Coda (14 page)

“Earth to Anthem,” Scope says, tapping the side of myhead.

“Yeah?”

“I was just wondering when you wanted to get started,” Pixel says.

“Oh.” I haven’t really thought about it. “I guess we need another few weeks to practice?” If we still had Johnny . . . But we wouldn’t be doing this if we still had Johnny. He’s the reason now as much as he was the obstacle before. That same itch, the one he first cured by showing me there was another way, another path to music, has been crawling over my skin since he died. I have to do something to make this all make sense. I have to do something to protect the twins, even if I fail.

I just have to do . . . something, even if they kill me before I’m done.

“Sweet. Okay, I’ll take care of stuff here, but you guys should think about using this place to practice. You need to get used to the acoustics. Plus, I wanna know you don’t suck.”

Scope hits him and Pixel laughs. I wonder if life would be easier if I had a sibling closer to my own age. A brother, instead of being an almost-parent to two little kids I’d die for.

My mind is too young for this, my body too old.

Work is especially draining the next day, the time spent thinking about my energy traveling in pulses of light along wires to the labs upstairs. I didn’t cover Johnny’s ears with headphones, but it doesn’t make a difference. I help power the Grid, the Grid powers the music, and the music is killing us all.

I think of Haven, angry enough to want the Corp dead, though she’s too good to ever act on it. I’ve murdered, even if I’ve been apathetic, sometimes barely conscious during the process.

If there’s going to be a future without the Corp and its evil, where music is just music, then death is going to have to come first. My own, maybe, if we build enough of a cause that I need to martyr myself for it. Anyone who stands up to fight will be risking themselves. There’ll be deaths caused by action, not by the energy sucked
from me while I sit in a chair in a basement with a thousand others.

I guess that’s just a matter of scale, too.

Haven’s usually pink lips are stretched white and thin around the rim of her water bottle. We’re sitting in a bar mid-Web, dodging dirty looks from the waitress because we’re not ordering anything else. Like the water doesn’t cost enough.

“I need my own place.” She’s been upset since we met up, something her father did. She won’t say exactly what, but enough that she was torn between shouting and crying when she got here.

“So, do it.”
You can afford it
hangs between us. Honestly, I don’t know why she’s lived at home for this long, except for the fact that she’s almost never there.

She chews a pointed fingernail, its once smooth edge ragged. “He wants me to stay.”

I love her, but she frustrates the hell out of me sometimes. “You have two choices—that’s more than most of us get—and neither one is okay?”

Water sloshes against plastic; the table shakes. “I thought you’d listen!”

“I am,” I say, glaring at the waitress who is now too interested in us for a different reason. We’re not here for entertainment. “What do you want me to say?”

“I can’t stop thinking about what we found out. Every time I go home, I . . . why are they doing that?
How
can they do it?”

“Look.” I peel her fingers from the water bottle and link mine with them. “You’re at my place most of the time anyway.”

That might not be true if she found herself some swanky upper-Web place away from her family. My gut twists. I can’t leave the twins overnight. I never leave until after they’re in bed, and the few
hours of sleep I get every night end when they wake up. I don’t want my bed to stop smelling like Haven. I don’t want to stop finding long black and pink hairs in my hygiene cube.

She smiles softly. “You’re not sick of me yet?”

I shake my head. “Never.” I’m pretty sure she knows that. Those words are loud between us, too. “I have to get home to the twins.”

“Want me to come over?”

“Can’t. I, uh, promised Scope I’d help him with something. Guy stuff.”

“Oh.” Her face falls, and I want to punch myself. “Okay, well, tab me later?”

“Sure.”

I go to the club, via an apartment empty of anyone but my father. Fable’s mother was only too happy to accept more credits to look after them, which at least lets me act like I’m doing a good thing.

This is for them
, I remind myself.

Partly, anyway.

The stage is makeshift, hastily assembled, and ready to be taken apart and hidden before the club next opens for its legitimate purpose. The rough, homemade quality fits in with everything sitting on it. Pixel hasn’t run this place five years without learning a little about sound. I don’t know where he got the amps, or the parts if he built them himself, but the sight of them makes something itch inside me. Whether it’s excitement or fear, I can’t tell—or if the difference even matters.

One more week.

We’re not expecting a huge crowd, just people we know from Quadrant Two and the ones who’ve seen Mage’s coded message.

I’m still expecting guards to storm in any minute, and the knot in my stomach throbs to the beat of imagined footsteps made heavy
by boots and weapons and righteousness.

“Ready?” Pixel asks, carrying in a microphone stand made of pipes held together with silver tape.

“How would I know?”

He sets the stand on the stage and perches beside me on the edge. “You’re doing a good thing.”

“I’m doing an illegal thing that could get my whole family killed. So are you.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “but maybe that’s
why
it’s good. A sign or whatever. Something easy wouldn’t be worth it. You still think it is?”

I think I don’t know what else to do, that this feels like the only thing I
can
do. I guess that’s the same. Not smart, but right.

Pixel nudges my shoulder with his. “Never pictured you as the type to have stage fright,” he says, and the tightness in my chest unfurls a little. Yeah. That’s all this is.

We’re quiet for a few minutes, staring around at the empty club. “Does Scope seem different to you?” he asks eventually.

“How so?”

He shrugs. “Dunno. Calmer, or something, even with everything going on. Maybe that boyfriend of his is a good influence. Never thought I’d say that again, after you.”

I shift uncomfortably. “He’s in love. Give him a break.”

“That bother you?”

“Not the way you mean.”

Mage walks in wearing a black leather trench coat that billows out with his long strides, Phoenix following in a skirt that’s really more of a belt. Yellow Guy seems to have become some kind of mascot—I have to fight a laugh at the idea as he lets go of Scope and the four of us climb onto the stage.

The club looks different from up here. The few extra feet of height lets me imagine looking out across a crowd, not being swallowed up in it like I am when I’m on that floor. They’re all staring up, glittering and beautiful, their mouths singing my words back to me. The idea that we’re still fucking crazy for using the club disappears when I bring my hand down across the strings for the first time today, my guitar across my body. Phoenix pounds her xylophone so it can be heard above the crash of Mage’s drums; improbable melodies burst from Scope’s growing collection of noninstruments.

Generators hum, a low, buzzing bass line. I don’t mind using my energy for this—twice.

We sound nothing like the music that usually fills this room, the stuff that’s polished in a studio before it’s sent to a lab for enhancement. I’m sure those musicians aren’t pouring with sweat as they sing into their microphones, playing harder when the calluses on their fingers threaten to rip.

I’m sure they can’t feel
this
. If they could feel anything, they wouldn’t have sold their souls to the Corp.

My arms ache, and my throat is raw when I stop midsong to tell Mage his timing is off. Broken glass crunches under my boots. I step back to the mic again, suddenly hyper-aware of Pixel and Yellow Guy watching from the back of the room.

Stage fright. Yeah. I breathe, calm my heartbeat, and sense the others’ impatience behind me.

This is our last practice until we do a final soundcheck next week before the concert. I think we sound good. I don’t know how good we’d have to sound for me to be ready.

“Anthem.” Scope gets my attention.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

We launch back in and repeat the verse we were on when Mage
messed up. Every song we know blares out of the speakers, building a wall of noise that begs to be climbed. I want to stand on it and stare down at the Corp below.

Heat bubbles in my chest. I look at the others.

We can do this.

My apartment is too quiet without the twins, filled with only the constant babble of the TV and my father’s rattling breaths. I leave my room, a track ringing in my ears, relief humming through my veins, a pink feather held between two fingers. My father blinks and turns his head toward me when I switch the TV off, his eyes going to the feather. I’m never sure how aware he is of Haven, but I think the nod he gives is some kind of indication. Even that small movement seems to exhaust him.

“I need to do something,” I say, crossing the room to sit on the floor by his head.

He grunts; the soft wheezing of air could mean he understands me or it could mean nothing at all.

“It might get me into a lot of trouble.” Understatement of the year. But his clouded, milky eyes sharpen and his muscles tense. “It’s for the twins,” I continue. “And me, and all of this. Are you listening?”

“Do . . .” Coughs puff out his hollowed cheeks, and he fumbles for the water bottle I’ve left out for him. I grab it and hold it to his lips. “Do . . . what you have to,” he gasps, shudders wracking his body. “Anthem . . . I’m sorry.”

“I know.” My mother had said the same many times in her last weeks. “It’s okay,” I lie. I can’t bring myself to yell at this shell of the
strong man I once admired, though fuck knows I’ve wanted to in the past.

He’s silent for a few minutes; I think he’s fallen asleep again. “What?” he mumbles finally.

I shake my head. “You don’t need to know. But if anything happens to me, you
have
to make sure Alpha and Omega are okay, you hear me? I know you can’t do it, but Haven will, and Fable’s mother. Listen to them. Let them help.” I wait until he nods and his eyes flutter closed before I stand and go back to my room. I’d feel better if I was sure he’d remember this in the morning—hell, in five minutes—but there’s no way to make sure of that. Death would have to have me by the throat before I stopped worrying about the twins. I gather my last scraps of faith and hope it’s the same for him.