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.