Coda (4 page)

“The same. Your mother?”

He shakes his head. She’s held on longer than a lot of people do, but it’s coming for her. Her death will be more comfortable than my father’s; Scope and Pixel together can afford some of the more specially encoded tracks. The powerful ones that numb pain and bring restful sleep.

Permanent sleep, eventually.

“You weren’t at the club last night.”

“Yeah. The twins, they asked to go to the CRC. Didn’t want to leave them alone after that, you know?”

“Ouch.” He winces. “They handle it okay?”

“Better than I did my first time. How was your night?” That smirk. I used to be in love with it. Now it’s just another accessory, like the silver ring through his nose or the chains hanging from his belt. “Never mind, spare me the details. Did you see Haven?”

“See, you’re not asking if
I
saw her. You want to know if
other
guys saw her.”

Heat rises in my face.

“Both of you could just stop being stupid, then you wouldn’t have to worry about this.”

“We’re being smart.”

“You’re the luckiest bastard I know. I’m just saying. You fall for the one rich, gorgeous hacker chick in the entire Web who feels the same fucked-up way about relationships you do.”

“Fate,” I say.

“Do you ever wish you’d never met her?”

My heart lurches. “No, but Haven’s got a normal life expectancy. Mine’s shot to hell.” One year off for one year on, that’s the accepted ratio, and I’ve been hooking up to the Grid for five. I think of my mother, my father. “I haven’t changed my mind, okay? I’m not putting Haven through that. And I already spend more time away from the twins than I should.”

“Not even if she wants to?”

“She doesn’t. And I couldn’t keep this secret from her if . . . Next topic.” I can’t talk about her anymore, not down here.
She
and
this
can never be in the same place.

Scope holds up his hands. “Fine. Your life, man.”

Such as it is.

Our feet know where they’re going; our eyes check often to make sure we’re not being followed down to the warehouse on the edge of the island. There are a lot of abandoned buildings down here, empty of the fruits of commerce for which the first incarnation of this city was known. Less damaged ones have been turned into needed housing, but ours is echoing and bare, swathed in razor wire and silence. Squeezing through the hole in the fence takes care embedded by years of practice.

Inside, twisted pieces of junk litter the floor, too worthless to be scavenged. A frayed square of carpet is folded back; the edge of a trapdoor is visible in a patch of floor a little less dirty than the rest.

We descend into an apparently empty room; our boots clang on the ladder’s metal rungs. “Just us,” I call, and faces emerge from shadows thrown by the single lightbulb, bodies half-hidden by old generators we’ve rebuilt and strange shapes that don’t look like what they are. Mage, whose skin is so dark I can find him only by the whites of his eyes, and Phoenix, who is busy examining a lock of her red and orange hair with affected boredom.

“Hey, guys,” says a voice above us that I know almost as well as my own, the way it meshes with my own when we sing.

“You’re late,” I reply. Johnny’s usually the first one here. He grimaces, disappears into the shadows, and reemerges, looping a strap over his head.

“Yeah,” he says, frowning. “I think I was followed.”

Mage, Phoenix, Scope, and I all stare at Johnny.

“Patrol-pod was paying a little too much attention to me. Had to double back and come through the alley to lose them,” Johnny says. His fingers reach almost reverentially for a tuning peg. Johnny’s the only one of us who’s scraped together the exorbitant number of credits a real instrument costs on the black market. It’s like the thing’s plated in gold, he’s so protective of it.

Not that I blame him. If I had a guitar, I would be, too. I’m lucky that he lets me mess around with it sometimes when the others aren’t around.

“You sure they didn’t see you come in here?” Mage asks.

“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. If they knew something, they’d have tried harder to see where I was going. Probably just bored. We’re cool.” I know him better than the others and I see from his expression he’s not convinced by his own words, but Johnny wouldn’t put the rest of us in danger.

“Okay,” says Scope. “All here. Let’s play.”

“One sec.” Mage picks up a brick and beats out a dent in one of his old oil drums. Each heavy blow makes me blink. “Thing’s been screwing with my sound.”

“Can’t have that,” Phoenix says, blowing a speck of dust off a homemade stick.

We use what we have. What we can find, build, break, and deform into the things we need. Hammered sheets of steel, glass bottles, a xylophone I spent months crafting from scrap metal and salvaged wood three summers ago.

It takes a few more minutes to set up, slipping past each other in
the damp, dusty, moldy space with its cheap attempts at soundproofing on the walls and ceiling, avoiding lengths of rusted pipe that stick out at dangerous angles. Mage shifts his drums into position, moving them in increments of inches. Scope prepares to extract glittering melodies from glass, Phoenix stands behind the xylophone, and Johnny holds his battered guitar. I get ready to sing.

None of it is perfect. Perfection would be something like the studios the Corp shows off on TV sometimes. Perfection would be amps to crank high, and no fear of using them. As it is, we only have two hours while the guards in the pods head back to base to change shifts.

Definitely not perfect, but this is real.

Mage lifts his drumsticks and counts us in.

I exhale.

This
is music. Scope starts, an eerie drone into which Phoenix rains clear, metallic mist. Long, languid notes slide from Johnny’s guitar, and Mage hits a drum once. Just once. Stale, ordinary air transforms to song in my lungs, a cloud of warmth that spreads out from my chest and sets my limbs buzzing. Johnny’s heavy, darkly sensuous song surrounds me and imbues me with a secret energy, like kissing at night.

I’m part of an intangible
hugeness
. We’re all connected, united, looking to each other for cues and playing our parts. A dance, but here my mind is
mine
, and I can control every movement.

Down here, only the music needs me. My family and the conduit chair and my mother’s hologram are too far away to ask me for anything. Here, I’m not haunted by faces. Energy builds, refilling me for another week.
Thump. Thump
. Mage starts up again behind me, the guitar gets louder, and Phoenix fights for footage in the sonic space, punishing her metal keys. My voice is deep, almost growling for this
one. As I move my feet around Scope, he grins up at me and strikes the glass again.

Johnny and I trade lyrics in a race to the sudden end.
More
. Panting and energized, we launch into another. A slow song, almost lazy, its power from the near frustration of restraint, then a faster one, hard and loud and almost violent.
More
. Adrenaline heats the room, sweat paints our faces, and my feet feel like they’re not touching the ground, buoyed by the flurry of motion and sound.

The two hours go by too fast, divided into common measures and Johnny’s recent experiments with weird time signatures. Scope’s watch goes off—discordant, jarring—and we stop right away. There have been close calls in the past; now we don’t play even a second longer than we should. We’re not stealing food. The Corp would have to come up with a whole new creative punishment just for us.

“Phoenix, you were a little off on that last bridge,” Johnny tells her. His ear is incredible; more so when I remember that he, like the rest of us, plays almost totally by instinct. What little technical knowledge we have comes from an illegally traded, prewar textbook.

Phoenix flips her hair in front of her face to hide a sulk. The flaming strands ripple when she talks. “Who cares? Not like anyone’s going to hear. None of us are going legit.”

“That’s not the point. Wanting music to be what it
should
be is why we’re all here.”

“Just work on it next week, girl,” Mage says. Phoenix shrugs.

“Fine.”

We cover our instruments with scraps of threadbare cloth and hide them in dark corners before we leave. I hang back with Mage
and watch the others go one by one. Scope pauses with one foot on the ladder.

“Club tonight? Heard there’ll be some new tunes.”

“Yeah,” I say. “See you there.”

We can never escape.

Mage and I hit the depot on the way home, where stalls of Corp-licensed vendors hawk food and other necessities. If you know the right ones, they’ll sell things that definitely aren’t vegetables and soap. Mage goes off to talk to a man named Imp about some black-market piece of computer gear I wouldn’t have a clue how to use. I buy a loaf of rough bread, a bag of rice, vegetables, nuts, a small cheese I hope will tempt my father. Red meat is almost nonexistent down here—the only land on which large animals can be kept is the giant park in the middle of the island, and even those are weak, over-cloned from the ones brought in before the siege began. An upper-Web luxury. The chicken I pick up is small and anemic, a product of one of the skyscraper farms. We say good-bye back on the street, Mage’s arms full of delicate electronics wrapped in cheap cloth.

“Where’ve you been? You look . . . happy.”

I nearly drop one of the bags at Haven’s feet, which are resting against the bottom step below the door to my building.

“Shopping.”

Haven looks at the two rough cloth bags in my hands. “It took you an hour?”

“Yeah, well, that’s how long it takes when you don’t have people to do it for you,” I say, realizing too late that it was a genuine question. She inhales sharply at the hint of bitterness beneath the teasing.

“Shit, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t know you were waiting. You should’ve messaged me.” My tablet is in my pocket, but it hasn’t buzzed all afternoon.

“What can I say,” she says, standing and kissing my cheek. Her perfume makes me lightheaded. “I’m full of surprises.”

“Well, mystery girl, how was your day?”

“Busy. Working on a new project.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll see when it’s ready.”

I pass my wrist across the scanner and refuse her offer of help with carrying the groceries upstairs. Alpha and Omega get home a few minutes later, both making a beeline for us and then the couch.