locks on his briefcase, pulled out his pen.
I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.
"Hi, guys," I said. "Nice place."
PART V
THE GIG
Study the Black Death, and you'll understand one truth: when things start to go wrong, human beings always find ways to make them worse.
The year the Death came to Europe, a city called Caffa on the doorstep of Asia was under siege. When the attackers found themselves coming down with a strange new disease, they wisely decided to run. But first they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the city - so both sides would get the disease. Brilliant move.
When the Black Death was at its worst, the church decided to look for someone to blame and began to persecute heretics, Muslims, and Jews. As people fled these attacks, the disease fled with them. Nice work.
England and France had gone to war one year before the Black Death struck, but instead of making peace while the pandemic raged, they kept on fighting. In fact, they kept on fighting for 116 years, keeping their people poor, malnourished, susceptible to disease. Now that's commitment.
The Black Death was helped along by war, by panic, even by the weather, but it had no greater ally than human stupidity. Sometimes, you wonder how our species has made it this far.
Not without a lot of help, I assure you.
NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:
411-421
23. MORAL HAZARD
- ALANA RAY-
I still hadn't made a decision, but my hands were steady.
I'd been here at the nightclub more than three hours and hadn't needed to drum my fingers or touch my forehead even once. Like being suspended in that moment before playing, the cadence of the universe around me needed no adjustments.
The club was at one end of a long alleyway in the meatpacking district, one free of garbage, the walls painted with giant murals and tagged with graffiti. I'd come in through a huge loading dock, trucks full of equipment rumbling in a tight line, waiting to disgorge.
Inside, the space was more than three hundred feet from stage to back wall, the echoes returning lazily, almost a whole second late - two beats at 120 beats per minute. Useless for playing, but that was fine with me. I liked my fake echoes with this band, just to be in control of something. My visions, my emotions, even the patterns I played all seemed to spring unbidden from the air, but at least my echo boxes obeyed me.
Astor Michaels had asked me to come early for sound check, so that the engineers could get used to my paint buckets. I'd brought thirty-six to arrange in eight stacks (S8 = 36), along with my special buckets: unusual sizes and thicknesses, even the broken ones that gave off the buzz of cracked plastic.
Unlike Pearl, the engineers here thanked me when I ran only two channels from my board to theirs. They had four bands to worry about tonight - each with its own array of treble, bass, effects, and volume settings - and wanted things as simple as possible. They let me hang out for the whole sound check, watching as they plastered the club's huge mixing board with notes scribbled on masking tape. Its backside sprouted a tangle of cables, four bands' worth of musical specificities sculpted in color-coded spaghetti.
I was still watching them work when I felt Astor Michaels behind me.
"Miss Jones," he said, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
"I prefer Alana Ray."
He smiled. "Sorry to be formal, but we have business to conduct." The papers rustled, making the air ripple. "You're the only one who hasn't signed yet. Not embarrassed about your penmanship, are you?"
"Top of my class," I said, then shrugged. "The competition was less than average."
"Ah. Didn't mean it that way." He pulled out a thick fountain pen. "I'm sure your signature's more legible than Zahler's - or his mother's, for that matter."
The drummer on stage started a long fill, rolling across his whole set, the sound phasing and twisting as engineers played with their settings. For a few moments, we couldn't speak.
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