air - but at least I can bring my own echoes.
Pearl watched me clip the mikes to my stacks of plastic, run their cables into the mixer, then route them out through the effects.
"Paint cans, huh?" she asked.
"Paint buckets," I corrected, and saw Moz smile for the first time.
"Uh, sure. How many channels you need?" she asked, fingering the sliders on the mixing board. "Six? Twelve?"
"Just two. Left and right." I handed her the cables.
Pearl frowned as I turned away from her. This way, she couldn't control my mix from her board. It was like she wanted me to give her my eggs, my cheese, and my chives all in separate bowls. But instead I was handing her the whole omelet, cooked just the way I liked it.
She didn't argue, though, and I saw that Moz was still grinning.
"Everybody ready?" Pearl asked. Everyone was.
Minerva swallowed and walked up to grasp her mike with one pale hand. The other held a notebook, which I could see was open to a page of chaos, like the handwriting of the unluckiest kids back at my special school.
Moz just nodded, not looking up at Pearl, flicking his cords around on the floor with one toe.
The burly boy (whose name I'd already forgotten; should have written it down) was the only one who smiled. He leaned his head down to stare closely at his strings, setting his fingers carefully. Then, concentrating hard, he began to play. It was a simple riff, thick and dirty.
Pearl did something on the board, and the sound softened.
I listened for a moment, then tuned my echoes to ninety-two beats per minute. Moz started playing, high and fast. I thought it was a strange way to start, too complicated, like a guitar solo bursting out of nowhere. But then Pearl entered, playing a gossamer melody that wrapped a shape around what he was doing.
I listened for a while, not sure what to do. I had a lot of choices. Something simple and lazy, to give the music more backbone? Or should I swing the beat, a little off-kilter, to loosen it up? Or follow Moz's superquick fluttering, like rain against the roof?
I always relished this moment, right before starting to play. It was the one time my fingers didn't tremble or drum against my knees, when I could hold my hands out steady. No reason to hurry.
Also, I didn't want to make a mistake. There was something fragile about this music, as if it would fly apart if pushed in the wrong direction. Pearl, Moz, and the other boy thought they knew one another already, but they didn't yet.
I began carefully, only a downbeat at first, building the pattern one stroke at a time - simple to complicated, less to more. Then, just before it got too crowded, I slipped sideways, subtracting one stroke for each I added, gradually shifting the music around us, but leaving it still tenuous, directionless.
For a moment I thought I'd made a mistake. These were just kids. Maybe they needed to be pushed in one direction or another, or maybe they'd wanted a drum machine, after all.
But then the junkie girl came in.
There were no words, though she held one of the notebooks open in front of her. With the microphone pressed close to her lips, she was humming, but the melody emerged from the speakers sharp-edged and keening, cutting through the mass of intricacies we'd built.
Suddenly the music had focus, a beating heart. She wrapped the rest of us around herself, piercing my gradual shadows with a single ray of light.
I smiled, having a rare moment of absolute comfort in my own skin, every compulsion satisfied, the clockwork of the whole world clicking into place around my drumming. Even if they were young and flawed, these four had something. Maybe a happy accident was happening here, like the first time I'd ever noticed the echoes from the street matching my footsteps...
Then the strangeness began, something I hadn't seen since I was little. The air started to glitter wildly, my eyelids fluttering. This was more than ripples of heat from summer asphalt, or the shimmers I saw when someone was angry at me.
Shapes were forming on the cable-strewn floor, and faces materialized in the patterns of the soundproofing: I glimpsed expressions of hurt and fear and fury at the edges of my vision, as if my medication was failing.
I imagined dropping my sticks, reaching into my pocket, and spilling out my pills to count them. But