The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes

The Spark

Cecilia Tan

Glory picked a bad moment to check out on us. We were booked on Autarie- one of those self-contained orbital casino resorts with nowhere to go but around and no easy way on or off — for six simulcasts. Lots of money, and every “night” a different time zone with no travelling or loading out for us. Sweet deal. Or it would have been if not for Glory’s sudden departure the night after the first show.

I suppose it was a trick of fate that I was the one who found her and not one of the others. There she was, stretched out on the coffee table in her suite as if it were a mortuary slab, her fingers cold and stiff around the neck of her trademark vintage Walker original. Her skin was all pastel shades of violet and blue, except where her black lipstick and eyeliner were smeared, as if at the end she’d shed a few tears for herself. Most don’t go so gracefully — history is full of those who went on wild rampages, died in flaming vehicles, collapsed of overdose in public places, or choked on their own vomit. But she just lay there, beautiful and dead.

She’d lost the Spark, and the grief I felt seeing her there, alone, cut off from us for ever, was at least partly for myself. I knew someday I might go to a similar fate. And with her gone. . my day seemed like it might be closer at hand than before. My mind was starting to fill up with details: our unfulfilled six album contract with Warner-Sony, tour cancellation. . and then some tears came and blurred away all the business thoughts for a moment.

Calla was the next to come in. She’d heard me sob and come to see what was up — she probably thought Glory, in one of her mercurial moods, said something horrible to me, made me cry. But then she saw what lay on the table and she took me by the hands. “Oh, Luna, Luna, I’m so sorry,” she said and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. My lover — in name if not in function recently — was dead.

I coughed a little but the tears had dried up already. “Shit, Calla, what are we going to do now?”

She leaned against the sloping, non-rectilinear wall and rested her eyes on her hand. She looked remarkably undebauched given last night’s events. Her blonde hair gelled into a neat twist and her face fresh and make-up free above her resort-issue bathrobe. She was a double-x realgirl, like me, her eyelashes blonde in the artifi cial light. “Did you guys have a fight?”

“Yesterday. Twice. You were there.”

It had started out a bitch session and ended up a screaming fit for Glory. She’d been going on and on about how a gig on Autarie was the ultimate ignominy. I’d tried to point out, as our booking agent had, that doing orbital simulcast was economical and easier on us. “But Autarie!” she’d screamed. “It’s like fucking Vegas!” At the time I’d assumed that “Vegaz”, as she said it in her Saturnal accent, was an ex-lover of hers who’d sucked in bed. Now little pieces of rock and roll history bounced through my moon-raised brain and I recalled an old interview I’d read with Mick Jagger — or was it Sting? — saying he’d never play Las Vegas and the meaning came clear: home of the has-beens. No one had been listening to her but me. Once she would start to go hysterical the others would tune her out. I suppose I only listened because I was the one trying to argue with her. “Oh, fuck,” I murmured. Even if I had caught the reference, though, what good would it have done? I couldn’t have stopped her, could I? She was gone.

Calla went over and knelt in front of the body. “It looks like she just. . lay down and died.”

“She did.”

“What do you mean?” Calla had been with us a year, a great bass player, but neither Glory nor I had been sure she would stick with us. So she didn’t know about the Spark.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Well, we have to get a doctor in here, find out what happened. .”

I held up my hand. “No, no doctors.”

“But Luna. .”

“Not yet.” My mind tried to come up to speed, but last night’s party and the shock of seeing her there like that kept me partly paralysed. “Huiper. First call Huiper and figure out what to say about it.”

I put my head against the doorjamb and sighed. It was the end of Glory, the end of the Seekers in all likelihood, possibly the end of all our careers. Replacing a drummer or back-up singer is one thing, replacing the lead singer and founder is another thing entirely. I felt cold and lonely and sick and I sank down there in the doorway and almost wished it could have been me instead of her.

Basil almost tripped over me when she came in waving hard copy of a review of last night’s show. I liked Basil, even if I wasn’t sure if she was a double-x or some form of genderqueer. Those things never mattered to the omnivorous Glory. For me it was good enough that she used a female pronoun. She was about to begin crowing the good bits of it aloud when she caught sight of the spectacle on the table. I couldn’t bear to watch her face crumble into grief. So, I looked at my own whiter-than-white hands, and at Glory’s, still streaked with the indigo and violet of last night’s stage make-up, clamped tight around the neck of the guitar. I supposed that the Walker was mine now, but I couldn’t bring myself to prise it out of her grip.

I heard my own voice. “We can’t have her photographed like this, like some funeral or something.” Oh Glory, couldn’t you have lived up to your name and gone out with a blaze of it?

Calla did not turn around, but said in a weak voice “Was she. . with anyone last night?”

I looked up at the two of them. Basil was taking it well. If anything she looked a little pissed off, and when she heard Calla’s question she stiffened. Young and spurned. “Not me. She took off during the party and didn’t come back. .”

Until after we were all unconscious. Poor Basil, the newest of us, she’d only been playing with the Seekers for about six months and Glory had been leading her on for most of it. She cursed under her breath. Glory had liked her youthful fire, her defi ance. Perhaps she saw a little of herself there, or perhaps someone else she knew. She would have been a good vessel for the Spark, too, but Glory had held back passing it on. “Baz, could you get Huiper on a secure channel?”

“I’ll try,” she said, and went into her room to boot up a terminal.

Calla had left the room, too, leaving me alone with my dead lover. Ex-lover in any case now, I supposed. Although neither of us had taken up with someone else — we hadn’t “broken up” — we hadn’t had sex in a long time. A year, maybe two. And the fights recently had been worse, hadn’t they? I’d wanted to believe that Glory’s irritability, irrationality, and general out-of-control bitchiness was just a periodic magnifi cation of her lead-singer prima donna persona, just a phase that we’d work out. But all along she had been suffering. The burning out. The end.

And I hadn’t even felt it. Could I have helped her? Saved her? She’d been so distant from me, I doubted it. When the Spark is lost, there’s no getting it back.

The first one I’d ever seen was just a month after I’d joined the group. Glory’s ex-lover Saffron had split off to form his own band, but he came back once in a while to jam with us. His band wasn’t doing very well. The critics were lambasting them for repeating the formulas of the past, and even I thought his music was kind of dull. He went out with a super cocktail of drugs and stims. Repeating the formulas of the past, as it were. We found him with the injector still in his hand at one of Glory’s penthouse suites on Triton.

That one was easy for me to handle. I didn’t know him that well, I was in love with Glory, and I was so young and new to the Spark that I didn’t really connect Saffron’s fate with mine. Huiper, our publicist, did a pretty good job of spreading the dirt around about the wild rock and roll boy who didn’t know when to stop, and even made him into a kind of small-time martyr among his few but loyal fans. That was Huiper’s job. But what would he say when he heard about Glory?

He would, of course, look for an angle that would generate maximum publicity and make Glory into a posthumous legend. That wouldn’t be hard since she was already a legend when she was alive. We all were. It was all a part of the Spark, the magic. We were stars in the celebrity skies of the whole solar system. But Huiper didn’t know why or how she really died and this time I didn’t have a story to feed him. Mysterious cause of death unknown is what the headlines would have to say. The powers that be took her too soon, they’d lament. Or, maybe she died of a broken heart? Had our love really died? I shuddered at the thought. Huiper wouldn’t implicate me in such a thing, would he? A sordid affair of lost love and betrayal?

The first fight we’d had yesterday was at sound check. The kind of spat that turned the mills of tabloid rumour, and all too typical. One of those fights that started as a bad mood, became a disagreement, then a full-fl edged argument, and finally that hands and skin and bodies roughness that comes all too naturally with those who have been lovers. I had been tuning my guitar while she picked at the catered food backstage. Artifi cial gravity always screwed up her stomach for a couple of days but I didn’t see as how that was any excuse for her to treat us all like shit. So when she brushed past me and bumped my tuner I griped at her loud enough for everyone to hear. I would have, stupidly, made even more of it if Maynard, our stage manager, hadn’t called for everyone to take places for sound check.

Glory was the first one out of the room but the last one to climb on to the riser and sling her guitar over her shoulder. We were only on the second verse of “Tears” when Glory called for a halt. “I need this monitor up, less rhythm guitar.”

I tried to talk into my mic but it was off. I waved at Maynard to up it and everyone heard me say “. . can’t do that. I won’t be able to hear myself and you’ll get off strum and you know it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She put her hands on her hips, the guitar hanging loose over her middle. Even under the house lights her skin had some hints of the lavender and blue that were her trademark colours. “You’re so loud I can’t hear the backing vox.”

“Glory,” I said, walking closer to her so she could hear my unamplifi ed voice. “That’s what you said at our warm-up gig on Metassus and your solo was completely off. .”

I saw her jaw clench as she made a little starting/stamping motion. “You deaf wretch!” She took a step towards me, swinging the Walker off her shoulder and brandishing it in one hand like a sceptre. “You wouldn’t know a good solo if it split your skull.” Her voice had gone shrill and Maynard modulated it through the PA to save all our ears. “Which one of us is the lead here?” And then she broke down into hurling epithets at me in Saturnal.

I didn’t hear what she called me; I started to shout back, “Fuck you, you egoistic bitch.” But all I got out was “Fuck. .” and then I threw off my head-mic and put my guitar in its stand and started to stalk off the stage. I couldn’t be reduced to calling her names. I had to walk past her to the stairs and, as I did, she pushed me on the shoulder. My arm fl ailed back and connected with her cheek and then she was trying to grab me by the hair and strangle me and bite me all at the same time. Then the road crew, uniformly burly, uniformly imperturbable, were pulling us apart. She’d scratched my arm hard enough that bright crimson blood began to trickle down my skin, lurid on the paleness of flesh that never sees sunlight. And she said, “You ungrateful bitch! Without me you’d still be rotting on your ass in moondust! You’ll never be anything more than a second-rate fill-in back-up stringer!”

I was gone before I heard any more — I didn’t need to. Fact is without her I’d never have been in this band or for that matter ever made it away from suburban Luna. Fact is I mostly believed the rest, too. Sometimes she told me I only had that one good song in me, and sometimes I believed her. We never recorded another one of mine after “Tears”, that’s true. Huiper, the paparazzi, the fan sites, were always making up stories about us. Sometimes it was hard even for me to tell truth from fiction. The legend they tell about me is that I sneaked backstage at a Seekers show on Luna with a demo in my back pocket, and, when she heard it, she fell in love with me. In some versions she is heartbroken over Saffron leaving, and that’s why she swore off men, and fell for me.

The true story is not like that. First of all, Glory’s heart never broke. And second, although I did go to that show on Luna, it hadn’t been my intention to meet her. My own band had just broken up from the force of apathy and neglect. I’d been ready to sell the guitar, maybe move to Earth where my parents wouldn’t have any more say about me, but I decided to spend at least one night forgetting all of that, suped up and dancing like a banshee at their show. It was at the Dome, huge crowd, thousands at the biggest gathering space on all of Luna. It was being simulcast all over Earth, a big event. I was in the general admission section down front where I elbowed my way to the stage. I can only speculate that she saw me then, and liked what she saw. Halfway through their final encore one of their road crew pulled me out of the crush at the front, over the security wall into the tech pit. I couldn’t make out what he was saying but I got the vague idea that I wasn’t being busted but invited to some kind of party. There were some others there, dressed like fans, looking lost too, so I figured we were all either equally safe or equally endangered.

It was a party. A tremendous party at the Lunar Grand Hotel. We were all a part of the entourage and never before had I felt so welcome wearing ragged black denim in the retro-look of the times. We were ushered into a grand ballroom where food and swirling lights were already in attendance as if the inanimate party had already begun. And at some point I recall being near her, Glory, and wanting to tell her something about how much I had enjoyed the show. Maybe I did tell her. Anyway, she led me to the true party within the party, an inner sanctum penthouse where the band members and all manner of miscellaneous wildlings were lounging, boozing, orgying and so on. And eventually she pulled me even deeper into things, and we were in her own room, and in her own bed, in the dimness, as I traced the curve of her stomach by the shine of the glitter there and she breathed hot on my sex and we did not sleep until well into the next morning.

I only remember that night in snatches now. I remember lavender lips and the way she closed her eyes when she kissed me. I kept mine open to watch the way her mouth moved, then closed them as her hand sought deep into my jeans. I remember her left hand seeking between my legs and I imagine that I even felt the callouses on her fingers as she dragged them over my slick clit. I remember being on my back on the expanse of her bed, her body pressing mine down as her tongue hunted in the forest of my bush and I stared at the cleft of her ass, her cunt, pistoning above my face until I reached out with my own tongue. I remember what seemed like hours with my legs over the edge of the bed, and her quick fingers playing over my clit again and again, and sinking her hand into me, first the cone of her fingers, and eventually her entire hand, balled inside. There was probably more, but it has been obliterated by time and drugs and overlayers of bad memories.

It wasn’t until after we woke up that afternoon that she began to ask me about myself. Or maybe I should say tell me about myself. I played guitar, right? And I sang. And I wrote about what was black and dripping in the human soul. “How do you know?” I must have asked, my jaw fl apping as she ran her fingers through my straight black hair and remarked how even my lips were moon-dust pale. And she started calling me Luna right then. She hinted that she was very good at reading people through sex, though of course now I know it could have been the Spark.

Then she told me she wanted to hear me play. She forced the Walker into my hands and made me play. I was too nervous to sing, but I let my fingers go by themselves, through riffs I’d fought with Derel over before we’d both begun to act like we didn’t care about the band or each other. And at the end of the song, the one that would later become “Tears” when I wrote words for it, she did have tears in her eyes and she told me she knew just how it was with me.

There is nothing like making love with your lover’s tears wetting your face. She kissed me then, and laid the guitar aside, and pushed me back on the bed, and it is not like we were wearing clothes anyway. She dragged her cunt along my thigh, hot and slick like her tear-stained face, until she came, and then I flipped her over and fucked her with my fingers and ate her at the same time, until I don’t know how many times she came, piling orgasm on top of orgasm, until she turned the tables and did the same back to me.

That was probably the last time I had been in charge at any time in our relationship. Because when her fingers were still inside me, after my third or fourth orgasm, as she sank her other hand into my hair, she asked me if I was interested in leaving Luna, and joining her as rhythm guitarist.

That’s the real story of how I got whisked away. Because of course I said yes. Had she already passed the Spark to me? I think she had. I think it happened when she fucked me right after I had played. What would have happened if I had said no? Would the Spark have died, and me with it? I just didn’t know. There was too much we didn’t know. I know that through the fire and heat of music and sex and losing ourselves in both she passed it to me, but even ten years later, I knew very little more than that.

Calla and Basil had not had such an initiation from her. They were still waiting.

I should have realized when Saffron died that I might be in over my head. But I was so caught up in her, and in music, in finally devoting my life to someone and something that I enjoyed, that I felt I was born to do, that I didn’t worry about how the Spark worked. It was just the lifeblood that fed us, that kept each of us going, writing, composing, playing. Some nights, when we’d played to a fever pitch, it boiled over, and there were always wildlings around to party with, to soak up that energy and go home tired and exhilarated both in the morning. Groupies don’t know it, but it’s the Spark they are attracted to, addicted to. Maybe they figure it’s just the drugs, or the excitement, they feel it during the sex we have, that thrill singing in their veins. But unless they have music in their souls, it can’t hurt them. It passes through them just like the drugs. It’s only people like me that it takes hold of and doesn’t let go. And Saffron. And Nura and Rose, who were both gone now for years, replaced by a string of studio musicians of Glory’s choosing, until now Calla and Basil. .

I had started to shiver, there in the doorway, as if the coldness of her flesh was making me chilly. There was also the fact that I was wearing just an old show T-shirt and underwear. I felt cold and empty, and the shaking became worse.

Calla was there, then, dressed in show clothes. Anticipating a press conference, I guess. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, Luna. .” she started. “Be strong.”

But I wasn’t shaking with sobs. Glory had told me once that the Spark runs its course like a fever — oh sure, it could be years and years, but the hotter it burns the more likely it is to burn you up. At some point it burns out and leaves you high and dry and unable to function.

She had waited until after I’d accepted her offer to spell all that out for me. When she told me, it felt almost like it wasn’t anything that I didn’t already know. Some hacks can go on for ever because they never had it in the first place. But those who really had it. . I didn’t have to hear her name out the others. The agonizing slow death of Elvis, who staggered on long after the Spark had abandoned him, trying to replace it with amphetamines and sycophants until both failed him. Janis Joplin, whose own insecurities about her talent strangled it and forced her into drugs also. Kurt Cobain. The murderous rampage of the octogenarian Paul McCartney outside Buckingham Palace.

My body was wracked with spasms. And suddenly it made sense to me. The Spark was going to go out for me if I didn’t do something about it. The fl ame needed to be fed, stoked, with music and sex with other people who had it. Was that what killed Saffron, ultimately? Being cut off from her, and being unwilling to share it with others for his own survival? I wished I had known him better. Had he been losing it already, starting to burn out, when he left the Seekers? Had Glory and I been killing each other with the fighting and “creative differences”? The passion had turned to anger long ago, is that what made her burn up or gutter out?

“What happens now?” I asked Calla, who was squeezing me harder now, as I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

I hadn’t meant her to answer, but she did. “Luna, you’re sick. We have to get you to medical.”

“No!” What would they find? The Spark was a secret not even Huiper knew about. Who could I turn to? I had met very few others who I knew beyond any doubt had it. Bowie, still going in his thirteenth decade, reinvented once again. But I didn’t know how to reach him and couldn’t imagine the conversation we would have.

Looking at Glory there on the table, I considered the traditional ways out for a moment. But I couldn’t see myself drowning my “sorrows” in chemicals or crashing my fl yer while “under the infl uence”. I took a deep breath and got the shivering under control for a few moments.

There was really only one choice. Pass the Spark on to Calla or Basil, or die. “Calla,” I said, trying to work up the nerve to say something.

But then Basil was there. “Huiper’s not reachable. We can try him again at four, though.” I looked up to see Calla take her hand, and I suddenly knew the two of them had slept together last night.

No, they were about to. They had each been waiting, hoping, to be the one that Glory took up with when she took up with someone again. Now she was gone, and they could see each other clearly for the first time. They looked into each other’s eyes, a kind of wordless connection strung between them.

They looked up at the first sound of the guitar. I had crawled over to where Glory lay, and slid the Walker from her hands to cradle it in my lap. I had no pick and just used my fingernails to strike a chord, the first of a descending series starting up on the neck and working my way down until it felt right. From there, I fell naturally into a minor key riff, alternating the strum with finger-picking.

I could almost hear the parts that would go along with it, a cello, with a deep, rich bowed voice, and hand drums, a doumbek maybe. I kept playing. There were no words. I didn’t know what to tell them, what I wanted to say about her or me or my life. I just kept playing.

But eventually the song came to a close, as it cycled down and my energy fl agged. When I finished, I saw they were both crying. I laid the guitar aside and went to them, and hugged them.

Exactly how that turned into me kissing Calla, I’m not sure. Her mouth was hot in mine, her cheeks wet and scarlet. Her breath came fast and hard. My hands travelled down her sides, over her hips. I felt her weight shift, as she reached out to Basil. Then she was kissing her, too, and in the back of my head I tried to pause. I had done many wild sexual things since leaving my quiet life on the moon. Some of them had been with Glory, some not. But I did not know what Basil had under her jeans and to some part of me that mattered.

The Spark did not much care for my squeamishness. The pang of fear I felt transmuted into thrill, and then my attention went back to Calla and I felt desire fl are. I pulled her towards me, Basil trailing along like the caboose, on to the smooth, hospital-cornered bed. I began peeling off the clothes she had just put on. Basil took her other side, and very shortly Calla was naked there on the coverlet between us. Basil and I exchanged a look, then each of us took a nipple in our mouths and Calla gasped. In perfect harmony, we each slid a hand up the inside of her legs, teasing her. Then Basil’s fingers cupped over her mons, her labia, and then spread, opening her for me. I used the tip of my index finger to skim the cream from the edge of her vaginal opening, spreading it liberally around her clit. She moaned. I continued to move gently, my touch light, until she ground her hips upwards towards my hand. But she could not move much, as Basil and I kept sucking her nipples, and I lifted my hand away from her.

She whimpered and Basil chuckled low in her throat in response. I played with her lightly until she bucked again and this time I let her impale herself on my fingers, my index and middle fingers curving into her, my thumb extended over Basil’s hand and then sliding between her fingers to where her clit swelled. One of her hands clutched at Basil’s jeans and I gave her a little nod. I had her cunt to myself then, and I took the opportunity to position myself there, my cheeks between her thighs. But as I licked her with long strokes, at first softly but then with urgent energy as her voice rose to a wail, I had one eye fi xed on Basil. Under the jeans she had plain white briefs, with a noticeable bulge. My stomach tightened. Then she slipped those off, too, and I almost laughed with my tongue plastered in Calla’s cunt. Basil’s protuberance was a technocock of some sort, form fitted and wired to her nervous system, rising rapidly in response to the arousal signals her brain was sending. The skin was imbedded not only with millions of nanosensors, but with accompanying lightglow effects. Right now the base was a deep red but the tip was glowing white like an iron left in the fire.

Calla tugged at Basil’s brightly coloured cock then and silenced herself as she pulled the slender machine into her mouth.

Baz gasped and steadied herself on the bed with one hand, as Calla’s tongue worked. It felt to me like I was licking her, too, as if somehow, through Calla, Basil’s cock and my tongue were connecting. “Kee-rist. .” she breathed, the only one of the three of us whose mouth was not busy, and yet she could barely speak. “Wow. . it’s. .”

Calla paused to grin up at her. “Is it as good as they say?”

Basil nodded, then must have read the questions in my eyes. “It’s new. She. . paid for it. .” and that was all she could say as Calla’s mouth went back to work. It made sense now, the way she kept expecting Glory to invite her to bed. I felt Calla’s clit spasm under my tongue and knew she was close to coming. I increased my pressure and she came while Basil thrust into her mouth, into the fleshy side of her cheek where I saw it bulge. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on making her come once more, two fingers spiralling in and out of her while my mouth drew her clit in and I clicked my tongue on it. She rewarded me quickly, wailing again as Basil popped free.

I sat up and Calla looked at me, pleadingly, both of them did, and it was easy to see she wanted more of the technocock. Basil and she giggled a bit as we swapped positions, and I shifted around until Calla was sitting up, her back against my chest like two kids on a gravity toboggan. I reached around with my hands to brush her nipples and she arched just as Basil thrust in. Soon she had established a rhythm, and I let the waves of sensation come through her body and into my own cunt. I had tucked my head next to hers and she could turn her head to kiss me on the lips. I closed my eyes and kissed her and rode the wave of Basil’s backbeat for a while. Then she broke away and kissed her, too.

I was startled out of my reverie then by Baz’s lips on mine, her tongue searching urgently for something in my mouth. The Spark fl ared up to meet her hungrily. And then somehow she was climbing past Calla, and the two of them together climbed on to me. Calla lay along one side, kissing my neck and stroking me from breast to the top of my bush, while Basil crushed the erect technocock into the crook of my hip with her body.

“Luna,” she whispered, her throat tightened by desire. “Luna.”

I quivered under her, the echo of the shivering fit I’d had before starting again. I knew if I paused too long. . I knew I didn’t want to pause too long. Glory and I had played with dildos, the low-tech kind, from time to time — she liked sticking things into my cunt as a way to prove she was in charge — but never anything like this and not in a long time. I crooked one knee up and there was the tool, now glowing blue and green and casting an undersea look on Basil’s face, bumping up against the flesh between my legs. It had looked so slim before as she had pumped Calla’s mouth, but now I wondered if it would hurt when she put it in. I clutched at her sweaty back with one arm, the one that wasn’t trapped by Calla, craving it and fearing it all at the same time, which only stoked the Spark hotter. Calla’s free hand then, it had to be, reached between my legs and opened me wide, and Basil thrust upwards through the slippery juices, then she adjusted her angle and sank into me.

I cried out, not from physical pain but from the sudden memory of the shape of Glory’s hand stuffed into me. Basil’s technocock was nothing like that, conveniently shaped for pleasure but not the rock heart that her fi st had been.

Calla moved then, letting Basil push my knees up, and straddled my face. I licked at her between gasps as she dug her fingers between our bodies to get at my clit. She soon had the loose skin of my labia and bush stretched up taut towards my belly with one hand while the other jabbed in double time over the hard nub. Basil’s thrusts mashed her hand even harder into me and I thrashed my head from side to side. “Harder,” I said through clenched teeth. My body wanted violence, needed it to break through the tense wall of pain that separated me from them. The wall that Glory’s death had erected.

No, I realized. The wall that Glory and I had built bit by bit over the last few years. Basil and Calla obliged, fucking me and frigging me as hard as they could, until I felt the edge of Calla’s finger claw over my clit. “Yes!” She crooked her finger more and I bucked hard against her, Basil now the one along for the ride. The orgasm seemed to radiate along my skin as well as through my insides, doubling back and cresting for a second time as they continued their motions until I went limp.

I was amazed that Basil had not come, but what did I know about how the technology worked? Maybe she had a way to turn it down. She pulled out of me, the tool glistening wet and now throbbing a deep purple, and Calla nearly leaped upon it. Baz obliged, falling on to her back and letting Calla seat herself with the cock deep inside. She moaned and fell forwards for a moment, then sat up erect. Now I could again circle her with my arms and get my fingers on to her clit and nipples.

I don’t know how long it was before she succeeded in making Basil come. All sense of time had long since fl ed. The three of us were just in a groove, where Calla would peak, then I would, using my own fingers when I had to, until eventually she arched and cried out and gripped her by the hips for two last thrusts that set Basil finally into a spasm, while I thrust my own fingers into my empty vagina, trying to remember what Glory’s callouses had felt like.

The two of them were then on me again quickly, Calla burying her face in my muff while Basil hugged me from behind. Then, as Calla drew another orgasm out of me, as I beat my palms on the coverlet, I shouted, “Enough, enough!”

They fell away from me as the sensation ebbed. There weren’t many cases, but there were a few, where people were fucked to death. The Spark can burn out a host, too. It was time to get it back under control.

I think it was some time later that I began to speak. I’m not sure if I blacked out or not, but when I came to, they were still there. The three of us were lying on top of the bed and I had no way of knowing if we’d been there for a minute or an hour. “We’re going to play tonight,” I said.

“What?” Basil sat up at the sound of my voice and rubbed her eyes.

“We’re going to play tonight. A tribute concert for her. Just like we did here. Improvisational, cooperative.” Not like anything we’d done before. As I described it to them, I could see the idea catching fire, the memory of the song I had played stirring faintly. “And there’s something else I have to tell you.” And I told them, about the Spark, about Saffron, about Glory, Rose and Nura, and all I knew. “I’m sorry,” I said as I finished. “I should have told you before. For some it becomes a curse. .” I looked at Glory, still lying in state on the low table. “But it is a gift, too.”

In response, they came and kissed me, both together. I already had the sound in my head of the music we could make together.