Chapter Ten — Eight O'Clock Is a Wound (continued)

At 8:31, Asher Quinn discovered that an empty rehearsal building could still contain an astonishing amount of noise.

There was the ventilation rattling above the corridor. Somewhere downstairs, a technician was wrestling a road case over a threshold. A vending machine clicked every thirty seconds without dispensing anything. And inside Asher's head, a perfectly ordinary read receipt had acquired the volume of a stadium.

He had sent an apology. Luna had opened it. He had made the call he promised to make, and she had let it ring out.

He couldn't know whether she'd been too angry to speak, too tired, or simply unwilling to risk another argument. He could know that she had seen what he wrote. That was enough to keep him looking at the same four letters beneath the message.

Read.

The rehearsal office hadn't become more comfortable in the last thirteen minutes. He carried his phone down the hall to the private writing room they kept available between production meetings, then immediately regretted bringing it.

At the door he passed the sign Nico had taped over the keypad that morning: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE PERFORMER AFTER MIDNIGHT. HE BECOMES MANAGEMENT.

Asher had retaliated by replacing the label on Nico's access pass with UNION REPRESENTATIVE FOR BAD IDEAS.

It had been a good day for that joke.

He set his phone on the desk, sat behind the small keyboard, and stared at the unopened notebook beside it.

A week ago, he'd been writing a song about a woman who could make him lose his place in a room. Tonight he knew exactly where he was and couldn't find anywhere else to put himself.

His thumb reached for the phone again.

Nothing.

He leaned back and told the ceiling, "You've played ninety thousand people without asking permission to check a screen. Get a grip."

It was the wrong argument. Ninety thousand people weren't Luna. They couldn't tell him why a little folding chair had mattered or whether she'd believed his apology. Most importantly, he hadn't promised any of them he'd be somewhere and then turned up in their lives as an excuse.

The phone lit.

Asher snatched it so quickly he nearly knocked his notebook onto the floor.

Nico calling.

"Who died?" he demanded.

There was a pause. "I'm delighted you answered with such warmth. Nothing died. The moving-wall cue passed the final clearance review. Imani signed it off, and we're running it at half pace again on Monday before the full show sequence."

"Good. It needed another pass."

"It did. Also, you left your jacket in the office."

"I'm wearing my jacket."

"Then you left a second jacket in the office, which suggests either wealth or an extremely small wardrobe with duplicate entries."

"Why are you calling about a jacket?"

"Because you've been ignoring my messages about the final cue notes for twenty minutes, and you never ignore someone offering you an opportunity to correct them."

Asher looked at the phone beside his notebook, where Luna's silence occupied the top of the screen. "I had something else going on."

"Something musical?"

"Not yet."

Nico's voice changed, not softer so much as less interested in scoring points. "The library?"

Asher shut his eyes. He hadn't told Nico every word of the argument, but he'd mentioned the exhibition that morning and boasted that he was getting out of rehearsal in time to attend. Nico could count hours.

"I missed it."

"I heard. The safety cue ran long."

"The safety cue was real. I could've warned her earlier. Instead I kept thinking the next pass would fix it, and then I called seven minutes before I was supposed to be standing next to her." He swallowed. "I joked about furniture."

"You joked about furniture at a library exhibition?"

"Please don't make me say it twice."

"Was it at least good furniture?"

"Nico."

"Understood. Catastrophic furniture."

Asher rubbed his eyes. He could hear Nico shift something on a table, probably the stack of technical sheets neither of them ever managed to keep in alphabetical order.

"She called me back," Asher said. "We fought. I brought up her VESPER obsession, like that somehow made me less wrong."

"Ah. So you deployed yourself as a witness for the defense."

"Apparently."

"Did the witness help?"

"She said VESPER hadn't promised to be there. I had."

For the first time, Nico didn't have a joke ready.

"She's right," he said.

"I know."

"And you can be right about staying for a safety problem and wrong about how you treated her afterward."

"I know that too."

"Then what do you want from me?"

Asher looked down at the message marked read. "She hasn't answered me. I called when I said I would. She let it ring."

"Do you think she's safe?"

"Yes. She was at work, and she's capable of getting herself home. That's not what I'm worried about."

"No," Nico said. "I didn't think it was."

The honesty was unexpectedly difficult to bear. Asher had called arenas to attention with a raised hand. He'd made entire crews alter course with three words. Here was a man who knew how much noise he could generate, sitting in a room because silence from one woman had made him feel small.

"I think I wanted the apology to work right away," Asher admitted.

"An apology isn't a soundcheck. You don't get to repeat it until the room gives you the response you wanted."

"That's awful."

"It's also correct. I can be both. You taught me."

Asher let out a laugh. It lasted only a second but it was real.

Nico added, "Don't use the public account to distract yourself."

Asher's gaze shifted toward the other notifications crowding his screen. Somewhere in that flood, the fan called Orbit was probably still conducting her highly public trial of the universe. He remembered the clever post he'd answered at 7:31, a spontaneous laugh in an otherwise miserable evening. He knew nothing about the woman behind the handle.

"I've done enough talking to strangers tonight," he said.

"Then talk to your notebook. It charges less by the hour."

Nico ended the call before Asher could think of a respectable comeback.

For a while, Asher remained still.

Then he opened the notebook.

He didn't want to write a song that punished Luna. He was already angry enough to compose something grand and accusatory, and experienced enough to know that anger could produce an impressive chorus and an ugly person. He didn't want the anonymous woman in a future record to stand in a courtroom and receive the sentence he wasn't brave enough to say aloud.

He wanted to write what the waiting felt like.

That was a more humiliating task.

The first image that came to him was a man absurdly dressed for a phone call, trying to treat eight o'clock like a first date. Asher hadn't changed shirts or cleaned a room tonight. He had spent most of the evening in rehearsal clothes, half arguing with himself, half hoping an apology would be enough. But a man rehearsing jokes at his reflection would tell the truth of the feeling better than another account of a delayed safety cue ever could.

He put the pen to paper.

You said you'd call at eight

He looked at the line. In life, he'd been the one who promised to call. On the page, he allowed the little reversal to stay. The lyric wasn't a sworn statement; it was the shapeless ache of an appointment that had become an empty hour.

So I cleaned my room like a first date

Ridiculous.

He read the two lines aloud and almost smiled.

A moment later he sketched a quick, restless rhythmic figure on the keyboard and let it repeat. There was no finished arrangement, no recording session, no audience. Just a pulse that kept arriving before he was ready, much like the urge to check the screen.

He began breaking the phrases into short pieces. A clock looked at twice. A typed greeting erased before anyone could receive it. A scarf turned into a prop in the room's imaginary little comedy. The ordinary domestic details had no obligation to have happened. They were a way of making anxiety visible without giving it a speech.

He tried an angrier version of the refrain, disliked the smugness of it, and crossed out his attempt.

His eyes returned to the phone.

No answer.

Luna.

Moon.

He'd heard the meaning of her name in conversation and liked it long before tonight. Now it gave him something startlingly exact: a person close enough to want and impossibly distant across a few inches of glass. He looked toward the building's narrow window, where reflected ceiling lights hovered in the night sky like a row of fake stars.

Then he wrote the line that made the rest of the idea turn toward him.

Guess I'm left on read by the moon

He said it once, quietly. The line was almost comic. He could imagine an audience laughing at a man who had made the night sky into a messaging app.

He could also feel the exact instant the joke stopped protecting him.

The phrase landed over the pulse. He let the music run, tapping out short pauses where an answering notification ought to have been. A bright, impatient shape began gathering around the words, refusing to let their sadness turn solemn.

At 9:07, he saved a rough working sketch under a new title: Left on Read.

It was not a finished song. The verses were incomplete, several images still lived only in the margin, and Nico would eventually have opinions about what deserved to survive. No master existed. Nobody outside that room had heard a note.

Asher sat with the pen uncapped and the phone beside his hand.

He could have called again. He could have written something accusing. He could have told himself that a woman who didn't answer wasn't worth the trouble, and the lie would have lasted perhaps three seconds.

Instead he added one more small idea to the margin, the image of a man claiming he'd moved on while checking the screen one last time.

He didn't send it to her.

For once, VESPER could make something out of the silence without being able to make the silence end.

At 9:11, Asher checked his phone again.