We were in business with a monster. The New Sound was the music of monsters.
I took a deep breath, reminding myself about the contracts. This didn’t have to change anything. Artists had been bat-shit crazy before; it was what you did with your insanity that mattered. We were still a good band, a great band even, even if our whole style of music was based on… a disease.
As long as we were the Taj Mahal of cannibal bands, maybe it wasn’t so bad.
“Okay,” I said.
It wasn’t really, but sometimes saying that word helps.
Astor Michaels smiled. “So we’re in this together, right, Pearl? We have to keep Min healthy, so that all our hard work—yours and mine—finally pays off. Even if she does something that makes you really, really angry. Okay?”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Like what?”
“You know, something she’s not necessarily… in control of.” He shrugged. “The disease makes people crazy, violent, and especially horny. Sometimes even I can’t control myself.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’ve been trying that hard.”
He smiled, revealing his razor teeth to the gums. “A small price to pay for art.”
Zombie’s ear perked up, and he jumped from my lap and ran to the door. A second later came the jingling of keys outside.
“Ah. They’re home,” Astor Michaels said, eyes twitching. “Just remember, we all want this band to be a success. So don’t get mad at poor Min. I’ve seen the change happen with my own eyes, and she’s been through more than you can imagine. So be nice, all right?”
I nodded, but my head was spinning again.
They’re home, he’d said.
They.
The door opened, and Minerva breezed in. Moz followed behind, carrying a threadbare duffel bag.
“Mozzy! Look who’s here!” Min cried, beaming all the wattage of her fawesome beauty at me, her cannibal-rock-star charisma. Moz just stood there staring, looking a little surprised, a lot guilty.
With a twist in my stomach, I remembered his mother’s anxious voice on the phone that morning.
He took a slow breath, then shrugged the duffel bag from his shoulder. It thumped to the floor like a dead body—stuffed full.
He was moving in.
“Hey, Pearl. How’s it going?”
I tried to answer, but my gut was writhing now, squeezing the taste of stomach-ripe champagne up into the back of my throat. Minerva moved a step closer to Moz, five pale fingers wrapping protectively around his arm.
He was hers now. Completely.
With the three of them here together, I could finally see the changes in Moz, all the clues I’d managed to blind myself to: the luster of his skin, the beautiful, inhuman angles of his face. Just like Min back in spring—when the hunger was first welling up—he’d grown a heart-twisting shade more fetching.
Even slitted against the dim candlelight, his eyes glowed, full of pity for me. He must have known what I’d wanted.
But she’d taken it instead.
Suddenly the desolate feeling in my stomach was swept away by fury: Minerva had done it again, hooked up with someone in the band—in my band. Even after what had happened with Mark and the System, after everything Luz had told her, Min had done this to me again. I clenched my fists. Of course she would throw it in my face now, when we were this close, the contracts near enough to touch, ready to be signed.
I felt Astor Michaels’s gaze, willing me to keep it together. For the good of the band. For the good of the New Sound… the music of monsters.
He snapped open the locks on his briefcase, pulled out his pen.
I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.
“Hi, guys,” I said. “Nice place.”
PART V
THE GIG
Study the Black Death, and you’ll understand one truth: when things start to go wrong, human beings always find ways to make them worse.
The year the Death came to Europe, a city called Caffa on the doorstep of Asia was under siege. When the attackers found themselves coming down with a strange new disease, they wisely decided to run. But first they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the city—so both sides would get the disease. Brilliant move.
When the Black Death was at its worst, the church decided to look for someone to blame and began to persecute heretics, Muslims, and Jews. As people fled these attacks, the disease fled with them. Nice work.
England and France had gone to war one year before the Black Death struck, but instead of making peace while the pandemic raged, they kept on fighting. In fact, they kept on fighting for 116 years, keeping their people poor, malnourished, susceptible to disease. Now that’s commitment.
The Black Death was helped along by war, by panic, even by the weather, but it had no greater ally than human stupidity. Sometimes, you wonder how our species has made it this far.
Not without a lot of help, I assure you.
NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:
411–421
23. MORAL HAZARD
— ALANA RAY-
I still hadn’t made a decision, but my hands were steady.
I’d been here at the nightclub more than three hours and hadn’t needed to drum my fingers or touch my forehead even once. Like being suspended in that moment before playing, the cadence of the universe around me needed no adjustments.
The club was at one end of a long alleyway in the meatpacking district, one free of garbage, the walls painted with giant murals and tagged with graffiti. I’d come in through a huge loading dock, trucks full of equipment rumbling in a tight line, waiting to disgorge.
Inside, the space was more than three hundred feet from stage to back wall, the echoes returning lazily, almost a whole second late—two beats at 120 beats per minute. Useless for playing, but that was fine with me. I liked my fake echoes with this band, just to be in control of something. My visions, my emotions, even the patterns I played all seemed to spring unbidden from the air, but at least my echo boxes obeyed me.
Astor Michaels had asked me to come early for sound check, so that the engineers could get used to my paint buckets. I’d brought thirty-six to arrange in eight stacks (S8 = 36), along with my special buckets: unusual sizes and thicknesses, even the broken ones that gave off the buzz of cracked plastic.
Unlike Pearl, the engineers here thanked me when I ran only two channels from my board to theirs. They had four bands to worry about tonight—each with its own array of treble, bass, effects, and volume settings—and wanted things as simple as possible. They let me hang out for the whole sound check, watching as they plastered the club’s huge mixing board with notes scribbled on masking tape. Its backside sprouted a tangle of cables, four bands’ worth of musical specificities sculpted in color-coded spaghetti.
I was still watching them work when I felt Astor Michaels behind me.
“Miss Jones,” he said, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“I prefer Alana Ray.”
He smiled. “Sorry to be formal, but we have business to conduct.” The papers rustled, making the air ripple. “You’re the only one who hasn’t signed yet. Not embarrassed about your penmanship, are you?”
“Top of my class,” I said, then shrugged. “The competition was less than average.”
“Ah. Didn’t mean it that way.” He pulled out a thick fountain pen. “I’m sure your signature’s more legible than Zahler’s—or his mother’s, for that matter.”
The drummer on stage started a long fill, rolling across his whole set, the sound phasing and twisting as engineers played with their settings. For a few moments, we couldn’t speak.