“Sex,” I said. “But deniable.”
Movie sex, where nobody rolls onto anybody’s hair and nobody ever sneezes.
Peter peered around me to fix his tie in the mirror. Subdued blue and charcoal paisleys, very elegant. “They’ll eat it up,” he said.
I drove my team crazy at the sound check, but you would have, too. I couldn’t even tell the Clownfish was there. Maybe the headpiece was incrementally heavier, or maybe it was my imagination. But other than that homeopathic sensation, the drum rig felt the same, it sounded the same, it moved the same—but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I just tested enough different combinations enough different ways, something would provoke a failure. So I put the rig and the band and the sound team through everything I planned to do on stage that night, and everything I could ever remember having done by mistake, and everything I could imagine doing by accident. Probably twice.
The rig, for a wonder, worked. Which just redoubled my unease, and the conviction that it was going to fail catastrophically in front of nine and a half thousand people, probably in the middle of “Mystic Verses” or “Digger” or “The Judge.” I was terribly afraid that the new tech would not just crash, but crash in the middle of the popular, showstopping numbers. Thereby, ironically, actually stopping the show.
But if there was a failure built in, or some accidental combination of drum and brain wave that would crash it, I couldn’t find it. And Peter had promised that he and Claude were going to be there all night, and that if anything went wrong it would be fixed posthaste. I disgusted myself by finding Peter’s assurances, well, reassuring. But I also made sure Suzie had the backup drum rig out, and oiled, and ready to go.
And then I stood in the wings and hyperventilated and got in the way—I mean, “supervised”—while the roadies broke down the set for the opening act and wheeled our stuff out, mine and my band’s. I watched chrome and steel and enamel catch the lights from above, and I watched the roadies file off, and I caught my breath and held it as the spots went down.
You think it’s going to get easier with time, that you’re going to get used to it. That with experience, your hands will stop shaking before every show. But they won’t; not as long as you’re alive up there. It’s the adrenaline.
It doesn’t get easier. You just get addicted to it.
At 9:15 p.m., by my bangle, I followed the glow tape onto the darkened stage. I found my mark and took up my position center stage and waited for the hired guns to locate their instruments in the dark. My bangle lit up pale green when everybody checked in as ready.
I snapped the fingers on my left hand.
The electrostatic triggers in the drum rig pick up every motion. Some, they’re calibrated to ignore. But most—the intentional movements of dance, the gestures that punctuate a song—are transformed into percussion, into rhythm, into joy. So my fingers went snap-snap-snap-snap. And the rig translated it into the thump-thump-thump-thump of the bass drum, setting time.
The spots came up. All my white and silver trappings dazzled in the sudden glare.
I’d found my beat. I’d found my light. The technology was working fine. It was going to be Okay again, just as it always was in the end. We were going to do a good show.
And, you know, it was a really good crowd that night. I felt the energy as I hadn’t all tour, and I think the hired guns felt it too. At least, I saw the bassist and the keyboard player grinning at each other through the sweat, and that’s never a bad sign.
I was still high on it when I walked backstage after the encore, and Mitch wasn’t there with my towels. I should have known then, right then, that something was terribly wrong. But the bassist walked over to hug me, and I hugged her, and then we all had a good stoned-on-adrenaline giggle, feeling like we’d finally started working as a group.
When I finally extricated myself, there were still no cold towels. I was irritated, but not really irritated: I’d known Mitchell Kaplanski for the better part of a decade, and if he wasn’t there when I got off stage, something or someone was on fire or shorting out or drunk inappropriately. I resisted wiping my face on my arm, so as not to get makeup on the costume or the rig, and I picked my way over cables and past the bustle of load-out to my dressing room. I poked my head into the buffet along the way, just in case. No Mitch, and it was pretty picked over at this point, but I managed to assemble a chicken fajita with extra extra salsa and a smear of guacamole and ate it—balanced over a paper plate and seasoned with sweat and lipstick—as I minced on aching feet back down the hall to the dressing rooms.
I pressed my bangle to the lock and the door clicked tunelessly. It had been unlocked. Bad news. Had I left it unlocked?
I didn’t think so, but I had been fretting so much about the new technology that I might have forgotten. It was a stupid mistake if I had. Or maybe it had been Mitch or Suzie? Or Peter? Or the venue manager? Nobody else was supposed to have the code…
I opened the door.
Of course it’s no surprise what I found. Everybody knows what I found.
Mitchell sprawled bonelessly across the ruined Envirug. It had humped up around him, trying to support his spine and neck, but it hadn’t been able to do much other than flop him like a rag doll. His blood had soaked the white pile, which was thick and sodden with syrupy, gagging crimson on every side of his corpse.
I was cooler than I would have expected myself to be. When I realized where I was, the wooden floor had bruised my knees, but I hadn’t screamed and I had my bangle to my ear and was dialing 911.
It was 4 a.m. before the police finished with me, but Claude was fiddling with the backup rig when I walked in, the one I’d been wearing on stage dangling from my left hand.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Er,” he said. “Yes?”
I gave him my best Dazzling Smile. God knows the orthodontia cost enough. “Hey, Claude?”
He raised a properly suspicious eyebrow. Flirting was the wrong tack, I decided. An appeal to his hacker identity was more likely to get me what I wanted.
I said, “Can you show me how to download and compile that raw file? The one we made tonight?” I held up the drum rig and let it swing from my crooked fingers.
“You going to do something illegal with it?”
“Only technically.” I winked.
A smile spread across his face like bread rising, warm and steady. I felt like a first-class heel for using his ideals so cynically. But I did it anyway.
At least I felt bad about it. It’s possible that’s the biggest thing separating me from Peter.
Peter was on a call, headset rather than bangle, when I found him in the business office. Because he was Peter, and if he went without contact with his phone for longer than fifteen minutes, withdrawal symptoms might set in.
From his end of the conversation it sounded like he was setting up a press conference. About the death. Of course.
“Put this on.” I shoved the Clownfish tiara at him.
He stared at me, his hands not moving, his mouth making noises that were probably very important to the person on the other end of the line. The tiara wobbled across my palm. I wanted to jam it down his throat.
I threw it into his lap because that was better than hitting him with it. “Put it on,” I said again.
“Gotta go,” he said to the phone call, and dropped the connection. He set his gadget aside and picked up the headpiece. “Are you about to pull a gun on me, Neon?”
“There’d be some buzz in that.” I tried for sweet reason and probably approximated icy mildness. “And the cameras in here aren’t mysteriously malfunctioning, the way the ones in my dressing room were.”