay on my feet as the mastiff charged ahead, opening up into her full gallop. She pulled the rest of us straight out onto the road, where a yellow flash of taxi screeched past dead ahead of us. A squat little delivery van squealed around us, horn blaring, scaring the mastiff into a sharp left turn.

We were headed down the middle of the street now, a garbage truck thundering along in front of us, the delivery van behind. We were in traffic, as if I’d decided to take a dog-powered chariot out for a little spin.

Unfortunately, I’d sort of forgotten to bring the chariot, so I was stumbling and staggering, seven leashes still tangled around my legs. And if I fell down, I knew the mastiff would keep going, galloping along until my face had been rubbed off completely on the asphalt. Even if my face friction somehow brought the pack to a halt, the pursuing delivery van would squash us all flat.

It was still blaring its horn, because that was clearly helping, and the two guys on the back of the garbage truck were laughing, pointing their giant-gloved fingers at me. A pair of bike messengers shot past in polka-dotted Lycra, me and my dogs just another bunch of clowns at the rodeo.

The whole procession swerved around some street work ahead, and suddenly my feet were slipping across an expanse of loose sand. I spotted an abandoned pizza box and planted my sneakers on it. Then I was skidding, my free hand in the air, riding the box like it was a boogie board at the beach.

Just when it was getting fun, the garbage truck began to slow, pulling up in front of a big apartment building with long, turd-shaped garbage bags piled outside. The truck filled the whole street, leaving nowhere for the pack to go.

Our momentum stalled, and the pack’s energy wrapped itself into a tightly wound bundle of nipping and barking. By now the little dogs could hardly even stand, reduced as they were to a spaghetti mishmash of leashes and legs. Even the mastiff was tired out, her long, curving tongue lapping at the air.

One of the garbage guys swung himself down to work a big lever on the side of the truck, its huge maw opening in front of us with a metal screech. The other jumped off and shouted at me through the din.

“Hey, boss! You didn’t take those pooches into that alley back there, did you?” He pointed over my shoulder, but I knew which one he meant.

“Um, yeah?”

He shook his head. “Bad idea. Even we don’t go down there no more. Not worth it.”

I blinked, still trying to catch my breath. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear about the crisis? Way things are going, you got to be respectful. Let the rats have some of the city back, you know?” He laughed, patting the rumbling metal expanse with his gloved hand. “Especially if you don’t got a big truck to protect you. Bunch of pooches isn’t enough these days.”

He turned to the pile of bags behind him and kicked one viciously. Waiting for a second to make sure no tiny creatures scattered from it, he shouldered the bag and began to feed its length into the giant steel maw.

I blew out a slow breath, knelt down, and started to untangle my dogs, wondering what they and the Sanitation Department knew that I didn’t. Moz had said some paranormal stuff about the woman who’d tossed him her guitar—that she was part of something bigger—and I’d read there was a crime wave now, to go along with the heat and the garbage.

But wasn’t it always like this in the middle of every long summer, brains beginning to zigzag in the fawesome temperatures?

Of course, the day before, Moz and I had watched that black water spraying out of a fire hydrant, as if something old and rotten had been dredged up beneath the city. Despite the heat bouncing off the asphalt, I shivered, thinking about what I’d seen back in that alley. That cat was in charge of all those rats, one glance had told me. Like my dogs, those glowing eyes were one big pack, but the feline had total control, no jostling or butt-sniffing required, like they were all family. And that just wasn’t natural.

The delivery truck guy blared his horn at me one more time—like it was me in his way and not the garbage truck—so I gave him the finger. On the other side of his glass, his face broke into a smile, as if a little disrespect was all he’d been looking for.

Before the garbage truck was done, I got the pack unwound and back onto the sidewalk. We headed across town, toward the bottom end of Times Square, where we were supposed to meet Moz.

Maybe we could see my drummer after all. The hundred-yard dash had finally worn my dogs out, and the mastiff trotted ahead, tail high, having taken over through the mysteries of dog-pack democracy. Maybe it was because she’d led us down the street to safety, or because the Dobermans had fled first from the rat-infested alley.

Whatever. At least it was all decided now, and someone other than me was in charge.

8. CASH MONEY CREW — MOZ-

Times Square was buzzing.

Even in broad daylight, the battery of lights and billboards rattled me, rubbing my brain raw. Huge video screens were wrapped around the curving buildings over my head, shimmering like water in the rain, ads for computers and cosmetics flickering across them. News bites scrolled past on glittering strips, punctuated by nonsense stock-ticker symbols.

I was an insect in a canyon of giant TVs, mystified and irrelevant.

And penniless.

I’d never felt poor before, never once. I’d always thought it was moronic to ogle car ads and store windows, but now that I needed it, I saw money everywhere—in silver initials on thousand-dollar handbags, woven like gold threads into suits and silk scarves, and in the flickering images overhead. On the subway coming up here, I’d coveted the dollars invisibly stockpiled in magnetic strips on MetroCards, even the change rattling in beggars’ paper cups.

Money, money, everywhere.

I couldn’t go back to my piece-of-crap guitar after that Stratocaster. I had to own that same smooth action, those purring depths and crystal highs. Of course, maybe it didn’t have to be a ’75 with gold pickups. In the music stores on Forty-eighth Street, I’d found a few cheaper guitars I could live with, but I still needed to scrape together about two thousand bucks before the crazy woman returned.

Problem was, I had no idea how.

I’m not lazy, but money and me don’t mix. Every time I get a job, something always happens. The boss tells me to smile, pretending I want to be at work when I’d rather be anywhere else. Or makes me call in every week to ask for my hours, and it turns into a whole extra job finding out when I’m supposed to be at my job. And whenever I explain these issues, someone always asks me the dreaded question, If you hate it so much, why don’t you just quit?

And I say, “Good point.” And quit.

In that flickering canyon of advertising, two thousand dollars had never seemed so far away.

Zahler was waiting at the corner where he’d said to meet, seven dogs in tow.

He was panting and sweaty, but his entourage looked happy—gazing up at the signs, sniffing at tourists passing by. It was all just flickering lights to them.

No jobs, no money. Lucky dogs.

“How much you get paid for that, Zahler?”

“Not enough,” he panted. “Almost got killed on the way down here!”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. One of the little ones was nibbling me, and I knelt and petted him. “This guy looks deadly.”

“No really, Moz. There was this alley… and this cat.”

“An alley cat? And you with only seven dogs.” One of which was gigantic, like a horse with long, flowing hair. I stroked its head, laughing at Zahler.

Still panting, he pointed his free hand at one of the little ones. “It’s all his fault, for peeing.”

“Huh?”

“It was just—never mind.” He frowned. “Listen, you hear that drumming? It’s her. Come on.”

I grabbed the monster-dog’s leash from Zahler, and then two more, pulling the three of them away from a pretzel cart whose ripples of heat smelled like seared salt and fresh bread. “So, you think Pearl will approve of this drummer?”

“Sure. Pearl’s all about talent, and this girl is fexcellent.”

“But she plays on the street, Zahler? She could be homeless or something.”

He snorted. “Compared to Pearl, you and me are practically homeless. Didn’t you see that apartment?”

“Yeah, I saw that apartment.” I could still smell the money crammed into every corner.

“And there were stairs. More floors than we even saw.”

“Sure, Pearl’s insanely rich. And this is supposed to convince me she can deal with a homeless drummer?”

“We don’t know that this girl’s homeless, Moz. Anyway, all I’m saying is that if Pearl can deal with you and me, she’s no snob.”

I shrugged. Snob wasn’t the word I would’ve used.

“Are you still bummed because of what she did to the Riff?”

“No. Once I got used to the idea of flushing all those years of practice down the toilet, I got over it.”

“Dude! You are still bummed.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Look, I know it hurts, Moz. But she’s going to make us huge!”

“I get it, Zahler.” I sighed, angling my dogs away from a hot-dog cart. Of course, practicing yesterday had hurt—but so did getting a tattoo, or watching a perfect sunset, or playing till your fingers bled. Sometimes you just had to sit there and deal with the pain.

Pearl had rubbed me raw, but she knew how to listen. She could hear the heart of the Big Riff, and she hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t have if I’d been listening. I’d had six years to figure out what she’d recognized in six minutes. That’s what made me cringe.

That and the whammy she’d put on Zahler. He wouldn’t shut up about how brilliant Pearl was, how she was going to make us big, how things were finally going to happen. Like all those years with just the two of us had been a waste of time.

Zahler had a total crush on Pearl—that was obvious. But if I said so out loud, he’d just roast me with his death stare. And talk about wasting time: girls like her were about as likely to hook up with boys like us as Zahler’s dogs were to pull him to the moon.

“Okay, I thought you said she was a drummer.”

“What?” Zahler cried above the rumble. “You don’t call that drumming?”

“Well, she’s got drumsticks. But I thought drummers were to supposed to have drums.” I shook my head, trying to keep my three curious dogs from surging into the rapt crowd of tourists, Times Square locals, and loitering cops surrounding the woman.

“Yeah, well, imagine if she did have drums. Listen to how much sound she’s getting out of those paint cans!”

“Those are actually paint buckets, Zahler.”

“What’s the diff?”

I sighed. Painting had been one of my shorter-lived jobs, because they just gave you the colors to use, instead of letting you decide. “Paint cans are the metal containers that paint comes in. Paint buckets are the plastic tubs you mix it up in. Neither of them are drums.”

“But listen, Moz. Her sound is huge!”

My brain was already listening—my mouth was just giving Zahler a hard time out of habit and general annoyance—and the woman really did have a monster sound. Around her was arrayed every size of paint bucket you could buy, some stacked, some upside down, a few on their sides, making a sort of giant plastic xylophone.

It took me a minute to figure out how a bunch of paint buckets could have so much power. She’d set up on a subway grate, suspending herself over a vast concrete echo chamber. Her tempo matched the timing of the echoes rumbling up from below, as if a ghost drummer were down there following her, exactly one beat behind. As my head tilted, I heard other ghosts: quicker echoes from the walls around us and from the concrete awning overhead.

It was like an invisible drum chorus, led effortlessly from its center, her sticks flashing gracefully across battered white plastic, long black dreadlocks flying, eyes shut tight.

“She’s pretty fool, Zahler,” I admitted.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Especially if we could rebuild this chunk of Times Square every place we played.”

He let out an exasperated sigh. “What, the echoes? You never heard of digital delay?”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the same. Wouldn’t be as big.”

“Doesn’t have to be as big, Moz. We don’t want her playing a gigantic drum solo like this; we want her smaller, fitting in with the rest of the band. Didn’t you learn anything yesterday?”

I glared at him, the anger spilling out from the place I thought I’d had it tucked away, rippling through me again. “Yeah, I did: that you’re a total sucker for every chick who comes along with an instrument. Even if it’s a bunch of paint buckets!”

His jaw dropped. “Dude! That is totally unfool! You just said she was great. And you know Pearl’s fexcellent too. Now you’re going to get all boys-only on me?”

I turned away, thoughts echoing in my brain, like my skull was suddenly empty and lined with concrete. Between the Stratocaster that wasn’t mine, the other guitars I couldn’t afford, Pearl’s demolition of the Big Riff, and now the thought of paint buckets, it’d been too many adjustments to make in forty-eight hours.

I almost wished it was just Zahler and me again. We’d been like a team that was a hundred points behind—we weren’t going to win anything, so we could just play and have fun. But Pearl had changed that. Everything was up in the air, and how it all came down mattered now.

Part of me hated her for that and hated Zahler for going along so easily.

He kept quiet, wrangling the dogs while I calmed myself down.

“All right,” I finally said. “Let’s talk to her. What have we got to lose?”

We waited till she was packing up, stacking the buckets into one big tower. Her muscles glowed with sweat, and a few splinters from a stick she’d broken rolled in the breeze from a subway passing underneath.

She glanced at us and our seven dogs.

“You’re pretty good,” I said.

She jutted her chin toward a paint bucket that was right side up and half full of change and singles, then went back to stacking.

“Actually, we were wondering if you wanted to play with us sometime.”

She shook her head, one of her eyes blinking rapidly. “This corner is mine. Had it for a year.”

“Hey, we’re not moving in on you,” Zahler spoke up, waving his free hand. “We’re talking about you playing in our band. Rehearsing and recording and stuff. Getting famous.”

I cringed. “Getting famous” had to be the lamest reason for doing anything.

She shrugged, just a twitch of her shoulders. “How much?”

“How much… what?” Zahler said.

But it was obvious to me. The same thing that had been obvious all day.

“Money,” I answered. “She wants money to play with us.”

His eyes bugged. “You want cash?”

She took a step forward and pulled a photo ID card from her pocket, waved it in Zahler’s face. “See that? That’s from the MTA. Says I can play down in the subway, legal and registered. Had to sit in front of a review panel to get that.” As she put the card away, a little shiver went through her body. “Except I don’t go down there anymore.”

She kicked the upturned paint bucket, the pile of loose change clanking like a metallic cough. “Seventy, eighty bucks in there. Why would I play for free?”

“Whoa, sorry.” Zahler started to pull his dogs away, giving me a look like she’d asked for our blood.

I didn’t move, though, staring at the bucket, at the bills fluttering on top. There were fives in there—it probably totaled a hundred easy. She had every right to ask for money. The world was all about money; only a lame-ass bunch of kids wouldn’t know that.

“Okay,” I said. “Seventy-five a rehearsal.”

Zahler froze, his eyes popping again.

“How much for a gig?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. One-fifty?”

“Two hundred.”

I sighed. The words I don’t know had just cost me fifty bucks. That’s how it worked with money: you had to know, or at least act like you did. “Okay. Two hundred.”

I held out my hand to shake, but she just passed me her business card.

“Are you crazy, Moz? Pearl’s going to freak when she finds out she has to pay for a drummer.”

“She’s not paying anyone, Zahler. I am.”

“Yeah, right. And where are you going to get seventy-five bucks?”

I looked down at the dogs. They were staring in all directions at the maelstrom of Times Square, gawking like a bunch of tourists from Jersey. I tried to imagine rounding up customers, going door-to-door like Zahler had, putting up signs, making schedules. No way.

My plan was much better.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah, sure you do. But what about the Strat? You can’t save up for a guitar if you’re paying out seventy-five bucks two or three times a week.”

“I’ll figure that out when its owner shows up again. If she shows up.”

Zahler let out his breath, not sure what to make of this.

I looked down at the card: Alana Ray, Drummer. No address, just a cell-phone number, but if she could make a hundred bucks a day in cash, somehow I doubted she was homeless.

It had been so simple hiring her, a million times simpler than I’d imagined. No arguing about influences, getting famous, or who was in charge. Just a few numbers back and forth.

Money had made it easy.

“Moz, you’re freaking me out. You’re, like, the tightest guy I know. You never bought your own amplifier, and I’ve only seen you change your strings about twice in the last six years.”

I nodded. I’d always waited until they rusted out from under my fingers.

“And now you’re going to pay out hundreds of dollars?” Zahler said. “Why don’t we find another drummer? One who’s got real drums and doesn’t cost money.”

“One who’s that good?”

“Maybe not. But Pearl said she knew a few.”

“We don’t have to run to her. We said that we’d handle this. So I’ll pay.” I turned to him. “And don’t tell Pearl about the money, okay?”

Zahler groaned. “Whoa, now I get it. You want to pay this girl so she owes you, right? You want her to be your drummer, not Pearl’s.” He shook his head. “That is some dumb-ass logic at work, Moz. We’re supposed to be a band.”

“Pearl’s already paying for rehearsal space.”

“Which is no big deal for her. You’re getting into a spending contest with a girl who lives in an apartment that has stairs. Whole other floors!”

I looked down at my tattered shoes. “It’s not a contest, Zahler. It’s just business.”

“Business?” He laughed. “You don’t know jack about business.”

I looked up at him, expecting to feel the death stare, but he was just confused. I didn’t understand myself, not completely, but I knew I had to get some part of this band under control. If I let Pearl decide everything and pay for everything, Zahler and I would wind up just a couple of sidekicks along for the ride. “Just don’t tell her about the money, okay?”

He blinked, his dogs winding around his feet in disarray. I saw him wondering if I’d gone insane, wondering if I was going to screw this whole thing up, and knew I was right on the edge of losing him.

Which was fine, if he really thought I was that hopeless. Maybe it was better to walk away now than later.

But finally, he exhaled. “Okay. Whatever. I won’t tell Pearl you’re paying. I guess I can pitch in some of my dog money too.”

I shook my head. “I’ve got it covered.”

“But maybe we should warn Pearl… before we all show up for rehearsal.”

I frowned. “Warn her about what?”

“Um, that our new drummer drums on paint buckets…”

9. FEAR — PEARL-

I took the subway to Brooklyn, so Mom wouldn’t find out from Elvis.

Skittering sounds wafted up from the tracks as I waited for a train, the shuffling of tiny feet among discarded coffee cups and newspapers. The platform was empty except for me, the tunnels murmuring with echoes. The subways sounded wrong these days, almost alive, like there was something big down here. Something breathing.

I hated facing the subway on Sunday mornings, with no rush-hour crowds to protect me, but we didn’t have much choice about when to rehearse. Minerva said that church was the only thing that kept Luz away till after noon.

This would all be much easier when we didn’t have to sneak Minerva out of her room, but she needed to join the band now. Lying around in bed all day was never going to cure her. She had to get out of that dark room, meet some new people, and, most of all, sing her brains out.

Moz, Zahler, and I had rehearsed together four times now—we had a B section for the Big Riff and two more half-formed songs. We were better every time we played, but we needed structure: verses and choruses, a drummer too. We didn’t have time to wait for Min to get completely well. The world was in too much of a hurry around us.

Except for the F train, of course. Ten minutes later, it still hadn’t come, and I hoped it wasn’t broken down again. The subways were having some kind of weird trouble this summer. Minor earthquakes, they said on TV—Manhattan’s bedrock settling.

That was also the official explanation for the black water infecting the pipes. They said it wasn’t dangerous, even if they didn’t know exactly what it was—it evaporated too quickly for anyone to find out. Most people were drinking bottled water, of course. Mom was bathing in Evian. I wasn’t sure I believed any of it, but in any case, I didn’t have time for earthquakes today. The rehearsal space was reserved in my name, on my credit card—the others couldn’t get in without me. If I was late getting up to Sixteenth Street, everything would fall apart.

I fished out my cell phone. It searched for a signal, until a tremulous 7:58 A.M. appeared. One hour to get to Brooklyn and back.

Still hovering on the screen was the last number I’d called the night before—Moz’s—to remind him again about this morning.

Lonely and nervous on the empty platform, I pressed send.

“Yeah?” a croaky voice answered.

“Moz?”

“Mmm,” came his annoyed grumble. “Pearl? Crap! Am I late?”

“No, it’s only eight.”

“Oh.” He scratched his head so hard I could hear it over the cell-phone crackle. “So what’s up?”

“I’m on my way out to Brooklyn to pick up Minerva. I was wondering if… you wanted to come.”

“To Brooklyn?”

That’s how he said it: Brooklyn? Like I wanted to drag him to Bombay.

I should have given up. For two weeks now I’d been trying to connect with Moz, but he always kept his distance. If only I hadn’t messed up that first rehearsal, the one where I’d pulled the Big Riff apart. I should have gone slowly, respecting what had been conjured between us when the Strat had fallen from the sky. But instead I’d decided to dazzle him with nine kinds of brilliance. Clever, Pearl.

Eight A.M. was probably not the best time to break my losing streak, but for two seconds I’d imagined that maybe this morning—the morning we became a real band—might be different.

I kept talking, trying to make it sound fun. “Yeah. I didn’t explain this before, but it’s kind of a ninja mission, getting her out of there.”

“Kind of a what?”

“Kind of tricky. Her parents have this thing about…” Insanity? Abduction? “Well, let’s just say I could use your help.”

I hadn’t said much about Min to anyone yet, except what a lateral singer she was. It wouldn’t hurt if Moz got used to her weirdness before she met the rest of them. And it would be nice just having someone beside me on the way out there, even if he only waited outside while I snuck in to get her.

“Look, uh, Pearl…” he said. “I just woke up.”

“I sort of figured that. But I’m at the F station down from your house. You could get here in five minutes.”

Silence crackled in my ear; a breeze stirred newspapers on the tracks.

I sighed. “Look, it’s no big deal. Sorry to wake you up.”

“That’s okay. My alarm’s about to go off anyway. See you at nine.”

“Yeah. You’re going to love Minerva. And a drummer! It’s going to be fawesome, huh?”

“Sure. Totally.”

I felt like I was supposed to say more, something to get him revved up for our first real rehearsal. “Don’t forget your Strat.”

“It’s not mine. But yeah, see you soon.” Click.

I slipped the phone back into my pocket, letting another sigh slip through my teeth. I’d let him take the Stratocaster home after the second rehearsal, but that hadn’t changed anything between us. I was still Boss Pearl.

The newspapers stirred on the tracks again, one rolling over restlessly. I felt the platform rumbling under my feet, and my stomach tightened. As the sound steadily grew into a roar, it pushed all the thoughts from my head, thundering across me as if something huge was about to burst from the tunnel, overpowering all my plans.

But it was just the F train pulling in.

In the past two weeks, Minerva’s block had gotten worse. The garbage had been massed into a few huge, leaking mountains. Like how you deal with snow: push it into piles, then wait for the sun to make it go away.

Except garbage doesn’t melt, and snow doesn’t smell bad.

It was more than weird. Mom always bitched about this or that neighborhood going to seed, but I’d figured that took decades, longer than I’d been alive anyway. Until this summer, New York had always looked pretty much the same to me. But this part of Brooklyn seem to change every time I saw it, like someone dying of a disease before my eyes.

Luz always talked about “the sickness” like it wasn’t just Minerva but the whole city—maybe the whole world—that was afflicted, all of it a prelude to the big struggle. Only she never said what the struggle was actually about. Good versus evil? Angels versus demons? Crazy versus sane?

Crazy Versus Sane. Now there was a band name that fit us like a glove.

The early morning shadows stretched down the block, sunlight spattering the asphalt through the leaves, dancing with the breeze. I crept past the garbage mountains, trying not to listen to the things inside them and wishing I didn’t have the Taj Mahal of hearing. No people were on the street, not even any dogs. Just the occasional red flash of cats’ eyes watching me from overgrown front yards.

The front-door key was where Min had told me her mom kept it, under an iron boot-wipe by the door. It was covered with grime and stained my fingertips a red-brown rusty color when I tried to wipe it off. But it fit smoothly into the lock, the bolt sliding across with a soft click.

The door swung open onto a silent audience of skulls.

I took slow, careful steps into the darkness, listening for any noise from the wooden planks underfoot. According to Minerva, her parents were deep sleepers—her little brother, Max, was the one we had to worry about. I just hoped Min was awake and dressed, not surfing some nightmare that would make her scream when I opened her door.

I took the stairs slowly, my soft-soled fencing shoes pressing on the edges of the steps, not in the creaky middles. As a little kid, I’d once gotten up at midnight and pushed down every key of our baby grand from top to bottom, pressing so delicately that the hammers never struck the strings, making not a whisper of sound the whole way. Once you’ve managed that, you can pretty much do anything without waking the grown-ups.

The house creaked and settled around me, like a huge old instrument in need of tuning. I passed the blenderized-reality crucifixes, her parents’ room, my slow, trembling steps carrying me silently to Min’s door. Staring at the heavy sliding bolt that locked her in, I suddenly wished I didn’t have to touch the scrollwork symbols carved into the bolt: cat’s eyes and centipedes, worms with eyes and spindly legs, and, of course, more skulls.

I swallowed as my fingertips grasped the cool metal, then slid the bolt slowly across. I opened the door and slipped inside.

Minerva was still under the covers, still asleep.

“Min!” I hissed.

A cold hand fell on the back of my neck.

10. THE MUSIC — MINERVA-

Pearl was shiny, glistening, smelling of fear. There was lightning in her eyes—like Zombie when you rub his fur the wrong way hard.

She made sputtering noises, so I put a finger to my lips. “Shhh, Pearl. Mustn’t wake Maxwell.”

“Jesus, Min!” she hissed. “You scared the crap out of me!”

I giggled. I’d been giggling for half an hour, waiting in that corner to make her jump. That was the first thing being sick taught me: it’s fun to scare people.

“Look!” I pointed at the Min-shaped bundle in my bed. “It works like magic.”

“Yeah, nine kinds of supernatural.” As her breathing slowed, Pearl’s eyes swept up and down me, still flashing. I was dressed in cocktail black and dark glasses, more Saturday night than Sunday morning, but it felt fantastic to be in real clothes after months of pajamas. The dress squeezed me tight, shaping my body, embracing me. My four thickest necklaces lay tangled against my breasts, and my nails were painted black.

I shook my head, making my earrings tinkle.

“Cute,” she whispered. “You look like an Egyptian princess crossed with a twelve-year-old goth.”

I stuck my tongue out at her and snapped for Zombie. He scampered over and jumped into my arms. “Let’s go. I want to make music.”

Pearl glared at him, still pissy. “You can’t bring a cat to rehearsal, Min!”

“I know, silly.” I giggled softly, stroking Zombie’s head. “He’s just going out to play.”

She frowned. “But Luz says he’s not supposed to go out.”

“We can’t leave poor Zombie in here. He’ll be all lonely.” I stared into his eyes and pouted. “What if he starts scratching on my door and yowling? Could wake up Daddy.”

Pearl pushed her glasses up her nose, which she does when she’s being bossy. “Luz will freak if she sees him outside.”

“Luz is mean to Zombie,” I said, pulling him closer to kiss his little triangular cat-forehead.

“She’ll be even meaner to me if she figures out I took you into Manhattan.”

“She won’t. It’ll be okay, Pearl. We’ll bring him in when we get back. He’ll come when his mommy calls.” I smiled.

Her breath caught. My teeth had gotten pointy lately. Certain things kept happening, no matter what Luz did to stop them.

“I just don’t see how Zombie escaped that whole throwing-things-away bit,” Pearl muttered. “You got rid of your boyfriend, your band, your fexcellent German stereo, and me—but not your stupid cat?”

“Not stupid.” I turned Zombie around and looked into his eyes. He knew things. Big things.

Pearl was being pissy at her phone now. “Crap. It’s past eight-thirty. I don’t suppose there are any taxis around here on Sunday morning?”

“No taxis ever.” I frowned. “Daddy says they won’t bring him home from work anymore.”

Pearl swore under her breath, closing her eyes. “I’m going to have to call Elvis, or we’ll be late.” She looked at me, all serious. “Can you try to act normal in front of him?”

“Of course, Pearl. No need to get all shiny.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

I smiled my pointy smile and turned to face my desk. “Watch this…”

I leaned across to blow out the candle, and smoke poured up, sandalwood turning instantly to the smell of ashes. Reaching out with my free hand, I tugged at one corner of the fabric draped across the mirror, and velvet flowed down onto the desk like water.

“Minerva!” Pearl hissed.

There was my face, trapped inside the mirror frame, but it didn’t make me scream. I didn’t faint or suddenly want to throw Zombie out the window.

Luz had put the beast inside me to sleep, and everything was easier now.

My skin was pale and flawless, glowing softly in the candlelight. Two months uncut, my dark hair flowed raggedly around my features. Cheeks, chin, brow—everything was sharper and finer now, as if my flesh had tightened. When I pulled off my sunglasses, my eyes were radiant and wide, stuck in an expression of bewilderment and wonder.

Zombie purred softly in my arms.

“Still pretty,” I whispered. And something more than pretty now.

I hadn’t told Luz yet that I could do this: look at my own reflection. It would make her too happy, like she was winning. Luz wanted to strip away my new senses, file down my pointy teeth, turn me back into the boring old Minerva.

But Pearl was going to help me stop that from happening—Pearl and her music. I slipped my glasses back on and, Zombie’s weight shifting in my other arm, lifted the notebooks from the desk. Inside them were secrets, ancient words I’d heard in the worst of my fever. Singing the old mysteries would keep me the way I was: not crazy anymore, but so much more than boring.

Halfway cured was best.

Pearl was talking on her phone, wheedling Elvis until he promised not to mention this little trip to her mom.

When she hung up I pouted. “But I wanted to go on the subway.” Luz had told me never, ever to go down in the earth again. But I could feel it calling me, rumbling underfoot. It wanted me.

“There’s no time for a train,” shiny Pearl whispered, opening the door. “Come on. And try to be quiet on the stairs.”

Stairs, I thought happily. Finally, I was headed down, out of this attic prison and down toward the earth. I wanted to go down into basements, into tunnels and chasms and excavations. I wanted to sing my way down to the things waiting there for me.

“Ah, la musica,” I whispered. “Here I come.”

11. SOUND DIMENSION — ALANA RAY-

I got there early, just to watch.

I’d been to the Warehouse plenty of times. It’s an old factory building in Chelsea, hollowed out and loaded up with rehearsal spaces, foam spread across the walls to kill the echoes, forty-eight power plugs in every room. There’s a recording studio in the basement—sixty dollars an hour, one dollar a minute—but it’s full of junk and strictly for the kids.

I watched the place fill up, random guitar chops and drumbeats filtering out, bouncing up and down the block. Sixteenth is a narrow street, about thirty-five feet from wall to wall, so it takes a tenth of a second for sound to cross over and jump back. At 150 beats per minute, that’s a sixteenth-note lag.

I clapped my hands and listened to the echo, then drummed softly on my jeans in tempo as I watched.

From the stoop of the empty FedEx office down the block, I could catalog all the faces going in, concentrating so I’d remember the new people I was meeting upstairs. I always try to see people before they see me, same way as animals want to be upwind, not down.

At the school I went to, where we all had special needs, some of the other kids couldn’t recognize faces very well. They learned to identify people by their posture or their walk, which seemed like a good idea to me. I can understand faces just fine, but I don’t trust people till I’ve seen the way they move.

A long gray limousine slid up in front of the Warehouse. A big Jamaican guy in a gray uniform got out and glanced up and down the block, making sure it was safe. But he didn’t see me.

The bulge of a shoulder holster creased his jacket. Times Square was getting more like that every day, armed guards appearing at the entrances of the big stores. More policemen too.

Satisfied, the driver opened the limo’s door for two girls.

They looked about the same age as the boys who’d hired me nearly two weeks ago, seventeen or eighteen, but I figured these limo-girls couldn’t possibly know them. Those dog-walking boys didn’t have limo money—not even taxi money.

Also, the boys hadn’t been druggies, and one of these girls definitely had a problem. Skin pale as an oyster, she unfolded from the limousine and stood there holding on to the door, shaky from the ride. Though her long arms were thin and wiry, her muscles were almost as defined as mine.

What kind of junkie works out? I wondered as she made her way around the car to the entrance of the Warehouse. Her movements were slow and pointy, articulated in the wrong spots. I couldn’t take my eyes off her: it was like watching a stick insect walk along a branch.

A minute later the two dog-boys showed up, and it turned out they did know one another—or at least the boys knew the other girl, the little one with eyeglasses. She introduced them to the junkie girl; then they all went inside except the boy who’d hired me. He waited outside, like he’d said he would.

His name was Moz: M-o-z. I remembered that because I’d written it down.

I watched him wait, doing a nervous little dance, never putting his guitar case down. His fingers ran through practice patterns, flickering against his thigh, and I matched his tempo for a while on my knees.

I wondered how they’d come together: a junkie, a rich girl, two scruffy boys, all of them younger than me, probably too young to be serious about their music. Maybe they were all rich, and the boys had dressed down just to hire me cheap.

That was a dirty trick if they had, and I don’t play with people who trick me. But I wasn’t sure yet.

When my watch said sixteen seconds left, I picked up my duffel bags and crossed the street.

“Hey, Alana,” he said. “You made it.”

“Alana Ray,” I corrected him. “Nine o’clock on Sunday morning.”

“Yeah. Pretty messed up, huh?” He shrugged and rolled his eyes, like the time had been someone else’s idea. Someone annoying.

“You got my eighty bucks?” I asked, still drumming two fingers against the strap of one duffel bag.

“Sure… um, eighty?” His eyes narrowed a bit.

I smiled. “Seventy-five. Just messing with you.”

He laughed in a way that said five bucks meant something to him, and the money came out of his pockets in crumpled singles and fives, even ten dollars’ worth of quarters rolled by hand.

I relaxed a little. This boy was dirt poor. There wasn’t any kind of rich person who’d go to that much trouble to trick me.

“Those all your drums… um, buckets?” he asked, staring at the duffel bags.

“Don’t take up much space, do they?” I said. But really I hadn’t brought everything, not for the first time. No sense hauling forty-two pounds of gear if all these kids wanted was a drum machine with dreadlocks.

“Must be easier to carry than a real set.”

I nodded. I’ve never carried a real drum set, but it seemed like it would be hard.

He counted up to seventy-five, which seemed to clean his pockets out. I felt a little bad about my eighty-dollar trick, and my feet started tapping.

“Um, there’s one thing,” he said, shouldering his guitar and screwing up his face, nervous and flickering again. He was kind of cute, all uncomfortable like this. I felt myself worrying about him, like a kid walking down the street with one shoelace untied.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’d be better if you didn’t mention the money to Pearl.”

“Who’s Pearl?”

“She’s the…” He frowned. “Just don’t mention it to anyone, I guess. Okay?”

“Fine with me.” I shrugged. “Money’s the same, whoever gives it to you.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” He nodded, his face serious like I’d said something profound instead of simply logical. That was the point of money, after all: crisp and clean or wrinkled or disintegrated into quarters—a dollar was always worth a hundred cents.

We headed on in.

Upstairs was like every practice room: distracting. Four walls and a ceiling of undulating foam, the pattern shimmering in the corners of my vision. The disconcerting tangle of cables on the floor. The stillness hovering around us, the air robbed of echoes.

The small girl with eyeglasses took over, introducing me to everyone.

“This is Zahler. He plays guitar.” The big burly dog-boy smiled broadly. He hadn’t wanted to pay me, I remembered.

“And Minerva. It’s her first time too. She’s going to sing for us.”

The junkie girl took off her dark glasses for two seconds, squinting in the fluorescent lights, and smiled at me. She was wearing a long black velvet dress, as shiny as the streets after it rains, a tangle of necklaces, and dangling earrings. Her long black nails glistened, dazzling me like the undulating ceiling.

“She’s a singer?” I asked. “Huh… I’d have figured she was a roadie.”

They all laughed at my joke, except for Minerva, whose smile curled tighter. Her teeth sent a little shiver toward me. I touched my forehead three times, blinked one eye, then the other to still the air.

“And I’m Pearl: keyboards,” the other girl said. “You’re Alana, right?”

“Alana Ray. One name,” I said, my voice tremulous from Minerva’s stare.

“Cool,” she said. “Hyphenated?”

I grinned. I’d known the little rich girl was going to ask that. It bugs some people, me having two first names that are invisibly stuck together.

“No. Carbonated. Just a little bubble of air.”

No one laughed, but no one ever does. That joke was just for me.

Setup was quick. The boys just had to plug in and tune, and Pearl had only one small keyboard. She balanced it on the room’s mixing console, where she could control everyone else’s sound. The junkie girl adjusted her microphone stand higher, then fiddled with the light switches, her movements still jerky and insectlike. Even though she was still wearing those dark glasses, she turned down the lights till I could hardly see.

I didn’t complain, though. Her glare had made me shiver once already.

I set up in one corner, two walls of foam padding at my back, twenty-one paint buckets arranged before me, the stacks growing taller from right to left, one to six buckets high. (S₆ = 21)

I pulled out six contact microphones, my own mixer and effects boxes, and went to work. I don’t like rehearsal spaces or recording studios as much as the open air—but at least I can bring my own echoes.

Pearl watched me clip the mikes to my stacks of plastic, run their cables into the mixer, then route them out through the effects.

“Paint cans, huh?” she asked.

“Paint buckets,” I corrected, and saw Moz smile for the first time.

“Uh, sure. How many channels you need?” she asked, fingering the sliders on the mixing board. “Six? Twelve?”

“Just two. Left and right.” I handed her the cables.

Pearl frowned as I turned away from her. This way, she couldn’t control my mix from her board. It was like she wanted me to give her my eggs, my cheese, and my chives all in separate bowls. But instead I was handing her the whole omelet, cooked just the way I liked it.

She didn’t argue, though, and I saw that Moz was still grinning.

“Everybody ready?” Pearl asked. Everyone was.

Minerva swallowed and walked up to grasp her mike with one pale hand. The other held a notebook, which I could see was open to a page of chaos, like the handwriting of the unluckiest kids back at my special school.

Moz just nodded, not looking up at Pearl, flicking his cords around on the floor with one toe.

The burly boy (whose name I’d already forgotten; should have written it down) was the only one who smiled. He leaned his head down to stare closely at his strings, setting his fingers carefully. Then, concentrating hard, he began to play. It was a simple riff, thick and dirty.

Pearl did something on the board, and the sound softened.

I listened for a moment, then tuned my echoes to ninety-two beats per minute. Moz started playing, high and fast. I thought it was a strange way to start, too complicated, like a guitar solo bursting out of nowhere. But then Pearl entered, playing a gossamer melody that wrapped a shape around what he was doing.

I listened for a while, not sure what to do. I had a lot of choices. Something simple and lazy, to give the music more backbone? Or should I swing the beat, a little off-kilter, to loosen it up? Or follow Moz’s superquick fluttering, like rain against the roof?

I always relished this moment, right before starting to play. It was the one time my fingers didn’t tremble or drum against my knees, when I could hold my hands out steady. No reason to hurry.

Also, I didn’t want to make a mistake. There was something fragile about this music, as if it would fly apart if pushed in the wrong direction. Pearl, Moz, and the other boy thought they knew one another already, but they didn’t yet.

I began carefully, only a downbeat at first, building the pattern one stroke at a time—simple to complicated, less to more. Then, just before it got too crowded, I slipped sideways, subtracting one stroke for each I added, gradually shifting the music around us, but leaving it still tenuous, directionless.

For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. These were just kids. Maybe they needed to be pushed in one direction or another, or maybe they’d wanted a drum machine, after all.

But then the junkie girl came in.

There were no words, though she held one of the notebooks open in front of her. With the microphone pressed close to her lips, she was humming, but the melody emerged from the speakers sharp-edged and keening, cutting through the mass of intricacies we’d built.

Suddenly the music had focus, a beating heart. She wrapped the rest of us around herself, piercing my gradual shadows with a single ray of light.

I smiled, having a rare moment of absolute comfort in my own skin, every compulsion satisfied, the clockwork of the whole world clicking into place around my drumming. Even if they were young and flawed, these four had something. Maybe a happy accident was happening here, like the first time I’d ever noticed the echoes from the street matching my footsteps…

Then the strangeness began, something I hadn’t seen since I was little. The air started to glitter wildly, my eyelids fluttering. This was more than ripples of heat from summer asphalt, or the shimmers I saw when someone was angry at me.

Shapes were forming on the cable-strewn floor, and faces materialized in the patterns of the soundproofing: I glimpsed expressions of hurt and fear and fury at the edges of my vision, as if my medication was failing.

I imagined dropping my sticks, reaching into my pocket, and spilling out my pills to count them. But I was positive I’d taken one that morning, and the labels always warned that they built up slowly in the bloodstream: weeks to take effect, weeks to fade away. Never stop, even if you think you don’t need them anymore.

Minerva was glowing, her pale skin luminous in the darkness. Her movements had smoothed out, no longer insectlike. She was singing now, teeth jammed close to the microphone, her incomprehensible song sputtering for a moment as she turned a page of the notebook.

The practice room was seething, phantasms filling up the spaces between objects, demons with long tails riding the sound waves in the air.

I was afraid, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t bring my drumming to a halt any more than I could smother the tapping of my foot or the twitches in my face. I was trapped here, caught in the pattern I’d helped shape.

Then reality shifted once more, like the sprockets of a film finally catching, and I saw something I’d almost forgotten… what music looked like.

Moz’s guitar notes were scattered like Christmas lights across the ceiling, shimmering in and out, Pearl’s sinuous melody linking and electrifying them. The dog-boy’s riff spread out underneath, solid and steady, and my drumming was the scaffolding that held it aloft, all of it pulsating at ninety-two beats per minute, alive and connecting us.

I stared at the apparition, awestruck. This was the way I’d been born to see music, before the doctors had taught me to separate my senses, to grab objects and faces and hold them in place. Before they’d cured me of these visions with therapy and pills.

How had this other reality returned? Every sense conjoined, complete and undivided…

But then my eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw Minerva’s song.

It was tangled around our feet, twisting its way through cords and cables, plunging in and out of the floor, like loops of Loch Ness monster in the water. It was a worm, blind and horned, its rippling segments pushing it through the earth, rearing up a hungry maw teethed with a ring of knives.

And suddenly I knew that Minerva’s curse was something a thousand years older than heroin or crack.

I let out a gasp, and she turned her head toward me, saw me seeing it. She dropped the notebook and pulled off her glasses in one brittle motion, her song dissipating into a long, furious hiss. The architecture of the music shattered overhead, my drumsticks spinning from my hands.

The rest of them stumbled to a halt. Pearl was staring at her friend, alarmed. Moz was staring at Minerva too, and for a moment his expression was unmistakable: the boy was dripping with desire.

“Why’d you two stop, man?” the burly dog-boy cried. “That shit was paranormal!”

I blinked, looking down at empty hands. No trembling, just like after any good session. I felt no need to tap my feet or touch my forehead. There was nothing in the air but the hiss of amplifiers, a barely visible ripple in the corners of my eyes.

But I still felt it in the soles of my feet, the beast we’d been playing. Something was rumbling in the earth, deeper than six stories below. Answering Minerva’s song.

“You can smell it too, can’t you?” she whispered to me.

“No… not smell. But sometimes I see things I shouldn’t.” I swallowed, clutching at my pill bottle through my jeans, by reflex spilling out the speech they made us memorize at school, in case the police ever thought we were on drugs: “I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations.”

Minerva raised an eyebrow, then curled back her lips in a sneer that showed too many pointed teeth. “Spasticus… autisticus.”

I nodded. That was more or less me.

But what the hell was she?

12. THE TEMPTATIONS — MOZ-

Her uncovered face was radiant, shining with a brilliance that liquefied me.

She’d worn her shades until that moment—a total poser, I’d figured. But I could see now that she had to wear them, not for her protection, but for ours, to shield us from her eyes.

What she had wasn’t beauty, it was something a thousand times scarier, something that gnawed at my edges. I’d already heard it in the music, felt it in the way she’d wrenched us all into her wake—the whole band sucked up and totaled by her magnetism, or whatever you’d call it. Something charisma was too small a word for.

Something overriding, bottomless.

Suddenly, this was her band, not mine or Pearl’s. And just as suddenly, I didn’t mind.

Minerva put her sunglasses back on.

I picked up her notebook from where it had fluttered to the floor.

What covered the open pages wasn’t writing, more like the scroll from a lie detector, or one of those machines that inscribes the shapes of earthquakes. Ragged black lines undulated in impenetrable columns, smeared and spattered with drops of water. A few smudges were rusty brown, like old blood.

I offered it to her, but Minerva was still staring at Alana Ray—glaring, her gaze dangerous even through dark glasses. I felt like I should say something to calm her down, since I’d brought Alana Ray here and Minerva was angry at her about… something.

Because Alana Ray had dropped her sticks? But Minerva had freaked out before the Big Riff had broken down. I opened my mouth but found myself silenced by the memory of Minerva’s naked eyes.

“Min?” Pearl said.

I closed my mouth. Let Pearl handle this.

“You okay, Min?”

“Yeah, sure.” Minerva leaned across to take the notebook from my hand, pressed it close against her chest. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to have a hissy fit. I was just kind of… into that song.”

“I’m sorry too,” Alana Ray said quietly. “My condition sometimes leads to performance complications.”

I swallowed, trying to remember what Alana Ray had confessed about herself… something wrong with her brain? All of a sudden, she was talking funny, with microscopic pauses between her words. Little twitches traveled across her body as she stared back at Minerva, as if her nervous system was unraveling inside. I opened my mouth again to say something.

“Hey, no problem,” Zahler said first. “You were fawesome. We were all totally paranormal!” He turned to Pearl. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Pearl said softly. “We were.” She gave me a questioning look.

I held her gaze, something I hadn’t done in two weeks.

It had all clicked—our music, this band. Pearl’s strange, electric friend had pulled us together and forged us into something as brilliant as she was.

“That was great,” I said, nodding at Pearl. “Good going.”

Her face brightened in the dark practice room. “Well, okay, then.” She turned to Alana Ray. “You need to take a break?”

Alana Ray blinked one eye, then the other, then shook her head like she had water in her ear. “No. I’d rather keep playing. I think my… complication is over. But maybe a different song? Sometimes the same stimulus can provoke the same reaction.”

“Uh, sure,” Pearl said, then shrugged. “How about Piece Two?”

Zahler and I just nodded, but Minerva smiled, pulling the microphone closer to her mouth. Low, soft laughter, touched with reverb, scattered about the room.

“No problem, Alana Ray,” she whispered, opening her notebook. “I’ve got about a million stimuli to go.”

Nobody freaked out for the rest of rehearsal.

We played Piece Two, a long jam wrapped around a looped sample from an old vinyl record of Pearl’s, then our third song, which didn’t even have a working title yet. Alana Ray never stumbled again, just accompanied us with psychic comprehension. With every new section she’d follow along for a while, then slowly start to build us up, adding structure and form, staring at invisible sheet music hovering in the air, somehow seeing what we needed her to do.

I didn’t catch a single word Minerva sang, but every time she opened her mouth, she injected us with brilliance. Her voice had an uncanny magnitude, as if her notebooks were full of incantations for making the ground beneath us rumble. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, except when I closed them and listened hard.

Between songs, I kicked myself for not having gone out to Brooklyn that morning. I finally saw how stupid the struggle between Pearl and me had been. Neither of us were rock stars—we were backups, sidekicks, allies. Good musicians, maybe, but Minerva was luminous.

The anger that had been dogging me the last two weeks was spent, leaving nothing but contentment. I had an awesome band, a place to rehearse with no one yelling, “Turn it down!” and a 1975 Strat with gold pickups in my hands. I’d even cracked the money thing and was saving a few bucks for myself every day. I couldn’t remember why being miserable had seemed so important.

Minerva had changed everything.

After an hour and a half, we’d played every song we knew as many times as we could and ground to a reluctant halt.

“Hey,” Zahler said. “We need some new tunes, don’t we?”

“Yeah.” I looked at Pearl. “We should get together soon. Work on some more stuff for next Sunday.” Suddenly I had fragments of a million songs in my head.

Pearl smiled happily. “More tunes? No problemo.”

Minerva frowned. “Problema. Pero masculino.”

“Huh?” I said, glancing at Pearl.

“Um, Min’s been studying Spanish, sort of.” Pearl pulled out her cell phone and frowned at it. “Speaking of which, I think we need to get back to Brooklyn for your, um, lesson.”

“You’re studying Spanish?” Zahler said, grinning. “Mas cervezas!”

“Prefiero sangre,” Minerva said, her teeth glimmering in the darkness.

“Yeah, okay.” Pearl turned to Alana Ray. “Listen, it was great to meet you. You were brilliant. I mean, especially for paint cans.”

“Paint buckets,” Alana Ray said. “It was good to meet you too.”

“So… you want to play with us again?”

Alana Ray looked at me, and I nodded—at seventy-five bucks she was a bargain. She smiled. “Yes. This was very… involving.”

“That’s us. Involving.” Pearl swallowed. “Sorry that Min and I have to run, but you’ve got the room until eleven. If I go reserve it for next week, can you guys handle breaking down?”

“What about your mixing board?” Zahler said.

“They keep it locked up downstairs. Here’s my key.” She threw a glittering chain across the room to Zahler and grabbed Minerva’s hand. “Come on, Min. We really have to motor.”

Zahler shouted goodbye, but Pearl was already pulling Minerva out of the door, yanking her along like a five-year-old who didn’t want to leave the zoo.

I followed them into the hall, running ahead to stab the elevator button.

“Thanks,” Pearl said. “Sorry to leave you guys to clean up. It’s just…” Her voice faded into a sigh.

“Smelly Spanish lessons,” Minerva said. From all around us, the mutterings of bands leaked out, the thump of drums, muffled stabs of feedback.

“Don’t worry about it.” I wondered what their mysterious rush was really all about. Not Spanish lessons, obviously. I tried to remember what Pearl had said on the phone that morning. Something about ninjas? “You’ve done everything so far, Pearl. It won’t kill us to put some stuff away.”

“Not everything. You guys found Alana Ray. She’s incredible.”

“Yeah, I guess she is.” I smiled. “Listen, I’m sorry I was so sleepy when you called this morning. Next time, I’ll be glad to help out…” I glanced at Minerva. “With whatever.”

“Oh, cool,” Pearl said softly, her smile growing. She was staring down at the floor. “That’s great.”

The elevator came, and when they stepped on, I did too, wanting a few more seconds with Minerva. “I’ll come down with you guys, if you don’t mind, and then ride back up.”

“We don’t mind,” Minerva said.

It was quiet in the big freight elevator, the walls padded with movers’ blankets to protect them from the ravages of dollies, amps, and drums.

I cleared my throat. “Listen, Pearl, I’ve been kind of a dickhead.”

“About what?” Pearl said, and Min’s eyebrows rose behind dark glasses.

“About everything; about you. But this band is finally coming together, and I feel kind of stupid about the way I’ve been acting. So… I’m okay now.”

“Hey, Moz. It’s my fault too.” Pearl turned to me, her face a little pink, almost blushing. “I know I can be sort of bossy.”

“She’s got a point there,” Minerva said.

I laughed. “Nah. You just know what you’re doing.” I shrugged. “So me and Zahler should come over tomorrow? Get some new tunes worked up before next Sunday?”

Pearl nodded, still grinning. “Perfect.”

“You coming?” I asked Minerva. “I mean, you’re the singer and everything.” I pointed at the notebooks she still clutched to her chest.

“Um, probably not,” Pearl said. “She’s kind of—”

“It’s very intensive Spanish,” Minerva said.

“Oh. Sure.”

The elevator doors opened, and we stepped out into the lobby, Pearl still pulling Minerva along. A couple of guys were rolling a dolly full of turntable decks into the building, negotiating the bump between stairway ramp and marble floor with extreme care.

Pearl stepped up to the front desk, pulling out a credit card and talking to the guy about next week.

Minerva turned to me and said softly, “See you next week.”

I nodded, swallowing, suddenly glad she was wearing those dark glasses. I wondered how many fewer stupid things I’d have said in my life if all pretty girls wore them. “I’ll totally be there.”

Okay, maybe not that many.

But Minerva just laughed and reached out with the hand Pearl wasn’t holding. Hot as a freshly blown-out match, her fingertip traced my arm from wrist to elbow. Between her parted lips, I could see teeth sliding from left to right against each other, and then she mouthed a silent word.

Yummy.

She turned away from my shiver, back to Pearl just as she finished up and flicked open her phone.

“Elvis? We’re ready.” Pearl snapped the phone shut and looked at me. “See you guys tomorrow. Call me?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell Zahler.” My breath was short, the line Minerva had traced along my arm still burning. “See you.”

They waved, and I watched them walk through the door and out, then make their way toward a huge gray limo—a limo? — that slid into view. Minerva’s mouthed word still echoed in my head, so unexpected, more like a daydream than something that had actually happened. My brain couldn’t get hold of it, like a guitar lick I could hear but that my fingers couldn’t grasp.

But she turned back toward me just before she ducked into the car and stuck her tongue out. Then her smile flashed, wicked and electric.

The limo slid away.

I swallowed, turned, and ran back to catch the elevator’s closing doors. The guys with turntables were piled inside, leaving just enough space for me to squeeze in. As we rode up, I was rocking on the balls of my feet, humming one of the strange fragments Minerva had left in my brain, bouncing off the blanketed wall behind me.

I glanced over at the two guys and noticed they were watching my little dance.

“Fresh tunes?” one said, grinning.

“Yeah, very.” I licked my lips, tasting salt there. “Things are going great.”