When the drumroll stuttered to a halt, Astor Michaels spread the contracts out on the mixing board. “Shall we?”

I stared down at them, all those carefully chosen, hair-splitting words. When I’d read the contract, it had made a tangle in my mind, the numbered and cross-referenced paragraphs twisted around one another like the theme of a fugue.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m concerned about… the ethics of signing.”

“Ethics?” He laughed. “Good God, Alana Ray. This band has four minors, two of whom are bat-shit crazy. Minerva had to forward-date her contract to next week. We’ve got a simpleton and a control freak as well. The ethics of you signing? You’re practically the only one of sound mind!”

I didn’t like how he was talking about the others, but first I had to explain: “I’m not concerned about my own competence. I am worried about tonight.”

“Stage fright?” His voice softened. “Is it tough with your condition?”

I shook my head. “This is not about me. What if signing this contract risks harm to others? In the law, that is called a moral hazard.”

“I don’t follow you.”

I looked up from the mass of words spread out across the mixing board, finally meeting Astor Michaels’s eyes. “I think that something dangerous may happen here tonight, because of us. Because of what Minerva is.”

“Oh.” He blinked. “So you’ve… seen something?”

“Only what I always see when she sings.”

“Your little Loch Ness hallucination?” He smiled.

“I also saw it at the Morgan’s Army gig, but stronger.” The drummer hit his snare, its echo bouncing across the vast club. There would be a thousand people here tonight. Huge stacks of amplifiers waited on either side of the stage, buzzing in the silence, crinkling the air. “More people makes the beast bigger; more sound makes it bigger.”

“I hope so, Alana Ray, but that doesn’t make it real.” Astor Michaels frowned. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Do I?”

He stared at me for a moment, genuinely puzzled. Then he shook his head. “We’ve both seen strange things in our lives, I’ll grant you that. We’ve both had… conditions to deal with. But both of us made something from them. That’s why we’re sitting here across this contract, you and me.”

I looked at his teeth, remembering what Pearl had told me on the phone last night. How Astor Michaels had made a career out of making more insects.

He stabbed at the papers with one long fingernail. “What you have right here is real, and your visions aren’t. You know that.”

I was suddenly angry. “How can you be certain? This is in my head, not yours. No one else can see the things I do.”

His stare held me coolly. “But you’re the most logical person I’ve ever met, Alana Ray. And you wouldn’t have come here for a sound check if you weren’t going to play tonight, and you wouldn’t play tonight if you weren’t going to sign. So you don’t really believe in monsters, do you?”

I swallowed, looking down at my hands—perfectly still, ready to play. I had dreamed of drumming all last night, of being under the spotlights. “But you say Minerva is going to change things. What if she makes the beast real?”

“I’ve watch this epidemic roll across New York City for two years, and I’ve never seen anything like what you describe.”

I stared at him, wanting to believe. Astor Michaels had discovered the New Sound, after all. Maybe he knew what he was talking about.

“Don’t you trust me?” he said, the pen flickering in his hand. “Don’t you think I’ll do right by you?”

“I think it was right, what you did for Minerva.”

He let out a snort. “Finally somebody thanks me.”

“Yes. Thank you,” I said. Minerva’s freedom had frightened Pearl, but I’d watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal—against normal, not beside it. Locks didn’t cure; they strangled.

“Well, then.” He held out the pen, eyes glinting. “I don’t think you’re afraid of me or afraid of monsters. I think you’re just afraid of your own success.”

I shook my head. Astor Michaels was very wrong about that. That morning, I’d thrown my change bucket away. Moral hazard or not, I wanted to be more real than someone begging on the streets.

So I signed, as he’d always known I would.

24. 10,000 MANIACS

— ZAHLER-

The crowd was filling the main room now—a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for someone to poke it with a stick.

The more I listened, the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the stage. Especially some lame bassist who’d only been playing for about four weeks…

I swallowed. Nobody had ever been this nervous before.

This was real. This was actual. This was happening right now.

Under the dressing room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from humiliation.

Sometimes, playing my new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had across a guitar. Lately I’d been dreaming of the whole world expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the strings of Pearl’s bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers like quicksand in a nightmare.

Moz didn’t look much happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room, wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his face and bare arms.

“You look like you got the flu, Moz,” I said.

He shook his head. “Just need my cup of tea.”

“Almost ready, Mozzy.” A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be brewed.

“Your cup of tea?” I shook my head. Living with a girl had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I’d told him to call Minerva, because I’d been so mad at him for wanting me to switch instruments…

It was all the stupid bass’s fault!

Alana Ray stood right in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands. Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had stolen all her twitchiness.

She’d traded her usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No one had told me we were supposed to dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept saying would make everything really intense…

But what if it just pissed them off?

Pearl was in the opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she’d worn to Red Rat Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was melting.

But she didn’t look happy. She kept swearing under her breath: “Special Guests? More like Special Retards. I can’t believe we’re going out as ‘Special Guests.’ Why don’t we just call ourselves Special Education?”

“The band going on first is called Plasmodium,” Moz said. “How much does that name suck?”

Pearl looked at him, gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, “Sounds a lot like Toxoplasma.”

“We should pick a real name soon,” Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn’t look nervous at all. She didn’t notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. “If we let Astor Michaels choose one, it’ll have the word plasma in it.”

“What does plasma even mean?” Moz asked.